Eternity Ring (8 page)

To everyone’s astonishment Miss Alvina pecked back, not in defence of her name, but of “my dear father.” A reflection on the name he had given her was a reflection on him. A gentle fury filled her breast. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks a delicate pink. She had always considered Mabel an odious name, but she would never have said so if she had not been tried beyond her strength. She came as near to saying it now as a ladylike upbringing would permit.

“A name like mine has at least one advantage—people do not become tired of it. Yours, my dear Mabel, after being sadly overdone, is now quite out of date—one never hears it, even in the village.”

Mrs. Bowse did not even notice that she had been pecked. She took the last iced cake, and remarked that village children were all called after film stars nowadays.

Cicely was playing a toccata and fugue by Bach. The great crashing waves of music swept in upon her and swept her mind quite clean. All the things which had troubled and vexed her were like small dust, which this great tide of beauty carried away. When the last notes died she came back to her surroundings— but slowly, like someone waking from a sleep which has been so deep that it has drowned memory and pain. There is a time in such a waking when consciousness has returned but has not yet regained its power to wound. It lies smooth and bright, as the sea lies over a wreck. She was relaxed and quiet. Except for the organ light the church around her was dark. The air throbbed with that tremendous music, passed out of audible sound but present still.

She took her hands from the key-board and turned her head. She didn’t know why she turned it. She thought afterwards that she must have heard him move, not consciously but with that finer sense which lies at the edge of consciousness. He was standing in the shadow where the curtain which screened the organist had been drawn aside. The odd thing was that it seemed quite natural for him to be there. She could rage about it afterwards, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world—the dark church—the music still echoing in her— and Grant. And all the pain gone.

But it only lasted a moment. They looked at one another, and he said,

“Saint Cecilia—”

And that was another thing to trouble over in the watches of the night, because just how did he say it? Lightly? Mockingly? Yes—yes, of course it would be that way. But then why did it shake her heart? She turned a hot face into her pillow and gave herself the answer—“Because I’m such a damned fool about him still.” At the time she just sat there looking at him, her eyes wide and the light all round her. Then he said,

“That was very fine. You’ve come along a lot.”

“Have I?”

It didn’t really matter what she said. All that mattered was not to break this moment of release. It wouldn’t last, but she could have said like Faust, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön.” With everything in her, that was what she was saying now. But not aloud. Words were too difficult. They said too much or too little. There had been too many of them already. The things she had said to Grant in love, the things she had said to him in bitter resentment, were not to be remembered now, or the moment of peace would be gone. But if she didn’t say something, he would think—She came perilously near to letting everything go without caring what he might think.

It might have been some instinctive recoil from this, it might have been something simpler and more elementary, which made her say,

“Someone has been writing me anonymous letters.”

It was so entirely unpremeditated that the sound of the words shocked her. She had never meant to tell anyone about the letters. She had certainly never meant to tell Grant. The words had just come out of her mouth. It was rather frightening.

The effect upon Grant Hathaway was to make him duck under the rod which held the curtain and come into the light. He looked incredulous and a little angry.

“Anonymous letters?”

She nodded.

“About us?”

“About you.”

She oughtn’t to have spoken about the letters. The pain was coming back. But it would have come back anyway. She must go through with it now.

He put out a hand.

“Let me see them!”

She picked up her bag from the organ stool and opened it. The letters were in an envelope stuck down. She slit it.

“I thought I’d burn them, and then I thought I wouldn’t. I thought if it went on I might have to try and find out who was sending them, so I put them in this envelope and stuck it down, then I thought I’d know if anyone—well, tampered with them.”

“Did they come through the post?”

“No. That’s what’s so horrid. They weren’t even in an envelope—just screwed up and pushed in at the hall letter-box with my name on the outside.” She took out a crumpled piece of paper and handed it to him. “Look—like that.”

“Printed, I see.” He turned it over. “And the same inside.”

His face hardened as he read:

“Do you want a divorce? You could get one if you knew as much as I do. He married you for your money. You know that, don’t you? Why not get free?

A well-wisher.”

When he came to the end he said,

“It sounds almost as if the well-wisher had been eavesdropping—doesn’t it? Is there another instalment?”

Her voice was hard with pain as she said,

“There are two more. The first came on Saturday, this one two days later.”

She gave him a second note. In crooked, stumbling capitals it said:

“He is quite the bachelor again. Don’t you care? Ask him who came to see him on Friday night. If you had any proper pride you would get a divorce.”

Cicely gave him a third note. It was much shorter than the others—no more than a single sentence. It ran:

“Some people might want to know what happened on Friday night.”

When he had read it he took the envelope out of her hand, put all three notes inside it, and put it away in a pocket.

“You’d better let me keep them. Just let me know if you get any more, will you? And don’t handle them more than you can help. I’d like to get any fingerprints on record.”

There was a sense of relief in getting rid of the things. She shut her bag and turned to go, switching out the light and turning on a torch to see them out. As he fell into step beside her on the churchyard path he said in a laughing voice,

“Quite a new scandal for the village if they only knew—Mr. Grant Hathaway sees Mrs. Grant Hathaway home!”

She came back quickly and defiantly with,

“I’d much rather you didn’t.”

“Well, I’m going to, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. And here’s something else. I don’t much like your being out on your own after dark at the moment.”

She managed a laugh.

“Because of Mary Stokes? You don’t suppose she really saw anything, do you?”

“She seems to have had a fright.”

“It’s as likely as not to have been an owl, or a rabbit. You know the way those big owls swoop down at night—it really is startling, and she’s not what you’d call a country girl. No— something frightened her and she started off and ran herself into hysterics. And of course when they wanted to know what it was, an owl wasn’t nearly exciting enough, so she made up a story. I can’t think why Frank is wasting his time over her. I should have thought Scotland Yard would have had something real to put him on to nearer home.”

There was a short silence before he said,

“I didn’t know your cousin was here on duty.”

“I thought everyone knew that. And I just can’t make out why anyone should bother about Mary Stokes.”

He said, “I’m afraid I haven’t thought about it at all. I heard she had had a fright, but that’s as far as it went. What frightened her?”

Cicely pulled herself up with a jerk. She and Grant were not on those sort of terms, and she hadn’t any intention of letting them get there. But it was frightfully easy to slip. She had felt herself slipping. She said stiffly,

“I expect it was an owl.”

He made some kind of sound which might have been the beginning of a laugh. Whatever it was, it was broken off short. She thought she knew very well what it meant. She and Grant walking together in the dark and talking about Mary Stokes. As if either of them cared a halfpenny stamp what Mary had seen! She and Grant alone in the dark with nothing real to say, whilst all the things between them clamoured to be said—that was a quite unendurable prospect. She panicked in the silence and cast wildly about her for something safe with which to break it, but of all those clamouring words not one came to her tongue.

It was Grant who said in a conversational tone,

“Seeing much of Mark?”

That helped, because she could get up a little spurt of anger.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“No reason at all. He writes comic songs, you play the organ— it’s bound to be a bond.”

He heard her catch her breath.

“That’s beastly of you, Grant.”

“A bald statement of fact.”

“His stuff’s clever—if you like that sort of thing.”

“All right, all right—don’t like it too much, that’s all.”

“As a matter of fact I don’t like it at all.”

“But you like Mark. Are you by any chance trying to tell me that you love him for himself alone?”

He was baiting her, and she knew it. If she let her temper go, he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had scored. She achieved a creditable calmness of tone.

“It wouldn’t be your business if I did.”

“Well, that would depend—because, you see, you can’t marry anyone else unless you get divorced from me, and you can’t get divorced from me unless I make it possible.”

There was a horrid little pause. Then she said,

“Are you going to?”

“Oh, no.”

“Then I shall just have to wait for three years.”

“My dear child! What three years?”

“You can get a divorce after three years. Mr. Waterson said so.”

“Exactly. He said I could get a divorce for desertion in three years’ time. You see, it’s you who are doing the deserting, not me, and if I choose to put up with it, there isn’t one—single— solitary thing you can do about it.”

She turned on him in a glow of anger.

“But you will—you will—you must!”

“Not a bit of it. Why should I? You don’t imagine that I could possibly want to marry again—after such a very unpleasant experience?”

“It wasn’t!”

The words flashed out before she could stop them, and she heard him laugh.

“Not altogether—not all the time? Well, that’s something at any rate! Bride to groom, ‘Thanks for the memory,’ and all that!”

They were just at the turning. She caught her breath sharply and ran from him up the Lane. Her blood drummed in her ears, and her heart against her side. She was sick with mortification and anger. And he would know—he would know that she had run away because she couldn’t bear to stay. She couldn’t even run fast enough to get in before he caught her up. She fumbled at the garden gate, shaking too much to make sure of the latch.

Grant’s hand came down over her shoulder. The latch clicked, the gate swung in. And then, just as she crossed the threshold, his left arm took her about the shoulders and for a moment she felt his cheek against hers.

“Thanks for the quarrel, darling,” he said in a light laughing voice, and gave her a little push and was gone.

Frank Abbott came in late, the net result of a long afternoon’s work being a number of fingerprints from the interior of the Forester’s House, most of them from the room where the window had been blocked and the settle drawn up to the hearth. The prints were those of two people, a man and a woman—some of them from the passage, but nearly all from the one closed room. Upstairs no prints at all—no sign that anyone had trodden the old dust.

“It’s clear enough that two people have been meeting in that room. They’ve been coming in the same way we did, and they haven’t bothered about the rest of the house. That’s as plain as a pikestaff. There are no other prints of anyone at all, so it looks as if either there wasn’t any murder, or as if the man did it. I wondered about a jealousy motive—the one-man-two-women triangle. What do you think about that? Suppose Louise Rogers was an old flame of the man’s and butted in on his rendezvous— one of those French words which the Chief dislikes so much— he might do her in to prevent Mary knowing, or Mary might do her in out of jealousy. Only if she was there, how did she contrive not to leave any prints? I suppose the answer would be that she was wearing gloves.”

He stood by the fire looking down at Miss Silver on her low chair. They had the morning-room to themselves in the half hour before dinner. She looked up across her knitting.

“If she was killed in that house, there would surely be stains, or some traces of their having been removed.”

He leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. “I know—I know. But the passage had been swept—there was a birch broom in the kitchen. Smith’s taken it back with him to see if they can get any traces off it. There are no signs of the flags having been washed—Smith is prepared to swear that they haven’t.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“What about the sacks in front of the hearth in that room?”

“No sign of a bloodstain. ” He hesitated for a moment. “There’s just one thing—it’s probably negligible—”

“I shall be interested to hear what it is,” said Miss Silver.

“You know that passage between the kitchen and the front door—on the right there is the stone wall, and on the left the panelled side of the stair. Well, fairly high up on the panelling there is just one dark stain which might be blood—fairly recent and soaked down into the wood. Smith has taken a scraping, so we shall know more about it by tomorrow, and then we shall have to find out whether the woman’s prints were made by Mary Stokes.”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked rapidly.

“Did you find any more of her footprints?”

He bent down to put a log on the fire.

“Oh, yes—there were half a dozen more. She must have run right through the wood just about as hard as she could pelt— there’s no doubt about that. And, you know, it looks to me as if she didn’t bolt like that for fun. A pretty tough young woman who has been making a habit of meeting a man in a place like the Forester’s House doesn’t act like a scared rabbit for nothing. I say she’s been making a habit of meeting someone there, because she left far too many fingerprints for a single visit. They’re all over the place—on the door that was blocking the window, all round the hearth and chimneypiece as if she had been making up the fire, and on both sides of the door. Something unusual must have taken place, or she’d never have bolted like that. And anyhow, where is Louise Rogers?”

Miss Silver coughed.

“And the missing earring, Frank.”

He bent a look of cold exasperation on her.

“For the matter of that, they’re both missing,” he said. “And so is she. And it’s a week today since she walked out of Mrs. Hopper’s room and never came back.”

Next day being Saturday, Mary Stokes delivered eggs and butter at the three houses whose back gates opened upon the Lane. Since she neither drove a car nor possessed a bicycle she had to make these deliveries on foot, and regular exercise in the open air being one of the things recommended by Dr. Wingfield, Mrs. Stokes made no bones about keeping her up to it—not that Mary appeared at all disinclined to go. Just how she managed to take so much time over her errands, Mrs. Stokes never quite made out, but she was an easy-tempered woman and supposed that it was dull for the girl on the farm, and that she would be talking with the maids and perhaps get invited in for an elevens. Mrs. Abbott had those two nice girls under Mrs. Mayhew— sisters they were, from the other side of Lenton. And there would be Mrs. Caddie at the Grange garage, which you had to pass to get in from the Lane. Not that she’d be Mary’s sort at the best of times, and a very peter-grievous poor thing these days by all accounts, but perhaps a word with Mary would cheer her up—you never could tell. And there was always Mrs. Green and her daughter up at the House, doing for Mr. Harlow like they did for his uncle. Nice steady women the both of them, but of course too old for Mary—Mrs. Green in her sixties, and Lizzie forty odd. She did wish there were more girls of her age for Mary to be friends with, but what with her having such high notions and thinking nobody good enough—well, it wasn’t too easy.

Continuing up the Lane in her mind, Mrs. Stokes arrived at Deepside. Mrs. Barton, the housekeeper there, was a friend of her own and as nice a woman as ever stepped. Been there thirty years, and nursed the old gentleman to the end. And a blessing for Mr. Grant Hathaway to have such a dependable person in the house, with Miss Cicely running home the way she done. And to be hoped it would all come right—young people like that with their life before them. Mrs. Barton didn’t speak about it of course, but you could tell how it troubled her. That girl Agnes Ripley, the house-parlourmaid, she wasn’t Mary’s sort either. Come to think of it, she wasn’t much anyone’s sort. Good at her work-—Mrs. Barton hadn’t a word to say about that. One of those moody girls, if you could call her a girl, which she must be up in her thirties, and plain at that. No notion of making anything of herself either. Not that she held with all the stuff girls put on their faces these days, but you got used to it, and there was no getting from it, it did brighten them up. That Agnes now, she’d a good figure and good hair—if you liked it as straight as a horse’s tail. But that sallow skin and those dark eyes, and the way she stared at you—well, Mrs. Barton could have her. She would rather a dozen times put up with Mary, airs and tempers and all.

Frank Abbott took an early train from Lenton. “Business” was all he told Monica Abbott. To Miss Silver he was more communicative.

“I want to know if they’ve routed out anything more about Louise Rogers, and I want to see the Chief. So far I haven’t been able to raise anything this end. If she came to Lenton by train, nobody noticed her there. It’s a busy station, and of course she may have just passed in a crowd, especially if it was getting on towards dusk. But how did she get out to Deeping? It’s all of four miles. Do you suppose for a moment that she walked it in the dark?”

“She would not do that.”

“And how would she know the way? No, that’s out. And she certainly didn’t come by bus. Everyone in Deeping has heard Mary’s story by now—they’d be tumbling over one another if any of them had come out from Lenton in the same bus as a mysterious stranger with diamond earrings. No, if she ever came at all she must have come by car. And where is the car? You see, whichever way you look at it, it all goes up in smoke. I’ve got an advertisement in the county paper and the little Lenton rag today. I can’t do anything more down here till I get those results from Smith. It’s practically certain that the woman’s fingerprints are Mary’s, but I want to put it to them at the Yard, ‘Where do we go from there?’ You see, it’s all very awkward. The Yard isn’t concerned with her morals, so how hard am I to press her about this story of hers? There isn’t really a shred of evidence to connect her with Louise Rogers. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and I’m going to put it up to the Chief. She ran away from that house in a fright, but we don’t know what frightened her. She’s the sort of girl who might enjoy working a chap up until he lost his head—it happens every day. Then she’s frightened and bolts. When she has to explain herself she can’t say what happened, so she pitches a tale. The only solitary link with Louise is that blighted earring, and you know there’s an easy explanation for that. We don’t know where Louise went last Friday. It’s not impossible that Mary may have seen her and remembered the earrings. A lot of people go through Lenton, you know. Mary may have seen her there any time. If the earrings took her fancy, she’d remember them. When she wanted a story in a hurry, and an exciting one, don’t you think it’s the sort of thing she might fish up? Anyhow I’m going to put it up to the Chief and see what he says. What will you do with yourself?”

Miss Silver said primly, “I shall walk into the village and call on Miss Grey. There is a book she has promised to lend me.”