A Christmas Homecoming - Anne Perry [44]
“What times were those?” Eliza asked. They were standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, talking quietly. No one else seemed to be around. Housemaids were busy. Footmen must have been in the servants’ quarters and would come only if the doorbell rang, which at the moment was impossible. Kitchen staff would be busy preparing luncheon for the household, which—including servants—was well over twenty people.
“We went to bed at quarter to eleven,” Caroline answered. “I went down to get my note just before midnight.”
“An hour and a quarter, roughly,” Eliza said. “Everyone would be in their bedrooms, or say they were. How does one prove that?”
“Well, I know where Joshua was and he knows where I was,” Caroline reasoned. “You and Mr. Netheridge could account for each other, as could Mercy and James.” She stopped, seeing a shadow in Eliza’s face. “What is it?” she said more gently.
“Charles and I do not share a bedroom,” Eliza confessed, as if it were some kind of sin. She looked deeply uncomfortable. She seemed to be struggling for an explanation, but no words came.
“I’m sorry,” Caroline apologized. “In a house this size of course you would not need to. In the later years of my first marriage, I did not share a bedroom with my husband.” She smiled briefly; the memory no longer hurt. “He was very restless. I share with Joshua now because we’re both happy doing so, and also we do not have the means to do otherwise most of the time, especially when we are traveling.”
Eliza smiled and blinked. “You are very generous. It must be an interesting life, going to so many places, meeting people, performing different plays. You can never be bored.”
“I’m not.” Caroline wondered how much of the truth to tell. “But I am quite often lonely, because I am not part of the cast.”
Eliza looked amazed. “But you are. You are involved.”
“Not usually. This is in many senses an amateur production … or, it was. We were to make our own scenery, and I was taught how to work the lights. In an ordinary professional production there is no work for me, except sometimes to help Joshua learn his lines. I speak the other parts to cue him. Otherwise I have nothing in particular to do, and we are away from home a lot.”
“But you are happy,” Eliza said, smiling. “I can see it in your face, and in the way you look at him, and he at you.”
Caroline wanted to thank her, make some gracious acknowledgment, but the sudden rush of gratitude she felt had brought tears to her eyes and a tightness to her throat that made it momentarily impossible to speak. She had risked so much in marrying Joshua: the horror of her family, the outrage of her former mother-in-law, the loss of most of her friends and certainly any place in the society to which she had been accustomed through most of her life. She had been respectable, and financially safe. Now she was neither. But she was certainly happier, and she was very aware that Joshua loved her in a way Edward Ellison never had.
She also realized that Eliza Netheridge had never experienced those gifts of happiness and love. Even now she felt a stranger in her own house, as if her mother-in-law still watched her every choice with disapproval.
Caroline made a sudden, rash decision. “Eliza, I wonder if you can help me. We may at the very least be able to make certain that some among us could not have killed Mr. Ballin. I imagine it could not have been any of the servants, but let us save them from police questions and suspicion by making certain ourselves. I have no authority and no right to ask them, but you do. If you are careful, and precise, you may be able to find some sort of proof that clears them all. Especially if you promise them that whatever they were doing, there will be no blame in this instance. You may need to tell them that something very unpleasant occurred, and it is absolutely necessary that they tell the truth, whatever that may be.”
Eliza took a deep breath, but she seemed perfectly steady. “Yes, of course I can do that,” she said