Ladies’ Bane

by Patricia Wentworth

  Jacqueline Delauny maintained the calm level of her voice.

  “Miss Muir, I understand your feelings and have every sympathy with them, but you must be aware that I am not the authority in the matter. If you care to speak to Mr. Trent about it, he will, I am sure, be able to satisfy you that we are all doing our best. It has been an unfortunate occurrence, and it has naturally upset you. It has upset Mr. Trent, and I think it would be kinder not to discuss the matter with him for a few days.” Ione became aware that she was being put in the wrong. All the tolerance, the kindness, the consideration for others, were on Jacqueline Delauny’s side. Ione Muir was the visitor who was disturbing the harmony of the household. It was a completely infuriating situation, and she must get herself out of it as best she could. She produced a kind, tolerant smile of her own and said,

  “Poor Geoffrey! It’s a frightful millstone to have tied round his neck, isn’t it?”

  By the evening Allegra had relapsed into the little pale ghost of yesterday. Margot was on her best behaviour. She had changed into a well-cut frock of dark blue velvet, her hair had been brushed until it shone, and her hands and nails were spotlessly clean. She giggled to herself every now and then as if her thoughts were pleasurably occupied, but on the whole her manner was more restrained than Ione had seen it yet, and she wondered whether Geoffrey’s temper had not carried him into giving her the dressing-down she had asked for. He was certainly in very much better spirits. She saw him for the first time as the gay and charming host, leading the talk with great skill but never monopolizing it. He had been in some unusual places, he had a gift of description, and he could make a story come alive.

  Allegra drooped in her sofa corner as the talk flowed round her. If Geoffrey included her in some passing allusion, he did not make the mistake of expecting an answer. It was this which gave Ione her most painful impression. The lifeless apathy, the silence, which were to her so startling and so new, were nothing of the sort to Jacqueline Delauny or to Geoffrey Trent. They were something to which they had become accustomed. With these thoughts in her mind, it said much for the charms of Geoffrey’s conversation that the evening passed with so little sense of strain.

  At half past ten the following morning Ione set out to walk into the village. Geoffrey was apologetic over letting her go alone.

  “I’d come with you, only I’m expecting this chap about the house. The church is always open, and you can buy picture-postcards at the general shop.” He laughed. “In fact a perfect riot of entertainment!”

  She had not got very far beyond the gate, when the taxi which had brought her from Wraydon came into view at the end of the street. She was looking at it with interest and wondering what the expert was going to say about the Ladies’ House, when the car stopped a few yards away and Jim Severn jumped out. Ione was surprised to find how pleased she was to see him. Startled too. Because of all the unexpected things! Or was it?

  He held her hand and forgot to let it go.

  “Ione! Were you coming to meet me? How extraordinarily nice of you!”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t. You see you are a Dreadful Shock-because I hadn’t the faintest idea you were coming.”

  “Didn’t your brother-in-law get my letter?”

  She laughed.

  “If you are ‘the chap he was going to see about the house,’ he did. But that’s all I knew. He didn’t mention your name.”

  “Well, it was put up to our firm, and I thought I’d come myself. It’s a very interesting place by all accounts. And you told me you were going to be here on a visit.”

  It was at this point that she became aware of the interested scrutiny of a stout woman with a mop of grey hair, an old man with a clay pipe between his teeth, a lumpy boy on a bicycle which he was balancing against a cottage wall, and the taxi driver. Jim Severn was still holding her hand, and the taxi’s meter was ticking up. With a fine bright colour in her cheeks, she detached herself and said,

  “Hadn’t you better pay your taxi? You are just there, and I can show you the way.”

  Jim Severn extracted a case from the back of the car and overpaid the driver, watched with the greatest interest by the little knot of sightseers, to whom a woman in a pixie hood and a little girl with her thumb in her mouth had now added themselves.

  Just inside the gates of the Ladies’ House he stopped.

  “Your brother-in-law seems very keen about getting this place. Do you know, we’ve had it to look over before-in ’33. There was an American who wanted to buy it then, and the owner wouldn’t sell-couldn’t in fact, because the heir was a minor. But the guardian, who was a Miss Falconer, gave the American a seven years’ lease with the option of renewal and let him make a lot of improvements-hot water system and all that sort of thing. My Uncle John went down himself, and he has dug out all his notes for me, and the plans. He was very anxious not to spoil the character of the place, and it’s no joke working a modern hot water system into one of these old houses, but I gather he made a pretty good job of it.”

  “There is really hot water!”

  They began to move again. The drive was quite a short one. It was too short. They reached the front door before either of them wished to.

  Ione walked back to the village and bought picture-postcards.

  She returned to find Geoffrey Trent in the highest of good humours. To have an expert to share his enthusiasm for the Ladies’ House, to talk about it to his heart’s content and to so agreeable a fellow as Jim Severn was an experience in which he was obviously revelling. And when he discovered the elder Mr. Severn’s previous connection with the house, and the fact that his nephew was a friend of Ione’s, nothing would serve him but that Jim must make a week-end of it and stay with them.

  “It’s a sheer impossibility to get the hang of a place like this in an hour or two. You want to live with it, in it-you want to steep yourself in the atmosphere, before you can even begin to think of making a report.”

  Jim Severn made no demur. He had, as a matter of fact, intended to put in the week-end in the neighbourhood-at the Station Hotel at Wraydon if nothing better turned up. He could take Ione out to lunch and see whether that strong sense of attraction held. The circumstances of their first meeting had been of the kind to stir the imagination. He found himself thinking about her in a very persistent way, and he wanted to check up on it. Sometimes these curious first impressions held, and sometimes they did not. It was a matter of ten years since he had been so disturbed over a woman, and he wanted to know where he stood. Love at first sight-well, it happened. Or love at the first sound of a voice which was not like any other. If he had only met her under the shroud of the fog and never seen her face, he would have known her anywhere and at any time the moment she opened her lips and spoke.

  CHAPTER 12

  Miss Maud Silver looked up from the card in her hand to the client whom Emma Meadows was ushering in, a short, broad person in the roughest of tweeds, stoutest of brogues, and the most sensible of country hats. Repeating the name which she had just read, Miss Silver said in a tone of mild enquiry,

  “Miss Josepha Bowden?”

  Her free hand was warmly grasped and wrung.

  “How do you do? You have no idea what a relief it is to hear my name pronounced correctly. You have no idea of the number of people who just say Joseph and then add some kind of a little grunt. Most infuriating! It is, of course, pronounced as if the ‘e’ were doubled-Joseepha, and I cannot tell you how much pleasure it gave me to hear you say it properly.”

  She seated herself in the chair which had been placed for her on the far side of the large writing-table, stripped off a pair of thick leather gloves, and said,

  “You are Miss Maud Silver?”

  Miss Silver inclined her head.

  Miss Bowden’s eyes were fixed upon her. They were rather good eyes, grey with a growth of strongly curling lashes. Her hair which was streaked with grey curled too, and quite obviously without any other assistance than that of nature, one g
lance being enough to dispel the idea that she would ever bother about her appearance for longer than she could possibly help. She was fortunate in possessing what had once been a very fine complexion and was still, in spite of the buffetings of all kinds of weather in all quarters of the globe, an extraordinarily healthy and colourful affair. With her eyes on Miss Silver’s face she said,

  “I have come to see you on a-well, I don’t know how to put it, and I hate beating about the bush, but it’s-well-it’s a delicate matter.”

  A great many delicate matters had been brought into that room and laid before Miss Silver-in doubt, in perplexity, in dreadful anxiety, or mortal fear. Josepha Bowden went on.

  “Elizabeth Moore is a distant connection of mine-she is Elizabeth Robertson now. She tells me you got her young man out of a mess, and what is a great deal more important so far as I am concerned, she says that you can hold your tongue, and that you actually do.”

  The temperature of the room appeared at this moment to sustain a chill. There was a faint distance in Miss Silver’s voice as she replied that the confidences of a client were, of course, inviolate.

  “There now-I’ve offended you, and that’s the last thing I meant to do! I can’t wrap things up and be tactful about them. All I can do is to tell the truth and hope that everyone else is going to do the same. And, do you know, they very often do. I’ve got out of quite a lot of tight places that way. I’m a traveller, you know-or perhaps you don’t. I go knocking round in odd places, and then I write books about them.”

  Miss Silver’s memory was seldom at a loss for long. It now connected Miss Josepha Bowden quite firmly with such phrases as “Intrepid woman explorer.” “The first European to attempt this dangerous route,” and the like. She smiled in her own peculiarly charming manner and said,

  “Oh, yes-I have seen accounts of some of your journeys. So very interesting. And now what can I do for you?”

  Miss Bowden sat back in her chair and allowed her eyes to travel about the room. It was the pride of Miss Silver’s heart, and it never failed to make its own impression upon her clients. They were sometimes wafted back to the home of some old-fashioned relative who had preserved the furnishings and pictures of an earlier date. Miss Bowden perfectly remembered being taken to see an aged great-aunt who possessed chairs in curly walnut frames which could not be distinguished from those on either side of Miss Silver’s hearth, and at least two of the pictures which had graced Aunt Janet’s walls looked down at her now from over the mantelpiece and above the bookcase-the Black Brunswicker’s farewell to his bride and “Bubbles.”

  She hastened into speech.

  “I’ve been rude again, but I was admiring your things. My great-aunt Janet had chairs like these, and some of the pictures too.”

  Miss Silver beamed.

  “They came to me from my grandparents, and I value them highly. Whilst I was engaged in the scholastic profession it seemed improbable that I should ever be in a position to accommodate them in a flat of my own, but when circumstances enabled me to exchange that profession for a more lucrative one I was able to do so.”

  Her eye travelled fondly about her little room, so bright, so cosy, with its peacock-blue curtains and carpet, both new since the war but repeating as far as possible the shade and pattern of their predecessors. She came back to Miss Josepha Bowden.

  “You think that I can help you in some way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Miss Silver waited. After a pause Miss Bowden said with a jerk,

  “When I said it was delicate-well, it is. And most people would say it was none of my business, and I suppose strictly speaking, it isn’t. But if you’re going to mind your own business to that extent, people might be murdered right and left under your nose and you wouldn’t feel called upon to do anything about it. And if I was one of the people who was going to be murdered I’d rather have someone who didn’t mind sticking his fingers into other people’s pies.”

  Miss Silver gazed at her mildly.

  “Do you know of anyone who is going to be murdered?”

  “I’m sure I hope not!” said Josepha Bowden with considerable force.

  Miss Silver continued to gaze at her in an expectant manner.

  Miss Bowden pushed back her chair and planted a hand squarely on either knee.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m worried about my goddaughter Allegra.”

  The name meant nothing to Miss Silver. She waited for more. Miss Bowden went on.

  “When I said this was delicate, I meant all of it-right from the beginning where I come in. Allegra isn’t any relation of mine, but she’s the daughter of the woman who got me out of a very nasty mess when I was a girl-about the nastiest mess a girl can get herself into, and you can dot the i’s and cross the t’s for yourself. She died when Allegra was a child, and if there’s ever anything I can do to show that I haven’t forgotten what she did for me, well, I’m here to do it whether anyone thinks I’m interfering or not.”

  Miss Silver had picked up some soft white knitting. About two inches of a baby’s bootee hung down like a little frill from the needles.

  “You are in some concern about Miss Allegra?”

  Josepha gave a loud vexed laugh.

  “That’s the bother-she isn’t Miss Allegra! She’s married, and I want to know a lot more than I do about the man-where he comes from-what he was doing before he married Allegra-whether he really has got any money, and if so, where that comes from-and why, ever since her marriage, she doesn’t answer anyone’s letters, or go and stay with her relations or have them to stay with her.”

  Miss Silver shook her head.

  “I could not undertake such an enquiry in respect of the husband. It would not be in my line at all.”

  “And I wouldn’t want you to undertake it. To put it quite bluntly, it’s a man’s job, and I’ll have to get a man working on it. I’ve just put things clumsily-I always do. What I want you for is this. Look here, I’m taking Elizabeth’s word for you, and I’m taking you as I’ve found you and I’m going to put my cards down on the table. The man’s name is Geoffrey Trent, and he’s taken Allegra to live in some kind of a medieval house in a village called Bleake. I hear he’s trying to buy the place-with Allegra’s money. She has quite a lot, and most of it is in trust, thank goodness. But her other god-mother left her enough to buy this place and a good bit over without any strings to it at all. So one of the things I want to know is why that money isn’t being used.”

  “It is not?”

  Miss Bowden shook her head vigorously.

  “No. They are trying to get round the trustees to let them use some of the money out of the trust, and I want to know why. There’s been some talk about losses.”

  Miss Silver coughed.

  “You think that the other money may have been spent?”

  Josepha Bowden thumped her knee.

  “Looks like it to me! If they’ve still got it, why don’t they use it? Then there’s this house-I want to know more about it. Old houses don’t appeal to me. After all, nobody washed in the Middle Ages, and I don’t fancy living in a place where nobody ever had a bath between the cradle and the grave for hundreds and hundreds of years-it doesn’t sound healthy to me! Now what I want you to do is to go down and stay in the village. There’s a Miss Falconer who will take an occasional p.g. if she thinks they are all right. She lives in a cottage, but this place Geoffrey Trent wants to buy, the Ladies’ House, belongs to her. There hasn’t been any money for donkey’s years, and the last male Falconer was killed in the war, so she ought to be tumbling over herself to sell. But by all accounts she isn’t. That’s one of the things I want to know about.”

  Miss Silver laid down her knitting, opened a drawer on her left, and took out what used to be called a copybook with a bright blue cover. Moved by the insatiable curiosity which is one of his besetting sins, Detective Inspector Frank Abbott of Scotland Yard had once explored the source and origin of these survivals from an earlier
and more brightly coloured world. It then transpired that a grateful client retiring from the conduct of an old-fashioned stationery business had come across a couple of gross of these books, and had forthwith presented them to Miss Silver. “And really, my dear Frank, the supply appears to be inexhaustible.”

  The bit of bright colour pleased Miss Bowden. She watched Miss Silver write down Miss Falconer’s name, the names of the village, the Ladies’ House, and of Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Trent, together with the question upon which she had desired to be informed.

  Pencil in hand, Miss Silver looked up and said,

  “Pray proceed.”

  “I want to know why Miss Falconer doesn’t jump at selling the place. Have you got that down?”

  Miss Silver inclined her head.

  “The survivors of an old family are often averse to parting with the last vestiges of former greatness.”

  Miss Bowden made the sound which is usually written, “Humph!”

  “That’s as may be! I just want to make sure that she hasn’t got some kink in her conscience. Geoffrey Trent would be welcome to buy up all the insanitary ruins in England he’d a mind to if he hadn’t married my god-daughter. But he has, and that brings me in neck and crop. The person I am concerned about is Allegra, and I don’t want her saddled with a mouldy old manor built over a cesspool-if they even had cesspools at the time it was built-or one of these places that has got a curse on it, or some particularly horrid kind of ghost!” She banged her knee even more decidedly than before. “And we all know that ghosts and curses are just a lot of superstitious nonsense! But I’m not having Allegra subjected to them! There is such a thing as suggestion, and she’s not in a state to have unpleasant things suggested to her!”