The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  I heard them laughing and the gate click, and saw them race across the street to her green open sports coupé that I hadn’t even noticed when I came in, and heard its soft powerful motor whirr. And then I saw it slip away, with Bill at the wheel. I believe it’s considered very subtle flattery to let a man drive one’s car.

  People say the early colonists used to stand on Capitol Landing and watch the ships round the bend for home and England with very heavy hearts indeed. They couldn’t have been much heavier than mine was, watching that car go round the curve into Woodpecker Street and out toward the York Road…especially as the Palace was in exactly the opposite direction.

  CHAPTER 10

  Bill didn’t, of course, get home to supper. I don’t think I really expected he would—there had been something so like carefree escape in the way that car had gathered speed toward the open road. But I should never have admitted it—not openly, the way Community did. And I hadn’t even known she knew anything had happened until I sat down at the table and saw the dreary York River flounder in front of me instead of the golden mountains of fried chicken and Sally Lunn I’d ordered because Bill had never eaten either Sally Lunn or enough fried chicken.

  For the first time since I’d got used to being the sole occupant of the house, I felt poignantly and intolerably lonely, sitting there at the end of the long mahogany table. My great-great-grandfather looked soberly down at me from the white painted overmantel. My great-grandmother, holding a single damask rose in her pale hands, looked down from the panel over the sideboard. We seemed, just then, all equally of the dead past. Bill and Ruth Napier and Faith—they were the present. And that night—and I’m rather ashamed to admit it, but since the Restoration has come, and manna seems to rain from it instead of Heaven, I’m afraid I’ve got a little remiss about saying them—I said my prayers not for a patch on the roof, but for Bill and Faith Yardley, and Doctor Yardley. Possibly if I’d included Melusina and Ruth Napier, and Hallie Taswell, and even the dead Mason Seymour and his man Luton, they’d have been answered more readily. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Or perhaps I was just then learning what I should have learned with its first touch of colic if one of them had been my own child—though I believe children very sensibly don’t have colic any more: that each human being’s life is his own, and so is his destiny, and no matter how close we are we’re still as far apart as the stars… and that for each of us pain, especially pain, has an inviolable personal orbit of its own.

  I wasn’t thinking that then as I sat there at the table, trying to choke down flat bits of flounder fried in coarse white cornmeal. The old blue willow platter and the silver dish with the dab of green peas and mint leaves in the bottom swam in front of my eyes. And then through the flickering unsteady candlelight something else swam too. I had to catch my fork sharply to keep it from falling, and tell myself it wasn’t a ghost, no matter how much she looked like one, standing there in the open door with her hair a nimbus of gold-colored light, her wide grey eyes dark like summer dusk.

  I pushed my chair back and got up, realizing with a sharp pang that this was why I’d been so unbearably lonely. It wasn’t that my loyalties had changed, but because I’d been afraid in my own heart that Bill Haines and Melusina together had driven Faith away from me, and that she wouldn’t come back to me, or not soon, and when she did she wouldn’t be the child grown up, trudging across the Court House Green to make daily grave little visits of state.

  Across the pointed yellow candle tips I saw her gallant little smile and the quick proud toss of her head that was hardly that as much as it was an association in my own brain of a kind of challenge she was meeting, coming here. We went together, without either of us speaking, back into the parlor. My own heart was far too full to speak and still make sense.

  “I had to come tell you I’m sorry about what I said,” she said softly, pulling up a horsehair gout stool that some early forbear of mine addicted to too much port had brought from England, and sitting down at my feet. “I was…very upset, and I was so afraid Aunt Melusina would do something to make this all…so much worse. Oh, I suppose she means well, Cousin Lucy, but—that doesn’t make it any less…embarrassing, and awful. Does it?”

  “No,” I said, picking up my work. “It probably makes it worse.”

  She sat there looking straight ahead of her for a long time, her slim brown arms resting across the sock I’ve been eight months knitting for some Eskimo who’d probably much prefer reindeer hide next to his feet.

  “Cousin Lucy, did you ever…ever hate anybody almost more than you could bear?” she whispered, suddenly and with so much passion that I should have been alarmed and shocked if I hadn’t seen the bright tears glistening on her long dark lashes.

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s too corrosive. It only hurts the person who does the hating. Of course, there have been a thousand people I could cheerfully have boiled in oil, but it never lasts more than a minute or two.”

  “But I really hate Aunt Melusina,” Faith whispered again. “I really do, Cousin Lucy. I’ve tried to keep away from her all last night and today—even before what she was saying to you. Because…oh, no, it’s such a dreadful thing to say!”

  “In that case you’d better say it, honey lamb, and get it out of your mind, and then we’ll both forget it,” I said. Which shows, I’m afraid, that Melusina isn’t the only one who can mean well and still be very stupid indeed.

  “I mean about all my whole life making me do things I hated because Father wanted me to—like marrying…Mason to keep from selling Yardley Hall, and all that, because there’s nothing I wouldn’t do if he wanted me to, and she’s known it all the time. And all my life I’ve just taken it for granted that when she said ‘Your father says he wants you to wear your overshoes,’ or ‘eat your rhubarb,’ or ‘wear your sunbonnet so you won’t get freckles,’…that it really meant that, that she’d really, some way, got the orders from him. I didn’t care who made fun of my sunbonnet or my funny shoes. I was proud, because I was doing it for him.—You know?”

  She gave me a twisted unconvincing smile.

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “Well, last night, at dinner…” She hesitated, and looked down, biting her red lower lip to steady it. “Father put his napkin down and said—oh, so quietly, the way he does—‘Daughter, unless you’re very sure your happiness depends on your marriage with Mason Seymour, I strongly suggest that you withdraw from your understanding with him at once.’ I couldn’t believe my ears…not until I saw Aunt Melusina. She was utterly speechless, Cousin Lucy. You know—”

  “Yes, I know,” I said hastily.

  “Marshall and I just sat there, and then Aunt Melusina broke loose, and said…oh, all sorts of things—ending with that we’d have to sell the house to vandals. Father just sat looking at her, and then all of a sudden his eyes were like they’d caught on fire. He got up, and even Aunt Melusina looked frightened. He didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t have to—he just said, ‘That’s enough, Melusina. I’d rather sell my house than sell my soul, but I’d rather sell both of them than sell my daughter.’”

  Faith’s eyes were like two dark stars.

  “It was me he meant, Cousin Lucy!” she whispered—poor hungry lamb!

  “Then he said, ‘I don’t wish the matter referred to again… and hereafter I shall expect to be advised of what is going on in this household.’—He hadn’t even known… and he’s never known anything…I mean about the rhubarb, or the sunbonnet, or my doing things for him.”

  Her eyes were suddenly bright with tears, but she blinked them back, trying to smile as if it was all very silly, really. And of course, it was ironic in the extreme that marriage, and Mason Seymour, and death all crowded overwhelmingly together in one pan of the scales were nothing against a fragile childhood sacrifice made for love in the other. But I’m told there are psychologists who think that what happens before
one is two is more important than anything else that happens this side of the grave. So perhaps Faith Yardley was quite innocently fulfilling a high law. I’m sure I shouldn’t attempt to judge—beyond its very immediate irony.

  “Then he left the room, and Aunt Melusina nearly went out of her mind,” she went on, in a controlled grown-up voice again. “I just sat there. I scarcely heard what she was saying, except that it was something awful she’d done that they’d send us all to jail for. All I could think of was that I didn’t have to marry Mason Seymour now, and it was just as if somebody had taken a lot of heavy chains off me that I hadn’t really known I’d had on.

  “I expect that sounds very silly, Cousin Lucy,” she added, with a sudden flash of her old prim gravity, so that for a moment all I could see was the stodgy little buttoned boots and the snub freckled nose and tight plaited hair, all denying the loveliness of the girl at my knee pulling the hard-won stitches—I don’t really like to knit—out of the missionary sock with the pressure of her brown arms across my lap.

  “Then I sort of came to—as if I’d been sitting in a dream—and saw Marshall trying to make her be quiet, telling her that they couldn’t send Father to jail and that he’d go and see Mason. Oh, Cousin Lucy, it was dreadful! Marshall was white as that paper, and Aunt Melusina was like an old rag that’s been wrung out in coffee.”

  Faith’s eyes were wide and almost black, remembering. Her mat brown skin was pale. She gripped her folded hands tighter to keep her arms from trembling on my lap.

  “But Aunt Melusina wouldn’t let Marshall go. He tried to loosen her hands, but she kept holding him back and he didn’t want to be unkind. Then she…she sort of flew at me, saying I’d given my promise, it was my duty. Then Marshall jerked away. I’ve never seen him defy her before. He was terribly, terribly angry.—’It’s nothing of the sort, and don’t you dare say that to her again!’ And out he went.”

  She sat almost rigid for a moment. Then she got up and moved over to the fireplace, and stood looking down just the way her father had done that morning. The candlelight on her hair made it glow like molten gold against the lead-blue overmantel. When she spoke again there was a note of weariness in her voice that I’d never heard there before.

  “It seems that Aunt Melusina had…involved us all, much more than we knew—or she knew either, I suppose. Because she came upstairs after me and explained she hadn’t dared tell Marshall everything, but that unless I did go through with it Mason could take the house and everything, and leave nothing for…for Father.”

  She drew a deep unhappy breath.

  “I never knew I could…well, hate anybody so much, Cousin Lucy. It was just as if everything inside me had turned to…oh, well, it doesn’t matter now—I mean that doesn’t.”

  She turned to me suddenly.

  “Have you ever been terribly, terribly afraid, Cousin Lucy?” she said softly.

  I nodded. In the years before the Restoration I’d been afraid—terribly afraid—of the grim grey sisters who crept with me up and down the rickety stairs and stood beside my bed. Now Old Age had taken on a kinder face since Homeless Poverty had gone. But I had known fear, and I recognized it now as it seeped like a numbing vapor into my heart again as I sat there, my bone needles motionless in my lap, looking at Faith.

  “I’ve got to tell somebody, Cousin Lucy, or I’ll go mad!”

  I tried to open my lips to tell her not to tell, but they wouldn’t move. She stood there silently looking down for a moment, then she sat down on the ottoman where Ruth Napier had sat and moved so Bill could sit beside her, and leaned toward me, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

  “I went downstairs to phone Mason. Luton answered and said he was engaged.”

  She went on quickly, her voice like soft running feet in a distant room coming closer.

  “I asked him if it was my cousin. He said he wasn’t at liberty to say who was with Mr. Seymour. In just a few minutes I heard Marshall come in and go into the library. I tried to get Mason again, but nobody answered the phone. Then I guess I got sort of scared. I don’t know, but the house seemed so still, and at the other end the phone ringing in Mason’s house with no one answering… I got the sudden feeling that I was the only person in all the world. When I held my breath I couldn’t hear a sound. Anyway, I ran down the hall to the library. The door was closed, of course, but I didn’t wait to knock—I knew Father would understand and wouldn’t mind. But nobody was there, Cousin Lucy…just a curl of smoke that hadn’t all disappeared yet. The window was open. I ran to it and called, but no one answered.

  “It seemed too strange… and then I turned around, and there were all Father’s things, his glasses on his book, the medicine he’d mixed for Abraham’s rheumatism… And that’s when I decided really I would go on with Mason. I know it sounds horrible… but he was getting what he must have thought he wanted. I mean, Aunt Melusina hadn’t made him want to marry me, had she?”

  I shook my head. That was one thing Melusina hadn’t had the least hand in. If the Adam mirror at the end of the room hadn’t been so mildewed even Faith herself must have realized it, just then.

  “Anyway,” she went on quickly, “I tried to phone Mason again, and I still couldn’t get him. Then I got a panicky feeling that what if Father and Marshall had gone to see him, not knowing about any of the other—and I knew I had to see him first. That’s why I went over. I know it was a dreadful thing to do, Cousin Lucy, but I had to—don’t you see?—before anything happened.”

  “What time was that, Faith, do you know?”

  “I know the ten-thirty train went by as I was going down Mason’s path,” she answered. “But that was…later.”

  She stopped. The color deepened in her cheeks, and something very like resentment drove the fear out of her eyes for the moment.

  “When did you meet Bill Haines?” I asked, as quietly as I could.

  “He told you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then how did you know…?”

  “I just guessed it,” I said. I couldn’t say, “Both of you are as transparent as an April shower.”

  “He was just coming out of Mason’s gate,” Faith said steadily. “He closed it and stood in front of it and said, ‘What is this, ladies’ day at the races?’ I suppose it was silly, but I got very angry.”

  She looked down at the roses and lilies in the carpet.

  “I guess I must have sounded just like Aunt Melusina. I said a lot of things I wouldn’t have said if…well, if it hadn’t been for something that happened after lunch that…that came back into my mind the minute Father said I didn’t have to marry Mason.”

  I took up my knitting. She hadn’t been as impervious to Bill’s yarn about the inscription on their table at home—“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”—as she’d appeared to be, I thought. Bill’s presence there blocking the gate had somehow allayed the fear in my heart… but only for a moment, because she went on.

  “I told him I was going to marry Mason, and he said, ‘But your father says you’re not,’ and I said Father was mistaken, and anybody else who said I wasn’t was mistaken, and that I knew quite well what I was doing, and that I…oh, a lot of things I didn’t mean, and didn’t want to say, and hated myself for all the time I was saying them.”

  “What did he do?”

  “What could he do but tip his hat and say ‘I’m sorry,’ and stand aside. But he didn’t open the gate. I had to do that myself, and I couldn’t. My hands were shaking. I was so angry… and miserable too, I guess. He said, ‘There, you see? A wooden gate post has sense enough to see it’s no good. Even if you leave me out, Faith, don’t go down there tonight. Go home and sleep on it.’”

  “Very sound too,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I know,” she said wretchedly. “But just then the gate came open and I ran down the path. I was almost in t
ears, and I…I didn’t want him to see me crying. Anyway, I got to the door, and then I…I got cold feet. I would have gone back then, but I could see Bill still standing back there. So I went up on the porch. The door was open. I knocked, but nobody answered. I waited a long time, and called. Then I thought maybe Mason was in the garden, because I knew he’d never go away and leave the house open like that—he was too careful of his things and never understood how we left our doors open all the time.”

  She hesitated. She was even paler under her brown skin than when she’d first come.

  “Then I got awfully alarmed, some way. I looked back. Bill was gone. It was all so terribly still. The only sound was that little enamelled clock on the parlor mantel, and it seemed to be going so fast, as if it had to catch up with something that was getting way ahead of it. The library door was closed. I knocked at it, but nobody answered. I started to open it… and a funny thing happened, Cousin Lucy.”

  All the color was drained from her face now, leaving only her red lips and her eyes dark like great subterranean lakes.

  “Nobody would believe me, but it’s really true,” she whispered. “As I stood by that door, something touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Don’t go in there, Faith’…just as plain as I’m speaking to you, Cousin Lucy. For a minute I even thought it was Bill. I looked around.—Nobody was there, and I…I knew nobody had been there.”

  I put down my sock and looked at her. There was something so translucently lovely in her face that it didn’t seem strange or far-fetched to me that some manifestation of what simpler people used to call a guardian angel might very easily have spoken to her that night. But the Rector has frequently complained of my unorthodoxy, and perhaps it was just Faith’s subconscious mind… although I’m sure I don’t see that it matters a great deal what you call it.