The young women looked at each other. Martha turned back to look at Cecilia. “Maybe to see who she could trust?” she suggested tentatively.
“Or perhaps, who she could control?” Cecilia suggested in return.
Martha frowned, her voice edged. “Are you saying she controlled us?”
“Well, didn’t she? And didn’t she do the same with Summer and the Cathcart twins, and try to do so with Mr. Vernon and the viscount?”
“She did want everything just so,” Augusta admitted.
“Don’t you really mean she wanted everything her way?” Cecilia asked.
The young ladies squirmed in their seats. Cecilia decided she’d made her point and given them much to think about.
“Now, what does concern my husband and me is who killed Miss Inglewood. We doubt she would have taken any of thatpennyroyal to drink. From everything we have learned, she was not the kind to take her own life.”
“No, my lady, that she weren’t,” affirmed Matha, “and that has had us concerned and confused since the day she died.”
“She did say her father kept urging her to drink the tea to purge the babe and get this over with.” Augusta shuddered. “I can’t imagine doing that; never could. Anyway, Georgia wouldn’t listen to him, said there was no need, that she was going to get the Viscount to marry her. She even told him that her father would help her!”
Cecilia’s eyebrows rose. “I assume the viscount did not take kindly to that assurance.”
“No, but her father was worse!” Martha said, rolling her eyes.
“I don’t understand,” Cecilia said.
“After we saw and heard the viscount’s refusal, we walked with her back to the Inglewood house. We met the squire on the steps. Georgia was still irritated with the viscount so she told her father to pressure the viscount to wed her,” Martha explained.
“More like she ordered him,” Augusta corrected, “and no, he didn’t like that. If we hadn’t been there, he might have cuffed her.”
Cecilia stroked the side of her cheek with one finger, her brow furrowing as she thought. “I wondered if that wasn’t the magistrate’s way,” she said, more to herself than to the young women.
“We’ve seen evidence in the past, haven’t we, Martha?” Augusta said.
Martha Broadbank nodded sadly.
Cecilia looked between the two women. Thoughts rushed through her mind. If the magistrate was abusive…
“But Georgia, she never backed down,” Augusta finished.
“Were you aware she wrote in a diary?” Cecilia asked, wondering how deeply the young women were in Georgia’s secrets.
“Yes, she actually kept two diaries, one in her bedroom and one in the cottage.”
“Two! Why two?” Cecilia asked. That there were two diaries was not something she had expected.
“She liked writing in a diary, but one day, Mrs. Hester spied her father in her bedroom reading her diary. She told Georgia. Georgia had always been afraid he might, so she hadn’t written about him hitting her or anything like that. The diary she kept in the cottage was her real diary, and she said she could allow herself to say anything she wanted in that diary.”
“Why keep writing in the diary she kept in her bedroom?”
“To keep him appeased, and, I think, because it amused her to know he was being fooled,” Augusta said.
Clever, Cecilia thought. “Have you read her diary? Either of them?”
They shook their heads. “No, we haven’t. We went to the cottage after she died to get the diary, but it wasn’t in her hiding place,” Augusta said.
If the Cathcart twins and these young women both knew of the hiding place, it wasn’t a hiding place. Still, she had to be certain that what the twins knew as a hiding place and what the women knew as a hiding place were the same.
“Where was her hiding place?” she asked.
