Father turned them over in his hand, his face stony as he touched a finger to the trinkets. Suddenly, he shot Brisbane a piercing glance. “Do you believe these are related to your other matter?”
Brisbane did not look at me, but he shifted in his seat, averting his profile as if to exclude me from the conversation.
“I do not,” he said, his voice pitched so low I very nearly did not hear him at all. Instantly I left Grim to his sweets and took the chair next to Brisbane, looking with interest from him to my father.
Brisbane’s cheek twitched a little, and I knew he was thoroughly annoyed, but with Father or me, I could not decide.
Father gave the bundle a searching look and placed it on the desk. “In that case, I do not think we need concern ourselves with this. I will see to it that it is returned to Lady Hermia’s room.”
“My lord, I would rather keep the evidence myself,” Brisbane began. Father waved him off with a peremptory hand.
“I see no need. You know what was found and where. Surely keeping it in your possession is not necessary.”
Brisbane did not argue, but I could feel the irritation emanating from him. He was a man seldom thwarted, but then so was my father. What had begun as a small territorial skirmish between them was rapidly deteriorating into a formidable battle of wills.
Father exerted his command over the situation by changing the subject. As it would have been a breach of etiquette to return to a topic once he had abandoned it, this was a gambit he used when it suited him. I always found it illogical that a family so willing to throw off society’s greater constraints would abide by the lesser, but we were nothing if not inconsistent.
“Where are we then, with this business of Snow? Lucy is resting, claiming she knows nothing of it, and we have no clue save the bruises, which tell us a man must have been involved? And someone wishes to put her and her sister out of the way.”
“Succinct, and correct,” Brisbane replied. “We have discovered no reason for Miss Lucy to have wished Mr. Snow ill, nor have we discovered a reason for her to have been willing to take an accomplice’s guilt on her own shoulders.”
Father considered for a moment, running his hands through his silver-white hair. “I think she must have told Julia the truth. She is innocent in every possible way of this atrocity and remembers nothing. Someone is preying on her now, gambling everything on her inability to remember what she has seen.”
Brisbane’s eyes narrowed. “It does explain the attack on Miss Lucy and her sister. Were I the villain, I should not like to stake my chances on escaping the gallows on the slender hopes that a young and healthy girl will not recover her memory. If I were cold-blooded enough to murder once, I should do so again, very soon and without compunction.”
“And the attack on Emma as well?” I asked.
Brisbane shrugged. “They are close as two sisters can be. If Miss Lucy took anyone into her confidence, it would be her elder sister. Whoever poisoned Miss Lucy either did not care if Miss Emma died as well, or hoped that she would.”
Father nodded. “We will keep a footman on watch, for their protection.”
“Agreed,” I said. “But we must consider the possibility that Lucy is in league with the murderer as well. Father, I know you wanted us to find some proof, some shred of evidence to speak in her favour and keep her from the hangman’s noose, but I cannot be persuaded she is entirely innocent.”
Father reached for the snuffbox on his desk and began to fidget with it. It was a nervous habit of long standing. He flicked the lid open with a thumbnail, then snapped it closed. It was a practice that annoyed Aunt Hermia to no end. If he indulged the habit in front of her, she usually snatched it out of his hand or snapped it closed on his finger.
Now he opened and closed it, rhythmically, like a metronome keeping time. I suspected it helped him to think. He finally snapped it closed and sat up in his chair, rather more energetic than I had seen him since Snow’s broken body had been discovered the night before.
“I know you suspect Cedric, Julia. But I wonder, a girl like that, on the verge of marriage to a man so much her elder. She has seen nothing of the world, had no experience. I must wonder if she decided to indulge in a liaison before she married.”
“I did wonder,” I admitted, “but it seemed so diabolical. Suppose she did decide to take a younger lover. Could it have been Snow? Cedric might have murdered him in revenge,” I mused.
“I think his lordship is thinking more abstractly,” Brisbane put in. Father regarded him coldly, doubtless resenting Brisbane for speaking on his behalf. I smothered a sigh. There were enough currents and eddies of tension within the household without the two of them at each other’s throats. Brisbane continued, oblivious to Father’s annoyance. “Cedric is the obvious choice for the murderer if Snow was her lover. But what if Snow discovered her affair with another and demanded a price for his silence? That would make him a blackmailer, and there is already evidence he was.”
I blinked at him in wonder. “Aunt Hermia’s jewels?”
He nodded. “It seems possible, but not likely to me he would have stolen them himself. It would have been dangerous for a gentleman guest to be discovered in the ladies’ wing. Far safer for him to have pilfered something from another gentleman or from the public rooms. But if a lady were to try to lay hands on something small and valuable to meet the demands of a blackmailer, what better place to look than the bedchamber of an absent hostess?”
I sat back, marvelling at the twisted little tangle of ideas he had just presented. “And if Lucy were engaging in anaffaire du coeur,she might well cover the crimes of her lover by claiming sanctuary for a murder done by his hand.”
“In which case she is in no danger, but still ought to be kept under watch so as to keep her near at hand,” Brisbane put in.
“But she has been attacked, with malice prepense,” I pointed out.
“Has she? What did the footman see but a sheet-draped figure drifting through the hall? You yourself pointed out the proximity of the vestry to the chapel. What if the footman nodded off and Miss Lucy or Miss Emma played the ghost? The footman went haring off after it, just as the miscreant planned. When he returned to his post, the brandy was there, supposedly by the hand of the phantom. The idiot footman passes it to them and they drink. It does not take much medical knowledge to know how much laudanum is fatal. And they might both have been pretending to be sicker than they were. We must keep them under guard for their possible culpability as well as their safety.”
I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. It was a fantastic story, and the most fantastic part of all was that it might very possibly be true.
“Surely you do not think they would try to escape? To begin with, it would be impossible. The Abbey is entirely cut off from the outside,” I argued.