“A child? My God. She never said.” She closed her eyes to compose herself. “I knew what Helen was doing. I think we all did.”
“Not Anthony,” Jasper interjected.
“He would have known, had he not been pickled all the time,” Nadia replied, her dislike for her brother-in-law evident in the way she fought the rolling of her eyes.
“How long had they been having an affair?” Jasper asked.
Decamp, his dejection causing his head to hang and his shoulders to droop forward, appeared utterly defeated. And why shouldn’t he, given what he’d lost?
“Several months, that I know of,” Nadia replied. “But they were in love long ago too. Before she married Anthony.”
Jasper cocked his head, his interest piqued at this new bit of information.
“For what reason did Stephen and Helen part ways?”
“It was inevitable, wasn’t it? Grandfather would never have approved of their match, and I told her so,” Nadia said abrasively. Angrily, even. With a flicker of remorse, she glanced at Decamp. “I mean no disrespect, but you understand, Decamp. It is the way of things.”
He nodded morosely. “I do understand, Miss Nadia. So did Stephen...eventually.”
“He took the rejection hard?” Jasper asked.
“Yes. She broke things off after Master Teddy’s fall,” the butler replied. Sighing, he then added, “The boy’s death broke the whole house. The family, the staff, everyone. Stephen was heartbroken, but so was everyone else.”
Jasper was surprised to hear Teddy’s name, and the connection drawn to his death.
“Why after the young master’s fall?” he asked.
“Helen and I went away,” Nadia provided. “We spent several months with friends in southern France, while our mother was in Wales at a…retreat,” she said. The uneasy tone of her voice and a furtive glance in Jasper’s direction revealed that theretreathad likely been an asylum of some kind.
“And Stephen?” he asked.
“He returned here, to Cowper Fields,” Decamp provided.
“Do you mean to say he was at the Craven Hill residence at the time of Theodore’s death?”
“Yes, working as a groomsman,” Decamp provided. He raked his fingers through his thinning silver hair. “Inspector, do you truly believe my son took his own life?”
Jasper did not feel confident enough in his answer, so he skirted it with another question of his own. “After I reported Helen had been murdered, did you go to your son’s home? Did you try to tell him what had happened?”
Decamp stiffened in his seat and tensed his jaw. “I did.”
“He wasn’t home, I take it?” Jasper asked. At the answering shake of the butler’s head, he followed with, “What about his gig? Had he taken it somewhere?”
Decamp held up his palms in surrender. “I know I should have said something. But with Mrs. Dalton dead in London and my son missing, his carriage and horse gone… It looked bad for him.”
Nadia’s incisive glare settled on the butler. “Itlookedas if he had taken my sister to Craven Hill and killed her. And yet you kept this to yourself?”
Decamp lowered his head, his palm rising to cover his eyes.
“It appears Stephen and Helen did travel to London together the night of the storm and that he did not return to Harrow until late yesterday. Is there somewhere in the city where he might have stayed overnight before coming home? Friends he might have approached?” Jasper asked.
The stench of spirits on his person, the empty liquor bottles, and the delay in arriving home, all pointed toward a stretch of time spent wallowing in either grief or guilt.
“No, he didn’t often go to London. He didn’t like it. Too dirty, he said, and congested.” Emotion slackened Decamp’s face again. But he rallied in the next moment. “He had a farmhand a few years back, a boy by the name of Everton. Sam Everton. He bought a patch of land in Sudbury. Stephen would check in on him from time to time. They were friends.”
As Sudbury wasn’t far from Harrow, it would be worth a visit.
Ursula returned to the butler’s pantry with another cup and saucer. She went to the pot of tea to pour for Decamp.
