“Right next door on your left. It is why I selected this room for you.” His dark eyes seemed to take in my every movement as I sat gingerly down on the chair that didn’t look as if it could support a Teddy bear. “I wish I had better to offer you.” He did not embellish, there was no need. His voice said it all. “As for a meal, I’ll take your husband to the kitchen and hopefully between the two of us we can concoct something that he can bring up on a tray.” He turned to Ben, who was still standing in the doorway to the passage, and now asked him about the tablets Tommy had said he would let me have.
“We’ll get them from him.” “Then best to get going.” Ben cast me an anxious look that was not alleviated by my bright statement that there was no rush because I was feeling almost back to normal. “Lie down, sweetheart, and try to rest.”
“What about my night things?”
“I’ll get our cases from the car.”
“Plunket can bring them up and put them outside the door,” Lord Belfrey assured me in a voice equally soothing to that of my husband, adding that he’d had Mrs. Foot put a hot-water bottle in the bed. Perhaps I should have kissed them both before they left me. Ben was so incredibly dear, and his lordship emanated a secret sorrow that it was surely the duty of any compassionate woman to assuage. Let it be hoped, I thought rather woozily as I got off the chair, that in one of the contestants he would find a love that went beyond gratitude for helping him save Mucklesfeld. Perhaps an all-consuming passion was too much to be hoped for under the circumstances, especially as at the age of almost fifty-six he must have known and had his pick of countless women. Very likely he had been married in the past. At any other time I would have imagined a scenario to match his fascinating good looks, but I discovered that I was so desperate to lie down that I crawled under the eiderdown without worrying that it was filled with moths or that the pillow on which I laid my head had been around since the plague.
My feet searched out the hot-water bottle and discovered that it was lukewarm, which didn’t surprise me given my opinion of Mrs. Foot’s incompetence or malevolence… no, there I was being unkind. I turned on my side in hope I would find the lumpy mattress more comfortable that way. My original impression of her had been fueled by pure silliness. She was not the hag who had rejoiced in Wisteria Whitworth’s subjugation at Perdition Hall. And if, as seemed credible, she had dropped the lamp shade on Mrs. Malloy’s head, anyone doomed to live in this house might be excused for occasionally giving way to giddy attempts at humor. I lay thinking about the odd trio of Mrs. Foot, Mr. Plunket, and Boris, who presumably had a last name. Had his lordship hired them because they were affordable or because he was kind and doubted anyone else would?
If I lay completely still and kept my eyes squeezed shut against the light, which I should have turned off, but hadn’t because the idea of complete darkness was even more unappealing, my headache receded. Except when the window rattled irritably. Checking the latch would have required standing on the flimsy chair and I did not want to risk a pair of broken legs that might keep me at Mucklesfeld beyond the morning. I was wondering what Mrs. Malloy was up to when a jolt jerked me up, and my eyes flew wide open, to find her there, arms akimbo, staring down at me.
“Did you have to bump into the bed?” I grumbled.
“I didn’t.” She was smiling dreamily.
“With the force of the Titanic hitting the iceberg.”
“Not feeling better, Mrs. H?”
“I was. More to the point-why are you looking as if you just swallowed a dozen canaries?”
“Sure you’re up to hearing?” She sat down at the foot of the bed, her ringed hands folded demurely, and I knew instantly what was coming. Even so, my heart gave a thump when she said the words. “I’m to replace the dead lady as the sixth contestant. Now, don’t go looking at me like that, Mrs. H, it’s not a case of me dancing on her grave, just being practical like, and after all we do owe his lordship for taking us in out of the fog.”
“So you proposed marriage to him out of a sense of obligation?”
“What makes you think I asked him?”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“And why shouldn’t I?” she demanded haughtily. “Really, I don’t know what’s got into you, Mrs. H. I’d have thought you’d be thrilled for me, getting the chance to live out me romantic dreams. All them books we’ve both read with the blissfully happy endings.”
I could have pointed out that these invariably occurred after a couple of bodies had turned up along the way, either in the millpond or the suspiciously locked turret additionally guarded by the yellow-eyed black dog, but I restrained myself out of concern for my head, which had been good to me over the years. “This isn’t a situation that invites the grand passion, Mrs. Malloy, it’s a reality show. Which some people might consider vulgar.”
Understandably, she bridled. “You’re saying that his lordship-my intended-lacks refinement?”
“No, no!” I protested hastily. “I’m sure only dire necessity drove him to this course…”
“Coarse?” Her voice rose, along with the rest of her, but fortunately she sank back down without grabbing my throat.
“Course of action. I suppose it could even be said that there is something noble in his desire to save his ancestral home. What really worries me is the thought of your being hurt when… if, he doesn’t select… choose you as his bride.”
“Well, that’s the chance I’ll be taking. Tomorrow we’ll get to size up the other candidates, won’t we?”
“We? But Ben and I will be going home first thing.”
“What? Rush off before you’ve had breakfast?” She eyed me as if I had just produced a stake to thrust through her heart. “Or lunch. Well, I must say, that wouldn’t be treating his lordship very nice after all he’s done for you.”
“He didn’t say anything to me or Ben about his arrangement with you.”
“And why should he?”
Why indeed? It was unreasonable of me to feel left out in the cold. Perhaps, despite Tommy’s assurances to the contrary, I had injured my brain when I fell.
“It’s not like I’m under age, needing a guardian’s approval,” Mrs. Malloy pointed out.
“I’m sorry. This house must be getting to me.”
“What’s wrong with it? I think it’ll be lovely and comfy with a little tweaking.”
Make that demolition, I thought.
“Although,” Mrs. Malloy addressed the wall behind the bed, “being the gentleman he is, his lordship said as he wouldn’t make the agreement final until he had a word with you and Mr. H. I suppose, despite me mature charms, he saw the vulnerable girl inside.” Her purple-lipsticked mouth flickered like a butterfly landing on a dewy rose. Then her eyes hardened, giving off an iridescent sparkle to match her shadow. “But that doesn’t go giving you license to stand in me way. Of course, I understand how you’ll miss my slaving away for you at Merlin’s Court, but it’s not like I won’t come over to visit you and Mr. H and the kiddies when I can find time away from opening the summer fête or hosting a ball.”
“What about our partnership as amateur detectives?”
“Well, we still could-no, I suppose it wouldn’t do.” Faint sigh. “A proper husband wouldn’t want his wife risking her life getting mixed up in the sordid.”
So much for Ben!
“I didn’t mention that aspect of me life to his lordship and I’d rather you didn’t neither, Mrs. H; I wouldn’t want him thinking I’d be the snooping sort. And then there’s that requirement of his that the contestants all come from ordinary lives, not the glamorous pampered-puss sort. I’ve even wondered about keeping dark having been three times chairperson of the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association. That sort of office could come across as being snooty.”
Before I could answer this one, Ben came though the doorway carrying a tray. While he was settling it in front of me and asking me to taste the tomato soup, which regrettably came from a tin, and sample the Marmite toast and fruit salad, also tinned, she teetered out of the room on her high heels, brazenly humming “Here Comes the Bride.”