The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place (11 page)

“Is it safe to come in now?” she asked, pulling off her bonnet. “I planted our cherry tree, and watered it with a bucket from the pump. Aldous here wanted to dig the bodies right back up, didn’t you, you naughty boy?”

She sank to her knees and kissed the puppy, which attacked her face with loving licks.

“
Aldous
?” Disgraceful Mary Jane cried. “You named him after nasty Mr. Godding?”

“I thought we wanted a bulldog to protect us, not a silly spaniel,” Stout Alice said.

“Aldy’s not a silly…” Pocked Louise turned and noticed Alice’s costume for the first time. She blanched for an instant, then smiled. “I say! Spot-on, Alice! You nearly made me consider the possibility of ghosts for a second.” Aldous grew more passionate in his ardent licking, and Louise abandoned human conversation in favor of canine. “That’s a boy, there, isn’t he a good boy? We don’t need any frightful bulldog, do we, Aldy? He’s a
smart
boy, yes he is, yes he is.”

Dour Elinor blinked languidly. “What is it about pets that makes rational people start babbling like infants?”

Dear Roberta and Dull Martha joined Louise on the
f
loor to make Aldous’s acquaintance. Even Stout Alice joined the party, and admitted readily that Aldous was a smart boy and a handsome fellow and not a silly spaniel at all. He had great curly ears that
f
lapped and
f
lew like windmill blades as he spun his head.

“I hope we can manage the expense of a dog,” Smooth Kitty said. “And while we’re on the subject of money, our independent feminine utopia can’t exist long without some funds, or all this fuss over hiding the bodies will come to naught. Oh!”

Dull Martha looked up at Smooth Kitty’s exclamation. “What is it, Kitty?”

Kitty reached into her pocket and pulled out the coins from her pocket. “Nothing … just that thinking of money made me remember…”

“Yes, do tell,” Alice said. “I noticed you looked puzzled when you counted the coins in your hand this morning for Barnes.”

“Hm, did it show?” Kitty held two gold coins up for a view in better window light. “I thought these were sovereigns, but that’s not Victoria. She squinted at the coin to read the engraving. “
CAROL III, D. G. HISP. ET. IND. R
.” She turned the coin over and read the other side. “
Auspice Deo In Utroq Felix.
” Elinor? Louise? You’re our Latin scholars. What does it mean?”

Both girls peered over Kitty’s shoulder at the coins.

“Through the auspices—or the generosity, you might say, or grace, of God, we … live happily?” Dour Elinor ventured.

“Prosper,” Pocked Louise said. “Charles the Third, R for ‘Rex,’ or king. ‘Hisp’ is Hispania, or ‘Spain,’ in Latin, and ‘Ind’ is for Indies.”

The three girls looked at each other.

“So these are Spanish coins?” Disgraceful Mary Jane inquired.

“Old ones,” Kitty replied, peering again at the inscription.

“Doubloons, I should think,” offered Dour Elinor.

“Ooh, how romantic!” Disgraceful Mary Jane sighed. “They sound like something from a pirate novel.”

Pocked Louise ignored this interruption. “They’re probably worth more than their face value,” she said. “I imagine collectors would pay extra for these.”

Dear Roberta peeked in for a closer look. “But where did you find them, Kitty?”

Kitty’s mind was so busy, she almost didn’t hear the question. “Hm? Oh.” She hefted them in her palm, and thought. “These are what I thought were sovereigns when we cleaned out Mrs. Plackett’s and Mr. Godding’s pockets. They each were carrying one.”

Pocked Louise frowned. “That’s odd.”

“Family heirloom?” offered Dear Roberta.

Disgraceful Mary Jane threw her hands up in the air. “Maybe they each found one in the bottom of a drawer, or an old sea chest. Honestly, Louise, sometimes you severely overthink things. Let’s leave off with this coin nonsense and find something to eat. I’m starving.”

CHAPTER 9

The students at Saint Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies breakfasted on bread and butter and milk, and lunched on eggs gathered from the henhouse. At teatime they had toast and tea. To an outside observer these might have seemed to be the only events of this quiet day at Saint Etheldreda’s school. But as is so often the case with groups of young ladies, the real intrigue took place underneath the surface, in small domestic matters, in conversations, in whisperings, and in private thoughts.

Take, for instance, Pocked Louise’s afternoon stroll outdoors with Aldous, ambling along the hedgerows that lined Prickwillow Road. She was still fuming over Disgraceful Mary Jane saying she overthought things. A dose of occasional thinking, she thought, would do Mary Jane a mountain of good. Pocked Louise pressed her lips together grimly. She didn’t care what they said. She would never, never, never allow herself to grow to be a noodle-headed young lady whose brains had been sacrificed on the altar to boy-worship. Though Louise’s experience with males was limited, she knew enough of what sticky-fingered fiends her boy cousins were to know that no male, be he ever so combed and shoe-shined, could tempt her to give up her intellectual pursuits. Never.

She wandered around a hedge, then Aldous let out a yap and dragged her headlong into someone.

“I say! Pardon me,” that someone said, disentangling himself from the leash and from Pocked Louise. “So very sorry.”

Louise leveled a look at him. It was a young man, a few years older, she would guess, than the eldest girls at Saint Etheldreda’s. What’s more, she deduced from his well-dressed look, courteous bearing, and rather excessive smiling, he was the sort of young man that Disgraceful Mary Jane or even Smooth Kitty might fall batty over. She was in such a pique with those overbearing young ladies, and with males in general, that she chose to hate this young man on principle.

“Do you mind telling me,” said her new acquaintance, oblivious to the ill-regard in which she held him, “if this house here is the finishing school for young ladies? Saint Ethel’s?”

Louise’s gaze narrowed. What could
he
want with a finishing school? Nothing worthwhile, she was sure. Perhaps he was an old beau of Mary Jane’s, and she’d posted a letter to him the moment their backs were turned. If Disgraceful Mary Jane thought the others would stand by while she invited
f
lirtatious young men over, she had another thing coming.

“Ely has several finishing schools for young women,” Louise said stif
f
ly. “This house isn’t one of them.”

“Oh,” he said, and knitted his eyebrows together. “I thought for certain this was the right place. When I met you, I assumed, naturally, you must be one of the students.”

“I live here with my grandparents,” Louise said, inwardly surprised to find what a liar she’d become. But the last thing any of the girls needed was more visitors. It wasn’t her fault this person was so inquisitive.

He tipped the brim of his hat toward her. “My apologies, then,” he said. “A very good day to you.” And he headed off in the direction of town.

Louise watched him leave. Mary Jane and Kitty, she knew, would have fits if they knew such a well-dressed young man had come a-calling. All the more satisfaction, then, Louise thought with a private smile, she would take in forgetting she ever saw him.

Meanwhile, Dull Martha and Dear Roberta had volunteered to cook supper, but Disgraceful Mary Jane insisted on doing so herself. Mary Jane, who had never cooked a thing in her life, was certain that with the aid of Mrs. Lea’s famous cookery volume she would be perfectly able to conjure up something edible.

“She’s acting like she doesn’t trust me,” Dull Martha whispered to Dear Roberta.

“Do you think so?” Roberta whispered back with deep concern.

“Ever since … what happened at Sunday dinner, I’ve wondered,” Martha said. “I cooked, you know.”

“But surely!” remonstrated Dear Roberta, who couldn’t imagine anyone suspecting ill of her dear roommate, Martha.

Martha tugged Roberta up the stairwell and into their bedroom. “Do you want to know what I think?”

“Of course!”

Martha lowered her voice to a hushed whisper. “With all this talk of murders, I think it’s curious that Mary Jane…” Her voice trailed off.

“Yes? Go on!”

Dull Martha removed her spectacles and polished them on her skirt. “Oh, I don’t know. I feel awful even thinking it.”

Dear Roberta was practically beside herself. “Thinking
what
?”

“Well,” Martha said, “I don’t know. But she is so very risqué in her behavior, wouldn’t you agree? She’s an absolute
f
lirt! And I can’t help but wonder whether she mightn’t … Now that I speak it out loud it seems shocking, but I just wonder if she couldn’t have conceived the idea of poisoning Mrs. Plackett as a means of setting herself free.”

Dear Roberta’s jaw dropped. “No more chaperones, you mean?”

Dull Martha glanced from side to side as if fearing the walls might be listening. “It’s probably just another one of my foolish ideas, isn’t it? I should know better than to go guessing. She wouldn’t kill Mrs. Plackett just so she could go chasing boys, would she?”

Roberta thought of the many lurid crimes mentioned in the London newspapers, and shook her head. “Stranger things have happened,” she said. “Of course, you might well be wrong. The scriptures say it’s a sin to judge.”

Dull Martha hung her guilty head.

“However,” Roberta continued, “we can’t overlook the fact that she’s shown a shocking lack of reverence and respect for the dead. She’s been absolutely
f
lippant about it.”

Dull Martha sat on her bedspread and twisted the tail of her braids nervously between her fingers. “Ohhh, dear,” she said. “I feel terrible now. I feel so disloyal for thinking these things. And speaking them aloud, too.”

“Never mind, Martha.” Roberta slipped an arm around her friend. “I won’t tell a soul. We’ll forget it ever happened. But we’d both be wise to keep our eyes wide open. Just in case. We can’t forget we’ve been witness to murder.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane grew bored in midafternoon and went hunting for Smooth Kitty. She found her poring over papers at Mrs. Plackett’s writing desk, scratching figures on a blotter, and frowning.

Mary Jane sprawled upon Mrs. Plackett’s bed. “What’s the matter, Kit?” she said. “Why the long face? These murders got you down?”

“Murders? Pah,” Kitty replied. “I can’t make head nor tail of these books. Mrs. Plackett’s finances are a mess. My father would burst a blood vessel if he saw them.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane would not be put off from her chosen subject by something so mundane as bookkeeping. “Tell me, pet,” she said, “which of us do you think polished the old duffers off for good?”

Kitty’s eyebrow rose. “Which of
us
? Why do you think it was one of us?”

“Oh, I want it to be, desperately,” Mary Jane said. “A nice private, domestic vendetta, and then we can all just go on happily. Someone else, someone
out there
makes matters a frightful nuisance. One of us? Cozy as anything.”

Smooth Kitty laughed. “You really have no morals at all, do you?”

“Not a brass farthing’s worth.” Disgraceful Mary Jane lolled around on the bed, then propped herself up luxuriantly with pillows and bolsters. “Want to hear my choice for our little murderess?”

Kitty, whose mind was more occupied by totting up numbers, nodded. “Why not?”

“Elinor, obviously!”

Kitty paused to picture this. “Oh?”

“Of course, can’t you see? The girl was born in a mausoleum. Or ought to have been. Death is all she thinks about. Why, in her warped world, there’s probably nothing at all wrong with killing someone. She might have thought she was doing them a favor. You know … Mrs. Plackett’s liver complaints—just end it all, as a merciful gesture.”

Kitty found this theory amusing. “And Mr. Godding?”

Mary Jane wrinkled her nose. “What difference does it make? Perhaps she thought she’d spare him the trouble of grieving.”

Kitty tried to picture Elinor tiptoeing into the kitchen and pouring cyanide over the veal cutlets. She couldn’t. “If I were to picture Elinor in the role of murderess,” she said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t think poison. Battle-ax, perhaps, or a scythe.”

Mary Jane laughed. “I see your point.”

Kitty returned to her arithmetic. “Seventeen … twenty-three. I don’t like thinking it was one of us, so I’m not going to,” she said firmly. “Carry the two, makes fourteen. But if I did, I wouldn’t picture Elinor. I’d picture…”

“Me?”

“Don’t
f
latter yourself.”

Mary Jane pretended to pout.

“It couldn’t be one of the younger girls,” Kitty went on, now forgetting her accounting entirely. “Out of the question. I wonder … you know, I do. I wonder about someone like Alice.”

Mary Jane sat bolt upright. “Not our Alice! She’s so doggedly
decent
. And far too sensible. She doesn’t
f
ly off in rages. She’d be the last person
ever
to think of such a thing.”

Kitty nodded. “I know. And that’s why I
do
think of it.”

“But…!”

“Still waters run deep, don’t they say?”

Disgraceful Mary Jane shook her head. “Alice! I never. You know, sometimes you surprise me, Kitty Heaton.”

Kitty grinned. “If so, I learned it from you. It’s one of your gifts.”

Mary Jane preened like a cat. “One of many.”

Pocked Louise’s trip to the chemist’s shop that morning had equipped her with all the chemicals she needed to perform tests upon the veal. Now that she and her puppy – for she privately thought of Aldous as
her
puppy—were refreshed by their walk, she decided it was time someone took this crime more seriously. She set about transforming the schoolroom into a science laboratory. She had to use drinking glasses as beakers, which distressed her scientific mind, but the pursuit of truth allowed her to overlook shoddy equipment.

She soaked the two remnants of veal in two different jars, each with just enough water to submerge the meat. She then removed the meat and proceeded to swirl granules of potash into the water in each jar.