Patricia Wentworth - Poison In The Pen

To this letter she presently received the reply which she expected. Miss Wayne would be very pleased. She was sure that any friend of Miss Cutler’s… She had lost her dear sister of whom Miss Cutler would doubtless have spoken, but she and her niece would do their best to make a guest’s stay pleasant. She was writing to thank Miss Cutler for the recommendation. As to terms, everything kept going up so. She felt obliged to charge a little more than they had asked a year ago…

The small spidery writing ran on to a signature which could just be identified as Irene Wayne.

Miss Silver found herself delighted with Willow Cottage. Tilling Green was a charming little place, far enough from Ledlington not to have been spoiled but within sufficiently easy reach by bus. It had a fourteenth-century church with some interesting tombstones and brasses, the fine old Manor house, and two or three really charming half-timbered cottages. Willow Cottage was of course of a later date, which she considered preferable from the point of view of a residence. Old cottages were doubtless picturesque, but they were sadly apt to have uncomfortably steep stairs and low ceilings, to say nothing of out-of-date sanitary arrangements and a shortage of hot water. Willow Cottage had a nice little modern bathroom which, as Miss Wayne informed her, had taken the place of an early Victorian conservatory.

“We found it full of ferns when we bought the cottage- it is thirty years ago now-and it made the dining-room so damp. My sister decided immediately that it must go. She was a wonderful person, Miss Silver. She always made up her mind about things at once. The moment she saw that fernery she said that it must go. Now I am quite different. I am afraid I see so many difficulties . I said, ‘Oh, Esther!’-that was my sister’s name-and she said, ‘Well, what are you oh’ing about?’ It was very stupid of me of course, but I couldn’t help thinking how inconvenient it would be to go through the dining-room if one wanted to take a bath, but she pointed out that mealtimes would quite naturally be different from bathtimes, and that if one had a tendency to be late in the morning it would help one to overcome it. And so it actually did. I found that I was able to get up quite half an hour earlier without it being any trouble at all. It only needed a little perseverance.”

Without thinking its situation ideal, Miss Silver was in no frame of mind to cavil at it. There might so easily have been no bathroom at all, and she was delighted with her bedroom, one of the two which looked towards the front of the house and provided that view across the Green towards the Manor gates and the neighbouring church described by Frank Abbott.

Miss Wayne informed her that there was to be a wedding at the Manor within the next day or two.

“Really Tilling Green will be quite gay-a rehearsal for the wedding on Wednesday and a party at the Manor in the evening. It is giving them a great deal of work-Colonel and Mrs. Repton and his sister. It is she who really does the housekeeping-young Mrs. Repton doesn’t take much interest. Joyce and I are not invited, but as I said to her, ‘My dear, we really can’t expect it. Of course I have known them for thirty years, and you and Valentine have been friendly-and we could have got Jessie Peck in to be with David-but as we were not asked, there is no more to be said about it. You must remember that we are not relations.’ I must say I shouldn’t myself consider Mettie Eccles or Connie Brooke to be anything more than connections. My dear sister always thought it absurd to use the word relation for anyone farther away than a second cousin.”

Miss Silver checked this dissertation with a question.

“And the bride? She is a young relative of Colonel Repton’s, I think you said? You have known her for some time?”

“Oh dear me, yes-from a child-Valentine Grey. The wedding is on Thursday afternoon. Such a charming girl, and the bridegroom is so very goodlooking. Of course one didn’t quite expect-but people very seldom marry their first love, do they?”

Miss Silver turned an interested ear.

“Very seldom indeed, I should think.”

“How kind of you,” said Miss Wayne in her small earnest voice. She proceeded in a burst of confidence. “I do really mean it, because I was just thinking that perhaps it was an unkind thing to say, and one doesn’t like to feel one has been unkind.”

Miss Silver smiled.

“It is, I think, a question of fact. Characters develop and tastes change. Someone who would be congenial as a companion at seventeen or eighteen years of age might no longer be so in five or six years’ time.”

Miss Wayne continued to gaze. She was a little mousey creature with a tendency to turn pink about the eyes and nose when moved or distressed. She blinked and said,

“How well you put it. I shouldn’t like to have felt that I had been unkind. Valentine is such a charming girl, and no one has heard anything of Jason Leigh for a very long time. I asked his uncle about him the other day-he is our Vicar’s nephew, you know-and he said, ‘Oh, he never writes.’ ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Oh dear, Mr. Martin, that is very sad for you, isn’t it?’ But he said he didn’t think it was, because young men liked to be off ‘adventuring.’ Don’t you think that was a very curious word for him to use?”

Miss Silver enquired what Mr. Leigh’s profession might be.

“Oh, he writes ,” said Miss Wayne vaguely. “Rather odd sort of books, I think. My niece tells me they are clever-but then if you are not clever yourself you like something simpler, don’t you think? A nice love story with a happy ending, if you know what I mean. Of course I can’t help taking an interest in dear Valentine and hoping that she will be very happy indeed. I think I told you they are having a rehearsal of the ceremony on Wednesday afternoon. Would it interest you to slip into the church and watch? I have never seen a wedding rehearsal, and there cannot be anything private about it, can there? Of course Joyce and I have been asked to the wedding, and if the Reptons see you with us on Wednesday, I expect they will ask you too. After all, one more can make very little difference-there are always some people who cannot come. I know for a fact that Janet Grant, who is a very old friend, will not be able to be there because the rather tiresome sister-in-law who is always getting ill has had one of her attacks, and that means Janet having to go all the way down into Kent. Esther used to say-my dear sister, you know-she used to say that Jessica wouldn’t get ill nearly so often if she hadn’t been allowed to count on Janet running down there every time her finger ached. But of course one mustn’t be unkind about it, and no one knows better than I do how terrible it is to be lonely . Jessica didn’t marry, you see, and she doesn’t get on with Janet’s husband, Major Grant-such a nice man, but rather a sharp temper. So it is all rather sad. Now my dear sister and I, there was never a word between us all the years we lived together. But then it is generally men who make the trouble, is it not?”

It was this identical theme which was occupying Mrs. Needham who had kept house for the Rev. Thomas Martin at the Parsonage across the Green for almost as long as he had been there himself. If he ever looked back to the days before her coming, it was with a heartfelt shudder. A wife in failing health, a succession of well-meaning but incompetent “helps,” the shock of Christina’s death and his own conviction that the failure of their marriage must somehow have been his fault and his alone-these were not things upon which any man would choose to dwell. At his darkest hour Mrs. Needham had walked in, sent undoubtedly from heaven by way of a Ledlington registry office, and she had been there ever since-large, strong, imperturbable, a good cook, an excellent housekeeper, a wonderful manager. She had, in fact, so many virtues that the absence of just one might be considered to weigh lightly in the scales. She was kind, she was clean, she was honest, she had every domestic quality, but she had a tongue which practically never stopped. There had been moments when Tommy Martin had felt that he couldn’t bear it. It was at these moments that he allowed himself to look back, and he never had to look for long. In time he developed a way of life in which she learned to play her part. When he went into the study and shut the door he was not to be disturbed. For the rest, he could bear with her and in case of need withdraw his attention to a point at which he really hardly knew whether she was talking or not.