Your father had laid aside even his accounts, and all was still, excepting only the thunder and rain without. A mouse ventured into the middle of the floor. Your father said, “We must find another cat,” and at the sound of his voice the mouse scurried away.
Close on to one, Curnow came, knocking at the door in the pattern they had arranged. His lordship sent me with a rushlight to bring in his hireling. Curnow was wrapped in a ragged sodden cloak, and trailed mud and filth wherever he stepped, yet on seeing me, he gave me a greeting which shewed he had indeed had gentle breeding once.
When we were come again into the parlour, his lordship stood with the silver bottle in one hand already and a fresh glass in the other. “Have you done it?” he asked.
Curnow unwrapped the cloak and tossed it down on the bench. Beneath it he carried in one hand his miner’s pickaxe of iron. The rain had wetted him through, cloak and all, but had not utterly rinsed away the blood and bits of hair from the flat-headed end. Curnow stepped forward to shew it his lordship at closer hand.
His lordship looked closely at the blood, and nodded. “There is your fifteen pounds, safe in the purse,” said he. “But drink you a glass of hippocras before you go, to warm you against the weather.”
“Tom Penhallow told me much about you before he died,” replied Curnow, “and there is one thing which I owe his soul.”
And turning the pickaxe to its sharpened end, he drove it into your father’s skull. The poisoned wine mingled with the blood and streams of filthy water, and the silver bottle took a great dent as it fell and struck the floor.
Curnow let fall his pickaxe with your father’s corpse, and turned to me. He smiled. “Here is enough of murder for the day, my lady,” he said. “But do not follow me, lest you take a chill in the storm.”
I smiled at him then as a woman smiles at a man. “There will no one come until the morning,” I said. “Time enough to take off your clothes and dry them by the fire.”
Hal, your father never did but one good work in the whole of his life, and that was the begetting of you, and that he undid again the night he let you die for his stubborn heart. Yet he was your father, and my father-in-law, and murdered, and he had at least the bowels to leave me better provided for by his death than he had in his life. Let his slayer go out into the night and the storm, and by morning was it likely they could find so much as his trail?
Forgive me, Hal, my husband, but how else could I keep Ned Curnow until the morning, when he could be taken, save in my bed?
Lloyd Biggie, Jr.
Have You a Fortune in Your Attic?
Grandfather and the Great Fiddle Mystery... Was the old violin, stored in the Peterson attic lo these many years, a genuine Stradivarius? The trouble was, Grandfather knew nothing at all about violins...
It was a sight Borgville had never seen before and most likely would never see again, and I almost missed it.
It had been raining hard all morning, and for want of anything else to do I was down in the cellar getting in some target practice with my air rifle. I had a couple of windows open, and when I heard something that sounded like a herd of cows stampeding along the sidewalk, naturally I went to look.
It was Doc Beyers’ wife, and she was running!
Mrs. Beyers prides herself on being the most sedate woman in Borgville — though as Grandfather says, she really hasn’t much choice. There’s so much of her to move around that it’s only a question of doing it sedately or staying put. She even holds her laughs down to chuckles because of what she’d have to move if she cut loose with anything more violent than that. If I’d known she was going to be running in front of our house, I’d have set up some chairs and charged admission.
I watched her until she started up our walk, and then I headed for the stairs. I got to the front hall just as she came stumbling across the porch. My Grandfather Rastin had seen her coming, and he was waiting at the front door. He helped her out of her raincoat, and she gasped, “Elizabeth...” and collapsed onto the sofa.
“Take it easy,” Grandfather said.
“Elizabeth...”
“Elizabeth will keep for a couple of minutes. She’s standing outon her porch now, looking over this way, so she can’t be in very bad shape. Wait till you get your breath back.”
For the next ten minutes Mrs. Beyers panted on the sofa, and was hushed up by Grandfather every time she opened her mouth. I came close to dying of curiosity, but Grandfather sat down and rocked as if it was an ordinary social call. He always says the first lesson a man has to learn from life is patience, and in eighty years he’d learned it pretty well.
Finally Mrs. Beyers got a grip on her breathing, and Grandfather let her talk.
“Elizabeth found a violin in her attic!” she said.
Grandfather nodded. “You don’t say. That’d be...”
“It’s a Strad... Strad—”
“Stradivarius? You don’t say. That’d be...”
“It’s worth a fortune.”
“You don’t say. That’d be Old Eric’s fiddle. I heard him play it many times, when I was a boy. I often wondered what happened to it.”
“It’s a godsend, what with Elizabeth needing money for Ellie’s wedding. She wants you to come and see it.”
“I’ve seen it,” Grandfather said. “Many times. Old Eric was quite a fiddler in his day.”
“He lived to be a hundred and two,” Mrs. Beyers said.
“A hundred and three. And he loved to tell about the time...”
“Will you come and see it?”
“I suppose.”
We got our raincoats and went back to Elizabeth Peterson’s house with Mrs. Beyers, all three of us walking very sedately.
Elizabeth Peterson has been a widow for more years than I am old, and in a friendly sort of way half the women in Borgville hate her. She’s the example everyone holds up to them. She has no regular income at all, and has to work at anything offered to her at Borgville wages, which aren’t much; but somehow she manages wonderfully well.
Lately, though, she’d been worried. Her daughter Ellie, the prettiest girl in Borgville, was graduating from high school and getting married. Her fiancé was Mark Hanson, whose father is our Village President, and President of the Borgville Bank, and the richest man in town. Naturally, Mrs. Peterson wanted her daughter to have the prettiest wedding and the biggest and best reception in the history of Borgville, if not the whole state of Michigan; but she didn’t have any money.
So I wasn’t surprised to find her hardly touching the floor as she paced up and down her porch waiting for us. Even I had a vague notion that a genuine Stradivarius might be worth a lot of money.
“Do you think it really is?” she asked Grandfather, all out of breath, as if she, rather than Mrs. Beyers, had been doing the running.
“Of all the things I’m not an expert in,” Grandfather said, “it’s violins. But I’ll take a look. How’d you happen to find it?”
“It was more a matter of remembering it than finding it. It’s been up there in the corner of the attic for years, and I guess I just forgot it was there. The funny thing is, I knew all the time it was valuable. It’s a tradition in the Peterson family. My husband told me once that when he was a little boy playing in the attic, his mother would tell him not to go near Grandpa Eric’s fiddle, because it was a valuable instrument. It never occurred to me that the value could be measured in money.”
“It’s the usual way of doing it,” Grandfather said.