Outrageous Fortune (14 page)

Without having thought of it beforehand, Caroline found herself saying, “Please may I pass?” She had to say that because the schoolboy was standing right in the doorway. He moved as the guard came along to shut the door.

Caroline said in a soft breathless voice, “I'm getting out,” and jumped down on to the platform just as the train began to move. She didn't wait for the guard to scold her.

Mrs Rodgers was already giving her ticket. Caroline ran after her and caught her up just outside the station where Meade Hill runs steeply up between hedges full of bramble and elder.

Mrs Rodgers stared at her in astonishment, and Caroline realized that she had no idea what she was going to say. How could she when she hadn't even known that she was going to get out of the train? One minute she had just been sitting there, and the next minute she was saying, “Please, may I pass?” and jumping down from the moving train. It must have come over her suddenly that she simply couldn't let Mrs Rodgers go, and now that she had caught her up she didn't know what to say. She said the first thing that came into her head.

“Can I help you with your basket?”

Mrs Rodgers looked her up and down.

“What's a young lady like you want to carry my basket for?”

“I'm going your way.”

“And how do you know what way I'm going, miss?”

Caroline looked rather as if she had been caught stealing jam. Her lips trembled into a smile.

“I r-ran after you,” she said.

Mrs Rodgers set down her basket in the road and nodded.

“Honesty's the best policy. What brought you after me? For by the look of you you hadn't any thoughts of getting out here.”

“No,” said Caroline. “I should truly like to carry your basket.” She picked it up, and they began to mount the hill.

“And that's what you came after me for, I'll be bound!”

“No—I came after you because I wanted to talk to you.”

“That's straight anyway. And what have you got to say?”

“I didn't want to say anything. I wanted you to tell me what Mrs Henry told you.”

Mrs Rodgers swung her ample black skirts in silence. They just cleared the dust of the road. Her colour deepened as she climbed.

Caroline wished that the road was flat. She wished Mrs Rodgers would say something. She wished that she herself had said something different. In the railway carriage Mrs Rodgers had been a jolly chattering old thing; she had fairly oozed good nature and gossip. What had happened to her all of a sudden? She said, on a quick caught breath,

“Mrs Rodgers—”

Mrs Rodgers turned a streaming crimson face upon her.

“Talk on this 'ill, I can't,” she panted, and Caroline had to get what comfort she could from that. It wasn't very much.

The morning was muggy, with mist hanging about, and the heat and the hill might account for Mrs Rodgers' blank face and drawn brows—or they might not.

At the top of the hill there was a stile, and on the step of the stile Mrs Rodgers seated herself and proceeded to get her breath. Caroline stood before her with the basket and felt her courage slip and slip away.

“Well?” said Mrs Rodgers at last.

Caroline looked at her imploringly.

Mrs Rodgers fanned herself.

“Well, since we're 'ere, we'd best have it out.”

Caroline spoke before all her courage left her.

“Will you please tell me what Mrs Henry said?”

“And why?”

There was something portentous in the slow, heavy voice. Not a jolly voice, not a good-natured voice; more like the voice a judge might use when he asked whether you had anything to say before sentence was passed.

“I thought I'd like to know,” said Caroline rather faintly.

“And why?” said Mrs Rodgers in an even slower and more portentous manner.

To her horror, Caroline felt as if she was going to cry. How awful to cry in a public lane at eight o'clock in the morning, with a fat woman in black cashmere looking at you!

She began to speak quickly.

“You were telling us as the train stopped, and I—I wanted to know. You were telling everyone in the carriage.”

Mrs Rodgers nodded.

“What's taken light can be told light. 'Twasn't nothing to them, no more than it wasn't to me. Stands to reason everybody'll talk about a murder—and this is as good as one by all accounts.”

“Then won't you tell me?”

“I dunno,” said Mrs Rodgers. She pursed her lips together and cast an odd look at Caroline. “Do you know where I'm going?” she said with apparent irrelevance. “No, I don't suppose you do. Well, I'm walking across the fields by this here footpath to Stowbury to spend the day with my sister, Harriet Brown, that used to be Harriet Welsh.”

Caroline's colour changed sharply. She had the horrible sensation of having walked into a trap. That she should have followed her old nurse's sister was a piece of the most devastating bad luck. Perhaps she didn't know her—
perhaps
—

Mrs Rodgers nodded again.

“I knew you at once, miss, though I could see as you didn't know me. You haven't changed a mite since Harty 'ud bring you in for a cup of tea and some of my mint honey. I've put on a bit since those days, so I made sure you didn't know me. But I knew you. 'That's Miss Caroline Leigh,' I says to myself, and when you come running after me I got a turn, and all the way up the 'ill I been trying to make up my mind what I was going to say.”

“Mrs Rodgers—”

“I'm a-going to tell you what Mrs Henry told me, and I'm not a-going to ask you why you want to know, because maybe I know already and maybe I don't—and anyway least said, soonest mended.”

“Yes?” said Caroline in a whisper.

“What I said in the train is neither here nor there. There isn't a servant up at the Hall as don't know there was a tray and glasses in the study the night Mr Van Berg was shot, and the housemaid see with her own eyes how the police took the finger-prints—a clapper-tongued woman if there ever was one—so there ain't no secrets there. No—it was the butler told Mrs Henry what I'm a-telling you. They're keeping company, and going to be married come Christmas, and he told her and she told me, being, as I said, my brother Jim's second wife's cousin-in-law through her late 'usband, Albert Henry, being Maria's cousin, and one way and another I've know her, girl and woman, the last forty years.”

“What did she tell you?”

“When they had finished taking the finger-prints and all the rest of it, the inspector he sees all the servants separate, and then he has the butler back and he says, ‘I understand,' he says, ‘as Mr Van Berg kep' a book with all his friends' finger-prints in it,' he says. ‘That's right,' says Jackson—that's the butler's name. ‘Well,' says the inspector, ‘I wants to see that book.' And Jackson, he says, ‘It's always a-laying on Mr Van Berg's table, and whenever he has a visitor he gets him to make his mark and sign his name.' And the inspector laughs and says, ‘Very handy for us, Mr Jackson'—they being on friendly terms along of Mrs Henry—Albert Henry 'aving been a police sergeant, like I said.”

Caroline's eyes widened.

“And then it wasn't so handy after all,” said Mrs Rodgers—“for lo and be'old the book wasn't nowheres to be seen.”

The blood came back into Caroline's cheeks with a rush. She said,

“Oh!”

Mrs Rodgers waved her hand as one who commands silence.

“And where was it?” she demanded.

Caroline caught her breath.

“Pushed right down be'ind all the books at the back of the bookshelf. They went on looking till they'd found it. And then what do you think?”

“I don't know,” said Caroline, trembling. Mrs Rodgers looked at her with a kind of awful pity.

“There was a page tore out,” she said.

Perhaps it was because she had been awake all night, perhaps it was because she had had a dreadful picture in her own mind of a finger-print with Jim's name signed underneath it, but at these words, she saw the stile with Mrs Rodgers sitting on it tilt at the strangest angle; the hedge swung across the road and back again. You can't stand up straight when things begin to slip and tilt and slide like that. Caroline felt the grit of the road against her knees and the palms of her hands. And then Mrs Rodgers was shaking her by the shoulder and saying something. But Caroline never knew what it was, because she had fainted.

XVI

She was really only unconscious for about a minute, but it was long enough for Mrs Rodgers to have laid her down flat. She had got a new cabbage-leaf out of the basket and was fanning her with it. She looked hotter than ever, her face like a very red sun coming up in a fog.

Caroline opened her eyes wide. There seemed to be a good deal of fog, but it was getting less. She got up on her elbow, and was relieved to find that things had stopped tilting. Then she remembered why she had fainted—she had been so horribly afraid that Mrs Rodgers was going to say that the police had found Jim's finger-prints. Jim would have been sure to have made his mark in Mrs Van Berg's book. A page had been torn out. Was it that page? Who had torn it out?

“Better keep laying down a bit,” said Mrs Rodgers.

“No—I'm all right—I am really.” She sat up and leaned against the stile.

Mrs Rodgers was kneeling on the stubbly grass. She sat back on her heels, fanning herself now instead of Caroline.

“Who tore out the page?” said Caroline. She didn't feel as if she could wait a single moment before she asked that question.

“Who do you suppose?” said Mrs Rodgers.

“I don't know.”

“Who would tear it out, if it wasn't the one who shot Mr Van Berg? It stands to reason he wouldn't go away and leave his finger-prints there all ready for the police, and his name signed to them—would he? That's what I said to Mrs Henry. And Jackson, he says, ‘There's only Mr Van Berg's friends in that book.' Quite shocked he was. ‘Then,' I says, ‘it was one of his friends as shot him, Mr Jackson?' You're not feeling faint again, are you, miss?”

Caroline bit her lip. There was something wrong about the way Mrs Rodgers was arguing, but she couldn't quite get hold of it—only there was something wrong. She thought of Jim, and she said with a rush,

“Oh, he
wouldn't
! A friend
wouldn't
!”

Mrs Rodgers shook her head.

“Nobody can't say that. Folks get quarrelling, and you can't say what'll happen. But Mrs Henry, she says, and she holds to it very strong, ‘What 'ud be the good of his tearing the finger-prints out of the book and leaving the glass he'd drunk out of fairly plastered with 'em? It wouldn't 'ave took 'em 'arf a minute to 'ave wiped them off,' she says—and there's something in that.” She got up and dusted her knees with the cabbage leaf. “I can't sit on my 'eels like I could when I was a gel. Fourteen stone's fourteen stone—and I shouldn't wonder if it wasn't fifteen now.” She sat down on the stile again.

A little colour came back into Caroline's cheeks. That was it—that was what she had been trying to get hold of. If it had been Jim who had torn the page out of the book, then why hadn't he wiped his glass? Everyone knows about finger-prints nowadays. He hadn't wiped his glass because he hadn't anything to hide. He hadn't shot Elmer Van Berg.

She knelt up by Mrs Rodgers and laid a hand on her knee.

“In the train you said—”

Mrs Rodgers looked glum.

“And I'd better have held my tongue. No need to tell me that.”

“Oh, I didn't mean that—I didn't truly. Oh, dear Mrs Rodgers—I didn't mean anything like that.”

Mrs Rodgers relaxed a little.

“In for a penny, in for a pound. What did I say?”

“Something about Mrs Van Berg's maid.”

“A French 'ussy!” said Mrs Rodgers. “And if Mrs Van Berg 'ad 'arf an idea of the things that 'ussy's been 'inting—because 'ints is 'er line, and as Mrs Henry says to me, ‘If there's one thing despisabler than another, it's an 'inting woman. Say what you've got to say and 'ave done with it,' Mrs Henry says, ‘and then you know where you are—but when it comes to 'inting and prying and listening at doors and reading other people's letters, there's no one don't know where they are. Not that it's only foreigners that's given to it, for that there Miss Bussell that's housekeeper at the Hall she's the worse of the two, and the dear knows how Mrs Henry's stood it, for I wouldn't.'”

Caroline patted Mrs Rodgers' knee.

“What did the maid say?”

“Miss Louise, they call her. Well, she don't
say
nothing. That's just her aggravatingness—she'll 'int and 'int until you're sick, sore and sorry, and then she'll slip out of the whole thing and pretend she never said nothing.”

“What does she hint?”

Mrs Rodgers gave a kind of snort.

“'Int
? She's as good as said it wasn't no secret to her what name was tore out, and then went back on it.”

Caroline looked up into Mrs Rodgers' red face with the look of a frightened child.

“How could she know what name had been torn out?”

“There isn't much goes on in the house as she
don't
know—picking, and prying, and 'inting! 'Orrid, I call it! Letting on she knows things about Mrs Van Berg too!”

“What sort of things?”

“She's a wicked 'ussy,” said Mrs Rodgers, “and I wouldn't repeat what she says, if it weren't for a warning. You might know someone as wanted warning, or you mightn't. If you don't, there's no harm done, and if you do—well you was Harty's baby, and I took to you myself when you came to tea and thanked me so pretty for the honeycomb.”

“It was lovely honey,” said Caroline. “You were very, very kind.
Please,
Mrs Rodgers, tell me as much as you can.”