Wyrde and Wild

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

In point of fact, Theodore Werth — otherwise known as Lord Bedgberry, and (incidentally) the next heir to the Werth Earldom — was not at Stebbington’s at that moment.

He was at the bottom of somebody’s garden, with a shovel in his hands, hastily burying a certain corpse.

He couldn’t have meant to kill the woman, of course — not that he remembered having done so, but that could not be said to matter. A few weeks’ carousing had not, as yet, given him much of a head for liquor, and the events of the previous night — indeed, most nights — remained hazy. Nor had his head yet ceased to pound, and the sensation was distracting; every whack and thud of the shovel in the half-frozen earth prompted another sickening ache, and his temper was not in good order.

At this hour, he should be at home in bed, sleeping it off. Or still at the club, as Gussie had surmised.

He did not remember coming home, though he must have done so at some point. He certainly did not remember bringing a woman with him.

What had possessed him to snatch her? Had he carted her after him, like a sack of flour, and dumped her in the parlour? What on earth for?

It was as he had always feared, he supposed: the thirst had got the better of him, and in his addled and drunken state he had been unequal to resist the urge to slake it by any means available. The means in question must have been that unfortunate woman. Her limp form lay, like a silent reproach, on the frosted ground while he urgently prepared her impromptu tomb.

But that didn’t make sense either. Theo’s thoughts moved sluggishly and reluctantly, but even he had to conclude, after some little time, that he could not have been thirsty when he had come home from Stebbington’s the night before. He had imbibed a great deal besides the liquor, and must have been happily sated.

And what could he have been doing in his mother’s parlour — with, or without, a lifeless female? He never went in there, except when summoned to present himself.

He paused his digging, and took a moment to catch his breath. He stared, only half seeing, at the prone and insensate woman, and sighed. What a deal of nonsense.

Theo was rarely unhappy, and never self-reproaching, but that morning he was labouring under sensations of both. Either he had killed this unfortunate female in an uncontrollable lust for her blood, or — a better prospect, but not by much — he had interrupted the perfectly legitimate rest of a woman somebody else had partaken of, and now proposed to award her an ignominious grave next to somebody’s prized rose-bushes.

Whose garden had he fetched up in? He glanced wildly about, struck all of a sudden by this thought, when it had not seemed to matter before.

Devil take it. He was still drunk, or — something. Fuddled.

‘I suppose this won’t do,’ he informed the corpse. ‘I shouldn’t like to be slung into an unmarked grave by a shambling drunkard, and I don’t suppose you are much enjoying it, either.’

He would have to take her back again, which was awfully inconvenient, for she was heavy, and Theo was tired.

Still, that was his own fault. Having passed the parlour door on his way in — and it having been standing open — he had caught sight of the woman’s remains and… panicked, he supposed, like a small, startled animal. Not at all the thing. He could only hope that he could take her back again, quietly, and nobody would ever know that she’d been gone.

And after that, he would go to bed.

Which was what Theo did, supremely untroubled by the question of who else might have left a freshly-killed female lying on the floor of his mother’s best parlour. Some freak of Lady Werth’s, he supposed, and why shouldn’t she keep a body or two about the place, if she liked it?

Lady Werth arrived home some few hours later, fresh from an engagement with the lavishly Wyrded Gouldings, and in high good humour.

This lasted until she entered her own, comfortable parlour, happily entertaining thoughts of a pot of tea, and discovered what had become of the room in her absence.

The bell was, once again, rung.

‘Do please have this removed,’ she requested of the harried maid, whose appalled stare at the spectacle of the corpse upon the carpet did not bode well for her career in the household. ‘And pray ask Mrs. Gavell what she can manage by way of removing all that blood,’ she added.

‘It’s back,’ said the maid, incomprehensibly. ‘Oh, sorry, my lady. I mean, she’s back.’

Finding this babbling unintelligible, Lady Werth ignored it. ‘Pray be a little quicker about it, my dear. I suppose it is too late to prevent any severe damage to the furnishings, but I should like to try. Oh! And while you are about it, please have Lord Bedgberry sent in.’

Really, it was careless of Theo to have left the remains of his meal in here, of all places. Careless of him all round, in fact, for he did not ordinarily kill when he dined, and it was most unlike him to make such a mess of it.

Lady Werth reposed herself in a chair far from the remains — they were not yet beginning to smell, thank goodness, but she preferred to avoid getting any blood on her gown as well as her carpets — and composed herself to wait.

It was neither Theo nor Mrs. Gavell who appeared first, however, but Gussie.

‘The corpse is back!’ she carolled as she swept in, her hands clasped together in delight. ‘Famous!’

Dimly aware of some parallel between Gussie’s pronouncement and the maid’s, Lady Werth enquired.

‘Oh, she was discovered in here earlier this morning,’ said Gussie, striding over to the inert remains, and looming over them. ‘Then she disappeared. Mr Ballantine was most displeased — he really gains nothing in liveliness or good humour, does he? — and went away in high dudgeon. But here she is again! I wonder how she came to get all this mud on her? She appears lifeless, as before, so I think it unlikely that she removed herself from the house. But perhaps it was only a temporary return to life and feeling, and she has gone off again.’

‘Well, and I never!’ said Mrs. Gavell, coming into the room all in a flurry. ‘What with bodies appearing and disappearing, I hardly know whether I’m coming or going! I am sorry, my lady. I had Jane do her best with the carpet, but if people will keep disposing of their corpses in your ladyship’s best parlour—’

Poor Mrs. Gavell was deeply aggrieved, as Lady Werth readily perceived. She was a dedicated and conscientious woman, and would not appreciate these attacks upon the spotlessness of her housekeeping. ‘I quite understand, Mrs. Gavell,’ she said. ‘No blame can attach to you, I assure you. I shall, however, be most pleased if the unfortunate woman could be removed, once and for all.’

‘You and me both, your ladyship,’ said Mrs. Gavell grimly.

‘Mr. Ballantine will be delighted by the news, I don’t doubt,’ put in Gussie. ‘He was so disappointed to be deprived of a subject for his investigation.’

‘Investigation?’ echoed Lady Werth, aware of a feeling of foreboding. ‘Mr. Ballantine has been called in, has he?’

‘Yes! And now he will have to question all of us, which will be exciting for him. I’m so pleased.’

‘Why…’ began Lady Werth, but did not trouble to complete the sentence. People did tend to make rather a fuss about unexplained bodies; she had been a resident at Werth Towers, and the wife of Lord Werth, for so long as to forget this.

‘Was it Theo?’ she said instead, with weary resignation.

‘I do not think Theo was home this morning,’ Gussie said, this pronouncement reviving her aunt’s flagging spirits a little. ‘So I do not think it was he. Though I must own, he sneaks about so that I cannot keep up with his whereabouts at all. Perhaps it was him, after all. How disappointing. I should have liked to have someone else for the villain.’

‘Your loyalty to your cousin is gratifying, if uncharacteristic.’

‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Gussie firmly. ‘Theo has been the villain of the family for so long that there can be nothing left to interest me about it. Besides, if Theo has done it, then there is no mystery about the matter at all.’

‘You would prefer a mystery, I collect?’

‘Why, of course. If there is a culprit to be discovered, then I shall have to exercise my wits, shan’t I? And when I present the answer to Mr. Ballantine, all neatly resolved, he can hardly continue to deny me a place at Bow Street.’

Lady Werth had enjoyed hopes that Gussie had divested herself of this latest of her mad ideas. She relinquished these hopes, faint though they had been, with a sigh.

Theo appeared at last, rumpled and displeased. ‘What can be the matter now?’ he demanded, hovering upon the threshold, and regarding the gathering in the parlour with misgiving. His gaze fell upon the corpse. ‘Really, Mother, I would have thought you would have finished with that by now. Ordered it in for father’s amusement, did you?’

‘A fine idea,’ said Gussie, in her tart way. ‘My uncle has been a little low in spirits since the fire. A body or two would be just the thing to cheer him up.’

Lady Werth permitted this to pass without comment. ‘Am I to understand that the presence of this unfortunate has nothing to do with you, Theo?’ She watched his face closely as he answered, aware that he had never been much given to falsehood, even as a boy. He felt little shame, and therefore, could have no reason to lie.

‘Nothing whatsoever,’ he declared. ‘That is, I did take the woman away for just a short while, but—’

‘Why, Theo!’ interrupted Gussie. ‘How delightfully peculiar of you! I begin to take heart again.’

‘Thought I might have done it, you see,’ Theo explained. ‘Better tidy up.’

‘Hide the evidence, you mean,’ Gussie surmised. ‘For I cannot think you gave much thought to the fate of your mamma’s comfortable arrangements.’

Lady Werth lifted a brow. ‘Nor is it like you to hide your leavings. What could you have been thinking?’

‘Drunk,’ said Theo briefly.

Lady Werth permitted herself a small sigh.

‘You become very nearly a rake, Theo,’ Gussie said. ‘Positively dissolute. I salute you. It just occurs to me to ask, however: did you kill the lady?’

‘Can’t have. I had enough blood last night to fill up a cow.’

‘A delightful vision.’

‘Perhaps two.’

‘So,’ said Gussie, walking a thoughtful circle around the corpse. ‘Let us attempt to reconstruct the events, as far as we know them. This woman died, by means and by villain unknown, and ended up in here, we know not how or why. But it most definitely wasn’t Theo.’ She directed an arch, shrewd look at her cousin as she spoke, a look many a man might have squirmed under, but not Theo. He merely nodded.

‘Theo became aware of its presence somehow,’ Gussie continued.’

‘Wandered in,’ Theo put in. ‘Drunk, you know.’

‘Theo was drunk and is therefore useless as a witness, even as to his own actions and motives,’ said Gussie. ‘But we would still like to hear where he took the body.’

Theo shrugged. ‘I was going to bury it, but it’s harder work than I thought.’

‘You went grave-digging.’

‘Only got a few inches into it.’ Theo’s tone was half apologetic. ‘Ground’s rather hard just at present.’

‘Was this in a graveyard? I hardly dare ask.’

‘No.’ Theo waved his hand, vaguely. ‘Garden somewhere.’

Gussie appeared to be in a state of no uncommon enjoyment. ‘Lord Bedgberry attempted to give the woman a, shall we say, decent burial in some unsuspecting soul’s garden, but finding the task a little too tiring he abandoned the project.’

‘Brought her back here.’ Theo seemed to be rapidly losing interest in the subject.

‘And thus deposited the slain back onto his mother’s freshly-cleaned carpet, before retiring, untroubled, to bed.’

‘Yes, that’s about it.’

‘Thank you, Theo. That is most helpful.’

Theo accepted this, either unconscious of the irony or merely uninterested in it. ‘Any chance of some chocolate?’ he said to his mother. ‘Might do something for this headache.’

‘A night or two at home would do a great deal more for it,’ said Lady Werth. ‘That man Hargreve dissipates you, Theo.’

‘I can’t tonight. Theatre.’

The arrival of the coroner put an end to this exchange before Lady Werth could remonstrate again with her son. He slipped away, and she did not attempt to prevent him. The blame for the night’s events would likely fall on Theo’s head, a fact that seemed, at present, to be escaping him. Let him sleep, while he could.