3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock

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      Though Celia was not to know it, I’d been giving the question some thought on my own behalf. With the amount of work demanded from a governess, I couldn’t see how I was to find the time to get to the Silver Horseshoe, let alone make regular reports to Mr Blackstone.

      ‘There surely must be a way,’ she said.

      I let her see that I was thinking hard.

      ‘There must be some livery stables near here, with carriages that meet the mail coaches,’ I said. ‘If I could take your letter to one of those …’

      ‘Yes. Oh, Miss Lock, how very clever of you. Could you do that?’

      Her eyes were shining. She took hold of my hand again.

      ‘I think so, yes. I’ve heard somebody talking about a place called the Silver Horseshoe, on the west side of the heath.’

      ‘Yes. We pass it in the carriage sometimes. I think they keep race horses there as well as livery.’

      ‘Is it far away?’

      ‘About two miles, I think.’

      ‘If I were to walk there, in the very early morning, say, do you suppose anybody would notice me?’

      ‘You must not be noticed. You simply must not be noticed.’

      Which was hardly an answer to my question. She turned her head suddenly.

      ‘What was that?’

      A chesty cough came from the far side of the beech hedge. A bent old gardener in a smock limped through the arch into the garden, trug over his arm. He didn’t glance in our direction and moved on slowly to a bed of delphiniums.

      ‘I must go,’ she said. ‘We must not be seen alone together.’

      ‘You surely don’t take him for a spy?’

      I kept a firm hold of her hand.

      ‘It was strange, wasn’t it, meeting in Calais like that?’ I said.

      She nodded, but her hand was tense and her eyes were on the old man.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘What were you and your stepfather doing in Calais?’

      With an effort, she brought her attention back to me.

      ‘He had business in Paris. He wanted me to go with him.’

      ‘Does he often travel abroad?’

      ‘Not very often, no.’

      ‘I suppose you stayed several days in Calais?’

      ‘Not even a day. He’d worked himself into such a fume about getting home, we hardly had time to sleep. It was nearly two o’clock on Tuesday morning before we got to Calais and we were on the packet out by Tuesday afternoon.’

      She said it so naturally, with half her mind still on the old gardener, that it sounded like the truth. My father’s body was brought to the morgue in Calais early on Saturday morning. So if she was right, by the time the Mandevilles arrived there, he was nearly three days dead. And yet a memory came to me of the foyer of the Calais hotel, and her stepfather disputing a bill several pages long.

      ‘You’d built up a very long hotel bill in a few hours,’ I said.

      She blinked, as if she didn’t understand what I meant at first.

      ‘Oh, that was mostly Stephen’s. He was there waiting for us. My stepfather frets if he thinks Stephen’s being extravagant.’

      She let go of my hand and stood up. The stable clock was striking.

      ‘What time is that?’

      ‘Seven,’ I said.

      ‘Fanny will wonder what’s become of me. I shall say I couldn’t sleep. Lord knows, that’s true enough. I’ll make some excuse to come to the schoolroom and give you the letter.’

      She took a step or two then turned round.

      ‘I can trust you, can’t I?’

      ‘Yes.’

      Then she was gone through the gap in the beech hedge, a few white rose petals fluttering after her. The old gardener went on cutting delphiniums, not noticing anything.

      I went through the back courtyard and the backstairs route to my room in the attic. From there, I hurried down to the schoolroom as if I’d just got up. Betty had the three children round the table, choosing pictures to paste into their scrapbooks.

      ‘Say good morning to Miss Lock.’

      They chorused it obediently.

      ‘It’s such a lovely morning, I thought we might all have a walk on the terrace before breakfast,’ Betty said.

      So we went on to the terrace through a side door and the children played hide and seek among the marble statues.

      ‘I let them run wild when there’s nobody about,’ Betty said. ‘They’re not bad children, considering.’

      After breakfast at the schoolroom table of boiled eggs and soft white rolls with good butter, it was time to start my governess duties. I realised that, with all my other concerns, I’d given no thought to the question of teaching, and with three freshly washed faces looking up at me and three pairs of small hands resting on either side of their slates I felt something like panic. Still, we managed. I devoted most of the morning to finding out how much they knew already, and the results were patchy. They were very well drilled in their tables and the Bible (I thought I detected Mrs Beedle’s influence there), adequate in grammar and handwriting and able to speak a little French, though with very bad accents. Their geography and history seemed sketchy, with many gaps, although they could all recite the kings and queens of England from Canute to the late William. Charles’s Latin was nowhere near as good as he believed and consisted mostly of recognising a few words in a passage then giving an over-free translation from memory. That possibly explained why he had not been sent away to school yet, although he was clearly old enough. I discovered early on that he had a passion for battles. Problems in addition and multiplication that otherwise brought only a blank stare were solved in seconds if I presented them in terms of so many men with muskets and so many rounds of ammunition. It was a principle of my father’s, following the great Rousseau, that learning should be made a pleasure for a child. I decided that in what would probably be a very short time with the Mandevilles, I’d try to put it into practice. After all, whatever had happened was hardly the children’s fault.

      Around midday, we moved on to poetry. To my astonishment, they’d never even heard of Shelley so I went straight upstairs to get the treasured volume from my bag and read to them.

       I met a traveller from an antique land,

       Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

       Stand in СКАЧАТЬ