“In bed,” Benedict answered.
Francine nodded. “And I with him.”
“I retired as well,” Mr. Teasdale added, his voice cracking.
Liars, all. Evangeline could hardly believe her ears.
Susan’s jaw dropped. Evangeline gave her a preemptive kick beneath the table. No wonder they hadn’t been eager to summon the constabulary. They all had something to hide.
If the rest of them saw no need to admit their nocturnal wanderings, why should she? For all she knew, neither Lady Stanton nor Lady Heatherbrook nor Nancy Heatherbrook had been in their quarters, either.
“I was in my bedchamber,” she said aloud.
“As was I,” Susan added. “In my bedchamber, that is. Not Evangeline’s.”
Mr. Lioncroft shot Evangeline a quick, wry glance as if to sayhewould not have been opposed to spending the evening in Evangeline’s bedchamber rather than just a portion of it up against the wall outside his office. Arrogant blackguard. She should never have kissed him.
“I interviewed the servants,” he said calmly, as if he spent most mornings questioning his staff about inconvenient homicides. “They saw nothing.”
Edmund toyed with his silver flask. “Well, somebody strangled Heatherbrook.”
“Perhaps the marks on his neck have nothing to do with his death,” Mr. Lioncroft suggested softly. “Those could easily be a relic of an earlier altercation.”
“That’s true.” Evangeline glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She’d be willing to wager Mr. Lioncroft had been an active participant in any earlier altercations. “Lord Heatherbrook was also bandaged about the head. Perhaps that wound was the fatal injury.”
For some reason, Mr. Lioncroft appeared no happier with her alternate explanation. It was hard to think clearly when this unexpected death followed so soon after her own mother’s.
“Botheration.” Susan’s arms crossed below her bodice. “I suppose we shall never know the truth.”
Evangeline sipped her tea and wondered if Susan was right. Last night’s vision with Lady Heatherbrook had only shown what the lady herself had recounted.
“Convenient,” Edmund put in, with a sly glance toward Mr. Lioncroft. “Much like last time.”
Mr. Lioncroft leapt to his feet so fast Edmund started, spilling burgundy liquid down the front of his shirt and into his lap.
“The primary question,” came Mr. Teasdale’s quavering voice, “is why anyone would murder Heatherbrook in the first place. I can only imagine two motives.”
Still standing, Mr. Lioncroft slid his dark gaze to Mr. Teasdale. “Only two?”
“First, and no offense to the new earl, but any time a titleholder is killed, we must generally take a look at the next in line. The most obvious reason for bloodshed is personal gain.”
Personal gain? Evangeline stared at her toast. Maybe that seemed like a reasonable motive to sheltered rich folk who’d never met a man like Neal Pemberton. Where her stepfather was concerned, violence was sport, not strategy.
Benedict coughed, scowled, crossed his arms. “And the other reason?”
“Anger, of course. Rage makes us capable of the worst possible things.”
“Well, the old codger’s right,” Edmund drawled. “And nobody had more to gain than the new Lord Coughs-A-Lot.”
“Point your greasy finger at someone else, or I’ll—” Benedict began, but the rest of his warning was lost in a barrage of hacking coughs, which only served to send Edmund into a fit of drunken laughter. When Benedict regained control of himself, he took several sips of tea before speaking again. “Don’t you think I know a suspicious death would bode badly for me, precisely because of primogeniture? I’d ratherneverbear the title than to earn it through such catastrophic means. Rage, not the title, was the motivator in this instance.”
“Not only that,” Mr. Teasdale said after a moment, “in most cases where some dastardly cousin or unscrupulous younger brother sought to usurp his brother’s place, the death was made to look accidental. There’s nothing accidental about being clubbed on the head and strangled. Whoever did that was angry.”
Benedict and Francine Rutherford shot Mr. Lioncroft considering glances.
Evangeline bit her lip. Some powerful men indulged their rage and never owned up to their actions. Was their host one of them?
Lioncroft’s jaw flexed. “I. Did not. Kill him.”
