The Nine Tailors (19 page)

“There, there!” said her husband, embarrassed, and sprinkling a great quantity of vinegar on his tinned salmon, “it’s all over now, and there’s no call to get talking that way.”

“Of course not,” said the Superintendent. “Not but what you had a pretty stiff time of it, didn’t you, Will? Delirious and all that kind of thing, I’ll lay. I know what pneumonia is, for it carried off my old mother-in-law in 1922. It’s a very trying thing to nurse, is pneumonia.”

“So ’tis,” agreed Mrs. Thoday. “Very bad he was, that night. Kept on trying to get out of his bed and go to church. He thought they was ringing the peal without him, though I kept on telling him that was all rung and finished with New Year’s Day. A terrible job I had with him, and nobody to help me, Jim having left us that very morning. Jim was a great help while he was here, but he had to go back to his ship. He stayed as long as he could, but of course he’s not his own master.”

“No,” said Mr. Blundell. “Mate on a merchantman, isn’t he? How’s he getting along? Have you heard from him lately?”

“We had a postcard last week from Hong Kong,” said Mary, “but he didn’t say much. Only that he was well and love to the children. He hasn’t sent nothing but postcards this voyage, and he must be terrible busy, for he’s such a man for writing letters as a rule.”

“They’ll be a bit shorthanded, maybe,” said Will. “And it’s an anxious time for men in his line of business, freights being very scarce and hard to come by. It’ll be all this depression, I suppose.”

“Yes, of course. When do you expect him back?”

“Not for I don’t know when,” replied Will. The Superintendent looked sharply at him, for he seemed to detect a note almost of satisfaction in the tone. “Not if trade’s decent, that is. You see, his ship don’t make regular trips. She follows cargo, as they call it, tramping round from port to port wherever there’s anything to be picked up.”

“Ah, yes, of course. What’s the name of the ship, again?”

“The
Hannah Brown.
She belongs to Lampson & Blake of Hull. Jim is doing very well, I’m told, and they set great store by him. If anything happened to Captain Woods, they’d give the ship to Jim. Wouldn’t they, Will?”

“So he says,” replied Thoday uneasily. “But it don’t do to count on anything these days.”

The contrast between the wife’s enthusiasm and the husband’s lack of it was so marked, that Mr. Blundell drew his own conclusions. “So Jim’s been making trouble between ’em, has he?” was his unspoken comment. “That explains a lot. But it doesn’t help me much. Better change the subject.”

“Then you didn’t happen to see anything going on at the church that night?” he said. “No lights moving about? Nothing of that kind?”

“I didn’t move from Will’s bedside all night,” replied Mrs. Thoday, with a hesitating glance at her husband. “You see, he was so ill, and if I left him a minute, he’d be throwing the clothes off and trying to get up. When it wasn’t the peal that was in his mind, it was the old trouble—you know.”

“The old Wilbraham affair?”

“Yes. He was all muddled up in his head, thinking the—the—that dreadful trial was on and he had to stand by me.”

“That’ll
do!
” cried Thoday, suddenly, pushing his plate away so violently that the knife and fork clattered from the plate upon the table. “I won’t have you fretting yourself about that old business no more. All that’s dead and buried. If-it come up in my mind when I wasn’t rightly in my senses, I can’t help that. God knows, I’d be the last to put you in mind of it if I’d been able to help myself. You did ought to know that.”

“I’m not blaming you, Will.”

“And I won’t have nothing more said about it in my house. What do you want to come worrying her this way, Mr. Blundell? She’s told you as she don’t know a thing about this chap that was buried, and that’s all there is to it. What I may have said and done, when I was ill, don’t matter a hill of beans.”

“Not a scrap,” admitted the Superintendent, “and I’m very sorry such an allusion should have come up, I’m sure. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. You can’t assist me and that’s all there is to it. I’m not saying it isn’t a disappointment, but a policeman’s job’s all disappointments, and one must take the rough with the smooth. Now I’ll be off and let the youngsters come back to their tea. By the way, what’s gone with the parrot?”

“We’ve put him in the other room,” said Will, with a scowl. “He’s taken to shrieking fit to split your head.”

“That’s the worst of parrots,” said Mr. Blundell. “He’s a good talker, though. I’ve never heard a better.”

He bade them a cheerful good evening and went out. The two Thoday children—who had been banished to the woodshed during the discussion of murders and buryings, unsuited to their sex and tender years—ran down to open the gate for him.

“’Evening, Rosie,” said Mr. Blundell, who never forgot anybody’s name, “’evening, Evvie. Are you being good girls at school?”

But the voice of Mrs. Thoday calling them at that moment to their tea, the Superintendent received but a brief answer to his question.

* * *

Mr. Ashton was a farmer of the old school. He might have been fifty years old, or sixty or seventy, or any age. He spoke in a series of gruff barks, and held himself so rigidly that if he had swallowed a poker it could only have produced unseemly curves and flexions in his figure. Wimsey, casting a thoughtful eye upon his hands, with their gnarled and chalky joints, concluded, however, that his unbending aspect was due less to austerity than to chronic arthritis. His wife was considerably younger than himself; plump where he was spare, bounce-about where he was stately, merry where he was grave, and talkative where he was monosyllabic. They made his lordship extremely welcome and offered him a glass of homemade cowslip wine.

“It’s not many that makes it now,” said Mrs. Ashton. “But it was my mother’s recipe, and I say, as long as there’s peggles to be got, I’ll make my peggle wine. I don’t hold by all this nasty stuff you get at the shops. It’s good for nothing but to blow out the stomach and give you gas.”

“Ugh!” said Mr. Ashton, approvingly.

“I quite agree with you, Mrs. Ashton,” said his lordship. “This is excellent.” And so it was. “It is another kindness I have to thank you for.” And he expressed his gratitude for the first-aid given to his car the previous January.

“Ugh!” said Mr. Ashton. “Pleased, I’m sure.”

“But I always hear of Mr. Ashton engaged in some good work or other,” went on his lordship. “I believe he was the good Samaritan who brought poor William Thoday back from Walbeach the day he was taken ill.”

“Ugh!” repeated Mr. Ashton. “Very fortunate we happened to see him. Ugh! Very bad weather for a sick man. Ugh! Dangerous thing, influenza.”

“Dreadful!” said his wife. “Poor man—he was quite reeling with it as he came out of the Bank. I said to Mr. Ashton, ‘How terrible bad poor Will do look, to be sure! I’m sure he’s not fit to go home.’ And sure enough, we hadn’t got but a mile or so out of the town when we saw his car drawn up by the side of the road, and him quite helpless. It was God’s mercy he didn’t drive into the Drain and kill himself. And with all that money on him, too! Dear, dear! What a terrible loss it would have been. Quite helpless and out of his head he was, counting them notes over and dropping of them all over the place. ‘Now, Will,’ I said, ‘you just put them notes back in your pocket and keep quiet and we’ll drive you home. And you’ve no call to worry about the car,’ I said, ‘for we’ll stop at Turner’s on the way and get him to bring it over next time he comes to Fenchurch. He’ll do it gladly, and he can go back on the ’bus.’ So he listened to me and we got him into our car and brought him home. And a hard time he had, dear, dear! He was prayed for in church two weeks running.”

“Ugh!” said Mr. Ashton.

“What he ever wanted to come out for in such weather I can’t think,” went on Mrs. Ashton, “for it wasn’t market day, and we wouldn’t have been there ourselves, only for Mr. Ashton having to see his lawyer about Giddings’ lease, and I’m sure if Will had wanted any business done, we’d have been ready to do it for him. Even if it was the Bank, he could have trusted us with it, I should think. It’s not as though Mr. Ashton couldn’t have taken care of two hundred pounds, or two thousand, for that matter. But Will Thoday was always very close about his business.”

“My dear!” said Mr. Ashton, “ugh! It may have been Sir Henry’s business. You wouldn’t have him anything but close about what’s not, rightly speaking, his affair.”

“And since when, Mr. Ashton,” demanded his lady, “has Sir Henry’s family banked at the London and East Anglia? Let alone that Sir Henry was always a deal too considerate to send a sick man out to do business for him in a snowstorm? I’ve told you before that I don’t believe that two hundred pounds had anything to do with Sir Henry and you’ll find out one of these days I’m right, as I always am. Aren’t I, now?”

“Ugh!” said Mr. Ashton. “You make a lot of talk, Maria and some of it’s bound to be right. Funny if it wasn’t, now and again. Ugh! But you’ve no call to be interfering with Will’s money. You leave that to him.”

“That’s true enough,” admitted Mrs. Ashton, amiably. “I do let my tongue run on a bit, I’ll allow. His lordship must excuse me.”

“Not at all,” said Wimsey. “In a quiet place like this, if one doesn’t talk about one’s neighbours, what is there to talk about? And the Thodays are really your only near neighbours, aren’t they? They’re very lucky. I’ll be bound, when Will was laid up, you did a good bit of the nursing, Mrs. Ashton.”

“Not as much as I’d have liked,” said Mrs. Ashton. “My daughter was took ill at the same time—half the village was down with it, if it comes to that. I managed to run in now and again, of course—’twouldn’t be friendly else—and our girl helped Mary with the cooking. But what with being up half the night—”

This gave Wimsey his opportunity. In a series of tactful inquiries he led the conversation to the matter of lights in the churchyard. “There, now!” exclaimed Mrs. Ashton. “I always thought as there might be something in that tale as little Rosie Thoday told our Polly. But children do have so many fancies, you never know.”

“Why, what tale was that?” asked Wimsey.

“Ugh! foolish nonsense, foolish nonsense,” said Mr. Ashton. “Ghosts and what not.”

Oh,
that’s
foolish enough, I dare say,” retorted his lady, “but you know well enough, Luke Ashton, that the child might be telling the truth, ghost or no ghost. You see your lordship, it’s this way. My girl Polly—she’s sixteen now and going out to service next autumn, for whatever people may say and whatever airs they may give themselves, I will maintain there’s nothing like good service to train a girl up to be a good wife, and so I told Mrs. Wallace only last week. It’s not standing behind a counter all day selling ribbons and bathing-dresses (if they call them dresses, with no legs and no backs and next to no fronts neither) will teach you how to cook a floury potato, let alone the tendency to fallen arches and varicose veins. Which,” added Mrs. Ashton triumphantly, “she couldn’t hardly deny, suffering sadly from her legs as she do.”

Lord Peter expressed his warm appreciation of Mrs. Ashton’s point of view and hinted that she had been about to say that Polly—

“Yes, of course. My tongue do run on and no mistake, but Polly’s a good girl, though I say it, and Rosie Thoday’s always been a pet of Polly’s, like, ever since she was quite a baby and Polly only seven. Well, then, it was a good time ago, now—when would it be, Luke? End of January, maybe, near enough—it was pretty near dark at six o’clock, so it couldn’t be much later—well, call it end of January—Polly comes on Rosie and Evvie sitting together under the hedge just outside their place, both of them crying. ‘Why, Rosie,’ says Polly, ‘what’s the matter?’ And Rosie says, Nothing, now that Polly’s come and can they walk with her to the Rectory, because their Dad has a message for Rector. Of course, Polly was willin’ enough, but she couldn’t understand what they was cryin’ about, and then, after a bit—for you know how difficult it is to get children to tell you what they’re frightened on—it comes out that they’re afraid to go past the churchyard in the dark. Well, Polly being a good girl, she tells ’em there’s no call to be frighted, the dead being in the arms of our Saviour and not having the power to come out o’ their graves nor to do no harm to nobody. But that don’t comfort Rosie, none the more for that, and in the end Polly makes out that Rosie’s seen what she took to be the spirit of Lady Thorpe a-flittin’ bout her grave. And it seems the night she see her was the night of the funeral.”

“Dear me,” said Wimsey. “What exactly did she see?”

“No more than a light, by what Polly could make out. That was one of the nights Will Thoday was very bad, and it seems Rosie was up and about helping her mother—for she’s a good, handy child, is Rosie—and she looks out o’ the window and sees the light just a-rising out of where the grave would be.”

“Did she tell her mother and father?”

“Not then, she didn’t. She didn’t like to, and I remember well, as a child I was just the same, only with me it was a funny sort of thing that used to groan in the wash-house, which I took to be bears—but as to telling anybody, I’d ha’ died first. And so would Rosie, only that night her father wanted her to go a message to the Rectory and she tried everything to get off doing it, and at last he got angry and threatened to take a slipper to her. Not that he meant it, I don’t suppose,” said Mrs. Ashton, “for he’s a kind man as a rule, but he hadn’t hardly got over his illness and he was fratchety, like, as sick people will be. So then Rosie made up her mind to tell him what she seen. Only that made him angrier still, and he said she was to go and no more nonsense, and never to speak about ghosts, and such like to him again. If Mary had been there, she’d a-gone, but she was out getting his medicine from Dr. Baines, and the ’bus don’t come back till half-past seven and Will wanted the message sent particular, though I forget now what it were. So Polly told Rosie it couldn’t have been Lady Thorpe’s spirit, for that was at rest, and if it had been, Lady Thorpe wouldn’t do harm to a living soul; and she said Rosie must a-seen Harry Gotobed’s lantern. But it couldn’t well a-been that, for by what the child said it was one o’clock in the morning past that Rosie see the light. Dear me an’ all! I’m sure if I’d a-known then what I know now, I’d a-paid more attention to it.”