by Charles Todd
“I can’t leave you here-”
“But you can,” I said quickly, taking the decision out of his hands. “Go to the next village-ask for a telephone. I’ll tell you how to reach three people. Leave a message with anyone who answers. Describe how to find us.”
I began to dig in my valise for pen and paper, fumbling in my haste.
“I don’t like leaving you, Miss,” he said, his failure to use Sister a measure of his anxiety. “He almost got to you on Merlin. What was I to tell the Colonel then?”
“I asked you to guard the motorcar.”
“It wouldn’t suffice, Sister, if you were at the bottom of Portsmouth Harbor and the motorcar safe as houses. The Colonel-never mind what he’d want to do. But you know him as well as I do, and how he’d take such news. ”
I said as I wrote down three names and three telephone numbers, “I’ve reloaded my pistol-”
“It wouldn’t stop a fly, Miss, begging your pardon. Nor someone as determined to see you dead as this bast-as this one is.”
“I’ll be all right. I’ll take Private Morton with me, if he can manage to walk that far.”
He swore he could, and while I didn’t believe him, his was a comforting bulk to have beside me.
I handed over the sheet of paper. We got out, Hugh Morton and I, while Trelawney, with a last reluctant glance over his shoulder, drove away, leaving us by the side of the road.
Private Morton foraged for a moment in the hedgerow to the far side and came away with a stick he could use. The two of us started toward the distant farmhouse in a roundabout way, trying to keep out of sight. The hawthorns and the lay of the land contrived to help us. I didn’t think that even from the upper floor of the farmhouse we could be seen unless someone was looking for us.
“What if it’s a trick, and he leaves before the Sergeant comes back?”
I shook my head. It was a risk we had to take. I wanted to find out who lived in the farmhouse.
Gripping the stick with a tight fist, Private Morton managed to keep up across the pasture, but began to fall behind as the ground beyond the stile changed to a field with humped rows of marrows. He called to me, keeping his voice low.
“I’ll wait for you,” I said, “closer by the house.”
On the far side of the field I came to small yard and a derelict shed, one that had been used for shearing sheep from the smell of it. I stepped into its shadow just as the sun went behind a cloud and looked back for Hugh Morton, but he had turned toward the trees along the drive, where it was easier to walk. I watched him, fearful that he would be in trouble if the man suddenly reappeared.
Just then, from the direction of the farmhouse, across the back garden from where I was standing, I heard two distinct shots.
I started to run, Private Morton forgotten. It was faster to go around the house than try to find my way through it. I had barely reached the first of the trees that lined the drive when I heard a door slam and then the motorcar was racing toward me at reckless speed. The driver’s face, bent forward over the wheel, was a twisted mask of hatred.
I didn’t hesitate. I spun around so that I was half protected by the nearest tree, letting him pass. But I don’t think he’d have noticed a line of cavalry if it had stood in his way.
I didn’t look to see where he was heading. I went straight toward the farmhouse door.
It was a lovely old house, three stories and built of local stone. There was a bow window to one side of the door, which stood ajar, and somewhere through the open panes I could hear a woman crying. I stopped on the threshold and called out.
“I’ve come to help,” I said. “Please don’t be frightened.”
There was no answer. I went inside.
The wide hall was empty.
There were stairs just to my right, and beyond the newel post was an open door to my left.
I moved to it and stepped into the room, stopping almost at once as I tried to take in the scene before me.
An older woman, a maid judging by the way she was dressed, her arm bleeding badly, dripping down her hand to the floor, was struggling to help the young woman who lay in the middle of the floor on a patterned carpet.
There seemed to be a great deal of blood, more than could be explained by the arm wound. I said, bending over the younger woman, “Let me see.” But I had to push the maid to one side even to tell if the other victim was still alive.
For a wonder she was breathing, although it was labored, and the cloth that the maid had pressed against her side was already making its own pool across the carpet.
My kit was in the motorcar with Trelawney, but I said, “Scissors, quickly, and more clean cloths.”
The maid, still quite dazed, scrambled to her feet with an effort, and disappeared. Meanwhile, I was trying to find where the shot had actually gone in-and if it had come out.
The woman moaned as I moved her, and I said gently, “You’re with friends. I’m going to stop the bleeding and make you more comfortable.”
I wasn’t certain she could hear me, but I kept making soothing noises as I worked and finally determined that she had been shot in the side. It appeared to me that the bullet had dug furrow along the ribs. I didn’t think it had reached the lung-there was no froth of blood on her lips.
The scissors came, and I cut away the once-pretty white and green fabric of her summer gown for a better look. The problem was, I couldn’t find where the bullet had stopped. Although it was very possibly lodged in her shoulder somewhere, without instruments I couldn’t be sure, and internal bleeding was still a danger if it had penetrated the rib cage under her arm.
She was so much slimmer than the wounded soldiers I’d dealt with, not much muscle or flesh there to shield the ribs, and as I tried gently to probe the site, then stanch the bleeding, she cried out. I had nothing to give her.
It took time, more time than I cared to think about, to stop the bleeding and bind up the wound as best I could with the simple bandages the maid brought me.
And as I worked I spoke to the maid hovering over my shoulder.
“What is your name?”
“Maggie,” she said, her voice shaking from shock compounded by her own pain. “Will she live?”
“Yes, I think she has a good chance. What happened here? Why were the two of you shot? Did you know the man who did this?”
“He came through the door, shouting her name. Over and over, in such a voice that I ran out from the kitchen and came to see what was happening. And then she came down the stairs, staring as if she’d seen a ghost. And it was. Dear God, it was.”
“Her husband?” I asked, ripping lengths of cloth to bind the woman’s arm to her side.
“No, oh, no. He’s in France. This was the man she was once engaged to, and then broke it off. And he’d come for revenge.”
“Her name?”
“Julia Palmer.”
“His? Do you know his name?”
“Ralph Mitchell.”
“Go on.” I sat back on my heels, looking down at my handiwork, satisfied that for the moment Julia Palmer was out of danger. “She was on the stairs, you said?”
Getting to my feet, I took the scissors to Maggie’s bloody sleeve, and I began to clean and bind up her wound as well. It went deep, and it must have been painful for her to endure my touch, but she went stoically on.
“He told her he’d come to ask her again to marry him. Then she said, cool as you please, ‘Come into the parlor, Ralph. We’ll talk about it, shall we?’ And she walked ahead of him into this room and turned to face him. I’d come with her, not knowing what to expect. Before she could say anything more, he told her that he was a Major now, and as she was a widow, he had come to ask a last time if she’d marry him. She told him he was mistaken, she was still a wife, and he said, ‘I’m an officer now, I outrank Palmer. What’s more, he’s dead. You should have heard by this time. There was a letter from Colonel Prescott. I saw it myself.’ ”
“Was Colonel Prescott his co
mmanding officer?”
“Miss, I don’t have any idea.”
“Go on.”
Fighting back tears, she said, “Miss Julia told him, ‘But I haven’t.’ He was very angry, he told her she was lying. On purpose, to put him off. Then-then, Miss, he told her he’d killed the Lieutenant himself. Miss Julia cried out at that, and he went on shouting, ‘Do you love me? Tell me you still love me.’ But she couldn’t, could she?”
I led Maggie to a chair, and she sat down suddenly, her face very pale. “He just stood there, waiting for an answer. I didn’t know where to look. It was as if I could hear the ticking of the clock on the table behind me. But maybe it wasn’t that, only my heart in my throat.”
“How did Mrs. Palmer answer?”
“She told him then that she had never loved anyone but her husband.”
I could imagine what must have followed. But as it happened, I was wrong.
“And then?”
“He said he couldn’t live without her, and that’s when he took out his revolver, and I thought he was about to kill himself right in front of us. But it wasn’t that, was it? He pointed that revolver straight at her, and he told her that if he couldn’t have her, no one else would. She answered that if he truly loved her, he would want her happiness above his own.”
Maggie broke down as she relived the shooting in her mind. I knelt beside her, trying to comfort her.
“I don’t know what possessed me. When he fired, I pushed her to one side, and the bullet struck my arm instead. He stepped forward, shoved me away so hard I fell against the wall, and then he shot her. Standing over her, he cried out, ‘Damn you, Crawford,’ as if someone else had pulled the trigger. Then without even waiting to see if I was alive or not to tell the tale, he was gone, out the door, driving away like a whirlwind.”
I’d finished binding up Maggie’s arm. Suddenly aware that Hugh Morton had been on my heels but had never appeared, I hurried to the door to look for him. He was nowhere to be seen. I called his name, and there was no answer. There wasn’t time to worry.
I came back to the parlor and asked, “Is there a doctor close by? Do you have a motorcar-some way we can get Mrs. Palmer to him? She needs more care than I can give her. What’s more, so do you.”
“There’s the dogcart,” Maggie said, standing up. “Out back. And the old horse is in the pasture. I don’t know if I can find the strength to harness him up. There’s no one else here today. The cook’s daughter got word her husband had been killed, and so the cook and the boy who does the handiwork went over to sit with her.”
It was up to me, then.
“Stay here with your mistress,” I said. “I’ll fetch the cart.”
I found my way through to the kitchen and then out into the yard. The small dogcart was in a good state of repair, and the horse in the field came at once to my call. It took no more than ten minutes to hitch him to the cart and then drive round to the house door.
It took much longer to bring Mrs. Palmer as far as the cart. Slender as she was, she had fainted again and couldn’t help us. I sent Maggie to bring as many pillows and blankets as she could find, piled them into the cart, and then began the arduous task of settling my patient among them. It was impossible to bring Mrs. Palmer around sufficiently to help us help her. And all the while I thought about Hugh Morton, who would have been such a support through all this.
Finally, her face nearly as pale as the linens she lay on, Mrs. Palmer was ensconced among the pillows and I had shut the house door behind us before taking up the reins to drive to the nearest village. Trelawney hadn’t returned either, but it could well have taken much longer to find a telephone than I’d hoped. If that was the case, then I would surely meet him somewhere between here and the doctor’s surgery.
I drove as carefully as I could along the drive and out into the dusty road beyond, trying not to jostle Mrs. Palmer and start the wound to bleeding again. The sky was threatening, and although the distance to the nearest village was only three miles, it seemed much farther. All that mattered was whether or not it had a doctor.
“Shelpot,” Maggie said and pointed. “The village. The surgery’s down there. Just past the church. Dr. Glover.”
It was a long, rambling house with a thatched roof and a pretty garden.
His nurse answered my knock, saw the cart with two bloodstained women in it, and with a shocked “Oh my dear Lord,” she went to fetch the doctor.
He was a man of perhaps sixty years of age, straight as an arrow and strong enough to lift Mrs. Palmer himself and carry her into his surgery. I ushered Maggie in after him.
The nurse was sent for tea while the doctor examined my two patients. Looking at my uniform at one point, he asked, “On leave, are you? Well, it’s a good thing you were, or Mrs. Palmer might not have made it. She’s lost a good deal of blood, and her breathing is not as comfortable as I’d like to see it. There’s the bullet, of course, but at the moment the bleeding worries me most. I’ll have to keep her here. Maggie as well, I should think. I’m not happy with either of these women returning to the house.” He finished rebinding Maggie’s wound with proper bandaging and reached for the teacup his nurse had set on his desk. “Gunshot wounds are rare hereabouts. Who did this? Any idea?”
“Ralph Mitchell. So I was told.”
“Good God. I thought he was in France.”
“So, apparently, did Mrs. Palmer.”
“His father owned a farm some miles from here. Young Mitchell took it into his head that he was going to marry Julia Baldwin. Made a right nuisance of himself instead, and then when he failed to qualify as an officer, he blamed everyone but himself and swore he’d win the VC before the war ended.”
“Baldwin,” I repeated. “What was her father’s name?”
“Tobias. An Army man himself, although he’d been invalided out. Recalled to do something or other in London. Died there in a Zeppelin raid.”
I knew who Tobias Baldwin was. And he hadn’t died in a Zeppelin raid. That was the official reason, but he’d been killed during one, and his murderer had never been caught. He’d worked for my father, and the fear early on was that his death had to do with his work. As time went by, that seemed more and more unlikely.
Was Ralph Mitchell in London when Captain Baldwin died? My father would have to look into that.
I remembered what Maggie had told me. That Mitchell had stood over Julia and cried, “Damn you, Crawford!” And he had had more than an hour’s head start-
“I must find a telephone,” I said quickly.
“Actually, there’s one at the house. Baldwin had it put in when he began reporting to London and Mrs. Palmer chose to live here after her father died in the bombing rather than stay in her husband’s London house. She believed it was safer, poor woman.”
If that was the case, where were Trelawney and Private Morton?
There was no time to consider that. I had only a dogcart at my disposal, and that wouldn’t carry me any great distance in pursuit of a motorcar. I needed to make the calls that Trelawney hadn’t. And as far as that went, where on earth was he? What had become of Private Morton? I was beginning to worry that they had run afoul of Mitchell somehow.
After asking Dr. Glover to send someone to the house of the Palmers’ cook’s daughter, to let her know what had become of her mistress, I set out alone in the dogcart, against all advice.
“If Mrs. Palmer is in danger, you will be as well, Sister,” Dr. Glover warned me. “He could come back. The man’s not stable if he’d do something like this to Julia Palmer. If he can’t find her, he’ll turn on you. Let me summon the constable; he’ll need your statement anyway.”
“There isn’t time. I’ll be all right. I must get to that telephone. I promise I’ll speak to the constable as soon as possible.”
“Then promise me as well that once your telephone calls are made, you’ll return to the surgery.”
Dr. Glover followed me to the door, quietly asking out of earshot of the other
s what was so urgent, but I wasn’t prepared to tell him that I thought Mitchell’s next victim was very likely going to be my father.
There was still no sign of Trelawney or of Private Morton on my return to the house. The door was shut, as I’d left it, but I took the horse around to the back where he couldn’t be seen by anyone approaching down the drive, and with the little pistol in my hand, I went from the kitchen through to the wide hall, searching for a telephone. I found it in the room that Captain Baldwin must have used for his study. I locked myself inside and sat down at the burled desk.
I called London first, but I was told by a voice I didn’t recognize that Colonel Crawford was not available.
The next call I put in went to Somerset and my mother. Iris, pleased to hear from me, was full of questions and finally told me that my mother was not to home.
“Where is she?” I asked, praying that she’d gone to market or was calling on friends.
“She went to the clinic, Miss Elizabeth. The one where you were. She should be coming home before very long.”
Debating what to say, I settled on, “Tell my mother, and Sergeant-Major Brandon if he’s with her, to close the house at once and go back to the clinic. They must wait there until I come. And you must go with them, taking Cook as well. Do you hear?”
“Yes, Miss, but Cook is in the midst of preparing dinner-”
“I’m sure she must be. But you must convince her to go with you. As quickly as you can, you must leave the house. There’s something wrong, Iris, and I don’t know what’s about to happen. It’s best if there isn’t anyone in the house at all.”
It took all of my persuasive powers to convince her to heed my warning. Iris, accustomed to the safety of the Crawford household, found it hard to believe that any threat could touch her there.
And my final call was put through to Longleigh House. Matron answered the telephone, and I asked if my mother was there, or, failing her, Simon Brandon.
She hesitated for a moment. “Sister, I shall be happy to take a message for them.”