The Questioning Miss Quinton

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It was perhaps only a small act of rebellion after so many years of doing only what she was told, but it was to set a precedent for the future.

CHAPTER FOUR

PATRICK HALTED on the threshold of the club’s sedately decorated main salon and looked about for Pierre Standish, finally locating his quarry sitting alone and looking very much at his ease near one of the large floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the busy street below.

Sherbourne did not take himself immediately to that side of the room. Instead he spent several minutes wandering about in a seemingly aimless fashion, passing the time of day with some of his friends, although declining to sit and take refreshment with any of them.

He even took the time to place a wager with Lord Alvanley on the outcome of a mill that was to be held in the countryside later that week, before eventually arriving at his planned destination and sliding into a facing wing chair, a jaunty greeting on his smiling lips.

“Tsk, tsk. That took you precisely three minutes longer than it should have, my darling Patrick, although, in general, it was rather well done,” Standish drawled amicably before returning his large gold watch to his pocket and looking up at Sherbourne for the first time.

“I beg your pardon, Pierre?” Patrick questioned, keeping a carefully blank look on his face as he adjusted his coattails before crossing his legs at the knee, allowing one elegantly fashioned Hessian to dangle.

“Yes, I believe you should,” Standish answered smoothly as he motioned to a servant who was hovering nearby to fetch another glass for his lordship. “I recall that I have urged you to find an interest, my darling, but I fear your future does not lie in cloak-and-dagger machinations.”

Patrick shook his head in admiration, admitting defeat. “How did you know I was looking for you particularly? I thought I was being quite smooth, actually.”

Pierre took up the glass the servant had brought and poured some rich-looking red liquid into it from a decanter before handing the glass to Wickford. “I could, I suppose, say I have visited a wizened old gypsy in Europe who—because of some heroic service I rendered her—has given me the gift of foretelling events, causing you to look at me in awe, but honesty prevents me. Actually, dearest, I was at home when you called this morning but—how shall I say this without being indiscreet?— I was considerably engaged at the time.”

Taking a small sip of his wine, Patrick leaned back in his chair and quipped mischievously, “My deepest apologies. I can only pray that I didn’t interrupt at a critical moment? Some indiscretions have so little understanding of the link between concentration and performance.”

Pierre’s dark eyes twinkled slightly in his otherwise emotionless face. “I have amazing powers of concentration, thankfully. Besides, Patrick, you know I have always made it a point never to disappoint a lady.”

Patrick acknowledged his understanding with a slight nod of his head, knowing better than to dwell on the subject. Besides, he had not sought out Standish merely to spend a few pleasant minutes enjoying the verbal sparring that helped pass the time between noon and an evening’s entertainment. “Speaking of ladies, Pierre—”

“Not I, my dear, at least not literally,” Standish said, a smile still lurking in his eyes.

Patrick chose to ignore this last statement, knowing that Pierre could keep a conversation jogging along in this lighthearted vein forever, without once saying anything to the point. He had met with his friend for a reason, and it was time the two of them got down to serious business. “There’s something I think you should know, Pierre. Miss Quinton believes her father knew his murderer,” he announced baldly, watching his friend closely for any reaction.

Pierre did not so much as blink. “How utterly amazing. I am, of course, astonished,” he said in a tone that totally belied his statement.

“As usual, my friend, you react by not reacting. Perhaps a bit more information is required.” Leaning forward a bit so that he could speak without fear of being overheard, he went on confidingly, “Does the fact that this same Miss Victoria Quinton considers you and me to be her prime suspects pique your interest in the slightest?”

“Are we, by God?” Standish responded, raising his dark brows a fraction. “I begin to believe you have awakened a slight curiosity on my part—perhaps even the faint glimmerings of interest. Perhaps you will oblige me by beginning with how you have come upon this charming little tidbit of information.”

Patrick leaned back in the chair once again, satisfied at last with his friend’s response. “The lady in question told me herself the day of the funeral, not that she wanted to, you understand.”

“It’s that pretty face, Patrick,” Pierre interrupted, an earnest expression on his dark face. “I’ve noticed before the devastating way you have with the ladies. I imagine you’ve heard quite a few things over the years. Have you ever thought of writing your memoirs?”

“It was not my pretty face that did it, but her own satisfaction with her deductions that had her flinging her outlandish theory at my feet like a gauntlet,” Sherbourne corrected testily. “Lord, man, at first she attacked me like a hound on a blood scent, trying, I believe, to frighten me into confessing.”

“Quite the little Trojan, hmmm?”

“Quite the little idiot,” Patrick amended. “She’s taken it into her head to solve the mystery of the Professor’s murder, you see, and believes the answer might lie somewhere in the papers I’ve inherited.”

“And your thoughts on the subject?” Standish prodded, reaching for his wineglass.

Patrick smiled slightly, shaking his head. “I think the lady in question is a bit queer in her attic. Quinton was killed by a burglar; everybody knows that.”

“Do they?” The question held no inflection, hinted of no hidden curiosity. It was just as if Standish, like Miss Quinton, had thrown out a suggestion, and now was waiting to see if his friend was going to pick it up.

Patrick slowly twirled the glass in his hand by its slender stem, watching the small bit of wine swirl around the bottom in a tight whirlpool as he considered Pierre’s question. At last he raised his head a fraction, staring intently into the other man’s eyes.

“Yes, darling?” Standish purred.

“Victoria Quinton may have the disposition of a cursed warthog—and a face to match—but she’s sharp as needles, Pierre. Much as it pains me to admit it, I can’t simply dismiss her assertions as daughterly grief. It’s—it’s as if she considers what she’s doing as some sort of duty. Do you know, Pierre, I don’t think she loved Quinton—or even liked him.”

“Quennel Quinton was many things as I recall, but I know I did not find him to be especially lovable. Perhaps I have underestimated our little drab. She must have some intelligence,” Pierre put in thoughtfully.

Patrick nodded in agreement. “A dedicated bluestocking, I’d say, which is why I cannot comfort myself by believing her theory to be some romantic bag of moonshine she’s embraced merely in order to lend some sparkle to her humdrum existence. She’s just not that sort of female.”

Pierre directed a long, dispassionate stare at the man facing him before speaking again, all trace of mockery now gone from his voice. “You seem to have given our dowdy Miss Quinton and her assertions quite a bit of thought, Patrick. Perhaps you have even begun to question the reasons behind the Professor’s demise yourself. Tell me, my dear, is this to be an intellectual exercise only, or do you plan to do something about it?”

Patrick lapsed into silence once more, absently raising his wineglass to take a drink before realizing it was empty, and then holding it out as Pierre refilled it from the decanter. Lifting the glass to his lips, he then downed its contents in one long gulp before rising to his feet. “She’s a damned obstinate woman, Pierre, and she’s deadly serious about this foolishness she’s taken into her head. Somebody has to watch out for her, or she’ll land in a scrape for sure.”

Pierre put down his glass and applauded softly. “Congratulations, my darling man. You have come to exactly the correct decision. But do be careful, Sir Galahad—lest the lady decides to view her benefactor in a romantic light. You may save her from carelessly falling into the hands of a desperate murderer, only to have her end up casting herself into the Thames for love of you.”

“Don’t worry about that, Pierre,” Patrick assured him. “Victoria Quinton hates the sight of me. She thinks I’m a terrible, shameless person. Useless too, I believe she said.”

“I wait with bated breath, my dear one, to hear your opinion of her opinion.”

Patrick slipped a snow-white lace handkerchief from his cuff and daintily dabbed at the corners of his mouth in imitation of one of his friend’s little affectations before answering: “I was flattered, of course, my dear Pierre. What else could I be?”

CHAPTER FIVE

“YOU’RE LOOKING kinda peakedlike, Miss Victoria,” Wilhelmina Flint remarked a week after the Professor’s funeral as she lifted yet another stack of papers from the desk in the library in order to run her feather duster over its shiny surface. “Why don’t I run myself on down to the kitchens and brew you up some of my black currant tea onc’t I’m all finished puttin’ this mess to rights?”

“Finish it, Willie?” Victoria questioned lightly, leaning back in the Professor’s big leather chair to look up at the hovering housekeeper. “The only way this room could possibly get any cleaner would be if you were to dump all the furniture into the garden and whitewash the walls. Didn’t you just dust in here this morning?”

Willie raised her chin and sniffed dismissively, although she wasn’t really offended by her young mistress’s words, considering that she had raised Miss Victoria since the girl was just out of soggy drawers and had therefore long ago become accustomed to her genial attempts to belittle her own love of cleanliness and order.

“Go away with you now, Missy,” she said, going on with her work, which for the moment meant she was concentrating on chasing down yet another daring bit of lint that had somehow escaped her eagle eyes earlier.

While Wilhelmina tidied and fussed and generally stirred up more dust than her switching feathers could capture, Victoria sat at her ease, idly observing the hubbub as she gratefully abandoned her increasingly disquieting research for a few moments. Willie was a treasure, even with her seeming obsession with cleanliness, and Victoria knew it, just as she knew that the woman must never learn so much as the slightest hint of damning information coming to light about her longtime employer.

Although the housekeeper—who had left the countryside to be with her mistress in London when the Professor took the local squire’s only daughter to wife—had never tried to replace Victoria’s dead mother in her heart, Wilhelmina’s brisk efficiency had always been liberally laced with affection for the plain, awkward child who received nothing but the most cursory notice from her busy professor father. If Victoria confided in her now, Wilhelmina would put a halt to the murder investigation immediately!

Victoria had grown to love the tall, rawboned redhead, and as she grew older she had secretly coveted Willie’s buxomy, wide-hipped, narrow-waisted, hourglass figure, believing the housekeeper’s ample curves and brilliant coloring to represent the epitome of feminine beauty.

Even now, with the once vibrant red hair showing traces of grey, Victoria could still see much of the full-blown beauty that had once been Wilhelmina’s, and wondered yet again why she had never married. Surely there must have been plenty of opportunities. “Willie,” she ventured now, “tell me truly—there must have been someone you wished to wed, maybe some farmer back in Sussex before you moved here? I mean, you didn’t stay with us all these years just because of me, did you?”

The housekeeper stopped in the midst of rubbing a brass bookend with a corner of her starched white apron and peered intently at the serious young woman. “Because of you, Miss Victoria?” she questioned in a tone that hinted at the utter ridiculousness of such a question, then laughed out loud. “Lord love you, Missy, I should most certainly think not! It’s crazy in love I was with the dear, sweet Professor, of course. That’s why I stayed. It’s as plain as the nose on your face!”

Now it was Victoria’s turn to laugh, for if there were ever two people born to do murder to each other they were Wilhelmina Flint and Professor Quennel Quinton. Clearly Willie was doing her best not to load her young mistress down with yet another heavy dose of guilt, to be piled atop all the other guilt she was feeling over being unable to muster up any genuine grief over her father’s death.

“I may have led a sheltered life, Willie, but I’m not a complete greenhead,” Victoria reminded the housekeeper, sobering again. “You and the Professor were many things to each other, but none of them were even remotely connected to anything of a romantic nature.”

“You’re forgettin’, Missy. The Professor left me that fine miniature of hisself. Wouldn’t you be wonderin’ why he should do such a thing?”

Victoria sat front once more, placing her elbows on the desk. “That’s another thing that puzzles me, Willie. There’s something about that miniature that bothers me. I don’t ever remember seeing it before, for one thing, but it’s my inability to reconcile the miniature with the man I knew that is most difficult. I imagine it is hard to conjure up a real sense of recognition when faced with an image of one’s parent at an age closer to one’s own.”

Willie backed hurriedly away from the desk, turning her body slightly away from Victoria’s as she extracted a cloth from one of her apron pockets, and then proceeded to make a great business out of dusting one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs that comprised the only seating for visitors in the room. “Doesn’t quite look like the old geezer, does it? It’d be the smile that’s throwin’ you off, I wager, Missy, seein’ as how he did precious little of it in his lifetime.”

Victoria allowed a small, appreciative grin to show on her face before prudently hiding it with her hand. Willie had always been fairly outspoken about her lack of love for the Professor during his lifetime, but now that the man was gone she seemed to be pulling out all the stops. If she only knew… But no, Victoria didn’t dare tell her.

“I won’t scold you, Willie, even though I must remind you that you are being disrespectful of the dead. You have every right to be upset over the pittance he left you after all your years of service,” Victoria went on, urging further confidences. “Even Mr. Pierre Standish—although he was extremely rude to voice his opinion aloud—said that thirty pounds was a most sorry sum.”

“It was thirty pounds more than I was expectin’, Missy,” Wilhelmina replied, flicking her cloth briskly over the seat of the chair before sitting herself down with a thump and looking her mistress straight in the eyes. Victoria suppressed the sudden urge to flee, knowing that somehow the tables had been turned and Wilhelmina was about to ask some very probing questions of her own.

“What I wants to know now, Miss Victoria, is this—how much did the cheeseparin’ old skinflint set by for you? I’ve been watchin’ you and wonderin’ what it is that’s put you so badly off your feed. You’ve been sittin’ in here day in, day out for over a week now, shufflin’ those papers back and forth from one pile to another. It’s bad news, isn’t it?”

Victoria hesitated a moment, wondering if it was exactly fair to pour out at least a part of her troubles to Willie, who could do nothing more than commiserate with her—other than to throw a few colorful curses the Professor’s way, of course—but she did feel a great need to talk to somebody.

“Well,” she began slowly, a note of bitter self-mockery in her tone, “as you must know, Willie, there existed between the Professor and myself a certain, er, want of openness while he was alive.”

“He treated you like an unpaid servant, lovin’ and trustin’ none but hisself and his useless scribblins’,” Wilhelmina cut in candidly. “Let’s call a spade a spade, Missy. There’s naught but ourselves here to listen, you know.”

Victoria lifted her head, throwing her long, slim neck and clearly defined, fragile, square jaw into prominence. “You’re right, Willie, as usual,” she said with some asperity. Then, losing a bit of her bravado, she began to ramble, hoping to change the subject. “It’s time to call a spade a spade, whatever that silly saying means, for whatever else would one call it—a flowerpot? Willie, did you ever stop to consider just how silly some of our time-honored sayings are? Like ‘right as a trivet.’ Whatever could that mean? Could it just as easily be ‘left as a trivet’? Or ‘wrong as a trivet’? After all—”

“Are we soon goin’ to be servin’ tea in the parlor to the sheriff’s officers?” Willie interrupted brusquely, not about to be sidetracked now that she had nearly gotten her mistress to the sticking point.

“You mean like Lord Barrymore did years ago, Willie?” Victoria asked, obviously still more than eager to digress from the distasteful subject of her current financial embarrassment. “I read somewhere in the Professor’s notes that Lord Barrymore was dunned so much that the sheriff’s officers seemed as much at home in his house as did his own servants.”

Wilhelmina nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. His lordship had them dress up as servants when he was throwin’ a party. I know all about it, Missy. Us that serve know everythin’. Now stop tryin’ to twist out of it and tell me—are we rolled up?”

It was no use, Victoria decided, opening her mouth to speak. “The Professor held the purse strings entirely, of course,” she began slowly, “and I doubt even you could find anything unusual about that.”

“Not out of the way, Missy, just stupid,” Wilhelmina answered baldly. “As if there was yet a man born who knew the real cost of things—yellin’ for fresh peas in the dead of winter like I was goin’ to take m’self off out into the back garden and find ’em hangin’ on the trees.”

“But although he kept the household on quite a strict budget,” Victoria pressed on, wishing to get over this rough ground as smoothly as she could, “he always seemed to have funds enough to purchase his expensive books and his favorite tobaccos and, of course, his finely aged brandy. Oh dear, that sounded rather condemning, didn’t it?”

“He knew how to live, that he did. I’ll say that much for him,” Wilhelmina put in thoughtfully. “I can’t say I liked his choice of tailors, with the dull as ditchwater browns that he fancied for everything, but the quality was always there, wasn’t it?”

Victoria nodded her head up and down firmly, as if Willie’s confirmation of her assessment of the Professor’s finances had reinforced her own feelings. “Naturally I assumed that the Professor had some private form of income—monies invested in the Exchange, or some income from an inheritance. You know what I mean.”

Wilhelmina sat forward at attention. “But?”

“But his solicitor tells me he has no record of any such matters, and I have searched and searched this room without unearthing a single clue as to where the money came from. Even this house is rented.”

Wilhelmina’s expressive brows came together as she frowned, considering what she had just heard. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that the old bas—, um, that the Professor left you without a penny to scratch with? I can’t believe it! It doesn’t make a whit of sense, Missy.”

“Oh, there’s some money in the house,” Victoria explained hastily. “I found nearly one hundred and fifty pounds locked in a small tin box in the bottom drawer of his desk. There’s more than enough to honor the Professor’s bequests to you and Betty, and the rent for this quarter’s already been paid. If nothing else, at least I didn’t find any unpaid tradesmen’s bills.”

“So there’s naught but a hundred pounds standin’ betwixt you and the street?” Wilhelmina pursued intently, shaking her head in mingled anger and disgust. “You keep my thirty pounds. I’ve got more than enough put away that I don’t need to be takin’ the bread out of a child’s mouth. Lucky thing for old Quennel that he’s dead, let me tell you, for I’d like to strangle him with my own bare hands, and then go off to the hangman singin’!”