Laetitia Rodd and the Case of the Wandering Scholar

by Kate Saunders

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Blackbeard. ‘The truth is nearer home, Mrs Rodd. As it usually is. If you don’t see me for a day or two, it’ll be because I’m out and about looking up some of them names.’

  ‘But it was so long ago,’ I said. ‘Those men must all be dead by now!’

  ‘I’m banking on at least one of them being alive and in his right mind. Twenty golden coins don’t spring out of nowhere.’

  Twenty-seven

  ‘I looked in Crockford’s for the name of Wainright,’ said Mrs Watts-Weston. ‘And I looked in vain, until I suddenly remembered that the man was actually called Belling. He is dead, but his widow still lives nearby. I cannot imagine how old she must be now.’

  I was in the Warden’s carriage once more, driving along the principal road towards the town of Wallingford. Inspector Blackbeard had expressed a cautious interest in Lady Tremlett’s paid companion, and that was the only hint I needed to seek the Gorgon’s help that morning. She was delighted, and ordered such handsome provisions for the journey (game pie, claret from the college cellar, ham sandwiches) that we might have been headed for Timbuctoo.

  ‘This is quite a holiday for me, Mrs Rodd! Domestic matters will have to take care of themselves for once.’

  ‘It is most kind of you,’ I said. ‘And it may lead nowhere. We are clutching at straws.’ I had not told her about the gold.

  ‘Never mind, I am simply intrigued. May I help you to more pie?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘I’ve warned my husband for years – one bright morning, I shall simply run away, just like Joshua Welland.’

  ‘I can’t see you living in the forest,’ I said, smiling (and thinking that it would need to be a very orderly forest). ‘Is life at the college so terrible?’

  ‘Life at the college is perfectly beautiful, Mrs Rodd, for those allowed to spend their days in the library. My days are spent in wash houses, kitchens, nurseries, and the drawing rooms of other women that I don’t much like.’

  I laughed outright at this. ‘Have you found no congenial society here?’

  ‘Not really. I know only too well how it feels to be denied an education. Joshua Welland merely wanted more money. My situation was far worse.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Because I’m a woman, of course!’

  ‘Oh – yes.’

  ‘Every door is barred with gold, Mrs Rodd, and opens but to golden keys – unless you’re a woman, in which case there are no keys at all. I have sometimes wondered why the Almighty bothers to create clever women in the first place. It seems such a waste.’

  ‘He creates nothing without a purpose,’ I said decidedly. ‘If he gave us females brains, it follows that he meant us to use them; he is not to be blamed for wrong-headedness that is entirely human in origin.’

  ‘Good heavens, I didn’t expect you to be such a radical!’ cried Mrs Watts-Weston, smiling in a way that suddenly gave me a glimpse of how handsome she had been as a girl. ‘There are some advocates of female education in Oxford, but nobody asks them to dinner or takes them at all seriously. And they are so badly dressed!’

  She broke off to pull down the window of the carriage, and to stick her head out of it, as she had done every ten minutes or so since we started.

  ‘Robbins! ROBBINS! Why are we so slow? What IS the obstruction?’

  Robbins, up on the box, shouted down something about the traffic.

  Mrs Watts-Weston whisked her head back inside and shut the window. ‘It’ll be easier once we take the turning to Barncott. Mrs Belling lives in Lower Barncott.’

  ‘I’m a little uneasy about descending on her like this,’ I ventured. ‘Without any warning.’

  ‘Pish!’ said Mrs Watts-Weston. ‘I don’t imagine she’s doing anything else.’

  The carriage turned off the main road, and she once more stuck her head out of the window to shout instructions at Robbins, and at a farmer who was blocking the way with his wagon. We passed through the main village, a busy and bustling place. Lower Barncott was a mile or so beyond it, a scattering of pretty thatched houses surrounded by fields.

  Larkspur Cottage, the home of Mrs Belling, was the largest and most genteel of the houses; a long, low cob cottage set in a walled garden. The door was opened by a neat young servant-girl, and Mrs W-W’s loud preamble was cut short by a voice from somewhere nearby.

  ‘Show them in, my dear; they will not mind a little informality.’

  Mrs Belling was in her drawing room, in the middle of washing some delicate pieces of china in a small bowl of warm water, on the table at her elbow.

  ‘Please sit down, ladies, and forgive me for not getting up; I suppose you are here on behalf of the Winter Relief Club. Good heavens, it comes round earlier every year!’

  She had grey hair, covered with a muslin cap of antiquated design, a rounded, unlined face and cordial manner. I judged her to be around seventy-five years old, and as hale as a much younger woman. Mrs Watts-Weston began her explanation, and the face of the former Miss Price lit up when she heard the name of Warrender.

  ‘You must be little Caroline!’

  ‘Why – yes—’ For once, Mrs Watts-Weston was thoroughly rattled. ‘But how can you possibly—?’

  ‘I had you all by heart,’ said Mrs Belling. ‘The family tree and its ramifications were all my employer liked to talk about. You were the only girl in your family, and the apple of your father’s eye.’

  ‘No, you’re quite wrong,’ said Mrs Watts-Weston, her cheeks reddening. ‘My father didn’t approve of me at all!’

  ‘He was very proud of you,’ said Mrs Belling. ‘But clever little girls must not be cleverer than their brothers.’

  ‘Oh—’

  ‘Mrs Belling,’ I said quickly (we could not afford too much ancient history), ‘we are trying to find out about the time of Sir Christopher’s disappearance.’

  ‘Are you, indeed! Well, there can’t be any harm in speaking of it now.’ For the first time, her smile took on a hint of sourness. ‘When everybody has been dead for years.’

  I chose my words carefully. ‘Lady Tremlett made a great noise about her nephew’s disappearance, I believe.’

  ‘That she did,’ said Mrs Belling. ‘She had notices printed, she placed advertisements in newspapers, she offered a reward and I don’t know what. She was very angry, ma’am. And she died angry.’

  ‘It was all about money, apparently,’ said Mrs Watts-Weston, now recovered from the glimpse into her childhood. ‘We wondered if he’d run off with something of value.’

  ‘Ha! Did you, now?’ Mrs Belling’s reaction was intriguing; though she chuckled, as if at a private joke, her expression was grim. ‘It was bound to come out eventually.’

  She would say no more until she had called to the maid for glasses of Madeira and a plate of sugary biscuits that crumbled like dust.

  ‘I didn’t care for Sir Christopher Warrender,’ she said. ‘And I cannot pretend I was sorry to see the back of him.’

  ‘Did you live at Binstock?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Belling. ‘My employer considered herself the head of the family, and took up residence at Binstock when the old baronet died. The story was that she was keeping house for Sir Christopher. The plain truth of the matter, however, was that she was too poor to keep her own establishment. By the time I came to her, the house was in a shocking state – and she made me do the work of at least three servants. The term “paid companion”, as I’m sure you know, covers a multitude of sins. I was a very distant cousin – which meant that I was expected to live upon crumbs and be grateful.’

  As she talked, she dried her little pieces of china with a soft linen cloth, before placing them carefully in a cabinet with glass doors (beautiful china, very like the blue-and-white pieces that I inherited from my dear mother, who also washed her china with her own hands; servants simply can’t be trusted with such fragility).

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ said Mrs Watts-Weston, ‘Lad
y Tremlett was rather a horrid old thing.’

  Mrs Belling laughed softly, not at all put out by Mrs W-W’s bluntness. ‘She was an angry woman, and a disappointed woman, who never stopped complaining. And I’m sorry to say that I thought her extremely horrid. It was an unpleasant house. Sir Christopher was a drunkard, and the one thing that can be said for Lady Tremlett is that her presence protected me from his dreadful friends. I knew that she was at the end of her life, and I was frankly rather impatient for the end to come. The shameful fact is that I was secretly engaged to the local curate, my dear late husband; at the time of the disappearance, I was longing to be married – but I could not leave Lady Tremlett, for she had no one else in the world.’

  ‘That was decent of you,’ said Mrs Watts-Weston. ‘And I know for a fact that she never paid you a bean.’

  Mrs Belling opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again and looked at us both, a little warily. ‘I might as well let it out now, though I have never told a soul except my husband. Lady Tremlett was stingy but that’s not even the half of it – she was a thief!’

  ‘I knew it!’ gasped Mrs Watts-Weston, alight with excitement. ‘The Romney!’

  ‘Yes, Miss Caroline; that picture truly existed. And Lady Tremlett truly took it off to London wrapped in sacking. Sir Christopher had nothing to do with it. There were other things, too; an enamel clock, a set of fine glasses – the house was in such chaos that it was possible for her to filch little bits and pieces without being found out. She felt that she had a right to the things because she had been born a Warrender. But there was something else – something that I was not supposed to know. The wicked old lady was invited to a large house party, from which she returned with a valuable necklace; it looked valuable to me, at any rate. She tried to hide it at the bottom of her work-box. But Sir Christopher managed to find it, and take it with him when he disappeared.’

  ‘That explains why Lady Tremlett was in such a state,’ I said. ‘She could hardly advertise for the return of a stolen necklace!’

  ‘Quite,’ said Mrs Belling tartly. ‘Her fury was a sight to behold; I’m sure it was the cause of the seizure that killed her. I hope you will believe that I did my best for her, but she died raging.’

  ‘Was there no response to her campaign?’ I asked. ‘Did she find out what happened to the necklace?’

  ‘There was a story going round, a few months after she died, that the necklace had been sold at a horse fair for one hundred pounds – a fraction of what it was worth.’

  ‘One hundred pounds!’ cried Mrs Watts-Weston. ‘So much for all the rumours of stolen fortunes!’

  My mind had gone back to the gold sovereigns, gleaming in Blackbeard’s hand.

  Had Sir Christopher been murdered for the sake of a few gold coins?

  Men have been murdered for a lot less.

  Twenty-eight

  ‘Interesting,’ said Mr Blackbeard. ‘In a round-about sort of way.’

  ‘I know it’s not much, and might be nothing,’ I said. ‘But Mrs Belling’s story does explain why there is no record of a robbery at the time of Sir Christopher’s disappearance. According to her, it happened somewhere else, at this house party, when the old lady stole a certain necklace and her nephew exchanged it for gold.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I was afraid you would make that irritating noise, Inspector! Don’t you think it warrants further investigation?’

  ‘Indeed I do, Mrs Rodd, but it’s slow work that can’t be hurried.’

  There was a gleam of satisfaction about him this morning, almost invisible to the naked eye but enough to make me intensely curious; he had turned up quite unannounced, to request my company, but so far he had revealed nothing. I did not even know where we were going, for the windows of that plain black carriage of his were small and thick with dirt.

  ‘I thought I’d take a look at Binstock,’ said Mr Blackbeard. ‘I know that Mr Arden is in London, but it ain’t him I’m after. I’m still chasing after some of those names, and I’m betting that they were local rascals – if a man wishes to go to the bad, ma’am, he never has to look very far for company.’

  ‘Very true,’ I said.

  ‘Will Tapp, John Gore, Dan Smith, Jack Barker and Dan Cummings.’ He rattled out the names. ‘I’ve had my constables searching through all the parish records for miles about, and I’ve already scratched John Gore off the list; he was hanged for sheep-stealing twenty years ago. And then ten years ago, Jack Barker got drunk and drowned in the river. But it won’t be easy finding the others, after so many years. Times passes, ma’am, and memories fade.’

  ‘They may not all be dead,’ I said stoutly. ‘And country memories never fade, Inspector! If we ask the right questions of the right people, we will find the truth.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Blackbeard. ‘You’re light-hearted today, Mrs Rodd!’

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as light-hearted,’ I said, smiling at his accusatory tone. ‘But this new line of yours makes me hopeful for my poor friends.’

  ‘The papers have lost interest in them, anyhow,’ said Mr Blackbeard. ‘All eyes are on Swinford now.’ (This was perfectly true, as those of my years will remember; at the time the scandal was enormous, splashed across every publication and preached about from every pulpit.)

  ‘Have you discovered anything new there?’ I dared to ask him a direct question.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘The trouble is, I’ve been distracted for too long by a load of tittle-tattle.’ His stony eyes glinted humorously; this was the nearest he would get to admitting he had been wrong about Rachel and Mr Barton. ‘But gold is gold, and that’s a good solid thing to chase after.’

  ‘Again, very true,’ I said. ‘How should we proceed? And did you bring me along for a particular purpose – or simply to assist in the general stirring-up of old village gossip?’

  ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from you, ma’am, it’s that nobody knows a place better than the vicar. And you have the knack of shaking them down.’

  I could not help smiling again at this rather doubtful compliment. ‘Whom would you like me to “shake down”, Inspector? Is it anyone I know?’

  ‘A curate,’ said Blackbeard, ‘by the name of Charles Yates.’

  ‘Yates?’ I was puzzled for a moment, and then remembered where I had heard the name before. ‘Oh, of course; the young man who discovered Mr Fogle’s body at Swinford!’

  ‘That’s the fellow.’ A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. ‘When he ain’t praying in a stable, Mr Yates is curate-in-charge at Binstock church. And I’m sorry to say that he don’t like the police.’

  ‘I suppose it’s understandable,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘The whole experience must have been quite shocking to him. I wrote to request an interview, but he refused, saying that he was ill.’

  ‘Well, he ain’t,’ said Blackbeard shortly. ‘The inquest put him into a fright, that’s all.’

  ‘Really? From what I have read, I thought the coroner’s questions were perfectly civil.’

  ‘It’s what happened outside the court that got him. Someone who don’t like Catholics chucked a bad egg at him.’

  ‘Poor man – how horrid!’

  ‘Now he runs a mile whenever he sees me, Mrs Rodd. So you see why I need you; I want all the local information and Mr Yates won’t give me the time of day.’

  ‘In which case, I shall be tact itself,’ I said. ‘Would you be kind enough to open the window?’

  Blackbeard jerked down the dirty window, so that I was able to see where we were going; we passed the lodge at Binstock and followed the road for a mile or so, until we came to the village.

  This was Mr Arden’s ‘pet’ village, held up as a model for miles around. Blackbeard stopped the carriage when we came to a trim little green, overlooked by a row of trim little cottages; every thatch was new here, every wall was freshly whitewashed, and even the cows that grazed in the field behi
nd the single street looked as if they had been polished. I was strongly reminded of the bucolic picture upon the lid of Mrs B’s sewing-box.

  The church was an old one with a square tower, set well back from the road behind a large and wondrously tidy churchyard.

  ‘You’ll see some familiar names in here, ma’am.’ Mr Blackbeard nodded towards the tipsy-looking gravestones in the cropped grass. ‘There’s a Gore, and a Tapp, and a Cummings. Some folks spend their lives on one small patch of earth, until they end up being buried in it.’

  ‘When I was a girl,’ I said (wondering yet again where the man had spent his childhood), ‘people stayed where they were born, and regarded twenty miles as a great distance. There were always one or two, however, that managed to leave.’

  ‘Like Arden.’

  ‘Yes – but Mr Arden came back to his patch.’

  ‘Do you happen to know, ma’am, exactly where Arden was born?’

  ‘Not exactly; I understood that he grew up within a few miles of here, but was not attached to any village in particular.’

  The entrance to the church, through a quaint lychgate, was situated in a turning off the road, faced by the small, neat, grey stone vicarage. I had been prepared to send in my card, but Mr Yates was out in the garden to one side of the house; a slender young man with fair hair and a permanent dint of anxiety over the bridge of his nose. He wore an apron of brown holland over his black suit, and brown holland sleeve-guards, and the young woman beside him was similarly attired. They were pulling the pelargoniums from a row of pots and cutting them right back to the roots to store over the winter (my mother and I used to do this; it seems brutal, but the reward is a profusion of flowers when you plant them again the following year).

  The sight of Mr Blackbeard made the young man stiff and defensive. Blackbeard, however, took his leave as soon as he had made the introductions, leaving Mr Yates openly relieved, although still a trace suspicious of me.

  ‘What a charming garden you have here, Mr Yates,’ I said. Of course I was ‘buttering him up’, as Fred would say, yet the garden truly was very pretty, even at the beginning of autumn, and most beautifully maintained.