Lord Belfrey’s expression darkened, as Carson Grant’s had done on so many occasions when dealing with the sorrows of Wisteria Whitworth’s incarceration at Perdition Hall. “I’d met her… years ago on a Caribbean cruise. We spent the better part of a week together, dining, dancing. I was between marriages at the time. And she was a very attractive, likable woman.”
I stared at him.
“Let me show you, Ellie.” He stepped sideways, beckoning me forward. Accompanied by the faithful Thumper, I joined him at the desk. Scattered across it were a series of eight-by-ten photos displaying the faces of women. His hand went to one in the middle. “This is Suzanne.”
“As you say” (and so had Tommy) “she is… was… very attractive.”
“The applicants were all instructed to submit a photo of this size. They went to Georges. I told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing them, that I didn’t wish to be influenced by looks one way or the other. The selections were up to him, based on the personality criteria we had agreed upon. When he arrived at Mucklesfeld, he took over this room. Yesterday afternoon I came in and saw these,” waving a hand over the photos, “and recognized Suzanne despite not having thought of her in years. I told Georges at once.”
“Was it specified on the application form that the contestants must have no prior acquaintance with you?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps Suzanne didn’t connect you with the man she had met on the cruise.”
The line of his mouth was bitter. “I wasn’t traveling under an assumed name.”
“But you weren’t Lord Belfrey at the time.” Looking at her face, I decided it was etched with sorrow and felt a reluctance to believe she had broken the rules intentionally. “What did Georges say?”
“That the situation could be put to dramatic use. Either on Suzanne’s arrival or further down the road.”
“The other contestants would have a right to be upset.”
“Especially as Georges had made his selections based on an interlocking connection between them. Her death is going to come as a shock to the ones who knew her.”
I thought of Livonia and Judy. “Does it have to come out now that you and Suzanne knew each other? Even Georges must see there’s no point in setting that cat among the pigeons.” I looked studiedly at my watch. “And now I really must get out of here. Thumper’s owners must be getting dreadfully worried about him. I’ll need to find some sort of lead…”
“Take this,” he began unknotting his tie, and to my embarrassment I felt my face flush. Ridiculous to feel that something so ordinary implied an intimacy between us. “Why don’t you stop at Witch Haven, home of my late cousin Giles’s daughter Celia, and inquire there about him, if you can get the door opened to you? I haven’t been allowed in and neither has she come here since the day she demanded that I hand over Eleanor Belfrey’s portrait, saying Giles had given it to her because she admired the artist, if not the subject.” He handed me the tie and I took it wordlessly. “If you do get inside Witch Haven, you might get to see the portrait and discover whether or not I am exaggerating your resemblance to Eleanor.”
“Am I right in thinking you didn’t know her?”
“Giles was never welcoming of family visits.” His lordship turned his back on the desk and the spread-out photos. “Nevertheless, I showed up in defiance of that attitude shortly after their marriage. When the butler grudgingly allowed me into the hall, she was going up the stairs wearing the dress in the portrait, ankle-length and of pale filmy gauze. She must have been sitting for the artist. Halfway up she turned and looked down before going on her way. I stayed until late evening, despite the frequent glares from Giles, and from Celia, who was twenty-three at the time. A couple of years younger than myself. Despite Giles and I being first cousins he would have been fifty or fifty-one at the time. The ages stick in my mind. He was so damnably proud of having snared so young a bride.” Lord Belfrey moved a hand around his shirt collar as if fingering for his tie, looked at what was in my hand, stared for a moment in puzzlement, and then said gently: “Go on, Ellie Haskell, make your getaway with the dog.”
“As did Eleanor,” I replied, “only she didn’t come back.”
“Thank God for that. Don’t let my dislike of Celia put you off stopping at Witch Haven. She certainly isn’t a woman to answer her own door.”
“Did she marry?” Just being incurably nosy.
“Not to my knowledge. I think of her as devotedly wedded to herself; but don’t picture her as a recluse. Tommy claims to get on well with her. She has plenty of help in the house, including an elderly handyman named Forester she doesn’t deserve, and, so I’ve been told, a recently acquired paid companion. God help the woman!” He gave Thumper a farewell pat before holding the study door open for us.
I had to ask, “Are you over your cold feet?”
“Whoever she is, she won’t be a vulnerable girl living in fear of her life while wishing she were dead. That was the look I saw on Eleanor’s face when she looked down at me from the stairs.”
The study door closed behind him. Thumper looked up at me expectantly and together we crossed the hall to the passageway that Judy had said led to an outside door. I did think about going to the kitchen and telling Ben that I would be gone for a while. But he was bound to be busy. I knew that I had to try to return Thumper, and also felt compelled to make myself scarce before the house became a hotbed of activity.
Once outside, I knotted the tie around Thumper’s collar, but let it dangle loose. Time enough to take hold when we got out onto the road. But how to get there? I couldn’t do so by way of the drive. Even to sidle down the wooded side would be an intrusion; I didn’t flatter myself I was sufficiently slim to be easily hidden by the trees. Diminutive Judy with her muted coloring might have managed this feat, although I couldn’t imagine her sidling anywhere. Practical, kindly Judy-or so I saw her on early acquaintance-what would she have thought of his lordship’s recounting of seeing Eleanor Belfrey on the stairs?
Thumper was trotting a little ahead of me across the weed-ridden lawn as I searched for a path through the woods that might take me out onto the road sufficiently beyond the gates for me to head toward the village without drawing attention. Most particularly, I didn’t want to be seen by Lord Belfrey. How awful if he thought I was checking to make sure he had stuck with his decision and was now greeting the contestants with the requisite amount of pleasure and pageantry.
I stopped and looked in the direction of the dell, with its broken fountain and misshapen tumbles of mossy stone. A silken breeze brushed my face and rippled questing fingers through my hair-loosening strands that I did not bother to tuck back in place. The sky was a pure, pale blue between the skeined fleece of the clouds. Thumper stopped to look back at me before apparently deciding that the only way to keep his doggie figure was by racing in ever-narrowing circles and cheering himself on by a series of congratulatory barks. I found myself wondering what the garden had looked like when Eleanor Belfrey was here. Had she liked flowers, reveled in birdsong, been happy during any of her time at Mucklesfeld? I pictured her coming up from the dell wearing the dress from the portrait; I saw the soft filmy material as the color of moonlight. I saw the look on her face described by his lordship. Had she hated the idea of returning to the house, hated and feared the husband old enough to be her father? I shivered despite my light jacket. A dreadful thought socked me in the chest.
What if Eleanor had suspected Giles was planning to murder her? What if she had never left Mucklesfeld on that fateful night… and her body concealed along with the maligned Scottie was somewhere in the house? Or buried in one of the wooded areas… perhaps even the ravine where Suzanne Varney had met her death? The present faded, taking Thumper’s joyful barks with it. The dreadful scenario continued to unfurl from the wrappings of shadow woven into a shroud thirty years before. Whatever Eleanor’s reasons for marrying Giles, her feelings had turned to revulsion and loathing… the eyes that watched her every movement, followed her even when she was briefly alone, the grasping of her shrinking flesh. And he had known with bitterness and despair that she could never be his-except in death. It all fitted. The missing jewels buried with her to give credence to her flight. The dog killed first to prevent his barking. The sightings of her ghost, the house left to rot around him as Giles completed his descent into madness. But, rational thought (something my parents had vaguely despised as too close to reality) crept back. Who knew if the legend was the true story?