The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  It was the first time for years and years that I’d been in that old pine-panelled room, with its side walls covered with mellow calf bindings, and high carved overmantel with the dim portrait of the first Sir Robert Yardley, with the tower of the Jamestown church behind his left shoulder and the sails of the little ship with the English flag at his right. The old turkey carpet was still on the floor, and the green corded silk curtains, stained and faded with sunlight and age, were still at the windows. The big globe of a long-changed world was there too, and in the corner the old mahogany press, behind whose close-curtained doors, neatly packed against time and rust, were Doctor Yardley’s medical instruments…including, I thought with sudden irony, the forceps that had brought young John Crabtree reluctantly into the world, leaving a mark now faded that used to be the source of unwearied interest when he was a lad.

  Doctor Yardley sat down behind the walnut Queen Anne table, folded his hands on its tooled leather cover, and looked at me.

  “I went to call on Mason Seymour last evening, Lucy,” he said quietly.

  I nodded.

  “I became convinced that you were quite right—it would have been most inappropriate and unsuitable for…my daughter to marry him.”

  I nodded again.

  He got up and moved over to the fireplace, and stood, one hand resting on the mantel, looking down into the empty grate.

  “Melusina hasn’t been as discreet as she might have been,” he said, after a moment. “But there are things worse than death. We sometimes have…obligations to the living that are greater…”

  He hesitated.

  “Well, no matter. Lucy, I only wanted to say that if you hear things that seem very strange to you, just remember that…”

  He stopped again, and stood there, lost in his own solitary world so long that I thought he’d forgotten me and moved toward the door. He looked up, his face strangely contracted.

  “Lucy,” he said abruptly, “—has Marshall…declared himself?”

  I was completely bowled over.

  “I’m—sure I don’t know,” I stammered. “I certainly shouldn’t think so…I mean—”

  “No, I presume he hasn’t. Well, no matter. It’s most unfortunate—I wish it could have been avoided.”

  I got out at that point. Unfortunate, I thought, was hardly the word for it. Not even Melusina could approve of Marshall Yardley’s marrying a girl who played hide and seek around a bachelor’s establishment at ten o’clock at night the very day his engagement was announced. I believe they’re broader about these things in the North, but I doubt even if one lived as far north as the Pole one could approve of that.

  “Declared himself indeed!” I thought, crossing the hall to tell Bill Haines I wouldn’t be but a moment now.

  CHAPTER 9

  I didn’t get more than halfway to the door before I stopped dead. Voices, angry and subdued with obvious effort, were coming out of the parlor where Lady Anne’s portrait with the saber cut in it hung between the windows. One of them—the one doing the talking—was William Quincy Adams Haines’s.

  “It’s just as distasteful for me to be here, Miss Yardley, as it is for you to have me here. After last night I thought I’d never see you again—but I’m not running out till I’ve done as much as I can to keep them from tying a noose around your neck…whether you like it or not. And the sooner I can pass you in the street, and not have Miss Lucy and your father and the local constabulary wonder why we’re not speaking, the better I’ll like it. Just get that straight, sister.”

  I don’t think I ever got up a flight of stairs quicker or more quietly in my entire life. I know it was the first time in all my life that I burst into Melusina Yardley’s room without first rapping and waiting to be told to come in. And it was probably the one time when I should have waited. At least it was if I was to judge by the extraordinary expression on the face of Melusina, propped up on a dozen pillows in the middle of her fourposter bed with its crisp muslin curtains, a crocheted cap on her head, her face covered with cold cream that I knew was there to hide the haggard expression she couldn’t keep from looking out of her eyes.

  But it was the other woman who was the most overcome. Hallie Taswell, in her sprigged muslin Colonial hostess gown, with cerise velvet bows on her frilled white fichu and white ruffed sleeves and frilled cap, and paint enough on her face to stop a train, looked as if she’d swoon. She jerked back in her chair—she and Melusina must have had their heads together like a couple of hungry magpies—and batted her eyes.

  “Oh, Lucy!” she cried. “Dear Lucy—oh, isn’t it dreadful about poor Mason!”

  “It surely is,” I replied stiffly, and I hope I shan’t be called to account for it on Judgment Day, because I didn’t actually intend to say it, and nobody was more surprised than I was to hear myself saying it. “And they’re hunting for a woman who’s been slipping through the hedge from Mason Seymour’s garden into the Lanes’ old place and out. It seems,” I said, “some one’s been making a practice of that.”

  It was a horrible thing to have said.—After what I’d said to Bill Haines when we’d seen her, tear-streaked and upset, the day before, about his being an intolerant young man. Especially, of course, as it was me myself they were hunting, not poor Hallie. But the effect of it was even worse than I could have believed! She turned a perfectly ghastly greenish-white, and her fluttering hands were as still as still, until one of them crawled, shaking horribly, to her throat, clutching at it as if she were going to die.

  “Oh, my God!” she gasped. “They mustn’t, Lucy! They mustn’t!”

  Melusina, who had stiffened against her pillows in outraged propriety, snapped her mouth shut, and opened it immediately.

  “Hallie!—Have you been going to Mason Seymour’s?”

  “Just once, Melusina…just yesterday, after I saw the paper!” Hallie cried piteously. “You must believe me!”

  “Then you’re an even bigger donkey than I took you to be,” Melusina said acidly. “And my advice to you, Hallie Taswell, is to go home and take off that rig, and tell your husband the whole ridiculous business!”

  She took a deep breath. “—I am surprised!”

  I stared at her. It couldn’t, I thought, be possible she didn’t already know all this. Everybody in town knew that Hallie had been making the most extraordinary donkey of herself for months. Melusina must have heard her say a dozen times, with that smug simper, that if she wanted to she could divorce Hugh just like that, and do very much better for herself. And when Hallie got out of the room, which I may say she did with incredible despatch, I turned to Melusina.

  “You don’t mean this is the first you’ve heard of all this?” I demanded.

  Melusina poured some witch hazel on the pad in her hand and laid it over her eyes, and leaned her head back against the pillows.

  “Oh, of course not, Lucy,” she said heavily. “But there are times when it’s so much simpler not to know too much. Especially as Hallie’s been here the last hour trying to get out of me how much everybody does know—or worse, how much they suspect. Twelve hours ago there was not a person in town wouldn’t have been too happy for the chance to tell her at length—now nobody will open their heads.”

  There was no reason why I should have been surprised, and I wasn’t, really.

  “Just how much do you know?” I asked. “Not about Hallie. About Mason Seymour.”

  “Not a thing, Lucy,” she replied evenly. “—Except that it’s a great pity.”

  “Because of Faith?”

  She took the compress off her eyes and looked at me.

  “We had decided last night to break the engagement, Lucy—before any of this happened.”

  She spoke with a kind of even tartness.

  “That’s for your private ear. My brother proved exceedingly recalcitrant.”

  “Really?”

 
“Yes. But that—as it happens—isn’t what I want to speak to you about. It was, when I phoned this morning, because I didn’t, at that time, know poor Mason was dead.”

  I stared at her. She met my gaze with perfect—or almost perfect—composure. I thought for a moment that I had never in my life seen anything to equal it. And yet, when I stopped to think, I had no right to doubt her word. Just because I’d known for hours that Mason Seymour was dead was no sign every one else did. But there was something in the way she underlined each word as she spoke it.

  “Since it was you, Lucy,” she was going on, not taking her eyes off me, “that set my brother against Mason in the first place, I thought the least you could do—for all of us—was to undo the damage you’d done. I didn’t at that time know that you had something else in your mind… although I suppose I should have suspected.”

  I must have looked perfectly blank. I certainly felt it.

  Melusina leaned forward a little.

  “Lucy,” she said, almost entreatingly. “Why couldn’t you have been frank with me? It would have saved all of us so much…so much heartache!”

  I just sat perfectly limp in the chair Hallie Taswell had vacated, completely bewildered.

  “Why couldn’t you have come to me and told me who the young man you sent to my brother was?”

  I stared at her. “I didn’t send him, in the first place,” I literally blurted out then. “And who is he in the second?”

  Melusina put her head back against the pillows and closed her eyes. There wasn’t any cold cream on her eyelids, so that they looked odd and dry, like a mud terrapin’s. Her lips were trembling and her hands plucked at the counterpane.

  “You’re being stupid and unkind, Lucy,” she said, controlling herself with an effort.

  “About what?” I cried. “I wish you’d tell me what you’re talking about!”

  “Now, Lucy,” she said tartly. “Don’t get hysterics. You know quite well what I’m talking about. Hallie went to your house before she came here, and she saw Summers Baldwin’s card introducing this young man on your parlor table. She didn’t have time to read all of it, apparently—Community interrupted her—but obviously if Summers Baldwin sent him, he must be a highly eligible young man.”

  She took a deep breath and went on.

  “I dare say it never occurred to Summers that we, at Yardley Hall, would stoop to take in a…guest, which is why he sent him to you. But there’s no doubt the young man was greatly attracted to Faith. Even my brother noticed that, and I must say it was rather clever of you, arranging it all the way you did. It will no doubt be an excellent match for Faith.”

  I was staring at her open-mouthed, appalled, almost sick, at this extraordinary leaping to conclusions with all the amazing agility of a super-mountain goat. I was so appalled that I hadn’t seen the door open, nor seen Faith Yardley standing in it—how long heaven only knows but far, far too long—until I saw Melusina’s jaw drop and saw her eyes fastened in the dim old Adam mirror over the fireplace. And as I looked at her she seemed literally to shrink.

  I turned around, and that’s when I saw Faith standing there, her eyes as black as living coals, her face white as death. At first she didn’t move, and then she did, coming in slowly, never taking her burning eyes off her aunt. She closed the door behind her and stood against it, her hands gripping the knob, steadying her trembling body. And then she spoke, her voice so cold and distilled with passion that my insides shrivelled like a strip of bacon on white-hot coals. Melusina’s face under the cold cream was putty-grey.

  “Listen, Aunt Melusina,” Faith said. “I agreed to marry Mason Seymour because you made me believe it was what my father wanted me to do. I would have done it, and done the best I could at it. But that’s the last thing I’ll ever do. And as for Mr. Haines, I wouldn’t marry him if he was the King of the Golden Mountains—even if he wanted me to, which it happens he doesn’t.

  “And there’s one thing I do want, and I’m going to have. And that’s for you to let me alone and never again as long as you live meddle in my life again. You’ve done your best to ruin it. Now leave it alone.”

  She turned slowly to me, almost as if she hated me, at first, until her frozen calm broke and she cried, suddenly and passionately, “Oh, Cousin Lucy, how could you? How could you? I’ve always thought you were my one friend! How could you scheme and plot with Aunt Melusina and with…with him to make a fool of me!”

  She turned and fled out the door, almost strangled with sobs.

  Melusina and I sat there, dumb and old. It was she, of course, who got her voice back first.

  “Well, Lucinda,” she said sharply. “You’ve certainly made a mess of that.”

  And I suppose I had, although heaven knows I couldn’t make out where my mess left off and somebody else’s began.

  I was even deeper in fog when I got home—I don’t even know how—and crept into my sitting room, darkened against the glaring midday sun, and collapsed on the sofa and closed my eyes. Then I opened them again, abruptly, and sat up, suddenly aware that Ruth Napier, of all people on earth, was sitting quietly on the needle-point ottoman in front of the fireplace.

  I couldn’t for a moment believe my eyes. I thought I must be losing my mind.

  “You’re surprised to see me, aren’t you, Miss Randolph?” she said with a twisted smile.

  “Very,” I said, and thought, “oh, dear, how much like Melusina I’m getting to sound.”

  “You look all in,” she remarked coolly.

  “I am,” I said.

  Then we just sat there, both of us, looking at each other. I don’t know what she was thinking. I was thinking how amazingly untouched she seemed by Mason Seymour’s death, and how strikingly good-looking she was.

  She had on a riding coat, perfectly tailored, of a coarse white stuff, salt sacking I think it is, with tan twill jodhpurs and brown jodhpur boots. Her white silk shirt was open at the throat, and her thick black hair, tied back with a ribbon around her head, hung in heavy wavy masses around her slim brown throat. Her large liquid dark eyes looked apparently untroubled out from under two perfectly arched narrow black eyebrows, and her thin oval face had an exotic kind of beauty I should have thought would have appealed very strongly to Mason Seymour. Only a faint pallor around her nostrils, spreading down around her small scarlet mouth, indicated that somewhere behind all that perfect façade there was anything remotely resembling pain…or fear.

  “I’ve been coming to see you a long time,” she said. She looked at me, tracing the roses in the carpet with the end of her plaited leather crop.

  I smiled. Her eyes tightened. I think it was then she decided to change her method and come to the point, because she said, “This Mr. Haines who’s staying with you, Miss Randolph. Was he a…friend of Mason’s?”

  “I really haven’t an idea,” I said.

  She straightened one neat leg, fished in her jodhpurs pocket, brought out a leather cigarette case, flexed her knee again and sat there with the case in her hands between her slim knees.

  “And if you had you wouldn’t tell me, is that it?” she asked coolly.

  “Something of the sort,” I answered. “After all, his business is his own, isn’t it?”

  She took a cigarette out and tapped it meditatively against her knee. “She must be about twenty-five or twenty-six,” I thought, “but she doesn’t look it—except that she doesn’t look as much like a young green sapling as Faith does, and Faith’s twenty-one.”

  “He’s very attractive, isn’t he?” she said, a slow little smile just in one corner of her red mouth.

  “Very,” I said.

  I don’t know why my heart began to sink very slowly. Or rather I do, of course, and part of it was because I heard the latch of the front gate click, and heavy steps on the brick walk until the hinge of the office door groaned.

  Ruth Napi
er’s eyes moved from the window to me, the smile in her dark eyes deepening warily. Then, almost at once, the hinge groaned again. Her lithe body straightened, but when my knocker banged perfunctorily she relaxed, and when Bill shouted “Hey, Miss Lucy, you home?” and pushed open the sitting room door, she wasn’t even looking up.

  Not till he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t—” and I said, “Do come in.” Then she looked up, and her face took on the most pleasant naïve surprise, just as if she were actually saying out loud, “How extraordinary seeing any one so marvelous just walk in a door!”

  And Bill, whose reaction time when it comes to young women I knew from experience was anything but slow, went through a short kaleidoscope from annoyance to surprise to a pleased grin. Flesh and blood couldn’t have done otherwise.

  “This is Miss Napier, Mr. Haines,” I said.

  She looked up at him with a gay open smile and held out her hand, moving over so he could sit down beside her on the ottoman.

  “I hear you’re an architect,” she said. I glanced at the table. Summers Baldwin’s card was gone, but it certainly had done its job of introducing Mr. William Quincy Adams Haines to Williamsburg society, I thought sardonically.

  “You’ve come to the one most marvelous place in the entire world—hasn’t he, Miss Randolph?” Ruth Napier laughed. “But of course the people who’ve always lived here can’t appreciate it, they don’t know about subways and zoning laws. Don’t you adore the supper room in the Palace?”

  “I haven’t seen it,” Bill grinned. “I just got here. I haven’t been any place.”

  “But how thrilling, to have it all ahead of you! You must see the Palace, I’m simply mad about it! It’s too lovely! Oh, do come right now—I adore going with people who’re seeing it for the first time! You mustn’t wait another minute, must he, Miss Randolph?”

  I’m sure I haven’t given a very clear account of just how that happened. It was all so much smoother and more natural and charmingly casual than it sounds…her just chancing to meet him there, and his being the one architect in the world who hadn’t seen the Palace, and she being so perfectly just the person to show it to him because she was so completely mad about it! And of course a riper plum never sat on a tree waiting to be shaken off.