Maggie by M.C. Beaton Page B

brick, so covered with ivy and creeper and roses that it was hard to guess its age.
    “I want you to wait in the carriage, Maggie,” said the earl. She nodded her head, taking off her hat and placing it in her lap.
    The earl and Roshie left and Maggie sat alone in the carriage, fatigue keeping her thoughts at bay. The air through the open carriage window was gentle and soft. It was almost as warm as a summer’s day. Great fleecy clouds sailed high above a pale blue sky, as pale and blue as the eyes of Lord Dancer.
    No! Don’t think!
    After what seemed like a very long time, the earl opened the carriage door. “My aunt will see you now,” he said. “She is in the garden.”
    He led her through the sunny cluttered rooms of the house and out through the french windows at the back. A wrought-iron staircase led down to a pretty garden where alarge woman stood by a sundial, waiting for them.
    She was dressed in mannish tweeds and wore a hard celluloid collar with a thin black tie. Her pepper-and-salt hair was clubbed short at the neck and she had a great beefy face with wiry grey hairs sprouting from her chin. Her eyes were small and brown and wistful, a contrast to the truculence of her face, making her look like a tired bulldog, dreaming of the days of succulent bones, long gone by.
    “So you’re Maggie Macleod,” boomed Miss Rochester. “Well, what I want to know is… if
you
didn’t murder your husband, then who did?”
    Maggie halted on the bottom step and stared at Miss Rochester. She put a shaking hand to her lips and then fainted dead away.
    For the next two weeks, Maggie Macleod lay in the upstairs bedroom at the back of
The Laurels
while the doctor came and went. The days grew darker and colder and the birds cheeped dismally in the ivy around the windows. Shadows of leaves flickered across the walls by day, and candlelight sent dark shadows looming out of the corners of the room at night.
    Raging with fever, tortured by nightmares, Maggie tossed and turned. At times she felt she was back in bed with her husband and his great body was suffocating her and his coarse voice was muttering obscenities in her ears. At other times, Lord Dancer stood at the end of the bed, slowly raising the black cap and putting it on his wigged head. Sometimes she was back in her father’s shop, slicing bacon, cutting cheese, measuring potatoes out of the barrel into the heavy brass scoop, parcelling sugar into blue paper bags and lentils and split peas into brown paper bags, looking up from her work and seeing the shadow of the inspector’s thick body falling across the floor of the shop.
    One night she looked through the distorted windows ofher delirium to where her husband and Murdo Knight sat playing cards at the end of her bed. “This’ll make me superintendent,” said the inspector. “This’ll make me superintendent.”
    “What will?” cried Maggie desperately, feeling that she must have his answer, but their figures faded and once more she was back in court and Lord Dancer was putting the black cap on his head.
    And then as the first snow of the winter began to fall on the ploughed brown fields of Oxfordshire, Maggie’s dreams abruptly changed. She had been allowed once during her brief schooling to go on a school picnic to Glen Strathfarrer and in her dream she was back in the cart with the schoolgirls, giggling and laughing while the cart lurched and bumped and the sun slanted through birch and hazel, pine and spruce. A salmon leapt high in the river with a flash of silver scales. In reality, her father had descended on the picnic before it had hardly begun and had dragged her back to the shop, grumbling that he needed help. But in her dream, no angry father appeared and she could smell the tangy scent of pine and bracken mixed with the picnic smells of tea and strawberries.
    She opened her eyes to find pale sunlight shining in at the bedroom window and the heavy figure of Miss Rochester sitting reading beside the