The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place

by Julie Berry

  “As for the betting parlor,” said Constable Quill, “the force has been building their case against you for quite some time. Mrs. Lally of Witchford has been extremely helpful. One of her tenants is one of your best clients. She became concerned when he went missing, and alerted us, thinking there could be some connection. She’s seen Mr. Roper come by to collect more than once, and even seen you together. That’s why we pursued Mr. Godding’s disappearance so thoroughly.” His chest puffed out rather larger than usual. “This burglary and this … elephant give us all the evidence we needed.”

  “Balderdash,” declared Dr. Snelling. “I’m heading home. I don’t need to submit to such slander.”

  “Harbottle,” said the Constable. “Take him into custody.”

  Dr. Snelling made a show of refusing to cooperate, but Harbottle moved with a speed one might not expect from a person of his girth. The older man quickly surrendered to the handcuffs Harbottle slapped on his wrists.

  As this bit of police bravado unfolded, Pocked Louise sat on the sofa and placed little Aldous on her lap, then flipped frantically through her notebook, crossing out names and scribbling. It was here. It was all here, she was sure. If she could just make the pieces fit!

  “Constable,” said Mrs. Godding. “I’m confused. Are you saying my sister-in-law, Constance Plackett, was a gambler? That she owed debts to this man? This is absolutely preposterous.”

  Constable Quill shook his head. “No. Her brother was. Aldous Godding.”

  Mrs. Godding opened her mouth as if to contradict, then closed it once more and shook her head. From down the corridor they could hear footsteps on the stoop, and the sound of the front door opening. Pocked Louise watched the conversations closely, capturing every detail. She knelt and laid little Aldous gently down on the rug, then commenced a stream of steady scribbling in her notebook.

  Amanda Barnes lifted her weary head off the couch, where she had lain in a daze ever since her faint. “He was just trying to get ahead in the world. Make something better of himself.”

  Mrs. Godding frowned. “Gambling’s a wicked, foolish way to do it.”

  Stout Alice turned toward the couch. “I still don’t understand, Barnes,” she said. “Why should you care what Mr. Godding was trying to do, or why? What made you look for him? Why are you so anxious to defend him?”

  Pocked Louise snapped her notebook shut. “I suspect,” she said, “they must have been a couple. It’s the only reason I can think of for why she would murder Mrs. Plackett for him.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “You take that back, Miss Pox,” Amanda Barnes cried. “She lies! I’ll not be spoken down to by a little slip of a girl like her.”

  The door opened, and Constable Tweedy, Farmer Butts, Henry, and Julius entered the parlor. Julius went to his mother and took her hand in his. Shock had made even his tanned skin pale and drawn. Smooth Kitty couldn’t bear to see his downcast face, nor could she leave off watching it.

  Constable Tweedy surveyed the scene and noticed Dr. Snelling in handcuffs. “Ho!” he cried, and leaped to Constable Harbottle’s side. He frowned at the sight of Amanda Barnes stretched upon the couch. “What about … Weren’t we…” Constable Quill silenced him with a shake of the head.

  “It’s true,” Henry Butts said. He seemed so stunned by what he’d seen, that he forgot to be tongue-tied. “The bodies are wrapped and lying in the back of Father’s wagon. We found them both buried in the garden. Right where the young ladies planted their cherry tree.”

  Dull Martha covered her face and began to cry.

  The adults in the room turned accusing eyes toward the students at Saint Etheldreda’s School.

  “Wrong time of year for planting trees,” added Farmer Butts, as if that clinched the matter.

  Dr. Snelling sneered at the girls. “Looks like you’ve found your murderers, Constable,” he said. “These little minxes! Do you have enough handcuffs to go around? Take mine. I haven’t any need for them.”

  Amanda Barnes lay still upon the low couch, gazing at the ceiling, paying no attention to the conversation but speaking like one in a dream. “I told you he’d be there,” she said. “I found him there tonight. I saw the grave yesterday, after teatime. Just earlier, I’d heard her threaten him. So she’d done it, I thought. Tonight, after the social, came straight here and I dug him up.” Her voice grew soft with weeping. “I knew he wouldn’t go off and leave for India without telling me.”

  “’Course he would’ve,” scoffed Dr. Snelling. “In a minute, if it suited his purposes. He was a scoundrel and a wastrel. You’re not the first woman—”

  “Hush!” Mrs. Godding hissed. “Have you no pity whatsoever?” She turned to Barnes. “Were you a couple, then?” inquired Mrs. Godding in a low voice.

  “We were going to be married,” Barnes said in a faraway voice. “In a church, with my mother there, as soon as Mrs. Plackett was … as soon as Mrs. Plackett gave her blessing.”

  Pocked Louise knelt and stroked little Aldous.

  “What you mean to say, Barnes,” she said, “is that you and Mr. Godding planned to marry as soon as Mrs. Plackett was out of the way.”

  Constable Quill paused and studied Pocked Louise. “How old are you, exactly?”

  Louise ignored this. “It’s quite simple,” she said. “Martha. Tell us how you cooked the veal, and why you did it that way.”

  “I fried it in two little pans.” Martha’s voice was small. “But first, I roasted both cutlets together in the oven with a little water. Cook, back home, taught me that trick, so I wouldn’t undercook the pork chops and make Papa sick again.”

  Constable Quill frowned. “I fail to see what undercooking veal has to do with murder, unless you think the deceased contracted food poisoning.”

  “It’s hard to know with meat!” Dull Martha cried. “Pre-roasting it makes sure it’s done. Papa got ever so ill that one time, and I never wanted to make the mistake again!”

  “And, now, Martha,” Louise said reassuringly, “tell us who provided you with the recipe you used to cook the meat.”

  Martha’s eyes were wide. “Why, Barnes, of course,” she said. “She always leaves instructions for how to cook Sunday dinner.”

  Louise nodded. “And how did she tell you to prepare the veal?”

  “By breading and frying it,” answered Martha obediently. “Only, it was the strangest thing. Ordinarily we have at least three skillets that would serve to fry several cutlets. But they all went missing. The only things I could find were two tiny frypans, the kind you use to fry a single egg. Each barely large enough for one cutlet. One pan was ours, but the other I’d never seen before. That’s the one Barnes came and collected on Monday evening.”

  “Don’t you see, Freddie?” Mary Jane cried. “Barnes left the recipe, swiped the skillets, and left the little pan. She wanted the cutlets cooked separately, because she had poisoned one of them.”

  “Yes, don’t you see, Freddie?” mimicked Dr. Snelling, making the constable turn purple.

  “But Miss Barnes left work on Saturday afternoon, I presume. Isn’t that correct?” asked the constable.

  “That’s true,” Kitty replied. “And the groceries didn’t arrive until later, Louise.”

  Louise smiled. “It doesn’t matter. The groceries were delivered to us by her nephew. His younger brother told us just the other day how he makes a point of bringing them to her so she can inspect them before he brings them to our house. She could poison one veal chop from her home in town and wrap it separately.”

  “Where would she get poison?” inquired the usually silent Officer Harbottle.

  “Simple,” said Louise. “Insect killer made from cyanide. The chemist asked us just the other day if Barnes has been successful in getting rid of our carpet beetles. To our knowledge, we’ve never had a bug problem.”

  “Cyanide,” scoffed Constable Quill. “Now you’re inventing madcap ideas you’ve read about in mystery books. You’d have no way to recognize cyan
ide.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t she, though?” cried Disgraceful Mary Jane. “Freddie, you’re being a beast and showing your ignorance. Our Louise is the best scientist in all of Cambridgeshire, I’ll wager! You march into the schoolroom and see for yourself all the equipment she’s set up, with … acids and chemicals and things. She proved it was cyanide.”

  Constable Quill nodded toward Officer Tweedy then glanced toward the door. Tweedy lumbered off in search of the laboratory.

  “I brought it out of suspension using potash, iron sulfate, and oil of vitriol,” Louise said simply. Constable Quill looked quizzically at Dr. Snelling, who hesitated, then nodded. “But you don’t need to take my word for it. Doctor Snelling, you know it was cyanide that killed the admiral tonight, don’t you?”

  Dr. Snelling, still handcuffed, stuck out his lower lip. “I’ll save my professional opinions for the inquest.”

  “You smelled the almonds, too, didn’t you, Constable?” Louise asked.

  Constable Freddie Quill seemed torn by some great inner struggle. “But it makes absolutely no sense!” he sputtered. “I never heard of a more reckless, foolish game. To poison one piece of veal, and not the other, and trust that the right one would be eaten by the right person … it’s an outrageous gamble!”

  “You’ve already told us,” Stout Alice said, “that Aldous Godding was a gambler.”

  The constable’s pencil flew across his notebook pages. Miss Barnes struggled upright on the couch, peeping over its edge like a corpse rising from its coffin. Mrs. Godding and Julius stood close to one another, listening mutely to all that unfolded.

  “Mr. Godding and Miss Barnes must have used some system of communicating about which cutlet to choose,” said Kitty. “It doesn’t really matter how.”

  Pocked Louise snapped her fingers. “Oh, but we know that, too,” she said. “Roberta, dear, will you fetch for me the little urn on the sideboard in the dining room?”

  Dear Roberta tiptoed across the parlor, shrinking at her awareness of all the people watching her. She returned in a moment with the rough stonework urn and handed it to Louise.

  “This is where we placed all the items we found in Mr. Godding’s and Mrs. Plackett’s pockets, the night they died,” Louise said. She retrieved a small scrap of paper from the bottom and held it up to the lamplight. “This. This bit of paper, with what we thought was a scribble or an inkblot on it. That scribble was your drawing, wasn’t it, Barnes?” She held it closer to their former housekeeper, who kept her lips pressed tight. “The triangular shape. It’s a piece of veal. The one Mr. Godding was supposed to eat. The one that was free from poison?”

  “Mr. Godding took the largest piece, like he always did,” said Stout Alice. She added, as an afterthought, “It always struck me as just the piggish sort of thing he would do.”

  “But this time,” said Pocked Louise, “it wasn’t greed—or I suppose I should say, it was greed on a much larger scale—that made his choice. He had Barnes’s sketch to guide him. The veal that looked like that,” here she indicated the paper Constable Quill had taken from her, “was the one she had not poisoned.”

  “Wrong.” Amanda Barnes spat the word.

  Constable Harbottle turned to face her. “What was it, then?”

  Constable Tweedy reentered the room. “There’s some sort of laboratory in there, all right, though what it aims to do I couldn’t begin to say.”

  “Never mind, Tweedy. Go on, please, Miss Barnes. You were about to tell Miss Dudley how wrong she was. What did the paper illustrate, if not the unpoisoned veal?”

  “Nothing.” Amanda Barnes sagged back onto her couch. “I don’t know anything about that scrap of paper.”

  Pocked Louise let out a laugh. “Oh, I see,” she said. “The picture indicated the poisoned piece, if we must split hairs.”

  Miss Barnes glared at her, but said nothing.

  “Hm.” Constable Quill appeared in genuine danger of running out of notebook. “Miss Dudley. If only one piece of veal was poisoned, how did they both die?”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane, who now saw herself as a culinary expert, since baking her burnt Mansfield muffins, answered before Louise could. “Martha has already explained that,” she said. “She roasted the cutlets together in the oven, in a pan with some water, before frying them. That’s how the cyanide would have spread, through the water and juices in a shared pan.”

  “Foolish girl,” said Barnes.

  Dear Roberta’s face lit up. “And remember, Louise, when I said that one veal specimen made your testing water more blue than the other?”

  Pocked Louise grinned. “That’s right, Roberta. The pieces were unequally poisoned. Mrs. Plackett’s piece got the full dose, then some of it seeped into the other cutlet.”

  Constable Tweedy was puzzled. “Blue?”

  Dr. Snelling sighed. This whole affair appeared to bore him. “Prussian blue,” he explained. “Cyanide.”

  Smooth Kitty wondered aloud. “Perhaps that’s why Mr. Godding took longer to die.”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane would have none of this theory. “Perhaps it was because he was an evil rat, persuading his infatuated accomplice to poison his sister so he could inherit her money. And what money, at that? Other than this house and that elephant and a few dishes and trinkets, precious little.” She tossed back her pretty head, and Kitty noted that Constable Quill seemed to momentarily forget his notebook. “You’re a fool, Barnes, if you think he would actually have married you. You might have been next in line for a special veal dinner.”

  Amanda Barnes swung her legs off the couch and rose somewhat shakily to her feet. “You take that back, Miss Mary Jane,” she said, pointing a finger at that young lady. “I won’t be sassed around by you lot anymore! You take back what you said about Aldy Godding. And about me.”

  Disgraceful Mary Jane’s eyes flashed. “I shall not! You are a fool to have trusted him. And he’s fool enough to have died from his own poison. The wretch didn’t deserve to live. Divine justice will prevail over fiends like him.” She clapped her hands. “Oh! I see it now. Remember, girls, all that cooing we heard in the back garden that night?”

  Constable Quill wiggled his finger in one ear. “Pardon me. Did you say ‘cooing’?”

  “That’s right, Freddie. Coo! Coo! Like that.”

  “Coo, coo.” Constable Quill looked, for a moment, like a man regretting his choice of profession, but he plowed onward. “And you say you heard someone cooing in your back garden on Sunday night?”

  “Exactly. It was Barnes, hoping her precious Mr. Godding would come outside and tell her all was clear, Mrs. Plackett was dead, and we girls had been sent packing.” Mary Jane folded her arms across her chest in triumph. “And to think, Henry, I was so certain it must have been you, cooing for me to come outside to see you!”

  Farmer Butts’s eyebrows rose. “How’s that again? Henry? Are you chasing after these girls? Do you have something to tell me?”

  The farmer’s son cringed. “No, sir. Never!” He sent a pitiable glance in Dull Martha’s direction.

  “He would have married me,” Amanda Barnes cried. “He told me. Right here in this room, he promised me. I know in my heart, he meant it truly. I was going to be a lady, with a parasol, and live respectably, and boss my own servants around! I could take care of my little mother proper. Aldy was going to buy me a ring, a golden one, with a ruby in it, just as soon as…”

  “As he’d paid off the fortune he owed me?” Dr. Snelling sneered.

  “As soon as, apparently, he’d gotten his hands on Mrs. Plackett’s money,” said Constable Quill.

  “Which,” interrupted Reverend Rumsey, who rose eagerly to his feet, “is now bequeathed in large part to Saint Mary’s, as her other heir, Mr. Godding, is now dead.”

  “Not so,” said Stout Alice. “Isn’t that right, Barnes?”

  The former daily woman shook with rage. She pointed at Alice as though she was still confusing her with Mrs. Plackett.

 
“She threatened to take Aldy’s name out of her will after they quarreled,” she cried. “Who knew the witch would up and do it before the weekend was over?”

  Constable Quill sighed. In the lamplight he began to look like an older, wearier man. “Will? What’s this about a will?”

  Amanda Barnes drooped and collapsed back onto the couch. “She left her fortune all to Julius,” she said. “She got to her solicitor before we could stop her.”

  Julius Godding’s eyes grew wide, but he said nothing. Reverend Rumsey sat down with a thump.

  Stout Alice nodded her head. “Barnes could only know that, Officer, if she stole the new will, which Mr. Wilkins’s office delivered here on Monday morning. Tonight isn’t the first time she’s been prying and snooping about the house, searching, I suppose, for Mr. Godding himself.”

  “Or for the money,” said Dr. Snelling.

  “That’s what I still don’t understand!” cried Kitty. “What money? Doctor Snelling believes there’s a fortune here, or he and Mr. Rigby wouldn’t have burgled the place. Barnes and Mr. Godding believed there was a fortune, large enough to murder for. But I swear, I’ve been through every ledger, every file and drawer, every speck of paper in this house. There isn’t a spare farthing, I assure you.”

  Constable Quill snapped his notebook shut. “Makes it all the more ironic, doesn’t it? To murder for nothing?” He nodded toward Constable Tweedy, who unlatched the handcuffs from his belt and slipped them over Amanda Barnes’s wrists.

  Miss Barnes submitted to the handcuffs while her face streamed with tears. “Oh, Aldy, Aldy,” she whispered. “We were so close.”

  Pocked Louise and Smooth Kitty exchanged a private glance. She’d actually loved him, then? Impossible though it was to conceive, there was a woman whose heart throbbed with affection for Mrs. Plackett’s greasy, odious rascal of a younger brother. She would spend the rest of her days knowing she’d poured the poison that had killed her love—even if, as both girls suspected, the entire nefarious plot had been his idea.