Outrageous Fortune (6 page)

His head swam for a moment. Then he straightened up and half turned, still leaning on the mantelpiece. He caught a curious look on Nesta's face, a watching look, but it went past him.

“Is Van Berg dead?” he said.

“Not
yet
,” said Nesta.

“Is he bad?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“If he doesn't die for a year and a day they can't hang you.”

His voice came at her with an angry leap.

“Is he bad?”

“So so.” And then, “It's not your fault he's not dead. You let him have it all right.”

He went over to the window and threw it up. He had to push past the pink geraniums; one of the bright blooms snapped off. The room had suddenly seemed crowded with used air. Outside, a light wet wind blew veeringly. There was rain in the wind, but it would not fall yet awhile. It struck damp and cool against his face, and he was glad of it.

Nesta's voice came from close behind him.

“Where did you put the emeralds, Jimmy?”

He turned blindly, pushed past her, and went blundering through the door and out into the street.

VII

Caroline drove to Marley, which, as the day sister had told her, was only eight miles from Elston. She found a charming little village with stone walls and thatched roofs. The cottage gardens were full of white and crimson phloxes, and bergamots, and marigolds, and home-painted signs with the word tea printed on them in tall straggly letters. The thatched roofs were doubtless a refuge for earwigs, but though Marley contained some six hundred inhabitants, with the usual allowance of cows, cats, pigs, hens and children, it did not, so far as Caroline could ascertain, conceal Mr and Mrs James Riddell.

At first this made Caroline angry. A very bright colour bloomed in her cheeks, and she thought of several things which she would have liked to say to Mrs Riddell. Later on, whilst she was having tea in the prettiest of the cottage gardens, she had what she called a brain-wave. There
were
earwigs in the thatch. She had just fished the third out of her tea, when the brain waved and she wanted to know why Mrs Riddell had said she was coming to Marley when she wasn't coming to Marley.

Caroline had, of course, taken the greatest possible dislike to what she described as that snatching woman. But even people whom you dislike very much don't as a rule tell entirely purposeless lies; so why had the Snatcher said she was coming to Marley?

Caroline drank some of her tea hastily, because she was very thirsty and she wanted to get in before the next earwig. She had a feeling that there were going to be more earwigs, and sure enough when she put down her cup there was one in the saucer. She never killed anything, so she just said, “Shush!” and tipped it on to rather a moth-eaten marigold. Then she thought very seriously about Mrs James Riddell. And the more she thought, the less she could think of any reason why she should have told that lie—
unless
—

The “unless” was so exciting that Caroline felt quite dazzled by it. Why does anyone give a false address? Because they don't want to give a real one—and they only don't want to give a real one because they've something they're ashamed of or something they've got to hide. Mrs Riddell had come and fetched
him
away from the Elston cottage hospital. She had
said
that he was Jim Riddell, and she had
said
that she was going to Marley. Well, she hadn't told the truth about going to Marley, so why should she have told the truth about
Jim
being Jim Riddell? There may be people whose minds do not work like this, but Caroline's mind worked this way.

She deflected a spider from the milk-jug, drank the rest of her cup of tea, and was quite, quite sure that Mrs Riddell was not only a Snatcher but a Lying Snatcher, and that for some irrelevant reason of her own she had disappeared into the blue with Jim Randal—“Because if it wasn't Jim, how did he have a bit of my letter in his pocket? You can't get away from that—nobody can.” She could see the twirl with which she had written Caroline—quite an extra one because she was so thrilled about Jim. When you've got one man in your family, and have made rather a special hero of him, and haven't seen him for seven years, it just naturally runs to twirls. Why should anyone but Jim Randal have the torn-off end of a letter with Caroline on it? She ought to have asked the day sister whether it was Caroline with a twirl, because that would have settled it—not that it needed settling, because she felt quite, quite sure. On the strength of which she drank another cup of tea, and was glad that her name was Caroline, and not a name that just anyone might have. She had, of course, never heard of old Caroline Bussell who was housekeeper at Packham Hall.

Well, if the snatching Mrs Riddell had stolen Jim Randal, she had got to be found. The bother was that Caroline hadn't any idea of where to look for her. She didn't even know what sort of car she was driving or anything. She supposed she would have to ring up the hospital and find out—and then it would probably be a Morris, or a baby Austin, or something that was as thick on the roads as—as—earwigs. Here Caroline brushed away no less than three.

And then she remembered the folded paper which the day sister had given her to take to Mrs Riddell. “The ward maid picked it up. We think it must have dropped out of her bag.” That was what the day sister had said. And Caroline had just let it go right through her head and out at the other side. She opened her bag in a hurry, found the paper, and spread it out. It was a bill—one of the flimsy black-lined sort that a girl scribbles on in a carbon-papered book and then gets the shop-walker to sign.

Caroline tingled all over with excitement as she looked at it. It was, in her vocabulary, “absolutely stuffed with meat.” To start with, there was the name of the shop—Smithies, Ironmongers. And then there was the address—29 Market Street, Ledlington. Lastly there was the bill itself—One purdonium, 19/11.

“For the love of Mike—what's a purdonium?” said Caroline solemnly, and then all at once remembered Mrs Pocklington's sale. Coalscuttles became purdoniums—or was it purdonii—or purdonia when they got into an auction. They evidently started life in iron-mongers' shops under the same classic alias. Anyhow Mrs Riddell had bought a purdonium at a shop in Ledlington. Now, you might buy sweets, ribbons, tapes, or cotton anywhere, or a hot wherever it took your fancy; but if you bought a coalscuttle in Ledlington, the chances were that you lived somewhere near by and that you made them send it home. Of course you might take it away in a car—but coalscuttles do have the most revolting corners, and what would be the sense of scratching your car when Smithies might just as well deliver the blighted thing? After all, Smithies had got to do something to keep his end up.

She paid for her tea, went down six moss-grown steps to the car, and pored over a map. Ledlington was a good fifty miles. She looked at her watch.… getting on for six. It was a clear impossibility to reach Mr Smithies before his shutters went up.

Caroline slapped the map together and jammed it back in the pocket. She did hate not doing things at once. And it was waste of petrol too, because she would have to pass within twenty miles of Ledlington anyhow. It was not until she had run a dozen miles that she reflected on the state that Pansy Ann would have been in if she had gone off to Ledlington and not come home till midnight.

The village of Hazelbury West is like a good many other English villages. There is a pond, and a green, a big house with stone pillars crowned by pineapples and a long neglected drive, a church, a parsonage, two or three houses of the better sort, a butcher, a baker, a general shop which is also the post-office, and a straggle of cottages.

Miss Arbuthnot, who was Caroline Leigh's first cousin once removed, lived in the last cottage on the left. Caroline lived there with her. Sometimes she wondered whether she was just going to go on living in Hazelbury West with Pansy Ann for ever and ever.

Miss Arbuthnot had been christened Ann, but preferred to be called Pansy. She sketched a little, and gardened a little, and painted a little on china. She also wrote minor verse and belonged to a society under the rules of which all the members read one another's compositions. Caroline called it The Vicious Circle.

It was half past seven when she ran her car into the shed which did duty as a garage and went up the flagged path with the red standard rose-trees on either side of it.

The cottage was really two cottages thrown together. The front door opened directly into a sitting-room, out of the corner of which a steep curly stair went up to the bedrooms.

Caroline stood on the door-step and said, “Golly!”

All the furniture had been pushed back, and there was laid out upon the floor a short length of brightly flowered chintz, a longer piece of sage-green serge, and a remnant of navy-blue crepe de chine with a pattern of green and yellow daisies. Some strangely shaped pieces of newspaper were disposed like islands and peninsulas upon the serge, whilst, kneeling with her back to the door and holding a pair of cutting-out scissors in a hesitating, hovering manner, was Miss Pansy Arbuthnot.

“Pansy Ann—what are you doing?” said Caroline.

Miss Arbuthnot sat back upon her heels and slewed round. She had very pretty dark hair, and it was obvious that she had been running her fingers through it. She was about ten years older than Caroline, and she had just missed being as pretty as her own romantic picture of herself. She had melting dark eyes and enormously long lashes; she had arched eyebrows, a straight nose, and a fine if rather colourless skin; she also had a tiny mouth, rabbity teeth, and a lisp. She wore a rather tired crimson smock stuck dangerously full of pins, and a yard-measure trailing round her neck like a scarf.

“Oh, I'm so glad you've come!” she said.

“Did you think I'd been abducted?”

“This won't come out.” Caroline came nearer and surveyed the mess.

“What are you trying to do?”

“It's those three remnants that I got. There isn't enough of any of them, but I thought if I could cut out the chintz flowers and
appliqué
them on to the serge—”

Caroline gurgled.

“It'd look exactly like boiled greens served up with asters.”

Pansy gazed at her with a worried frown.

“Do you think it would? And even then there wouldn't be enough, with these long skirts. And I don't see how I can work in the crepe de chine whatever I do.”

“You can't,” said Caroline with great firmness. “And, darling if we don't have some food soon, I shall probably swoon. I've got a feeling that I shall see those asters going round and round in about half a minute. What are we having?”

“Scrambled eggs.”

“Go and scramble them. I'll put the mush away. You can make a knitting-bag out of the chintz, and a tablecloth for Mrs Vickers out of the serge—if you keep it here, I'll leave home. I daresay I'll have a brain-wave about the crepe de chine some other time. Now go and cook. I simply must wash.”

When Caroline came down again she had taken off her hat. She laid the table, and presently Miss Arbuthnot came in with a flushed face and a smoking dish of eggs. As she put it down, she shot a hesitating questioning glance at Caroline—

“It wasn't Jim?”

“I don't know?”

“You don't know?”

“He's gone to Ledlington. I'm going there tomorrow. He's lost his memory. I don't awfully want to talk about it, Pansy Ann.”

Pansy looked a little offended. She loved Caroline dearly, but she thought her odd. It was odd of Caroline to be so reserved about Jim Randal. Pansy could have talked about him all day. It had always been her cherished belief that when Jim Randal went abroad he had taken with him a romantic passion for herself. She would have simply loved to hint at this to Caroline; she had in fact done so once, but somehow or other she had not felt as if she could do it again. Perhaps she was too sensitive. But there it was—Caroline had not responded, and Pansy required response. It was so hard to have to live one's emotional life without anyone to confide in. If Uncle James had died six months earlier, it might have made all the difference. Jim wouldn't have quarrelled with his uncle and gone abroad; and if he hadn't gone abroad, no one knows what might have happened. As it was, every time she went through the village there were the stone pillars at the entrance to Hale Place a little more covered with a green mould, and the drive a little more neglected. And Caroline wouldn't talk about any of it. She probably wouldn't even have said she was going to Elston if Pansy hadn't heard the radio message with her own ears.

Of course this man wasn't Jim Randal, and of course Caroline was disappointed. But then why not say so, and have a good cry and let Pansy comfort her? It must be terribly bad to repress one's self like that.

Caroline did not feel in the least inclined to cry. Her thoughts were full of a warm, delicious excitement. There were little slants of light and mysterious hide-and-seek shadows, like the glints and shadows in a wood. Far away amongst the trees a bird sang. But it was her wood, her trees, her sun and shadow. If she let anyone in, it would all be spoilt. Jim was her secret playfellow. She never talked to people about him, and he wasn't any real relation to Pansy Ann, though they had all been brought up together.

“I think you might talk about something,” said Pansy in an aggrieved voice.

Caroline was quite ready to talk about anything except Jim.

“What shall we talk about?”

“You might have brought an evening paper.” Pansy was still aggrieved.

“I wasn't near one. What did you want it for?”

“I wanted to know whether there was anything more about the emeralds and Mr Van Berg.”

“Why should there be?”

Caroline wasn't really attending. She was thinking that she could get to Ledlington by eleven. She was thinking that fourteen hours was a very long time to wait.