Читать книгу Lady Molly Of Scotland Yard - Baroness Orczy - Страница 6
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ОглавлениеAfter the verdict we found our way back to our lodgings. Lady Molly tramped along silently, with that deep furrow between her brows which I knew meant that she was deep in thought.
“Now we’ll have some tea,” I said, with a sigh of relief, as soon as we entered the cottage door.
“No, you won’t,” replied my lady, dryly. “I am going to write out a telegram, and we’ll go straight on to Canterbury and send it from there.”
“To Canterbury!” I gasped. “Two hours’ walk at least, for I don’t suppose we can get a trap, and it is past three o’clock. Why not send your telegram from Ninescore?”
“Mary, you are stupid,” was all the reply I got.
She wrote out two telegrams—one of which was at least three dozen words long—and, once more calling to me to come along, we set out for Canterbury.
I was tea-less, cross, and puzzled. Lady Molly was alert, cheerful, and irritatingly active.
We reached the first telegraph office a little before five. My lady sent the telegram without condescending to tell me anything of its destination or contents; then she took me to the Castle Hotel and graciously offered me tea.
“May I be allowed to inquire whether you propose tramping back to Ninescore to-night?” I asked with a slight touch of sarcasm, as I really felt put out.
“No, Mary,” she replied, quietly munching a bit of Sally Lunn; “I have engaged a couple of rooms at this hotel and wired the chief that any message will find us here to-morrow morning.”
After that there was nothing for it but quietude, patience, and finally supper and bed.
The next morning my lady walked into my room before I had finished dressing. She had a newspaper in her hand, and threw it down on the bed as she said calmly:
“It was in the evening paper all right last night. I think we shall be in time.”
No use asking her what “it” meant. It was easier to pick up the paper, which I did. It was a late edition of one of the leading London evening shockers, and at once the front page, with its startling headline, attracted my attention:
THE NINESCORE MYSTERY MARY NICHOLL’S BABY DYING
Then, below that, a short paragraph:—
“We regret to learn that the little baby daughter of the unfortunate girl who was murdered recently at Ash Court, Ninescore, Kent, under such terrible and mysterious circumstances, is very seriously ill at the cottage of Mrs. Williams, in whose charge she is. The local doctor who visited her to-day declares that she cannot last more than a few hours. At the time of going to press the nature of the child’s complaint was not known to our special representative at Ninescore.”
“What does this mean?” I gasped.
But before she could reply there was a knock at the door.
“A telegram for Miss Granard,” said the voice of the hall-porter.
“Quick, Mary,” said Lady Molly, eagerly. “I told the chief and also Meisures to wire here and to you.”
The telegram turned out to have come from Ninescore, and was signed “Meisures.” Lady Molly read it aloud:
“Mary Nicholls arrived here this morning. Detained her at station. Come at once.”
“Mary Nicholls! I don’t understand,” was all I could contrive to say.
But she only replied:
“I knew it! I knew it! Oh, Mary, what a wonderful thing is human nature, and how I thank Heaven that gave me a knowledge of it!”
She made me get dressed all in a hurry, and then we swallowed some breakfast hastily whilst a fly was being got for us. I had, perforce, to satisfy my curiosity from my own inner consciousness. Lady Molly was too absorbed to take any notice of me. Evidently the chief knew what she had done and approved of it: the telegram from Meisures pointed to that.
My lady had suddenly become a personality. Dressed very quietly, and in a smart close-fitting hat, she looked years older than her age, owing also to the seriousness of her mien.
The fly took us to Ninescore fairly quickly. At the little police-station we found Meisures awaiting us. He had Elliot and Pegram from the Yard with him. They had obviously got their orders, for all three of them were mighty deferential.
“The woman is Mary Nicholls, right enough,” said Meisures, as Lady Molly brushed quickly past him, “the woman who was supposed to have been murdered. It’s that silly bogus paragraph about the infant brought her out of her hiding-place. I wonder how it got in,” he added blandly; “the child is well enough.”
“I wonder,” said Lady Molly, whilst a smile—the first I had seen that morning—lit up her pretty face.
“I suppose the other sister will turn up too, presently,” rejoined Elliot. “Pretty lot of trouble we shall have now. If Mary Nicholls is alive and kickin’, who was murdered at Ash Court, say I?”
“I wonder,” said Lady Molly, with the same charming smile.
Then she went in to see Mary Nicholls.
The Reverend Octavius Ludlow was sitting beside the girl, who seemed in great distress, for she was crying bitterly.
Lady Molly asked Elliott and the others to remain in the passage whilst she herself went into the room, I following behind her.
When the door was shut, she went up to Mary Nicholls, and assuming a hard and severe manner, she said:
“Well, you have at last made up your mind, have you, Nicholls? I suppose you know that we have applied for a warrant for your arrest?”
The woman gave a shriek which unmistakably was one of fear.
“My arrest?” she gasped. “What for?”
“The murder of your sister Susan.”
“’Twasn’t me!” she said quickly.
“Then Susan is dead?” retorted Lady Molly, quietly.
Mary saw that she had betrayed herself. She gave Lady Molly a look of agonised horror, then turned as white as a sheet and would have fallen had not the Reverend Octavius Ludlow gently led her to a chair.
“It wasn’t me,” she repeated, with a heart-broken sob.
“That will be for you to prove,” said Lady Molly dryly. “The child cannot now, of course remain with Mrs. Williams; she will be removed to the workhouse, and—”
“No, that shan’t be,” said the mother excitedly. “She shan’t be, I tell you. The workhouse, indeed,” she added in a paroxysm of hysterical tears, “and her father a lord!”
The reverend gentleman and I gasped in astonishment; but Lady Molly had worked up to this climax so ingeniously that it was obvious she had guessed it all along, and had merely led Mary Nicholls on in order to get this admission from her.
How well she had known human nature in pitting the child against the sweetheart! Mary Nicholls was ready enough to hide herself, to part from her child even for a while, in order to save the man she had once loved from the consequences of his crime; but when she heard that her child was dying, she no longer could bear to leave it among strangers, and when Lady Molly taunted her with the workhouse, she exclaimed in her maternal pride:
“The workhouse! And her father a lord!”
Driven into a corner, she confessed the whole truth.
Lord Edbrooke, then Mr. Lydgate, was the father of her child. Knowing this, her sister Susan had, for over a year now, systematically blackmailed the unfortunate man—not altogether, it seems, without Mary’s connivance. In January last she got him to come down to Ninescore under the distinct promise that Mary would meet him and hand over to him the letters she had received from him, as well as the ring he had given her, in exchange for the sum of £5,000.
The meeting-place was arranged, but at the last moment Mary was afraid to go in the dark. Susan, nothing daunted, but anxious about her own reputation in case she should be seen talking to a man so late at night, put on Mary’s dress, took the ring and the letters, also her sister’s purse, and went to meet Lord Edbrooke.
What happened at that interview no one will ever know. It ended with the murder of the blackmailer. I suppose the fact that Susan had, in measure, begun by impersonating her sister, gave the murderer the first thought of confusing the identity of his victim by the horrible device of burying the body in the slimy mud. Anyway, he almost did succeed in hoodwinking the police, and would have done so entirely but for Lady Molly’s strange intuition in the matter.
After his crime he ran instinctively to Mary’s cottage. He had to make a clean breast of it to her, as, without her help, he was a doomed man.
So he persuaded her to go away from home and to leave no clue or trace of herself or her sister in Ninescore. With the help of money which he would give her, she could begin life anew somewhere else, and no doubt he deluded the unfortunate girl with promises that her child would be restored to her very soon.
Thus he enticed Mary Nicholls away, who would have been the great and all-important witness against him the moment his crime was discovered. A girl of Mary’s type and class instinctively obeys the man she has once loved, the man who is the father of her child. She consented to disappear and to allow all the world to believe that she had been murdered by some unknown miscreant.
Then the murderer quietly returned to his luxurious home at Edbrooke Castle, unsuspected. No one had thought of mentioning his name in connection with that of Mary Nicholls. In the days when he used to come down to Ash Court he was Mr. Lydgate, and, when he became a peer, sleepy, out-of-the-way Ninescore ceased to think of him.
Perhaps Mr. Lionel Lydgate knew all about his brother’s association with the village girl. From his attitude at the inquest I should say he did, but of course he would not betray his own brother unless forced to do so.
Now, of course, the whole aspect of the case was changed: the veil of mystery had been torn asunder owing to the insight, the marvelous intuition, of a woman who, in my opinion, is the most wonderful psychologist of her time.
You know the sequel. Our fellows at the Yard, aided by the local police, took their lead from Lady Molly, and began their investigations of Lord Edbrooke’s movements on or about the 23rd of January.
Even their preliminary inquiries revealed the fact that his lordship had left Edbrooke Castle on the 21st. He went up to town, saying to his wife and household that he was called away on business, and not even taking his valet with him. He put up at the Langham Hotel.
But here police investigations came to an abrupt ending. Lord Edbrooke evidently got wind of them. Anyway, the day after Lady Molly so cleverly enticed Mary Nicholls out of her hiding-place, and surprised her into an admission of the truth, the unfortunate man threw himself in front of the express train at Grantham railway station, and was instantly killed. Human justice cannot reach him now!
But don’t tell me that a man would have thought of that bogus paragraph, or of the taunt which stung the motherly pride of the village girl to the quick, and thus wrung from her an admission which no amount of male ingenuity would ever have obtained.
