The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place (20 page)

She reached the gardens surrounding the farmhouse. Mrs. Butts’s superb husbandry was in evidence everywhere—in smart red geraniums blooming in gleaming white pots, in fat speckled chickens roaming and pecking, in smooth white gravel lining the walks up to the bright green door, in the fragrance of rhubarb pie wafting from the kitchen windows. Martha felt a pang of terror, of inadequacy, and quailed at the thought of approaching the farmer’s house, never mind the farmer’s son. Who was she, Martha called Dull, still so young, and no prettier than the spectacles pressing down upon her nose, to dare to strike up an acquaintance with Henry? She turned her steps toward the barns instead, and wondered if she could pretend she’d only come to visit Merry, their pony.

She found the gentle creature leaning out of his stall, apparently in some conversation with a pair of sheep, who wandered off to the far corner of their pen when Martha approached. Merry was a sociable pony, and he whickered at the sight of Martha. She stroked his long face and pressed her palms into his cheeks. He sniffed suggestively at the bouquet of wild
f
lowers she’d tucked into her apron pocket.

“They’re too pretty to eat, Merry lad,” she said. “Let’s braid them into your mane instead.” She found a brush and comb hanging on a nail and set to work grooming Merry’s mane, weaving in delicate strands of wild
f
lowers along with his own thick dark hair.

“You’ve got a good hand with him.”

Martha was so immersed in her work that the voice shocked her, and she jumped.

“I’m sorry. I’ve startled you.”

She turned to see Henry Butts in the doorway, still gripping the handles of a wheelbarrow full of straw. She ducked behind Merry and sank her fingers deep into his mane. How, exactly, did one respond to compliments from boys? Mrs. Plackett’s comportment lessons had never said. For Martha, this was a first. It felt nice, but it left her unsure of what to do with herself.

“I’m sorry to have come without asking,” she said.

Henry set the wheelbarrow down and approached the pony. He ran his fingers along the braided portion of Merry’s mane. “Merry belongs to the school,” he said. “You can visit him anytime you like. He’d like more company, wouldn’t you, you old
f
lirt?”

“Flirt” made Dull Martha think of Disgraceful Mary Jane, and then of her own plainness, and her spectacles, and how she always managed to say the wrong thing, or miss the crucial point of important conversations. And here she’d felt, just a moment ago, so happy.

“Did you come to see Mother?” Henry asked. “Some message from Mrs. Plackett about the milk?”

The thought of an interview with Mrs. Butts made Dull Martha quail. Her temper was as famous as her cottage cheese. “No,” she said. “No message about the milk.”

“Just as well,” Henry said. “Mother says there isn’t room in all of Ely, much less on Prickwillow Road, for her and Mrs. Plackett. Whenever she complains about the milk, Mother’s banging pans and swearing bloody vengeance for days.”

Dull Martha’s fingers froze. “Bl-bloody vengeance, did you say?”

Henry nodded. “And milk’s only the half of it. They’ve been fighting over the fence that divides your property and ours these past five years at least.”

“Gracious.” Dull Martha tried to process her spinning thoughts. “I didn’t know.”

Was it possible? Should she mention it to Louise? Could anyone in the world begin to believe that Mrs. Butts, the supremely efficient farmer’s wife, could have efficiently poisoned her widow neighbor and her bachelor brother, all of a Sunday evening?

Henry’s voice jolted Dull Martha’s thoughts once more. “That’s some fine fancywork you’ve done, Miss Martha.”

He remembered her name. Among so many girls, he remembered. Her face began to feel warm, and she realized she was starting to blush. This wouldn’t do. She’d best get her errand over with and
f
ly home. Why, oh, why didn’t she leave this task to Disgraceful Mary Jane, or any of the girls?

“Henry, will you take me to the strawberry social?”

Henry Butts’s mouth opened slightly, like a carp’s. He looked like a schoolboy who can’t guess the answer to a teacher’s question, and the teacher wields a strap.

He seemed to need help, so Martha supplied it. “In your cart? With Merry?”

She waited in agony for his answer. Would he, or would he not take them?

Then she realized something had gone wrong. She knew the feeling well—a sort of buzzing in her ears that meant her dull brain and her wayward tongue had said the worst possible thing yet again. She groped desperately through her memory for the words that had passed her lips, still hanging suspended in the air between them.

Will you take …
me
 …

She clapped her hands over her mouth, turned, and ran from Mr. Butts’ barn.

“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Pocked Louise told Dour Elinor. They’d been sitting in the drawing room for an hour, as ready for the strawberry social as they saw any need to be, while the other girls still attended to their toilettes.

“You sound proud of it,” Elinor observed.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Louise
f
lipped through the pages of her notebook. “I don’t condone killing, but if killing happens anyway, then I think women go about it much more sensibly. Leave it to men to be loud and violent and messy about the business. It’s egotistical of them. It’s not enough to eliminate their enemy. No. They must conquer them face to face and watch them plead for mercy, whereas women dispatch victims quickly and silently.”

Elinor picked up a sketchbook and began to draw. “Men might say poison isn’t sporting.”

“Yes, and men think that organizing parties of dozens of riders and hounds to chase down one poor fox
is
sporting.” Louise snorted. “Men’s opinions are irrelevant.”

Dour Elinor shaded her paper briskly with a charcoal. “Tell that to Parliament.”

“You’re in an odd mood.”

Dour Elinor shrugged. “I don’t much fancy a strawberry social. I have a queer feeling about it. Something ill will come of our going.”

Pocked Louise, who placed no stock in queer feelings, harrumphed. “You’re a prognosticator now, are you?”

“I have instincts,” Dour Elinor replied, quite unperturbed, “where death is concerned. Sunday morning, before Mrs. Plackett and Mr. Godding died, I had no appetite for breakfast, and I couldn’t focus on Reverend Rumsey’s sermon for persistent thoughts of the grave.”

The tall, tight collar of Pocked Louise’s dress chafed at her neck. “I dread the social, too,” she said, “but not for any instinct other than avoiding tiresome spectacles intended to make us meet young men and parade us on display for older ones. Your instincts are pure pif
f
le; no one concentrates on Reverend Rumsey’s sermons, and you never think of anything
but
death.”

Dour Elinor cocked her head and examined her sketch from another angle. “Say what you will. Something bad will happen tonight.”

“Yes.” Pocked Louise
f
lexed her feet. “My toes will atrophy in these wretched slippers.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane entered the room clutching a necklace. She skidded to a stop at the sight of Elinor and Louise on the sofa.

“You’re wearing
those
frocks tonight?”

Louise and Elinor exchanged commiserating looks.

“And why shouldn’t we?” Pocked Louise asked. “They’re clean enough.”

“Help me fasten this clasp.” Mary Jane swooped onto Pocked Louise’s lap so she could assist with the necklace. “Nobody wears dark gray drab to a springtime strawberry social.”

“Mercy me, we forgot to wear our red dresses with yellow dots, and our matching green hats.” Louise finished buckling the necklace clasp. “Then we’d
be
strawberries for the social.”

“Don’t be pert with me,” Mary Jane said loftily. “I’m only trying to help you be seen to best advantage tonight.”

Pocked Louise sniffed. “My best advantage would be to avoid being seen entirely.”

“Come, that’s no way to think,” scolded Disgraceful Mary Jane. “Just because your face is pocked, that doesn’t mean you must hide your candle under a bushel.”

Louise sat, if possible, a little straighter. “I wasn’t worried about my pocks, thank-you very much,” she said. “And don’t go misquoting scripture to me. Candle under a bushel, indeed!”

Stout Alice wandered into the drawing room and sank onto a sofa. She clutched her forehead and moaned. “
Ohhhh
 … don’t make me go through with this.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane, admiring and adjusting her curls in the mantelpiece mirror, shot her a disapproving look. “That’s not the spirit we want to see in our stalwart headmistress.”

“Something awful’s going to happen,” said Stout Alice.

“See? What did I tell you, Louise?” Dour Elinor looked extremely self-satisfied.

“My song will be a dismal failure,” Alice went on.

Pocked Louise wrinkled her nose at Dour Elinor. “It takes no powers of divination to know that Alice’s song will go badly, for heaven’s sake.”

“Thanks much, Louise.” Stout Alice was too morose to take real offense. “Martha will have to play her pianoforte terribly loudly whilst I croak out my song. ‘’Tis not fine feathers make fine birds,’” she warbled, badly. “’Tis a singing voice, which I lack, and that will ruin all. Everyone will see through my disguise, and we’ll all be arrested for murder.”

“Let’s not be so gloomy.” Disgraceful Mary Jane turned her attentions to Stout Alice’s hair, powdered to look like Mrs. Plackett’s. “Maybe only
you
will be arrested for murder, Alice, dear. Elinor, my lamb, run and fetch your paintbox. You need to get working on Alice’s wrinkles. And, Alice, I definitely suggest you wear your veil tonight.”

“A widow in mourning wouldn’t go singing a peacock song at a social!”

“Nevertheless,” Mary Jane insisted, “you’ll have to. Say it’s your anniversary, or your dear husband’s birthday, or some such thing.”

“Has anybody seen Martha?” Pocked Louise enquired. “She left long ago to ask Henry Butts if he’d drive us to the social.”

“I saw her come back,” said Dour Elinor. “She came into the house, but I don’t know where she’s gone.”

“Oh, Lord, you don’t suppose he’s said no to her, do you?” Mary Jane cried. “Then we shall have to walk, and we’ll arrive all dusty.” Disgraceful Mary Jane went about calling for Martha, searching in and out of rooms, and the others followed. They found her curled in a stuffed chair in the parlor, clutching her knees.

“I won’t go to the social,” she declared. “I’ll stay home with Aldous. Go without me.”

“Hear, hear,” cried Pocked Louise. “I’ll stay and keep you company.”

Mary Jane crouched beside Martha’s chair and slipped an arm around her neck. “Now what’s all this?” she said. “What’s made you decide you can’t go?”

Dull Martha was nearly swayed by Mary Jane’s tenderness, but when she recalled that Mary Jane represented all that she, Martha, was not—confident, sophisticated, fascinating, clever—she bit her lip and hunched down low in her chair.

The doorbell rang, and Disgraceful Mary Jane heaved a sigh of vexation. “I’ll get it,” she said. “You stay here. Alice, you can’t be seen. Elinor’s not done your makeup yet.” She glided out into the corridor, where Smooth Kitty, having heard the doorbell, joined her from upstairs.

In the parlor, Stout Alice sat opposite Dull Martha for a quiet moment. “If you stay, Martha, you can’t play the pianoforte for me, which means I couldn’t sing, and nothing in this world could make me happier. But I think you’d actually like to go tonight. So why so sad?”

Martha sighed. “I just made an idiot of myself in front of Henry Butts.”

Pocked Louise laughed. “Is that all? He does that in front of us on a daily basis.”

Martha couldn’t forgive this slur. “He does not. Now he knows, and he must hate me.”

Dour Elinor, who’d brought her paintbox with her, began rolling bits of actors’ putty between her palms to soften it. “Now he knows what?”

Martha slid down lower in her chair and hid her face behind a plush velvet cushion. Her words were somehow both whisper and wail. “That I
fancy him
!”

Stout Alice, who knew how unsympathetic Pocked Louise could be in matters of the heart, shot her scientific roommate a daggered look. “Martha, dear,” she said, “Henry Butts couldn’t possibly hate you, even if he suspects you fancy him. I’m sure he would find it extremely
f
lattering to be noticed by such a charming young lady as yourself.”

Dull Martha peeked up over the rims of her spectacles to gaze hopefully at Stout Alice. “Do you really think so?”

“I’m sure Henry Butts is home right now,” Alice said, “getting himself all combed, and spiffing up for the social, thinking about the chance to visit with you there.” Alice smiled and swallowed the Leland Murphy-sized lump in her throat.

“Did Henry agree to drive us?” Dour Elinor asked.

Dull Martha paused. “I don’t know. I
f
led before I could hear his answer.”

Stout Alice waved this concern away. “Of course he will. He’ll be over here like a puppy dog, well in advance of when we need to leave. So you’d best hurry with my makeup, Elinor.”

“Speaking of puppy dogs,” Pocked Louise said, “has anyone seen Aldous? He chewed up Kitty’s slipper earlier, and she’s frightfully cross with me. As if
I
was the one to eat her shoe!”

Her question was soon answered by a growl and a bark coming from the hallway, followed by a crash of something wooden, and a man’s voice uttering loud expletives wholly unsuited to the ears of delicate young ladies. Louise and Elinor hurried to investigate, while Alice, who could not yet be seen in public, stayed behind with Martha.

Louise and Elinor came upon a confused scene in the front doorway. A stout woman with brassy gray hair and an unfortunate straw hat decorated with wax grapes was scolding a man in workman’s clothes. Aldous had attached himself by the teeth to the trouser leg of the workman and was threatening to worry a chunk of fabric clean out of those trousers. The man, who had apparently dropped a wooden crate on the
f
loor, kicked and shouted at Aldous, calling that exuberant little fellow all sorts of colorful names and attempting to extricate his pants from the dog’s jaws. Smooth Kitty looked astonished; Disgraceful Mary Jane gazed on with amusement.