Mrs. Jeffries and the Feast of St. Stephen (A Victorian Mystery) by Emily Brightwell

making a comment. When the housekeeper finished, she leaned back in her chair. “We’ve the names of the other guests at the dinner party, and we know the man died under suspicious circumstances, but before we go on the hunt, perhaps we’d better wait until we hear whether Dr. Bosworth finds any poison in the man’s stomach.”
    “But we might not find that out until late tomorrow,” Betsy protested. “I think we ought to take Dr. Bosworth at his word and start right away.”
    “What if it’s not murder?” Wiggins asked reasonably. “We’d ’ave wasted a lot of time and energy findin’ out about people who’ve done no wrong. That doesn’t seem right.”
    “And just because these people were at the dinner party, that doesn’t mean anything, especially if he was poisoned,” Mrs. Goodge pointed out. “A poisoner doesn’t have to see his victim die. It’s not like doin’ the deed with a knife or gun. If Stephen Whitfield was poisoned, the killer might have put it in something he ate or drank days before he actually died. Poisons don’t always act right away.”
    “That’s true,” Betsy agreed. But she wanted to be out of the house. She wanted to be walking the streets and chatting with merchants and grocery clerks so that she wouldn’t have to deal with her current problem. “But I don’t think it would hurt anything to find out a few bits and pieces about the people who were there last night. Maybe the killer wanted to watch him die and was sitting right there at the dinner table.”
    “You think one of the Farringdons murdered him?” Mrs. Jeffries asked curiously. It wasn’t like Betsy to leap to any sort of conclusions at this stage of the investigation.
    “I’ve no idea. But Whitfield was the only one drinking the Bordeaux wine, and he’s the only one who is dead.”
    “So far,” Mrs. Jeffries murmured. “As Mrs. Goodge has pointed out, some poisons don’t act right away. The poison might have been in something else, and he simply got a larger, stronger dose than the others.”
    “I don’t think so,” Wiggins said. “No one else that come out of the house looked the least bit ill. Betsy’s on to something ’ere. The wine was opened as soon as the Farringdons arrived, but Whitfield were the only one drinkin’ it. Then it set open for a good while as the guests milled about the place.”
    “Which means that anyone might have dropped something into it, especially if it looked like Whitfield was the only one drinking it,” Smythe said. “Which would mean the killer was definitely wantin’ him dead.”
    “That’s right.” Betsy grinned triumphantly, then caught herself and composed her features. She didn’t want him getting any special smiles. Not yet, at any rate. “So I think we ought to get right on the case. As Mrs. Jeffries said, our inspector is going to have all sorts of pressure on him to get this murder solved before Christmas.”
    “What about Luty and Hatchet?” Wiggins asked. “Are we goin’ to bring them into it before we know for certain?”
    Luty Belle Crookshank and her butler, Hatchet, were friends of the household. Luty was a wealthy, eccentric American who’d been a witness in one of their earliest cases. She’d then come to them with a problem of her own to be solved, and ever since, she and her butler had insisted on helping. Unfortunately, due to Luty’s illness and her need to travel to America to confer with her American bankers and lawyers, they’d missed several of the inspector’s cases, so now they were adamant about being included right from the beginning.
    “I think that would be best,” Mrs. Jeffries replied. “Right, then. I take it we’re all agreed that we ought to proceed with the investigation.”
    Everyone nodded their assent.
    Betsy got up and headed for the stairs. She didn’t want to be alone with Smythe. “I best get upstairs. I want to get my chores done bright and early so I can get out and about.”
    “I’ll do a