Death and the Maiden (11 page)

‘Take two Oounces of Jesuit's Bark, infuse it in Spring-water . . .'

Mrs S
ARAH
H
ARRISON OF
D
EVONSHIRE

(
The Housekeeper's Pocket Book, etc.
)

 

M
rs
BRADLEY
was as interested in Mr Tidson's unexpected views as, if he had intended to interest her, he could have wished. She did not betray her feelings further, however, but startled Mr Tidson by giving a short, harsh cackle.

‘It seems a pity to go home straightway,' she said. ‘Why shouldn't we do a little sightseeing? What about the Cathedral?'

‘Not that, if you have no objection. If we are going to stay out, let us take a good long walk to give us time to forget what I have said. I think you know that I intended nothing definite. It is just that one sees what one sees, one hears what one hears, and one understands with whatever understanding one has been granted by omnipotent Providence.'

‘And what do you mean by that?' asked Mrs Bradley. Mr Tidson waved a plump hand.

‘Live and let live!' he replied. ‘And now for a really long walk. Emotion shall be dissipated in action.'

Mrs Bradley was astonished by this change of plan, and she wondered what, in Mr Tidson's opinion, constituted a long walk. He turned left along the road and they walked on to the by-pass and then began to climb Saint Catherine's Hill.

Mrs Bradley made no comment. She merely lengthened
her stride and had the satisfaction, very soon, of hearing her companion begin to puff and blow. She smiled, and went almost at a run up the short turf mound as it rose ever more steeply to the earthworks.

Soon she had outdistanced Mr Tidson. She stopped when she reached the fringe of the grove of trees, and waited for him to join her. He was pouting and scowling like a bad-tempered little boy, but Mrs Bradley, unperturbed by this emotional display, raised a skinny arm and pointed downwards towards the water-meadows and over the plotted landscape with its intersecting carriers and brooks.

‘I suppose you have brought your field-glasses?' she enquired. ‘Otherwise you will scarcely see her from here.'

‘See whom? Not the nymph?' Mr Tidson's ill-temper vanished. ‘I believe,' he added, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his face, ‘you are as interested in her as I am! Confess, now, if you are not!'

‘I am quite as interested,' said Mrs Bradley emphatically. ‘But I'm still not sure that I believe in her, in spite of all you can say.'

‘Don't you?' asked Mr Tidson anxiously. ‘I do think you'd better, you know. You must try to forget what I've said this afternoon. I believe in my nymph fully, and you would be well advised to do the same.'

‘Perhaps it would make things simpler,' Mrs Bradley agreed. ‘But what do I see down there by the old canal?'

‘Where? Where?'

‘That way, look! To your left. Isn't some kind of disturbance going on? There, by the railway signal. Look!'

‘I don't see anything,' said Mr Tidson peevishly. But she noticed he had turned very pale and his plump cheeks shook. ‘We can go back that way, if you like, but I think you must be mistaken. That is – those are – the grounds of a private house. We can't get in, even if we do go down there. I know it well.'

‘I should like to go back that way,' said Mrs Bradley. She started off at the same tremendous pace as she had set in coming up-hill. Mr Tidson grunted, slipped and slithered,
and then swore in the bastard Spanish he affected when something did not please him. At last he gave up any attempt to keep level with her, and found her waiting for him on the rough and muddy path which led under the railway arch at the foot of the hill.

They returned alongside the water, but whatever Mrs Bradley had seen from the top of the hill had left no trace, and their homeward walk was uninteresting. ‘I shall come out alone this evening,' said Mr Tidson.

‘I'm afraid your relative doesn't like me very much,' Mrs Bradley said later to Miss Carmody. ‘I think I shall go upstairs early, out of his way.' She and Connie had already changed rooms, and Mrs Bradley, who had spent some time in examining number twenty-nine, thought that it had, as it were, some ghostly possibilities.

A squarish Tudor window looked on to the side entrance of the hotel, and a large open fireplace seemed to speak of logs, priest-holes and a chimney with a long and interesting history. A low window-seat concealed a box, and the room also contained a massive and gloomy cupboard.

Mrs Bradley shut the window, locked the door, took off her skirt and shoes, and, putting her head up the wide aperture and shining her torch upon the blackened brickwork, soon discovered footholds in the chimney.

She put the torch in the fender, but where she would not tread on it when she came down again, listened at the door, wedged an armchair against the cupboard, put her heaviest suitcase, fully packed, on the window-seat, and then climbed into the chimney.

About halfway up she discovered, as she had expected, that there was easy access to the roof, for the chimney terminated squarely and had no pot.

The roof here was flat, and facing her was another chimney, broad-breasted and nearly three feet thick. She walked over to it, or, rather, almost crawled, hoping that she would not be detected from the garden below. She was also in mortal fear of being spotted from somebody's bedroom window. It was by this time almost dark, however
– the chimney had been like the Pit – so she hoped to remain undetected.

It took her ten minutes to find the concealed door on the outside surface of the second chimney. The doorway had been painted to look like the brickwork, and she had to explore the whole side of the chimney, as soon as she discovered which face was of iron, before she could swing the door open.

She managed it at last. The door was on a pivot, and, as it swung, it showed a dark flight of very narrow steps. Mrs Bradley descended into the hotel and soon found herself in a small square room. There were six feet of headroom, and the floor space, roughly, was eight feet by seven. It remained to discover how to get from this elaborate priest's hole into one of the bedrooms or on to the main staircase.

She listened again, but could not hear a sound. She had closed the top door behind her and now, by carefully testing the walls, she discovered that a hidden spring gave admittance not to a bedroom or to the main staircase, but to that other priest's hole, the present, prosaic linen-cupboard passage which she had pointed out to Connie soon after their arrival at the hotel. To construct a priest's hole to conceal another priest's hole seemed to Mrs Bradley an intelligent thought, and she wished she could have shared her discovery.

However, as the ghost had taken to walking, it would be as well, Mrs Bradley thought, to keep to herself the means by which it could make its entrances. She would wait, she decided, upon the order of events before she took anyone into her confidence.

She did not undress, but sat for some time at the window, gazing out and with ears alert for sounds. There were plenty of these to be heard. Conversation, laughter, and what seemed, at one point, rather like a quarrel between Crete and Edris Tidson, came floating up out of the garden. There was the hum of traffic from the High Street, not so very far away; and, half an hour later, raucous singing from men turned out of the public house at the top of the quiet street.

Gradually all sound was hushed, but Mrs Bradley sat on in the quiet darkness. It was a warm night, and she had raised her window halfway up at the bottom as soon as she had entered the room. She knew when the lights in the public rooms went out, for they cast no more reflections on the lawn. She saw the lights in the glassed-in corridor which led to the annexe flick out one by one as a distant clock struck a quarter past eleven, and Thomas made his solemn nocturnal rounds – a Presbyterian elder sentencing the household to slumber.

Mrs Bradley sat on. All was silent and dark. She strained her ears. At last came the sound that she was waiting for. She got up noiselessly, tip-toed over to the towel rail, which she had moved out a few inches from the wall, and squeezed herself quietly behind it. She was wearing a black dress which was wide and easy-fitting. She bent and crouched so that only her eyes and the top of her head appeared above the screen she had selected, and then, with grim patience, waited, watching the chimney.

The ghost, however, came gliding in from the built-in cupboard which served the room as a wardrobe. It had to open the door of the cupboard, Mrs Bradley noted, a human trait which gave her confidence. Having entered the room, it went unhesitatingly up to the bed, which it leaned over, making a very faint mewing noise, more like a kitten than a cat. It was white and tall, but the movements it made were not menacing. Mrs Bradley started forward. The towel rail fell with a muffled sound owing to its smothering of towels. It made just sufficient noise to frighten the ghost, which turned, with a flourish of draperies.

Mrs Bradley picked up a piece of soap from the side of the bedroom basin, and flung it hard, but it was slightly wet, and slipped as she let it go. She picked up the nailbrush and let fly. There was a muffled yelp as the nailbrush got home, and the next instant the ghost had disappeared, apparently through the bedroom wall.

Mrs Bradley came out from behind the towel rail. She partly closed the window and drew the blind. Then she
switched on the light and spent the next two hours in searching and sounding every part of the room. She gave it up in the end, as being a task more suitable to daylight than to the unequal lighting given to the room by the dressing-table and bedhead switches. She then went to bed and slept soundly.

Next morning she sought out Miss Carmody.

‘Let us leave Mr Tidson to hunt alone,' she said, ‘and take Connie with us to visit Bournemouth. Why not?'

‘I shall look rather odd at Bournemouth,' said Miss Carmody. ‘I knocked into the edge of my bedroom door last night whilst I was groping for the switch in the dark. Just look at my eye! People will think I have been fighting!'

Mrs Bradley had been unable to keep a fascinated and glittering eye off Miss Carmody's contused face ever since she had first encountered her, and she welcomed this frank reference to a large and interesting bruise.

‘I wondered what you had been doing,' she said. ‘But it isn't really your eye. It is more to the side. I don't think it would notice any more at Bournemouth than it does here. But just as you like.'

‘Oh, I should like above all things to visit Bournemouth,' exclaimed Miss Carmody. ‘Do let us find Connie and tell her. I expect she is still in her room. As a matter of fact, I think Bournemouth a most restful idea! No one will question me there!'

The two ladies were in the garden. Breakfast had been in progress for an hour, and Mrs Bradley had already had toast and coffee. Miss Carmody usually waited for Crete and Mr Tidson, and sometimes for Connie, who, like nearly all girls of her age, was either out of bed before six or fast asleep until ten unless somebody woke her.

Not at all anxious that Miss Carmody should discover so soon that she and Connie had changed rooms, Mrs Bradley began to frame an excuse for keeping Miss Carmody with her, and was pleased to see Crete coming out of the sun-parlour towards them. As she drew nearer,
the two ladies raised a questioning cry, for Crete, like Miss Carmody, had an interestingly-tinted contusion just between the eyebrow and the temple.

‘Oh, yes,' she said. ‘I did a stupid thing. I tripped on the bath mat and caught my head against the edge of that silly little shelf below the mirror. You know the one I mean?'

‘Ah?' said Mrs Bradley, immensely intrigued by this revelation. But further matter for speculation was in store when they encountered Mr Tidson in the hall.

‘Good heavens!' Miss Carmody exclaimed. ‘Have
you
got a black eye, too?'

Mr Tidson warily touched the bruise at the edge of his cheek-bone.

‘Crete gave me this,' he said, with some natural annoyance. ‘I asked her to pass some cold-cream from her room to mine. Instead of handing it to me, she flung it – positively hurled it – in the direction in which I was standing, supposing, she said, that I should catch it.'

‘I hope she apologized,' said Mrs Bradley solemnly. She went close up to Mr Tidson and examined his wound minutely.

‘Well?' he said, resentfully backing away. Mrs Bradley cackled. Mr Tidson was about to add to this one tart observation when it dawned on him that Miss Carmody and his wife were both adorned with facial bruises not remarkably different from his own. The expression on his face as he made this discovery gave Mrs Bradley great pleasure. She watched the Tidsons go into breakfast, followed by Miss Carmody and Connie, and then glanced at the letters on the hall table, for the
Domus
had no letter-rack.

‘Naething for ye,' said Thomas, coming to rest beside her.

‘I am not sorry,' she said. ‘Tell me, have you had any complaints about people slipping and hurting themselves in this hotel?'

Thomas took time to consider this question.

‘Weel,' he said cautiously, ‘there was Sir William, wha
slippit on the soap in 1925, and there was a wee shrappit body by the name of Wemyss, I mind, in 1932, who was knockit over on the staircase by a professor from Harvard Univairsity. I dinna recollect ony mair.'

‘Strange! Miss Carmody and Mr and Mrs Tidson have all been injured either last night or this morning. Have you not noticed their bruises?'

Thomas clicked his tongue, but more in wordless condemnation of their carelessness than for regret at the accidents, Mrs Bradley decided. She went out to find George, her chauffeur, and, upon re-entering the hotel, she came face to face with Connie Carmody, who was just descending the stairs. Connie had her hand to her eye. She took it away to disclose an already purple swelling. Mrs Bradley could have cried ‘Eureka,' but restrained herself.