Bismarck Herrings (Timothy Herring)

by Gladys Mitchell

  The creek had broadened. At the last bend it had been almost a quarter of a mile wide. Timothy’s first thought of running out past the Old Quay as though he intended to put to sea he soon abandoned, for he had thought of a better and a far less dangerous idea. He would find out whether it was possible to tie up at the landing-stage which he and the president had noticed on their trip after they had rounded the island, and which seemed to belong to one of the Georgian houses they had seen. From there, having switched off his lights, he could follow the other cruiser if she came back, and find out where she was heading for. The alternative, that of continuing to the Old Quay, boldly tying up near the two vessels, supposing they were there, and watching what they were up to, he dismissed almost as soon as he thought of it. The spot was lonely, there might be more than one man on the cruiser and a crew of three or more on the ship, if ship there was. Besides, nobody knew where he had gone and the deep silt of the marshes would soon hide any trace of his body should he be unlucky enough to fall foul of desperadoes, and Jabez Gee, at any rate, would not stick at much, if Timothy had read him rightly.

  He had already passed the landing-stage opposite the Georgian house, so he put about, found the place deserted, tied up, and put out his lights. He went into the cabin, filled a pipe, poured himself another drink, and settled down to wait and listen. Sure enough, it was not more than twenty minutes or so before the sound of an engine came to his ears and a motor-cruiser, still without lights, passed him, going upstream. He gave it a full five minutes and then cast off and followed it. The tide was still running in, and the ship, if there was one, was waiting, he supposed, for it to turn.

  Timothy was not slow, as a rule, in making up his mind about a course of action, but on this occasion he was far from certain what his next move was going to be. Much depended on whether his hunch was correct, that Jabez and his friends were in the cruiser and that their night errand was nefarious. He took his boat along at not more than his usual five knots and was not in the least surprised to find the other cruiser (as he supposed) lying moored at the Hall’s decrepit jetty where he had left his car. He pulled over until he was only about a yard from the opposite bank and continued upstream until he had rounded the bend, then he put his boat across the river, turning her as he did so, cut out the engine, and quanted her along until he reached a couple of willows. Here he drove her nose into the soft bank, tied up, and, with his torch to help him, made soggy tracks on foot towards the broken-down sheds behind which he had hidden his car.

  He was banking on another hunch—that the people on board the other cruiser had gone ashore. He hoped that this was so, for his squelching progress towards their boat on the oozy bank of the creek was far from noiseless. He reached the shelter of the sheds, felt firm ground under his feet, and made a cautious reconnaissance. There were still no lights on the cruiser. He had only made her out as a black hull when he passed her. He approached her with extreme caution, and was soon in no doubt that she was untenanted.

  “Taken her cargo, whatever it was, up to the Hall,” thought Timothy. “Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.” He put his torch in his anorak pocket and strode out in the thickly-misted night to where his formidable inheritance confronted the steaming marshes.

  There was no longer any light showing from the gatehouse and he was already under its archway when he saw a man leaving by the front door of the Hall. Timothy had two choices; either he could flatten himself against the gatehouse wall, hoping that the fellow would unwittingly pass him by in the blackness, or he could step out and confront him. He decided upon the bolder course, having the comfortable feeling that the odds, if it came to a punch-up, ought to be in his favour, as he would be taking the other man by surprise.

  “Hullo, there!” he called out. “Is that you, Gee? Do you happen to have a key on you? My car’s broken down again, so I’ll have to spend the night here, and I don’t seem to have my key with me.”

  “Why, good evenin’, sir,” said Jabez, obviously startled, but speaking in a mild and civil tone. “Oh, yes, sir, I got a key. Mother and me both got one. She’ve kep’ the big four-poster aired, sir, against you and your lady takin’ a fancy to come ’ere again for a night. I’ll let you in, sir, and then I’ll rout Mother out to make you a bit of supper.”

  “Oh, don’t trouble her,” said Timothy. “I’ve had some dinner.” They went to the front door together and Jabez unlocked it. “I’ll be off before breakfast,” Timothy went on, “so no need to disturb anybody in the morning. What took you up to the Hall so late? Anything wrong?”

  “Oh, no, sir, nothing wrong. I thought I spotted a light and went across to investigate, as it were, sir, but I must a-been mistook. There wasn’t nothing.”

  “Oh, well, good of you to take the trouble.”

  “Wasn’t no trouble, sir, Mother bein’ caretaker, as you might say . . . Oh, thank you, sir, I’m sure, but there isn’t no call for you to give me nothing. I was only doin’ my dooty, sir, when all’s said and done.”

  Timothy went into the house. He remained in the screens passage and waited and listened. Nothing was to be heard and he was disinclined to explore the rooms again. He concluded that the sounds he had heard before must have been made by Jabez, for there was nothing to show that he had been the occupant of the mysterious, unlighted cruiser. When Timothy went for his car at dawn to return to his Cotswold home, the other cruiser had disappeared. He stopped at his up-river moorings and arranged for his own boat to be collected from the willows.

  * * *

  * Remora—pronounce Remoray. A fabled fish having the power to delay ships by using a suction pad on the top of its head.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rumours of Wars

  “Nor are thine eares so deafe, but thou canst heare,

  (Far more with wonder, than with feare)

  Fame tell of States, of Countries, Courts, and Kings;

  And beleeve there be such things:

  When of these truths, thy happyer knowledge lyes,

  More in thine eares, then in thine eyes.”

  A Country-Life

  After Timothy’s experiences, one way and another, at Warlock Hall and on the river estuary, the next few days seemed somewhat of an anti-climax. His instinct was to haunt the Hall by way of giving it a second and perhaps (as he put it to Alison later, who recognised the quotation immediately and was rude about it) an individual and bewildering ghost, but this fanciful and romantic plan was scuppered because of the Phisbe committee meeting which, after his promise to the president, he felt bound to attend.

  It was a meeting which never contrived to attract the full strength of the membership and he arrived at it somewhat late, owing to a traffic hold-up on the Great West Road. The meeting, in any case, had been kept mercifully short, and by the time he got to it the president, realising that the members were anxious to get away in order to enjoy the long summer recess, had arrived at the stage of Any Other Business.

  Certain that there would be none, he was in the act of gathering his papers together, preparatory to declaring the meeting closed, when a mild, spectacled young man who was seated at a separate table where he had been engaged in taking down the minutes, rose and said diffidently,

  “Well, yes, Mr. President, if you don’t mind.”

  The young man who thus astonished and somewhat exasperated the other members, who had been hoping to get away early, was not the official secretary. That honorary post was held by Timothy Herring, but the more boring tasks appertaining to the office were performed by the meek and spectacled young Coningsby, who was handsomely paid for being saddled with those chores, such as taking down the minutes, keeping the archives, and sending out notices of meetings, which Timothy declined to carry out.

  The Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest, known to its members as Phisbe, was an influential and wealthy body, generously endowed, and its membership fees were on a sliding scale for which a species of means test had been a
dopted. This was in order that knowledgeable, hardworking, but indigent persons should not be deterred from placing their talents at the service of the society, and that wealthy dilettantes should be encouraged to subscribe heavily to a worthier cause than any they might have been able to devise for themselves.

  Whatever the president’s personal feelings may have been at this unexpected prolonging of the meeting, he accepted the interruption with a charming smile.

  “Oh, really?” he said. “All right, my dear chap, go ahead.”

  Coningsby cleared his throat and glanced apologetically at those who were seated at the long table.

  “They want to put an end to Lady Matilda’s Rest,” he said, “and I don’t think we ought to let them.”

  “Was it hot in London?” asked Alison, when she and Timothy were together again in the luxurious guest-room which Miss Pomfret-Brown had allotted to them at the school.

  “So-so. It was clever of you to have accepted Sabrina’s invitation before the date of the committee meeting was changed. How did the Open Day go?”

  “Well, it went, and that’s about all I can say. I shall opt out next year, if I’m invited. Most of the girls I taught have left, and there have been several staff changes. I was a fish out of water until the evening. It was all right then. I spent it gossiping with P.-B. in her quarters after a more than adequate dinner.”

  “I trust that my adored Sabrina was in her usual health, and delivered her usual speech to the parents in her usual inimitable manner?”

  “Yes. Of course she’s cross with you because you wouldn’t duck the committee meeting and attend her Open Day. She said that if I could, you could, and she never listens to explanations. She made her usual speech to the parents, but with a significant addition. She astounded them by saying that she proposes to use the south wing of the house next term as a preparatory school for boys.”

  “Never!”

  “Yes, indeed. There are to be three resident masters, to begin with, and others will be added as the numbers warrant this. The boys will take most of their lessons with the junior girls, but she’s bespoken a large field just up the road for the boys’ games and is building them a workroom where they can learn carpentry and how to do useful jobs about their homes.”

  “Glad I’m not their parents! But do you think she’ll get any boy pupils?”

  “Oh, yes. Everything she touches succeeds.”

  “Bless her enterprising old heart! May her shadow never grow less!”

  “Well, it won’t, unless her appetite fails or she goes on a diet. I may have more to tell you about this prep. school scheme later on. She hasn’t fully worked it out yet. So now, to change the subject, is it to be Madeira for our holiday, or would you prefer the Dalmatian coast?”

  “I’m glad you brought that up. The answer, melancholy but unavoidable, is that it’s possible it won’t be either.”

  “That means something cropped up at the Phisbe meeting. How sickening! Can’t it wait until the autumn?”

  “I don’t know yet. Look, let’s get into bed and then, if you’re not too sleepy, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know, if it’s going to upset our summer holiday. Will you put off telling me until after the play tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course. I don’t want you brooding about Madeira and the Dalmatian coast while you’re supposed to be planning the murder of Duncan.”

  “You know, the psychology in the play is all wrong. It wouldn’t have been a bit like Shakespeare says.”

  “Don’t you think so? I can quite understand Macbeth’s going from bad to worse. Evil deeds do tend to make people disintegrate. It just becomes one damn thing on top of another. Once you begin you’ve got to go on.”

  “I know, but I don’t believe Lady Macbeth would have cracked up in the way she did. She was made out to be much the stronger character.”

  “Not with her husband seeing the ghost of Banquo and all that. And she’d lost her own children, it seems—there’s a reference to her having “given suck”—so she may have been horribly affected by the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and babes.”

  “Oh, don’t let’s begin discussing the play tonight. And don’t say I started it. I know I did, and I’m sorry. Now tell me about the committee meeting. I think I’d like to know, after all, what has killed our summer holiday.”

  “Oh, no need to jump to conclusions yet. It was young Coningsby who took the pin out of the bomb, and in the most dramatic fashion, too. Have you ever heard of Lady Matilda’s Rest?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “Nor had I, so I was somewhat at a loss for words when Coningsby announced that somebody is going to put an end to it.”

  “That sounds most intriguing. Do explain.”

  “All right. It’s not a long story, and the thing which interests me—well, one of the things—is that Lady Matilda’s Rest is situated not so very far from Warlock Hall. In fact I think I spotted it when the president and I were cruising up the river.”

  “Herrings, darling, not Warlock Hall. What a coincidence, though, so please go on. I love your bedtime stories.”

  “This is rather a grim one, not so much for us as for the old ladies who are concerned in it. Lady Matilda’s Rest is a charitable institution with rather an interesting history. According to Coningsby, Lady Matilda’s Rest was originally a small mediæval monastery housing twelve monks and a prior. It was supported largely by a pious local lord who made it his contribution towards a seat among the cherubim, and at that time it was called Saint Cuthbert’s. At the Dissolution it went the way of all flesh, of course, and the buildings and land were sold to a man called Carlege, who handed them over to his wife, the Lady Matilda of the present title. She turned the thing into almshouses for twelve poor women. She altered the cloisters so as to build a row of Tudor cottages on one side and, facing them, she turned what had been the monks’ dorter into a hospital. The other buildings—a tremendous gatehouse which had been used as the prior’s lodging, the stone-built frater, and a small Norman church—she left alone.

  “Well, in the fullness of time, the local council acquired possession, but it kept the almshouses going. Now, however, it seems that there’s a scheme to pack the old ladies off to various other homes, turn the gatehouse and the dining-hall into a folk-museum, pull down the cottages and the hospital, and turn the land and gardens into a public park.”

  “I don’t see what’s to stop it happening. Maybe there’s good reason to condemn the cottages and, if they move the old ladies, there’s no longer any need for the hospital, I suppose. What is the setting like?”

  “What you’d expect in that countryside—flat and watery. There are two rivers near by—ours and a smaller stream—lush water-meadows, enough land to make part of it into a sports ground with football pitches and a running track, and there’s a scheme for making a bathing-place and using a straight stretch of the minor river for rowing-boats and canoes.”

  “It sounds like a plan for doing the greatest good to the greatest number. Why is Mr. Coningsby against it?”

  “Apart from the fact that it will probably break the inmates’ hearts to be separated and sent to other institutions—not that that is Phisbe’s concern, of course—he says he’s seen the place, and, next to St. Cross, just outside Winchester, which it somewhat resembles, he claims that it’s the most complete and delightful set of buildings he’s ever seen, and he thinks it ought to be preserved just as it is, and any necessary repairs put in hand by the council, or, failing them, by us.”

  “It doesn’t sound a bit like a Phisbe job to me. From what you say, it seems that the original mediæval buildings are to be preserved and only the Tudor additions scrapped. Perhaps the cottages ought to be condemned, anyway, as I’ve already said. They’re probably damp and they may be insanitary.”

  “Granted. Anyway, it won’t hurt to go and have a look at them, once the play is over. Coningsby is a knowledgeable chap and absolutely
dedicated to our work, so I’m inclined to pay heed to what he says. But now—to sleep. We must give of our best tomorrow.”

  “Yes. You know, Tim, I can’t help thinking and wondering about Kilbride Colquhoun. It’s rather worrying, in a way.”

  “Oh? Any particular reason for saying that? I thought at the dress rehearsal young Davidson was definitely good.”

  “I didn’t mean he wasn’t, although he’s much too young for the part. I was simply wondering why Colquhoun walked out on us so suddenly. That’s what worries me.”

  “I considered his explanation was more than sufficient. You seem to have pricked his bubble of self-importance pretty effectively. Enough to make any man champ and rear, especially if he’s a pro.”

  “I don’t think I was the real reason he gave up the part, though.”

  “What was the reason then?”

  “I really don’t know. We knew he was going to duck out of one rehearsal, of course. He pleaded private business and gave P.-B. to understand that he’d had an offer to play in America, but there wasn’t the slightest suggestion that he was going to abandon us altogether. He was cutting no end of a dash with his boasting the last time I saw him.”

  “Something must have cropped up during his American audition, then, I should think, and he used your spirited criticisms as an excuse for oiling out. Anyway, let’s not worry about him. Let’s get some sleep, so as to be ready for the fray tomorrow.”

  “I’m glad you’re in the play. I wouldn’t have seen very much of you, otherwise, during these last three weeks. When we go to Lady Matilda’s Rest, is there any chance that we might spend another night or two at Herrings? You said they weren’t so very far apart.”