Dead Men's Morris (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “Oh, by the way,” he added, getting up, “what do you want us to do with the hundredweight of coal, or whatever it is, that we took from the back of the car? It’s in the hall at present, awaiting instructions, as they say.”

  “Oh, yes, the boar’s head,” said Mrs. Bradley. “By the way, where’s your friend Hugh? I thought he would be here again for Christmas.”

  “He is, and so is young Denis. They’ve gone to the market in Oxford. And by the way, Aunt Adela, I’m sorry but we can’t put George up in the house. I’m afraid we’ll be rather crowded. Girls of sorts, and a fearful tick called Pratt—engaged to Fay—you remember Fay and Jenny?—are coming over for Christmas, so we’re rather short of room. I expect they’ll stay a day or two. Do you mind?”

  “Girls of sorts!” said Mrs. Bradley. “And I thought I was being invited for myself alone, not to chaperone a gaggle of hussies who will probably refer to me in private conversation as ‘that old scream’ if they like me, and ‘the Cenci’ if they don’t.” She got up, fixed her nephew with the eye of a good-humoured snake, and poked him in the ribs exuberantly. Then she gave a harsh cackle and suddenly made for the door.

  “Come and help me drag the boar’s head to the kitchen, child, and then come and show me my room.”

  “Your room? Yes, of course,” said Carey. “The washing arrangements are rather primitive here, but we’ve indoor sanitation—of a kind! But Mrs. Ditch’ll show you. A most valuable woman. She housekeeps, and her husband and her youngest son are my pigmen. She has other children—a girl of eighteen or so, who works at Simith’s place, and three more boys, aged twenty upwards, I think. Nice people. Came from Headington originally. Mrs. Ditch is quite a mother to me. I’ll summon her.”

  He lifted his head and yodelled. The sound, invented to carry over mountain valleys, rang through the quiet house like the call of a bugle, and Mrs. Ditch came hastening. She was a shrewd-eyed, pleasant-faced woman, grey-haired and bold-featured, of a type to be seen all over the county. She was wrinkled and roughened from being out in all weathers, had the coarse, red skin of the middle-aged peasant, and square-palmed, masculine hands, the fingers scarred with potato-peeling, the cuts deepened by hot soda water. Her manner was like her appearance—countrified—not that of a servant, and yet respectful and courteous.

  She carried the parlour lamp, which she trimmed and lighted. She looked at the yodeller affectionately.

  “Oh, I say, Mrs. Ditch, you might show my aunt her room. I don’t know which one you’re giving her, but I suppose it’s all ready, and so forth?” Carey said.

  “Mrs. Bradley’s hav-en the room over this one, mam,” said Mrs. Ditch, dividing the sentence politely between her listeners. “Tes a very good room, and them younger ladies have softer bones than at our age, mam, I thenk. Well you come this way, mam? I’ll light ee with a candle, else praps ee might mess your step.”

  She held her candle so that Mrs. Bradley could see the way out of the parlour and up the stone staircase. Carefully she illumined every stair, and then led the way along a narrow stone passage to Mrs. Bradley’s room.

  “There ee be,” she said, with great goodwill, as she set down the candle on an ancient chest of drawers. “Shall I draw the curtains, or well ee leave ’em open? Nobody can’t see ee, as I knows on, but I’ll draw ’em ef you like.”

  “Don’t draw them,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Dinner’s at seven, along of Mr. Denis,” said Mrs. Ditch, withdrawing. She closed the door quietly behind her, and Mrs. Bradley could hear her dignified retreat along the passage.

  The bedroom was bare and clean. Brightly-coloured, very thick rugs covered the cold stone floor, the bed was modern and there was an adequate wardrobe. The bedside table was also a revolving bookcase. The fire was burning red, and the room was warm.

  “Carey plus Mrs. Ditch, and a pleasant combination it makes,” thought Mrs. Bradley. She went to the window and looked out. Before her, dim in the dusk, was a field of rough pasture; beyond it, the road to the village led up to the church. She could just make out the squat tower, she thought, in the distance. Behind the house lay Stanton Great Wood, but nothing at all of its great blue mass could be seen from her bedroom window. Somewhere at hand she could hear the winter singing of the brook in the stillness of the desolate countryside. The gurgle of fast-flowing water pleased her ears. It reminded her of a honeymoon spent in the south of France in the days when she was young and had been in love.

  Immediately under her window was the gravelled front yard of the farm, under Carey’s tenancy free from manure heaps, refuse, sodden half-hayricks, and scavenging, squawking fowls. It even boasted a narrow flower bed under the wall of the house.

  There came a rhythmic tapping at the door. Mrs. Bradley walked towards the fire whilst the visitor concluded the first few bars of Handel’s Largo in G, and then invited him in. It was Carey who had knocked. He was not alone. Hugh Kingston, whom she had met at Carey’s mother’s house at one time, entered just behind him. Hugh was taller than Carey, a thin-mouthed, good-looking man in a greenish suit of plus fours.

  “How are you, Mrs. Bradley?” he said. “We’re fellow-sufferers over Christmas, I take it. I’ve done nothing but work since I came. This man—” he indicated Carey, who had shut the door and was standing with his back to it, “has saved up all his odd jobs for the year, and pulled me in to help him out with them.”

  “But what have you done with Denis?” asked Mrs. Bradley, whose grandnephew, at that time twelve years of age, afforded her almost endless entertainment, and of whom she was very fond.

  “I expect he’s practising carols on his oboe,” Hugh replied. “Musical instrument, so-called,” he explained in response to Carey’s look of alarm. “Makes noises like a modern poet in pain.”

  “Modern poets are never in pain,” said Mrs. Bradley, reprovingly. “They have no inhibitions. But who taught Denis to oboe?”

  “Priest, Simith’s pigman, I believe.”

  “Can Priest oboe?” asked Carey. “Good Lord! I’d sack him if I were Simith, I think! Still, I rather hope he won’t, because at the moment I can’t do without him very easily. He’s posing to me for a set of London Passenger posters to advertise country outings.”

  “He looks like an inmate of a thieves’ kitchen to me,” said Hugh. “But if he’s a musician, as you say, perhaps he’d give you tips on yodelling. But, look here, now! What about tea for Mrs. Bradley?”

  “Ready, I expect, by now,” said Carey. “I warned Mrs. Ditch to stand by. I’ll yodel for her to come up.”

  He had seated himself on the bed, pulled Mrs. Bradley down beside him, and was talking amicably to Hugh Kingston over the top of her head. He inflated his lungs and yodelled long and loud, and Mrs. Ditch came up with a loaded tray.

  “Well done, Mrs. Ditch!” said Hugh, who had stayed in the house before. “You think of everything!”

  “And so does Mr. Carey, too and all,” said Mrs. Ditch, with a comical air of giving the devil his due. “It were him who warned me to have the pot ready to wet.”

  “Ah, but you’ve trained me, Mrs. Ditch,” said Carey. “I regard you as the angel of my better nature. But what have you done with young Scab?”

  “Mr. Denis a-ben playen just lovely for the dancen and now he’s chasen about playen smugglen. I don’t know what he gets up to half his time, but there! He’s a dear lettle chap,” said Mrs. Ditch, “and plays for the dancen just beautiful.”

  “On his oboe?” said Mrs. Bradley, determined to sift Hugh’s statements about this mythical instrument.

  “You don’t mean his lettle drum,” said Mrs. Ditch, “and his lettle whestle?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “What is an oboe?” she asked, sotto voce, of Carey. Carey shrugged and grinned. Hugh said,

  “He plays the violin. Not too badly, either, for a kid.”

  “I should thenk he don’t! But they’m worried about Mr. Tombley. Says he
’s gev up the dancen. Can’t thenk for why. A beautiful dancer he is, and capers lovely. He says his uncle don’t like et, but all my eye and all, that is, I reckon.”

  “Well, now, these people,” said Hugh, when Mrs. Ditch had retired. Mrs. Bradley drank tea and ate thin bread and butter. Her nephew munched biscuits. Hugh leaned against the door.

  “I think we’d better cut it down to Fay, Jenny, and that wart Pratt,” said Carey. “We must have him, I suppose, since Fay has really decided to put up the banns.”

  “Has she? Already?” asked Hugh. “I thought she had a crush on Tombley, your pig-farming neighbour.”

  “He who has given up dancing?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “That’s Morris dancing, you know. Yes, the same chap. Perhaps we ought to have him as well. No. Can’t very well, with Pratt, Although how any spouse of yours could have a sister who’d be such a mutt as to team herself up with that strip of bacon-rind, I can’t imagine,” he added to Hugh. Hugh grinned.

  “Not so much sisters, really, you know. Jenny is illegitimate,” he said. He turned to Mrs. Bradley. “I’m afraid the marriage will be very much in the future. I’ve got to make some money somehow, first.”

  “I hope you’ll like Jenny, Aunt Adela,” said Carey anxiously.

  Mrs. Bradley smiled, and pinched his knee. “Anyhow,” Hugh continued, speaking to Carey, “you can’t fetch that lot in the sidecar.”

  “I know I can’t. Anyway, I’m not going. You’re the man to transport the lovelier fair. Borrow Aunt Adela’s car. It’s old, but it goes all right, or she wouldn’t have got here in it.”

  “A good idea. But George is to drive, not Hugh,” said Mrs. Bradley firmly. “When are these children coming?”

  “Christmas Eve. The day after tomorrow,” said Carey. “But Hugh isn’t going over to fetch them until after dinner. And, talking of dinner, Hugh, do we or don’t we dress? Aunt, what are you going to do?”

  “We’ve got to dress,” said Hugh, before Mrs. Bradley could answer. “Mrs. Ditch has given orders. Said she to me, when she knew that your aunt was coming: ‘How nice for you, sir. You can wear your nice black and white. I always think gentlemen look so nice in their Dress!’ Sinister, don’t you think?”

  “Talking of sinister,” said Carey, “old Fossder, your father-in-law to be—”

  “Uncle-in-law,” said Hugh.

  “Sorry. Your uncle-in-law to be, has received a Rummy Communication, and also two hundred pounds.”

  “Oh, Lord. Anonymous stink of some kind, do you mean?”

  “Not exactly, no. It’s anonymous, all right, but it takes the form of a couple of shields sketched in pencil. One’s got a cross on it and the other a criss-cross. They came by post in an envelope postmarked Reading. I heard all about it from Pratt, when I went over there on Sunday to fix up this Christmas weekend. The two hundred pounds impressed Pratt less than the drawings.”

  “Oh, Pratt would be impressed. Doesn’t he make a sort of hobby of that kind of thing? It used to be crossword puzzles, but now it’s odd bits of archaeology and folk-lore and what-not. He doesn’t really know anything, but he browses about and collects odd bits of information which he insists on retailing,” said Hugh. “Not to me; to the girls. He knows I won’t put up with it!”

  “No. You might be able to put him right,” said Carey, grinning, “surrounded, as you are, by slabs of learning.”

  Mrs. Ditch knocked at the door.

  “Hullo?” said Carey.

  “Just to inform ee, mam, the water’s got hot for the bath, ef so be ee warnts one, after your ride en the motor.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Bradley, dismissing her squires by standing up and pointing towards the door. When they had gone she prepared for her wash, and followed Mrs. Ditch along the stone landing. Suddenly Mrs. Ditch halted.

  “Come out o’ that, Mr. Denis! What next, with all them clean does!”

  Mrs. Bradley’s grandnephew crawled from a large old cupboard built into the wall. He looked crumpled but full of purpose. He was a grave child, earnest and intelligent, whether in goodness or sin.

  “I’ve proved it doesn’t come out into that, at any rate,” he said. “Oh, hallo, Aunt Bradley! How’s George?” He came up and shook hands gravely.

  Mrs. Bradley cackled, and poked him in the ribs. “Hallo! How’s Christmas?” she said.

  “Been on a diet,” said Denis, “to make enough room to stodge.”

  The conversation at dinner was of crime.

  “You can’t possibly know what crime is, really, in these parts,” Hugh said, when the discussion had passed its zenith. “After all, the villagers can always kill a pig. It must make a good deal of difference.”

  “Aunt Bradley,” said Denis, tilting his glass and peering at the ginger wine it contained, “do murders seem to follow you about?”

  “I hope not,” said Mrs. Bradley. She cackled harshly and accepted from Mrs. Ditch a second helping of hot boiled bacon and winter greens. The meal had begun with bacon pudding. It was to continue with fried blackpudding and potatoes.

  “Everybody for miles around breeds pig, eats pig, and talks pig,” Carey said. When she had come downstairs he had broken to her, gently, the menu for dinner that evening and for breakfast on the following morning. “But on Christmas Day there will be turkey, and even fish, if you want it,” he now added. “We thought of taking the sidecar to Oxford market to-morrow and securing a whole halibut or something, and some prawns. With prawns and olives and a sardine or two, we could pretend we were having hors d’oeuvres.”

  “You can use the turkey’s liver,” said Denis, helpfully. He drank some ginger wine. “At any rate, Aunt Bradley, you do believe that murders follow certain people about don’t you? I think they do. In fact, I’ve nearly proved it.”

  “There’s something in that theory, you know,” said Carey, yodelling for Mrs. Ditch to substitute the third course and remove what remained of the hot boiled bacon and greens. “Now, what about a jolly good ghost story, Aunt Adela?”

  “Or a nice little monologue about dangerous lunatics you’ve met, Mrs. Bradley?” said Hugh, with a grin.

  “Or both,” said Denis, with his mouth full. He swallowed and then wiped grease from his lips. “But I’d much sooner have a jolly good murder in the village. A jolly good murder,” he continued with enthusiasm, “would make Christmas jolly well worth while. What do you say, Mrs. Ditch?”

  “Well, I dunno as I should enjoy my fowl and plum pudden any the better for a murder, Mr. Denis,” said Mrs. Ditch, entering the dark doorway bearing blackpuddings cut in halves and a dish of creamed potatoes.

  “But think how exciting it would be,” Denis went on, “to have detectives and the inquest, and everybody afraid to go to bed in case the murderer was lurking all over the place. I bet you’d be scared, Mrs. Ditch. I bet you’d hide in the pantry.”

  “Yes, Mr. Denis, I daresay,” replied Mrs. Ditch, unperturbed by the aspersion cast upon her courage. She served him some creamed potato and took away his empty wineglass.

  “Here,” said Denis, “I want some more ginger wine.”

  “Not until Christmas Day,” said Mrs. Ditch, quietly and firmly. She gave him a third half of hog-pudding, and then retired with the tray-load of empty dishes. Denis caught Mrs. Bradley’s eye and grinned as he poured some water into a tumbler.

  “You don’t really think, then,” he said, a little wistfully, “that murders do follow people about? I mean, there’s you, for instance. You wouldn’t consider yourself a kind of low-pressure area—you know—”

  Carey laughed, and Hugh, after a startled pause, joined in. Mrs. Bradley grinned.

  “I don’t know about a low-pressure area, but I shouldn’t like to imagine that just because I once—”

  “You don’t mean,” said Denis, round-eyed, “that you’ve ever murdered anyone?”

  “This is uncanny,” said Mrs. Bradley to Hugh. She drank some wine, and attacked the blackpudding resolutely. Denis drank water,
and eyed her reverently over the rim of the glass.

  “Could you—would it be bothering you too much—” he blurted out, after a moment.

  “I don’t think I will. It wasn’t pleasant,” said Mrs. Bradley briskly.

  “Sorry,” said Denis. “Have some ginger wine.”

  Further yodelling from Carey brought Mrs. Ditch with tipsy-cake, some cheese, and a dish of jam tarts.

  “Why not mince pies?” asked Denis, taking a tart.

  “Because it’s not Christmas yet, Mr. Denis,” said Mrs. Ditch, heaping his plate with tipsy cake and producing, apparently by magic, a bottle of mushroom ketchup. She placed this on the table beside the cheese. Then she went back to the kitchen and brought in a bottle of brandy.

  “Smuggled, accorden to Ditch, by way of that there old pack-horse road over Shotover ’Ell,” she observed. “Er’s dirty enough, in conscience, to be as old as Boney.” She dumped the grimy bottle on the table.

  “She is as old as Boney,” said Carey, gazing enraptured at the filthy-looking receptacle. “Napoleon brandy, Hugh. Mrs. Ditch, get two more glasses, and bring Ditch back with you. Though we ought to save it for Christmas, I suppose.”

  Ditch, a good-looking, middle-aged fellow with the easy yet upright stance of a Morris-man, a large moustache, and tolerant, grey-blue eyes, came in and smiled at their plaudits.

  “I found ’er,” was all he would say in response to Carey’s questions. “Overlooked when the folks left this house in ’74, I’ll back, and never thought on again. ’Er was well ’id, but I come upon ’er one mornen, and here ’er be. And here’s to your health, my lady and masters all, and ef ee be thinken of goen through Sandford on Christmas Eve, look t’other way ef that there old Sandford coach come along.” He chuckled, and gulped his brandy.

  “And what is the Sandford coach?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “It’s a local legend—a ghost story,” Carey replied. He crossed his legs and leaned back in his seat, a comfortably-upholstered armchair of modern conception. Dinner over, they had grouped themselves round the fire. “I’ve heard that in the reign of Queen Elizabeth a certain Catholic priest named George Napier, of the Sandford family of Napier, was executed at Oxford. His body was hacked into four pieces and a limb was placed on each of the four Oxford gateways. His head was on view in the city somewhere—outside Christchurch, I believe. Anyway, his relatives came secretly and possessed themselves of the body, but couldn’t get the head, so they brought him, headless, back to Sandford, where they buried him. Since that time, George Napier drives in a coach every Christmas Eve round Temple Farm, at Sandford, in search of his missing head. To see the coach means death within the year, or so they say. I know some better ghost stories if you’d like to hear them. Incidentally, the two hundred pounds we’re all so thrilled about!—I notice nobody’s mentioned it during dinner!—is a freak bet made with old Fossder to go and look for the ghost.”