Cinderella Six Feet Under(22)

“Lord and Lady Cruthlach,” Gabriel said. “How delightful to see you.” He had hoped never again to lay eyes on this accursed pair. “How long has it been? Two years? Three?”

“Three, dear Lord Harrington, three.” Lady Cruthlach tipped her undersized head and smiled, revealing teeth as perfect as a little child’s.

Ivory teeth, surely. Not . . . a little child’s.

Lady Cruthlach’s too-bright eyes sunk into her crumpled face. Her sparse yellowed hair was dragged back from an aristocratic, high forehead and fastened with jeweled hairpins. The jewels emphasized the shining flesh of her scalp.

Gabriel forced himself to kiss her mottled hand.

“Why,” Lord Cruthlach wheezed beside her, “why does he stand? Rohesia, why? He blocks the light. He blocks the warmth. My bones ache from the cold, Rohesia, oh!”

Legend had it that Athdar Crawley, Lord Cruthlach, had once been one of the tallest, proudest gentlemen in the Scottish peerage. Heaven only knew how long ago that had been, for now he resembled nothing so much as a suit of clothes abandoned on the cushions.

“Rohesia, they pain me again. My veins, they pain me. Oh, why does this blackguard block the warmth?”

“Drink?” Lady Cruthlach crowed to Gabriel. “And please, do sit.”

Gabriel sat. Sweat beaded beneath his arms and at the small of his back. “A drink would be splendid.”

Hume poured out tiny glasses of something at a sideboard. His bulky back concealed his operations.

Three drinks were brought forth on a tray.

Normally, Gabriel wouldn’t dream of accepting a drink from the Crawleys. He had heard whispers of foes found, necks snapped, at the base of Castle Margeldie’s battlements. Of a snooping Cambridge scholar sunk forever out of sight in a bog on their Highland estate. Of a nosy marchioness taken fatally ill after ingesting a slice of chocolate cake at their winter solstice dinner party in 1861.

Gabriel sipped. Putrid, medicinal sweetness, and it scalded all the way down. The four of them seemed to silently count together ten ticks of the mantelpiece clock. Gabriel did not topple to the carpet in convulsions.

Good, then.





7




Ophelia devoured two apples, a wedge of cheese, nearly half a loaf of bread, drank three glasses of water, and felt her spirits perk up. She left Prue in the kitchen—Prue would not be pried away from her scrubbing—and went upstairs to her chamber. She took the back staircase she’d discovered. Better not to let the entire household in on her comings and goings.

She set to work on a note to Inspector Foucher, using paper, envelope, fountain pen, and ink she kept in her carpetbag. The paper was crumply and the ink flaked. She described with as much detail as possible what she had learned about Sybille Pinet at the opera house and the boardinghouse.

A scream rang out. Then another, and another.

Ophelia dropped her pen. She followed the screams down to the stepsisters’ salon. She burst through the doors.

The screams stopped. Several pairs of eyes stared at Ophelia.

“Is everything quite all right?” Ophelia asked.

“Madame Brand,” Eglantine said. “Is it not the fashion to knock in Boston?” Eglantine stood upon a dressmaker’s stool. She was flushed, and she clutched a ripped piece of paper to her chest. Her pink moiré silk skirts half concealed two seamstresses who knelt at the hem, stitching.

“I beg your pardon, but I grew alarmed at the sound of screams.”

“That was Austorga,” Eglantine said.

Austorga sat on a sofa. Her sturdy shoulders rose and fell. Like her sister, she clutched a ripped piece of paper. In her other hand she held a large, square envelope.

“Was the screaming not Austorga, Mademoiselle Smythe?” Eglantine asked.

Miss Seraphina Smythe was the frail girl in owlish spectacles who had been playing the piano when Sybille’s body had been discovered. She sat beside Austorga on the sofa and she had just bitten into a chocolate bonbon. At Eglantine’s question, her jaws froze. She nodded.

“Screaming?” Mrs. Smythe, Seraphina’s mother, said in a vague voice, from the opposite sofa. She looked up from the pages of a book. “I did not hear anything.” Mrs. Smythe had also been in attendance at the stepsisters’ soirée on the evening of the murder. She was a stout lady with bleary blue eyes, attired in a smart visiting gown.

“You never do hear anything, Mother,” Seraphina said.