Peril by Post Read online

  In any case, the carriage ride was certainly accomplished more quickly than the walk would have been, and it seemed no time at all before they were set down before the Hetherington abode. A matched set of footmen (there was really no other way to describe them) flung open the double doors, and as they entered the hall, Robert Hetherington himself came to meet them.

  “Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Pickett! So pleased you could come. I can’t recall, Mr. Pickett, did you meet my wife on the occasion of your earlier visit? No? Come and let me introduce you, then.”

  He steered them through a door opening off the hall to the left, where a still-handsome woman of about sixty sat on a sofa upholstered in cherry-striped satin brocade. She rose and shook out her plum-colored skirts as they entered the room, and Pickett noted that she was tall and so thin as to appear gaunt. Still, her smile was sweet, and when she spoke there was a pleasant, almost musical, lilt to her voice.

  “I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Pickett, Mr. Pickett,” she said, offering white-gloved hands to Julia. “My husband tells me you are newly married.”

  “Three months,” Julia said, taking Mrs. Hetherington’s hands in hers. She felt the older woman flinch, and immediately loosened her grip.

  “Allow me to wish you both very happy,” her hostess said. At that moment the dinner gong sounded, and she turned to Pickett. “Well! That was very prompt, was it not? If you will give me your arm, Mr. Pickett, we will go in to dinner. I have an excellent cook—a French émigré, you know—but he can be quite temperamental if his masterpieces are allowed to grow cold.”

  “That’s always the way of these geniuses,” observed Mr. Hetherington as he offered his arm to Julia. “They all have their weaknesses. Don’t you find it so, Mr. Pickett?”

  The look which the man fixed on him was so fraught with meaning that Pickett wasn’t sure if he was being invited to confide something unflattering about Mr. Colquhoun, or if his magistrate’s letter had somehow given his host the impression that he fancied himself a genius, and was thus in need of a setdown. Not for the first time, he wished he knew exactly what Mr. Colquhoun had written in his letter of introduction. “I don’t think I can claim acquaintance with any geniuses,” Pickett confessed. “I shall have to take your word for it.”

  Whatever the cook’s quirks of temperament, it soon became evident that his abilities had not been exaggerated. Pickett, accepting a second serving of green turtle soup, took the liberty of saying so.

  “I was very fortunate to get him,” Mrs. Hetherington said. “He had fled France at the beginning of the Terror, and escaped to Dublin. Mr. Hetherington found him there while we were visiting family, and we brought him back with us.”

  “You are Irish, then?” Julia asked her host in some surprise.

  “No, no, I’m Cumberland born and bred, but Brigid there”—he pointed his fork in the general direction of his wife, seated at the opposite end of the table—“hails from the Emerald Isle.”

  “What a lovely name for your home country,” Julia told her hostess. Both ladies had slipped their hands free of their gloves in order to eat, and Julia noted with shocked pity that Mrs. Hetherington’s fingers were so racked with arthritis as to look like claws. Small wonder the poor woman had flinched when Julia had pressed her hands!

  “It is indeed a lovely name, and fitting as well, but it isn’t original with my husband,” she replied, smiling at him down the length of polished mahogany.

  “No, some poet fellow said it first,” Mr. Hetherington confessed with unimpaired good cheer.

  “It figures,” Pickett said, giving Julia a wink.

  “Eh, what’s that?” Mr. Hetherington asked.

  Coloring slightly, Julia resolved to have a word with her husband regarding the propriety of winking at one’s spouse over the dinner table. “There is a young man staying at the Hart and Hound who claims to be a poet,” she explained. “As I am not familiar with his work, I can offer no opinion as to its quality, but he does have a tendency to express himself in rather florid terms.”

  “Aye, since that Wordsworth fellow moved to Grasmere—what, ten years ago?”—receiving confirmation from his wife, Hetherington continued—“every ha’penny rhymester in England has taken up residence near the Lakes. But I think I know the fellow you refer to. Testified at the inquest today, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Pickett concurred, somewhat surprised. “Were you there, sir? I didn’t see you.”

  “No, I wasn’t there. I reckoned I’d done my bit by organizing the search. Besides, it was plain as a pikestaff what the verdict was going to be. Misadventure, falling off the cliff, am I not right?”

  Pickett nodded. “You are. Does it happen often? People falling off the cliff, I mean.”

  “Aye, it’s a fairly common occurrence, but not usually amongst the locals. They have better sense than to stand on the edge. Most of ’em, anyway,” he amended darkly, then picked up his wineglass and drank deeply.

  “Robert, try to be charitable, my dear,” his wife chided him. “Ned Hawkins has never seemed to me to lack for sense. Who knows what he might have had on his mind that day?”

  “Aye, I suppose you’re right. I’ll wager just reining in that daughter of his would be enough to drive any man to distraction.”

  “I’m afraid Lizzie Hawkins is a bit of a coquette,” Brigid Hetherington explained for the sake of her guests. “A young farmer has been courting her, but I fear the girl’s head has been turned by this sudden influx of poets.”

  “Yes, we’ve seen one of them flirting with her at the inn,” Julia said. “The same one who testified at the inquest, in fact. He calls himself Percival Hartsong, but as it turns out, his real name is Gape.”

  “For my money, she’d do best to take young Wilson,” put in their host.

  “That has been my impression, too,” Julia agreed. “Much as I enjoy reading it on occasion, I fear writing poetry would not provide the steadiest of incomes on which to support a wife—unless, of course, he possesses an independence from some other source.” She discreetly left unsaid the suspicion, shared by herself and her husband, that marriage was not the poet’s primary object in wooing the innkeeper’s daughter.

  The butler and two footmen entered the dining room at that moment, bearing the dishes that comprised the meat course, and conversation was suspended while the first course was removed and a joint of roast beef was placed before Pickett.

  “Will you carve, Mr. Pickett?” asked Mrs. Hetherington, regarding him expectantly.

  It was with some trepidation that Pickett took the large knife the butler offered, for this was a skill he had acquired only in the months since his marriage. Before that time, he’d lived alone in a small flat in Drury Lane, and on those rare occasions when he could afford a cut of meat for his dinner, he’d torn the roasted flesh from the bone with his teeth in order not to miss a single shred. Shortly after he had moved into Julia’s Curzon Street town house, her kindhearted butler, Rogers, had recognized his dilemma, and had taken him aside for a private lesson in the art.

  Still, this was the first time he had been obliged to demonstrate his skill (or lack thereof) before an audience. Mentally rehearsing Rogers’s instructions, he identified the grain and sliced across it with sufficient firmness that he was not obliged to hack the meat to pieces by sawing back and forth on it. He glanced up at Julia and, finding her beaming at him in approval and, yes, even pride, let out a sigh of relief, marveling anew that she had known exactly who—and what—he was, and had married him anyway.

  The roast having been successfully carved, the Hetheringtons’ butler took charge of serving a slice of the meat to each person at the table. To the slightly embarrassed surprise of both Picketts, one of the footmen took up a position at Mrs. Hetherington’s elbow and began cutting her meat into much smaller pieces.

  “Pray, pay me no heed,” she implored them. “I suffer from a stupid arthritic complaint which makes it impossible for me to perform such simple tasks as cutting m
y own meat. It makes me feel so very childlike, I half expect my long-departed governess to appear at any moment and drag me back to the schoolroom. You will say I should spare my guests’ blushes and restrict myself to foods I may manage on my own, but I confess I enjoy André’s cooking too much to make the sacrifice.”

  “Nor should you be expected to do so!” cried Julia, appalled by the very suggestion.

  “For my part, I would be far more embarrassed to be eating while you did without,” Pickett concurred.

  “What excellent young people you are!” exclaimed their hostess. “I can see Mr. Colquhoun did not exaggerate.”

  She thanked the footman and dismissed him, and after the servants had left them alone, her husband picked up the strands of their abandoned conversation. “Tell me, Mr. Pickett, will you attend the funeral tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” Pickett confessed. “I suppose I ought to, since I was one of the three men who discovered the body.”

  “Rather macabre way to spend your honeymoon, don’t you think? I should say—”

  Mrs. Hetherington raised her gnarled hands. “No more, please, Robert! I refuse to have dinner haunted by the ghost of Ned Hawkins. Tell me, Mrs. Pickett, is this your first visit to the Lake District?”

  With this query, the conversation grew more general. The Hetheringtons, upon discovering that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Pickett had visited the area before, were quick to recommend such pastimes as might be of interest to a newly married couple, from hiking in the fells to hiring a boat and rowing on the lake. Pickett held his breath when Mr. Hetherington suggested an especially picturesque spot in which to enjoy a picnic, recognizing it as the very place where he had dozed while Julia had witnessed murder most foul, but here he did his wife less than justice: nothing in either her expression or her manner conveyed anything beyond polite interest.

  “We usually have assemblies on Wednesday nights, just like they do in London,” Mrs. Hetherington continued. “I daresay the one two nights hence must be canceled. What a pity! I’m sure it must go sorely against the grain with Jedidiah Tyson—he owns the Golden Feather, you know, right across the street from the Hart and Hound—but I should think they will resume next week, if you intend to stay in Banfell that long.”

  “Our plans are not fixed,” Julia told her, darting a quick glance at Pickett for confirmation, “but we will certainly bear it in mind. Your husband had told Mr. Pickett about the assemblies, and we have already stopped by the Golden Feather to sign the subscription book.”

  “That seems to be quite a rivalry,” Pickett remarked to his host.

  “Came up at the inquest, did it?” Mr. Hetherington asked in some surprise. “Surely no one thinks Tyson shoved Hawkins off the cliff?”

  Since this was much too close to the truth for Pickett’s liking, he was only too glad to be able to deny any such supposition. “No, of course not. But the question arose as to whether Ned Hawkins might have leapt to his death, with loss of revenue to Tyson’s rival establishment being a potential motive for suicide.”

  “I can see why the possibility must be considered,” Hetherington conceded, albeit grudgingly. “It must have been hard on poor old Ned, seeing a new inn open up practically on his doorstep.”

  “And a very elegant one, at that,” Julia agreed, “if the little we saw when we went inside is anything to judge by. But Mrs. Hawkins said Mr. Tyson had never had two shillings to rub together. How, pray, did he contrive to open an inn at all, especially one catering to a fashionable clientele?”

  “I believe he inherited a considerable sum from a relative, a merchant in Penrith,” their host recalled. “It was two years ago, maybe three, so I can’t remember all the details. He used his legacy to purchase the Feather—it wasn’t an inn at the time, but a private residence that had fallen into disrepair—and set about converting it into a commercial establishment. Mind you, it has no yard, being up against the street as it is, so the mail coaches and the stage from Penrith still use the Hart and Hound. Still, it’s near enough that fashionables who prefer the Feather aren’t inconvenienced, provided they have no objection to hauling their own bags across the street.” He chuckled at one of the more amusing aspects of the rivalry. “And haul ’em themselves they must, for Ned Hawkins wouldn’t let any of Tyson’s staff set foot in his inn yard, nor allow any of his own people to fetch bags for his rival’s patrons.”

  “And so Tyson conceived of the assemblies as a form of revenge,” Pickett deduced.

  “I should say the shoe was on the other foot! Tyson started hosting assemblies the first summer he was open. He’s got a big room one floor up that’s particularly well-suited to the purpose. Ned Hawkins, on the other hand, has no place to host such things even if he wanted to, and don’t think Tyson doesn’t know it!” He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “A word of warning, Mr. Pickett. If you and Mrs. Pickett should happen to attend next Wednesday’s assembly, you’d best steer clear of any drinks on offer. Tyson has been known to slip something into the wine, something that incapacitates his guests—not seriously, mind you, just enough so that they’re obliged to put up at the Feather for the night—even holds rooms vacant for the purpose.”

  “He told us about the rooms, and I suspected the rest,” Pickett said thoughtfully. “He sounds like the sort that wouldn’t stick at much.”

  “No, but the idea that he should drive Ned Hawkins to suicide is absurd, and I’m pleased that the coroner’s jury recognized it as such,” Hetherington said. “In fact, I should have said if Hawkins was inclined to kill anyone, it wouldn’t have been himself, but Tyson—or perhaps that poet who’s trying to give his daughter a slip on the shoulder.”

  “That does it!” Mrs. Hetherington laid aside her serviette and pushed her chair back. “If you are determined not to let poor Ned Hawkins rest in peace, I shall leave you to your port. Will you accompany me, Mrs. Pickett?”

  Julia was conscious of a reluctance to abandon her husband, well aware that he was uncomfortable with many of the social conventions that were second nature to her. Still, it would be the height of bad manners to refuse her hostess, so she gave Pickett an apologetic smile, assuring herself that surely a friend of Mr. Colquhoun’s would be inclined to look favorably upon him, and allowed Mrs. Hetherington to lead her from the room.

  “Here we may have a comfortable coze,” this lady pronounced, ushering Julia into a withdrawing room at the rear of the house. Once the door was closed behind them, she added, with a twinkle in her eye, “Besides, I thought by now you might be in need of the chamber pot. When I was in your condition, I could hardly get through dinner without making my excuses and escaping to relieve myself. How Robert used to tease me about it!”

  “My—my condition?” Julia echoed.

  “You are increasing, are you not?” Mrs. Hetherington asked in some consternation. “Pray forgive me if I was mistaken—”

  “No, you are quite correct. But how did you know?” Julia cast a furtive glance down the front of her gown. “I thought it was not yet obvious.”

  “It is not yet evident in your figure,” the older woman assured her. “But some women have a particular glow about them when they are in the family way. Add to that the fact that you have been married for three months to a young man whom you obviously love very much, and it is easy to deduce the rest. In any case, I have been in that condition too many times myself to fail to recognize it in another. Never fear, Robert will not keep your handsome Mr. Pickett from you for long. Tell me, how did the two of you meet?”

  Which was a tactful way, Julia thought, of saying they appeared to be an oddly matched couple. She began to see why her husband wished he knew exactly what Mr. Colquhoun had said about them. Seeing her hostess was awaiting her answer, Julia chose her words with care. “We—we met very shortly after the death of my first husband. He was murdered, you see, and Mr. Pickett was—was very helpful—to me during the weeks that followed, although of course I had no thought at the time of marr
ying again. But you say you have been in the family way yourself,” she added, seizing the opportunity to turn the subject. “Pray, how many children do you have?”

  “Alas, none,” Mrs. Hetherington said with a sigh of regret. “At least, none that survived. I was unable to carry a child to term.” As Julia’s eyes grew round with alarm, she added quickly, “It was the result of an injury suffered when I was very young. I am sure there is no reason to suppose you will not safely deliver a healthy child.”

  Julia had considered the possibility that she herself might not survive the birth (hence her furtive letter to her sister, which still resided at the bottom of her portable writing desk) but it had not yet occurred to her that she might lose the baby. Suddenly she wanted a moment alone to compose herself while she considered this new and frightening possibility. Fortunately, her hostess had provided her with a convenient excuse.

  “You—you said something about a chamber pot?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll show you.”

  Mrs. Hetherington led the way up the central staircase to her own bedchamber. The poetic phrase “emerald isle” rose unbidden to Julia’s brain, for the room was furnished in shades of green, and the space over a very fine fireplace of green marble was dominated by a framed painting of a stately house set amidst the lush green of its parkland. Julia could not identify either the artist or his subject, and wondered if this was her hostess’s family home, committed to canvas by some local talent unknown to the wider world.

  “My dressing room is through there,” the older woman said, indicating a door set in the far wall. “The chamber pot is in the cupboard.”

  Alone in the dressing room, Julia made no move to open the cupboard, but regarded her reflection in the cheval mirror with a long, appraising look, pressing a hand to her abdomen as if by doing so she might impart strength to the infant within. You have nothing to worry about, she told herself firmly, and tried hard to believe it. After all, her sister, following the drum with her husband in Spain, had given birth to a healthy baby under the most primitive of conditions. Even her mother, frail as she was, had managed to deliver two girls without mishap. Julia’s own physician said everything was progressing exactly as it should up to this point—and in the meantime, while she fretted over nightmarish scenarios that might never come to pass, the gentlemen would be joining the ladies in the withdrawing room, and John, finding her gone, would wonder where she’d got off to and worry about her protracted absence. Now, about that chamber pot . . .