“Yougaveit away? Ashawlby Madame Valenaire? Asilkshawl by Madame Valenaire fromthisseason? Do you have any idea how precious an au courant Madame Valenaire silk shawl is? Ten pounds, John. You disposed of a garment that cost our household ten pounds! Ten pounds!”
With every repetition of the price, Mr. Nutting flinches, for it is not an insignificant amount of money, and he owns himselfastonished to discover the item was so dear. “I thought it was a castoff! Jane gave it to her maid! I assumed our daughter had more sense than to give an article of value to her maid, and then her maid did not want it, so she gave it to Mrs. Todd. As she also did not want it, she gave it to Hewitt, who passed it to me during our weekly meeting, and as I had no use for it, I gave it away. I thought it was better that it go to someone who needed a scarf than it become a kitchen rag. The color is atrocious, but beggars cannot be choosers.”
Mrs. Nutting, who had pressed a hand to her heart at the thought of a Madame Valenaire original being used in the scullery to dry saucepans, bobbles unsteadily on her feet, as though in danger of swooning. “Russian flame is a lovely warm pinkish tan!”
“On that point, I defer to you, my dear,” he says graciously.
The civility does little to appease his wife, who demands to know where the shawl is now. “To whom did you give it and how may I find them?”
He is appalled by the question. “It was a charitable donation, Grace. You cannot just take it back! We would be the laughingstock of the neighborhood if they knew you hounded a peasant into returning a scarf. The gossips would snicker and the speculation about our situation would be ruinous. They will say we are one step above paupers. No, I will not tell you where I donated the damnable thing. Instead, we will have a conversation about your spending habits. Paying ten pounds for a scarf is indefensible, and even if our daughter is a featherbrain for giving it away, the graver sin is purchasing it for her in the first place. Clearly, she does not have the depth of character to appreciate something of real value.”
Although the look on Mrs. Nutting’s face is stormy, she does not repeat the mistake of forgetting my presence and refrains from pressing her husband in my presence. Whether her effortswill bear fruit remains indeterminate, I can readily imagine her walking the streets of Lower Bigglesmeade, examining every passerby for the garment in question.
“Come, Miss Hyde-Clare, we must allow Alan to return to his business, for he is a busy man and does not have time for our chatter,” she says, looping her arm through mine and giving it a hardy tug to propel me toward the entry hall. As we approach the front door, which Hewitt has opened in expectation of my ejection, she thanks me again for my assistance with Jane. “Your curiosity is natural. To be candid, I could wish my Jane had a little more of it. But I cannot allow my family to become enmeshed in a murder just so you can appease your curiosity. If word of this very,veryslight connection should spread, I will know whom to blame. Do keep that in mind and give my best to your parents during this troubling time.”
Then she pushes me over the threshold and slams the door shut behind me.
Chapter Thirteen
Sebastian is right.
Over and over again, I asked how an exquisite shawl made of the finest-quality silk could have wound up in the possession of an impoverished widow in Bedfordshire, and now I have the answer.
It is Miss Nutting’s castoff.
The sequence of events is shocking, and I am as aghast as the girl’s mother at how the beautiful garment had passed from one set of hands to another until it was tossed into a trunk with other donations, thereby removing the largest impediment to the theory of the embittered villager.
Does it pain me to acknowledge the accuracy of Sebastian’s speculation?
Not in the least.
As an investigator, I owe my allegiance to the evidence. I must go where it leads, and in this instance, it leads to Lower Bigglesmeade. As I have no desire to continue in the wrong direction, I am grateful for the correction and gladly reexamine my previous assumptions in light of the new revelation.
Devil it, itdoespain me!
I am trying to be stoic again, but it is impossible.
The consequences of this reversal are huge.
All I want is for Sebastian to admire my pluck and daring and intelligence and to apologize for underestimating me, so that I can graciously offer my forgiveness.
Is that reallysomuch to ask?
But now I am forced to reexamine all my previous conclusions.
The connection toThe Fate of the Dark Dawn,for example.
It had struck me as obvious, but perhaps it is a product of my own bias. I thought there was a link, so I found a link. In retrospect, I can see that “eternally devoted” is not an especially obscure way for a lover to sign her letters, and it is substantially different from Georgiana’s “yr. eternal beloved.”
And ponds!
A great many villages have ponds.
The countryside is riddled with them!
That I was able to attribute the mention of a small body of water to a particular source is further proof that I was looking for the association in order to draw it.
I made the same mistake with the open window in the music room. Because the murder happened on the night of the dinner party, I convinced myself that had to mean the killer was one of the guests. But all sorts of tradesmen and shopkeepers are in and out of Red Oaks all the time, and any one of them could have taken advantage of the hubbub preceding the party to sneak upstairs. Mrs. Jackson would be too busy to notice, what with the additional housekeeping responsibilities created by my family’s visit and dinner preparations for the neighbors.
