A Brazen Curiosity, page 5
part #1 of Beatrice Hyde-Clare Series
“The Duke of Kesgrave was the one who found the body,” Flora said. “Apparently, it was a dreadful scene. The poor man.”
“The duke!” Bea exclaimed. Of course it was he who had arranged the scene to make it appear as if Mr. Otley had killed himself. No wonder he wanted her gone! He couldn’t manipulate events to suit himself with her standing right next to him.
Did that mean Kesgrave was the killer? Had she been duped by an autocratic air and an attitude of condescension?
“Yes, the duke,” Aunt Vera said, her perverse pleasure at being the bearer of bad news easily overcoming her despair at the bad news itself. “He discovered Mr. Otley when he went to the library to get a book. By all accounts, the sight was beyond terrifying. There was blood.”
“A tremendous amount, apparently,” Flora added, “for the duke insisted that it wasn’t seemly for Mrs. Otley and her daughter to see him until Skeffington’s staff had an opportunity to clean him up. Can you imagine? I would think any man who had decided to leave his wife and child to the vagaries of fate would have the decency to choose a more pristine method. Poison, perhaps. Like that Greek philosopher. Socrates, yes? He took a potion that allowed for a very dignified death. I believe he held court until the end.”
“Hemlock,” Aunt Vera said with approval.
“I would advise all suicidal men to seek hemlock,” Flora said.
“A laudable suggestion,” her mother affirmed. “Or perhaps an extra dose of laudanum. There are several ways of ending one’s life that don’t necessitate a full scrubbing by servants before your loved ones can pay their respects.”
Bea looked at her relatives as if they had gone mad, for she couldn’t believe they were taking the poor dead man to task for killing himself improperly.
But he didn’t kill himself!
Mr. Otley was the victim of a cruel attack.
Was the Duke of Kesgrave the one who had wielded the weapon?
Truly, she had no idea. Last night, in the library, such a thing had seemed wildly implausible, and yet she could think of no explanation for why he would tell such a blatant lie other than to protect himself. Making Mr. Otley’s untimely death a suicide ensured that the constable would investigate no further. The only person who would benefit from such a turn would be the perpetrator.
The reasoning was sound, and yet she couldn’t help but feel that lying to slither out of blame wasn’t the way the arrogant duke would free himself of suspicion. Rather, he would stand on his consequence and dare anyone to point a finger. She imagined nobody would, certainly not the village blacksmith whose concern for justice was second to feeding his family.
“All the talk of blood has made Mrs. Otley quite frantic in her grief,” Aunt Vera said. “The poor woman doesn’t know what to do with herself, roaming the drawing room from end to end and whimpering from time to time. Helen and I have tried insisting that she retire to her room to mourn in private, for the whimpering, although understandable, is quite distressing to one’s nerves. She sounds like a cat whose tail is trapped under the leg of a rocking chair, which, at a time like this, is the last thing one wants to think of. But she refuses to go. She says she finds the presence of other people comforting, but there are more things to consider—such as the comfort of those other people. I swear, my nerves are stretched quite as far as they can go.”
And yet her eyes glittered with excitement, Bea noted, for a nabob succeeding in ending his own life was quite the most dramatic thing that had ever happened in her aunt’s vicinity. Previously, her most oft-told tale was the time she suddenly found herself in the path of a notoriously high-in-the-instep dandy whose cutting remarks were so effective he frequently left his victims stunned for days. Fortunately for her, a goldfinch fluttered its wings, drawing the dandy’s attention with its loveliness, and in that brief moment of distraction, Uncle Horace pulled his wife aside, as if out of the way of a rampaging horse.
“Despite my own trials, I’m determined to be as consoling as possible,” her aunt said with withering graciousness. “We must be strong for Amelia and her daughter.”
“Especially for Miss Otley,” Flora said, her tone as admiring as ever as she spoke of the ravishing young lady whose esteem she sought. “This is a setback from which she might never recover. And with Mr. Skeffington on the verge of proposing too! Naturally, that cannot happen now. The stigma of aligning oneself with a family whose patriarch had done himself in is far too great. She will have to remain buried in the country or”—here she gasped—“retire to a nunnery. In either case, her perfection would be wasted on the unworthy.”
Bea thought it was foolish to cast the Skeffington heir’s pronounced indifference in such an optimistic light, but her aunt agreed readily with her daughter’s assessment before emphasizing that God appreciated beauty in all its forms. Flora conceded the point in theory but remained firm in the belief that her idol deserved an admirer with more rigorous standards.
Although Bea thought both her relatives were inclined to extravagant exaggeration, on this topic their respective assessments were accurate. Suicide wasn’t a matter that the church or the state took lightly, and the family would suffer far greater consequences as the victim of self-murder than actual murder, something she’d been too shocked to consider when she first heard of the duke’s lie. But now that she was able to consider the stark implications—burial at a crossroads rather than on consecrated ground; surrender of his property to the Crown—she knew she could not remain silent. Mr. Otley had suffered enough injustice without compounding the wrongdoing by depriving him of the ability to care for his family upon his death.
No, the Duke of Kesgrave would simply have to admit the truth.
She would make him.
Naturally, she erupted into laughter the moment she had the thought, for there was nothing she could do to make the gentleman speak if he didn’t want to. He wasn’t a pliable sapling she could bend to her will, but an impervious oak tree. Every decision he had made since attaining his majority had no doubt been done to please himself and please himself only. She would have to devise a plan that was a little more complicated than her simply asking him to do the moralistic thing. She would need to be devious.
It was some indication of her exhaustion that she had quite forgotten the presence of her aunt and cousin, for she was quite surprised to find herself the target of their disapproving gazes.
“Really, Beatrice,” Aunt Vera tsked, “I’d expect you to show more sensitivity in the face of such a very great tragedy. A man’s life is lost as well as his family’s standing and wealth. I’m sure your levity is the even greater insult.”
Ah, there was the hypocrisy she was used to!
“You’re right, aunt,” she said, composing herself at the rebuke, which she felt was well earned. “I apologize for the display of levity. I fear your news is so distressing, it has undermined my ability to respond appropriately.”
“I expected it would,” Aunt Vera said with a glimmer of pride. To have the honor of delivering such distressing tidings was a rare opportunity. “You were always a sensitive child, more prone to tears than to laughter.”
That was true, yes. As a young girl who had become an orphan over the course of one very long afternoon, she’d frequently been morose and difficult to tease out of her moods, which were sullen and serious. But her reaction to Mr. Otley’s death was considerably more complicated than a decades-old tendency toward sadness, a fact she could not explain to her relatives. Instead, she kept her eyes focused on the bedcovers and wondered aloud if it was too late to get breakfast.
As far as hints went, it was too subtle for her aunt and cousin, for rather than jump up and insist she get dressed right away, they entered into a ten-minute discussion on the topic, with each insisting their hosts were too thoughtful to remove a single plate from the sideboard before each and every guest had partaken. Although their opinions aligned perfectly on the matter, mother and daughter vigorously exchanged ideas as if they were in robust disagreement.
Knowing her presence was incidental to the conversation, Bea considered closing her eyes and going back to sleep. It was only the thought of the lecture on rudeness that her aunt would subject her to that kept her awake—even though waking someone up to talk at her for forty-five minutes was arguably the greater social transgression.
Inevitably, Aunt Vera and Flora, having reached a consensus on their consensus, turned their attention to Beatrice and chastised her for remaining in bed at the advanced hour of nine-thirty. Knowing it was futile to protest, she apologized for her laziness and rang the bell for her maid, grateful when her family left her to her own devices.
Now all she had to do was get her hands on a cup of strongly brewed tea and come up with a plan to maneuver the Duke of Kesgrave into confessing the truth about Mr. Otley’s demise, and everything would be well.
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time Beatrice finished her second cup of tea, she was forced to admit that a self-inflicted death did not spoil the mood of a house party as stridently as one would expect. Tones were hushed, of course, and appropriately somber, but the young men seemed incapable of keeping admiration entirely out of their voices as they discussed the method by which Mr. Otley had ended his life.
“With a candlestick,” Amersham observed, shaking his head with wonder as he leaned forward in the armchair. The company had gathered in the well-appointed drawing room after breakfast, ostensibly to relax for a few minutes before the events of the day began but in actuality to gossip. The room was large and well-appointed, with tufted settees, oversize bergères, ornate moldings and imperious ancestors masterfully recorded in oil. “Made of gold, of course, and of considerable heft, but still only a device for lighting one’s way. That is to say, it’s not a knife, which is more of what one would expect.”
“I would have aimed for my forehead,” Mr. Skeffington said, inflecting a practical note, “and spared myself the contortions of reaching behind my back.”
“I cannot believe a man of Otley’s age was agile enough for what you’re proposing. I say he took the northern route, carrying the candlestick over his head to strike himself on the back of his skull,” his friend said and demonstrated the technique by tapping the area with a spoon.
“Head wounds are the most unpleasant in terms of blood and bleeding,” Russell said decisively, before crediting the information to a friend’s father who had fought on the Peninsula. His mother, sitting across from him, frowned at the comment, but Bea couldn’t tell if she disapproved of the ill-advised topic or resented the fact that as a woman she could not offer her opinion on the benefits of an extra dose of laudanum without appearing unduly macabre. She hoped it was the former, as the conversation was highly distasteful. “Which is why I would never choose the candlestick method. It seems boorish to leave a mess behind when I’m already leaving a mess behind.”
Amersham and Mr. Skeffington cackled at this sally, which made Russell, who was unaccustomed to an appreciative audience, blush slightly, while Viscount Nuneaton rustled his newspaper in disgust and muttered, “Ignorant puppies.”
He lowered The Times, and Bea waited for the older man to issue a stinging rebuke for their disrespectful treatment of poor dead Mr. Otley, whose widow and daughter were upstairs resting—hopefully sleeping—after a tragically difficult morning.
“The pistol is widely accepted as the traditional weapon for honorably discharging one’s obligations,” he explained. “Anything else is indulgent and inappropriate.”
Although the viscount spoke with the authority of his years, which gave him a decade on the other young men, Mr. Skeffington didn’t hesitate to contradict him. “Falling on one’s sword is also a time-honored tradition. Isn’t that how Brutus ended it? Plutarch tells the tale of Brutus asking a friend to help him hold his sword so he may stab himself and when Volumnius refuses, he grasps the hilt with two hands and falls on it.”
“Andrew!” his mother exclaimed, entering the room just in time to hear her son’s ghoulish description. “Given your grades and the reports I received from your tutors, I’d assumed your education was a complete waste of time. I’m astonished to discover you’ve learned something after all.”
Mr. Skeffington straightened his shoulders in offense. “Your shock is insulting, Mama. I scored consistently high marks on my mathematical exams, as you well know. Literature, I will admit, was not my strong suit, but I’m capable of recalling some details.”
Amersham, who had been sent down from Oxford with his friend at least three times, added, “’Twas inevitable he would eventually manage to absorb a bare minimum of information. Even a stopped clock is correct two times a day.”
The comment drew soft chuckles of amusement from several of the room’s occupants, including its target and his mother.
Knowing how greatly unsettling death could be, Bea tried to be patient with their humor, which she knew to be of the gallows variety. Nevertheless, she found it grievously distressing to listen to them chatter so frivolously about a man whose life had been taken from him in such a brutal manner only hours before. Weighing the relative merits of the way he’d chosen to kill himself! It was an outrage, and every inch of her longed to scream at the top of her lungs until they all shrunk in fear of her.
Naturally, she did not, for she’d never raised her voice in the presence of company in her entire life. Once, when she was a child newly settled with the Sussex Hyde-Clares, she’d shrieked at her aunt for daring to throw away the worn glove she carried with her everywhere. Yes, it was stained and torn, as her aunt claimed, but she was wrong when she said it served no purpose. It was Bea’s mother’s glove—a lone, threadbare memento that hadn’t been sold off to pay for Bea’s upkeep—and the purpose it served was to provide comfort.
How cold Aunt Vera had gotten, listening to a child of six wail as if she’d just cut off her arm with a dull ax rather than merely tossed away what she considered to be a tattered rag. Bea’s punishment, immediate and harsh, was made worse by a frigid lecture on the importance of not letting one’s affection for one’s husband’s niece corrupt one’s good judgment.
It was the last time Bea had shouted.
Although the urge to scream was so strong she felt as if she would shake from it, she sat immobile on the settee, her expression as serene as a spring morning.
Sitting several feet away from her, also silent, was the Duke of Kesgrave, placidly drinking a cup of tea while perusing the London Daily Gazette. His pose was one of complete indifference, almost as if he were alone in the room or at his club. For all he knew, the company could have been discussing the weather.
It was infuriating.
His depraved apathy to Mr. Otley’s suffering and the consequences of the lies he’d told was quite the most maddening thing Bea had ever seen in her life. It was somehow more enraging than her aunt’s destruction of her mother’s glove, for Aunt Vera could not have known the depth of the knife she was twisting. But Kesgrave understood every aspect of his action. He knew exactly what his selfish decision exposed the Otleys to and he didn’t care.
Unable to contain her fury, for, like her grief over the glove, it came from a deep and wild place, she spoke with a rage so tightly suppressed you would never know it was there. “What do you think, your grace?”
Next to her on the settee, her aunt gasped in horror, for not only was it remarkably out of character for Bea to speak a cogent sentence in public, it was also outrageously bold of her to initiate conversation with a duke. The Hyde-Clares, as a rule, did not approve of audaciously addressing those more favorably situated in Debrett’s than they. They preferred a more subtle approach such as staring in wonder at their betters out of the corner of their eyes.
For more than two decades, Bea had complied unfailingly with her relatives’ founding principle, and now suddenly she was talking to a duke. She didn’t even have the decency to start slowly, with a knight or a baron, but shot straight to the top rung of the social ladder.
Thank goodness Prinny wasn’t in the room.
If Kesgrave found her interest as impertinent as her aunt did, he didn’t reveal it as he lowered the corner of the broadsheet to look at her over the edge of the paper. It was a smooth move—just a flick of his wrist—and she resented even that small act because she knew for him everything was so easy to manipulate.
“About what?” he asked mildly.
“About why Mr. Otley would kill himself,” she said plainly.
“It would be rude to speculate,” he said.
Bea knew she should leave the matter there, for the duke’s tone was as firm as it was polite and the rapid beating of her heart made her highly aware of how fragile her cogency was. It had been easy in the early-morning hours to respond impertinently because the horror of the situation overwhelmed her natural reticence, but now she was in a drawing room surrounded by titled gentlemen and her family. It was precisely this milieu that had cowed her time and time again.
And yet she didn’t feel herself shrinking in embarrassment or discomfort. The notion that he would take refuge in civility when he had defamed an innocent man for his own, unknown ends further stoked her ire. “Ordinarily, I would agree, as it is the height of discourtesy for people to dissect the matter for their amusement without thought of the poor man’s suffering. But your situation is different, as you were the one who found him.”
That Bea had just insulted their hosts’ son and half their guests did not escape anyone’s notice, least of all Aunt Vera, who glared at her angrily.
Too deep into the discussion to worry about her aunt’s censure, Bea continued, “Although I can’t conceive what an experience like that must have been like for you, having that ghastly image seared forever in your memory, I believe it created a bond between you and the victim. Given that bond, I don’t believe that speculation would be rude. Rather, it would be an act of respect.”
