A Death in the Pavilion: A Euphemia Martins Mystery Page 4

  ‘Unleashes your imagination?’ I said.

  ‘And this wing of the house is odd.’

  ‘Modern design?’ I suggested.

  ‘Or he ran out of money,’ said Richenda. ‘That’s the kind of thing I need to know if I’m to accept his proposal.’

  ‘He’s proposed?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think he’s even thought of it yet,’ said Richenda, ‘but he’s coming round. The autumn ball.’

  ‘It’s like he is putting on a show for you,’ I agreed.

  There was a soft, but distinct noise above us. ‘So you see,’ said Richenda, ‘I do need to know if he has any secrets in his attic.’

  The hairs stood up on the back of my neck as the faint sound continued above us. I attempted to catch Richenda’s lighter tone though I had begun to shiver. ‘And if he murdered his wife?’ I asked.

  ‘Even you, with your ability to attract murder, must admit that to come from one household where there was one confirmed murder and one murder disguised as a suicide, must agree that the chances of us stumbling on another murder within a month are slight.’

  ‘I suppose it depends on the circles you move in,’ I said gloomily.

  ‘But my brother isn’t involved in this!’ said Richenda, which was as close as she would probably ever come to admitting what her brother was capable of doing.

  ‘He and Muller have been friends for years,’ I said.

  ‘Richard does not go around murdering everyone he meets,’ said Richenda. ‘We’d have no friends or family left.’

  I thought it prudent at this point to suggest that we hunted for the stairway. I persuaded Richenda to take her own candle by promising I would still go first if we found the attic and we set off to tiptoe through the hallways.

  Now, when a house-party is in progress it is very easy to tiptoe around the bedrooms. I fear I must explain why. It is not uncommon for those of the upper classes to seek to change bedroom accommodation during the night for extra – er – entertainment. It is therefore an unwritten rule that noises in corridors are ignored. However, this was not a house party. Richenda was the only guest in residence. (I didn’t count.) And I believe both Muller and his mother would be shocked if she sneaked about in the night. I had no way of knowing if Muller would welcome such an advance or, as many men would be, be frightened by it. Richenda had her hair in rags and was at her most gorgon-like. Either way to be caught was unacceptable for either of us.

  So like a pair of inept, but very, very cautious burglars, we checked up and down the hallway. Muller’s bedroom lay at the end of the hallway and I assumed must be a set of rooms, considering how the outside of the building was formed – or as much as I could recall of it in the middle of the night. His mother’s room was two doors away. We could hear her snoring and Richenda’s room had been two doors further away than that. In all there were eight bedrooms on the corridor.

  The carpet lay charitably thick and plush beneath our slippered feet, but as we walked down the corridor we could see no exit but the stairs down.

  ‘Perhaps there is a secret passageway,’ whispered Richenda.

  ‘Perhaps one of the bedrooms isn’t a bedroom,’ I said.

  ‘How do we tell which one?’ asked Richenda.

  ‘Well, if I was going to hide a secret staircase to a secret attic, I would do it close to my own room if not in it.’

  ‘We cannot enter Muller’s bedroom,’ squeaked Richenda.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s check the doors either side. If it’s neither of them I think we should count ourselves lucky we haven’t been caught and go back to bed. I’ll swap rooms with you tonight if you want. There are definitely no noises above mine.’

  ‘That will not be necessary,’ said Richenda haughtily.

  Richenda took the door to the left of Muller’s room and I the one to the right. Even by the candlelight I could see her steeling herself. Then very slowly, with her fingers widely splayed, she opened the door. Her other hand trembled as she held up the candle to peer inside. Then she closed the door and turned to me. ‘Bedroom,’ she mouthed.

  I turned the handle of my door and lent gently on the door at the same time to help prevent the hinges from groaning. But like everything in this house the hinges were well-looked-after and well-oiled. The door gave easily. A cold gust of air blew out my candle flame. Richenda crept to my side and held her candle aloft.

  Stairs.

  Chapter Six

  The Creature in the Attic

  With her usual flair Richenda moved her candle into exactly the place where I had held mine aloft and it too guttered and went out. Richenda uttered a small squeak which would have been much louder if I hadn’t stuck my hand over her mouth. I reckoned a companion got to take far more liberties than a maid, especially when we were outside the bedroom door of a potential wife-murderer.

  Richenda’s pale blue eyes widened and rolled and for one dreadful moment I thought she was going to faint. I feared considerable injury if she landed on me. But I did the lady an injustice. She pulled my hand none too gently away from her face, scowled ferociously, and whispered, ‘What do we do now?’

  Neither of us having interest in tobacco, we did not carry any means of making fire on our persons. ‘Do you want to go back?’ I asked. Richenda shook her head. ‘The moon’s bright tonight.’

  ‘That won’t help us in an attic,’ I answered.

  ‘In this one it will,’ said Richenda deepening her voice, presumably in an effort to sound ominous, ‘there are windows. I checked from the outside. If you walk over in the woods on the left just before the tree-line you can see up far enough to see them.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ I said.

  Richenda nodded.

  ‘Is there any reason we’re doing this in the middle of the night?’ I asked. ‘We could wait until Muller goes back to town and his mother is having her afternoon nap.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would be chicken,’ said Richenda.

  I sighed. ‘You have to admit I am awfully good at coming across the unpleasant and unexpected,’ I said. ‘I’m sure daylight would make it easier.’

  ‘Personally, if Muller has shut his mad wife up in the attic, I’d rather discover her when she was asleep,’ said Richenda.

  I agreed she had a point. Cautiously I mounted the first stair. Of course, it creaked. Wait until Richenda stands on you, I thought down at it, you’ll positively groan. I moved on quickly, not convinced the treads would take the weight of both of us at once. The staircase was no darker than the rest of the house and my eyes were beginning to adjust when we were plunged into pitch-darkness.

  ‘I closed the door,’ hissed Richenda in my ear. ‘We don’t want anyone following us up.’

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ I protested.

  ‘Oh, let me,’ said Richenda.

  There followed some complicated tussling as we manoeuvred for position. If Richenda wanted to go first I had no objection. I had begun to get a very bad feeling about this plan. We squeezed past each other in the dark. Richenda, though large, proved to be squishy without her numerous usual strappings. I got a bit breathless at one point and seriously considered it might be better to pitch down the stairs than to have my lungs flattened out against the wall, but the moment passed and she was ahead of me.

  ‘Right,’ breathed Richenda, and she gave a little snort not unreminiscent of a horse anticipating a good gallop. ‘We’re off!’

  As if to prove her superior fearlessness and excellent night vision she set off at a fast pace. I lagged cautiously behind her. Now we had tested the width of the passageway against our frames I wanted warning if I needed to press myself against the wall as she tumbled past.

  In my defence I will say that Richenda had considerably more padding than my bonier self and was less likely to come to serious injury. Besides, now I was in the rear I found myself unreasonably peeved. Usually when I made night-time discoveries I was in the lead. Mentally I scolded myself for being prideful, but as a serva
nt one has very few distinguishing characteristics. I rather liked being the brave and bold one. Obviously not too bold. I am a vicar’s daughter after all. My internal musings were cut short by Richenda sneezing. If you have ever heard a horse sneeze you know the sound. While not overly loud it is pronounced and liable to be moist. I hung back.

  The air tasted dry and stale in my mouth. Dust tickled my nose. Reason asserted itself. No one came up here. Even a mad wife would need to be fed over a period of three years. I opened my mouth to share this insight with Richenda, but I was cut off by a loud thump. Sense fled. My heart beat frantically, but I pressed my lips tight so no sound could escape.

  A most unladylike exclamation came from above. ‘There’s a hatch,’ said Richenda. ‘I just found it with my head.’

  ‘Is it bolted?’ I asked.

  ‘Wait a mo,’ said Richenda. ‘I’m feeling around the edges. Hmm. There it is.’

  I heard a rusty bolt being pulled back and then came a bang that must surely wake anyone below as Richenda threw open the hatch. ‘Quick!’ she cried and scrambled up. ‘Before anyone comes.’ I had a sudden mental image of us both standing over the closed hatch, candlesticks aloft to preserve our virtue. Giggles bubbled inside me.

  With the hatch open the darkness thinned. It thickened momentarily as Richenda’s posterior filled the hatchway and then lightened. I hurried up after her. Richenda shut the hatch after me. ‘So we have warning if anyone comes,’ she said. I set down my useless candlestick.

  Moonlight flooded the attic casting a landscape of shapes and shadows around us. I looked out one of the big round windows. The ground below lay wide and silver in the moonlight. Grass. Not even prickly bushes. Not an escape exit then; unless I pushed Richenda first and landed on her.

  I heard Richenda behind me moving across the room, muttering to herself. I turned and tried to make sense of the shapes around us. She really did have much better night-sight than me. The attic was huge. We seemed to be at the end of this wing, and, I realised with a shudder, directly above Muller’s bedroom. Three round windows allowed the moonlight to flood in from the end wall, but the attic stretched on and on. It appeared to contain the whole of this wing without division. Or so I suspected. Bright though the moonlight was, it could not penetrate the most remote corners. Across the floor were not simply boxes, but I could make out the outline of a desk and some bookcases against the walls. It looked as if the attic was indeed intended for habitation. I feared the worst.

  ‘Richenda,’ I hissed at her disappeared shadow. ‘Come back. Someone’s up here.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Richenda!’

  I placed my hand against the wall and began to inch along, skirting the objects I could see. Nevertheless my feet frequently came into contact with hard immovable objects. When they did, I put my hands on them and edged my way round. It would be all too easy to lose my balance. To my surprise most of the things I touched felt soft. Dust, I thought, until I felt a prickling sensation across my hand. Spider webs. Spider webs and spiders. If I never saw another attic again it would be fine by me.

  Richenda still continued on, despite my hissed implorings for her to stop. Twice I edged my way around a chimney. At least there were no open fireplaces. I moved as quietly as I could and strained my ears for any sound. I particularly listened for the creaking of the hatch, but Richenda’s footfalls echoed loudly in the darkness. If there was anyone or anything here it must surely have heard us. I begun to feel about me for a weapon. Then I heard it. The sound of a falling body.

  ‘Ooofff!’ said Richenda. ‘I think I’ve found a fireplace.’

  I made my way across as quickly as I could. Richenda lay in a pool of darkness, a combination of soot and shadow. The fireplace was modest, but I didn’t miss that a poker set stood to one side. ‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘No. This was a ridiculous idea, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Um – yes.’

  ‘Then why in the world did you let me go ahead?’

  I said nothing, but helped pick some of the larger pieces of soot out of her hair. I was about to suggest we took advantage of our luck so far and made our escape, when the rumbling sound we had heard in Richenda’s room filled the attic. In the stillness of the night it sounded loud as thunder.

  ‘What the hell!’ said Richenda.

  ‘The chimney. It’s coming from the chimney.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ said Richenda and, before I could stop her, she grabbed the poker and stuck it and her head up the chimney. ‘Hi you!’ she cried. ‘Come down here this instant!’

  There was a rumbling, a clattering and the rushing sound of falling soot. Richenda staggered out and backwards as a creature burst out from the chimney. It squawked and shot across the room in a cloud of soot and feathers.

  ‘Pigeon,’ said Richenda, sitting down in a barely controlled fall.

  The bird, completely panicked, flapped and swooped and dived around us. I hauled Richenda to her feet (no mean feat) and pulled her back with me to the end of the attic where we had begun our adventure. I felt her shaking. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It can’t harm us.’

  ‘Pigeon,’ said Richenda again and I realised she was shaking with laughter. I opened one of the round windows and the pigeon left the building. We both sat down and gave way to mirth.

  We were laughing so loudly we didn’t hear anyone approaching until the hatch was thrown back. Muller appeared, a broken gun on one arm and a lantern in his other hand. He set the lantern down and snapped the gun shut. The look on his face was dark and thunderous.

  He pointed the gun straight at Richenda and me.

  Chapter Seven

  Revelations

  ‘H-h-Hans?’ stuttered Richenda.

  Muller broke the gun at once and set it down. Now I was no longer mesmerised by the weapon I was sure a moment ago was about to send me to my doom, I took in Muller’s full and rather glorious appearance. He wore a green garment, something between a smoking jacket and a dressing gown. Embroidered golden dragons swooped and dived across it. It shimmered by the light of his lantern. On this feet were matching slippers and his legs were clad in green pyjamas of a similar hue. His short brown hair, greying at the sides, without its usual hair oil, curled around his face. In this dishevelled state he looked quite the best I had ever seen him. It occurred to me that in everyday life he did his best to appear as normal and as nondescript as possible. This immediately made me thing of Fitzroy and spies. (Fitzroy had also once levelled a shotgun in my direction, but in fairness this had been to kill someone behind me. Though I had not known that at the time. See my journal A Death in the Highlands for the full story.)

  ‘Richenda,’ he said in astonished accents. ‘Euphemia too? What in God’s name are you doing up here?’

  ‘We heard an intruder,’ said Richenda in a throbbing accent.

  ‘It was a pigeon,’ I explained. Richenda shot me a deathly look for ruining the mood.

  ‘Why the devil didn’t you wake me?’ demanded Muller.

  ‘I didn’t feel it would be appropriate for me to come to your room,’ said Richenda in a strangely breathy voice. I assumed she was trying to sound alluring, but honestly it sounded more like she had a bad chest cold. ‘Besides, Euphemia has much experience of going about in the dark.’

  Muller raised an eyebrow at me and I had to suppress a chuckle. ‘You could have summoned a servant to fetch me,’ he said not unreasonably.

  ‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ said Richenda, still trying to be weak and feminine. As this was rather like a shire horse trying to skip like a lamb she wasn’t awfully successful. But it was a better response than admitting we were checking to see if he had locked his last wife up in the attic.

  ‘Could we possibly continue this discussion downstairs?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Muller at once. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Please, ladies, descend.’ And he gestured to the stairs.

  Once we were all back on the landing,
Muller turned on the gas light. ‘It is not my usual practice to chat to ladies in the middle of the night, but I think we should take a cup of tea together in the morning room. Please meet me there. I need to lock away the gun.’

  Richenda and I exchanged looks. Then Richenda nodded. We both smelled a mystery. Muller waited until we left then we heard him open his door. ‘Am I sooty?’ hissed Richenda.

  ‘No, not really. Am I?’

  ‘Why would that matter?’ said Richenda rudely.

  ‘So you are eager to win his affections,’ I said.

  Richenda bit her lip. ‘If we can rule out the wife-murderer thing.’

  I nodded, unaccountable mirth bubbling inside me. ‘That does seem sensible.’

  We had reached the ground floor by now. Both of us too caught up in our discussion to be even remotely disturbed by shadows.

  ‘Oh damn it, Euphemia,’ said Richenda, ‘I’m not getting any younger. My brother is – well whatever he is, he is not a saint.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed wholeheartedly. ‘I …’

  ‘Listen. I’m not like you. I come from a different class. Women my age need to be established. I’ve only a couple more years and people will be talking about me as a confirmed spinster. I want a family, dammit. I want a place in society. I cared for Tippy, but he’s gone and there’s nothing I can do about that. Muller’s alive and he’s clearly looking for a wife.’

  ‘Have you fallen in love with him?’ I asked quietly as I opened the door to the morning room. I turned on the gas lamps.

  Richenda snorted. ‘No, I have not. I barely know the man. I do find him charming,’ she admitted.

  ‘Everyone does,’ I said.

  Richenda brushed my comment away like I was a fly. ‘He behaves like a gentleman and I have no doubt he would treat his wife with consideration and the proper respect. But his mother, even when she isn’t pretending to have that dreadful accent …’

  ‘Why does she do that?’ I interrupted.