Hither Page

by Cat Sebastian

  Chapter 6

  “Christ,” Page said as they approached Little Briars. The sun was setting, but there was enough light to make out the building’s unusual silhouette. James had known this place his entire life, but now he tried to imagine seeing it through Page’s eyes. It had initially been a farmhouse, probably dating from the sixteenth century. But it had been added to in a higgledy-piggledy manner over the years, and now boasted an agglomeration of gables and wings in various architectural styles. Chimney pots poked out in unlikely places and the scattershot arrangement of windows hinted that the interior of the house might reflect the outside.

  “It looks like a gingerbread house assembled by a thoroughly mad child,” Page said. He took a puff from his cigarette and stepped a few paces to the side as if to survey the house from a different angle. “I love it.”

  James felt absurdly relieved. It wouldn’t have mattered if Page thought Little Briars a chaotic mess. It was only a house, not even his own house, and besides, it wasn’t like a man’s opinion on architecture cancelled out his being a...whatever it was Page was.

  “I’ll bring you around to the front,” James said. They had approached the house from the back, through the woods.

  “What’s that over there?” Page gestured towards a small structure in the corner of the garden.

  “That’s Wendy’s hen house.” The girl had built it with her own two hands that spring, using boards she had pried loose from a derelict shed and a box of nails she found in the cellar.

  “I meant the garden.” He let out a low whistle. “This is more a small farm than a kitchen garden.”

  “That’s also Wendy’s doing. She started it as a victory garden and it got rather out of hand.”

  “This must produce more than she and the two old ladies can eat.”

  “Indeed it does. She kept the village in vegetable marrows and potatoes all autumn, to say nothing of the eggs. By the way, I asked Mrs. Griffiths about Wendy’s family, and apparently, she was brought to Little Briars by some kind of private arrangement.” James didn’t like repeating this information to an outsider, knowing that Page would interpret it as proof something was amiss with the girl. “And she’s mislaid the paperwork.” When the silence between them dragged on, he felt compelled to add, “I’m afraid she’s rather scatterbrained. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

  “Are you, though?” Page asked.

  “Yes,” James insisted.

  Leo regarded him levelly for a moment before giving him a slight smile that seemed tinged with pity.

  AS SOMMERS HAD FORETOLD, the ladies of Little Briars welcomed Leo and gave him tea, biscuits, and anecdotes. Within half a minute of walking through the door, he was drinking criminally sweet tea and poring over a book of photographs featuring a very young and pretty Miss Delacourt in full Edwardian regalia. He now sat on a chair near the fire, drowsy from the heat and the surfeit of sweets. On the sofa opposite him, Sommers shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over the arm of his chair, and Leo gratefully followed suit.

  Cora Delacourt had to be 70. In the photo album that rested on Leo’s lap, there were blurry photographs of Miss Delacourt with a portly Prince of Wales—Miss Delacourt must have been quite fast indeed—taken a good fifty years earlier. In the fluffy, bespectacled, white-haired lady who repeatedly offered him biscuits, Leo could see traces of the Edwardian belle in the photographs before him. In several of the pictures, a thin and grim-faced woman looked on; this Leo recognized immediately as Miss Pickering. Edith Pickering had the sort of austere features and fine bones that changed little with age. He realized that this book of photographs was the documentation of a life spent together, half a century lived side by side, one woman a blur of ribbons and flounces on a passing bicycle, the other a constant, watchful presence.

  Leo was used to not having a family; he was used to not having a place where he belonged or people he belonged to. But looking at these women and knowing they had spent a lifetime together made him think it was a failure on his part that he hadn’t managed to even acquire friends.

  He hoped with all his heart that his next case would bring him to a proper den of thieves, someplace lousy with crime and crawling with unprincipled mercenaries and he could be reminded of what sensible priorities looked like. He wasn’t cut out for old ladies and tea.

  “Have another scone,” Miss Delacourt said brightly, jolting him back to the present. “And try some of this marmalade. Wendy made it.”

  Leo took a bite of the scone, letting the sharp tang of citrus distract him from his train of thought.

  “Dare I ask where Wendy got the sugar?” Sommers eyed his half-eaten scone with a sort of guilty hunger. “Last I heard, she used all her coupons on peppermint creams for the children at the vicarage.”

  “She’s very resourceful,” Miss Delacourt said dubiously, and Leo inferred this meant the girl was up to shenanigans that were not entirely above board.

  Leo turned the page and saw a photograph of an elderly man in a clerical collar and a serious-faced boy in short pants. With a start, Leo realized the boy was Dr. Sommers. He glanced up and saw the same grave expression, the same cowlick disordering his hair, the same smattering of freckles. He flipped the page again, and there was Sommers as a young man, before the war, his handsome face lit by a smile. He didn’t quite know why it bothered him to see this proof that Sommers belonged here, in this place, with these people, but he decided it was an excellent time to do some reconnaissance. He excused himself to go to the washroom.

  Upstairs there was a corridor with six doors. Two he identified as an airing cupboard and the washroom, which meant the remaining four were likely bedrooms. Behind the first of these doors, he found a room littered with odd numbers of socks and featuring an unmade bed. He didn’t risk flicking the light switch, but his pocket torch showed him the muddy shoes Wendy had been wearing at the funeral. He stepped back into the corridor and opened the next door. A narrow bed, a dresser empty except for a fine layer of dust—about a week’s worth, which meant they hadn’t hired a new cleaning lady since Mrs. Hoggett’s death, and also that nobody regularly used this room. The third room contained a large bed, with a drinking glass on one bedside table and a bible on the other. Miss Delacourt’s, perhaps? He opened the fourth and final door, expecting to see a similar bedroom belonging to the other old lady, but instead found a very small room with its contents half packed into boxes, meaning it had to be the dead charwoman’s quarters. Which meant he was short a bedroom, unless—oh. Oh. The two night tables in one room, the dust in the other. So, the two elderly women shared a bedroom. They were a couple. He ought to have gathered as much from the fifty years of photographs. That rather warmed his bombed out shell of a heart.

  Still, even if they were as queer as he was, it didn’t mean they weren’t murderers. Mrs. Hoggett could perhaps have noticed their secret and attempted to blackmail them. The incongruity of that thought—those two old ladies as murderers—jolted him to awareness. He really wasn’t cut out for tea and gossip if he started seeing skeletons in the closets of elderly women.

  Treading lightly so the floorboards wouldn’t creak and give away his explorations, he returned to the end of the hall to the tiny room that had been Mrs. Hoggett’s. His torch held under one arm and a pair of leather gloves on his hands, he deftly searched every drawer, every inch of the place. It was good, he thought, to remind himself why he was really here. He was here to violate the space of a dead woman, not to befriend old ladies, not to kiss handsome doctors in the wood. This was just what he needed to put himself back in his place.

  JAMES REALIZED HIS error even before Page sat on the overstuffed armchair.

  The sight of Page in Cora and Edith’s drawing room, Edith’s pretty rose-patterned teacup in his hands and Cora’s book of photographs open on his lap, stripped the man of all his dangerous associations and turned him into a person—a warm, living, laughing person. A person who made conversation with the peo
ple James loved, a person who drank tea and let old ladies give him too many biscuits. It was so ordinary, so commonplace, so utterly disarming.

  James sank back into the sofa cushions and allowed his gaze to travel over Page’s lean form, let himself appreciate how good the other man looked in his shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled back to reveal lean forearms dusted with dark hair. It was a lapse in judgment, letting himself be drawn to a man like this. But even after Page excused himself—presumably to look for clues in Edith’s knitting basket or engage in some other act of subterfuge—he couldn’t quite muster up the outrage he knew he would have felt a few days earlier. Because now Page wasn’t just a spy: he was a person who—like James himself—had been in the war and now took comfort in an overheated parlor and a well-worn photo album. James at least could have this whenever he wished; God only knew what Page’s future held.

  His thoughts were interrupted by squawking from the garden, followed by the sound of a door being thrown open and booted feet stomping through the kitchen.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been feeding those hens, Wendy,” Edith called, “but if they’re going to fuss like that every time you walk past, we’ll have to move the coop away from the house.” The woman’s tone was brisk, but a note of indulgence underlay her words. “I realize the world is upside down, but we must cling to some niceties.”

  “I ought to stop feeding them altogether and stew them up,” Wendy said, flinging herself onto the sofa beside James. She wore a pair of disreputable looking boots and an old men’s overcoat that dwarfed her, and the cold wafted off the wool of her clothes. “They’re so lazy in this weather that I haven’t gotten so much as a single egg all week.”

  “It’s just as well,” James said, placing a cup of tea on the table before the girl. “Eggs would freeze in this cold. Mrs. Murphy’s pipes burst yesterday while I was seeing to Freddie’s tonsils.”

  “I saw Freddie at the pond and he said he’ll have to have them out.”

  James suppressed a slight shudder at the thought of blood and scalpels, the smell of the operating theater.

  “It would be better if it snowed,” Cora murmured, then narrowed her eyes as she took in Wendy’s ensemble. “Tell me you haven’t been wearing that all day, Wendy dear. We have company—the gentleman from London who was at the funeral. He’ll be back downstairs any minute now and he won’t know what to think if he sees you dressed like a scarecrow.”

  “Isn’t it funny,” Wendy said as she pulled off her gloves, “that we went months and months without seeing a new face, and then all of a sudden we have a new housemaid at Wych Hall, that cousin who visited you, and now Mr. Page?” She cupped her hands around her mouth to warm them with her breath.

  “What cousin?” James asked, picking up the girl’s gloves from her lap and folding them neatly.

  “Nobody interesting,” Wendy said mournfully, reminding James of Polly Griffiths complaining about beef tea. “Some old man visited Miss Delacourt. Mr. Tarmington? No, he had a title. Balding and tweedy. You know, James, I don’t think they were cousins at all. I think he was one of her beaux.”

  “Wendy!” Edith reproached, but Cora only laughed.

  “I’m afraid she’s onto me,” Cora said. “Although, how lowering it is that in all these years, only one beau has cared enough to visit me in my waning years.”

  “The rest are probably dead,” Wendy said comfortingly. The two women stared at her for a moment, eyes wide.

  “Wendy!” James said. “You can’t say that sort of thing.”

  But then Edith and Cora started to laugh. James didn’t think he had ever heard Edith laugh. She looked like she might keel right over. “It’s all right, James,” Edith said once she had gotten control of herself. “We know we’re old. Oh, Wendy, I meant to tell you. There are three very drunk mice in the pantry.”

  “Mice? Oh! The Christmas pudding!” Wendy shot to her feet. “I mustn’t have covered it properly. Oh, bother. Nobody will want pudding mice have gotten to.”

  “More urgently,” Edith said, “something needs to be done about the mice. I can’t stoop to pick up mice or anything else.”

  “Feed them to the cat,” Cora suggested mildly. “Perhaps if she has a full belly she’ll keep away from Wendy’s chickens.”

  James tried to drag his mind away from the gruesome image of greedy snapping kitchen cats gobbling up half-dead mice, but his stomach turned anyway. This was a new and irritating development. He had thought he could count on his mind behaving itself in Edith and Cora’s sitting room, surrounded by butter biscuits and milky tea. Was he to spend the rest of his days shaken by any mention of unpleasantness? Were bombs and blood to follow him into every safe haven he created for himself?

  “I’ll put them outside. It’s my fault,” Wendy said, moving toward the door. When James looked up at her, he saw Page standing in the doorway. He didn’t know how long the man had been there.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that girl,” Edith said after they heard the back door shut and the chickens send up their equivalent of a cheer. “She’s fifteen. Shouldn’t be mucking about with chickens and traipsing about the village dressed like a farmhand.” She pulled a wad of knitting out of her work basket and began stitching as if the wool had done her a gross injustice and being made up into a muffler was a proper revenge. “She ought to be going to dances and trimming bonnets or whatever it is girls do these days.”

  “Doesn’t she go to school?” Page asked.

  “She finished early,” Edith said. “Either she’s quite clever or the headmistress was happy to see the back of her. Probably both.”

  “Well, dear, when I think of what you and I were up to at that age, I daresay we would have been safer at home with the chickens,” Cora said placidly, topping Page’s cup off with tepid tea and catching Edith’s eye.

  When they stepped outside, the cold air was almost a relief. James hadn’t lost the queasy feeling, the sense of imminent doom. He needed to go home, sit in the dark, and probably take one of the pills that he saved for emergencies. And wasn’t that a pitiful thought—that a stray mention of dead mice and a minor surgery counted as an emergency. James didn’t know what would become of him in the event he was confronted with something truly disturbing.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Page asked after they had walked in silence down the drive from Little Briars.

  “Quite,” James snapped. He supposed his mental state was common knowledge now. First Mary Griffiths, now Page. Apparently one could tell just from looking at him that he wasn’t quite right in the head. Not, he reflected grimly, an ideal quality in a doctor.

  “Naturally,” Page said easily, after only the barest hesitation.

  At the place where the lane forked, in one direction heading through the wood to Wych Hall and the other to the village, Page announced that he needed to go back to Wych Hall, presumably to spy on its inhabitants. James reminded himself that this was why he needed to stay away from the man, needed to keep clear of things that would put him in a place where he couldn’t even trust his own mind. But through all his muddled thoughts, past the racing of his heart, he mainly worried that Page would catch cold.

  “Take the damned muffler, Page,” he insisted, shoving it at the man with none of their earlier intimacy. “Otherwise, you’ll be the only one within twenty furlongs of Little Briars without one.”

  Page shook his head and stepped backward, vanishing into the shadows.

  LEO TOOK THE FOOTPATH through the woods, passing the cottage where the shell-shocked beekeeper lived. It was only six, but long since dark, and only a single light burned inside the cottage’s small windows. He kept walking until he reached the garden gate that gave access to Wych Hall. From there, he could see the terrace that skirted the back of the house and the french doors of Colonel Armstrong’s library. Little Briars had been empty the night of the murder; a person could have come from the village, through the woods, through the french doors, with only the c
hance of being witnessed by one person who didn’t seem to have much interest in the outside world.

  It shouldn’t have come as a relief to discover that a stranger might have committed the murder. In fact, it was utter nonsense, and Leo knew it. It was entirely implausible to think that a stranger had slipped into the house, somehow poisoned a charwoman, and then pushed her down the stairs. The fact that it had occurred to Leo at all was a sign that he wasn’t thinking straight about this case.

  The sound of a throat clearing made him reach for the pistol he kept in the holster under his coat.

  “Mr. Page,” Mr. Norris said. “What a pleasure to see you twice in one day.”

  “I left my cigarette lighter,” Page said, transforming his grab for the pistol into a sheepish shrug. And, in fact, he had left the lighter in the kitchen to provide an excuse for his return. “Are you taking a walk? It’s a bit cold, I would have thought.”

  “Come over here and I’ll show you what I’m doing,” Norris said.

  Page hoped the man didn’t intend to murder him. He was not in the mood for disposing of a corpse this evening. One hand casually on the hilt of a knife he kept sheathed in his coat pocket, he followed the secretary.

  They didn’t have long to wait. As they stood in the shadows of the ruined Wych Hall chapel, Leo saw a figure emerge from the wood and poke through the shrubbery. The figure had a pair of untidy black plaits peeking out from beneath a knit cap.

  “This is three nights running that Wendy Smythe has been prowling about,” Norris said. “If I didn’t know better I’d think she was looking for something. Perhaps she lost her lighter too.”

  With that, Norris bade Leo good night and returned to the house.

  Chapter 7