Page 10 of The Case of the Curate

“How long has she been dead, Paxton?” Chadbon asked.

The doctor laid his hand on her neck, then lifted her hand, bending her arm at the elbow and letting it fall again.

“Not long,” he replied. “She’s warm. No signs of death rigor. Within the hour, I’d say, two at the most.”

Remington groped for his fob watch. “It’s almost half past eleven now, so the chances are she died while young Grande was in the orangery.”

This is not good…

From the door, Kemp said. “Mr. Remington, your men are here for the…deceased.”

Already she was dehumanized, no longer Dinah but a body causing problems for the gentlemen gathered around her and upsetting the household she had served barely an hour before.

Remington grunted by way of acknowledgment.

Kate leaned closer to Rupert. “What did you see?” she asked, low and urgent.

“Nothing. What did you mean, they’re going to cover it up?”

“It’s too damaging, politically and socially, for too many important people.”

The skin just under his left eye twitched upward. He scrubbed one hand over his face from forehead to chin. She had never seen him so tense, even when about to face well-deserved punishment. Bleakly, he watched the men loading Dinah onto the cart. They covered her with a sheet of some kind and a tarpaulin before driving off slowly, through the courtyard gate.

The horse’s plodding hooves seemed to beat in an unpleasant rhythm with her own, much quicker heart.

“Let’s go inside,” Chadbon said peremptorily. He paused, blinking at the bench. “Lady Ambrose! You should not be here amongst all this unpleasantness. In fact, the farther you are from it, the better.”

“It makes no difference,” she said, rising, which at least made Rupert rise too. They all shuffled back into the orangery, and somewhat blindly Rupert picked up his hat and coat from the same chair they’d been on when Kate spoke to him earlier.

“Is that where you were sitting?” Remington asked him suddenly.

“It is.”

“Facing the glass? And you were there from when?”

Rupert shrugged tiredly. “Just after ten, I suppose.”

“From when you left us in the drawing room, in fact,” Chadbon put in, giving him a very odd look.

“You must have seen or heard something,” the magistrate declared. “Think, man! Did anyone come through the orangery while you waited?”

I did…

“No,” Rupert said, and she closed her mouth on her own not-yet-spoken admission.

“Then what happened outside? You must at least have seen the girl crossing the courtyard from the kitchen. It’s a moonlit night.”

Rupert frowned. “I didn’t see her or hear her. I didn’t hear anything. Except…”

“What?” Remington asked.

“I thought I heard a hinge, like a gate or a door. I didn’t pay much attention because I expected Dinah to come from the house, not the garden.”

Remington was staring at him. “So you just sat there for forty minutes? What were you doing all that time?”

“Just watching the sky. Thinking. It might surprise you that clergymen don’t always get much time for thinking.”

Remington and Chadbon both regarded him with skepticism. So did Kate, though for different reasons. The very idea of Rupert as a clergyman was still bizarre. And contemplation had never been one of his habits.