Silent Nights

by Martin Edwards

  The young doctor looked at him sternly.

  “Why should Lady Strangeways make a confidant of me?” he asked. “Do you know that she was a friend of mine ten years ago before she married you?”

  “Was she? How curious! But you met like strangers.”

  “The light in this room is very dim—”

  “Well, never mind about that, whether you knew her or not—” Sir Harry gasped out in a sudden snarl. “The woman is a murderess, and you’ll have to bear witness to it—I’ve got her letters, here under my pillow, and Garth Deane is watching her—”

  “Ah, a spy! I’ll have no part in this, Sir Harry. You’ll call another doctor—”

  “No, it’s your case, you’ll make the best of it—My God, I’m dying, I think—”

  He fell back in such a convulsion of pain that Bevis Holroyd forgot everything in administering to him. The rest of that day and all that night the young doctor was shut up with his patient, assisted by the secretary and the housekeeper.

  And when, in the pallid light of Christmas Eve morning, he went downstairs to find Lady Strangeways, he knew that the sick man was suffering from arsenic poison, that the packet taken from Mollie’s work box was arsenic, and it was only an added horror when he was called to the telephone to learn that a stiff dose of the poison had been found in the specimen of cambric tea.

  He believed that he could save the husband and thereby the wife also, but he did not think he could close the sick man’s mouth; the deadly hatred of Sir Harry was leading up to an accusation of attempted murder; of that he was sure, and there was the man Deane to back him up.

  He sent for Mollie, who had not been near her husband all night, and when she came, pale, distracted, huddled in her white fur, he said grimly:

  “Look here, Mollie, I promised that I’d help you and I mean to, though it isn’t going to be as easy as I thought, but you have got to be frank with me.”

  “But I have nothing to conceal—”

  “The name of the other man—”

  “The other man?”

  “The man who wrote those letters your husband has under his pillow.”

  “Oh, Harry has them!” she cried in pain. “That man Deane stole them then! Bevis, they are your letters of the olden days that I have always cherished.”

  “My letters!”

  “Yes, do you think that there has ever been anyone else?”

  “But he says—Mollie, there is a trap or trick here, some one is lying furiously. Your husband is being poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “By arsenic given in that cambric tea. And he knows it. And he accuses you.”

  She stared at him in blank incredulity, then she slipped forward in her chair and clutched the big arm.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered in panic terror. “He always swore that he’d be revenged on me—because he knew that I never cared for him—”

  But Bevis Holroyd recoiled; he did not dare listen, he did not dare believe.

  “I’ve warned you,” he said, “for the sake of the old days, Mollie—”

  A light step behind them and they were aware of the secretary creeping out of the embrowning shadows.

  “A cold Christmas,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “A really cold, seasonable Christmas. We are almost snowed in—and Sir Harry would like to see you, Dr Holroyd.”

  “I have only just left him—”

  Bevis Holroyd looked at the despairing figure of the woman, crouching in her chair; he was distracted, overwrought, near to losing his nerve.

  “He wants particularly to see you,” cringed the secretary.

  Mollie looked back at Bevis Holroyd, her lips moved twice in vain before she could say: “Go to him.”

  The doctor went slowly upstairs and the secretary followed.

  Sir Harry was now flat on his back, staring at the dark tapestry curtains of his bed.

  “I’m dying,” he announced as the doctor bent over him.

  “Nonsense. I am not going to allow you to die.”

  “You won’t be able to help yourself. I’ve brought you here to see me die.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve a surprise for you too, a Christmas present. These letters now, these love letters of my wife’s—what name do you think is on them?”

  “Your mind is giving way, Sir Harry.”

  “Not at all—come nearer, Deane—the name is Bevis Holroyd.”

  “Then they are letters ten years old. Letters written before your wife met you.”

  The sick man grinned with infinite malice.

  “Maybe. But there are no dates on them and the envelopes are all destroyed. And I, as a dying man, shall swear to their recent date—I, as a foully murdered man.”

  “You are wandering in your mind,” said Bevis Holroyd quietly. “I refuse to listen to you any further.”

  “You shall listen to me. I brought you here to listen to me. I’ve got you. Here’s my will, Deane’s got that, in which I denounced you both, there are your letters, every one thinks that she put you in charge of the case, every one knows that you know all about arsenic in cambric tea through the Pluntre case, and every one will know that I died of arsenic poisoning.”

  The doctor allowed him to talk himself out; indeed it would have been difficult to check the ferocity of his malicious energy.

  The plot was ingenious, the invention of a slightly insane, jealous recluse who hated his wife and hated the man she had never ceased to love; Bevis Holroyd could see the nets very skilfully drawn round him; but the main issue of the mystery remained untouched; who was administering the arsenic?

  The young man glanced across the sombre bed to the dark figure of the secretary.

  “What is your place in all this farrago, Mr Deane?” he asked sternly.

  “I’m Sir Harry’s friend,” answered the other stubbornly, “and I’ll bring witness any time against Lady Strangeways. I’ve tried to circumvent her—”

  “Stop,” cried the doctor. “You think that Lady Strangeways is poisoning her husband and that I am her accomplice?”

  The sick man, who had been looking with bitter malice from one to another, whispered hoarsely:

  “That is what you think, isn’t it, Deane?”

  “I’ll say what I think at the proper time,” said the secretary obstinately.

  “No doubt you are being well paid for your share in this.”

  “I’ve remembered his services in my will,” smiled Sir Harry grimly. “You can adjust your differences then, Dr Holroyd, when I’m dead, poisoned, murdered. It will be a pretty story, a nice scandal, you and she in the house together, the letters, the cambric tea!”

  An expression of ferocity dominated him, then he made an effort to dominate this and to speak in his usual suave stilted manner.

  “You must admit that we shall all have a very Happy Christmas, doctor.”

  Bevis Holroyd was looking at the secretary, who stood at the other side of the bed, cringing, yet somehow in the attitude of a man ready to pounce; Dr Holroyd wondered if this was the murderer.

  “Why,” he asked quietly to gain time, “did you hatch this plan to ruin a man you had never seen before?”

  “I always hated you,” replied the sick man faintly. “Mollie never forgot you, you see, and she never allowed me to forget that she never forgot you. And then I found those letters she had cherished.”

  “You are a very wicked man,” said the doctor drily, “but it will all come to nothing, for I am not going to allow you to die.”

  “You won’t be able to help yourself,” replied the patient. “I’m dying, I tell you. I shall die on Christmas Day.”

  He turned his head towards the secretary and added:

  “Send my wife up to me.”

  “No,” interrupted Dr Holroy
d strongly. “She shall not come near you again.”

  Sir Harry Strangeways ignored this.

  “Send her up,” he repeated.

  “I will bring her, sir.”

  The secretary left, with a movement suggestive of flight, and Bevis Holroyd stood rigid, waiting, thinking, looking at the ugly man who now had closed his eyes and lay as if insensible. He was certainly very ill, dying perhaps, and he certainly had been poisoned by arsenic given in cambric tea, and, as certainly, a terrible scandal and a terrible danger would threaten with his death; the letters were not dated, the marriage was notoriously unhappy, and he, Bevis Holroyd, was associated in every one’s mind with a murder case in which this form of poison, given in this manner, had been used.

  Drops of moisture stood out on the doctor’s forehead; sure that if he could clear himself it would be very difficult for Mollie to do so; how could even he himself in his soul swear to her innocence!

  Of course he must get the woman out of the house at once, he must have another doctor from town, nurses—but could this be done in time; if the patient died on his hands would he not be only bringing witnesses to his own discomfiture? And the right people, his own friends, were difficult to get hold of now, at Christmas time.

  He longed to go in search of Mollie—she must at least be got away, but how, without a scandal, without a suspicion?

  He longed to have the matter out with this odious secretary, but he dared not leave his patient.

  Lady Strangeways returned with Garth Deane and seated herself, mute, shadowy, with eyes full of panic, on the other side of the sombre bed.

  “Is he going to live?” she presently whispered as she watched Bevis Holroyd ministering to her unconscious husband.

  “We must see that he does,” he answered grimly.

  All through that Christmas Eve and the bitter night to the stark dawn when the church bells broke ghastly on their wan senses did they tend the sick man who only came to his senses to grin at them in malice.

  Once Bevis Holroyd asked the pallid woman:

  “What was that white packet you had in your workbox?”

  And she replied:

  “I never had such a packet.”

  And he:

  “I must believe you.”

  But he did not send for the other doctors and nurses, he did not dare.

  The Christmas bells seemed to rouse the sick man from his deadly swoon.

  “You can’t save me,” he said with indescribable malice. “I shall die and put you both in the dock—”

  Mollie Strangeways sank down beside the bed and began to cry, and Garth Deane, who by his master’s express desire had been in and out of the room all night, stopped and looked at her with a peculiar expression. Sir Harry looked at her also.

  “Don’t cry,” he gasped, “this is Christmas Day. We ought all to be happy—bring me my cambric tea—do you hear?”

  She rose mechanically and left the room to take in the tray with the fresh milk and water that the housekeeper had placed softly on the table outside the door; for all through the nightmare vigil, the sick man’s cry had been for “cambric tea”.

  As he sat up in bed feebly sipping the vapid and odious drink the tortured woman’s nerves slipped her control.

  “I can’t endure those bells, I wish they would stop those bells!” she cried and ran out of the room.

  Bevis Holroyd instantly followed her; and now as suddenly as it had sprung on him, the fell little drama disappeared, fled like a poison cloud out of the compass of his life.

  Mollie was leaning against the closed window, her sick head resting against the mullions; through the casement showed, surprisingly, sunlight on the pure snow and blue sky behind the withered trees.

  “Listen, Mollie,” said the young man resolutely. “I’m sure he’ll live if you are careful—you mustn’t lose heart—”

  The sick room door opened and the secretary slipped out.

  He nervously approached the two in the window place.

  “I can’t stand this any longer,” he said through dry lips. “I didn’t know he meant to go so far, he is doing it himself, you know; he’s got the stuff hidden in his bed, he puts it into the cambric tea, he’s willing to die to spite you two, but I can’t stand it any longer.”

  “You’ve been abetting this!” cried the doctor.

  “Not abetting,” smiled the secretary wanly. “Just standing by. I found out by chance—and then he forced me to be silent—I had his will, you know, and I’ve destroyed it.”

  With this the strange creature glided downstairs.

  The doctor sprang at once to Sir Harry’s room; the sick man was sitting up in the sombre bed and with a last effort was scattering a grain of powder into the glass of cambric tea.

  With a look of baffled horror he saw Bevis Holroyd but the drink had already slipped down his throat; he fell back and hid his face, baulked at the last of his diabolic revenge.

  When Bevis Holroyd left the dead man’s chamber he found Mollie still leaning in the window; she was free, the sun was shining, it was Christmas Day.

  The Chinese Apple

  Joseph Shearing

  Joseph Shearing was another of the male pen-names used by Marjorie Bowen, under which she published fifteen novels of historical suspense. They include Aunt Beardie (1940), set in post-Revolution France, and the better known Airing in a Closed Carriage (1943), a successful fictionalization of a classic real life case, the poisoning of James Maybrick, with the setting switched from Liverpool to Manchester.

  For Her to See (1947) was another mystery inspired by a famous true crime—the Bravo case of 1876, which has fascinated criminologists ever since Charles Bravo met his end in mysterious circumstances. The book was filmed in 1948 as So Evil My Love, with Ray Milland and Ann Todd in leading roles. “The Chinese Apple”, written shortly afterwards, is typical of Shearing at her rather dark and brooding best.

  ***

  Isabelle Crosland felt very depressed when the boat train drew into the vast London station. The gas lamps set at intervals down the platform did little more than reveal filth, fog and figures huddled in wraps and shawls. It was a mistake to arrive on Christmas Eve, a matter of missed trains, of indecision and reluctance about the entire journey. The truth was she had not wanted to come to London at all. She had lived in Italy too long to be comfortable in England. In Florence she had friends, admirers; she had what is termed “private means” and she was an expert in music. She performed a little on the harpsichord and she wrote a great deal about ancient musical instruments and ancient music. She had been married and widowed some years before and was a childless woman who had come to good terms with life. But with life in Florence, not London. Mrs Crosland really rather resented the fact that she was performing a duty. She liked things to be taken lightly, even with a touch of malice, of heartlessness, and here she was in this gloomy, cold station, having left the pleasant south behind, just because she ought to be there.

  “How,” she thought, as she watched the porter sorting out her baggage, “I dislike doing the right thing; it is never becoming, at least to me.”

  A widowed sister she scarcely remembered had died: there was a child, quite alone. She, this Lucy Bayward, had written; so had her solicitors. Mrs Crosland was her only relation. Money was not needed, companionship was. At last it had been arranged, the child was coming up from Wiltshire, Mrs Crosland was to meet her in London and take her back to Florence.

  It would really be, Isabelle Crosland reflected, a flat sort of Christmas. She wished that she could shift her responsibility, and, as the four-wheeled cab took her along the dingy streets, she wondered if it might not be possible for her to evade taking Lucy back to Italy.

  London was oppressive. The gutters were full of dirty snow, overhead was a yellow fog.

  “I was a fool,” thought Mrs Crosland, “ever
to have left Florence. The whole matter could have been settled by letter.”

  She did not care for the meeting-place. It was the old house in Islington where she and her sister had been born and had passed their childhood. It was her own property and her tenant had lately left, so it was empty. Convenient, too, and suitable. Only Isabelle Crosland did not very much want to return to those sombre rooms. She had not liked her own childhood, nor her own youth. Martha had married, though a poor sort of man, and got away early. Isabelle had stayed on, too long, then married desperately, only saving herself by Italy and music. The south had saved her in another way, too. Her husband, who was a dull, retired half-pay officer, had died of malaria.

  Now she was going back. On Christmas Eve, nothing would be much altered; she had always let the house furnished. Why had she not sold, long ago, those heavy pieces of Jamaica mahogany? Probably out of cowardice, because she did not wish to face up to writing, or hearing anything about them. There it was, just as she remembered it, Roscoe Square, with the church and graveyard in the centre, and the houses, each like one another as peas in a pod, with the decorous areas and railings and the semicircular fanlights over the doors with heavy knockers.

  The streetlamps were lit. It was really quite late at night. “No wonder,” Mrs Crosland thought, “that I am feeling exhausted.” The sight of the Square chilled her: it was as if she had been lured back there by some malign power. A group of people were gathered round the house in the corner, directly facing her own that was number twelve. “Carols,” she thought, “or a large party.” But there seemed to be no children and the crowd was very silent.

  There were lights in her own house. She noticed that bright façade with relief. Alike in the parlour and in the bedrooms above, the gas flared. Lucy had arrived then. That part of the arrangements had gone off well. The lawyers must have sent the keys, as Isabelle Crosland had instructed them to do, and the girl had had the good sense to get up to London before the arrival of the boat train.

  Yet Mrs Crosland felt unreasonably depressed. She would, after all, have liked a few hours by herself in the hateful house.

  Her own keys were ready in her purse. She opened the front door and shuddered. It was as if she had become a child again and dreaded the strong voice of a parent.