“Does her daughter take after her?” I asked, slipping back into my role as chief interrogator.
“In some ways,” Henrietta allowed. “Miss Charlotte keeps herself to herself, and she still orders lots of things from London— force of habit, I suppose—but the milk’s delivered to the kitchen door as it should be, along with local butter, cheese, veg, and fruit.
I told her when she interviewed me that I couldn’t do my job without fresh ingredients, and she took it to heart. Mr. Bellamy’s devoted to her, of course, and Jacqueline seems content enough, and I’ve never had a cross word from her, so I can’t find a reason to complain. To tell you the truth, I’ve only laid eyes on her a handful of times since she interviewed me for the job. I don’t go upstairs, and she’s not the sort of woman who comes down to the kitchen for a cuppa with the cook.”
“It sounds as if she leads a lonely life,” I commented. “Does she ever entertain?”
“Never,” said Henrietta, taking a bite of the cheese-slathered bread. “I wish she would. I’m a dab hand at banquets.”
I gave Kit a meaningful glance, and he returned it with a thoughtful one. It had evidently occurred to him, as it had to me, that, if Henrietta wasn’t allowed to have guests and Miss Charlotte never entertained, then Rendor couldn’t be a visitor to Aldercot Hall.
Ergo, he had to be a family member.
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“Does Miss Charlotte have brothers or sisters?” Kit asked.
“An older brother,” Henrietta replied, “but I don’t know anything about him. Mr. Bellamy mentioned him once—not by name, you understand, just as ‘the young master’—but he clammed up after that. Considering the state of the house, I’d say that Miss Charlotte’s brother disgraced himself financially—cards or the geegees or some such—and got himself booted out of the family. You know how it is with the gentry. There’s always a naughty boy in the bunch. All I know is, he’s never set foot in Aldercot Hall since I’ve been here.”
While Henrietta washed down the bread and cheese with a swig of beer, a voice inside my head cried out, The brother’s in the attic!
Luckily, no one but me heard it.
“For all practical purposes,” Henrietta continued, patting at her mouth with a napkin, “Miss Charlotte is the only surviving member of the DuCaral family. Her mother died two years ago—a year before I came on board—and from what I’ve heard, the old lady’s death was a blessed release for Miss Charlotte.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Old Mrs. DuCaral had a stroke after her husband died,” Henrietta informed me, “and she never really recovered from it. Miss Charlotte waited on her hand and foot until she passed.”
“Did Mr. DuCaral die a long time ago?” I asked. “Like, say, forty years ago?”
“More like three,” said Henrietta. “The date’s out there, in the mausoleum. But he’d been an invalid for nearly forty years before that.”
Lizzie Black seemed to whisper in my ear: “Ask them, if you dare, about the murder that took place there forty years ago. Ask them why it was never reported to the police. Ask them how a man could be dead one day and alive the next.”
I stared down at my plate, certain that I’d found the answers Lizzie had dared me to find, the kernels of truth in her garbled
128 Nancy Atherton
story. Mr. DuCaral hadn’t been murdered forty years ago, as Lizzie had intimated, but he had been viciously attacked, perhaps by his own mysteriously missing son. Though the attack hadn’t killed Mr.
DuCaral outright, it had turned him into an invalid and caused the lingering illness that had led to his death.
Mrs. DuCaral hadn’t wanted her son to go to prison—what
mother would?—so she’d sequestered him in the attic—drugged him, perhaps, to control his violent behavior. When she died, Charlotte had taken over the tasks of controlling and concealing her brother. Charlotte was the last DuCaral left to guard the family’s secrets.
“Poor Charlotte,” I murmured, caught up in my own musings.
Henrietta seemed to think I was talking to her. “Poor Miss Charlotte, indeed. Her brother a ne’er-do-well and her parents invalids . . . What a burden her family has been to her.”
Kit and I were nodding sympathetically when the kitchen door opened and Mr. Bellamy entered the room with his arms wrapped around a large bundle of cloth.
“Hello, Mr. Bellamy,” boomed Henrietta. “What’ve you got there? Curtains for me to wash?”
Mr. Bellamy acknowledged her query with a nod but didn’t answer. Instead, he crossed to stand wordlessly behind me and Kit.
Kit and I exchanged questioning glances, then turned our chairs around to face him.
“I beg pardon for intruding,” he said, with a formal half bow, “but I have explained your plight to Miss Charlotte, and she wishes to be of further assistance to you. Since your garments are besmirched, she hopes that you will allow Mrs. Harcourt—”