Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

Widow’s Might by Margaret Yorke

Mrs. Watson found life hard alone, for Mr. Watson, fifteen years older than she, had cherished her all the twenty-five years of their life together. She had worked in his office as a bookkeeper: she was good at figures, and very pretty, and had soon attracted the attention of the rising Mr. Watson, who was looking about for a suitable wife — something he had been too busy to do sooner — for what was the point of amassing a fortune if you had no one to spend it on...?

Mrs. Watson watched as the gardener, high on a ladder, lopped the branches of the tall palm in the hotel garden. Heavy trusses of berries fell to the ground, and the trunk of the tree bore smooth white spherical scars where he made his cuts. So death came, chopping down those who had lived too long or who had flirted with danger, or were doomed.

She sat in a comfortable chair in the shade of a pomegranate, a book on her knee. A gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the red hibiscus and the blue flowers of a plumbago that sprawled on a trellis beside the steps leading to the terrace. Though it was November, the island, warmed by the Gulf Stream, was never cold and seldom uncomfortably hot. Its jagged coastline bore a rash of large hotels, but Mrs. Watson’s, one of the oldest, was also the most expensive and the most luxurious. Here, the ratio of staff to clients was almost one to one and, lapped in care, the pampered guests felt worries, aches, and pains slip away, forgotten.

Mrs. Watson and her husband had first visited the island when on a cruise. Their liner had steamed in at daybreak and they had spent an interesting day visiting the cathedral and driving into the country in a taxi. They had passed banana plantations, waterfalls, and reached mountain areas where the air was fresh, and had had tea at this hotel where now she sat alone. Her husband had approved it as a suitable place for them to visit in the future.

Only there had been no future for Mr. Watson, for that very night, en route for Gibraltar, he had had a heart attack in their cabin on A deck and had died within minutes. Mrs. Watson and the coffin had flown home to a well attended funeral at the local crematorium, where representatives of the many organizations with which Mr. Watson had been connected, diluted with members of his staff and several workmen from the current sites he was developing, made up the congregation. There were no children of their union, no son to lead her to her pew, and Mrs. Watson proudly walked alone.

Mr. Watson had been a property developer, and by the terms of his will so long as the business prospered his wife would be well provided for. However, now it was in the hands of his partner. They had amalgamated when both were competing for a particularly desirable site in the center of a new town. A Dutch auction over it had seemed pointless at the time, and since then the two had worked well together. Now the partner was obliged to pay Mrs. Watson a large portion annually of his profits. This was satisfactory for several years, until the partner spread himself too far, the banks called in their loans, and the business fell apart.

Mrs. Watson was only forty-five when she became a widow. She was still trim and shapely, her hair burnished gold, rinsed regularly by Sandra at Bandbox Coiffures, and her complexion smooth. She found life hard alone, for Mr. Watson, fifteen years older than she, had cherished her all the twenty-five years of their life together. She had worked in his office as a bookkeeper: she was good at figures, and very pretty, and had soon attracted the attention of the rising Mr. Watson, who was looking about for a suitable wife — something he had been too busy to do sooner — for what was the point of amassing a fortune if you had no one to spend it on?

Mrs. Watson, then Madge Fraser, had grown up in a semidetached villa in Luton, where her father was a bank clerk and her mother devotedly kept house, running up frocks for Madge on her Singer machine and cooking nourishing meals, in between keeping the house spotless. In those days, women weren’t expected to strive on all fronts as mothers, wives, and wage-earners, and couples who found themselves incompatible or bored with one another usually stayed together in civilized truce until or unless one of them was tempted away by a new love. However, Madge’s parents were fond of each other and of their only child, pinning their ambitions and hopes on her, and when she married her boss, just as happened in the magazines her mother read, their joy and pride was boundless.

Madge went to live in Bletchley, in a new four-bedroom house with two bathrooms, a study, and a utility room, as well as a large lounge and dining room. It stood in nearly an acre of garden, all laid out and planted by a nursery man. Like her mother, Madge cleaned and baked, and in her spare time did cross point as there was no daughter to sew for or take to dancing class, nor was there an economical reason to dressmake for herself. She went to flower-arranging classes and art lessons to fill up her time, and gradually she became a gardener, rearranging what the nursery man had planned and devising new corners and grottos. She joined a gardening club and went with them on excursions to stately homes, where she secretly broke off shoots of plants to propagate through cuttings, building up a remarkable collection of shrubs unique in their neighborhood. Mr. Watson was proud of her green fingers and had no notion as to the true source of her acquisitions.

After Madge’s father died, her mother stayed on in the house in Luton, but she accompanied the Watsons on their holidays, staying in hotels in Spain and villas in Greece, which she found rather hot. Eventually she expired peacefully in her sleep after a bout of flu, giving in death no more trouble than she had given in life and leaving Madge her worldly possessions, the house now free of its mortgage and a few pieces of jewelry.

Madge sold up and used the money to open a florist’s shop which she named Rosa’s, where she installed as assistant a woman she met in her flower-arranging class. Mr. Watson was amused at the venture and pleased with its success. “Madge’s toy,” he called it, “her baby, seeing as we’ve none of our own.” The enterprise flourished and she opened a second shop in another district, then a third.

Her foraging trips to alien gardens grew fewer as the business absorbed her surplus energy and her administrative skills. By the time of Mr. Watson’s demise, she was prospering in her own right, so that when his partner went officially bankrupt — though in fact he had siphoned away considerable funds in the name of his wife and daughter, enough to enable him to start up again when his debts were written off — she was able to maintain her customary standard of living. She continued to reside at Greenways, which property alone was now worth a considerable sum, enough to fund a comfortable life for Madge if her florists’ shops failed. But they did not: they expanded and throve as Madge took on able managers, to whom she paid bonuses on turnover.

But she did not enjoy being a widow.

It wasn’t simply that she missed the comfort of Mr. Watson’s protection, his big warm body, his interest and his pampering: it was the rest of the condition that irked. She was unpartnered now, half of what had been a whole, an outcast in paired society. When traveling, her single state seemed as if it was a crime. People shunned her. Except in the best hotels, she was given an inferior room and at far higher cost than the rate for one half of a couple. Her table in the dining room would be near a service door or in a draught and the wine waiter would ignore her, although she always ordered a half bottle of the best local wine available. Sometimes she would be served rapidly, course following upon course so that she could be removed swiftly from the scene — at other times she would be neglected. Mrs. Watson never returned to hotels which treated her in this manner, but here nothing was too much trouble: she was tended to ceremoniously.

Here, it was the guests to whom she seemed invisible, and Mrs. Watson knew the reason. It was fear. The women were warned of the isolation that would be theirs when they became widows themselves, as statistically was quite probable, and the men were reminded of their own mortality.

When she was younger, Mrs. Watson had posed a different threat, though at the time she had been unaware of it because it had never occurred to her to embark on any sort of affair. With hindsight now, she recognized that she had been still pretty, even desirable, when she began to travel alone. At home she had been pursued, to her naive surprise, by one of her husband’s cronies, an untimely widower, but she had soon made her lack of interest plain. She needed no meal ticket for her security, and her energies were directed toward her own business and her garden, where an aged man helped her keep down the weeds and cut the grass.

She observed the couples who came and went during her visits to various luxurious hotels, and she wondered which of them would still be together the following year, which would be parted either by death or by divorce. Because the hotels were expensive, most of the couples she encountered were older guests whose families had grown and flown, but sometimes there were honeymooners, shyly young among their elders and benignly smiled upon, and there were other couples obviously paired without the formality of a marriage certificate.

Mrs. Watson watched an elderly man and his wife cross the lawn and stiffly mount the stairs that led from the garden to the wide veranda where teas were served. The man carried his wife’s knitting in its floral bag: Mrs. Watson had observed the wife turning the heel of a warm olive-green sock. Her own mother had knitted socks like that when Mrs. Watson was a schoolgirl during the war. Her father, myopic and flat-footed, had been spared the call-up but he was an air-raid warden and her mother was a member of a knitting party.

Mrs. Watson hadn’t realized that people still wore hand-knitted socks. She wondered what work, if any, the husband had done — he was long past retiring age. With them was their son — unmistakable because he was so like the mother — and a daughter-in-law, a pale, elegant woman with an air of confident distinction. Breeding, thought Mrs. Watson, breaking off a spur on the red hibiscus — which, if it took, would replace one she had lost in a recent severe winter — breeding gave you that air of quiet arrogance, but would it be of help if your husband was struck down prematurely and you were left alone? Who, then, would open doors for you, carry hand luggage, park the car after dropping you at the door of wherever you were going, complain if a room was unsuitable or the service bad? She would not be left penniless, that elegant woman — there would be insurance if not family wealth — but that wasn’t the only provision she would require.

The younger couple passed Mrs. Watson’s chair, and the woman saw Mrs. Watson drop her hibiscus sprig into her bag.

At dinner, Mrs. Watson sat not far from the quartet. Ready to be pleasant, she smiled across at them but was ignored as she consumed her lobster bisque, her gnocchi, her chicken, then her chocolate mousse.

Leaving the dining room while the four were still eating, passing behind the younger woman’s chair, Mrs. Watson heard her speak.

“That woman was stealing sprigs from the plants,” she said in a clear voice. “I saw her do it. An hibiscus shoot today. What will it be tomorrow? A pomegranate, do you suppose? Perhaps she could grow one from the fruit.”

“Charlotte, don’t — she’ll hear!” shushed the mother, whose own voice was more penetrating than her daughter-in-law’s.

“Who cares?” was the answer. “It should be reported. If every guest did it, there’d be nothing left. She’s like those people who come to Ferbingham. They’ve stripped whole sprays from the mulberry — some of the choicest shrubs are decimated. We’ve had to put notices up and we may have to employ special patrols.”

Mrs. Watson, moving slowly, had heard most of this. So they lived at Ferbingham, did they? She had visited that garden and had a shoot from the well known mulberry rooted and beginning to sprout. Ferbingham was a Tudor mansion opened on certain selected dates in the year. Mrs. Watson knew that the elder couple had moved to the dower house some years ago, leaving their son to manage the estate.

She made up her mind that night. The supercilious Charlotte should be this year’s victim. Every time she went away, she chose one — and had been foiled only once, when her target had left before she could carry out her plan, leaving no time for a substitute to be picked. Mrs. Watson never returned for a second visit to any hotel, however enjoyable her stay — it didn’t do to retrace one’s steps lest a second incident might seem more than coincidence.

Last year, in Montreux, vulgarity had been the trigger. She had felt shame, witnessing the brash conduct of a couple who, as they acquired money and the spurious status it bought, had not acquired manners to match. This year it was an excess of conceit and condescension that were significant.

Last year, near a cable-car station there had been a fatal fall from a cliff. No one had suspected the white-haired widow (Madge had abandoned her gold rinse years ago) who reported witnessing the fall of being its cause. The man had strayed from his wife: the side of the mountain was steep and the sudden shove totally unexpected.

This year, opportunity and method might be less easy.

Mrs. Watson stalked her prey and heard them order a taxi to visit the Botanical Gardens which, she knew, were high on a hillside — she had been there already herself.

She was there an hour before they arrived. She had walked around seeking possible hazards, and admired lilies and orchids, glossy scarlet anthurium which looked waxen, strelitzia — the birds-of-paradise flowers — the pendulous trumpets of datura, which was a poisonous plant. She leaned on the walking stick she often carried — a versatile accessory — and gazed across the ravine dividing the hills to where the distant sea shone blue. There was no cruise ship in today and, late in the season as it was, there were few visitors to the gardens that day. Then she saw the elderly mother approaching along a side path, pausing to gaze at various plants. She was with her son. Looking about, Mrs. Watson saw no sign of Charlotte or her father-in-law. Perhaps they had decided not to come.

It proved to be so. She watched carefully, making sure they were absent: so much the better for her purpose. The old woman and her son — his name was Hugo, Mrs. Watson had heard it spoken — consulted the labels attached to various plants, moving slowly to a viewpoint where, protected by a low stone parapet built less than a yard from the sheer drop beyond, one could gaze in safety at the vista. She made an entry in a small red notebook where she listed plants seen and identified. As she wrote down the name of an unusual cactus — she did not like cacti — fate played into her hands, for Hugo, ahead of his mother approaching the spot where Mrs. Watson was waiting, called out to the old lady: “There’ll be a wonderful view here.”

“You go ahead,” she replied, “you know I don’t care for heights. I’ll wait for you near those lilies we liked. We might note some varieties and see if we can order the bulbs.”

She turned and walked down a cobbled path, vanishing from sight around a bend, and Hugo advanced toward where Mrs. Watson stood. She surreptitiously dropped her notebook over the parapet and, before uttering small cries of distress, leaned over to poke at it with her stick till it lodged in a small bush on the edge of the ravine. Hugo, ever civil, although aware that this was the woman his wife had seen snipping cuttings from plants in the hotel garden, made concerned inquiries as to what was wrong.

“My references!” cried Mrs. Watson. “My checklist of flowers I’ve seen and identified — I’ve dropped it!” And she leaned over the parapet, gazing at the spot where, only just out of reach, the small notebook reposed.

“It’s important, is it?” asked Hugo.

“Vital! It’s the only record I’ve got!” Mrs. Watson declared. “I have to give a talk to my group when I get home!” She looked at him. “You’re very tall. Couldn’t you reach it?”

“Hardly,” said Hugo with a grimace. “I might simply knock it over the hillside down the ravine.”

“I’ll climb over and get it, then,” said Mrs. Watson. “Perhaps you’d just hold my arm to steady me.”

“I can’t let you do that!” exclaimed Hugo, looking aghast at Mrs. Watson, five foot two inches tall and no longer young. “I’ll have a go — my arms are longer.”

“Oh, no—” Hand to mouth. Mrs. Watson demurred.

Hugo, carried back to boyhood days of derring-do, swung one leg over the low wall, then the other, and crouched low out of sight of anyone who might come toward them. The ledge was narrow, but though he held the wall at first he found he couldn’t reach the notebook without releasing his grasp.

He had just seized it when he felt a sudden jab in the small of his back. Mrs. Watson, pushing with all her might, had feared she would lack the strength to make him lose his balance, but she succeeded — and, uttering only a strangled cry, he tore at a bush which broke off in his hand as he hurtled toward the valley.

Mrs. Watson held back her piteous cries and shrieks for a few vital seconds, making sure he had fallen satisfactorily and fatally far before raising the alarm.

When retrieved, Hugo’s body bore a great many bruises and the sharp round one caused by the ferrule of Mrs. Watson’s walking stick aroused no special interest. She said, with truth, that he had insisted on climbing over the wall to rescue her notebook, which most foolishly she had dropped. “I tried to persuade him it was of no consequence,” she declared, weeping gently, “but he insisted.”

The notebook was still clutched in his hand. It contained, as she had said, a list of a great many plants, but it wasn’t just what she had seen on the island — it was of more significance, for each plant noted was special. The oleander was a memory of Crete, and an accident in a swimming pool. An agapanthus meant a fall at Lindos. A gentian reminded her of Lausanne and sleeping pills in brandy, followed by a lakeside walk in the dusk. There were others.

Perhaps a camellia should represent Hugo?

It didn’t do to mock at widows. Their ranks increased all the time. Now it was Charlotte’s turn.

Who would be next?