‘They’ll be getting under my feet and pinching the maids and stealing the sweetmeats,’ she grumbled.
‘Ooh, I do like a man in uniform,’ Rosie said on her way through to the cool of the dairy room with a tray of jellies.
‘You mind yourself, my girl, or you’ll find yourself with a bun in the oven and some useless soldier boy denying he had anything to do with putting it there,’ Mrs Bishop snapped.
‘We want to get to the bottom of all this trouble, Mrs Bishop,’ Laura said. ‘And if we discover who has been attacking poor Mr Thwaite and murdering loyal British agents for gold we need to be able to arrest them.’
‘Humph. Well, just so long as they wipe their boots and keep their hands to themselves, that’s all.’ She broke eggs into a bowl and began to whisk them ferociously. ‘And if there’s fighting, you tell them to keep the blood off the carpets.’
‘Yes, Mrs Bishop,’ Laura said as she fled.
Jared and Flynn were fencing in the back yard, neither of them looking as though they wanted to be interrupted, let alone plagued with her worries about Theo, so she went in search of Perry.
She found him in the stableyard moodily chewing on a straw and gazing into space.
‘Thinking?’
‘What?’ He jumped to his feet, but subsided again when she perched up beside him again. ‘Yes I was, actually. Don’t know what reminded me – seeing Hogget in the drawing room perhaps, but that night when he called round and told us about his father…’
‘What night?’
‘You must recall. No, you’d gone to bed, hadn’t you? He dropped in and Theo and I were with Thwaite. Hogget was in a strange mood, touchy – I suppose things weren’t going well and there was no-one besides Charlotte to talk to about it. Can’t recall how we got onto the subject now, but he was speaking about the Reverend Gilpin’s funeral and how his own father had been dropping hints about how this Rector had died a natural death and some people getting a nasty shock if some other people came back from the dead. How they wouldn’t be so high and mighty.’
‘That is odd, unless he was senile or just spiteful and enjoyed upsetting mourners at a funeral.’
‘He might have been spiteful,’ Perry said, ‘but he wasn’t senile. Hogget said he was only sixty three and in good health. Then he died almost immediately afterwards.’
‘You mean – No, surely not.’
‘We know we’re dealing with a killer,’ Perry said, flicking the chewed straw away. ‘What’s more likely than he snuffs out some awkward neighbour who seems to know one of his deep, dark secrets?’
‘So what is this deep, dark secret? What would someone coming back from the dead be able to do? Make an inheritance void if a second son had inherited when his older brother apparently died? Let me think. Squire Jenner is an only child, isn’t he? I recall Mrs Jenner lamenting that she had only daughters. She told Aunt that her mother-in-law had confided that the Jenner menfolk were notorious for having small families and that she was grateful that her only child was a son. My Uncle Swinburn never had any brothers, not unless someone has done a very skilful job of erasing them from the family Bible.’
‘But he is the child of a second marriage,’ Perry said slowly. ‘If his father’s first wife wasn’t dead when his father married again…’ His voice trailed off as they stared at each other.
‘We’re making a huge assumption,’ Laura said after a moment. ‘Are we just making bricks without straw?’ She scuffed at the wisps around her feet with the toe of her shoe.
‘Let’s go and tell the others, see what they think. Will was there, so he’ll say if I am misremembering.’
Will was watching the fencers and when Jared and Flynn saw the three of them with their heads together they broke off the bout and walked across. Jared had hardly broken a sweat, Laura noticed, whereas Flynn dragged his shirt sleeve across his brow with a grimace.
‘We think we’ve got the thread of a clue,’ Laura said. ‘But we’re not sure whether we are just imagining it.’
‘Let us wash and change and we’ll talk it through.’ Jared was already striding towards the back door.
They gathered in the drawing room and Perry went through the conversation with Hogget again, this time with Will nodding agreement with what he recalled. ‘At the time I forgot about it because he was having a bit of a poke at me about parish registers. His feathers were ruffled over the rumours that he’d di
sposed of his wife unlawfully or that Charlotte was his mistress. But you are right, it does sound as though his father knew something and was silenced to stop him talking about it.’
‘If it was your uncle’s step-mother who was alive eight years ago then the only person with a motive is your uncle,’ Perry said.
‘She didn’t need to be alive in 1805 at the time of the funeral,’ Jared pointed out. ‘Only to have been alive when Swinburn senior married Sir Walter’s mother. And Sir Walter is not the sole suspect. What about his wife?’
‘Aunt Lavinia?’ Laura laughed out loud, then thought again. ‘It would make her own marriage bigamous and it would disinherit her sons,’ she said reluctantly. ‘She is a very determined person… No, I cannot believe it of her.’
‘What about your cousins? How old would they have been eight years ago?’ Flynn asked.
‘Eighteen and seventeen. But Charles simply wouldn’t have the wit to manage an undetected murder.’