Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery by Benedict Brown (romantic novels in english .txt) 📗

back and read the names all the birds I might have, though probably didn’t see. There are wheatears and golden orioles (which I’m more or less certain was a starling catching the light of the sun) firecrests and yellowhammers.

There was no time for my favourite hobby right then though, as I had urgent matters to attend to. I cracked open a fresh page at the back of my notebook and wrote down our list of suspects. Just looking at the names helped me focus on what I knew about each person. I tried to write an account, not just of the things I’d discovered that weekend, but relevant facts I had always known.

Marmaduke Adelaide could be summed up in two simple words: absolute thug. But the others were more complex. To begin with, my second cousin Cora was an odd case. She’d been quite the darling of the family in her teenage years. She’d excelled in school, not just academically but in arts, sports and cookery too. She’d represented Surrey in archery competitions for years, had one of her paintings displayed by a London gallery and been offered a place at Cambridge after she finished boarding school. I never discovered what caused her to cut her hair short, swap her elegant dresses for masculine suits and loiter around London instead of making the most of her talents.

Everyone had an opinion on her transformation, of course. My father put it down to the negative influence of the flapper movement on young women – not that such a movement actually existed outside of the lurid minds of Fleet Street journalists. My mother claimed that Cora had woken up to the possibilities of the fairer sex, though I don’t see what this had to do with her hairstyle, and Albert said that Cora was very pretty with long or short hair, and she could do whatever she liked.

I don’t suppose my opinion counts for much, but, if you ask me, she was a very sad person. Her parents had lived abroad through her childhood and died of typhoid when she was still young. Most young men her age had gone off to war and either come back scarred by the horrors they’d seen, or failed to return at all. So it’s not really surprising that Cora would have struggled through all of that now, is it?

I moved on to my cousin George, who was just young enough to have missed out on the war himself but would have felt the same pressures in different ways. He belonged to a generation which had been hacked through before it could reach its prime. With all that expectation on the remaining few, it only made sense for them to rebel. I was more of a conformist myself, but I sometimes wished I had the courage to stand up to my father and say, I’m not going to be the person you want me to. Flappers and war veterans, tomboys and playboys were the ones changing the world. Albert and I just did as our parents told us.

Naturally, there was a dark side to George which I’d have been a fool to ignore. As good as he was at getting his own way, he didn’t always seem happy to succeed. Perhaps it just came too easily. For years, his mother had idolised her only son and wouldn’t hear a word against him. His father was dead, his friends had followed their illustrious forebears into city jobs or family life and George had opted for a more scandalous existence; spending every night in a different bed, living for the roll of the dice and the spin of the roulette wheel.

He had been the second in line to the family fortune and had by far the most to gain from his mother’s death, as Cranley Hall would pass on to him once our elderly grandfather died. Perhaps her patience had run out and she’d finally taken him to task for his aberrant behaviour. Perhaps this wasn’t the first time he’d crossed the line of what was strictly legal and his mother had found out. Or perhaps…

My mind ran with vivid imaginings of just what George might have got up to before planning to murder the whole Cranley clan. Arms dealing, opium addiction, gangsters and blackmail – there was no evidence for any of it of course, but it was exciting to consider the possibilities.

I was getting carried away, so I lit an extra candle for warmth and got into bed. The technological advances of our burgeoning century, such as central heating and electric lights, were yet to reach my quarters at Cranley.

I tried to think dispassionately about my cousin, to examine the hard facts. George was friends with a criminal – that much was certain. He’d brought Marmaduke Adelaide to the party as a favour to his father, who had made his fortune from petty crime on a massive scale. Had George helped Horatio Adelaide to exact revenge upon the legendary Lord Edgington? And, if they were to blame for the murders, what part did Marmaduke play?

An image came back to me then, of Marmaduke at the ball after the police had arrived. His clothes were unkempt, just like after any fight at school. There was a bloody bruise on his cheek, which certainly hadn’t been there when he’d arrived at the ball, and his flaming red hair was dishevelled.

But, perhaps most significantly, Marmaduke had begged for help. He’d been shaking as he spoke to me, terrified in fact. It was hard to imagine that he could have switched from budding murderer to frightened schoolboy in such a short space of time. Perhaps he’d seen something he shouldn’t have, or helped in the killing and regretted it. He wasn’t coming to gloat or tease, he’d needed my help and I’d sent him packing. Even the black eye he’d given me didn’t warrant that.

With my head growing ever heavier, I moved on to the evidence against Great-Aunt Clementine. She had