Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband

by Barbara Toner

  Adelaide’s heart softened. ‘That won’t happen if you tell me the truth. Now sit down as I’ve asked.’ Fairness was so hard to achieve in the face of impudence and history.

  ‘I took what I was owed,’ said Maggie coolly, not sitting. ‘Yesterday I bought cheese for nine pence and pickles for sixpence. Total cost one and three. I gave Mr Stokes a two-shilling piece. He gave me threepence. He owed me sixpence. I told him he owed me sixpence. He said he didn’t. I went outside, I counted my money, I went back in and told him he’d made a mistake. He said I was a stupid girl and he refused to pay. You stole from me. Again.’ There! Gauntlet slung! Implications only too clear!

  ‘I am not a dishonest person, Maggie,’ said Adelaide, and Maggie, staring at the troubled eyes with the tragic dark circles, granted she might not be. Her father was, but possibly she wasn’t.

  ‘But Mr Stokes is,’ said Maggie. ‘And you will take his side because it’s me.’

  Through Adelaide’s head rampaged sixpences and threepences and ninepences and cheeses and pickles, which meant nothing to her, and through her heart charged devotion to her father and suspicion of the O’Connells, which she strove to set aside. In the way was fear of her own cowardice and her very poor ability at arithmetic. ‘It might have been a genuine mistake,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ said Maggie. And Adelaide knew she was right. She stared back at the neighbour whom she’d hated by association and neglected out of loyalty and she saw someone young and outraged and tired and her heart suddenly ached for her. The poor little mite had troubled brothers, but why wouldn’t those boys be troubled? They had no mother, no money and a wicked father who had abandoned them. She was a girl doing her best, and now she was the one person in the world who knew, as she did, that Archie Stokes was a thief.

  ‘You know what I think, Maggie,’ she began. But whatever she thought was lost in such a fierce drumming at the door that it quaked in its frame and might have fallen in had it not been opened without invitation by Archie Stokes, announcing the arrival of the Constable McDermott.

  ‘You can hand her over now, Mrs Nightingale,’ said Mr Stokes. ‘I bet that baby of yours is wondering where you got to.’

  Adelaide ignored the shop manager. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been troubled, Constable,’ she said. ‘As far as I’m concerned the matter is now closed. Mr Stokes, please wrap a pie for Miss O’Connell. There will be no charge. Maggie, if you’d like to walk home with me, I know Miss McCleary is baking and we’ll have far too much to eat ourselves.’

  Chapter Seven

  The cakes were cooling as the neighbours walked in silence down Hope Street, each as confused as the other by the turn of events. Pearl herself was, at that moment, sitting at the small table in her bedroom, reading and re-reading a letter freshly received from Annie McGuire. Dear girl, it said, I can’t sleep for thinking how foolhardy you can be when you imagine you are in the right. Please, please be careful. I beg you not to make any direct approach but to find an intermediary who can handle his fists. She sighed at both the criticism, and the absurdity of it. She was no closer to making a direct approach to anyone than she was likely to find a physically fit intermediary. Father Kelly wasn’t an option. Also, Annie had written, Dr Spencer paid a visit. He says Beattie needs no more worries. I think you should come home.

  She took up the pen in front of her, dipped it in ink and wrote. Dear Annie, I can’t come home. Father Kelly is a kind man and helping with my enquiries but progress is necessarily slow. The situation isn’t … At the sound of a key in the front door, she put down her pen and hurried into the hall just in time to be brushed aside by Marcus, head down, ploughing past her like a bull through a herd of repulsive cows. ‘Can I get you anything, Captain Nightingale?’ she enquired.

  He turned to her, puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked in bewilderment. And there being no obvious reply, Pearl went to the baby’s room because Freddie had woken at the sound of the door and was now as unhappy as his father.

  ‘Where’s Mrs Nightingale?’ Marcus appeared in the nursery doorway, glass in hand. ‘In her absence can I offer you a drink, Miss McCleary?’

  ‘She’s at the shop. She’ll be home soon,’ said Pearl. ‘The baby’s due to be fed. I think I might take him to meet her.’

  ‘So you don’t want a drink?’

  ‘I don’t want a drink, thank you.’ She lifted young Freddie from his crib and carried him past his father and into the hall. She settled the baby in his pram, piled it high with blankets of all weights and sizes and headed for the door, hearing Adelaide addressing an unknown companion before she opened it.

  ‘My husband will take care of everything.’ She wanted to warn her with all her might that in his current mood he almost certainly wouldn’t, but too late. Adelaide, and Maggie of all people, were in the house and removing hats and coats before Pearl could even say, ‘The baby’s getting hungry.’ And Captain Nightingale was already at the drawing-room door looking for trouble.

  ‘Your son’s going to forget who his mother is. I want to talk to you in here at your convenience. No, at my convenience, if you don’t mind.’

  Maggie, whose quickness wasn’t confined to figures, reached at once for her outer-garments but Adelaide was doing what she believed she did best, which was making the most of a desperate situation by pretending it was normal. ‘Hello Freddie,’ she cooed into the pram. ‘He can wait a couple of minutes, can’t he, Miss McCleary? It’s only a quarter past two. And Marcus, I’d like to see you as well. You can spare a minute for Maggie and me, can’t you?’ She led Maggie into the drawing room where Marcus was adding whisky to his whisky. ‘A lemon cordial for us,’ Adelaide said. ‘Surely you’ll sit down now, Maggie,’ but Maggie wouldn’t, sensing only too well that at any minute running might be required. Adelaide closed the door on Pearl and confronted her husband.

  ‘You must sack Mr Stokes,’ she said. ‘He steals from us every day and yesterday he stole from Maggie.’

  Marcus stared, then laughed unnaturally long and loud. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped, ‘but is this the Maggie who tried to steal from me yesterday and would have stolen again from me today except Archie Stokes grabbed her as she ran? It’s all over town. Mrs Mayberry saw it all. You don’t need to concoct some ridiculous story to keep the girl out of jail.’

  ‘I have my own evidence against Mr Stokes. It’s in the ledgers.’

  Marcus laughed again. ‘Adelaide, please! This, if I’m not mistaken, is also the Maggie whose family stole your cattle.’ Maggie inched towards the door but Adelaide grabbed her hand.

  ‘This is Maggie O’Connell who’s struggling to raise two motherless boys on almost no money and who can’t afford to be robbed of sixpence.’

  Marcus put his glass down in order to confront his wife unencumbered. ‘Archie Stokes has served my family since I was a boy. This girl has bad blood in her veins, you’ve told me so yourself, and Archie Stokes is a man of impeccable reputation with a brilliant head for business.’ He turned to Maggie. ‘I suggest you run along home and be very grateful I have such a sentimental wife. Anyone else would have had you arrested.’

  Maggie snatched her hand from Adelaide’s grasp and Adelaide stared in horror at the man who would never have been so heartless had he not gone to war. ‘She has no job. She has no money. Our employee robbed her.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Captain Nightingale and it might have been except, from across the road, they all heard quite clearly the sound of gunshots as Louisa, thinking she had a human target, unloaded a couple of rounds into the horses. Then they heard her scream, a quite horrible scream that drained whatever colour there was from his face.

  He fell back into his chair, knocking over his glass in the process and covering his head with his hands.

  Chapter Eight

  Maggie and Adelaide ran for the door, across the road and through Louisa’s front gate only inches behind Pearl who, having heard enough from outside the drawing-room door, had decided to take the baby out fo
r as long as possible, feeding routine notwithstanding. ‘Gunshots,’ Adelaide called.

  ‘Take the baby home, Mrs Nightingale,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s well after two. Maggie, come if you want to but stay well behind me and be prepared to drop.’

  ‘Drop what?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘To the ground,’ said Pearl. Adelaide took charge of the pram but she didn’t go home. Home was as hideous to her as the notion of a dead body riddled with her neighbour’s bullets.

  ‘Did they come from the house?’ she called.

  ‘From the paddock,’ said Pearl. So Adelaide and the baby headed to the house and Pearl ran towards the paddock, closely followed by Maggie, who could not have been more astonished to find herself secondary to the excitement. They saw Louisa soon enough owing to the billowing whiteness of the nightie she was wearing. She was on the ground, cradling the horse she had shot and crying as if her heart had finally exploded from sorrow.

  ‘Mrs Worthington?’ Pearl called gently.

  ‘She’s gone mad,’ Maggie observed sensibly. Louisa did look mad when she turned to face them, possibly not as mad as Marcus had looked only minutes before, but where he was out of his mind, she was most profoundly within hers and it was full of terror.

  They helped her inside and arranged her on the daybed in the sunroom, opposite Adelaide, now feeding the baby, who, out of some unearthly understanding of the generalised horror, didn’t fuss. Pearl would have made tea but there was no fire and, as it turned out, no tea. There was, however, a bottle of gin on the sideboard in the kitchen, so she poured each of them a small cupful and although manners and breeding required them to refuse it, they each accepted and sipped it on their empty stomachs. Even Maggie, who’d never had a drink in her life. A surprising calm settled on the room.

  ‘What happened, Louisa?’ Adelaide asked.

  Louisa, as white and fragile as the nightgown she was wrapping around herself, closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the bed. ‘I thought I saw someone in the paddock and I fired over his head to warn him but there wasn’t anyone. I shot the poor horse.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Oh God!’ she gasped. ‘I have to tell someone.’ They waited. The prayer suggested a nightmare. ‘I’m being blackmailed,’ she finally whispered. ‘I don’t want the stupid horses. But they won’t let up. They’ll send me more and more until I find two thousand pounds.’

  ‘Holy hell,’ Maggie cried.

  ‘You must go to the police,’ said Adelaide.

  Louisa shook her head. ‘Jimmy ordered the horses. He said the Army would buy them from him. It would make us a mint, he reckoned.’ Louisa put her hands to her forehead. ‘I don’t know how he thought he could pull it off, but that was Jimmy. He knew the officer who did the buying and he knew a man with horses to sell. Then he was killed, the war ended, no one wanted the horses. I can’t pay for them so they’re starving them and delivering them to me a few at a time. In the end they’ll be bringing me piles of corpses.’

  ‘But they know you have no money,’ said Pearl.

  ‘They want the house.’ She looked at the faces opposite, wide-eyed and slightly tipsy, settling on Adelaide’s, which she scrutinised for signs of condemnation or mirth.

  ‘Who is they?’ asked Adelaide.

  ‘Are they,’ Maggie corrected her. Her smug laugh hung in the air alone and unwanted.

  ‘If I tell you that, it’ll be around town before dinner and I’ll be the corpse.’ There was no escaping the bitterness.

  ‘Louisa, it wouldn’t. I said you were a tramp to my own mother, years ago. And this is different. You’ve nothing to blame yourself for.’

  ‘But I do,’ said Louisa. ‘I do blame myself. I told Jimmy I had no money. I told him he’d left me destitute. I said I might never eat again and the house was falling down and he said I wasn’t to worry, he’d get me money, but how could he, from a trench?’ The faces struggled with such poor behaviour and Louisa noticed. ‘I’ve been such a greedy, ridiculous person and now I’ve shot a horse and I don’t even know how to bury it.’ Tears rolled down her slim little face. A single violent sob caused her shoulders to heave.

  ‘We’ll burn it,’ said Pearl, ‘won’t we?’

  ‘Will we?’ Adelaide frowned. ‘I don’t think we can.’

  ‘You need to get Mr Lambert to take it away,’ said Maggie. ‘It’ll stink if you don’t. It was a shame you shot it.’

  ‘I thought I heard someone,’ Louisa protested. ‘I aimed at the sound.’ She rubbed her eyes so hard that for a minute it seemed that she might blind herself. ‘I can’t pay Bert Lambert. I don’t have the money. At present.’

  ‘We can take care of it,’ Adelaide said. ‘Can’t we, Miss McCleary?’

  ‘He’ll do it as a favour to me. Ginger’s a friend,’ said Maggie. And if this felt all wrong to Adelaide, who wasn’t sure why Maggie should have more sway than she over Ginger’s Uncle Bert, from whom her own family had bought sulkies for as long as she could remember and when she employed Ginger himself in her very own shop, she said nothing. Louisa had started to cry all over again and what was needed immediately was sweetness of nature.

  ‘Don’t cry, Louisa,’ she said. ‘Please don’t cry.’ She took the tiniest sip of her gin. ‘Even I make mistakes.’ All eyes turned to her. ‘I’m so stupid at sums that I’ve let Archie Stokes rob me blind year in, year out but Marcus won’t let me sack him because he says I’m stupider than Mr Stokes and the mistakes in the books are all mine.’

  ‘Heavens above,’ Louisa said through her tears. ‘That’s awful.’ It was awful and she was grateful.

  ‘But she isn’t stupid,’ said Maggie. ‘Because he tried to rob me.’

  ‘And then you tried to steal from him,’ Pearl sympathised. ‘And I can’t say I blame you.’

  ‘There is blame though,’ said Louisa. ‘Theft is against the law.’ It was a harsh judgement from a woman who’d just shot a horse.

  ‘But there will be retribution,’ said Adelaide. ‘Maggie has lost her job.’

  ‘She didn’t sack me,’ cried Maggie in alarm. ‘Did she?’ She leapt to her feet. ‘Oh no! I need to go. I have to work or we’ll have no money. I need to ask her to forgive me, and now I’ve been drinking.’

  ‘Dear, she won’t give you your job back and you mustn’t beg from her. She’s a ridiculous woman. We won’t let you starve,’ said Adelaide. ‘We can give her one of our cakes, can’t we, Miss McCleary?’

  Maggie fell back into her chair. ‘We’re sunk,’ she said. ‘What will I do? I can’t protect and provide and dig and build and make the boys into normal men, it doesn’t matter how many cakes you give me. I don’t know how.’ She stared blindly at the faces turned towards her. She put her head in her hands, as Marcus had done. ‘It’s just too hard.’

  And it seemed to the room that she spoke for them all. They sat in ghastly contemplation of the mountains they were being asked to climb and finally Pearl spoke so softly they had to strain to hear her.

  ‘I think we could all do with a bit of help.’ It was either recklessness or the gin, loosening her grip on the need for secrecy.

  The others thought she must have said you not we, because quite clearly she wasn’t in need, and it wouldn’t have surprised any of them had she come up with answers to all of their problems on the spot. She looked and sounded so sensible.

  But then she said, ‘We need help and we’re going to have to find it,’ which couldn’t have been clearer. They couldn’t take their eyes off her. Nothing in her face resembled desperation or poverty. She had a good job in a respectable household and she was secure as could be.

  ‘You only have a missing fiancé to worry about,’ Louisa pointed out.

  Pearl took a short, sharp breath. ‘He’s only missing because he doesn’t want anyone to know where he is.’

  ‘Does he know where he is?’ Louisa had clung all day to the idea of a puzzled man swathed from head to toe in dressings.

  ‘Of course he does,’ said Pearl. ‘He doesn’
t want anyone to know where he is because he’s hunting for someone he wants to bring to justice and he has to look for him in secret. If the man he’s hunting knew he was being hunted he’d try to kill the man hunting him. Who is my fiancé. Do you follow?’ They sort of did. It wasn’t easy.

  ‘So why are you looking for him?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘Because his sister is so ill and he’s been away so long. She might die without seeing him again.’

  ‘Dear Lord,’ said Adelaide.

  ‘Strewth,’ said Maggie. ‘Is he a hired gun?’

  Louisa giggled through her tears, delighted that she wasn’t alone in functioning so close to the edge of the law.

  ‘Not a hired gun.’ Pearl’s treacherous smile showed positively no consideration for her extreme need to keep matters to herself.

  ‘And the man he’s hunting is in Prospect,’ cried Maggie. ‘It’s why you’re here. Is it Charlie Saunders?’

  ‘Maggie, that’s silly talk,’ said Louisa. ‘Is it Charlie Saunders, Miss McCleary?’

  ‘You’re not really a housekeeper, are you?’ Gin had bestowed on Adelaide the gift of insight.

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ Pearl admitted and even as she did, she heard her folly. The fear she had contained through fire and gunshots surged from its moorings, flooding her heart then her brain. What had she done? In revealing so much, what had she done? Her brain, as adept at raising alternatives as Maggie’s was at calculating sums, fought with the gin for a clear way forward. Her heart throbbed in agony at such a terrible lapse. It pleaded with her to go back to her tiny room, but she’d had the germ of an idea that was rapidly contaminating her whole being so she wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘I knew it,’ said Louisa. ‘It’s why she dresses so well. And why she’s so bossy. And why she knows so much about children. Surely you smelled a rat, Adelaide.’