The Town Cried Murder

by Leslie Ford

  “No, I believe I’d better go along home, thank you, Cousin Lucy,” she said evenly.

  She picked up her blue cartwheel hat and smiled, and the gold tip of her head, like the flame of a candle Marshall was carrying in his hand, was all I saw past his dark solid figure as she went out the door in front of him.

  I let my head rest back against the carved rosewood frame of the rocking chair and closed my eyes. I heard the gate click, and followed them in my mind each step of the way down Francis Street, across the Market Square by the Powder Horn, across the Court House Green into England Street, into Scotland Street along under the tumorous paper mulberries, through the garden gate, through the dark mountains of box…to the well house. Then in my inner ear I could hear the thin sound of that chain again, and the plop of the oak bucket, and I could see the shadowy hand in the moonlight, and the blood against the whitewashed board.

  My heart stood almost paralyzed with fear as I waited, minute after minute dragging hour-long. Then I got up and ran to the phone. At last—it seemed years and years—I heard Doctor Yardley’s mild quiet voice at the other end.… I’d never heard him answer the phone before.

  “Why, no, Lucy, they haven’t come. Is anything the matter? She’s perfectly safe with her cousin, my dear…”

  And then after a long silence: “Why, yes, here they come, down the Palace walk.”

  I hung up the phone, my hand shaking like a sear dead ivy leaf against a closed shutter. They hadn’t taken the path past the well, then, I thought, and somehow it seemed to confirm the fear in my heart.

  I went slowly back to the parlor door and stood there with a seasick feeling in my stomach, not knowing what I could do, and knowing that whatever I did would be just wrong. I don’t know now how long it was that I stood there before an odd scratching sound outside the house got through, like a bad telephone connection, to my conscious mind. It seemed to me that I’d been hearing it, when I finally did hear it, for a long, long time. It came from the garden door at the back end of the hall, which was strange, because Community had been gone for some time and I couldn’t think of any one else who’d be likely to be back there at half-past nine at night.

  I suppose one of the bad things about fear is that it distorts and stains all parts of one’s fife, not just a narrow immediate bit of it, and makes warm friendly things cold and unfriendly…so that I stood there, hesitating even to go to my own back door. Then after a moment I said, “Don’t be ridiculous!” and went back…turning on a lot of lights, however. Rather more than the occasion seemed a moment later to warrant, I’m afraid, for when I got the door opened it was George Luton, Mason Seymour’s valet, butler, secretary and what-not, who was out there. He was sort of batting about in the dark, hunting a door, the way a tired moth miller hits against a lighted screen.

  CHAPTER 13

  He looked startled too, from the way the house was suddenly illuminated, as if I were receiving Lafayette himself. Although, of course, it wasn’t our house the gallant French general visited by the garden door. However, that’s something else again, and I can’t really see that calling it the intimate history of colonial times makes old Williamsburg’s gossip any the less. Certainly there was nothing about Luton that suggested Lafayette. He stood there, not as discreetly sure of himself as he ordinarily was, but still with that quality of unobtrusive persistence that had made one always conscious he was in the room at Mason Seymour’s.

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Randolph,” he said in a low voice, glancing over his shoulder down the moon-lit garden toward the kitchen, for all the world like the third conspirator in a play. “I’m sorry to be corning at this hour. I’m sure I wouldn’t want it to look…”

  I pushed the screen door open and said, even more like Melusina than I’d intended, “Come in, Mr. Luton, and don’t stand out there stuttering. I’m sure nothing ever looks like anything but what it is, so kindly state your business.”

  I led the way back into the parlor…something pricking at the corner of my mind, telling me to be careful. I sat down, and said, “Well?”

  Luton stood in the door. I supposed at first it was the way the light caught him that made his face look jaundice-pale and haggard. Then I saw it wasn’t entirely that. He had changed—just since the morning before he had changed unbelievably. What Bill had called his ten layers of lard had worn down to hardly one. His eyes seemed to be hunting corners to crawl into. His hands—not weak but surprisingly small and feminine—kept moving around the hard brim of his bowler hat like a green measuring-worm on a rose stem. He was most plainly laboring under some extraordinary emotion.—And suddenly it occurred to me that maybe this man was sorry Mason Seymour was dead!

  That may sound very odd, but it’s quite true. I’d just assumed, I’m afraid, that everybody had taken the philosophic attitude about Mason’s untimely decease that I myself had taken—namely that everything works out for the best…though I wasn’t, unfortunately, able to carry that over to Faith’s problem.

  He looked down at me with oddly naked eyes, and said unsteadily, “I beg your pardon, madam. I have just put Mr. Seymour’s body on the train, going North for burial. I…I hope you will excuse me, madam.”

  And I felt very much ashamed of myself, and sorry for this man standing there with me watching him gimlet-eyed and sour-mouthed, saying stonily, “Well, my good man?”—in effect anyway.

  Actually I said, “Sit down, Mr. Luton.”

  “If it wouldn’t be taking too great a liberty, madam,” he said, almost gratefully…so gratefully, in fact, and at the same time so smoothly that I found myself remembering that people had said sometimes Luton acted more like the master than the servant at Mason Seymour’s. Then all the other gossip began to seep up out of the cellar of my mind. That Luton wasn’t actually a servant at all, because Mason had the full quota of colored help. That Mason had some strange hold over Luton, or conversely that Luton had some strange hold over Mason…the sort of thing I’d always put down to the fact that we don’t have white servants in Williamsburg and have to have some explanation for any one who does. Anyway, I’m sure a visitor from Mars would be rather put to it at times to discover from the way Community runs me that I’m the mistress and she the servant. Her hold over me is as effective certainly as any blackmailer’s could be, through the simple fact that she’s been my hands and feet so long that I’d probably starve without her. Yet she’s the best friend I have in the world, and would be very sorry indeed if anybody murdered me.

  That’s why I’d never paid much attention to the discussion of Mason’s and Luton’s problems, and I shouldn’t be doing it now, Heaven knows, if they hadn’t been dumped at my feet on the parlor floor by the man sitting stiffly—in spite of his smooth tongue—his hat balanced on his knees, in the last of my great-grandmother’s Hepplewhite dining-room chairs, against the wall next to the pembroke table with one drop leaf missing.

  “You see, Miss Randolph, my position is equivocal in the extreme,” he said.

  “I’m sure you’ll find both Mr. Crabtree and Sergeant Priddy honest and capable men, Mr. Luton,” I said.

  “That’s not entirely the point, if I may say so, madam,” he replied evenly. “If I might explain…”

  “Don’t you think it would be better to explain to Mr. Crabtree?”

  His grip on his hat brim tightened. He made a move to rise.

  “Perhaps it would, madam.”

  He put one hand in his coat pocket and took out an envelope.

  “But in view of…this, and in so much as you seem to have the confidence—”

  He had got up and put the envelope in my lap, and got back to his chair, with almost no evidence of motion, some way, and I sat there looking at it.

  “If you’ll open it, madam…”

  I picked it up and raised the flap. Inside was a white handkerchief—except that it wasn’t white. It had big dry brown spots on it. My ha
nds shook—not at the spots but at the blue letters trailing gaily, like sky writing, across the corner folded so that I would see it first. “Faith Yardley,” they said, with a gallant little flourish.

  And the awful part of it was that I’d given them to her myself—two dozen of them with her name in red and blue, and in white on red and blue, because she could never keep handkerchiefs at school.

  “—The confidence of Miss Faith, madam. I thought perhaps…”

  I heard Luton’s quiet voice as I imagine a prisoner hears the key turned in a smooth oiled lock behind him. I could feel his steady eyes on me. I closed the flap of the envelope. He got up again and came toward me, holding his hand out for it. I tried not to shrink back, clutching at it to keep it from him, as I wanted to do but dared not do, for fear he’d see how much it all meant.

  So I let him take it. He moved to the mantel and held the corner of the handkerchief in the tip of the candle flame, watched it flare up until I thought the flame would eat his hand, dropped it into the fireplace, and stood there, very quietly, watching it burn. Then he took the fire irons and scattered the crisp black ash. I watched him go back to the chair against the wall and sit down.

  “What is it you wish to say, Mr. Luton?” I asked.

  “Thank you, madam,” he said.

  I reached down and picked up my knitting and unfolded the towel on my lap.

  “You see, Miss Randolph, my position with Mr. Seymour was not precisely that of a servant. At one time I was employed in a bank in Paris. I lost my post…through a youthful indiscretion. I was unable to get another position. Some one suggested I might be useful to Mr. Seymour, who had just come abroad. It happened that I was familiar with the Boulevards, and the West End of London. Mr. Seymour had all the facts at his disposal, and when he quit Europe two years later he suggested I come along with him and make a fresh start in the new world.”

  I suppose anybody who’d not spent her life in Williamsburg, Virginia, with a very rare foray into the metropolis of Richmond, or Norfolk, would have got a great deal more, or possibly a great deal less, out of this extraordinary circumlocution than I. I found myself one moment deciding he’d lost his post, as he called it, for falling in love with a duchess, and the next that he’d made off with the entire French gold reserve. It was all too confusing, and every time I glanced up from my knitting there he’d be with his eyes fixed on me so steadily that I declare I didn’t know what to think.

  “Then Mr. Seymour bought me a farm in Canada,” he continued quietly. “But I found very shortly I hadn’t got the physical stamina farm work demands, so I came back to him. I had charge of his household, his accounts, and all except the most personal of his correspondence. I never so much as answered the door except when he had very…especial guests.”

  He moistened his lips and hesitated for an instant.

  “My position now is very difficult, madam. Mr. Talbot Seymour, who has taken charge of the house, doesn’t understand my previous duties, and acts as if I were a personal servant. The result is that I am unable to stay there any longer.”

  I looked up. I didn’t, I’m afraid, see how any of this was concerned with me or the girl whose handkerchief still filled the room with a faint odor of burnt cloth. He apparently understood at once, because he went on more quickly.

  “You see, Miss Randolph, I was planning to leave as soon as Mr. Seymour’s marriage to Miss Faith took place. We had discussed it. Mr. Seymour felt, and I felt even more strongly, that Miss Faith, being a Southern girl, would wish to have personal charge of her own establishment. He made arrangements for me to have a position in New York with a firm of wine merchants where I could use the knowledge I have, and where the work wouldn’t be too difficult. You see, I was badly gassed during the last months of the War, and am not as strong as I should like to be. It’s possible for me to take that position the first of next month, although we had thought it would be somewhat later.”

  “That’s splendid,” I said.

  Mr. Luton cleared his throat.

  “There is only one thing, madam.”

  His hands moving on his hat brim were agitated now… and I’d given up all pretense at working.

  “It’s very difficult to explain—and that’s why I felt you might be able to help me,” he said slowly. “You see, Mr. Seymour called me into the study just before Doctor Yardley came to the house last evening, and said that because everything had gone so nicely—he was very much in love with Miss Faith, madam—he was going to give me the present now that he had planned on giving me later. He had his check book out on the table and had started writing. He was in very high spirits, and I may say I was surprised to see the figure on the check.”

  I thought, “Oh,” and picked up my knitting again.

  “Just then we heard the knocker, and I went out to see who it was. Mr. Seymour was anxious not to be disturbed by… certain people.”

  Mr. Luton’s hands were motionless on his hat.

  “It was Doctor Yardley. I showed him in, and closed the door. He stayed about half an hour.”

  I waited, looking at him, keeping back a dozen questions that rushed to my lips.

  “Mr. Seymour showed him out himself, and when I went in to take away the glasses I saw the check there, still unsigned. Mr. Mason came back and said, ‘Will you see if you can get Miss Melusina Yardley on the phone.’ He seemed disturbed, but not seriously so. I asked him if anything was wrong. He said No. I tried to get Miss Yardley, but she was out. Mr. Seymour said to try again after dinner. Then, as I was bringing in brandy—he didn’t trust the servants with the key to the cellarette—I saw him out in the garden with Mr. Marshall Yardley.”

  “In the front garden, or the back garden?” I asked.

  “In the front, madam. It was dark, and our front garden is quite private, though I imagine Mr. Seymour would have preferred as little seclusion for his interview with Mr. Marshall Yardley as possible. Mr. Marshall was angry, and even…threatening. But that is not the point, Miss Randolph. I don’t wish to go into any of that. It’s just that later, when Mr. Haines came and I called Mr. Seymour, I saw the check still on the table. I said, I hope you won’t forget the most important part of a check, sir,’ and he laughed and said, ‘As soon as I’m through here, George.’”

  Mr. Luton paused. His face had taken on an odd determined look, his eyes were terribly bright.

  “Well, this morning, madam, when I went downstairs and found him, I couldn’t help seeing he was sitting there with a pen in his hand, his check book still open… but the check he’d made for me was gone. There was just the blue perforated tip under his hand, Miss Randolph… as if somebody had ripped it out, and torn it as they did.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that you never got the check?”

  “No, madam. And…I thought perhaps you would ask the young lady to give it to me—in return for her handkerchief.”

  I stared at him.

  “You mean you think Faith Yardley—”

  “I simply mean, madam, that that amount of money means a great deal to me. And I understand that Mr. Mason’s latest will leaves all his property to her…”

  I was utterly speechless. His voice kept falling on my brain like monotonously dripping water.

  “I can’t blame her for being incensed at Mr. Mason’s philandering, Miss Randolph. Being young and unsophisticated, she hadn’t any way of knowing that he was tired of being unsettled and that he regarded his marriage very seriously indeed. It was just the abrupt way the announcement came out, when he hadn’t hoped for it for some months, that upset everything.”

  I got my breath then, and got up.

  “Mr. Luton,” I said. “I think, if I were you, I would go to Mr. Crabtree immediately.”

  His face hardened, not very pleasantly; but his eyes dimmed as if a bright light had been turned off behind them.

  “I think you’re
making a mistake, Miss Randolph,” he said steadily.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  He stood a moment. Then he said, “I’ll wait till morning, madam. If you should change your mind, perhaps you’ll be good enough to phone Mr. Mason’s house.”

  I heard the knocker give a little bang, the way it does when the door closes, and stood there, my hands quite cold. What, I thought, if I was making a mistake? But I couldn’t be, it was ridiculous on the face of it. Faith Yardley wouldn’t take a check. But what if some one else… I stopped. I didn’t dare go past that.

  I put my hand on the door knob, not to call him back, really, but to tell him I’d let him know in the morning what I’d decided. I turned it and drew the door open, and stopped.

  Luton was still there at the gate, and beyond him, just coming in, was the towering white figure of Bill Haines. I saw him stop, and then I heard Luton’s soft unholy voice say:

  “I don’t believe you remember me, do you, Mr. Haines?”

  I closed the door quickly. My heart had gone as cold as my hands.

  CHAPTER 14

  I knew, without knowing exactly how I knew it, that Luton was referring then to some particular time in the past that Bill Haines didn’t remember him from…not just that he hadn’t at that moment recognized him, coming out of my gate. It’s strange, too, how some sounds that just as sounds are quite harmless seem nevertheless to strike deep-rooted memories of fear…like a bird hearing a water moccasin, or a dog, they say, coming on a tumble-down graveyard in the woods at midnight. Something in Luton’s voice affected me that way then, stirring a forgotten atavistic terror, so that as obediently as if I were obeying an old instinct I stole silently into the parlor and put out the lights and crept upstairs in the dark.

  It seemed a long long time before I heard the gate click and the hinge on the office door groan. A little ladder of light through the slats of the shutter climbed up the ceiling above my window. I lay in bed watching it, missing the sound of Bill Haines bursting exuberantly about in the four narrow walls like a Newfoundland puppy in a shoe box. Once or twice a black shadow crossed the yellow slits on the wall, and at last I heard the hinge groan open, and creak shut, and then after a while the light went out and I heard Bill open the window and put the screen in.