The Importance of Being Ernestine Read online

  “Did Niles Edmonds inherit the title?” I got up and poured her a glass of water.

  “I could do with a brandy.” The black eyes flashed.

  “Well, it just so happens…” Mrs. Malloy reached into her bag but susbsided on meeting my scowl. “I was only going to offer her a lemon drop,” she muttered.

  “No, Niles is the son of Horace’s youngest brother. The title went to another nephew, Alfonse Krumley, whose father was next in line to my husband.” Lady Krumley straightened her leg and sipped at the glass of water. “Niles came to live at Moultty Towers when he was ten-years-old and Sir Horace and I were newly married. He has been all but a son to me.”

  Mrs. Malloy and I made appropriate noises.

  “His parents had died in a freak accident. Sadly, his electric train set blew up and completely gutted the nursery one night when they went in to hear him say his prayers.”

  “And the poor little lamb wasn’t hurt?” Mrs. Malloy gave a knowing smirk that I itched to wipe off her face.

  “He had suffered an asthma attack and gone down to the kitchen to be cosseted by the cook. Understandably, the incident affected poor Niles deeply. He was afraid to sleep alone for years after he came to Moultty Towers. Sometimes I think he married Cynthia to have someone in his bed.”

  “Well, that is odd,” Mrs. Malloy said in an effort to straighten her face.

  “Always so afraid of the bogeyman coming to get him.” There was a suggestive glisten of tears in Lady Krumley’s eyes. “And Cynthia, whatever else might be said against her, isn’t afraid of anything or anyone. My husband wasn’t particularly sympathetic to Niles even when it came to his asthma. Sir Horace insisted that Niles used his attacks to get me to spoil him. And it must be said that at age fifty he is still very much a small boy in long trousers. He began to wheeze yesterday when I said I was going out in the car and would not be back for several hours. I did not feel comfortable leaving him until Cynthia came in from her riding lesson, especially as Daisy Meeks who would agitate anyone, was present. A foolish, nattering woman. Another family connection of my husband, living in the village. She has the most irritating yap, like that dog of Vincent’s.

  “Was it found?” I asked.

  “Pipsie or Wipsie or whatever it was called? Niles didn’t say, nor did I think to ask. All that can be assumed is that Vincent must have gone looking for it in the cottage garden and got it into his panicky head that the animal had fallen in the well, and in peering down to take a look, himself fell in.”

  “And who found Vincent?”

  “Again Niles didn’t say.”

  “And all because the dog got out,” Mrs. Malloy said. “A door left open by mistake. Easy enough done.” Mrs. Malloy didn’t fool me. She had already worked it out in her mind that the dog had been removed from the house so that Vincent would go looking for it and end up being dropped down that well.

  “Lady Krumley,” I said, “matters have taken a most regrettable turn since last night. I understand your wish to bring Mrs. Malloy and myself current with the situation, but is there any other reason why you wished to see us so urgently today? Is there perhaps something you consider to be of significance that you forgot to mention? For instance,” I rattled on as she stared silently back at me, “I have been wondering if you know what became of Ernestine’s father.”

  “Her father?”

  “Ernest the under gardener. Was he around when she was born, or had he deserted Flossie by that time? From the way you described her living arrangements during her illness it doesn’t sound as though she was receiving any significant financial support.” Receiving no reply I kept going: “Of course the young man may not have been making much money.”

  Lady Krumley stared down her eagle nose at the bed covers.

  “Or was he given the sack for getting her pregnant? This all happened nearly forty years ago, and I do realize that times were different then.” I sat still, thinking that thank goodness society was less condemning now, at least to the point of not routinely referring to children born out of wedlock as illegitimate. Mrs. Malloy started to say something at the moment when Lady Krumley spoke, her voice coming out so deep-throated that I shot sideways in my chair to collide with Mrs. Malloy.

  “What I told you yesterday was true. The rumor went around the house that Flossie was pregnant by this young man Ernest. Mrs. Snow, the housekeeper, apprised me of the fact that he was making quite a nuisance of himself coming indoors under any pretext in hope of seeing the girl and also waylaying her in the garden. And when her condition was revealed he offered to marry her. One may assume that he loved her. But he wasn’t the father.”

  “Then who was?” I asked, surmising the answer.

  “My husband. Sir Horace.”

  “Rotten bugger!” Mrs. M. proffered a lemon drop, which seemed somewhat inadequate under the circumstances. “Don’t tell me he wanted to up and marry the flighty piece.”

  “He wouldn’t have done that, even had Flossie been of his social standing.” Her ladyship’s mouth curved in a bitter smile. “He was fond of me. I never doubted that even then. But it was a quiet affection, of shared interests and common background. There was never any passion on his part. No fire in his loins where I was concerned. How could it have been expected? I was ever a plain woman. Without feminine wiles. What I did have-being an only child-was a fortune inherited from my family. Sir Horace was badly in need of money when he married me. Without what I brought with me he would have been unable to hold onto Moultty Towers. And the place was everything to him.”

  “Until Miss Flossie showed up on the scene.” Mrs. Malloy who’d had her own trouble with errant husbands glowered in sympathy.

  “As I told you she was a pretty girl, and clever with it in a pert cockney sort of way, as Mrs. Snow told me.”

  “That woman seems to have been a fount of information,” I said.

  “She was a loyal employee, doing her duty as she saw it. But even without her input I would have had my suspicions. I twice observed him kissing her in the conservatory.”

  “Did you say anything to Sir Horace?”

  “It was difficult but I was determined to take the pragmatic approach-turn a blind eye and hope that when the hunting season began the silliness would end. He was after all a man in his late fifties, wanting to think of himself as still in his prime. I told myself that any giddy young girl’s coy ways and flattering adulation would have done to boost his male ego. So I focused my attention on Niles. A mistake. I see that now. It only added a source of irritation to our marriage. When I heard that Flossie was pregnant I clung to the hope she would marry the gardener boy and that they would make a life for themselves elsewhere. On the day that the emerald and diamond brooch disappeared matters came to a head. When Mrs. Snow informed me that she had seen Flossie coming out of my bedroom that morning, I knew the truth. She had been with Sir Horace in his connecting dressing room while I was away from the house at a luncheon. Being confronted by Mrs. Snow’s knowing look was the utmost in humiliation. And when I discovered the brooch to be missing, I lost all control, storming at my husband and threatening to leave him. He retaliated at first by accusing me of pretending to lose his grandmother’s brooch. But I could see in his eyes that he did not believe it. He knew that I was not a liar.” Lady Krumley’s face closed in to even greater hauteur. “You may doubt that, with justification, since I withheld part of the story from you yesterday. But whatever my state of mind I would not stoop to a downright untruth. Sir Horace then insisted that I had misplaced the brooch and in my spite was intent on fixing its loss upon Flossie. He went to battle for her, asserting that she would never attempt to turn his world upside down, especially with the baby on the way. It was then,” her ladyship continued, slumping back on the pillow, “that I knew two things: that he was in love with her-in the sadly desperate way of an older man for a young girl.”

  I moved to the bedside, but resisted the inclination to stroke her hair back from her brow. There would
n’t be much I could do for her if she ordered my hands to be cut off. “Was there no possibility that it was Ernest’s?”

  “My husband retreated behind a wall of silence that condemned him utterly.”

  “Did it cross your mind, Lady Krumley, that Flossie might have been playing both men to her own ends?”

  “How could it not? But if Sir Horace doubted he was the father, why did he not say so? All I could wrench out of him was that the child must be his, and he would see it suitably provided for when the time came. It was, as even I knew, the right and honorable thing to do. But hatred had entered my soul, Mrs…”

  “Haskell,” I provided, and she actually reached out and touched my hand.

  “I told my husband that the girl would be dismissed for stealing and if he so much attempted get in touch with her, let alone see her, I would divorce him and take every penny of my money with me. He tried to bluster. But I knew I had won.” The hand that gripped mine tightened painfully. “Flossie was sent packing, and I became a murderess in the making. I allowed her to die in that bed-sitter by depriving her of the support to which she was entitled. Now do you understand why I am so desperate to find Ernestine? She is my husband’s daughter, and I am convinced that only by making the fullest reparation possible can I prevent Flossie’s vengeance from whittling away at every branch of the family tree.”

  “And just how do you plan to put things right?” Mrs. Malloy teetered onto her high heels.

  “By leaving her the bulk of my fortune.”

  Which provided, I conceded silently, an interesting twist to the situation. I could tell by the glint in her eye that Mrs. Malloy was thinking the same. Or was she pondering just how much money her ladyship would be willing to pay for our services?

  She named an amount and Mrs. Malloy was turning her gasp into a cough when a courtly, silver-haired gentleman stepped into the room. He wasn’t a doctor. He was introduced to us as Lady Krumley’s friend and Vicar, Mr. Featherstone. The one person, as she had told us last night, which whom she had discussed her appointment with Mr. Jugg. Mrs. Malloy looked at him with deep suspicion while he took Lady Krumley’s gnarled hands in his and stood looking down at her without speaking. Words-mere words would have been superfluous. The expression in his eyes betrayed him. Or so I would have thought. Her ladyship regarded him in the mildly affectionate manner that takes for granted the rights afforded by long acquaintance.

  “Do sit down, Cyril,” she said. “These women are about to take their leave; so I depend on you to scare away any doctor with the temerity to sidle around the door. For it has been brought home to me that I am not ready to be reunited with Horace at the pearly gates. Dying at this moment would be tantamount to running away, and what ever my failings, I was never a coward.”

  “My dear Maude,” replied Mr. Featherstone, “What am I going to do with you?”

  Ten

  “Five thousand pounds!” Mrs. Malloy folded her arms and looked up at the ceiling with a beatific smile on her face. We were seated in a café halfway between Mucklesby and Chitterton Fells. There were bottles of tomato sauce on the tables and a menu scrawled on a chalkboard behind the counter. This was definitely not the Sistene Chapel, but I could understand why she felt heaven was within our grasp.

  “That’s only if we find Ernestine within the week,” I pointed out as the waitress bustled our way with plates of baked beans on toast and a pot of tea for two.

  “And why shouldn’t we, if we set our minds to it? The point is, Mrs. H., that Lady Krumley wouldn’t have offered us a tenth as much if that Vincent bloke hadn’t taken a nosedive. No getting round it. His misfortune, not to sound callous, is our good luck. Her ladyship’s panicking, the poor duck. Probably thinking it won’t be any time at all before the curse gets her too. Leastway, that’s the way I see it.”

  “Do you?” I bit thoughtfully into a forkful of beans.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mrs. M. eyed me as if I were a genie who had just popped out of the bottle of tomato sauce. “That funny look on your face is what I’m talking about.”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?” She picked up the teapot.

  “Mr. Featherstone.”

  “So?”

  “He looked rather nice.”

  “Being a vicar; that’s his job.” Mrs. Malloy dabbed irritably away at a drip of tea that had landed on the bosom of her powder pink raincoat.

  “Somehow I don’t think he just came to minister.”

  “Am I getting this right? You think he’s involved with the bad guys and you just walked me all light and breezy out of that there room, leaving him to strangle her sweet little old ladyship in her hospital bed? Well, I think you should be downright ashamed of yourself Mrs. H.! The least you could’ve done was hand her a bedpan so she could hit him over the head.” Clearly, Mrs. Malloy could see the five thousand pounds vanishing as we spoke.

  I laid my knife and fork down on my empty plate. “What I am saying, and it is only a feeling, is that I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Mr. Featherstone is very fond of Lady Krumley.”

  “What sort of fond?”

  “Come on, Mrs. Malloy! Didn’t you notice the way he looked at her when he took her hand? Didn’t that faint tremor in his voice make you think that here was a man fighting desperately to control his emotions?”

  “Could be you’re right. But it’s kind of hard to grasp right off the bat, seeing that her ladyship, through no fault of her own,” she spoke piously, “isn’t what anyone could call passable, let alone a raving beauty. And then there’s her age.”

  “Mr. Featherstone may be younger,” I said, “but I doubt by much. Not that it matters if he’s thirty-five to her seventy odd, if she has none but friendly feelings for him. And I didn’t see anything in her manner to suggest that her heart was throbbing a mile a minute at the sight of him. When we left she seemed to be more concerned about why her nephew Niles was taking so long to show up. Besides, Mr. Featherstone could be married, and Lady Krumley may be the sort of woman for whom there is only one man.”

  “Go on!” scoffed Mrs. M. “She’d have to be a fool if you’re talking about that hubby of hers. She as good as said he married her for her money and then off he goes and gets another woman pregnant right under her nose. Think on the humiliation! That Mrs. Snow, the sneaky housekeeper, rubbing salt in the wound for all she was worth. And all them other tongues clacking. If I’d been that Sir Horace I’d have run for me bloody life.”

  “And Lady Krumley could be a woman who knows how to hold onto a grudge.” I poured myself another cup of tea and looked longingly at the toasted teacake being handed to a woman at a nearby table.

  “Out with it, Mrs. H., what is it you’ve got ticking away inside that clock of yours?”

  “I’m just trying to look at the situation from another point of view.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to take Lady Krumley at her word when she talks about wanting to locate Ernestine to make up for the wrongs done to her. What if there’s another reason? A darker one, born of old hate and a desire to protect the interests of someone near and dear to her?” The waitress passed by, and I ordered a toasted teacake.

  “Spell it out, Mrs. H., before me nerves give out.”

  “What if her ladyship has twisted the facts to suit her story? What if Sir Horace had plenty of money in his own right? What if he left a will bequeathing his estate upon his wife’s death-and in the event of there being no other living relations-to his out-of-wedlock daughter Ernestine?”

  “What, including the house?”

  “It may be entailed, just as her ladyship said, to that other nephew, Alfonse Krumley. And no great loss. A house of the size I imagine it to be must be enormously costly to maintain and horribly inconvenient to live in. Niles, with his asthma, might be a lot more comfortable living in a modern flat without big overstuffed sofas and voluminous curtains harboring a century’s worth
of dust. Besides, if my idea is correct, it won’t matter that Alfonse is to inherit Moultty Towers, because he will shortly go the way of Vincent Krumley-the victim of another unfortunate accident.”

  “Arranged by Lady Krumley is what you’re saying?” My toasted teacake arrived on the table, and Mrs. Malloy reached for the plate. “Just like she had all them others-like the old geezer in Australia that got mauled by a kangaroo and the woman that fell down a lift-bumped off.”

  “I’m not accusing her ladyship of mass murder,” I responded coldly to Mrs. Malloy’s snicker. “What I am suggesting is that when she learned of those deaths, most of them the result of freak accidents that no one questioned because the victims were all old and possibly not in full possession of their faculties, it may have got her thinking.”

  “Takes some thinking about.” Mrs. Malloy polished off the teacake.

  “Just being a dear old auntie getting rid of the remaining family members so that Niles, whom she described as the closest thing to a son, could inherit a fortune.”

  “But how many would she have to do in? That’s the question, Mrs. H. We’re talking about an old woman that you’d expect to be parked in the rocking chair most of the day. Murdering people’s got to take up a lot of time and energy, which would make for skipped meals. Maybe we should check with her doctor to see if she’s recently been in asking for a prescription for iron and vitamin pills.”

  “Perhaps only Alfonse and possibly that woman Lady Krumley mentioned-Daisy something-now stand between Niles and what she considers his rightful inheritance. Apart from Ernestine that is.”

  “Oh, good! Because I wouldn’t want to think of her overdoing things!” Mrs. Malloy sat back in her chair replete with baked beans, teacake and the wink received from a man on his way out of the café. “I suppose what you’re telling me is she dropped Vincent down that well before leaving for Mucklesby and she’s only pretending to be poorly enough to be in hospital. There wasn’t no car crash. No one threw no flower pots at her and all that business about Flossie Jones and the deathbed curse was just a load of malarkey? So who was it what sent the man with the gun to scare us off the case?”