Page 75 of Murder at Hambledon Hall
“What harm?” she bellowed. “What harm, Miss Fox? A great deal, that’s what.” She jabbed the pen in my direction again. “A note leads to a liaison, and a liaison can lead to a girl getting herself into trouble. Unwed girls need to be careful.”
“That’s quite a leap to make, Mrs. Short.”
“Not in my experience. I’ve been in service many years, Miss Fox. I have seen girls give their virtue to a boy they thought loved them. More often than not, the boy disappears the moment she tells him he’s going to be a father. As housekeeper, all the maids are under my care. Their well-being and reputation aremyresponsibility, and if a girl is too silly to know what’s good for her, then I must make the difficult decisions for her.”
I was so stunned by her tirade that I didn’t know how to answer. While she was right in general, she was still treating the maids as though they were naïve children who were unaware of the consequences. Perhaps that was true for some, but not all.
She must have thought my silence meant I agreed with her. She softened her tone but did not end the lecture there. “If the worst happened, and the footman abandoned her, Mary would be in a terrible predicament. Either she’d have to give the baby up, or she’d plunge it and herself into a lifetime of poverty and misery.” Mrs. Short had leaned forward an inch or two with each sentence in her attempt to get her point across. Now she sat back and concentrated on her paperwork. “If you don’t mind, Miss Fox, I have work to do before I leave for the day.”
As I closed the office door behind me, I had the vague sensation that I could have said more—that Ishouldhave said more. But I couldn’t quite grasp why. All I could think about was unwed mothers giving birth to illegitimate children. That led me to think about Miss Crippen, which led me to think about Esmond Shepherd, the father of her unborn child. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about Esmond Shepherd’s life. Not just his death, but his birth, too.
Pieces of the mystery became clearer—Esmond’s search through the Morcombe church records, the moved photograph in his cottage, the niggling feeling this entire case hinged on the past.
I was now sure that it did. I just had to make a telephone call to prove it.
Chapter16
Itelephoned the Morcombe post office first thing in the morning and asked for an urgent message to be sent to Reverend Pritchard with my brief instructions. I paced the foyer of the hotel for the next hour, worrying that he’d be offended at me giving him orders. Or perhaps the postmaster didn’t heed my request for urgency. Or perhaps the vicar wasn’t available.
It was a relief when the clerk at the check-in desk signaled to me. I accepted the telephone receiver from him and spoke into the mouthpiece. “This is Miss Fox.”
Reverend Pritchard’s voice crackled down the line. “This is most irregular. I don’t have the time to come to the post office to make telephone calls to London. My flock in Morcombe need me.”
“This affects your flock,” I reminded him. “I do appreciate your time, Reverend, as I’m sure Lord and Lady Kershaw will when they’re made aware of your help.”
Mentioning the names of the most important members of his flock had the desired effect and his next words lacked the acerbity of his previous ones. “Esmond Shepherd was indeed baptized here in 1855. His parents are listed as William and Mabel Shepherd.”
“And Susannah’s death?”
“She was buried in the churchyard in 1855 at the age of twenty-one, just five days after Esmond’s baptism. The cause of death is given as fever. It must have been a tumultuous time for the Shepherd family. They experience the joy of welcoming a son after years of barrenness only to lose their daughter mere days later. I can’t imagine what they went through.”
Nor could I. The vicar was right about the joy and the heartbreaking loss. But he was wrong about the rest.
After I hung up, I telephoned Harry’s office, but the operator informed me there was no answer. I hung the receiver on its hook and thanked the clerk. I needed to talk over my findings with someone, but all the staff were at work. If I had to work, too, then so be it.
I found Harmony cleaning a room on the third floor. I joined her at the bed where she was unfolding a set of clean sheets. We’d discussed my theory that morning over breakfast, so she knew of my plan to telephone the vicar.
“You look as though you’ve won a prize,” she said, her eyes bright. “You were right? Susannah Shepherd was Esmond’s mother, not his sister?”
I signaled for her to give me one side of the sheet to help her spread it over the bed. “The parish records list William and Mabel Shepherd as his parents.”
“Oh.”
“They also show that Esmond was baptized five days before Susannah was buried, when he was a mere week old. Her cause of death was given as a fever. The timing can’t be a coincidence, not when women who die days after giving birth are sometimes noted as having succumbed to fever rather than a result of childbirth. I’m sure that Susannah was his mother, despite what the records say.”
“All right. So, if we accept that, then who is the father? Surely it can’t be the fourth earl. If the rumors suggested he was Susannah’s father, not her lover, then there must have been quite an age difference.”
“It’s more likely her lover was thefifthearl, the current Lord Kershaw’s father. That the rumor about thefourthearl andMabelShepherd being lovers was wrong.”
“Perhaps they were never quashed because it was better to have everyone believe that than know the truth.”
She had an excellent point and I told her so.
I assisted her to pull up the bedspread and watched as she tucked it firmly into her side of the bed. I attempted an equally firm tuck on my side, but she insisted on redoing it to her standard. Harmony picked up a cleaning cloth from her cart, so I picked up one, too. We split the room down the middle, each of us wiping over the surfaces on our half.
Cleaning proved to be a good activity to do while thinking, particularly for this case. As I lifted up objects on the bedside table to clean under them, I was reminded of the photograph in the gamekeeper’s cottage, as well as all the dust. The dust had built up over the previous month, after Mabel Shepherd died. Esmond, and the world, had assumed she was his mother. But if my theory was correct, she was his grandmother.
“Mabel Shepherd died recently,” I pointed out. “Again, an apparent coincidence that might be more significant than we thought.”
