“You are better now, Major?” he inquired, dabbing sweat delicately from his hairline with a linen handkerchief.
“Much, I thank you. I take it that both Reinhardt Mayrhofer and his wife are out?” Reinhardt, he reflected, was almost certainly out. But the wife—
“So the butler says. If he is not out, he is a coward,” von Namtzen said with satisfaction, putting away his handkerchief. “I will root him out of his hiding place like a turnip, though, and then—what will you do, then?” he inquired.
“Probably nothing,” Grey said. “I believe him to be dead. Is that the gentleman in question, by chance?” He nodded at a small framed portrait on a table by the window, its frame set with pearls.
“Yes, that is Mayrhofer and his wife, Maria. They are cousins,” he added, unnecessarily, in view of the close resemblance of the two faces in the portrait.
While both had a delicacy of feature, with long necks and rounded chins, Reinhardt was possessed of an imposing nose and an aristocratic scowl. Maria was a lovely woman, though, Grey thought; she was wigged in the portrait, of course, but had the same warm skin tones and brown eyes as her husband, and so was also likely dark-haired.
“Reinhardt is dead?” von Namtzen asked with interest, looking at the portrait. “How did he die?”
“Shot,” Grey replied briefly. “Quite possibly by the gentleman who poisoned me.”
“What a very industrious sort of fellow.” Von Namtzen’s attention was distracted at this point by the entrance of a parlor maid, white-faced with nerves and clutching a small dish containing the requested egg whites. She glanced from one man to the other, then held out the dish timidly toward von Namtzen.
“Danke,”he said. He handed the dish to Grey, then proceeded at once to catechize the maid, bending toward her in a way that made her press herself against the nearest wall, terrorized into speechlessness and capable only of shaking her head yes and no.
Unable to follow the nuances of this one-sided conversation, Grey turned away, viewing the contents of his dish with distaste. The sound of footsteps in the corridor and agitated voices indicated that the butler was indeed assembling the household, as ordered. Depositing the dish behind an alabaster vase on the desk, he stepped out into the corridor, to find a small crowd of household servants milling about, all chattering in excited German.
At sight of him, they stopped abruptly and stared, with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and what looked like simple fright on some faces. Why? he wondered. Was it the uniform?
“Guten Tag,”he said, smiling pleasantly. “Are any of you English?”
There were shifty glances to and fro, the focus of which seemed to be a pair of young chambermaids. He smiled reassuringly at them, beckoning them to one side. They looked at him wide-eyed, like a pair of young deer confronted by a hunter, but a glance at von Namtzen, emerging from the morning room behind him, hastily decided them that Lord John was the lesser of the evils on offer, and they followed close on his heels back into the room, leaving von Namtzen to deal with the crowd in the entry hall.
Their names, the girls admitted, with much stammering and blushing, were Annie and Tab. They were both from Cheapside, bosom friends, and had been in the employ of Herr Mayrhofer for the last three months.
“I gather that Herr Mayrhofer is not, in fact, at home today,” Grey said, still smiling. “When did he go out?”
The girls glanced at each other in confusion.
“Yesterday?” Grey suggested. “This morning?”
“Oh, no, sir,” Annie said. She seemed a trifle the braver of the two, though she could not bring herself to meet his eyes for more than a fraction of a second. “The master’s been g-gone since Tuesday.”
And Magruder’s men had discovered the corpse on Wednesday morning.
“Ah, I see. Do you know where he went?”
Naturally, they did not. They did, however, say—after much shuffling and contradicting of each other—that Herr Mayrhofer was often given to short journeys, leaving home for several days at a time, two or three times a month.
“Indeed,” Grey said. “And what is Herr Mayrhofer’s business, pray?”
Baffled looks, followed by shrugs. Herr Mayrhofer had money, plainly; where it came from was no concern of theirs. Grey felt a growing metallic taste at the back of his tongue, and swallowed, trying to force it down.
“Well, then. When he left the house this time, did he go out in the morning? Or later in the day?”
The girls frowned and conferred with each other in murmurs, before deciding that, well, in fact, they had neither of them actually seen Herr Reinhardt leave the house, and no, they had not heard the carriage draw up, but—
“He must have done, though, Annie,” Tab said, sufficiently engrossed in the argument as to lose some of her timidity. “’Coz he wasn’t in his bedroom in the afternoon, was he? Herr Reinhardt likes to have a bit of a sleep in the afternoon,” she explained, turning to Grey. “I turns down the bed right after lunch, and I did it that day—but it wasn’t mussed when I went up after teatime. So he must have gone in the morning, then, mustn’t he?”
The questioning proceeded in this tedious fashion for some time, but Grey succeeded in eliciting only a few helpful pieces of information, most of these negative in nature.
No, they did not think their mistress owned a green velvet gown, though of course she might have ordered one made; her personal maid would know. No, the mistress really wasn’t at home today, or at least they didn’t think so. No, they did not know for sure when she had left the house—but yes, she was here yesterday, and last night, yes. Had she been in the house on Tuesday last? They thought so, but could not really remember.
“Has a gentleman by the name of Joseph Trevelyan ever visited the house?” he asked. The girls exchanged shrugs and looked at him, baffled. How would they know? Their work was all abovestairs; they would seldom see any visitors to the house, save those who stayed overnight.
“Your mistress—you say that she was at home last night. When is the last time you saw her?”
The girls frowned, as one. Annie glanced at Tab; Tab made a small moue of puzzlement at Annie. Both shrugged.
“Well . . . I don’t rightly know, my lord,” Annie said. “She’s been poorly, the mistress. She’s been a-staying in her room all day, with trays brought up. I go in to change the linens regular, to be sure, but she’d be in her boudoir, or the privy closet. I suppose I haven’t seen her proper since—well, maybe since . . . Monday?” She raised her brows at Tab, who shrugged.
“Poorly,” Grey repeated. “She was ill?”
“Yes, sir,” Tab said, taking heart from having an actual piece of information to impart. “The doctor came, and all.”
He inquired further, but to no avail. Neither, it seemed, had actually seen the doctor, nor heard anything regarding their mistress’s ailment; they had only heard of it from Cook . . . or was it from Ilse, the mistress’s lady’s maid?
Abandoning this line of questioning, Grey was inspired by the mention of gossip to inquire further about their master.
“You would not know this from personal experience, of course,” he said, altering his smile to one of courteous apology, “but perhaps Herr Mayrhofer’s valet might have let something drop. . . . I am wondering whether your master has any particular marks or oddities? Upon his body, I mean.”
Both girls’ faces went completely blank, and then suffused with blood, so rapidly that they were transformed within seconds into a pair of tomatoes, ripe to bursting point. They exchanged brief glances, and Annie let out a high-pitched squeak that might have been a strangled giggle.