Bridesmaids Revisited (20 page)

She patted a lopsided roller back into place. “And how are you today?” she inquired, looking at me. “Got to meet that Chambers woman yesterday, I suppose. Needs a fist put through her face, if you ask me. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, Miss Maywood”—she swiveled her gaze towards Rosemary—“but did you get anywhere with her? Did you put it to her fair and square that she could tell her boss we’ll all be out with pitchforks if he forces you to sell up?”

It was abundantly apparent that it was this topic even more than her interest in Ted’s demise that had brought her here. Not that I doubted she would want to hear all the ghoulish details pertaining to the pruning shears before she made her departure. Mercifully, Thora explained that I had been on the point of leaving to make a couple of stops and Susan graciously excused me, adding that she would like to have me over for a cup of coffee and a good long natter. But not tomorrow. Because tomorrow was Thursday and she always had her hair washed and set on Thursday morning and in the afternoon she had to come home and re-roll it to get it back the way she liked it. And then there was this program she had to watch on the telly.

“So, better make it Friday, love.”

Love? This from the woman who yesterday had been on the verge of crushing me with her bare hands into something not fit for the junkyard?

“That’s awfully kind,” I said as I stepped over Dog in my haste to keep up with Thora, who was already heading out of the kitchen.

“I’ll have Frank and Irene come and make a proper party of it. Tom will likely be at work. He drives a van, delivering fish to people that don’t want to buy that dyed smoked haddock and piddling pieces of cod from the supermarket. And Friday’s his busiest day,”

“There’s nothing like fresh fish,” piped in Jane, and all three cats mewed agreement.

“Ellie will let you know, Susan. She could be busy. We’ve a lot of plans and she can’t remain with us very long.” Rosemary set the kettle on the cooker, looking none too pleased about it, and got down a cup and saucer from the cupboard.

“Off we go!” Thora herded me out into the hall, and I picked up my handbag from the coat stand, where I’d put it on coming downstairs, and listened to detailed but cogent directions on how to find Richard Barttle’s photography studio and how to get to Upper Thaxstead from there.

“Sure you won’t take your raincoat?” she asked while opening the front door for me. I told her I didn’t think I’d need it. She agreed that it didn’t look like there was much chance of rain, although one never could tell, but if things changed while I was with Richard, she was sure he would lend me an umbrella. She added that I shouldn’t worry about getting back for lunch, although if I showed up, there would be something for me. And I went down the steps to the sound of Susan’s voice announcing that she liked two spoons of sugar in her tea and that she wouldn’t object to a biscuit or a slice of cake and what exactly did Amelia Chambers, the nasty cow, have to say for herself?

I spared only a passing glance at my car as I went through the gate and out into the lane, just enough to see that it had all its hubcaps and that its antenna had not been snapped off by some passing youths intent on livening up their night. After which I turned cheerily left at the fork, beyond which the fields stretched out like a green sea. About a hundred yards along Church Road I paused to take a look at the sign listing the times of services at St. John’s, which looked very much like St. Anselm’s, whose vicar had arranged the holiday to Memory Lanes. Although I didn’t think St. John’s was Norman, but only posing as such, having instead been built in the mid-nineteenth century. I was tempted to stop and take a look around the churchyard, but I was afraid my ebullient mood would ebb if I stood looking at the family tombstones, particularly the one marking William Fitzsimons’s final resting place, he not being precisely the grandfather I would have chosen.

So I walked on and turned along Hawthorn Lane, which immediately brought Sir Clifford Heath to mind. I wondered, as I looked at the charming cottages lining both sides of the street, which doorstep he had been deposited on by the mother who for one reason or another had not felt equipped to rear him? It was impossible not to feel sympathy for him, whatever his later shortcomings. As I stood admiring the picturesque Old Mill, I remembered my dream, in which he had figured, I had to admit, so appealingly. I felt an urge to meet him and discover how hardened a villain he had really become. I was so fully occupied wondering how he now looked that I reached the High Street with its scattering of shops, passing cars, and ambling pedestrians before I realized I must have passed the studio and had to turn back.

Yes, here it was—Barttle and Henshaw, Photographers. Its bay window contained only one portrait of two soberly dressed children standing sideways under a tree—the girl holding out a glossy red apple to the boy. What made it especially interesting, in addition to the expressions on those faces, was that the photo, apart from the apple, was in black and white. After a second look, I pushed open the iron-studded oak door and entered a space that gleamed with white paint trimmed with black. Its stark simplicity emphasized the warm gloss of the honey-colored wood floor. Elegance was provided by the graceful positioning of a Chippendale chair, seemingly casually draped with a paisley throw. Only five or six photographs were on display and not all were portraits. One in particular caught my eye. It was of the Old Mill, which I had passed on my way, and included the shadow of a tree—rather than the tree itself. Again, it was in black and white with a single introduction of color. This time of blue wildflowers peeking up alongside a brook that appeared to be gliding over boulders and stones.

“Do you like it?” a voice inquired, and I turned to see a man standing behind the crescent-shaped white counter, on which reposed nothing but an old-fashioned black telephone.

“I love it,” I said.

“I’m not surprised.” He smiled and his thin, aesthetic face warmed. “The Old Mill was one of your grandmother’s favorite subjects to paint in Knells.” He came around the counter, and even close up it was hard to believe he was in his seventies. His hair was still more brown than gray and apart from the crows’-feet around his eyes he had next to no wrinkles. Neither was he dressed like an old man. He wore corduroy trousers and a lightweight cotton sweater over a plaid shirt. It was an ensemble I might have chosen for Ben. “Don’t look so spooked.” He held out his hand. “There was no need for you to tell me who you are. You’re the very image of Sophia. Far more so than your mother ever was. I was very sorry”—he now gripped my hand in both his own—“when I got word of Mina’s death.”

“Thank you.”

“It shouldn’t have happened.” His voice took on an agitated edge and in that moment I knew who he was.

“It was you.” I found myself sitting on the Chippendale chair that probably was there for art’s sake and not to be sat upon by anyone. “It was you who phoned me in the middle of the night and warned me not to accept the brides— ... Rosemary, Thora, and Jane’s invitation to come to the Old Rectory.”

He stood looking down at me, not denying it.

“Why?”

“Why,” he echoed, “phone at all? Or why wait until three in the morning?”

“Both!” I watched the paisley throw slither onto the floor.

“To answer the first part, I didn’t want to see you risk the same fate as your mother. As to the second, it took me until that unconscionable hour to convince myself I wasn’t being a needless alarmist. Or I should say, it took that length of time for Arthur to get me to brace up.”

Without waiting for a response, he went to a door that opened onto a flight of stairs painted the same stark white as the studio walls and called out to someone above. I was feeling close to fainting. But I was brought to attention by the thunder of descending footsteps and I was looking sideways into the eyes of a brawny man with a tattoo showing below one of the short sleeves of his black T-shirt. The shirt featured a dragon spewing fire emblazoned on the front and he wore his gray hair in a bushy ponytail that went halfway down his back.

“Ellie,” said Richard, “I’d like you to meet Arthur Henshaw, my partner in both the personal and business sense.”

“Hello,” I responded in a toneless voice. How could I be pleased to make anyone’s acquaintance after being told for the second time in the space of a few hours that Mother had been murdered? For what other interpretation could I put on Richard’s words? He could hardly have meant that the excitement of a visit to the Old Rectory would be sufficient to cause me to trip and fall down a flight of steps. And if he was correct in his belief that my mother had not met with an accident, but with someone intent on getting her out of the way, how could I go on believing that I dreamed up the person who had entered my bedroom last night? Hadn’t that voice—had it been a woman’s?—said the very same thing: that I was risking the same fate as my mother?

“Ellie knows it was I who made that phone call,” I heard Richard tell Arthur but I couldn’t bring either of their faces back into focus.

“Why don’t we take her upstairs to the flat?” Arthur suggested to Richard.

It was like listening to people auditioning for parts in a play, except that I was also on stage and I had no idea what was going to happen next. Other than that I was going to be forced to play out the next scene, in which anything might happen. No one handed me a script that I could thumb through to find out how the last act ended. Nor did I have a clue as to whether these two men were to play the roles of heroes or villains.

“Drink this down, it will help you feel better—get over the shock.” Richard handed me a brandy snifter.

“Thank you, but I’m not much of a drinker.” I stared mindlessly down into the amber depths, then downed the brandy with quick gulps.

“That’s what your great-grandfather, Reverend Hugo McNair, wished his parishioners to believe. You may have heard of poor Gladys Bradley and her problem. But it wasn’t only Edna Wilks’s mother who used to tipple at the Old Rectory. It was the man who preached teetotalism from the pulpit. That was why he was always sucking on those cherry cough drops of his—to cover his taste for cherry brandy. Gladys was the one who sneaked him the bottles, it was the reason he couldn’t give her the sack. I’m sure Agatha McNair never guessed. She was the sort who saw only what she wanted to see, not what was right under her nose. It was William Fitzsimons who caught on and threatened to inform the bishop if McNair didn’t pressure Sophia into marrying him.”

“Richard, I don’t think this is the time to go into all this,” Arthur said, tapping him on the arm with a hand almost as big as one of Susan’s. We were in the flat above the photography studio. I was aware of chrome-legged chairs and tables and a long, brown sofa, and some really beautiful ultramodern glass sculptures in a rainbow of jewel-like colors.

“It’s all right, Arthur,” I said as if this were my one line in the play and I’d been practicing it for weeks. “I’m interested.” Untrue, but it was better than talking about who had murdered my mother, and why.

“If we’re going to dig into the subject”—the man with the bushy ponytail sat down on the end of the sofa closest to my chair—“what I’d like to know is why it would have mattered a hill of beans to his lordship the bishop if McNair did enjoy a drink. Doesn’t sound as though it kept him out of the pulpit, not if he was always ranting on against the stuff. Makes him a hypocrite. A guilty conscience will do that to you every time. And guilty for nothing, because I never heard that the Church of England makes its members take the pledge.”

“True,” said Richard from where he was leaning against an armoire, “but McNair’s congregation was a mixed bag. A good number of them had come over to St. John’s from having been Methodists until they married and got roped into going down the road to the other church. Once the wedded bliss wears off a bit, as it tends to do for most couples ...”

“Speak for yourself,” Arthur told him.

“Then it doesn’t take much, such as finding out the rector is an imbiber, to send the not-so-converted chasing back to their old pews. In a village the size of Knells the defection of a dozen or so members of the congregation means a considerable difference in what goes into the collection plate. Besides which, Reverend McNair would have had to explain to the bishop why he was losing customers. And his lordship, not being of the nonconformist mentality, might have concluded that rather than enjoying the occasional, or possibly frequent, glass of oh-be-joyful, McNair was a staggering drunk. In other words, William Fitzsimons must have convinced him with a few well-chosen words that he had him over a barrel ... of cherry brandy, at risk of being publicly shamed and out of a job.”

“What a predicament,” I said.

“Hugo McNair, like a lot of men who roar about their households like lions if anyone so much as treads on their toes, was something of a coward when anyone faced him down.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Arthur leaned forward in his chair so that the dragon on his T-shirt was reduced to a pair of green nostrils spewing fire. “I can do my share of stomping and snarling and flinging saucepans around. And I don’t shrivel up into a quaking huddle when anyone rallies to say ‘Boo!’ back to me.”

“You’re the charming exception that proves the rule.” Richard smiled absently back at him before saying to me, “Here. Have another poison. I won’t report you to the church elders if you do. And I promise you it’s not drugged.”

At that moment, the paralysis that had turned me into a zombie for the past ten minutes seeped out of my pores, leaving me limp but alive again. “The cocoa. The cup Jane brought to me in bed last night.” I got up and paced the shining wooden floor of the flat’s sitting room. “Of course! It was drugged! How could I have been so stupid as not to realize? The feeling even when I was asleep that I couldn’t move, that my limbs were weighted down with concrete, that I was trapped in a bog. That’s how Jane also described how she felt. But of course she could have been making it up, if she was the one who had put whatever it was in my cocoa. Or someone else could have drugged her, too—either Thora or Rosemary, because it had to be one of them who did it. Whoever came into my room in the middle of the night and whispered in my ear that she had killed my mother wouldn’t have wanted to rouse either of the others when making her getaway. For all I know they could be light sleepers given to getting up in the wee hours and prowling around the house. It was horrible! She probably had to shake me half-awake so that I could hear what she was saving, but needed me to be thoroughly sluggish so that I couldn’t nip out of bed after her. Or”—I whirled around, spilling half the contents of my brandy snifter—“do I have it all wrong? Maybe it wasn’t Rosemary, Thora, or Jane.”