by Otto Penzler
Events seemed to move quickly in the days after the police visit, though I cannot be certain of the actual time period involved. Four things, however, conspired to put the murder out of my mind for some time: Miss Teresa died, I think in the November of that same year; Miss Eunice retreated into an even deeper silence than before; the war escalated; and I was called up to military service.
The next time I gave any thought to the two ladies of Rose Cottage was in Egypt, of all places, in September 1942.1 was on night watch with the 8th Army, not far from Alamein. Desert nights have an eerie beauty I have never found anywhere else since. After the heat of the day, the cold surprises one, for a start, as does the sense of endless space, but even more surprising is the desertscape of wrecked tanks, jeeps, and lorries in the cold moonlight, metal wrenched and twisted into impossible patterns like some petrified forest or exposed coral reef.
To spoil our sleep and shatter our nerves, Rommel’s Afrika Corps had got into the routine of setting up huge amplified speakers and blaring out “Lili Marleen” over and over all night long. It was on a night such as this, while I was trying to stay warm and awake and trying to shut my ears to the music, that I struck up a conversation with a soldier called Sidney Ferris from one of the Dorset regiments.
When Sid told me he had grown up in Piddlehinton, I suddenly thought of the two ladies of Rose Cottage.
“Did you ever hear any stories of a murder around there?” I asked, offering Sid a cigarette. “A place called Higher Bockhamp-ton?”
“Lots of murder stories going around when I was a lad,” he said, lighting up, careful to hide the flame with his cupped hand. “Better than the wireless.”
“This would be a wife murdering her husband.”
He nodded. “Plenty of that and all. And husbands murdering their wives. Makes you wonder whether it’s worth getting married, doesn’t it? Higher Bockhampton, you say?”
“Yes. Teresa Morgan, I believe the woman’s name was.”
He frowned. “Name don’t ring no bell,” he said, “but I do recall a tale about some woman who was supposed to have killed her husband, cut him up in pieces, and buried them in the garden. A couple of young lads found some bones when they was digging an air-raid shelter a couple of years back. Animal bones, if you ask me.” “But did the villagers believe the tale?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t say as I did. So many stories like that going around, they can’t all be true, or damn near all of us would be murderers or corpses. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?” And he took a long drag on his cigarette, holding it in his cupped hand, like most soldiers, so the enemy wouldn’t see the pinpoint of light.
“Did anyone say what became of the woman?” I asked.
“She went away some years later. There was talk of someone else seen running away from the farmhouse, too, the night they said the murder must have taken place.”
“Could it have been him? The husband?”
Sid shook his head. “Too slight a figure. Her husband was a big man, apparently. Anyway, that led to more talk of an illicit lover. There’s always a lover, isn’t there? Have you noticed? You know what kind of minds these country gossips have.”
“Did anyone say who the other person might have been?”
“Nobody knew. Just rumors of a vague shape seen running away. These are old wives’ tales we’re talking about.”
“But perhaps there’s some tru —”
But at that point I was relieved of my watch, and the next weeks turned out to be so chaotic that I never even saw Sid again. I heard later that he was killed at the battle of Alamein just over a month after our conversation.
I didn’t come across the mystery of Rose Cottage again until the early 1950s. At that time, I was living in Eastvale, in a small flat overlooking the cobbled market square. The town was much smaller and quieter than it is today, though little about the square has changed, from the ancient market cross, the Queen’s Arms on the corner, the Norman church, and the Tudor-fronted police station.
I had recently published my first novel and was still basking in that exquisite sensation that comes only once in a writer’s career: the day he holds the first bound and printed copy of his very first work. Of course, there was no money in writing, so I worked parttime in a bookshop on North Market Street, and on one of my mornings off, a market day, as I remember, I was absorbed in polishing the third chapter of what was to be my second novel when I heard a faint tap at my door. This was enough to startle me, as I rarely had any visitors.
Puzzled and curious, I left my typewriter and went to open the door. There stood a wizened old lady, hunch-shouldered, whitehaired, carrying a stick with a brass lion’s head handle and a small package wrapped in brown paper, tied with string.
She must have noticed my confused expression, because, with a faint smile, she said, “Don’t you recognize me, Mr. Riley? Dear, dear, have I aged that much?”
Then I knew her, knew the voice.
“Miss Eunice!” I cried, throwing my door open. “Please forgive me. I was lost in my own world. Do come in. And you must call me Christopher.”
Once we were settled, with a pot of tea mashing beside us — though, alas, none of Miss Teresa’s scones — I noticed the dark circles under Miss Eunice’s eyes, the yellow around the pupils, the parchmentlike quality of her skin, and I knew she was seriously ill.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes. Everyone knows where the famous writer lives in a small town like Eastvale.”
“Hardly famous,” I demurred. “But thank you anyway. I never knew you took the trouble to follow my fortunes.”
“Teresa would have wished it. She was very fond of you, you know. Apart from ourselves and the police, you were the only person in Lyndgarth who ever entered Rose Cottage. Did you know that? You might remember that we kept ourselves very much to ourselves.”
“Yes, I remember that,” I told her.
“I came to give you this.”
She handed me the package and I untied it carefully. Inside was the Smith, Elder & Co. first edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, complete with Hardy’s inscription to “Tess.”
“But you shouldn’t,” I said. “This must be very valuable. It’s a fir—”
She waved aside my objections. “Please take it. It is what Teresa would have wished. And I wish it, too. Now listen,” she went on. “That isn’t the only reason I came. I have something very important to tell you, to do with why the police came to visit all those years ago. The thought of going to my grave without telling someone troubles me deeply.”
“But why me? And why now?”
“I told you. Teresa was especially fond of you. And you’re a writer,” she added mysteriously. ‘You’ll understand. Should you wish to make use of the story, please do so. Neither Teresa nor I have any living relatives to offend. All I ask is that you wait a suitable number of years after my death before publishing any account. And that death is expected to occur at some point over the next few months. Does that answer your second question?”
I nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be. As you may well be aware, I have long since exceeded my three score and ten, though I can hardly say the extra years have been a blessing. But that is God’s will. Do you agree to my terms?”
“Of course. I take it this is about the alleged murder?”
Miss Eunice raised her eyebrows. “So you’ve heard the rumors?” she said. “Well, there was a murder all right. Teresa Morgan murdered her husband, Jacob, and buried his body in the garden.” She held out her tea cup and I poured. I noticed her hand was shaking slightly. Mine was, too. The shouts of the market vendors came in through my open windows.
“When did she do this?” was all I could manage.
Miss Eunice closed her eyes and pursed her cracked lips. “I don’t remember the exact year,” she said. “But it really doesn’t matter. You could look it up, i
f you wanted. It was the year the Queen was proclaimed Empress of India.”
I happened to know that was in 1877. I have always had a good memory for historical dates. If my calculations were correct, Miss Teresa would have, been about twenty-seven at the time. “Will you tell me what happened?” I asked.
“That’s why I’m here,” Miss Eunice said rather sharply. “Teresa’s husband was a brute, a bully, and a drunkard. She wouldn’t have married him, had she had any choice in the matter. But her parents approved the match. He had his own small farm, you see, and they were only tenants. Teresa was a very intelligent girl, but that counted for nothing in those days. In fact, it was a positive disadvantage. As was her willfulness. Anyway, he used to beat her to within an inch of her life —where the bruises wouldn’t show, of course. One day she’d had enough of it, so she killed him.”
“What did she do?”
“She hit him with the poker from the fireplace and, after darkness had fallen, she buried him deep in the garden. She was afraid that if the matter went to court the authorities wouldn’t believe her, and she would be hanged. She had no evidence, you see. And Jacob was a popular man among the other fellows of the village, as is so often the case with drunken brutes. And Teresa was terrified of being publicly hanged.”
“But did no one suspect her?”
Miss Eunice shook her head. ‘Jacob was constantly talking about leaving his wife and heading for the New World. He used to berate her for not bearing him any children — specifically sons — and threatened that one day she would wake up and he would be gone. Gone to another country to find a woman who could give him the children he wanted. He repeated these threats in the ale-house so often that no one in the entire county of Dorset could fail to know about them.”
“So when he disappeared, everyone assumed he had followed through on his threats to leave her?”
“Exactly. Oh, there were rumors that his wife had murdered him, of course. There always are when such mysteries occur.”
Yes, I thought, remembering my conversations with Sid Ferris one cold desert night ten years ago: rumors and fancies, the stuff of fiction. And something about a third person seen fleeing from the scene. Well, that could wait.
“Teresa stayed on at the farm for another ten years,” Miss Eunice went on. “Then she sold up and went to America. It was a brave move, but Teresa no more lacked for courage than she did for beauty. She was in her late thirties then, and even after a hard life, she could still turn heads. In New York, she landed on her feet and eventually married a financier, Sam Cotter. A good man. She also took a companion.”
‘You?” I asked.
Miss Eunice nodded. ‘Yes. Some years later, Sam died of a stroke. We stayed on in New York for a while, but we grew increasingly homesick. We came back finally in 1919, just after the Great War. For obvious reasons, Teresa didn’t want to live anywhere near Dorset, so we settled in Yorkshire.”
“A remarkable tale,” I said.
“But that’s not all,” Miss Eunice went on, pausing only to sip some tea. “There was a child.”
“I thought you said —”
She took one hand off her stick and held it up, palm out. “Christopher, please let me tell the story in my own way. Then it will be yours to do with as you wish. You have no idea how difficult this is for me.” She paused and stared down at the brass lion’s head for so long I feared she had fallen asleep, or died. Outside in the market square a butcher was loudly trying to sell a leg of lamb. Just as I was about to go over to Miss Eunice, she stirred. “There was a child,” she repeated. “When Teresa was fifteen, she gave birth to a child. It was a difficult birth. She was never able to bear any other children.”
“What happened to this child?”
“Teresa had a sister called Alice, living in Dorchester. Alice was five years older and already married with two children. Just before the pregnancy started to show, both Teresa and Alice went to stay with relatives in Cornwall for a few months, after it had been falsely announced that Alice was with child again. You would be surprised how often such things happened. When they came back, Alice had a fine baby girl.”
“Who was the father?”
“Teresa would never say. The one thing she did make clear was that no one had forced unwanted attentions on her, that the child was the result of a love match, an infatuation. It certainly wasn’t Jacob Morgan.”
“Did she ever see the child again?”
“Oh, certainly. What could be more natural than visiting one’s sister and seeing one’s niece grow up? When the girl was a little older, she began to pay visits to the farm, too.”
Miss Eunice stopped here and frowned so hard I thought her brow would crack like dry paper. “That was when the problems began,” she said quietly.
“What problems?”
Miss Eunice put her stick aside and held out her tea cup. I refilled it. Her hands steady now, she held the cup against her scrawny chest as if its heat were the only thing keeping her alive. “This is the most difficult part,” she said in a faint voice. “The part I didn’t know whether I could ever tell anyone.”
“If you don’t wish —”
She waved my objection aside. “It’s all right, Christopher. I didn’t know how much I could tell you before I came here, but I know now. I’ve come this far. I can’t go back now. Just give me a few moments to collect myself.”
Outside, the market was in full swing, and during the ensuing silence I could hear the clamor of voices selling and buying, arguing over prices.
“Did I ever tell you that Teresa was an extremely beautiful young girl?” Miss Eunice asked after a while.
“I believe you mentioned it, yes.”
She nodded. “Well, she was. And so was her daughter. When she began coming by herself to the house, she was about twelve or thirteen years of age. Jacob didn’t fail to notice her, how well she was ‘filling out’ as he used to say. One day, Teresa had gone into the village for firewood and the child arrived in her absence. Jacob, just home from the ale-house, was there alone to greet her. Need I say more, Mr. Riley?”
I shook my head. “I don’t mean to excuse him in anyway, but I’m assuming he didn’t know the girl was his step-daughter?”
“That is correct. He never knew. Nor did she know Teresa was her mother. Not until much later.”
“What happened next?”
“Teresa came in before her husband could have his way with the struggling, half-naked child. Everything else was as I said. She picked up the poker and hit him on the head. Not once, but six times. Then they cleaned up and waited until after dark and buried him deep in the garden. She sent her daughter back to her sister’s and carried on as if her husband had simply left her, just as he had threatened to do.”
So the daughter was the mysterious third person seen leaving the farm in Sid Ferris’s account. “What became of the poor child?” I asked.
Miss Eunice paused again and seemed to struggle for breath. She turned terribly pale. I got up and moved toward her, but she stretched out her hand. “No, no. I’m all right, Christopher. Please sit.”
A motor car honked outside and one of the street vendors yelled a curse.
Miss Eunice patted her chest. “That’s better. I’m fine now, really I am. Just a minor spasm. But I do feel ashamed. I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely truthful with you. It’s so difficult. You see, I was, I am, that child.”
For a moment my mouth just seemed to flap open and shut and I couldn’t speak. Finally, I managed to stammer, ‘You? You are Miss Teresa’s daughter? But you can’t be. That’s not possible.”
“I didn’t mean to shock you,” she went on softly, “but, really, you only have yourself to blame. When people see two old ladies together, all they see is two old ladies. When you first began calling on us at Rose Cottage fifteen years ago, Teresa was ninety and I was seventy-six. I doubt a fifteen-year-old boy could tell the difference. Nor could most people. And Teresa was always remarkably robust and wel
l-preserved.”
When I had regained my composure, I asked her to continue. “There is very little left to say. I helped my mother kill Jacob Morgan and bury him. And we didn’t cut him up into little pieces. That part is pure fiction invented by scurrilous gossip-mongers. My foster-parents died within a short time of one another, around the turn of the century, and Teresa wired me the money to come and live with her in New York. I had never married, so I had no ties to break. I think that experience with Jacob Morgan, brief and inconclusive as it was, must have given me a lifelong aversion to marital relations. Anyway, it was in New York where Teresa told me she was really my mother. She couldn’t tell Sam, of course, so I remained there as her companion, and we always lived more as friends than as mother and daughter.” She smiled. “When we came back to England, we chose to live as two spinsters, the kind of relationship nobody really questions in a village because it would be in bad taste to do so.”
“How did the police find you after so long?”
“We never hid our identities. Nor did we hide our whereabouts. We bought Rose Cottage through a local solicitor before we returned from America, so it was listed as our address on all the official papers we filled in.” She shrugged. “The police soon recognized that Teresa was far too frail to question, let alone put on trial, so they let the matter drop. And to be quite honest, they didn’t really have enough evidence, you know. You didn’t know it — and Teresa would never have told you — but she already knew she was dying before the police came. Just as I know I am dying now.”
“And did she really die without telling you who your father was?” Miss Eunice nodded. “I wasn’t lying about that. But I always had my suspicions.” Her eyes sparkled for a moment, the way a fizzy drink does when you pour it. “You know, Teresa was always unreasonably jealous of thatTryphena Sparks, and Mr. Hardy did have an eye for young girls.”
Forty years have passed since Miss Eunice’s death, and I have lived in many towns and villages in many countries of the world. Though I have often thought of the tale she told me, I have never been moved to commit it to paper until today.
