The Warrielaw Jewel, page 23
“Or to say,” said Bob a little questioningly put out my hand to wish him good night.
“No, nothing!” I shook my head determinedly.
“Then the rest is silence,” said Bob slowly I left them.
CHAPTER XVI
THE END
Warrielaw House stood empty and desolate for several years after the tragedy of that July day. Mary had made no will, in spite of Rhoda’s persistent entreaties to her to do so, and the estate passed therefore into the possession of the four surviving Warrielaws—Cora, Neil, Rhoda and Alison. It was, John said, characteristic of the family that they would not meet to discuss the fate of the house itself, or of Rhoda in her long and miserable confinement. Alison made all arrangements for her sister with the firm to which Rhoda had entrusted her affairs, and went off to live with relations in Glasgow. Without a word of farewell to her relations or to us. Cora recovered her health and spirits with surprising rapidity. Charles Murray feared that she might wish him to buy out her relatives’ shares, and establish herself in the home she had loved so passionately, but, fortunately for him, she turned from any thought of the place with horror, and persuaded him to retire and settle down to hunt near Melrose. With the astounding adaptability which one or two of her family possessed, she became a county lady with a profound interest in poultry, pedigree stock and racehorses. Neil had a theory that she gave up all evening entertainments when he categorically refused to give her the fairy jewel. Charles, he said, had trouble enough without that, and he handed it over to the safes of the British Linen Bank.
Neil himself was no less anxious to shake off his connection with Edinburgh. He went off to Italy, where he purchased an island and married a cheerful colonial widow to whom Warrielaw, and all it meant in his life, was unknown. Before he left he had exerted all his influence successfully on Rhoda’s behalf. Her position was indeed a curious one. No charge could be made against one in her condition, and yet on her recovery she might be found guilty as accessory to Mary in the matter of Jessica’s death, and the suppression of the truth, in Neil’s trial. By medical advice and legal influence, however, she was placed in a private nursing-home. Thence, just before the War, she was sent to Switzerland for a cure. There, we heard, she was making a complete recovery, and from there in 1915 she made her escape and disappeared, leaving a curt letter in which she renounced all her claims to the Warrielaw estate in favour of Alison. In that action the more charitable of us might trace some sign of penitence, but Rhoda remained a mystery to us all to the end. We never heard of her again.
It is usually sad to round off stories which took place before the Great War, but our lot was singularly fortunate. John went out with the Royal Scots and returned in eighteen months with a wound severe enough to keep him at home till the Armistice, and no eventual disability. Neil considered himself the worst sufferer from the European upheaval, for he was refused for active service and spent his time in one of the new Ministries in Whitehall, a victim to a regular life and the inanity of incompetent and fluffy typists. Only Charles Murray went out never to return, and not a few of us felt that a hero’s death in Flanders was better than life with Cora. Dennis, being Dennis, went through the War without a scratch.
Alison vanished out of our life till the War. She and Dennis had never met since that dreadful day in July until my brother appeared in Edinburgh in September, 1914, with a commission in the Black Watch. He was, he told me, Scotch by adoption, and if he had to risk his life in any old war would like to do so in the company of men like my husband and Bob Stuart. Next day he met Alison in Princes Street: she had, it appeared, a job as a V.A.D. and he brought her to see us in Moray Place, looking prettier and more fairy-like than ever. A month later, without a word to anyone, he married her in the true war style and introduced her to us proudly as Mrs. Dennis Howard.
No one could have welcomed a marriage into that family, but life in those days was so precarious, happiness so rare and snatched at so readily, that we accepted the accomplished fact with fewer misgivings than we might have known in ordinary times. The only cloud on their happiness was the occasion when Alison received a registered parcel from Neil as a wedding-present, and opened it to find the fairy jewel. Not a few of us gave way to foolish superstitions in those days, and I urged them to throw the thing away at once. But Alison was more practical. The jewel was sold at last for a marvellous sum, and set aside for the education of the future little Howards. Her John and Dennis are, I must add, exact reproductions of their father, and even her fairy-like little girl has Dennis’s eyes. It is only when my children really want to annoy them that they denounce them as “Black Borderers” and “Fairy Freaks”.
In the madness of the War the last Warrielaws met in sanity and friendliness, and agreed at last to sell the house. The park is a golf course now, and the place a cumbrous and inconvenient club house. None of us have ever played a round there, but I hear that the secretary makes up his accounts for green-fees and drinks in the library where the two sisters sat once, in silent hatred, over their interminable embroidery.
THE END
About The Author
WINIFRED PECK (1882-1962) was born Winifred Frances Knox in Oxford, the daughter of the future Bishop of Manchester. Her mother Ellen was the daughter of the Bishop of Lahore.
A few years after her mother’s death, Winifred Peck became one of the first pupils at Wycombe Abbey School, and later studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Returning to Manchester, and under the influence of Christian Socialism, she acted as a social worker in her father’s diocese, as well as starting out as a professional writer.
After writing a biography of Louis IX, she turned to fiction in her thirties, writing over twenty novels, including two detective mysteries.
She married James Peck in 1911, and they had two sons together. James was knighted in 1938, and it was as Lady Peck that his wife was known to many contemporary reviewers.
Titles by Winifred Peck
FICTION
Twelve Birthdays (1918)
The Closing Gates (1922)
A Patchwork Tale (1925)
The King of Melido (1927)
A Change of Master (1928)
The Warrielaw Jewel (1933)
The Skirts of Time (1935)
The Skies Are Falling (1936)
Coming Out (1938)
Let Me Go Back (1939)
Bewildering Cares: A Week in the Life of a Clergyman’s Wife (1940)
A Garden Enclosed (1941)
House-Bound (1942)
Tranquillity (1944)
There Is a Fortress (1945)
Through Eastern Windows (1947)
Veiled Destinies (1948)
A Clear Dawn (1949)
Arrest the Bishop? (1949)
Facing South (1950)
Winding Ways (1951)
Unseen Array (1951)
MEMOIR
A Little Learning: A Victorian Childhood (1952)
Home for the Holidays (1955)
HISTORY
The Court of a Saint: Louis IX, King of France, 1226-70 (1909)
They Come, They Go: The Story of an English Rectory (1937)
Winifred Peck
Arrest the Bishop?
He caught the back of a chair, staggered and groaned. There was a heavy crash and fall, and the parson lay motionless and livid, while lilies from a vase fell, like a wreath, across his chest.
The Rev. Ulder, everyone agreed, was the parish priest from hell. In addition to tales of drunkenness and embezzlement, the repellent cleric had recently added blackmail to his list of depravities. There was scandal in the district, plenty of it, and Ulder had the facts. Until, that is, a liberal helping of morphia, served to him in the Bishop’s Palace, silenced the insufferable priest – for good.
Was it the Bishop himself who delivered the fatal dose? Was it Soames, the less-than-model butler? Or one of a host of other inmates and guests in the house that night, with motives of their own to put Ulder out of the way? Young Dick Marlin, ex-military intelligence and now a Church deacon, finds himself assisting Chief Constable Mack investigate murder most irreverent.
Arrest the Bishop? was first published in 1949. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes a new introduction by crime fiction historian Martin Edwards.
Arrest the Bishop?
I
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
“How on earth can any one afford to keep all this up nowadays?”
This was the invariable question of every tourist who, for the sum of half a crown, was privileged once a week to view the grounds of the Bishop of Evelake’s Palace. It was not so much the Palace itself, that long low patchwork of Elizabethan brick and Georgian stone, that plum-and orange-coloured centre in the pattern of brilliant flower-beds, shimmering glass-houses and starry shrubs, which inspired the question. Ringed by shaven lawns, the patchwork quilt was set in a frame of grey fragile arches, haggard pillars, broken lichened steps and tombs, bounded by the crumbling yet inviolate walls of the old Abbey of Evelake. To preserve this grey-gold outer fortification was the responsibility of the Bishop of the See, and a heavy one financially.
“Well, we married Pound’s Paste!” was the answer of the butler-guide in 1920, a cigarette poised behind his ear. In that time of domestic upheaval any butler was better than none, and the ex-Miss Pound, as Mrs. Broome, the Bishop’s wife, made light of the impertinence when the rumour reached her. “I’ll tell Soames he must really keep to his Book of Words,” she said pacifically to her horrified informant. “He’ll probably understand what I mean and of course it was perfectly true!”
The See of Evelake was indeed one of those which caused perennial difficulty to the Crown early in this century. Twenty-five years before the diocese had been divided and the episcopal income with it. Twenty-five years later the Palace would be handed over to the National Trust.
“We must look first for a man of means rather than a man of God,” said the Dean sardonically when the ex-head master of St. Blaze College, Dr. Broome, was appointed. “I am glad to think we shall have a little of both. Ours is the Church of a Compromise!”
“You’ve got a man of peace anyhow,” suggested his interlocutor. “That is more than you can say of most school masters. Too much peace and too little discipline at St. Blaze in his time, they say.”
But the Dean was not to be drawn on the possible failings of Dr. Broome in his former career. “The less discipline anyone tries to enforce in the Anglican Church the better!” was his only reply.
If our Church is one of a compromise so also was the Palace. To the Bishop as he made his way from his low, panelled room to tea in his wife’s drawing-room, on a grey stormy December twilight in the year 1920, it seemed a symbol of his life. The original building, long and low, its mullioned windows gazing from its mellow, red-brick walls with the serenity of three hundred years, recalled to him his early life, his brilliant youth, his Oxford successes, his idyllic marriage and rapid rise in the Church. And then—the low graceful passage opened into an amorphous wing, known as the Bridge. “Thrown out by Bishop Main in 1850, with no architectural pretensions, to house his family of twenty children,” said the Book of Words. (“And no such goings-on nowadays,” Soames usually added with a chuckle.) Now, to this Bishop, that huddle of pantry and offices and rather mean bedrooms above seemed a parable indeed of his years at Blaze, his heart broken by the loss of his young wife, his spirit broken by the covert resistance of the masters, and open rebellion of the boys, against a young and nervous newcomer.
The Bridge passage terminated in a new wide archway opening upon a magnificent white-panelled hall, and it was thus, it seemed to the Bishop to-day, that his new life with his second wife had begun.
“My dear, you must just have that Bridge business pulled down,” said Mrs. Broome’s Pound relations, who were all by this time established in vast Palladian country houses. But the ecclesiastical commissioners were difficult, the architect half-hearted, and, after all, St. Paul had indicated, said Mrs. Broome, that a Bishop should have plenty of spare bedrooms, especially at Ordination times. So between them the architect and Mrs. Broome tacked on the excrescence of a more or less Georgian new wing, with a suite of drawing-rooms which Mrs. Proudie might have envied, and luxurious accommodation for guests and servants above. It was a pity, she told her relatives laughingly, that by the time it was finished the Bishop had dug himself into the old wing, and refused to change his own study, or the old bed room suite of long-dead bishops; it was not even possible, in view of the coal shortage, to use the new drawing-rooms habitually. But to-day everything was prepared for a large house-party for the Ordination. (“And that means, dear,” wrote Mrs. Broome to a Nonconformist aunt, “two young men to be priested, six to be ordained deacons, the Chancellor to license them and Canon Wye to address them. As dear little Sue and myself will be the only womenfolk it wouldn’t be your idea of a successful house party!”)
“Well, did you enjoy your long walk to-day?” Mrs. Broome rose, as she spoke, from a desk covered with Christmas correspondence, as big, welcoming and genial as one of her large gay arm-chairs. This comment on the distances to be covered in the Palace was a well-worn family joke, but perhaps it was not, she considered, very tactful this afternoon, in view of the Bishop’s weary countenance.
“It has been a worrying day, a very worrying day,” said her husband, moving gratefully to his luxurious chair by the blazing fire and the shining hearth.
“Dear me, I am sorry,” said Mrs. Broome, in the voice that somehow always sounded jovial. “Never mind, the Ordination will soon be over, and no one is arriving till about six. Everything is arranged, and I made sure that that stupid Soames had got the name-cards in the bedrooms right—the Chancellor in St. Francis, Canon Wye in St. Dominic, as usual”—(it should be admitted that nothing in Mrs. Broome’s scheme of comfort suggested the austerities of the patron saints)—“And all the candidates will be in the top story of this wing. Except Dick Marlin, for he’s almost one of the family so I’ve put him in St. Bede. These three all like the old panelled rooms like you, I gather, though I can’t understand why! I’m so glad we needn’t use the Bridge bedrooms, as I’ve got poor old Moira in the one over the pantry to save trouble in carrying trays. I do hope the Hospital will send for her soon, for she’s often in such pain!”
“Dear, dear!” murmured the Bishop courteously. Ordinary people had not at that date begun to see themselves as in a State of Conflict. The Bishop would have diagnosed his state of mind as a want of consistent grace rather than dignifying himself as a split personality, but there was indeed a hidden conflict between the stately ascetic divine revered by his diocese and wife, and the terrified heart, haunted by memories, beset by future fears, which beat beneath his episcopal garb. Let it be said at once that few guilty secrets lurked there, as the world would count guilty. The evil genius of the Bishop’s life, as a scholar, don, cleric and schoolmaster, had been no thrilling vice, but the possession of one of those morbid consciences which cannot put the past behind them, combined with an imagination which hag-rides the mind all the more mercilessly because it has always been so sternly concealed. “The dear Bishop is so sensitive and far-sighted,” was Mrs. Broome’s version of her husband’s character. “The man’s a coward and afraid to say so,” declared one of the Council of St. Blaze College, after a peculiar exposure of indecision in the Headmaster’s attitude. “You’ve only to say that you tremble for the future if he won’t adopt your view, and he’ll give way,” the Dean would advise his clergy confidentially. From the Bishop’s Guardian Angel, who understood the tragedies in his past life, the depth of his devotion for his loved ones and his God, the struggles for trust and for hope, that most elusive of the Christian virtues, we may imagine a far more tolerant and pitying verdict. Few but the angels presumably, and a skilled psychiatrist possibly, could understand the discrepancy between the clean-shaven, finely moulded and lined face, and the cautious self-composed manner, with the heavily lidded eyes of a frightened and hunted child which peered out in side glances. His chaplain, who entered now, held that with his beard the Bishop would represent exactly the drawing of St. Joseph by Leonardo, and some such parallel might be discerned in the Bishop’s nature with the thwarted yet exalted saint who bore in his bosom the torment of doubt and dread, of self-suppression, as the world gazed at his so-called wife and that miraculous Birth whose ultimate promise to the world must have seemed very far away in Nazareth.
“I’m sure everything is in the best possible order!” Though he roused himself to speak and smile, his wife’s cheerful vitality seemed to the Bishop only as a fire through a glass screen to a cold man. “Where’s Sue?”
“Out at the G.F.S. party, but she’ll be back soon.”
Like most clergy and headmasters the Bishop had a secret predilection for the society of the other sex, and not least for the young and attractive. Sue, his only child by the second Mrs. Broome, had managed to inherit her father’s admirable features with her mother’s quality of cosy warmth. She was no noted beauty like Judith, his daughter by his first wife, but that young lady’s meteoric career through two seasons with her stepmother’s wealthy relatives, mild flirtations, broken heart, spectacular wedding and recent far less pleasing, and even more notorious activities, had given him a certain distrust of outstanding charm in women.
“Ah, here’s Bobs! That’s nice. I’m sure you’ve arranged everything beautifully for us, Bobs!”
There was no false geniality in Mrs. Broome’s welcome to the genial, red-headed young parson who joined them. One of a Bishop’s problems is to find a chaplain who is a budding administrator, a competent shorthand typist, and congenial to his family all in one. The Broomes had endured in succession a bullying martinet and an over-competent young business woman during the war. They were, after this, delighted to welcome Robert Borderer, a connection of the Pounds and an Old Boy of St. Blaze, though his powers of organization were as sketchy as his Pitman, because he was pre-eminently pleasant to live with and devoted to the family. (Too devoted to Judith once, but that’s over long ago, thought Mrs. Broome sometimes.) Of course, as Bobs himself candidly told them, it was too cushy a job for him, but a wound sustained as a stretcher-bearer and chaplain in France made more active work impossible for the present.
