The Monogram Murders (22 page)

I would welcome the chance to tell the story to

another outsider like myself.”

“Then please do,” I said.

She nodded, returned to her chair, and proceeded

to tell me the story of Patrick and Frances Ive, to

which I listened without interruption. I shall now set

it down here.

THE RUMOR THAT STARTED all the trouble sixteen years

ago came from a servant girl who worked in the home

of Reverend Patrick Ive, the young vicar of Great

Holling, and his wife, Frances. Having said that, the

servant was not solely or even mainly responsible for

the tragedy that resulted. She told a spiteful lie, but

she told it to one person only and had no part in

spreading it more widely throughout the village.

Indeed, once the unpleasantness began, she withdrew

almost completely and was scarcely seen. Some

speculated that she was ashamed, as she should have

been, of what she had set in motion. Later, she

regretted her part in the affair and did her best to

make amends, though by then it was too late.

Of course, she was wicked to tell a lie of such

magnitude even to one person. Perhaps she was

frustrated after a particularly hard day’s work at the

vicarage, or it could be that, as a servant with ideas

above her station, she resented the Ives. Maybe she

wished to perk up her dreary life with a little

malicious gossip and was naïve enough to imagine

that no serious harm would be done.

Unfortunately, the person she chose as audience for

her heinous lie was Harriet Sippel. Again, maybe her

choice was easy to understand. Harriet, embittered

and vindictive as she was since the death of her

husband, could be relied upon to receive the lie with

great excitement and to believe it, because, of course,

she would want it to be true. Someone in the village

was doing something gravely wrong, and, even worse

(or, from Harriet’s point of view, even better) that

someone was the vicar! How her eyes must have

flashed with glee! Yes, Harriet was the perfect

audience for the servant girl’s slanderous story, and

no doubt that was why she was chosen.

The servant told Harriet Sippel that Patrick Ive

was a swindler of the most cruel and sacrilegious

kind: he was, she claimed, luring villagers to the

vicarage late at night whenever his wife Frances was

elsewhere helping parishioners, as she often was, and

taking their money in exchange for passing on

communications from their deceased loved ones—

messages from the afterlife that these departed souls

had entrusted to him, Patrick Ive, to deliver.

Harriet Sippel told anybody who would listen that

Patrick was practicing his charlatan trickery upon

several villagers, but this might have been her attempt

to enlarge his wrongdoing in order to make a more

shocking story. The servant girl insisted later that she

had only ever mentioned one name to Harriet: that of

Nancy Ducane.

Nancy was at that time not a famous portrait

painter but an ordinary young woman. She had moved

to Great Holling in 1910 with her husband, William,

when he took a job as headmaster of the village

school. William was much older than Nancy. She was

eighteen when they married and he was almost fifty,

and in 1912 he died of a respiratory illness.

According to the wicked rumors that Harriet

Sippel began to circulate in the snow-beleaguered

January of 1913, Nancy had been seen several times

entering and leaving the vicarage at night or in the

evening, always when it was dark, always looking

furtive, and only on nights when Frances Ive wasn’t at

home.

Anyone with a grain of sense would have doubted

the story. It is surely impossible to observe a furtive

expression, or indeed any expression, on a person’s

face in the pitch-darkness. It would have been hard to

ascertain the identity of a woman leaving the vicarage

in the dead of night unless she had a particularly

distinctive gait, and Nancy Ducane did not; indeed, it

is more likely that whoever saw her on these several

occasions followed her home and found out who she

was that way.

It is easier to accept the account of a person more

zealous than yourself than to challenge it, and that is

what most people in Great Holling did. They were

content to trust the rumor and to join Harriet in

accusing Patrick Ive of blasphemy and extortion. Most

believed (or, to avoid Harriet’s vitriolic scorn,

pretended to believe) that Patrick Ive was secretly

acting as a conduit for exchanges between the living

and the souls of the dead, and taking substantial sums

of money from gullible parishioners as recompense. It

struck the villagers of Great Holling as eminently

plausible that Nancy Ducane would be unable to

resist if offered a means of receiving messages from

her late husband, William, especially if the offer came

from the vicar of the parish. And, yes, she might well

pay handsomely for such an arrangement.

The villagers forgot that they knew, liked and

trusted Patrick Ive. They ignored what they knew of

his decency and kindness, and they disregarded

Harriet Sippel’s relish for sniffing out sinners. They

fell in with her campaign of spite because they were

afraid to attract her wrath, but that was not the only

thing that persuaded them. More influential still was

the knowledge that Harriet had two substantial allies:

Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury had lent their

support to her cause.

Ida was known to be the most pious woman in

Great Holling. Her faith never wavered, and she

rarely opened her mouth to speak without quoting

from the New Testament. She was admired and

revered by all, even if she was not the sort of woman

you would seek out if you wanted to have a riot of a

time. She was far from being gay company, but she

was the closest thing the village had to a saint all its

own. And she was engaged to be married to Richard

Negus, a lawyer who was said to have a brilliant

mind.

Richard’s considerable intellect and air of quiet

authority had earned him the respect of the whole

village. He believed the lie when Harriet presented it

to him because it tallied with the evidence of his own

eyes. He too had seen Nancy Ducane—or at least a

woman who might have been Nancy Ducane—leaving

the vicarage in the middle of the night on more than

one occasion when the vicar’s wife was known to be

away visiting her father, or staying in the home of one

of her parishioners.

Richard Negus believed the rumor, and so Ida

Gransbury believed it too. She was shocked to her

core to think that Patrick Ive, a man of the cloth, had

been carrying on in such an unchristian fashion. She,

Harriet and Richard made it their mission to remove

Patrick Ive from his position as vicar of Great

Holling, and to see him expelled from the Church.

They demanded that he appear in public and admit to

his sinful behavior. He declined to do so, since the

rumors were untrue.

The villagers’ hatred of Patrick Ive soon expanded

to include his wife, Frances, whom people said must

have known about the heretical and fraudulent

activities of her husband. Frances swore that she did

not. At first she tried to say that Patrick would never

do such a thing, but when person after person insisted

that he had, she stopped saying anything at all.

Only two people in Great Holling declined to

participate in the hounding of the Ives: Nancy Ducane

(for obvious reasons, some said) and Dr. Ambrose

Flowerday, who was particularly vociferous in his

defense of Frances Ive. If Frances knew about the

unsavory activities that were taking place at the

vicarage, he argued, why did they only happen when

she was elsewhere? Surely that suggested she was

entirely innocent? It was Dr. Flowerday who pointed

out that it is impossible to see a guilty expression on a

person’s face in the pitch dark, Dr. Flowerday who

declared that he intended to believe his friend Patrick

Ive unless and until someone produced undeniable

evidence of his wrongdoing, Dr. Flowerday who told

Harriet Sippel (one day on the street, in front of

several witnesses) that she had very likely packed

more wickedness into the last half hour than Patrick

Ive had committed in his entire life.

Ambrose Flowerday did not make himself popular

by taking this view, but he is one of those rare people

who does not care what the world thinks of him. He

defended Patrick Ive to the Church authorities and

told them that, in his opinion, there was not a grain of

truth in the rumors. He was dreadfully worried about

Frances Ive, who by now was in a pitiful condition.

She had stopped eating, hardly slept, and could not

under any circumstances be persuaded to leave the

vicarage. Patrick Ive was frantic. His position as

vicar and his reputation no longer mattered to him, he

said. His only wish was to restore his wife to good

health.

Nancy Ducane, meanwhile, had said nothing at all,

neither confirming nor denying the rumors. The more

Harriet Sippel goaded her, the more determined she

seemed to remain silent. Then one day, she changed

her mind. She told Victor Meakin that she had

something important to say to put a stop to the

foolishness that had gone on for long enough. Victor

Meakin chuckled, rubbed his hands together, and

quietly slipped out of the back door of the King’s

Head. Very shortly afterward, everybody in Great

Holling knew that Nancy Ducane wished to make an

announcement.

Patrick and Frances Ive were the only people in

the village who did not appear in response to the

summons. Everybody else—even the servant girl who

had started the rumor and whom no one had seen for

weeks—assembled at the King’s Head, eager for the

next phase of the drama to begin.

After a brief, warm smile at Ambrose Flowerday,

Nancy Ducane assumed a cool and forthright manner

to address the crowd. She told them that the story

about Patrick Ive taking her money in exchange for

communications from her late husband was

completely untrue. However, she said, not all of what

was being said was a lie. She had, she admitted,

visited Patrick Ive in the vicarage at night more than

once when his wife was not present. She had done

this because she and Patrick Ive were in love.

The villagers gasped in shock. Some started to

whisper. Some people covered their mouths with their

hands, or clutched the arm of whoever was next to

them.

Nancy waited for the hubbub to subside before she

continued. “We were wrong to meet in secret and put

ourselves in temptation’s way,” she said, “but we

could not stay apart. When we met at the vicarage, all

we ever did was talk—about our feelings for one

another, and how impossible they were. We would

agree that we must never be alone together again, but

then Frances would go somewhere and . . . well, the

strength of our love was such that we could not

resist.”

Someone shouted out, “All you did was talk, was

it? My eye and Betty Martin!” Once again, Nancy

assured the crowd that nothing of a physical nature

had taken place between herself and Patrick Ive.

“I have now told you the truth,” she said. “It is a

truth I would rather not have told, but it was the only

way to put a stop to the vile lies. Those of you who

know what it means to feel deep, all-consuming love

for another person—you will find yourselves unable

to condemn me and unable to condemn Patrick. Those

with condemnation in your hearts—you are ignorant

of love, and I pity you.”

Then Nancy looked straight at Harriet Sippel and

said, “Harriet, I believe you
did
know true love once,

but when you lost George, you chose to forget what

you knew. You made an adversary of love and an ally