by Ellis Peters
Marcellina was a compound of anachronisms. Not only did a zipper close her laced gown, but the busks that stiffened the bodice were slightly flattened spirals of wire covered with smooth plastic, instead of whalebone. A whole cage of springy supports ran from neck to hip, and the two front ones, one on either side of the zipper, were slightly larger than the others, and slightly stiffer. The seams were not sealed at the neck, but only closed by the fold of the lace-trimmed hem, so that the busks could be withdrawn at will. Gisela turned back the fold from the left-hand one, and drew out the top of the plastic-coated spiral a few inches. It was more rigid than would have been expected, and in a moment Johnny saw why. She turned the open end downwards and shook it, and with finger and thumb coaxed out of it something long and bright, with a small round knob at the end. As soon as she had the knob clear of its sheath the rest came out easily, and she held it up in her hand for him to see.
A strong steel knitting-needle, the old-fashioned kind nobody uses in these days of improving plastics. About nine inches long, but in its knitting days it had been longer; and filed down to a long, needle-sharp point that turned it into an efficient and deadly dagger.
He took it from her and looked at it closely. A faint film of a stain dulled the point end for several inches, though there was nothing material there under his fingers, only the discoloration. He looked up at her over the incomprehensible thing, and she saw that his hands were trembling.
‘Sorry!’ said Johnny. ‘I’m dumb, you’ll still have to tell me.’
‘Did you not see that he had some new blue needles for his eternal knitting? Hero has been trying to finish his work for him – go and look at it, if you wish. And then remember how many years he had these.’
The trembling had reached his body. He moistened his lips with a tongue almost as dry, and said in a creaking whisper: ‘Are you really trying to tell me that this –? Not the sword? But the sword was in him.’
‘Yes, the sword was in him. But the sword didn’t kill him.’
‘Girl, do you know what you’re saying? Are you sure?’
He took her by the arms and held her before him, shivering suddenly, shaking her with his bewilderment and exhaustion and grief, and the tiny flame of hope and ease at the heart of all. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘because I saw him killed. In front of my eyes, almost within touch of me. And I’m sure about the needle being the thing that killed him, not the sword, because, God help me, I know he was dead when I pulled out the needle, and drove the sword into him in its place.’
Deep within the turmoil of his mind a small core of quiet came into being, as there had been, so it seemed, a core of justice, however lame and inadequate, at the heart of the tangle of Marc Chatrier’s death. He took the foaming bundle of Marcellina’s skirts out of her arms, drew her with him to the ottoman by the wall, and made her sit down there. He went on his knees beside her, and held her fast by the hands. He did not yet realise for the chaos she had made of his ideas that the barrier and the distance between them had been wiped out. He could touch her, he could hold her hands, he could question her and answer her questions.
Codger’s mutilated knitting-needle lay beside her on the green brocade. A dual penetration in the last fraction of an inch of the wound, Musgrave had said – signs that the sword had been slightly disturbed in an attempt to withdraw it, and then thrust back again. Musgrave could fit everything into his theory. It seemed it was perfectly possible to pick the right man and get everything else wrong.
‘You didn’t really think,’ she said, her hands clinging suddenly to his with a desperation that belied the composure of her face,’ that I could make a good job of sticking a rapier into a man’s back? Silently – while he was alive?’
‘Girl, how could I know what you had it in you to do? You or any other woman? Or any man? I don’t know much of anything, and what I do know I get all wrong. You tell me. You should have told me then, right from the start.’
‘How could I? Above all, I wanted you not to know. I couldn’t feel that he – that the guilt … And you loved him!’
‘And don’t I love you?’
He shut both her hands gently in one of his, and with the other stroked back the long hair from her forehead and cheek. He didn’t even know what he had said, it had slipped from his tongue so naturally.
‘So that was why you took the needle away and hid it, because knitting-needles would have led straight to Codger. I know! I can imagine!’
For years they’d all been sharing the responsibility for Codger. How could she let him go bewildered and frightened into custody, and then to trial, however kind the law might prove, however surely he would be found unfit to plead? How could she, being the person she was, let him be taken away and shut up in an asylum? She must have acted so quickly, so instinctively, that thought had hardly been involved at all.
‘I told you the truth about picking up the sword and bringing it down with me,’ she said, ‘but not about the reason. I never thought of killing anyone. I did try talking to him, I did threaten him, even, to make him leave you alone. I said I could make trouble for him if he made trouble for you, and so I would have done. What would it have looked like for him if I’d told some Sunday newspaper the whole story of our marriage, and what he did to me? But that was all, because I was sure it would be enough. He had as much to lose as you, maybe more, and he wasn’t a fool. And then I tripped over Hero’s rapier in the passage outside her door, and I saw the baldric was broken. So I brought it down with me. I didn’t stop to ask any questions about how it got there, because I thought at first that if we were very quick we could put a few stitches in it to hold it for the rest of the evening, and give it back to Hero, but then I saw there wouldn’t be time. And that’s why I had it in my hands when I came into the wings.’
It was all entirely in character. She was the tidier-up, the mender and tranquilliser and smoother of ends about the place. It was always Gisela who took care of the little things.
‘I was early for my entrance. And you know how dark we had the stage, and how complex the set is. Tonda and Inga were somewhere to my right, but nowhere near me, Max and Ralph were over on the other side. And he was on the stage singing his aria, and then he backed into the pine-grove, almost towards me. There was someone standing there under cover, waiting for him. I didn’t see or hear him until he moved a little to keep directly behind Figaro. And I didn’t understand, I never realised … we were all so used to seeing him about the stage, he went where he pleased. There was no reason why I should even wonder. And then – he simply slipped his left hand over Figaro’s mouth, and the needle into his back, there in front of my eyes, before I could move or speak. It didn’t seem possible it could be done so smoothly. He just lowered him in his arm and let him lie, and he never made a movement again.’
Her voice had grown thin and fine with wonder and terror, not of death so much as of its silence and suddenness. Even killing a chicken, even hooking a fish, had more struggle and conflict about it than this. He held fast to her hands, and thought of the act almost as an achievement; for that was the spirit in which Codger had learned the art of silent killing. He made no mistakes about the things he did know. He had forgotten the names of his brothers and half the events of his own life, but he never forgot his acquired skills, and his hands could still reproduce them.
‘He was dead,’ she said, ‘before I even touched him. He’d left him there just – lowered him to the boards and slipped away and left him. And I … the knitting-needle was so childish, so obvious. I thought of him on trial, and of you … Or perhaps not thought, I doubt if I did think. It simply happened to me. I pulled out the needle. There was almost no blood. It wasn’t even difficult. I tore the loose end off the baldric, in case, and held it with that, but there was nothing, not so much as when you cut your finger. I wiped the needle on the piece of silk so that had to vanish, too …’
As simple as that, the curious diagon
al line over which Musgrave had exercised so much ingenuity. Nothing to do with the chasing on the blade, just the thin mark left where she wiped the needle.
‘And then I unsheathed the rapier, and put the point to the wound at the same angle, and …’
A sudden convulsive shudder ran through her, but her face remained fixed in a stunned and wondering calm, and her hands, starting and quivering for an instant like frightened wild things in his, sank again into a warmer ease.
‘The wound would have given away almost as much as the weapon, I had to mangle and disguise it somehow. You can do anything if you have to. I don’t remember much about it now,’ she said, staring back wide-eyed into the memories she had disturbed, ‘except that I did it.’
Just as well, thought Johnny, seeing before his eyes the thin, telltale stroke of blood on the bright silk, and the slender blade swaying upright, its point in Chatrier’s back.
‘And how did Hans get into it?’ he prompted gently. Keep her talking, make her pour out the whole of it, empty the darkness and share the last of it with him, so that there should never again be so much as a shadow between them. He knew now that he couldn’t bear another such banishment.
‘He didn’t do anything, he didn’t know anything, there wasn’t any conspiracy. He simply came into the wings ready for his entrance, and he must have seen me get up from the body and run on-stage. I was nearly late on my cue. I didn’t know he was there until I turned to go into the arbour, and then I looked quickly to see if the body showed at all, and there he was. Standing right beside it, staring at me. I knew by his face he’d seen me, I knew what he was thinking. Such horror, and such pity! I couldn’t guess what he would do. I couldn’t do anything about it, whatever he did. So I just went on into the arbour. Then I was all right, then I had time to think, time to hide the ribbon where you found it, and slip the needle into the busk of my dress.’
‘And Hans gave you what he thought you needed, an alibi.’
The boy must have made up his mind in about twenty seconds, for Figaro’s first indignant comment came only three lines after Marcellina’s retreat into the arbour. Johnny heard again vividly with his inward ear the final bitter: ‘“Il fresco – il fresco!”’ Maybe Hans had had qualms about his act afterwards, maybe he’d deeply regretted it, but he’d stood to it stoutly even when he feared he was himself beginning to figure as chief suspect. No, there was nothing there that need make a man hesitate to confide his daughter’s future to Hans Selverer. On the contrary, such stubborn loyalty was not easily to be found, and Johnny knew how to value it.
‘He never had time to think, either,’ she said, ‘only to feel sorry for me.’
‘Does he know now? That it – wasn’t you? That you only intervened to protect Codger?’
‘Yes, he knows now.’
‘And when the alarm was given and the police took over, of course, you had to leave the ribbon where it was, and let it take its chance. And the needle, too? Do you mean to tell me that thing’s been in your dress ever since? Even when the dressing-rooms were searched?’
‘They were searched for the first time while I was still wearing it. And then, they were looking for the baldric, not for a knitting-needle. I knew there was a certain risk in leaving it where it was, but it seemed to me much more risky to try and move it while the police were always here among us. I knew I could get the ribbon back as soon as we gave Figaro again, and the best way not to draw attention to it until then was not even to look towards it or think about it. It wasn’t so surprising that they didn’t find it, you see, because it was perhaps the one place where they took it for granted it couldn’t be … Nan and I being in there together, by their reckoning, from before the murder was committed until after it was discovered. When I did recover it I meant to get it away out of the theatre and burn it. But you know what happened.’
Yes, he knew. After all her patience and courage and resolution, after the days and nights of going about her business with a composed face and keeping her own counsel, all to save Codger, Codger had undone all her work with his own hands.
‘When you left me alone with them, that night, I didn’t know what to do. Codger was dead then. He couldn’t be saved, and you couldn’t be spared. It was too late to do anything but pick up what few pieces I could, and it seemed to me the best thing I could do was hand Musgrave his evidence, let him make his case as it stood. There was no way of getting Codger out of the blame this time, and he couldn’t be hurt now. So I put the baldric in his pocket for Musgrave to find. Maybe it was the wrong thing, I don’t know. I was frightened of the complications I’d made, now that they were no more use I only wanted to be rid of them.’
‘Girl, girl!’ said Johnny, drawing her into his arm with a groan of self-reproach. ‘What you’ve gone through alone!’
‘It wasn’t quite so bad then. Not even quite so lonely. After that night I told Hans … to put his mind at rest. And it did something for my mind, too. He’s a good boy, Johnny, he’ll never let her down, you can be sure of that.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me the truth then? You could have, then. It was over for Codger, there was no need to hide it any longer.’
‘If I’d known you knew the half of it, like him, of course I’d have told you the rest. But I didn’t know, you never said anything. Why didn’t you tell me you knew I had the baldric? Then I should have told you everything.’
Why didn’t you tell me? They were both asking it; they could lose so soon the sense of helplessness and isolation, shake off so soon the state of separation where speech was a burden and confiding an impossibility, however much goodwill, however much love they brought to the struggle.
‘And then, I didn’t want to involve you in anything I’d done. I thought you were better out of it. One of us was enough to be tangled in all that. Poor Codger!’ she said, and turned and rested her smooth forehead for a moment against Johnny’s cheek.
‘Poor Codger! But better that way than the other. If they’d taken him away from us he’d have died of fright and loneliness. But that you should have to go through all that for him!’
‘It was mostly for you,’ said Gisela with the shadow of a smile warming the drained pallor of her face.
‘Well, don’t you ever do anything like that for me again, that’s all. It scares the living daylights out of me when I think I’ve lost touch with you. We’ll dispose of this thing now. You and I, together. We can, now. Musgrave’s gone, and the case is closed.’
And not, it seemed, so unjustly as he had thought.
There was a kind of providence in it, after all. After she was back with him, he saw her clearly, his voice could reach her, they were saved. Never risk that again, never in life. He knew now that he couldn’t manage without Gisela.
She drew herself gently out of his arm and rose, drawing breath deeply as though she had cast off a burden as great as the one she had lifted from him. ‘I must dress. No, you sit there, don’t move. And you won’t have to turn Hans down, after all, you see. All he did was take pity on me.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Johnny. ‘He’s a fine boy, and they’ll make a grand team. If he can manage her.’
‘He’ll manage her. She’ll see to that.’
It sounded like a recipe for a pretty good marriage. Johnny, thinking of his darling, began almost to look forward to the excitement and promise of her dazzling career beside Hans Selverer; each of them would be a stimulus and a challenge to the other. Gisela watched him from the mirror, and the warm, heavy, lingering smile of her love played upon him without concealment. She thought he was safely clear of all his doubts and reservations concerning the death of Marc Chatrier; but suddenly the shadow was back in his eyes, and he harked back to it again, as it seemed she must be prepared for him to do many times yet before the place in his mind healed.
‘One thing bothers me,’ said Johnny. ‘Codger never thought of that by himself, you know – either time. He never hurt anybody in his life off his own bat, only when he was
told. Someone told him to do it. And I’m horribly afraid it was me. I know I said something about knocking off Musgrave – you remember?’
‘But he’d often heard things like that said, and never taken them seriously.’
‘But that time I meant it. I did mean it! Only for a minute, but … From other people he had to have orders spelled out, but from me a hint was enough. He might have sensed that I was in dead earnest – I wish to God I knew!’
‘You were not,’ she said quickly and fiercely.
‘Then he must have thought I was. Damn it, I don’t know myself. And something comes back to me now about the other time, about Chatrier. I said something about him, too, a day or so before it happened. Something about him being due for a funeral, not a wedding, if everybody had his deserts. I didn’t say it to Codger – but Codger was there. Gisela, Codger only did what he thought I wanted! In the end I’m to blame.’
‘Oh, Johnny!’ she said, and turned suddenly and took his face between her hands. ‘Oh, Johnny; oh, my darling, don’t! I love you, and I can’t bear any more. Let it alone, let it alone, and don’t kill me!’
She got him to the bottom of the stairs safely, silent and dazed between the revelations of his wretchedness and his happiness. They were very late. The theatre was hushed and still, but its emptiness felt warm and at ease, without a qualm for dead Figaro. In Sam’s box by the stage-door there was an ache where Codger had been, but even there, it seemed, there could be no permanent void. Sam’s voice, gruff and querulous, addressed some unseen presence within:
‘Take your tail out o’ that fire, you daft mutt, and get from underfoot.’
The dog Buster, a stray with one wall eye, had walked in and insinuated himself into Sam’s room yesterday morning, draggled with rain. Not an attractive beast, nor a bright one, but bright enough to recognise encouragement beneath what had sounded like the opposite. Probably Sam wouldn’t have welcomed a more presentable specimen. The vacancy wouldn’t have fitted anything but a helpless, well-meaning creature doomed eternally to be a liability and a nuisance.
