The Town Cried Murder Read online

  Then Faith Yardley came home to stay. She’d changed almost as much as Williamsburg. She’d grown up to those wonderful eyes she’d had as a child. Her freckles were gone, her hair, released from Melusina’s iron hand, had darkened until it was a burnished gold. She’d cropped it, to Melusina’s horror, and she’d also taken to using lipstick, and powder on her nose, and although Melusina didn’t like that either, with the example of the girls at William and Mary always before her she subsided eventually, and was even thought by some of her contemporaries to use a touch now and then herself. The Yardleys still hadn’t sold the Hall, and with the rest of Williamsburg so spruce and clean and grand it looked pretty seedy and run down. Faith never mentioned selling it again to me, but when somebody suggested that she be one of the hostesses in their paniered colonial gowns and frilled caps who show visitors around the Palace and the Raleigh and the Capitol, she shook her head.

  “I’d love to,” she said wistfully one morning, as we watched the blue coach with its liveried coachman and footman driving up to the Palace gate and saw Hallie Taswell in sprigged muslin with a yellow petticoat flutter down, as grand if she hadn’t probably covered up the breakfast dishes and left them in the kitchen sink to gather flies.

  “Some other people who haven’t sold work for the Restoration,” I said casually.

  She gave me a sideways impish glance and raised her eyebrows, black and thick and unplucked.

  “We Yardleys are as proud as Lucifer.”

  “Yes, I remember,” I said.

  She laughed. “And rather silly, if you ask me—but don’t tell Aunt Melusina.”

  It was just about then that Mason Seymour came to Williamsburg.

  He came with a white man servant, and an open car that looked very expensive to me, and took the Davis house in Scotland Street, and presented letters to everybody in town, and was accepted by everybody, because his mother was from Fauquier County—which means a lot in Virginia. Mason Seymour was, I believe, what is known as God’s gift to women. And since Williamsburg has been essentially a woman’s town as long as I’ve known it—the fire of the signers burns more ardently in the feminine bosom, it seems, and furthermore every man between sixteen and sixty marched out of Williamsburg in 1861 and few came back, and each generation that’s come up since has gone out into the world—I suppose Mason Seymour was also God’s gift to Williamsburg. He had nothing to do with the Restoration, except that he was a sort of restoration in himself. For the first time since old Colonel Dandridge lay down with his forefathers in Bruton Churchyard, the ladies of Williamsburg had a gentleman of means and leisure who had nothing to do but make himself agreeable. I don’t mean there weren’t other men in the town who were charming and agreeable, and even gallant upon occasion, with sufficient provocation or a mint julep or two, but they never made a life work of it. They hadn’t time, for one thing, and most of them were married. Even the students at the college had work to do, from time to time, and in any case their interest was bounded by the ripe age of eighteen, or possibly twenty.

  Mason Seymour was subject to no such limitation. He could be—and was—as agreeable to Miss Melusina, who was sixty, as he was to Ruth Napier who was twenty-eight; and each of them, it appeared to me, was as susceptible to his particular charm as Hallie Taswell was, and Hallie was forty-six on Christmas Day last in spite of anything she says to the contrary. I know it because my mother went over to her mother’s to help out, and ruined a day I’d looked forward to for weeks, because we were to have gone in the buggy to York to spend the day with some cousins, and couldn’t go on account of Hallie, who had to be kept wrapped up in warm flannel cloths saturated with sweet oil.—I dare say that’s why I’ve always been prejudiced against Hallie. Certainly I’ve never blamed the Restoration for her, the way Melusina does. Although I do think that if you put the average woman who has never been much to look at even when she was young in the sprigged muslin paniers of a colonial dame, which is the most flattering costume in the world, with its crisp white tissue berthas and velvet ribbons and white frilled beribboned cap, and put her in a room filled with priceless beautiful things, you’ve done all that is humanly possible to make her lovely to look at, and the least she can do is to act as charming as she looks.

  And Hallie Taswell is the only one of all the Williamsburg ladies I know who, when she took off her mustard-colored homemade knit dress and put on fancy dress, let it go to her head. Because, to give the devil his due, I don’t think Mason Seymour, when he whispered into the ever so faintly rouged lobe of Hallie’s ear, in the state dining room of the Royal Palace, that she was as lovely as the chelsea figure on the carved mantel, had the faintest notion that he meant anything further than that. I expect, as a matter of fact, that he was merely keeping his hand in…or it may have been habit too strong to break. But he didn’t know Hallie. He didn’t know that she had at one time nursed an ambition to go on the stage—a thing no nice girl did, especially if she had no talent—as well as a hundred other romantic impossible ambitions that marriage to Hugh Taswell could only be the most pedestrian substitute for.

  The little old Williamsburg lady who kept a dame’s school and never married—or so she said—because she read Paradise Lost and fell in love with Satan came nearer her heart’s desire, I expect. Because Hugh Taswell is pleasant, but he’s not romantic. His life is bounded by his insurance business, his lawn, his roses that he’s continually spraying with one noxious thing after another, his dinner, his pipe, a rubber of bridge and his bed. They say a gypsy once at Capitol Landing told Hallie she was cut out for a glamorous life. Whoever it was who put her, one day when there were two thousand tourists in town, in a colonial costume with frilled cap, and let her ride down the Palace Green and up Duke of Gloucester Street to the Capitol in a blue coach with a liveried coachman in the peach broadcloth draped box and a liveried footman up behind, certainly finished the gypsy’s job.

  But Hallie Taswell would have been a silly woman anywhere. It just happened that she was born in Williamsburg, and that Mason Seymour happened, at a psychological moment, to tell her she was as lovely as a chelsea figure on a palace mantelpiece. It might have been John W. Smith in the waiting room of the Grand Central Station in New York. It was just unfortunate that it happened at precisely the moment Melusina Yardley decided that Mason Seymour would make an excellent match for Faith. Because when Melusina decides anything, there’s not much she’ll stop at to go through with it. I didn’t know at the time, and I doubt if any one else did, that it wasn’t only that Mason Seymour was agreeably well-to-do, but also—and I’m not sure that it wasn’t quite as important—that Marshall Yardley was in love with that strange girl Ruth Napier, who had come since the Restoration to live in the Aspinwall house in South England Street.

  The connection between Faith and Mason Seymour and Marshall Yardley and Ruth Napier isn’t very obvious unless you happen to know what has been fairly common gossip for some time, that Ruth was very much interested in Mason Seymour, and not the least interested, apparently, in the young lawyer who commuted daily from Yardley Hall to Norfolk so he could see her.

  I thought, as I went up the Palace Green and turned right into Scotland Street by the old vine-covered Brush house with its little turreted brick office and old box gardens, and turned again on Palace Long Wall Street into the elm-shaded carriage drive that leads to Yardley’s pillared doorway, that it seemed odd Melusina should have forgotten that the chief argument she advanced against her brother’s marrying Faith’s mother was that he was forty-seven and she was only twenty-two. Mason Seymour was forty-five, Faith was twenty. But I suppose the fact that Melusina was sixty instead of forty made the difference…or part of it, anyway.

  I went in the dim old panelled hall with its faded turkey carpet and old mahogany, and the faint scent of potpourri mingling with the clouds of yellow roses that grew jungle-thick over the front of the old house, and up the carved stairway with its inset of hollyw
ood, like the stairs at the Palace.

  Old Abraham, the white-haired darky who’s been with the Yardleys as long as any one can remember, came out of the pantry and greeted me.

  “Go right up, Mis’ Lucy. Mis’ Faith’s in Mis’ Mel’ciny’s room.”

  They were there, the two of them, and also old Miss Alicia, a cousin of Melusina’s so old and fragile that if it hadn’t been for her black cloth dress, I thought, you could have seen the chair through her. She didn’t look at me when I came into the room. I saw it was because her eyes were fixed on the thick folds of old white satin that Melusina had taken from the mahogany press in the hall and laid on her high fourposter bed while she took the old tissue paper from the folds. A faint odor of orris root and musk came from it, and from the delicate cobweb folds of the lace veil that lay beside it.

  Miss Alicia bent forward and picked up a piece of yellowed tissue that Melusina had let fall, and unwrapped brown pressed petals of orange blossom, and let them lie in her frail hand a moment.

  Faith, who stood by watching all this with a detachment almost as objective as Melusina’s own, was suddenly still. I’ve never known her attitude toward her long dead mother. I don’t suppose Melusina had had much to say about her, and I hadn’t supposed, some way, that Faith had ever associated her father’s retirement from the world with any very definite cause, though she certainly must have heard it spoken of. But young people today are practical, and I rather think Faith had regarded the business of wearing her mother’s wedding gown as something one did, just as she’d wear the old lace veil that the Yardley women and the women the Yardleys married had worn since Lafayette brought it to one Anne Yardley on his last visit to Williamsburg in 1824.

  But the pressed orange blossoms in Miss Alicia’s delicate transparent hand seemed suddenly to move her. The three of us, old Miss Alicia, Faith and I, stood silently looking at it.

  Melusina turned and saw it.

  “Oh, that’s just some old rubbish,” she said practically. “Here, Faith—let’s see if you can get into this.”

  Faith stiffened, and I saw her eyes darken almost black. I put my hand on her arm. She relaxed, and looked away quickly. Then she slipped off the brown linen sport frock she had on, and stood while Melusina put her mother’s wedding gown on her. I smiled at the brown throat and the brown hands. Her mother’s skin had been like buttermilk.

  “Of course it’s got to be let out everywhere,” Melusina said brusquely. “Here are the scissors, Lucy. After all, you made it, and you ought to know what to do with it now.”

  “Did you make it, Cousin Lucy?” Faith asked.

  I nodded.

  “And here’s the spot of my life’s blood I left on it, hurrying to get it done that Tuesday night.”

  I pointed to the tiny faint brown spot on the belt.

  “That’s why I’ve always felt you belonged partly to me,” I said.

  She bent down quickly and kissed the top of my head, her eyes suddenly wet with tears.

  “I’d like to take it off!” she whispered. “Oh, please—take it off!”

  Melusina put her hands on her hips and pressed her lips to a thin colorless line.

  “Faith Yardley!” she exclaimed angrily. “Are we going to be favored with another fit of temperament?”

  “Oh, no, but I can’t wear it, Aunt Melusina—I can’t, really!”

  “Your father wants you to wear it, Faith. And anyway, we can’t possibly afford to buy you a gown, with all the other expense we’re being put to. I should think you’re old enough to understand a little of our position.”

  She picked up the heavy white satin folds.

  “Of course, it isn’t very well made, but it’s sufficiently traditional, and the stuff’s fine enough, to overlook that.”

  Faith’s fingers pressed lightly on my shoulder.

  “I think it’s beautifully made. It isn’t that. It’s…”

  “Well, what is it, then?” Melusina demanded sharply.

  “Oh, nothing.—Nothing that you’d understand,” she added, so softly that for an instant I thought I was the only one who heard—Melusina being a little deaf actually, as well as totally deaf and totally blind when she wants to be, though I don’t think she’s ever been dumb, in the sense of being mute.

  I snipped the seams at the waist. If Faith had been corseted as her mother was, the dress would have been too loose. Her slim ungirdled body was as graceful and delicate as her mother’s had been. They were the same height—the only difference was that Faith’s shoulders were a little sturdier and she was as straight as a young sapling.

  I took the dress off her.

  “You’ll do it here, won’t you, Lucy?” Melusina asked.

  I nodded. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “I’ve given the announcement to the papers,” Melusina said.

  Faith was staring at her, the blood drained completely from her face. She put her hand out and steadied herself against the reeded post of the old bed. Melusina, folding up the dress, didn’t even glance at her.,

  “We couldn’t go on putting it off forever,” she said curtly. She put an old linen sheet around it and laid it on the satin-wood chest between the windows.

  “But…Aunt Melusina! You promised not to, until I told—”

  “Do you think Mason Seymour wants to be kept dangling all spring like a college boy?” her aunt asked calmly.

  “But you promised—”

  “Don’t be absurd, Faith. If you’re going around with him all the time things have got to be put on a proper and respectable basis. I don’t want people talking about you the way…”

  She stopped abruptly.

  “The way they are about Ruth Napier!”

  That was old Miss Alicia’s voice, high and reedy and sharp as a needle.

  Melusina was conveniently deaf, and Faith’s waxen face flushed.

  “Precisely, Miss Alicia!”

  There was a sob in her voice that she tried desperately to choke back.

  “This is all perfectly ridiculous,” Melusina said. She folded the lace veil, put it in a pillow slip and put it in the drawer of the Chippendale highboy at the end of the room. Faith put her dress back on, her eyes almost black again, her red lips as vivid against her pale face as blood against snow.

  CHAPTER 3

  Marshall Yardley was just coming in the house when I went downstairs.

  “Hello, Miss Lucy,” he said. He tossed his brief case on the inlaid sunburst Sheraton table under the old print of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. “It’s hot today.”

  He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. I looked at him, thinking how much he was like the portrait of Doctor Yardley’s father that hangs in the Blue Room at the College, with his prominent jaw and the Yardley nose that is more serviceable than beautiful. He has the Yardleys’ dark, almost somber and rather deep-sèt eyes and thin flexible mouth.

  He took the folded paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. He didn’t look very happy.

  “Seems funny to think of Faith getting married,” he said.

  I read the announcement.

  “Daughter of Doctor Peyton Yardley to Wed New Yorker,” was the heading of a column on the front page of The Evening Journal. Then followed the long line of the Yardley ancestors, beginning with Sir Robert Yardley, who came with the Jamestown Expedition of 1607, and including a thumbnail sketch of their careers in Revolution and Civil War and public life, and ending with an account of Doctor Yardley’s life. In a sentence at the end it said, “Mr. Mason Seymour’s mother was Miss Frances Mason of Parkers-burg, Fauquier County.” The date of the wedding was to be announced later.

  “I didn’t know it was all set,” Marshall said.

  “Neither did Faith, apparently,” I heard myself saying before I realized what I was doing.

  He looked at me, the
Yardley jaw tightening. I thought he was going to say something, but he evidently thought better of it. Instead he glanced at the smoked panel of the library door, and bit his lower lip, as if for a moment he’d had the extraordinary idea of barging in on his uncle. Then—and I don’t suppose he actually planned it that way—his dark brilliant eyes moved up to the cracked discolored plaster of the ceiling, and an odd defeated look came in them. A mirthless and rather hopeless smile twisted his thin flexible mouth for an instant.

  “It was always going to be me who retrieved the family fortunes, not Faith,” he said bitterly. “And it’s all I can do to pay office rent.”

  “It’s something to do that, these days,” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound as banal and sententious as it must have done.

  “But not enough.”

  I looked around at the dingy cracked walls and the old panelling that hadn’t been painted for twenty years. There was a certain sardonic humor in my even noticing that its grandeur was so shabby. I never had done, in all the years my own panelling needed paint, and grandfather’s old tin footbath sat under the leak in the bedroom dormer and often had to be emptied two or three times a day in a heavy downpour. But now that my panelling was rubbed down to the satin-smooth old pine, and a stone roof looking like slate shingles that the Restoration people put on kept me snug, I found myself looking patronizingly at the sagging place above the old eight-panelled door that showed that my cousin Yardley’s hall needed a good deal of jacking up. It wasn’t that I’d ever envied them Yardley, or all the things in it. My mother had sold all the things that came to her out of it, through her mother.

  I turned back to Marshall.

  “Do you want to sell the Hall, to the Restoration?”

  He opened and shut his long hands—all the Yardleys have long narrow sensitive hands—and shook his head, as if he was trying to shake the cobwebs out of it.

  “I’d hate to—. If we could keep it up…”