By the Watchman's Clock

by Zenith Brown

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Contents

  Guide

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1932, 1960 by Zenith Brown.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  CHAPTER I

  In the little town of Landover the most important thing is Daniel Sutton. Landover College is the next most important. Landover, like the rest of Maryland, measures everybody and everything by two yardsticks. One is Money and the other Age. The conclusion is inevitable. Daniel Sutton is disgustingly rich and the college is exceedingly old. Some people might dispute the matter of priority. There are Marylanders who believe that age is more important than money; but as a rule they are held to be prejudiced. There’s certainly no doubt in the minds of practical people that it would be better to be as rich as Daniel Sutton than to be as old as Landover College.

  As a matter of fact, to give credit where credit is due, Daniel Sutton has done considerably more for himself than Landover College has ever done for itself.

  Daniel Sutton had lived only about sixty-five years. He had none of the fine classic lines of the old buildings on the hill. If anything he was inclined to be short, and to run to Rubens rather than Adam. He was proud, I think, in a half-regretful way, that the evening waistcoat he wore at Yale no longer met by fourteen and one-half inches. There’s no doubt he regarded that as more admirable than if it had lapped over that far. One instance was a symbol of success; the other would have been failure, either of Daniel Sutton to provide amply for his inner man, or of the inner man to react comfortably to Daniel Sutton. As it was, they had worked together perfectly. At sixty-five Daniel Sutton, without a twinge except possibly the disturbing knowledge of slightly increased blood-pressure, had multiplied the small estate his father had left him, and was an iron-grey man of vast wealth, with grey hair, myopic grey eyes, a set jaw, and a passion for all things that belonged to Daniel Sutton. More than that, he disliked nearly everybody, and certainly nearly everybody loathed him.

  Landover College, on the other hand, had grown lovelier as it grew older. Its lines never altered. Successive generations had done their best with paint and hammer and nails to change the elegant simplicity of Mascham Hall. That phase fortunately is over. Five of the original buildings of the college, all built between 1705 and 1774, are still standing, and are in the finest Georgian manner, simple and lovely. But they are pretty much all that Landover has left of its royal grant of five thousand acres from Queen Anne. More properly the grant might be said to have been made to Abigail Mascham, the Queen’s favorite after the fall of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. Undoubtedly it was the Queen’s interest in her favorite rather than in colonial education that prompted the gift.

  Abigail Mascham’s brother Dick, so the story goes, was in command of a part of her Majesty’s troops in the New World. It occurred to him that this continent would be an excellent place for a certain very close connection of the family’s, who had taken orders at Cambridge and thereupon had become not only a scandal to the Church of England—which could be put up with—but exceedingly embarrassing to the family. He took it up with his sister, who took it up with the Queen, who promptly agreed that a college in the New World was an ideal place for her favorite’s cousin. The necessary grant of lands and money had sent the Vicar to Landover, where he stayed five years and built the college with the help of the local burgesses. No one knows precisely what happened to him after that. He went out one night, quite sober, his servant said, and never returned. The college flourished; it wasn’t until after the Civil War that it fell on evil times. Gradually its tobacco fields were sold. Once it had owned most of the land and houses in the little town; they were first heavily mortgaged, then they went under the hammer. This lasted until 1920, when a few old Landoverians got together and said, This has got to stop. The college unfortunately had nothing left, by that time, but the square on which its five buildings had stood surrounded by spreading oaks, tulip poplars and maple trees—the land and the buildings also heavily mortgaged. The job of reclaiming it all looked decidedly hopeless. In fact, as far as its being important in the town at that time is concerned, the college wasn’t at all. It was rather in the position of being pretty much of a stepchild. It’s because of that that I’m inclined to think everybody here really believes money is more important than age.

  So in 1920 the college wasn’t important at all, and Daniel Sutton had just come to town. It’s just as well that only people can suffer, otherwise I think the little college on the hill must have had a pretty bad time, knowing it had lost everything it ever had, and that the townspeople despised it. So did the students in it, who cut their initials in the mahogany chair rails in the great room in Mascham Hall; to say nothing of the underpaid men who taught in its fine old class rooms and kept cows and raised vegetables on the back campus. Of course, the townspeople despised it, and consequently they sold it decayed foodstuffs at exorbitant rates, and charged it appalling prices for coal that was mostly dust. And like all townspeople of the sort, complained bitterly at having the college quartered on it, very much as if it were a prison and put there to harass the good people of Landover.

  That was before Dr. Knox came to make it over. He was drastic. He sent back the first order of bad meat, the first order of stale bread, the first load of poor coal. The people of Landover began to regret the fine old days when their college represented the better traditions of the old Free State. They shook their heads and said, What can you expect? It doesn’t surprise us at all! When, as it turned out, some colored boys needed money and sold Ye Gifte Shoppe sign to get it, they shook their heads again. Students did not do such things, they implied, before Dr. Knox in 1920 disturbed the sacred edifice of the old school.

  But that is all over now. In fact they are rather inclined to point to the college with some satisfaction, as an example of what enlightened townspeople can accomplish when they put their minds to it. Only a few of the die-hardests still shake their heads and wonder what the world is coming to, if anything. But Mr. Chew, the local leading butcher, says quite plainly that the college is the town’s biggest industry. How can a college be an industry? Its meat bill, says Mr. Chew, is bigger than half the town’s put together, if you leave out Mr. Sutton. And obviously you have to leave Mr. Sutton out of all such calculations, because he is very rich and the townspeople of Landover are very poor.

  Mr. Sutton’s Seaton Hall occupies a piece of Landover something like a large slice of apple pie. One straight side is bounded by York Road, just across the street from the northern half of the college campus. The other straight side is along the full length of King Charles Street, from where it makes a T-Square with York Road down to the edge of Seaton River. Seaton River by the way is an arm of the Chesapeake, like the Magothy or the Severn. The grounds of Seaton Hall, laid out in
gardens, some formal, others charmingly informal, slope down to the water, the curving outer crust of the piece of pie making an undulating shore several miles long.

  When Daniel Sutton came to Landover and bought the Seaton mansion in 1920 it occupied a small plot of ground on York Road extending from Duke of Gloucester Street to King Charles Street. Duke of Gloucester Street runs from York Road where it joins the State Highway down to the river. There were houses and shops on each side of it, and along the shore were a number of oyster sheds and a small ship-building concern that did a considerable business in Maryland rye and corn whisky. There were also nondescript houses along King Charles Street, and in Bleinheim Road, which intersects King Charles and Duke of Gloucester streets a block down from York Road.

  The Seatons had come on evil days since they built their town house on York Road. There’s some question in the mind of Mr. Tasker, the librarian and local antiquarian, as to whether their property ever actually ran to the water. However there was no question in Daniel Sutton’s mind that if it hadn’t it should have, and when he bought the old house from John Seaton he bought all the property in the triangle formed by York Road and King Charles Street. At least he bought all but a plot thirty by seventy-five feet on the corner of Duke of Gloucester Street and York Road. And that plot rose to plague him beyond endurance, and caused him more distress than seems logically possible.

  He tore out the houses, the oyster sheds and the shipyard. He tore up the cobblestones and sidewalks on Blenheim Road and Duke of Gloucester Street and erased them completely from the map. He built a ten-foot brick wall, with broken glass firmly set in concrete on the top, along the two edges of his slice of pie, and built a retaining wall along the crust. In two years lilacs and jasmine hung over the brick wall in the spring, and in summer it was covered with trumpet vine and white clematis. Within five years Daniel Sutton’s wall might have been there forever, so quickly do people forget old streets and old houses. Even Mr. Tasker had forgotten. Mr. Sutton was the only person who couldn’t forget. That was because of those thirty feet along York Road, and old Aunt Charlotte who wouldn’t sell them to him.

  It was on the morning of April 24th that I came out of my front door and saw Sebastien Baca leaning against the low brick wall that runs around my garden on the corner of York Road and King Charles Street, across from the south wall of Seaton Hall. My house faces the college, I might add, across York Road. I didn’t know then that the man was Sebastien Baca. In fact I shouldn’t even have known it was April 24th if later events hadn’t impressed it on my mind. I’m congenitally unable to keep calendars, stamps or matches in the house. I never know the date and never mail a letter on time.

  I was on my way over to see Thorn Carter, Mr. Sutton’s niece and an intimate friend of mine. I saw a dark, elegantly dressed man half sitting on my wall, and I hoped for his own sake that the children hadn’t left any of their nameless concoctions of mud, berries and garden bugs there for him to mop up with his immaculate light grey flannels. I glanced down at him and noticed that he was absently digging the green moss from between the bricks in the sidewalk, where it isn’t much used, with his stick. I remembered at that point that I’d forgot to tell Lillie what sort of a salad we’d have for lunch and went back inside to do it.

  When I came out again, ten minutes later, he was still there. It didn’t seem strange to me, of course. If you live in a town that’s famous for anything, you get quite used to being an unpaid adjunct of the local Chamber of Commerce, especially if you live across the street from a college that has five perfect gems of eighteenth century architecture in plain sight. And if your brick wall is just high enough to make a comfortable perch you quite expect to see people sitting on it. As I say, all you hope is that the children using it as a counter in a store haven’t left some frightful, for the moment unnoticeable, mess.

  The man turned when I came down the walk to the gate and raised his hat.

  “Pardon me, madam. Is that Mr. Daniel Sutton’s residence?”

  With his stick he indicated the high brick wall across the street, with the heavy clusters of purple and white lilacs hanging over it.

  The question was not unusual, but the questioner was decidedly so. In the first place he was definitely foreign. He was above middle height, slim, with clear deep olive skin and brilliant intelligent dark eyes.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  He bowed and thanked me with rather more courtesy than I usually get from the people who use my garden wall as a grand-stand. I crossed the street and continued down York Road under the overhanging lilacs, wondering vaguely how some men managed to look immaculately fresh, as if they’d just come out of the customary bandbox. I was thinking that my husband always managed to look rather mussed, in spite of my efforts, sporadic I’ll admit, to keep him pressed. Then I began to wonder what a bandbox was, and forgot all about the olive-skinned foreigner sitting on my wall.

  CHAPTER II

  Tim Healy, the Irish watchman, was parading solemnly back and forth behind the great iron gate of the York Road entrance to Seaton Hall. He hurried to open the side grill for me.

  “Good morning, Miss, good morning to you! It’s a rare foine day. Miss Thorn’ll be as glad to see ye as would the angels themselves, bless ye, Miss!”

  Bill Sutton said once that Chicago got the idea of an official greeter from Tim, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised. He knew moreover just whom to greet and whom to glower at and turn away, and whom to admit in spite of the fact that the much harassed young man who stands between Daniel Sutton and the world would shortly turn him out again. The family’s friends Tim never failed. If the day was bright and fine, and Tim paraded back and forth across the drive, it was a blessing, he assured you, and would be to one of God’s very angels, to see you. If the day was bad and Tim limped rheumatically out of his lodge to admit you, he inquired narrowly and with infinite concern into the health of each member of your family. Death and disaster, he regretted, were not far off. Poor old Tim, with his smoked glasses for dark days and his rosy glasses for bright ones. People said he hated Mr. Sutton, but I’ve never believed it. I’ve seen them, in the evening, walking back and forth in the side garden, Tim with his black stumpy clay glowing fitfully, Mr. Sutton with a fine cigar making fragrant undertones for it. I don’t know what they talked about, but it must have been amusing. Those evenings are the only times I’ve ever heard Mr. Sutton laugh. Except once. After that I didn’t know whether to think it was well or ill for Mr. Sutton to laugh.

  In view of all the things that happened later I think it’s just as well to sound a warning to all people who’ve never lived in a college town. It’s simply this: never, never forsake the scientific method. In other words, never believe anything you hear until you’ve examined it closely and found out if it’s true or false. Maybe it’s because people who live in or around colleges have more imagination, and like the business of creative gossip. I don’t know. But if the wife of the professor of Egyptology tells you that Mr. Sutton’s wife jumped from the ninth story of a hotel in Paris because she couldn’t stand it any longer, don’t believe it. I did, for a long time, and viewed Mr. Sutton with fascinated horror. Later I learned that his wife was always delicate and died quite naturally of pneumonia in Paris, Maine.

  Thorn Carter and I once started a rumor just for fun and to see what would happen. Before we were through—well, we were two mortified and chastened young women. But that was some years ago. We have more sense now.

  I talked with Tim Healy a few minutes about the possibility of rain and whether the summer was to be cool or hot, and went on towards the house.

  Seaton Hall itself is a fine old mansion, whose salt glaze bricks have weathered into a deep brownish mauve. The central unit is three stories high with a fine simple doorway and elaborately carved Palladian window and frieze. The wings are separated from the house by two hyphens in the usual Maryland manner. In fact the house is very much like the Brice House in Annapolis, although the peop
le of Landover think it is far more beautiful—now that they’ve learned to prize their architecture. Rather late, of course, for Daniel Sutton’s high brick wall hides the house except through the York Road gate, and there’s a ten-foot box hedge across the diameter of the circle of the drive that makes a pretty effectual screen. Very few people now living have actually seen Seaton Hall. Daniel Sutton isn’t very gracious about showing it, in fact he won’t show it at all.

  Lafayette Johnson, the white-haired old Negro who has opened the door at Seaton Hall for as many years as he can rightly remember, opened it now and grinned broadly.

  “Mornin’, Miss. How is you, Miss? How’s the Doctor, and how’s the children?”

  That was Lafayette’s formula, never varied rain or shine. With fine darkey tact he called all the instructors at Landover, from the youngest assistant in Chemistry just out of Johns Hopkins to the president himself, Doctor without prejudice. That he called all the students Doctor too, grinning joyfully at his jest, was fair enough, and maybe he didn’t realize how finely ironic it was.

  One’s reply was as set as Lafayette’s greeting.

  “Morning, Lafayette. I’m fine. It’s a lovely day. He’s fine and so are the children. How are you?”

  “That’s good, Miss. I’m tolable. Miss Thorn’s upstairs, Miss.”

  I went up to Thorn’s sitting room and went in.

  “Hello,” she said. She threw the book she was reading on the floor and drew her feet under her to make room for me at the other end of the sofa.

  “See Uncle Dan on the way up?” she asked.

  “No. Why?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Thought you might have,” she said indifferently, and added, “he’s on the rampage again. You’re apt to run into him in the oddest places.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, not particularly alarmed, for Daniel Sutton’s rampages were nothing new.

  She didn’t answer me at once, she just sat there tearing into bits a piece of notepaper she’d taken out of her pocket. She seemed unhappy about something, but I couldn’t believe it was her uncle, for she, like the rest of his family, takes his peculiarities with inscrutable calm.