Elizabeth Temple stared at the peonies for some minutes. When she spoke she uttered one word. It echoed like the tone of a deep bell so much so that it was startling.
"Love!" she said.
Miss Marple queried the word sharply.
"Love?"
"One of the most frightening words there is in the world," said Elizabeth Temple.
Again her voice was bitter and tragic.
"Love…"
Chapter 7
AN INVITATION
Miss Marple decided to miss out on the afternoon's sightseeing. She admitted to being somewhat tired and would perhaps give a miss to an ancient church and its 14th-century glass. She would rest for a while and join them at the tea room which had been pointed out to her in the main street. Mrs Sandbourne agreed that she was being very sensible.
Miss Marple, resting on a comfortable bench outside the tea room, reflected on what she planned to do next and whether it would be wise to do it or not.
When the others joined her at teatime it was easy for her to attach herself unobtrusively to Miss Cooke and Miss Barrow and sit with them at a table for four. The fourth chair was occupied by Mr Caspar whom Miss Marple considered as not sufficiently conversant with the English language to matter.
Leaning across the table, as she nibbled a slice of Swiss roll, Miss Marple said to Miss Cooke.
"You know, I am quite sure we have met before. I have been wondering and wondering about it. I'm not as good as I was at remembering faces, but I'm sure I have met you somewhere."
Miss Cooke looked kindly but doubtful. Her eyes went to her friend, Miss Barrow. So did Miss Marple's. Miss Barrow showed no signs of helping to probe the mystery.
"I don't know if you've ever stayed in my part of the world," went on Miss Marple, "I live in St Mary Mead. Quite a small village, you know. At least, not so small nowadays, there is so much building going on everywhere. Not very far from Much Benham and only twelve miles from the coast at Loomouth."
"Oh," said Miss Cooke, "let me see. Well, I know Loomouth quite well and perhaps…"
Suddenly Miss Marple made a pleased exclamation.
"Why, of course! I was in my garden one day at St Mary Mead and you spoke to me as you were passing by on the foot path. You said you were staying down there, I remember, with a friend -"
"Of course," said Miss Cooke. "How stupid of me. I do remember you now. We spoke of how difficult it was nowadays to get anyone – to do job gardening, I mean anyone who was any use."
"Yes. You were not living there, I think? You were staying with someone."
"Yes, I was staying with… with…" for a moment Miss Cooke hesitated, with the air of one who hardly knows or remembers a name.
"With a Mrs Sutherland, was it?" suggested Miss Marple.
"No, no, it was… er… Mrs…"
" Hastings," said Miss Barrow firmly as she took a piece of chocolate cake.
"Oh yes, in one of the new houses," said Miss Marple.
" Hastings," said Mr Caspar unexpectedly. He beamed.
"I have been to Hastings – I have been to Eastbourne, too." He beamed again. "Very nice, by the sea."
"Such a coincidence," said Miss Marple, "meeting again so soon – such a small world, isn't it?"
"Oh, well, we are all so fond of gardens," said Miss Cooke vaguely.
"Flowers very pretty," said Mr Caspar. "I like very much." He beamed again.
"So many rare and beautiful shrubs," said Miss Cooke.
Miss Marple went full speed ahead with a gardening conversation of some technicality. Miss Cooke responded. Miss Barrow put in an occasional remark.
Mr Caspar relapsed into smiling silence.
Later, as Miss Marple took her usual rest before dinner, she conned over what she had collected. Miss Cooke had admitted being in St Mary Mead. She had admitted walking past Miss Marple's house. Had agreed it was quite a coincidence. Coincidence? thought Miss Marple meditatively, turning the word over in her mouth rather as a child might do to a certain lollipop to decide its flavour. Was it a coincidence? Or had she had some reason to come there? Had she been sent there? Sent there for what reason? Was that a ridiculous thing to imagine?
"Any coincidence," said Miss Marple to herself, "is always worth noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence."
Miss Cooke and Miss Barrow appeared to be a perfectly normal pair of friends doing the kind of tour, which according to them, they did every year. They had been on an Hellenic cruise last year and a tour of bulbs in Holland the year before, and Northern Ireland the year before that. They seemed perfectly pleasant and ordinary people. But Miss Cooke, she thought, had for a moment looked as though she were about to disclaim her visit to St Mary Mead. She had looked at her friend, Miss Barrow, rather as though she were seeking instruction as to what to say. Miss Barrow was presumably the senior partner…"
"Of course, really, I may have been imagining all these things," thought Miss Marple. "They may have no significance whatever."
The word danger came unexpectedly into her mind. Used by Mr Rafiel in his first letter, and there had been some reference to her needing a guardian angel in his second letter. Was she going into danger in this business? and why? From whom?
Surely not from Miss Cooke and Miss Barrow. Such an ordinary-looking couple. All the same Miss Cooke had dyed her hair and altered her style of hairdressing. Disguised her appearance as much as she could, in fact. Which was odd, to say the least of it! She considered once more her fellow travellers.
Mr Caspar, now, it would have been much easier to imagine that he might be dangerous. Did he understand more English than he pretended to do? She began to wonder about Mr Caspar.
Miss Marple had never quite succeeded in abandoning her Victorian view of foreigners. One never knew with foreigners. Quite absurd, of course, to feel like that – she had many friends from various foreign countries. All the same…? Miss Cooke, Miss Barrow, Mr Caspar, that young man with the wild hair – Emlyn Something, a revolutionary, a practising anarchist? Mr and Mrs Butler, such nice Americans – but perhaps…too good to be true?
"Really," said Miss Marple, "I must pull myself together."
She turned her attention to the itinerary of their trip. Tomorrow, she thought, was going to be rather strenuous. A morning's sight-seeing drive, starting rather early, a long, rather athletic walk on a coastal path in the afternoon. Certain interesting marine flowering plants, it would be tiring. A tactful suggestion was appended. Anyone who felt like a rest could stay behind in their hotel, the Golden Boar, which had a very pleasant garden or could do a short excursion which would only take an hour, to a beauty spot nearby. She thought perhaps that she would do that.
But though she did not know it then, her plans were to be suddenly altered.
As Miss Marple came down from her room in the Golden Boar the next day after washing her hands before luncheon, a woman in a tweed coat and skirt came forward rather nervously and spoke to her.
"Excuse me, are you Miss Marple, Miss Jane Marple?"
"Yes, that is my name," said Miss Marple, slightly surprised.
"My name is Mrs Glynne. Lavinia Glynne. I and my two sisters live near here and, well, we heard you were coming, you see -"
"You heard I was coming?" said Miss Marple with some slight surprise.
"Yes. A very old friend of ours wrote to us – oh, quite some time ago, it must have been three weeks ago, but he asked us to make a note of this date. The date of the Famous Houses and Gardens Tour. He said that a great friend of his, or a relation, I'm not quite sure which would be on that tour."
Miss Marple continued to look surprised.
"I'm speaking of a Mr Rafiel," said Mrs Glynne.
"Oh! Mr Rafiel," said Miss Marple. "You – you know that -"
"That he died? Yes. So sad. Just after his letter came. I think it must have been certainly very soon after he wrote to us. But we felt a special urgency to try to do what he had asked. He suggested, you know,
that perhaps you would like to come and stay with us for a couple of nights. This part of the tour is rather strenuous. I mean, it's all right for the young people, but it is very trying for anyone older. It involves several miles of walking and a certain amount of climbing up difficult cliff paths and places. My sisters and I would be so very pleased if you could come and stay in our house here. It is only ten minutes' walk from the hotel and I'm sure we could show you many interesting things locally."
Miss Marple hesitated a minute. She liked the look of Mrs Glynne, plump, good-natured, and friendly though a little shy. Besides – here again must be Mr Rafiel's instructions…the next step for her to take? Yes, it must be so.
She wondered why she felt nervous. Perhaps because she was now at home with the people in the tour, felt part of the group although as yet she had only known them for three days.
She turned to where Mrs Glynne was standing, looking up at her anxiously.
"Thank you, it is most kind of you. I shall be very pleased to come."
Chapter 8
THE THREE SISTERS
Miss Marple stood looking out of a window. Behind her, on the bed, was her suitcase. She looked out over the garden with unseeing eyes. It was not often that she failed to see a garden she was looking at, in either a mood of admiration or a mood of criticism. In this case it would presumably have been criticism. It was a neglected garden, a garden on which little money had been spent possibly for some years, and on which very little work had been done. The house, too, had been neglected. It was well proportioned, the furniture in it had been good furniture once, but had had little in late years of polishing or attention. It was not a house, she thought, that had been, at any rate of late years, loved in any way. It lived up to its name: The Old Manor House… A house, built with grace and a certain amount of beauty, lived in, once cherished. The daughters and sons had married and left and now it was lived in by Mrs Glynne who, from a word she had let fall when she showed Miss Marple up to the bedroom appointed to her, had inherited it with her sisters from an uncle and had come here to live with her sisters after her husband had died. They had all grown older, their incomes had dwindled, labour had been more difficult to get.
The other sisters, presumably, had remained unmarried, one older, one younger than Mrs Glynne, two Miss Bradbury-Scotts.
There was no sign of anything which belonged to a child in the house. No discarded ball, no old perambulator, no little chair or a table. This was just a house with three sisters.
"Sounds very Russian," murmured Miss Marple to herself. She did mean The Three Sisters, didn't she? Chekhov, was it? or Dostoievsky? Really, she couldn't remember. Three sisters. But these would certainly not be the kind of three sisters who were yearning to go to Moscow. These three sisters were presumably, she was almost sure they were, content to remain where they were. She had been introduced to the other two who had come, one out of the kitchen and one down a flight of stairs, to welcome her. Their manners were well bred and gracious. They were what Miss Marple would have called in her youth by the now obsolete term "ladies" – and what she once recalled calling: "decayed ladies". Her father had said to her:
"No, dear Jane, not decayed. Distressed gentlewomen."
Gentlewomen nowadays were not so liable to be distressed. They were aided by Government or by Societies or by a rich relation. Or, perhaps – by someone like Mr Rafiel. Because, after all, that was the whole point, the whole reason for her being here, wasn't it? Mr Rafiel had arranged all this. He had taken, Miss Marple thought, a good deal of trouble about it. He had known presumably, some four or five weeks before his death, just when that death was likely to be, give and take a little, since doctors were usually moderately optimistic, knowing from experience that patients who ought to die within a certain period very often took an unexpected lease of life and lingered on, still doomed, but obstinately declining to take the final step. On the other hand, hospital nurses when in charge of patients, had, Miss Marple thought from her experience, always expected the patients to be dead the next day, and were much surprised when they were not. But in voicing their gloomy views to Doctor, when he came, they were apt to receive in reply as the doctor went out of the hall door, a private aside of, "Linger a few weeks yet, I shouldn't wonder". Very nice, of Doctor to be so optimistic, Nurse would think, but surely Doctor was wrong. Doctor very often wasn't wrong. He knew that people who were in pain, helpless, crippled, even unhappy, still liked living and wanting to live. They would take one of Doctor's pills to help them pass the night, but they had no intention of taking a few more than necessary of Doctor's pills, just in order to pass the threshold to a world that they did not as yet know anything about!
Mr Rafiel. That was the person Miss Marple was thinking about as she looked across the garden with unseeing eyes. Mr Rafiel? She felt now that she was getting a little closer to understanding the task laid upon her, the project suggested to her. Mr Rafiel was a man who made plans. Made them in the same way that he planned financial deals and take-overs. In the words of her servant, Cherry, he had had a problem. When Cherry had a problem, she often came and consulted Miss Marple about it.
This was a problem that Mr Rafiel could not deal with himself, which must have annoyed him very much, Miss Marple thought, because he could usually deal with any problem himself and insisted on doing so. But he was bedridden and dying. He could arrange his financial affairs, communicate with his lawyers, with his employees and with such friends and relations as he had, but there was something or someone that he had not arranged for. A problem he had not solved, a problem he still wanted to solve, a project he still wanted to bring about. And apparently it was not one that could be settled by financial aid, by business dealings, by the services of a lawyer.
"So he thought of me," said Miss Marple.
It still surprised her very much. Very much indeed. However, in the sense she was now thinking of it, his letter had been quite explicit. He had thought she had certain qualifications for doing something. It had to do, she thought once again, with something in the nature of crime or affected by crime. The only other thing he knew about Miss Marple was that she was devoted to gardens. Well it could hardly be a gardening problem that he wanted her to solve. But he might think of her in connection with crime. Crime in the West Indies and crimes in her own neighbourhood at home.
A crime where?
Mr Rafiel had made arrangements. Arrangements, to begin with, with his lawyers. They had done their part. At the right interval of time they had forwarded to her his letter. It had been, she thought, a well considered and well thought out letter. It would have been simpler, certainly, to tell her exactly what he wanted her to do and why he wanted it. She was surprised in a way that he had not, before his death, sent for her, probably in a somewhat peremptory way and more or less lying on what he would have assured her was his deathbed, and would then have bullied her until she consented to do what he was asking her. But no, that would not really have been Mr Rafiel's way, she thought. He could bully people, none better, but this was not a case of bullying, and he did not wish either, she was sure, to appeal to her, to beg her to do him a favour, to urge her to redress a wrong. No. That again would not have been Mr Rafiel's way. He wanted, she thought, as he had probably wanted all his life, to pay for what he required. He wanted to pay her and therefore he wanted to interest her enough to enjoy doing certain work. The pay was offered to intrigue her, not really to tempt her. It was to arouse her interest. She did not think that he had said to himself, 'Offer enough money and she'll leap at it' because as she knew very well herself, the money sounded very agreeable but she was not in urgent need of money. She had her dear and affectionate nephew who, if she was in straits for money of any kind, if she needed repairs to her house or visit to a specialist or special treats, dear Raymond would always provide them.
No. The sum he offered was to be exciting.
It was to be exciting in the same way as it was exciting when you had a ticket for the Irish Swe
ep. It was a fine big sum of money that you could never achieve by any other means except luck.
But all the same, Miss Marple thought to herself, she would need some luck as well as hard work, she would require a lot of thought and pondering and possibly what she was doing might involve a certain amount of danger. But she'd got to find out herself what it was all about, he wasn't going to tell her, partly perhaps because he did not want to influence her? It is hard to tell anyone about something without letting slip your own point of view about it. It could be that Mr Rafiel had thought that his own point of view might be wrong. It was not very like him to think such a thing, but it could be possible. He might suspect that his judgement, impaired by illness, was not quite as good as it used to be. So she, Miss Marple, his agent, his employee, was to make her own guesses, come to her own conclusions.
Well, it was time she came to a few conclusions now. In other words, back to the old question, what was all this about?
She had been directed. Let her take that first. She had been directed by a man who was now dead. She had been directed away from St Mary Mead. Therefore, the task whatever it must be, could not be attacked from there. It was not a neighbourhood problem, it was not a problem that you could solve just by looking through newspaper cuttings or making enquiries, not, that is, until you found what you had to make enquiries about. She had been directed, first to the lawyer's office, then to read a letter – two letters – in her home, then to be sent on a pleasant and well run tour round some of the Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain.
From that she had come to the next stepping stone. The house she was in at this moment. The Old Manor House, Jocelyn St Mary, where lived Miss Clotilde Bradbury-Scott, Mrs Glynne and Miss Anthea Bradbury-Scott. Mr Rafiel had arranged that, arranged it beforehand. Some weeks before he died. Probably it was the next thing he had done after instructing his lawyers and after booking a seat on the tour in her name. Therefore, she was in this house for a purpose. It might be for only two nights, it might be for longer. There might be certain things arranged which would lead her to stay longer or she would be asked to stay longer. That brought her back to where she stood now.
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