Property of a Lady

But nothing moved, and I went across the cobbled yard to the front of the building. The street was deserted, but, as I stood there, I heard, very faintly, the chimes of St Paul’s. Two o’clock. I came back down the steps to finish this journal entry.

A sensible man would go to bed and try to sleep. But I am not sensible – although I don’t think I am mad any longer. My sanity returned in that bedroom when I heard Elizabeth exulting in her own promiscuity, scorning her husband for his impotency, flinging her daughter’s paternity in the poor wretch’s face. I think that might be when my own madness entered William Lee, for if ever raging insanity glared from a man’s eyes it did so in that moment.

It is now almost three o’clock, and I must at least make the attempt to sleep – and to appear shocked and horrified tomorrow when the news reaches me that Elizabeth Lee of Mallow House has died in a brutal attack.

I find I cannot mourn for her. I can mourn for the creature I thought she was, but I cannot mourn for the sluttish shrew she really was. I can mourn a little for William Lee, though, and for the madness that had him in its grip when he killed her.

But if I am going to mourn for anyone, it will be for the child – Elvira.





18th November


The news of Elizabeth’s death is all over Marston Lacy. I heard it from the dairyman when he left the churn of milk, and again from the postman. Mrs Figgis was voluble on the subject and eager to impart all the information she had gleaned on her way to my house. Most of it was wrong – how I ached to correct her. I did not, of course.





20th November


It’s becoming known, by gradual stages, that the police have questioned William Lee, and that he has said a burglar entered the house and resisted Lee’s attempts to throw him out. His wife came to his assistance, and in the scuffle the intruder lashed out at her, landing a blow which sent her tumbling down the stairs to her death. Lee is known to be distraught at his loss and is seeing no callers.

Everyone in Marston Lacy is quivering with sympathy and a ghoulish curiosity. There is genuine concern for the child. I have concern as well, but I am ashamed to write that alongside the concern is a selfish anxiety. Did she recognize me when we stared at one another on the landing? She cannot have done – as far as I know she has never seen me before.

But if she sees me in the village at any time, will she remember who I am?





21st November


The police have asked everyone in the village if a stranger has been seen in the area. Clearly, they are taking William Lee’s statement of a burglar seriously. I was in the Black Boar last evening, and the four-ale bar was alight with speculation. The village constable, seated morosely in a corner with his notebook and modest glass of cider, made notes of everything that was said, and as the evening wore on it began to seem that three-quarters of Marston Lacy had seen a sinister stranger on the very day of Elizabeth’s murder. A shifty fellow he was, they said, egging each other on. Wall-eyed and low-browed. He shambled through the main street, muttering and cursing to himself, opening and closing his hands as if looking for a victim to throttle. This last was hastily corrected to ‘looking for a victim to push down the stairs’. By closing time, the stranger’s appearance had attained the grotesque proportions of the deformed bell-ringer of Notre Dame and was possessed of much the same attributes and lusts as R.L. Stevenson’s Mr Edward Hyde.

I contributed my own mite by a vague half-memory of having noticed a tall, thin man wearing a trailing coat and worn boots walking through the village at dusk. I did not embellish this thumbnail sketch – I have always found far more notice is taken of a brief, unemphatic statement than of the hyperbole of the ale-flown.