“Miss Fletcher was murdered? As well as Mr. Rivers? Constable Collins said he was dead when he came downstairs.”
I nodded, after taking a moment to sort out the pronouns. “Someone cracked him over the head with a vase. There was no attempt at all to try to make it look like anything but a violent attack.”
Unlike Cecily’s death, which had been carefully designed to look like a natural occurrence, or at best an accidental overdose with death as the result.
Unless, of course, it had actually been an accidental overdose and nobody had tried to make it look like anything else.
Although with Rivers dead, it did make it more likely that whatever had happened to Cecily had at least been instigated by somebody, whether the goal had been to kill her or simply to make her body reject the pregnancy. If it hadn’t been done on purpose, why kill the person who was the most likely purveyor of the pennyroyal?
“Pippa, dear,” Aunt Roz’s voice cut through the noise in my head, and I blinked and took another step into the room.
“I’m sorry.” Aunt Roz had taken a seat on the edge of the bed, while Constance was standing halfway between me and her, with her hands twined anxiously together before her. “I was just thinking,” I added, vaguely.
Aunt Roz’s eyebrows rose. “I just arrived. Would one of you care to explain exactly what has been going on here this weekend?”
I exchanged a glance with Constance, who made a face, but waved at me to go ahead.
I drew breath. “From the beginning, then. Last night, when I came up to bed, I ran into St George coming out of Cecily Fletcher’s room…”
After going through the entire sordid story, up to and including walking in on Dominic Rivers’s dead body, I closed my mouth and waited for Aunt Roz to give her verdict.
There was a moment’s silence.
“In my day,” she said, “there were Beecham’s Pills.”
I blinked. “There are still Beecham’s Pills, aren’t there?”
She nodded. “There were also Dr. Vandenburgh’s Female Restorative Pills, and French Periodical Pills, and of course there was turpentine and diachylon and gin...”
“I don’t think she drank turpentine,” I said, while Constance made a face, “although there was probably some gin last night. A lot of the drinks were gin-based, as I recall.”
Constance nodded agreement. “Turpentine has a very pungent smell, as I recall, and I can’t imagine it being in either the drinks or the tea. Someone would have noticed, surely?”
Oh, surely. “What was left in the cup last night smelled like mint,” I said. “I think I would have noticed had it smelled like turpentine.”
“Pennyroyal is quite easy to find, as well” Aunt Roz said. “Easy to distill, too.”
“We found a patch of it growing just a few hundred feet from the front door,” I nodded, “so anyone who wanted to make their own wouldn’t have had a problem.”
“Laetitia, Geoffrey, and I are all familiar with the area,” Constance said, and I turned to her.
“Nobody suspectsyou, Constance. You had no reason to want Cecily Fletcher dead. Or her baby gone, either. It certainly wasn’t Francis who got her in trouble.”
Aunt Roz shook her head firmly. “Of course not, Constance. That would be silly.”
Constance didn’t look reassured. “Do you think it was one of my cousins, then?”
“I think it could have been any number of people,” I said. “I’ve been to the Dower House before, so I could theoretically have known that there was pennyroyal growing in the ditch. Crispin has been here before, so he might have known. If Laetitia has had her friends here to stay, they may have known. Violet, Olivia, Cecily herself, maybe even Lady Serena.”
“Your aunt and uncle,” Aunt Roz added, “I assume. And all of the servants.”
There was another moment of silence.
“I don’t think Aunt Effie would have done something like that,” Constance said. “And I don’t believe that Uncle Maury would have known what to look for.”
“Of course not, my dear.” Aunt Roz smiled reassuringly. “We’re just talking, you know. No need to worry.”
There was a moment’s pause.
