St. Peter's Finger (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Fire! The gust of hot air struck against her as she reached the first-floor landing. Fire! The whole of the ground floor appeared to be in flames. As she arrived at the top of it, the whole of the last flight of stairs collapsed almost under her feet.

  She raced for the children’s dormitories, found Mother Ambrose awake, and told her, quickly but quietly, what had happened. Mother Ambrose got up at once, and—interesting reaction, Mrs. Bradley thought—clothed herself fully and then prayed before she began to make the rounds of the various dormitories and wake the children. Mrs. Bradley left her, and made a systematic tour of the two top floors of the house.

  She first roused Miss Bonnet, who immediately pulled over her pyjamas the inevitable pair of trousers, shoved her arms into a blazer, and her feet into brogues. She was as calm as Mother Ambrose had been, Mrs. Bradley noted with relief.

  Little Mother Jude knelt and prayed, then put on her habit—perhaps this was part of the rule, Mrs. Bradley thought—and also began to go the round of the beds. Mother Benedict and old Mother Bartholomew, the two nuns who happened to be on duty at the Orphanage that night, placed themselves under the direction of Mother Ambrose.

  All this was accomplished with the greatest rapidity and quietness, but, by the time all the children had been roused, the fire had gained ground, and the bottom floor of the house was an inferno. The children were kept in the rooms whilst Mrs. Bradley and Mother Jude went to survey the chances of escape by the staircase. The position, as Mrs. Bradley had known it must be, was hopeless.

  “Never mind,” said Mother Ambrose, who had lined up the orphans and put each section in charge of one of the eldest, “there’s a fire escape from the top storey. Let us all go up there.”

  So up the stairs they mounted to the Infirmary, and found Sister Bridget, the cause of all the mischief, asleep in her bed. She had run away from the fire, and, by the time she was back in the Infirmary, had forgotten both the danger and her mouse.

  They left her asleep for the moment, whilst Miss Bonnet took it upon herself to investigate the chances of escape down the outside ladder.

  She opened the Infirmary window, which ended in a broad, perforated iron platform, the top of the fire escape, and lowered herself into the darkness. Suddenly a great tongue of flame leapt out of a window, and in a minute Miss Bonnet came back into view at the top of the ladder.

  “No go,” she muttered in Mrs. Bradley’s ear.

  “Smoke?”

  “Flames, too. The blinking thing’s red hot on the floor below the upper dormitory. I blistered my hands on the metal. We might risk it, but these kids will never face it. What are we going to do?”

  “Tell the others,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The decision, I suppose, must rest with Mother Saint Ambrose.”

  “Right. You tell ’em. I’ll stay here with the kids and quell any riot,” Miss Bonnet officiously observed.

  Mrs. Bradley drew back from the window to let Miss Bonnet climb in. The girl was trembling, but her voice was steady and her eyes were clear and brave. Mrs. Bradley walked towards the door and gave the nuns a glance to get them to follow. There, away from the children, she told them Miss Bonnet’s opinion.

  “I’ll go down myself, just to confirm what she says, but I’m certain she’s right,” she added. So, with a jest as she passed the children, who were all assembled in straight, mute lines behind their leaders, she opened the window and crawled out. The dressing-gown was a nuisance, so she shed it, and pushed it back over the sill. Then she began to climb backwards down the ladder.

  The air got hotter and hotter. She could hear the roaring of the fire. Soon she was coughing, her lungs full of acrid smoke. Then the metal became hot to the touch, and she imagined that she could feel the heat through her shoes. She tried to get farther down the ladder, but felt herself being suffocated by the smoke which now was billowing in great thick clouds about her. The heat against the palms of her hands was unbearable, and another tongue of flame shot out of a window, this time above her head, and singed her hair.

  As quickly as she could she mounted again, pulled herself over the sill, walked, smoke-grimed, to the door, and went outside on the landing to clear her lungs. She leaned against the stair-head, eyes streaming and throat like a rasp, coughing from effects of the smoke.

  The children, by this time, could hear the roaring of the fire, and see the smoke drifting past the window, and had become terrified. Some were crying, others were whimpering pathetically for the mothers who had either died or deserted them. One began to scream, and Mother Ambrose, to prevent a general panic, seized the child quickly, muffled her head in her habit, and almost suffocated her into silence.

  “Now all of you children sit down on the beds,” she said calmly, “and Mother Saint Bartholomew will tell you a nice, quiet story whilst we are waiting. Not a long story, please, Mother. We shall not have to stay here very long.”

  Old Mother Bartholomew, owing, Mrs. Bradley supposed, to her former profession, was a gifted raconteuse.

  She began to tell the children, not stories of saints and angels, but racy tales of a pantomime that she had taken part in as a child. Mrs. Bradley looked at the group; at Mother Ambrose, justifying gloriously her military habit and address; at little Mother Jude, cherubically smiling in death’s face, as though she saw God’s face behind it, as a man may show his own expression through a mask; at Mother Benedict, who had never looked more beautiful than she did at that moment, serene, calm, and courageous; at old wrinkled Mother Bartholomew, suddenly returned for inspiration to her first love, her eyes sparkling with amusement, her gestures free and occasionally vulgar, as with a flow of anecdote, reported repartee, descriptions of scenes and “business,” stories of quarrels, generosity, poverty, travel, she turned once more to take Rosa Cardosa from limbo, and exhibit, in God’s name, the former idol of five capitals and two continents.

  Last Mrs. Bradley looked sideways at Miss Bonnet’s hard young face.

  “Take it pretty well, don’t they? I suppose they do know there’s not an earthly?” said Miss Bonnet, meeting her glance.

  “And that being so,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I suppose that you and I can take it that our short but interesting game of cat and mouse is now at an end?”

  “What I can’t make out,” said Miss Bonnet, drawing away to the farthest corner of the room, so as not to interrupt the pantomime story, “is how you tumbled to it all.”

  “Well, there was nobody else. I couldn’t see for a time how you stood to gain, until, of course, the business of the paten and the chalice came up. Then I remembered that the children’s grandfather had made an offer for them to the convent some time previously. It also transpired that he was an unscrupulous old man who had not the slightest objection to purchasing stolen goods as long as they were what he desired, and I heard about you and the pictures—”

  “Oh, damn!” said Miss Bonnet, dismayed. “How did that come out?”

  “You appear to have overlooked the fact that your reputation followed you to Kelsorrow, and from Kelsorrow to the convent.”

  “But I didn’t think the nuns could know, when they let me come here and teach in the private school.”

  “Well, they did know. And the next thing which occurred to me was that you had killed the child because she was the heiress, and would be certain to go to New York at some time when she would immediately identify the stolen property.”

  “It’s quite true that the confounded kid had caught me measuring the beastly things once, before the copies were made. I was really sneaking them then, but she interrupted the good work. However, the rest of your suspicions—”

  “I supposed,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that you had inserted a cigarette holder in the end of the gas-flex, so that the teeth marks would not show on the rubber nozzle.”

  “How did you get on to that? It doesn’t act, of course, because I don’t use a holder. But I can see that it must very soon have dawned on you that all the times fitted in rather well with the days
that I came to the convent, and I admit, of course, that I lobbed the hammer at your head that night you sat in the Common Room after the nuns had gone. In fact, it struck me pretty soon that you were altogether too hot. I began to feel beastly unsafe. I tried to get you, too, by firing that room in the guest-house, but only knocked out the poor old lay-sister, and I meant to lay for you on the following Thursday, and then at the pub.”

  She walked over to the window and looked out. There was nothing to see except smoke. She returned to Mrs. Bradley’s side.

  “It’s all right to discuss the thing, I suppose. Our chances appear to be nil. How did you think you could prove the murder on me? Or mustn’t I ask?”

  “Well, you could have been the girl on the guest-house roof. She was wearing a tunic. Then, you did not know that the children here are always bathed under a wrap. You knew where to find a guest-house towel—a thing I was pretty sure that scarcely any of my suspects would have known—for you had been offered a bath in the guest-house before! Then, you were almost the only person who insisted that the suicide verdict was the right one, so, naturally, I wondered whether you had anything to gain from it!”

  “I believe,” said Mother Jude, breaking in as Mother Bartholomew came to the end of her tale, “that it might be better to move a floor higher, Mrs. Bradley.”

  So the children, very difficult now to control, were marched up the next flight of stairs, those behind pushing hard against those in front, and one poor creature murmuring, “Mummy! Mummy!” in heart-breaking accents of fear.

  “Not too good a move,” said Miss Bonnet quietly. “I see her point, but these rooms are so beastly cheerless, and there’s nowhere on earth to sit in these beastly attics except on the floor.”

  She sat on it, and, taking no further notice of Mrs. Bradley, made the children into two concentric circles, feet to the middle, and started some sitting-down physical exercises to occupy the attention of the party.

  “She is a good girl. She has a good heart,” said Mother Jude. “Is there any chance, do you think?”

  Mrs. Bradley beckoned her, and the two of them, followed by Bessie’s anxious eyes, went out on to the landing. They crossed it, and entered the room on the opposite side of the house. The attic windows, being set in the slope of the roof, did not give a very good view, so they went down the next flight of stairs to the Infirmary landing, and stood at the window again, but at the one in a small room on the opposite side of the house where the smoke was not blowing. A great crowd of people, lighted by the flames that now belched luridly forth from the lower part of the Orphanage, waved to them and shouted. Mrs. Bradley waved, and scanned the crowd anxiously for George. He was not to be seen. There was a sudden movement, and then a struggle, and two of the nuns could be seen holding back another nun who was trying to rush into the building. It was too uncertain a light in which to distinguish one habited figure from another. Suddenly there was another commotion, however, and, hatless, there stood George. He cupped his hands and bellowed—for he could see his employer silhouetted against the light which she had turned on in the little room:

  “O.K., madam! Hang on! I’ve been and dug out the brigade!”

  “Good heavens, George!” Mrs. Bradley returned, with a sudden screech of laughter. She withdrew her head, and addressed her companion, Mother Jude.

  “But the job will be to get these children out in time, even so. It won’t be much good to carry them one by one down a ladder, I imagine, even if a ladder can be set up. The fire is gaining rapidly, and the firemen aren’t here yet, because George is only just back.”

  They mounted to the attics again. Miss Bonnet had concluded her table of exercises and the children seemed a little more controlled. It was only a matter of time, though, Mrs. Bradley decided, before there was screaming panic. Suddenly Bessie, grim-eyed, set up the languishing theme song of a film. She kept one eye on Mother Ambrose, but the nun made no objection, and after a bit the other orphans joined in.

  Taking advantage of this timely assistance from Bessie, Mrs. Bradley explained the position to the nuns.

  “Have to chuck ’em out into a sheet, I’d say,” said Miss Bonnet. “They won’t like it, poor little brutes, but it can’t be helped. Even if there were time to get ’em down one by one, I doubt whether the men could climb past that red-hot stuff.”

  The position was now truly terrifying, and the children were kept from the windows. A sentry—Mother Benedict—was posted outside on the landing to keep watch on the progress which the fire was making up the stairs, and Mrs. Bradley herself went back to the floor below—which was burning hot to her feet and might, she knew, at any moment fall through in a rush of flame—to shout down orders to George.

  The brigade, she saw, had arrived. She went back to the attics to report.

  “These blasted bars!” said Miss Bonnett, tugging with maniac strength at the bars which covered the window. All the upstair Orphanage windows were barred, except for the one which opened on to the useless fire escape.

  Mrs. Bradley and Mother Ambrose helped Miss Bonnet to pull. Mrs. Bradley had brought Sister Bridget upstairs with her this time, for the half-witted creature had continued to sleep through the danger. She now sat in a corner whimpering, until Mother Ambrose told her to be quiet. So she squatted down obediently, to Mrs. Bradley’s relief, and did not give any more trouble.

  “I think,” said Mother Ambrose, “that we should all pray.”

  “Pray, nothing!” said Miss Bonnet, from the window. “They want us to climb on the roof! I’ll go up first, if you like, and help haul the kids up. Lord, what a leap in the dark!”

  “It’s an impossible jump,” said Mrs. Bradley, under her breath; but, before she could make any other suggestion, Miss Bonnet was out on the landing and had made a cat-like leap to catch at the edge of the open trap-door. She pulled herself up by her arms—a gymnast’s movement—swung her legs, and then was up and through. She lay on her stomach and stretched an arm through the opening.

  “Come on, next!” she said. “Make a straight line, you girls, and nobody is to shove! Big ones first, Mother Saint Ambrose. There’ll be no one to mind the babies, else, up here. quiet!” she added, in a bellow which silenced even the terror-stricken orphans.

  “They’ll never be able to jump from such a height. It’s four stories,” said Mrs. Bradley, who, assisted by Mother Ambrose, had swung herself up beside her.

  “Ladder in a slant from the gatehouse roof,” said Miss Bonnet. “It’s your man. He’s a sensible feller. Push us up some of those kids, and hats off to Casa-bianca!” she added, with good-humoured roughness, for she was really, it was obvious, horribly frightened.

  The little children were carried down first by the firemen. Miss Bonnet and Mrs. Bradley descended again through the trap-door to assist the nuns through the opening on to the roof. It was easy enough to lift Mother Benedict up, and Annie and Bessie, strong girls both, soon hauled her to safety; Mother Jude, too, was not much trouble. But lay-sister Bridget, heavy Mother Ambrose, and old Mother Bartholomew taxed the strength and ingenuity of the party, who were now augmented, however, by George and one of the firemen.

  In the end, the last of the orphans, children of twelve or thirteen, had to be made to jump. Most of them hung back, and it was pretty to see Miss Bonnet, obviously in her element, lobbing them into the sheet held out by the firemen on the roof of the gatehouse.

  CHAPTER 25

  CONCLUSION

  “He was a shepparde and no mercenarie;

  And though he holy were, and vertuous,

  He was to sinful man ful piteous.”

  CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales.

  “We should never have managed it without her,” said Mrs. Bradley. It was some weeks later, and the time was Easter Saturday. Ferdinand, true to his promise, had come down to see his mother. The school children had all gone home for the holiday, and the religious and the orphans were in church for Compline, Matins, and Lauds.

  From where she stood,
with her son and George on either side of her, Mrs. Bradley could hear the beginning of the Alleluias.

  “Don’t apologise to me for having let her go,” said Ferdinand. “I suppose, as long as those two children and the precious vessels are safe, you don’t care whether the murderer is laid by the heels or not? Queer the old chap altering his will like that, and leaving all his money to the convent. Saved the Maslins a journey to New York! How angry that rather spiteful little woman was, wasn’t she? What’s happening to our young friend Ulrica—the girl I saw on to the boat?”

  “She is going to stay over there in the care of a Catholic community.”

  “What, as an orphan, do you mean?”

  “No. The grandfather has set aside a sum of money for her education, and enough to give her a small dowry if she decides, later on, to take the veil. If she does not become a nun, the sum will secure to her a small income, but she will have to earn a little money as well.”

  “It’s all a bit odd to me, mother.” Ferdinand knit his black brows and stared away over the top of his mother’s dark head to where, beyond the orchard, the tall church rose to the sky. Mrs. Bradley cackled, and George observed:

  “Madam didn’t exactly let Miss Bonnet go. It was more that the young lady managed to disappear in the general mêlée of the rescue.”

  “Very fairly put, George,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And the fact does remain, of course, that I could not have handed her over to the police, for I could not prove much against her, although she confessed that she had attacked Sister Bridget. In any case, I do not think that the attack was meant to kill the victim, although the actual force of the blow was rather dangerously misjudged. But that’s Miss Bonnet all over.”

  “But the murder of the child! You remember you described to me how you reconstructed the murder with that piece of gas-tubing in the guest-house dining-room?”

  “Oh, that? But that was not a reconstruction of the murder! It was to assure myself that that was not a way in which the thing could very well have been done. If the murderer had held that tube of escaping gas so that the victim could breathe from it, she would have run considerable risk of being gassed herself. Have you turned the gas on in there? And the child, you remember, was not injured. Her nose might well have been broken, if the method that I demonstrated was right.” Ferdinand looked at his mother in some perplexity.