Groaning Spinney Page 4

  ‘I don’t think we know any more about him, do we, Deb?’ asked Jonathan.

  Deborah hesitated. Then she shook her head.

  3. The Expected Begins to Happen

  *

  ‘Tis custom, Lord, this day to send

  A gift to every vulgar friend.’

  Nathaniel Eaton

  * * *

  HOWEVER HAPPY THE Christmas, there is usually a deep-seated human instinct which feels tremendous relief when it is over. This emotion attacked all three Bradleys on the day which followed Boxing Day. Miss Hughes, Mansell and Obury all departed and the household sighed and settled down.

  Deborah and Mrs. Bradley remained indoors and took stock of the scraps. The servants, toiling loyally and stoically through the snow, which was now very deep, returned at approximately the appointed time. Jonathan went out for a scrambling walk through the drifts, and followed a track which led him a wild dance up to his thighs in the soft white morass on the hillside.

  ‘What about the ghost’s footprints?’ asked Deborah, when he returned.

  ‘Didn’t go that way,’ replied Jonathan. ‘What about a bath? Is the plumbing, as such, in tune?’

  ‘Yes. There’s plenty of hot water. Go on up.’

  Whilst he bathed, Deborah and Mrs. Bradley looked again at their Christmas gifts.

  ‘Book tokens; that means Cheltenham or Gloucester,’ pronounced Deborah, shuffling a dozen bright cards. ‘When shall we go?—To-morrow?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I shall wait until I get to London’ Mrs. Bradley replied.

  ‘Oh, no. I want to go and choose my books with you. We can’t go while the snow’s so deep, that’s one thing. I wonder what cook will manage for lunch? I do hope nothing weird and wonderful.’

  To the surprise of everybody, the postman contrived to make his way to the house in the early afternoon. No one had expected him, for the snow began again at just after one o’clock, and fell silently and steadily until four.

  However, at just after a quarter past two, when Mrs. Bradley had gone up to her room to write letters which might or might not get posted that day, Sidney Blott, son of the postmistress and a postman in his own right, ploughed his way up the hill and delivered his cargo of letters, belated Christmas cards and presents.

  He apologized for not having come in the morning, but the post, it appeared, was late because the road was almost impassable for the Post Office van. By the time the van had completed its journey, Sidney’s mother had suggested that he wait until the morning, and the argument between Mrs. Blott and her son had lasted until after the mid-day meal. Sidney had won by remaining silent until his mother had galloped herself tired, as he explained.

  ‘Well, I rather agree with your mother, Sidney,’ said Deborah, dragging him inside the hall door. ‘Still, as you’ve been good enough to come, you’d better have something to warm you.’

  ‘Beer, then, your ladyship,’ said Sidney, ‘if so be as his lordship has got any.’

  The original owner of the estate had been a peer of the realm, and it had proved impossible to persuade Sidney and his mother to address Jonathan and Deborah by any other titles than the ones now loyally bestowed.

  ‘But our letters and parcels come addressed to Mr. or Mrs. Bradley,’ Deborah had observed. The postmistress had agreed.

  ‘But,’ said she, ‘the old house always had a lord and a lady in it, and I’ve always voted Conservative and always shall.’

  ‘Then, by rights, you ought to call Miss Hughes, up at the College, My Lady,’ Deborah had pointed out.

  ‘Oh, no, certainly not,’ said Mrs. Blott decisively. ‘She’s only a kind of housekeeper, when all’s said and done. She has to work for her living, same as I do.’

  ‘But so does my husband, and so did I until I married him.’

  The postmistress was not to be persuaded, and re-opened the subject one day before Christmas when Jonathan was in her shop.

  ‘And all of them racketeering young school teachers!’ she said firmly. Even Jonathan felt bound to protest at this description.

  ‘That’s sheer libel, Mrs. Blott,’ he told her, counting out the money for his tobacco. ‘Even if you mean racketing—and a woman of your education should know the difference!—it still isn’t true. Those embryo schoolmarms are painfully, morbidly earnest. A good many of them have given up other and lesser jobs in pursuit of what they consider to be an ideal, and their zeal is positively nunlike—until, of course, they discover what the job really entails!’

  ‘Not much ideal in learning how to learn young Bob Wootton and Tommy Mayhew,’ retorted Mrs. Blott with a sniff. As there was no possible answer to this except a direct contradiction which would have amounted to an equally direct lie, Jonathan pocketed his tobacco and his change, laughed, and wished her good-bye.

  On the afternoon of Sidney’s arrival in the snow, therefore, Jonathan and Deborah, having accepted their unwished-for titles without further question, went into the morning-room to examine the post.

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ said Jonathan. ‘I do hope this isn’t going to begin. Have you got one?’

  ‘One what?’ asked Deborah, opening some retarded Christmas cards.

  ‘An anonymous contribution to your knowledge of my morals and conceits. I’ve got a beauty about you!’

  ‘Show me.’ She took the letter from her husband, and, to his dismay, flushed scarlet. ‘Oh, dear!’ she cried. ‘Now who on earth could have known that!’

  ‘Known what?’ said Jonathan. ‘Good Lord, it isn’t true?’

  ‘No, of course not. But I did have a bit of bother with him. It was very soon after we came. It’s all right now.’

  ‘But why the devil didn’t you tell me? I’d have broken his neck!’

  ‘Yes, I know, you idiot! That’s precisely why I didn’t tell you. But he got no change out of it, one way and another. But I wonder—what’s the postmark on the envelope?’

  ‘What you’d expect—Cheltenham. Anybody in the village has only to get on a bus.’ He got up. ‘I’m going into Cheltenham and I’m—dash! I suppose whoever it was just bunged it in the nearest pillar-box. Probably didn’t even need to go into a post-office for a stamp. I know what I will do, though. I’ll find out who in the village went to Cheltenham on the day before Christmas Eve and on what errand. That might give us a clue.’

  ‘Oh, darling, I wouldn’t bother. Some nasty person thinks she’s got hold of a bit of scandal and wants to make mischief. That’s all there’s to it. Far better take no notice.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Jonathan, influenced already (although against his will) by his wife’s calm reasonableness. ‘You see, if this is just one nasty person’s reaction to one particular incident, and that’s the end of it, all well and good; but if it’s the beginning of a poison-pen campaign, we ought to take strong action and try to nip it in the bud. This letter constitutes grounds for an action for slander, I should say, and, if it does, we’d be well advised, in my opinion, to push it as far as it will go. I suppose we’re strangers here, and therefore, to that extent, resented, and, in somebody’s opinion, vulnerable.’

  ‘Well, look,’ said Deborah, ‘why not take the thing to the vicar? He’s a sensible old darling, and will probably be able to put his finger on this anonymous Peeping Thomasina without much trouble.’

  ‘Fine idea,’ said Jonathan, looking grimly happy. ‘I’ll go over there right away.’

  ‘Oh, wait until to-morrow, at any rate,’ said Deborah. ‘Aunt Adela will want her tea in another hour, and, anyhow, the weather’s so frightful. Apart from anything else, it’s snowing again.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the remorseful host. ‘I’d forgotten Aunt Adela was here. Where’s she got to?’

  Mrs. Bradley was discovered in the kitchen. She had finished her correspondence, and was now helping in the preparations for dinner and discoursing to an enthralled audience consisting of cook, Jane and Carrie, upon the subject of George Joseph Smith and his brides
in the bath. They were preparing the vegetables, washing up her various utensils, and breathlessly hanging upon her words. Mrs. Bradley, meanwhile, was engaged with savoury messes which carried their own recommendation.

  ‘Cooking (vide Captain MacHeath’s views upon women) unbends the mind,’ pronounced Mrs. Bradley, upon the advent of her nephew and his wife. ‘And murder makes the whole world kin. There cannot be any doubt about that.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Mrs. Fairleaf, the cook, ‘a funny kind of case when I lived in Gloucester. It was somebody that murdered a grand-nephew because he believed in ghosts. And nobody could ever make out whether the ghosts committed the murder or whether the murder settled the ghosts, for they never had no ghosts after that.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Mrs. Bradley remarked. ‘I shall add it to my memoirs, Mrs. Fairleaf.’

  ‘I say, Aunt Adela,’ said Jonathan, when Mrs. Bradley was ready to leave the kitchen, ‘what do you think about this?’ He produced the anonymous letter. Mrs. Bradley shook her head over it.

  ‘I should keep it,’ she said briefly. ‘I suppose you do not recognize the handwriting?’

  ‘No, I can’t say that I do. But except for one or two communications from the original owners of this place, a letter or so from Miss Hughes, and several notes from Tiny Fullalove, all about the house and the estate, I don’t think I know the handwriting of anybody in the village.’

  ‘If you get any more anonymous letters I should submit them, together with the writings at your disposal, to an expert. You will, at that rate, clear your acquaintances of suspicion, even if you accomplish nothing more.’

  ‘So far as I am concerned, they are cleared already,’ declared Jonathan. ‘Tiny Fullalove would hardly put me wise to his own dirty little games, and the others would have no interest in giving me this sort of information, even if they possessed it.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ asked Mrs. Bradley instantly.

  ‘What about Bill Fullalove?’ asked Deborah.

  ‘Bill? Well, he could have told me by word of mouth if he was going to tell me at all. That is, if he knew. Did he know, Deb?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Deborah, ‘he did. I told him myself. I think he blacked Tiny’s eye. He would hardly have done that if he intended to write you anonymous letters, would he?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. But I wish you’d told me, Deb.’

  ‘She did well not to tell you,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘It would be different if she had really needed protection. Was that the only letter?’

  ‘No. But there was nothing for you,’ said Deborah. ‘There are one or two parcels, though, Jon. Let’s go and open them, shall we? Come along, Aunt Adela. You can be the one to shake each parcel and guess what’s in it. I haven’t heard from Cecilia Randome yet, so one of the parcels is almost certainly from her.’

  The rest of the day, the evening and the night passed without incident, but snow continued to fall, and, by the morning, although the house was not absolutely snowed up, Jonathan gave way to Deborah by putting off his visit to the vicar in favour of a day indoors by the fire. Mrs. Fairleaf set to and baked some bread, and this was as well, for the tradespeople apparently considered that the toilsome, snowbound, uphill lane to the house was impassable and rang up to ask for instructions; this was as long as the telephone wires held.

  ‘We can manage for a day or two,’ said Deborah. ‘There’s stuff left over, and we’ve got some tins and plenty of vegetables. We shan’t starve. I hope it doesn’t get much worse, though.’ She looked rather anxiously out of the window at the misty and whirling snowflakes as they dropped softly upon ledges and steps and drifted ever more thickly in the lane and against the banks in the garden and park, and upon the side of the house. ‘There’s something horribly eerie about snow in the country. I’d never realized it before. It’s so silent. I’d rather have rain, and hear the sound of it.’

  ‘I miss the newspapers,’ said Jonathan. ‘The wireless is all right in its way, but——’

  ‘What did it say about the weather?’

  ‘Snow on high ground, spreading eastwards and south.’

  ‘Oh, dear! We may be cut off for days!’

  ‘Yes. I think I’d better dig us out to-morrow. It will be something to do. I need exercise.’

  ‘Yes, but not if it’s still snowing, and it sounds from that weather report as though it will be. I wonder how Miss Hughes is getting on? I’m glad she’s not alone up there. It’s such an awful great barrack of a place.’

  ‘I wish to goodness she’d stayed here. Still, one of her staff was coming back to keep her company for the day or two before the students arrived, wasn’t she? I’m glad of that. All the same, if I can get out to-morrow, I’ll go up there and see how she’s getting along. I wonder——’ He did not finish his sentence. His lips closed and his mouth tightened. That wretched anonymous letter, thought Deborah, had thoroughly upset him. For the hundredth time she wondered who could have sent it. That, and the snow and the lonely situation of the house, were enough to make people brood, and when people brooded trouble started. She put her hand on her husband’s arm.

  ‘That awful Amy Curtis has sent me an awful handbag,’ she announced. ‘Do you think I could send her that book token for a guinea which Myra Standish sent me and didn’t sign, and buy myself some stockings with the money? I’ve had dozens of book-tokens this Christmas and no stockings at all.’ Jonathan laughed, forgot his cold anger against the oafish Mr. Fullalove, and pulled Deborah on to his knee.

  ‘You’re an immoral little tyke,’ he said, holding her. ‘Do what you like, but it won’t be for a day or two yet. I wonder’—he laughed again—‘I wonder how our ghost likes the snow?’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Deborah. ‘Snow scares me, I tell you. I didn’t know it did, but it does. It’s horrid and soft-footed and it acts like a great, thick blanket, stifling everything. I loathe it.’

  ‘Here, here,’ said Jonathan, protesting. ‘Don’t get fanciful! If you live in the country you’ve got to put up with the weather. Whatever next?’

  It stopped snowing during the night, so on the following day he took a spade, a shovel and a hard broom and, dressed in breeches and leggings and a thick pullover, began to clear a path at each of the doors of the house. The snow was light and soft and the work was easy. By eleven in the morning he had got as far as the kitchen dump at the back of the house, and beyond the end of the lawn at the front. He went indoors for his elevenses, and then announced his intention of going up to the College to find out how Miss Hughes was getting on and whether her friend had arrived.

  The snow had ceased at about five o’clock that morning. All the footmarks of the previous day were covered up. A wintry sun was trying to break through, but there was still plenty of snow in the sky, and Jonathan, glancing up at the heavens as he left the house for his long and difficult walk, began to wonder whether he had wasted time in clearing paths from the house.

  He reached the College thoroughly tired. Some of the time he had been up to the thighs in snow, and the going everywhere was bad. He called at the lodge before going on to the main building, and was firmly jerked inside by the formidable Miss Emma Wootton, the sister of Abel Wootton and Harry Wootton, and Bob Wootton’s painstaking aunt.

  ‘Well, sir,’ she said discouragingly, ‘you must want something to do!’

  ‘I came to find out how Miss Hughes was getting on,’ explained Jonathan, feeling rather like a small boy with jam on his face. ‘Did Miss Diana Bagthorpe turn up, do you know?’

  ‘Being Physical, she did.’

  ‘Oh, the P.T. lady, is she? I’m glad she made it.’

  ‘The bus got stuck outside Stroud. She came that way. She walked it from there.’

  ‘Good heavens! She must be an Amazon!’

  ‘No. Little and good is what she is. One of the wiry, tough ones. She was about finished, though, when she got here, and wet to the skin, like you. She felt she had to get here, because of Miss Hughes. A grand little creetur, she
is!’

  ‘I should just about think so. I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘Well, you will. Now, sir, you’ll just get out of them there soaking trousers, and I’ll have ’em all dried out by the time you get back here. It’s not too bad from here to the College. Abel and Harry swept a path, so as long as you’re back before the snow comes down again, you’ll at least get up there dry.’

  ‘But I can’t——’

  ‘Now just you do as I say, sir. I’ve got Brother Abel’s velveteens as will fit you nicely. I always keep spare clothes here for my brothers. You needn’t mind changing your trousers in front of me. I don’t take no notice. I’m too used to men being wet through and dirty for that.’

  So Jonathan changed obediently into Abel Wootton’s corduroys, and very much more comfortable they were than his own snow-soaked garments. The swept path to the College, although only a couple of feet wide, was heaven after the ploughing uphill walk he had had after leaving the stable courtyard at the foot of his own hill. He was grateful to Miss Wootton, and regretted that he had ever referred to her in private as a bossy old cat.

  All was well at the College. He found Miss Hughes and the lecturer for Physical Training taking their ease in front of a great open fire. One was nursing the College cat, the other was doing some embroidery. He stayed long enough to be assured that there was plenty of food in the house, including tinned milk, that bread could be baked in the College oven, and that neither of the ladies was in the least dismayed at the prospect of being snowed up. The students were due back in three days’ time, but Miss Hughes was hoping that the snow would be melted by then.

  She followed Jonathan’s glance out of the window at the leaden sky, and shrugged and laughed.

  ‘We must do what we can,’ she said, comfortably. ‘What is not to be won’t be. There is no sense in worrying. If I know the students, they will get here somehow, luggage or no luggage. I shall do what I can with my car, but it won’t be much, in this.’

  She gave Jonathan some rum and lemon, for which he was grateful, and then she began to talk about the ghost. Miss Bagthorpe, who turned out to be a jolly, bouncing sort of person, rather like a solid rubber ball in human dress, expressed the opinion that to see a ghost meant death. Jonathan and Miss Hughes debated this point with her, and the argument went merrily until it was time for Jonathan to go.