Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband

by Barbara Toner

  The extraordinary night had given birth to a dark, dark day. No one would miss Norah Quirk. But for the loss of Mr Stokes someone needed to be held accountable, and that someone was Mrs Nightingale Junior along with her sidekicks the unsmiling housekeeper and the fiery Maggie O’Connell, a known thief. Look at them skulking together in the office that only yesterday had been his. Look at them rejoicing like witches over a cauldron. They had seen him off only because he had revealed them to be creatures of the moral swamp they clearly were. Well, they would be made to pay. They certainly would. They would be made to pay. Archie Stokes had been a hero all war long and now he was a saint. If he’d taken money from the till as reported, it would have been due to him. The man was a saint before morning tea, and by morning tea the town had agreed to a woman not to shop at Nightingales until justice was done for that poor man.

  That they were the objects of such anger and derision simply did not occur to Adelaide, Pearl and Maggie even though the shop was as astonishingly empty of customers when they emerged from the office to close its doors at noon as it had been all morning. ‘Everyone’s sleeping it off,’ Maggie decided and the others agreed. If Mrs Lambert and Ginger had other thoughts they kept them to themselves, because that’s where they had kept them under the reign of Mr Stokes.

  The ladies walked home together oblivious to any whispering and back-turning because they had so much to discuss: firstly how to proceed with the case against Mr Stokes, which was mounting with every document Maggie uncovered, and secondly how to manage the running and maintaining of a thriving business when the only experience any of them had was Adelaide’s. Maggie said she would be proud and delighted to take on any work Mrs Nightingale wanted to offer her and Adelaide was only too happy to oblige. ‘You have an excellent head for numbers and I’m sure if you put your mind to it you could deal with some of the suppliers. Miss McCleary and I will be on hand to help you.’ It might not have been what Pearl had in mind for herself but she was as silent as Mrs Lambert and Ginger.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  In their ignorance, it seemed to the ladies that afternoon that the awful fog of futility and despondency that had surrounded them for so many weeks was lifting. A way forward could be glimpsed for all of them. Pearl and Adelaide called on Louisa and it was agreed that on Monday she would take Mr Lambert’s taxi to Cooma and the train to Sydney where she would wait at The Cumberland in Phillip Street until Annie McGuire came to collect her. All bills would be paid for by Adelaide. ‘I would do the same for you,’ Louisa said by way of thanks. Adelaide said she knew she would, though she knew she wouldn’t and, another day, she might have agonised.

  There was no need for agonising today. Adelaide was finding independence a very pleasant thing. She could make decisions without deference to public opinion, or anyone’s opinion, and so she could be generous. With Pearl and Maggie by her side, she felt no fear of the basket of ledgers. They would no longer be a burden. They would serve her as evidence. Nightingales would make a fresh start without Mr Stokes, Marcus or his mother to interfere. There would be a new set of ledgers, drawn up and overseen by Maggie O’Connell whose genius had been a wonder to behold. She’ll get over him, Adelaide had told herself of Maggie’s broken heart as she’d watched her tot column after column aided only by a pencil. I’ll work her to the bone to make her forget.

  If Maggie herself was unable to trust in the happy future Adelaide saw for her, she was at least grateful for occasional pain-free moments it offered. Leaden sorrow continued to engulf her when she raised her head from anything engrossing. She mourned the loss of Martin Duffy’s easy laugh, his affectionate gaze, his gentle touch, his reassurance, his friendship, his company, the life together she believed he’d agreed to. But she found herself comforted by the value placed on a skill she’d taken for granted as a critical tool for survival. She might still be unprotected but with a job at Nightingales, should there ever be a job at Nightingales, she could provide for the boys and they would eat well and often. She told them as much as they sat down to some excellent ham that Saturday lunchtime and they hugged her.

  Pearl and Adelaide also viewed possibilities over a late lunch together. Pearl said their best hope for justice was with Harry Fletcher, brother of Joe, who was a law-enforcement officer with the Army. What kind of law was he enforcing, Adelaide wanted to know, but Pearl, honour bound, could only shake her head. ‘He arrested some bushrangers,’ she said. ‘Joe Fletcher told me.’

  ‘Then Joe Fletcher should tell his brother to arrest Archie Stokes because he’s worse than a bushranger. I mean it, Miss McCleary. We have the evidence. Go and ask him. Take the sulky. It’s a long walk along the lane. Quickly, go.’ It was as clear an instruction as she’d ever given.

  Pearl didn’t take the sulky. She took a note. Her plan was to leave it and disappear before she was spotted. She had no confidence that Joe Fletcher would receive her with anything other than scorn, and the closer she got to the homestead, the more certain she was that he’d despise her. She’d been denounced before his very eyes as a woman without morals or scruples. Her intention was to tell Adelaide she’d found the place empty. The note said all that needed to be said. Mr Stokes had taken money from the shop and fled. He’d also tried to take the ledgers that incriminated him. She and Adelaide had caught him red-handed. As she turned the corner to the front of the house, her heart sank.

  There was Go To Blazes hitched to the post by the verandah. Pearl told herself she could still take off without having to see him. She was on her knees, cramming the note through the very small gap under the door when it opened and she fell through it. ‘There’s a knocker,’ said Joe Fletcher. ‘Look.’

  He helped her to her feet but she kept her eyes firmly fixed on the ground as she handed him the note. ‘What is it?’ he asked. Was that scorn? Loathing? How could she tell?

  ‘A note.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It says Mr Stokes has taken off with the contents of the shop’s safe.’ Finally she met his gaze but it was just the gaze of a man receiving old news.

  ‘Want a cup of tea?’ he asked. She didn’t. They stood together on the verandah looking out into the distance rather than at each other. Smoke curled from the chimney of a tumbledown shack halfway up the hill many paddocks away. ‘Harry reckoned he’d take off when he’d heard about the arrests,’ Joe Fletcher said.

  ‘Shouldn’t someone go after him?’

  Joe Fletcher paused, weighing up her trustworthiness, she guessed. ‘They’ll know where he is, don’t you worry about that.’ He dropped into one of the two large chairs strategically placed to view the sunset and gave her arm a tug obliging her to sit in the other. ‘He was the last link. Using men posing as bushrangers to hold up deliveries to the Army.’

  ‘Surely the Army could have stopped him. They’re the Army.’

  ‘The Army was in on it. Not the whole Army. Just a dishonest quartermaster working for a mastermind yet to be unmasked.’ Joe Fletcher grinned. ‘Exciting, isn’t it? Stokes is just a middleman, a very greedy middleman. Now that’s as much as I can tell you.’

  ‘Do you know who the mastermind is? You do!’

  Joe Fletcher laughed. ‘I can tell you no more.’

  ‘You can’t stop me asking. Louisa’s horses are Army horses. So why’s Mrs Murdoch delivering them? Is she working for Archie Stokes or for the mastermind?’

  Joe Fletcher raised his eyebrows. ‘You any closer to finding your missing friend?’ Pearl shook her head. ‘Have you tried advertising?’ And where this might have been better said with a laugh, there was no laugh.

  Pearl felt herself redden, first with shame, then with annoyance. A deep flush. ‘Maybe I will,’ she said sharply and in a fit of pique she regretted at once, she jumped up from the chair, hurried down the verandah steps and took off as fast as a housekeeper could while maintaining her balance and her dignity.

  Joe Fletcher laughed at last. He said, ‘You can’t run all the way home. I’ll
drop you at the gate.’ But she didn’t stop, no matter how silly she told herself she must look. She couldn’t. He unhitched his horse, caught up to her, swept her into his arms and up into the saddle, then he swung himself up in front of her. They galloped down the lane to the side gate and as he helped her from the horse, his hand lingered very slightly about her waist. He said, ‘Miss McCleary, I’ve trusted you with information my brother would shoot another man for blabbing. So keep it to yourself and keep your wits about you. You’re too clever by half and I won’t be the first one round here to have noticed.’ She didn’t watch him ride away. She hurried through the back door and directly to her room, wanting peace and privacy and time to recover from her extreme agitation at everything.

  Adelaide waited no more than five minutes before banging on the door. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said I should advertise for Daniel.’

  ‘About Mr Stokes?’ Pearl opened the door and joined Adelaide in the kitchen.

  ‘He said his brother knew Mr Stokes would run. He has someone watching him.’

  ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘Of course I trust him.’

  This was lucky. By the next morning, none of the ex-part-time wives trusted anyone very much, not even themselves. Each, in her own way, was juggling with an unfamiliar self who might also prove to be untrustworthy, so in their unease, the best they could do was stick together. Pearl and Adelaide called first on Maggie, then on Louisa.

  They found Maggie supervising the boys’ homework while preparing clothes for a job that didn’t require an overall. ‘Theresa Fellows has let me know she can’t take Ed and Al any more after school,’ she reported dully.

  ‘They can come to the shop,’ Adelaide said. ‘I’ll give them pocket money for sweeping.’

  Louisa opened the door to them but didn’t ask them in. She said she needed no help. They’d already done enough. She had private matters to attend to so they left, rebuffed but relieved because there was nothing to be said that wouldn’t result in someone’s hurt feelings.

  On her own Louisa wandered from room to room looking for a hopeful future among the ruins of a messy past. She stared without seeing into the room she’d shared with her husband for just long enough to know the marriage would only ever have been temporary. She entered the room still smelling of her lodger, where she smoothed the blankets, sniffed the pillow, then jumped up quickly, prodded by the treacherous longing that was to blame for the state she was now in.

  The kitchen, once so bare, was as stocked as it needed to be for an affluent landlady with a paying guest. The pantry spoke only of lost hope. She stared out into the overgrown garden where the falling-down lean-to remained unattended to by the man employed to put her life to rights.

  It was enough to make a woman give up on men altogether. It crossed her mind to give all the unneeded food to Maggie. She thought she could sort through her wardrobe and possibly give her some of the dresses she certainly wouldn’t be taking to Sydney as well. But these thoughts were idle and she soon forgot them. She spared no thought at all to the future of the baby inside her. She gave no thought to the horses. She gave no thought to her sister-in-law or her sister-in-law’s husband, even though Larry Murdoch had taken her aside in a Mayberry arbour to assure her that the feelings he’d always had for her were as strong as ever. Ugh!

  All Louisa could think was she’d wear her pink-and-white with the three-quarter sleeves on her journey because she intended to arrive in style. The hotel would admire style whereas Miss McCleary’s pretend mother, she was one hundred per cent sure, would not.

  She wondered how on earth she’d survive in a pokey house in Bondi with strangers so distant from her in every respect. They were ungrateful thoughts, she knew it, but they were hers not to be shared. What she would share was a brave face and no complaints because these would be her lot. If she were thankful at all, it was that her lot could be endured well away from the judging eyes of anyone she knew even slightly.

  Chapter Fifty

  On the first business day of their new lives, all the ladies were on the move well before the town was properly awake. Pearl and Adelaide saw Louisa into Bert Lambert’s cab, then they, the baby and Maggie with her brothers made their way quickly up Hope Street in tight formation despite the empty streets. They reached the palace from which the prince had fled, passing only Mrs Jenkins sweeping the church steps, and they entered it through the delivery bay, which was empty of deliveries and of anyone attempting to deliver.

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Adelaide. ‘Mr Benjamin should be here from across the border. He always delivers first thing on a Monday. Was it my imagination or did Mrs Jenkins turn her back on us? Maybe she didn’t see us.’

  ‘She saw us,’ said Maggie.

  There was, however, seeing and looking right through, and that’s what the town was doing when avoiding completely, which was preferable, was impossible. Loyal Mrs Lambert arrived as usual at half-past seven to prepare the counters for opening at half-past eight, but there was no sign of Ginger who, Mrs Lambert said, must be sick. By half-past nine, not one customer had entered the shop and there was no pretending it was the plague or an accident or everyone waking up and thinking it was Sunday.

  Their reputations, which might have been questionable on Saturday, by Monday were in ruins. After Mass on Sunday, Lorna Stutt, who wanted only to be liked, had admitted in confidence to Theresa Fellows that the story of the advertisement had come from her, but not in the first place. She’d heard of it from the girl on the telegraph in Cooma, so who was to say whether it was true or not. Of course it was true, Theresa Fellows said. There hadn’t been a body who’d heard it on Friday night who hadn’t told themselves there was no smoke without fire, except possibly Mrs Quirk who had learned many years ago not to trust her daughter.

  Given the very clear light in which the ladies were now viewed, the town agreed that nothing was beyond them. Had anyone had seen Captain Nightingale lately? He hadn’t gone to his mother because his mother was on the high seas. Did anyone else think this was suspicious? Did anyone trust the housekeeper? Had anyone seen her smile? Who was she anyway? Arriving here out of the blue.

  It seemed not to matter that young Mrs Nightingale had been a firm favourite in her youth and that, in her youth, if anyone had had a mean word to say about her they’d have been slapped down hard. Overnight, the sweet, slightly silly, large-boned but very popular Adelaide Bluett that was, had become the bullying, possibly murderous, wife of a deranged hero. She’d taken advantage of his illness to dismiss out of hand the store manager whose fierce loyalty to the family was famous throughout the shire. She had counted for nothing his extraordinary success during the war in providing the town with a showpiece from which they had all taken heart.

  ‘Who does she think she is?’ was the rallying cry. They would show her, and they did. They found they could make do with Merrivale the butcher, Andrews the baker and by swapping what they had from their kitchen gardens, home cows and chooks. As for suppliers, it seemed only those who hadn’t been alerted in time turned up. The few local vegetable growers, dairies, butter and cheese makers who appeared at the door skedaddled the minute they’d been paid. ‘Shut the shop,’ Pearl advised at close of business on Monday. ‘Put a notice on the door. Closed all week for stock-taking.’

  The shutters were pulled down, Mrs Lambert was advised to take her holiday pay, to let Ginger know he should collect his, and for both to come back the following Monday. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Pearl. They would stock-take down to the very last grain of sugar. They would itemise every article on every shelf in the shop, the storeroom and the delivery bay and they would match it to the entries in the ledgers. It was a huge task. There were so many shelves. And who knew what was in the small shed at the far end of the yard to which no one could find the key?

  The three of them worked together. Pearl and Adelaide took it in turns to mind the baby and count items while the other made notes. In the office, Mag
gie painstakingly produced columns of figures gleaned from every last ledger, folder, exercise book, bulging envelope, brown paper bag and box full of cryptic notes. They all told a story, she was certain. She ducked in and out of the office to scan the shelves, biting her pencil, shaking her head, so absorbed that she might have been a bookkeeper all her life. ‘The problem is,’ she reported, ‘I can’t find receipts for half the stock I can see. I’ve no idea who he paid or how much he paid them. It must be here somewhere.’

  Pearl might have saved her the trouble of looking, knowing what she knew, but when it all boiled down, what inside information did she have except the man was buying stuff that appeared to be, but wasn’t, stolen from the Army by bushrangers who weren’t bushrangers. Who was she to say there’d be no evidence in writing anywhere in that office?

  ‘Mrs Nightingale, Miss McCleary, come quickly,’ Maggie cried mid-afternoon. ‘Look at this.’ She carried a small box labelled J Worthington into the shop and laid its contents out on the shiny mahogany counter. She opened it with care and removed the first document, the contract Louisa had signed so foolishly and so recently. ‘Strewth, Mrs Nightingale, look at the interest he was going to charge. Why on earth did she sign it?’

  ‘Mr Duffy advised her to,’ Pearl said.

  Maggie paled. ‘Don’t tell me he was working for Mr Stokes.’

  ‘Not a chance. He was as useless at sums as … I’m sorry, Mrs Nightingale … Mrs Nightingale. He thought he was getting her out of trouble.’

  ‘Here’s a contract for the horses. It’s signed by Lieutenant Worthington, 9th March, 1918.’ Maggie handed it to Adelaide.

  ‘A month before he was killed.’