‘So what will we do?’
‘We’ll leave it to me,’ said Mr Stokes. ‘Now you’ll have to excuse me, Mr Mayor,’ he said, rising. ‘It’ll soon be closing time and I have work to do.’
What a day the grocer was having. He’d no sooner seen the Mayor to the door than Captain Nightingale was bearing down on him demanding a few minutes of his time exactly as the Mayor and Martin Duffy had done, as if he had minutes to dole out to all and sundry like scraps of ham for sampling.
‘About this audit, Stokes,’ he said with positively no acknowledgement of the need for discretion in a forum to which all and sundry had access. ‘We need to tread carefully.’
‘Like a cup of tea, Captain Nightingale?’ he suggested softly, already treading carefully. ‘Or something stronger?’ Captain Nightingale never said no to something stronger and a Captain Nightingale a little the worse for wear was definitely more easily managed than a Captain Nightingale wearing well.
‘Thank you, no, Stokes. This won’t take long.’ The Captain closed the door on the office and sat in the chair that Stokes usually occupied. ‘Larry Murdoch,’ he said. ‘You know and I know the fellow’s banned from practice. My wife, as far as I know, doesn’t. I don’t want my wife harbouring unhelpful suspicions. I think she’s taking advice. I think she might have confided in someone and if that’s the case, for the sake of our good name, we need to show that our books are not only as clean as a whistle but that the man who says they are as clean as a whistle is himself whistle-clean. Do you get me?’
Mr Stokes got him in an instant and leaned forward. ‘Is she indeed? And from whom do you think she might be receiving this advice?’
‘I’ve no idea. Possibly the housekeeper. There’s something not quite right about her. Something a bit too big for her boots.’
‘Or her cousin. It could be the housekeeper’s cousin.’
Captain Nightingale was puzzled. ‘Her cousin?’ he repeated.
‘Who’s lodging with Mrs Worthington. A ladies’ man, by all accounts. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way and I only offer it out of loyalty to you and your mother.’ Mr Stokes moistened his lips, preparing them for the treachery that was about to spill from them. ‘Keep an eye on that one. He may be offering your wife something more than advice, and it occurs to me that she might be taking it.’ Mr Stokes left no room for doubt. If he wisely didn’t spell matters out in as many letters, his face conveyed the state of affairs even more effectively than anything an alphabet could offer.
‘Christ,’ said the Captain, slamming his fist on the desk. ‘I knew it.’ And with that, he stormed from the shop, kicking the display of tinned fruits as he went, back down Hope Street, meeting no gaze and returning no greeting. All he could see in the eye of his bruised and battered mind was a grotesquely painted wife naked on a bed in the arms of a man whose features he could barely remember. All thoughts of the rightness or wrongness of Larry Murdoch’s audit had been vanquished, as intended.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Captain Nightingale strode not to his own home to confront the painted Jezebel. He turned in at Louisa Worthington’s gate in the hope of finding the housekeeper’s libidinous cousin in so he could punch him in the face before returning home to sack the housekeeper and deal with his wife. Not once, in the eight minutes it took him to get from his shop to Louisa’s door, did his thoughts stray to logic or reason. Not once did he ask himself if he truly believed Adelaide was the kind of wife who would be anything other than loyal and upright.
‘Louisa,’ he said when she opened the door, ‘may I come in? I’d like a word with your lodger.’
Louisa, in pale pink muslin scooped low to reveal the generous rise of her bosom, said, ‘You may come in but the lodger isn’t here. Will I do?’ He hesitated. He looked at Louisa in bewilderment and she, spotting his confusion, opened the door wider to admit him. ‘What is it, Marcus? You look dreadful. What’s happened?’
Oh the dilemma for Louisa when he told her. His wife, he’d heard on the grapevine, was conducting some kind of dalliance with their housekeeper’s cousin. An Irish good-for-nothing ne’er-do-well who was a nobody, a no one, not even a returned soldier with an excuse for … Well, an excuse. It was beyond outrage when he considered the love, the loyalty and the comfort he’d lavished on her. It was criminal. He was heartbroken. He would have revenge. How could she? What about their child, his son, his lovely innocent son? What about the sanctity of marriage? He’d been away a long time it was true, but only to defend her. What horrors had he not endured on her behalf? What lack of appreciation in return. It was too much to bear. And so on and so on, amid fury and tears and pacing and banging fists against hard surfaces.
She listened in silence then she suggested he sit for a minute to gather himself because really, these were very large accusations he was making and who on earth had made them in the first place? The grapevine was a very long one in Prospect and surely he knew how unreliable it was. She did not, however, contradict it. She simply asked him to consider it. She could have laughed in its face and told him it was the silliest thing she’d ever heard and could he hear himself, because honestly when was Adelaide supposed to have had time to conduct a dalliance and frankly when was the lodger? He was up to his eyes in the affairs of his part-time wives whose existence she clearly couldn’t reveal but whose demands she could discuss in a general way. She raised no such objections. She offered him a drink, which he accepted.
It didn’t suit her to defend Adelaide. It suited her to have Marcus look at her with longing and desperation and to tell her in great misery that now it was out, it hardly surprised him. Ever since he’d come home he’d been asking himself if he’d made a terrible mistake in marrying a girl so, well, foolish, if he was honest, so easily led, so open to persuasion on every single little thing.
‘Unlike you, Louisa. I should have married a woman with your spirit.’
Louisa smiled at him, thinking he was being a bit of a dill but even as she thought it, a plan occurred to her, the brilliance of which swept aside any drawbacks connected to inadequacy. It was a plan so neat that only its extreme wickedness stopped her from executing it immediately. Instead she said, ‘Now, Marcus, you really have to be calm. Adelaide is a nice woman. She’s large boned but she’s not bad looking and she’s easygoing. She’s everything a man could want in a wife.’
‘But is she loyal? How can I know if she’s loyal?’
‘You could ask her,’ Louisa said innocently. ‘That’s what I think you should do. I think you should go straight home and ask her.’ She took the glass from Marcus because he’d drained it in an instant and she showed him the door.
She stood in the hallway calculating, smiling to herself, but as she smiled an awful thought occurred to her. What if there were truth to the rumour? What if Adelaide was a dark horse? Not for a single second had she imagined that. The only idea along those lines she had ever entertained was that if Martin Duffy had eyes for any of them, it was for herself. But what if it were Adelaide? She laughed. Of course it wasn’t, and her plan really was too clever.
Martin Duffy had not made it as far as Maggie O’Connell’s. Mrs Mayberry, having accompanied her husband to the shops and parted company with him at Furlongs, the dress shop, had seen him from a distance and cried out with joy. She’d taken a good many very short steps at amazing speed to catch him up, the entire time calling, ‘Mr Liffey, Mr Liffey, please stop, could someone please stop that man,’ and Theresa Fellows, imagining him to have performed all sorts of mischief upon Mrs Mayberry’s body, kicked him hard behind the knees and brought him crashing to the ground. Any gratitude she might have expected was slow in coming.
‘For heaven’s sake, Mithus Fellowths,’ Mrs Mayberry had cried. ‘I didn’t ask you to kill him, just to stop him. Are you hurt, Mr Liffey?’ When he’d assured her he wasn’t and had forgiven Mrs Fellows for taking quite understandable matters into her own capable hands, he’d accepted an invitation to have a cup of tea
at the Mayoral home. They had walked back up Hope Street together, deep in conversation, leaving Mrs Fellows to ask of Maisie Jenkins, who’d seen the whole thing, what she thought that was all about. Mrs Jenkins had said she would search herself but, having done so, came up with nothing except that this was a juicy titbit she would pass on to Mr Stokes with all speed.
Had either of them actually taken the trouble to eavesdrop they’d have heard nothing more sinister than the Mayor’s wife expressing only very high hopes for the smooth running of her Peace Party. Not just its smooth running; its triumph. It must be a triumph. She was relying on Mr Liffey to help her make it so and he could do this by presenting her in the most dramatic and effective light as a representation of Peace On Earth. It went without saying, so she said it anyway, that the association between herself and Peace would benefit all their futures in the immediate and long term. ‘My performance needs to be perfect. I want it to go like clockwork,’ she explained as they skirted the park.
The nub of the meeting, which required very little input from Martin Duffy, was the order of service as she described it. Mrs Mayberry would, with her husband the Mayor, greet all guests as they arrived and she would welcome them into their grounds. Then while they mingled and chatted and drank punch and ate sandwiches, which he would supervise prior to the serving of the suckling pig, which would be after the speeches, she would hurry to the house to deck herself out in a costume that represented Victory and so Peace. At her signal he would take the dinner gong onto the verandah, sound it and the band would strike up ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. She would emerge, the perfect embodiment of Everything She Stood For in a costume of her own design. He would march ahead of her, clearing a path through the throng until she reached the marquee from where she would address the assembly.
It took two cups of tea to tell him this, and Martin Duffy, having smiled only where manners allowed, informed her that he really did have a very clear understanding of her expectations. Then he rose to leave, saying he was expected at home for dinner. She asked where home was and when he explained he was lodging at Mrs Worthington’s, she said, ‘Poor woman. All alone. Unprovided for, so I understand. And unprotected. Happily, no children.’
Adelaide was nowhere to be found when her husband, as far from calm as it was possible to be, unlocked the front door with a trembling hand and stamped from room to room in search of her. Not finding her, so in extreme agitation, he ran back across the road and knocked on Louisa’s door and she, half-expecting it, indeed having rehearsed it, opened it with a smile that might have been of sympathy but equally could have been delight.
‘That was very quick, Marcus. I hope you were kind to her,’ she said. But he didn’t reply. He strode past her and into the drawing room where he helped himself to another rum and threw himself onto the sofa, where she joined him. She allowed her thigh to rest gently against his.
She said, ‘Marcus, I know you like me and I want you to know that even though I am your wife’s friend, I am also your friend. In fact, I sometimes feel I am more than your friend than I am hers.’
‘Do you?’ He clutched her hand. ‘You are so lovely, Louisa. I know you understand me better than Adelaide does. You seem to, Louisa. I think you always have.’
‘I think I always have. So when you turn to me in distress, you know I will always comfort you.’ She stroked his hand. He dropped his head onto her shoulder. ‘I comforted you the other night, didn’t I, when you were so unhappy about things.’ She couldn’t remember what things but the things hardly counted, just the comfort.
‘You did,’ he said. ‘You’re so kind and sweet and gentle and clever. And you smell so nice.’ She kissed the top of his head lightly. ‘I’m so miserable,’ he moaned.
‘There,’ she crooned. ‘You needn’t be. I could have made you happy, Marcus, if things had been different.’
‘Life is cruel,’ he said.
‘But it doesn’t have to be,’ she said.
The Captain got to his feet, overwhelmed by the need for another drink. He waved the bottle in her direction, inviting her to join him and she said, ‘Just a small one.’ As he poured she said, ‘Marcus, you remember the other night, after you took me in your arms …’ He froze. Of course he froze. A war-damaged man smells danger at a million miles even if he doesn’t know how best to avoid it. Louisa saw him freeze but decided the strength was with her given his madness and her own desperate need. ‘I’m pregnant, Marcus,’ she said.
‘You can’t be,’ he gasped. He sat down heavily, so close to her that his thigh pinched hers.
‘Well I am.’
‘But who’s the father?’ Though her expression was regret with a hint of joy, mostly it was explicit. ‘I can’t be,’ he whispered.
‘You must be,’ she said. ‘You are the only … I know you were very confused, and perhaps it was wrong of us, but certainly we – it was a very brief encounter, but a lovely one.’
‘But we didn’t,’ he cried. He put his hand to his brow. ‘I know we didn’t. I’d remember. Surely I’d have some memory …’ But they both knew that he mightn’t and that he hadn’t a leg to stand on. ‘Are you going to blackmail me?’ he asked. ‘Is this what you’re doing? I don’t know what you’re doing, Louisa.’ His voice was ever rising. ‘I don’t know what my wife is doing. But between you, you’ll drive me mad.’ He got to his feet and wheeled on her. ‘You’re not pregnant. How could you be? I want nothing to do with it.’
‘Marcus,’ she said, rising from the sofa to soothe him. ‘Of course I’m not blackmailing you. I’m appealing to you.’ She took his elbow but he shook it off. He glared at her, angrily and miserably, and then he fled, leaving the poor widow alone, unprotected and unprovided for, sipping rum, definitely pregnant as her body had only too clearly confirmed, and not at all sure that she’d played her brilliant hand correctly.
Captain Nightingale wasted no time. He went directly to his room, he packed a small bag, flinging garments into it willy-nilly. He scrawled a note for his wife containing no accusations of infidelity or any suggestion of extraordinary paternity, and he left the marital home, cadging a lift with Cocky Watson, who said, ‘I’m only going as far as Myrtle Grove tonight, but I’ll be pleased of the company. There must be trouble on the road. There’s coppers everywhere looking for someone.’
Chapter Forty
A less bewildered husband might have spotted the need at this news to protect his household from the someone, but no such thought occurred to Marcus. He said, ‘Myrtle Grove will do,’ and chucked his small bag into the cart.
The rest of the town reacted with greater alarm. As the cart gathered pace, Norah Quirk heard from the girl on the exchange at Myrtle Grove that something was up but no one was quite sure what. She ran from the Post Office to announce the imminent arrival of bushrangers to everyone within earshot, and everyone within earshot hurried home to check their front doors for sturdiness.
Adelaide and Pearl heard nothing. Adelaide, in particular, was blissfully unaware of anything awful thundering across her horizon because the one she was admiring, as Cocky put mile after mile between her and her protector, was a glorious festival of pinks, purples, reds and oranges that reflected her spirits. There was no hint of trouble brewing. No runaway husband, no aspersions on her good name, no treacherous friend. Not even an inkling of a conspiracy between her husband and the shop manager to allay her fears about the books by further cooking them.
In the very short time between her apparently loving husband leaving their house in seemingly good order and him fleeing from it a broken and deranged man, Adelaide had embarked on the gentlest and pleasantest of walks with her baby and her housekeeper, whose company she was deciding she enjoyed more than most people’s. She’d looked out of the window, seen the wondrous sky and suggested that since Captain Nightingale was clearly delayed at the shop they might as well take a stroll. Despite her very tiring day, Pearl agreed and in the briefest of heartbeats turned it to her advantage.
; ‘Instead of going to the river, why don’t we walk along the lane?’ she suggested.
‘Why not? If Mr Fletcher isn’t as moody as he looks he won’t mind his landlord’s sister trespassing,’ Adelaide said. They wandered at a leisurely pace along the dirt track towards her childhood home with Adelaide pointing out special landmarks and wondering at improvements the tenant had made to fencing.
She explained again how the land had been acquired in bits as parcels were released for auction, how the best bid won and how canny her grandfather had been in his acquisitions compared to Maggie’s grandfather. ‘We ended up with all this. And the O’Connells ended up with just that, and Frank O’Connell was very bitter. It’s odd I’m on such easy terms with her now. She’s a brave little thing. You have to hand it to her.’
The air was warm and comforting. The breeze allowed no suggestion of upset or disharmony, just softness and welcome, and Pearl listened to Adelaide burble about this and that with just the one ear. Nothing was needed in the way of a response apart from the occasional nod and exclamation of wonder, so she allowed her mind to drift to the garden party and what she might wear.
A more responsible fiancée might have applied herself to the missing Daniel, but she was sick of Daniel and whatever he was up to. The only advice she’d had, from Father Kelly and the Fletcher brothers, well-meaning men all of them, was to leave him to his own devices, and were it not for Beattie she thought she would. She still might. She’d decide after the party. Why shouldn’t she go to a party? There was no direct connection between the possibility they might see Joe Fletcher on their walk, and her wardrobe, just a small sliding from one thought to the next.
Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband Page 22