“Mary, I actually phoned you a couple of hours ago—I didn’t know the woman would continue to try you. It could wait till morning…”
“I’m glad to hear it’s not drop-everything urgent, but since you’ve reached me, why don’t you go ahead and tell me about it? Is it Simon?” The child was occasionally sickly, but in summer?
“Simon? No, he’s super, why? Oh, I mean, I know why, but no, he’s doing marvellously. I’m sorry you missed his birthday party last month. Mother hired a pony ride—she found this funny little man with ponies down in Brighton and Simon climbed right up, never a hesitation, you should have seen it…”
I waited through a proud mama’s recitation of genius, studying the room, wondering if Holmes might rid it of Mrs Hudson’s homely touches, wondering if Ronnie would notice if I gently laid down the earpiece to go fetch my wine glass—which was no doubt serving as a swimming pool for midges. When Ronnie paused for a breath, I hastened to interrupt. “That all sounds perfectly super. So if not Simon, what’s the trouble?”
“Do you remember my Aunt Vivian?”
“The one—” I stopped to reach around for a diplomatic word, but Ronnie wasn’t bothered.
“In the loony bin, yes.”
“I only met her the once, but it was…”
“Terrifying?”
“Memorable.”
My old friend laughed sadly at the understatement. “I know. Well, she’s vanished, into thin air.”
* * *
—
A solid twenty minutes later, I removed the telephone receiver from my numb ear. Five more minutes passed before I stood and went back through the terrace doors.
As I approached, Holmes stretched out an arm and removed his clean handkerchief from the top of my wine glass: no drowned midges.
“That was Ronnie Beaconsfield—Fitzwarren, rather,” I told him. “Her aunt has disappeared.”
“The mad one?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t she in Bedlam? Escape from there is not an easy matter.”
I glanced over at him, but his face was in shadow. “Holmes, that sounds oddly like the voice of experience speaking.” He did not reply, which meant that here was yet another episode in his life he had neglected to mention—probably because there was something embarrassing about it. “No, in fact, she’d been given a week’s home leave, with a nurse in charge, in order to celebrate her brother’s—her half-brother’s—fiftieth birthday. The Marquess of Selwick? Vivian and the nurse were headed back to the asylum on Friday, but they never arrived.”
“And your friend wishes you…?”
“To look into it, yes. She has a young child, so her movements are somewhat restricted.”
“The child hasn’t a governess?”
“Only a few days a week. The widow’s pension Ronnie gets doesn’t leave her with many luxuries.”
“Veronica Beaconsfield is living on an Army pension?”
“Ridiculous, I know. But I suspect that her uncle the Marquess made some bad investments, since he’s never moved back to the London house since the War—ironic, considering that Ronnie’s father was something of a financial genius—and the other uncle, on the mother’s side, married an American who’s rather tighter with her dollars than he anticipated. Neither are keen on providing Ronnie an allowance to live in her own place in London. I’m sure it’ll be sorted out in the end, but until then…”
He grunted. I took another sip from the too-warm wine.
Peace returned. As did the midges. Holmes gathered the near-empty bottle and the glasses and took them into the house, leaving me to listen to the sea and think about beehives, and carefree Young Things, and Ronnie’s mad aunt.
As I remembered it, Vivian Beaconsfield had always demonstrated a particular antipathy for her half-brother Edward, Lord Selwick. I was pretty sure that most of her overt violence had been aimed at him. Perhaps her willingness to celebrate the anniversary of the Marquess’ birth had been a sign of healing.
Or had it been something else?
* The Beaconsfield case is described in A Monstrous Regiment of Women; the meeting and apprenticeship of Russell and Holmes are found in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and Mary Russell’s War.
Chapter Two
1922
THE LADY VIVIAN BEACONSFIELD WAS the third and youngest living child of William Reginald George Beaconsfield, Seventh Marquess of Selwick. The Marquess had married twice, with sons Edward and Thomas by his first wife, then Lady Vivian with his second. Edward, the heir, was sixteen when his little sister came along, thus nearly entirely fledged from his native Surrey nest. His brother, Thomas, was only fourteen, and though both had been at boarding school when Vivian was born, Thomas was the one who returned home during the long holidays, the one who was actually interested in running the estate. As I remembered, from various things Ronnie had said over the years, Lord Selwick—her Uncle Edward—had no interest in the countryside until he had been forced to return during the War, preferring the bright lights and the halls of power to bucolic Surrey.
Vivian’s mother died of a fever in the winter of 1912, when her daughter was twenty-one. The following year, the aged Seventh Marquess faded away as well, and Edward inherited the title and lands. The new Marquess was happy at Selwick Hall in London and the family chateau in the south of France, leaving his brother to oversee things in Surrey. Thomas Beaconsfield—now with a lesser title of his own, Earl of Pewsley, a reward for steering some very important men away from some very costly financial mistakes—came to be known by the jocular nickname of “Lord Waterloo” for his idiosyncratic habit of commuting up and down between London and Surrey. He was often joined on these journeys by his wife, who was active on various Arts ventures, and Ronnie, who came to Town for tutoring. But they went home each night to Selwick, and to Vivian, his fragile younger sister.
Then came the War. Despite his title, his age, and his responsibilities, Thomas Beaconsfield enlisted, and volunteered for the Front. There he died, a bare twelve months later. His wife and sixteen-year-old Ronnie were bereft. His twenty-four-year-old sister was devastated.
Vivian had always been eccentric, and vulnerable—even physically so, being delicate of bone, pale of hair and skin. Her coming out in 1910, at the alarmingly late age of nineteen, had been a trial for all concerned, and she fled London even before the Season was at an end, with no sign of a ring or even an agreement. She spent some weeks in Europe before returning to her refuge in the country, there to remain.
Selwick having no master and London being under attack, Edward had little choice but to return home. Ronnie and her mother spent much of their time away, burying their grief in war work and grim preparations for University exams. The Marquess had moved their things into the east wing, that he might take up residence in the main house. His sister, Vivian, was moved to the women’s side as well.
That disruption, added to the deaths of both parents and brother and the long absences of sister-in-law and niece, seemed to push Vivian’s eccentricities into something darker. The servants’ reports of her behaviour grew more and more alarming—her habitual country walks would extend long after sunset; her shyness grew into a pathological avoidance of former friends. There were occasional outbursts of temper that would be followed by unnatural, almost cringing withdrawal. She grew ever thinner, would pick at her finger-nails until they bled, bit at the corner of her mouth, nervously pulled locks of hair. Ronnie and her mother, coming back from London in June to help with harvest chores, found a quivering and nervous woman. One day, the maid discovered a sharp little kitchen knife in Vivian’s pocket. The next afternoon Ronnie came upon her, weeping uncontrollably in the morning room. A few days after that, one year to the week after Thomas’ death, Vivian tried to murder the Marquess with a fireplace poker.