Outrageous Fortune

by Patricia Wentworth

  Mrs Rodgers swung her ample black skirts in silence. They just cleared the dust of the road. Her colour deepened as she climbed.

  Caroline wished that the road was flat. She wished Mrs Rodgers would say something. She wished that she herself had said something different. In the railway carriage Mrs Rodgers had been a jolly chattering old thing; she had fairly oozed good nature and gossip. What had happened to her all of a sudden? She said, on a quick caught breath,

  “Mrs Rodgers—”

  Mrs Rodgers turned a streaming crimson face upon her.

  “Talk on this ’ill, I can’t,” she panted, and Caroline had to get what comfort she could from that. It wasn’t very much.

  The morning was muggy, with mist hanging about, and the heat and the hill might account for Mrs Rodgers’ blank face and drawn brows—or they might not.

  At the top of the hill there was a stile, and on the step of the stile Mrs Rodgers seated herself and proceeded to get her breath. Caroline stood before her with the basket and felt her courage slip and slip away.

  “Well?” said Mrs Rodgers at last.

  Caroline looked at her imploringly.

  Mrs Rodgers fanned herself.

  “Well, since we’re ’ere, we’d best have it out.”

  Caroline spoke before all her courage left her.

  “Will you please tell me what Mrs Henry said?”

  “And why?”

  There was something portentous in the slow, heavy voice. Not a jolly voice, not a good-natured voice; more like the voice a judge might use when he asked whether you had anything to say before sentence was passed.

  “I thought I’d like to know,” said Caroline rather faintly.

  “And why?” said Mrs Rodgers in an even slower and more portentous manner.

  To her horror, Caroline felt as if she was going to cry. How awful to cry in a public lane at eight o’clock in the morning, with a fat woman in black cashmere looking at you!

  She began to speak quickly.

  “You were telling us as the train stopped, and I—I wanted to know. You were telling everyone in the carriage.”

  Mrs Rodgers nodded.

  “What’s taken light can be told light. ’Twasn’t nothing to them, no more than it wasn’t to me. Stands to reason everybody’ll talk about a murder—and this is as good as one by all accounts.”

  “Then won’t you tell me?”

  “I dunno,” said Mrs Rodgers. She pursed her lips together and cast an odd look at Caroline. “Do you know where I’m going?” she said with apparent irrelevance. “No, I don’t suppose you do. Well, I’m walking across the fields by this here footpath to Stowbury to spend the day with my sister, Harriet Brown, that used to be Harriet Welsh.”

  Caroline’s colour changed sharply. She had the horrible sensation of having walked into a trap. That she should have followed her old nurse’s sister was a piece of the most devastating bad luck. Perhaps she didn’t know her—perhaps—

  Mrs Rodgers nodded again.

  “I knew you at once, miss, though I could see as you didn’t know me. You haven’t changed a mite since Harty ’ud bring you in for a cup of tea and some of my mint honey. I’ve put on a bit since those days, so I made sure you didn’t know me. But I knew you. ’That’s Miss Caroline Leigh,’ I says to myself, and when you come running after me I got a turn, and all the way up the ’ill I been trying to make up my mind what I was going to say.”

  “Mrs Rodgers—”

  “I’m a-going to tell you what Mrs Henry told me, and I’m not a-going to ask you why you want to know, because maybe I know already and maybe I don’t—and anyway least said, soonest mended.”

  “Yes?” said Caroline in a whisper.

  “What I said in the train is neither here nor there. There isn’t a servant up at the Hall as don’t know there was a tray and glasses in the study the night Mr Van Berg was shot, and the housemaid see with her own eyes how the police took the finger-prints—a clapper-tongued woman if there ever was one—so there ain’t no secrets there. No—it was the butler told Mrs Henry what I’m a-telling you. They’re keeping company, and going to be married come Christmas, and he told her and she told me, being, as I said, my brother Jim’s second wife’s cousin-in-law through her late ’usband, Albert Henry, being Maria’s cousin, and one way and another I’ve know her, girl and woman, the last forty years.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “When they had finished taking the finger-prints and all the rest of it, the inspector he sees all the servants separate, and then he has the butler back and he says, ‘I understand,’ he says, ‘as Mr Van Berg kep’ a book with all his friends’ finger-prints in it,’ he says. ‘That’s right,’ says Jackson—that’s the butler’s name. ‘Well,’ says the inspector, ‘I wants to see that book.’ And Jackson, he says, ‘It’s always a-laying on Mr Van Berg’s table, and whenever he has a visitor he gets him to make his mark and sign his name.’ And the inspector laughs and says, ‘Very handy for us, Mr Jackson’—they being on friendly terms along of Mrs Henry—Albert Henry ’aving been a police sergeant, like I said.”

  Caroline’s eyes widened.

  “And then it wasn’t so handy after all,” said Mrs Rodgers—“for lo and be’old the book wasn’t nowheres to be seen.”

  The blood came back into Caroline’s cheeks with a rush. She said,

  “Oh!”

  Mrs Rodgers waved her hand as one who commands silence.

  “And where was it?” she demanded.

  Caroline caught her breath.

  “Pushed right down be’ind all the books at the back of the bookshelf. They went on looking till they’d found it. And then what do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Caroline, trembling. Mrs Rodgers looked at her with a kind of awful pity.

  “There was a page tore out,” she said.

  Perhaps it was because she had been awake all night, perhaps it was because she had had a dreadful picture in her own mind of a finger-print with Jim’s name signed underneath it, but at these words, she saw the stile with Mrs Rodgers sitting on it tilt at the strangest angle; the hedge swung across the road and back again. You can’t stand up straight when things begin to slip and tilt and slide like that. Caroline felt the grit of the road against her knees and the palms of her hands. And then Mrs Rodgers was shaking her by the shoulder and saying something. But Caroline never knew what it was, because she had fainted.

  XVI

  She was really only unconscious for about a minute, but it was long enough for Mrs Rodgers to have laid her down flat. She had got a new cabbage-leaf out of the basket and was fanning her with it. She looked hotter than ever, her face like a very red sun coming up in a fog.

  Caroline opened her eyes wide. There seemed to be a good deal of fog, but it was getting less. She got up on her elbow, and was relieved to find that things had stopped tilting. Then she remembered why she had fainted—she had been so horribly afraid that Mrs Rodgers was going to say that the police had found Jim’s finger-prints. Jim would have been sure to have made his mark in Mrs Van Berg’s book. A page had been torn out. Was it that page? Who had torn it out?

  “Better keep laying down a bit,” said Mrs Rodgers.

  “No—I’m all right—I am really.” She sat up and leaned against the stile.

  Mrs Rodgers was kneeling on the stubbly grass. She sat back on her heels, fanning herself now instead of Caroline.

  “Who tore out the page?” said Caroline. She didn’t feel as if she could wait a single moment before she asked that question.

  “Who do you suppose?” said Mrs Rodgers.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who would tear it out, if it wasn’t the one who shot Mr Van Berg? It stands to reason he wouldn’t go away and leave his finger-prints there all ready for the police, and his name signed to them—would he? That’s what I said to Mrs Henry. And Jackson, he says, ‘There’s only Mr Van Berg’s friends in that book.’ Quite shocked he was. ‘Then,’ I says,
‘it was one of his friends as shot him, Mr Jackson?’ You’re not feeling faint again, are you, miss?”

  Caroline bit her lip. There was something wrong about the way Mrs Rodgers was arguing, but she couldn’t quite get hold of it—only there was something wrong. She thought of Jim, and she said with a rush,

  “Oh, he wouldn’t! A friend wouldn’t!”

  Mrs Rodgers shook her head.

  “Nobody can’t say that. Folks get quarrelling, and you can’t say what’ll happen. But Mrs Henry, she says, and she holds to it very strong, ‘What ’ud be the good of his tearing the finger-prints out of the book and leaving the glass he’d drunk out of fairly plastered with ’em? It wouldn’t ’ave took ’em ’arf a minute to ’ave wiped them off,’ she says—and there’s something in that.” She got up and dusted her knees with the cabbage leaf. “I can’t sit on my ’eels like I could when I was a gel. Fourteen stone’s fourteen stone—and I shouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t fifteen now.” She sat down on the stile again.

  A little colour came back into Caroline’s cheeks. That was it—that was what she had been trying to get hold of. If it had been Jim who had torn the page out of the book, then why hadn’t he wiped his glass? Everyone knows about finger-prints nowadays. He hadn’t wiped his glass because he hadn’t anything to hide. He hadn’t shot Elmer Van Berg.

  She knelt up by Mrs Rodgers and laid a hand on her knee.

  “In the train you said—”

  Mrs Rodgers looked glum.

  “And I’d better have held my tongue. No need to tell me that.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that—I didn’t truly. Oh, dear Mrs Rodgers—I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  Mrs Rodgers relaxed a little.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound. What did I say?”

  “Something about Mrs Van Berg’s maid.”

  “A French ’ussy!” said Mrs Rodgers. “And if Mrs Van Berg ’ad ’arf an idea of the things that ’ussy’s been ’inting—because ’ints is ’er line, and as Mrs Henry says to me, ‘If there’s one thing despisabler than another, it’s an ’inting woman. Say what you’ve got to say and ’ave done with it,’ Mrs Henry says, ‘and then you know where you are—but when it comes to ’inting and prying and listening at doors and reading other people’s letters, there’s no one don’t know where they are. Not that it’s only foreigners that’s given to it, for that there Miss Bussell that’s housekeeper at the Hall she’s the worse of the two, and the dear knows how Mrs Henry’s stood it, for I wouldn’t.’”

  Caroline patted Mrs Rodgers’ knee.

  “What did the maid say?”

  “Miss Louise, they call her. Well, she don’t say nothing. That’s just her aggravatingness—she’ll ’int and ’int until you’re sick, sore and sorry, and then she’ll slip out of the whole thing and pretend she never said nothing.”

  “What does she hint?”

  Mrs Rodgers gave a kind of snort.

  “’Int? She’s as good as said it wasn’t no secret to her what name was tore out, and then went back on it.”

  Caroline looked up into Mrs Rodgers’ red face with the look of a frightened child.

  “How could she know what name had been torn out?”

  “There isn’t much goes on in the house as she don’t know—picking, and prying, and ’inting! ’Orrid, I call it! Letting on she knows things about Mrs Van Berg too!”

  “What sort of things?”

  “She’s a wicked ’ussy,” said Mrs Rodgers, “and I wouldn’t repeat what she says, if it weren’t for a warning. You might know someone as wanted warning, or you mightn’t. If you don’t, there’s no harm done, and if you do—well you was Harty’s baby, and I took to you myself when you came to tea and thanked me so pretty for the honeycomb.”

  “It was lovely honey,” said Caroline. “You were very, very kind. Please, Mrs Rodgers, tell me as much as you can.”

  Mrs Rodgers nodded.

  “You’d a pretty coaxing way, and you’ve got it yet. I’ll tell you what I can. Now, my dear—whether the police have got wind of it or not, I can’t say, but what that ’ussy keeps ’inting is just this, that her mistress, Mrs Van Berg, knows a sight more than she lets on. It’s all ’ints and no plain speech, but that’s what it comes to—that Mr Van Berg found out something that he wasn’t meant to find out, and that’s why he was shot. ‘The emeralds—’ she says in her ’inting way, ‘can’t they be ’idden? Can’t they be a fine excuse?’ she says. ‘Oh ’eavens!’ she says. ‘You make me laugh, with your emeralds!’ she says. ‘A gentleman quarrels with another gentleman about a lady and shoots him—what a good idea to hide the emeralds and say a thief has done it!’ she says. And when Mrs Henry and me presses her, she says she is talking about a story she has been reading in a magazine—and how I kep’ my hands off her, I don’t know and I can’t say. And she laughs and goes out of the room, and Mrs Henry says to me, ‘Mrs Rodgers,’ she says, ‘if that’s not an evil-speaking, lying, slandering ’ussy, then I never learned my catechism,’ she says.”

  Caroline got up a little uncertainly. She held to the cross-bar of the stile and leaned against it. She wanted to get away from Mrs Rodgers before she said anything more. Mrs Rodgers had said too much already. If she said any more, Caroline was afraid she might cry out—say Jim’s name—say that it wasn’t true—that it couldn’t be true. Jim wasn’t in love with Susie Van Berg—it couldn’t be true that he was, or that he had quarrelled with Elmer Van Berg and shot him, and hidden away the emeralds to make it look like a burglary. It simply couldn’t be true. She must get away quickly before she began most passionately to deny it.

  She said, “There’ll be another train—I must catch it.”

  Mrs Rodgers got up too.

  “To be sure! There’s the eight fifty-seven—but you’ll have to hurry.”

  Caroline took her hand and squeezed it.

  “You’ve been so kind! I do thank you so much. You’ll give Nanna my love—won’t you?”

  Mrs Rodgers nodded. She watched Caroline turn away and begin to go down the hill. Then she took a step towards the stile, but almost in the act of taking it she swung about like a boat when the current catches it. She called,

  “Miss Caroline! Miss Caroline!”

  And Caroline came back. She didn’t want to come back, but she came.

  “I mustn’t miss my train,” she said.

  “There’s time,” said Mrs Rodgers, and took her by the sleeve.

  Caroline turned cold with dread of what she was going to hear.

  “Miss Caroline—” said Mrs Rodgers.

  Caroline’s eyes besought her.

  “My dear, you’d best know and ha’ done with it. That torn out page—”

  “Oh, no!” said Caroline. “No!”

  “You’d best know it, my dear. Mrs Henry’s no ’inter, and it’s what she seen with her own eyes. She took pertickler notice, because there wasn’t no name signed on that page.”

  “No name?”

  “No name, my dear—nothing but the finger-prints and two great big initials getting on for a couple of inches high. She took pertickler notice, and when the book was found pushed down behind the book-case like I told you, she took a look at it, and that there identical page was gone. I s’pose I didn’t ought to tell you what the initials was, but what’s the good of baking the bread if you don’t take it out of the oven?”

  Caroline tried to pull her sleeve away, but she couldn’t. She tried to say, “Don’t tell me,” but she couldn’t speak. Mrs Rodgers’ voice boomed in her ears.

  “Mrs Henry won’t talk unless she’s asked, and it’s not for me to say whether she’ll be asked or no, but if so be she is, she’s bound to tell the truth—not that she or anyone else around these parts ’ud want to get a young gentleman that was well liked, and his family respected, into trouble, but there’s a name that ‘as been mentioned, and Mrs Henry’s own nephew—Willie Bowman, that’s been his caddy at golf many and many a time afore he went off to f
oreign parts—Willie seen him in the drive getting on for midnight, and hasn’t told no one, only his aunt and me. ‘And what were you doing Willie?’ she says, and of course he hadn’t got a word to say, she knowing same as everyone else that he’s carrying on with that flighty piece, Gladys Garrett, down at the Cricketer’s Arms.”

  Caroline’s head swam. Through a jumbled whirl of irrelevant anecdote something horrible advanced upon her. She wanted to run away, but she couldn’t.

  Mrs Rodgers dropped her voice to a penetrating whisper.

  “It was Jim Randal as Willie seen—and the initials on the tore out page was J.R.”

  Caroline’s mouth made a soundless “Oh!” There was no sound, because she did not seem to have any breath. She pulled away from Mrs Rodgers and ran down the hill, as if by running she could get away from Jim’s name.

  XVII

  The clock of St Mary Magdalene’s church struck half past twelve as Caroline turned into Grove Road. The things that Mrs Rodgers had told her were all locked away in a dark secret cupboard at the back of her mind. She wasn’t going to let herself look at them or think about them until she and Jim could look at them together. What she had got to do now was to be sensible and practical and businesslike. She had to prove from the entry in the register that it wasn’t Jim who had married that horrible Nesta woman on July 25th. It stood to reason that it wasn’t Jim, but she had got to prove it. Well, one glance at the register would do that, because she would know Jim’s writing anywhere, and she was quite sure that the entry wouldn’t be in Jim’s writing.

  She found the office quite easily. Why did anyone ever get married in a registry office? It was the most depressing place, with linoleum on the floor, a bench against the wall, and an air of gloom. A faint but distinct smell of disinfectant was the last depressing touch.

  An elderly clerk inquired Caroline’s business. He had a pale plump face, and reminded her of one of those fish which slap slowly to and fro behind the plate glass of an aquarium. The light in the office was almost as opaque as water, and he had the pale unwinking stare of a fish. Caroline thought that if a fish had hair, it would have just such thin, smarmed hair, breaking into little colourless tufts over the ears. She was so fascinated by this thought that he had to repeat his question. He had a voice that matched the hair, high and weak.