“Very well, you stay out here and keep guard in case Mr. Edmonds comes creeping back to have a listen at the door.”
“Not on your Nelly!” she fumed, and was on my heels as I went into the room that was the right one this time. To say I was shocked by Lady Krumley’s appearance is putting it mildly. No one looks their best in a hospital bed under lighting that is worse than that found in department store changing rooms, but even so the woman I had been visualizing clinging to a life raft bobbing its way toward death’s portals looked remarkably… bobbish. She wasn’t flat on her back; she was sitting up with a crocheted shawl around her shoulders and her mahogany hair, far from hanging drearily around her shoulders, was tidily pulled back in a coil. As for her hooded black eyes, they had lost little of their intensity as they turned toward the door.
“So you came.” She beckoned Mrs. Malloy and me over to a pair of stiff-looking armchairs positioned at the side of the bed. “The circumstances are not what I expected for our second meeting. You did make sure that door is closed? Good! One wouldn’t wish to invite passers-by to listen in on our conversation, given how very odd it would all sound. And yet if there was anything needed to convince the skeptical of the validity of my fears concerning Flossie Jones, I would think it must be this new tragedy.”
“Nasty things, car accidents.” Mrs. M. took the more comfortable looking of the chairs and sat with legs crossed at the ankles for the best display of her fishnet hose. “But it don’t look like you took too bad a pasting.”
“I am not talking about myself. I’m sure I would have been perfectly fine if I hadn’t allowed myself to become so upset, which I wouldn’t have done under other circumstances. After all, not wishing to be callous, I hadn’t seen Vincent in twenty years. Not until he showed up at Moultty Towers so unexpectedly the night before last. However, blood being thicker than water, one could do no less than make him welcome, and I encouraged him to stay for a few days. Regrettably, he had not been in the house two minutes before he offended Watkins’s, the butler, sensibilities by being too familiar.” Her ladyship drew the shawl up around her chin. “Watkins is not cut from the same cloth as his predecessor Hopkins. But even so, servants do not care for that sort of thing. My late husband Sir Horace did not approve of Vincent. Went to Eton together. Thought him a blot on the old school tie. Unfortunate, considering they were first cousins, but there it is and now… he has been added to Flossie’s list of casualties.”
“You mean he’s…?” I began.
Mrs. Malloy finished for me: “Dropped off the family twig?”
Lady Krumley folded her hands. “I had just begun the drive home last night when I heard a ringing from somewhere under the dashboard. I had forgotten there was a phone in the car. I am rarely in the vehicle these days. Watkins drives it two or three times a week when I have some commission for him. Otherwise, for the most part, it remains garaged. At all events, I was sufficiently startled to almost go off the road. When I did locate the receiver, it was to hear my nephew Niles Edmonds’s, informing me in his sad little voice that Vincent had met with a fatal accident.”
“Oooh! Nasty!” Mrs. Malloy batted her eyelashes in horror. “What sort of accident?”
“He had fallen into a well…”
“What? One of them fancy wishing well types? With a bucket hanging from its little wooden roof?” Mrs. M. looked most unsuitably entranced. “Me and me first husband met at one of them. I was wishing he’d stop looking up me skirt as I bent over to drop in a penny for luck and…” on catching my eye she continued smoothly, “just thought we should know for the record like.”
“The well is as you describe, although it is not located in a public place.” Lady Krumley shivered despite the fierce central heating. “It is in the garden of a cottage on the Moultty Towers property. They are kept for longtime family retainers. A Mrs. Hasty, who was the kitchen maid in Flossie’s time, lives in it. If she is deceased by the time Watkins retires he will be offered it. As I told you yesterday, it has long been viewed a duty by the Krumleys to honor the promise inscribed on the family crest.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have my notes with me,” I hedged. “What is the exact wording?’
“Serve Well Thy Servitors.” Her ladyship leaned back on her pillow, looking all at once like a woman who needed a nurse with a syringe at her side. “It dates back to the early thirteenth century when Hugh de Krumley took a blow on the head in a skirmish against King John. He wandered about the country for a year thinking he was a peasant, until rescued by his ever-faithful jester, a fellow by the name of Lumpkin who brought him back to his senses with another blow by way of a juggling skittle that went astray. Overjoyed, Hugh rewarded Lumpkin by not having his hands cut off. Upon his return to the manor, after taking a long hot bath one would hope, Hugh swore upon his sword and his father’s beard-or it may have been his mother’s (the Krumleys all tend to be hirsute)-to deal mercifully with those who served him. He also vowed that should this pledge not be kept, by himself or future generations, the house of Krumley would fall. One may assume that none failed in their duty until”-her ladyship’s dark eyes seemed to sink into her head-“I so cruelly wronged Flossie Jones.”
“Is it known how your cousin Vincent came to fall into the well?” I asked.
“He had gone out into the grounds in search of his dog, a Maltese terrier that he had brought down with him and had insisted be allowed to dine at the table. It was discovered missing from the house shortly after I left for Mucklesby. A tiresome, yapping creature. One would think no one could regret its absence. But Vincent was quite besotted. Credited it with having helped him stop drinking, by threatening to walk out if he ever touched another drop. One could never tell if Vincent was serious or joking. And I suspected upon this visit that he had grown addled in his wits.”
“Was he very elderly?” I inquired.
“In his nineties, close in age to what Sir Horace would have been.” Her ladyship lay plucking at her shawl. “So I suppose there is some excuse. He kept saying Niles’s wife looked like a go-go dancer and something about Daisy Meeks, another relation who was present on the evening of his arrival, having a twin. He’d chortle in a silly way. It was all extremely tedious. And I must say I was happy to get out of the house.”
“Family!” Mrs. Malloy sat looking soulful. “It’s never all it’s cracked up to be, is it, your ladyship ducks? Still, I’m sure you wasn’t pleased to hear he’d kicked the bucket… on the way down the well.”
“When I put down the phone after receiving the news from Niles I must have gone into shock. The realization that the deathbed curse of Flossie Jones had been again at work was too much for me. For I have no doubt that it was my breaking the family code of honor that empowered her. The doctors here suspected I had suffered another heart attack, but I knew such was not the case. I had merely fainted-something I had never done before in my life-thus precipitating the crash.”
“That’s all it was?” Mrs. M. looked seriously aggrieved. “No one had done nothing nasty to the brakes, or run you off the road.”
“I merely lost consciousness for a few moments.” Her ladyship sat back up with a surprising bounce. “I should have been allowed to go home instead of being kept imprisoned in this most uncomfortable bed and woken up in the night to be made to take a sleeping pill. And this morning they were talking about having me examined by a cardiologist to be brought down from London. So much nonsense. I detest having poor, sensitive Niles…”