Slander’s Mark
I STEPPED OUT OF the King’s Head Inn with great relief. A light rain had started to fall. In front of me, a man wearing a long coat and a cap broke into a trot, no doubt hoping to reach his house and get himself inside before the weather worsened. I gazed out across the field that was opposite the pub, beyond a low hedge: a sizeable expanse of green, bordered by rows of trees on three sides. Again, that silence. Nothing to hear but the rain on the leaves; nothing to see but green.
A country village was the wrong place to live for anyone who wanted to be distracted from their own thoughts, that was for sure. In London, there was always a car or a bus or a face or a dog whizzing past, making some sort of commotion. How I longed for commotion now; anything but this stillness.
Two women passed me, also apparently in a hurry. They ignored my friendly greeting and scuttled away without looking up. It was only when I heard over my shoulder the words “policeman” and “Harriet” that I wondered if I had blamed the perfectly innocent rain for a phenomenon of my own making. Were these people running from the weather or from the London policeman?
While I had been applying my little gray cells, as Poirot would call them, to Walter Stoakley’s disjointed proclamations, had Victor Meakin left his inn by the back door and stopped passersby on the street to inform them of my presence in the village, against my clearly stated wishes? I could imagine that might be his idea of sport. What a strange and unpleasant man he was.
I continued along the S-shaped street. Ahead of me, a young man emerged from one of the houses. I was pleased to see that it was the man with the glasses and freckles whom I had met when I first got off the train. When he saw me strolling toward him, he stopped as if the soles of his shoes had been glued to the pavement. “Hello!” I called out. “I found the King’s Head, thanks to your help!”
The young man’s eyes widened as I approached. He looked as if he wanted to flee; evidently he was too polite to do so. If it hadn’t been for that distinctive boomerang of freckles across his nose, I might have concluded that this could not be the same person I had met before. His manner had totally altered—exactly as Victor Meakin’s had.
“I don’t know anything about who killed them, sir,” he stammered before I had an opportunity to aim a question at him. “I don’t know anything. I’ve never been to London, like I told you.”
Well, that put the matter beyond doubt: my identity and reason for being in Great Holling were common knowledge. Silently, I cursed Meakin. “It isn’t London that I’m here to find out about,” I said. “Did you know Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus?”
“I can’t stop, sir, I’m afraid. I have an errand.” He was calling me “sir” all over the place. He had not done so the first time we spoke, before he knew I was a policeman.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, might we speak later today?”
“No, sir, I don’t think I’ll be able to spare the time.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“No, sir.” He chewed his bottom lip.
“I see. And if I force the issue, I dare say you would only clam up or lie, wouldn’t you?” I sighed. “Thank you for exchanging these few words with me, at any rate. Most people see me coming and take off in the opposite direction.”
“It’s no reflection on you, sir. People are scared.”
“Of what?”
“Three are dead. No one wants to be next.”
I don’t know what answer I was expecting, but it wasn’t that one. Before I could reply, the young man darted past me and marched off down the street. What, I wondered, made him believe that there was likely to be a “next?” I thought about Poirot’s mention of a fourth cufflink, waiting in the murderer’s pocket to be placed in a future victim’s mouth, and my throat tightened involuntarily. I could not allow the possibility of another laid-out body. Palms facing downward . . .
No. That was absolutely not going to happen. Announcing this to myself made me feel better.
I walked up and down the street for a while, hoping to catch sight of someone else, but nobody appeared. I was not yet ready to return to the King’s Head, so I walked to the very end of the village where the railway station was. I stood on the platform for the London trains, frustrated that I could not board one and return home immediately. I wondered what Blanche Unsworth would cook for dinner tonight, and whether Poirot would judge it to be satisfactory. Then I forced my thoughts back in the direction of Great Holling.
What could I do if everybody in the village had resolved to avoid and ignore me?
The church! I had walked past its graveyard several times without noticing it properly—without thinking about the tragic story of the vicar and his wife who had died within hours of each other. How could I have been so oblivious?
I walked back into the village and made straight for the church. It was called Holy Saints and was a smallish building of the same honey-colored stone as the railway station. The grass in the churchyard was well tended. Most of the graves had flowers by them that appeared newly laid.
Behind the church, on the other side of a low wall into which a gate had been fitted, I saw two houses. One, set back, looked as if it must be the vicarage. The other, much smaller, was a long, low cottage, the back of which was almost pressed up against the wall. It had no back door but I counted four windows—large ones for a cottage—that would have afforded views of nothing but rows of gravestones. One would have to be made of strong stuff to live there, I thought.
I opened the iron gates and walked from the street into the churchyard. Many of the headstones were so old that the names were illegible. Just as I was thinking this, a new and rather handsome one caught my eye. It was one of the few by which no flowers were laid, and the names carved upon it made my breath catch in my throat.
It couldn’t be . . . But surely it had to be!
Patrick James Ive, vicar of this parish, and Frances Maria Ive, his beloved wife.
PJI. It was as I had explained to Poirot: the larger initial in the middle of the monogram was the first letter of the surname. And Patrick Ive was once the vicar of Great Holling.
I looked again at the birth and death dates to check that I had not made a mistake. No, Patrick and Frances Ive had both died in 1913, he at the age of twenty-nine and she at twenty-eight.
A vicar and his wife who had died tragically, within hours of one another . . . His initials on three cufflinks that ended up in three murder victims’ mouths at the Bloxham Hotel . . .
Confound it all! Poirot was right, loath though I was to admit it. There was a link. Did that mean he must also be right about this Jennie woman? Was she connected too?
Beneath the names and dates on the gravestone there was a poem. It was a sonnet, but not one I knew. I started to read:
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
I had read only the first two lines when a voice spoke behind me and prevented me from getting any further. “The author is William Shakespeare.”
I turned and saw a woman of fifty or thereabouts, with a long and somewhat bony face, hair the color of horse chestnuts with the odd streak of gray here and there, and wise, watchful gray-green eyes. Pulling her dark coat tight around her body, she said, “There was much debate about whether the name William Shakespeare ought to be included.”
“Pardon?”
“Beneath the sonnet. In the end, it was decided that the only names on the stone should be . . .” She turned away suddenly, without finishing her sentence. When she turned back to me, her eyes were damp. “Well, it was decided that . . . by which I mean that my late husband Charles and I decided . . . Oh, it was me, really. But Charles was my loyal supporter in everything I did. We agreed that William Shakespeare’s name received plenty of attention one way and another, and did not need to be carved there too.” She nodded at the stone. “Though when I saw you looking, I felt obliged to steal up on you and tell you who wrote the poem.”
“I thought I was alone,” I said, wondering how I could have missed her arrival, facing toward the street as I had been.
“I entered through the other gate,” she said, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb. “I live in the cottage. I saw you through my window.”
My face must have betrayed my thoughts on the unfortunate situation of her home, because she smiled and said, “Do I mind the view? Not at all. I took the cottage so that I could watch the graveyard.”
She said this as though it were a perfectly normal thing to say. She must have been reading my mind, for she went on to explain: “There is only one reason that Patrick Ive’s gravestone has not been dug out of the ground, Mr. Catchpool, and it is this: everybody knows I am watching.” She advanced upon me without warning and held out her hand. I shook it. “Margaret Ernst,” she said. “You may call me Margaret.”
“Do you mean . . . Are you saying that there are people in the village who would wish to disturb Patrick and Frances Ive’s grave?”
“Yes. I used to lay flowers by it, but it soon became apparent that there was little point. Flowers are easy to destroy, easier than a slab of stone. When I stopped leaving the flowers, there was nothing for them to destroy apart from the gravestone itself, but I was in the cottage by then. Watching.”
“How appalling that anybody would do such a thing to another person’s resting place,” I said.
“Well, people are appalling, aren’t they? Did you read the poem?”
“I started to and then you appeared.”
“Read it now,” she ordered.
I turned back to the stone and read the sonnet in its entirety.
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater, being wooed of time;
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days
Either not assailed, or victor being charged;
Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,
To tie up envy, evermore enlarged,
If some suspect of ill masked not thy show,
Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.
“Well, Mr. Catchpool?”
“It’s a peculiar poem to fetch up on a gravestone.”
“Do you think so?”
“Slander’s a strong word. The poem suggests that—well, unless I’m mistaken—that there were attacks upon Patrick and Frances Ive’s characters?”
“There were. Hence the sonnet. I chose it. I was advised that it would prove too costly to engrave the whole poem, and that I should content myself with the first two lines—as if cost were the most important consideration. People are such brutes!” Margaret Ernst gave a disgusted snort. She rested the palm of her hand on the stone, as if it were the top of a beloved child’s head instead of a grave. “Patrick and Frances Ive were kind people who would never willingly have hurt anybody. About how many can one say that, truly?”
“Oh. Well—”
“I didn’t know them myself—Charles and I only took over the parish after their deaths—but that’s what the village doctor says, Dr. Flowerday, and he is the only person in Great Holling with an opinion worth listening to.”
Wanting to check I had not misunderstood her, I said, “So your husband was the vicar here, after Patrick Ive?”
“Until he died three years ago, yes. There is a new vicar now: a bookish chap without a wife who keeps himself to himself.”
“And this Dr. Flowerday . . . ?”
“Forget about him,” Margaret Ernst said quickly, which did an excellent job of fixing the name Dr. Flowerday firmly in my mind.
“All right,” I said dishonestly. Having known Margaret Ernst for less than a quarter of an hour, I suspected that all-embracing obedience was the tactic most likely to serve me well.
“Why did the inscription on the gravestone fall to you?” I asked her. “Did the Ives not have family?”
“None who were both interested and capable, sadly.”
“Mrs. Ernst,” I said. “Margaret, I mean . . . I can’t tell you how much more welcome in the village you have made me feel. It’s plain that you know who I am, so you must also know why I’m here. No one else will speak to me, apart from an old chap at the King’s Head Inn who made little sense.”
“I’m not sure my intention was to make you feel welcome, Mr. Catchpool.”
“Less unwelcome, then. At least you don’t flee from me as from a monstrous apparition.”
She laughed. “You? Monstrous? Oh, dear.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“This man who made little sense at the King’s Head—did he have a white beard?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke to you because he is not afraid.”
“Because he’s too furiously drunk to fear a thing?”
“No. Because he was not . . .” Margaret stopped and changed course. “He is in no danger from the murderer of Harriet, Ida and Richard.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I would speak to you as I have, and as I am, whatever the danger.”
“I see. Are you unusually brave?”
“I am unusually pigheaded. I say what I believe needs to be said, and I do what I believe needs to be done. And if I happen to catch a suggestion that others would prefer me to remain silent, then I do the opposite.”
“That’s commendable, I suppose.”
“Do you find me too direct, Mr. Catchpool?”
“Not at all. It makes life easier, to speak one’s mind.”
“And is that one of the reasons your life has never been easy?” Margaret Ernst smiled. “Ah—I see you would prefer not to talk about yourself. Very well then. What is your impression of my character? If you don’t object to the question.”
“I have only just met you.” Heavens above! I thought. Unprepared as I was for an exchange of this nature, the best I could muster was, “I’d say you come over as a good egg, all in all.”
“That’s a rather abstract description of a person, wouldn’t you say? Also rather brief. Besides, what is goodness? Morally, the best thing I have ever done was unquestionably wrong.”
“Was it really?” What an extraordinary woman she was. I decided to take a chance. “What you said before about doing the opposite of what people would like you to do . . . Victor Meakin told me nobody would speak to me. He would be delighted if you neglected to invite me to your cottage for a cup of tea, so that we can talk at greater length, out of the rain. What do you say?”
Margaret Ernst smiled. She seemed to appreciate my boldness, as I had hoped she would. I noticed, however, that her eyes grew more wary. “Mr. Meakin would be similarly delighted if you followed the example of most in the village and refused to cross my threshold,” she said. “He is joyous about any misfortune to anyone. We could displease him on two accounts if you are mutinously inclined?”
“Well, then,” I said. “It sounds to me as if that settles the matter!”
“TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED to Patrick and Frances Ive,” I said once the tea was made and we were sitting by the fire in Margaret Ernst’s long, narrow parlor. That was what she called the room we were in, though it contained so many books that “library” would have done just as well. On one wall hung three portraits, two painted and one photographic, of a man with a high forehead and unruly eyebrows. I assumed that he was Margaret’s late husband, Charles. It was disconcerting to have three of him staring at me, so I turned to the window instead. My chair afforded an excellent view of the Ives’ gravestone, and I decided it must be where Margaret usually sat in order to conduct her vigil.
From this distance, the sonnet was unreadable. I had forgotten all of it apart from the line “For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair,” which had lodged itself in my mind.
“No,” said Margaret Ernst.
“No? You won’t tell me about Patrick and Frances Ive?”
“Not today. Maybe I will tomorrow. Do you have other questions for me in the meantime?”
“Yes, but . . . do you mind if I ask what is likely to change between now and tomorrow?”
“I would like some time to consider.”
“The thing is—”
“You’re going to remind me that you’re a policeman working on a murder case, and it is my duty to tell you everything I know. But what have Patrick and Frances Ive to do with your case?”
I ought to have done some delaying and considering of my own, but I was eager to see what response I would get if I presented her with a fact I had not told Victor Meakin, and that therefore she couldn’t possibly already know.
“Each of the three victims was found with a gold cufflink in his or her mouth,” I said. “All three cufflinks were monogrammed with Patrick Ive’s initials: PIJ.” I explained, as I had to Poirot, about the surname’s initial being the largest of the three, and in the middle. Unlike my Belgian friend, Margaret Ernst showed no sign of believing civilization to be imperiled by such an arrangement of letters. She also did not appear shocked or surprised by what I had told her, which I found unusual.
“Now do you see why Patrick Ive is of interest to me?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Then will you tell me about him?”
“As I said: perhaps tomorrow. Would you like some more tea, Mr. Catchpool?”
I told her that I would, and she left the room. Alone in the parlor, I ruminated over whether I had left it too late to ask her to call me Edward, and, if not, whether I ought to do so. I pondered this while knowing that I would say nothing, and would allow her to continue with “Mr. Catchpool.” It is among the more pointless of my habits: wondering what I ought to do when there is no doubt about what I am going to do.
When Margaret returned with the tea, I thanked her and asked her if she could tell me about Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus. The transformation was incredible. She made no attempt to dissemble, and, in a most efficient fashion, told me enough about two of the three murder victims to fill several pages. Infuriatingly, the notebook I had brought with me to Great Holling lay in one of my cases in my room at the King’s Head Inn. This would be a test for my memory.
“Harriet used to have a sweet nature, according to the overflowing archive of village legend,” said Margaret. “Kind, generous, always a smile on her face, forever laughing and offering to help friends and neighbors, never once thinking of herself—positively saintly. Determined to think well of all she met, to see everything in the best possible light. Na?vely trusting, some said. I’m not sure if I believe all of it. No one could be as perfect as Harriet-Before-She-Changed is painted as being. I wonder if it’s the contrast with what she became . . .” Margaret frowned. “Perhaps it wasn’t, in strictest truth, a case of her going from one extreme to the other, but when one is telling a story, one always wants to make it as dramatic as possible, doesn’t one? And I suppose losing a husband so young could turn even the sunniest nature. Harriet was devoted to her George, so they say, and he to her. He died in 1911 at the age of twenty-seven—dropped down dead one day in the street, having always been the picture of health. A blood clot in his brain. Harriet was a widow at twenty-five.”
“What a blow that must have been for her,” I said.
“Yes,” Margaret agreed. “A loss of that magnitude might have a terrible effect upon a person. It’s interesting that some describe her as having been na?ve.”
“Why do you say that?”
“ ‘Na?ve’ suggests a falsely rosy conception of life. If one believed in a wholly benign world and then tragedy of the worst kind struck, one might feel anger and resentment as well as sadness, as if one had been duped. And of course, when we suffer greatly ourselves, it becomes so much easier to blame and persecute others.”
I was attempting to conceal my strenuous disagreement when she added, “For some, I should say. Not for all. I expect you find it easier to persecute yourself, don’t you, Mr. Catchpool?”
“I hope I don’t persecute anybody,” I said, bemused. “So am I to take it that the loss of her husband had an unfortunate effect upon Harriet Sippel’s character?”
“Yes. I never knew sweet, kind Harriet. The Harriet Sippel I knew was spiteful and sanctimonious. She treated the world and nearly everyone in it as an enemy, deserving of her suspicion. Instead of seeing only the good, she saw the threat of evil everywhere, and behaved as if she had been charged with unearthing and defeating it. If there was a newcomer to the village, she would start out with the belief that he or she was bound to be heinous in some respect. She would tell others of her suspicions, as many as would listen, and encourage them to look out for signs. Put a person in front of her and she would search for wickedness in that person. If she found none, she would invent it. Her only pleasure after George died was condemning others as wicked, as if doing so made her a better person somehow. The way her eyes would shine whenever she’d sniffed out some new wrongdoing . . .”
Margaret shuddered. “It was as if, in the absence of her husband, she had found something else that could ignite her passion and so she clung to it. But it was a dark, destructive passion that sprang from hatred, not love. The worst part was that people flocked around her, readily agreeing with all her unpleasant accusations.”
“Why did they?” I asked.
“They didn’t want to be next. They knew Harriet was never without prey. I don’t think she could have survived for as long as a week without a focus for her righteous spite.”
I thought of the bespectacled young man who had said, “No one wants to be next.”
Margaret said: “They were happy to condemn whichever poor soul she had fixed upon if it diverted her attention from them and whatever they might be up to. That was Harriet’s idea of a friend: someone who joined her in vilifying those she deemed to be guilty of a sin, minor or major.”
“You’re describing, if I may say so, the sort of person who is likely to end up getting murdered.”
“Am I? I think people like Harriet Sippel aren’t murdered nearly often enough.” Margaret raised her eyebrows. “I see I’ve shocked you again, Mr. Catchpool. As a vicar’s wife, I shouldn’t say these things, I dare say. I try to be a good Christian, but I have my weaknesses, as we all do. Mine is the inability to forgive the inability to forgive. Does that sound contradictory?”
“It sounds like a tongue-twister. Do you mind if I ask you where you were last Thursday evening?”
Margaret sighed and looked out of the window. “I was where I always am: sitting where you’re sitting now, watching the graveyard.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like me to tell you about Ida Gransbury now?”
I nodded, with some trepidation. I wondered how I would feel if it turned out that all three of the murder victims were vindictive monsters while alive. The words “MAY THEY NEVER REST IN PEACE” passed through my mind, swiftly followed by Poirot’s account of his meeting with Jennie, her insistence that justice would finally be done once she was dead . . .
“Ida was a dreadful prig,” said Margaret. “She was every inch as sanctimonious as Harriet in her outward behavior, but she was driven by fear and by faith in the rules we are all supposed to obey rather than by the thrill of persecution. Denouncing the sins of others wasn’t a pleasure for Ida as it was for Harriet. She saw it as her moral duty as a good Christian.”
“When you say fear, do you mean fear of divine retribution?”
“Oh, that, certainly, but not only that,” said Margaret. “Different people regard rules differently, no matter what those rules happen to be. Mutinous characters like me always resent constraints, even perfectly sensible ones, but there are some who welcome their existence and enforcement because it makes them feel safer. Protected.”
“And Ida Gransbury was the second sort?”
“I think so, yes. She would not have said so. She was always careful to present herself as a woman driven by strong principle and nothing else. No shameful human weaknesses for Ida! I am sorry she is dead, though she did untold harm while alive. Unlike Harriet, Ida believed in redemption. She wanted to save sinners, while Harriet wanted only to revile them and feel elevated by comparison. I think Ida would have forgiven a demonstrably repentant sinner. She was reassured by contrition of the standard Christian sort. It bolstered her view of the world.”
“What untold harm did Ida do?” I asked. “To whom?”
“Come back and ask me that question tomorrow.” Her tone was generous but firm.
“To Patrick and Frances Ive?”
“Tomorrow, Mr. Catchpool.”
“What can you tell me about Richard Negus?” I asked.
“Precious little, I’m afraid. He left Great Holling soon after Charles and I arrived. I think he was an authoritative presence in the village—a man people listened to and took advice from. Everybody speaks of him with the greatest respect, apart from Ida Gransbury. She never spoke of him at all after he left both her and Great Holling behind.”
“Was it his decision or hers to call off the marriage plans?” I asked.
“His.”
“How do you know that she never spoke of him afterward? Perhaps to others she did, even if not to you?”
“Oh, Ida wouldn’t have spoken to me about Richard Negus or anything else. I know only what I have been told by Ambrose Flowerday, the village doctor, but there is no more reliable man on earth. Ambrose gets to hear about most things that go on, as long as he remembers to leave the door to his waiting room ajar.”
“Is this the same Dr. Flowerday that I am supposed to forget about? I had better forget his Christian name too, I dare say.”
Margaret ignored my mischievous remark. “I have it on good authority that after Richard Negus abandoned her, Ida resolved never to speak or think of him again,” she said. “She showed no outward signs of upset. People remarked upon it: how strong and resolute she was. She announced her intention to reserve all her love for God thenceforth. She found him to be more reliable than mortal men.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury took afternoon tea together in her hotel room in London last Thursday evening?”
Margaret’s eyes widened. “To hear that the two of them took tea alone together—yes, it would surprise me greatly. Ida was the sort who drew firm lines and did not cross them. By all accounts so was Richard Negus. Having decided he didn’t want Ida as a wife, he is unlikely to have changed his mind, and I cannot think that anything short of prostrate penitence and a renewed declaration of love would have persuaded Ida to agree to a meeting with him in private.”
After a pause, Margaret went on, “But since Harriet Sippel was at the same London hotel, I assume that she too was present at this afternoon tea ceremony?”
I nodded.
“Well, then. The three of them obviously had something to discuss that was more important than the lines any of them had drawn in the past.”
“You have an idea about what that thing might be, don’t you?”
Margaret looked out of the window toward the rows of graves. “Perhaps I shall have some ideas by the time you visit me tomorrow,” she said.