A Casualty of War: A Bess Crawford Mystery (Bess Crawford Mysteries)

by Charles Todd

  I glanced back the way we’d come. There was a woman just going into the doctor’s surgery, and Mrs. Caldwell, the Vicar’s wife, was crossing the churchyard. I wondered if we could learn anything by speaking to her, then rejected the idea. The Vicar would see to it that we didn’t. He’d have warned his wife about us. “But what other choice does Mrs. Travis have? Is there anyone else she’d rather see inherit? Someone James overlooked? Or preferred not to leave the estate to? If it isn’t entailed, he could leave it to the gardener or the gamekeeper, if he chose.”

  Before we could cross the road, a lorry lumbered by, and I waited until it had passed before saying, “We’ve overlooked something. Mr. Spencer’s clothing wasn’t that of a thief. He was soberly dressed too. I think that’s why we assumed he was a solicitor.”

  “Back to where we started,” Simon replied.

  As we reached the far side of the road, I noticed a cottage set back from its neighbors. It boasted a dark blue door, and there were blue flower boxes at the windows, empty of plants this time of year. A plaque hung from a wrought-iron post halfway up the walk. It read the pottery.

  I pointed it out to Simon. “I wonder if that’s where Sister Potter lives. She struck me as the sort of person who would probably call her house that.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.” We walked on to the tea shop, several doors away. It was a bit early for elevenses, but I could always fuss over the gold pin with the red enameled rose.

  But despite the sign, I found that the door was locked when I tried it.

  “I hope whoever asked her to keep the shop closed is also willing to reimburse her for lost revenue,” I said, disappointed, peering in the window.

  Just then someone came down the stairs, more or less a moving shadow, and I stepped back. A moment later the door opened, and Mrs. Horner greeted us.

  Her welcome wasn’t as warm as it had been on our first visit, but I said cheerily, “I remembered a pin I saw when last we were here. I think my mother might like it.”

  Simon stood with me as I searched for the pin in the tray, found it, and picked it up.

  “Yes, it’s just the sort of thing she’d wear,” Simon agreed as I showed it to him. I turned and handed it to Mrs. Horner, and then paid for it.

  She took the pin and wrapped it neatly in a pretty paper, making a perfect little packet I could put into my kit. I thanked her, and then asked if she was serving tea.

  “I am,” she said, and we took the same table as we had yesterday. “I’m surprised you’re still here,” she added as she set about arranging a tray.

  “I think it’s a charming village,” I said.

  “Rumor has it you were invited to pay your respects to Her Majesty.”

  I was surprised—not so much by the fact that she’d know where we went, but because she actually mentioned it. And by the way she referred to Mrs. Travis. Not much love lost there, I thought. Then why did Mrs. Horner agree to closing her shop? If that was the reason it was closed.

  “I expect she wanted to know who was exploring her village,” I said lightly. “Even if she chooses to live a quieter life.”

  “She wasn’t always this way,” Mrs. Horner admitted. “Not when her husband was alive. For one thing, he’d have had a word with her about that. And for another, she was James’s mother and wanted the village to love him as she did. Now she’s neither wife nor mother, and all she has left is the Travis name.”

  “And did the village love James?” Simon asked.

  “Of course they did. You couldn’t help it. The Vicar and his wife were like a second family to him. And when he was a little boy, the shopkeepers always spoiled him shamelessly. I did my share, I must admit it. Miss Potter—Sister Potter as she is now—bound up his dog’s foot when the poor thing had cut it on a stone. And it wasn’t because James was from The Hall and we were currying favor with his parents. His death was such a tragedy to all of us. We felt like we’d lost our own.” She looked out the window, the kettle whistling in the tiny kitchen behind her. “That’s to be replaced by a stone. That wooden memorial. By next year, so Vicar says. Mrs. Travis has given a sum toward it, but the rest of us put up what we could. We lost so many men in Sinclair and the neighboring farms. And those who have already come back aren’t well.”

  There was sadness in her voice.

  When she brought the tray holding cups and saucers and the milk, I said, “Is the man who came to take a room in The George last night a frequent visitor to the village?”

  “The one who fell down the stairs?” She shrugged as she set around the crockery and added a jar of honey. “The girl who does the dishes in the inn kitchen is claiming she didn’t recognize him. I saw you come from the doctor’s surgery just now. Is the man all right?”

  “Cracked ribs and a badly sprained ankle. He’ll heal in time, but he won’t be leaving the surgery until he’s able to manage crutches.”

  “Doctor will probably ask Sister Potter to nurse him, then,” she replied, nodding. “She lives just up the way, and there are two bedrooms in the cottage.”

  “She’s done this before?” Simon asked.

  “It’s convenient for Doctor and for her. We had three influenza cases this autumn, and she was asked to care for them. Mrs. Lacey and her daughters.”

  She disappeared into the back, then, and we drank our tea. Simon said in a low voice, “When we leave here, do you want to go back to Bury, to speak to the solicitor?”

  “I’d thought it would be possible to use Mr. Spencer as my excuse for calling. But now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. What’s more, the clerk would show us the door if we put a foot wrong.” I hesitated. “Simon. There’s one way. And it might do the Captain more good than anything we can accomplish here, now that we know James Travis is dead. I think we should take our chances with the solicitors.”

  “Then finish your tea and we’ll be on our way.”

  It was just a little before noon when we lifted the brass knocker on the door of Ellis, Ellis and Whitman.

  A clerk opened it and invited us inside, then asked how the firm could help us.

  “Could you tell me which partner is handling the affairs of the Travis family in Sinclair?”

  “There is only Mr. Ellis now. His father, the senior partner of that name, died the first Christmas of the war, and Mr. Whitman was killed during the second battle of the Somme.”

  “Then I expect it will be Mr. Ellis who can help me.” I gave him the smile Matron used when she expected us to obey instructions without question.

  The clerk hesitated. He was an older man, possibly nearing sixty, and schooled in the Victorian era, when one didn’t contradict a lady, if there was a way around it.

  “Let me ask if Mr. Ellis is free,” he said with a slight bow and disappeared through the only other door in the room.

  I liked what I saw here. The walls were paneled in dark wood below the chair rail, but linen fold in the old style above. Instead of the usual partner portraits or hunting prints, masculine and indicative of the firm’s standing and longevity, there was a collection of lithographs of Cambridge in the early 1800s. Elegant carriages with handsome horses pulling them, women wearing bonnets that framed their faces, gowns with high waists and just showing tiny pointed-toe shoes. The backdrop, of course, was the colleges, beautifully drawn.

  The door opened and Mr. Ellis himself appeared, giving his name and asking how he could assist us. I was sure he’d been curious but had every intention of sending us packing after he’d seen us.

  He was a man slightly above medium height, fairly young—perhaps mid-thirties—with what in the old days would be called the look of a consumptive. Pale face, sunken chest, lank hair. I had no doubt he hadn’t been fit for military service. And even as I was noting this, he coughed. It didn’t sound very good.

  “I’ve come about the care of Captain Alan Travis.” If the papers Simon had seen were from this office, then Mr. Ellis would certainly know where the Captain was at present. “I
have just visited him in hospital. They have done their best for him, but he needs personal attention from a physician trained to deal with head wounds. I have no way of reaching his family or his firm of solicitors in the islands. But as I am informed that he’s heir to the estate of the late James Travis, I expect you are the person most likely to help him.” I had used Matron’s voice too, brooking no dissent, as if I believed I had every right to be here. And in many ways I did.

  “And what is your relationship to Captain Travis?” he asked, glancing from me to Simon behind me, and then back to me again.

  “I was the Sister who treated him when he was wounded, and while I’ve been on leave, I looked in on him at the clinic. I was appalled by what I saw.”

  “You’d better come back.” He moved from the door and indicated that we were to follow him to his private office. The clerk, hovering in the shadows, closed the door behind us.

  We walked into a room filled with papers, some in marbled boxes, others rolled and tied with ribbon. Every surface seemed to be covered with them. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, coming in behind us. “There was an attempt to break in recently. I’ve been asked by the police to tell them what’s missing.”

  I had no intention of telling him that Mr. Spencer might know something about that. I primly took the chair he emptied for me, and Simon sat in the only other uncluttered one. Mr. Ellis went behind his desk, coughed again, and sat down.

  “Why do you feel that it’s your duty to make other arrangements for Captain Travis?”

  “Who else has done anything to better his treatment? I had had the good fortune to meet Captain Travis when he was rejoining his regiment after being called to HQ. We were both waiting for transport at the time, and I had an opportunity to observe him as a healthy man. What I see now is a man in despair, confined in a small room with neither exercise nor recreation of any kind. The clinic is shorthanded, they aren’t cruel by intent. But something must be done before Captain Travis is made ill.”

  Mr. Ellis listened to me intently. “Mrs. Travis tells me that there is another branch of the family more closely related to her late husband than the branch in the islands. She has presented family records that support her belief. I am not certain that Captain Travis is our responsibility.”

  “Indeed,” I said, genuinely angry now. I had expected to hear at least a promise to look into the Captain’s situation and see what could be done. Mr. Ellis’s callous dismissal of any duty toward a member of the family he served disturbed me. “Will you wait until there is a clear connection, or Mrs. Travis asks you to act on her behalf, before you do something for Alan Travis? He will hardly thank you, when he is well enough to take up his duties at The Hall.”

  “He hasn’t requested our assistance. Nor has she.” A fit of coughing caught him and he turned away.

  I took a deep breath. “He’s been told his cousin James is dead, but he has no idea that he could be the heir to his estate. He has no access to news.”

  “That’s unfortunate. But I have no authority here until we have established who the legitimate heir may be.”

  “Do you even know where the Captain is at this moment?”

  I could see that he did, even before he lowered his eyes to the file in front of him on the desk blotter. He had obviously seen and read the papers that Mr. Spencer now had in his possession.

  “I’m afraid that’s not pertinent to this conversation.”

  “It is,” I said with a smile, “if you know and have done nothing to help him.”

  “You must forgive me, Sister, but I have another engagement. I am truly sorry that there is nothing I can do at present for Captain Travis. I suggest that you contact his solicitors and his family in the islands. They might be more successful.”

  He was rising as he spoke, and I had no choice but to do the same.

  He escorted us to the inner door, where his clerk was waiting to see us out.

  On the street outside his chambers, I turned to Simon.

  “I didn’t accomplish very much, did I? I thought—well, never mind. It was worth trying. Mrs. Travis won’t hear us, and now Mr. Ellis has made it clear that he doesn’t want to help.”

  “I saw his eyes before he turned away. He knows about those papers. I can’t say whether he also knows if they’re missing, or not.”

  “What part does Mr. Spencer play in all of this? The clerk just told us that there are no other partners or even junior partners in the firm. A good thing I didn’t begin with their missing solicitor. Because he isn’t.”

  We were walking back to the motorcar, and now that I realized I had nowhere else to turn, I was feeling rather depressed.

  “I must go back to Wiltshire. I owe Captain Travis that much. He deserves to know what we learned. As little as it is. Before I go back to France, I could write to his solicitors on Barbados.”

  “Bess. Ellis just mentioned another heir. You don’t suppose that Spencer is representing him? It would be to his benefit to know what Ellis knows, and it would serve his client if it could be shown that Travis was mad and likely to be confined to a hospital or an asylum for the rest of his life.”

  “A solicitor doesn’t go around stealing the files of his competitors,” I said, but the idea was taking hold. “All the same, there’s no doubt Spencer has the file, however he came by it. And he brought it with him when he came to Sinclair. After all, you saw it.” I frowned. “He fell coming down the stairs, on his way to ask when dinner was being served. That tells me he was in a hurry. Not to have his dinner, perhaps, but to find out if he had time to go to The Hall either before or after. His next question would have been to ask for directions, and to see if there was any way to get there other than on foot.”

  We’d reached the motorcar, and Simon was holding my door as I stood there, trying to think through what I was saying to him.

  “But now Spencer is in Dr. Harrison’s surgery and unable to go anywhere. Not to The Hall. Nor back to wherever he came from,” he said, picking up the thread of my thoughts.

  “I can’t believe he’d wish to speak to her in the surgery. There are too many people about—too many ears to hear and gossip later.”

  “There’s the Vicar. What better go-between?”

  “I don’t know. Would the Vicar be a party to any of this? I think he came yesterday to protect Mrs. Travis from whatever it was she feared we might be doing here. After all, she’s alone now.” I got into the motorcar, and Simon shut my door. When he’d turned the crank and got behind the wheel, I said, “I wonder if, in so much pain, Mr. Spencer will ask for the Vicar, to give him the support of prayer? He would have to feel, wouldn’t he, that the Vicar could be trusted?”

  “Or he must wait until Mrs. Travis sends the Vicar to him.”

  But I kept going back to the main question. Did Mrs. Travis know why Mr. Spencer had come to Sinclair? Or had he traveled here on his own to represent his client, that different heir?

  I turned to Simon, smiling ruefully. “It’s rather like trying to diagnose what’s wrong with a patient, when he’s behind a screen and you can’t look at him. We’re missing too many bits of information to make a whole picture.”

  We traveled in silence back to Sinclair, and as we came into the village, we saw Sister Potter, leaning heavily on her stick, just coming out of the tea shop. She waved when she saw who it was passing in the motorcar.

  “Simon. Do you think we might call on her? To see what she can tell us about this tangle of heirs? She must know as much about village life as Mrs. Horner, surely?”

  “I’ll set you down here, shall I? She might be more amenable to discussing the Travis family if you’re alone.”

  “Good idea.”

  He slowed and I got down, walking back to meet Sister Potter before she reached her own door.

  “How was your consultation with Dr. Harrison?” I began.

  “Well enough.” She made a wry face. “He wants me to take on that poor man who tumbled down the stairs at The George.
Did you hear about that? You must have done, if you were staying there, and not at The Five Bells.”

  “Yes, I was first on the scene. I sent my friend, the Sergeant-Major, for the doctor, and dealt with Mr. Spencer until Dr. Harrison arrived.”

  “He’s a good man, Harrison. A little brusque, but a good doctor. I didn’t mind the Lacey family, they were people I knew. I’m not so certain I wish to take on a stranger, and a man at that. Not that I have anything against men!” She smiled. “I nursed enough of them. But that was different, it didn’t seem to matter if you didn’t know them, did it? You coped, and tried to save their limbs if not their lives. I know nothing about Mr. Spencer.”

  I could understand her reluctance to take him in. We’d been standing on the walk outside her door, and she added, “I’ve forgot my manners! Won’t you come in? Smokie will be upset, but never mind.”

  Smokie was a small gray cat with green eyes. He met us at the door as Sister Potter opened it, then turned and stalked off as soon as he realized that I was about to come in with her.

  The cottage was small but comfortable, and from the style of the furnishings, I gathered it must have belonged to her parents before her. There were family photographs on the table by the window, and on the pale blue walls hung small watercolors of the various sights of Sinclair. One of them was a rendering of the Travis house.

  She saw me looking at them. “My mother insisted on framing them. She thought me quite clever. But of course I had sense enough to realize I had only a small talent. Still, I took my watercolors to France with me, and when I had time I painted.” There was a sudden shadow of sadness in her face. “Not that there was much that was scenic. Blasted trees, ruined villages, and bloodred poppies. I’ll never frame them. Still, it gave me something to do.” Indicating a chair, she went on. “Would you care for tea?”

  I’d seen her leaving the tea shop, and so I said, “Thank you, but Simon and I had our tea earlier.”

  She nodded. “Tell me more about where you served. I’d like to hear about it.”

  I gave her a brief account of my postings, and she nodded. “I knew one or two of those doctors. I was mostly at the base hospitals, but they sent me forward when there was a need for Sisters. Italy was so very different from France. I was appalled when I got there and saw where most of the fighting was taking place. Italy had just declared war on the Austro-Hungarians, and the border was a range of mountains. We had the devil’s own trouble getting men back to proper care. I was with the British regiment, and I worried day and night that my next patient might be my brother. I’m ashamed to admit that I was so grateful when it turned out to be someone else’s brother or son or husband.”