A Perilous Perspective (Lady Darby Mystery #10)(109)

She clasped my hand between hers. “You remember you told me about the miniature showing up on your pillow, and then I found your mother’s missing pendant?”

I lifted my other hand to press it to the amethyst. “Yes?”

“Well, I’ve uncovered something.”

“Have you?” I replied, trying to suppress some of the amusement I felt at the victorious tilt of her head. She was clearly quite proud of herself.

“I spoke to some of the staff, and one of the maids recalled seeing an older woman entering your chamber.”

My eyes widened at this pronouncement and then immediately shifted to Lady Bearsden’s face.

“The maid told me she’d thought it was Lady Bearsden, so she didn’t say anything,” Morven continued.

“But it was not,” Lady Bearsden proclaimed with a harrumph. “As if I would enter another guest’s room without their being there or having their leave to do so.”

I struggled to hide a guilty flush, for I’d done just such a thing numerous times in the past. Of course, it had been in the pursuit of one of our inquiries, but that didn’t absolve me entirely. Mercifully, neither lady seemed to notice.

“Yes, but the maid couldn’t have known you’d not been given leave to do so,” Morven pointed out. “And she wasn’t going to be so impertinent as to ask you.”

Something whoever the culprit was had counted on.

“I suppose you’re right,” Lady Bearsden replied, seeming slightly mollified.

“Would you say this maid was particularly perceptive?” I asked Morven.

“I should say not,” Lady Bearsden grumbled. “Naming me the culprit.”

“What I mean is, would she have noted the details? Or would she have simply seen an older lady entering my room, and so assumed it was Lady Bearsden since she was the guest who most easily fit that description?”

“Definitely the latter,” Morven proclaimed. “When I pressed her on whether she was certain it was Lady Bearsden, the only details she could recall was that she was dressed like a lady and had white or gray hair.”

I frowned. “She didn’t see her face?”

“No.”

Then, for that matter, the intruder might have been anyone dressed in disguise with a wig. Though I couldn’t imagine why anyone would go to such lengths just to employ a few pranks. Which told me that they weren’t merely larks but the work of someone much more intent on preying on my mind. Someone like the woman in the blue cloak.

I turned to look at Gage, knowing he was thinking of Miss Ferguson, but someone else had come to my mind. The same person whose possible involvement had been troubling me since the governess mentioned a lady had regularly visited Lord Alisdair. The same person who had made sure I was aware of my mother’s connection to her and her gift to her of the amethyst pendant even now hanging around my neck.

Could Miss Campbell have snuck into the manor? Could she have been the woman to don the blue cloak? That first time I’d seen her from the battlements, she couldn’t have anticipated I would do so, but perhaps she had seen me standing up there and realized the effect it had on me. Perhaps that’s when she’d decided to keep exploiting it.

I had to admit it was possible she could have done all that. Though that didn’t answer whether she had.

Just contemplating the idea of it left me feeling cold inside, for I had liked Miss Campbell. I had felt a growing affection for her, particularly in light of her relationship with my mother. But if she had sought to exploit that connection to some nefarious effect, then I had been well and truly fooled. At least temporarily.

I turned to look up at the painting behind me, forcing my eyes to follow the sweeps of that long-ago painter’s brush, to breathe through each swipe as if I was making it myself while my mind grappled with the unsettling possibility that Miss Campbell was complicit in the forgeries, and perchance a poisoner. For if she was the lady who had been such a regular visitor of Alisdair, she had almost certainly known of his dishonorable activities. Activities Mr. MacCowan and Mairi had also known about, as well as her presence at Alisdair’s cottage. And if she had been the older woman sneaking into my chamber and skulking about in a blue cloak, then she had been intent on at least hindering my efforts to investigate. She had also left the cloak inside Mr. MacCowan’s cottage, which made me suspect it wasn’t the first time she’d been there. She might have poisoned both servants to keep them quiet about her past.

After all, it was my discovery of the forgeries which appeared to have set everything into motion. Before then, Miss Campbell must have felt relatively safe from discovery. Alisdair and Signor Pellegrini were dead. The MacCowans were unlikely to speak up about it or be believed if they did. But once I’d realized the Van Dyck was a forgery, everything had changed. We started asking questions, and she must have feared it was only a matter of time before the MacCowans talked.

It was a disconcerting feeling to suspect that my knowledge and actions—no matter how innocent or well-meaning—might have initiated the events that had led to other people’s deaths. Usually the murders we investigated had little, if nothing, to do with us, for they transpired for reasons independent of us, and we either happened to be nearby or were called in later to investigate. But this time was different. And while the notion of my feeling guilty about it was absurd, I did, in at least a small way, feel culpable.