A Grievous Wound
THE FOLLOWING DAY, IMMEDIATELY after breakfast, I set out for Margaret Ernst’s cottage next to Holy Saints churchyard in Great Holling. I found the front door ajar and knocked as lightly as I could, taking care not to push it open any farther.
There was no answer, so I knocked again, more volubly. “Mrs. Ernst?” I called out. “Margaret?”
Silence.
I don’t know why, but I turned, sensing some kind of movement behind me, but perhaps it was only the wind in the trees.
I pushed the door gently and it swung open with a creak. The first thing I saw was a scarf on the kitchen’s flagstone floor: blue and green silk, elaborately patterned. What was it doing there? I took a deep breath and was steeling myself to enter when a voice called out, “Come in, Mr. Catchpool.” I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Margaret Ernst appeared in the kitchen. “Oh, I was looking for that,” she said with a smile, bending to retrieve the scarf. “I knew it would be you. I left the door open. In fact, I expected you to arrive five minutes ago, but I suppose nine o’clock on the dot would have looked too eager, wouldn’t it?” She ushered me inside, draping the scarf around her neck.
Something about her teasing—though I knew it was not intended to offend—emboldened me to be more direct than I might otherwise have been. “I am eager to discover the truth, and I don’t mind looking it,” I said. “Who might have wished to murder Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus? I believe you have an idea about that, and I’d like to know it.”
“What are those papers?”
“What? Oh!” I had forgotten I was holding them. “Lists. Guests at the Bloxham Hotel around the time of the murders, and people employed by the Bloxham. I was wondering if you might take a look and let me know if you see a name you recognize—after you’ve answered my question about who might have wanted to murder—”
“Nancy Ducane,” said Margaret. She took the two lists from my hand and studied them, frowning.
I said the very same words to her that Poirot had said to Samuel Kidd the day before, though I did not know then that he had said them. “Nancy Ducane the artist?”
“Wait a moment.” We stood in silence while Margaret read the two lists. “None of these names is familiar to me, I’m afraid.”
“Are you saying that Nancy Ducane—the same Nancy Ducane I’m thinking of, the society portrait painter—had a motive for killing Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus?”
Margaret folded the two pieces of paper, handed them back to me, then beckoned me to follow her into the parlor. Once we were sitting comfortably in the same chairs as on the previous day, she said, “Yes. Nancy Ducane the famous artist. She is the only person I can think of who would have had both the desire to kill Harriet, Ida and Richard and the ability to do it and get away with it. Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Catchpool. Famous people aren’t exempt from evil. Though I must say I can’t believe that Nancy would do such a thing. She was a civilized woman when I knew her, and no one ever changes all that much. She was a brave woman.”
I said nothing. The trouble is, I thought, that some killers are civilized for the most part, and only break from their routine of civility once, to commit murder.
Margaret said, “I lay awake all of last night wondering if Walter Stoakley might have done it, but, no, it’s impossible. He can’t stand up without help, let alone get himself to London. To commit three murders would be quite beyond him.”
“Walter Stoakley?” I sat forward in my chair. “The drunken old cove at the King’s Head that I spoke to yesterday? Why should he want to murder Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus?”
“Because Frances Ive was his daughter,” said Margaret. She turned to look out of the window at the Ives’ gravestone, and once again the line from the Shakespeare sonnet came into my mind: For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair.
“I would be glad if Walter had committed the murders,” said Margaret. “Isn’t that dreadful of me? I would be relieved that Nancy hadn’t done it. Walter’s old, and there’s not much life left in him, I don’t think. Oh, I don’t want it to be Nancy! I’ve read in the papers about how well Nancy is doing as an artist. She left here and really made a name for herself. That was a source of comfort to me. I was happy to think of her prospering in London.”
“Left here?” I said. “So Nancy Ducane also lived in Great Holling at one time?”
Margaret Ernst was still staring out of the window. “Yes. Until 1913.”
“The same year that Patrick and Frances Ive died. The same year that Richard Negus also left the village.”
“Yes.”
“Margaret . . .” I leaned forward in an attempt to draw her attention away from the Ives’ gravestone. “I’m hoping for all I’m worth that you have decided to tell me the story of Patrick and Frances Ive. I’m certain that once I have heard it, I will understand many things that are a mystery to me at present.”
She turned her serious eyes toward me. “I have decided to tell you the story, on one condition. You must promise not to repeat it to anybody in the village. What I say to you in this room must go no further until you arrive in London. There, you may tell whomever you wish.”
“No need to worry on that score,” I said. “My opportunities for conversation in Great Holling are limited. Everyone takes off as soon as they see me coming.” It had happened twice on the way to Margaret Ernst’s cottage that morning. One of the gaspers was a boy of no more than ten years old: a child, and yet he knew who I was and that he should avert his eyes and hurry past me to safety. He would, I felt sure, have known my Christian name, my surname, and the nature of my business in Great Holling. Small villages have at least one talent that London lacks: they know how to ignore a chap in a way that makes him feel terribly important.
“I am asking for a solemn promise, Mr. Catchpool—not an evasion.”
“Why is there a need for secrecy? Don’t all the villagers know about the Ives and whatever it was that happened to them?”
What Margaret said next revealed that her concern was for one villager in particular. “Once you have heard what I have to say, you will doubtless want to speak to Dr. Ambrose Flowerday.”
“The man you urge me to forget, yet remind me of time and time again?”
She blushed. “You must promise not to seek him out and, if you do happen to encounter him, not to raise the subject of Patrick and Frances Ive. Unless you can give me such an undertaking, I shan’t be able to tell you anything.”
“I’m not sure I can. What would I tell my boss at Scotland Yard? He sent me here to ask questions.”
“Well, then. We’re in a bind.” Margaret Ernst folded her arms.
“Supposing I find this Dr. Flowerday and ask him to tell me the story instead? He knew the Ives, didn’t he? Yesterday you said that, unlike you, he lived in Great Holling while they were still alive.”
“No!” The fear in her eyes was unmistakable. “Please don’t speak to Ambrose! You don’t understand. You can’t understand.”
“What are you so afraid of, Margaret? You seem to me to be a woman of integrity, but . . . well, I can’t help wondering if you intend to give me only a partial account.”
“Oh, my account will be thorough. It will lack nothing.”
For some reason, I believed her. “Then, if you’re not intending to withhold a portion of the truth, why must I not talk to anybody else about Patrick and Frances Ive?”
Margaret rose to her feet, walked over to the window and stood with her forehead touching the glass and her body blocking my view of the Ives’ gravestone. “What happened here in 1913 inflicted a grievous wound upon this village,” she said quietly. “No one living here escaped it. Nancy Ducane moved to London afterward, and Richard Negus to Devon, but neither of them escaped. They carried the wound with them. It wasn’t visible on their skin or on any part of their bodies, but it was there. The wounds you can’t see are the worst. And those who stayed, like Ambrose Flowerday—well, it was terrible for them too. I don’t know if Great Holling can recover. I know that it hasn’t yet.”
She turned to face me. “The tragedy is never spoken of, Mr. Catchpool. Not by anybody here, never directly. Sometimes silence is the only way. Silence and forgetting, if only one could forget.” She clasped and unclasped her hands.
“Are you worried about the effect my question might have upon Dr. Flowerday? Is he trying to forget?”
“As I said: forgetting is impossible.”
“Nevertheless . . . it would be a distressing subject for him to discuss?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Is he a good friend of yours?”
“This has nothing to do with me,” came her sharp retort. “Ambrose is a good man, and I don’t want him bothered. Why can you not agree to what I’m asking?”
“All right, you have my word,” I said reluctantly. “I will discuss what you tell me with no one in the village.” Having made this pledge, I found myself hoping that the residents of Great Holling would continue to ignore me as assiduously as they had thus far and not put temptation in my way. It would be just my luck to leave Margaret Ernst’s cottage and run into a garrulous Dr. Flowerday, keen to have a good old chinwag.
From his three portraits on the wall, the late Charles Ernst bestowed three warning glances upon me: “Break your promise to my wife and you will regret it, you scoundrel,” his eyes seemed to say.
“What about your own peace of mind?” I asked. “You don’t want me to talk to Dr. Flowerday in case it upsets him, but I’m worried I might upset you. I don’t want to cause you any distress.”
“Good.” Margaret sighed with relief. “The truth is, I would welcome the chance to tell the story to another outsider like myself.”
“Then please do,” I said.
She nodded, returned to her chair, and proceeded to tell me the story of Patrick and Frances Ive, to which I listened without interruption. I shall now set it down here.
THE RUMOR THAT STARTED all the trouble sixteen years ago came from a servant girl who worked in the home of Reverend Patrick Ive, the young vicar of Great Holling, and his wife, Frances. Having said that, the servant was not solely or even mainly responsible for the tragedy that resulted. She told a spiteful lie, but she told it to one person only and had no part in spreading it more widely throughout the village. Indeed, once the unpleasantness began, she withdrew almost completely and was scarcely seen. Some speculated that she was ashamed, as she should have been, of what she had set in motion. Later, she regretted her part in the affair and did her best to make amends, though by then it was too late.
Of course, she was wicked to tell a lie of such magnitude even to one person. Perhaps she was frustrated after a particularly hard day’s work at the vicarage, or it could be that, as a servant with ideas above her station, she resented the Ives. Maybe she wished to perk up her dreary life with a little malicious gossip and was na?ve enough to imagine that no serious harm would be done.
Unfortunately, the person she chose as audience for her heinous lie was Harriet Sippel. Again, maybe her choice was easy to understand. Harriet, embittered and vindictive as she was since the death of her husband, could be relied upon to receive the lie with great excitement and to believe it, because, of course, she would want it to be true. Someone in the village was doing something gravely wrong, and, even worse (or, from Harriet’s point of view, even better) that someone was the vicar! How her eyes must have flashed with glee! Yes, Harriet was the perfect audience for the servant girl’s slanderous story, and no doubt that was why she was chosen.
The servant told Harriet Sippel that Patrick Ive was a swindler of the most cruel and sacrilegious kind: he was, she claimed, luring villagers to the vicarage late at night whenever his wife Frances was elsewhere helping parishioners, as she often was, and taking their money in exchange for passing on communications from their deceased loved ones—messages from the afterlife that these departed souls had entrusted to him, Patrick Ive, to deliver.
Harriet Sippel told anybody who would listen that Patrick was practicing his charlatan trickery upon several villagers, but this might have been her attempt to enlarge his wrongdoing in order to make a more shocking story. The servant girl insisted later that she had only ever mentioned one name to Harriet: that of Nancy Ducane.
Nancy was at that time not a famous portrait painter but an ordinary young woman. She had moved to Great Holling in 1910 with her husband, William, when he took a job as headmaster of the village school. William was much older than Nancy. She was eighteen when they married and he was almost fifty, and in 1912 he died of a respiratory illness.
According to the wicked rumors that Harriet Sippel began to circulate in the snow-beleaguered January of 1913, Nancy had been seen several times entering and leaving the vicarage at night or in the evening, always when it was dark, always looking furtive, and only on nights when Frances Ive wasn’t at home.
Anyone with a grain of sense would have doubted the story. It is surely impossible to observe a furtive expression, or indeed any expression, on a person’s face in the pitch-darkness. It would have been hard to ascertain the identity of a woman leaving the vicarage in the dead of night unless she had a particularly distinctive gait, and Nancy Ducane did not; indeed, it is more likely that whoever saw her on these several occasions followed her home and found out who she was that way.
It is easier to accept the account of a person more zealous than yourself than to challenge it, and that is what most people in Great Holling did. They were content to trust the rumor and to join Harriet in accusing Patrick Ive of blasphemy and extortion. Most believed (or, to avoid Harriet’s vitriolic scorn, pretended to believe) that Patrick Ive was secretly acting as a conduit for exchanges between the living and the souls of the dead, and taking substantial sums of money from gullible parishioners as recompense. It struck the villagers of Great Holling as eminently plausible that Nancy Ducane would be unable to resist if offered a means of receiving messages from her late husband, William, especially if the offer came from the vicar of the parish. And, yes, she might well pay handsomely for such an arrangement.
The villagers forgot that they knew, liked and trusted Patrick Ive. They ignored what they knew of his decency and kindness, and they disregarded Harriet Sippel’s relish for sniffing out sinners. They fell in with her campaign of spite because they were afraid to attract her wrath, but that was not the only thing that persuaded them. More influential still was the knowledge that Harriet had two substantial allies: Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury had lent their support to her cause.
Ida was known to be the most pious woman in Great Holling. Her faith never wavered, and she rarely opened her mouth to speak without quoting from the New Testament. She was admired and revered by all, even if she was not the sort of woman you would seek out if you wanted to have a riot of a time. She was far from being gay company, but she was the closest thing the village had to a saint all its own. And she was engaged to be married to Richard Negus, a lawyer who was said to have a brilliant mind.
Richard’s considerable intellect and air of quiet authority had earned him the respect of the whole village. He believed the lie when Harriet presented it to him because it tallied with the evidence of his own eyes. He too had seen Nancy Ducane—or at least a woman who might have been Nancy Ducane—leaving the vicarage in the middle of the night on more than one occasion when the vicar’s wife was known to be away visiting her father, or staying in the home of one of her parishioners.
Richard Negus believed the rumor, and so Ida Gransbury believed it too. She was shocked to her core to think that Patrick Ive, a man of the cloth, had been carrying on in such an unchristian fashion. She, Harriet and Richard made it their mission to remove Patrick Ive from his position as vicar of Great Holling, and to see him expelled from the Church. They demanded that he appear in public and admit to his sinful behavior. He declined to do so, since the rumors were untrue.
The villagers’ hatred of Patrick Ive soon expanded to include his wife, Frances, whom people said must have known about the heretical and fraudulent activities of her husband. Frances swore that she did not. At first she tried to say that Patrick would never do such a thing, but when person after person insisted that he had, she stopped saying anything at all.
Only two people in Great Holling declined to participate in the hounding of the Ives: Nancy Ducane (for obvious reasons, some said) and Dr. Ambrose Flowerday, who was particularly vociferous in his defense of Frances Ive. If Frances knew about the unsavory activities that were taking place at the vicarage, he argued, why did they only happen when she was elsewhere? Surely that suggested she was entirely innocent? It was Dr. Flowerday who pointed out that it is impossible to see a guilty expression on a person’s face in the pitch dark, Dr. Flowerday who declared that he intended to believe his friend Patrick Ive unless and until someone produced undeniable evidence of his wrongdoing, Dr. Flowerday who told Harriet Sippel (one day on the street, in front of several witnesses) that she had very likely packed more wickedness into the last half hour than Patrick Ive had committed in his entire life.
Ambrose Flowerday did not make himself popular by taking this view, but he is one of those rare people who does not care what the world thinks of him. He defended Patrick Ive to the Church authorities and told them that, in his opinion, there was not a grain of truth in the rumors. He was dreadfully worried about Frances Ive, who by now was in a pitiful condition. She had stopped eating, hardly slept, and could not under any circumstances be persuaded to leave the vicarage. Patrick Ive was frantic. His position as vicar and his reputation no longer mattered to him, he said. His only wish was to restore his wife to good health.
Nancy Ducane, meanwhile, had said nothing at all, neither confirming nor denying the rumors. The more Harriet Sippel goaded her, the more determined she seemed to remain silent. Then one day, she changed her mind. She told Victor Meakin that she had something important to say to put a stop to the foolishness that had gone on for long enough. Victor Meakin chuckled, rubbed his hands together, and quietly slipped out of the back door of the King’s Head. Very shortly afterward, everybody in Great Holling knew that Nancy Ducane wished to make an announcement.
Patrick and Frances Ive were the only people in the village who did not appear in response to the summons. Everybody else—even the servant girl who had started the rumor and whom no one had seen for weeks—assembled at the King’s Head, eager for the next phase of the drama to begin.
After a brief, warm smile at Ambrose Flowerday, Nancy Ducane assumed a cool and forthright manner to address the crowd. She told them that the story about Patrick Ive taking her money in exchange for communications from her late husband was completely untrue. However, she said, not all of what was being said was a lie. She had, she admitted, visited Patrick Ive in the vicarage at night more than once when his wife was not present. She had done this because she and Patrick Ive were in love.
The villagers gasped in shock. Some started to whisper. Some people covered their mouths with their hands, or clutched the arm of whoever was next to them.
Nancy waited for the hubbub to subside before she continued. “We were wrong to meet in secret and put ourselves in temptation’s way,” she said, “but we could not stay apart. When we met at the vicarage, all we ever did was talk—about our feelings for one another, and how impossible they were. We would agree that we must never be alone together again, but then Frances would go somewhere and . . . well, the strength of our love was such that we could not resist.”
Someone shouted out, “All you did was talk, was it? My eye and Betty Martin!” Once again, Nancy assured the crowd that nothing of a physical nature had taken place between herself and Patrick Ive.
“I have now told you the truth,” she said. “It is a truth I would rather not have told, but it was the only way to put a stop to the vile lies. Those of you who know what it means to feel deep, all-consuming love for another person—you will find yourselves unable to condemn me and unable to condemn Patrick. Those with condemnation in your hearts—you are ignorant of love, and I pity you.”
Then Nancy looked straight at Harriet Sippel and said, “Harriet, I believe you did know true love once, but when you lost George, you chose to forget what you knew. You made an adversary of love and an ally of hate.”
As if determined to prove her right, Harriet Sippel rose to her feet and, after a swift dismissal of Nancy as a lying harlot, began to denounce Patrick Ive more vociferously than ever before: not only did he profit from selling fraudulent encounters with the souls of the dead, but he also consorted with women of loose morals while his wife was away. He was a heretic and an adulterer! He was even worse than she, Harriet, had suspected! It was an outrage, she said, that a man so steeped in sin should be allowed to call himself vicar of Great Holling.
Nancy Ducane left the King’s Head halfway through Harriet’s rousing speech, unable to bear it. A few seconds later, the Ives’ servant girl ran for the door, red-faced and in floods of tears.
Most of the villagers did not know what to think. They were confused by what they had heard. And then Ida Gransbury spoke up in support of Harriet. Though it was unclear what was rumor and what was true, she said, it was surely beyond doubt that Patrick Ive was a sinner of some description and that he could not be allowed to remain in his post as vicar of Great Holling.
Yes, agreed most of the villagers. Yes, that was true.
Richard Negus said nothing, even when called upon to speak by Ida, his fiancée. He told Dr. Ambrose Flowerday later that day that he was worried by the turn events had taken. “A sinner of some description,” while apparently good enough for Ida, was not, he said, good enough for him. He declared himself disgusted by Harriet Sippel’s opportunistic attempt to portray Patrick Ive as guilty twice over, of two sins instead of one. She had taken Nancy Ducane’s “not this but that” and turned it into “this and that” without evidence or justification.
Ida had used the words “beyond doubt” at the King’s Head; what now seemed to Richard Negus to be beyond doubt, he told Ambrose Flowerday, was that people (including himself, to his shame) had been telling lies about Patrick Ive. What if Nancy Ducane had also lied? What if her love for Patrick Ive was unrequited, and he had met her in secret at her insistence, only to try to explain to her that she must desist from harboring these feelings for him?
Dr. Flowerday agreed: no one knew for certain that Patrick Ive had done anything wrong, which had been his opinion of the matter from the start. He was the only person the Ives would admit to the vicarage, and on his next visit, he told Patrick what Nancy Ducane had said at the King’s Head. Patrick simply shook his head. He made no comment on the truth or falsehood of Nancy’s story. Frances Ive, meanwhile, was physically and mentally deteriorating.
Richard Negus failed to persuade Ida Gransbury to see things the way he saw them, and relations between them became strained. The villagers, led by Harriet, continued to persecute Patrick and Frances Ive, shouting accusations outside the vicarage all day and night. Ida continued to petition the Church to remove the Ives from the vicarage, the church and the village of Great Holling, for their own sakes.
And then tragedy struck: Frances Ive, unable to bear the ignominy any longer, swallowed poison and put an end to her unhappy life. Her husband found her and knew straight away that it was too late. There was no point summoning Dr. Flowerday; Frances could not be saved. Patrick Ive knew, also, that he could not live with the guilt and the pain, and so he too took his own life.
Ida Gransbury advised the villagers to pray for mercy for the sinful souls of Patrick and Frances Ive, however unlikely it was that the Lord would forgive them.
Harriet Sippel saw no need to allow the Lord any discretion in the matter; the Ives would burn in hell for ever, she told her flock of righteous persecutors, and it would be no more than they deserved.
Within a few months of the Ives’ deaths, Richard Negus had ended his engagement to Ida Gransbury and left Great Holling. Nancy Ducane left for London, and the servant girl who told the horrible lie was never seen again in the village.
In the meantime, Charles and Margaret Ernst had arrived and taken over at the vicarage. They quickly became friendly with Dr. Ambrose Flowerday, who forced himself to relate the whole tragic tale. He told them that Patrick Ive, whether or not he had made the mistake of harboring a secret passion for Nancy Ducane, had been one of the most generous and benign men he had ever known, and the least deserving of slander.
It was his mention of slander that gave Margaret Ernst the idea for the poem on the gravestone. Charles Ernst was against the idea, not wishing to provoke the villagers, but Margaret stood her ground, determined that Holy Saints Church should display its support for Patrick and Frances Ive. “I would like to do considerably more to Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury than provoke them,” she said. And yes, when she uttered those words, murder was what she had in mind, though only as a fantasy, not as a crime she intended to commit.
AFTER SHE HAD TOLD me the story, Margaret Ernst fell silent. It was a while before either of us spoke.
Finally I said, “I can see why you gave me the name of Nancy Ducane when I asked you who might have a motive. Would she have murdered Richard Negus, though? He withdrew his support for Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury as soon as doubt was cast upon the servant girl’s lie.”
“I can only tell you how I would feel if I were Nancy,” said Margaret. “Would I forgive Richard Negus? No, I would not. Without his early endorsement of the lies told by Harriet and that wretched servant girl, Ida Gransbury might not have believed the nonsense they were spouting. Three people drummed up hostility towards Patrick Ive in Great Holling. Those three people were Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus.”
“What about the servant?”
“Ambrose Flowerday doesn’t believe that she meant to start what she started. She was clearly unhappy as soon as the bad feeling toward the Ives took hold in the village.”
I frowned, dissatisfied. “But from a murderous Nancy Ducane’s point of view—purely for the sake of argument—if she can’t forgive Richard Negus who later saw the error of his ways, why would she forgive the girl who told the lie in the first place?”
“Perhaps she didn’t,” said Margaret. “Perhaps she has murdered her too. I don’t know where the servant ended up, but Nancy Ducane might have known. She could have hunted her down and killed her too. What’s the matter? Your face has turned rather gray.”
“What . . . what was the name of the servant girl who told the lie?” I stammered, fearing I knew the answer. “No, no, it can’t be,” said a voice in my head, “and yet how can it not be?”
“Jennie Hobbs. Mr. Catchpool, are you all right? You don’t look at all well.”
“He was right! She is in danger.”
“Who is ‘He?’ ”
“Hercule Poirot. He’s always right. How is that possible?”
“Why do you sound cross? Did you want him to be wrong?”
“No. No, I suppose not.” I sighed. “Although I am now worried that Jennie Hobbs is not safe, assuming she’s still alive.”
“I see. How strange.”
“What is strange?”
Margaret sighed. “In spite of everything I have said, it’s hard for me to think of anyone being in danger from Nancy. Motive or no motive, I don’t see her committing murder. This will sound peculiar but . . . one cannot kill without immersing oneself in horror and unpleasantness—wouldn’t you say?”
I nodded.
“Nancy liked fun and beauty and pleasure and love. All the happy things. She would want nothing to do with a business as ugly as murder.”
“So if not Nancy Ducane, then who?” I asked. “What about drunk old Walter Stoakley? As Frances Ive’s father, he has a powerful motive. If he laid off the drink for a day or so, it might not be beyond him to kill three people.”
“It would be quite impossible for Walter to lay off the drink even for an hour. I can assure you, Mr. Catchpool, Walter Stoakley is not the man you’re looking for. You see, unlike Nancy Ducane, he never blamed Harriet, Ida and Richard for what happened to Frances. He blamed himself.”
“Hence the drinking?”
“Yes. It is Walter Stoakley that Walter Stoakley set out to kill after he lost his daughter, and he shall very soon succeed, I imagine.”
“In what possible way could Frances’s suicide have been his fault?”
“Walter didn’t always live in Great Holling. He moved here to be closer to Patrick and Frances’s resting place. You will find this difficult to believe, having seen him as he is now, but until Frances’s death, Walter Stoakley was an eminent Classicist, and Master of the University of Cambridge’s Saviour College. That is where Patrick Ive trained for the priesthood. Patrick had no parents. He was orphaned at a young age, and Walter made a sort of protégé of him. Jennie Hobbs, then only seventeen years old, was a bed-maker at the college. She was the best bedder Saviour had, and so Walter Stoakley arranged for her to look after Patrick Ive’s rooms. Then Patrick married Frances Stoakley, Walter’s daughter, and when they moved to Holy Saints Vicarage in Great Holling, Jennie went with them. Do you see?”
I nodded. “Walter Stoakley blames himself for putting Patrick Ive and Jennie Hobbs together. If Patrick and Frances had not taken Jennie with them to Great Holling, she would not have been in a position to tell the terrible lie that led to their deaths.”
“And I would not have to spend my life watching a gravestone to make sure nobody desecrates it.”
“Who would do such a thing?” I asked. “Harriet Sippel? Before she was killed, I mean.”
“Oh, no, Harriet’s weapon was her toxic tongue, not her hands. She would never defile a grave. No, it’s the rowdy young men of the village who would do that, given half a chance. They were children when Patrick and Frances died, but they’ve heard their parents’ stories. If you ask anyone around here, besides me and Ambrose Flowerday, they will tell you that Patrick Ive was a wicked man—that he and his wife practiced black magic. I think most of them believe it more strongly as time goes on. They have to, don’t they? It’s either that or dislike themselves as heartily as I dislike them.”
There was something I wanted to clarify. “Did Richard Negus sever ties with Ida Gransbury because she continued to denounce Patrick Ive after Richard had come to his senses? Was it following Nancy’s announcement at the King’s Head that he ended their engagement?”
A peculiar expression passed across Margaret’s face. She started to say, “That day at the King’s Head was the beginning of . . . ,” then stopped and changed course. “Yes. He found her irrational insistence upon the virtue of her and Harriet’s cause too galling to bear.”
Margaret’s face had a shut-down look about it all of a sudden. I had the impression that there was something important she had chosen not to tell me.
“You mentioned that Frances Ive swallowed poison,” I said. “How? Where did she get it from? And how did Patrick Ive die?”
“The same way: poison. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of abrin?”
“I can’t say I have.”
“It comes from a plant called the rosary pea, common in the tropics. Frances Ive obtained several vials of the stuff from somewhere.”
“Forgive me, but if they both took the same poison and were found together, how was it established that Frances killed herself first and that Patrick only did so after finding her dead?”
Margaret looked wary. “You will repeat what I tell you to no one in Great Holling? Only to Scotland Yard people in London?”
“Yes.” I decided that, for present purposes, Hercule Poirot counted as a Scotland Yard person.
“Frances Ive wrote a note to her husband before she took her own life,” said Margaret. “It was plain that she expected him to survive her. Patrick also left a note that . . .” She stopped.
I waited.
Eventually she said, “The two notes told us the sequence of events.”
“What became of the notes?”
“I destroyed them. Ambrose Flowerday gave them to me, and I threw them on the fire.”
This struck me as most curious. “Why on earth did you do that?” I asked.
“I . . .” Margaret sniffed and turned away. “I don’t know,” she said firmly.
She certainly did know, I thought to myself. It was clear from her clamped-shut mouth that she intended to say no more on the matter. Further interrogation from me would only consolidate her determination to withhold.
I stood to stretch my legs, which had grown stiff. “You’re right about one thing,” I said. “Now that I know the story of Patrick and Frances Ive, I do want to speak to Dr. Ambrose Flowerday. He was here in the village when it all happened. However faithful your account—”
“No. You made me a promise.”
“I should very much like to ask him about Jennie Hobbs, for example.”
“I can tell you about Jennie. What would you like to know? Both Patrick and Frances Ive seemed to think that she was indispensible. They were very fond of her. Everyone else found her to be quiet, polite—harmless enough, until she told a dangerous lie. Personally, I don’t believe that someone who could produce a lie of that sort from thin air can be harmless the rest of the time. And she had ideas above her station. Her way of speaking changed.”
“How?”
“Ambrose said it was very sudden. One day she spoke as you would expect a domestic servant to speak. The next day she had a new, far more polished voice and was speaking very correctly.”
And using correct grammatical constructions, I thought to myself. Oh, please let no one open their mouths. Three mouths, each one with a monogrammed cufflink inside it: grammatically satisfactory. Confound it all, Poirot had probably been right about that too.
“Ambrose said that Jennie altered her voice in imitation of Patrick and Frances Ive. They were both educated, and spoke very well.”
“Margaret, please tell me the truth: why are you so determined that I should not speak to Ambrose Flowerday? Are you afraid of his telling me something you would rather I didn’t know?”
“It would be of no help to you to speak to Ambrose, and it would be a great hindrance to him,” Margaret said firmly. “You have my permission to terrify the life out of any other villagers you come across.” She smiled but her eyes were hard. “They are scared already—the guilty are being picked off one by one, and deep down they must know they are all guilty—but they would be even more afraid if they heard you say that, in your expert opinion, the killer will not be content until all who helped to destroy Patrick and Frances Ive have been dispatched to the fiery pits of hell.”
“That’s rather extreme,” I said.
“I have an unorthodox sense of humor. Charles used to complain about it. I never told him this, but I don’t believe in heaven and hell. Oh, I believe in God, but not the God we hear so much about.”
I must have looked nervous. I did not want to discuss theology; I wanted to return to London as soon as I could and tell Poirot what I had found out.
Margaret continued: “There is only one God, of course, but I don’t believe for a moment that he wants us to follow rules without questioning them, or be unkind to anybody who falls short.” She smiled then with more warmth and said, “I think that God sees the world in the way that I see it, and not at all in the way that Ida Gransbury saw it. Would you agree?”
I gave a noncommittal grunt.
“The Church teaches that only God can judge,” said Margaret. “Why didn’t pious Ida Gransbury point that out to Harriet Sippel and her baying flock? Why did she reserve all of her condemnation for Patrick Ive? If one is going to present oneself as a model of Christianity, one should strive to get the basic teachings right.”
“I see you are still angry about it.”
“I will be angry until my dying day, Mr. Catchpool. Greater sinners persecuting lesser sinners in the name of morality—that’s something worth raging about.”
“Hypocrisy is an ugly thing,” I concurred.
“Besides, one could argue that it cannot be wrong to be with the person you truly love.”
“I’m not sure about that. If a person is married—”
“Oh, fiddlesticks to marriage!” Margaret looked up at the paintings on the parlor wall, then addressed them directly: “I’m sorry, Charles, dear, but if two people love one another, then however inconvenient it is for the Church and however against the rules it might be . . . well, love is love, isn’t it? I know you don’t like it when I say that.”
I can’t say I liked it much either. “Love can cause a whole heap of trouble,” I said. “If Nancy Ducane had not loved Patrick Ive, I would not now have three murders to investigate.”
“What a nonsensical thing to say.” Margaret wrinkled her nose at me. “It is hate that makes people kill, Mr. Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.”
“I have always believed that the hardest rules to follow are the best tests of character,” I told her.
“Yes, but what aspect of our characters do they test? Our credulity, perhaps. Our cloth-headed idiocy. The Bible, with all its rules, is simply a book written by a person or people. It ought to carry a disclaimer, prominently displayed: ‘The word of God, distorted and misrepresented by man.’ ”
“I must go,” I said, uncomfortable about the turn our discussion had taken. “I have to get back to London. Thank you for your time and your help. It has been invaluable.”
“You must forgive me,” Margaret said as she followed me to her front door. “I do not usually speak my mind quite so bluntly, apart from when I am speaking to Ambrose and Charles-on-the-wall.”
“I suppose I should feel honored, in that case,” I said.
“I have spent my whole life following most of the rules in the dusty old Book, Mr. Catchpool. That is how I know it’s a foolish thing to do. Whenever lovers throw caution to the wind and meet when they ought not to . . . I admire them! And whoever murdered Harriet Sippel, I admire that person too. I can’t help it. That doesn’t mean that I condone murder. I don’t. Now, go away before I become even more outspoken.”
As I walked back to the King’s Head, I thought to myself that a conversation was a strange thing that could take you almost anywhere. Often you were left stranded miles from where you had started, with no idea about how to get back. Margaret Ernst’s words rang in my ears as I walked: However against the rules it might be, love is love, isn’t it?
At the King’s Head, I strode past a snoring Walter Stoakley and a pruriently peering Victor Meakin and went upstairs to pack my things.
I caught the next train to London and bade a joyous farewell to Great Holling as the train pulled out of the station. As happy as I was to be leaving the village, I wished I could have spoken to the doctor, Ambrose Flowerday. What would Poirot say when I told him about my promise to Margaret Ernst? He would disapprove, for sure, and say something about the English and their foolish sense of honor, and I would no doubt hang my head and mumble apologetically rather than voice my true opinion on the matter, which is that one always manages to extract more information from people in the end if one respects their wishes. Let people think that you have no wish to force them to tell you what they know, and it’s surprising how often they approach you of their own accord in due course with the very answers you were looking for.
I knew Poirot would disapprove, and I decided not to care. If Margaret Ernst could disagree with God, then it was perfectly all right for me to disagree with Hercule Poirot occasionally. If he wished to interview Dr. Flowerday, he could go to Great Holling and speak to the man himself.
I hoped that it would not be necessary. Nancy Ducane was the person we needed to concentrate on. That and saving the life of Jennie, assuming we were not too late. I was full of remorse on account of having dismissed the possible danger to her. If we did manage to save her, the credit would be all Poirot’s. If we solved the three Bloxham Hotel murders satisfactorily, that would be down to Poirot too. Officially, at Scotland Yard, it would be noted as one of my successes, but everyone would know that it was Poirot’s triumph and not mine. Indeed, it was thanks to my bosses’ knowledge of Poirot’s involvement in the case that they were content to leave me to my own—or rather, to my Belgian friend’s—devices. It was the famous Hercule Poirot they trusted to do as he wished, not me.
I started to wonder if I might not prefer to fail alone and entirely under my own steam than succeed only thanks to Poirot’s involvement, and I fell asleep before I had reached a conclusion.
I had a dream—my first on a train—about being condemned by everybody I knew for something I hadn’t done. In it, I saw my own gravestone clearly, with my name instead of Patrick and Frances Ives’ carved on it, and the “slander’s mark” sonnet beneath. In the earth beside the grave, there was a glint of metal, and I knew somehow that it was a cufflink bearing my initials that was partially buried there. I woke as the train pulled into London, bathed in sweat, my heart beating fit to burst from my chest.