Sarah Caudwell - The Sirens Sang of Murder

“It’s the thirtieth of April,” said Selena. “Which means that the courts begin sitting again tomorrow.”

“It is indeed the thirtieth of April,” said Ragwort. “Which means that tonight is Walpurgis Night.”

Nurtured as I have been in a sceptical tradition, I am disinclined to believe in witchcraft. No other reason having occurred to me for Cantrip to remain longer in the Channel Islands, I was surprised, on encountering my friends in the coffeehouse on the following morning, to find Julia in possession of yet a further telex from him.

TELEX CANTRIP TO LARWOOD TRANSMITTED SARK 8:00 A.M. TUESDAY 1ST MAY

Phew — if Henry complains about being one suave Chancery junior short of strength, tell him that after last night he’s jolly lucky it’s not permanent.

Look here, Larwood, what I want to know is why birds nowadays aren’t like they used to be in the old days. Yielding is what birds were in the old days, and what I specially like about birds being yielding is that they can’t start being it till they’ve got something to yield to, viz they jolly well wait to be asked.

You remember this book I told you about, the one where this bird and this chap are stuck on Sark with no clothes on being all chaste and noble? Well, there’s a bit where the chap feels tempted by his baser nature, and he goes striding off into the storm until he conquers it, and in some ways you can see it’s pretty sickening for him. On the other hand, when he isn’t being tempted by his baser nature, he doesn’t have to worry about the bird not bothering to conquer hers and dragging him off into the bracken and telling him to get on with it. That’s because it’s all happening in the old days, and you can’t help thinking that in some ways it must have been jolly restful.

The thing that gets me, looking back on last night, is that there was actually a stage when I was quite looking forward to getting a solid eight hours of health-giving zizz. Which just goes to show how right all those chaps are who say what a waste of time it is expecting things to turn out the way you expect them to, because they never do.

We’d all adjourned to the bar for a swift one after dinner, but Gabrielle drank hers quite fast and said she felt like an early night. She’d been a bit edgy all evening, because on the way over from the cottage before dinner she’d thought she’d spotted someone prowling about at the far end of the garden. She wasn’t sure — she’d only seen him for a second or two and it was getting dark — and she pretended it didn’t worry her, but I could see it did.

I wouldn’t have let her walk back on her own, even if there hadn’t been anyone prowling. It’s not far from the farmhouse to the cottage, but it was pretty dark and a bit spooky. The weather had changed while we were having dinner and the moon kept getting covered up with clouds and the wind was making a sort of wailing noise in the telegraph wires.

So I said I’d quite like to turn in early as well, and then Clemmie said she would, too, and we all walked back to the cottage together. We left Patrick Ardmore and Edward Malvoisin drinking whiskey and playing darts, and Darkside drinking barley water and looking disapproving.

Right then — at ten-thirty there I am respectably tucked up in bed, just meaning to read another chapter of this book before I go to sleep, when there’s a knock on the door and Clemmie waltzes in, wearing a pink thing with a lot of frills and saying “Well, how about it?” or words to the like effect.

I know what Ragwort says you ought to do when your instructing solicitor makes a pass at you — adopt an attitude of dignified remonstrance is what he says, viz make a long speech about the traditions of the English Bar and tell her there’s nothing doing. Well, it’s all very well him saying that. If a bird makes a pass at you and you turn it down, either she takes it personally and gets miffed or she doesn’t take it personally and thinks you’re a dead loss, and either way it doesn’t do a lot for the chances of her sending you another brief.

Another thing that cramped my style for remon-stering was that she kept shushing me, because Gabrielle was in the room next door and Clemmie didn’t want her to hear us. It’s jolly difficult to make a speech about the dignity of the English Bar if you’ve got to do it in a whisper.

And then all the lights went out. I suppose we were on course for putting the light out anyway, but it’s one thing putting it out on purpose and knowing you can put it on again and another suddenly finding it’s pitch dark and knowing you can’t.

It looked as if all the lights in the cottage had gone, and I didn’t think it would be much fun for Gabrielle to be all on her own in the dark, worrying about the Revenue chaps prowling round in the garden. So I whispered a few soothing things to Clemmie and pootled out onto the landing in my pyjamas to do the heroic and chivalrous bit, viz call out to Gabrielle to sit tight and not worry while I went and looked for the fuse box.

I don’t actually know why I’m supposed to be any better at finding the fuse box than anyone else, but most birds seem to think nowadays that there are two things chaps are useful for and the other one’s mending the electricity. Which just goes to show that Gabrielle isn’t like most birds nowadays, because she said I mustn’t bother about it and she’d be all right until morning, and I said was she sure and she said absolutely.

So I pootled back, bumping into a lot of furniture that hadn’t been there when the lights were on, and by the time I got to my bed again Clemmie’d sort of settled down in it. After that she wouldn’t let me say anything, not even in a whisper, and I couldn’t remonster any more at all.

I think Clemmie’s one of those birds that get more enthusiastic in bad weather, because the weather outside got worse and worse, with the wind howling round the chimney as if it was trying to get a part in a horror picture, and the worse it got, the more enthusiastic she was.

It was quite lucky really that she wouldn’t let me say anything. She was wearing one of those rather nice kinds of scent that smell like cinnamon toast, and what with that and all the enthusiasm, I started feeling like saying things I’d have felt a frightful ass about afterwards, specially with a sensible sort of bird like Clemmie that I’ve been mates with for years.

When the racket started outside I didn’t really feel much like going to investigate. It’s a bit difficult to explain what kind of racket it was — it was like all the kinds of racket you can think of, all happening at the same time. There was a noise like horses galloping and a noise like roofs falling in and a noise like a lot of people yelling at each other, and the wind decided to put in an extra effort in the special effects department.

The first thing I thought was that the Third World War had broken out and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. The second thing I thought was that the Alexandra wasn’t a terribly likely place for anyone to start a world war, but it was a jolly likely place for the Revenue to make a raid on — you know, the way they did on those Rossminster chaps a few years ago. I know they’re not supposed to go around making raids on people outside the jurisdiction, but after what Clemmie and Gabrielle had been telling me I didn’t think they’d worry about a little technicality like that.

I still didn’t feel much like getting out of bed, but I couldn’t help feeling that Clemmie and me were going to look pretty silly if we were just lying there being cosy while our clients were being rounded up and interrogated in their nightclothes and having their documents seized. I got this across to her as well as I could in whispers and got up and strode out into the night.