45
Cecilia did not like the idea of going out into the passageway without some manner of weapon, and so had picked up a sturdy brass candlestick on her way across her bedchamber. Grasping it tightly, as though it were a hammer – how she wished she had a hammer or a knife or a gun – she stepped out through the door that she had so carefully eased open.
The upper landing was lit by several windows that remained uncurtained – they would have to see to that if they meant to spend the winter here, she thought absently – and so the stark moonlight poured in through the glass and made it easy enough to see. Last time, it had been much darker and there had been nothing there, apart from Miss Macintyre with a candle. This time…
There was nobody there, but there was no time to collapse in relief either, because Beatrice’s door was ajar, a flickering candle flame showed inside the room, and Cecilia knew, sheknewthat her sister hadn’t opened the door or lit the candle herself. This wasn’t mere intuition, but a perfectly sensible and terrifying deduction, because there was an open panel just beside her in the passageway, a dark, gaping hole where no hole had been before. Therewasan intruder. She had not been imagining things, not this time and not before. Someone had entered through the concealed door in the panel, and was now in Bea’s room with her as she slept, doing God knows what.
But while she stood frozen in agonising indecision, wondering if the nocturnal visitor could possibly be Miss Pallant, and be expected and welcome, she heard an urgent whisper.
‘Cecilia… Miss Constantine!’ said an entirely unexpected voice. This night was taking on the aspect of a nightmare, with a nightmare’s nonsensical logic. The Major stepped through the open panel and hastened to her side. Cecilia had not the least idea what he was doing here, but she was excessively pleased to see him. She gestured wordlessly towards Bea’s open door, and they moved towards it together, and slipped inside in careful silence. She might be making a hideous and embarrassing mistake, and involving Alistair in it to make matters worse, but… she had to be sure that her sister was safe. No other consideration could weigh with her just now.
A tall, cloaked figure stood with its back to them in Bea’s sitting room, lifting something down from the wall. Beatrice, thank God, was nowhere to be seen.
Cecilia would swear she had not made the slightest sound, and nor had Alistair, but as she stood watching, some instinct alerted the intruder – was it a him? – and he whirled around in a threatening fashion. It really didn’t seem that this was Vivienne Pallant on a romantic adventure. This was someone far more dangerous.
The mysterious stranger, whose head was muffled up in a scarf, was darting glances from one of them to the other. Cecilia and the Major blocked his escape by the stairs and by the secret passage – good God, there really was a secret passage! No doubt she was the less formidable opponent and might easily be pushed over – but whatever he might decide to do in a split second’s panic, he was encumbered by the painting he’d just taken down from the wall. It wasn’t large, but it looked heavy. She’d never so much as noticed it before, but presumably it was valuable, or he’d not be stealing it. He was cornered, but would that not make him all the more dangerous?
‘I think between us, we have you pretty well trapped,’ another voice put in drily. It was Miss Macintyre, wrapped up in her tartan robe, standing in the open door of Bea’s boudoir. Extraordinarily, she was wielding a small but deadly looking pistol, pointing it at the burglar with what looked to Cecilia like a very steady aim. ‘Set down the Rembrandt, if you please, sir, and step carefully away from it with your hands in the air. To your side, that is, not towards me, or Miss Constantine, or the Major.’
The figure did not move.
‘You will perceive I am holding a weapon, Lord Pallant,’ the old governess said calmly. If no one else had the faintest idea what was going on tonight, it seemed she did. ‘I have not the least objection in the world to shooting you, though I will not do so unprovoked, and I must warn you that I am a quite excellent shot. I was shooting the pips out of cards before you’d terrified your first housemaid. I daresay you think I’m an elderly spinster of no account and can’t or won’t hit you even if I do fire. But you are seriously mistaken. Men of your type so often are, especially where women are concerned. What I don’t want to do is damage the painting. But I will risk it, I promise you, if you take so much as a step towards any one of us.’
The intruder didn’t listen; if it was indeed Lord Pallant, he wasn’t the sort of man who’d ever listened to a woman in all his life. He strode impetuously towards her, still clutching his prize awkwardly to his chest. Impossible to imagine what he thought he could possibly do, with his arms full of Rembrandt and three people opposing him and blocking his escape. But still he attempted to menace the old lady with the grey braids and the wicked little pistol.
So she shot him.
46
The report of the little gun sounded very loud in the quiet room. The Baron stood swaying for a moment, and Miss Macintyre, still clutching her weapon, leapt forward with astonishing agility and pulled the precious painting from his hands; there was a grotesque moment in which he seemed to resist her and they struggled, but then she managed to prise it from his grip, and jumped back as he subsided to the floor like a marionette with the strings cut. This was no wonder. She’d shot him in the head.
Beatrice’s inner chamber door swung open and she burst out, then froze on the threshold, regarding the bizarre scene with wild eyes, apparently unable to speak.
The Major recovered himself first and strode over to check on the fallen man. He was somewhat accustomed to seeing people mown down in front of him, as he hoped the others were not. ‘He’s quite dead,’ he said levelly after a moment. ‘That was an extraordinary shot, Miss Macintyre, straight through the eye. I always knew from a boy that governesses were greatly to be feared. Is it the sort of thing you make a habit of?’
‘Not recently,’ she replied, still cradling the painting in her arms as though it were a newborn baby she had just rescued from some deadly peril. ‘Though a certain skill with weapons has occasionally been useful on my travels. I did warn him; you both heard me. But even while I was saying it, I knew he wasn’t listening. I was perfectly prepared, you see, to have to shoot him.’
‘What in the name of heaven was he doing here in my room, whoever he is?’ Bea asked faintly, clutching the doorframe and looking frantically from one of them to another.
Nobody felt like pulling back the scarf to reveal the face, or what was left of it; this would in any case have been a difficult and unpleasant feat, in the circumstances.
‘It’s Lord Pallant,’ Miss Macintyre said, ‘and he came to steal this Rembrandt that’s been hanging here more or less unnoticed, I imagine, for fifty years or so. I told you Mrs Albery had hidden depths, did I not? These rooms were hers, I’m almost sure Mrs Pritty will confirm, and she received visitors here. I’ve been waiting for him to appear since the night of the party. And I was right, which is most gratifying. But do you think we could all go downstairs and have some brandy, assuming there is any in the house?’
Cecilia said swiftly, ‘I’ll go and get some, and wake Mrs Pritty to see if she can send Mr Fisk for the village constable. She’ll know what to do. You both keep watch, and I’ll bring the brandy back upstairs. We can sit in my room, Bea, not here. But we can’t leave Bianca – who I must assume is still sound asleep – alone up here with a dead body and an open passage that anyone else could use to creep into the house. We’ve had quite enough excitement for one night.’
Miss Macintyre and the Major admitted the sense of this, and Cecilia sped off down the stairs, still carrying her candlestick even though it gave no light. No doubt she would be some while on her errand. Alistair shook himself mentally. An absurd desire to tidy up made him wish to close the panel that led to the secret stair, which was gaping open onto the darkness in a manner he found most unpleasant, but he knew that this would be unwise; the authorities should see everything just as it had been. This infernal affair was going to be difficult enough to explain without making matters worse by meddling with the evidence.
‘No doubt you were walking on the beach, sir, as you so often do, and saw Lord Pallant coming in the direction of this house?’ Miss Macintyre said in an entirely expressionless tone that still managed to convey both utter disbelief and the fact that she thought this much the best tale to tell.
‘That’s exactly right, ma’am,’ he said quickly. ‘Though I had no notion it was him. I really didn’t, I promise you. There was something about the person’s manner as he approached the house that was extremely furtive, and yet I had no earthly right to challenge whoever it was. I suppose it could have been any one of you, going about your private business, or an invited guest. Yet I thought somehow that I was not witnessing anything so harmless, I was deeply uneasy in my mind, and so I decided to follow. And here we are.’
‘Where does the secret passage originate?’ the governess asked with tolerable composure. They’d passed into Cecilia’s chamber now, a place he’d far rather have been visiting in much happier circumstances, and Miss Macintyre had very carefully set down the painting in a corner, while Miss Constantine set about lighting a few candles. He thought that they were all, including Cecilia, astonishingly calm for a household who had a dead baron lying in one of their bedrooms and a secret entrance gaping open behind him.
‘In the stables, inside one of the stalls. Once I had seen that, you must understand, I had no choice but to follow into the house and hope I would be in time to prevent some dreadful tragedy. Of course, if it had been some illicit visitor expected by an inhabitant of the house…’
‘It would have been excessively embarrassing for everyone,’ Miss Macintyre replied drily. Miss Beatrice Constantine appeared to be blushing, but no doubt this was a mere manifestation of shock. He’d seen new young officers do the same after their first battle; at least she showed no immediate disposition to cast up her accounts in the fireplace, or burst into floods of tears and call for her mama. Women were made of sterner stuff than men, he’d often suspected, whatever society chose to believe. But nonetheless, they’d all be better for some medicinal brandy, him included.
He had a great desire to ask the Scottish lady how she had known that His Lordship was going to come housebreaking, as apparently she had, but he thought it would be inconsiderate to make her go through the story more than once – the authorities would be doing that soon enough, no doubt – and Cecilia of all people deserved to hear the first recounting of the tale. This whole affair, he was slowly realising, could easily have ended very differently for the inhabitants of this house. Pallant dead was by no means the worst possible outcome. It might even be the best.
