He grinned. “Nanny, of course.”
“Nanny?”
“She is remarkably insightful about her own sex, you know. When I went to visit her earlier she said she noticed something when Augusta was here twenty years ago, a sort of heightened awareness in her whenever Lorenzo was around. She did not much care for it, given that Augusta was engaged to be married to James. So she took to keeping a weather eye upon her. She saw Augusta coming back to the house the night Lorenzo died.”
“She knew Augusta killed him and said nothing!” I was indignant that the peevish old woman hadn’t cared to share her observations earlier.
“Nanny knew nothing of the sort,” Stoker corrected. “She merely saw Augusta coming into the house. She might have been anywhere.”
“Feathers. It was a filthy night, everyone said so. The storm of the century,” I reminded him. “She knew perfectly well where Augusta had been.”
“Be that as it may,” Stoker said severely, “she had no cause to accuse anyone. Augusta was a guest, remember. And the house party broke up the next day. Why would Nanny have made trouble at that point when Augusta might have had a perfectly logical explanation? And Nanny did not believe she had been up to no good, at least not murder. She thought they’d been having an assignation.”
“They had been.” I related swiftly what Augusta had told me about her interlude with Lorenzo. “Where is she now?”
“Tiberius has had her locked in her room, with Merryweather and Collins standing guard.” I had dispatched Merry on a quick errand to the village, but he had sent word through J. J. that my suspicions were correct. I looked forward to hearing him fit one last piece of the puzzle into place.
Stoker went on. “James is furious, of course, demanding she be released, claiming it must have been an accident that you fell. Tiberius wants him to hear your version of events.”
I smoothed my skirts and patted my hair. “Unto the breach, then. Let us screw our courage to the sticking place.”
Stoker escorted me to the library, where Tiberius sat in lordly state behind the great polished desk. Chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle in front of it and Pietro sat in one—or rather, slumped, for his usual urbane pose had abandoned him. He looked like a broken doll, flung aside and abandoned. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen from weeping, but he was composed, his hands folded in his lap. He gave us a nod of acknowledgment as we entered. No sooner had we seated ourselves than Sir James arrived, blustering and puffing and furiously indignant.
“I will have the law on you for this,” he spat at Tiberius. He refused a seat but paced, uneasy as a panther, behind the chairs. But he stopped the instant Augusta appeared, pale and dry-eyed, accompanied by Collins and Merryweather, who stood behind her chair as she sat. Behind them, J. J. slipped into the room as unobtrusively as a mouse. She had had only a few minutes to complete an errand I had set her, but a quick wink told me she had been successful. She took a chair against the wall and waited in demure silence.
“My dearest,” James began, flying to Augusta’s side. But she held up a hand and gestured towards the chair next to her. He looked confused a moment, then seated himself. He patted her hand awkwardly, murmuring words of reassurance mingled with bombastic asides to Tiberius threatening everything from litigation to bodily injury until at last Tiberius abandoned his pose of languor and roared a single word. “Enough!” He accompanied this with a slap of the hand on the desk, the thud reverberating through the room. It was so unlike Tiberius to have recourse to bad temper that James lapsed into silence.
Tiberius addressed him directly. “I know you are outraged at the insult done to your lady, but I assure you it was entirely necessary. And it is the least of what she deserves.” James gaped in astonished umbrage, but Tiberius ignored him, turning instead to Pietro. “I am sorry,my friend. This will be painful in the extreme, I have no doubt. But it must be done.”
Tiberius looked at last to Augusta. “Twenty years ago, you murdered Lorenzo d’Ambrogio. Yesterday, you murdered his sister, Beatrice. And today you attempted the murder of Veronica Speedwell. Have you anything to say for yourself?” He made a swift aside to James. “I can feel you working up to another outburst, and believe me when I say I am fully capable of having you forcibly gagged. You will sit and listen and your wife will speak for herself.”
“Aye, that she will.” James looked to his wife, his brows beetling angrily. “Tell them what madness this is, Augusta. And then we can be gone from this place and these peopleforever.” He fairly spat the last word, but even as he said it, his expression changed. Something in her looks, her stony acceptance of Tiberius’ charges, must have alerted him. He shrank suddenly and the next words to slip from his lips were a feeble whisper. “Augusta? Augusta,no.”
“Yes, James. Everything Tiberius says is true. I might quibble about whether I murdered Lorenzo. It was not my intention, but I am the reason he was there on the cliffs that night, and although I did not plan to push him over, I did.” Stoker and I exchanged quick glances. She might claim not to have deliberately orchestrated his death, but I thought of the setting. If she was determined to speak away from the house, where they might have been overheard, she could have lured him to the pineapple folly for their confrontation, or any one of a dozen discreet spots that would have been far more comfortable on such a filthy night. Instead, she had insisted upon meeting at the cliff, that most precarious of places.
Almost imperceptibly, Stoker moved his hand as if to write, and I understood what he meant. On that fateful night, Augusta had taken pains to retrieve the note, the one physical clue that would have tied her to his death. Surely that, if nothing else, spoke of premeditation.
James gave a faint cry at his wife’s confession, but she seemed notto notice his anguish. She went on in a calm voice, resigned, or perhaps eager even, to acknowledge her deeds. Confession, they say, is good for the soul, and I wondered if she longed for absolution, for someone at last to understand her.
She went on. “I realised who Beatrice was the first night, and I knew then she was my enemy.”
“But why?” Timothy Gresham ventured. “Why did she not say, poor lady, who she really was?”
Tiberius looked to Pietro, who stirred wearily in his chair. “She had a scheme of revenge, a plot to avenge her brother.”
He paused and Tiberius prompted him gently. “A plot she had already undertaken by causing the deaths of Kaspar von Hochstaden and Alexandre du Plessis.”
Pietro nodded. “I knew nothing of it. I did not understand what she meant to do, I swear it upon everything I hold sacred. If I had... never would I have brought her here.” At this, he gave himself up to weeping, deep, violent sobs wrenched from his very soul. The sound was terrible, a despairing howl into the wilderness, and Merry went to him, putting an arm about him to offer consolation. At last Pietro subsided, wiping his eyes with Merry’s handkerchief. All the while, Augusta stared directly ahead, as if his enormous, consuming grief had nothing to do with her.
When his sobs had subsided to quiet snuffling, Tiberius went on. “I had deduced that someone was targeting the Seven Sinners, but I did not know who or what their purpose might be. But gathering the remaining Sinners here seemed the best way to bring matters to a head. And so it did, because Augusta recognised Beatrice as Lorenzo’s sister.”
“But how could you have known Beatrice was behind the deaths of Kaspar and Alexandre?” Timothy asked of Augusta. She pressed her lips together and did not reply. Instead, I ventured an answer on her behalf.
“Augusta was suspicious of this house party from the beginning, pricked by a guilty conscience and by the fact that you, Sir James, received a set of cuttings of your own—just like the ones that Tiberius received.”
The assembled menfolk looked decidedly astonished and I relished the moment before explaining. “Sir James was the recipient of an identical set of cuttings—cuttings which indicated he too would fall victim to the wrath of Lorenzo’s avenger. If,” I pointed out icily, “he had bothered to share that information when you disclosed yours, Tiberius, it would have immediately become obvious that Pietro was the only remaining Sinner who had not received a set. We would have suspected him at once of being the avenger—or Beatrice.”
Sir James’ moustaches twitched guiltily, but I went on. “Sir James concealed the cuttings from Augusta because he did not wish to alarm her. And because he was innocent of the crime of killing Lorenzo, he believed the whole thing a distasteful joke. But when Augusta found the cuttings quite by accident, she understood the danger. It was necessary then to come to Cherboys and confront the killer of Kaspar and Alexandre herself.”
