Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband

by Barbara Toner

  ‘I was wondering, Mrs Nightingale, if I could have a look at the store’s books so I can see exactly what’s going on there. I can’t promise to come up with anything but at least I can see what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Adelaide,’ said Adelaide, since Louisa was clearly Louisa. ‘Please call me Adelaide. Louisa, would you mind if I brought them over here? I’m not sure Marcus would understand the need for Martin to be looking at them.’

  ‘Poor Marcus,’ said Louisa. ‘He doesn’t understand much these days, does he? But I think he was happier when I left. Did he seem better to you?’

  ‘When?’ asked Adelaide, startled. ‘Happier when? When did you come and go?’

  ‘Last night before dinner,’ replied Louisa. ‘You were nowhere to be seen after you closed the door on me so suddenly. Martin was at the pub so your husband asked me to have a drink with him. I must say I found him in low spirits.’

  ‘He didn’t mention it. How funny. He must have forgotten.’ Adelaide stood. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. I won’t be interrupting anything, will I?’

  This was how it always was with Louisa. Adelaide fumed as she crossed the road. One minute she was your friend, the next minute she was trampling all over your happiness with uncalled for announcements of her superiority in any way she could, whether it was her capacity for good cheer or the cut of her bodice.

  The minute the door closed behind her, Louisa rolled her eyes at Martin Duffy. ‘Funny old Adelaide. I’m not sure she’s ever known how to handle the opposite sex.’

  However you looked at it, it was an invitation for him to appreciate her own expertise on the subject.

  You could argue it was an underhand tactic when these four respectable ladies were jockeying hard for the attention of their part-time husband, each having to draw on whatever charms they had at their disposal, not all of which were as obvious as Louisa’s. But Norah Quirk could have told Louisa she was barking up the wrong tree.

  If Martin Duffy was thinking that, tantalising though Louisa might very well be compared to Adelaide – compared to anyone, really – he knew trouble when he saw it. His landlady was trouble from top to her very dainty toe. He knew because he was trouble himself, as Norah Quirk was quick to report to anyone interested, which was everyone. It had taken just the four beers the night before for him to confide that it was the very thing that had driven him from Sydney.

  ‘A beautiful woman,’ she’d reported to her mother within minutes of him leaving the bar. ‘With a husband she’d been keeping to herself and who didn’t take kindly to him. I said to him, “Mrs Worthington is a widow so you’re safe there. But it won’t stop people talking.”’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’

  ‘He said, “Let them talk. My cousin’s arranged it, and she knows what’s what.”’

  ‘You watch your step, Norah Quirk,’ Mrs Quirk had warned. She didn’t trust her daughter’s eye for trouble.

  ‘He’s no one special, Mother,’ Norah had said aloud, but to herself she’d admitted that trouble was the thing she loved most in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  You can’t blame a town for taking such an interest. A good-looking stranger lodging inexplicably with its most beautiful widow is rich pickings. When his arrival precipitates unusual activity in the immediate locale of his lodgings, how can it not draw comment? ‘Have you noticed how pally Mrs Nightingale is with Mrs Worthington all of a sudden?’ Maisie Jenkins invited Theresa Fellows to address it on the steps of St Benedict’s shortly after seeing Mrs Nightingale hurry across to her neighbour carrying what appeared to be a basketful of ledgers. ‘I can’t think what to make of it. What do you make of it?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you?’ Theresa Fellows was interested but wary. Maisie Jenkins was prone to wicked speculation about the comings and goings of others. Sometimes it was fun. Other times it wasn’t. You never knew what she was going to do with your opinion when she interpreted it for the amusement of others.

  ‘I’m making nothing of it. Just wondering. There’s certainly more to it than meets the eye.’ The two ladies stared down the road together, aware of but not seeing the town’s activity as wind swept dust along the high street, driving everyone and the horses mad. If Theresa Fellows decided silence was the better part of survival, Mrs Jenkins was under no such constraint.

  ‘It’ll be the cousin who isn’t a cousin. And if he isn’t her cousin, we have a right to know why he’s here. There’s no work going. He can’t have come all the way from Sydney to look for a job in a town with no jobs. What’s Norah Quirk say?’

  A direct question couldn’t be comfortably shrugged off. ‘Norah says he had to skedaddle because of a woman.’

  ‘And doesn’t he look the type!’ Maisie Jenkins considered his type. ‘Would you put a type like his into the same house as a young, good-looking, grieving widow?’

  ‘Who’s no better than she should be.’ Even as she spoke Theresa regretted it. You tried to resist Maisie’s evil train of thought, tried not to gossip – Father Kelly loathed gossip – but in the end you were drawn in.

  Thankfully Mrs Jenkins appeared not to have heard. ‘I would not,’ she answered herself. ‘What was he doing with the housekeeper out at the railway? That’s something we should be asking ourselves.’

  ‘Maybe he was looking for work out there.’ It was a charitable suggestion. Theresa felt better for making it but Maisie Jenkins scoffed at it.

  ‘That man has never done a day’s heavy lifting in his life. He went out to talk to people. That’s what I heard. She sat in the buggy and he went round talking to people. What about? That’s what I want to know.’ She appeared to know already. ‘Some chap no one had ever heard of. Certainly not about work. So why’s he here? Something’s not right. We need to know what. The last thing we want in this town is Bolsheviks.’ Mrs Jenkins’ busy little lips folded in on themselves as she thought about Bolsheviks. ‘Mrs Mayberry should be informed about subversives on the railway. We can’t say she didn’t warn us.’

  ‘You can tell her at The Candlelit Party for Peace.’

  ‘I very well might. She’ll be making another announcement I shouldn’t wonder.’

  She did wonder though. Everyone did. They wondered how on earth the Mayor’s wife had had the nerve to sack a hard-working committee who’d been planning a ball for months and had even asked her to represent Victory in the parade. No one wondered more than the Mayor himself.

  ‘Why, Florrie? Why do anything so drastic? I’m the Mayor. Peace celebrations are for me to decide. The ball plans were going so well. Have you offended the committee? I’m sure you’ll have offended them.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said his wife firmly. ‘They still want to help with the food and so on. That’s what a committee does, wherever the event is held.’ They were in the garden, which was to have second billing to Mrs Mayberry at the event in question. She snipped a not-quite-dead rose from its moorings as her husband stood by helpless at the brutality. ‘I explained that we wanted to give something back to the town and that our house and gardens were so much safer and better protected from intruders than the town hall.’

  ‘But they’re not. Not for a Peace Ball.’

  ‘This isn’t a Peace Ball. It’s The Mayor and Mayoress’s Candlelit Party for Peace, a delightful idea whether you think so or not. I don’t care what you think. It’s something I’m doing off my own bat because I have found my bat.’ The Mayoress, who strictly speaking wasn’t a Mayoress but the unimportant wife of a Mayor, considered her bat. ‘It’s my own and I intend to use it. To strike, to … hit a few sixes.’ Oh, that was good. That was very good, she knew from the look on her husband’s face. Oratory was so clearly her gift. ‘The people expect more from me. They came to hear me at my assembly and now they know I’m their voice. They would like it heard across the land, and it will be. I will inform them in a speech I’m going give on the subject of How Things Will Be Around Here From Now On. I will be their saviour, their pr
otector and their figurehead.’ Snip went her horrible little shears.

  ‘Dear God!’ cried the Mayor as the words pierced his breast.

  Maggie O’Connell, not ten yards away on the other side of French doors to the drawing room, coming late to the conversation, heard only the horror in his voice and wondered what his wife might have done to cause it. She peeped around the curtains but the Mayor had moved away and his wife had also moved away but in the opposite direction.

  It was as diverting an exchange as she could ever hope to hear between her employers and very briefly she was diverted, but there is nothing more likely to distract an eavesdropper than the sound of her own name. Except in this case it was not the sound so much as the sight. There, as large as life on a sheaf of papers that clearly belonged in a different room entirely, were the words BLUETT v O’CONNELL LAND DISPUTE (FINAL!).

  What could a sneaky housemaid do except sit down and read the document concerning her family’s fortunes from beginning to end? She read no less avidly than Maisie Jenkins spoke in Mr Stokes’ office behind the smallgoods. Not on the subject of her most excellent hams, but about the goings-on of the ladies Beyond the Arch on whom she had been specially charged to spy.

  Had any personage other than the shopkeeper himself asked her to do such a despicable thing, she would have reported it immediately to the very next twelve people she met in the street, and that personage would have been hounded from the shire. But Mr Stokes was a man whose character, in her eyes certainly, was above reproach. Not only did he admire her work with curing and smoking above all others, not only did he pay her handsomely for her hams and refuse all other offers from country women for miles around who imagined their work to be the equal of hers, he supplied her with a week’s provisions free of charge. All he required in return was a cuddle now and then, which she was pleased to provide because he’d been alone so long and frankly the quality of cuddling in her own home was less than up to par. Lately, very lately, as well as the cuddling, she was required to partake on his behalf in a little light spying. ‘They’re in and out of each other’s houses like mad little birds on a cuckoo clock,’ she reported from his lap, on which he’d suggested she sit for convenience.

  ‘Any further sign of the books?’ asked the grocer, rearranging his legs under the weight.

  ‘Not since this morning. Want me to keep watching?’

  ‘Oh, most definitely,’ said Mr Stokes. ‘Just excuse me a minute, my dear. I just need to …’ He gave her a shove from behind to extricate himself then he went to the door. ‘Ginger,’ he called and, when the boy appeared, he whispered something before turning back to her with a grin that revealed carnal intention as well as yellow teeth. ‘Now what’s that perfume you’re wearing? It smells exactly like my favourite. Juicy Pink Sow.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was a shame from Mr Stokes’ point of view that Mrs Jenkins was where she was. Had she been at her post, she might have heard Adelaide enquire of Louisa, as Louisa opened her front door to her, whether Martin had discovered anything interesting. She might have seen Louisa roll her eyes and heard her report, ‘He doesn’t seem to have a very good head for figures.’

  ‘Are you unwell, Louisa?’ Adelaide asked, pausing at the dining-room door to stare intently at her neighbour’s pallor.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean are you ill? You look very pale.’

  ‘I’m very well, thanks,’ said Louisa and if there was bristling in the exchange, there was only sweet concern on Adelaide’s face. She entered the dining room uneasily and her stomach sank at the sight of Martin Duffy with the ledgers open and next to them a sheet of paper, which he’d covered in dreadful columns of figures.

  He got to his feet and pulled out a chair for her. ‘Who’d be a bookkeeper?’ he said. But he laughed to show he meant well and that all was well.

  ‘Not me,’ Adelaide replied as she took off her hat and gloves and put them on the table in front of her. ‘Obviously. I know how to add up, but it takes me hours to get the same result twice.’ The hat was straw and decorated with small white flowers, nothing special, but enough to distract Martin Duffy.

  ‘Daisies,’ he observed and in the observation Adelaide heard her own aversion to the ledgers and felt hope slide from her heart.

  ‘They haven’t defeated you as well, have they? Please tell me they haven’t.’

  ‘Of course they haven’t,’ said Martin Duffy.

  ‘You can see my problem though, can’t you?’

  Martin Duffy confronted the ledgers and inhaled deeply. Adelaide wondered if there wasn’t something stupid in his expression. Marcus was less good-looking, no denying it, but he was intelligent, or had been.

  ‘The point, Mrs Nightingale, Adelaide,’ Martin said, ‘is that I can’t see much difference between the docket totals and the takings. They seem to tally perfectly well.’

  ‘Because they do,’ said Adelaide. ‘But then look.’ She turned several pages of the ledger in front of him. ‘Go to bank entries which Mr Stokes assumes I can’t read and if you match them against the statements from the bank …’ she flicked through several pages … ‘they don’t. When you add up the weekly takings and compare them to the bank deposits, there are pounds missing every week. Also,’ she flicked back to the daily entries, ‘look at the dockets.’ Adelaide picked up a pile of dockets. ‘Sometimes he charges different amounts for identical items on the very same day. A pound of sugar on one docket costs nine pence and on another costs a shilling. And there are items here I’ve never seen in the shop as well as all these items he only calls by initials. See here. Item A. And item C? From a supplier who crops up all the time called QM. I don’t know any QM.’

  ‘So how does Mr Stokes account for that?’ asked Martin.

  ‘He says market forces. He says all the money that’s taken at the till goes into the bank so why am I fussing?’

  ‘But it doesn’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t. And he doesn’t keep proper records of payments to the suppliers. He says it’s the war. “You get things where you can and you pay what you must so you charge what you must always remembering the laws of supply and demand.” That’s what he says.’

  Martin smiled at Adelaide’s clever impersonation. ‘And what are the laws of supply and demand?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Adelaide and Martin Duffy exchanged a look of mutual sympathy, clueless people at war with ledgers cleverly manipulated to bamboozle the likes of them. When they finally removed their eyes from each other’s gaze, which had proved surprisingly difficult, they fixed them on the table and when they eventually looked up, Martin said, ‘You mustn’t worry though, Mrs Nightingale, Adelaide. I might not be a bookkeeping genius but I know someone who is. Give me a week or two and we’ll have a proper case against the blighter, you’ll see.’

  Despite all odds, Adelaide believed him and she felt the weight of many months leave her poor, tired shoulders. A week or two was nothing when the only alarm being raised was hers. She took Martin Duffy’s hand and held rather than shook it. Any doubt concerning treachery died within his firm grasp, which might not have been calloused from hard manual labour but was steadfast and reliable as well as gentle and soothing. Here was a man of principle prepared to do battle for her, not against her. ‘Thank you,’ she said and she left Louisa’s house happier than she’d felt since the day Pearl McCleary had agreed to come and work for her.

  The joy was short-lived. ‘For God’s sake, Adelaide,’ her husband greeted her as she entered her own front door, ‘where are the bloody ledgers? Stokes wants them.’ It was all she could do to stop herself fleeing back across the road and into the arms of a man more interested in her welfare.

  She’d have been disappointed if she had. Martin Duffy was that very minute putting on his jacket. ‘Off to Maggie’s,’ he was saying to Louisa, who had emerged from her bedroom with cleverly rouged cheeks. ‘I promised. She needs help with her hen house. That’s all right by
you, isn’t it?’

  It wasn’t. Louisa was pouting prettily, if you like a pout. ‘But I thought we could have some afternoon tea. The O’Connells aren’t urgent.’ And though she was extending a fragile arm, he managed to avoid it, so Adelaide would have found herself alone with a very cross Louisa and not a sweet and smiling substitute husband.

  Maggie, on the other hand, was preparing herself for his passionate embrace. She was charmingly attired in a neatly fitted calf-length skirt and an enticingly scoop-necked lace blouse cleverly adapted from further items in her mother’s trunk to resemble the height of fashion as displayed in the English Women’s Weekly. ‘Welcome to our humble home,’ she said as she showed Martin into her newly spotless kitchen. ‘I thought we could have tea and cake before I showed you the mess the boys made of the chook pen. It’s not something a hungry man could tackle.’

  Martin took from his jacket pocket the list Pearl McCleary had provided. ‘The hen house – or chook pen,’ he read. ‘Some fencing. Your roof. Some painting. A hand with the boys. I’m not sure we have time for tea.’

  ‘We do. Of course we do. And anyway, something else has come up that’s more urgent. I made a sponge cake. The cake’s not urgent. Well it is, because I baked it specially and I’d like you to try it. But this is more urgent.’ As he took a chair in front of the cake, she handed him the folder marked BLUETT v O’CONNELL LAND DISPUTE (FINAL!) and announced with some pride, ‘I stole it from the Mayor.’

  Martin flinched. ‘Was that wise?’

  His disapproval rattled Maggie. ‘I don’t care if it was or wasn’t. It’s about my family and he has no business with it. I’ll take it back tomorrow. He won’t even know it’s gone. I needed time to study it.’ Her voice softened. ‘I wanted you to study it.’