A pelican waddled along the path towards her. What a peculiar bird. Freda was sure they had none of them in York. Was it even British?
As the pelican drew nearer, a horrified Freda could see that it had a pigeon in its mouth. It stopped in front of her and, as if putting on a performance, made a great show of gulping the bird into its pouchy beak, where Freda could see it still struggling to escape. To live. The pelican regarded Freda with a cold eye, as if daring her to censure it. Hideous creature! Freda jumped off the bench and sped away, feeling an unfortunate kinship with the poor pigeon, for she, too, had been snared and devoured by a beast of prey.
Visiting Time
“You’ve had a small operation but you’ll be as right as rain,” an artificially cheerful Nellie said to Edith. The unconscious Edith said nothing. Perhaps she knew, in the depths of anaesthesia, that the operation had not been so very little. (“Removed the lot,” the surgeon told Nellie with unwarranted satisfaction.)
Edith had been admitted to a small private hospital in the early hours, quietly but urgently, the Bentley stealing through the gates in the middle of the night. Nellie was furtive by nature, she didn’t like anyone knowing of any weakness in the family.
Now they had all arrived to cheer on the invalid. All apart from Niven, who had already been discharged from duty. Edith was not in the clear, it was still touch and go, the crisis far from over, and the surgeon had intimated to Nellie that now might be the time for final farewells from her family, but Nellie had decided not to pass on this information to them. Edith, Nellie said, had “women’s trouble,” a diagnosis that covered a multitude of possibilities, many of which could have been more metaphorical than medical in Nellie’s opinion, although not in this case.
“A serious infection,” she added, leaving open the possibility of catastrophe but not inviting it.
“Is she dead?” Kitty whispered.
“No, she’s had an anaesthetic,” Nellie said. “She’ll start to come around soon, I expect.”
“And will she be better?”
“Yes,” Nellie said stoutly.
Betty and Shirley looked doubtfully at the pale figure of Edith in the stark hospital bed. She didn’t look like someone who was intending to improve. They had expected tubes and fluids and other unpleasant things, but Edith was unadorned by anything medical and looked as though she was awaiting the embalmer.
Kitty reached over and gently pawed the back of the hand that was lying lifelessly on the pale-green jacquard bedspread. She hadn’t realized until now that she cared for Edith. The thought made her feel slightly sick.
They had been sitting around the bed for some time. Growing accustomed to the sight of the corpse-like Edith, they began to speak at a normal volume instead of the funereal murmurs they had been employing up until now. The novelty of hospital visiting was being slowly replaced by the fatigue of hospital visiting.
Edith would probably have been dead by now if maternal intuition had not led Nellie to the bathroom when she returned from the docks in the small hours. She had discovered Edith lying lifeless on the bathroom floor, her lips bloodless and the sheen of a cold fever on her skin. Nellie had woken Niven, whom she knew had the soldier’s gift of moving instantly from the depths of sleep to the heights of readiness for combat.
Heroically, he had carried Edith downstairs—there was a strange awkwardness to her shape, it was like carrying a small camel or a giraffe. On Nellie’s instructions he carried her through to the mews garage where the Bentley (and Hawker) lived. The bleary-eyed chauffeur was woken and helped to shuffle Edith into the back of the Bentley, Niven’s car having been deemed unsuitable by Nellie, for which Niven was thankful as Edith began to vomit extravagantly. Nellie dismissed him and she alone accompanied Edith on her journey to the hospital in Kensington. It was a place where Nellie knew that, for a high price, medical skill was almost as important as discretion.
* * *
—
Shirley had brought a box of Turkish Delight for the invalid, but now, as Edith was clearly not going to be eating Turkish Delight for some time to come, if ever again, she placed the fancy box on the bedspread on top of Edith’s immobile legs and they all helped themselves.
Nellie, more practical, had brought a cashmere shawl and a box of French lavender soaps.
“Should have brought some knitting,” Shirley said.
“You don’t know how to knit.”
“Chance to learn.”
“So, Ma,” Betty said, “that woman…”
“Gwendolen,” Kitty said.
“Yes,” Nellie said. “Miss Gwendolen Kelling. She’s going to be helping me out.”
“Helping you out?” a startled Betty asked. “Helping you out how?”
“She’s going to run the Crystal Cup for me.”
“What?”
Betty and Shirley spluttered their protests; even the torpid Edith seemed to moan a quiet objection.
“Well, I think it’s a good idea,” Kitty said.
“Shut up,” Betty said fiercely. “You know nothing.”
“We don’t need anyone else,” Shirley said to Nellie. “You have us. Betty and I can run the Cup.”
“She’s not family,” Betty added. “In fact, she’s a complete stranger to us. She might be a Trojan horse, for all we know.”
“What’s that?” Kitty asked. She was intending to own a string of Arabian racehorses one day. Like the Aga Khan. She had met him when he came to the Amethyst. He had given her a liquorice chew and was thus in her good books for ever. You didn’t expect someone like the Aga Khan to be carrying liquorice chews in his pocket.
“You’re such an ignoramus, Kitty,” Betty said.
“Am not!” Kitty protested, under the misapprehension that an ignoramus and a hippopotamus were close relatives.
“It’s deception,” Shirley said. “It’s getting inside the walls of the enemy under false pretences and then destroying everything within. For all we know, Gwendolen Kelling could be working for the police. A spy.”
“Frobisher,” Betty said and gave a little shiver. “That man is as cold as a dead cod. She could be his minion, sent to destroy us all.”
“The Fall of the House of Coker,” Shirley said.
“What? Don’t be so dramatic, all of you,” Nellie said brusquely. “She’s a librarian.”
“A what?”
Nellie stoutly ignored this chorus of dismay.
Out in the corridor someone began to walk up and down, ringing a handbell to signal the end of the visiting hour. “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls,” Shirley said. Sometimes her education was glimpsed. Edith twitched in her sleep and murmured something indecipherable.
“Oh, look, Edith’s back from the dead,” Kitty said.
Pastoral
Frobisher arrived early at Bow Street to take stock for the coming week. He was so early, in fact, that the night shift was still on duty, the amiable desk sergeant winding up the night’s activities.
“Here’s one for you, Chief Inspector,” he said, obviously highly amused.
“And what would that be, Sergeant?”
“Part of the night’s haul—a drowned Pierrot!”
“A what?” Frobisher thought he had said “parrot” (the man had a slight speech impediment). It made him think of the unfinished parrots on Lottie’s tapestry.
“Pierrot,” the sergeant said, enunciating more carefully. “You know—end-of-the-pier performers.”
“Yes, I know what a Pierrot is, thank you, Sergeant. Where is he? Here?”
“No, still in the Dead Man’s Hole.” (Not again, Frobisher thought.) “Didn’t drown though, sir.”
“You just said that he did, Sergeant.”
“Not drowned, pulled from the water sometime in the wee small hours. Slashed—here.” The desk sergeant paused to draw a finger across his neck. “Big smile across his throat, sir.”
“A Pierrot?”
“I know, peculiar, eh? I reckon what happened was he goes to a party—in fancy dress, obviously—then he gets in a rumpus with someone, they stick the knife in and—voilà!” The desk sergeant had been at Verdun, he relished his few words of café French.
“Thanks for your analysis, Sergeant. You should be a policeman.”