The Bungalow Mystery (30 page)

Conversation during the meal was, of course, restricted to the baldest commonplaces. They talked of their travels, of the beauties of Sermoneta, of Roger's labours in Germany. At last, when all had finished, Courtenay pushed back his chair with an air of relief.

“Now, come, Roger, we will have our cigars on the veranda where it is cool and quiet; Daphne can bring little Jim to us there.”

Lady Courtenay made some laughing remark as she glided away, and Roger followed his host through the window. Two hammock-chairs stood outside; Courtenay motioned Roger to one, and sank in the other himself.

“Well, Roger, old boy,” he said when they had lighted their cigars, “don't you want to ask after your old friends at Oakthorpe?”

“Well, you see, you keep me pretty well posted up in the news.” Roger watched his smoke curling up to the roof. “I saw a paragraph concerning Miss Luxmore's forthcoming marriage in one of the papers.”

Courtenay looked at him curiously beneath his lowered eyelids.

“Ah, you saw that!” He lay back and idly blew his smoke into gay twists. “Roger, I know you'll think I am a lazy fellow; but even with the best of artificial limbs walking is not an unmixed joy, and my soul pines for a particular brand of tobacco. There is a jar of it in the
salon
, where we were before lunch. I wonder whether you would mind fetching it for me.”

“Of course not!” Roger rose. “Don't you think of getting up while I am here.”

He found his way across the hall to the
salon
. As he opened the door he heard a slight movement; a tall, white-clad figure rose from the low seat by the window.

For the moment Lavington's eyes, coming from the dimness of the hall, were dazzled by the sunshine.

“James sent me for his tobacco, Lady Courtenay,” he began. Then he stopped short, his face changed.

“Miss Luxmore! I did not know—I had no idea—”

Elizabeth moved forward. Roger stood still. His heart was beating wildly; he did not know what to say; and it was Elizabeth who broke the embarrassing silence.

“I wanted to see you,” she said tremulously, “and so I made James and Daphne promise—I told them not to tell you. I knew you would not come if you knew.”

She was looking a little older, a little thinner, Roger saw now that he was becoming accustomed to the light. There were faint hollows in the perfect oval of her cheeks; there was a pathetic droop about the corners of the sweet, curved mouth; but in the eyes of the man watching her she had never looked lovelier, more adorable. With a supreme effort he pulled himself together.

“You were quite mistaken, Miss Luxmore,” he said gravely. “I was extremely rude to you the last time we met. I have often hoped that some day I might have the opportunity of apologizing. I can only assure you now that the words were no sooner spoken than they were regretted.”

“Oh. You were quite right to be angry!” Elizabeth said with a little sob. “That—that did not matter.”

“I had no right,” Lavington contradicted her stiffly. “But since you are good enough—” He broke off abruptly. “I must not forget to congratulate you, Miss Luxmore,” he resumed in a lighter tone.

“Oh, that!”—Elizabeth interrupted him—“that was all a mistake. It was contradicted the next day. Didn't you see it?”

The joy light leaped into Roger's eyes. Could he hope after all? Was the prize still to be won?

“There has been no question of an engagment with Mr. Whitstone. The notice was a mistake on the part of the paper.” Elizabeth Luxmore's beautiful eyes were fixed on Roger's changing countenance as she spoke.

“A mistake!” Roger caught his breath. “I beg your pardon. I didn't know.”

The girl pouted as she glanced up at him for one moment from beneath her upcurled brown lashes.

“I—think you ought to have known better.”

A flash of swift, incredible joy swept over Roger, then it passed, leaving him white and cold.

“I don't understand,” he said, bewildered. “I quite thought—”

But Elizabeth had seen and understood the change in his face, a misty gladness was shining in her brown eyes, her lips were trembling.

“You—you won't understand,” she whispered. “Oh, Roger, I have not forgotten”—she paused, the swiftly hot colour flashed over face and neck and temples—“what you told me when you thought I was Daphne.”

The man's dark, rugged face lighted up; he made one swift forward movement as if to gather her in his arms. Then he remembered, and stopped short.

“But it was hopeless then!” he groaned. “It is hopeless now. I am only a poor man, a comparatively unknown scientist.”

“Father said the services you had rendered humanity in the recent researches had placed your name on the foremost list of men of science,” Elizabeth quoted demurely. “He said you were a match for anyone. But, of course, if you don't want—if you have changed your mind”—in a small voice.

“I? Changed my mind?” The man laughed aloud recklessly. “When for every moment of these two years I have been hungering for you, for the touch of your hand, for the glance of your eyes.”

Elizabeth drew a little nearer.

“Then why don't you tell me again? O–h, Roger!”

For the man's arms had closed round her, had crushed her against his breast, his lips were pressed to the mass of wavy, brown hair that lay across his shoulder.

THE END

Annie Haynes was born in 1865, the daughter of an ironmonger.

By the first decade of the twentieth century she lived in London and moved in literary and early feminist circles. Her first crime novel,
The Bungalow Mystery
, appeared in 1923, and another nine mysteries were published before her untimely death in 1929.

Who Killed Charmian Karslake?
appeared posthumously, and a further partially-finished work,
The Crystal Beads Murder
, was completed with the assistance of an unknown fellow writer, and published in 1930.

The Abbey Court Murder

The Secret of Greylands

The Blue Diamond

The Witness on the Roof

The House in Charlton Crescent

The Crow's Inn Tragedy

The Master of the Priory

The Man with the Dark Beard

The Crime at Tattenham Corner

Who Killed Charmian Karslake?

The Crystal Beads Murder

“There's no dirty trick he wouldn't play—it's my belief that he wouldn't even stop at murder!”

Her husband unmasked as a scoundrel, Lady Cynthia Letchingham seeks refuge at her cousin Hannah's north-country home Greylands. But on Cynthia's arrival, she finds Hannah an invalid, having recently suffered a mysterious paralysis; the house is devoid of servants, and Hannah's husband, charming and sinister by turns, keeps watch over everything and everyone. Only the presence of charming Sybil Hammond and a darkly handsome neighbour relieve the atmosphere for Cynthia – but then a dark red stain appears mysteriously on the sleeve of her coat…

What has really happened to Hannah, and the other entangled mysteries along the way, make
The Secret of Greylands
(1924) an absorbing golden age crime novel matching Wilkie Collins' high Victorian gothic to the agility of early jazz age fiction. This new edition, the first in over eighty years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

“Not only a crime story of merit, but also a novel which will interest readers to whom mystery for its own sake has little appeal.”
Nation

“Full of thrills and unexpected developments.”
Star

“A most skilfully written detective story and the mystery is carried through quite brilliantly.”
Clarion

“A capital story— highly ingenious.”
Truth

“G
LASTWICK
? Next stopping-place, miss! We ought to be there in twenty minutes.”

Cynthia Letchingham shivered as she sat back in the corner of her third-class railway carriage. She felt a sudden shrinking from the end of this journey of hers. After all, she wondered if she had made a mistake in coming? Then, for the hundredth time, she told herself that she could have done nothing else. But, as she mechanically watched the dreary northern country through which they were passing, her eyes filled with tears—she felt so young, so friendless, so alone. At last she took a letter from her hand-bag. The envelope was soiled and creased as if with much carrying about, and was addressed to Miss Cynthia Densham, in an old woman's shaking writing.

The mist before Cynthia's eyes thickened as she looked at it. Alas, she who had been yesterday morning Cynthia Densham was now Cynthia Letchingham, a woman flying from the man she dreaded most on earth—her husband! 

She drew out the letter from its envelope and glanced over it once more:

Here the letter broke off abruptly and began lower down the page in a strangely different strain.

Cynthia read it over again; she felt the same thrill of amazement as when she first saw this extraordinary epistle. What could be wrong with her cousin, Lady Hannah Gillman?

At any rate, Lady Hannah lived in a country-house far away from London; she had begged Cynthia to come to her, and to the best of the girl's belief her husband had never heard of the old lady. Greylands seemed to Cynthia the only refuge to which she could go in her present sore straits.

She slipped the letter back into its envelope and opened her bag to put it away. As she did so, she caught sight of another letter folded away in the corner—a letter, the very look of which drove the blood from her cheeks and moistened her forehead with sickly fear. And yet it did not look such a terrifying affair—just a very short note, undated, with no address. It began abruptly:

If it had only reached its destination two hours earlier! But already Cynthia Densham was Lady Letchingham when she received it.

And then she had not taken it on trust. She had taxed her newly-made husband with being Alice Winthrop's betrayer. The very memory of the scene that followed was terrible and, seizing her first chance of escape, she had fled from her husband and, remembering her Cousin Hannah's letter, had determined to appeal to her for refuge. But now that the actual moment was at hand she was beginning to feel nervous, and to wonder uncertainly what kind of a reception her Cousin Hannah would give her. Quite possibly she thought, she might have changed her mind about wishing to see her; in any case, she would certainly not expect to see her now, and she asked herself for the hundredth time whether she had done wisely in coming to Greylands for refuge.

She knew but little of her Cousin Hannah, as she had been taught to call her. That Lady Hannah Gillman, the daughter of an impoverished Irish peer, was her father's cousin Cynthia knew; and she had sometimes fancied that in their youth there had been some closer and warmer tie. The girl remembered still how, when she was a child, on one of her rare visits her Cousin Hannah had been left alone with her, and she had never forgotten how she had been caught up and the passionate kisses mingled with bitter tears that had been pressed upon her cheeks.

After her father's death, however, the acquaintance had ceased; without the matter being put into so many words, Cynthia had gathered that her mother did not care for Hannah Hammond, as Lady Hannah was then. For many years, on her birthday, an expensive present had come for Cynthia from her father's cousin, with a few brief lines expressing the donor's best wishes for the occasion; that and Cynthia's letter of thanks had been the only communication between them.

Through a mutual relative, however, Mrs Densham and her daughter had heard that a large fortune had been left to Lady Hannah, and that she had virtually adopted the orphan son of her only sister, who had married a Scotch baronet and died fifteen years afterwards, predeceasing her husband, and leaving this one child, in regard to whom Lady Hannah now took his mother's place.

Then, quite casually, just before Mrs Densham's death, Cynthia had heard that there had been a quarrel, that young Sir Donald Farquhar had gone to seek his fortune ranching in British Columbia, and that Lady Hannah was left alone. She would have had no difficulty in obtaining another heir among her numerous connexions; and her relatives were still speculating as to upon whom her choice would fall when they were thunderstruck to receive the announcement of her marriage with a man considerably younger than herself, whom she had met while staying in a  
pension
at Brussels. She had not suffered any hint of her intention to get abroad until the wedding was an accomplished fact, and indignation and remonstrance were alike useless.