‘My dear Lorna,’ I said, feeling an absolute heel. ‘What has happened? Come now, you shouldn’t cry on your birthday – it’s the most fearful bad luck.’ This was hardly the most opportune angle to take with her and the sobbing redoubled as soon as I had said it.
‘Come, what’s happened?’ I asked again.
‘I thought he liked me,’ she said. ‘He acted as if he liked me.’
‘Who did, dear?’ I said, kneeling in front of her and trying to do a bit of mopping.
‘C-captain,’ she managed to get out.
‘Has he been nasty to you?’ I said. ‘Shall I fetch your father?’
‘No!’ wailed Lorna. ‘And he hasn’t been nasty. He’s just… He asked if he could speak to me on my own and I thought… So we came in here, and then he said it was a most delicate matter and he hoped he wasn’t going to shock me.’
Oh, Alec, I thought. What did you do?
‘Then he said he had come to Luckenlaw to paint but almost immediately he had realised that Providence must have sent him here to meet his heart’s desire, and if only he could be sure that his affections were returned he would be the happiest man alive.’
I waited, while a fresh bout of weeping swept over her. Time was I should have been thrown into confusion by watching people weep, but it is something of which a detective has to do a surprising amount, at least the way my cases seemed to unfold anyway. Presently she gulped, blew her nose and resumed.
‘And then he asked me if he could be so bold as to press me into service for him. He asked if I would speak to the lady and see if she returned his affections. He said he could not bear to approach her and be turned down, because he thought it would kill him.’
‘Who was it?’ I said, genuinely keen to hear.
‘Effie Morton,’ shrieked Lorna.
‘Miss Morton, the bishop’s niece?’ I blurted. ‘I thought she was an old maid?’
‘She is,’ Lorna cried with an hysterical bleat in her voice. ‘She’s forty-three and he loves her.’
I brought all my self-command to bear to keep from laughing, for really it was not at all funny.
‘Well, Lorna dear,’ I said at last, when she seemed to be growing calm. ‘I think Miss Morton is welcome to him. If he came badgering you for favours, on your birthday, if he was that full of his own concerns on what should have been your special night, then he is just the kind of selfish… nincompoop you can well do without.’
‘You sound like Hetty McCallum,’ Lorna said, smiling unsteadily, and she took a deep shuddering breath. ‘There are worse people to sound like, I suppose.’ She gave me a brave look. ‘There are worse people to be like, I suppose.’
‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘He is not the only, or even the best, young man in the world. And you are a lovely girl with plenty of time left to meet a better one.’ Right now, of course, she was quite freakish, with rivulets of kohl and ravaged hairdressing, but there were no mirrors in this linen cupboard.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I believed and I tried and I failed and that’s the end of it.’
I sat regarding her, wondering whether to leave it there since she had obviously learned her lesson or whether, for the kitten’s sake, to make a point of it, birthday night or no. In the end, I decided to be thorough instead of kind, and so – if I were going to be as rigorous when I viewed my own actions as when I was viewing hers – one might say that everything that happened after that could be laid at my door.
‘You believed?’ I said, drawing myself away from her a little. ‘You tried? My dear Lorna, you don’t mean to tell me it’s been you making this silly hair-piece, do you?’ Her eyes darted to the floor and then fixed on my face. ‘Oh yes, I know about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it for your father. Do you really mean to tell me it was you?’
Her chest was rising and falling at an alarming speed. She hesitated, rubbed her face with her hands and then, finally, nodded.
‘I should never have believed it of you.’
‘I know,’ she groaned, dropping her head back to her knees again. ‘I’ve been a fool.’
‘That’s putting it rather kindly, if you ask me. Nailing a kitten to the ground by its poor little tail is far beyond foolish.’ She had gone quite still, shrinking into herself. ‘As is digging up a soul that deserves her long-awaited rest.’ I could hear that my voice was hard but I could not turn it gentle again. Lorna looked up at me, white behind the clownish streaks.
‘What?’ she said.
‘All right,’ I assured her. ‘I’ll believe that wasn’t you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
‘Your father has been keeping rather a lot of horrid little secrets from you, Lorna,’ I told her. ‘But I think you should know. Someone in thrall to the old ways of spells and luck dug that poor girl’s bones up out of her grave.’
‘My father always said the old ways were harmless.’
‘Well, they’re not. This dabbling you’ve been doing, all in the name of love, has its ugly side, and if you dip a toe in it you can easily end up lost to goodness for ever.’ She was nodding faster and faster.
‘They dug up a grave?’ she said. ‘My father knows?’
‘He has handled it all most sensitively,’ I said. ‘He is a lovely, kind, charming man and you should be glad that you have the chance to spend your years with him. Believe me. Marriage is not… the only way to a happy life, you know.’
‘They dug her up out of her grave?’ said Lorna, still unbelieving. ‘Why?’
‘To put her back where she belonged. In the chamber. To put things back as they should be.’
‘But that’s…’ She stopped talking and simply shook her head very fast, as though trying to shake off the idea the way a dog shakes off water. I stood up to leave her. If she could be as horrified as all that then she was surely not lost to decent feeling. The kitten was an aberration, the desperate act of a lonely, muddled girl, but she would come right in the end.
I hesitated at the door.
‘Will you be all right?’ I asked her. ‘You’re sure you don’t want your father?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.
Her voice had an odd, strained note in it, but I told myself that anyone’s voice would sound peculiar after such upsets and weeping, and so I walked away.
19
I gave Mr Tait the briefest of reports the next morning, saying no more than that the trouble was over and no one knew or needed to know a thing about it.
‘And you are sure there won’t be a recurrence?’ he said. I thought back to Lorna’s broken bewilderment the evening before and shook my head firmly.
‘You’ve done a splendid job, my dear Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have asked for more discretion.’
‘I could have asked for quite a bit less discretion from you, Mr Tait,’ I told him. ‘You haven’t been frank with me, exactly.’
‘And what if I had been?’ he said, smiling. ‘Would you have come?’
‘Certainly not!’ It was out before I could stop it and he chuckled. ‘If I’d heard all the lurid details before… well, before I got to know you, I might even have tried to stop the luncheons at Gilverton.’
‘Well, well,’ he concluded, nodding benignly with his hands folded across his middle. ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’
Than which one cannot really hope for a better epitaph to one’s labours. I rose, picking up my gloves and Bunty’s lead, and took my leave of him.
Alec had decided to stay on for a bit at Ford Cottage. He said it was because his disguise could not just be folded up and put away if the good he had done Lorna was to last, and I suppose there was something to that, but I suspected too that he felt remorseful for having let her down with such a thump and wanted to see what he could do by way of a belated cushioning. Personally I thought her bruised pride, if not her heart, would heal more quickly if she never saw him again but he was determined and so I left him there when Bunty and I accompanied Hugh back to Gilverton the day after the party.