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Three oh three.
We’d arrived at three oh three that afternoon.
I swallowed down the bile, and that was chased by an involuntary shiver.
I mean, what the fuck?
Was that just a wild coincidence?
And why was Daniel walking into the mist in the wee hours of the morning?
Where was he going?
Why had he and Portia gone to bed so early?
We’d had tea, after meeting Richard and Jane, but I didn’t even know where my sister’s room was in this house. I hadn’t been allowed much time with her, neither had Lou, including during cocktails, when Daniel didn’t leave her side.
I didn’t want to, but I had to.
I pulled my phone off the charger, opened Safari, and typed in Dorothy Clifton.
I’d read the Wikipedia entry in my Alcott Family and Duncroft House research when Portia got involved with them, and again scanned it when we’d been asked to the house.
However, sitting in bed in the Carnation Room, I read it again.
Very closely this time.
Dorothy Clifton had been a silent film star. Platinum blond and beautiful. Very famous. Very glamorous. It had been rumored she’d had a torrid affair with the Prince of Wales years before he’d become enamored of his future wife, the woman he’d abandon the crown for, Wallis Simpson.
She had also, and these rumors were definitely true, been carrying on an affair with the handsome, dashing, but very married Earl Alcott.
For some inexplicable reason, still engaged in this affair, she’d agreed to attend a house party at Duncroft. Multiple attendees, after the fact, let slip that she and David, the earl, had continued their liaison in the very house where his wife lived and was in attendance.
On the last evening of the house party, wearing a stunning gown created by up-and-coming fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, Dorothy Clifton fell over the railing, at the very top of the grand staircase, to her death on the white marble floor below.
Guests and servants all shared she had been quite inebriated.
But many questions remained unanswered about this fall, foremost being why she was on the top floor at all. It housed staff quarters, the tutor’s rooms, and storage. There was no reason for her to be there. With the house party requiring them to see to their duties, there wasn’t even any staff up there.
And both David and Virginia Alcott had not been located until several hours after the incident. When they arrived at the house, they claimed to be engaging in a moonlit stroll that included David alluding to a marital tryst.
In the end, the incident was deemed an accident, regardless of the fact the balustrade twining along the entirety of the staircase was unusually high, nearly four feet tall. Practically impossible to topple over…unless you threw yourself over.
Or you’d been lifted and dropped.
Or pushed.
In the aftermath, for years, the scandal and scuttlebutt clung to the Alcotts and Duncroft like a pall, with ping-pong theories of Virginia doing the deed out of jealous rage, even though she was slight and petite, Dorothy being several inches taller than her, therefore it was doubtful she could manage it physically. Though, not impossible, considering the level of Dorothy’s supposed intoxication.
So aspersions were cast on David, who it was said wished to end the affair, regardless that he very clearly continued to engage in it during the party.
There were whisperings that Dorothy wasn’t even invited to the house, but showed of her own accord, and the Alcotts were too polite to turn her away (though perhaps not too polite not to kill her?).
For Dorothy’s part, it was said she was worried that talkies were sweeping the globe and she’d be cast aside as other actresses had been. She was pressing David to divorce Virginia and marry her.
However, that theory seemed thin, considering the undeniable truth in all of it was, Dorothy was a well-educated young woman from an upper-middle class home. Due to her film career, she was very wealthy in her own right, and reports stated she’d managed her money well, and this bore true. On her death, she’d left over one million dollars to her younger sister, the equivalent of over sixteen million today.
Her sister remained vigilant of these funds, even after the crash that devastated the world in 1929. Indeed, the Clifton family had a penchant for finance and were now considered semi-old money by Britain’s standards, because they were still loaded.
