The Catherine Wheel

CHAPTER 23

It was one of the longest Sundays that any of the twelve people shut up together in the Catherine-Wheel could remember. Perhaps Jane and Jeremy felt it least, since each was still exploring the other’s territory and finding it full of new and exciting things. They were also helpfully bent upon making themselves useful, laying and clearing meals and washing up with efficiency and despatch. In the evening Mrs. Bridling returned to oblige, having conducted an all-day battle against Mr. Bridling’s scruples as to her doing so on the Sabbath. She had emerged victorious, not only on account of her own prowess, but because of some fifth-column assistance from Mr. Bridling’s passionate desire to be kept in touch with what was going on. Having arrived, it was difficult to see how she was going to acquire any information, since she never stopped talking and Annie Castell never seemed to open her lips.

Be that as it may, she went on talking for a long time after she got home.

“Annie’s got something on her mind, you can’t get from it.” She beat a pillow vigorously and slipped it back under Mr. Bridling’s head with the dexterity of long practice. “It isn’t what she says, but I didn’t go to school with her for nothing, and there’s something she’s got on her mind. You wouldn’t have known the pastry for hers, for one thing. I don’t say it was heavy, and I don’t say there isn’t many a cook that wouldn’t be glad if she could make it as well, but it wasn’t her usual.”

Mr. Bridling observed in a rather perfunctory manner that he didn’t hold with cooking on a Sunday, not if it wasn’t a work of necessity and mercy like doing for an afflicted husband.

Rightly considering that this required no answer, Mrs. Bridling continued.

“Mr. Castell, he keeps talking about his dear Luke and where is he going to find his equal. I could have told him, but I kept myself. In prison, or in any other place where there’s offscourings is what I could have said, but I kept myself. Never said a word, and let him run on about his dear Luke, which if ever there was a good riddance-”

Mr. Bridling gave it as a considered opinion that it was a judgment. He was a plump old man with a nice colour and a soft purring voice. Successive hospitals had failed to find any reason why he should lie in bed and be waited on hand and foot, but he continued to do so. He spoke through the sheet which his wife had drawn up over his face whilst she straightened the blankets.

“How’s the others taking it?”

“Old Mr. Jacob Taverner, he sits by the fire with the Sunday papers.”

Mr. Bridling said he didn’t hold with papers on Sunday.

“And I’ll thank you to turn down the sheet and let me get my breath. If I was to die choked-”

Mrs. Bridling turned it down, and went on talking.

“Looks like a sick monkey and don’t fancy his food. Mrs. Duke, she doesn’t fancy hers neither-sits and looks at it and doesn’t eat a thing. Another one that doesn’t eat is that Lady Marian’s husband. Makes up with what he drinks-had to be carried to bed last night, so I hear.”

“One of the drunkards of Ephraim,” said Mr. Bridling. Then, in a less lofty vein, “Then it wasn’t him that did it.”

“Seems it couldn’t have been. Well, then there’s Mr. Geoffrey Taverner-some kind of a traveller, they say he is, but quite the gentleman. He walks into Ledlington and gets the papers and comes back and reads them and does the cross-word puzzle. I’ll fetch it along for you to do tomorrow. And that Lady Marian and the other one, Miss Taverner, they say they’ve been up all night and go off to their rooms and have a good lay-down. I could have laughed. A lot they know about being up in the night! I could have told them a thing or two! It’s not so much the up, it’s the up-and-down that gets you.”

Mr. Bridling checked her by shutting his eyes and groaning.

“Are you throwing my affliction up at me, Emily?”

Mrs. Bridling was struck to the heart.

“I wouldn’t do it, Ezra-you know I wouldn’t. It was thinking of a sufferer like you.”

He said in a resigned voice,

“There may be those that suffer more. I’m not complaining.”

“Nobody can’t ever say you do, Ezra.”

“The nights I never close my eyes,” said Mr. Bridling. “And nothing the least bit of use-not hop pillows, nor cups of cocoa, nor hot bricks to the feet changed constant, nor my mother’s fumitory drink, nor yet your grandmother’s herbal tea. Have we tried them all night after night, or haven’t we?”

“Indeed we have. And if there was anything else-there’s nothing I wouldn’t do.”

He gave a confirmatory groan.

“I don’t complain. What about that Al Miller? Mrs. Cleeve looked in and said he’d run off. Seems Mrs. Wilton where he lodged is some sort of a cousin and they met at the Congregational. Mrs. Wilton told her it was a real good riddance. She supposed he’d come back and want them to take him on again, but Mr. Wilton wouldn’t have it. What with coming in late, and coming in drunk, and talking big about how he was going to be a rich man and show everyone how, she said they’d downright lost patience. And there’s a very respectable young man, a brother of Mr. Wilton’s sister’s daughter-in-law, that would like the room, so they’re letting him have it.”

Mrs. Bridling said, “Well, I never!” And then, dropping her voice, “Run off, has he? You don’t suppose-”

Mr. Bridling shook his head regretfully.

“Seems it couldn’t have been, because he come in drunk just before half past eleven-made an awful noise and used language. And Mr. Wilton, he gave him his notice-told him he could get out in the morning and stay out, and went down and took away the front door key so they’d be sure they got their money before he went. What time of night did you say it was when they all roused up and found Luke murdered?”

“One o’clock, Annie says. And the police come it might have been half an hour later.”

“And the blood still wet,” said Mr. Bridling with gusto. “And Al Miller locked in Thread Street a matter of three miles away, and the key under Mrs. Wilton’s pillow. Don’t seem possible Al Miller could have a hand in it. A back slider and a sinner he is if ever there was one. In my class at Sunday school, and brought up Band of Hope, and look what he’s come to now-drinking, and all kind of carryings on! But seems he couldn’t of murdered Luke White, not if he was locked into a house three miles away.”

“They both wanted Eily,” said Mrs. Bridling. “Time a girl’s married when it comes to too many men wanting her. It makes trouble.”

“Girls always makes trouble,” said Mr. Bridling. “What about the rest of them up at the Catherine-Wheel?”

“The little detective lady, she has a lay-down too. Seems nobody knew she was a detective when she come. And the gentleman that’s staying at Sir John Challoner’s, he’s another-”

Mr. Bridling took her up sharply.

“Don’t you demean yourself calling him a gentleman!”

“He’s Sir John’s cousin.”

Mr. Bridling stared

“Then he did ought to be ashamed of himself. There aren’t any real gentry left like there used to be.”

Mrs. Bridling was mixing cocoa in a cup and being very careful about it, because Mr. Bridling was most particular in the matter of lumps and grit, and if there was one thing that roused her, it was for him to tell her that she couldn’t make cocoa like his mother did.

“That’s right,” she said. “Well, this Mr. Abbott-Inspector Abbott-he goes off, and the other Inspector. And Captain Taverner and Miss Heron, they go off in his car, and not back till just on seven. And that’s the lot of them, except for Eily.”

“What about Eily?”

Mrs. Bridling began pouring boiling water very carefully and stirring all the time.

“By the look of her she’d been crying her eyes out. ‘I can’t leave Aunt Annie,’ she says. And John Higgins wanting her to marry him right away.”

Mr. Bridling had his eye on the cocoa.

“Marriages and murders don’t agree,” he said sententiously. “That’s enough hot water, Emily. Don’t drown it.”