by Dicey Deere
Torrey said, “Uhhuh … Thanks for the tea.” What she was looking for, whatever it was, wasn’t to be found here at Castle Moore. Waste of time. What was she looking for, anyway? She got up. “I’m off.”
Winifred speculatively watched Ms. Torrey Tunet pedal off down the avenue. Something doing behind Ms. Tunet’s big gray eyes starred by the black lashes.
“Wouldn’t you say, Sheila,” Winifred said to Sheila Flaxton, “that Ms. Torrey Tunet has that look again?”
“What look?”
“Her dragon-slaying look.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Winifred! You have the most amazing tendency to make something out of nothing.”
3
Thursday morning at ten o’clock, Sean O’Boyle finished clipping the boxwood hedges at Sylvester Hall. Shears in hand, he straightened. He was sixty-two. Every Thursday since he was in his thirties, he’d manicured the green lawns that sloped away from the hall down to the woods. He pruned the glossy yews and rhododendrons and cut back the shrubs. In the greenhouse, he planted seeds and nurtured plants. He oversaw the kitchen garden, so there was always a supply of fresh fruits and vegetables for the household. And even after so many years, he still felt a lift of pleasure when his old car rattled through the gates and up the avenue of oaks, and there, set like a gem in the folds of the hills, lay Sylvester Hall.
As for the shears—Sean made a face. They’d gotten dull; he liked a shears sharp as razors. He’d give them a good grinding. The whetstone was kept in the coach house. It was a grindstone that purred like a cat, a pleasure to use; he’d even sharpened his penknife on it. And Breda, the cook, always gave him her kitchen knives to sharpen.
He started across the stone-flagged courtyard toward the handsome coach house. It was grey, with three sets of black, arched double doors, wide enough for carriages with double-harnessed horses. The doors had brass pulls shaped like lions’ heads.
But now, of course, it was a garage. There was Ms. Cameron’s Saab and Dakin’s red Jeep. The old silver Rolls was there, seldom used now, though in Sybil Sylvester’s day Olin Caughey, the chauffeur, would drive the old lady to her shopping and bridge games in the Rolls. Not that Olin Caughey should’ve been driving at all, what with his kidneys always acting up. Tough old bird. “I’ll use your guts for garters!” he’d threaten Sean when he’d been drinking. And Sean, younger and stronger, had to laugh.
There was still the one old carriage left in the coach house, though. It was a black boxlike, closed carriage, elegant looking, with two square lamps with beveled glass. A hundred years old. Last year, an antiques fellow had offered Ms. Cameron a hefty sum for the carriage, but she’d turned him down. Odd, because Ms. Cameron wasn’t what you’d call sentimental about historical family possessions.
“Mr. O’Boyle?” Jessie Dugan, the younger of the two maids, was coming across the courtyard. She was carrying the morning’s post of letters and magazines from the postbox at the end of the avenue.
“Morning, Jessie.”
Jessie was frowning, head tipped sideways in puzzlement. “This morning, Mr. O’Boyle—When you got here, did you see anyone about? Maybe near the postbox?”
Sean shook his head.
“Well, queer. Yesterday when I got the mail, a letter for Ms. Cameron was in the box without a stamp. Now, this morning, another letter! This one.” Jessie held up a blue envelope. “Had to’ve been just put there!”
Sean said, offhandedly, “Well, what of that? What with stamps costing as much as a side of bacon to send a letter!” He said it just to have Jessie on. But it was odd. In truth, he didn’t like it. Anything a bit off sent a little tightness of alarm between his shoulder blades and he’d look about like a deer raising its head at the scent of danger. It always had.
At ten-thirty, after a half hour’s brisk morning walk with the two hounds, Natalie Cameron arrived back at Sylvester Hall. She’d been in the woods and fields, nettles clung to her woolen pants. She felt healthy, happy, and glowingly alive; autumn was her season, she loved it.
“Dakin was up at six,” Jessie had told her over her late breakfast. “He waited to talk to you. But he finally had to leave. He was putting up scaffolding. The Conklins’ barn.” Lucinda had left for school at eight.
“Sorry I missed Dakin.” She’d been in Dublin until late last night at a meeting about low-cost housing. She’d arrived home after one o’clock and had slept late.
Absentmindedly plucking nettles off her pants, she went into the library. At the big table she settled down and opened the folder of plans for Marshall’s housing project. Marshall was somewhere in America. Oregon, a three-week teaching seminar. When he got back, they’d plan the wedding. A dozen close friends. After Andrew’s death, she’d thought she’d never be in love again. And why Marshall? Forty-two, up from a working-class Scotch-Irish family, and too decent to be true. “Marshall West, the architect,” was the way he’d been introduced to her at a fund-raiser. He’d taken her to dinner. He drove a Honda. He had a couple of organic apples in the glove compartment; he liked to munch an apple and listen to music, Beethoven and Mozart. He told her that at nineteen, at university, he’d been engaged, “but my girl suddenly married a soccer player she’d met in a pub the week before.” Since then, pleasant, short-lived affairs without true involvement on either side. Until now.
“Ma’am?” Jessie came into the library. “Ma’am? Breda says, about lunch, Coyle’s is out of asparagus, and will broccoli do? She can make the soup with carrots and the broccoli in the blender. And mix in a bit of yogurt for tartness. Considering—”
“Yes, Jessie. Broccoli soup’s fine.”
“And ma’am?” Jessie glanced at the morning’s post that Natalie had picked up from the hall tray but hadn’t yet looked through. “That there’s another letter without a stamp. The blue. The one on top. If you’ll notice.”
“Yes, Jessie.” Watching Jessie leave, she couldn’t help smiling. Jessie, always so apprehensive, as though the sky might fall.
As for that first unstamped letter she’d received Monday morning with its ridiculous enclosure wrapped in a twist of white tissue—! Reading the letter, she’d laughed. What nonsense! A sharp, angular handwriting on copy paper:
A pity to let the exposure of one’s past jeopardize one’s present life and future! Especially when you’re espousing such a worthy cause. Decent housing is critical indeed! I respect your cause! But due to unfortunate circumstances, I am in need of funds. I must save myself. So I have no recourse but to resort to you. In the amount of twenty thousand pounds. At twelve noon on Wednesday, bring twenty thousand pounds to the white cairn cornerstone that separates the Sylvester property from Castle Moore. The Cloverleaf shall then be yours.
Reading the letter Monday morning, she’d been bewildered. Then laughed. Blackmail! Pay up or he—or she?—would expose her past! Was this a joke? Her past? What past? How boring that she didn’t even have a past. She’d never done anything shameful. She was, now that she thought of it, ridiculously moral. True, even as a child she’d had a dirty mouth. But that wasn’t a shameful past. “I’m a bloody paragon!” she’d said aloud, and laughed.
What other foibles? Hung out as a teenager in Dublin pubs, smoking pot? She only wished she had! But from the age of six she’d attended that sickening goody-goody Alcock’s Academy, that all-girls school that was strict as a nunnery. Her great-aunt Sybil, who’d brought her up, had seen to that. A tediously numbing experience. Damn it! She’d never even had time to do anything worth being blackmailed for!
She’d rattled the preposterous blackmail letter. “You’ve got the wrong lady!” She’d been barely nineteen when her great-aunt Sybil had taken her on a trip to Italy. In Florence she’d met her beloved Andrew. She’d never cheated on Andrew with a lover. She’d never even been tempted to cheat. After Andrew’s death in the cross fire outside the Gresham, she’d had two years of numbness. The children, Dakin and Lucinda, then fourteen and eight, had been her only comfort. Who was the
Greek matron who said of her children, “These are my jewels”? Somebody. Penelope? Anyway. Dakin and Lucinda, her jewels. Then four months ago, she’d met Marshal West and fallen in love.
So, incredulously looking down at the letter, she’d laughed. And what did this blackmailer mean by Cloverleaf? The Cloverleaf shall be yours. What a crock!
Then, curious, she’d unwrapped the tissue paper. A tarnished silver charm bracelet with three silver unicorns dangling from it. Souvenir-shop kind of cheap bauble. Was it supposed to mean something significant to her? Well, it didn’t. She’d tossed it into the wastebasket along with the letter.
But then, frowning, she’d thought, better to keep the letter and its enclosure to show to Inspector O’Hare in case she decided to call him. Such a nuisance! Exasperating. She had a million letters to write about Marshall’s housing project. Still …
She took the letter and charm bracelet from the wastebasket and put them into the shallow desk drawer. Before sliding the drawer closed, she looked down at the bracelet. She frowned. She lifted a hand and brushed her fingers over her left brow as though to brush away something thin and gauzy that obscured her vision. She blinked, and it was gone. She closed the drawer.
Now this second letter.
“Hell and damnation! What a nuisance!” She picked up the blue envelope and slit it open. This second letter, too, had an enclosure wrapped in tissue paper.
Elbows on the desk, exasperated at wasting time over such nonsense, she read the letter, the already-familiar heavy handwriting, with its sharp up-and-down angles:
Same time, Saturday noon. At the white cairn. But now it will cost you thirty thousand pounds. The cloverleaf will be yours.
In place of a signature, a heavy, black dash.
There were two postscripts. The first:
Don’t think you can be rid of me until you pay—not even by under-handed means. As for crying out to the law, I’ve no fear of that, since you’re aware that it would lead to the revelation about you—I’d make sure of that. So I am untouchable. As Napoleon said at Montereau, “The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.”
The second postscript said only, “A present for Dakin.” The single sentence made her catch her breath. Dakin. Why Dakin? She tore open the tissue. A small penknife Ivory. Perhaps five inches long.
She sat holding the knife. She turned it over and over. She felt a shiver. The ivory penknife, cool to the touch. Familiar, somehow.
“Ma’am?” Jessie again in the doorway. “Lester’s here, to be paid. That’s the mulch and the hydrangeas. And he says Sean O’Boyle says plantings are needed along the roadside both sides of the gates, he’s given Lester this list.”
“You’ll find Lester’s check on the hall table. Leave the list. Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The door closed behind Jessie.
Familiar. She turned the penknife over and over. Familiar. And then she knew why: Engraved into the ivory on one side were the initials, JHS. Her father’s initials. It was the little penknife she’d inherited. It had been her father’s as a boy.
She left the library. At the east end of the upper hall, opposite the grandfather clock was the old escritoire. It had been there since her childhood. She’d always thought of it as her escritoire, her great-aunt Sybil had had no use for it. She knelt down and opened the base of the grandfather clock. She took out the key to the escritoire. Dust motes rose from inside the clock, making her sneeze.
She unlocked the escritoire. The penknife. She had kept it here in the top left drawer with her other treasured childhood keepsakes.
She pulled open the top drawer. But of course the penknife was not there: she was holding it in her hand. JHS. Her father’s ivory penknife. Someone had come into Sylvester Hall and crept up the staircase and stolen the penknife. Who? And why?
A present for Dakin.
4
“Ma?” The coach house no longer smelled of horse and feed, but old harnesses still hung from iron hooks. Dakin always thought of sleek horses harnessed to carriages and trotting with arched necks down the avenue. A smell of gasoline now, though, from the cars. Light came only dimly through the high horizontal windows. Dakin walked past the cars to the far end and approached the boxlike old carriage.
“Ma?”
She was in the carriage. He’d suspected she would be. Even as a small boy, he’d known it was her refuge, as though it had some indefinable power, some mysterious means of soothing whatever troubled her.
“It’s me.” He put a foot on the step and pulled himself up; the springs creaked. He sat down on the faded mulberry-colored button seat opposite his mother. “What’s it about?”
“What’s what about?”
“Don’t you know?” He was startled. “Yesterday, I was doing some carpentry for a friend of Winifred Moore. That old groundsman’s cottage that belongs to Castle Moore? While I was there, I got a phone call, a man’s voice. It was a threat. He said, ‘Tell your mother to pay attention to the blue envelope communication. If she ignores it, her secret will become public knowledge. Tell her! Everyone will know the truth about her! As for you—And he laughed. It was too—a nightmare! Out of the blue! It stunned me. When I hung up, he tried to call back. I should have answered, but I couldn’t, I was too—too—Is that what shock is like? Bile in one’s throat? Sickened?” Dakin leaned toward his mother. “Ma, who’s that man? What did he mean? I wanted to kill him!”
His mother said, helplessly, “I’ve no idea. A man, was it? Anyway, a blackmailer. I want to laugh it off as nonsense. But …” She told him then about the two letters and her father’s stolen penknife. “That’s what bothers me. The penknife. That someone sneaked into Sylvester Hall and stole it. It couldn’t have been anybody in the house; Jessie and Breda have worked at the hall for years.” She plucked at a frayed bit of the mulberry-colored velvet.
“Ma, you have to call Inspector O’Hare right away. He’ll get in touch with Dublin Castle. The crime division will send Gardi to stake out the cairn. When the blackmailer shows up for the money, they’ll grab him.”
His mother was frowning. “Dakin, I’m thinking. There are people who prey on other people’s feelings of guilt. Maybe this Mr. X is one of them. There’s that theory that everyone feels guilty about something—or almost everybody. Once, to prove it, a psychologist picked ten people’s names out of the telephone book and sent them each a telegram saying, ‘All has been discovered. Leave town immediately.’ Eight of them left town.”
“But—”
“Maybe, Dakin, this blackmailer is working on the same principle. Maybe he preys on women! Frightens them into paying him thousands of pounds. So maybe I should just ignore his—”
“Ma. What about your father’s penknife?”
His mother stared at him. Then her hazel eyes, so much like his own, wavered. “Yes … that.” She bit her lips.
“Then you’ll call Inspector O’Hare?”
“You’re right, Dakin. I’ll call O’Hare.” But even as she said it, she realized she wasn’t going to call O’Hare. It had something to do with … with what? She raised her hand and brushed her fingers across her brow; it was as though a gray veil hid something almost glimpsed.
“Good!” Dakin said. “That’s that, then.”
But because Natalie had never lied to her son, she said, “No, Dakin. I’m not going to call O’Hare. I’m not sure why not. But I won’t call him.”
Dakin looked at his mother, her ordinarily glowing face had gone pale, her bright hair in the dimness of the carriage had a dull sheen. Against the faded color of the carriage, she looked like some lost Renaissance princess, never mind her sweater and gray pants to which a few nettles still clung.
Dakin said, appalled, “That letter! Saturday noon! You mean you’re going to get the money and go to the cairn to meet with this blackmailer?”
“And give him thirty thousand pounds? Of course not! I haven’t done anything to warrant this! And what’s Cloverleaf
? I’ve no idea.” She leaned forward. Her honey-colored hair fell across her brow. “Darling.” She laid her hand over the strong, tanned hand that rested on his knee. “I wish you didn’t know about any of this.”
But he was glad he knew. Because if he hadn’t known, there wouldn’t have been anything he could do about it.
Dakin gone, she leaned back in the old carriage, soothed as always by its musty-smelling, faded mulberry upholstery. Overtired, that was it, working too hard on the housing project. Otherwise, why this strange little lurching of the heart, as though there was something … but how could there be? Yet … She raised a hand and brushed it across her eyes. Something glimpsed. Blood oozing on the palm of a hand. Poor lad! Laughing, bending her head to lick the palm, the taste of blood. A green … box? A marble what? … cold to the touch.
“What? What?” she said aloud. She gave a jerk as though suddenly roused from sleep. She pushed open the carriage door and stepped out. She was trembling, it was so cold. She should have worn a sweater. It was, after all, October.
5
A few minutes before noon, two hours after Torrey had left Castle Moore, she leaned her bicycle agaainst the wall outside O’Malley’s Pub. It wasn’t just that she owed Dakin because of the two lads of the fookin’ drugs. It was also inherent outrage at the cruel telephone call. So, no use trying to ignore it. Connaître le dessous des cartes, as the French had it: know the undersides of the cards. Something in her demanded to know.
There was only a handful of customers in O’Malley’s this early. Young Sean was behind the bar cutting cheese into half-inch squares and piling them into bowls and putting out the little glasses of toothpicks. The table at the end of the bar was occupied by Michael McIntyre, its usual occupant at eleven-thirty.
