The Questioning Miss Quinton

Victoria gave herself a mental kick, realizing she was only delaying the inevitable. She had hesitated too long as it was; it was time she stopped hemming and hawing like some vaporish miss and acted. So thinking, Victoria straightened her thin shoulders, turned the knob, and pushed on the door.

The room thus revealed was in complete disorder, with papers and books strewn everywhere the eye could see—which wasn’t far, as the Professor’s huge, footed globe was lying tipped over onto its side, blocking the heavy door from opening to more than a wide crack.

“Willie will doubtless suffer an apoplexy,” she joked feebly, wondering if she herself was going to faint. No, she reminded herself grimly, only pretty girls are allowed to fall into a swoon at the first sign of trouble. Plain girls are expected to thrust out their chins and bear up nobly under the strain. “Just one more reason to curse my wretched fate,” she grumbled under her breath, pushing her spectacles back up onto the bridge of her nose, taking a deep breath, and resigning herself to the inevitable.

Putting a shoulder to the door, she pushed the globe completely aside with some difficulty and entered the library, blinking furiously behind her rimless spectacles as her eyes struggled to become accustomed to the gloom. The heavy blue velvet draperies were tightly closed and all the candles had long since burned down to their sockets.

“Oh, Lord, I don’t think I’m going to like this,” she whispered, trying hard not to turn on her heels and flee the scene posthaste like the craven coward she told herself she was. Victoria could feel her heart starting to beat quickly, painfully against her rib cage, and she mentally berated herself for not having had the foresight to have acted sooner.

“Pro—, er, Professor?” she ventured nervously, hating the tremor she could hear creeping into her voice. She then advanced, oh so slowly, edging toward the cold fireplace to pick up the poker, then holding it ahead of her as she inched her way across the room, her gaze darting this way and that as she moved toward the front of the massive oak desk.

The Professor wasn’t behind the desk; he didn’t appear to be anywhere. Lowering the poker an inch or two, Victoria walked gingerly round to the rear of the desk, as she had decided that the intruder—for what else could possibly have caused such a mess except a house-breaker?—was long gone.

She looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully, for the Professor’s chamber was directly above the library, and wondered if he was still abed, and as yet unaware of the ransacking of his sacred workplace. “Wouldn’t that just be my wretched luck? I most definitely don’t relish being the one landed with the duty of enlightening him with this marvelous little tidbit of information,” Victoria admitted, grimacing as she cast her eyes around the room one more time.

“Oh,” she groaned then, realizing at last that the stained, crumpled papers that littered the floor at her feet constituted at least three months of her painstaking labor, now ruined past redemption. “The only, the absolute only single thing in this entire world that could possibly be worse than having to transcribe all those boring notes is having to do them twice!”

She flung the heavy poker in the general direction of the window embrasure in disgust, not caring in the slightest if her impetuous action caused more damage.

“Arrrgh!” The pain-filled moan emanated from the shallow window embrasure, and the startled Victoria involuntarily leaped nearly a foot off the floor in surprise before she could race to throw back the draperies, revealing the inelegantly sprawled figure of the Professor, his ample body lying half propped against the base of the window seat.

“Professor!” Victoria shrieked, dropping to her knees beside the man, who now seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness. For one horrifying moment she thought she had rendered him into this woeful condition with the poker, until a quick inspection showed her that it had come to rest on the tip of his left foot, which must have been sticking out from under the hem of the draperies all along, if only she could have located it amid the mess.

Running her hands inexpertly over the Professor’s body, she didn’t take long to discover that there appeared to be a shallow, bloody depression imprinted in the back of his skull. As she probed the wound gingerly with her fingertips, Victoria’s stomach did a curious flip when she felt a small piece of bone move slightly beneath her fingers.

“The skull is broken,” she said aloud, then swallowed down hard, commanding her protesting stomach to take a firm hold on her breakfast and keep it where it belonged.

“Ooohhh!” the Professor groaned mournfully, moving his head slightly and then opening one eye, which seemed to take an unconscionably long time in focusing on the woman kneeling in front of him. Reaching out one hand, he grabbed her wrist painfully hard before whispering, “Find him! Find him! Make him pay!”

“Professor! Are you all right?” Even as she asked the question, Victoria acknowledged its foolishness. Of course he wasn’t all right. He was most probably dying, and all she could do was ask ridiculous questions. She may have long since ceased feeling any daughterly love for the man now lying in front of her, but she could still be outraged that anyone would try to kill him. “Who did this to you, Professor?” she asked, feeling him slipping away from her.

“Find him, I said,” the Professor repeated, his words slurring badly. “He has to pay…always…must pay…promise me…can’t let him…”

“He’ll pay, Professor, I promise he’ll pay. I won’t let him get away with it,” Victoria declared dutifully, wincing as the hand enclosing her wrist tightened like a vise, as if the Professor had put all his failing strength into this one last demand for obedience. “But you must tell me who he is. Professor? Professor!”

The hand relaxed its grip and slid to the floor. Professor Quennel Quinton was dead.

CHAPTER ONE

AS HE WAITED for the reading of the will to begin, the only sounds Patrick Sherbourne could hear in the small, dimly lit chamber were intermittent snifflings—emanating from a woman he took to be housekeeper to the deceased—and the labored creakings of his uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chair, the latter bringing to mind some of his least cherished schoolboy memories. He lifted his nose a fraction, as if testing the air for the scent of chalk and undercooked mutton, then looked disinterestedly about the room.

That must be the daughter, he thought, raising his quizzing glass for a closer inspection of the unprepossessing young woman who sat ramrod straight on the edge of a similar wooden chair situated at the extreme far side of the room, placing either him or her in isolation, depending upon how one chose to look at the thing.

No matter for wonder that Quennel kept her hidden all these years, he concluded after a moment, dropping his glass so that it hung halfway down his immaculate waistcoat, suspended from a thin black riband. The poor drab has to be five and twenty if she’s a day, and about as colorful as a moulting crow perched on a fence.

She looks nervous, he decided, taking in the distressing way the young woman’s pale, thin hands kept twisting agitatedly in her lap. Odd. Nervous she might be, but the drab doesn’t look in the least bit grieved. Perhaps she’s worried that her dearest papa didn’t provide for her in his will.

That brought him back to the subject at hand, the reading of Quennel Quinton’s will. Professor Quinton, he amended mentally, recalling that the pompous, overweening man had always taken great pains to have himself addressed by that title, although what concern it could be to the fellow now that he was six feet underground, Patrick failed to comprehend.

The other thing that Sherbourne was unable to understand was the Quinton solicitor’s demand for his presence in this tall, narrow house in Ablemarle Street, after one of the most woefully uninspiring funerals it had ever been his misfortune to view.

He had not met with Professor Quinton above three times in the man’s lifetime—all of those meetings being at the Professor’s instigation—and none of those occasions could have been called congenial. Indeed, if his memory served him true, the last interview had concluded on a somewhat heated note, with the irate Professor accusing Sherbourne of plagiarism once he found out that the Earl had entertained plans for compiling a history of his own and saw no need to contribute information to Quinton’s effort.

Easing his upper body back slightly in the chair, he slipped one meticulously manicured hand inside a small pocket in his waistcoat and extracted his heavy gold watch, opening it just in time for it to chime out the hour of three in a clear, melodic song that drew him an instant look of censure from the moulting crow.

He returned her gaze along with a congenial smile, lifting his broad shoulders slightly while spreading his palms—as if to say he hadn’t meant to interrupt the strained silence—but she merely lowered her curiously unnerving brown eyes before averting her head once more.

“Bloodless old maid,” he muttered satisfyingly under his breath without real heat. “I should buy her a little canary in a gilt cage if I didn’t believe she’d throttle it the first time it dared break into song.”

“Prattling to yourself, my Lord Wickford? Bad sign, that. Mind if I sit my timid self down beside you? I feel this sudden, undeniable desire to have someone trustworthy about in order to guard my back. But perhaps I overreact. It may merely be something I ate that has put me so sadly out of coil.”

Patrick, who also happened to be the Eleventh Earl of Wickford, looked up languidly to see the debonair Pierre Standish lowering his slim, elegant frame into the chair the man had moved to place just beside his own. “I didn’t see you at the funeral, Pierre. It wasn’t particularly jolly,” Patrick whispered, leaning a bit closer to his companion. “By your presence, may I deduce that you are also mentioned in the late Professor’s will?”

Standish carefully adjusted his lace shirt cuffs as he cast his gaze about the room with an air of bored indifference. “Funerals depress me, dearest,” he answered at last in his deep, silk-smooth voice, causing every head in the room to turn immediately in his direction. “I would have sent my man, Duvall, here in my stead this afternoon, could I have but carried it off, but the Professor’s solicitor expressly desired my presence. It crossed my mind—only fleetingly, you understand—to disappoint the gentleman anyway, but I restrained the impulse. Tiresome, you’ll agree, but there it is.”

He paused a moment, a pained expression crossing his handsome, tanned face before he spoke again in the same clear voice. “Tsk, tsk, Patrick. Can that poor, plain creature possibly be the so estimable daughter? Good gracious, how deflating! Whatever Quinton bequeathed to me I shall immediately deed over to the unfortunate lady. I should not sleep nights, else.”

Sherbourne prudently lifted a hand to cover his smiling mouth before attempting a reply. “Although I am fully aware that you are cognizant of it, dare I remind you that voices rather tend to carry in quiet rooms? Behave yourself, Pierre, I beg you. The creature may have feelings.”

“Impossible, my darling man, utterly impossible,” Standish replied quickly, although he did oblige his friend by lowering his voice ever so slightly. “If it has feelings, it wouldn’t be so heartless as to subject us to its so distressing sight, would it? Ah,” he said more loudly as a middle-aged man of nondescript features entered the room and took up his position behind the Professor’s scarred and battered desk. “It would appear that the reading is about to commence. Shall we feign a polite interest in the proceedings, Patrick, or do you wish to abet my malicious self in creating a scene? I am not adverse, you know.”

“I’d rather not, Pierre—and you already have,” Sherbourne answered, shaking his head in tolerant amusement. “But I will admit to a recognition of the sort of uneasiness you are experiencing. At any moment I expect the proctor to come round, crudely demanding an inspection of our hands and nails as he searched for signs of poor hygiene. It is my conclusion that there lives in us both some radical, inbred objection to authority that compels us to automatically struggle against ever being relegated to the role of powerless standers-by.”

“How lovely that was, my dearest Patrick!” Pierre exclaimed, reverently touching Sherbourne’s arm. “Perhaps even profound.”

The solicitor had begun to speak, to drone on insincerely for long, uncomfortable moments as to the sterling qualities of the deceased before clearing his throat and beginning the actual reading of the will, the first part of which dealt with nothing more than a series of high-flown, tongue-twisting legal phrases that could not possibly hold Sherbourne’s interest.

“I wasn’t aware you were acquainted with old Quinton,” Patrick observed quietly to Standish, having realized at last that Pierre had never sufficiently answered his earlier query on the subject. As if they were exchanging confidences, he went on, “Indeed, friend, I am feeling particularly stupid in that I have failed to comprehend why either one of us should be found unhappily present here today. For myself, I can only say that the good Professor did not exactly clasp me close to his fatherly bosom whilst he was above ground.”

“I knew the man but slightly, untold years ago in my grasstime,” Standish replied, adding smoothly, “though I had foolishly not thought to inform you of that fact. I trust, dearest, that you will accept my apologies for this lapse.”

“Why not just call me out, Pierre, and have done with it?” Sherbourne asked facetiously, slowly shaking his blond head, as he should have known he couldn’t get past Standish so easily. “And please accept my apologies for my unthinking interrogation. I was striving only for a bit of mindless, time-passing conversation. I assure you it was never my intention to launch an inquisition.”

“Are you quite set against starting one, then?” Standish asked glumly, appearing quite crestfallen. “A pity. I begin to believe I should have welcomed the diversion—if not the thumbscrews. Our prosy friend behind the desk is not exactly a scintillating orator, is he?”

Just then Patrick thought he caught a hint of something the solicitor was saying. “O-ho, friend, prepare yourself. Here we go. He’s reading the gifts to the servants. We should be next, before the family bequests. What say you, Pierre? Do you suppose it would be crushingly bad ton if we were to spring ourselves from this mausoleum the moment we collect our booty?”

“Shhh, Patrick, I want to hear this. Oh, my dear man, did you hear that?”

“I’m afraid I missed it, Pierre,” Patrick said, amused by the patently false concern on Standish’s face.

“Quinton left his housekeeper of twenty-five years a miserly thirty pounds and a miniature of himself in a wooden frame!” Standish pronounced the words in accents of outraged astonishment. “One can only hope the old dear robbed the bloody boor blind during his lifetime.”

The solicitor reddened painfully upon hearing this outburst from the rear of the room, then cleared his throat yet again before continuing with the next bequest, an even smaller portion for the kitchen maid.

“As the Irish say, my dear Patrick, Quinton was a generous man,” Pierre ventured devilishly. “So generous that, if he had only an egg, he’d gladly give you the shell.”

This last remark was just too much—especially considering that the housekeeper, upon hearing it, gave out a great shout of laughter, totally disrupting the proceedings, while drawing Standish a chilling look from Miss Quinton. The angry solicitor removed his gaze from the document before him, prepared to impale the author of such blasphemy with a withering glare, but realized his error in time. A man did not point out the niceties of proper behavior to Pierre Standish—not if that man wished to die peacefully in his bed.