Free Anne Perry's Christmas Mysteries: Two Holiday Novels by Anne Perry

not have time to go out at all. Surely she told you that she arrived without giving us any prior warning, and we were thus unable to accommodate her. Do you imagine we would have asked Joshua Fielding to offer his hospitality were it possible for us to do so ourselves?”
    So she was correct! Maude had been given the single dose of peppermint water by someone in the house. She must think very rapidly. Better to retreat than to cause an argument, much as the words stuck in her mouth. Was it better to be considered a fool and of no danger at all, or as a highly knowledgeable woman who needed to be watched? She must decide immediately. She could not be both, and time was short.
    Bedelia was waiting. They were all looking at her. A brilliant idea flashed into her mind. She could be both apparently stupid, and extremely clever—if she affected to be a little deaf!
    She drew in a breath to say so, and apologize for it. Then just before she did, she had another thought of infinitely greater clarity. If she were to claim to be deaf then any evidence she gained could later be denied!
    She smothered her pride, a thing she had never done before, except on that unmentionable occasion when her own past had loomed up like a corpse out of the river. But if she had survived that, then nothing this family could do to her would ever make a dent in her inner steel.
    “You are quite right,” she said meekly. “I had forgotten she had been away so very long. If she had no interest before, then it must have been acquired entirely by reading. Perhaps she was homesick for the wide skies, the salt wind, and the sound of the sea?”
    There was a flash of victory in Bedelia’s eyes, a knowledge of her own power. Grandmama felt it as keenly as if it had been a charge of electricity between them such as one is pricked by at times if one touches certain metals when the air is very dry. She had read that predatory animals scented blood in the same way, and it gave her a shiver of fear and intense knowledge of vulnerability, which made life suddenly both sweet and fragile.
    Was that what Agnes had known all her life? Or was she being fanciful? What about Maude? Was she crushed, too? Was that really why she had left England, and everything familiar that she unquestionably loved, and gone to all kinds of ancient, barbaric, and splendid other lands, where she neither knew anyone nor was known? A desperate escape?
    Perhaps there was very much more here, beneath the surface, than she had dreamed, even when she had stood in the bedroom beside Maude’s dead body this morning?
    Bedelia was smiling. “Perhaps she was,” she agreed aloud. “But she could have chosen to live by the sea if she had wished to. Poor Maude had very little sense of how to make decisions, even the right ones. It is most unfortunate.”
    “We were hoping to go out far more, later, when she returned…” Agnes glanced at Bedelia. “In the New Year…or…or whenever we were certain…,” she trailed off, knowing that somehow she had put her foot in it.
    Grandmama stared at her, willing her to explain.
    Bedelia sighed impatiently. “Agnes, dear, you really do let your tongue run away with you!” She turned to Grandmama in exasperation. “You had better know the truth, Mrs. Ellison, or you will feel that we are a cruel family. And it is not so at all. Maude is our middle sister, and she was always unruly, the one who had to draw attention to herself by being different. It happens in families at times. The eldest have attention because they are first, the youngest because they are the babies, the middle ones feel left out, and they show off, to use a common term.”
    “Maude was not a show-off,” Arthur corrected her. “She was an enthusiast. Whatever she did, it was with a whole heart. There was nothing affected or contrived in her.”
    Bedelia did not look away from Grandmama. “My husband is a man of extraordinarily generous spirit. It is his work for the less fortunate for