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  Mingled With Venom

  ( Mrs Bradley - 54 )

  Gladys Mitchell

  Mingled With Venom

  Gladys Mitchell

  Bradley 54

  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Three Houses in Cornwall

  Chapter 2: Family Dinner

  Chapter 3: Headlands

  Chapter 4: Campions and Seawards

  Chapter 5: Hallucination or Fact?

  Chapter 6: The Smugglers’ Inn

  Chapter 7: Threats and Legacies

  Chapter 8: Speculations and Near Certainties

  Chapter 9: Death of a Matriarch

  Chapter 10: Unexpected Ending to an Inquest

  Chapter 11: Last Will and Testament

  Chapter 12: Arrested and Charged

  Chapter 13: Monkshood

  Chapter 14: Family Matters

  Chapter 15: A List of Suspects

  Chapter 16: What’s in a Name?

  Chapter 17: Gamaliel’s Law

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  speedy death

  mystery of a butcher’s shop

  the longer bodies

  the saltmarsh murders

  death at the opera

  the devil at saxon wall

  dead man’s morris

  come away death

  st. peter’s finger

  printer’s error

  brazen tongue

  hangman’s curfew

  when last i died

  laurels are poison

  the worsted viper

  sunset over soho

  my father sleeps

  the rising of the moon

  here comes a chopper

  death and the maiden

  the dancing druids

  tom brown’s body

  groaning spinney

  the devil’s elbow

  the echoing strangers

  merlin’s furlong

  faintley speaking

  watson’s choice

  twelve horses and the hangman’s noose

  the twenty-third man

  spotted hemlock

  the man who grew tomatoes

  say it with flowers

  the nodding canaries

  my bones will keep

  adders on the heath

  death of a delft blue

  pageant of murder

  the croaking raven

  skeleton island

  three quick and five dead

  dance to your daddy

  gory dew

  lament for leto

  a hearse on may-day

  the murder of busy lizzie

  a javelin for jonah

  winking at the brim

  convent on styx

  late, late in the evening

  noonday and night

  fault in the structure

  wraiths and changelings

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd., 52 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3EF

  © 1978 by Gladys Mitchell

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner.

  ISBN 0 7181 1689 5

  Phototypeset by Granada Graphics Ltd. Printed and bound by Redwood Burn.

  “A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,

  That the united vessel of their blood,

  Mingled with venom of suggestion…

  Shall never leak, though it do work as strong

  As aconitum…”

  Henry IV, Part 2, IV, sc.4

  Chapter 1

  Three Houses in Cornwall

  ^ »

  ‘A full family reunion can be a very chancy business,’ said Maria Porthcawl.

  ‘This one looks like being a chapter out of Ivy Compton Burnett,’ said Fiona Bute. ‘Mrs Plack has already thrown a fit of hysterics and retired to her bed with a migraine at the thought of all the cooking involved.’

  ‘Madre has left me to issue the invitations. Surely she must know better than to seat Rupert and Diana at the same table. They haven’t spoken a civil word to one another for years.’

  ‘They need not sit next to one another.’

  ‘Then what about Gamaliel? Does she know he’s black?’

  ‘I doubt whether she even knows of his existence. Anyway, it’s a legal adoption, so he counts as one of the family. Then there are Quentin and Millament, Diana’s twins.’

  ‘But they’re only twelve years old. Surely they won’t be expected to dine with the rest?’

  ‘If she said everybody, she meant everybody.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope some of them won’t be able to come. What with Parsifal’s allergies, Diana on a diet and Bluebell being a vegetarian, no wonder Mrs Plack has taken to her bed! It’s enough to send any self-respecting cook to the madhouse, not to mention Garnet’s antisocial habit of trying all his food on his dog before he touches it himself.’

  ‘It is because Parsifal collects strange herbs for Blue to cook, but as for coming, they’ll all turn up if they know what’s good for them. Nobody knows yet who is mentioned in the Will.’

  ‘Oh, goodness, give her a chance! She’s only just over seventy. She isn’t going to die just yet.’

  ‘Everybody has to go at some time or other and she takes big chances scrambling about on the cliffs the way she does.’

  ‘I wonder whether I could fiddle the invitations a bit.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Make a judicious selection and not invite them all.’

  ‘Those who weren’t invited would find out. Off you go. Get the job done and the cards delivered. The notice is short enough as it is. It is only a question of cards, not letters, I suppose?’

  ‘Cards, yes. I shall be as formal as the printed message allows. The more off-putting the invitations sound, the more likely they are to be turned down.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’

  ‘Just wishful thinking, that’s all. Is your own future secure?’

  ‘Is yours? We may be giving the best years of our lives, as the saying goes, but nothing in this world is a certainty. She takes us both for granted, and that is no advantage when it comes to receiving benefits.’

  Maria was the daughter of seventy-five-year-old Mrs Leyden. She was a widow of fifty-two and had been known to refer to herself as her mother’s unpaid housekeeper, but this was an unfair assessment of her position in Romula Leyden’s household. She did pretty much as she pleased most of the time and was generously treated, although her mother had never approved of her marriage to Vannion Porthcawl, an actor who was far more often out of work than in it, and Romula had made no secret of her satisfaction when, having lived long enough to see his twin children, Garnet and Bluebell, reach the age of twenty, he obtained a part in a London pantomime, got drunk on the strength of this and was run over by a bus in Oxford Street and killed. Maria had lived at her mother’s house in Cornwall for the ten years which succeeded this accident.

  Fiona Bute, aged thirty-five, was nominally the secretary, but was, in fact, a protégée. Romula had been disappointed in both her own children: Maria had made a marriage which deeply displeased her and Basil had fathered an illegitimate child. What was worse, in Romula’s opinion, was that neither he nor the woman had ever wanted to be married but had lived happily together until the woman died. When this happened, Basil begged his sister Maria to bring up his boy Rupert with her own two children, and unable to live without his lover, he put an end to himself by blowing his brains out.


  Bereft, as she saw it, of both her offspring—for she had never had both of them together in her house after they had formed what she regarded as their disastrous partnerships—Romula had taken unto herself the orphaned child of a second cousin, so that Fiona Bute found herself in the position of adopted daughter. When, forgiven after her husband was dead, Maria returned to the maternal fold, Fiona went out of her way to make a friend of her. This was first because, with Maria’s advent, she wondered whether her own standing with her protector was likely to be put in jeopardy, and later on because the two women genuinely liked one another. Between them the house ran smoothly.

  ‘And now this upset!’ thought Fiona, shoving gilt-edged cards into envelopes she had already addressed. ‘Why on earth does she want to draw the family together for a dinner party? It must be to discuss her Will. But why all of them? She thinks Rupert comes of tainted stock; she’s often told me so. She disapproves of Garnet and Bluebell because they’re Vannion Porthcawl’s children, and what she’s to make of Gamaliel goodness only knows!’

  She wondered whether she had uttered this thought aloud, for the door opened and a girl of twenty came into the room.

  ‘Did you call?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Ruby, I didn’t,’ replied Fiona testily. ‘Here, lick some of these envelopes for me while I go and call up Lunn to act as postman.’

  ‘What’s all this? A dinner party? Oh, good! We’ll get something decent to eat.’

  ‘We always get something decent to eat,’ said Fiona. ‘Anyway, I expect you’ll have to stand down, or there won’t be enough men to go round.’

  ‘I could provide my own. Barnaby would love to come and it would give him a fine chance to meet the abuela and ingratiate himself with her, wouldn’t it? After all, she foots his bills for my singing lessons.’

  Ruby Pabbay’s position in the household was an ambiguous one. As a girl of sixteen she had been taken on as kitchen-maid, having been recruited from the local orphanage. Less than a year later, Romula, paying an unexpected visit to the kitchen, had heard her singing as she prepared the vegetables. The upshot was that she was being groomed and trained for the concert platform; the peeling of potatoes and the rest of her mundane duties had long been things of the past.

  She was a tall, good-looking girl, sensible enough not to abuse her new position, a ready learner of upstairs speech and manners and very anxious to shine in the sphere which Romula had chosen for her. She had proved adept at picking up languages, could sing in French, German and Italian, and called Romula madame in public and abuela (which Romula herself had chosen) in the house, but not in front of the servants. Mrs Plack, the cook, hated her and called her ‘that jumped-up hussy’; Redruth Lunn, the chauffeur, made amorous approaches to her, was unmercifully snubbed, and remained faint but pursuing, and Maybury, Romula’s personal maid, petted and spoilt her. Some of the servants thought that this was in the hope of future gain when Romula died, but in fact, Maybury was Ruby’s natural mother, although Ruby herself did not know this.

  The house was called Headlands and was aptly named since it stood, in a somewhat isolated position, between two of these, Scar Point and St Oleg’s Head. Its immediate surroundings were the downland turf. The views from the back windows were of a superb stretch of the Cornish coast and there was no garden or surrounding wall or fence and no approach except for an unmade-up track just wide enough to take the car and the tradesmen’s vans. The outbuildings consisted of a double garage, the stables which housed three well-bred horses, two large kennels for the guard-dogs and a cottage shared by the chauffeur and his sister who groomed the horses. Her name was Mattie, but she preferred to be called Matt. She wore men’s clothes, whistled through her, teeth and was a regular customer at the pub in the village, where she slapped people on the back, stood her round and was the local darts champion.

  The house in which Romula’s grandson Garnet lived was very much smaller than Headlands. It belonged to him and he shared it with his sister Bluebell, her husband Parsifal Leek and their adopted son Gamaliel. The house was called Seawards and was as romantically situated as its name suggests, for it was built literally on the coast and from the back of the house a slipway for boats ran down to a strip of rough beach and the opening of a tiny cove. Built originally towards the end of the seventeenth century, it had been altered and added to by its various owners until its original builder would hardly have recognised it.

  Seawards was approached downhill. A short slope curved down to it from the road which led to the village, the hotel and, further off, the pub. An iron gate near the culvert over a small but noisy waterfall opened on to a garden with crazy paving, florabunda roses, fuchsias and lavender. Against the stonework of a high wall, the tall stems, broad leaves and sinister flowers of monkshood made a patch of green and purple in an angle of the steep-stepped little enclosure.

  At the back of the house, which faced the sea, strong wooden shutters were attached to the windows to offer a defence against the winter gales. From the french-windows, unshuttered in the lovely June weather, there was a wide view of the Channel, for the house was on a curve of Veryan Bay. From these french doors, which were on the second and third floors, steps led down from the balconies to a long, stone-flagged back garden, walled on the one side, but bounded on the other by the small stream which rushed in a waterfall past the side of the house and down to the cove and the sea.

  The stream was nowhere very wide. It could be crossed by stepping stones and then a long ascent of narrow steps, cut into the hillside and mounting steeply upwards led to an overgrown track which marked what had been the smugglers’ path to the inn. The inn, since those days, had been greatly enlarged and was now a holiday hotel, although the oldest part of the building was still in use, thanks to extensive renovation and repairs.

  In spite of their grandmother’s wealth, neither Garnet nor Bluebell was comfortably endowed. Each received an allowance from the old lady, but they felt it was grudgingly given and even after their father’s death it had not been increased. Romula had forgiven her daughter Maria for marrying, but she could not bring herself to forgive Garnet and Bluebell for being Vannion Porthcawl’s children.

  Almost needless to say, the inhabitants of Seawards boasted no servants except a daily char and a weekly washer-woman and lived plainly.

  Parsifal, Bluebell’s husband, was a minor poet whose romantic Christian name was off-set by his less poetical surname of Leek. Apart from his wife’s allowance from her grandmother, he kept the wolf from the door by publishing an occasional slim volume, begging sycophantically from Romula when the big bills came in, and also by writing verses to be printed on Christmas and birthday cards and, when he could get the work, by doing research for authors too busy, too incompetent or too lazy to do it for themselves. He lived his own life and wandered about the countryside in search of what he called inspiration.

  Bluebell was a painter who sold an occasional picture to the summer visitors to the hotel. Her brother Garnet wrote moderately successful romantic novels under the pen-name of Gertrude Fosseway, and bore most of the household expenses.

  Bluebell’s adopted son, the negro boy Gamaliel, was still at school. He was a beautiful and intelligent lad, a splendid swimmer and the school boxing champion. His hero was Muhammad Ali, and his immediate ambition was to be chosen for the next Olympic Games. He saw this as the best means of turning professional later on and becoming world champion at his weight whatever, in adulthood, that weight turned out to be.

  He kept these ambitions mostly to himself, being well aware that they differed very considerably from Bluebell’s conception of his future. She wanted a university scholarship for him and a professional career of a very different sort from that which he had mapped out for himself. He was down on the school register as Gamaliel Leek, but he detested both names and always called himself Greg Ubi on the covers of his exercise books, the name under which he intended to fight later on.

  He was popular with the
masters and particularly so with the women teachers to whom he was always courteous and cordial; thus he was allowed to get away with his assumed name, the staff and the head teacher feeling sympathy, no doubt, with one who disliked his adoptive cognomen so much.

  The registers were never called, the easy-going staff being content to cast a non-militant eye over the class, put a black zero against the names of any absentees and fill in all the red markings on Friday mornings while the school was at hymn practice in the hall with the head teacher. It was not a school which gained university scholarships, but nobody had told Bluebell that, and, as the school was in a town fifteen miles away and she had no car, she had made no enquiries, content to thank God for the school bus which made farepaying for Gamaliel unnecessary.

  Only to Garnet did the lad ever unburden himself and only occasionally at that. He would sit on Garnet’s bed while the novelist tapped away at a typewriter set on a table in the window and remain there, silent and unwinking as a statue, for perhaps a couple of hours or more. When Garnet knocked off work they would drink beer together, eat ginger biscuits and sometimes talk, sometimes not. Gamaliel had taught Garnet to swim. In return, Garnet had dedicated a book to him: To my splendid friend, Greg Ubi.

  Gamaliel had not read the book, but in his own room he mouthed the dedication over and over again. As neither Parsifal nor Bluebell ever read Garnet’s books, they never asked who Greg Ubi was.

  On the other side of the hills, high up, since it was built on top of the cliffs although some fifty yards inland, stood the rambling, somewhat decrepit Edwardian house known as Campions. Here lived the rest of Romula’s relatives, Rupert Bosse-Leyden, his wife Diana and their twelve-year-old twins Quentin and Millament, when the last-named were not away at boarding-school.

  There was nothing unusual about the house except that it stood on land belonging to the National Trust. Rupert and Diana lived rent-free in return for keeping the environs free of holiday makers’ litter and the surrounding footpaths clear so that the public could have access to the cliffs and the impressive and beautiful views.