Earwig gave him an inscrutable smile. “A room of his own, a telephone and a live-out housekeeper—what more could a man wish for?”
Redfyre had the self-restraint to wait until she had put down her dessert spoon, following her second helping of apple pie, before he asked his first question.
“Are you ever going to tell me why you twisted my aunt’s arm and arranged for an officer of the law to be sitting next to you when your friend performed this evening?”
“You didn’t believe what I had to tell you about Wulfie? No? Thought not. Hetty warned me you were a jolly handsome bloke, but she didn’t tell me you were quite sharp-witted, really . . .”
“For a policeman?”
“For a man.”
“What story did you tell her?”
“The Wulfie saga. But she refused to believe me, too. Skepticism seems to be a family trait. Hetty thought I was trying to get alongside one of the most eligible bachelors in Cambridge . . . That’s you! You clown.” She sighed with impatience as he dismissed the compliment by casting a joking look over his shoulder to locate the eligible bachelor. “Ladies of her generation keep lists, you know. And you feature in pole position in one of them. They are quite firmly of the opinion that those men lucky enough to have survived the war in reasonably good shape should do their duty by their species and marry one of the superfluous girls left on the shelf through no fault of their own.” She paused for a moment, then added with a slight smile. “You’re looking at one such, I’m afraid. Twenty-six next birthday. An old maid. Worse, I’m very choosy. Worst of all, I’m penniless. Or shall be soon, when Pa kicks the bucket. ”
“Surely he’ll have made provision for his daughter?”
“You don’t know him! In his world, daughters are farmed out as quickly and as cheaply as possible onto some well-to-do, obliging chap of the same class.” She gave a world-weary sigh that would have gone over well onstage, playing opposite Noël Coward. “You know—over the brandy and cigars, some young Percy or Cecil will be drawn aside and sounded out. ‘My gel Earwig? I hear you’ve been paying some attention? Interested, are you? If you’d care to take things further, I wouldn’t stand in your way. Could do worse, you know!’”
The bitterness in her voice roused Redfyre to strive for a cheering antidote. He gave a theatrical shudder. “Don’t! I have been that Percy, that Cecil! Though it takes an increasingly desperate father to pencil in a policeman on his list of approved suitors. But your allowance—will it be protected, do you think?”
“Interested, are you?” Her lip curled. “I don’t think my allowance was at the forefront of his mind when he drew up his new will. In any case, he’s struggling, things being what they are in these austere times.” She glanced at the fur hanging casually on a peg behind the door. “The coat is very much pre-war. It was my mother’s. The silk dress, I wore for my coming-out party five years ago. I’ve altered it to look fashionable, thanks to the skill with a needle I acquired in the war.”
Redfyre recognised a diversion and a lie when he heard them. “But you’re flush enough to pay for your friend’s medical attention?”
“Just about. Juno’s very welcome to whatever I have.”
“Right. Next layer of the onion, please. What exactly were you afraid would happen this evening? I think you were aware that Juno was in danger of some sort. There was a Beware-the-Ides-of-March twitchiness about you all evening. But the moment the accident happened, you were calm and unafraid, and displayed all the sangfroid of an unflappable sergeant-major. I admired the brisk way you made a decision on the smelling salts! I don’t suppose the master has been dealt with so peremptorily since he left the nursery. By the way, I’ll relieve you of that little silver holder, which I believe you slipped into your bag. An antique vinaigrette, if I’m not mistaken, though of an unusual shape? It looks valuable; I’ll undertake to have it returned to its thoughtful owner.”
He extended his hand, calmly ignoring the hackle-raising that signaled she’d taken offense, and held it steady until she placed the holder into it. He dropped it into his pocket.
Conscious that he had asked too much too soon, inadvertently having accused her of stealing, he added a shorter, more straightforward question that could raise no prevarication: “Where did you acquire your medical knowledge?”
“At Elmleigh Abbey, a cycle ride from home. I volunteered as a nursing assistant there in 1915, when Lord and Lady Elmleigh converted part of their house into a military hospital. It’s conveniently on the rail line to London, and the ambulance trains could get there easily. I was a Voluntary Aid Detachment girl—a VAD. On a short three-month contract—renewable, which suited my parents better. They didn’t quite approve of what I was doing, but as I was doing it only a few fields away from home and could leave at any moment, they didn’t object too strongly. Living under the grand roof of one of their friends and surrounded by other young girls of good family, I was in a socially secure, even admirable position, they judged. They could say that even their daughter had rolled her sleeves up and joined the war effort. Thank God they never came to visit! It would have shattered their comfortable Arts and Crafts world. The blood, the screams, the filth, the ribaldry, the comingling of ranks, classes and sexes—they would have been horrified.”
“Ribaldry? Comingling? I’m shocked to hear you were party to any of that!” he teased. “So, with your nursing experience, you recognised as soon as I did that Juno’s condition was in no way serious. But, I say again, you had been anticipating an attempt on her safety or well-being all evening. Why?”
With a sigh and an obvious dragging of feet, she got up and retrieved her bag from the armchair. “You’d better see these,” she said.
“These” proved to be a slender brown cardboard file containing three or four sheets of writing paper. Earwig cleared a space on the table and put it down in front of Redfyre. “They’re in date order of receipt, starting from the top,” she told him, and sat back watching his face to assess his reaction.
“Ah! This begins to make sense,” he said grimly, on reading the first.
“Words and letters cut out of the local newspaper. The evening edition of November the fifteenth. I checked the print with their editor,” Earwig said. “He was very helpful.”
“He usually is when he scents a story,” Redfyre commented. “What promise did he extract from you in return, I wonder? This seems to be arranged and stuck on with Cow Gum to a clean sheet of writing paper—the kind you can buy at any W. H. Smith.”
“Does it qualify for the description of ‘poison pen,’ in your professional experience?”
“Hardly! This message appears to be rather milder than the usual offerings.”
He read out. “Ladies do not play trumpets. I’m more used to the Sally the Slag is having it off with Filthy Fred variety. Who was the recipient of this little billet-doux?”
“Juno. She showed it to me. She thought it was quite a laugh. I stopped her from chucking it in the fire. It seemed to me to have more importance than she was giving it credit for. Someone went to quite a lot of trouble to do all that craftwork. It looks grotesque! Is this the common way of communicating bile these days?”
Redfyre laughed. “In fact, it’s not at all common outside of the pages of the penny-shocker press.”
“Well, I was glad I’d preserved it when another appeared in the next day’s post.”
“The correspondent seems to have given up on the tedious business of cutting and sticking and opted for handwriting in capital letters,” he said, studying the second. “A person leading a busy life, do we infer from that? Impatient? Too much to say to be able to convey it by means of scissors and paste? Or a time-on-his-hands busybody who’s run out of detective novels to pass the time, but remembers the barmy techniques he’s learned from them? The content is more alarming. He seems to have given up on the mild rebuke, as well. He—shall we say ‘he’
for brevity, while acknowledging that it’s quite likely, possibly even more likely to be a ‘she’? Anyhow, he is more explicit in number two, not to say downright crude.
“ONLY SLUTS APPEAR IN PUBLIC BLOWING ON MALE INSTRUMENTS. Disturbing. And oddly phrased, don’t you think? Is the writer throwing light on a lapse in social etiquette or musical taste? It’s a vulgar notion conveyed in rather high-flown language. It’s a thought that could be expressed by either a man or a woman, but one with . . . er . . . a certain knowledge of the ways of the world,” he finished delicately.
“A knowledge that makes the writer almost certainly a man,” Earwig said firmly, “since the arts of trumpetry and fellatio do not generally feature in the repertoire of a Cambridge lady. Even the married ones.”
Redfyre looked aside, embarrassed by such loose talk and annoyed by her lack of logic. “And therefore a correspondingly small number of Cambridge gentlemen, I’d have thought. It still takes two to tango, I discovered when I last took to the floor with a lady in my arms. But perhaps I operate in morally elevated circles—there’s always that. Whatever the underlying meaning, this nonsense hardly constitutes a threat. It could be dismissed by any half-competent barrister as a personally held opinion. You’d find that at least ten out of the twelve male jurors would sympathize with the sentiment. The other two would fail to understand the innuendo. The Public Prosecutions Service would advise against pursuing a case.”
“You’re hard to please. But look, he’s just getting into his stride. Here’s the next one. Received two weeks before the performance was to take place.” She fell silent and waited for him to work his way through the sheets.
“And we have number three? Mmm. Leaning towards what I’d call the biblical proscriptive style: THOU SHALT NOT ENTERTAIN HARLOTS IN GOD’S HOUSE! No case there, either. I believe some Puritan households have that in needlework above the fireplace, masquerading as the eleventh commandment.”
Earwig was frowning at him, but said nothing, clearly waiting for him to move on to the next note.
“Number four, again in capitals. This one’s more promising! ENTER THE ORGAN LOFT ALIVE, LEAVE IT DEAD. Now, unless this is a carpenter’s report on the outbreak of a bad case of Anobium punctatum, here we have a clear threat! It’s very silly, but it’s clear all right. Something we can work with.
“Hand me number five. This is more like it! It’s even more specific and bluntly threatening. I’d say he was getting angrier. The strokes are thicker, less controlled. YOU WILL BE THROWN FROM A HEIGHT AND YOUR BODY DEVOURED BY DOGS. How nasty! But why dogs?”
Redfyre was acquainted with the biblical reference to the point that he could have given chapter and verse number for it, but he wanted to hear her interpretation of the threat. With a bit of coaxing and trickery, she might even hand him her theory on the motivation of the culprit. He was quite certain that Earwig knew much more about this sordid affair than she was letting on. He’d draw her out, entangle her in the thread of truth and—he admitted to himself—take shameful satisfaction in hobbling her with it.
“It was the punishment meted out to Jezebel, Queen of Israel. Kings 1 and 2. I thought all spotty little boys knew that lurid story?”
“Forgive my ignorance. I’ll put my hands up to the spots and the callow youth, but I’ll have you know I spent my formative years under the blankets with a torch in the company of Huckleberry Finn, Rob Roy, Blackbeard the pirate, and other clean-cut villains. Kings 1, you say? Old Testament—Historical Bible Studies, my parents called it. Both scientists who swore by New Testament stuff in these post-Darwin days. I’m Church of England, of course—you had to be in the army, but all I can be counted on for are the hymns and prayers. Does this reference to Jezebel hold significance to you?”
“Of course! He’s shown his hand, revealed his motive!” She looked pityingly at Redfyre’s blank expression and sighed. “Let’s pick up our coffee and drink it over there by the fire, shall we? This is definitely a fireside story. No, don’t pull that face! It’s utterly fascinating, I think, and a likely clue to the diseased mentality of the oaf who composed this.”
He plumped up the cushions of the two armchairs, threw Snapper back into his basket and poked up the fire, sending a dazzle of sparks up the chimney and a gush of warm air over the hearthrug.
Earwig gave proper lip-smacking attention to her coffee before embarking on her story, he was pleased to see. He brewed his coffee with care in a silver contrivance he’d brought back from France with him, and he always ground the best beans he could find in the ancient brass-handled grinder his father’s cook had been about to throw away. Earwig savoured every drop and held out her cup for more before beginning.
This was to be no “once upon a time” told-to-the-children account, he realised from her opening. He was not to be lulled into a passive role. She started with a question: “Do you know what the name ‘Jezebel’ means?”
“Um . . . Well, I know it’s synonymous with ‘harlot,’ but I expect I’ve got that wrong.”
“Funnily enough, it has exactly the opposite meaning: ‘chaste and virtuous.’ An equivalent to ‘Virginia,’ perhaps. A good name for a queen, you’d say. She was a beautiful, intelligent and talented princess of the Phoenician people, who were neighbours to the Israelites. A sophisticated, seagoing, clever race, the Phoenicians were admired and feared in equal measure by the dwellers in the Promised Land. In a political arrangement, Ahab the king married her, and seems to have been completely dazzled by her. Sadly, she was of a different religion. Rather than worshipping the one god, Yahweh, she set up altars to Baal and the goddess Astarte. She worshipped idols. Instead of converting his new wife to his faith, Ahab surrendered to her polytheism, building altars to Baal in his capital, Samaria.”
“Oh, dear! Never a people to lie down unprotesting, the ancient Jews, if I remember correctly. And didn’t they have a nifty knack with a war trumpet?”
“You’re right. This surrendering of the faith went down very badly with the people. They also despised Jezebel’s flighty foreign ways—she painted her eyes with kohl and dressed her hair. It was said that, in spite of the ardour-dampening presence of a pair of guardian eunuchs provided by the king, she was lecherous by nature and took many lovers.”
“Sounds fun!” Redfyre said, unguardedly. “But I take your meaning. Queen Jezebel was quite a strider! And just the kind of villain we can expect to see when a strong woman steps onstage with painted face and tiddled-up hair: Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Mata Hari, my cousin Joan. Becky Sharp—would she qualify?”
“Probably. But I’ll tell you who doesn’t. Juno Proudfoot!”
“In someone’s mind she does. What, in Juno, has triggered this comparison, would you say?”
“She’s very pretty. Lovely hair. Wears makeup on stage. Her dress was a bit . . . well, showy, as you noticed. Though if it had been Marie Lloyd or Gertie Gitana wearing it, no one would have batted an eyelid. Juno was so cross when she saw these notes, in defiance she borrowed a daring evening dress from one of our friends who shops in Paris, and we sewed it down to her size.” Earwig grinned. “If I seemed nervous about the gown holding out for the performance, it was with good reason! I sewed the seams!”
“Well there you are! The world is full of fuddy-duddies. They see a good-looking girl who’s taken trouble with her appearance and think the worst of her. Forget them! They aren’t worth knowing. But, I’m thinking that alone wouldn’t trigger such a nasty explosion of hatred. In any case, even our psychologically disturbed chum would have no way of knowing that she wouldn’t appear shrouded in a layer of black bombazine over a woolly vest for the performance.”
“There’s her talent. She’s streets ahead of any male trumpeter in the country.”
“Somehow I don’t think we’re looking for a jealous musician at the bottom of all this.”
“No. I think it was a cocktail of unintentional provoca
tion. Sex, talent, looks but also . . . would it be over-interpretation to suggest that her very position that night—up in the loft, looking down on the audience—might have conjured up in the letter-writer’s mind a picture of Jezebel?”
“Ah. We’re back to the throwing from a height and the devouring by dogs?”
“Yes. And to the vengeful mind behind that. Jezebel may have wound the king round her little finger, but when Ahab died, she ran into the stony fist of the prophet, Elijah, who ordered the queen’s priests, supporters and sons to be killed. Bloody battles between the two strong wills ensued: Israelite male versus Phoenician female.”
Redfyre sighed. “Now, there’s a pair of contenders the Cambridge CID had quite overlooked. I’ll put them on our watchlist.”
She arched an eyebrow at him and said: “Yes, you should,” before continuing her story. “Unusually for a female in the Bible, Jezebel is given a voice: ‘If you are Elijah, so I am Jezebel.’ Her very words and their meaning couldn’t be clearer. She’s thrown down the gauntlet, and is gunning for him in a fight to the death. Elijah blinks first and flees in terror.”
Redfyre smiled at her imagery, which seemed to him to owe more to the Wild West than the Ancient East. This girl certainly relished a good story. “But it doesn’t end there?”
“Leaving a woman in power? Certainly not! Elijah plots that one of the king’s generals, Jehu, will exterminate Jezebel and all her descendants. Jehu drives about Caanan like a whirlwind in his chariot, hacking and slaughtering everyone on his list. Finally, he screeches to a halt in front of the palace, his hands still red with the blood of Jezebel’s eldest son. As she sits at the window of her tower, preparing for the deadly encounter, Jezebel dresses her hair and paints her face. A seductive ruse? Is she readying herself for quite a different sort of encounter with General Jehu? That’s the typical leering masculine interpretation! They accuse her of a last desperate act of harlotry. Rubbish! The woman was a grandmother by this time! Facing the man who had just killed her sons and grandsons, she was simply performing her last defiant gesture in the face of death in accordance with her own tradition—‘If I’m going down, I’ll go down looking stunning.’ I’d have done the same.”
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