“Are you walking back to Markham Hall now? Please, let me give you a ride!” She scooted over and tucked her skirts back, and feeling as if I had no choice, I climbed in beside her.
“Thank you,” I said.
“It’s nothing at all. Is that a new dress, Miss Leavold? You are done up quite well today.”
Something told me she was mentally comparing today’s frock to the dress I’d been wearing when we first met in the village. Comparing, and mentally ticking away each yard of silk and lace. She had to know that Mr. Markham had furnished me with something like this; there was no way I could have afforded it myself. But I didn’t care that Mrs. Harold would inform the village of this sartorial charity and I didn’t care what they would think. Only my own opinion mattered.
And Mr. Markham’s.
Mrs. Harold took my silence for confirmation. “Now, please,” she said, snapping the reins. “You must tell me all about the party up at the hall. We saw those coaches rolling through the village yesterday, and the rumor is that Mr. Markham is hosting almost twenty-five guests.”
“Thirteen,” I corrected.
Her eyes glinted at this fact. “And do you know all of their names?”
I allowed that I did.
“And where are they all from?”
I told her that they had come from London and had been friend’s of Mr. Markham’s when he had traveled abroad, but that I had went to bed early last night, and so my knowledge was still very limited. She nodded at this, filing away the little tidbits I’d given her, no doubt already expanding and speculating on them, readying them to be shared amongst her flock of village women.
“Is it true that Mary O’Flaherty is there?”
“You know her?”
“Of course not. She’s Irish, you know, by way of Liverpool. Do I look like someone who knows a lot of Irishwomen?” She didn’t give me time to answer, not that I would have volunteered one anyway. “But everyone knows about her. Her father owned one of the largest shipping companies in Liverpool. He died a few years ago, and instead of passing on the business to a male relative, she decided run it herself.” She shook her head, as if Molly had decided to parade naked through the streets instead of follow in her father’s footsteps.
“So she’s wealthy,” I said. Another thread of pain laced itself in my heart. Lovely and rich. I would never be able to compete with that.
Mrs. Harold didn’t notice my change in tone. “Oh yes. She has as much money as an aristocrat. They say she has quite the head for business, which shouldn’t be a woman’s purview, but one does hear that the Irish are of a baser sort. Maybe their women are more like men.”
Loath as I was to defend Molly in this moment, I felt a flash of ire. I’d heard whispers about my mother’s heritage all my life. Irish, Scotch, Welsh—God forbid any of us baser sorts pollute Britannia. I focused on breathing, on feeling
the wheels rattle underneath me, before I said something I regretted.
She went on. “Anyway, Mr. Markham hasn’t had any guests—other than you—since his wife died. One might think it’s a little, well, not done, to have such a party when his wife is barely cold in her grave.”
“One might think, Mrs. Harold? Or you might think?”
She turned her head to look at me, giving me the look of someone who’s just realized that they’ve underestimated an adversary. “What do you know about Violet Markham’s death?” she dropped the overly friendly tone and switched into something more businesslike. “As her cousin, surely you must be interested.”
“I must admit I don’t know much.”
“Let me tell you something then. Mr. Markham is dangerous. There isn’t a villager in Stokeleigh who doesn’t think he murdered Violet, and his first wife too.”
“His first wife died of consumption.”
Mrs. Harold waved a hand dismissively. “That’s what killed her, yes, but that was just the method—he meant for her to die as soon as he married her. He never wanted to marry, you know. He traveled after his father died and the stories you’d hear about the things he got up to. But then the family lawyers convinced him to come back and to wed, to have a son because there are no longer any living relatives to be listed as inheritors. They practically picked a wife for him—Arabella Whitefield—and you couldn’t have found a richer, more pedigreed girl anywhere. But she was frail—everyone knew that—she’d always been frail. Then he took her to Venice—hot, wet, rife with illness—for their honeymoon and she was so weakened by the travel and the weather that she immediately took sick.”
“I think that sounds more like a tragic circumstance than intentional murder.”
“You really think that a man in love, who knew his wife was sickly and weak, would subject her to such a journey? Would take her into such a warm, unhealthy climate? No. He wanted her to get sick. And don’t even get me started on Violet. They fought from the moment she moved into Markham Hall.” Her eyes were far down the path, and something in her voice hinted at more substance than speculation. “And then she took up with Gareth the servant—who used to be such a nice boy—just to spite him. No wonder he snapped and decided to kill her.”
“I’m not sure that qualifies as a certain evidence of homicide,” I said, but inside I wondered…could Violet have really carried on an affair with Gareth? There was a possessiveness to Mr. Markham; perhaps he would be very angry indeed if he discovered his wife had been unfaithful. And our childhood curate had always said that sexual immorality bred other types of sin—perhaps a man so rife with the vice of lust would be rife with others…
“Certain evidence?” Mrs. Harold said. “How about this? The night before she died, they had a dinner party, and of course, my husband and I were invited. They were in rare form that night, fighting from the moment the meal started until the guests started leaving late that night. At one point, he pulled her out of the room, but we could still hear them quite clearly. He told her he’d have no shame divorcing her, and then she told him that she would never submit to a divorce and that he’d have to kill her if he wanted free. The next morning, she was cold in the field. And do you know what Mr. Markham did when he found her body? He laughed. He threw his head back and laughed.”
This last comment gave me pause. The thought of him laughing next to Violet’s corpse, shrouded in the fog, her neck at an unnatural angle—it made me deeply uncomfortable. It made me doubt whatever surety I’d felt about Mr. Markham’s innocence. Who could laugh next to the body of his dead wife?
