A Christmas Homecoming - Anne Perry [54]
“I don’t know. Perhaps a dying confession. A stagehand, a prop man. We’ll never know now.”
“Then why didn’t Anton just tell the authorities, and have Vincent arrested?”
“There are lots of possibilities. Perhaps he wanted Vincent to do something for him, a repayment other than having to answer to the law.”
“Poor man,” she said quietly. Joshua took her hand. “We can’t leave him lying in the snow by the icehouse. Should we waken Mr. Netheridge and tell him?”
“Yes. I think so. Since this is his house, he deserves to know. We have taken enough liberties already.”
“Have we?”
He smiled. “Yes. Very definitely. And unfortunately we won’t even be entertaining his guests on Boxing Day.”
“But you will help Alice, won’t you?”
“Of course. We might even perform Dracula sometime.” He smiled with a wry twist of his lips, his eyes very gentle. “But we will have to find another Van Helsing.”
n the morning, breakfast was eaten, largely in silence. Then Mr. Netheridge asked the guests to leave the withdrawing room for a certain matter of business he had to attend to, all but Joshua, Caroline, and Vincent. Perhaps no one except Caroline noticed that the butler and three footmen were waiting in the hall.
“Is this about Alice … Miss Netheridge?” Vincent asked curiously when the doors were closed.
“No,” Netheridge replied. “I think perhaps Mrs. Fielding will explain it best.”
Vincent was standing in front of the great stained-glass window. His back was to the magnificent view it partially concealed, even though it was possible to see through its paler sections the sunlight on the snow beyond.
“How melodramatic,” he said, looking at Caroline. “You seem to have acquired a taste for acting yourself. But you need more practice. Your timing is poor, and timing is everything.”
“Actually, I prefer to work with the lights,” she responded. “So much depends on which light you see things in. Anton Rausch has taught me that,” she replied.
Vincent paled. Suddenly his body was stiff, his hands clenched.
“I found his body,” she added simply. She touched her own cheek. “The makeup had slipped, and I recognized him from a photograph I once saw in a theater. He was a great actor, better than you, Vincent. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Nothing to do with that actress, beautiful as she was.”
Vincent’s face hardened. “He came for revenge. He didn’t know who had fixed the blade at the time it happened, and of course they jailed him. He must have worked it out, or somebody else did, and told him. He attacked me. He came at me with that broom handle, spiked at the end like the blade of a halberd.” He lifted his shoulder a little, his gaze steady on her face. “Wicked-looking thing. I barely had time to defend myself and turn his lunge back against him.”
“Vincent, don’t make more of a fool of yourself than necessary,” Joshua said wearily. “You are at the end of this. There is no way you could have turned a weapon that length against the man holding it. And there are no wounds on you. You attacked him, to keep the truth from coming out. I’m sure he did want revenge, at a price you could not afford.”
It was Netheridge who moved toward Vincent. “The snow is thawing. We’ll be able to get a man out to fetch the police by tomorrow. Until then we’ll lock you in one of the storerooms—”
Vincent sprang suddenly and without any warning. He leaped forward and grasped a light wooden chair. If he smashed it, then one of its legs would make a dagger of hard, sharp-pointed wood. But Caroline was faster; she picked up the onyx ashtray from the table nearest her and threw it at him. He ducked it, caught his arm in the huge velvet curtain, and lost his balance. He fell backward, dragging the curtain with him, fighting hard and panicking. There was a splintering crash and the whole vast stained-glass window buckled and flew outward, Vincent with it. His thin scream echoed back in the air, and then stopped abruptly.
Caroline felt the sudden rush of cold air, and at the same moment heard in the silence the church bells in the distance, ringing