Farriers' Lane - Anne Perry [30]
“I never ’eard o’ that.” Gracie looked disappointed.
“You wouldn’t,” Charlotte agreed. “It was five years ago. You were only twelve then.”
“That were before I could read,” Gracie agreed with considerable pride. Reading was a real accomplishment, and placed her considerably above her contemporaries and previous social equals. Charlotte had taken time in which they should both have been employed in domestic chores in order to teach her, but the reward had been enormous, even if she was quite sure Gracie spent much of her reading time with penny dreadfuls.
“The master’s goin’ ter investigate it?” Gracie interrupted her thoughts. “Actresses and judges. ’e’s gettin’ ever so important, in’t ’e?”
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed with a smile. Gracie was so proud of Pitt her face shone when she mentioned his name. Charlotte had more than once overheard her speaking to tradesmen, telling them precisely who she worked for, whose house this was, and that they had better mind their p’s and q’s and provide only the very best!
Gracie began wiping the lower shelves of the dresser and replacing the dishes and pans. Twice she stopped to hitch up her skirt. She was so small that skirts were always a bit too long for her, and she had not taken this one up sufficiently. Charlotte spread out the fruit on a baking tray and put it into the warm oven, which was well damped down to keep it from getting any hotter for the time being.
“Of course it may have been his wife,” Charlotte said, referring back to the murder of Stafford. “Or her lover.” She went to the pantry and took out the butter to wash away the salt, then wrap it in muslin and squeeze out any water or buttermilk.
Gracie hesitated for a moment, working out whether Charlotte meant the original murder in Farriers’ Lane or the death two nights ago in the theater. She made the right choice.
“Oh.” She was disappointed. It seemed too simple, not adequate to test Pitt’s skills. It offered no adventure, and certainly nothing in which she herself could help. She swallowed. “I thought as you was a little worried, ma’am. I s’pose I got it wrong.”
Charlotte felt a pang of guilt. She was touched by a considerable anxiety, just in case it had been something to do with Joshua Fielding. If it were the Blaine/Godman case, then he was implicated, and that would distress Caroline, the more so since she had actually met him.
“I shouldn’t like it to be the actor,” she explained. “My mother found him most pleasing, and when she met him …” She tailed off. How would she explain to the maid that her mother was enamored of a stage actor at least thirteen or fourteen years her junior? Of course it was only a superficial feeling, but still capable of causing hurt.
“Oh, I see,” Gracie said cheerfully. She had heard how gentlemen felt about the Jersey Lily, and some of the music hall queens. “Like as she’d go to the stage door, if she was a man.” She began to sieve the flour to remove the lumps. She would leave the grating of the orange peel and nutmeg to Charlotte. That required a certain amount of judgment. “Well, maybe it weren’t ’im.”
“I don’t think it was the judge’s wife,” Charlotte said slowly.
“What are you going to do about it, ma’am?” Gracie said with no hesitation at all, no possibility in her mind that Charlotte would do nothing.
Charlotte thought for several minutes, her mind racing over the snatches she had pieced together in the theater, and the little Pitt had told her. Why did she not think it was Juniper? And was her judgment of any value? She had been wrong before, several times.
Gracie sieved the flour a second time.
“I suppose we should solve the murder in Farriers’ Lane,” Charlotte said expansively at last.
Gracie did not for an instant question her mistress’s competence to do such a thing. Her loyalty was absolute.
“That’s a good idea,” she approved. “Then they couldn’t say it were ’im. Wot ’appened?”
Charlotte summarized it concisely and not entirely accurately. “A young gentleman, who was married, was paying court to the actress Tamar Macaulay. After