Free The Shadow at Greystone Chase (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 10) by Clara Benson Page B

was so upset that she left without notice.’
    ‘I don’t blame her,’ said Freddy. ‘I’m only surprised more of them didn’t do the same. You are obviously made of sterner stuff, though, Mrs. Smith. Are you the only one left now?’
    ‘Of those who were here at the time? Yes, I believe I am,’ said the housekeeper.
    ‘I understand there was some doubt as to whether the younger Mr. de Lisle was guilty,’ said Freddy.
    ‘None of the servants could believe it,’ said Mrs. Smith. ‘He was very well liked, you see. We none of us believed he could have done it. We all thought some passing tramp must have got in somehow and killed her. I saw Mr. Edgar shortly after he found her, and nobody to look at him could have thought he was anything but truly shocked and grief-stricken. He seemed in a daze, the poor thing. The servants were quite moved to pity. Not like—’
    Here she seemed to recollect herself, and Angela wondered whether she had been going to say, ‘Not like his family.’
    ‘Which of these pictures is of him?’ said Freddy.
    ‘None of them, sir,’ said Mrs. Smith. ‘After the trial his portrait was taken down on the instructions of the late Mr. de Lisle. I don’t know where it is now.’
    Angela had turned to look at a picture of an elegant, dark-haired woman.
    ‘That is the late Mrs. de Lisle,’ said Mrs. Smith. ‘The present Mr. de Lisle’s mother. Sadly, she went into a decline and died not long after the trial.’
    ‘And this must be the young Mrs. de Lisle,’ said Freddy.
    Angela turned her head sharply and went to stand beside him. She could not help but be curious about the woman Edgar Valencourt had loved, married and supposedly murdered. Her first thought was that Selina de Lisle had been nothing like herself. The girl in the picture was slight and fair-haired, and undoubtedly a beauty. She was dressed in the height of the fashions of ten years ago, and was shown in an informal pose in a garden, standing and leaning with her elbow on a crumbling wall. She was painted in full face, but there was a tilt to the head and a knowing look in her green eyes which spoke of—what? Repressed mischief, perhaps? Angela could not tell.
    ‘Such a lively young lady, she was,’ said Mrs. Smith. ‘All the gentleman admired her. Mr Edgar was lucky to get her for himself, as she was very young at the time, and you know how fickle the young can be.’
    There seemed an under-current to her speech, and Angela longed to ask exactly what she meant by that, but Freddy was already asking another question about one of the de Lisle great-aunts, a forbidding-looking woman in widow’s weeds, and so the moment passed and could not be retrieved.
    They were conducted upstairs and shown around the bedrooms—none of which was thirty feet square—and then they returned to the entrance-hall, where Mrs. Smith handed them over to a gardener, who was to show them the grounds. They thanked her profusely and went out, and Mrs. Smith was left to wonder whether she had been too indiscreet. The young man had been so charming, however, while the pale-faced lady with the sad eyes had seemed so sympathetic, that she had not been able to stop herself from telling them the story.
    They took a short tour of the grounds in company with the gardener, and then returned by way of the side of the house to the front door. As they did so, Angela’s attention was caught by a little copse of trees at the bottom of the meadow perhaps two hundred yards away, and she wondered whether that was the wood in which Selina de Lisle had been found. She had half a mind to ask to go and see it, but decided against it, since it would look odd and perhaps even a little ghoulish—for there was no possible reason for anyone to be interested in the place unless they knew of the murder. Besides, after all this time there would be nothing to see.
    Angela looked towards the building. Eleven years ago, someone had choked the life out of Selina de Lisle in