The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  He felt again the throb of his Spitfire, full throttle, nose up, the patterns of fields and roads falling away behind him and clouds streaming over the wings—he’d break free of earth and cloud alike and see the stars strewn across the night sky, constellations marching from horizon to horizon—the sound of his engines, of his thoughts, would be lost in the mighty vastness. . . . He crash-landed in his own present.

  He’d drunk too much scrumpy cider in Glastonbury, Jake told himself. The Brits hadn’t been joking, it was powerful stuff.

  The surrounding trees creaked and thrashed in the wind. Cold rain sifted down on his face. Awkwardly he felt his way up the unlit steps and opened the front door of the house. Once a butler had answered this door. Now Jake was greeted by the acrid hospital smell of disinfectant and overcooked cabbage.

  A musical feminine voice asked, “Did you enjoy your leave?”

  He looked around. There was the one bright spot in this dark, cold, wet, besieged country. Nurse O’Neill. Bridget. Tonight the starched wings of her cap contained her tightly-bound red hair. Last night, during her birthday party, her hair had tumbled down over her shoulders and he’d caught a flowery whiff more intoxicating than any alcohol.

  “I’d have enjoyed my leave a lot more if you’d come along,” he told her with a smile. “Country boys like me, we need native guides.”

  “You manage well enough, I’m thinking.”

  Jake could see her breath leaving her parted pink lips. He leaned forward. “All those narrow lanes, night coming on fast—I was expecting a Roman soldier or a medieval knight to step out in front of me.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised to see one myself, not here.”

  “The car heater was acting up. Feel my hands.” He grasped her warm hands with his icy ones.

  She pulled hers away, but not very quickly. “You’re thinking it’s cold? Just you wait, it’s autumn now, winter’s round the bend. . . .”

  “Well, well, well.” Harry Davenport’s nasal bray echoed from the high ceiling.

  Bridget’s face went rigid and she stepped back abruptly. She hasn’t done anything wrong, Jake told himself. I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone make her feel like she’s done something wrong.

  Harry’s nose and teeth thrust forward like a predator’s. A red scar creased one cheek. “So you fancy foreigners like yourself, is that it, Bridget? Can’t resist our Yank’s Hollywood handsome face? No accounting for tastes, is there? But then, I hear beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “And handsome is as handsome does.” With a tart glance at Jake, Bridget walked off down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Harry’s dark beads of eyes followed her. Jake stepped in front of him. “She told you last night she wasn’t interested.”

  “Why should I be interested in her, she’s nothing but a bog-trotter’s daughter.” Harry pivoted on his crutch and started heaving himself up the staircase, one thudding step at a time.

  Jake wanted to shout after him, Pick on someone your own size. But the other airmen were already Harry’s favorite targets, like Taffy with his Welsh accent and tin ear, and serious, literal-minded Dicky.

  Jake took off his coat. Outside a rush of wind threw raindrops like shrapnel against the mahogany panels of the door. The fanlight was blocked by cardboard. The marble flooring of the entrance hall would have gleamed if it hadn’t been smudged by muddy footprints—and if more than two bulbs of the chandelier had been lit.

  This was a hell of a place, Jake thought, and amended, had been a hell of a place. Now the carved wood and marble trim was roughly boxed in. Now pale rectangles on the wallpaper were the ghosts of paintings taken away for safekeeping. Anthony Jenkins-Ashe was trying to preserve his ancestral home. He’d told Jake his family had lived at Lydford Hall for centuries.

  Jake had grown up in a bungalow in Kansas City and was hard-pressed to name his grandparents. While the other airmen might call the elderly estate owner “Dotty Andy”, Jake found him both educational and entertaining—not least because he refused to let anyone call him “My lord” or “his lordship” or however a baronet was supposed to be addressed.

  Jake pulled a paper and twine wrapped package out of his coat pocket and headed for the back parlor that was now Andy’s sole domain. He knocked. After a long moment Andy’s reedy voice answered, “Come.”

  The room was cold and dark. A small fire provided the only light. The old man would rather strain his eyes than close the blackout curtains, even though tonight his view was of blank darkness. His chair sat on the hearth, so close to the fire that the flames illuminated the hills and furrows of his face as harshly as the folds in his old tweed suit. He was scraping the mud off a boot.

  “Have you studied Herodotus?” Andy asked. “‘In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.’”

  He was thinking of his son, dead at Dunkirk. “I was scheduled for a classics seminar,” Jake answered. “Then the war started, and suddenly history and literature seemed mighty useless.”

  “Useless? No, history and literature are never useless. Glastonbury, now, is proof of that.”

  “It’s an interesting little town with a heck of a history—I looked at some of the books while I was waiting for the clerk to fill your order. Here you go.” Jake handed over the package.

  Andy put the boot down next to his rack of pipes and used his knife to cut the twine. “Thank you, Pilot Officer Houston. Very kind of you.”

  “Seems only fair, I was using your car.”

  “The car belongs to the hospital now. There’s a war on.” Paper rustled and Andy held two books to the firelight.

  Jake squinted at their spines—The Company of Avalon by Frederick Bligh Bond and The High History of the Holy Grail. Those names were vaguely familiar, which was more than he could say of most of Andy’s books. He’d barely heard of heraldry and astrology and DeBrett’s Peerage before he’d come here.

  With a weary sigh Andy stacked the books by his chair, next to his omnipresent notebook and pen, and picked up the boot again. “Please, sit down.”

  Jake glanced over his shoulder, but Bridget was probably back under Matron’s watchful eye. He pulled up a footstool and lowered himself onto it. The wind whistled a low note in the chimney and rain streamed down the windows. “Did you get out for your walk this afternoon? Find any more Roman ruins?”

  “Perhaps a trace or two by the Brue, between the bridge and the apple orchard. If this rain ever lets up I’ll give you a tour. Although we’re unlikely to see any improvement so late in the year. It’s the equinox, you know. Virgo giving way to Libra . . . What is that commotion? Are they playing cricket in the gallery again?”

  Voices spoke urgently in the distance. Footsteps drummed overhead. A door slammed. “I don’t think so,” Jake answered. “I’ll take a look.”

  He got up, opened the door, and peered out. Now several voices were talking at once. Foggy Dewar was stumping along the hall as though he was working his way through deep mud. “What’s happened?” Jake called.

  “Another poor sod’s bought it. Randy last week and now . . .” Foggy disappeared around the corner.

  Hell, Jake told himself. Losing a colleague on the mend was worse than losing him in the midst of battle.

  Behind him Andy said quietly, “Fate can be cruel, can’t it? Damnable war, too many young men lost.”

  Jake agreed, but he didn’t see any way of stopping the war other than sacrificing even more men. With a half-salute to Andy, he followed Foggy toward the library.

  Its double door was clotted with his fellow patients. Using his cane, Jake levered himself high enough to see Doc Skelton, the flight surgeon, kneeling on the floor. “Yes, he’s dead. Has been for over an hour.”

  A murmur ran through the group. Jake pushed his way through the gathered men until he could see Bridget. She was standing alone next to the massive Victorian desk. Her normally rosy cheeks were pasty white and her a
rms were laced across her chest.

  Skelton stood up and brushed off his trousers. He turned toward the door, shoulders coiled and head down like a bull searching for a china shop. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, gentlemen, his head’s been bashed right in, by that bit of sculpture, I should think. He was murdered.”

  Murdered. Jake’s mind tripped over the word and went sprawling. In the sudden silence he could hear the wind howling outside, rain sluicing down the tall windows behind the heavy black curtains, and the ragged breaths of the men around him. Then someone swore, softly. Each airman inched a bit farther away from the man he was standing next to and Jake found himself popped like a cork into the library.

  Stretched out on the bare planks of the floor lay Dicky Richardson. A rust-red puddle pillowed his head and his blond hair was mottled with crimson. His face was as white and still as the plaster cast on his left arm. His blue eyes looked purple. Maybe, Jake thought, they’d stared yearningly into the sky so long they’d bruised.

  A fist-sized lump of gray stone lay between Dicky and the desk. Even in the dim light Jake could see the half-dozen drops of blood spattering its weathered surface.

  He braced himself on his cane. Dicky. He’d liked Dicky, even though the man had no sense of humor. Which was hardly reason to murder him.

  So what, then, would be enough reason to murder him? Or anyone, for that matter? Hadn’t there been enough death already? Jake looked up at Bridget. She bit her lip, and for just a moment fear dulled her eyes.

  “Has anyone been seen going into or coming out of the library in the last hour?” asked Skelton. “Save Nurse O’Neill, who fetched me.”

  Some of the men looked off into space, some at the floor, some at each other. No one answered.

  “Has anyone had a row with Richardson, lent him money, anything of that nature?”

  Silence.

  “Right. Houston?” Skelton pronounced it “Hooston”, like everyone except Andy, who knew better, and Bridget, who’d asked.

  Reluctantly Jake turned away from her. “Sir?”

  “You were on leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago. Maybe twenty.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because it appears you’re the only person in the house who couldn’t have done Richardson here in. He died whilst you were away.”

  “Twig and I’ve been playing cards all evening,” said Epsom, his moustache bristling.

  Foggy added quickly, “I’ve been reading, Taffy looked in on me.”

  Harry’s voice overrode the others. “A bit hard to sneak up on a chap and bash him when you’re lumbered with a bloody great crutch, isn’t it?”

  “No one here is incapacitated,” Skelton told him.

  Jake nodded. “And the wind is noisy enough to hide footsteps.”

  “Very observant,” said Harry acidly.

  Matron thrust her way through the door, parting the men with her cantilevered bosom like a ship’s bow parting the waves. A clean white sheet hung from her arm. “I phoned for the police, but the line’s dead. A tree’s gone down in the storm, I expect. Good job the electricity’s from our own generator. I’ve sent the orderly with the car round by West Pennard, in case the road’s blocked or the bridge over the Brue is awash.”

  “Slow going, but needs must,” said Skelton.

  Taffy asked, “What if the orderly’s the murderer?”

  “Then he’ll be in the hands of the police, won’t he?” Matron beckoned to Bridget. “Come along, Nurse.”

  “Aren’t you going to pick him up and lay him out properly?” asked Foggy.

  Skelton shook his head. “The police will want to see him like this.”

  The women unfolded the sheet, stretched it out over Dicky’s body like a canopy, then lowered it. His outstretched arm and hand lay at an angle to his torso and Bridget bent down to pull the fabric over them. She looked like a ministering angel in a Renaissance manuscript, Jake thought. . . . “Wait a minute. What’s he holding?”

  Skelton brushed Bridget aside, knelt, and inspected the tightly curled fingers of Dicky’s right hand. “A pen. His fingers have ink on them. Was he writing something?”

  Jake walked the dozen paces to the desk. A bottle of ink stood in the center of the blotter, its lid beside it. Next to that lay a partly crumpled piece of paper. When he smoothed it out Jake saw several smudges looking like badly-drawn heiroglyphs straggling across its top. The only words he could read were “Lydford” and “suspected t . . ,” the rest of the word trailing away and ending in a blotch. The letter “B” nestled beside another blotch.

  “Dicky was left-handed,” said Bridget at his shoulder. “He was learning to use his right, but still I was writing the letters home to his mum.”

  “This one he wanted to write himself,” Jake said, handing the paper to Skelton.

  “Lydford,” Skelton read aloud. “Suspected, followed by a word beginning with T. Another word beginning with B. Anyone have any idea what he was on about?”

  Jake looked back at the men crowding the door. Funny how clear his mind was now, the last vapors of the cider burned away. He saw each face as clearly as a dial on his control panel. Everyone’s expression ranged from puzzled to blank except for Twig’s and Harry’s.

  It was, of course, Harry who spoke up. “The word is traitor. A suspected traitor.”

  “Traitor?” Matron repeated.

  “Out with it, man,” ordered Skelton.

  Harry drew himself up, the center of attention. “Last night, after the party for Nurse O’Neill, Dicky said he suspected someone here of handing information to the Nazis.”

  “Too much to hope he gave you a name?” Jake asked, wondering whether Harry’s sneer had made his face look like a gargoyle’s even before it was scarred.

  “He started to do, then was interrupted when Matron called lights-out.”

  “Harry’s having us on, isn’t he?” Taffy’s freckled face peered over his neck brace like a fox from his hole. “He was always having Dicky on, Dicky being such an easy target and all—positively gullible at times.”

  “No,” said Twig, shuffling forward. “I heard what Dicky said, too. He had evidence of a traitor at Lydford Hall.”

  Jake exchanged a look with Skelton. The doctor knew as well as he did that Twig was a former divinity student who made George Washington look like a liar and a cheat.

  “B,” Skelton repeated reflectively. “That might be the initial of a name. The person Richardson suspected.”

  “It’s bleeding obvious, isn’t it?” demanded Harry. “B as in Bridget. Bridget O’Neill. She’s the traitor.”

  Jake stepped forward, his fist already raised. “Why you . . .”

  “Steady on,” murmured Skelton.

  Bridget’s slender body swayed. Jake thought she was going to fall back against the desk and changed course. But she caught herself. The look she shot toward Harry would’ve disintegrated anyone made of flesh and blood.

  “Think,” Harry went on. “She found Randy dead last week, didn’t she? Lying in the bathroom, not a mark on him. She’s the one goes about with tablets and injections—what if she slipped him a few grams of poison?”

  “Pilot Officer Randolph had two broken femurs,” said Matron, stepping closer to Bridget. “The cause of death was a pulmonary fat embolism.”

  “Are you questioning my competence?” demanded Skelton.

  Harry plunged on. “And today Bridget finds Dicky.”

  “I’m a nurse,” said Bridget. “My job is watching the patients.”

  “So she watches well enough she catches Dicky writing a letter that’ll expose her for what she is. You said yourself, Tex, normally she’d be writing his letters for him, but this one he was writing on his own.”

  “My name isn’t Tex,” Jake said. “And it’s bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain that just because Dicky wanted to keep his su
spicions to himself doesn’t mean he suspected Brid—Nurse O’Neill. Unless you planted the whole idea in his mind to begin with, as another of your stupid jokes. Maybe you wanted to get back at her because she refused your advances.”

  “And accepted yours?” asked Harry.

  Matron shot a swift look at Bridget, who suddenly grew very interested in her shoes.

  “No,” Jake snapped. “There’s nothing between us.”

  Harry’s voice was taking on the same shrill note as the sound of the wind in the chimney. “She’s a foreigner, just like you are. Worse. She’s Irish. Ireland’s sitting out the war. It’s not only letting the side down, it’s filthy with Nazi sympathizers who’d do anything, commit any crime, to defeat us.”

  Jake wanted to reach out and pry Bridget’s fingernails loose from where they were sunk into her palms, but he didn’t dare touch her. Was that what frightened her, that Harry’s constant slanders about her homeland would eventually stick? “America’s not in the war, either,” he said. “Are you accusing us of being a fifth column, too?”

  Harry made a dismissive gesture that was almost an obscene one. Jake doubled his fist again. He’d knock the chip off the man’s shoulder whether he was wounded or not.

  Skelton stepped between them. “Stop it. We’re getting nowhere with this. The police have been notified, they’ll sort it.”

  “She needs locking up,” said Harry, pointing his crutch at Bridget. “In the linen closet or pantry, so she’ll keep. The police’ll take her away, and good riddance.”

  Frowning, Matron took Bridget’s arm. “We’ll sit in my room and have ourselves a cuppa, won’t we? Come along.”

  With a look over her shoulder at Jake—whether pleading for help or warning him to keep out of it, he couldn’t tell—Bridget let herself be led away. The police, he thought. The police might well take Harry’s accusations seriously. Everyone in the country was damned touchy right now. And with Hitler’s armies poised right across the Channel, who could blame them? But if Bridget was arrested, no matter how quickly she was cleared, she’d have a blot on her record dark enough to cost her not only this job but any other one. That wasn’t right.