Outrageous Fortune

by Patricia Wentworth

  Well, if the snatching Mrs Riddell had stolen Jim Randal, she had got to be found. The bother was that Caroline hadn’t any idea of where to look for her. She didn’t even know what sort of car she was driving or anything. She supposed she would have to ring up the hospital and find out—and then it would probably be a Morris, or a baby Austin, or something that was as thick on the roads as—as—earwigs. Here Caroline brushed away no less than three.

  And then she remembered the folded paper which the day sister had given her to take to Mrs Riddell. “The ward maid picked it up. We think it must have dropped out of her bag.” That was what the day sister had said. And Caroline had just let it go right through her head and out at the other side. She opened her bag in a hurry, found the paper, and spread it out. It was a bill—one of the flimsy black-lined sort that a girl scribbles on in a carbon-papered book and then gets the shop-walker to sign.

  Caroline tingled all over with excitement as she looked at it. It was, in her vocabulary, “absolutely stuffed with meat.” To start with, there was the name of the shop—Smithies, Ironmongers. And then there was the address—29 Market Street, Ledlington. Lastly there was the bill itself—One purdonium, 19/11.

  “For the love of Mike—what’s a purdonium?” said Caroline solemnly, and then all at once remembered Mrs Pocklington’s sale. Coalscuttles became purdoniums—or was it purdonii—or purdonia when they got into an auction. They evidently started life in iron-mongers’ shops under the same classic alias. Anyhow Mrs Riddell had bought a purdonium at a shop in Ledlington. Now, you might buy sweets, ribbons, tapes, or cotton anywhere, or a hot wherever it took your fancy; but if you bought a coalscuttle in Ledlington, the chances were that you lived somewhere near by and that you made them send it home. Of course you might take it away in a car—but coalscuttles do have the most revolting corners, and what would be the sense of scratching your car when Smithies might just as well deliver the blighted thing? After all, Smithies had got to do something to keep his end up.

  She paid for her tea, went down six moss-grown steps to the car, and pored over a map. Ledlington was a good fifty miles. She looked at her watch.… getting on for six. It was a clear impossibility to reach Mr Smithies before his shutters went up.

  Caroline slapped the map together and jammed it back in the pocket. She did hate not doing things at once. And it was waste of petrol too, because she would have to pass within twenty miles of Ledlington anyhow. It was not until she had run a dozen miles that she reflected on the state that Pansy Ann would have been in if she had gone off to Ledlington and not come home till midnight.

  The village of Hazelbury West is like a good many other English villages. There is a pond, and a green, a big house with stone pillars crowned by pineapples and a long neglected drive, a church, a parsonage, two or three houses of the better sort, a butcher, a baker, a general shop which is also the post-office, and a straggle of cottages.

  Miss Arbuthnot, who was Caroline Leigh’s first cousin once removed, lived in the last cottage on the left. Caroline lived there with her. Sometimes she wondered whether she was just going to go on living in Hazelbury West with Pansy Ann for ever and ever.

  Miss Arbuthnot had been christened Ann, but preferred to be called Pansy. She sketched a little, and gardened a little, and painted a little on china. She also wrote minor verse and belonged to a society under the rules of which all the members read one another’s compositions. Caroline called it The Vicious Circle.

  It was half past seven when she ran her car into the shed which did duty as a garage and went up the flagged path with the red standard rose-trees on either side of it.

  The cottage was really two cottages thrown together. The front door opened directly into a sitting-room, out of the corner of which a steep curly stair went up to the bedrooms.

  Caroline stood on the door-step and said, “Golly!”

  All the furniture had been pushed back, and there was laid out upon the floor a short length of brightly flowered chintz, a longer piece of sage-green serge, and a remnant of navy-blue crepe de chine with a pattern of green and yellow daisies. Some strangely shaped pieces of newspaper were disposed like islands and peninsulas upon the serge, whilst, kneeling with her back to the door and holding a pair of cutting-out scissors in a hesitating, hovering manner, was Miss Pansy Arbuthnot.

  “Pansy Ann—what are you doing?” said Caroline.

  Miss Arbuthnot sat back upon her heels and slewed round. She had very pretty dark hair, and it was obvious that she had been running her fingers through it. She was about ten years older than Caroline, and she had just missed being as pretty as her own romantic picture of herself. She had melting dark eyes and enormously long lashes; she had arched eyebrows, a straight nose, and a fine if rather colourless skin; she also had a tiny mouth, rabbity teeth, and a lisp. She wore a rather tired crimson smock stuck dangerously full of pins, and a yard-measure trailing round her neck like a scarf.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come!” she said.

  “Did you think I’d been abducted?”

  “This won’t come out.” Caroline came nearer and surveyed the mess.

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “It’s those three remnants that I got. There isn’t enough of any of them, but I thought if I could cut out the chintz flowers and appliqué them on to the serge—”

  Caroline gurgled.

  “It’d look exactly like boiled greens served up with asters.”

  Pansy gazed at her with a worried frown.

  “Do you think it would? And even then there wouldn’t be enough, with these long skirts. And I don’t see how I can work in the crepe de chine whatever I do.”

  “You can’t,” said Caroline with great firmness. “And, darling if we don’t have some food soon, I shall probably swoon. I’ve got a feeling that I shall see those asters going round and round in about half a minute. What are we having?”

  “Scrambled eggs.”

  “Go and scramble them. I’ll put the mush away. You can make a knitting-bag out of the chintz, and a tablecloth for Mrs Vickers out of the serge—if you keep it here, I’ll leave home. I daresay I’ll have a brain-wave about the crepe de chine some other time. Now go and cook. I simply must wash.”

  When Caroline came down again she had taken off her hat. She laid the table, and presently Miss Arbuthnot came in with a flushed face and a smoking dish of eggs. As she put it down, she shot a hesitating questioning glance at Caroline—

  “It wasn’t Jim?”

  “I don’t know?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “He’s gone to Ledlington. I’m going there tomorrow. He’s lost his memory. I don’t awfully want to talk about it, Pansy Ann.”

  Pansy looked a little offended. She loved Caroline dearly, but she thought her odd. It was odd of Caroline to be so reserved about Jim Randal. Pansy could have talked about him all day. It had always been her cherished belief that when Jim Randal went abroad he had taken with him a romantic passion for herself. She would have simply loved to hint at this to Caroline; she had in fact done so once, but somehow or other she had not felt as if she could do it again. Perhaps she was too sensitive. But there it was—Caroline had not responded, and Pansy required response. It was so hard to have to live one’s emotional life without anyone to confide in. If Uncle James had died six months earlier, it might have made all the difference. Jim wouldn’t have quarrelled with his uncle and gone abroad; and if he hadn’t gone abroad, no one knows what might have happened. As it was, every time she went through the village there were the stone pillars at the entrance to Hale Place a little more covered with a green mould, and the drive a little more neglected. And Caroline wouldn’t talk about any of it. She probably wouldn’t even have said she was going to Elston if Pansy hadn’t heard the radio message with her own ears.

  Of course this man wasn’t Jim Randal, and of course Caroline was disappointed. But then why not say so, and have a good cry and let Pansy comfort her? It must be
terribly bad to repress one’s self like that.

  Caroline did not feel in the least inclined to cry. Her thoughts were full of a warm, delicious excitement. There were little slants of light and mysterious hide-and-seek shadows, like the glints and shadows in a wood. Far away amongst the trees a bird sang. But it was her wood, her trees, her sun and shadow. If she let anyone in, it would all be spoilt. Jim was her secret playfellow. She never talked to people about him, and he wasn’t any real relation to Pansy Ann, though they had all been brought up together.

  “I think you might talk about something,” said Pansy in an aggrieved voice.

  Caroline was quite ready to talk about anything except Jim.

  “What shall we talk about?”

  “You might have brought an evening paper.” Pansy was still aggrieved.

  “I wasn’t near one. What did you want it for?”

  “I wanted to know whether there was anything more about the emeralds and Mr Van Berg.”

  “Why should there be?”

  Caroline wasn’t really attending. She was thinking that she could get to Ledlington by eleven. She was thinking that fourteen hours was a very long time to wait.

  “Well,” Pansy went on, “he’ll either be better or else worse. Won’t it be dreadful if he dies? Jim having known him seems to bring it home so. You know, of course it must be wonderful to have the finest emeralds in the world—and I simply adore emeralds—don’t you?—but just think of the anxiety. Even if they get them back, I shouldn’t think that Mrs Van Berg would ever want to wear them again—anyhow not if he dies. I should think she’d always feel as if there was blood on them.”

  Caroline winced, not visibly, but deep inside herself. She couldn’t talk about a woman who was waiting to know whether her husband was going to die. Jim had written about the Van Bergs from New York—they had been awfully good to him—Mrs Van Berg was pretty and kind. The emeralds were like a fairy tale. Now it was spoilt. She couldn’t bear to think about kind, pretty Susie Van Berg with everything fallen to bits around her. A shot in the night had broken the fairy tale. She wished that Pansy Ann would stop picking over the pieces.

  VIII

  Caroline left her car in the Market Square at Ledlington next day, fitting it in neatly between a ten-year-old Daimler and a brand-new Hillman. Then she walked round the corner into Market Street and penetrated into Mr Smithies’ ironmongery. The day was damp and rather muggy, and the shop was full of the mingled smells of paraffin, turpentine, varnish, tin-ware, and creosote.

  Caroline asked for coalscuttles, and having been led into the corner which they shared with patent wringers, lawn-mowers and wheelbarrows, she produced Mrs Riddell’s bill and smiled trustingly upon a freckled young man whose red hair rose a sheer three inches from a rather pallid brow.

  “I do wonder if you can help me,” said Caroline, her voice very soft and deep. “It would be so very kind if you would.”

  The young man blushed. He was a susceptible young man.

  “Was it anything in the way of a purdonium?”

  Spoken, the word was completely awe-inspiring. Caroline found herself echoing it in a rapt mental recitative: “Cadmium—chromium—euphonium—harmonium—purdonium ……” She withdrew herself from this fascinating exercise with a start.

  “Oh yes—if you’d be so awfully kind. No, I don’t want one for myself.”

  “We’ve got some very nice ones, miss.”

  Caroline looked politely at a black purdonium with a wreath of pink roses, and a hammered copper purdonium trimmed with gun-metal tulips, and at a very refined oxidised silver purdonium with a bas relief of angels’ heads. She looked, and looked away, controlling an inward shudder.

  “I think Mrs Riddell bought one here. And this is the bill—she dropped it, and I’d like to give it back to her, but I don’t know the address, so I thought perhaps you would be very kind and let me have it.”

  The young man asked nothing better than to be very kind to Caroline. He made a number of most helpful suggestions, such as, why bother about the bill, as it was a cash payment and no chance of its being sent in again; and “Let us have it, miss, and we’ll see it’s posted to Mrs Riddell, and no need for you to trouble.”

  Caroline handed all these suggestions back with gentle tact. She thought the red-haired young man was rather a lamb. She succeeded in making it quite clear that she wanted Mrs Riddell’s address. When it came to the point, the young man had to go and ask Miss Smithies, a pale angular young woman in pincenez, and after some wrinkling of the brow Miss Smithies, recollected that Mrs Riddell was staying with young Mrs Williams out at Ledlington End. Yes, that was it, because the purdonium had been got for a wedding present and Mrs Williams came and helped choose it—“and—let me see—what’s the name of the house? Not The Nest, nor Cosy Corner, but something after that style.” Miss Smithies was afraid she’d have to look it up, and having looked it up, gave the address as c/o Mrs T. Williams, Happicot, Sandringham Drive—“and you go right out to Ledlington End and straight past the War Memorial, and Sandringham Drive’s the first turning on the left after you pass the Kosy Korner tea-house—and you needn’t mention it, I’m sure; it’s no trouble.”

  Caroline drove past the Kosy Korner tea-house, which displayed rustic seats and orange and chocolate striped umbrellas. Then she turned into Sandringham Drive. It was a bright, clean little road full of bright, clean little houses, all new and shiny like the toys off a Christmas Tree.

  Happicot was the seventeenth house on the left, and it was not as up to date as the other sixteen. They had for the most part casement curtains in shades of orange, scarlet, rose-pink, or delphinium-blue; but the parlour windows of Happicot were hung with blue plush and Nottingham lace. The garden was raw earth, with a scarlet geranium surrounded by a circle of lobelia set out in the middle of it.

  Caroline lifted the latch of the rustic gate, walked up a bright yellow gravel path, and knocked upon the front door. It was Nesta Riddell who opened it. She looked at Caroline with a mixture of surprise and suspicion. “Flag-day, or something of that sort,” she said to herself, and prepared to shut the door.

  “Mrs Riddell?” said Caroline.

  Nesta nodded. If she wasn’t collecting for something, what on earth could she want? Suspicion deepened.

  Caroline felt as if there were strong invisible bars between them. She lifted her chin and took a step forward. All the bolts and bars in the world weren’t going to keep her from Jim.

  “May I come in?”

  Nesta stood where she was, the door half closed.

  “I’m Mrs Riddell—but I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m Caroline Leigh. I’ve got a message from the Elston cottage hospital. May I come in?”

  Nesta Riddell had no intention of talking about the Elston cottage hospital at Min’s front door. She stepped back, let Caroline pass her and, shutting the door, showed the way into the parlour. Caroline turned to face her, flushed with success. There, beside the hearth, was the coalscuttle, as bright as a new penny. She held out the bill.

  “I think you dropped this bill. Sister asked me to give it to you.”

  Nesta glanced at it, frowned, and crushed it in her hand.

  “Thank you—you needn’t have troubled; it didn’t matter.”

  “Oh, but I was coming to see you anyhow.”

  “You were coming to see me? What for?”

  Caroline stayed silent. Her feeling of success drained away. She felt as if she were on the edge of saying something very important. Once she had said it, she would not be able to take it back. Yet she must say it. Only what it was that she must say she did not really know.

  Then she said it.

  “Where’s Jim?”

  Nesta’s hand closed hard upon the crumpled bill. Jim—Jim … Jim wasn’t here, thank goodness. It was no more than ten minutes since he had barged out of the house. Jim! She’d teach other women to come after her husband. She repeated the name in a most offensive voice.
/>
  “Jim?”

  Caroline coloured brightly.

  “Mrs Riddell—please I must see him—because I think he is my cousin, Jim Randal. The sister said—”

  “What does she know about it? He’s my husband.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Nesta laughed angrily.

  “What do you suppose?”

  “The sister said—”

  “And I say, what does she know about it?”

  “Please let me speak. The sister said there was a piece of a letter in his pocket with the signature Caroline. I’m Caroline, and I sent him a letter signed just like that, so you see—”

  Nesta’s manner changed. She smoothed away her frown and said in her best company manner,

  “It’s a pity you’ve had so much trouble for nothing. The letter was from a Miss Caroline Bussell, who is a cousin of mine.”

  Dejection flowed in upon Caroline like a fog. It all came out so pat—Miss Caroline Bussell—a cousin of mine..… She couldn’t have invented a name like Caroline Bussell all in one flashing instant.

  She lifted her head as if to get above the fog and asked,

  “Have you got the letter here?”

  “No, I haven’t. I don’t keep old torn bits of paper.”

  “If I could have seen it—” said Caroline very earnestly. She was pressing her hands together, palm to palm, and finger to finger. Her eyes under her little brown tweed cap, the bright clear brown of peaty water, gazed pleadingly at Nesta. Her hair was the same bright colour.

  Nesta did not answer in words. She smiled a little.

  “If you would lend me a pencil—if I could write my name—you’d know if it was the same.”

  “Do you think I don’t know my own husband?” said Nesta.

  What did one say to that—what could one say? Of course she must know her own husband. Caroline’s hopes was a pricked bubble. She had made a fool of herself to a woman with a rasping voice and eyes like bits of tin.