Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband

by Barbara Toner

  Baby Worthington’s horse was hitched to the post by the delivery bay. The door to the shed that was always locked was swinging in the wind, its contents on display, enough guns to arm a regiment. ‘Holy God,’ he said. ‘Look at that! How did that get there, Miss McCleary?’

  ‘I’ll go for the police,’ said Pearl.

  ‘That’s Baby Worthington’s horse,’ he replied. ‘Do you ride?’

  ‘I can run. It won’t take me a minute.’

  ‘We don’t need the police. We need the Fletchers.’

  The Captain stared towards the shop, as silent as the grave, then back to Pearl as solemn as a headstone. ‘What do you think she’s up to, McCleary? Should I take her on?’

  It was no question for a Captain fresh from battle, calm or not, to ask an employee for whom he’d previously shown little respect. He looked sane enough, but was he? It wasn’t the time to put his capacity for clear-thinking or decisive action to the test, Pearl decided.

  ‘Don’t take her on,’ she said. ‘She’s not going to kill anyone, is she? You go for the Fletchers. I’ll keep watch. If the worst comes to the worst, I can go out into the street and yell blue murder.’ How could anyone have known how mad Baby was?

  The horse protested loudly at the unexpected weight of the Captain on his back but he took off in a flash of mane and tail and Pearl, alone in the yard, asked herself what exactly she intended to watch for and what she was supposed to do when she saw it?

  The answer was right in front of her. She knew at once what she could do. The only window onto the yard was the very small one in the storeroom off the delivery bay. It was so covered in grime there was no seeing through it from either side so there was no need for her to conceal herself. She carefully removed from the shed the closest rifle with absolutely no idea what to do with it other than aim.

  ‘Drop it!’ roared Baby Worthington from the back door. ‘Drop it, or this poor lad will lose the use of a foot.’

  ‘Which foot?’ asked the poor lad. ‘I kick with my left.’

  ‘Turn slowly,’ said Baby Worthington. ‘Drop the gun.’

  The heroic thing might have been not to drop the gun but to turn quickly and blow her head off. But this isn’t what Pearl did because she’d never fired a gun in her life and the head she blew off might just as easily have been Al’s or her own. She dropped the gun. She turned slowly. ‘Nice to see you again too, Mrs Murdoch,’ she said, then she calmly strolled past her to put her arm around Al O’Connell and guide him to the shop. ‘We’re both here, Maggie. Don’t worry,’ she called because Maggie was screaming for Al and demanding to be released from the office so she could take his place in the gun’s sights.

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled Baby. She unlocked the office and ordered everyone from it, except little Freddie who was sleeping and on whose tiny peaceful body she lay her rifle. ‘I want the Worthington papers, the ledgers and the QM file. Where are they?’

  ‘Burned,’ said Maggie, who now had a boy under each arm, grasping them to her so three small ashen O’Connell faces were in a line like a ghastly painting of innocents in torment.

  ‘We told Larry we were going to have a bonfire and we did,’ said Adelaide, edging into the room to make a grab for the pram.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Baby. ‘Get back, Adelaide. All of you stand back.’ She stared at the piles of papers Maggie had created, neat little testimonies to the scope of Mr Stokes’ dishonesty.

  ‘If you can’t produce them, I’m going to have to light my own bonfire.’

  ‘Obviously we can’t produce them if we’ve burned them,’ said Pearl reasonably. ‘Can I make tea? Shouldn’t we all have a cup of tea so we can resolve this in a rational manner?’

  Baby laughed hoarsely. ‘Once a housekeeper, always a housekeeper.’ With her eyes firmly fixed on her hostages, she took paper from the desk, set it alight from the lamp and applied the flame to the tallest files.

  ‘My baby!’ screamed Adelaide, stirring something in the crazed head of Mrs Murdoch, who thought about it for a minute then shoved the pram through the office door and into the body of the shop. She followed, closing and locking the door behind her. ‘Into the storeroom,’ she ordered, herding them in with rough nudges from her rifle. ‘You can stay in there until the burning is done and I’m long gone.’

  ‘The fire will take over the shop,’ said Adelaide. ‘We’ll burn to death.’

  ‘With any luck, ‘said Baby. ‘But I doubt it. You’re the kind of woman someone always saves.’ She counted them in, then she locked the storeroom door. They heard her prowling about the shop and within a very few minutes they heard her leave through the delivery bay, pulling its bolts noisily into place as she left.

  ‘We’re going to die,’ sobbed Ed.

  ‘We’re not,’ said Al.

  ‘We most certainly are not,’ agreed Pearl. ‘This is what we’re going to do.’

  Four sets of eyes turned to her in expectation as she formed and discarded plans so rapidly she scarcely recognised them as they came and went. She was on the verge of suggesting they all throw their weight at the storeroom door when something combustible from among the tins did the job for her. It chose that very moment to unleash such power that the door blew off its hinges, revealing the hell beyond. Flames of every colour and size were licking along the shelves seeking nourishment from the packets and jars and bottles, which instantly saw the fun and exploded for the thrill of it.

  ‘Get back. Get back!’ Pearl grabbed sacks from a pile under the tinned goods and tossed them towards the others. ‘Cover yourselves. Keep low to the floor. Mrs Nightingale, is there anything in here to dampen them?’ She didn’t wait for the response. Ignoring her own advice, she entered the inferno, grabbed the stool from which Baby had so recently unleashed her insanity and returned to smash the very small dirty window through which no body, unless it belonged to a small and wiry boy, could escape.

  Ed, being the smaller and more wiry twin, was lifted and pushed through the inadequate opening. For a horrible minute, with his shoulders half in and half out, he appeared to stick, so he was given an almighty shove, which plummeted him to the ground, several feet below.

  He gathered his senses, got to his feet then positioned himself beneath the window as instructed. He stood, as still as a rock with his arms stretched in front of him despite his completely useless ball skills, waiting to catch a very much smaller boy dropped by its mother into his skinny arms. Freddie was no lightweight, whatever the clinic nurse said about his erratic eating. The impact knocked young Ed to his knees and though the catch wasn’t clean, it was taken and the baby, on arrival, yelled his head off. ‘Run, Eddie, run and get help!’ cried Maggie.

  ‘He’ll get it wrong,’ wailed Al. ‘He always does.’ But he wouldn’t go after him. ‘You need me around,’ he informed his sister. ‘I’m staying.’

  Ed didn’t get it wrong. Within minutes shouts could be heard from the delivery bay and, at the sight of Maggie’s face at the very small window, cheers.

  ‘They’ll have us out of here in a jiffy,’ said Pearl. ‘Everyone keep low to the ground.’

  ‘Look, the flames are less and the office is open,’ said Maggie. ‘I know where the QM file is,’ and before the others could grab her, she was back into the shop and weaving between fallen, burning beams.

  ‘Watch out!’ cried Pearl, spotting the danger before Maggie did. The shelves behind her were teetering, rocking, creaking, preparing to fall.

  ‘Maggieee!’ screamed her brother. But Pearl launched herself at the slip of a thing, turning her shoulder so taking the brunt of the merchandise tumbling onto them, and together they pitched away from the shelves towards the flour sacks where smaller but crazier blazes licked at their skirts. Pearl, one arm dangling uselessly by her side, wrapped the other around Maggie and dragged her towards the delivery bay where Adelaide was clinging to young Al, whose last hope of a reasonable upbringing appeared to be on fire. ‘We need to roll them,’ she said.

/>   They smothered Pearl and Maggie in stinky, scratchy hessian and then they prepared to die because the flames had only been taking a breather and now the shop was truly alight and the partition between them flimsy as paper.

  Outside the whole town seemed to be shouting. ‘Push, push, push,’ it cried. ‘Push the bugger in. Come on, lads, all your might.’ And suddenly the bugger gave up the ghost, and Father Kelly led Prospect’s most able-bodied men to their rescue.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Within hours, it hardly mattered that as recently as three days ago there had been a Bolshevik Irish part-time husband installed in the house of the town’s most beautiful widow of a war hero, or that he was enjoyed not only by her but by three other ladies whose respectability had been trampled by notoriety at a peace party. The fire put everything into perspective, an act of God if ever there was one because God was angry with the town. Certainly He was angry with Mr Stokes, whose perfidy was acknowledged almost at once.

  The miracle was, there had been so few injuries. Young Ed O’Connell had a bruised chest where the baby’s head had crashed into it. His brave and pretty sister, whose cleverness with figures, someone said, had exposed the evil grocer, sustained burns to her hair, dress and shoes and scorches to the skin on her hands. Miss McCleary, equally brave, though not as clever as she looked, had a broken arm from Maggie O’Connell falling on top of her. She also had more serious burns to her ankles where her skirt had smouldered. But how much worse might it have been.

  The fire truck had made unexpectedly fast work of the flames so there was little damage to the buildings either side of Nightingales, but as for the monument to all that was right with the town, it was now a stinking, blackened carcass of a thing oozing spirals of savoury with a hint of spice smoke across the township. As night fell, the people of the town could only stare in wonder at their loss. When Mrs Jenkins declared it wouldn’t be the same without Mr Stokes, she was ignored. The smouldering wreck was a testament to his evil ways. It had had to go because of everything it represented. If the town felt complicit, it was only for a minute.

  As with most non-fatal calamities, hope’s appearance was pretty well immediate and, having been invoked by Father Kelly, so too was the word of God. This meant that God was probably less furious than a bit put out. It was generally accepted that Mr Stokes’ customers could be held neither accountable nor responsible, and they agreed almost as wholeheartedly that Mrs Nightingale Junior had done her level best to bring him to justice and hadn’t they always admired and respected her even when she was a new mother and mad-looking? They remembered that Stokes, always a thief apparently, hadn’t been kind and helpful to everyone. He’d had a mean streak, hounding the poor for payments and racking up interest when they were late, even if he could provide unlike any other shopkeeper in the state. ‘Cooking the books all those years. That poor woman,’ said Theresa Fellows.

  His evil, however, was nothing compared to the Murdochs’, in whose employ he’d been all along. They had been the masterminds. ‘Not him! Her!’ Maisie Jenkins informed everyone because she’d heard it from Mrs Lambert who’d heard it from Ginger who’d been on the spot when Mr Murdoch and Archie Stokes were apprehended. Ginger had the whole story, tangled though it was, and how proud he was to tell it, which he did many times that night.

  He’d been working alongside the gallant and wily Sergeant Harry Fletcher (brother of the tenant of Somerset Station), who’d been commissioned by the Army to track down stolen goods. They’d very soon suspected Mr Stokes, but it had taken them a little longer to connect him first to Larry Murdoch and then to his wife. But they had, and this was why Ginger had spent the best part of three days up a tree keeping watch on the comings and goings at Upsand Downs Station. The minute they’d connected Baby Worthington to the rogue soldier known as the Quartermaster, whom Harry Fletcher already had under lock and key, they knew they had their man. Woman.

  The brothers had arrested Murdoch and Stokes in a brilliantly staged raid which had caught them by surprise. It had been wonderful to watch. He’d have missed it had it not been for the arrival of Captain Nightingale. Now there was a man. He’d been up the tree wondering what was going on inside the homestead, when the Captain had come galloping underneath as if his life depended on it.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ Ginger had called because he had no way of knowing the man’s business with the Murdochs, any more than the Captain could know that the Fletcher brothers were in the process of arresting felons. The Captain had stopped and, when informed of the situation, had considered what to do for the best, then he’d asked Ginger how brave he reckoned he was and Ginger had replied, ‘Brave enough.’

  The Captain had replied, ‘Same goes for me.’ Then he’d said, ‘You need to get a message to the Sergeant. Tell him that Mrs Murdoch is at the shop with my wife and son. There are guns on the premises. Miss McCleary is keeping watch. I’m on my way back.’ And as he’d taken off to save them, Ginger had done exactly as asked, arming himself with a bit of tree, which, as it turned out, had not been required. Stokes was already handcuffed and Murdoch, having tried to run, was brought down in the dairy by Sergeant Fletcher, even though he only had one eye, in the best tackle Ginger had ever seen off a football pitch. When he’d finally been given permission to speak and had passed on to the Fletchers the Captain’s message, Joe Fletcher had yelled, ‘Shit!’ then taken off like a bat out of hell.

  The story was greeted with wonder and delight and many questions, including what had happened to the Captain and Joe Fletcher then, because they definitely weren’t at the shop when the door came down and nor, as everyone knew, was Mrs Murdoch. Ginger didn’t know and was alarmed to hear as much. There was talk of a search party but by the time volunteers had come forward and the womenfolk had given sensible instructions about the best routes to take, the need was gone.

  As darkness fell on Hope Street two horses appeared trotting side by side carrying all three of the missing persons. Captain Nightingale was on Phantom, Baby Worthington’s famous horse. On the other was Joe Fletcher, and sitting ahead of him, the dreadful Mrs Murdoch blindfolded, handcuffed and dressed like a man. A spectacle if ever there was one.

  According to Constable McDermott, into whose cell they delivered her, and whose version of events was demanded by everyone who’d gathered outside the police station, Mr Fletcher had caught up with Captain Nightingale within minutes. They’d continued into town but when they’d turned Dead Tree Corner they’d seen her, beating the living daylights out of Slowcoach, the Lambert horse no one had noticed was missing owing to him always being kept in the far paddock because he was useless. She’d spotted Joe Fletcher and Captain Nightingale just as they’d spotted her and they’d had to chase the blinking woman for miles with her firing at them over her shoulder from the ex-Army rifle she was carrying. Despite Slowcoach’s age, they’d had a hell of a job outflanking her. That they’d caught her at all was more good luck than good management. The poor animal had stumbled in a rabbit hole and she’d fallen off. ‘Now excuse me,’ the Constable said, ‘I have prisoners to attend to.’

  Late into that night, the town hummed with the same degree of excitement and inebriation that had signalled as special the candlelit peace party in the garden or whatever the ridiculous thing had been called. Several of the key players from that happy event were missing – Mr Liffey, Miss Quirk and Mrs Worthington had vanished off the face of the earth – but those creatures of doubtful virtue had been replaced by heroes, which was fitting because they rose, it seemed, from the ashes to restore faith in the town’s essential goodness. Most obviously good, aside from Mrs Nightingale, were Sergeant Harry Fletcher, Joe Fletcher and Captain Nightingale, who, thank God, hadn’t been murdered by his wife and whose stupid idea had that been anyway?

  Bewilderingly there appeared to be a fourth hero no one had ever met or heard of, even by distant reputation. A fellow called Flannagan, another Irishman who was not the new part-time husband (ha ha ha!) but a returned sol
dier. The Fletcher brothers held him in very high regard, it seemed, even though Sergeant Harry Fletcher had shot him in the leg. ‘He’s a bushranger,’ Theresa Fellows said to her husband. ‘That’s why Sergeant Fletcher shot him.’

  ‘You’re talking through your hat,’ said her husband but, regardless of the late hour, he hotfooted it from outside the Arts and Crafts Club, where someone had set up a tea stall, to the pub to see what everyone else made of it.

  They made nothing of it. They were confused enough already. Bert Lambert said, who cared? There was an even more important hero to salute and they should all raise their glasses. ‘Ed O’Connell,’ he said and everyone agreed, ‘Ed O’Connell.’ That young scamp had run from the back of the shop with a baby in his arms to raise the alarm, when all that had been visible from the front was a bit of smoke.

  ‘The little bugger was screaming his head off. “Fire! Fire! There are people burning to death!”’ That was how history recorded it. Less recorded was that he’d been blamed for lighting it by Maisie Jenkins, who’d snatched the baby from his arms and given him the shaking of his life. He had, however, shoved her large stomach and cried at the top of his lungs, ‘My brother and sister are burning to death. If you don’t save them, I will!’ And he’d run back towards the shop just as its windows were blown out. Poor little Ed. Victim, villain, hero in less than six hours, not to mention orphan.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Maggie insisted on taking the boys home after they’d all been examined by Doctor Pinkerton at the community hospital. He’d wanted to observe them overnight but she said, ‘We’ll be better at home.’ She fed them on the chicken casserole she’d made for Martin Duffy, and together they climbed into the very big bed that had been their parents’ and there they slept fitfully because they were sore all over, their nerves were raw and three in a bed was one too many.