by Emma Jameson
“It was a compliment,” she cried. “A mere acknowledgement of how beautifully your gentle, harmonious natures fit together. Allow me an hour or so off the lead, and I’ll return fed, rejuvenated, and altogether presentable.” She looked down at her overlarge tartan shirt, corduroy trousers, and big black boots. “Well, perhaps not presentable.”
“Go with our compliments,” Lady Victoria said, radiating genuine warmth in Ben’s direction. “Miss Jenkins and I will dine on mutton and summer wine, and miss you not at all.”
“You seem a trifle out of sorts,” Ben said when they were past earshot.
“‘Are you Irish?’” Lady Juliet retorted. Instantly, she sucked in her breath, as if trying to draw the words back in. “Oh, never mind me, I am out of sorts. I’m accustomed to being aggravated all over Birdswing and in every room of the manor, but being aggravated in my garden is a new experience. Well. That is to say, the plants aggravate me sometimes. And the insects. And the soil.” She laughed. “Upon reflection, I’m an entirely unsatisfied creature, and nothing but an enormous piece of pie can set me to rights.”
She set a rapid pace through the red-painted oaks toward Belsham Manor’s mews, a place where sometime in the last twenty years, carriages had given way to automobiles. Ben found that on crutches, he could nearly keep up with Lady Juliet’s great stride. And now that he wasn’t traveling by wheelchair, he didn’t have to crane his neck as far looking up. “So we’re leaving to escape the prune sponge, not the children?”
She tossed him a surprised glance. “I like the children. They’re utterly useless, and I won’t let them touch a rose bush, but they’re no bother in small doses. It’s Mother. Please understand, I love her dearly, and I really must admire any woman who can waft amongst the soil and manure without ever staining a glove.” She stripped off her own gloves, cowhide and well-used, hooking them in her belt. “But by inviting the children, she invited Miss Jenkins, and I cannot abide Miss Jenkins.”
“She seems pleasant enough.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, she’s a pretty face and nothing more. She spent ten minutes discussing her ensemble with Mother. How she bought the chambray from Vine’s and sewed her blouse from a pattern in Women’s Weekly so it would match the skirt. Just as I was about to go in search of hemlock, she switched topics. To her scarf. Canary yellow, because her soldier boyfriend adores her in yellow.”
“Boyfriend?”
Lady Juliet emitted a pained sound. “Boyfriend. Did you think she wouldn’t have one? Ask her about him. He’s a favorite topic of hers, or so I imagine.”
“Imagine? You don’t know?”
“I spend as little time around her as possible.”
Ben’s crutches were crunching against gravel now, the stone and timber mews only a hundred yards away. White-haired, white-mustached Robbie puttered along obliviously just outside the cavernous entrance. “Sounds like you’ve condemned her more for her looks than anything she’s done,” he said mildly.
Lady Juliet drew up short, rounding on him so fast, they almost collided. “That’s quite an accusation! A reckless, unwarranted, egregious accusation!”
He grinned. “That’s the thing about people with an overgrown vocabulary. They can turn a simple observation into a perfidious recrimination quicker than you can say antidisestablishmentarianism.”
Her broad face froze as if caught between a retort and a chuckle. Finally she softened, settling for the latter. “Usually you employ smaller words.”
“Yes, well, never use a bone saw where a scalpel will do. Now drive me somewhere, and let me buy you lunch.”
“Nonsense, I’ll pay my own way and yours too. It’s the least I can do.” She led him into the cool, shadowy mews where the Crossley waited. “Have you learned anything more about that odd little note?”
“No, and that’s what I’d like to talk to you about. If Gaston’s conducting an investigation, it’s so top secret, he should spy for Britain. But Mrs. Cobblepot told me a thing or two. About Penny’s trouble with Mrs. Archer and the Hibbets. I don’t mean to make another accusation,” he added lightly, “or say I’ve come to the conclusion the note was genuine and Penny’s death was no accident. Still.” He stood back as Lady Juliet opened the passenger door for him. “To say she made enemies is no lie. And if he won’t look into it, perhaps I should.”
“I agree. And that makes our choice of where to dine simple,” she said as he used his left leg’s growing strength to pull himself into the cab. “I only hope Archer’s still has pie on the menu.”
* * *
Archer’s restaurant was located far off the high street, in a converted semi-detached house with a patched roof and weed-choked front garden. Its four-paned windows had been painted black, and hastily, too, judging by the dried black splotches marring the sills. A hand-written notice affixed to the front door read:
NEW HOURS 8 TO 3. SUPPER SERVICE CANCELED INDEFINITELY DUE TO GOVERNMENT HARRASSMENT.
“Our intrepid air warden threatened to fine her because a patron left the door open a crack after sundown,” Lady Juliet told Ben in a low voice. “He’s threatened to fine every person in this village, including me, but Helen Archer takes things personally. To hear her tell it, she needs the income from her evening diners—she’s the only villager I know of who claimed she was too poor to buy cardboard and curtains, and went straight to black paint. And she’s petitioning the Ministry of Defense for reimbursement, or so she says. Still, the first time Mr. Gaston cautioned her, she was deeply offended. Called off supper and tacked up that sign.”
Ben thought the writing on that sign, overlarge and a bit wobbly, boded ill. He asked, “How’s the food?”
“Excellent. Or else we’d be in Morton’s café discussing the Hibbet side of the equation.” Lady Juliet opened the door, setting off a jangly bell over their heads. As they entered, Ben felt oppressed by the paneled wood walls and matted burgundy carpet. A single electric fan in the far corner could not move the air fast enough to dispel the sense of suffocation, and a few electric wall sconces did not make up for the gloom perpetrated by those blacked-out windows. The predominant kitchen odor, some kind of roast meat, smelled good. But not good enough to change Ben’s impression of Mrs. Archer’s restaurant as a nursing home for grudges.
There was a long Formica-topped counter with mismatched stools, some round tables and a handful of booths. All the booths were taken, mostly by older women lingering over cups of tea.
“This place used to cater to laborers the way Morton’s caters to old men, and Laviolette’s to those lacking sense of taste or smell,” Lady Juliet whispered to Ben. “Now with most of the men leaving, I suppose Mrs. Archer truly does face hard times. Perhaps I should stop mocking the paint. Though if she hadn’t been in such a rage over the blackout rules, she would have made a better job of it.”
“Lady Juliet. And that must be Penny’s husband,” a flat female voice said. It did not sound pleased.
“Mrs. Archer! What a pleasure, we were just about to claim our seats,” Lady Juliet said, taking a stool beside the dessert case. Ben spied caraway seed cake, custard tarts, and apple pie, and then the proprietress stepped around the counter.
Helen Archer was under forty, he would later learn, but looked fifty. Her gray hair, parted in the middle, had been combed neatly on the left side, yet remained wild and tangled on the right. The left side of her face was unremarkable—cold blue gaze, flared nostril, sullen lips. On the right side, her upper lid drooped over a white shrunken eye. The nostril and tip of the nose were scarred, and her mouth turned down, twisted by pain.
“My scalp hurts. Even my hair hurts. I wear a cap when I cook, which is God’s own torment, but the rest of the day I let it breathe. The shingles,” she said, still in that flat tone. “Being a doctor, you’ll know about that.”
All too well, Ben thought. Some of his older professors at medical school had still thought of this condition, caused by a virus called herpes zoster, as a form of erysipel
as, or “holy fire,” the burning red skin disease that killed St. John of the Cross. Its origins were still somewhat unclear, but the ability of those weeping red sores to flare up without warning, often around the sufferer’s trunk, was well known even to the ancients. In fact, the common name, shingles, came from a Greek word meaning “girdle.” Why the virus attacked one branch of the nervous system over another was still a mystery. But when it flared in the trigeminal nerve, the result could be a scarred nose, a blind eye, or scalp pain that lingered for years. Ben saw no active lesions, which meant Mrs. Archer’s disease, though quiet now, had left her with all three.
“I’m afraid I do. And I’m sorry for your trouble. Shingles is beastly. I’m Ben. Ben Bones.” He offered his hand.
Mrs. Archer studied it for what felt like such a long time, he feared he’d have to withdraw it. Then she sighed, clasped his hand, and gave it a perfunctory shake. “I’m sorry for your loss. That’s not me being insincere, mind you, only decent. What will you have to eat?”
“Is that beef I smell?”
“Minced beef and dumplings. For two?”
“For two,” Lady Juliet agreed.
As Mrs. Archer disappeared through the kitchen’s swinging door, Ben took the stool beside Lady Juliet. “Now that we’re here, I haven’t the faintest idea how to proceed,” he said close to her ear. There it was again, that scent he liked, less heady than a perfume but more pronounced than soap or eau de stick insect.
“I believe the standard course is to demand she account for her whereabouts on the night of the murder,” Lady Juliet whispered back. “Alternately, you tell her you know all, even though you know nothing, and intimidate her into confessing.”
“Trick her into boasting about it while you get Gaston to eavesdrop around a corner?” Ben chuckled. “The cinema makes detective work look so easy.”
“Did you know Mrs. Archer had shingles before she told you?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Observation.”
Lady Juliet’s interest seemed genuine, which was rare in non-medical folk. Most of them ascribed godlike powers to doctors, who were in turn emboldened to ascribe still greater godlike powers to themselves. “But surely many conditions look similar.”
“They do. That’s where questioning—taking the history—and sometimes laying hands on the patient comes in. Plus the differential diagnosis.”
He could practically see the gears turning behind those brown eyes, working out the meaning of the phrase. “Sort of like gardening, eh? Say the whole plant is wilted. Are the leaves a normal color? If yes, check for holes in the stems. If no holes… well, you get the picture. Once you’ve eliminated all the things it isn’t, you arrive at what it is. That must be how a criminal investigation goes, Dr. Bones. Observation, questioning, laying hands on the evidence.”
“So you think I should ask her about Penny?”
Mrs. Archer returned with two steaming plates of minced beef and dumplings. Without asking, she put out two cups and saucers, poured tea, left the pot between them, and disappeared into the kitchen again.
“Oh, do ask her.” Pausing to taste a dumpling, Lady Juliet made a little sound of approval. “This is better than half of what we eat at the manor. Mrs. Archer could put Morton’s out of business if she wasn’t so prickly all the time. And don’t look sidelong at me. Yes, I’m prickly, too, but I don’t rely on the public to pay my salary. And rest assured, she’ll want to discuss her husband’s indiscretions. She’s been quite free on that topic since the day he walked out. Myself, I prefer a narrow list of confidantes. The birds here sing readily enough without me buying them sheet music.”
After that, they ate in companionable silence. When Mrs. Archer returned to take away their empty plates, Lady Juliet ordered a slice of apple pie and asked if she might carry it into the back garden. “I adore your hornbeam tree’s yellow leaves. I’ll sit on the grass and gaze up at them as I eat.”
Shrugging, Mrs. Archer looked at Ben. “Same for you?”
“Yes. And I wonder—might we have a private word?”
“Why? You have a tonic for shingles?” Mrs. Archer’s sagging right eyelid lifted slightly as her left eye went wide. “Oh. Right. I’ll talk to you, doc, but I didn’t write you any note saying sorry.”
“You’ve heard about that?”
“Everyone from here to Barking’s heard about it. Maybe from here to Land’s End. Either Penny was done in by a killer with a conscience, or someone in our midst has a vile sense of humor. You’d think,” she added, ordinarily flat voice gaining sudden expressive bite, “the law in this village would be rooting out that sort of thing, not harassing a poor woman trying to run a business.”
She led him through that swinging door into the kitchen, a reassuringly clean place being made cleaner by two identical boys of about nine. Each had broad shoulders, firm features, and a shock of black hair. Both looked equally sullen, too, one mutinously pushing a mop, the other scouring a prep table with treasonous eyes.
“Caleb and Micah. My sons,” Mrs. Archer told Ben. “On punishment in the kitchen. Lying, this time. Telling our fool of an air warden they saw a plane with German markings flying over Pate Field. Put half the village in an uproar.”
“The stupid half,” one of the twins muttered.
“It’s not for you lot to criticize your betters.” Mrs. Archer glared at them.
“You call Mr. Gaston doolally all the time,” the other twin said.
“Yes, and when you’re a grown man and a taxpayer, you can, too. Now off with you! Get upstairs to your books and see that your homework’s done. I’ll see Miss Jenkins at church tomorrow, and she’ll tell me straight away if it’s not handed in.”
As the boys put away their cleaning gear and hung up their oilcloth aprons, Mrs. Archer led Ben to a table in the far corner. There she put out two cups, and as he sat down to pie and more tea, she produced a box of cigarettes. Taking the seat across from him, she said, “I never smoke around my cooking, not even when it’s safe in the oven. But in the afternoon, give me a ciggie over pudding any day.” Shaking one out, she lit up and pushed the box at him. “You?”
He gave her what he hoped wasn’t a weak-willed smile. “I try to avoid them. And tobacco’s sure to be rationed soon, so now’s the perfect time to go off it.”
Mrs. Archer took a deep drag. “Some days tobacco’s the only relief I get. What you got against it?”
He shrugged. Heaven knew dozens of physicians endorsed tobacco. A few, including a German doctor, had suggested cigarettes were linked to cancer, but the medical establishment took little notice, especially since that unpopular notion was championed in Deutschland. Still, it seemed reasonable to Ben that the deliberate daily inhalation of fumes courted throat and lung irritation, if not worse maladies. So after his injuries, he’d stopped buying cigarettes, and most days he didn’t miss them much. Yet now, after a bite of pie and a sip of tea, he couldn’t resist Mrs. Archer’s offer. Lighting one up, he inhaled with as much pleasure as when he’d picked up the habit, in a place where smoking was ubiquitous: medical school.
“Now. I got to ask.” Mrs. Archer’s tone was flat as ever, giving no hint of what would come next. “Are you broke up over losing Penny? Or thanking God she’s gone?”
Startled, Ben coughed, drank some tea, coughed again, and wondered for the second time in three minutes what his face looked like. Not just now, but in general. Did he seem too cheerful? Had he looked like a happy bachelor, ordering up lunch with Lady Juliet, when a proper widower should have been marinating in his own gloom?
“You don’t have to say it out loud. I just wanted to know for sure.” A faint smile curved the left side of her mouth. “People don’t look at me much since the shingles, but I look at them. Closer than I ever did when I had two good eyes. You seem decent enough to me, Dr. Bones. Toff manners, King’s English, ever so polite with no double-talk, no mockery. Good appetite, too. You aren’t grieving. You were n
ever her sort. I don’t think she even bit you. And if she did, you cut the wound and drew out the venom before it was too late.”
Ben thought about that. And since Mrs. Archer was so frank about her powers of observation, he returned the favor, taking in all she’d said and everything about her, from the wild half of her hair to her frayed shirt collar to that plain gold band, glinting on the third finger of her left hand. “But it was too late for you?”
“Yes. Bobby was the only one for me. So good-looking he put those handsome sons of mine in the shade. I worshipped him, and what’s worse, I trusted him. But he was weak.” Another drag on the cigarette, followed by a slow grudging exhalation. “Penny didn’t even want him, not really. It was a game to her, like everything else. A bit of fun, turning a weak man’s head. Making him believe he was good enough for her sort, that she saw past his wife and babies and dirty hands. She poisoned him, turned him against the life he was made for, left him fit for nothing but the drink. Poisoned me, too. But she didn’t eat me. Only wrapped me up tight and left me hanging in the web. Forever, I suppose.”
“It sounds like you hated Penny enough to kill her.”
“No. I hated her enough to wish her dead, and that’s not the same thing. No crime, either, thank God, or I’d swing ten times over.” Mrs. Archer’s chuckle was as flat as day-old champagne. “And I wouldn’t stand alone on the gallows. Your friend Lady Juliet couldn’t bear Penny.” She twisted the ring on her finger. The band was snug, bought for her hand before its joints reddened and swelled, and now moved only with difficulty. “Lady Juliet’s friend in Plymouth, Mrs. Freeman, grew up in Birdswing, and she loathed Penny, too. But when they get together to moan, they never include me. Likely I don’t use posh enough words when I complain.”
Ben’s instincts told him Mrs. Archer was telling the truth, that her calm, matter-of-fact delivery was no pose. But were the instincts that told him when a patient was being honest sufficient to sort the innocent from the guilty in a murder case?
