Murder Most Welcome

by Slade, Nicola

  Charlotte listened with interest then dragged Agnes to admire a clump of primroses at the edge of the road and to marvel at the snowy drift of blossom decorating a blackthorn tree. ‘So much green! I am accustomed to dry, dusty earth, mile upon mile of it. You can have no idea what it is like to one who was brought up where the land can go seven years without rain! And even when I went to India … No, you cannot imagine and neither could I have done so, even though everyone tried to tell me what England was like.’

  ‘Perhaps you have the English countryside in your blood,’ suggested Agnes kindly. ‘Your mama was English, was she not? What part of the country did she come from?’

  ‘Somerset, I believe,’ Charlotte replied, knitting her brows. ‘I don’t precisely recall that she ever told me the name of the town.’

  No, she hadn’t, had she. ‘Don’t bother me, dearest,’ was her constant refrain. ‘It’s all ancient history now; let’s look ahead to the next adventure!’ It had all been an adventure for Molly Glover, every last second of it, not excepting those moments that even an accomplished optimist like Molly had found hard to infuse with excited anticipation.

  Charlotte angrily brushed a tear from her cheek, hoping that Agnes was too preoccupied with nodding to the various cottagers they passed on their stately progress around the village green. No such luck; here was Agnes with a handkerchief at the ready.

  ‘Oh, Charlotte! Pray forgive me, I did not mean to distress you, and of course I’ve made you think of poor, dear Frampton, too.’

  ‘Nonsense, dear Agnes. I am quite composed, thank you. I don’t know why I … It is nearly a year now since Ma … since my mama died.’

  ‘Was it quite sudden?’ Agnes was clearly trying to be tactful.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlotte said bleakly. ‘She died in childbirth.’

  ‘Oh! Oh dear.’ Agnes was nonplussed. ‘She must have been rather … I mean she cannot have been very young to be—’

  ‘She was thirty-seven,’ Charlotte answered abruptly. ‘It was a breech birth, unexpectedly early, and there was no doctor near at hand. The midwife was drunk and she botched the job. My stepfather and I had been visiting an outlying farm and arrived barely in time to bid her farewell.’

  ‘Look after your little brother and love him,’ Molly had panted, weakly tugging at her daughter’s hand. And Charlotte, dry-eyed and with a cold stone in place of her heart, had promised, even as she looked across the room at the waxen little corpse in the makeshift crib. Will Glover had wept bitterly but Charlotte had not shed a tear when they buried mother and son in the little township on the south coast of the Australian continent, and she had remained dry-eyed all through the journey north to Freemantle and throughout the business of obtaining Will’s appointment to the Indian station.

  I cried for Will, for Pa, she thought now in astonishment, and I cried for myself when I married Frampton. But this is the first tear I’ve shed for Ma.

  Agnes was eyeing her charge with affectionate anxiety as she steered the younger girl towards the church.’Come and sit in the porch, dear,’ she persuaded her. ‘It’s nice and cool and you can compose yourself. What a sad tale, your poor mama, and so young. Why she must have been …’ Agnes did some arithmetic on her fingers and gasped. ‘Why, she must have been nothing but a child when you were born!’

  Charlotte nodded, struggling with the tears that again threatened to overcome her.

  ‘There now.’ Agnes had settled the matter to her own satisfaction. ‘She and your papa must have been desperately in love to marry at such an age.’

  ‘Yes indeed.’ Charlotte had pulled herself together now. ‘I think desperate might well be the word Mama would have used at that time. Now, won’t you show me the church, Agnes? Agnes?’

  Agnes was not paying any attention. Her bull’s-eye gaze was aimed at the lych gate through which a young man in holy orders was making his way. Charlotte shot a glance at her sister-in-law and was not surprised to see an unbecoming crimson suffuse her cheeks. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she sighed. She might have known Agnes would be in love with the curate. Oh well, let’s take a look at him. Hmm, well, there’s a surprise, balding and spindly, no accounting for taste; though, to be fair, she’s probably never had much to choose from.

  ‘Oh! M-m-miss Richmond! I did not see … I mean … how do you do?’

  ‘Oh! Mr Benson! How very … are you…? I thought …’

  Charlotte looked on benignly as the curate stammered and Agnes fluttered until she thought it was time to take a hand.

  ‘Agnes?’ She nudged the other woman with a firm though gentle elbow.

  ‘Oh, oh, of course, how remiss of me. Charlotte, this is Mr Percy Benson, curate to Uncle Henry.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Benson.’ Charlotte shook the curate’s limp and clammy hand. ‘Uncle Henry?’

  ‘M-m-miss Richmond’s uncle, the Reverend Henry Heavitree, vicar of this parish,’ explained the curate, his Adam’s apple bobbing and his gaze straying respectfully towards Charlotte’s companion.

  ‘Uncle Henry is Mama’s elder brother, her half-brother, I should say,’ Agnes explained. ‘My maternal grandmother was a widow, a Mrs Heavitree, with a small child – that was Uncle Henry – when she married my grandfather.’

  Charlotte nodded, waited for some initiative from her companions, shrugged at the lack of it and penetrated the gloom of the ancient porch by herself, to open the door into the church, admiring, as she did so, the enormous iron ring which lifted the latch. Agnes and Mr Benson made no move to follow her and she caught snatches of their stilted conversation as they stood in the porch like waxworks, Agnes still with that unbecoming flush mottling her cheek, and the curate gaping like a mooncalf at her. Oh well, let them be, she thought tolerantly, wondering if Mrs Richmond knew about this.

  Inside the church Charlotte paused and stared about her in delighted awe. Accustomed as she was to the corrugated iron shacks common in the townships, a genuine twelfth-century church built of stone was a revelation to her.

  ‘Oh! Oh, but this is wonderful,’ she gasped aloud as she gazed at the cool simplicity of the grey walls, the plain but elegant font and the ancient oak of the rood screen, all of it lit by the incredible glowing light streaming from the stained glass in the windows.

  ‘I think so too, so I’m exceedingly glad to hear you admire it,’ chimed in a familiar voice, and when the startled Charlotte looked around her she saw Mrs Knightley, her fellow diner from the previous evening. She was sitting in a pew at the front of the church, just below the pulpit and she smiled and beckoned to Charlotte.

  ‘Do come and join me, won’t you? I’m afraid I can’t get up and come to you – my legs won’t carry me so far.’

  Charlotte hurried down the aisle and sat beside the woman she had liked on sight.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she began. ‘I didn’t realize that you …’

  ‘That I was such a poor, sad creature?’ Elaine gave a sudden peal of delighted laughter. ‘There, I sound just like your dear mama-in-law, don’t I?’ She covered her mouth, looking like a guilty child. ‘Oh dear, what will you think of me?’ She sobered a little and patted Charlotte’s hand reassuringly.

  ‘The truth is that I have never been very strong and for the last few years my health has been rather poor. I had – I had a baby but something went badly wrong and the baby did not live, and I … well, never mind, I go along very well, after all.’

  Charlotte was moved by the blend of sadness and bright courage in the older woman’s voice and in mute sympathy she squeezed the too thin, too delicate fingers that still held hers in a cool, friendly clasp.

  ‘Still, enough of being morbid.’ Elaine spoke lightly and her eyes began to dance. ‘Surely you are not here alone? I expected to see you escorted by Agnes at the very least so that Mrs Richmond may hear every detail of your response to the sacred shrine of the Richmond family and particularly to Frampton’s memorial tablet.’

  ‘Oh Lord.’ Charlotte jumped up in haste. ‘Thank hea
ven you reminded me. Where is it? I had better go and admire it and see if I can squeeze out a tear or two.’ She moved into the aisle and cast an enquiring glance around the building. ‘Where is it, please? She has already expressed astonishment that I can be so composed in the face of my great tragedy, but she supposes, charitably enough, that a mother’s grief is the greater wound.’

  Elaine flashed her enchanting girlish grin at the deadly parody of Mrs Richmond in her best martyr mode and nodded towards the north wall.

  ‘There, just beside the window with the primroses on the sill. But you have not answered me. Surely you have not shaken off Agnes?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Charlotte was marvelling at the florid prose that commemorated her late, unlamented spouse. ‘We encountered the curate, and Agnes and he were instantly turned into pillars of salt; they were in the porch last time I looked. No doubt it was reprehensible of me to leave them unchaperoned but it seemed a kindness. She is scarcely a young girl, after all.’

  She paused in her exploration of the church to wrinkle her nose. ‘Heavens! What is that smell?’

  ‘Incense,’ Mrs Knightley told her. ‘We are very high church indeed in Finchbourne. The village adores its saints’ days and rituals and so forth. The vicar fell under the influence of Dr Pusey some twenty years ago …’ She smiled as Charlotte paused in her progress up the aisle and looked at her, a question hovering on her lips. ‘Dr Pusey is a leading light of the Oxford Movement,’ she explained. ‘He and others are trying to bring the ideals of an earlier age into the Church and this is their way of doing it. It works very well in the village. The people feel there should be mystery and pageant and colour and uncanny goings-on. It makes a nice change from everyday life.’

  Elaine seemed about to make some further comment when the ancient tranquillity of the church was doubly disturbed. The west door creaked open to reveal Agnes and the curate as they entered with due diffidence and reverence, at the same time as the vestry door crashed open, shuddering back on its hinges, and in roared a minotaur in clerical garb, with a shotgun on his shoulder and several dead magpies on a string in his other hand.

  Good God, thought Charlotte in amusement. It’s a bull in a surplice, another side of beef on legs. It must be Uncle Henry Heavitree – it can surely be none other.

  ‘Who’s that?’ roared the vicar, his head thrust belligerently forward as he charged towards the body of the church. ‘Is that you, niece Agnes? What the devil do you think you’re doing, dallying there with my curate, hey?’

  ‘Oh, Uncle Henry,’ twittered Agnes, wringing her hands and ducking her head in confusion, evidently trying to distract her uncle’s attention from the wretched Benson, who was sidling away towards the bell-tower. ‘I brought dear Charlotte. Mama wished her to see dear Frampton’s memorial.’

  ‘Who? What’s that you say? Charlotte? What d’ye mean, girl? Speak up! Who the devil is Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh, Uncle Henry, Uncle Henry! Of course, you have not heard. Here is our poor, dear Charlotte …’ A sob rose and Agnes had to gulp convulsively. ‘Poor, dear Frampton’s brave young widow, who arrived in Finchbourne only yesterday. Charlotte, let me present dear Mama’s brother.’

  Charlotte held out her hand and dropped a demure curtsey to the bulky monster before her.

  ‘How do you do, sir. How very much you resemble your late nephew Frampton. The likeness is startling.’

  In fact the resemblance was only apparent at close range. Henry must weigh half as much again as the late Frampton and was twice as broad, but the likeness was sufficient to give Charlotte an inward shudder.

  ‘Frampton, hey? That damned whelp threatened me with the bishop when he caught me with the archdeacon’s wife, damned trollop. Pusillanimous non-conformist. Good riddance, I say. He was a damned Bulgarian, young Frampton. Never forgave me for peppering his breeches with shot when he was up to no good with—’

  The Reverend Henry Heavitree broke off his remarks and took stock of his new niece and his eyes lit up suddenly with a gleam she found all too familiar in men. Not that much like his nephew after all, she sighed, firmly disentangling her hand from his fervent, sweaty grasp.

  ‘Well, niece Charlotte, do you ride then? Do you hunt, hey? Well, girl, cat got your tongue? D’ye shoot, I say?’

  ‘No, indeed I do not.’ Charlotte spoke decidedly. ‘Hunt, that is; hunting has not come my way. I can shoot, sir, and I ride, of course. One can scarcely travel about in Australia without a horse, at least in the parts where we lived.’

  As for hunting, she shrugged inwardly, she had far too often been the quarry herself, or at least Will had been, for her to enjoy the chase. Let others do as they would. To deflect the interrogation she foresaw, she drew the vicar’s attention to his own catch.

  ‘Are you aware, sir, that your magpies appear to be bleeding all over your surplice?’

  ‘Bleeding?’ he bellowed. ‘Bleeding? God’s nightgown! Of course they’re bleeding girl – the miracle would be if they did not bleed, considering I’ve just shot them! The thieving bastards deserve to bleed!’

  ‘Oh do pray hush, Uncle Henry.’ Agnes was tugging clumsily at the vicar’s sleeve, desperately trying to silence his bellicose outcry. ‘You have not said “How do you do” to Mrs Knightley.’

  ‘What? Oh, hah, beg your pardon, ma’am. How do you do? I did not see you there.’

  Mrs Knightley gave him her hand but was spared the rigours of a conversation by the arrival of a footman come to carry her out to the landau. She was looking pale and tired but she made her graceful farewells, with a particular smile to Charlotte and a promise that they should meet again soon for a good long talk. ‘You must come to call on me very soon,’ she suggested. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony, you’ll always be welcome.’

  Charlotte took a further turn round the church, struck once more by the serenity and the austere beauty of the place.

  ‘How lovely this is,’ she remarked to Agnes. ‘I have seen nothing so wonderful in my whole life.’

  ‘It’s only a little country church.’ Agnes halted and turned to stare at Charlotte, her plain face creased in a surprised frown, obviously puzzled by such enthusiasm. ‘I believe it is well thought of by artistic people but I have always found it quite commonplace. We must take you to see the cathedral at Winchester soon. Now that is truly a magnificent building.’

  Charlotte smiled slightly and allowed herself to be taken outside.

  ‘We should be making our way home.’ Agnes was beginning to fuss. ‘We usually have luncheon soon and Mama will be put out if we are late. You will have ample opportunity, dear Charlotte, to visit the church again. Perhaps you would like to help with the flowers?’

  She looked hopeful as Charlotte agreed, with reservations.

  ‘I know nothing about English flowers, Agnes,’ she warned. ‘I might do something shocking like filling a vase with weeds.’

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ Agnes began, then a slow smile spread over her face. ‘Why I do believe you are teasing me, Charlotte, are you not? No matter, whatever you do to the flowers will be more artistic than my own attempts. I have no taste whatsoever, and my flower arrangements often cause grief to poor, dear Mama.’

  Charlotte was heartened at this glimpse of humour and the prospect of a more congenial Agnes and answered by tucking her sister-in-law’s hand into her own arm. They had bidden the vicar and the curate farewell inside the church when Uncle Henry had frustrated his assistant’s attempts to escort the ladies to the gate by the simple expedient of bellowing at him not to be such a damned fool, looking damned spoony over a damned woman, and his (Henry’s) own damned niece to boot, and to damned well go and count the damned hymnals.

  Quite in charity together, the Richmond ladies were shutting the gate behind them, when a gauntly haggard figure in black hailed them from the lane to the side of the church.

  ‘Halt there! Can this be the widow of that monster?’ The scarecrow figure of a middle-aged woman approached unpleasantly close and thrust he
r face, wild-eyed and staring, into Charlotte’s. As Charlotte recoiled, the woman nodded. ‘Well may you look appalled, madam. And well may you thank the Lord thy God for the blessed release that He gave you by ordaining the death of that abomination of desolation!’

  Charlotte stood frozen to the spot, too surprised to do anything but inwardly agree with her assailant. Agnes burst into tears and dragged ineffectually at Charlotte’s sleeve, frantically trying to tug her away from the woman, and uttering soft cries to try to placate her.

  ‘Oh indeed, Lady Walbury, pray do not speak so! Poor, dear Charlotte is but newly arrived in Finchbourne, pray do not discompose yourself so. Oh Charlotte, dearest, do come away at once, you must not stay.’

  ‘I suppose they have not told you?’ The woman had ceased her rant and spoke in a more or less rational manner as she scanned Charlotte’s face, apparently to her satisfaction for she continued in the same conversational tone.

  ‘You look a sensible young woman. Why did you let him bamboozle you? Did they not tell you that the creature you called husband has another, more terrible name? That of murderer?’

  ‘Oh, I could sink into the ground in shame,’ gasped Agnes. She and Charlotte were hurrying up the Manor drive with as much dignity as they could muster in the circumstances.

  ‘Pray do not mention this to Mama, it could bring on one of her spasms; nor to Grandmama, she would be much distressed. Better not let Lily hear of it either, she would only make a fuss and write to her papa. And perhaps we should not tell poor Barney, he is such a good, bluff sort of fellow, he finds scenes so difficult.’

  ‘Of course I won’t mention it,’ Charlotte panted as they hurried through the side door and managed to reach their bedroom floor without being detected. ‘But you must tell me. Who is that woman and what in the world was she talking about?’