A fine set but it would be impossible to separate work and personal space, Joe thought. The Housekeeper, inevitably, became the heart of the House. Still, he knew some Metropolitan officers who appeared to live their lives in their office and sleep at their desk. He’d felt the compulsion himself on many occasions, had even, in his earlier years, been physically hauled out of his chair and bundled off home by his landlord. Ex–police inspector Alfred Jenkins had known the dangers.
“At this hour I usually treat myself to a tisane. I’m having lemon balm, gentlemen. Would you like some?”
Joe gratefully accepted for both of them. Mrs. Bolton snatched up a large handful of a sweet-smelling herb from the windowsill, stuffed it into a big white teapot and filled it with water from a kettle singing on the stove.
“Will you be staying, Ben?” she asked.
After a quick exchange of looks with Joe, Ben said, “Just long enough for a swig o’ your tea, Mrs. B. Just what the doctor ordered at this time of day.”
“Then make yourself useful, my lad, and draw up a chair for the commissioner by my tea table. We’ll take it over there at the window. Might as well catch a cooling breeze while we can.”
Ben bustled to and fro setting up a folding tray-table with white cloth and china mugs and borrowing three chairs from a large round central table already laid out for the upper servants’ breakfast. Joe counted eight places. Orders for the day would be dished out with the porridge, gossip exchanged with the toast and marmalade.
Feeling suddenly clumsy amid the practised dexterity, Joe moved his large form away from the scene of action and went to stand by a dresser whose upper shelves were crowded with books. He noted the essential Burke’s Peerage, an Olde Moore’s Almanack, a dictionary, and smiled to see a very ancient copy of The Accomplish Ladie’s Companion, the essential reference book of every woman in charge of a household since 1685. His mother had had one always within arm’s reach of the stove. He remembered that the title page of this book was crowded with lively illustrations of ladies in long gowns and headdresses taking delight in roasting, boiling and pastry-making as well as the more arcane arts of distilling “spirituous liquers,” preserving herbs and composing medicinal ointments, some of a very dubious nature. Joe had good reason to believe that the cure for croup in infants, as laid out for the “accomplisht ladie,” was decidedly more dangerous than the ailment itself. At least the recipe for macaroons did not appear in the same chapter as the one guaranteed to rid a household of rattus rattus and all his fleas. “Almonds” and “arsenic” were sensibly segregated.
He wondered if the recipe for gingerbread came from these ancient pages.
Stiffly corseted, though her slim figure didn’t require much in the way of whalebone, Mrs. Bolton creaked down onto the chair Ben held respectfully for her and began to pour the tea. A lady approaching sixty, he would have guessed, composed and elegant. Her face was attractive but sought no appreciation from others. She was a woman who would always absorb more from her audience than she gave out. “I know who you are, sir, and why you are here,” she said briskly, challenging him with grey eyes as sharp as his. “Lady Cecily has spoken to me and asked that I give you all the help you require.”
Her voice had the clarity and enunciation of a governess, which he understood from Ben that she had been earlier in her life. “Schoolmaster’s daughter or some such,” he’d reported, “fallen on hard times. The old story! But with Mrs. Bolton it’s likely true. If she catches you running she’ll grab you by the ear and growl ‘Festina lente!’ at you. The old dear’s got a good head for figures what’s more. None of the tradesmen try it on with Mrs. B.,” Ben had finished with pride.
She had followed her mistress Cecily from the Midlands when she came as a bride to Melsett and in later years had taken over the duties of housekeeper. She was now looking at him expectantly.
For a moment Joe was at a loss. Where to start? They’d all recited their stories to other interested parties and must have reached that stage of tedium when people either clammed up or began to embroider on the original to avoid further boredom. Always a difficult moment.
Joe sipped, savoured, and put his cup down. Grey eyes stared into grey eyes. “Mrs. B. I’ve had a rough day.” From the glancing focus on his sticking plaster and the accompanying twitch of the corner of her mouth, Joe gathered his encounter with Virbio, servant of Diana, had not gone unreported. “Why don’t you tell me what help I need? I’m sure you know.”
The twitch became a smile and the enlivened face took on the radiance of the goddess Minerva. Joe saw suddenly why the staff spoke of this woman with such respect.
“If you’ve just been upstairs with Ben I’m thinking you’ll be wanting these.” She hauled on a key chain attached to the belt of her skirt and selected a key ring. “Here you are. The big one unlocks Grace’s room. I doubt you’ll find anything helpful in there—it has been cleaned out regularly since the awful event and Grace has nothing to hide. She was caught up in all innocence in the machinations of others, Commissioner. Grace is not … a plotter or an evil-doer by nature. She’s a Suffolk girl with all their admirable qualities. There’s nothing more I can tell you. Mistress Cecily gave her leave to go home to Bury. It’s not an excuse, though I’m sure you must be suspecting—collusion? Would that be the word? No—her mother is very ill—not expected to live out the summer, I’d say. Heart trouble. Grace has arranged for her sister to go down and mind her mother next week and we’ll see her back on duty then. But that’s not much help to you. I’ll give you her mother’s address in Bury, should you wish to pursue her. Meantime—as for me—I can only report impressions. Do you want to hear them in the absence of hard evidence?”
Joe was thinking that any impression coming from the firm mouth of Mrs. Bolton was worth ten times most people’s idea of evidence and he accepted gratefully.
“It was the gingerbread that made me suspicious. Grace came in here and asked for a slice for the mistress. Just before midnight. With her cocoa. Lady L. didn’t like spicy things. Grace didn’t deny it when I guessed it was a craving of someone about three months gone, if you know what I mean. We had a bit of a laugh over it. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard as much hinted at but this was the first concrete clue.”
“How much gingerbread did she take away?”
“I gave her enough for three normal portions. Her ladyship had quite an appetite. I didn’t want to risk her putting Grace to the trouble of coming downstairs again for more. I was going to put it in the pig slop bucket anyway. It had gone hard and no one fancied it much.”
“Was anything left of it?” Joe asked, feeling foolish.
“Not a crumb. No idea what she did with it and Gracie’s not saying but by morning it had all vanished. Betty, who does out the rooms on that floor, reported that there was a strange smell in her ladyship’s room and she had to fling all the windows wide open to clear it.”
Joe nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. Bolton. I think I know what that was. And no—it wasn’t your gingerbread! Can you tell me why the room is still in its original state?”
“Mistress Cecily’s orders, sir. ‘Touch nothing,’ we were told. ‘You may clean surfaces but that’s all.’ ”
“Mistress Cecily, ah, yes …” Joe said, speculation in his eye. “Back in the saddle again. Things are moving more smoothly with the old mistress in charge again, would you say?”
Mrs. Bolton’s chilly expression warned him she would say nothing of the sort. Discretion even after death was the rule for housekeepers. She unbent so far as to confide, “Mistress Cecily and I understand each other well, Commissioner. Indeed, we arrived here at Melsett on the same day, over forty years ago. She brought me down with her from her father’s household when she married. I was given a position of rising authority here with the task of raising the level of domestic discipline and capability. Under Sir Sidney—the bachelor Sir Sidney—things had become regrettably lax.”