Page 39 of Death at the Dower House
Or—if Tom was right and it was an accident—Lady Peckham might have, for one reason or another, decided to take a sleeping draught last night, even if she usually didn’t, and because she usually didn’t, she accidentally gave herself an overdose.
“Where did the sleeping draught come from?” I asked.
“Chief Inspector Pendennis and Detective Sergeant Finchley are still figuring that out,” Tom answered.
I glanced at Francis, whose supply of Veronal had been responsible for Aunt Charlotte’s demise two weeks ago. He was pale and looked ill.
There was a moment of silence into which Constance dropped a simple, yet devastating, sentence.
“My mother’s dead,” she said, her voice small, and I was reminded, forcibly, of sitting in the library at Sutherland Hall a week and a half ago, as Crispin said those same words, with the same inflection and the same lost expression on his face.
I moved over and sat down next to Constance, and took her other hand. Crispin looked at me across the table, but he didn’t say anything. Perhaps he remembered, too.
And then there was a knock on the front door, and a moment later, Dawson’s measured steps across the tile floor of the reception room.
“The police,” Gilbert said, raising his head like a pointer on the job.
“I’ll go deal with them.” Tom headed for the door. “Don’t go anywhere.”
He vanished into the reception room. By now, Dawson had admitted the local constables and we heard Tom greet them and introduce himself. At that point I stopped paying attention to the conversation—I could guess what it was about—and turned to Constance, whose hand I was still holding.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Constance. You too, Mr. Peckham.”
Francis nodded. “Condolences all around, Peckham.” He patted Constance’s hand. She sniffed into her—or rather his—handkerchief.
“This is just so very hard to believe,” Gilbert said. “First Johanna and now Mother. Both on the same night. It’s almost as if Mother knew, isn’t it?”
There was a pause of—if you’ll excuse the turn of phrase—dead silence.
“Knew?” Constance repeated, a little shrilly. “Knew what? That Johanna would also die last night?”
Gilbert shrugged, somewhat sheepishly. “You have to admit it’s quite a coincidence.”
“I don’t see how it can be anything else,” I told him, “unless you’re suggesting that your mother sensed Johanna’s death was imminent, and decided to end her own life in solidarity.”
He didn’t say anything, and I added, “Because if you’ll excuse me, that sounds like a lot of rot. I’m sure your mother cared about Johanna—she certainly seemed to—but she still had you and Constance.”
“She liked Johanna better,” Constance said with a sniff. The sniff could have been sad or indignant, depending.
“That may be,” I told her, because I had certainly got the impression that the late Lady Peckham had been fonder of her pretty ward than of her natural daughter, “but that still doesn’t explain how she could have possibly known that Johanna, all the way in Dorset, was dying last night. Johanna’s death didn’t look planned to me, so Lady Peckham couldn’t possibly have known that it was going to happen.”
“All I said,” Gilbert grumbled, “was that it was strange that it should happen this way.”
He had done a bit more than that. It seemed, to me at least, that he had suggested the presence of some sort of supernatural knowledge on Lady Peckham’s part, which was plainly ridiculous. We were almost halfway through 1926, more than halfway through this thoroughly modern decade. We didn’t believe in ghosts and supernatural woo-woo anymore.
Besides, chances were that Lady P had ingested her fatal brew before the party broke up in the parlor of the Dower House anyway. Our family members at Sutherland Hall keep earlier hours than we had done last night. They would have been in bed by midnight, if not sooner. By the time Johanna kissed Crispin in the garden, Lady Peckham had certainly been asleep, if not actually dead.
At this point, Tom came back into the dining room, followed by a young constable from the nearby constabulary, and took over the proceedings.
“We’ll start with an overview of last night and this morning,” he told us, “while we wait for my colleagues to arrive from Sutherland Hall. Constable Collins here is going to take notes. Just pretend you don’t see him.”
He nodded to Collins, who took himself off to the far corner of the room where he pulled out a pencil stub and a notebook and pretended to blend into the wallpaper.
“I know who you are, of course,” Tom continued, “but if you would introduce yourselves and explain how you came to be here, for the record?”
It sounded nice and polite, with a question mark at the end, but it wasn’t a request. We went around the table, gave our names and addresses, and explained what we were doing at the Dower House.
“Philippa Darling,” I said, when it was my turn. “I went to Godolphin with Constance. When she and her family came to Sutherland Hall for Lady Charlotte’s funeral on Wednesday, she mentioned the house party and invited us all to come.”
