Collins made a face. “Nellie told you this?”
“The maid, yes. I assume you know Nellie?”
“We’ve met,” Collins said. “She has been here for a few weeks now.”
The tips of his ears were red, from which I deduced that he might think Nellie was pretty.
He was a nice young man, however, so I decided not to twit him about it. I wouldn’t have extended Christopher or Crispin the same courtesy, for the record. Not that either would have reacted with red ears to a pretty girl: Christopher because he doesn’t swing that way, and Crispin because he has far too much experience with women to blush simply because someone’s pretty.
“As for what else I know about them,” I said instead, “it’s not much. Like Cecily Fletcher, Lady Violet at one time had a fling with St George. Olivia Barnsley might have done, as well.”
“Gets around, doesn’t he?”
And then Collins blushed, as if he hadn’t intended to say anything, but the words had simply slipped out. I smirked.“You’re not wrong. Although from now on, Laetitia will keep him on a much shorter leash, I’m sure.”
Collins muttered something. He was bent over his notes, and the back of his neck was red.
“Before I go back to the dining room,” I added, “I ought to let you know that someone shot at me earlier. Or at us, I suppose I should say. It might have been Christopher or Francis who was the intended victim and not me.”
He raised his eyes from the notebook to look at me. “Why would anyone want to shoot at any of you?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “The suggestion was made that I look a bit like Cecily Fletcher from a distance. Perhaps the murderer—if there was one—thought the pennyroyal had failed to kill her and decided to take a more active role.”
“Poisoning is active enough,” Collins said. “When and where did this take place?”
I gave him the details, and added, “The bullet should still be in the wall outside. Or on the grass below the wall. We didn’t stop to pick it up.”
“Would you show me?”
“I’d be delighted.” I gestured him down the hallway towards the boot room and the exit to the outside. A minute later we were standing there in the warm sunshine, at the back of the house, and I had to fight back the shiver that ran down my spine as I recalled the sound of the bullet whistling past my ear and embedding itself in the wall.
“We were standing there.” I pointed to a spot a few feet out from the wall and to my right. “I had come out through this door. It was just after Constance and I had found Cecily. She was still alive, but not doing well. I ran downstairs to find Francis. He and Christopher were setting up wickets for a game of croquet for those of us who didn’t want to shoot partridge. Over there, see?”
I pointed out the already-standing wickets, and the ones that had been tossed to the grass when the two men had dropped everything to come towards me.
“The shot came from the trees. I’m not certain where. But the bullet ended up in the wall… somewhere over there.” I waved vaguely to the gray stone. “It passed within a foot of my head, and not much farther from Francis’s.”
Collins gave me a look on his way past, as he headed for the wall to look for the bullet. “What happened next?”
“We dropped to the ground and crawled to the door,” I said. “It was quite undignified. But there were no more shots. And it might have been an accident. Someone in the woods being careless.”
Collins hummed something that might have been agreement or its complete opposite. “Here we are,” he said. I wandered closer, and saw where a chip of stone had been taken out of the wall, sometime recently. The wound was lighter in color than the rest of the stone around it.
Collins squatted down and began looking around for the bullet. “You may go back to the dining room, Miss Darling,” he told me. “Would you tell your cousin I would like a word with him?”
“Of course. Which cousin do you want to see?”
“The younger Mr. Astley,” Collins said. “Ah. There we are.”
He eyed with satisfaction a piece of ground just to the left of his knee. I peered at it, too, and saw a glint of metal.
“Is that the bullet?”
He nodded. “Go fetch your cousin, Miss Darling. In the meantime, may I borrow a handkerchief?”
“Of course.” I pulled it out of my sleeve and gave it to him. “I’ll be right back.”
“Just your cousin, Miss Darling. You know how this goes. Separate statements.”
