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Authors: Carola Dunn

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Mr. Osborne shook his head. “No chance of that with Amos. He may be only a tenant farmer, but he is an intelligent man, and his beliefs, or disbeliefs, rather, are the result of deep reflection. Adelaide knows I visit him as a friend, not as a pastor. I would not offend him by trying to persuade him to return to the Church, even if I …” He cut himself off, with obvious consternation. “But I am keeping you standing, Miss Dalrymple. I must be on my way.”
Abruptly, he raised his hat, and he turned to his bicycle while Daisy was still expressing her thanks for his rescue of her nephew.
Puzzled, her curiosity further aroused instead of satisfied, she watched him wheel the cycle across the lane to the Vicarage. His somewhat rude departure was wholly at odds with his previous courtly manner. He had found himself on the point of disclosing something he had rather keep quiet. What had he been going to say?
Even if he had any hope of succeeding?
Perhaps it was rather remiss of a clergyman to relinquish one of his flock without a fight, Daisy thought vaguely, but not bad enough to explain Mr. Osborne's alarm. Surely not enough to warrant a reprimand from the bishop, let alone defrocking!
Even if he received anonymous letters on the subject?
A vicar was probably no more immune to Poison Pens than anyone else.
A movement off to her right distracted Daisy from her cogitations. A woman trotted down the steps of the Parish Hall, a high-roofed stucco building of the same vintage as the Vicarage, set well back from the lane on the far side of the churchyard. She passed through a gate in the churchyard wall. As she crossed the burial ground towards the lych-gate, passing behind a row of mausoleums and large monuments, her mud-brown dress and hat vanished at intervals from Daisy's view. The effect was oddly sinister, as if the earth kept swallowing her up and disgorging her.
“Mud to mud and ashes to ashes,” Daisy muttered to herself.
But the plump, white-haired old lady who stepped through the lych-gate was very much alive and vigorous, with pink cheeks and bright eyes. These she fixed on Daisy with a querying gaze.
“Good afternoon,” she said kindly, “have you lost your way?”
“No,” Daisy said in surprise. She was beginning to think all she had to do was stand there and half the inhabitants of Rotherden would come to talk to her.
No doubt she looked as if she was lost, or had lost her wits, she realized. “Oh, no, thank you. I was just waiting for two children and a dog, but I suppose the shop will be shut by the time I get there.”
The old lady turned to glance up at the church clock, which promptly began to strike the half hour. “I fear so. Mrs. Burden has no regard for the convenience of others. Often enough I have seen her lock the door when I was just a few steps away. A selfish woman, alas, as I have upon occasion felt obliged to mention to our dear vicar. You are staying at Oakhurst, then?”
“Yes, I'm Violet's sister, Daisy Dalrymple.”
“Ah yes, I had heard you were coming to visit. How delightful for Lady John. I am Mabel Prothero, by the way. I live just two doors down.” She gestured.
“Next door to Mrs. LeBeau?” Daisy asked, grasping at another suspect. “I've just met her. I thought her charming.”
“All is not gold that glitters,” said Miss Prothero darkly. So the kindly, rosy-cheeked old bird had sharp talons, did she? “Much as I dislike speaking ill of my fellow creatures,” she continued, “I hope you will not take offence if an old lady advises you not to pursue that acquaintance.”
A promising opening, and Daisy quickly jumped in: “Why, what … ?”
“Aunt Daisy!” The footsteps galloping down the drive towards her sounded like a herd of elephants, not a mere two children and a dog. “Aunt Daisy, I got my shoe. Now we can go to the shop. Oh, good afternoon, Miss Prothero.”
“Hold that dog! I will not have him putting dirty paws on my skirt.”
“Her,” Derek corrected, grabbing Tinker Bell's collar.
Miss Prothero ignored him. “Children these days are so dreadfully undisciplined, are they not, Miss Dalrymple? A great deal has changed since the War, and not for the better, as I
was saying to the dear vicar only the other day. Well, I'd better be getting home. My Puss will be waiting for his fish. Perhaps we shall meet again while you are here.”
“I hope so,” said Daisy sincerely, or rather purposefully. Miss Prothero was the perfect suspect. As Johnnie had said, Poison Pen letters were practically always written by frustrated spinsters, and by all accounts that description by no means fit Mrs. LeBeau!
Daisy turned to the children, and caught Derek sticking his tongue out at Miss Prothero's retreating back.
“Well, she was rude to me,” he said, catching his aunt's admonitory frown.
“Yes, she was,” Daisy agreed candidly, “but there's no need to lower yourself to her level. Though, actually, I don't suppose she realized she was being rude. Her generation had a different view of children.”
“Pos-it-ively hu-mil-iating.” Derek was joined by Belinda on the second word. They looked at each other, but gravely, not laughing. “We're people too,” said Derek.
“Our feelings can be hurt too,” Bel agreed.
“So can Tinker's,” Derek claimed, and now they laughed.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones,” chanted Bel, and Derek added his voice to the second line: “But words will never harm me.”
“Far less Tinker,” Daisy said with a laugh, “who didn't even know she was being insulted. And dirty paw-marks wouldn't have shown on that dress anyway. Come along, you two—you three—we might as well go home. The shop is closed now.”
“Race you, Bel!” said Derek, and off they ran, hurt feelings forgotten.
Daisy remembered Professor Osborne's Latin tag.
“O quanta species …
” wasn't it? The way his brother had cut him off with a frown had made her wonder whether it was insulting. When
she reached the house, she asked Johnnie, who hotly denied recalling a word of Latin from his schooldays. He directed her to a dictionary of quotations in the library, which he rather thought might have some scraps of the Classics in it.
With some difficulty, for it was indexed under species, not
quanta,
Daisy found it:
“O quanta species cerebrum non habet!
” The translation read, “O that such beauty should be so devoid of understanding!”
Just because she had never been taught any dead languages! Daisy was furious. No wonder Mrs. Osborne disliked her brother-in-law, if she had to put up with such underhanded denigration.
Words were not always harmless, Daisy thought, whatever the old rhyme asserted.
Look at Johnnie's distress over those horrible letters. She was determined to find out who had written them, and she felt she already had a foot in the door. An invitation to morning coffee with Mrs. LeBeau, and acquaintance with the Osbornes and Miss Prothero—not bad going when she had only arrived this afternoon. Surely she could make something of such opportunities.
The door opened wider that evening, just before dinner, when the vicar's wife rang up and asked for Daisy. The speaker for the Women's Institute meeting on Thursday had scratched. Mrs. Osborne wondered whether Miss Dalrymple would be so kind as to stand in. She was sure a lecture on the writing profession would interest members far more than the planned annual lecture on flower-arranging.
Daisy's first impulse was to reject the proposal outright. Let Mrs. Osborne organize her husband's parishioners to her heart's content; Daisy had no intention of being organized.
She hesitated, trying to word her refusal politely. Mrs. Osborne, no doubt adept at assuming that silence gave consent,
went on, “That's settled, then. Excellent! Would you care to come to tea at the Vicarage tomorrow to meet the committee members?”
Would she ever!
If anything in the world was guaranteed to be an absolute hotbed of village gossip, a veritable School for Scandal, it was a WI committee meeting combined with a vicarage tea-party.
“
… A
-and this the burden of his song forever seemed to be-ee,” Daisy sang to herself as she went up to her room to put on a hat, “I care for nobody, no not I, and nobody cares for me.” Now why on earth should the Miller of Dee be circling irritatingly in her head?
Mrs. Burden at the shop, of course, and Miss Prothero's view of her as disobliging. Daisy did not care for Miss Prothero, and was not at all sure she wouldn't put up the shutters if she saw her coming. The two or three times Daisy had popped into the shop before, for odds and ends, the shopkeeper-postmistress had not struck her as an awkward customer, so to speak.
If Mrs. Burden could be persuaded to violate the sacred confidentiality of the Royal Mail, she might be able to tell who else had received anonymous letters. Johnnie had not kept the envelopes, but he remembered them as all being postmarked in the village and addressed in thick pencil in block capitals. Assuming there had been more than Johnnie's half dozen, Mrs. Burden must have noticed them, even if she could not recall to whom they were addressed.
Hatted, gloved, and stockinged in anticipation of her elevenses
with Mrs. LeBeau—lucidly the morning was still cool, though the sky was delphinium blue—Daisy collected Derek, Belinda, and Tinker Bell.
“No climbing gates,” she commanded as they set out for the shop.
“It's all right, Aunt Daisy,” Derek said blithely, yesterday's fright forgotten, “the shop won't close for hours and hours.”
“But I have an engagement at eleven. No climbing gates. Or trees. Have you brought a lead for Tinker?”
“Yes, though she doesn't need one.” From the capacious pocket of his grey flannel shorts, Derek produced three toffee papers, a grubby hankie with something tied up inside, a pebble, a rabbit's foot and two pennies. “Must be the other side,” he muttered, restoring his treasures to their nest. From the other pocket he triumphantly drew a tangle of stout string. “It's a bit knotted.”
“I'll untie the knots,” Belinda offered. “I'm good at knots. Aunt Daisy, may I get shorts with big pockets?”
“We'll have to see what they have in the shop.”
By the time they reached the bottom of the drive, Belinda had reduced the tangle to a useful length of string. Derek tied it to Tinker's collar, much to her disgust, and wrapped the other end around his hand.
While he was thus occupied, Daisy glanced at the lodge. In one of the upper windows a curtain moved. The casement was open a few inches, but there was not the slightest breath of a breeze.
Someone had been watching them. Had the same person watched when Johnnie visited Mrs. LeBeau, all those years ago? If Mr. Paramount was the Poison Pen, his venom was probably directed only at the usurping nephew who had inherited Oakhurst, not at other victims. But why wait so long?
Daisy frowned. The old man might just have grown more
and more embittered, or nutty, until something had to give. Yet the letters surely would have at least touched upon his chief grievance—the injustice of his exile from his childhood home—not harped solely on the LeBeau incident. More likely the writer was his servant, either aiming at eventual blackmail or gone round the bend himself after so many years shut up with his dotty master.
Daisy sighed. She would have to try to talk to them, though it was quite possible today's watcher had nothing to do with the letters but simply had his attention drawn by the children's chatter.
As they turned left into the lane, here beginning its transmogrification into Rotherden's main street, Mrs. LeBeau's small front garden caught Daisy's eye and nose. She had been too interested in its owner yesterday to notice the fragrant rambler roses. White, pink, and yellow with deep golden hearts, they filled the garden with sensuous profusion, and a crimson climber draped the front porch.
In startling contrast was the garden next door. Miss Prothero favoured rigid ranks of scarlet salvia and Oxford blue lobelia, as cultivated by a thousand municipal parkkeepers. They grew in rectangular beds surrounding a rectangular lawn where no daisy dared raise its head amidst the short-trimmed grass. The modern bungalow, in a hideous yellow brick, was equally rectangular, with symmetrical windows. The front door, dead centre, was painted the same mud-brown shade as Miss Prothero had worn yesterday.
The whole thing shrieked “repressed old maid” at Daisy.
On the other hand, the bungalow was set back farther from the street than Mrs. LeBeau's house, and was separated from it by a high privet hedge, rigorously clipped. From indoors Miss Prothero could not possibly observe her neighbour's front door. In autumn, she'd be able to see the garden gate and path
through the hedge, but probably not clearly enough to recognize a person. Of course, she would have watched Johnnie pass her own gate first before stopping at Mrs. LeBeau's, and then entering.
Yes, Miss Prothero was still a prime suspect. However, for the moment Daisy turned her attention to the houses on the other side beyond the Vicarage, a row of small, two-story cottages opening directly onto the street.
“Who lives next door to the Vicarage?” she asked Derek.
“Sam Basin. He works in Wyndham's Garage in Ashford and he's got a tremenjous motor-cycle. It's a Wooler. They're called Flying Bananas, 'cause they're yellow and they have a long petrol tank. He once let me sit on it.”
“Not when it was going!”
“No, but all the same, don't tell Mummy. Mr. and Mrs. Basin live there too, and Sam's sister is one of our housemaids at home.”
Could those spelling mistakes and the clumsily formed letters be signs of an uneducated writer after all? Daisy would have sworn they were artificial, intended to mislead, but perhaps …
“And the next cottage,” Derek went on, “that's Mrs. Molesworth-who-came-down-in-the-world.”
Aha! Jealousy of those who retained the privileged position she had lost might be a powerful motive.
“What's ‘came down in the world'?” Belinda enquired.
Derek explained: “It means she's a lady but she lost all her money so she has to live in a poky little cottage like the common village people.”
“Poor lady!” said soft-hearted Belinda.
“It's all right, she's not starving or anything. She's
enormous
and she laughs a lot, and she's always sucking acid drops and she gives them to children, too. Do you like acid drops?”
“Not much. I like Dolly Mixture almost best, besides chocolate.”
Daisy ceased to listen as the children compared the joys of various sweets. The cottages they were passing now still had a fair view of Mrs. LeBeau's front gate, but she could not go on interrogating Derek about their inhabitants.
At the end of the row, the village green began on the right, sloping down to the Hop-Picker in the far corner. The people in the houses around the green might have seen Johnnie walking up the hill from the station towards Oakhurst, but they could not have seen more without binoculars. Possible, but unlikely and hard to check, Daisy decided.
On the left side of the street, facing the green, was the police station, or rather the local bobby's house, with a front room devoted to police business. Next to it was the village shop, which included the post office and, in a tiny cubicle walled off from the store-room at the back, the telephone exchange. The letter-box was not a pillar-box but the kind set into the wall, round the farther side of the building, Daisy remembered. A footpath ran down that side, cutting across hop-fields to the main road where the motor-bus to Ashford stopped. Fronting the street beyond the path rose the cone roofs of a pair of oast-houses.
It could not have been better arranged for someone who wanted to post letters without being noticed.
As Daisy and retinue approached the shop, a tall, bulky gentleman arrived from the opposite direction. Clad in brown tweed plus-fours, a shooting jacket of Edwardian vintage, and a tweed cap, he walked stiffly, rigidly upright, stalking along like a crane with the aid of a stout walking-stick. His long face was weatherbeaten, with a red tip to his nose, which looked the redder for the bristling white cavalry moustache beneath.
With a slight bow, he gestured to Daisy to enter the shop before him.
“No, please do go first,” said Daisy. “I have to make sure Derek ties the dog securely. It's Brigadier Lomax, isn't it? We've met, after church one Sunday I believe it was. I'm Daisy Dalrymple, Lady John's sister.”
And
you
are the one other victim Johnnie suspects of having received an anonymous letter!
“How d'ye do?” As he spoke, gruffly, the brigadier fished with finger and thumb in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a monocle. Through this he blinked at Daisy, then at the children. “Ah, yes, young Master Frobisher, is it not?”
“Yes, sir, and this is my friend, Miss Fletcher.”
“How d'ye do, Miss Fletcher.” This time the knobbly hand dived into a trouser-pocket and came up with a shilling. “Here, my boy. Treat the young lady to some sweets.”
“Gosh, thanks, sir. Is it all right if we buy a comic paper?”
“Yes, yes, by all means.” His duty done by the younger generation, Brigadier Lomax turned back to Daisy. “The wife mentioned you were coming to stay at Oakhurst, Miss Dalrymple. My daughter and son-in-law are staying with us, and my son's fiancée and her brother. There was some talk about getting up a tennis party, I believe, if you should care for it.”
“It sounds delightful,” Daisy said cordially. She was an absolute duffer at tennis, and could think of a hundred things she'd rather do than run about waving a racquet on a hot afternoon. But she might get a chance to sit in the shade with lemonade, chatting with the brigadier, and who could tell what magic her guileless eyes might work on him?
“I'll tell Rosa,” he said, with such gloom she revised the odds of his remaining within a mile of the tennis court. He courteously ushered her between the boxes of plums, pears, potatoes, onions, carrots, runner beans, and peas, and into the shop. There, she once again invited him to go first.
“The children will take ages choosing their sweets and paper,” she assured him.
No one else was there except for Mrs. Burden, a thin middle-aged woman with quick, jerky movements. Her daughter's voice could be heard from the telephone exchange cubicle, asking a caller what number he wanted. Daisy congratulated herself on having arrived between the rush of those who considered shopping early a virtue and those who put it off till just before time to get lunch. By sheer luck it was also market day in nearby Ashford, perfect conditions for a good gossip with the shopkeeper.
Brigadier Lomax bought pipe-tobacco and some stamps, and left. Mrs. Burden joined Daisy in the corner of the shop where she had found just what she was looking for. On shelves above the gumboots and plimsolls, among the white lisle stockings, babies' sunbonnets, handkerchiefs, farm-labourers' smocks, and socks of every description, was a pile of white cotton shorts, elastic-waisted.
“Everyone seems to go to the seaside these days,” said Mrs. Burden, “at least for the day in a charabanc. These are so much more convenient than a frock for little girls playing in the sand.”
“Yes, and in the garden. I'll take a couple of pairs if you have the right size. No shirts? Well, she'll just have to borrow Derek's. Belinda, come and see if these will fit.”
Belinda was disappointed with the one small patch pocket considered adequate for girls, but otherwise pleased. She went back to helping Derek decide between Beano and Dandy. At a counter encumbered by a large yellow cheese and a small display stand of boot polish, Daisy paid for the shorts and half a dozen picture postcards.
“I'll need stamps, too,” she said.
“If you wouldn't mind stepping over to the Post Office counter, miss.”
“Once you've stuck the stamp on, there's not much space for the address on these postcards, is there?” Daisy said chattily. “A friend of mine has a very long address, and I always have trouble squeezing it in. I expect you get some letters to be sorted with pretty badly written addresses.”
“There's some are a real puzzle for sure, miss.” Producing a block of penny stamps, Mrs. Burden leaned on the counter, quite ready for a chat. “You wouldn't think they cared if their letters never got where they're going.”
“I try to remember to write the town in capital letters. I suppose it would be best to do the whole thing that way. Do you get many like that?”
“Well, miss, to tell the truth, it's mostly those who haven't got much education who write all in capitals, and it stands to reason they don't write many letters.”
“I suppose not,” Daisy said, trying to think of some more leading yet innocent-appearing questions. “At least, when they do write, the capital letters make it easy for you to read the address.”
“You'd think so, wouldn't you?” said Mrs. Burden. “The trouble is, often as not they write in pencil, and it's that hard to make it out, specially by the gaslight. Still, it doesn't happen often. In the general way of things.”

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