Death at Bishop's Keep by Robin Paige Page A

Eleanor’s chatter seemed to plunge her brother further into gloom. Sir Charles sat quiet, thinking, perhaps, of his bats.
    Kate was half listening to Eleanor and watching the mist-draped groves on either side of the road when the carriage turned a sharp bend, a meadow opened, and Bishop’s Keep loomed through the silver fog. She suppressed a little “Oh!” and leaned forward eagerly.
    But what Kate saw before her was not the splendor of castle walls that Beryl Bardwell had conjured up in her novelistic imagination. It was instead a large and rather dull-looking Georgian residence built of gray brick and decorated only by monotonous rows of tall windows capped with white-painted pediments. A pair of stone lions, more like sour toads than royal beasts, flanked the slate steps that led down to the drive. Kate’s disappointment stuck in her throat like a bitter pill. Bishop’s Keep, despite its romantic name, was only an ordinary house. No doubt the life she would lead there would be equally ordinary, conventionally routine, and boring.
    Sir Charles glanced at her, the corners of his mouth amused. “Does Bishop’s Keep meet your expectation?” he asked mildly.
    Kate’s lips thinned. The man had seen through her. How intolerable!
    â€œIn every detail,” she lied tartly. She gathered her skirts, accepted Bradford Marsden’s hand, and alighted from the carriage.
    The farewells took but a moment and, after a round of promises to exchange calls, Kate found her bags sitting beside one of the lions and herself standing on the lowest step, waving. The coachman’s whip cracked, the Marsden carriage disappeared into the mist, and Kate turned reluctantly to face her fate. She stood looking for a moment, then stuck out her tongue at one of the lions and marched up the stairs and down the walk to the massive oak door. She lifted her hand to the brass knocker.
    Bishop’s Keep might not be a castle, but like it or not, she was here.

9
    â€œThe majority of servants would be judged criminal if their backgrounds and their actions were fully known. Many were previously discharged for lying or theft and have obtained their present places with forged credentials, while not a few supplement their honest wages by acting as paid informants for house-breakers. The careful mistress must beware of those who pretend to serve.”
    â€”The Practical Household, 1884
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    â€œI continue to believe, Sabrina,” Bernice Jaggers said, feeling quite cross, “that you are making a most dreadful mistake. This young woman’s reputation is not personally known to you, and it is the utmost folly to trust the word of some Pinkerton person on the other side of the Atlantic. We must be vigilant. Persons hired into our household must be of the most trustworthy sort.”
    Sabrina Ardleigh put down her pen and turned from the small rosewood desk in the withdrawing room. “I am not hiring a servant, Bernice. I am employing Brother Thomas’s daughter.”
    â€œI hardly see the difference.” Bernice sat down on a carved mahogany chair and twitched the skirt of her black bombazine, which she wore in mourning for her husband, Captain Reginald Jaggers, of whom in the last years of their marriage she had not been fond. He had fallen with General Gordon at Khartoum nearly a decade before, but like the Queen, Bernice lived daily with her husband’s memory. She drew her brows together severely. “She is an American. Worse yet, Irish.” Her mouth puckered on the word. “You have managed for years without knowing that Thomas had a daughter, and you have managed without a secretary as well. Why must you have one now? And why is Thomas’s daughter the only one who will do?”
    Sabrina rose from her chair and crossed the Turkish carpet to the window that gave a view of the sloping lawn. She spoke without turning. “We have discussed the matter fully,