A Curious Beginning

If she was aware of my scrutiny, it did not offend her, and in a very short time we were comfortably ensconced with a tin of shortbread. She handed me a cup and smiled. “Napoleon’s wedding china,” she told me.

“Rather different from Stoker’s notion of hospitality,” I remarked.

She looked to him and they exchanged smiles. Their friendship was a comfortable thing, and no doubt of long duration to make them so easy with one another.

He put down his cup. “Lady C.,” he began.

“Do not think to scold me,” she remonstrated softly. “I read the newspapers before I sent them on. I could not stay away and do nothing to help. I know how black things are against you at present.”

“All the more reason for you to have stayed in Cornwall,” he argued. “If this all goes south, you might have at least been able to persuade the authorities that you had no notion we were here. Now—”

“Now I shall be able to offer you and Miss Speedwell proper assistance,” she finished. Her smooth brow furrowed slightly. “It is unfortunate that Sidonie saw you. She is a terrible gossip, but if I explain the danger properly,” she said to Stoker, “she will hold her tongue. You know how she feels about you.”

I tipped my head. “How does she feel about you?” I asked Stoker pleasantly.

He flushed a dull red, but it was Lady Cordelia who replied. “My maid has conceived a tendresse for Stoker. Somehow she got it into her head that he is a proper buccaneer and she has never quite recovered. The French can be very suggestible,” she added. I was beginning to like Lady Cordelia.

She turned to Stoker. “You must know it never entered my mind that you might be guilty,” she said quietly.

“Bless you for that.”

Her smile was tinged with sadness. “I know how much the baron loved you. You would never have repaid that affection with violence.”

I interjected. “You, too, knew the baron, Lady Cordelia?”

She nodded. “Through my brother. His lordship collects, well, everything, really, as you can see,” she said with a gesture that encompassed the whole of the Belvedere. “And the baron enjoyed art. My brother first made his acquaintance a decade ago. They attended an auction, both of them bent on acquiring a painting of lovebirds rumored to have belonged to Catherine the Great. The bidding was furious, and in the end, both of them were outbid. They consoled each other by way of a rather splendid bottle of port.”

“Friendships have been built upon less solid foundations,” I mused.

Her smile deepened. “Indeed. In any event, they became quite good friends. It was through the baron that we met Stoker. We were deeply saddened to hear of the baron’s murder,” she added with a pensive look.

“How did you learn of it?” I asked.

“Veronica,” Stoker said, a warning edge to his voice. “What are you implying?”

“Nothing. I merely wanted to know his lordship’s reaction.” It was a lie of omission. Naturally, I was curious about the earl’s reaction to his friend’s death, but it also occurred to me that the Beauclerk family was the common ground between Stoker and the baron. Perhaps they knew more than they ought.

Stoker guessed my thoughts and disabused me of them swiftly. “His lordship and Lady Cordelia would be as likely to bludgeon Max to death as the queen would to ride naked in Trafalgar Square,” he said brutally.

To her credit, Lady Cordelia was not offended. She lifted a graceful hand against my quick apology. “Please, do not trouble yourself. It is the most natural thing to wonder, and I should have doubted your intelligence if you hadn’t. The truth, as it so often is, Miss Speedwell, is quite prosaic. The baron was a friend who came to dinner two or three times a year. He and my brother occasionally met for lunch or attended art lectures together, but that is the whole of it. We did not know his friends, save Stoker, and we had no motive to harm him. I give you my word.”

Her word could have been a lie, but I would have staked my own life upon that smooth, guileless brow. Lady Cordelia was that rarest of things—a creature without malice. She reminded me of a statue I had seen once in Sicily of a placid Madonna, above worldly cares and sweetly indulgent of those below her.

She went on. “As for my brother, the best way to explain Ambrose is to say he is vague and oblivious. It isn’t his fault, of course, but he spends nearly all his time with his collections. He takes almost no notice of the world around him. That is why I have the management of his household. I keep his account books; I organize his staff. I even oversee the rearing of his children since the death of his countess.”