The Murder of My Aunt

by Richard Hull

  Now I didn’t want Edward to come rushing into the house and giving himself away to the maids, so I arranged to intercept him outside the front gate, but I hadn’t reckoned on his deliberate attempt to run over me twice, once forwards and once backwards so to speak, and I very nearly lost my temper with him completely. I have since read over his account of how he thought I was a ghost haunting the place of his previous crime, and I am beginning to believe it was true and even to laugh at it, but that is only recently. At the time, and indeed until I began to write these notes, I thought it was another and most barbarous attempt. Indeed, the conviction that Edward was going to miss no chance was one of the causes that forced me to my final action, which perhaps was an unfair motive, but such is life.

  At any rate I was mad with rage at the time, and rather gave myself away in the enjoyment of pulling his leg about his luggage. Moreover, the need for a visit to Llwll that afternoon was quite imaginary.

  From that time onwards a curious misunderstanding arose. I had made up my mind what action I would take if he persisted, but I had also made up my mind to be fair, and given him plenty of warning that I would not tolerate any more nonsense. When I look back on it, I still think that on numerous occasions I did give him those warnings – only of course I did not tell him what the action would be. Indeed, even from reading Edward’s diary I think that the warnings were clear and obvious enough, and I might add that I think they were even more obvious than his record implies. But, amazing though it may seem, I am beginning to wonder now, when it is too late, whether he really ever understood that he was being warned.

  And so things went on, I thinking that he knew that I knew and understood my hints, and he thinking that I did not know and ignoring the hints, or at any rate pretending to ignore them. But did he? Was he really stupid? Didn’t he really in his heart of hearts know more than he admitted even to himself when he wrote his accounts of what was happening? I should like to think so, I know, but really I think he did.

  At any rate I thought, and I am still inclined to think, that he knew I had caught him out over the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He couldn’t tell, of course, that when he hurriedly shoved the book back on the shelf he had turned up a corner of the page and that I had read it afterwards, but surely it was clear enough for anyone? I really was alarmed when I found that he had been reading the article headed ‘Poison’. It’s nasty stuff, poison, so very difficult to provide against, and so very painful, but I was quite confident I had frightened him off it, completely, and when he went off to London I genuinely hoped that the whole business was over and that I could settle down again to my own life in peace without having to be always on the look-out for Edward’s little plans.

  5

  But while he was away I began to get nervous again.

  I had noticed that he had started to be less detailed in writing his description of his future plans, and that tendency might increase. On the whole I did not think that he suspected, or was likely to suspect, that I was in the habit of reading it, but he might become superstitious about it when everything put down in it failed abysmally or, even more likely, simply become too lazy to write any more – and then I might really be in danger.

  While he was away I kept worrying and worrying over it, and over what I should have to do, if he persisted, and I didn’t want to take the action he finally forced me to take, until it was no wonder that I began to make myself ill. I think that if I could have talked it over with kind Dr Spencer it would have made all the difference, but I didn’t want to involve him in my plans, and so I had to worry it all out by myself, and well, you must remember, when you have finished the next few pages, that I was on the verge of a breakdown.

  Meanwhile, I decided to make a last attempt to clear up the situation and do what I fondly hoped would be best for everyone. It was, of course, at my suggestion that Dr Spencer talked to Edward about making a career for himself. And, after all, how many young men wouldn’t have jumped at the chance I was offering? To choose his business or profession, to have his articles or premium paid for, and an adequate allowance while he was training; was it fair that Edward should treat this with such biting scorn? Should blather about Birmingham and dungarees? I know that any office would have tried to instil some discipline into him, would have made him get up in the morning, keep office hours, and do what he was told, and I know he would have hated it; but after all, don’t most young men have to go through that sort of thing? And he was absolutely free to choose any sort of career he liked at his leisure, and go where he liked. But, perhaps, in one way he was right – no office could have stuck Edward for more than a few weeks. However, setting apart the ingratitude at the very real cost of it to me, it was downright stupid not to jump at it. Edward was always a fool as well as being a poor fish.

  And so when I read his account of how he received my suggestion, my blood fairly boiled. There was, then, to be no peace. I had expected preliminary objections, but it looked as if there was no chance of his coming round to it. It boiled still more when I read his cold-blooded preparations to kill me in a singularly painful way. The way that young man sat down and discussed the relative advantages of one poison over another was positively disgusting. I got angrier and angrier as he waded through prussic acid and creosote and oxalic acid, and all sorts of other things, but all the same I couldn’t help laughing at him. At how his absurd attempts to buy oxalic acid resulted in his purchasing a Christmas card – at least, looking at them, I think he was too mean to buy one, and I know he never sent one to anyone – oh, yes, he did buy just one – at how he funked the poison register, at how he wondered how to make this and that chemical and cursed when simple scientific language was beyond his comprehension, even at how he overate himself at lunch, but I stopped laughing when I realized that the consequences of Edward’s little vendetta with me might affect all sorts of other people who were really barely concerned in the matter. He was rapidly getting to the state when he would have tried to bring in all the Spencers because they had thwarted him; Cook, because she obviously ‘couldn’t abide him’; and Mary, because she wouldn’t become his mistress. He would have been, at the best, indifferent as to whether he killed half the inhabitants of Llwll. And that I could not allow.

  However, I still gave him several more warnings, several more opportunities to drop his plan, and the door to an honourable career was still there if he chose to go through it and follow the road it opened on to. But he wouldn’t.

  Meanwhile, while I hoped that repentance or – if that was too much to hope for – mere caution would restrain him, I could not resist having a little quiet fun with him. The real cream of the joke was that there wasn’t an aconite in the garden! I wouldn’t have such a thing even if I liked it, and as a matter of fact I’m not very fond of them. Moreover, if there were, I have an idea that the kind one cultivates is not ‘aconitum ferox’, and is, though poisonous enough, nothing like so dangerous as Edward thought.

  I could, therefore, with safety, watch his elementary attempts at botany, and lead him almost literally ‘up the garden path’, and it was fun to see his back nearly breaking with the unaccustomed strain of stooping, to watch his soft hands blistering with the use of hoe and rake – oh, yes, Edward did a great deal more work that evening than he admitted – and all the time it really was a disgraceful swindle on the poor boy, for he wasn’t going to get his wages for his work.

  At first I thought that I would simply keep off the subject of aconites altogether. It would have been very easy to have avoided giving that name to any plant as they weren’t there, and I might have managed quite easily to close down the conversation long before we got to the plants he thought were aconites. (They were, in fact, nothing more dangerous than aquilegias, or columbines, if you must have the English name of them, and Edward’s description of them is not only scientifically quite wrong, but isn’t even well observed from a lay point of view.) I might, as I say, have stopped him quite readily by asking him to repeat what I had al
ready named, and when he failed – as fail he would have done – have gone over the old ones again and ended by saying that that was enough for one day. I did think of doing so and extracting more gardening for more information, but really Edward was so distressed by his exertions that I doubted if I should ever get him to try again.

  So presently I had another and brighter idea. First of all I tested out to see if he knew anything at all. As I imagined, he knew absolutely nothing. He swallowed quite cheerfully the most preposterous mistakes. I could have called a rose a foxglove if I had chosen, and I did call a perfectly ordinary dahlia an erica, to which it bears not the faintest resemblance, and finally I invented lovely names like escholeria and saxifranutum, and complete nonsense like that – and Edward was apparently terribly impressed. And finally, just for fun to see what would happen, I told him that a common or garden larkspur was an aconite.

  It was quite a good joke. It made it safer for one thing. If Edward had learnt that there were no aconites in the garden, he might have gone out and bought some, or started some other bright plan, ‘something lingering with boiling oil in it’. And for another, Edward’s face was a study. He really gave himself away much more than he thought or pretended by asking most ridiculous questions. And his subsequent furtive attempts, most of which I watched from a distance, to find out if I was wrong, if I was deceiving him, or if I was really right after all, were too funny. I’ve never known anyone so ignorant, but I must admit that I thought he had swallowed my lie completely, and I now know he had his doubts. Perhaps, if he’d remembered that aconites were ‘of the buttercup order’, it might have been a better guide for him than prating about racemes and sepals which he didn’t understand. Some of his experiments incidentally were most odd. He seemed to think that if you dug a plant up, examined its roots and then put it back again, it would continue to grow. It’s hard to believe, but at any rate he was rapidly removing all the larkspur and columbines from the garden.

  But much though I enjoyed watching this disciple of the ‘virile Mosley’ – really, though I don’t agree with him politically, I think that was a bit hard on poor Sir Oswald! – making a fool of himself botanically, the horrid fact remained that Edward was not yet cured of his desire to poison us, and a most unpleasant doubt began to assail me that perhaps the roots of larkspur, columbines, and possibly all sorts of other things mightn’t be good for me. And more seriously I began to wonder whether even when this plan had failed as ignominiously as the rest, Edward would abandon the unequal struggle, and I really didn’t think my health would stand it much longer.

  Accordingly, then, I decided finally to force the issue. Edward should have one last chance to start working. If he took it, I would do my level best to help him. If he refused and merely sulked, I would try to force him – and I think he was right about one thing, I should have forced him in the end to do something, though not necessarily in Birmingham. If he managed for the first time in his life to disobey me successfully and remain at Brynmawr, but abandoned his plans, so that life for both of us went back to what it had been before I forced him to walk that hot summer afternoon into Llwll and back, well, I would try to put up with it and we would jog along somehow. But if he refused, and after receiving this last final warning, still continued to attempt to carry out his design, then I should have no mercy.

  6

  And so we come to the final interview.

  Really, Edward’s account is hardly fair. It was, perhaps, tactless of me to select the moment when he liked to go to sleep as the time for entering on a serious discussion, but I never could approve or even remember this habit of his. Besides which, he was rather inclined to deny its regularity and to say, like so many people, that he liked a few minutes’ rest occasionally, but only if there was nothing else to do. But to say that I delivered ‘a monologue, a lecture almost’ seems to me an exaggeration. All I was trying to do was to point out to him why he really ought to try to adopt some serious rôle in life, and you can see, even from his account, that I started gently enough. By the way, I may have stood with my ‘stumpy, ungainly figure’ and my ‘feet planted firmly apart’, but just as a matter of accuracy they were planted on my hearthrug, not on Edward’s, and that was a detail which he could not remember.

  Well, letting that be, Edward’s attitude to what I considered, and still consider, a definitely serious offer, was anything but responsive. So far, I had kept my temper, though I must own, with difficulty, but I will allow that my tone was possibly a little stern when I said I was waiting for an answer. I intended to have one. But so far there had been no hard words; candour, certainly, but nothing bitter or cruel as yet, as Edward implies that there was.

  But then Edward, to my great surprise, lost his temper completely. I had no idea how full of bottled-up spite he was, and it was more with amazement than anything else that I listened at first. But as he went on I got angry in my turn. I could put aside the frothy claptrap about ‘wage slaves’ and the silly remarks about being freed of his keep –even Edward must have realized that I was offering to spend more money on him than I had been doing in the past – but I would not stand his rude references to dear Dr Spencer, a man without whose care Edward would never have been reared, and when finally Edward, with a reference to his Pekingese, threw in my teeth his own attempt to kill me, I came to the conclusion that it was time for plain speaking, for making one last attempt to warn him from his course of self-destruction, and as he says, I reminded him of the mess he had made of his boyhood and his life generally, and believe me, Edward’s diary has a remarkable trick of softening down his actions, and nowhere does he do it more neatly than when he describes his expulsion from school. Well, on that, and on many other points, I spoke out, and I will acknowledge I spoke heatedly, but I do deny that I ‘slated him like a fishwife’, even if I did use a telling phrase or two.

  And finally, did I not end by warning him clearly? He was to behave himself, and this time he did know what I meant. He was to behave himself or I should take action.

  And so, when he failed completely and utterly to behave himself, I did take action. What else could I do? I could not let things stay as they were. It was not only a question of danger to myself. There was danger for everyone else at Brynmawr, and even in Llwll, while Edward was able to go on with plan after plan; for, futile though his plans were, it was almost a certainty that one day one of his crude attempts would come off. Nor could I take anyone into my confidence, and least of all could I allow any scandal to fall on the name of the Powells of Brynmawr. For some centuries we had lived there; if Edward and I were the last of them we should not end with Edward being hanged for murdering me. Nor could I quite trust Edward to carry on the family name without my control.

  But it is time for me to cease my commentary on Edward’s diary and to conclude what he necessarily left unfinished. There are one or two details I shall leave out or intentionally confuse, in the same way that I have confused small points, names, geography, and so on, when editing what Edward wrote, so that inquisitive people may not take too great an interest in what does not concern them.

  Well then, that evening was grim. Edward would not speak to me and I, after a fruitless attempt, abandoned the effort. Besides, I had just had a slight shock. For the last few weeks, as Edward had noticed, I had avoided roast beef. Just before dinner, however, Mary had come to me with a message that the butcher had been unable to send the mutton I had asked for – he had none ready for immediate cooking – and so he had sent in a sirloin, ‘having noticed, ma’am, that you haven’t had one for some little while; and Evans brought up the horse-radish this afternoon’. I only hoped that Edward did not know of it. I thanked Mary, politely enough I hope, but now that things were coming to a crisis, I began to wonder if my nerves were equal to dealing with whatever might arise.

  I slept badly that night and that was why, I suppose, I was woken so easily by the noise of Edward’s alarm clock. For some minutes I lay there, puzzled, as one is when one is awa
kened up suddenly, until it dawned on me what the noise was. Then I got up and quickly put on some clothes.

  Quietly I peered round the curtain and looked out on the wonderful country of the Welsh border. In front of me the Broad Mountain was heaving its wooded sides out of the morning mist. Over the top of it, as I looked at it, the edge of the sun was just beginning to appear, while the feet of the long hill were still shrouded in the white fleece that comes up nightly from the river. To my right, the sheep were stirring on Yr Allt and cropping the short grass shining with the morning dew. To my left the trees of the Fron Wood were beginning to take on here and there the tinges of autumn. It was a morning to rejoice in, in which life was good to live and all the world should be friends, and in front of me on the green lawn, going to my carefully tended flower-beds, driving away my white pigeons and frightening an inquisitive water-wagtail, was Edward, going to get, not flowers, but roots – a nice morning bouquet!

  As he went, he gave a look up at my window, and at that moment I decided I was right in the action I proposed to take. It was the look of a madman, the look his father must have had when he and Edward’s mother met that accident I never really believed was an accident. Taking care that I made no movement that he could see, I slipped away from the window and into Edward’s room. In a few seconds I was possessed of the diary. I had all along determined to have that, in case it was necessary for my own protection. With grim satisfaction I noticed his preparations for instant flight. Then I went out to the garage. I am by no means such a fool about cars as Edward would have you believe, and I made the little arrangements I had planned quickly and efficiently. ‘La Joyeuse’ – to use Edward’s disgusting name – would only go as I desired it to.