“You’ll never guess who was next to me in the queue for Brussels sprouts today. A tin o’ corned beef, please, Emmy. Tried to make out she wasn’t there, mind you, but I knew it was her—not that, better make it a small one—from her picture in the paper a couple o’ years back when she opened the school fête. Ta, luv. And a packet of Oxo cubes.”
“Who was it,” mused Mrs. Henderson, “opened the fête two years ago? Humphrey Marsh, weren’t it? I wouldn’t call him a her, not with that beard, I wouldn’t.”
“So what about the smock?” demanded Mrs. Skinner, who some years ago had quarrelled with Mrs. Henderson over the church flower rota. The pair had never been known to agree on any subject since. “And that nancy hat he wears. Them artist types, you just can’t tell. Not if you know your way around at all, you can’t.”
“It’s a berry,” interjected Emmy Putts, her bosom heaving at this slur on her idol, about whom she had once watched a television documentary on the BBC. Emmy had harboured a kindred feeling towards the ultramodernist sculptor from the time of his commission by the Brettenden biscuit factory where her mother worked to create a masterpiece for their front yard. Emmy had taken it as badly as the flamboyantly bereted Marsh himself when a passing totter had carted the piece away to be melted down for scrap.
“Never mind berries,” said Mrs. Spice quickly. “It was Brussels sprouts as I was talking about. Brussels sprouts—and Lady Hallbank in ... a market queue!”
Plummergen appreciates the artistic tension of a pause as well as anyone. A gratifying chorus of disbelieving gasps followed Mrs. Spice’s revelation. Mrs. Spice preened herself and examined her newly acquired tin of corned beef as if her life depended on a letter-by-letter reading of the contents label.
Prompted at last by the chorus, having judged how far she could allow tension to stretch before breaking point (and a change of subject) should be reached, Mrs. Spice condescended to spill more of the beans. Or sprouts. “’Course it was her,” she said as a few daring voices raised doubts. “Know her anywhere, like I said, for all she had a great fur hood pulled over her face—”
“A fur hood?” The doubters grew more daring. “Why,” objected young. Mrs Newport, “it wasn’t nowhere near cold enough for fur today. You must’ve bin mistaken.”
“Snowed a bit this morning, though, didn’t it?” came the inevitable counterobjection from Mrs. Scillicough, sister to Mrs. Newport and thus fifty per cent of Plummergen’s Sibling Rivalry ideal. Mrs. Scillicough’s triplets were a village byword for sheer frightfulness; Mrs. Newport had four children under five who were generally regarded as angelic. Mrs. Newport had an automatic washing machine and a tumble dryer; Mrs. Scillicough had a twin tub and a mangle in which she pinched her fingers if she didn’t concentrate. It was as natural for Mrs. Scillicough to snipe at Mrs. Newport as it was for Mrs. Skinner to squabble with Mrs. Henderson.
“Call that snow?” scoffed Mrs. Newport, tossing her head in scorn.
“White and fluffy, fell out o’ the sky—reckon I do,” said her sister, likewise scornful. “Cold, too. And she ain’t no chicken, Lady Hallbank. Your blood gets thinner as you get old.” She tried not to look at the other shoppers, most of whom could give her twenty years at least. “She’ll have come out afore it stopped snowing, all wrapped up, and not worth going home to change in case it started up again later, that’s what she’ll have done.” She turned eagerly to Mrs. Spice. “Did you get a good look at her? What were the rest of her clothes like?”
Mrs. Spice did not scruple to crush the wistful daydreams of the younger generation. “Proper mangy, that fur looks close up. You’d think with all her money she’d want summat a bit smarter, wouldn’t you?”
Mrs. Scillicough’s face fell. “Oh,” she said. “Thinks her best’s too good for mixing with common folk, does she?”
This sour suggestion, born of nothing but disillusion, at once opened the eyes of all to the shocking possibility that Mrs. Scillicough (who lived in a council house) might harbour revolutionary tendencies. Everyone experienced the same delighted frisson of fear that Mrs. Scillicough’s red woollen scarf might at any minute be wrenched from her neck and used as a banner to rally the working classes against their oppressors ... even if, when all was said and done, it was hard to imagine Lady Hallbank, so quiet and well spoken, as one who habitually ground the faces of the local poor into the proletarian dust.
Still, one could never be entirely sure. “That must be it.” Mrs. Spice was a little peeved she hadn’t thought of this first. “And that coat—well, if it hasn’t had the sleeve patched, then I don’t know a patch when I see one. And she’d lost a button she’d not bothered to match properly. Looked like a rag-bag, she did, without a penny to her name. I tell you, if I didn’t know who she was ... why, I would never have known it was her.”
chapter
~ 3 ~
AT THIS POINT in the discussion Mrs. Flax drew breath and everyone fell silent. If the Wise Woman—the first, and sometimes the last, face the villagers saw in their lives—wished to pronounce, she must be allowed to do so. Nobody crossed Mother Flax—who helped at their birthing, laid them out at their dying—with impunity ... except, perhaps, Mrs. Scillicough, who had been more than disappointed in the efficacy of the myriad nostrums prescribed by the witch for the suppression of the high spirits of her triplets. Mrs. Scillicough was given to sharp retorts when she thought she could get away with it, and Plummergen forgave many minor trespasses on the part of the offspring of one who had from time to time defied the Wise Woman and yet survived.
“I saw Lady Hallbank, too,” said Mrs. Flax, nodding sagely. “But ’twasn’t at the market. No, indeed.” She surveyed her audience in a practised silence prolonged until just the right moment for the best effect.
“Fur hood and all,” said Mrs. Flax at last, defying anyone to argue with her. Nobody did. “Know her anywhere, I would, after all these years.” Mrs. Spice preened herself discreetly. “But,” went on Mrs. Flax, wagging her choppy finger against her nose, “in all the years I’ve known her, there’s never bin once I’ve seen her ladyship going into a pawnshop ...”
The sensation caused by this remark was all that could be desired. In the hubbub of gasps, cries, and exclamations Mrs. Flax did not stoop to preen herself; the Wise Woman was far above such vainglory. “A pound o’ carrots, Emmy,” she said in level tones. “When you can shut your mouth. Catch flies, my girl, if you ain’t careful.”
Nobody dared to point out that in the first fortnight of January insect life was in short supply, though in the background Mrs. Stillman banged a few irritated tins around at this implied slur on post office hygiene.
Nor did anybody dare ask Mrs. Flax what she’d been doing in the pawnshop to begin with. The Wise Woman moved in her mysterious ways, and it did no good to cross them. Besides, it was possible that she just might have been passing by on the other side of the road ...
“See what she was doing, did you?” demanded Mrs. Scillicough. Disillusioned though she might be with the aristocracy at close quarters, her disillusionment with Mrs. Flax ran even deeper. “Might have bin going to buy summat with the ticket run out, not pawning anything at all. Well?” she challenged as Mrs. Flax contrived to look wise without committing herself to a direct reply. “You didn’t, did you?”
This challenge to her authority was more than the witch could bear. Let the Scillicough minx get away with her cheek and the rest of ’em would think they could, too. She drew herself up to her full height. “If you’re doubting my word—” she began.
And was saved by the bell.
The collective sigh that immediately arose mingled relief and regret in equal proportions. The post office voyeuses had no real wish to watch any thaumaturgic harm being done to Mrs. Scillicough, but, if such harm as a curse (or worse) were to be done, they would want to be there to watch it, not have to hear about it secondhand. Still, perhaps it was just as well. Plummergen wished to go on believing in the power of Mrs. Flax and her k
ind, as it had believed for generations past. Let Mrs. Scillicough be the only one without illusion, and village life—village memory—was safe. Once bring the twentieth century into the darkest recesses of the Plummergen mind, and ...
“It’s growing so dark outside.” Norah Blaine closed the door and stamped her feet, blowing on her mittened fingers and shuddering. “And cold—but lovely and bright and warm in here, isn’t it, Eric?”
Miss Erica Nuttel—a tall and bony counterpoint to her buxom companion—inclined her equine features in an acquiescent nod. “Afternoon,” she greeted the company at large. “End of the queue here, is it?”
“We wouldn’t want to push in,” tittered Mrs. Blaine, who could see as well as the rest that any queue there might have been had long since dispersed. Mrs. Blaine’s black eyes gleamed with the thrill of gossip suspected; the tip of Miss Nuttel’s nose twitched at the scent of scandal.
“Got much shopping, Mrs. Blaine?” Mrs. Flax, grateful for deliverance, was disposed to be gracious. “Never you mind my carrots, Emmy. See to Mrs. Blaine next, will you?”
“We didn’t manage the bus today,” said Mrs. Blaine, telling nobody nothing of which she wasn’t already aware. The absence of the Nuts (as the aggressively vegetarian Nuttel-Blaine partnership is known to village wits) had been noted and debated throughout each six-mile journey to Brettenden and back. “But market prices are so much cheaper, I think I’ll just take one bag of wholemeal flour, Emmy, which ought to last until next week. And a small bottle of olive oil. You won’t have sea-salt, I suppose.”
Mrs. Blaine—Bunny, to her friend—supposed correctly. Plummergen is only prepared to humour this precious pair so far. The ladies have lived in the village now for a baker’s dozen of years, and, feeling completely at home, think themselves as completely accepted by the locals. The locals, if they chose, could tell them otherwise.
Home for Miss Nuttel and Mrs. Blaine is Lilikot, a plate-glass windowed, net-curtained modern monstrosity diagonally opposite the post office and convenient for the bus stop in both directions. The Nuts have a grandstand view of all who come or go about the village on public transport and of all who patronise Mr. Stillman’s establishment, which is, as has been explained, Plummergen’s nerve centre and heart. Eric and Bunny keep their fingers firmly on Plummergen’s pulse; and, should they ever feel its beat is on the sluggish side, their strong community spirit can always contrive some means or other to quicken it—means usually verbal, imaginative, and involving much mental agility, as the pair leap to conclusions any reasonable person would think impossible.
Few in Plummergen would think the Nuts reasonable persons; even fewer would miss the chance of hearing whatever item of gossip they might choose to impart. As it was not, however, entirely clear whether there was indeed any nutty news to be imparted, the Lilikot ladies were waved to the front of the nonexistent queue so that everyone else could go back to dissecting the character and habits of old Lady Hallbank. The best way of making the Nuts spill any beans they might have was to ignore such hints as they might drop until they could bear being ignored no longer; and on this occasion Plummergen, understandably aggrieved that the pair hadn’t gone on the bus to Brettenden market and couldn’t hope to cap the revelations of Mrs. Spice and Mrs. Flax, was minded not to play unless the stakes, if revealed, should prove sensationally high.
Mrs. Flax was still in a mood to be gracious and poured coals of fire on Mrs. Scillicough’s doubting head by chattering doggedly on as if the value of her evidence had never been in question. “Yes, ’twas at the pawnbroker’s I saw her, large as life—in a manner o’ speaking, that is, for she’s nought but a little thing, never mind she was wrapped up again the cold.” Once more the knowing finger wagged against her nose. Mrs. Flax winked. “Or so she’d like folk to think. But it’s as plain as the nose on my face she was there in disguise ...”
Now was the time for Mrs. Scillicough to eat humble pie and for everyone else to start pleasurably speculating on what reasons Lady Hallbank might have for moving about her native town in this inefficient incognito. Before any of the original audience could speak, however, Miss Nuttel chipped cheerfully in.
“Hear that, Bunny? Disguise. Told you there was something a bit odd about that business this morning, didn’t I?”
Mrs. Blaine, busy at the counter rejecting Emmy’s offering of plain boxed salt, answered without turning her head. “Well, yes, Eric, but if she was planning to start pawning things, it’s hardly a surprise, is it?” She coughed. “Considering.”
People stirred and glanced at one another with a slowly dawning gleam of hope in their eyes. This was unexpected. The Nuts, who—both by their own testimony and according to witnesses—hadn’t left the village all day, nevertheless knew about Lady Hallbank’s Brettenden peregrinations that morning.
Or—hopeful hearts beat faster, eyes gleamed more brightly—did Miss Nuttel and Mrs. Blaine mean someone who lived rather closer to home?
A little woman. A little woman whose behaviour, no matter how outlandish, when considered by those who knew her, would hardly come as a surprise ...
Lady Hallbank—together with her fur hood; her patched, button-mismatched coat; and her visit to Brettenden’s universal uncle—was banished without a qualm from the thoughts of every one of the post office shoppers. Even Mrs. Spice and Mrs. Flax knew that, when the Nuts spoke in that particular way, there could be only one particular person they had in mind ...
Miss Seeton.
And what had caused this gleeful banishment of the shade of Lady Hallbank?
Miss Seeton had overslept.
Miss Seeton had overslept: the suspicions of the Nuts, now being presented to a rapturous audience, were based on no more sinister occurrence than this. A pleasant supper the previous evening with Sir George and Lady Colveden at Rytham Hall had led to a later bedtime than usual for their guest, driven home through the starry night by their son Nigel in his red MG once he had returned from his Young Farmers’ meeting. Miss Seeton took pains to leave none of her habitual yoga programme unperformed before cleaning her teeth and slipping at last between the welcoming sheets ... but she had forgotten, as might anyone in the circumstances, to set her alarm.
Miss Seeton slept soundly, without dreaming; though had she dreamed, her dreams would have been undisturbed. As to whether others that night were undisturbed ...
Far above the silent room, the stars in their stately saraband wheeled unnoticed around the clear midnight sky, their distant brilliance extinguished by the silver glory of the moon enthroned, triumphant, high in the winter heavens.
A stray moonbeam tipped the corner of a window and began to cross the room with a gleaming, growing motion. Specks of dust glittered in its quiet white glow. There was no other sign of movement.
The moonbeam, encountering the silvered stillness of a mirror, leaped back to fall upon a human figure that had previously lain in shadow. No light as yet fell upon the face; the figure did not move.
The beam crept slowly—slowly—up from the tip of the outflung foot, pale and smooth in the moon’s pale light, towards the knee, bent at an angle for sleeping. From the knee it began moving up to the thigh ...
Then, all at once, there was more than moonbeam movement in the room. The pale sleeping figure slept on ... but another pale form was there in the dust-speckled dark. A form now creeping slowly—slowly—through the shadows towards that still, sleeping shape so white, so distinct, in the moonlit silence ...
A silence that was now no longer silent, as the shuffle of stealthy feet across the floor raised faltering echoes—so faltering that they might meld into sleeping dreams and leave them dreams, not nightmares—that did not make the sleeping figure stir.
The path of the pale, creeping form crossed that of the window-beaming moon, which for the first time flashed warning sparks from the long, thin blade in the creeper’s hand.
Yet still the sleeping figure did not stir ...
Clutching the shining sword, the
creeping one crept close. And waited.
Waited for the glow of the moon to reach the centre of that still, silent figure ...
And, when it finally did, whirled the sword arm above its head to plunge the blade, with all its force, deeper than the deepest deep into the sleeping heart ...
For the Plummergen sleeper it had not been one of Martha Bloomer’s days the day after her Rytham Hall supper. The rattling white of the milk float, the thud of the post van’s diesel engine did not wake Miss Seeton in her upstairs bedroom at the back. It was only when the clock of the church diagonally opposite Sweetbriars chimed eight that, with a guilty start, Miss Seeton awoke.
Miss Seeton disliked fuss and hurry. There were several matters to be put to rights before she could leave her dear cottage to its own devices for a whole day. She would not run for the bus—hardly sensible in this cold weather, with frost still a slippery sheen on roads and footpaths. She would, when she had everything sorted out, ring Crabbe’s Garage for a taxi to take her to Brettenden station for the most convenient London train.
Miss Seeton, that most retiring of English gentlewomen, had no idea that these innocent travel arrangements could be the concern of anyone but herself—that, indeed, any of her doings should be of the slightest interest. She would have been very surprised to learn that they were. She would have been still more surprised—startled, even—to learn that her decision to take a private taxi rather than the public bus, coupled with the belief that she had been seen in a Brettenden pawnshop, was to convince her neighbours that she was somehow involved in a stolen antiques fencing ring.
Or else in laundering counterfeit money—Plummergen didn’t much care which. It was enough for the village to know that, according to those reliable newsmongers the Nuts, Miss Emily Seeton was At It Again ...
As the village threw itself into joyous speculation, Miss Emily Seeton was at Charing Cross Station, about to board the homeward train. So many commuters: she had, after seven peaceful years in the country, forgotten what a crowded experience even the start of the rush hour could be. She shook the last of the raindrops from her umbrella, furled it, and set it in a discreet upright position against the wall as she sank thankfully into a corner seat, tucking her aching feet well out of the way of later arrivals, holding her bag on her knees, and finally closing her eyes. Behind their drowsy lids, the events of the day replayed themselves in pleasurable slow motion ...
Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20) Page 3