Envious Casca

by Georgette Heyer

"Oh, Joe! He's an escapist," said Paula scornfully. "But you! You ought to be able to appreciate a situation that shows us all up in the raw!"

"I don't think," said Mathilda, "that I care for seeing my friends in the raw."

"I believe that this experience will be very valuable to me as an artist," said Paula.

But Mathilda had never felt less inclined to listen to a dissertation on the benefits of experience to an actress, and she very rudely told Paula to try it on the dog.

It was now nearly eleven o'clock, and all the discomforts of a morning spent in a country house with nothing to do were being suffered by Lexham's unwilling guests. Outside, a grey sky and melting snow offered little inducement to would-be walkers; inside, a general hush brooded over the house; and everyone was uneasily aware of Scotland Yard's presence. While suspicion had centred upon Stephen, everyone else had been ready to discuss the murder in all its aspects; now that Stephen had apparently been exonerated, and the field was left open for his successor, an uneasy shrinking from all mention of the crime was visible in everyone except Paula. Even Mrs. Dean did not speak of it. She joined Maud in the morning-room presently, and, without receiving the slightest encouragement, favoured her with the story of her life, not omitting a list of her unsuccessful suitors, the personal idiosyncrasies of the late Mr. Dean, and all the more repulsive details of two confinements and a miscarriage.

Roydon, who had mumbled something about getting a breath of fresh air, had gone up to his room, on leaving the breakfast-table, thus making an enemy of the second housemaid, who had only just made his bed, and wanted to bring in the vacuum-cleaner. Being a well-trained servant, she withdrew, and went off to complain bitterly to the head-housemaid about visitors who knew no better than to come up before they were wanted, putting one all behind with one's work. The head-housemaid said it was funny, him coming up to his room at this hour; and on these meagre grounds a rumour spread rapidly through the servants' quarters that that Mr. Roydon was looking ever so queer, and behaving so strange that no one wouldn't be surprised to hear that it was him all the time who had done in the master.

All this made a very agreeable subject for conversation at the eleven-o'clock gathering for tea in the kitchen and the hall; and when one of the under-gardeners joined the kitchen-party with a trug of vegetables for the cook, he was able to enliven the discussion by recounting that it was a funny thing, them speaking of young Roydon like they were, for he had himself just seen him going off for a walk on his own. He had come upon him down by the potting-sheds and the manure-heap, and he had somehow thought it was queer, finding him there, and Roydon hadn't half started when he had seen him coming round the corner of the shed. Adjured by two housemaids, one tweeny, and the kitchenmaid, all with their eyes popping out of their heads, to continue this exciting narrative, he said that it was his belief young Roydon had been burning something in the incinerator, because he had been standing close to it, for one thing, and for another he'd take his oath he'd heard someone putting the lid on it.

This was so well received, with such delighted shudders from the tweeny, accompanied by exclamations of Go on, you never! from the two housemaids, that the gardener at once recalled that he had thought Roydon's manner queer-like at the time, and said to himself that that bloke wasn't up to no good, messing about where he had no call to be.

In due course, an echo of these highly-coloured recollections reached Inspector Hemingway's ears, by way of his Sergeant, who, by means of a little flattery, had managed to put himself on excellent terms with the female part of the staff. The Inspector, with the simple intention of unnerving the household, was spending the morning pervading the house with a notebook, a foot-rule, and an abstracted frown. His mysterious investigations were in themselves entirely valueless, but succeeded in making everyone but Maud and Mrs. Dean profoundly uneasy. Mottisfont, for instance, took instant and querulous objection to his presence in his room, and fidgeted about the house, complaining to anyone who could be got to listen to him of the unwarrantable licence taken by the police. Breaking in upon the two ladies in the morning-room, he tried to enlist their support, but Mrs. Dean said that she was sure she had no secrets to hide; and Maud merely expressed the hope that in the course of his investigations the Inspector might find her missing book.

The Inspector had not found the book, and, if the truth were told, he had begun to share the opinions of the rest of the household with regard to it. Since he had first encountered Maud, he had met her five times, and had on each occasion not only to sustain an account of when and where she last remembered to have had the book in her hand, but anecdotes culled from it as well. He darkly suspected that it had been hidden by the other members of the house-party, and told his Sergeant that he didn't blame them.