“It’s too late,” Verity murmured.
“Perhaps not. Perhaps they only left this morning,” I said, gathering up the pages of the letter and scanning them. They were covered with Tossie’s flowery hand and dozens of exclamation points and underlinings and badly blotted in places. She should have bought a penwiper at the jumble sale, I thought irrelevantly.
“ ‘It is no use to try and stop us,’ ” I read. “ ‘By the time you receive this we shall already have been married in Surrey at a registrar’s office and will be on our way to our new home. My dearest husband — ah, that most precious of words! — feels that we will thrive better in a society less enslaved to the archaic class structure, a country where one can have whatever name he likes, and to that end, we sail for America, where my husband — ah, that sweet word again! — intends to earn his living as a philosopher. Princess Arjumand is accompanying us, for I could not bear to be separated from her as well as you, and Papa would probably kill her when he found out about the calico goldfish.’ ”
“My split-tailed nacreous ryunkin?” Colonel Mering said, starting up out of the chair. “What about it?”
“ ‘She ate the calico. Oh, dear, Papa, can you find it in your heart to forgive her as well as me?’ ”
“We must disown her,” Mrs. Mering said.
“We certainly must,” Colonel Mering said. “That ryunkin cost two hundred pounds!”
“Colleen!” Mrs. Mering said. “I mean, Jane! Stop snuffling and fetch my writing desk at once. I intend to write to her and tell her from this day forward we have no daughter.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said, wiping her nose on her apron. I stared after her, thinking about Colleen/Jane and Mrs. Chattisbourne calling all her maids Gladys, and trying to remember exactly what Mrs. Mering had said about Baine. “ ‘I used it when I worked for Lord Dunsany.’ ” And what had Mrs. Chattisbourne said that day we went to fetch things for the jumble sale? “I have always felt it is not the name that makes the butler, but training.”
Colleen/Jane came back into the room, carrying the writing desk and sniffling.
“Tocelyn’s name shall never be spoken again in this house,” Mrs. Mering said, sitting down at the writing table. “Henceforth her name shall never cross my lips. All of Tocelyn’s letters shall be returned unopened.” She took out a pen and ink.
“How will we know where to send the letter telling her she’s disowned if we don’t open her letters?” Colonel Mering said.
“It’s too late, isn’t it?” Verity said bleakly to me. “There’s nothing we can do.”
I wasn’t listening. I gathered up the pages of the letter and turned them over, looking for the end.
“From this day forth I shall wear mourning,” Mrs. Mering said. “Jane, go upstairs and press my black bombazine. Mesiel, when anyone asks you, you must say our daughter died.”
I located the end of the letter. Tossie had signed the letter, “Your repentant daughter, Tocelyn,” and then scratched “Tocelyn” out and signed her married name.
“Listen to this,” I said to Verity, and began reading.
“ ‘Please tell Terence that I know he will never get over me, but that he must try, and not to begrudge us our happiness, for Baine and I were fated to be together.’ ”
“If she’s truly gone and married this person,” Terence said, the light dawning, “then I’m released from my engagement.”
I ignored him. “ ‘My darling William does not believe in Fate,’ ” I persisted, “ ‘and says that we are creatures of Free Will, but he believes that wives should have opinions and ideas of their own, and what else can it have been but Fate? For had Princess Arjumand not disappeared, we should never have gone to Coventry—’ ”
“Don’t,” Verity said, “please.”
“You have to hear the rest of it,” I said, “ ‘—to Coventry. And had I not seen the footed firugeal urn, we should never have come together. I will write when we are settled in America. Your repentant daughter,’ ” I read, emphasizing each word, “ ‘Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ ”
“Look here! I’ve an idea we’ve been working this thing from the wrong end.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Well, it wasn’t exactly the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, with Hercule Poirot gathering everyone together in the drawing room to reveal the murderer and impress everyone with his astonishing deductive powers.
And it definitely wasn’t a Dorothy Sayers, with the detective hero saying to his heroine sidekick, “I say, we make a jolly good detectin’ team. How about makin’ the partnership permanent, eh, what?” and then proposing in Latin.
We weren’t even a halfway decent detectin’ team. We hadn’t solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we’d had to be packed off out of the way before the course of history could correct itself. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.
Not that there wasn’t whimpering. Mrs. Mering was doing a good deal of that, not to mention weeping, wailing, and clutching the letter to her bosom.
“O, my precious daughter!” she sobbed. “Mesiel, don’t just stand there. Do something.”
The Colonel looked around uneasily. “What can I do, my dear? According to Tossie’s letter, they are already afloat.”
“I don’t know. Stop them. Have the marriage annulled. Wire the Royal Navy!” She stopped, grabbed her heart, and cried, “Madame Iritosky tried to warn me! She said, ‘Beware of the sea!’ ”
“Pah! Seems to me if she’d truly had any contact with the Other Side, she could have given a better warning than that!” Colonel Mering said.
But Mrs. Mering wasn’t listening. “That day at Coventry. I had a premonition — oh, if I had only realized what it meant, I might have saved her!” She let the letter flutter to the floor.
Verity stooped and picked it up. “ ‘I will write when we are settled in America,’ ” she said softly. “ ‘Your repentant daughter, Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ William Patrick Callahan.” She shook her head.
“What do you know?” she said softly. “The butler did it.”
As she said it, I had the oddest sensation, like one of Mrs. Mering’s premonitions, or a sudden shifting underfoot, and I thought suddenly of anti-cathedral protesters and Merton’s pedestrian gate.
“The butler did it.” And then something else. Something important. Who had said that? Verity, explaining the mystery novels? “It was always the least likely suspect,” she had said in my bedroom that first night. “For the first hundred books or so, the butler did it, and after that he was the most likely, and they had to switch to unlikely criminals, you know, the harmless old lady or the vicar’s devoted wife, that sort of thing, but it didn’t take the reader long to catch on to that, and they had to resort to having the detective be the murderer, and the narrator, and…”
But that wasn’t it. Someone else had said, “The butler did it.” But who? Not anyone here. Mystery novels hadn’t even been invented, except for The Moonstone. The Moonstone. Something Tossie had said about The Moonstone, about being unaware you were committing a crime. And something else. Something about disappearing into thin air.
“And the neighbors!” Mrs. Mering wailed. “What will Mrs. Chattisbourne say when she finds out? And the Reverend Mr. Arbitage!”