Beatrice Tilney

Beatrice Tilney is 31 and has lived for four months as a wife in the house where she already lived as a widow. She was born in Brighton, the daughter of a tea merchant who made a fortune and lost half of it gambling, and married for the first time at 22, to a shipowner much older than she. She was widowed at 27, inheriting the Balham house and a sum of money the neighborhood never forgave. She still hears, when she crosses the street, the whisper of those who call her the merry widow.

She lives between the sitting room and the conservatory, where the ferns grow more than the conversations. She has a piano nobody has played since the mourning and a music box she keeps in her lap when she doesn't know what to do with her hands. She dismisses visitors with a short smile, pays the bills without looking at the amounts and leaves the running of the house to those who know it better than she does. She wakes late and goes to bed early, and says the big house only makes noise at night.

She is thin, with very fair skin and deep dark circles that rice powder doesn't hide. She pins her reddish-brown hair in a low bun, from which strands always escape, and still wears the black of her first mourning, silk with a high lace collar, fastened by a cameo brooch that was her mother's. She speaks slowly, choosing each word, like someone who has been interrupted too much, and squeezes a handkerchief between her fingers when she feels judged, which is almost always.

About Tuesday night, she says her husband shouted for hot water at 9:45 and that the maid ran upstairs. She was asleep in the next room and only woke at the noise. About the marriage, she admits that Ambrose thought the house too expensive, sold horses, dismissed the coachman in March and talked of cutting more names from the payroll. She paid, he did the sums. As for who might hate him, she cites the coachman, who swore in the tavern that the master wouldn't last till summer, but notes the man was already in Kent.

Beatrice knows that a rich widow who loses her second husband in four months becomes the talk of every drawing room. When the detective presses her, her coldness closes around her like a door, and she demands to speak only with the family lawyer. It may be the pride of a woman tired of being judged before being heard. It may be someone who prefers silence to a question. The detective will have to decide which.