The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “Well, Molloy’s gone,” he said. “You know what that means? He’s washed his hands of you. Just in case—just in case, you’ve been relying on Molloy, I would like to point out to you that his own position is none too secure. The firm he works for has not been entirely satisfied with him for some time. It is, there-fore, quite out of the question that he should influence any decision that may be come to with regard to yourself. His going off like this shows that he realises the position and accepts it. Self-preservation is Molloy’s trump suit, first, last, and all the time. I shouldn’t advise you to count upon trifles like parental devotion, or anything of that sort. In a word—he can’t help you, but I can.”

  The man leaned forward as he spoke, and a sudden smile changed his features.

  “Just be frank,” he went on. “Tell me what you really heard, and I’ll see you through.”

  Jane let her eyes meet his. That smile had puzzled her; it was so spontaneous and charming, but it did not reach his eyes.

  She looked and found them cold and opaque, and as she looked, she saw the pupils narrow, expand, and then narrow again.

  He got up from his chair, walked to the mantelpiece, stopped for a light to his cigarette, and came back again with a thin blue haze of smoke about him.

  “Perhaps I haven’t been altogether frank with you,” he said. “That little romance of mine about a firm of chemists who employ your father—you didn’t really believe it? No, I thought not. The fact is, that first night I took you for just a schoolgirl, and one can’t tell schoolgirls everything. But now, now I’m talking to you as a woman. I can’t tell you everything, even so, but I can tell you this. It’s a Government matter, a most important one, and it is vital that I should know just what you overheard.”

  Jane looked down.

  “I don’t understand,” she said in a low voice. “I was dreaming and I waked up suddenly. There was a screen in front of me, and some one on the other side of the screen called out very loud, ‘The door, the door!’ That’s what I heard.”

  She felt the pale eyes upon her face. Then with an abrupt movement the man came over to her.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  Jane stood up.

  “Look at me.”

  Jane looked at him.

  After what seemed like a very long time, he threw out his hand with an impatient gesture. It struck the table edge with a sharp rap, the spring that held his wrist watch gave, and the watch on its gold curb flew off and fell on the floor behind Jane.

  She turned, glad of an excuse to turn, and bent to pick it up. The back of the watch was open; her fingers caught and closed it instantly, but not for nothing had she told Henry that she had gimlet eyes. The back of the watch contained a photograph, and Jane had seen the photograph before. Henry’s voice sounded in her ears. “It was done from Amory’s portrait of her, in 1915—the year of her marriage.” Number Two, the man in the fur coat, Renata’s “worst of them all,” had in the back of his watch a photograph of Lady Heritage!

  Jane laid the watch on the table without giving it a second glance.

  Chapter Six

  As the watch slid back into its place beneath his shirt cuff, the man spoke with an entire change of manner.

  “Well, Miss Renata, that was all very stiff and businesslike. You mustn’t hold it up against me, because I hope we’re going to be friends. Don’t you want to know your plans?”

  Jane looked at him with a little frown.

  “My plans?”

  “What is going to happen to you. Oh, please, don’t look so grave! It’s nothing very dreadful. You have heard of Sir William Carr-Magnus?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Jane. She hoped that she looked innocent and surprised.

  “Well,” said the man in the fur coat, “I happen to be his secretary, and that reminds me, I don’t believe you know my name. Your father and his friends use a ridiculous nickname which sticks to me like a burr… but let me introduce myself—Jeffrey Ember, and your friend, if you will have me.”

  The charming smile just touched his face, and then he said in a quiet, serious way:

  “Sir William’s daughter, Lady Heritage, has commissioned me to find her an amanuensis—companion—no, that’s not quite right either. She doesn’t want a trained stenographer, or a young person with a business training, but she wants a girl in the house—some one who’ll do what she’s told, write notes, arrange the flowers.… I dare say you can guess the sort of thing. She is willing to give you a trial, and your father has agreed. As a matter of fact, I’m taking you down there to-day.”

  “Oh!” said Jane, because she seemed expected to say something, and for the life of her she could not think of anything else to say.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to submit to certain restrictions at Luttrell Marches. You see, Sir William is engaged upon some very important experiments for the Government, and all the members of his household have to conform to certain regulations. Their letters must be censored, and they must not leave the grounds, which are, however, extremely delightful and extensive. It isn’t much of a hardship, really.”

  “Oh, no,” said Jane in her best schoolgirl manner.

  And there the interview ended.

  They made the journey to Luttrell Marches by car, but, after the manner of Mrs Gilpin’s post-chaise, it did not pick them up at the door. An ordinary taxi conveyed them to Victoria Station, and it was in the station yard that they and their luggage were picked up at the Rolls-Royce with the Carr-Magnus crest upon the door.

  The mist was thinner, and as they came clear of London, the sun came out. The day warmed into beauty, and the green growth of the countryside seemed to be expanding before their eyes. So many long hedges running into a blur, so many miles of road all slipping past. Jane fell asleep, and did not know how long she slept.

  It was in the late afternoon that they came into the Marsh country—great flat stretches of it, set with boggy tussocks and intersected by straight lanes of water. Purple-brown and green it stretched for miles. To the right a humped line of upland, but to the left, and as far as the eye could see in front, nothing but marsh. Then the road rose a little; the ground was firmer and carried a black pine or two.

  They came to a three-cross way and turned sharply to the right. The ground rose more and more. They climbed a steep hill, zigzagging between banked-up hedges to make the rise, and came out upon a bare upland. Ahead of them one saw a high stone wall pierced by iron gates. The car stopped. Mr. Ember leaned out, and after a pause the gates swung inwards.

  For a mile the drive lay through a flat waste of springing bracken, with here and there a group of wind-driven trees, then a second gate through a high fencing topped with wire. An avenue of trees led up to the house, a huge grey pile set against a sky full of little racing clouds.

  Jane felt stiff and bewildered with the long drive. She followed Mr. Ember up a flight of granite steps and came into the great hall of Luttrell Marches with its panelled walls and dark old portraits of half-forgotten Luttrells.

  Exactly opposite the entrance rose the stairway which was the pride of the house. Its beautiful proportions, the grapes and vine leaves of its famous carvings, were lighted from beneath by the red glow of a huge open fire, and from above by the last word in electric lighting.

  Ember walked straight across the hall and up the stair, and Jane followed him.

  She thought she knew exactly how a puppy must feel when, blinking from the warmth and straw of his basket, he comes for the first time into the ordered solemnity of his new master’s house.

  And then she looked up and saw The Portrait.

  It hung on the panelling at the top of the stair where the long corridors ran off to right and left, and it took Jane’s breath away—the portrait of Lady Heritage.

  Amory had painted more than a beautiful woman standing on a marble terrace: he had painted a woman Mercury. The hands held an ivory rod—diamond wings rose from the cloudy hair. Under the bright wings the eyes looked out,
looked far—dark, splendid, hungry eyes.

  “The earth belongs to her, and she despises it,” was Jane’s thought.

  She stood staring at the portrait. Nineteen-fifteen, Henry had said—the year when other women posed with folded linen hiding their hair and the red cross worn like a blazon. She could think of several famous beauties who had been painted thus. But this woman wore her diamond wings, though, even as she wore them, Fate had done its worst to her, for Anthony Luttrell was a name with other names in a list of missing, and no man knew his grave.

  A sharp clang of metal upon metal startled Jane. She looked quickly to her right, and saw that a steel gate completely barred the entrance to the corridor on that side. It had just closed behind a curious white-draped figure.

  “Ah, Jeffrey,” said a voice—a deep, rather husky voice—and the figure came forward.

  Jane saw that it was a woman wearing a long white linen overall, and a curious linen head-dress, which she was undoing and pushing back as she walked. She pulled it off as she came up to them, saying, “It’s so hot in there I can hardly breathe, but too fascinating to leave. You’re early. Is this Miss Molloy?”

  She put out her hand to Jane, and Jane, with her mind full of the portrait, looked open-eyed at its Original.

  Afterwards she tried to formulate her sensations, but, at the time, she received just that emotional shock which most people experienced when they first met Raymond Heritage.

  Beautiful—but there are so many beautiful women. Charming? No, there was rather something that repelled, antagonised. In her presence Jane felt untidy, shabby, gauche.

  Lady Heritage unbuttoned her overall and slipped it off. She wore a plain, white knitted skirt and jersey. Her fingers were bare even of the wedding ring which Jane looked for and missed. Her black hair was a little ruffled, and above the temples, where Amory had painted diamond wings, there were streaks of grey.

  Bewilderment came down on Jane like a thick mist, which clung about her during the brief interchange of sentences which followed, and went with her to her room.

  It was a queer room with a rounded wall set with three windows and to right and left irregular of line, with a jutting corner here and a blunted angle there. It faced west, for the sun shone level in her eyes.

  Crossing to the window, as most people do when they come into a strange room, she looked out and caught her breath with amazement.

  The sea—why, it seemed to lie just beneath the windows!

  They had driven up from the landward side, and this was her first hint that the sea was so near.

  There was a wide gravel terrace, a stone wall set with formal urns full of blue hyacinths, the sharp fall of the cliff, and then the sea.

  The tide was in, the sun low, and a wide golden path seemed to stretch almost from Jane’s feet to the far horizon. Overhead the little racing clouds that told of a wind high up were golden too.

  The humped ridge of upland, which Jane had seen as they drove, ran out to sea on the right hand. It ended in low, broken cliff, and a line of jagged rocks of which only the points stood clear.

  Jane turned from all the beauty outside to the ordered comfort within. Hot water in a brass can that she could see her face in, a towel of such fine linen that it was a joy to touch it, this pretty white-panelled room, the chintzes where bright butterflies hovered over roses and sweet-peas—she stood and looked at it all, and she heard Renata’s words, “At Luttrell Marches they will decide whether I am to be eliminated.”

  This curious dual sense remained with her during the days that followed. Life at Luttrell Marches was simple and regular. She wrote letters, gathered flowers, unpacked the library books, and kept out of Sir William’s way.

  Sir William, she decided, was exactly like his photo-graph, only a good deal more so; his eyebrows more tufted, his chin more jutting, and his eyes harder. For a philanthropist he had a singularly bad temper, and for so eminent a scientist a very frivolous taste in literature. One of Jane’s duties was to provide him with novels. She ransacked library lists and trembled over the results of her labours.

  Sir William did not always join the ladies after dinner, but when he did so he would read a novel at a sitting and ask for more.

  Mr. Ember was never absent, and when Lady Heritage talked, it was to him that her words were addressed. Sometimes she would disappear inside the steel gate for hours.

  Jane soon learnt that the whole of the north wing was given up to Sir William’s experiments. On each floor a steel gate shut it off from the rest of the house. All the windows were barred from top to bottom.

  She also discovered that the high paling where the avenue began had, on its inner side, an apron of barbed wire, and it was the upper strand of this apron which she had seen as they approached from outside.

  Sir William’s experiments employed a considerable number of men. These, she learned, were lodged in the stables, and neither they nor any of the domestic staff were permitted to pass beyond the inner paling.

  On the coast side there was a high wire entanglement —electrified.

  There were moments when Jane was cold with fear, and moments when she told herself that Renata was a little fool who had had a nightmare.

  Chapter Seven

  When Jane stood at her window and looked across the sea, she saw what might have been a picture of life at Luttrell Marches during those first few days. Such a smooth stretch of water, pleasant to the eye, where blue and green, amethyst, grey and silver came and went, and under the play of colour and the shifting light and shade of day and evening, the unchanging black of rocks which showed for an instant and then left one guessing whether anything had really broken the beauty and the peace.

  Over the surface all was pleasant enough, but incidents, some of them almost negligible in themselves, kept recurring to remind Jane that there were rocks beneath the sea.

  The first incident came up suddenly whilst she was writing Lady Heritage’s letters on the second day.

  She had beside her a little pile of correspondence, mostly about trifles. Upon each letter there was scrawled, “Yes”—“No”—“Tell them I’ll think it over,” or some such direction.

  Presently Jane arrived at a letter in French, upon which Lady Heritage had written, “Make an English translation and enclose to Mrs. Blunt.” Mrs. Blunt’s own letter lay immediately underneath. It contained inquiries about some conditions of factory labour amongst women in France.

  The French letter was an excellent exposition of the said conditions.

  Jane sat looking at it, and wondering whether Renata could have translated a single line of it, and how much ignorance it would behove her to display.

  After a moment’s thought she turned round and said timidly, “May I have a dictionary, please?”

  Lady Heritage looked up from the papers before her. She frowned and said:

  “A dictionary?”

  “Yes, for the French letter.”

  “You don’t know French, then?”

  Jane met the half-sarcastic look with protest.

  “Oh yes, I do. But, if I might have a dictionary—”

  Lady Heritage pointed to the bookcase and went back to her papers.

  An imp of mischief entered into Jane.

  She took the dictionary and spent the next half-hour in producing a translation with just the right amount of faults in it. She put it down in front of her employer with a feeling of triumph.

  “Please, will this do?”

  Lady Heritage looked, frowned, and tore the paper across.

  “I thought you said you knew French?”

  Jane fidgeted with her pen:

  “Of course I know I’m not really good at it, but I looked out all the words I didn’t know.”

  “There must have been a good many,” was Lady Heritage’s comment, and the imp made Jane raise innocent eyes and say:

  “Oh, there were!”

  She went back to her table, and Lady Heritage spoke over her shoulder to Mr. Ember, who
appeared to be searching for a book at the far end of the room. She spoke in French—the low, rapid French of the woman to whom one language is the same as another.

  “What do they teach at English schools, can you tell me, Jeffrey? This girl says she knows French, and if she can follow one word I am saying now—” She broke off and shrugged. “Yet I dare say she went to an expensive school. Now, I had a Bavarian maid, educated in the ordinary village school, and she spoke English with ease, and French better than any English schoolgirl I’ve come across. Wait whilst I try her in something else.”

  She turned back to Jane.

  “Just send the original to Mrs. Blunt—I haven’t time to bother with it—and make a note for me. I want it inserted after para three on the second page of that typewritten article that came back this morning.”

  Jane supposed she might be allowed to know what a “para” was. She turned over the leaves of the typescript and waited for the dictation. The last sentence read, “Woman through all the ages is at the disposal and under the autocratic rule of man, but it is not of her own volition.”

  She wondered what was to come next, and waited, keenly on the alert.

  Lady Heritage began to speak:

  “Write it in as neatly as possible, please; it’s only one sentence: ‘It is Man who has forced “das ewig Weibliche” upon us.’”

  Jane wrote, “It is man—” and then stopped. She repeated the words aloud and looked expectant.

  “‘Das ewig Weibliche’”—there was a slight grimness in Lady Heritage’s tone.

  “I’m afraid—” faltered Jane.

  “Never heard the quotation?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You don’t know any German, then?”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Jane.

  “My dear girl, what did they teach you at that school of yours? By the way, where was it?”

  “At Ilfracombe.”

  “English education is a disgrace,” said Lady Heritage, and went back to her papers.

  It was next day that she turned suddenly to Jane: “By the way, you were at school at Ilfracombe—can you give me the name of a china shop there? I want some of that blue Devonshire pottery for a girls’ club I’m interested in.”