Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “Oh, no; but we—someone—did look through the window and thought they saw something. But what is the rhyme?”

  “My uncle, Professor Wentworth—name wouldn’t mean anything to you, of course, but if you read history you might know that he’s still thought something of—he, being a bachelor, was let in; in fact, was on quite good terms with Adam Lond. He memorized the rhyme and entered it in his commonplace book. Adam noticed him looking hard at it; then the fat was in the fire. Adam, poor fool, thought some curse would come on the family if the rhyme became common property; he couldn’t see that his idiotic family were bringing their own curse on themselves.”

  “But what is it?” Gwyneth implored, unable to contain her curiosity.

  “Don’t be impatient! Sense of values is what all you girls lack! The point of this story is not the jingle of words, but the store that the old Londs set on them. Consider your own hat!” Mrs. Daker suddenly advised Gwyneth. “You think a North Oxford frump doesn’t know anything about modern hats, but I know that if that were put in a museum it wouldn’t give anyone a hundred years hence the ghost of a notion of what you look like, unless it were set at the right angle on a millinery model with the proper coiffure. Isn’t that so?”

  “You’ve absolutely got it taped!” Gwyneth declared, thinking that this was one in the eye for Mary.

  “And have you got it taped about this rhyme?”

  Gwyneth was slightly dazed.

  “The important thing,” Mary explained, “is how it came to be carved on the mantelpiece in Ferry House and how it influenced the lives of the Lond family and how great-uncle Gilbert came to write it down.”

  “Just so. Ferry House is Elizabethan, and a fine example of its type. It ought to be properly preserved, but I’ll guarantee Ezekiel is letting it fall into ruins; shiftless lad he always was. The Elizabethan Lond who built it had the rhyme carved there, worked into an intricate leaf pattern. It doesn’t stand out plainly; I really don’t see how you could recognize it from looking through a window.” She regarded Gwyneth suspiciously. “If Ezekiel had the wit to realize that only a connoisseur of carving would ever notice it, he could let hordes of trippers through his house, and get a good revenue from them, and never lose a wink of sleep over the secrecy of his family motto!”

  “Did your uncle keep the copy that he wrote out?” Gwyneth asked anxiously.

  “My Uncle Gilbert had no intention of mutilating his commonplace book, however much Adam might rage, but he had old-fashioned ideas of honour, and respected Adam’s superstition, so he never published the rhyme and only showed it to a few members of his own family and friends. He hadn’t the modern idea of making money out of private information, no matter how you may have gained it.”

  Gwyneth was wriggling with impatience but terrified of diverting the old lady once more to Elizabethan days or modern fashions. “Does it give a clue to any secret?” she asked.

  “Stuff and nonsense! A mere boasting jingle! I’ve got it here.” She half-rose. “Hm! I don’t know——”

  “We’d love to see it,” Gwyneth ventured.

  “Of course you would! Because it’s private!” She bent towards Gwyneth fiercely. “How do I know you’re not Lady Pauline Pry of the Sunday Gossip? I might see the Londs’ rhyme in print next week.”

  “You’d know quite well if you could see me trying to write an essay!” Gwyneth maintained. “I never write a word more than is necessary.”

  “Good—if you’re sure you know what is necessary! Well, I’m not such a fool as to ask for promises, but I rely on you both not to make any improper use of this!”

  Mrs. Daker went to one of the tall bookcases which flanked the fireplace and took out a small fat volume bound in vellum. She returned to her chair and browsed over the pages, covered with tiny sharp writing, faded brown. “Here it is!” She handed the open book to her niece, and Gwyneth seated herself on the sofa beside Mary and bent over the book with her. They read:

  “Inscription carved on a chimneypiece in Ferry House, Oxford, and believed by Adam Lond, the owner, to have some magic significance. I have given him my word that this shall not be published. 1867.

  “I Lond hold this Ilond

  As Deare to me as Lyf

  No Woman heere may Woo man

  Save shee be wedded Wyf,

  Shee who this rede gainsayth

  Atones onlie in Dethe.

  “The family tradition is that Giles Lond, who built Ferry House in the days of Queen Elizabeth, carved this himself. I opine that the popular saying ‘The Londs who would as soon shoot a woman as let her set foot on their land,’ comes from a misreading of this inscription. The intended meaning was probably that a woman who trespassed on the island would not be forgiven in her lifetime. But owing to the sinister significance popularly attributed to the inscription, the Londs have an aversion to its becoming common knowledge. The puns are typical of the era.”

  Gwyneth skipped hastily through Professor Wentworth’s wordy comments and read the rhyme again and again, hoping her memory would prove as good as his. When Mary had finished reading, she took the book from her and pored over it.

  “It’s queer writing, but very neat,” she said, hoping to gain time.

  “It doesn’t say that no woman may set foot on the island, but only that she may not ‘woo man’ there,” Mary pointed out.

  “The Londs probably considered that the mere approach of any woman to their vicinity constituted wooing!” Mrs. Daker suggested.

  “And, of course, an Elizabethan would say anything for the sake of a pun,” Mary commented.

  “Originality in orthography was also admired,” Mrs. Daker added. “Giles Lond did pretty well in that respect. Here! Let me have it!”

  Gwyneth parted reluctantly with the book.

  “Thank you so much for letting us see it. It really is thrilling—to know the whole story of it,” Gwyneth finished hastily. She was repeating the words to herself feverishly, praying that she and Mary might be able to take their leave at once, before the necessity of making further conversation should drive the verse from her mind. Fortunately Aunt Sophia was quite willing to let them go.

  “Come again! I’d like to see your next hat!” she told Gwyneth graciously as the two said good-bye. As soon as Gwyneth got back to Persephone College she rushed to her room, snatched up a note-book which, according to its label, dealt with Beowulf, and wrote down the Lond family motto. Then she hurried off to find Sally.

  CHAPTER XVII

  PAMELA AT THE BACK END

  SALLY’S feeling about dons was that although they might sometimes be pitied they should never be admitted to friendship or treated as equals. It was not altogether their fault, poor things, but if they cultivated their intellects so assiduously it was only to be expected that “the humanities”—to borrow an academic term—would suffer. So Sally would have been quite shocked to observe how Pamela, installed in Mr. Mort’s bookwalled room, was pouring out tea for him and treating him as a human being. She had quite forgotten that he was a don.

  Even Pamela, who was not a conceited girl, could not help noticing that he was pleased to see her. He questioned her now in an eager way about Cambridge, her work and friends and future plans. Yet sometimes she thought he wasn’t really listening to her answers, he gazed at her in such a dreamy way, as if he were seeing something else. And she wasn’t sure if she really caught a queer, twisted look on his face now and then, or whether it was only the effect of the yellow light of a sensational sunset, mixed with leaping glares from the fire.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve been worrying a lot about the way Aunt Myra would try to manage my life for me, and specially about the way in which she tried to keep me from having anything to do with Oxford. She was awfully angry when I told her you had called last term. Somehow I felt that was a kind of crisis and that things might be explained. But they weren’t. I feel that only you can explain now, and I want you to.”

  Denis Mort rested his chin in his h
and and turned his head away from Pamela, staring into the fire for some moments, frowning. Then he turned rather wearily towards her and relaxed into his high-backed chair, so that his face was shadowed by it.

  “The fact that your aunt never did explain makes it difficult for me now. You see, don’t you? You know that there was an old quarrel between us; that we felt differently, thought differently. She had only bitter memories of your father, and because of—of my friendship with him she did not wish you to meet me. It is an old, unhappy story, Pamela. Can it do any good to speak of it?”

  Pamela was strangely moved by those words which came slowly and brokenly from the man whose face she could no longer see. But she could not leave it at that.

  “I hate mysteries!” she declared vehemently. “Surely I have a right to know about my father, and perhaps you are the only person who can tell me.”

  “I’m not sure, Pamela. I thought I had a right to see you, because I felt a great interest—no, I may as well be honest—a great affection, for your mother’s daughter. But perhaps I was wrong; I seem to have made new difficulties for you.”

  “Oh, no!” Pamela assured him. “The difficulty had been there for a long time; your visit focused it, as it were. I didn’t mind the row itself so much; we were bound to have one some day. But I really was most awfully glad that you came to see me. I have been counting on seeing you again and getting you to tell me about my father. You seem to be my only link with him. And it wasn’t only because of that that I was glad you came. You were—well, understanding.”

  Denis Mort got up from his chair and crossed the room with long strides to the farthest wall of bookcases; he turned and strode back till he stood almost over Pamela.

  “Perhaps you had better know, Pamela. Probably it will not matter so dreadfully to you. Your father and mother were not married. But he intended to marry her; you must give him credit for that.”

  Pamela looked up at him calmly. “I had guessed that. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to fit in with the facts as far as I knew them. I don’t mind dreadfully; if I do mind at all it’s only very little; what I mind about terribly is whether he really loved her.”

  “That’s the one thing you can be perfectly sure of in this world.”

  “Then it wasn’t true—I never really believed it could be true—that he left my mother before I was born, because he didn’t care? That seemed to be why Aunt Myra hated him so.”

  “He did care, Pamela. You’re quite right. That mattered, and still matters, more than anything else. Your father was weak; I think that was his greatest sin. He was very young and circumstances were too difficult for him. He and your mother were both under age; your Aunt Myra and your father’s mother were both against the marriage. They thought it imprudent. Your father was still at college; he had little money but great expectations from an uncle who might be expected to disapprove strongly of such an early marriage. But your aunt felt even more strongly against the marriage; she seemed to wish to prevent it at all costs.”

  “She was jealous, you mean?”

  He was startled by her insight into the past. “Yes; I suppose she was. Jealousy may catch the best of us, you know. They were orphans and Myra had been like a mother to Pamela—your mother—and this was the first time that Pamela had seriously gone against her sister’s wishes and—worse still—had cared for anyone more than Myra, and had been ready to give up everything, even Myra, for someone else’s sake.”

  “But I don’t understand, about why he left her.”

  “It was a strange thing, Pamela. There were those two sisters; Pamela was about your age, nineteen; Myra was about twenty-five; both strong-willed, with their wills set so stubbornly in opposition, yet compromising on a plan of action. Pamela did not want to harm her lover; she had great faith in his career and was afraid he might wreck it for her sake. She loved him too much, if you can understand that, Pamela; perhaps, as her daughter, you can. So she tried to take Fate into her own hands. She did not tell him that she was expecting a child, and she agreed to Myra’s plan to go away to a remote village in Devonshire, where the child should be born and no one should know. Goodness knows what Myra intended to do after that!”

  “So my father never knew about me—that I existed?”

  “Yes; wait. Your mother wrote to him, telling him that she would not interrupt his work, but would see him again when he had finished at Oxford. She gave him no address and found an opportunity to get letters posted in a town some way off. Pamela, you must always remember that if your father was weak your mother had courage of the rarest kind, the courage that can refuse help and face loneliness and be content to be quiet.”

  “Content to be quiet,” Pamela repeated. “You speak of my mother as if you were very fond of her.”

  “Yes.” He dropped the word slowly into a deep silence. “And then you were born and she died. Myra wrote to your father the most terrible letter that a man could receive. Yet I don’t think it mattered to him, after what had happened. Then the war broke out. Your father enlisted at once; like many other weak men in difficulties, he thought that the war solved them. Really, it only postponed the necessity for solution. He—was—glad to die.”

  “It’s terrible that they couldn’t be happy together any longer, my father and my mother. Tell me about my mother.”

  “You are very like her, and yet she seemed younger than you; less sophisticated; perhaps it is just the difference between two generations.”

  Pamela realized that he was so lost in his memory of that other Pamela that he intended no criticism of her. Yet somehow she minded a good deal what he thought of her.

  “I’m not really sophisticated—not in the hard, worldly way. But other people all seem so much more grown-up than I; I have to try to be grown-up, too.”

  “Yes; I suppose youth generally strikes an attitude and plays a role. Just now it is the attitude of worldliness, and perhaps that makes life easier.”

  “But I want to know more about my mother,” Pamela persisted. “Not just what she looked like, but what she was like herself. She wasn’t like Aunt Myra, was she?”

  “They were both very resolute and both courageous. They were not much alike in other ways. Pamela had a heavenly sense of humour and a restless, active mind. She was adventurous, intellectually as well as in other ways. I never knew an honester person. ‘We must live truthfully,’ she used to say; and she was never afraid to know the truth. You are like her; I think you have an instinct for the truth, as she had. My dear child, even now it is difficult to talk about her; perhaps more so because I have not talked of her for so long. She was young and sweet and—lovable.”

  The room was almost dark except for the moving, uncertain light from the fire. Pamela felt that she herself had gone astray in the time before she was born. The middle-aged scholarly man who was again striding about his dark library with jerky spasms of energy, yet always softly, speaking in jerky difficult sentences, had dragged her back with him across twenty years. Pamela sat with her eyes half-closed, almost believing that if she looked up she would see her mother, who was so real and living in that room.

  Suddenly Denis Mort stopped his striding and sank into the high-backed chair.

  “I’m frightfully grateful to you for telling me about her,” said Pamela timidly, afraid that he would not hear her voice across the desert of years that separated them. But as she spoke the past slipped back to its distant place.

  “I had always tried to imagine them, putting together what I had heard, but they were only people I had made up. Now I know them. You have given me a father and a mother; I don’t suppose you can realize what that means to me, but it’s a lot.”

  He only said: “We ought to have some light,” and switched on a reading-lamp, tipping its shade so that the radiance flowed out away from him and towards Pamela.

  “I have some photographs of her, some of which you may not have seen,” he continued, and went to his desk to find them.

  • • • • •r />
  Meanwhile, at the Mitre, Sally and Betty had finished tea and thoroughly discussed plans for the Easter vac. before Basil returned.

  “Oh, Basil, lamb!” Sally greeted him. “Your car came in very useful, and I was most frightfully careful with it. There was a slight schemozzle in the Giler, but nothing was touched. Now I must get myself back to college somehow, because Gwyneth is sure to be there by now, and I’m dying to know what she was up to this afternoon.”

  “Which is a hint, I suppose,” said Basil resignedly. “All right. Come along before I settle down.”

  “I’ll come, too,” Betty announced. “I’d like to see Oxford by night.”

  “There’s nothing to equal Piccadilly Circus,” Basil assured her; “but come if you really want to. We’ll see what Sally has done to my car.”

  They deposited Sally at the front door of Persephone College, swept round the drive and returned over Mesopotamia bridge.

  “Don’t you think we might go and fetch Pamela?” Betty suggested. “I’m really quite worried about her; I don’t know why, but we’ve had a curious afternoon.”

  “You haven’t let my sylph run into danger?” asked Basil in concern. “I thought she’d gone to call on a highly respectable old don who coaches Sally?”

  “Yes. But I’m sure that detective didn’t like the idea of her being there. I could see it in his face. I can’t think why, unless he thinks Mr. Mort will worry Pamela by talking about her aunt. But he wouldn’t be likely to think of that. No, I can’t see any reason for worry, but I thought Pamela herself seemed almost frightened to go, though she suggested it.”

  “You’re all worked up by this pack of girls and their beastly detective work,” Basil assured her. “But Pamela must be about ready to come home. Where does the man live?”

  Betty explained as much as she had gathered, and Basil thought he understood, but it was not surprising that he turned along Norham Road instead of Norham Gardens, and thus approached Mr. Mort’s house by its private drive, little used except by tradesmen’s cars, instead of through the college quad. They left the car at the gate and entered the garden, but in the darkness took the path to the back door. This led them past the library, where the curtains had not been drawn, so that they saw Pamela sitting in a pool of lamplight, talking earnestly to a man who sat in the shadow.