The Town Cried Murder Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1939, renewed 1967, by Zenith Brown.

  All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  CHAPTER 1

  The first I knew that Faith Yardley was actually going to marry Mason Seymour was the afternoon her aunt Melusina Yardley stopped me going into the Powder Horn in Market Square to a meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. I don’t now recollect what we were meeting about, except that it concerned something the Restoration was doing in Williamsburg that Melusina didn’t think they ought to do. And as everybody who knows Melusina Yardley knows she will some day object to the way the milk and honey flow through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem, nobody was particularly concerned about it, except to get through in time to get to an affair they were having at the college green, at the end of the Duke of Gloucester Street.

  I myself was too perturbed to do more than vote “No” automatically with everybody else when we heard Melusina vote “Yes.” All I could think of was what she’d said:

  “Lucy, it’s still a secret, but Faith is going to marry Mason Seymour, and I want you to come over and see what we can do about her mother’s wedding dress.”

  If the Restoration Company had proposed razing Bruton Parish Church to the ground, or paving Palace Green, I don’t think I should have had the mind to worry about it just then. Maybe I’m too old-fashioned—or maybe modern, I’m sure I don’t know—but I still think it’s wrong to force a girl of twenty to marry a man of forty, or even more for all I know, just because the family needs money. And to all those people who instantly say, “Nonsense, you can’t force modern girls to do anything,” there’s always the answer that there are a thousand ways of forcing people to do things without using a club or locking them up in a safe room on bread and water, the way they did our recalcitrant grandmothers. A club can be real without being made of blackthorn, and the club Melusina Yardley held over her niece young Faith was a good deal realer than one of the tomahawks of old Powhatan that we still preserve in the Powder Horn.

  Because Faith Yardley adored her father, and ever since she’s been old enough to want any of the things that her Aunt Melusina doesn’t see any sense in her having, she’s been effectively stopped at the point of rebellion by Melusina’s reminding her all over again of her own sacrifice for Peyton Yardley, Faith’s father who’s Melusina’s older brother. And Faith, who would have given her bright head for her father, had always given up. I never thought she’d have to give up her heart for him too… but when Melusina said she was going to marry Mason Seymour, I knew she’d done just that.

  I have to go a long way back to make it clear. In Williamsburg everything goes back…just as each yellow and purple fall crocus you see in Virginia gardens in August and September goes back to the bulbs they brought from the Mediterranean and planted in the Palace gardens when the Royal Governors lived here in colonial days. Williamsburg itself is like the fall crocuses. It bloomed in its great heyday, the center of royal colonial society, and then it lay for long years of proud poverty and the desolation of war, stretching out a bare existence on barren ground, as the crocus bulbs buried in the stony ruins of the Palace gardens stretched out theirs. Then its fairy godparents came along and restored its old beauty and grandeur for the whole nation, as the garden clubs rescued the crocus bulbs struggling in the ruins and planted them all over Virginia. And the Yardleys are rather like Williamsburg and the crocuses, although they definitely haven’t been restored and Faith is the only one who resembles a flower at all.

  The Yardleys, like everybody else, were completely impoverished after the Civil War. And, like all the rest of us, they clung desperately to their houses and their land. The plantation on the James River was sold when Faith’s father was sent to take his medical degree at the University. He came back to Williamsburg and practised, but he never sent bills to any one who couldn’t afford to pay for his services, and so few people could that he finally gave up sending them altogether. The only ones that were ever sent after that were sent by Miss Melusina, who was born managing other people’s affairs, and after her brother stopped telling her to whose houses he went in the old buggy behind Nellie the bay mare, she never knew where to send the bills, and gave up too, reluctantly and not gracefully.

  Then came Melusina’s Great Sacrifice—except that she didn’t, at the time, know it was a sacrifice or she certainly never would have made it. The reason I happen to know is that it was my sacrifice too. I’ve never been able to make the use of it that Melusina has, because I’ve never had any one to throw it up to. And our sacrifice, if I may call him that, was a young man whose family moved to Williamsburg when we were grown girls. They owned the livery stable on Buttermilk Hill, and were, of course, definitely outside the pale. But the young man, whom we considered—and our parents certainly considered—an impertinent young upstart, managed to address Melusina Yardley…which is what we called proposing marriage to her. She was a handsome high-spirited creature of nineteen then, and she’s supposed to have boxed his ears soundly and sent him packing. A little later—it was in the ruined tower of the old church at Jamestown—he did me the same honor. I was just seventeen, and while I didn’t box his ears I did run back to the picnic party the color of a peony and avoided him thereafter as I would the plague. After that he left Williamsburg, and when he came back ten years later he was doing very well in the automobile business. I remember how sorry we were for the pale girl he’d married, because obviously nothing would ever come of a mode of locomotion so opposed to nature and reason.

  And then, just about the time the Yardleys were finally forced to sell the panelling of the old library to a Northern museum, we heard that our sacrifice had become one of the very wealthy men of the United States; and Melusina convinced herself that she’d recognized the seeds of genius in the poor but honest son of a livery stable, and she’d listened to the call of duty, forsaking love, and forsaking wealth, because her brother needed her to take care of him. That was just before the last war. The immediate reason for this extraordinary volte-face wasn’t entirely the fact that our former beau had got to be a multi-millionaire, though I expect that was part of it. It was chiefly because Melusina’s brother Doctor Peyton Yardley suddenly began to act in the most amazing and inexplicable—though quite natural—fashion.

  He was, or so everybody, including Miss Melusina, had assumed, a double-twisted old bachelor. He’d reached the age of forty-five, which seemed so much older then to me than it does now, without having shown the slightest interest in any woman. Melusina, who was five years younger than he, had tried for years to persuade him to marry the widow of a Chicago packer who had bought Whitehall on the James River, and who, having first married Money, was now looking out for Family. Doctor Yardley was not i
nterested, and Melusina saw great wealth pass them by a second time. Then one evening Doctor Yardley was called out to Rose-well to see a young lady who had been thrown from her horse while taking a fence with some other young people in an impromptu hunt. He went out once a day until she seemed to everybody to be mending very nicely, then began going twice a day. Suddenly Miss Melusina smelled a rat, but it was too late. It was just at that point that her great sacrifice sprang full grown…like whoever it was from the forehead of Zeus. Everybody was stunned by it; but they were so much more stunned by Doctor Yardley and the girl, whose name was Faith, whose family no one had ever heard of, since they weren’t Virginians, that Melusina’s fiction gradually became accepted fact, and people shook their heads over her selfless devotion and the ingratitude and folly of the middle-aged male. Everybody, that is, except her brother, who went quietly along in his own unperturbed fashion and married the girl whom he adored and who adored him.

  By that time my father, who was a lawyer, had died, and another man who had been at the picnic at Jamestown too, and at other picnics, had gone to the Philippines and had fallen there. And I was taking in a little sewing to help keep the house we’ve lived in in Francis Street since it was built in 1732, and where I still live…except that the restoration people have made it habitable again and painted the corner press with the Chinese Chippendale cornice and the pine panelling in the drawing room that I almost sold a dozen times to dealers down from Richmond. So I made Faith’s wedding dress. It was the first one I’d made. I watched it move down the nave of Bruton Church, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the spot at the narrow waist line where I’d pricked my finger, working late one night on it, and made a tiny scarlet spot on the white satin…so that I always thought of part of myself standing at the chancel rail, between the canopied pew of the royal governor and the high old pulpit with its massive bell-shaped sounding board that I used to sit as a child and watch, and expect to fall like the upper millstone and grind the white-surpliced rector to grist.

  Perhaps that was why Melusina, sitting in the square Royal pew that day, absolutely convinced by then that she really had sacrificed wealth and honor to a brother who was repaying her by marrying a chit of a girl as poor as a Bruton church mouse, seemed unusually vinegary lipped to me. And perhaps that’s why I always liked Peyton Yardley’s young wife, and why, when she died of the flu during the war years, little Faith, who was just three, became almost like a child I might have had if there’d never been malaria in the rice fields of the Philippines.

  Doctor Yardley made no more calls after that, and mixed no more powders in the old stone mortar that his grandmother’s slaves had used to grind spices in…which was supposed to be why his medicines had a far-off taste of Samarkand, and cured things more quickly than powders do today, or the other doctors’ powders did then. He retired to his panelled study that overlooks the long alleys of old box and the garden with those hundred-petalled roses that they make attar of roses out of. Sometimes he walked in the garden with its carpet of periwinkle and violets, and its white sand paths bordered with spice pinks and yellow pansies and great pink poppies and lemon lilies, down past the hundred-and-fifty-year-old crape myrtles shrouded in pink rambler, to the white picket fence covered with woodbine and honeysuckle, beyond the lily and mosquito pond, where the line of hackberry and chinaberry and mulberry and locusts is, up the ravine beyond the old spring house. Otherwise he never went out, except once a year to Commencement at William and Mary College, and once a year to the Phi Beta Kappa dinner—until they began having it in the Apollo Room of the restored Raleigh Tavern, and then he stopped that. His own life was like Williamsburg and the fall crocuses from the Palace gardens: it flowered briefly and beautifully, and stopped.

  Then Melusina took it over. She moved Marshall Yardley, a cousin’s child eight years or so older than little Faith, into Yardley Hall, and lavished on him all the adoration that the automobile manufacturer and an ungrateful brother had forfeited. She sold the Peale portrait of Washington that used to hang in the drawing room to send him to the University. Some people thought Doctor Yardley never knew it was gone, or knew for that matter when young Marshall came, or went, or came back again. He paid the scantiest possible attention to little Faith, and I don’t think anybody who knew them ever called her by her name in front of him…not consciously, but out of a kind of respect, I suppose, or maybe awe, even, at what the other Faith had meant to him. It always seemed to me he’d never really seen his daughter, not with any vision deeper than the barest surface of his retina at any event. I know now that I was right, for I was in the room the moment he really saw her for the first time.

  Faith, however, worshipped her father. The idea that she had a right to a more intimate relationship with him never for an instant occurred to her. I’ve seen her tiptoe past the library where he sat as a nun would go past a shrine. I’ve seen her little nose flattened against the window pane as she watched him pace slowly back and forth in the garden, his head bent forward, his hands behind his back, and seen her watch him from a stool in the corner the way a spaniel puppy watches his master. He was like a being far removed from her life, yet a hallowed and precious part of it.

  When the Restoration came, and started buying up the properties that make up the so-called restoration area, and Williamsburg became the Cinderella town of America, Faith came to see me one day. She was little more than a child. I don’t know who’d explained the situation to her. I can see her now, standing in my door that was pretty dingy then, not at all the way you’d see it now. She was a homely child, with a funny freckled nose and enormous tranquil grey eyes in a pointed, almost comically earnest little face. Her hair was an odd gold color, and pulled back in such tight little plaits that it always seemed to me her head must hurt. She had on a pink check sunbonnet and high buttoned shoes—that was the way Melusina had dressed when she was Faith’s age. She stood in the door, those big-calm grey eyes raised to mine.

  “It’ll be a very fine thing for us, Cousin Lucy,” she said soberly. “Because you know we’re very poor, and they’ll let Father and Aunt Melusina go on living there as long as they keep on living, without costing them anything. They’ll even put on a new roof, and pay the insurance that costs so much, and then Aunt Melusina won’t have to sell any more of the pictures—because pretty soon Father will notice they’re gone, and she can’t keep on telling him they’re in Richmond being repaired. Then, you see, if Father doesn’t have to pay the taxes or anything, he can use the money he’s got to buy books, and Aunt Melusina can have the fur coat she saw in Richmond.”

  I was surprised, of course, because just the day before at the meeting of the Guild in the Parish House, which was the old Wythe House on Palace Green, Melusina had delivered herself on the subject at a right considerable length.

  “Has your father decided to sell?”

  Her big eyes widened.

  “I thought everybody had, except…” She named several of the important recalcitrants of the town…not knowing, the lamb, that her Aunt Melusina would have been the chief recalcitrant in Paradise.

  But the next afternoon when she paid her daily call on me, she sat very primly for a moment with her ridiculous shoes crossed—I never could feel they had any relation to the little feet in them—and her hands, grubby in spite of Melusina, folded in her lap.

  “I shouldn’t have said what I did yesterday, Cousin Lucy. We’re very proud, even if we are poor. We think the idea of being tenants in our own house is very impertinent.”

  I knew she was blinking her long lashes to keep back the tears, though all I could see at the moment was the tight stretched part on the top of her head.

  “So we aren’t going to have Yardley Hall painted new white like the Tucker House.”

  She stopped for a moment, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Then she looked up at me. “—But it would have been right nice, wouldn’t it, Cousin Lucy?�
�

  I nodded.

  CHAPTER 2

  That wasn’t, of course, the last I heard about the Yardleys not selling out to the Yankees, but—in effect—it was the whole thing in a nutshell. It had the indubitably authentic ring of Melusina in it. I could hear her thin bitter voice as Faith Yardley was repeating her ultimatum, almost by rote.

  Then a little later Faith went to stay with some cousins in Richmond so she could go to a church school there. I watched the growing bewilderment in her wide-set grey eyes as she came back for occasional school holidays and saw the face of Williamsburg change into what was its old self for us, but for her generation was something entirely new. Some five hundred of the buildings she’d known came down, fully grown trees, box and crape myrtle a hundred years old were planted, old grey tumble-down ghosts of houses were straightened and painted a gleaming white again. Service stations were moved out beyond Woodpecker Street, a royal palace reappeared on a refuse lot this side of the railroad tracks, behind two schoolhouses that had desecrated Palace Green. The schoolhouses were torn down and a fine new schoolhouse built on what we used to call Peacock Hill. The Capitol at the end of Duke of Gloucester Street rose in what had been an empty lot with a few foundations marked with bronze plates by the Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. White fences with woodbine and honeysuckle and trumpet vine and wisteria trailing on them appeared, and jonquils along the roadsides were so thick that the children forgot to pick them. Very soon we who lived there forgot what the town had come to look like in the years during and following the last war, the way one forgets a bad dream or a severe pain, and began to think we’d always lived surrounded by gardens…or would have, if it weren’t for the hundreds of cars bearing licenses from every state in the Union and Canada that came and went up and down Duke of Gloucester Street. The time the service stations were on it seemed as remote as the year they had a railroad running down the center of it to carry soldiers to the Yorktown Centennial.