Ngaio Marsh: Scales of Justice

“Trust you. Implicitly. Implicitly. One other thing. Do you mind, Mark?”

“Of course not, Grandfather. Nurse, shall we have a word?”

Nurse Kettle followed Mark out of the room. They stood together on a dark landing at the head of a wide stairway.

“I don’t think,” Mark said, “that it will be much longer.”

“Wonderful, though, how he’s perked up for the Colonel.”

“He’d set his will on it. I think,” Mark said, “that he will now relinquish his life.”

Nurse Kettle agreed. “Funny how they can hang on and funny how they will give up.”

In the hall below a door opened and light flooded up the stairs. Mark looked over the banister and saw the enormously broad figure of his grandmother. Her hand flashed as it closed on the stair rail. She began heavily to ascend. He could hear her labored breathing.

“Steady does it, Gar,” he said.

Lady Lacklander paused and looked up. “Ha!” she said. “It’s the doctor, is it?” Mark grinned at the sardonic overtone.

She arrived on the landing. The train of her old velvet dinner dress followed her, and the diamonds which every evening she absent-mindedly stuck about her enormous bosom burned and winked as it rose and fell.

“Good evening, Miss Kettle,” she panted. “Good of you to come and help my poor old boy. How is he, Mark? Has Maurice Cartarette arrived? Why are you both closeted together out here?”

“The Colonel’s here, Gar. Grandfather wanted to have a word privately with him, so Nurse and I left them together.”

“Something about those damned memoirs,” said Lady Lacklander vexedly. “I suppose, in that case, I’d better not go in.”

“I don’t think they’ll be long.”

There was a large Jacobean chair on the landing. He pulled it forward. She let herself down into it, shuffled her astonishingly small feet out of a pair of old slippers and looked critically at them.

“Your father,” she said, “has gone to sleep in the drawing-room muttering that he would like to see Maurice.” She shifted her great bulk towards Nurse Kettle. “Now, before you settle to your watch, you kind soul,” she said, “you won’t mind saving my mammoth legs a journey. Jog down to the drawing-room, rouse my lethargic son, tell him the Colonel’s here and make him give you a drink and a sandwich. Um?”

“Yes, of course, Lady Lacklander,” said Nurse Kettle and descended briskly. “Wanted to get rid of me,” she thought, “but it was tactfully done.”

“Nice woman, Kettle,” Lady Lacklander grunted. “She knows I wanted to be rid of her. Mark, what is it that’s making your grandfather unhappy?”

“Is he unhappy, Gar?”

“Don’t hedge. He’s worried to death…” She stopped short. Her jewelled hands twitched in her lap. “He’s troubled in his mind,” she said, “and for the second occasion in our married life I’m at a loss to know why. Is it something to do with Maurice and the memoirs?”

“Apparently. He wants the Colonel to edit them.”

“The first occasion,” Lady Lacklander muttered, “was twenty years ago and it made me perfectly miserable. And now, when the time has come for us to part company… and it has come, child, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, darling, I think so. He’s very tired.”

“I know. And I’m not. I’m seventy-five and grotesquely fat, but I have a zest for life. There are still,” Lady Lacklander said with a change in her rather wheezy voice, “there are still things to be tidied up. George, for example.”

“What’s my poor papa doing that needs a tidying hand?” Mark asked gently.

“Your poor papa,” she said, “is fifty and a widower and a Lacklander. Three ominous circumstances.”

“Which can’t be altered, even by you.”

“They can, however, be… Maurice! What is it?”

Colonel Cartarette had opened the door and stood on the threshold with the packages still under his arm.

“Can you come, Mark? Quickly.”

Mark went past him into the bedroom. Lady Lacklander had risen and followed with more celerity than he would have thought possible. Colonel Cartarette stopped her in the doorway.

“My dear,” he said, “wait a moment.”

“Not a second,” she said strongly. “Let me in, Maurice.”

A bell rang persistently in the hall below. Nurse Kettle, followed by a tall man in evening clothes, came hurrying up the stairs.

Colonel Cartarette stood on the landing and watched them go in.

Lady Lacklander was already at her husband’s bedside. Mark supported him with his right arm and with his left hand kept his thumb on a bell-push that lay on the bed. Sir Harold’s mouth was open and he was fetching his breath in a series of half-yawns. There was a movement under the bedclothes that seemed to be made by a continuous flexion and extension of his leg. Lady Lacklander stood massively beside him and took both his hands between hers.

“I’m here, Hal,” she said.

Nurse Kettle had appeared with a glass in her hand.

“Brandy,” she said. “Old-fashioned but good.”

Mark held it to his grandfather’s open mouth. “Try,” he said. “It’ll help. Try.”

The mouth closed over the rim.

“He’s got a little,” Mark said. “I’ll give an injection.”

Nurse Kettle took his place. Mark turned away and found himself face-to-face with his father.

“Can I do anything?” George Lacklander asked.

“Only wait here, if you will, Father.”

“Here’s George, Hal,” Lady Lacklander said. “We’re all here with you, my dear.”

From behind the mask against Nurse Kettle’s shoulder came a stutter, “Vic — Vic… Vic,” as if the pulse that was soon to run down had become semi-articulate like a clock. They looked at each other in dismay.

“What is it?” Lady Lacklander asked. “What is it, Hal?”

“Somebody called Vic?” Nurse Kettle suggested brightly.

“There is nobody called Vic,” said George Lacklander and sounded impatient. “For God’s sake, Mark, can’t you help him?”

“In a moment,” Mark said from the far end of the room.

“Vic…”

“The vicar?” Lady Lacklander asked, pressing his hand and bending over him. “Do you want the vicar to come, Hal?”

His eyes stared up into hers. Something like a smile twitched at the corners of the gaping mouth. The head moved slightly.

Mark came back with the syringe and gave the injection. After a moment Nurse Kettle moved away. There was something in her manner that gave definition to the scene. Lady Lacklander and her son and grandson drew closer to the bed. She had taken her husband’s hands again.

“What is it, Hal? What is it, my dearest?” she asked. “Is it the vicar?”

With a distinctness that astonished them he whispered, “After all, you never know,” and with his gaze still fixed on his wife he then died.

On the late afternoon three days after his father’s funeral, Sir George Lacklander sat in the study at Nunspardon going through the contents of the files and the desk. He was a handsome man with a look of conventional distinction. He had been dark but was now grizzled in the most becoming way possible with grey wings at his temples and a plume above his forehead. Inevitably, his mouth was firm and the nose above it appropriately hooked. He was, in short, rather like an illustration of an English gentleman in an American magazine. He had arrived at the dangerous age for such men, being now fifty years old and remarkably vigorous.

Sir Harold had left everything in apple-pie order, and his son anticipated little trouble. As he turned over the pages of his father’s diaries, it occurred to him that as a family they richly deserved their too-much-publicized nicknames of “Lucky Lacklanders.” How lucky, for instance, that the eighth baronet, an immensely wealthy man, had developed a passion for precious stones and invested in them to such an extent that they constituted a vast realizable fortune in themselves. How lucky that their famous racing stables were so phenomenally successful. How uniquely and fantastically lucky they had been in that no fewer than three times in the past century a Lacklander had won the most famous of all sweepstakes. It was true, of course, that he himself might be said to have had a piece of ill-fortune when his wife had died in giving birth to Mark, but as he remembered her, and he had to confess he no longer remembered her at all distinctly, she had been a disappointingly dull woman. Nothing like… But here he checked himself smartly and swept up his moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He was disconcerted when at this precise moment the butler came in to say that Colonel Cartarette had called and would like to see him. In a vague way the visit suggested a judgment. He took up a firm position on the hearthrug.