Arrest the Bishop?

by Peck,Winifred

  “No, but she’d talk to shock or amuse people, but with Moira she’d just pour out everything, knowing Moira would applaud her all the time and always take her side. That first evening she went up to tell Moira all about Mr. Ulder’s seeing her at that hotel and blackmailing her, and about well, everything else—” said Sue with a pre-war blush. “And then after dinner, to describe Ulder’s arrival and his fit and all the rest of it. When Mummy and I tried to talk when Moira’s pain was bad she’d hardly listen, but she’d have come back from the grave to listen to Judith!

  “Moira must have taken a poor view of the Rev. Thomas Ulder!”

  “She did indeed! You know she’s often been rather queer with her dreadful pain—illusions the doctor calls it—and Ju said she used the most awful language about him and prayed Heaven to curse him. Rather dreadful, when she was so ill and going away to this dreadful operation.”

  “Any good news of her? Has she had it yet?”

  “Oh no indeed! Mummy rang up first thing. She has bronchitis still and they evidently expect pneumonia and can’t possibly operate. And Mummy told me straight out that they don’t expect the poor dear to get through!”

  “Better not,” said Dick sombrely.

  “I suppose so, with that operation before her! But, Dick, what has this to do with Addsey?”

  “Because Moira’s illegitimate baby was born there. She may have gone into service at some house or farm, near there when she first came over from Ireland, but of course that’s thirty years ago. I don’t suppose we’ll find out much, but I’d like to make sure of the register and pick up any gossip we can.”

  Sue drove in silence as they left the clear stream in sun shine and travelled steadily into thick dull clouds and the blackened countryside which surrounds mining neighbour hoods. Whether she had arrived at his own suspicions about Soames’ parentage Dick could not tell. He was tired and aching and could not rouse himself to try to disentangle the skein of this knotted story. So far he had only untwisted the thread and pulled it a little way before another cross-thread intervened. And whatever the end of the quest might be it seemed as if it must lead some human creature, however criminal, that hated road to the gallows.

  “Two miles to Addsey!” said Sue reading a sign-post. “Do you want to go to the Rectory, Dick?”

  “I believe it’s almost the only house there; it’s just a hamlet; we’ve only to find the Church and that’s up the hill before us.”

  “Shall I go to the Church and look at the register and leave you at the Rectory? Though I don’t see how it can help you!”

  “No, I don’t suppose we’d find any one to show the register to us. The police can ring up about that to-morrow. You stay with me, Sue! But don’t be afraid of dark towers. I don’t think it’s an historic old house. Ulder’s father, a local manufacturer, built and endowed the Church and kept the advowson for his precious son. It’s more likely pepper-pot Gothic in decay—the ancestral seat of papa Ulder, of the same date, is a reformatory now, I believe—a little ironic!”

  But the suppositions of both Sue and Dick were wrong. They had left the dark patch of coal pits behind for a dull, treeless, flat countryside, bare alike of trees and cottages: even the hedges were dwarf and there was no difficulty in locating the low small church with its squat tower. Opposite it, standing just back from the road behind a golden privet hedge, was a prim square bow-windowed house with clean windows and well-polished brass. It must be the Rectory, for a few huddled cottages composed the rest of the hamlet, but it was hard to believe it was the sinister Ulder’s home.

  But the surprising contrast was forgotten as Sue stood before the front door and rang the bell. It was fitting, perhaps, that the house, like Ulder, should present a respectable façade to the world. But when, after strange sounds of scraping, shuffling and dragging, the door opened at last, there could be no question but that something of him remained in his former lair. No woman, thought Sue, could have lived with Mr. Ulder without becoming bad or mad, and his cousin, Miss Ulder, had clearly chosen the latter alternative. She was small and emaciated: her dark dress was neat though shabby: her iron-grey hair plastered back stiffly. That was, as it were, the substructure of her original self. But everything else about her was eccentric to the verge, if not over the verge, of madness. It was not only that wild yet cunning eyes avoided theirs, that her hands were filthy, her old boots torn and plastered in the mud of weeks. In startling contrast she wore, floating round her, two or three gay flowered scarfs of shot tissue, a cheap gilt belt and so large and varied a store of old-fashioned jewellery that the total effect was that of a grandmother’s trinket-box, worn, torn and faded, exhibiting its store of pinchbeck, of cameos and onyx brooches, sets of jet and amber, massive gold lockets, silver filigree bracelets, coral ear-rings, rings and bracelets of hair mounted in gold, silver serpents entwined round the wrist, small garnets and sapphires deeply embedded in gold. In the place of honour on her bosom lay, however, in contrast, one of those gunmetal watches which had been fashionable some twenty years before.

  “If you’re reporters you can go away!” A thin, precise voice rapped out the words. “If you’re police you can go away! If you’re the removers you can take a look round. If you are the valuers for the auction you can come in!”

  “Well, we’re none of them really,” said Dick with his friendly smile. “As a matter of fact we’ve come from the Palace—this is Miss Broome, the Bishop’s daughter. We have all felt so much sympathy for you in this dreadful shock and—and loss.”

  Dick faltered over the last words, for Miss Ulder, eyeing him closely, burst into a shrill laugh.

  “Sympathy! From the Palace! My good young people, I imagine they feel at the Palace what I feel here, free at last!”

  “Still—it has been a very sudden blow for you,” put in Sue, seeing Dick wholly at a loss for once.

  “Why? I’d told him I wouldn’t stay with him any longer, and he was going to America, he said. Across half the earth or under it doesn’t make much difference. Who murdered him? Quite a choice, I expect, and I don’t blame them. I do believe in seeing things straight, don’t you?”

  “We do hope, at least,” ventured Sue, feeling it simplest to take no notice of this merciless candour, “that it hasn’t put you in an awkward financial position. My father is always so worried about any of the relatives of his incumbents when they sustain a very sudden loss.” (Good for you! thought Dick, admiring Sue’s diversion.)

  “Very kind of your papa, I’m sure. I hope it’s not what they call conscience money.” She laughed more heartily at her joke than her companions. “Tell the Bishop I’m in clover! Thomas speculated away all my money years ago. I had to stay with him and keep house for him for I hadn’t a penny or crust of my own, though indeed,” suddenly she began to whimper, “my father kept his own pony cart!”

  “You have all that lovely jewellery anyhow,” put in Sue swiftly, for the thin face had puckered, the wild eyes dimmed so desperately.

  “Yes, my dear! Isn’t it nice!” Miss Ulder cheered up at once. “A little excessive for a quiet day in the country, you may say, but I have never dared to wear any since I found he always managed to get hold of it and sell or pawn it. My dear father’s silver half-hunter watch, my aunt’s seed-pearls! Oh dear, oh dear! But he can’t steal any more now! He meant to, you know!”—she lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “Come in, for that poor young man has a bad foot and we’ll see if we can find a chair and I’ll tell you all about it. There is no one I can talk to in this village, as I always said to my cousin, not our class, not our class at all!”

  It was not at all easy to find a chair in the crowded sitting-room into which the pathetic, repulsive little elderly woman led them. One was evidently the throne of an honoured cat; another piled with old clothes, another with boots and shoes, and another with books. And over chairs, table and floor alike spread an avalanche of papers.

  “All his things! I’m going to make a bonfire of them wh
en the snow’s melted. I know the village thinks I’ll hand them round, but let his goods perish with him, and his heritage let no man take! The lawyer who came to see me yesterday, on seeing the news, said ‘Look through his papers,’ but I told him, ‘No,’ I’d destroy every trace of him!”

  The room was so unbearably stuffy, with the odour of foul tobacco, stuffy clothing and the kipper with which the cat was toying that Dick’s head ached unbearably, and though his sense of urgency remained he hardly knew what it was he had hoped to find. Some paper to trace the connection he was sure of had been his aim, but he felt like nothing now but Rider Haggard’s travellers trapped to death in the diamond cave. The riches of Ulder’s past records were all around him but how could he make use of them? But Sue, at his appealing glance, put in a quick question to their companion:

  “You were saying he meant to cheat you, but everything is all right, I hope?”

  “Yes, yes, he died intestate, so I inherit his money and furniture—not much, though he told me he was coming into a fortune, but quite enough for me! Oh yes, he meant to cheat me of it. He told me when I said I must leave him (for really a scandal in this village was too much, and such a common woman!) that he would cut me out of his will. And then he told his lawyer (so I heard yesterday) to track down all his—my dear, you are only a girl, I don’t know if I should tell you!—well, let us say all the women he had any connection with and their children, and let them know he would remember them. I don’t think the lawyer had got very far, for every woman who had ever known my cousin had no desire ever to see him again—it’s one thing to be hard and another mean—but to be both, you know! And this shows you what he was like! He was to raise their hopes as he used to raise mine, and then his last instructions were for the lawyer to draw up a will leaving everything he possessed to a home for fallen women. Dear me, how I laughed when the lawyer told me! I’m afraid the good man must have thought I was just a little odd, you know. Thomas meant to sign that will on Friday morning, but he didn’t, and his old one was destroyed and he died intestate, so I get everything!”

  “Then he never married?” asked Dick.

  “No, no indeed! Not married if you take me!” She turned her back on Sue and winked vigorously at Dick. “The lawyer asked that so I said: ‘No; if you like to look through my cousin’s diaries—40 years of them—you’ll see the kind of man he was, for he wrote everything down, everything. He gloated on his wickedness! But not one word of marriage!’ The lawyer looked through one or two and gave it up—there they are, you see, in that corner behind Adam, his cat. Adam got cream while I had skim milk, so I’m not sure that Adam shan’t go into the bonfire too!”

  “Oh no, you couldn’t be so cruel!” Sue’s pretty voice calmed the little woman strangely, and as Sue bravely patted the dirty ringed hand Miss Ulder smiled and the mad hatred died down. “You see, it wasn’t Adam’s fault that he got the cream!” added Sue.

  “No, no, how well you put things! My dear, would you like some tea?”

  “No, no, thank you!” However badly she needed it the thought of anything prepared in this house was impossible. “I’d like—I’d like to see the other pretty things you have upstairs. I see you have lost a jet ear-ring, haven’t you? I believe my mother has an old set, left her by a governess, which she never wears, so perhaps I could match it for you …”

  “How did you know I wanted to be left alone downstairs?” asked Dick when, half an hour later, the two escaped and, flinging open the car windows, welcomed every breath of the fierce winds as they drove away.

  “How could I help it when I saw you eyeing those diaries? Have you got what you want?”

  “Yes, I have, the last link.”

  “Then Moira was—”

  “Yes, it’s all here—1892—I took it away with me. Why not, if it was going into that bonfire? I won’t let you see it if you don’t mind, Sue. A bonfire’s the place for it, later!”

  “Moira! Moira!” repeated Sue in horrified surprise. “Then Soames is—”

  “Yes, Ulder’s son. And he must have known it. That lawyer’s envelope which she pointed to was the only other paper I looked at. He’d traced Soames all right—he must have been the other person who’d been enquiring at the Orphanage. I suppose he let the Army Records know later.”

  “Then—then—if Soames knew it was his father who’d wronged him and his mother—and might leave him money when he died! Oh Dick!” Sue suddenly stopped the car dead and, laying her head on the wheel, shook with sudden sobs. “I—I can’t believe there’s all this wickedness in the world. You think that Soames—”

  “I don’t think things happened as you imagine them,” said Dick cryptically. He himself was white and tense with the effort to sift his evidence rightly, but all he could think of was how to console Sue. “Listen, dear Sue, I’d better tell you. All this seems grim, and worse even than you imagine, I fear, but Mack was hot on a false trail which would have hurt you infinitely more!”

  “Did he think it was Judith? I sometimes worried a little, though it’s too awful to say so. She was on some warpath of her own, I’m sure, and I knew it wouldn’t be she who—who killed him, but—but the awful part was that someone did didn’t they?”

  “Well, love, here’s a post office and telephone in this village. Will you stop and I’ll manage to get out because I must do some telephoning and it’s urgent. Ah, it’s got a tea-shop behind. Tea for two, and you go and sit down and begin, Sue, and I’ll tell you this to make you forget the rest; Mack’s Favourite runner-up was—your father! Yes, just as well you weren’t driving when I said that! Be a good girl and keep some tea for me.”

  Dick was lucky with his calls. He got through to the Hospital and spoke to the matron and the doctor. He got through to Mack and wondered if the village telephone would ever recover from the grunts, oaths, queries and remonstrances with which Mack heard the story of Dick’s theory, his quest, and some of its results. But if he were only half or a quarter convinced he agreed to fall in with Dick’s plans, recognizing their urgency.

  “Then you’ll be with Soames at Evelake Hospital at six o’clock,” ended Dick. “There’s a chance of getting the truth, though it’s only a chance. They give her a few hours at most.”

  Then he rejoined Sue and to his relief found her laughing helplessly. “I can’t stop myself,” she said, handing him a crumpet and filling up his cup. “It—it just seems so ridiculously funny to arrest a Bishop!”

  “Doesn’t it!” said Dick, but inwardly he felt that funny hardly described the experiences of the last two days.

  XIV

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  “Well, Dick, I’ve done what you asked in your extraordinary message on the telephone an hour ago. Seen the matron and made all arrangements and got that fellow Soames here. But what on earth it’s all about you’ve still to explain! Why trouble that poor old soul who’s dying by inches? Why should she know the worst?”

  Mack stood puzzled and angry in a small bare waiting-room in Evelake Hospital, where Dick, flushed and jaded, limped in to join him when darkness had fallen and the building was echoing with the sound of trolleys carrying round suppers and running taps for night ablutions in the wards.

  “I’d better explain a bit later, Mack! Didn’t the sister say we haven’t any time to lose if we’re to see Moira, and it’s imperative that we should.”

  “Trouble her when she’s dying?” asked Mack angrily. Scotsmen think little of Bishops but much of mothers, said that imp in Dick’s brain which whispers such remarks to most of us in the most inappropriate moments. “Why not let the poor soul go in peace without knowing that her son’s a murderer?”

  “You’ll understand if only she can still speak. I can’t help it; a life depends on it!”

  “It isn’t pneumonia,” said Mack. “I asked Matron.”

  “Bronchitis, but the sister has just said the strain of the cough is terrible, and each fit of coughing may be the last. Don’t waste any more time, sir! Is Tonk
s there? He must be in the room to take notes. Where is Soames?”

  “In with his mother. Dick, it’s cruel, it’s abominable, it’s not necessary!”

  “Sorry, Major.” Dick was so nearly at the end of his tether that he hailed the sight of the nurse with infinite relief. To get this dreadful affair over was all he could hope for now. “Yes, Nurse, we’re coming!”

  At the end of a long corridor Tonks stood waiting outside a door. Dick had vaguely imagined a ward, and a bed screened only by a curtain, so it was a real relief to see that Moira was alone in a room for her few last hours.

  “You’d better come away now, dear!” said the nurse persuasively to someone within.

  “No, I’m not going to leave her now!”

  It was Judith who spoke and as she confronted the little party who filed in, Dick had an odd memory of some Flemish glass window where St. Michael, wide-eyed and unafraid in shining armour, trampled down the old dragon. Behind her radiance the poor bare little dusky room faded into grey insignificance; two narrow beds were empty; on the third, so wasted that her form scarcely showed under the sheet Moira lay, propped up with pillows. By her side was a chest with glass, books, and a vase of half-faded lilies, as sallow and drooping as the emaciated face of the old woman. Dick remembered Moira only as a pleasant, middle-aged, buxom woman who had, it would seem, disguised the outspoken merry ruler of the nursery under the pose of the high-class servant downstairs. Now that disease had worn away her body and pain her spirit, he found nothing to remind him of the past, till Moira opened her eyes. Those grey, dark-rimmed pupils and the murmur in a hoarse voice which had yet a lilt of the old sing-song Irish belonged to the Moira whom he remembered.

  “Don’t go, my darling!” Those eyes, dulled with drugs, sunk in the hollow face, could still shine, as in old days with passionate tenderness for Judith, and then they turned to the dark corner where Soames was standing, half-crouching over a radiator, and in them shone all the baffled, thwarted love of the saints and angels who would save mankind from itself, if only they could. “I’ll speak better if she’s near me.”