Free The Governess by Evelyn Hervey Page B

the corridor outside the library from the time Ephraim Brattle had left it, his instructions for the Lancashire works complete, till the time for Mr Thackerton’s nightly whisky and seltzer.
    Nor, as it chanced, had there been anybody who had been in someone else’s attested presence for the whole of that time. The servants had had various duties to perform that had taken them-away from their fellows at different times, some short, some longer. Mrs Thackerton had been alone in her sitting-room. Mr Arthur had been alone in the billiards-room, his wife alone in the drawing-room. So on the score of opportunity, in strict logic, no one except the two men servants outside the house could be ruled out, unlikely though it was to think of old Mrs Thackerton or young lubberly John taking advantage of the opportunity to enter the library and strike the blow.
    It came down to motive then. At once Miss Unwin felt inclined to dismiss all the servants under that consideration. Perhaps Peters, in the curiously close links between Master and personal valet, might be thought of as possibly possessing some reason for hating Mr Thackerton so much that he could come to wish to kill him. But Peters had been safely locked out.
    Surely, surely Mellings, old and faithful, could have no possible reason for murdering his employer. Mrs Breakspear, fat and comfortable, was a yet more ridiculous conjecture. Simmons, too, for all her habit of moving silently and secretively about the house, was an old retainer, in the employ of the family ever since they had come to Bayswater. No reason why now suddenly she should murder. Even Joseph, proven liar, had no good reason to kill his Master. He had been rebuked by him, warned by him, in the library on the morning of his death. But not by the most far-fetched reasoning could that constitute a motive for murder.
    As for the maidservants, none of them ever had anything to do with Mr Thackerton, except perhaps to move out of his way should he come upon them at work in the house somewhere andto hear his prayers for them each morning. So neither Hannah nor Nancy, in her scullery, nor, least of all, Vilkins, could be taken into account. John, too, was as much out of the question. Yes, in her own early knowledge, boys of fifteen had taken lives. But why should John, little more than three months in the house, want to kill Mr Thackerton?
    So that left the family.
    A member of the family to have a reason for killing its head? Unthinkable. But it must be thought, sensibly and step by step.
    First of all Mrs Thackerton. And, yes, looked at in cold logic, she could be said to have a motive for the murder. The old, old motive. A motive she herself in her young days in the lower depths had been acquainted with well enough, if only by rumour: the hatred of one person for another in what should be the most sacred relationship known to man. Yes, appalling though the idea might look seen from the quiet respectability which was her way of life now, a husband was the most likely murderer of his wife and a wife, woman though she was, the most likely killer of her husband.
    But Mrs Thackerton, who so seldom left her two rooms, a murderess? It was in the highest degree unlikely.
    On to the next in strict order. To Mr Arthur.
    At once there forced itself into Miss Unwin’s mind, though she half-wanted to exclude it altogether, a very sound motive for Mr Arthur to have murdered his father. It came in the form of a Latin tag she had picked up in the course of her hungry reading. She had learnt what it meant, even though Latin itself was a masculine preserve she had not yet ventured to penetrate.
Cui bono?
To whom the good of it? And the answer was plain. The good of Mr William Thackerton’s possessions and wealth was to his son and heir, Mr Arthur Thackerton. To Mr Arthur, of whom she had heard his own mother say ‘fast-at Eton, fast at Oxford and fast still’.
    Yet, Miss Unwin recognised, Mr Thackerton had always been ready to