Mrs. Worthington moved away from her and sat down. Distractedly, she waved Constance to the chair opposite.
“Only in the suddenness. My daughter was found in our own garden, where she had been reading. I thought she had fallen asleep in the sunshine and took her hat out to her. She didn’t want to damage her skin so close to the wedding. But she wouldn’t wake up…”
“It was you who found her?” Constance asked.
Mrs. Worthington nodded. “She looked so peaceful… I dropped the hat over her face—as a joke, you know, to wake her—but she didn’t stir. Though she was still warm to the touch, I could not rouse her. I shouted into the house for them to fetch the doctor immediately, and then my husband and Digby ran out and Digby felt dementedly for her pulse, for a breath, and found none. The doctor came quickly, but I already knew my daughter was dead.”
She ended on little more than a whisper.
Constance had to swallow before she said, “Mr. Montague had been with your husband before they came out to join you after you shouted?”
“What?” Mrs. Worthington blinked, as though making belated sense of Constance’s question. “No. No, we were expecting him, but he hadn’t yet arrived. I think he just came in and saw Stanley—my husband—bolt out of his study. He followed him, of course, sensing the emergency. He still had his hat in his hand when I saw him.” Her lips twisted. “Foolish, the little things one remembers about such huge, shattering events…”
“They can be,” Constance said, “and sometimes they are very helpful. I’m sorry to ask this of you, but could you possibly show me where this happened?”
Mrs. Worthington stared at her, jaw dropping. But something had changed. Outrage had vanished from her eyes, and wary curiosity had taken its place.
She closed her mouth and nodded. “Very well.”
Constance followed Mrs. Worthington through the house to a sunny parlor with French doors to a colorful garden. They stepped onto a close-cut lawn and walked toward a large, well-established pear tree.
“It was summer then, too,” Mrs. Worthington said. She pointed behind the tree. “That is where I found her. From the parlor, I couldonly see her legs and feet, and the sun was shining directly onto them…”
“And you found her lying down? On the grass?”
“On a red tartan blanket. I still have it, though I never use it.”
“Was she on her back or her front?”
“On her back, with her eyes closed. Her book was open beside her.”
“Was her head on a pillow?”
Mrs. Worthington shook her head. “No… She had brought a cushion to sit on, though she must have tossed it aside when she lay down. Usually, she sat on the cushion with her back against the tree trunk. Ever since she was a child…”
Constance’s stomach gave a twist of recognition. “Where was the cushion when you found her?”
“A few feet away.” Mrs. Worthington pointed toward a bed of bright, sweet-scented roses. “Just by the flower bed, lying carelessly, as though it had been knocked or thrown there without attention.”
Constance imagined a faceless young woman, little more than a child, sitting reading, with her back against the tree. The soporific effect of the sun on this contented girl could have caused her to move position, stretching out on her back, shoving the cushion aside with her right hand.
She looked around the garden, saw the path around to the front of the house. There was a tall old gate that had probably once been used to keep children safely corralled. She could imagine Montague walking up that path and through the gate, as silently as he had entered his house and his study this morning. Keeping to the same path, he could easily have kept himself from view from the parlor, where Mrs. Worthington had been sitting.
Had Sophie already been asleep when he approached the tree? Had he picked up the cushion and simply held it over her face until she stopped breathing? If so, would her mother not have noticed thefrantic kicking of her legs as she fought to save her own life?
Surely it was more likely that he found her in her usual position, with her back against the tree. She was probably delighted to see him. Perhaps they had kissed and he had swept her, lover-like, onto his knee, still hidden by the tree while he seized the cushion she had been sitting on and smothered her with it. He was a big man. He could have controlled her thrashing without moving that cushion.
And when she was dead, he had simply smoothed out any grimace or sign of distress from her skin. Closed her eyes. Perhaps he had even picked up escaped feathers from the cushion, from her nose and mouth and hands, replaced fallen pins from her hair, and then laid her out on the blanket so that only her legs were visible from the house, and hurried back down the path. Perhaps he had taken a short walk to calm his breath and his nerves. Or just gone straight to the front door and rung the bell…
“Was there a postmortem examination?” Constance asked.
Mrs. Worthington nodded. “The doctor advised it because there was no obvious cause of death. But it revealed nothing. She was perfectly healthy. Just…dead. There was no obvious signs of disease, but the coroner did say there was much they still had to understand about diseases of the heart and the brain…” She gave a helpless little shrug. “The cause didn’t really matter to me. It would not bring my daughter back to life.”
“No,” Constance agreed. “I am sorry. Where is your husband’s study, where he heard your call for help? At the back of the house?”
“It looks onto the side. My husband is dead too, you know. He never really got over Sophie’s loss. I think he was glad when the lung fever took him the following winter.”
Constance’s heart twisted. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “You have had much to contend with.”
