The Town Cried Murder Read online

  He shrugged.

  “I suppose Faith will inherit it,” I said. I hadn’t meant to be cruel. But he turned away abruptly.

  “Or Mason Seymour.”

  He said it so bitterly that I was stunned.

  “Why, Marshall!” I gasped. “—Don’t you want her to marry him?”

  “Oh, how could I, Cousin Lucy?”

  He spoke almost passionately.

  “He’s old enough to be her father, in the first place. He’s the worst sort of philanderer…the kind that makes all sorts of a fool out of a woman without ever getting his own fingers burned.”

  I knew he was thinking of Ruth Napier. I didn’t look at him directly, because I knew he was suffering considerably more than any Yardley would care for any one to know they could suffer. What he’d said about retrieving the family fortunes wasn’t only on account of repairing the cracked plaster and the sag in the carved stairway.

  “Why don’t you tell your aunt and uncle that?” I said.

  “I’ve told Aunt Mel. She’s such an innocent on the one hand, and such a damned realist on the other. And Mason Seymour’s got her just as fooled as he has Hallie Taswell, and… all the rest.”

  “And Ruth Napier,” I said.

  “And Ruth Napier,” he repeated evenly.

  “But what about Faith’s father?”

  Marshall raised his hands in the sort of despairing gesture that it seems to me I’ve seen people make whenever they speak of Peyton Yardley as long as ever I can remember.

  “He wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” he groaned. “I don’t think he knows who I am. Or who Faith is, for that matter. Well, why not? If you can escape everything you don’t like by just shutting yourself up, you might as well do it. Miss Alicia says the only time he ever came to life was the few years Faith’s mother was here.—What was she like, Cousin Lucy? I mean, according to Miss Alicia she was a feather from an angel’s wing, and according to Aunt Mel she was whatever they’d have called a gold digger twenty-five years ago.”

  “She was just like Faith,” I said. “Except that her childhood must have been—well, freer. Or had more open affection in it. Because certainly Melusina, with all her very sterling virtues, hasn’t been what you’d call an indulgent mother to Faith.”

  He grunted, and picked up the paper. I saw him staring at that announcement again.

  “Maybe she won’t marry him,” I said. “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip, you know.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s a matter of honor, now. No Yardley lady jilts a lover—not since the little lady Anne.”

  He nodded through the open door to the picture hanging over the Hepplewhite table beside the window overlooking the grape arbor, parallel with Scotland Street. It was a portrait of a dark-haired girl in a low-cut white gown with a chaplet of pearls on her head. Where her hands should have been was a large jagged hole. It was Anne Yardley, the first daughter of Yardley Hall, born at Jamestown in 1701. In her hands there had been a letter, a love letter supposedly, because she was a lovely capricious creature with as many beaux as there were gentlemen in the colony—one of whom she agreed to marry, and then jilted without rime or reason. And one evening he came to Yardley Hall—it was in 1718—in the bitter winter weather, strode through the hall, drew his saber and slashed the letter out of her hands, tossed it into the fire, went out and across to the canal in the Palace grounds; and there they found him the next morning, with a lock of dark hair and a note that still lie in the little chest under the portrait on the table there where we were looking. The note says something to the effect that the ice was warm compared with Lady Anne’s cold heart and death was kind where she was cruel.

  “Well, I can’t imagine Mason Seymour jumping into the Canal, with the bullfrog and the goldfish and the ducks,” I said. “And anyway, it’s summer now.”

  “I know,” Marshall said. “You didn’t, fortunately, grow up under the portrait of Lady Anne. Faith did.”

  He picked up his brief case and opened the great door with its enormous brass lock polished so that its surface was brighter than any of the old mirrors in the house. You looked grey and ill in the mirrors and hard and jaundiced in the lock, so it was best just never to look at all. We always thought that was why Melusina, when she finally took to using what she called a soupçon of paint on her face, looked more like one of the Indians who massacred her great-great-great-great-grandfather at Jamestown than the blush of a rose, which I dare say she thought she looked like. Yet she always thought Faith, who never used rouge at all, looked unnatural because she used lipstick.

  I was thinking that as I went along the Palace Green and out across Court House Green, stopped a moment to speak to the old gentleman who pastures his two pleasant cows on its broad velvet lawn, and across behind the Powder Horn—or the Magazine, as they call it now—up Francis Street to my white clapboard house with the silver moon rose twined with wisteria and woodbine at the door. And there I stopped abruptly.

  If only one’s guardian angel could pluck at one’s sleeve—and if one could feel it when he did pluck—when the threshold of a momentous event is reached, it would be extraordinarily convenient. Because as it was, I hadn’t the remotest notion, now, that the young man sitting on my door step was going to mean anything in my life, beyond the possible four dollars a day I might—if he was properly introduced—charge him for the privilege of being my guest…if, of course, he was a tourist, and the license plate on his rather undistinguished open car indicated that he was and that he came from Massachusetts.

  He scrambled to his feet as I came up. He was very tall, and if he hadn’t had blue eyes and crisp tow-colored hair I might have thought he was an Indian, he was burned so black. He grinned at me in the most infectious and irresistible fashion.

  “I was hoping you’d be wearing a hoop skirt and a cap with lavender ribbons, Miss Lucy,” he said, with rather engaging impudence. In fact it was so engaging that it really wasn’t in the least impudent.

  “You don’t mind if I call you Miss Lucy, do you, because you’re going to see an awful lot of me. My name’s Bill Haines—William Quincy Adams Haines, no less, and furthermore I’ve got a card.”

  He fished about in I never saw so many pockets full of ill-assorted trash, produced a dog-eared card, and handed it to me. And I started—for it was a long time since I’d seen the name of Melusina’s and my own Great Sacrifice. Not since he’d got to be a very wealthy man, certainly.

  “My dear Lucy,” it read. “As a favor to an old friend will you take in this young man? Feed him batter bread and pecan pie, tell him about our livery stable on Buttermilk Hill, and how you ran away from me when I proposed to you in the ruined tower at Jamestown. He wants to be an architect.”

  It ended, “Affectionately—if you will allow me—Summers Baldwin.”

  I don’t know why everything seemed awfully misty all of a sudden, because I certainly never entertained the least romantic notion about Summers Baldwin, and heaven knows there was no reason I should blush, except for the ridiculous solemn expression on the face of that young man, who apparently had got the amazing idea into his head that he was gazing on the ashes of a beautiful romance, and that I was the forlorn but reconciled little woman that the great man had left behind him.

  I opened my mouth to snap—I suppose—that I hadn’t any room for him, and then, seeing him look so sympathetic and long-eared and lugubrious and comical, I laughed and said, “My office is empty, if you’d like that.”

  He looked a little puzzled. I suppose he had a vision of a desk and a typewriter and a finished business basket. So I opened the door of the gleaming white little house that stands at the side of my own, that had been my father’s law office, and my grandfather’s, and so on back, even before that ancestor of ours who in the House of Burgesses listened to Patrick Henry’s speech in the Capitol at the
head of Duke of Gloucester Street and met with Washington and Jefferson and the rebellious patriots in the Apollo Room at the Raleigh. It still had their ink-stained table in it, and my great-grandfather’s arm chair. The bed was an old sleigh back that my mother had given to old Aunt Sally our darky cook and I’d bought back from her for fifty cents. The old fire irons were made from the iron band around the wheels of my grandfather’s buggy at the old forge in Nicholson Street.

  “Gosh, this is swell!” Bill Haines exclaimed.

  “You’ll have to use the bathroom in the house,” I said. “And I’ll have your breakfast sent over.”

  Bill Haines could not have been more pleased, apparently, if he had been put up in the State Bedroom in the Palace. He stood in the middle of the floor, making the room seem astonishingly small, grinning and rubbing his hands together like one of the lunatics farther down the street.

  “I’m going to like this,” he said.

  “Just use one of the ashtrays for cigarettes, is all I ask,” I said—almost as waspishly as Miss Melusina, I suppose. But I felt something was owing to the provincial character of the town. Not that it dampened Mr. William Quincy Adams Haines in the slightest degree.

  “Okay, Miss Lucy,” he grinned.

  “And supper’s at half-past six,” I said. “And if you want anything between half-past two and half-past five, you’ll have to get it yourself, because in Williamsburg the house servants are off then.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, so meekly that we both laughed. I went back to the house.

  It’s strange how sometimes memories suddenly start crowding in on one. I know I had a number of things to do that evening—afternoon, I believe Mr. Haines would have called it, but we call it evening below the Mason and Dixon’s line—but I didn’t seem to do any of them. If it hadn’t been for that noisy young man next door, banging his luggage about and putting books in Grandfather’s shelves, and whistling until every mocking-bird in the garden seemed to me to have learned “There’s an old spinning-wheel” and whistled it with him, I’d have been out of the present, back in the remote past entirely. At least I should have until I heard the Bruton chimes strike five, and the door opened and Faith Yardley walked in.

  Even then it wasn’t much of a wrench with the past. For a moment I almost thought it was the other Faith I was seeing—she was so lovely in an odd pinkish-grey dress that made her eyes a deeper grey behind her long black lashes, and her hair above her warm sunbrowned forehead brighter gold.

  She came quickly across the room and sat down on the little needle-point stool at my feet, and put her hand on my knee.

  “Cousin Lucy—you didn’t think I meant the wedding dress wasn’t made well enough for me, did you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Of course I didn’t, you precious lamb.”

  “Aunt Melusina said besides being undutiful and ungrateful I was rude and hurt your feelings.”

  I laughed. I really couldn’t help it. I’d only sewed to help hold things together because it was the only thing I could do at all. I’d always hated it, really. The Restoration that had taken the needle forever out of my somewhat rheumatic fingers had been a godsend. And after all, it was Melusina who said the gown wasn’t very well made, not Faith.

  “Because that wasn’t it at all,” Faith said. “It was just that—oh, I don’t know… But, all of a sudden, seeing it, and those pressed orange blossoms, and… and that speck where you’d pricked your finger, before I was born, everything became… clear. I mean, Father shutting himself up from everybody, after she died, and…—He must have loved her terribly much, Cousin Lucy?”

  “He did,” I said.

  “So that’s why… I mean, I don’t mind marrying Mason Seymour if it will…save the Hall for him—so he can just have her there, all his life. But I—oh, Cousin Lucy!”

  She buried her head in my lap, and I could just hear her.

  “It doesn’t seem right to marry anybody I don’t love, or who doesn’t love me! I mean the way she and Father loved each other when she…wore that dress and pressed those flowers!”

  “Then don’t do it, Faith,” I said quietly. “Don’t marry him. The Restoration will buy the Hall. He can live there just as he is, as long as he lives.”

  “But he won’t sell it,” she said.

  “You mean your Aunt Melusina won’t,” I said sharply. “I doubt if your father knows a thing about it. Have you told him why you’re marrying Mason Seymour?”

  She looked up at me with wide-eyed horror.

  “Oh, of course not!”

  “Because he’d never allow this,” I said. “And your aunt certainly has no right to ask any such sacrifice.…”

  “Except that she sacrificed her life for Father.”

  “Rubbish!” I said.

  It was the first time I’d ever said it, out loud, about Melusina’s sacrifice, and I was shocked hearing myself. That card Mr. Bill Haines had brought looked up at me from the table against the wall.

  Faith was too much involved in her own thoughts.

  “You see, Cousin Lucy, I’d really just as leave marry Mason. I wish he wasn’t quite so old, but he’s attractive, even apart from…saving the Hall. Maybe if I were in love with anybody else, it would be different, but I’m not. And Aunt Melusina says most women don’t really love their husbands until after they’re married to them. And anyway—love’s never been a very happy thing for the Yardleys. Look at Father, and look at Aunt Melusina. And Miss Alicia—lots of times I see her looking at an old daguerreotype.”

  “That was a cousin of my grandfather,” I said. “People used to say there were reasons why they never married. No one ever said what they were. He died an old man right here in Williamsburg. They used to sit in opposite pews at Bruton Church, when the nave and Lord Dunmore’s gallery were closed off and we just used the transepts. I remember them when I was a child. They’d bow very ceremoniously, but they never spoke.”

  “Oh, it seems horrible, doesn’t it—so many thwarted lives!” Faith cried.

  “But you’re letting your aunt thwart yours, my sweet,” I said.

  She got up quickly.

  “You mustn’t say that, Cousin Lucy. I’d do anything for Father, and for Yardley. And I’m really very fond of Mason. He couldn’t be sweeter to me, really. Anyway, it’s all settled now.”

  She turned away a little.

  “I couldn’t go back on my word—now that it’s out.”

  “As that devil Melusina knew very well,” I said to myself. To Faith I said, “I hope you’ll be happy.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Suddenly from outside came the blast of a motor horn. Williamsburg is so quiet that any noise sounds a thousand times louder than it is. I looked out the window. It was Mason Seymour’s big open car, and it was Mason Seymour at the wheel, wearing that kind of cap they tell me Breton sailors wear.

  He got out, slammed the door and came jauntily through the gate, stopped to pick a red rambler rose growing in a scarlet carpet on my whitewashed fence—the Restoration planted it too, even if it does look as if it had been there since the beginning of time; stuck it in the lapel of his light grey flannel jacket, came up the path and pushed open the door without the formality of using the brass knocker.

  “Hello, Miss Lucy!” he called. “Faith here?”

  He came on into the drawing room.

  “Oh, there you are, my dear.”

  He came over to her. “You didn’t tell me you were going to announce the happy event today.”

  He bent his head and kissed her lightly—too lightly, I thought, if he had to kiss her at all—on the lips. I felt, rather than saw, her slim back stiffen. And he must have felt it too, for he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her playfully to him. A faint flush had come to her cheeks, her eyes had darkened almost the color of coals, but she managed to smile and disengage he
rself. And in a swift intuitive instant I saw what I’d never in the world have guessed. Faith Yardley was afraid of the man. She was frightened and repelled, as I in my simple spinster way was always brought up to believe that innocence was always frightened and repelled by too apparent worldliness and sophistication.

  I don’t know why it was that Mason Seymour, who certainly was known to be a most accomplished man of the world, hadn’t sense enough then to see she was alarmed and let her alone. Whether he was acutely piqued, or perhaps had had a cocktail too many, or whether simply what my grandmother would have called his lower nature had got the best of him, I don’t know. But his hand clasped on hers and he drew her toward him and pressed his mouth to hers.

  It was just then that I looked around and saw, standing in the hall doorway, my new boarder, Mr. Bill Haines. And I don’t know whether it was the shocked and horrified look on my own face, or the terrified girl trying to release herself, without making a scene, from Mason Seymour’s arms; but I do know that the surprising young man stepped promptly into the room and up to Seymour, calmly and with apparently very little effort tore his arms from Faith’s body and gave him an apparently polite little shove that sent him back about two yards.

  “I beg your pardon,” Mr. Bill Haines said affably. “But where I come from, gentlemen don’t kiss ladies unless they have first found out if it’s perfectly all right.”

  Faith shrank against the table, her face the color of a peony, her eyes black with anger and mortification.

  Mason Seymour was the color of dirty putty. But not, I must say, the consistency of it. He caught his balance and straightened himself in the best Virginia manner. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said.

  Mr. Haines stood, his hands thrust loosely in his jacket pockets, a pleasant smile on his face, a dangerous look in his eyes.

  It is a tradition in Virginia that a lady is never visibly surprised at anything. I had certainly lapsed disgracefully, but at this point I was able to collect myself.

  I said, “Miss Yardley, this is Mr. Haines.—And Mr. Haines, this is Mr. Seymour…Miss Yardley’s fiancé…”