She was wringing her hands so tightly I thought they would start dripping. The nerve of her. Speaking about marriage that way as though it, and people like me who settle for it, were incurably dull. And yet… hadn’t Ben awakened on our wedding night shouting out Miss Thorn’s name? I had thought he was having a nightmare. Et tu, Jonas. Hadn’t he once said he got all hot under the collar when looking into Miss Thorn’s eyes?
“Can it be true, Mrs. Haskell, that you never suspected?” Miss Thorn’s eyes shuddered away from mine. “Vernon Daffy, may he rest in peace, refused to leave me alone. At your wedding reception he followed me upstairs, and after we had… delighted in each other, he begged me to play the piano for him, and I was so transported that I didn’t notice that his wig had come off until the cat started playing with it. The next moment you entered, and Vernon hid under the bedclothes.”
Hyacinth thumbed through the green book. “Mr. Vernon Daffy made the fatal mistake of asking his wife for a divorce, so he could marry another woman.”
“My men, God bless them,”-Miss Thorn closed her eyes-“have always respected me too much to reveal my name, but some suspicions must have been aroused because-” She stopped, digging her fingers into the edge of the table. “I heard rumours, shocking, unfounded rumours, that I was having an affair with a gentleman whom-although I never disliked him as much as many people did-I was never once tempted to visualise… naked.”
Primrose closed her eyes.
“Ellie,” said Hyacinth. “Miss Thorn is speaking of Charles Delacorte. Granted, he may have been having an affair with some unknown woman and used Miss Thorn as a scapegoat. But, what if he were guiltless of all wrongdoing, other than being an extremely unpleasant human being?” She paused for emphasis. “Something tells me we may have encountered a motive for murder different from the norm here. In other words, Mrs. Delacorte’s reason for wishing to be a widow may differ from that of the other club members.”
I tried to grip the seat of my chair, but my hands kept slipping. “You’re thinking Ann may have wanted Charles out of the way because of what I told you about her feelings for Lionel; but that doesn’t add up.” We were talking about a friend of mine. The sisters nodded and Gladys Thorn’s mushroom eyes magnified behind her glasses.
“Bunty’s still in the picture, you mean?” Hyacinth stood, paced for a few seconds and sat back down. “A stumbler, but Ann Delacorte may be banking on her allure as a heartbroken widow. And Flowers Detection must bank on her loyalty to the club not equalling that of her sisters, making her a little more approachable, a little less guarded if someone-”
She stopped significantly. I finished for her. “If someone attempted to infiltrate the group.” I picked up Edwin Digby’s book, The Merry Widows, then dropped it, as if it were white-hot. “I can’t do it; I can’t phone Ann and tell her I’ve just begun to realise how much we have in common-that I, too, want to murder my husband. What if something went wrong? What if I got in too deep and couldn’t get out?”
The pink bows in Primrose’s silvery curls and the Mickey Mouse watch were suddenly at odds with the sternness in her blue eyes. “Ellie, men are being murdered. Can you live with yourself knowing that?”
“I’m not at all sure that they are,” I flashed back.
“Then, my dear, nothing terrible can happen, if you just have a little chat with Ann about your unhappy marriage and how you are desperately seeking a way out.”
I couldn’t answer her. I didn’t have any words left. I opened up The Merry Widows and continued reading from the jacket where I had left off.
The heroine of this macabre tale is a foolish female who eventually gets what is coming to her.
20
“And now, my dear Ellie,” said Primrose, “it’s time to assign Bentley a paramour. Remember, to meet the eligibility requirements of The Widows Club, you must accuse him of conduct unbecoming a married gentleman.”
Miss Thorn raked fingers through her hair. “Anything I can do in the line of duty?”
Hyacinth froze her with a smile. “Without doubt, cousin Vanessa is the ideal choice. Her attentions to the vicar can so easily be made to look like camouflage. Now, Ellie, as to contacting Mrs. Delacorte and requesting she put you up for membership in The Widows Club, I suggest you allow a decent interval to elapse, say, a few days. Perhaps you could use the interim period to do something about eating sensibly?”
Miss Thorn twitched agreement. In addition to her other shortcomings, she undoubtedly ate like an elephant and lost rather than gained.
At midnight, after that marathon talk with the Tramwells, I crept into Merlin’s Court like a thief.
“Ellie.” Ben came out of the hall shadows and crushed me in his arms. “I thought you had left. And I was desperately worried about you; I didn’t think you would like being a nun.” He attempted a laugh. “I couldn’t blame you though if you’d had enough. I’ve failed you miserably.” He kissed my neck, my weakest spot. “My illness is no excuse…” Something in his voice told me he hoped it could be. “My treatment of you has been unforgivable.”
I wasn’t the innocent I had been when we married. I knew now that unless one chooses to join the ranks of the divorced-or worse-a spouse has, at times, to forgive the unforgivable. And Ben was compounding all the horrors of my situation by being utterly desirable. I stood there, my nose against his ear, arms rigid at my sides.
“Ellie, I know that even without what happened to Charles Delacorte, this has been a time of adjustment for you. First Mum, then Poppa descending on us with their problems, but in the end nothing counts but our love for each other. That is still so, isn’t it? We would have married even if so doing had cost us the inheritance. The house, and the money is just the fondant françois on the cake.”
This from the man I was plotting to murder! That I was doing so in a just cause and did not plan to bring the matter to fruition seemed, as the shadows in the hall stealthed the walls, to be splitting hairs. Ben had every right to know about my involvement with Flowers Detection; he was crucially involved. But if I told him everything… anything, he might be consumed by guilt, thinking that he had reduced me to this state of lunatic credulity. And… he might respond with heavy-handed chivalry and demand that I stop. A big chunk of me wanted to stop. But what if no one combatted the widows? What if they expanded their horizons? Did I want to raise children in a world where it was off with the heads of grannies who wouldn’t babysit every other Saturday or teachers who didn’t give all A’s?
In such a frame of mind, how could I go freely into my husband’s arms? That night I did not worry about the absence of violins; my head was filled with bells knelling. That sort of thing makes a woman frigid in a hurry.
There was, however, a glimmer of help for me. Ben blamed my abstraction upon his mother, who spent half the night pacing in her turret room. Even now we could hear every step, every chink of the rosary beads.
Poppa, on the other hand, caused us daytime audio problems. The next day and the next, the sound of his saw was enough to send anyone into orbit. He had turned the loggia into his workshop, and sawdust rose like a Sahara sandstorm. I tried to look pleased. He was, after all, engaged in making the cake from which I was to leap the night of Bunty’s Follies-now only a few weeks away. I had expected something disposable, but this was a magnificent edifice, good for the wear and tear of the next three generations. Not that my crystal ball showed any future generations.