Read Online Mrs. Jeffries and the Merry Gentlemen by Emily Brightwell - Free Book Online Page A

After marrying, they’d moved into their own flat.
    Betsy grinned. “She was up half the night so she’s taking a quick nap in Mrs. Goodge’s room. I’m sure she’ll be up before we get out and about. She’s not sleeping as much as she used to.”
    â€œNeither are we.” Smythe yawned. He was a heavily muscled man with thick black hair going gray at the temples and hard, sharp features. His face was saved from being harsh by the kind light in his brown eyes and his ready smile.
    â€œStop your fretting, Luty.” The cook smiled broadly. “You’ll get equal time to play with our little one.” There was a good-natured, but real, rivalry between the two women over time with the baby. Neither woman had ever had children and they both doted on the child. “Now sit down so we can get this meeting started. We’ve lots to discuss.” She picked up the big brown teapot and began to pour.
    Mrs. Jeffries slipped into her chair. There was an air of excitement around the table, but then, there always was at the beginning of an investigation. She glanced at the faces of the others.
    Ruth had arrived first, coming in the back door at almost the same moment the inspector and Barnes had gone out the front. She’d begun helping on the inspector’s cases some time back and now was a special friend of both Witherspoon and the household. The widow of a peer, she was the daughter of a country vicar who took the teachings of Jesus seriously. She worked tirelessly to love her neighbor as herself. To her way of thinking, that meant treating everyone, even servants, as her equal, so in the privacy of their meetings, she insisted the inspector’s household call her by her Christian name rather than her title. Publicly, she understood that none of them could refer to her as anything but Lady Cannonberry.
    Ruth turned her head and caught the housekeeper looking at her. “Is something wrong?”
    â€œNo, no, I was just thinking that perhaps you ought to start,” Mrs. Jeffries suggested quickly. “It’s important that all of us know the details as they happened.”
    â€œCertainly.” Ruth nodded her thanks as the cook handed her a mug of tea. “Gerald and I had finished dinner when we were interrupted by Constable Barnes,” she began. She repeated the sequence of events carefully, making sure she left nothing out of the recital. “And then Wiggins left to go to the murder house,” she concluded.
    â€œSo we had the victim’s name right from the beginning,” Hatchet murmured.
    â€œAnd we knew where he lived, more or less,” Wiggins added. “I’ll go next.” He told them everything he’d heard, starting with the shovel being the murder weapon and finishing with the tidbits Georgie Marks had gotten from Mrs. Wynn.
    â€œMrs. Wynn.” Betsy snorted in derision. “For goodness’ sake, you can’t trust anything that old witch says. That woman is a terrible gossip—she doesn’t have anything good to say about anyone.”
    â€œDon’t get so het up, lass.” Smythe patted his wife’s hand. “I know you don’t like her.”
    â€œNobody likes her.” She jerked her hand away, her blue eyes flashing angrily at her husband. “And if you’ll recall, she said some nasty things about me when we got married.”
    Smythe winced at the memory. Mrs. Wynn had hinted to everyone who set foot in her shop that the only reason Betsy and he had married was because they’d
had
to because Betsy was in the family way. That hadn’t been the case at all; they’d been engaged for ages before they wed. But that hadn’t stopped the old lady’s tongue and when the rumor had gotten back to Betsy she’d stormed into the shop, given the woman a piece of her mind, and vowed to buy her groceries elsewhere. “Sorry, love, I wasn’t tryin’ to defend