In the morning she heard from Mother Francis the story of the finding of the child. The second search party had set off across the mile and a half of moorland which led to the village. It had been rough, uneasy going in the darkness, and they had no idea whether the child, supposing she had crossed the moor, had travelled east, west, or south. Willing to obtain any help which might be forthcoming, the nuns had asked for assistance from the villagers, and a number of men had joined in the search, for the village of Blacklock Tor was not the home of the youths who had attacked the convent after the death of Ursula Doyle. Some had made their way to the big pond known as Lam Bottom, on the south side of the village about two miles away from the inn, in case the child had got drowned.
Whilst the search was thus progressing, the police had arrived at the convent and had asked a good many questions. Old Sister Catherine, however, had been thinking matters over in the ruminating manner of the aged, and, just before they arrived, had asked Reverend Mother’s permission to call upon the people who lived in the two private houses adjoining the convent grounds. So she, accompanied by old Mother Bartholomew, called upon the builder who lived next door to the guest-house (which he himself had put up in the form, at first, of three private houses, making a row of five) and straightway proved herself to be the most sagacious of all the people who desired the child’s safety and well-being. She said to the man:
“Have you seen our little girl who ran away?”
“Sure,” replied the man. “She had a nasty fall, and mother put her to bed and we telephoned the doctor. We dropped you a note in the door, and been expecting somebody over ever since tea. Didn’t know how you was placed, but made sure she’d be missed before this.”
Mrs. Bradley, in the morning, in conversation with Mother Francis, said:
“But what happened to the note that they sent?”
“It was found in the guest-house letter-box by Annie, and as it was not addressed to anyone, but bore the superscription, ‘Urgent,’ she put it on Sister Saint Jude’s desk for her to see directly she came over from the convent kitchen. But the postman, later, called with a pile of accounts, and these were placed on top. Sister Saint Jude’s habit is to deal with all her business correspondence in the morning immediately after church, so, of course, we did not find the man’s note because it was hidden.”
“And where is Mary Maslin now? In bed still, I suppose?”
“In the infirmary, yes. The doctor had said she could be moved if someone was there to carry her. She is not very badly hurt, but is suffering, the doctor thinks, from shock. Apparently she fell off the roof.”
“I wish you would let me have a short talk with Sister Catherine.”
Sister Catherine talked to Mrs. Bradley in the nuns’ parlour, a small, bare chamber more like a dentist’s waiting-room than anything else that Mrs. Bradley could think of, except that there were no magazines, and that a crucifix, very large, and carved with Spanish care for sadistic detail, hung on the high east wall.
“What I said to myself was: ‘They’re all alike,’” old Sister Catherine began. “They will do it. What one will do, another will do, just like sheep, as Our Lord knew, too.”
She nodded and mumbled, and looked at Mrs. Bradley with a kind of good-humoured craftiness. “I’ve seen them! I’ve seen them! I know!”
“On the roof?”
“On the roof. And I’ve said to myself: ‘She’ll fall!’ But the tricks these children get up to nowadays remind me of the time when I was a very young girl, and he climbed the balcony railings. Nearly seventy years ago, that was; and he was killed in battle, and so I came to the convent.” She appeared to have fallen into a dream, and after a minute or two Mrs. Bradley roused her again with a gentle question.
“When did you last see somebody on the roof?”
“Not very long ago; no, not very long ago.” She could not wrinkle her brow, for all her earthy old face was a network of wrinkles already, but her rheumy eyes became vacant in concentrated thought. She shook her head slowly, and smiled, a toothless, happy smile of great serenity. “No, I’m a stupid old creature. I can’t remember. I know that when I heard of the other poor little one I said to myself: ‘And lucky not to have broken her neck.’ That’s what I said to myself.”
“That child would have been about the size of this one?”
“No, no, bigger. One of the older girls, surely.”
“Was she dressed for climbing on roofs?”
“She was dressed as they dress for their drill, in a short tunic of grey serge and the scarlet girdle. When I was a girl we should have been whipped for appearing in public like that. But times change, and perhaps it’s all for the best.”
This time Mrs. Bradley did not interrupt the old lay-sister’s thoughts, and they sat in companionable silence until Sister Lucia, the assistant Infirmarian, came in to tell Mrs. Bradley that the child was awake, had breakfasted, seemed much better, and, in short, with the doctor’s permission, could be interviewed.
Mrs. Bradley walked from the parlour to the infirmary, which was on the top floor of the Orphanage. The spring morning was windy, with bright sunshine except when, at intervals, the fast-moving clouds obscured for a moment the sun. The nuns’ garden was sheltered by its hedges and high wall, and in it the early daffodils were already in flower, and there were the last of the crocuses at the base of trees, among the grass, and the trim borders were brilliant with anemones of all imaginable colours.
The fruit trees in the orchard showed traces of Mother Patrick’s labours. Bulges of clay on the crown-grafted ancient trees, and neat criss-cross of bast on the younger ones, which had been tongue-grafted with delicate, precise insertions in T-shaped incisions, proved that her leisure had been employed as pleased her best. Mrs. Bradley nodded, reviewing her own assistance in these labours.
CHAPTER 19
CULPRIT
“I leave the plain, I climb the height;
No branchy thicket shelter yields;
But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields.”
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.
The infirmary, a large, cheerful room with a view seawards which was partly blocked by the church, was, when Mrs. Bradley arrived, in the charge of Mother Mary-Joseph, who sat in a corner and, as it was Sunday, sedulously read from a book of religious character; what it was Mrs. Bradley did not know. She was seated out of earshot of any conversation which might be held between Mrs. Bradley and the child, and she kept this distance away all the time that Mrs. Bradley was there.
Mary looked pale, more from fear of getting into trouble than from the consequences of the fall, Mrs. Bradley thought. She greeted her cheerfully, whereupon the child burst into tears. This reaction, in one so obviously phlegmatic, provoked Mrs. Bradley’s interest.
“Come, now,” she said, with brisk kindness. “That’s enough of that. You and I must not waste each other’s time. What were you up to yesterday?”
“I thought I had a clue.”
“What about?”
“About Ursula.”
“Tell me.”
“Ulrica always thought that Ursula was murdered. It frightened me at first, but then I saw that Ulrica was also horribly frightened, and I asked her why, and she said that she supposed she would be the next one, and she didn’t want to die with her sins upon her. She isn’t a Catholic yet, you know. She was sure she was going to be murdered.”
“Rubbish. Accidents will happen,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“Yes, I know. But this was no accident. I found that out last night. Any more than poor Sister Bridget was an accident.”
“Sister Bridget,” said Mrs. Bradley, who knew that the children had heard nothing definite beyond what the first spate of gossip had washed down to the schoolgirls at the very beginning of the affair, “had a nasty experience, and is lucky to be on the way to recovering from it. She is not quite responsible for her actions, as I
think we all know, and things may happen to her which would not happen to others who are better able to take care of themselves.”
“But they said she was hit on the head,” said Mary, rightly disregarding this conventional and insincere explanation.
“Of course she was,” Mrs. Bradley vigorously answered. “If people rush about the place at night as though they are burglars, naturally they get hit on the head if the people in charge have anything to hit them with.”
“No one confessed to hitting her, though,” said Mary, with irritating logic.
“Naturally not, since she nearly died of the blow,” said Mrs. Bradley tartly.
“But—”
Mrs. Bradley, who had had considerable experience of adolescents who said: “But,” decided to change the subject.
“You haven’t told me your clue yet,” she remarked.
“Oh, that! Well, I soon realised that things were more dangerous for Ulrica than for me, and, when I thought that, I cheered up quite a lot, because, you see, if it was the money, I can’t get any until Ulrica is dead—I don’t mean that to sound horrid; it’s just common sense. So I decided to do a bit of snooping.”
“Do a—” said Mrs. Bradley, the accusing spectacle of Mother Mary-Joseph, teacher of English, there in the corner of the infirmary and immediately before her eyes.
“Oh, you know—snooping. Like detectives do. I thought perhaps the others had missed something that I might discover, and I thought how lovely that would be.”
“Yes?”
“Oh, yes. Well, we’re never allowed in the guest-house unless one of the guests invites us, so I made up my mind—I say, you won’t have to tell Mother Francis this?—to get into the guest-house somehow and have a look at that bathroom—only—I didn’t know, you see, which bathroom it was. That had to be found out first.”
“And what were your plans for getting into the guest-house?”
“Well, Ursula managed it, didn’t she? And she never broke any rules, as far as anyone knew. I thought there must be an easy way in, and it only needed finding.”
“Now this,” said Mrs. Bradley, “is what I’ve felt all along was the very nub of the matter. She never broke any rules, yet she broke one of the strictest rules of all. I understand from the nuns that it is only the most hardened offenders who ever dream of breaking into the guest-house.”
“The last girl who did it was expelled.”
“Were you willing to risk expulsion?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t have minded in a way, as soon as the row was over. Of course, I wouldn’t in the ordinary way want to leave the convent, but mother has been such a beast about taking me away in any case, that it didn’t seem to matter in quite the same way. And whether I am expelled or not, I am going to be taken straight out to my grandfather in New York.”
“Why is that?”
“Mother thinks he would like me better than Ursula or Ulrica, if he saw me, because Ursula was a bit mousy, and Ulrica really is rather fascinating, and, of course, most awfully clever, but I’m decidedly stupid, and as grandfather seems a bit stupid, too, mother—she isn’t my mother really, of course, she’s only my step, and I’m not, as a matter of fact, too terribly keen—”
“And as grandfather also seems a bit stupid,” said Mrs. Bradley, gently.
“Oh, yes. Mother thought he might like me a good deal better than either of them, and give me the money after all. It seems beastly to talk like this, but you do want to know it all, don’t you?”
“One moment,” said Mrs. Bradley. She wrote in her little notebook, the pencil that described her hieroglyphic shorthand flicking over the pages like a whip of silver fire.
“When did you know that your parents proposed to take you to New York to visit your grandfather!” she enquired.
“Oh, days! It was one of the first things mother mentioned when she got here.”
“And how many people have you told?”
“Oh, dozens. Simply everybody, by now.”
“And what made you sick on Friday?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Did you eat anything out of the ordinary?”
“No, but I don’t like fat, and I had an awful lot on my plate at dinner, and, of course, we have to eat everything on the plate. I rather expect it was that.”
“Why can’t you see your grandfather during the summer vacation?”
“He goes away himself. Anyway, he wouldn’t want us then. He says it’s too hot in the summer to be pestered with friends and relations.”
Mrs. Bradley could not regard this as a personal idiosyncrasy.
“I daresay he does. A good many people think the same. What does your father think about the trip to New York?”
“Daddy says while he pays school fees I’m to take advantage of them. It’s mother who’s always croaking about New York. All the same, I believe he’s just as keen as she is. He’d love me to have the money, naturally.”
“And it is your stepmother who is so much concerned about Ursula’s death?”
“Yes, of course she is. She doesn’t want anything to go wrong about the will. I don’t understand what she means by that. You could ask her about it if you liked.”
“I intend to do so. Well, did you manage to get yourself into the guest-house?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I funked it. Oh, I did! I know it sounds awful, but you don’t know what Mother Saint Francis and Mother Saint Patrick can be like. Mother Saint Patrick is my form-mistress, and I really believe she’s worse than Mother Saint Francis, and Mother Saint Francis once made a girl cry two whole days on end. I couldn’t explain how she does it, but she does.”
Mrs. Bradley could believe this, and came back to the previous evening’s exploit.
“Well, what about the guest-house?”
“I got an anonymous letter.”
“What?”
“You know—those letters people write and don’t put their name at the bottom. We had a poem like it, and Mother Mary-Joseph asked us why there wasn’t a name at the bottom, and Rosalie Waters—always very cheeky—she’s had three Major Penances from different people already this term—said, straight away, ‘I suppose he must be ashamed of it.’ Well, that might be true about some anonymous letters, I should think.”
“What did the letter say? Have you kept it, by any chance?”
“No. It said to destroy it, so I did. I pulled the chain on it.”
“A pity. It might, in itself, have been a clue.”
“Oh, dear. I didn’t think. It said: ‘To-night keep your eye on Bessie at the Orphanage’ and ‘Orphanage’ was spelt wrongly, I think, but I’m not too sure, because my own spelling’s rather shaky.”
“And is that what you were doing—keeping your eye on Bessie?”
“Oh, no! Do you read detective stories? We are not allowed them here, but at home I read a great many. I thought the letter was probably a blind. So I pretended to be keeping an eye on Bessie, but all the time I was trying to make out whether anybody had an eye on me.”
“But was not that a frightening idea?”
“No. I thought of Ulrica. She’d got to have an accident first, you see.”
“I admire your ghoulish intelligence, but listen to me: I want you not to take it upon yourself to do any more of this snooping. It isn’t really very safe.”
“No, it isn’t really. I got on to the roof of the guest-house, and I could have got into the bathroom, but didn’t dare. And then I couldn’t get down.”
“Lost your nerve, I suppose, in the dark?”
“Yes, I did. I believe anybody would have. And I thought I saw somebody lurking.”
“Bessie’s young man, I daresay.”
“The orphans don’t have young men! It isn’t allowed.”
“Sometimes they have them,” said Mrs. Bradley, with a pleasant recollection of the carton of cream and the rose. “Promise me, please, that you won’t do any more snooping by yourself.”
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br /> “Very well, then. I’m glad you’ve made me, because now I can’t break the promise, and really I didn’t want to do any more hunting for clues. If I hadn’t fallen off the roof of the first private house, though, and been helped by a gentleman who lives there, I think I should have found out quite a lot. But I came over sick again, and lost my hold, and crashed.”
“Oh, yes. The private houses,” said Mrs. Bradley. She did not want to bring them any further into the affairs of the convent if she could help it, but she reflected that they might have information on various points which the convent did not possess. There were only two of them, and in time, she supposed, the convent would absorb them into its guest-house just as it had absorbed the other three which the friendly speculative builder had put up.
“So the gentlemen helped you up?”
“Well, really, you know, I’d hurt myself. He picked me up, and then I got a sort of a clue, after all.”
“No!”
“Oh, yes. He said: ‘And how many more of you wretched kids am I going to spot on the roof?’
“I said: ‘I’m terribly sorry. I slipped, and then I rolled. But I didn’t know that anybody else had ever been on the roof.’ I didn’t like to ask him when it was, but it sounds like Ursula, doesn’t it? You can get into that bathroom from the roof, because that’s the way the girl who was expelled from school got in, only she was caught by Mother Saint Jude, and Mother Saint Jude was terribly upset at having to take her over to Mother Saint Francis, but she felt she had to, because the rule is so strict.”
“You said that you received an anonymous letter. Have you no idea at all who might have sent it?”
“You know how the nuns write? Well, it was just like that. But all the girls can do it. It’s very easy.”
“What about your clothes?”
“A fearful mess. I daren’t think what Sister Genevieve’s going to say. Do you think that she’ll report me?”
“I really have no idea. Did your stockings get torn?”
“Oh, yes. I took the skin off all down the side of my leg, and, of course, the stocking tore away too. And the roof is so terribly dirty. I got simply smothered in soot. Luckily I had my black overall on, and not my grey school tunic!”
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