Henrietta Read online

  M. C. Beaton is the author of the hugely successful Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series, as well as a quartet of Edwardian murder mysteries featuring heroine Lady Rose Summer, several Regency romance series and a stand-alone murder mystery, The Skeleton in the Closet – all published by Constable & Robinson. She left a full-time career in journalism to turn to writing, and now divides her time between the Cotswolds and Paris. Visit www.mcbeatonbooks.co.uk for more, or follow M. C. Beaton on Twitter: @mc_beaton.

  Titles by M. C. Beaton

  The Poor Relation Lady Fortescue Steps Out • Miss Tonks Turns to Crime • Mrs Budley Falls from Grace Sir Philip’s Folly • Colonel Sandhurst to the Rescue • Back in Society

  A House for the Season The Miser of Mayfair • Plain Jane • The Wicked Godmother Rake’s Progress • The Adventuress • Rainbird’s Revenge

  The Six Sisters Minerva • The Taming of Annabelle • Deirdre and Desire Daphne • Diana the Huntress • Frederica in Fashion

  Edwardian Murder Mysteries Snobbery with Violence • Hasty Death • Sick of Shadows Our Lady of Pain

  The Travelling Matchmaker Emily Goes to Exeter • Belinda Goes to Bath • Penelope Goes to Portsmouth Beatrice Goes to Brighton • Deborah Goes to Dover • Yvonne Goes to York

  Agatha Raisin Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener • Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage • Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam • Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate • Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance • Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon Agatha Raisin and Love, Lies and Liquor Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison • Agatha Raisin: There Goes the Bride Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body • Agatha Raisin: As the Pig Turns Agatha Raisin: Hiss and Hers • Agatha Raisin and the Christmas Crumble

  Hamish Macbeth Death of a Gossip • Death of a Cad • Death of an Outsider Death of a Perfect Wife • Death of a Hussy • Death of a Snob Death of a Prankster • Death of a Glutton • Death of a Travelling Man Death of a Charming Man • Death of a Nag • Death of a Macho Man Death of a Dentist • Death of a Scriptwriter • Death of an Addict A Highland Christmas • Death of a Dustman • Death of a Celebrity Death of a Village • Death of a Poison Pen • Death of a Bore Death of a Dreamer • Death of a Maid • Death of a Gentle Lady Death of a Witch • Death of a Valentine • Death of a Sweep Death of a Kingfisher • Death of Yesterday

  The Skeleton in the Closet

  Also available The Agatha Raisin Companion

  Henrietta

  M. C. Beaton

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York

  This edition published in the UK by Canvas,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © M. C. Beaton, 1979

  The right of M. C. Beaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-128-0 (ebook)

  Cover copyright © Constable & Robinson

  To my friend Madeline Trezza,

  her husband Tony,

  and her children Dana and Anthony.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter One

  SO THIS WAS LONDON!

  Miss Henrietta Sandford cowered in the corner of the carriage and fervently wished that she had never left the quiet county town of Nethercote to answer the mysterious summons she had received only that morning. The noise of the city streets was deafening as crowds jostled along the pavements under the old overhanging buildings. The smell from the kennels in the middle of the street was nigh overwhelming.

  The hack negotiated the film of Ludgate Hill and then picked its leisurely way up Fleet Street past the red latticed windows of the taverns. The shop signs rattled and creaked mournfully as they swung back and forth in the bitter November wind.

  The hack came to a halt in the press of traffic. Suddenly a drunk pressed his face against the carriage window, staring mindlessly at Henrietta with wild red eyes peering out from a forest of long, greasy unkempt hair.

  She gave a squeak of alarm and turned her head away. The carriage jerked forward and she went over the events of the morning in an effort to settle her mind.

  She had been going about her parish duties of visiting the poor—or rather her brother, the vicar’s duties—when suddenly an unfamiliar soberly dressed servant appeared by her side.

  He had a message for her from her Great-Aunt, Mrs. Hester Tankerton. Henrietta was not aware until that moment that she had a Great-Aunt or indeed any other living relative apart from her brother, Henry. Mrs. Tankerton feared she was dying, explained the servant and was desirous of seeing Miss Sandford without delay. He cautioned, she must not tell anyone, especially her brother, of her visit.

  Henrietta had been first frightened and then intrigued. Bullied by her brother and treated as little better than a servant, Henrietta had experienced very little excitement in her life. London was only a few hours ride from Nethercote, and all at once, Henrietta had decided to go. The servant seemed respectable. And before she had had time to draw breath, she was swaying and bumping along the London road. Now as she stared out at the strange sights and sounds of the metropolis, she felt she had been indeed mad to go on such a wild venture.

  With a sigh of relief, she noticed that the streets seemed to be getting broader and quieter and at last the coach came to a stop in front of an imposing mansion.

  Feeling suddenly quite shabby in her outmoded pelisse and refurbished poke bonnet, Henrietta knocked firmly on the door. It was opened by a middle-aged butler who bowed her into a shadowy hallway with various servants sitting around on wooden benches. Obviously Mrs. Tankerton’s staff was taking advantage of her illness, thought Henrietta. Even in provincial Nethercote, the servants were expected to remain in their own quarters unless they were actively engaged in work. Evidence of Mrs. Tankerton’s old-fashioned ways was amply illustrated when Henrietta was ushered into a cedar parlor on the first floor to await her Great-Aunt’s summons. A ring of hard upright chairs stood in a circle on an uncarpeted floor where the ladies were supposed to sit and coze. Obvio
usly Mrs. Tankerton did not believe in the more relaxed atmosphere of the modern drawingroom with its oriental rugs and scattered chairs.

  There was no fire in the grate and the wind howled dismally in the chimney. After what seemed like an age, the butler reappeared to inform Miss Sandford in hushed accents that Mrs. Tankerton awaited her.

  She passed up another narrow flight of stairs to a massive oak door and into a dark bedroom dominated by a huge four-poster on which a small figure lay hunched against the pillows. Henrietta hesitated on the threshold, her heart beating fast. The curtains were tightly drawn and the only light came from a single candle beside the bed. The bare floor was waxed to a high shine. The only other furniture was a table beside the bed, laden with phials and medicine bottles and a few occasional chairs crowded against the far wall.

  “Is that Miss Sandford, Hobbard?” came a querulous voice from the bed. The butler placed a chair beside the bed and withdrew. Henrietta moved slowly forward.

  “Come here child and let me have a look at you.” Mrs. Hester Tankerton raised herself slightly on the pillows. She was an elderly woman with thin wisps of grey hair escaping from under an enormous lace cap. The face was waxen, almost translucent, held to this world by a pair of small bright eyes like a bird’s. Henrietta stood before her, her hazel eyes looking wonderingly at the small figure on the bed. Mrs. Tankerton sank back on the pillows as if the small effort had completely exhausted her. “You don’t look like your brother,” said Mrs. Tankerton, “but that’s about all I can say for you.”

  “You know Henry?” asked Henrietta in surprise.

  “’Course I know Henry,” snapped the invalid. “I know Henry and about every other toady in London. I’m very rich and I’m about to make my will. What d’ye think of that?”

  Henrietta moved her hands in a sort of bewildered embarrassment and remained silent.

  “Faugh!” said Mrs. Tankerton in disgust. “Milk and water miss! I am looking for an heir worthy of my fortune. Not some countrified, dowdy miss, frightened to open her mouth. Be off with you!”

  She struggled to reach a small handbell beside the bed.

  “Allow me, madame,” said a voice like ice. Mrs. Tankerton looked up and encountered such a blazing look of dislike in Henrietta’s large eyes that she remained frozen, her withered hand stopped motionless in mid air.

  “You,” said Miss Sandford, clearly and distinctly, “are a horrible old woman. No amount of money in the world gives you the right to be uncivil, madame. Good day to you!”

  She marched past the astounded butler who had just arrived at the door of the room, and ran lightly down the stairs. She gave vent to her lacerated feelings by slamming the street door behind her with a resounding and most unladylike bang, and jumped into the coach.

  Hobbard went forward anxiously to where his old mistress lay shaking on the bed. To his surprise he found that Mrs. Tankerton was convulsed with laughter.

  “By George, Hobbard,” she gasped. “Send for my lawyers. This’ll put the cat among the pigeons. I’d give a monkey to see the look on Henry Sandford’s face when the will is read.

  “She’ll do. Yes, I really think she’ll do.…”

  Chapter Two

  “DEAR HENRIETTA, I FEEL you should pay a call on Miss Scattersworth,” said the vicar of St Anne’s, Mr. Henry Sandford. “I myself will call on Lord and Lady Belding.”

  Miss Henrietta Sandford twitched the curtains and stared out at the rain which was blanketing the county town of Nethercote. “You will be taking the carriage then,” she remarked in her placid voice.

  “Of course,” remarked the vicar, preening himself in the looking glass and straightening his cravat. “One must keep up appearances. But you will find the walk to Miss Scattersworth’s invigorating. We should not put off our calls simply because one of our parishioners lives in the poorer section of the town.”

  Henrietta reflected that her brother, the vicar, did not at any time feel obliged to put his glossy hessians inside the door of any low class house. He left that duty to his sister. But she was fond of Miss Mattie Scattersworth who was an elderly spinster of the parish and one of her few close friends. She made a move to leave the room.

  But her brother was not finished with her. He felt irritated that Henrietta had accepted the duty of a walk in the rain without fuss. He racked his brain for some way to annoy her.

  “It is very gracious of the Beldings to include you in their invitation to the ball. It promises to be a very grand affair. Ah! If only you were as beautiful as Miss Alice Belding, we should have you married to some fine London Lord.”

  Miss Henrietta Sandford’s one claim to beauty lay in a pair of magnificent hazel eyes. And with them, she surveyed her plump and pompous brother with an unfathomable expression. “Well, Henry, since I am six and twenty and practically an ape leader, you should realize that there is no hope for me,” she finally remarked with an edge to her voice.

  “And whose fault is that?” said her brother, turning an unflattering shade of red. “You could have been married to the squire had you not been so stubborn.” The squire, Sir Arthur Cromer, was a widower of fifty-eight with daughters as old as Henrietta herself. It was an old argument and Henrietta decided to make her escape. She was entirely dependent on her brother for the roof over her head and the clothes on her back and he unfortunately topped every argument by reminding her of that unpleasant fact.

  Henrietta escaped up the stairs to her room and began to prepare for the wet walk ahead. She pulled the heavy wooden pattens over her shoes and put that dowdy piece of headgear called a calash over her bonnet to protect her from the elements, reflecting that it would have cost her brother very little to allow her to hire a chair. But Henry delighted in penny-pinching—as far as his sister was concerned. His own clothes-leaned almost to dandyism and would not have disgraced a Bond Street beau.

  The town of Nethercote was considered by the few visitors from London to be a charming seventeenth-century village and by its residents as a bustling metropolis. Most of the town was centered round the central market square with its Assembly Rooms and posting house, The George and Dragon. Why go to London when the shops of Nethercote had everything there was to buy from the best of plain English fare to a real French dressmaker, Madame Aimée? The fact that Madame Aimée was once a Clapham seamstress called Bertha Battersby had been long forgotten and the townspeople did as much to foster her French image as Madame Aimée did herself.

  Aristocracy was in residence just outside the town in the shape of the Beldings; and & Arthur Cromer, Henrietta’s rejected squire, lived in a brand new cottage ornée to remind the sophisticates of Nethercote of the simple joys of country life despite the fact that his vast thatched-roofed residence could have housed a whole army of tenant farmers and their laborers.

  Henrietta picked her way across the slippery cobbles of the market square, with the heavy ring on the soles of her pattens making an ugly clanking sound and the rain beginning to trickle down her neck.

  The visit to Mrs. Tankerton seemed to be a long, long way away. She had told no one of her visit, not even Miss Scattersworth. Miss Mattie Scattersworth would have thought her mad for not trying to ingratiate herself into the rich lady’s graces.

  Miss Scattersworth lived above the bakery at the corner of the square. She was one of Nethercote’s many indigent gentlewomen, keeping the body and soul together by sharing each other’s modest tea trays, and perpetually living in the grim and awful shadow of the poorhouse.

  As she climbed the stairs to Miss Scattersworth’s lodgings, Henrietta composed her features into their usual outward calm.

  “My dear Henrietta!” gasped Miss Scattersworth, “So delighted! But in this terrible weather. You must be chilled to the bone.”

  “I am,” said Henrietta matter-of-factly. “Do let me in, Mattie.”

  Miss Scattersworth stood aside with profuse apologies and followed her young friend into the tiny parlor where a meager fire fought a losing battle
with the all-pervading chill of the bleak November day.

  Henrietta placed a basket of victuals tactfully on a small table but Miss Mattie’s quick eyes had caught the action and filled with grateful tears. “So good of your dear brother,” she said in a choked voice.

  “Fustian!” said Henrietta sharply. “You know he would not even give you a piece of bread. I stole these from the kitchens.”

  Only in front of her elderly friend did Henrietta put off her carefully cultivated social mask. Miss Mattie gave a delighted gasp and covered her mouth with her long, bony freckled fingers.

  A lifetime of genteel poverty had not dimmed Miss Mattie’s spirit for adventure. A thin angular female of sixty-two with thick grey hair in neat bunches of ringlets under a modest cap, she had never given up hoping that something exciting would happen to change her drab life. She was an avid reader of novels and Henrietta thought that her friend lived more between the pages of her favorite romances than in the real world.

  When they were both seated in front of the fire, Mattie leaned forward and grasped Henrietta’s hand. “Now tell me all about your going to the Beldings’ ball. What are you going to wear? Do you think you are going to fall in love? I can see it all. He will cover your face with impassioned kisses and…”

  “And throw me across his saddle-bow,” grinned Henrietta. “And of course Miss Alice Belding will be so madly jealous that she will…”

  “Take poison and in a fit of remorse for all the bad things she has said to you, will leave you all her money in her will and…” cried Mattie.

  “And,” interrupted Henrietta, “we will both go to London for the Season where we will dazzle all the gentlemen with our unique beauty and…”

  “I shall marry an Earl and you a Duke,” finished Mattie triumphantly.

  Both burst out laughing. Then Henrietta shook her head. “You know what it will be like, Mattie. I shall sit in the corner with the chaperones and occasionally be singled out by Alice who will deign to drop a few crumbs of gossip to me from her lofty height.”