Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  I remembered that Rosalind had said the two older women had spent the morning squabbling.

  When I joined them, Belle Kenton-Oakes, whose face was an angry red behind its English layer of rice powder, acknowledged my presence with the barest nod. Even Mrs. Lanchester seemed slightly pettish too, but, as if by automatic reflex, she let slip just enough charm to keep me ensnared.

  “Good morning, Dr. Westlake. How nice to see you. Do sit down.”

  She waved at the turf, and I obeyed, dropping down at her side.

  Irritation, or whatever it was, had brought out the family likeness in the two sisters. Mrs. Lanchester’s face, though lovely as ever, wore a severe expression which made her look older, while Belle Kenton-Oakes’s eyes, under their invisible brows, sparkled with a bright, almost youthful glint.

  Mrs. Kenton-Oakes, who had never been quite prepared to admit my existence, had obviously decided to continue their conversation as if the two sisters were still alone. Tugging a strand of canary-yellow thread through her embroidery, she snapped: “I don’t care what you say, Emily. Your needlepoint is sloppy and always has been sloppy ever since you were a little girl.”

  “I cannot agree with you, Belle, dear.” Mrs. Lanchester pursed her lips prettily and shot me a conspiratorial smile which was intended to make me realize that it was only out of politeness to her sister that she wasted her time arguing so trivial a point. “And I’m sure I don’t know whom you could find to support that extraordinary statement. Ask anyone who knows me in Rome. Ask the Pope. I have done a great many cassock covers for the Vatican. And I’m sure I’ve had no complaints. In fact, the Pope wrote me a very charming note.”

  “The Pope,” snorted Belle Kenton-Oakes heavily. “And why, may I ask, should you be making cassock covers for the Pope? To the best of my knowledge and belief, Father brought us all up as good Episcopalians.”

  “My dear”—Mrs. Lanchester’s voice was exasperatingly patient—“if you’d traveled as much as I, you would know that when one lives in Rome one just naturally knows the Pope.”

  “Fiddlededee.” By chance Mrs. Kenton-Oakes’s eye met mine. She looked straight through me, as if I had been the clump of budding zinnias behind me. “I’ve lived a great many years in London without just naturally meeting any Catholic archbishop. In Rome or out of Rome, one just naturally keeps to one’s own sort. The Pope!” She repeated that august title with elephantine sarcasm. “I suppose you embroidered a great many pairs of pajamas for Mr. Mussolini, too.”

  “Really, Belle.” Mrs. Lanchester’s beautiful hand dropped her embroidery and rested a moment on my shoulder. Rather breathlessly she said: “I am sure I always made a point of not meeting Mr. Mussolini in Rome, or the royal family. Of course, it was difficult at times not to run into the Cianos every now and then. And I do admit that on one occasion I invited Umberto to a very small luncheon party, but—Pajamas for Mr. Mussolini, indeed!”

  Disassociating herself entirely from Belle, she turned her full attention to me. “Really, Dr. Westlake, I am sure you are not at all interested in my sister’s most remarkable impressions of my life in Rome. I expect you have come about poor Nanny, have you not?” Her mouth drooped with enchanting wistfulness. “It is a terrible shock to me, a terrible shock. Having her die, it’s like the end of my childhood. All morning I’ve felt”—her fingers gestured as if seeking to spin the exact word from the air—“I’ve felt empty.”

  “Empty!” The word exploded from Mrs. Kenton-Oakes. From her quivering face it was clear that everything about her sister exasperated her and that this last affected statement, coming after whatever they had been squabbling about before my arrival, had goaded her beyond endurance. “You feel empty about Nanny’s death, Emily. How can you say that when you never even pretended to like her!”

  “Belle!”

  “Well, you didn’t. You know you didn’t. You never got on with Nanny, not even when you were a little girl. In fact you hated her because she always saw through you.”

  Mrs. Lanchester’s veneer of composure was cracking. Her eyes flashing formidably, she said: “Saw through me, indeed!”

  “Yes. Saw through you.”

  Both of their faces were flushed. They were absurdly like two little schoolgirls poised to make a grab at each other’s pigtails.

  “I’d like you to explain exactly what you mean by that,” said Mrs. Lanchester. “Name one example. Just one example.”

  “One! I could name a dozen.” Belle Kenton-Oakes leaned forward, breathing heavily. By now, I was sure, both had forgotten me. “What about the time when you wrote, ‘Henry James’ breath smells’ on the guest bathroom wall and tried to blame me? Oh, I would have been punished if it hadn’t been for Nanny. Even then she saw through you. She wasn’t like Mother. She wasn’t fooled by your dimples and your golden ringlets. She always knew you were a sly, deceitful child.”

  “Belle!” Mrs. Lanchester caught her breath.

  “And later, in Vienna”—when Mrs. Kenton-Oakes fought, she obviously employed the sledge-hammer technique—“when you were supposed to be going to the conservatory for your piano lessons, who was it that guessed you were up to no good and followed you and found you in the room of that greasy Rumanian fiddle player from the restaurant where you ate lunch? Who was it? Nanny. And who was it that saw Daddy married you off safely before you caused a real scandal? Nanny.”

  Mrs. Kenton-Oakes concluded her verbal pigtail pulling with a darted, triumphant glance at me. It was obvious that she took a real pleasure from exposing her sister to embarrassment before one of her tame admirers.

  This parade of ill-feeling was becoming increasingly grotesque. But it was more than that. The glimpses revealed by Mrs. Kenton-Oakes of their youth, with its rigid repression and its furtive sexual thrills snatched under the nose of the spying Nanny, showed it to be so pitifully like the present life of the dear girls. It showed me Mrs. Lanchester in a new light. I saw her no longer as the last of the Hiltons holding a torch for the simple life of Art and Letters. I saw her as just another “dear girl,” grown up and embittered, determined that her daughters should have as miserable a youth as her own.

  Mrs. Kenton-Oakes’s thrust had definitely drawn blood. Emily Lanchester had obviously been pierced in her most sensitive spot; she was seething with an indignation which, if the reason for it had been less infantile, would have been quite frightening.

  “Married me off to Bill Lanchester! I would like you to know, Belle, that I was perfectly at liberty to marry anyone in Europe—anyone at all. I would like you to know that I married Bill because he loved me so much and I was a simple, romantic child. Many, many men have loved me to distraction.” In her fury Mrs. Lanchester had, for the first time since I had known her, completely forgotten her audience. “Many, many men, I repeat. Unlike you. Who ever looked at you, may I ask? Who except poor Richard, and he only married you because he has a perverted sense of humor. You’re jealous. That’s all you’ve ever been. Jealous.”

  Having completely abandoned the social amenities, the two sisters glared at each other from their deck chairs in impassioned silence. Shamelessly exploiting their distraction for my own purposes, I said:

  “Whatever you thought about her, I know Nanny was devoted to both of you.” I paused, looking at Mrs. Lanchester. “At least I hope you had a chance to see her yesterday before she died.”

  “Naturally.” Mrs. Lanchester whipped around to me. There was still so much emotion pent up in her that, try as she would, she could sound neither composed nor charming. “Whatever Belle may think about me, I am not likely to let a poor old faithful servant lie sick in bed all afternoon without going up to see her. I dropped in just before we started preparing the picnic. Poor dear”—she sighed—“I was the last to see her alive.”

  “There you go again!” burst in Belle Kenton-Oakes. So eager was she to make her point that she turned to me, forgetting that she did not admit my existence. “I saw her after Emily did. I went up just before the picn
ic, after I’d sent the children to Indian Rock. She was brewing tea, and we sat together over a cup and chatted for almost twenty minutes until she felt sleepy. We had a most pleasant time, gossiping about the old days. Poor Nanny. I’m the one who’s really sorry that she died.” She shot a look at her sister. “Not that I’m allowed to get any credit for it.”

  I hardly heard those last words because her previous sentence had bowled me over. Out of this maelstrom of sisterly hostilities had come the most significant, the most ominous revelation of the morning. And, surely, if Emily and Belle had not been so heated, they must have grasped its significance themselves.

  Mrs. Kenton-Oakes had had a cup of tea with Nanny just before we started for the picnic. Mrs. Kenton-Oakes had drunk liquid from the improperly wiped teapot and was still very much in the land of the living.

  That could mean only one thing.

  If Nanny’s teapot had not been lethal hours after she had polished it, the accident theory collapsed. In fact, the tea in the pot must have been poisoned some time after Mrs. Kenton-Oakes’s visit to the bedside—some time just before the picnic.

  Although I was eager to question Mrs. Kenton-Oakes more thoroughly, I did not want to arouse her suspicions. Things were clear enough as they stood, in any case. Unless Mrs. Kenton-Oakes had been wantonly lying, my hunch had been right and my snooping had been alarmingly justified.

  There was no doubt about it now.

  The Angel of Death which had walked and stalked last night through the Hilton house had definitely been the Angel of—Murder.

  IX

  While Belle Kenton-Oakes’s admission was still monopolizing my thoughts, young female voices sounded behind us. I twisted around to see the four girls returning from the tennis court. At the sight of the younger generation, the Hilton sisters were able to obliterate all traces of rancor and transform themselves into their normal personalities of Mother and Aunt. With a sweet firmness which indicated that she would brook no argument, Mrs. Lanchester sent Perdita and Helena off to exercise the horses and dismissed Rosalind to the attic for viola practice. Since Janie, as George Hilton’s wife, was technically her equal and not a “dear girl,” Mrs. Lanchester was unable to assign to her any specific cultural or body-building task, but by icily ignoring the little southern girl she soon drove her off and our original trio was restored.

  My chief desire was to get away and mull over my latest and most sensational discovery, but Mrs. Lanchester, wishing presumably to dispel any bad impression which her loss of temper might have made on me, became archly social and kept me at her feet with questions which appeared to have no aim until I realized she was fishing to find out why I wanted to see her brother. When I told her about the inquest, she received the information as if it were of very little interest to her and, having invited me for dinner that night and having been assured I would come, she dismissed me almost as firmly as she had dismissed the dear girls.

  As I moved away from the two embroidering sisters down the flagged path through the garden, I started to correlate the stray facts I had unearthed. Since I had so strongly suspected murder from the start, the realization that I had almost certainly been right brought no particular shock. I was merely fascinated in trying to reconstruct the method by which it had been committed. There were two possibilities. If the English silver polish did contain sufficient cyanide to induce as quick a death as Nanny’s, there would have been no need for any of Dr. Stahl’s compound. And, if the murderer had been a doctor, there would have been no need, either, to have read the paragraph in Gonzales, Vance, and Helpern. In that case Nanny could have been killed simply by someone slipping into her room just before the picnic when she was asleep and smearing the silver polish around the spout of the teapot.

  If, on the other hand, the polish had not been the real cause of death, the crime could have been committed almost as simply. In that case the murderer would have gone to Dr. Stahl’s at lunchtime, read the textbook, stolen some of the toxicologist’s compound, and then later slipped the cyanide into the teapot and smeared the silver polish, as a blind, around the spout. Probably, unless the murderer was very careless, a little of the compound would also have been added to the can of silver polish itself.

  The method of murder was clear enough. So was the fact that everyone in the house, with no exception, had had an opportunity both to obtain the cyanide and to put it in Nanny’s tea. It remained only to figure out why anyone would have wanted to commit such a crime.

  I had learned a great deal that morning about the various antagonisms which lurked behind the sedate façade of the Lanchester house. I had learned, for example, that Nanny had hated both Janie and Vic as interlopers. I had also heard from Belle Kenton-Oakes’s indignant outburst that Mrs. Lanchester had hated the old nurse. I knew that both Perdita and Rosalind had rebelled against Nanny’s domestic tyranny. But were any of those animosities strong enough to have led to murder? It was possible but not very likely.

  I was forced to return to Dr. Hilton’s recent attack of ptomaine which Nanny had believed was a deliberate murder attempt and which Dr. Stahl had antithetically sworn to be a genuine case of food poisoning. What if Nanny had been right and the distinguished toxicologist wrong? What if someone had tried to kill Dr. Hilton and the old nurse had found proof of it?

  I had turned left past the Lanchesters’ front door. As I revolved this thought, I heard a soft “psst.” I looked around to see Rosalind standing at the door. Her face was tense, as if under the influence of some strong emotion.

  “Dr. Westlake, will you come up to the attic? It has to be the attic. I’m supposed to be practicing there. Please. Just for a little while.”

  When I hesitated, she put her hand on my arm with a wheedling gesture reminiscent of her mother. “Please. You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to seduce you.”

  My curiosity, if nothing else, was strong enough to make me consent to her suggestion. I stepped after her into the gloomy hall, and as we moved toward the stairs I heard Dr. Kenton-Oakes’s British voice raised, testily, it seemed, from the closed living room.

  “The conference,” announced Rosalind. With perfect calm she added: “I listened for a while at the keyhole. They’re all getting cross with each other. That means Uncle George will be in a mood for the musicale tonight and I’ll get hell for breaking down in one of those awful fast movements.” She sighed. “Oh, what a sordid life.”

  I followed her stripling figure up the stairs to the third floor and past the door of the room where Nanny had died. A precipitous stairway led us to the attic.

  The Lanchester attic was huge and strewn with a litter of Hiltoniana. Ancient trunks, bearing the illustrious initials of the late Vice-President, lay in dusty splendor, cheek by jowl with rusty fishing rods and magnificent vice-presidential chamber pots. An area had been cleared at one end, and in the center of it was a music stand with Rosalind’s viola on the floor at its side. An old davenport had been dragged close to a small window thick with mud wasps, and on it, the symbols of Rosalind’s inner life, lay an insecticide spray gun and a battered French novel which I guessed to be one of the volumes of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

  “Rosalind’s Bower, Dr. Westlake.” Rosalind picked up the spray gun, annihilated the most pushing wasps, and sat down on the davenport, patting the seat next to her. “I’ve almost finished Proust for the second time. If you knew how clever I have to be to keep twelve volumes hidden from Nanny and Mother. Oh, he’s so wonderful. So like life. Everything so polite and elegant on top and so filthy and vicious underneath.” As I sat down on the davenport next to her, she turned her young gaze on me. “Life is like that, isn’t it, Dr. Westlake?”

  I was forced to admit that life was usually less pleasant once you scratched its surface. I could imagine how particularly sound this piece of philosophy must have appeared to someone raised under the Hilton aegis.

  “It’s silly to be nineteen and to have to ask what life is like,” went on Rosalind
. “But, you see, I’ve never met it. Even Perdita and Helena know more than I do. At least they worked for a couple of months in the Arkwright this winter. Uncle George fired them, of course. He couldn’t bear seeing them enjoying themselves. But they haven’t been utterly insulated like me.”

  I said: “If you feel that strongly, why don’t you run away?”

  A curious flicker of fear was in her eyes. “I couldn’t. Not ever. Mother’s got to bring us up. It’s in the will. If ever we quit her, we’d forfeit our part of Grandfather’s money. I’ve got to have that money. I’ve got to be rich. I’m too much of a coward not to be rich.” She paused. “Mother knows that. She knows it about both of us.”

  “And when do you get your money?”

  Her mouth moved wryly. “When we’re thirty or when Uncle George dies. Grandfather didn’t believe in giddy girls being financially independent. Uncle George gets the income and doles little bits of it out to Mother and Aunt Belle.” She tossed back her fair, unmemorable hair, and an expression of infinite longing lit up her thin face. “Eleven more years of this. Oh, Dr. Westlake, you don’t know what it’s like, wanting to burn your candle at both ends and having to wait eleven years for a box of matches.”

  She went on speaking with a nervous swiftness, as if she were trying through garrulity to screw her courage up to a point where she could tell me what it was that she really had on her mind. The words flowed on for a while. Suddenly she broke off in the middle of a sentence and clutched my arm with her roughened, unmanicured hand.

  “Dr. Westlake.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve—I’ve been awfully kiddish and stupid with you. I don’t know why. I suppose I’ve been trying to impress you. I always try to impress everyone. But what I’m going to say now—it isn’t being clever or bright or shocking or anything. It’s true. I really mean it.”

  It was coming now. “Well?” I asked.