Enter Pale Death(75)
“Whose tears, Ben?”
“Miss Joliffe’s, of course. Nothing makes … made … the mistress cry. I was on coffee duty when the ladies withdrew. Miss Joliffe handed me her cup and announced she was going up to her room. There were tears in her eyes, I reckon. All that baiting by those upper-class ninnies! They behave like a pack of hounds when they think they’ve sighted a fox.” Ben took himself in control and carried on. “She told the mistress she was leaving first thing in the morning as soon as she could get a taxi to come out from Cambridge and pick her up.”
“How did the mistress take that?”
“Seemed to be just what she wanted to hear. But she said certainly not—she’d ask the chauffeur to take her to the station in the Bentley directly after breakfast. Detaining Miss Joliffe would be the last thing she wanted to do, she said, all sarky-like. Here we are. It’s not kept locked though there is a key always in the lock on the inside.”
Joe went in, trying to guess what had been Dorcas’s reactions to the insult of being allocated this unsuitable room.
He was quite surprised to find it pleasant and spacious, the lamps, when Ben lit them, casting a warm glow over the comfortable furnishings. The walls were papered with a lively print in which strawberries and nightingales featured. The polished boarded floor was covered in oddly luxurious cream rugs, a cut above the usual practical linoleum that most nurseries seemed to have. The child’s bed—eight-year-old Alex having been the last occupant, Joe supposed—had not been moved out; it was still here, still made up, as though the owner was expected to jump back in and call for a bedtime story from Nanny, who was always on hand right next door.
Lucky little owner, Joe reckoned. He was a happy child who had the run of this pretty space—secure, pampered, his child’s needs lavishly catered for. How very different from the childhood experience of the young Dorcas! What must she have made of all this? Alongside were an ancient rocking horse, a dolls’ house, a toddler’s trundle seat and other bits of nursery paraphernalia of a solid Edwardian grandeur. These relics of a cosseted infancy had been pushed over to one side of the room. The rest of the space was occupied by a fully stocked dressing table and an adult-sized bed, freshly made up with plump white pillows and a quilt of yellow Chinese silk.
Joe knew exactly how the insult had affected Dorcas. He had a vision of her dark head sobbing into the pillow and felt a rush of anger towards the dead Lady Truelove. The girl had struggled all her life with the knowledge that she had no place in polite society. The illegitimate offspring of a feckless father and runaway mother, she had received only hatred and slaps from her wealthy grandmother. Scorn from vindictive ladies was something she had grown used to dealing with and she would have recognised this deliberate slight for what it was. The mistress was saying: “You are not worthy of the attention a guest would normally receive. You have no place here.” James and Lavinia were still, the choice of the furnished nursery was suggesting, man and wife and going about their family duties. “So there, Miss Cleverclogs! Spend a sleepless night realising that whatever claims you might fancy you had on James’s attention are so much moonshine.”
And all this humiliation had been doled out right under the eyes of her respected mentor and fellow academic. Joe’s anger flared again. What the hell was James Truelove thinking to allow such a situation to develop! Joe would have stopped it in three words if he’d been there. If Lily’s Aunty Phyl had it right, the bloke was in love with his student—how could he sit back and watch this scene play out? To Joe, it was reminiscent of the scenes of animal torment Truelove dabbled in under the name of scientific discovery in his laboratories. Joe wondered nastily if the man had been making observations—taking notes. “Influence of social criteria in display of sexual rivalry in the human female” might perhaps have been his heading. Or was he merely terrified into silence by his wife?
He went to run a hand over the pillow. Poor girl! This was a sad way to learn that a man she had admired had no spine, no decency. “She must have spent a miserable night.” Lost in his thoughts, Joe had hardly been conscious of speaking out loud.
He was surprised when Ben answered him.
“Oh, I don’t know about that, sir!” The tone was heavy with suggestion. “She wasn’t lacking a shoulder to cry on.”
“What do you mean?”
Ben took a step closer and flicked a glance to check that the door was closed. He listened for movement in the house. A show of “resident sleuth” put on for Joe’s benefit? Joe didn’t doubt it but he was not about to challenge for the role. He waited, as he was meant to.