Mr Drake’s hotel was not ideal for ladies who lunch with delicate palates and sophisticated tastes. Its clientele was largely male, used to large helpings of meat and potatoes with enormous trifles and apple pies for pudding. Often they had spent the morning out of doors, farmers, vets, surveyors, blacksmiths, and they had worked up a healthy appetite. Lady Lucy had conferred at length with Mr Drake and his chef, a young man from Boston with high ambitions in the catering trade. Mr Drake said he could see Lady Lucy’s point, that the lunchtime offerings at the hotel were meant for healthy males with large appetites. But the ladies would eat it all, he assured her, and he said she might be surprised by the relish with which some of them disposed of the chef’s famous trifles. The prospect of more and more of these heavy meals filled Lady Lucy with dismay. She decided on one last try for different offerings on the menu at a meeting with hotel staff.
‘Fish?’ she said in an interrogative tone that did not expect an answer in the affirmative.
‘Fish?’ said the young chef from Boston reverently, his mind suddenly filled perhaps with the crab and the plaice and the Dover sole and the scallops he had prepared in his previous establishment.
‘Fish,’ said Mr Drake speculatively, ‘fish,’ spoken by one wondering if his kitchen has all the right equipment to cook the things and if there are enough fish knives and forks in the canteens of cutlery.
‘Fish,’ said Lady Lucy again. ‘Do you think we could get some fish on the menu?’
‘I’d be more than happy to order it and to cook it,’ said the chef, who secretly preferred cooking cod to roasting larger and larger cuts of the local beef. ‘We could use the same suppliers we had in Boston. They weren’t expensive.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Drake, ‘so be it. As far as the ladies lunching with Lady Lucy are concerned, let them not eat cake, let them eat fish instead.’
After two days, Lady Lucy was to tell her husband later, there was already a pattern emerging. To begin with the ladies from Keys Toft and Toynton St Peter, Sausthorpe and Cumberthorpe would assume that they were not there to talk about the death of the Earl. Indeed not. Instead they would talk about the local weather or their children’s progress or forthcoming attractions in the county, hunt balls or charity recitals. But once Lady Lucy had diverted their attention to the mysterious death of the Earl of Candlesby, it was as if the floodgates had been opened. Of course he had been murdered, said one. Don’t be absurd, countered another, this is a modern country, people don’t go round killing each other in 1909, for heaven’s sake. A jealous husband, claimed a third, lured him to a lonely stretch of country and murdered him. When Lady Lucy inquired about who the jealous husband might be, the ladies laughed. There were, she was informed, so many to choose from.
‘There’s a whole list of possibilities,’ said Mrs Devine from Keys Toft happily.
‘I know this sounds unlikely,’ Lady Folkingham entered the lists, ‘but I think it was the vicar myself.’
‘Which vicar?’ chorused the ladies, as if all the vicars in Lincolnshire were known to be murderers.
‘The one from Alford, of course.’ Lady Folkingham stuck to her guns. ‘Candlesby came to morning service there every Sunday for three months. I know as that’s our local church. And he was always eyeing up the vicar’s gorgeous wife – tall, willowy sort of a person with long blonde hair. Our butler swears he saw them once coming out of the most expensive hotel in Louth, looking as if they’d been up to something very naughty. And that vicar has a terrible temper. You should hear the way he shouts at the children in Sunday school.’
‘You’re not telling me, Bertha Folkingham, that the vicar went halfway across the county to kill the Earl,’ said Mrs Stanhope from Toynton St Peter. ‘Vicars don’t do that sort of thing. Their superiors like the Dean and Chapter at the cathedral would have them drummed out of the Church.’
‘But think what a perfect protection it would be, being a vicar.’ Lady Folkingham wasn’t going to retreat in the face of hostile fire. ‘Nobody’s going to suspect you for a moment. It’s an ideal way to commit a murder, if you ask me.’
‘I don’t believe that vicar did it,’ said the Honourable Mildred Grenfell from Cumberthorpe. ‘I think that was all a blind, going to church in Alford, designed to put everybody off the scent. Don’t you remember the wife of the vicar in Wainfleet All Saints, the one who went away last year very suddenly? Tall woman who looked as if she might have been a chorus girl in her younger days.’
Lady Lucy reflected that charity did not run very strongly through the veins of the ladies of Lincolnshire.
‘I do remember her,’ said Mrs Stanhope, ‘flighty piece she was too; she attracted men like a water carrier in the desert. They flocked to her, poor fools. But what does her disappearance – wasn’t she called Hardy, Tabitha Hardy or something like that – what does that have to do with Candlesby’s death?’
‘I’ll tell you what it has to do with Candlesby’s death,’ said a quiet woman called Mrs Morton from Skegness who hadn’t spoken yet. ‘I was told – in confidence, mind you, so I would ask you all to respect that – that she was carrying on with the Candlesby man. She was always going up to the Hall on the grounds that she liked looking at the deer. I don’t think they were the only stag she encountered up there, if you follow me. The vicar finds out. There’s a terrible scene with the wife. Candlesby refuses to have her living with him up at the Hall; maybe he did have some residual sense of the social proprieties, though I find that hard to believe. She goes away, nobody knows where. There is, for a while, a great murmuring in the parish of Wainfleet All Saints. No saintly behaviour is to be found except, maybe, from the vicar. Where is the vicar’s wife? Is she dead? Nobody knew then about her links with Candlesby or it would be even worse. Is she coming back? Eventually somebody from the Church hierarchy, probably the Dean of Lincoln, he always likes telling people off, instructed the parishioners to keep quiet. But think of the vicar! Think how he must have been feeling!’ The pinched, mouse-like features of Mrs Morton from Skegness grew especially animated at this point. ‘His life is ruined. His career may never recover from the taint of being abandoned by his wife. Alone with his newly acquired housekeeper – who happens to be the worst cook in the east of England – he grows bitter. His betrayal, by the wife, and even more by Candlesby, gnaws away at him. He grows obsessive. And in the end,’ Mrs Morton leaned back in her chair at this point with a flourish of her arms, ‘his emotions and his obsessions take him over. He kills Candlesby in a fit of rage. It will be one of your husband’s finest achievements, Lady Powerscourt, to bring this murdering vicar to book.’
There was a brief silence. The topic of murdering vicars seemed to have run its course. Lady Lucy made a mental note of the sections of the conversation she would report to her Francis. The ladies moved on to an abstract discussion of whether murder was more prevalent in the aristocracy than in the working classes. There was a surprising consensus that it was more common among the aristocracy.
James Candlesby, the youngest son who lived alone with his nurse at the top of the Hall, had not been well for some days. At first this took the form of wandering round the house on his own in the middle of the night, disturbing the mice and the rats and upsetting the bats in the basement. His nurse had sent word to the asylum outside Lincoln where the doctor who had been looking after him for some years was based. Dr Wilson, in spite of the entreaties of James’s eldest brothers, had refused to admit him as a patient in the asylum. He would only grow worse there, he said. He believed, Dr Wilson, that James’s eccentricities could be accommodated perfectly easily in the enormous house, especially if he was accompanied by a trained nurse.