‘We heard her, so you needn’t mind saying!’
‘Is she bringing Jenny back?’
‘She said she was going to!’
‘Jenny will have to come if she says so!’
‘Oh, yes, she’ll have to come!’
They hung on Carter and hopped while they spoke. When she tried to make herself heard they pulled her round and round about.
‘I’ve got to get her bed ready. Meg – Joyce – leave go of me! I’ve got to get on. Oh my goodness – what’s that?’
They froze where they stood, two little girls in white nightgowns with plaited hair, and Carter elderly and fat, all three of them possessed with the same fear. There was a dead silence. Everything in the house seemed to hold its breath.
Meg moved first. She whirled about and stamped with her bare foot on the carpet.
‘You made it up!’
‘Did you? Did you, Carter?’
‘No, I didn’t. You children will be the death of me. I’m sure I thought I heard your mother. And if it wasn’t her, we may be thankful, for she’d never understand the plague you children can be. You’re not like it with her, and I don’t know why you should be like it with me. Off to bed and no more nonsense!’
Mrs Forbes stood in the dark and waited for her sight to clear. In a moment she had decided not to put on the lamp, and had begun to cross the open space before the house. It was not really dark. There was a moon behind those clouds which hurried in a wind she could not feel. She saw the racing clouds, and they meant no more to her than a rising wind that might or might not bring rain.
She entered the darkness of the drive. Her finger went out to the switch of the lamp and stopped short of it. No, she could manage. She kept her thoughts on finding her way. Time enough to think what she would find on the other side of the road when she got there.
She came out through the open gateway and crossed the road. There was a light in Miss Garstone’s bedroom. Then it was true. She did not know that she had doubted it until that moment. If it was true, how did it affect her – and hers – the boys? She saw them suddenly, vividly, Mac – and Alan. But her mind was on Mac, her thought was full of him. He must be safe – safe. She opened the door of the house and went in.
Mrs Forbes walked up the crooked stairs with her firm step. The door of Miss Garstone’s bedroom stood open. She saw what there was to be seen – Jenny and Miss Adamson and Miss Garstone, and two of them were alive. And the third was a dead woman. Curiously enough, she didn’t know whether that was a bad thing or a good one. It meant a change, but there are always changes. How the change would work out she didn’t know. Something rose up in her fiercely. She would see to it that the working out should be as she had planned. She spoke Jenny’s name and came forward into the room.
‘Jenny—’
Jenny turned. She wasn’t crying. Mrs Forbes would have thought it more natural if she had been. She said, ‘She’s gone,’ and she said it quite steadily. Miss Adamson would have shared Mrs Forbes’ thought if she had not seen what she had seen and what she would never forget – Jenny’s look when she came in and found her alone with her dead. No one who had seen it could possibly think anything except that Jenny had been so far with Miss Garstone that it was difficult for her to realise that she was gone, difficult for her to come back.
Mrs Forbes took command. She said all the right things, and there wasn’t the least bit of reality in what she said. Not to Jenny. Not to Miss Adamson either. She felt her dislike of Mrs Forbes more keenly than she had ever felt it. It almost got the better of her and made her say something that she wouldn’t be able to explain away afterwards. And yet when it came to thinking it out she was surprised at herself, because really Mrs Forbes had done nothing to make her feel as she had felt. Thinking it over afterwards, Miss Adamson was astonished at herself – really she was.
It was Jenny who made the move. She said suddenly,
‘We can’t talk in here – Oh, we can’t. She doesn’t hear us but …’ She left it at that and walked out of the door. They heard her step go down the crooked stairs.
‘She’s upset,’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘I suppose it’s natural. I’ll take her back with me, and you can get on with what has to be done here.’
‘And never a word to ask me whether I minded staying!’ said Miss Adamson to herself.
THREE
JENNY’S SPURT OF independence did not last. She packed the suitcase with Mrs Forbes standing over her.
‘Your toothbrush, Jenny – and the toothpaste – and what else?’
‘My face-cloth,’ said Jenny in the obedient voice of a little girl.
‘That’s right – put them in. Do you use a hot-water bottle?’
Jenny stood quite still and stared at her. The pupils of her eyes were larger than usual. It seemed to her that Mrs Forbes’ voice came from a long way off. It seemed to her as if she was floating in the air. It was with a great effort that she could come down and touch the things she needed.
The voice went on. It was Mrs Forbes’ voice. It said things like ‘You’ll need your bedroom slippers, and your dressing-gown, and your night things. That dress you’ve got on will do to wear again tomorrow. Now your brush and comb – and that, I think, is all.’
Jenny placed all the things in the suitcase neatly.
When they were walking up the drive together Mrs Forbes asked her whether she had had anything to eat. She had to stop and think about that before she answered. Everything seemed so long ago and so far away, but when she got down to it she remembered that she and Miss Adamson had had tea at five o’clock, and that Miss Adamson had made her eat an egg. It felt like a long time ago – a long, long time. Garsty was alive then. It felt as if she had come a long way from the kettle boiling and Miss Adamson speaking cheerfully. It was a long, long way, and there was a gap in the middle of it which she could never cross over.
Mrs Forbes asked her question again, ‘When did you have anything to eat?’ and this time Jenny answered it.
‘At five. We had tea. Miss Adamson boiled me an egg.’
‘Then you had better get straight to bed,’ said Mrs Forbes briskly. ‘Carter can bring you up a cup of hot milk.’
They came into the lighted hall. There was neither sight nor sound of the little girls, only Carter stout and flurried.
‘I’ve brought Jenny back with me,’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘You’ve got the room ready? Now just get her a cup of hot milk, and she’ll be going to bed at once. She’s had a trying day. Miss Garstone is dead.’
The words went with Jenny and up the stairs into the little bedroom which she was to have. Mrs Forbes threw open the door, put on the light, and said in a clear, firm, practical voice,
‘Now, Jenny, no fretting if you please. We’ll talk things over tomorrow. Get into your bed and go to sleep. I told Carter to give you two hot bottles.’
Jenny stood in the middle of the floor and looked unseeingly at the door which had closed behind Mrs Forbes. She was still standing there when it opened again. Carter stood there with a cup of milk and a piece of cake on a plate beside it.
‘Oh, Jenny!’ she said. ‘Oh, my dear, I know how you feel indeed, for I was just your age when my mother went, and I’m sure Miss Garstone’s been a mother to you, hasn’t she? You never remembering your own mother and all. And how should you when she died the day you was born, poor dear. But I’m sure you favour her something quite out of the way. Now you drink this cup, and you eat the little bit of cake, my dear, for it’ll do you good.’
The kindness came in amongst Jenny’s scattered thoughts and gathered them together. She crumbled the cake and drank the milk, sat when Carter told her to sit, and stood when Carter told her to stand. She was vaguely aware of her clothes being taken from her and her shoes and stockings being removed, and of Carter’s soft country voice which never stopped talking but always said kind comforting things.
In the end she went into the warm bed, the clothes were tucked round her, the window thrown open, and the curtain dr
awn back. Did Carter actually say, ‘God bless you, my child’? Or was it an echo of something she felt-and knew …
The light was gone. There was a little moonlight outside. Jenny slept. She slept without a dream or any conscious waking. There was an enfolding sense of comfort and peace. That was all, and it was enough.
She came back gradually to morning light and her strange bed. Those were the first of her thoughts. The light had the hushed look which means the early morning. She waked and remembered, but even as the memory flowed into her mind there was a whispering sound on either side of her.
‘You’re awake at last.’
‘We thought you would never wake up.’
‘We’ve been sitting here as quiet as mice.’
‘We promised ourselves we would.’
‘But you are awake now, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, darling, do be awake!’
Jenny put out bare arms and stretched them. Somehow the arms became entangled with two plump little forms in teddy-bear dressing-gowns. They finished up, Jenny scarcely knew how, in the bed with her, one on each side, their arms about her neck, their little cold noses burrowing into a cheek on either side.
‘We were frozen, but we waited till you were awake,’ said Meg on the right.
‘Oh, yes – we promised ourselves we wouldn’t wake you up. And we didn’t, did we?’ said Joyce. She wiggled her cold toes into a warm chink as she spoke.
Jenny sat up and hugged them both. The little warm bodies and the little warm ways of them were just what she needed. They brought her back to an everyday world.
‘Nearly half past six,’ said Meg. ‘At six we came in, and you weren’t awake, so we waited very patiently.’
‘We didn’t make a single sound,’ said Joyce ‘– not a single one.’
‘And what we want to know is, have you come to stay – are you here for good? Because we want you – don’t we, Joyce?’
‘We want you dreadfully,’ said Joyce.
‘And we’ve got it all fixed up,’ said Meg on her other side. ‘Joyce isn’t supposed to go to school, or to do very much in the way of lessons – not since she was ill, you know. And first of all Mother had the horrid idea of sending me to school and keeping Joyce here with a governess. And you were to be the governess – lucky Joyce! But then she thought again. And this time she thought of having Joyce like a drip round her neck all the time, and she decided not to do it.’
‘Oh, Meg!’
‘Well, you know what you are without me to brisk you up and keep you in order.’
‘Oh, Meg!’
‘It was all arranged,’ said Meg, nodding.
Jenny had an odd mixture of feelings. It was so exactly like Mrs Forbes to plan all this and not to say a word to her. Had she just gone on her own way and planned it all without a word to Garsty, too? Perhaps she hadn’t gone quite as far as that. Perhaps Garsty knew. But how did these children know? She said,
‘Nonsense!’
‘It isn’t nonsense,’ said Joyce, and Meg said,
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘What I want to know is how you knew anything about it.’
‘You can’t keep things from us. We always find them out,’ said Meg. ‘And this time – this time we were playing at being mice in the drawing-room, and Mother came past with Mac, and she said, “I’ve decided not to send either of the girls to school for another term. That girl Jenny can come in and teach them. As a matter of fact she might just as well come and live in.” And Mac whistled and said, “Garsty won’t let her.”’
‘And then they went away. We sat ever so still and held our breath, and they went right away. Wasn’t it fortunate?’
‘We stayed like mice without a single twitch until they had gone. We thought we should have died,’ said Joyce.
They both shuddered.
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copyright © 1959 by Patricia Wentworth
cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4532-2568-4
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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The Fingerprint (The Miss Silver Mysteries Book 30) Page 29