How lovely it would be to live in a village with flower-studded meadows and woods all around one. I told myself that in reality there would be plenty of insects and other small creatures to contend with as well as mud and damp, but the paintings made it appear so tranquil.
The door opened behind me as I contemplated one of these pictures, a heavy silence telling me Fagan had returned.
“You’re to come upstairs,” he rumbled.
His accent put him from the north, possibly Birmingham or thereabouts. No matter where he hailed from, he was clearly morose, as though Lord Peyton’s death was a blow from which he was still reeling.
Fagan was the first person who’d jumped to mind as soon as I’d heard Lord Peyton had died. He’d accompanied Lord Peyton everywhere, at all hours, and was strong enough toheave the man out of his chair and drop him down the stairs. Inspector McGregor had said there were no signs of anyone having pushed Lord Peyton, but as Daniel had hinted, there were other ways to make certain a man fell.
Fagan now climbed lugubriously up a polished staircase, presumably the one Lord Peyton had tumbled down. Ivory-colored paneling made the hall light, as did a large window on the landing.
This tall window reached all the way up to the next floor and looked out onto the mews, its draperies open. I’d noted the window from the other side, when I’d spied on the house several weeks ago. The curtains had been drawn then, muffled like all the windows in the back of the house.
I wondered if Lord Peyton had insisted the drapes be kept closed and now that he was gone, that rule had been relaxed. Or else the household was distracted, and the opening and closing of the curtains was the least of their worries.
Fagan hesitated at the top of the stairs, and his shoulders quivered. I caught up to him, astonished to find the man weeping.
“Now then,” I said gently. “I know it must have been a shock.”
Fagan wiped his eyes, but more tears rolled past his large nose. “It were here, missus.” He pointed at the floor beneath his feet. “The master fell right here. He died, and I wasn’t there to prevent it.” He put his hands over his face and sobbed.
22
The sound of Fagan’s weeping filled the silence of the upper hall. His entire body shook, and I reached out a tenuous hand to touch his great arm.
“I am so sorry,” I said, scarcely knowing what to tell him. “It was an accident, the police said. Nothing you could have done.”
Fagan jerked from my touch. “I should have been with him. I left him alone because he sent me to bed. If I’d been here, he’d still be alive.”
He broke down, his chest heaving, his choked sobs pathetic to witness.
“You can’t blame yourself,” I tried. “You had to have slept sometime. His lordship would know that, else he’d not have sent you to bed.”
“I don’t know why he did. It was late, but I could have stayed with him all night. He needed me.” Fagan’s breath wheezed, tears streaming down his large face.
“You have no idea why he was at the top of the staircase?” I asked.
“None at all.”
I gazed past the weeping Fagan down the steep flight we’d just ascended. The window gave an excellent view along the mews, all the way to the corner I’d peeked around when I’d walked the road with Grace.
We were directly over the back door, I realized, the one that had the entrance between the walls. James had been correct that no one in the house could actually see that door. Once a visitor passed between the walls below, they’d vanish from sight.
I studied the scene for a time, while Fagan’s sobs slowly faded to a soft gasping.
A door opened somewhere behind me. “Where are they?” a woman’s stentorian voice demanded. “Go and find them. I want to make a start.”
I turned as a maid in a black frock with a white pinafore glided from a room at the far end of the hall. She had dark hair in a smooth bun and a neatly starched cap pinned securely atop her head.
I’d never have recognized Hannah if I hadn’t known it was she. Her face was impassive, and her eyes took in her surroundings and revealed nothing.
“This way, madam,” she said to me. “That will be all, Fagan.”
Hannah gave the last command in perfect imitation of a maid at the end of her patience with a manservant who at present was, in her opinion, shirking his duties.
Fagan turned and lumbered down the stairs, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. Hannah stood unmoving by the door she’d opened, waiting for me to enter.
I moved quietly toward her, reminding myself I was here asa guest, not a domestic. I had no need to scuttle inside in obedience, no need to curtsy to the reedy woman—Lady Fontaine, I assumed—who waited for me there.
