‘What happened?’ Josephine asked, looking at the stricken expression on Archie’s face.

‘A woman killed most of her children and then committed suicide,’ he said. ‘It would have been even worse, but the eldest boy had been sent out on an errand, and he came back just as his mother was turning on his sister. He saved the girl, but Mrs Naylor killed herself in front of them. It happened on Christmas Eve, and I found them hiding in the yard the next morning.’

‘Good God, how awful.’ Josephine stared at him, horrified. ‘What on earth drove her to do it?’ 121

‘We’ll never know,’ Hartley said, ‘and I’m not sure we even found out exactly what happened. There was talk amongst the neighbours that it was actually the boy who did it and not Mrs Naylor at all. I think there might have been some truth in that. There were only two people left alive to tell the tale, after all, and his little sister worshipped him.’

‘It was idle gossip,’ Archie said contemptuously. ‘Dangerous gossip at that. Just because there’d been violence in the family when the father was alive, people couldn’t wait to tar the boy with the same brush. And the newspapers didn’t help – a murder like that on Christmas Eve wrote its own headlines. The bloody scandal mongers couldn’t get enough of it.’

‘What have we done now?’ Fielding asked with a good-natured grin as he tracked the footman down for a refill.

‘Sorry, present company excepted,’ Archie said, embarrassed to have been overheard.

‘No offence taken.’

‘What happened to the two children?’ Josephine asked.

Archie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I tried to follow the case, but my inspector pulled me off it – told me I was being unprofessional. Did you keep in touch with them, Richard?’

‘Not after the first few weeks,’ Hartley said. ‘We took them in for a while, didn’t we, dear?’ His wife nodded, and Josephine was shocked by the intense sadness in her face, so raw that the tragedy might have happened only yesterday. ‘But then the authorities got involved, and they were farmed out to different places. I don’t know what became of either of them.’

‘It must have been painful to be separated on top of so much other grief,’ Hilaria said. ‘It’s hard to see how a child could ever get over something like that.’ 122

She left them briefly to go and speak to the butler, giving Josephine a clear view of the Lancasters; they had been listening intently, she noticed, and she wondered how long it would be before Archie was cornered about every criminal case he had ever worked on. They were saved now by the sound of a gong, and the butler announced dinner. Hilaria led them through to the dining room, obviously enjoying the impact that the room made on her guests. It was a stunning space, a true castle great hall with a high vaulted ceiling and a solid oak table that stretched the length of the room. Josephine could only begin to imagine how such an extraordinary piece of furniture had been carried up the Mount. The sheltered, internal windows held the room’s most beautiful feature: a collection of delicate stained glass, some of it clearly very old, which depicted vivid and fantastic flora and fauna, as well as the more traditional biblical scenes. At one end of the room, there was a plaque representing what she assumed to be the St Aubyn family emblem, and the royal coat of arms sat proudly over the fireplace at the other. The hearth was vast, and an entire tree seemed to be burning in the grate.