The Moonlit Murders: A historical mystery page-turner (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 3) by Fliss Chester (best ereader for pc .txt) 📗

her navel and a boa the red of a London bus. Spencer was in black tie and both of them looked, to Fen’s mind at least, as glamorous and glittering as a couple could be.

From the look on Mrs Archer’s face, she obviously disagreed with Fen and her disgust at being in such proximity to the actors was palpable. Fen couldn’t quite make it out but heard Eloise say something to her aunt, possibly along the lines of ‘don’t be such a prude’.

‘Prude?’ Mrs Archer’s voice, low, authoritative and clear as a bell, rang out. ‘Eloise, dear, in my day showgirls dined with the servants.’

The barb hit its spot and Fen felt terribly sorry for Genie as she pulled the boa off her, then changed her mind and covered herself up with it again. Her excitement at having been placed at the captain’s table, and no doubt the thrill of silencing the dining room with her very arrival, had dissolved and her eyes looked overly bright.

Spencer, usually the first to leap to the defence of his lady friend, stayed mysteriously quiet, and Fen could only think that he was perhaps the sort of man who knew his odds in a bar-room brawl but was hopelessly all at sea when it came to backchatting his superiors. That, or perhaps he too was a bit abashed over his partner’s choice of evening wear.

‘Well,’ James said decisively, his voice cutting the atmosphere that had clouded over the table. ‘Why let the servants have all the fun, eh. Genie, pleasure to see you again. Please, come and sit next to me.’

Genie flashed him the warmest of smiles, while Mrs Archer looked like someone had wafted a rotten fish under her nose, but she said no more on the matter of Genie and Spencer joining them and instead made a show of examining the glass and flatware in front of her, remarking, in too loud a voice for it to be anything other than intentionally provocative, that there were smudges on the forks and fingerprints on her wine glass.

James winked at Fen and mouthed a silent ‘how rude’, which almost made Fen spit her water out over the white tablecloth.

Bravo though, James, Fen thought to herself, bravo.

The captain, a handsome, if somewhat weather-worn man, sat himself down next to her, and once the other gentlemen around the table had sat themselves down too, he made a toast.

‘To a safe journey home, and amis absent… absent friends,’ he said, and there was a murmur of ‘absent friends’ said not only around the table but throughout the whole dining room.

Then, in what looked like a shoal of silvery mackerel, waiter upon waiter filed out of the kitchens, each carrying two serving plates complete with domed lids, their reflective surfaces glinting back the brilliance of the lights in the chandelier and all around the dining room. Dinner was served.

11

‘So what brings you on board, Eloise?’ Fen asked her in a quiet moment, wary of her aunt’s watchful eye and spiteful tongue.

‘Homeward-bound, finally!’ the young woman replied, placing her pudding fork down. ‘I was only meant to be being finished in France, but then the war came and…’

Fen nodded. She’d heard of Swiss finishing schools, of course, and had known a few girlfriends at Oxford who had narrowly escaped being sent to one and had pleaded bluestocking academia as an excuse not to have to parade around with books on their heads. ‘We’d rather be studying them than balancing them,’ one girl had said when she’d told Fen how her parents had wanted desperately for her to study at Lucerne rather than Oxford. And now Eloise was describing the same sort of thing, albeit in France rather than in Switzerland.

‘You see, I was told by Mama that I would be much better placed to marry well if I knew how to get out of a motorcar without flashing my own undercarriage.’

‘Wise words from mother there, I’m sure.’ Fen smiled at Eloise, who raised her eyebrows and continued.

‘I don’t see that it helped me hugely though, it’s not like I have to play the field, as they say. I’ve been set up to marry Reginald T. Vandervinter since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.’

‘Set up? As in an arranged marriage?’ Fen thought they hadn’t been a societal norm since the last century and said as much. ‘Isn’t that rather Victorian?’

‘There’s nothing high-class Americans like more than being compared to Victorians,’ Eloise said, rolling her eyes. ‘Look at Aunt Mariella’s hair. Anyway, I’m the collateral damage. Still, could be worse… Mrs Vandervinter trips off the tongue, and it does come with its privileges.’

‘Go on?’ Fen was intrigued. She didn’t realise that the Americans had the same sort of class system as the British did, or had. After the Great War, the class walls had started tumbling down with hardly anyone going into service at big houses any more, while families marrying each other for political alliances was a thing of Tudor, let alone Victorian, Britain.

‘The Archers and the Vandervinters have been pals since God was a boy,’ Eloise explained.

‘And the Miller-Wrights?’ Fen probed.

‘Pops is new money, according to Mama, but his greenbacks helped get the Archers back in the senate. Uncle Edward was a senator – that’s Aunt Mariella’s husband and Mama’s brother, you see – and Grandpappy was a senator too… You see what I’m getting at.’

‘I think so…’ Fen paused. ‘So the Vandervinters are politically allied to the Archers?’

‘Yeah.’ Eloise had drunk a little more now and her finishing-school gloss was losing its shine. ‘Vandervinters and Archers formed allegiances in the war. The Civil War that is. And Reginald and I have been meant for each other since we were kids. And Aunt M says with the war and all now, well, I don’t have much choice left and Reginald is rich and handsome. So Mama tells me in her letters, anyway. And that’s her plan. Get me home to New York before her scheming runs out of gas.’ Eloise