I had been about to remark that Miss Kitty was not, therefore, Lady Clevedon’s daughter, but had thought better of it. I should get more out of Martha, I reflected, by allowing her to tell her story in her own way.
“This Sir Philip was a cousin of the other baronet,” my housekeeper went on, “and next to him comes Mr. Billy Clevedon, who is Miss Kitty’s brother. He is in the army. They say that he and Sir Philip quarrelled, and there are all sorts of rumours about. Miss Kitty lives with Lady Clevedon. I believe she has some money of her own, though I don’t know how much. Her father was a rector down in Cornwall, but he’s been dead a long time now.”
“And this Sir Philip—where did he come from?”
“From somewhere abroad, I think. He was not very young, perhaps forty-five, and he wasn’t married. We didn’t see a lot of him in Cartordale—he lived mostly in London. He was not friends, they say, with Lady Clevedon, though I should not think they had really quarrelled. He was a stiff, solemn sort of man, and not very popular.”
In point of fact the Clevedon title was one of the oldest surviving baronetcies, though there had been Clevedons in the Dale long before James I invented baronets as a new means of raising revenue. The Clevedons had all been politicians of varying degrees of importance, frequently unimportant. A minor Minister or two, a Colonial governor or so, a small Embassy, all urbane, honest, honourable, but occasionally unintelligent personages, belonging to what one might describe as the great Official class, which has ruled England since the days of the Tudors, doing most things badly but generally with clean hands.
But the late Sir Philip Clevedon was something of a mystery. No one had heard of him until the death of his cousin had given him the title. He had never been in Cartordale before that, and was entirely unknown even to his relatives. They had no idea even where he lived. Rumour was almost equally divided between America and Australia, but without any real foundation, since he himself vouchsafed no information on the point. Among the people of the Dale, as Martha indeed had told me, he had not been popular. He was too chilly and unemotional in his manner and, being frequently absent for lengthy periods, took no real part in the life of the Dale and, apparently, little interest in its concerns. To many of the inhabitants he was not even known by sight.
All this is a summary not only of what Martha told me, but of what I subsequently gathered.
When I had finished with Martha I went out and met Detective Pepster strolling in casual fashion through the village. I should have missed him in the darkness but that we stepped at the same time into the light cast across the roadway by the “Waggon and Horses,” Tim Dallott’s roadside inn, famed far and wide among visitors to the Dale.
“You haven’t been to arrest me yet,” I said, as Pepster returned my salute.
“No,” he replied, with a placid grin, “we are giving you a little more rope.”