Sisters in Crime

by Mike Ashley

  ‘Pardon me!’ Little Miss Strange had advanced. ‘I think, if you will allow me the privilege, madam, that I can shift you into a much more comfortable position.’ And with a deftness and ease certainly not to be expected from one of her slight physique Violet raised the helpless invalid a trifle more upon her pillow.

  The act, its manner and the smile accompanying it could not fail to please, and undoubtedly did, though no word rewarded her from lips not much given to speech save when the occasion was imperative. But Mrs Postlethwaite made no further objection to her presence, and, seeing this, the doctor’s countenance relaxed and he left the room with a much lighter step than that with which he had entered it.

  And thus it was that Violet Strange – an adept in more ways than one – became installed at the bedside of this mysterious woman whose days, if numbered, still held possibilities of action which those interested in young Helena Postlethwaite’s fate would do well to recognize.

  Miss Strange had been at her post for two days and had gathered up the following:

  That Mrs Postlethwaite must be obeyed.

  That her stepdaughter (who did not wish to die) would die if she knew it to be the wish of this domineering but apparently idolized woman.

  That the old man of the clocks, while senile in some regards, was very alert and quite youthful in others. If a century old – which she began greatly to doubt – he had the language and manner of one in his prime when unaffected by the neighbourhood of the clocks, which seemed in some non-understandable way to exercise an occult influence over him. At table he was an entertaining host, but neither there nor elsewhere would he discuss the family or dilate in any way upon the peculiarities of a household of which he manifestly regarded himself as the least important member. Yet no one knew them better, and when Violet became quite assured of this, as well as of the futility of looking for explanation of any kind from either of her two patients, she resolved upon an effort to surprise one from him.

  She went about it in this way. Noting his custom of making a complete round of the clocks each night after dinner, she took advantage of Mrs Postlethwaite’s inclination to sleep at this hour to follow him from clock to clock in the hope of overhearing some portion of the monologue with which he bent his head to the swinging pendulum or put his ear to the hidden works. Soft-footed and discreet, she tripped along at his back and, at each pause he made, paused herself and turned her ear his way. The extreme darkness of the halls, which were more sombre by night than by day, favoured this attempt, and she was able, after a failure or two, to catch the ‘No! no! no! no!’ which fell from his lips in seeming repetition of what he heard the most of them say.

  The satisfaction in his tone proved that the denial to which he listened chimed in with his hopes and gave ease to his mind. But he looked his oldest when, after pausing at another of the many timepieces, he echoed in answer to its special refrain ‘Yes! yes! yes! yes!’ and fled the spot with shaking body and a distracted air.

  The same fear and the same shrinking were observable in him as he returned from listening to the least conspicuous one, standing in a short corridor, where Violet could not follow him. But when, after a hesitation which enabled her to slip behind the curtain hiding the drawing-room door, he approached and laid his ear against the great one standing, as if on guard, at the foot of the stairs, she saw by the renewed vigour he displayed that there was comfort for him in its message even before she caught the whisper with which he left it and proceeded to mount the stairs, ‘It says No! It always says No! I will heed it as the voice of Heaven.’

  But one conclusion could be the result of such an experiment to a mind like Violet’s. This partly touched old man not only held the key to the secret of this house but was in a mood to divulge it if once he could be induced to hear command instead of dissuasion in the tick of this one large clock. But how could he be induced? Violet returned to Mrs Postlethwaite’s bedside in a mood of extreme thoughtfulness.

  Another day passed, and she had not yet seen Miss Postlethwaite. She was hoping each hour to be sent on some errand to that young lady’s room, but no such opportunity was granted her. Once she ventured to ask the doctor, whose visits were now very frequent, what he thought of the young lady’s condition. But, as this question was necessarily put in Mrs Postlethwaite’s presence, the answer was naturally guarded and possibly not altogether frank.

  ‘Our young lady is weaker,’ he acknowledged. ‘Much weaker,’ he added with marked emphasis and his most professional air, ‘or she would be here instead of in her own room. It grieves her not to be able to wait upon her generous benefactress.’

  The word fell heavily. Had it been used as a test? Violet gave him a look, though she had much rather have turned her discriminating eye upon the face staring up at them from the pillow. Had the alarm expressed by others communicated itself at last to the physician? Was the charm which had held him subservient to the mother dissolving under the pitiable state of the child, and was he trying to aid the little detective-nurse in her effort to sound the mystery of her condition?

  His look expressed benevolence, but he took care not to meet the gaze of the woman he had just lauded, possibly because that gaze was fixed upon him in a way to tax his moral courage.

  The silence which ensued was broken by Mrs Postlethwaite. ‘She will live – this poor Helena – how long?’ she asked, with no break in her voice’s wonted music.

  The doctor hesitated, then with a candour hardly to be expected from him, answered, ‘I do not understand Miss Postlethwaite’s case. I should like, with your permission, to consult some New York physician.’

  ‘Indeed!’

  A single word, but as it left this woman’s thin lips Violet recoiled, and, perhaps, the doctor did. Rage can speak in one word as well as in a dozen, and the rage which spoke in this one was of no common order, though it was quickly suppressed, as was all other show of feeling when she added, with a touch of her old charm, ‘Of course you will do what you think best – as you know, I never interfere with a doctor’s decisions – but,’ and here her natural ascendancy of tone and manner returned in all its potency, ‘it would kill me to know that a stranger was approaching Helena’s bedside. It would kill her. She’s too sensitive to survive such a shock.’

  Violet recalled the words worked with so much care by this young girl on a minute piece of linen – I do not want to die – and watched the doctor’s face for some sign of resolution. But embarrassment was all she saw there, and all she heard him say was the conventional reply, ‘I am doing all I can for her. We will wait another day and note the effect of my latest prescription.’

  Another day!

  The deathly calm which overspread Mrs Postlethwaite’s features as this word left the physician’s lips warned Violet not to let another day go by without some action. But she made no remark and, indeed, betrayed but little interest in anything beyond her own patient’s condition. That seemed to occupy her wholly. With consummate art she gave the appearance of being under Mrs Postlethwaite’s complete thrall and watched with fascinated eyes every movement of the one unstricken finger which could do so much.

  This little detective of ours could be an excellent actor when she chose.

  III

  To make the old man speak! To force this conscience-stricken but rebellious soul to reveal what the clock forbade! How could it be done?

  This continued to be Violet’s great problem. She pondered it so deeply during all the remainder of the day that a little pucker settled on her brow which someone (I will not mention who) would have been pained to see. Mrs Postlethwaite, if she noticed it at all, probably ascribed it to her anxieties as nurse, for never had Violet been more assiduous in her attentions. But Mrs Postlethwaite was no longer the woman she had been and possibly never noted it at all.

  At five o’clock Violet suddenly left the room. Slipping down into the lower hall, she went the round of the clocks herself, listening to every one. There was no perceptible difference in thei
r tick. Satisfied of this and that it was simply the old man’s imagination which had supplied them each with separate speech, she paused before the huge one at the foot of the stairs – the one whose dictate he had promised himself to follow – and with an eye upon its broad, staring dial muttered wistfully, ‘Oh! for an idea! For an idea!’

  Did this cumbrous relic of old-time precision turn traitor at this ingenuous plea? The dial continued to stare, the works to sing, but Violet’s face suddenly lost its perplexity. With a wary look about her and a listening ear turned towards the stair top she stretched out her hand and pulled open the door guarding the pendulum and peered in at the works, smiling slyly to herself as she pushed it back into place and retreated upstairs to the sick room.

  When the doctor came that night she had a quiet word with him outside Mrs Postlethwaite’s door. Was that why he was on hand when old Mr Dunbar stole from his room to make his nightly circuit of the halls below? Something quite beyond the ordinary was in the good physician’s mind, for the look he cast at the old man was quite unlike any he had ever bestowed upon him before, and when he spoke it was to say with marked urgency, ‘Our beautiful young lady will not live a week unless I get at the seat of her malady. Pray that I may be enabled to do so, Mr Dunbar.’

  A blow to the aged man’s heart which called forth a feeble, ‘Yes, yes,’ followed by a wild stare which imprinted itself upon the doctor’s memory as the look of one hopelessly old, who hears for the first time a distinct call from the grave which has long been awaiting him!

  A solitary lamp stood in the lower hall. As the old man picked his slow way down, its small hesitating flame flared up as in a sudden gust then sank down flickering and faint as if it, too, had heard a call which summoned it to extinction.

  No other sign of life was visible anywhere. Sunk in twilight shadows, the corridors branched away on either side to no place in particular and serving to all appearance (as many must have thought in days gone by) as a mere hiding place for clocks.

  To listen to their united hum the old man paused, looking at first a little distraught but settling at last into his usual self as he started forward upon his course. Did some whisper, hitherto unheard, warn him that it was the last time he would tread that weary round? Who can tell? He was trembling very much when, with his task nearly completed, he stepped out again into the main hall and crept rather than walked back to the one great clock to whose dictum he made it a practice to listen last.

  Chattering the accustomed words, ‘They say “Yes!” They are all saying “Yes!” now, but this one will say “No!”’ he bent his stiff old back and laid his ear to the unresponsive wood. But the time for no had passed. It was Yes! yes! yes! yes! now, and, as his straining ears took in the word, he appeared to shrink where he stood, and, after a moment of anguished silence, broke forth into a low wail amid whose lamentations one could hear, ‘The time has come! Even the clock she loves best bids me speak. Oh! Arabella, Arabella!’

  In his despair he had not noticed that the pendulum hung motionless or that the hands stood at rest on the dial. If he had he might have waited long enough to have seen the careful opening of the great clock’s tall door and the stepping forth of the little lady who had played so deftly upon his superstition.

  He was wandering the corridors like a helpless child when a gentle hand fell on his arm and a soft voice whispered in his ear, ‘You have a story to tell. Will you tell it to me? It may save Miss Postlethwaite’s life.’

  Did he understand? Would he respond if he did, or would the shock of her appeal restore him to a sense of the danger attending disloyalty? For a moment she doubted the wisdom of this startling measure, then she saw that he had passed the point of surprise and that, stranger as she was, she had but to lead the way for him to follow, tell his story and die.

  There was no light in the drawing-room when they entered. But old Mr Dunbar did not seem to mind that. Indeed, he seemed to have lost all consciousness of present surroundings; he was even oblivious of her. This became quite evident when the lamp, in flaring up again in the hall, gave a momentary glimpse of his crouching, half-kneeling figure. In the pleading gesture of his trembling, outreaching arms Violet beheld an appeal, not to herself but to some phantom of his imagination, and when he spoke, as he presently did, it was with the freedom of one to whom speech is life’s last boon and the ear of the listener quite forgotten in the passion of confession long suppressed.

  ‘She has never loved me,’ he began, ‘but I have always loved her. For me no other woman has ever existed, though I was sixty-five years of age when I first saw her and had long given up the idea that there lived a woman who could sway me from my even life and fixed lines of duty. Sixty-five, and she a youthful bride! Was there ever such folly! Happily I realized it from the first and piled ashes on my hidden flame. Perhaps that is why I adore her to this day and only give her over to reprobation because Fate is stronger than my age – stronger even than my love.

  ‘She is not a good woman, but I might have been a good man if I had never known the sin which drew a line of isolation about her and within which I, and only I, have stood with her in silent companionship. What was this sin, and in what did it have its beginning? I think its beginning was in the passion she had for her husband. It was not the everyday passion of her sex in this land of equable affections, but one of foreign fierceness, jealousy and insatiable demand. Yet he was a very ordinary man. I was once his tutor, and I know. She came to know it, too, when – but I am rushing on too fast, I have much to tell before I reach that point.

  ‘From the first I was in their confidence. Not that either he or she put me there, but that I lived with them and was always around and could not help seeing and hearing what went on between them. Why he continued to want me in the house and at his table when I could no longer be of service to him I have never known. Possibly habit explains all. He was accustomed to my presence and so was she; so accustomed they hardly noticed it, as happened one night when, after a little attempt at conversation, he threw down the book he had caught up and, addressing her by name, said without a glance my way, and quite as if he were alone with her, “Arabella, there is something I ought to tell you. I have tried to find the courage to do so many times before now but have always failed. Tonight I must.” And then he made his great disclosure – how, unknown to his friends and the world, he was a widower when he married her and the father of a living child.

  ‘With some women this might have passed with a measure of regret and some possible contempt for his silence, but not so with her. She rose to her feet – I can see her yet – and for a moment stood facing him in the still, overpowering manner of one who feels the icy pang of hate enter where love has been. Never was a moment more charged – I could not breathe while it lasted – and when at last she spoke it was with an impetuosity of concentrated passion, hardly less dreadful than her silence had been.

  ‘“You a father! A father already!” she cried, all her sweetness swallowed up in ungovernable wrath. “You whom I expected to make so happy with a child? I curse you and your brat. I …”

  ‘He strove to placate her, to explain, but rage has no ears, and before I realized my own position the scene became openly tempestuous. That her child should be second to another woman’s seemed to awaken demon instincts within her. When he ventured to hint that his little girl needed a mother’s care, her irony bit like corroding acid. He became speechless before it and had not a protest to raise when she declared that the secret he had kept so long and so successfully he must continue to keep to his dying day, that the child he had failed to own in his first wife’s lifetime should remain disowned in hers and if possible be forgotten. She should never give the girl a thought nor acknowledge her in any way.

  ‘She was Fury embodied, but the fury was of that grand order which allures rather than repels. As I felt myself succumbing to its fascination and beheld how he was weakening under it even more perceptibly than myself, I started from my chair and sought to g
lide away before I should hear him utter a fatal acquiescence.

  ‘But the movement I made unfortunately drew their attention to me, and after an instant of silent contemplation of my distracted countenance Frank said, as though he were the elder by the forty years which separated us, “You have listened to Mrs Postlethwaite’s wishes. You will respect them, of course.”

  ‘That was all. He knew and she knew that I was to be trusted, but neither of them has ever known why.

  ‘A month later her child came and was welcomed as though it were the first to bear his name. It was a boy, and their satisfaction was so great that I looked to see their old affection revive. But it had been cleft at the root, and nothing could restore it to life. They loved the child – I have never seen evidence of greater parental passion than they both displayed – but there their feelings stopped. Towards each other they were cold. They did not even unite in worship of their treasure. They gloated over him and planned for him, but always apart. He was a child in a thousand, and, as he developed, the mother especially nursed all her energies for the purpose of ensuring for him a future commensurate with his talents. Never a very conscientious woman, and alive to the advantages of wealth as demonstrated by the power wielded by her rich brother-in-law, she associated all the boy’s prospects with money, great money, such money as Andrew had accumulated and now had at his disposal for his natural heirs.