The Warrielaw Jewel, page 1
Winifred Peck
The Warrielaw Jewel
‘Listen! I see I’d better take you into my confidence.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I said.
Betty Morrison, a lawyer’s wife, is flung into the society of an ancient Edinburgh family, the Warrielaws. There’s Neil the Rip, Cora the Siren, Rhoda the Business Woman, and Alison the little Beauty – not to mention the formidable, elderly Jessica and her meek sister Mary. The family all possess unusual gold-green eyes – and harbour a precious and historic jewel, a bauble under constant threat of theft. The alarmed Betty will become a crucial witness in a case that includes mysterious disappearances of gems and people, as well as wholesale murder.
The Warrielaw Jewel was originally published in 1933. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Martin Edwards.
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Contents
Introduction by Martin Edwards
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
About the Author
Titles by Winifred Peck
Arrest the Bishop? – Title Page
Arrest the Bishop? – Chapter One
Copyright
Introduction
WINIFRED PECK’S achievements have perhaps been overshadowed by those of other members of her astonishingly gifted family. Yet her career as an author lasted for almost half a century, and her work has enjoyed considerable popularity. Less than a decade ago, a reprint of her novel Housebound (1942) earned enthusiastic notices; Michael Morpurgo, for instance, described it as ‘beautifully written … supremely funny’. When Peck died in 1962, The Times said that “she showed a marked talent for sharp characterization, amusing dialogue and an ability to condense a life history into the minimum number of words.”
Peck was a versatile writer. She published a life of Louis IX in 1909, when she was 27, and turned to writing novels in her late thirties. Most of her books can be described as mainstream fiction, often written with a light touch that has drawn comparisons with the work of E.M. Delafield and Angela Thirkell. During the 1950s, she also wrote a couple of books about her childhood, but before then she had explored detective fiction. Her work as a mystery novelist, however, has tended – despite its quality – to be overlooked.
The Warrielaw Jewel and Arrest the Bishop? are detective novels that demonstrate the quiet accomplishment of her writing, but there are obvious reasons why she did not make a lasting impact as a crime writer. The books appeared more than a decade apart, and she made no attempt to write a series, or create a signature sleuth. The books had long been out of print and hard to find until Dean Street Press, which has unearthed a considerable number of long-lost gems, resolved to give them a fresh life. Their republication also gives a new generation of readers the chance to compare Peck’s fiction with the more high-profile detective stories written by her brother Ronald Knox, who was one of the leading lights of “the Golden Age of Murder” between the two world wars, and a founder member of the legendary Detection Club.
The Warrielaw Jewel was first published in 1933, but the events of the story take place in the era ‘when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach’. Thus the novel represents an early example of the history-mystery, a fashionable sub-genre today but much less common at the time that Peck was writing. The setting is Edinburgh, which ‘was not in those days a city, but a fortuitous collection of clans. Beneath a society always charming and interesting on the surface, and delightful to strangers, lurked a history of old hatreds, family quarrels, feuds as old as the Black Douglas. Nor were the clans united internally, except indeed at attack from without. Often already my mother-in-law had placidly dissuaded me from asking relations to meet, on the ground that they did not recognise each other.’
The story, narrated by the wife of the legal adviser to the Warrielaw family, encompasses such classic Golden Age elements as murder, a trial, a valuable heirloom, and a mysterious curse. The quality of Peck’s prose lifts the book out of the ordinary, and in a review on the Mystery*file blog in 2010, Curtis Evans argued that it is ‘an early example of a Golden Age mystery that, in its shifting of emphasis from pure puzzle to the study of character and setting, helped mark the gradual shift from detective story to crime novel.’
Pleasingly, Peck makes use of one of the game-playing devices popular with Golden Age novelists, a formal ‘challenge to the reader’, at the end of the twelfth chapter:
‘STOP. THIS IS A CHALLENGE TO YOU. At this point all the characters and clues have been presented. It should now be possible for you to solve the mystery. CAN YOU DO IT? Here’s your chance to do a little detective work on your own – a chance to test your powers of deduction. Review the mystery and see if you can solve it at this point. Remember! THIS IS A SPORTING PROPOSITION, made in an effort to make the reading of mystery stories more interesting to you. So – don’t read any further. Reach your solution now. Then proceed.’
The mystery writer most closely associated with explicit challenges of this kind was the American Ellery Queen, but the device was also employed by a range of British detective novelists, including Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, and Rupert Penny. It was a way of making explicit the fact that the whodunit essentially involved a battle of wits, dependent on the author playing fair by supplying (although often disguising) the clues to unravel the puzzle.
Having entered so wholeheartedly into the spirit of Golden Age detective fiction, Peck promptly moved away from the genre, and did not return to it until after the Second World War, by which time tastes in crime writing, as well as much else, were changing fast. Arrest the Bishop? appeared in 1949; set in a Bishop’s Palace, the story made excellent use of her first-hand knowledge of ecclesiastical life. This is another history-mystery, written in the aftermath of one world war, but relating events set in 1920, not long after the end of another.
As a bonus, the book is also an example of that popular sub-genre, the Christmas crime story. The murder victim is, as so often in traditional whodunits, an unscrupulous blackmailer, and again Peck makes use of tropes of Golden Age fiction such as a timetable of key events, and a list of prime suspects itemising their respective motives, opportunities for committing the crime, and instances of their seemingly suspicious behaviour. The result is a good old-fashioned mystery: Peck’s gentle humour ensures readability, and in the twenty-first century the book has added appeal as a portrait of a vanished age.
Winifred Frances Knox, born in 1882, was the third of the six children of the fourth Bishop of Manchester. She had an older sister, Ethel, as well as four brothers. The eldest son, E.V. Knox, became well-known as editor of Punch; he was also responsible for a splendid parody of the Golden Age detective story, ‘The Murder at the Towers’. Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox became a legendary code-breaker who worked for British Intelligence during both world wars, while Wilfred Knox earned distinction as an Anglican clergyman and theologian. The best-known of the four brothers was Ronald, a man of extraordinary talents, who was also ordained an Anglican clergyman before converting to Catholicism; he proceeded to carve a considerable reputation as ‘Monsignor Knox’. Amongst many other activities, he was a popular broadcaster in the early days of the BBC, one of the first Sherlockian scholars, an expert on word games such as acrostics, and creator of the Detective’s Decalogue – ten jokey commandments for crime writers that were adapted into the initiation ritual for new members of the Detection Club. Suffice to say that these supposed rules of the game were honoured, by Knox as well as by his crime writing colleagues, more in the breach than in the observance.
Winifred shared, The Times said, ‘her brothers’ lively wit and sharp minds, and was well able to hold her own in the complicated verse games they played among themselves. It was the family custom to spend the summer holiday in a furnished house, generally a rectory, where they amused themselves tracing the life of the absent incumbent as revealed in the photographs that were hung about his walls. In such stimulating and imaginative company she had every inducement to become a writer, where much of the material the novelist needs lay to her hand.’ In almost any other family, Winifred’s record as a high achiever could not possibly be eclipsed, but such was the brilliance of her quartet of brothers that even her niece, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (whose father was E.V. Knox), made only fleeting mention of Winifred in her book The Knox Brothers.
Winifred was among the first forty pupils to study at Wycombe Abbey School, and proceeded to read History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 1911, she married James Peck in Manchester Cathedral. James, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as “a small, quiet, reliable, clever and honourable Scotsman”, was at the time Clerk to the School Board in Edinburgh. The couple had three children, and James became an increasingly influential figure in both local and central government; when he was knighted in 1938, Winifred became Lady Peck.
By the time Winifred Peck died, her detective fiction had become a footnote to her literary career. It was
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
CHAPTER I
THE JEWEL IS THREATENED
Twilight had fallen and only the wood-fire illuminated my drawing-room when the big door swung open. The light in the passage cast the shadow of two figures on the wall as my maid, Christina, announced:
“Miss Warrielaw and Miss Rhoda Macpherson.”
All newly-married people will admit that for a year at least their home has little personality of its own. A new house, newly furnished, has the insipidity of a baby; an old house newly furnished shows itself in queer unexpected lights when visitors appraise it.
It was in the year 1909 that I married John Morrison of Edinburgh, the younger partner of the well-known firm of Hay, Morrison and Fletcher, Writers to the Signet, and came to live in the monumental house vacated for us by his parents in Moray Place. Like everyone of my day who had been brought up in an artistic atmosphere in London, I had my drawing-room painted white, and replaced the stout, stuffy Victorian furniture and carpet by Persian rugs, antique chests and bureaux, blue and white china and gay cretonne-covered chairs and sofas. I was very proud of the result, but as the new guests entered and Christina switched on the lights, it looked suddenly bare and raw and lacking in solidity. When I asked John later if he had experienced the same sensation and, like myself, put it down to the Warrielaw personality, he merely replied that all he felt was his own folly in being caught in the tail of one of my At Home days. Brides had their Days in the Edinburgh of those far-off years, and John never ventured into the drawing-room till half-past five.
“Will I infuse some new tea, Madam?” asked Christina. Like all good Scottish servants she was a perfect register of social standing. Evidently she felt nothing but respect for the dowdy couple she had just ushered into the room.
“Not for us, please don’t trouble for us,” intervened the elder woman nervously. “I have had tea with Rhoda and we came late intentionally in the hope of catching dear John.”
If I could tell from dear John’s expression that the pleasure was not mutual, I was glad for Miss Warrielaw’s sake that her hopes were fulfilled. The lights revealed nothing to explain Christina’s respectful greeting in Miss Warrielaw’s appearance or dress, but they did make it clear that this elderly lady, in her queer, rather pathetic efforts at finery, was worried and upset. To John’s murmur of introduction to “My wife” she paid only the tribute of a watery smile before she sat down by him, on the edge of a big sofa, in a flurry of agitation.
“How you must hate coming to live in Edinburgh!” Miss Rhoda Macpherson took a chair beside me and spoke coldly and abruptly. “I felt very sorry for you when I heard John was marrying an English girl.”
“But it’s such a beautiful place!” I protested. Already I had discovered the fact that no one but Edinburgh people can ever safely abuse Edinburgh.
“Oh that!” said Rhoda contemptuously. It seemed to me rather hard that this prim, neat little spinster, sitting so severely upright in her grandfather chair, should meet my compliments so ungraciously. “The place is all right, but you’ll find the people impossible. When you get to know the wearisome cliques and sets we all live in you’ll wonder, as I do sometimes, if it’s possible for anyone who’s been born and brought up in a radius of twenty miles to have a wholly reasonable attitude to life.”
Rhoda was, I felt, speaking with some justice for her aunt and herself. My eyes wandered to the sofa where Miss Warrielaw was pouring out an incoherent story to my husband, and Rhoda’s gaze followed me.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up suddenly, and for the first time I realized that her thin, pale little face, with its sharply pointed chin and tightly closed mouth, was redeemed from the commonplace by her eyes.
“I’m sorry if I’m too outspoken. The fact is that a rather curious, rather alarming thing happened in my aunt’s house yesterday and we’re all a little upset by it. They have such confidence in your husband—his family have looked after our affairs for generations—that Aunt Mary would come to him. We should really have gone to his office.”
“Do go and join them,” I said, moving a chair for Rhoda towards the sofa. “Don’t bother to talk to me till you’ve consulted my husband.”
My two guests, now that they were seated one each side of my husband on the sofa, leaving me to my observations, were much more interesting than they had appeared at first sight. They were queer and dowdy, but they represented some tradition or point of view intensified by the very narrowness of their outlook. Aunt and niece had, at first sight, little in common. Miss Warrielaw had clearly put on her Sunday dress to come to see me. To-day of course she would look a figure of fun, but twenty-four years ago she appeared only as one of a common type, the country lady who depended on the efforts of a little dressmaker. She wore a coat and skirt of that dismal fawn colour, so trying to an elderly, weather-beaten complexion; a small brown hat topped a fringe of fair hair streaked with grey; from her wrinkled forehead one of the thick brown spotted veils of the period entangled itself in her hair. On her forehead was a yellow mole which she rubbed so perpetually in any moment of agitation that a vague blackness over one eye was a characteristic of her appearance. A big Victorian locket of solid gold hung upon her fawn silk blouse and a variety of bracelets adorned her thin wrists. Those slender hands and wrists, and her long, beautifully shaped feet in their country brogues redeemed the heaviness of her stout shoulders and shapeless waist, and redeemed her appearance also from any impression of vulgarity. She was a country woman, one saw at once: one could imagine her best tramping across a field in tweeds followed by a string of dogs. Rhoda, in contrast, looked oddly urban. She was small and self-contained, and her neat, cheap, dark little coat and skirt and depressed little hat suggested only the efficient, dowdy little typist of that distant period. She was not in the least like her aunt, I decided, as I contrasted her narrow face, her pointed chin and air of cool competence with Miss Warrielaw’s long, broad face and agitated double chin. And then both looked up at once, and I saw that they had one feature in common. Both aunt and niece had wide, round eyes of that queer hazel shade which varies between yellow topaz in certain lights, and the dull green of old glass in others. The colour was not only odd in itself; the eyes were conspicuous because, owing I imagine to some curious defect of vision, they had very small pupils which, I was to learn, rarely contracted or expanded. Later I was to hear and see a good deal of the famous Warrielaw eyes, but from the first I subconsciously noted that peculiarity.
My thoughts wandered from the point because the story suddenly caught my attention. I was not particularly interested while Miss Warrielaw was occupied in denouncing the doings of her sister Jessica. Her voice was curiously even and toneless, and I had only gathered vaguely that Jessica was outraging her sister and her family by the proposed sale of some family property, when Rhoda’s voice broke in, clear and incisive.
“Don’t bother John with all that again, Aunt Mary. John knows and we all know, since Cora Murray brought that lawsuit against Aunt Jessica, and lost it, that Aunt Jessica can sell all the family property but the house, and do what she likes with the fairy jewel and throw away the money as she pleases. I thought it was about this attempt at burglary that you came to see John.”
I had only been married then for two months, and it was still entrancing to me to observe how impassive and non-committal my tall, dark husband became when acquaintances tried to get legal advice from him outside his office. It was, as he often complained, the favourite economy of his Edinburgh clients to extract an opinion from him in ordinary social life without wasting six shillings and eightpence. But at Rhoda’s sudden turn in the conversation, a look of relief and interest crossed his face. The Warrielaws, I gathered, had used an old friendship for legal discussions unmercifully in the past, and any change was welcome.
