The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place (6 page)

“That’s Mrs. Plackett to perfection!” Pocked Louise giggled. “You really have a talent, Alice.”

“Off to bed with you, Miss Dudley,” Alice said in a spot-on imitation of Mrs. Plackett’s cross voice. “Remember: beauty, that jewel to which every young lady should aspire, and you in particular, Miss Dudley, comes from taking adequate rest.”

Louise laughed. “I was so sick of her carping on about my ugly skin. What does a scientist care if her skin is pocked?” Her face grew worried. “Say, you don’t mean it, do you? About bedtime? Because I can stay up as late as the rest of you, if I want to!”

Stout Alice ignored this and scratched her side morosely.

Disgraceful Mary Jane shuddered. “Ugh, her horrid scratching. It’s a wonder she ever made a man want to marry her.”

“Perhaps the Captain was also a scratcher,” Dour Elinor said. “Those seafaring men catch
f
leas from rats. Perhaps they scratched one another.”

“Coo! Coo!”

They gazed out the dark window toward the garden from where the sound came.

“Henry Butts will get an earful from me in the morning,” Disgraceful Mary Jane said.

“First thing we should do, I think, in our life without adults, is get a bulldog,” Stout Alice declared. “Someone to scare away farm boys and intruders, and bite policemen.”

“Not if the policemen are handsome,” Mary Jane said.

“But what if it isn’t Henry Butts out there?” Dour Elinor said. “What if it’s someone with more sinister intentions?”

Disgraceful Mary Jane began unpinning her braids. “If it was, they wouldn’t coo their fool heads off.”

Stout Alice shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. Murders. Two of them right under our noses.”

“I know.” Dour Elinor shivered. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

Stout Alice sniffed in disgust. Then she sniffed again and pinched a fold of her headmistress’s nightgown to her nose. “Eugh. This smells of Mrs. Plackett. After a long afternoon in the vegetable garden.”

“Take heart,” Smooth Kitty said. “By tomorrow Mrs. Plackett and her odors will be resting in the vegetable garden permanently. We’ll launder all her clothes.”

“Shouldn’t Louise and I perform an autopsy first?” Dour Elinor inquired. “I can handle the bodies, and Louise can test the specimens.”

Disgraceful Mary Jane clutched at her stomach. “Really, Elinor,” she snapped. “Sometimes you go too far. Handle the bodies? Even Constance Contrary and her ghastly brother, Aldous the Arch-fiend, deserve at least enough respect not to be mangled by school-maidens before they reach their eternal rest. Chop them open to find … what? Daggers in their bellies?”

A wild light
f
lashed in Dour Elinor’s heavy-lidded dark eyes. “Poisons,” she said. “Once they’re buried in the gardens, crucial evidence goes with them, lost forever.”

Pocked Louise sat upright. “Oh! What’s the matter with me?”

They all stared at her. “I don’t know, dear, what
is
the matter with you?” Smooth Kitty asked.

“Poisons. Evidence. Of course, of course!” She gripped the armrests of her chair feverishly. “The food. When we cleaned up dinner, what did we do with the food?”

“Scraped it into the slop bucket like always,” Disgraceful Mary Jane replied. “Calm down, little Louise. I dumped it on the compost pile while Kitty took Miss Fringle her tea.”

Pocked Louise sprang to her feet. “Come on! There’s not a moment to lose!”

She grabbed a candle, lit it in the coal embers of the parlor fire, and ran downstairs to the kitchen and from there, outside in her bare feet. The bewildered older girls followed suit and brought candles with them.

Chill evening air caught them like a slap in the face after the drowsy warmth of the parlor. The grass was scratchy and damp with dew on their bare feet. Church bells rang out for ten o’clock, and all the girls jumped. Their short walk to the compost heap suddenly felt pregnant with danger.

“Watch out for Henry Butts,” Disgraceful Mary Jane warned. “If he tries to kiss me I’ll stab him with a pitchfork.” She paused. “Unless, perhaps, he’s a nice kisser, in which case I’ll wait a minute or two, and then stab him…”

“Hush with your foolish kissing talk,” Stout Alice panted. “Louise, we all ate the food. If it was poisoned, wouldn’t we all be … Oh! Of course. The veal!”

They stopped in their tracks, looking like a ring of ghosts in the dark night, with wavering candlelight playing over their pale faces and nightdresses.

“Martha cooked the veal,” Smooth Kitty whispered.

Stout Alice shook her head slowly. “She
wouldn’t
.”

“She couldn’t!” Disgraceful Mary Jane cried.

“By accident, she could,” said Dour Elinor ominously.

“She didn’t!” Alice insisted.

“Come on.” Pocked Louise urged them onward. “We must find that veal.”

“It’ll be revolting now, all mushed up with the compost and cold gravy and slimy beans.” Disgraceful Mary Jane grimaced at the thought.

They reached the compost pile, hidden behind the woodshed, where its odors wouldn’t reach the chairs by the
f
lowerbeds in the sunny back garden. Here there was no trace of light from the parlor windows, and the girls’ candles could scarcely penetrate the thick darkness. The compost pile was a blur of indistinct rottenness, and the smell made their stomachs clench.

“This won’t do,” Smooth Kitty exclaimed. “I can’t see a thing in all this mush. Mary Jane, do you remember where you dumped tonight’s bucket?”

“Never mind.” Pocked Louise had squatted down some feet away from the edge of the pile. Dour Elinor crouched beside her. “We have what we need.”

A frigid wind blew over them, snuffing out several candles.

“What is it?” Smooth Kitty cried, then immediately felt ashamed of the fear in her voice.

“A stoat, with a piece of veal in its mouth,” Pocked Louise announced with scientific neutrality. “I trod on its fur.”

Dour Elinor supplied the vital detail. “It’s dead.”

CHAPTER 5

“Poor little thing,” Stout Alice said. She dabbed her eyes with Mrs. Plackett’s nightgown sleeve.

“Hardly,” Disgraceful Mary Jane said. “That stoat’s probably the one that’s been making off with our baby chicks.”

“Justice will find you in the end,” Dour Elinor declared.

“Just like it did Mrs. Plackett and Mr. Godding?” Pocked Louise asked.

“Oh, let’s go inside,” Disgraceful Mary Jane exclaimed. “I’m sick and tired of this whole business. It’s a wretched dead rodent, for heaven’s sake.”

“Technically not a rodent.” Louise pried the stoat’s jaws apart and wrestled her morsel of meat from its vicious teeth. “A member of the weasel family.” She peered over the rest of the compost pile, snagged the other piece of slimy fried veal, and wrapped it in a handkerchief. Then they trudged back toward the house, by now with only one lit candle, Kitty’s, among them.

“Hsst!” Kitty threw an arm back to block other girls from advancing, and quickly blew out her light. “
Don’t move.
”

They waited, silent and watchful.

Stout Alice felt a curious tingly terror run up her spine and wondered if she might lose control of herself and start to scream.
Odd
, she thought
. I’m not the fanciful sort. Could it be ghosts? Rubbish. But what, if not? How would Mrs. Plackett’s ghost feel to discover Alice impersonating the dead and making off with her clothes? Any more of this, my girl,
she scolded herself,
and it’ll be the sanatorium for you.

They waited. A thin crescent moon peeked through a gap in thick-covering clouds. Pocked Louise listened to the silence till her ears itched. What had Kitty heard or seen?

Then they heard it. A snap, sharp as a drumbeat. A breaking twig.

Something moved in the dark. They sensed rather than saw it. Then there was no doubting it. Footsteps ran away, crashing through brambles and brush, helter-skelter toward the Butts farm.

Tension drained from the group like sand from a broken hourglass. “It’s only stupid Henry,” Disgraceful Mary Jane said. “We had nothing to fear.”

“But did he hear us?” Dour Elinor whispered. “
We spoke freely of death!
”

Smooth Kitty kicked at a tuft of grass with her bare toes. She should have known better. She should have foreseen this. As someone who prided herself on leadership, on management, on remembering every detail, this whole business had grown terribly sloppy.

“Those footsteps sounded fairly far away,” Stout Alice said. “I think we can comfortably assume Henry didn’t hear us. If he did, he probably wouldn’t have understood it all.”

“See? I told you he’s stupid,” Mary Jane said.

“I didn’t mean that,” Alice said. “I meant, without context, our words would make little sense to him … oh, never mind.”

They reached the door and went inside. Their nightgowns were wet to the knees with dew from the tall grasses. They sat by the coals in the parlor fireplace for several minutes to dry out. No one spoke.

“Well, here I go,” Stout Alice said at last. “Time for me to crawl into bed with Miss Fringle, on the very spot where a dead woman has lain for hours. At least I’m spared your job of hauling her away somewhere and hiding her. Where will you stuff the old girl?”

Smooth Kitty was happy to stop worrying for a moment whether or not Henry Butts had heard all. “Oh, I already have that figured out,” she said. “We’ll carry her upstairs to your bed.”

Pocked Louise and Dour Elinor retired to the bedroom they shared with Stout Alice while the older girl remained downstairs in the parlor, waiting to change beds with Mrs. Plackett’s body. Louise crawled in between her chilly sheets and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Are you worried a bit, Elinor?” she asked her roommate.

Dour Elinor combed slow strokes through her long black hair. “About what?”

Louise shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. About murder, I suppose.”

Elinor’s comb caught upon a snarl. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Murder doesn’t pay much heed to who’s worried about it or not. The Grim Reaper always collects his prize in the end.”

Pocked Louise rolled her eyes. It was so frustrating, sometimes, trying to talk to Elinor. “What if it was one of us?” she asked. “Do you think it’s possible?”

Elinor rose and stretched. “Of course I do.” Her nightgown rustled as she blew out their candle and climbed into the upper bunk of their bed. “Anything is possible.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. Whom do you suspect?”

Louise shuddered. “Suspect! It’s such a serious word. I wouldn’t dare to suspect anyone. Not without evidence.”

Elinor lowered her head down over the edge of her bed. Her hair hung down almost to the top of Louise’s bed, a swaying curtain that glistened in the wavery moonlight. “I won’t tell a soul what you say,” she said. “It’s not suspecting. It’s just asking the question. A scientist asks questions to find the truth, don’t you think?”

Louise slid down under her covers. “Yes … naturally.”

“Then what questions occur to you?”

This, Louise felt certain, was one of those times when saying nothing would be the wisest policy. But Elinor
did
promise to keep her words secret. And it wasn’t often that the older girls seemed this interested in Louise’s opinions. This was murder, after all. What if she said nothing, and then poor Elinor was the next to fall? Louise could never forgive herself.

“I don’t know anything,” Louise whispered. “Not a thing. Not a single clue.” She took a deep breath. “But doesn’t it seem rather strange to you how quick Kitty was to take charge of things?” She heard Elinor’s soft intake of breath and plowed ahead. “I mean … this idea of running the school all by ourselves. It seemed so … almost premeditated. Almost as if Kitty had been thinking of and planning this for a long time.”

Elinor nodded her dangling head, sending her hair undulating.

“That’s not suspicion, of course,” Louise said. “It’s just a question I have.”

“I know.” Elinor pulled her head back up and lay down upon her bed.

Footsteps down the hall made them both pause. Someone creeping down the hall after dark, and tonight … Louise’s pulse raced. She slipped out of bed to listen at the door. She breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s only Kitty and Mary Jane,” she said, then blushed to think of all she’d just said. “They’re bringing us the body.”

Smooth Kitty woke at four o’clock in the morning, when nothing but a sable stripe along the eastern horizon suggested morning would come. After a late evening spent deep in calculating thoughts and plans, she’d had less than three hours of sleep, but Kitty was blessed with the knack of waking whenever she had predetermined to—to the precise minute. Any less control over her person would have been unacceptable to her well-ordered mind.

She shook Disgraceful Mary Jane awake. The older girl did not rouse easily. Her chestnut curls spilled over her pillow like a waterfall.
It’s a shame she’s so disgraceful
, Kitty thought.
She really is quite lovely. Then again,
Kitty considered,
perhaps moral rectitude and dazzling beauty could scarcely coexist in the same person
.
Not, at any rate, in a person like Mary Jane.

“Mary Jane,” Kitty whispered. “Time to go grave digging.”

“Whatever you say, Reggie,” Mary Jane murmured. “Mamma will never know.”

“Not Reggie.
Kitty
,” said that young lady firmly. “Wake up!”

“Hmph?” Mary Jane’s eyes opened reluctantly. She squinted at Kitty’s offensive candle, scowled, and rolled herself out of bed. “Did I hear you say ‘grave digging,’ or was I having a nightmare?”

Kitty pulled her gardening frock over her shift and reached for yesterday’s stockings. No use soiling today’s before the sun was even properly up. “This whole excursion is a nightmare, I suppose,” she said, “but we must keep our eyes on the prize. Independence! Freedom from tyranny at home and at school. We shall form a perfect utopia of young womanhood right here at Saint Etheldreda’s School. It’s fitting, don’t you think? Saint Etheldreda, the Maiden Saint?”