Joan Smith Read online

  VALERIE

  Joan Smith

  Chapter One

  In defense of my reputation, let me deny at the outset the odious rumor that I went to Troy Fenners to nab a husband. That there chanced to be a few eligible gentlemen running tame at my Aunt Loo’s house was mere coincidence. That was not why I went at all.

  When one has, however, an aunt possessed of a staggeringly large fortune and no children, she is not tardy to accept an invitation to visit. Add to that the fact that Papa is not at all high in the stirrups, that he has not less than four of us daughters to see matched, that life at Kent had sunk into a dismal business of hearing hints I was destined for the shelf, add to that three bickering sisters, and you will, I hope, believe that I went for the adventure and the simple pleasure of a change of scene.

  My Aunt Loo, for Louise, is a dear, zany creature, totally unlike her brother, my papa. She is rather plump and fiftyish. She spends a great deal of her money on perfectly ugly outfits that run from the peculiar to the downright bizarre. She is a frustrated actress at heart, usually playing some role in her mind for which she unfortunately costumes her body. Having recently fallen amongst spiritualists, she brought with her a great many flowing, pale, vaguely ghostlike ensembles on her last visit home. It was while she was with us that she asked me to return with her to Troy Fenners, her estate in Hampshire. I said, “Yes, please and thank you,” before her words were hardly out of her mouth.

  “You will do very nicely,” she went on, running her bright blue eyes over my anatomy. Aunt Loo’s eyes tend to protrude more from their sockets than other people’s, giving her an air of perpetual surprise. It is a look that is quite familiar to me.

  There is plenty of the anatomy she was examining. Five feet and ten inches of it, to be precise. I go beyond Junoesque. No one has ever referred to me as a ladder either; the frame is well filled. My sisters are kind enough to call me a Percheron, but I like to think of myself as more of a lioness. I have hair of a lionish shade, eyes that are topaz in color and somewhat the shape of a feline’s eyes. I try to manage my large frame with catlike grace, though I cannot claim complete success in this endeavor. It is hard to be graceful when one must bend not only the head but also the shoulders to converse with other people. Then too the furniture makers scale down their sofas and chairs to accommodate smaller ladies. I am most at home in a man’s stuffed armchair.

  I never adopt any posture of apologizing for my size. There is nothing so pathetic as to see a large woman trying to shrink down to match her escort by buckling her knees, bending her head, or wearing childish flat-heeled shoes. I walk tall with my head high and my shoulders back, proud of my body. Cringing and groveling are not for a lioness. Just why my particular sort of body would “do very nicely” for my Aunt Loo was not clear to me at the time. I soon learned her meaning!

  Mama had a few reservations on the scheme of a visit. “You are not used to being away from home, Valerie,” she reminded me. This loomed as one of my chief desires, the change, but I could not like to tell her so.

  “I’ll write every week, Mama. Twice a week, and the girls will write to me.”

  “Hampshire is so far away,” she went on, with a worried frown. Mama, dear Mama, is the only person in the world who still sees me as a helpless little thing.

  “Loo is lonesome,” Papa pointed out in an encouraging way to my mother.

  “You must let me have her,” Loo implored. “Just for a month. A month will be long enough.”

  The question would just arise—long enough for what? Being so eager to go, I only smiled and nodded. “Just one month, Mama. I’ll be back for your birthday in July.”

  “I hope so, my dear. My fiftieth—we plan a large party you must know.”

  Lest you take the notion that, being the eldest daughter, I am verging on some such ancient age as twenty-five or thirty, let me point out that I have two brothers, both older than I am. I am twenty-one, and still consider myself very nubile, whatever my younger sisters may say. If ever I find a man I like who is over six feet tall, and providing of course he feels the same way about me, I shall have him. I have had several offers from midgets, and have been in love a few times with non-midgets who failed to return the compliment, but till the present, I and my true love have failed to meet.

  My sisters, excepting Sukey who is only fifteen and my favorite, were perfectly happy to see me go. Elleri’s so-called beau has lately been showing some symptoms of turning into a cat-lover (the cat in question being me), and Marie was never perfectly happy having to share a room with me. Marie is a martinet; her belongings are on hangers and in drawers within a second of leaving her body. Mine have the inexplicable habit of falling on to floors, and hanging off chairs, even landing on beds, sometimes Marie’s. I daresay I am a thorn in her side, but I am the one who actually cleans the room. She only tidies it. I am very particular about cleanliness, even if I am a little messy.

  What I crave, in my deepest heart of hearts, is a woman of my very own to pick up after me, and tend to the thousands of stupid chores women have to cope with. Mending, sewing, making hideous little flower arrangements—they are women’s work, not fit for a lioness.

  When Papa is in favor of anything at our house, it is done. I was allowed to accompany my Aunt Loo home to Troy Fenners, and went with no notion in my head what she wanted me for, but only the determination to have a wonderful time. We were two days and two nights on the road, for despite her elegant chaise and her team of four, she did not make a wild dart through the countryside.

  We stopped at the finest inns, dined on exquisite food, with my rich aunt picking up the bill for the whole. The first evening, we stopped over at Tunbridge Wells. As the clientele at our watering hole were well into their sixties and seventies, I made no demur when we retired to our rooms early, nor even when she handed me a novel do read, to while away the evening. It was an ersatz Mrs. Radcliffe gothic book, entitled Search for the Unknown. I never cared much for gothics. Elleri and Marie eat them up like bonbons. I skipped through twenty pages and set it aside.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked, disappointed.

  “It’s fine. I am rather tired from the trip. That’s all.”

  “Read a little more, just to please me,” she begged.

  I read on, trying to become interested in an insipid heroine who fell into a fit of hysterics every ten pages or so. When she began receiving bumps on the head in the dark, threatening messages, and most particularly when a dashing gentleman entered into the story, my simulated interest became more genuine. I read half the book at the inn at Tunbridge Wells and finished it the next night at Horsham. The heroine’s uncle was the villain; her dashing hero uncovered the plot, for Debora hadn’t the wits to know even that she was in love with him, or he with her.

  “How did you like it, Valerie?” she asked eagerly as soon as I closed the cover.

  “Very much. Do you have any more by this writer? What’s her name? Ah, Mrs. Beaton. I don’t recognize her.”

  “No one does,” she answered, with a sly look on her face. She was trying to narrow those little pop eyes, which had the strange effect of pushing them out farther.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, with elaborate nonchalance, pulling a fold of pale pink chiffon over her knees.

  “You know Mrs. Beaton. Who is she, Auntie? Do I know her?”

  She could contain her marvelous secret no longer. “It’s me!” she squealed, then threw back her brindled head and laughed in pure glee. “I am so glad you like it.”

  It was not necessary to do any playacting. I could not have been more surprised had she told me the incredible events in the story were true. I made all suitable exclamations of surprise and congratulation.

  “Oh, g
ood, then perhaps you won’t mind helping me,” was her reply.

  She had chosen poorly. Writing, like sewing, is one of my more pronounced aversions. Marie was the one she ought to have brought back with her. When Marie is not tidying her room, she is making up lists of good resolutions, of her belongings, of things to do and read, anything to give her a reason to sit at a desk writing. A lengthy book to be copied out in copperplate would be a boon to Marie.

  Before I had time to begin making my excuses, she went on, “The thing is, you see, I want to murder someone, and as soon as I saw what a great, strapping, strong girl you are, and so very bold, I realized it could be done very easily.”

  “Oh! But really, Auntie, I—I am not much good at—murder?”

  “You can do it if you put your mind to it.”

  “Who is the victim?”

  “Mr. Sinclair,” she answered promptly.

  My aunt’s married name is Sinclair. Of course she was a Ford, like Papa, before her marriage. The intended victim was not her husband; he had been dead for ten or more years. Sir Edward Sinclair was his name, some kin to the noble St. Regis family. A first cousin to Lord St. Regis I believe was the kinship. Just which relatives she planned to dispose of was unclear, but the whole idea was of course repulsive.

  “Papa would never allow me,” I told her, my tones rising to strange heights. My normal voice is low-pitched.

  “He shan’t know a thing about it, dear. How should he? I would not tell him for worlds. It will be our little secret. I have it all planned out. You must climb up the trellis outside of his window, after first entering in the afternoon and making sure the window is not locked, then you raise the window, crawl in, and—well, I have not decided whether to shoot or strangle him. Maybe a dagger would be nice,” she said, setting a finger to her chin to ponder this detail.

  I was beginning to think a straitjacket was what was called for. “Yes, but it is illegal, you must know, to go killing perfectly innocent men.”

  “Innocent?” she demanded, the eyes shooting forward. I feared they would depart from their sockets entirely. “It is nothing of the sort. He is the foulest villain ever darkened the countryside.”

  “What did he do?” I asked, my interest soaring.

  “As to that,” she said more mildly, “I haven’t quite sorted the details out. But he is to be the very blackest sort of villain, who will stop at nothing. He is after Gloria’s money, you see. I think he will have a wife already stashed away in a corner, while pretending to make love to Gloria.”

  “Auntie,” I said, weak with relief, “is this your next book we are discussing?”

  “Mrs. Beaton’s next,” she laughed merrily. “I had thought to call it Madness Most Discreet, from Shakespeare of course, but wonder if Tenebrous Shadows is not scarier. Walter will advise me; he is excellent at titles.”

  “Walter—who is that?”

  “A friend, a neighbor of mine. He is the one gave me the idea a mere female could not perform the feats required of Gloria in killing off the villain, but as soon as ever I saw how huge you are grown, and so bold, my dear Valerie, I knew perfectly well it could be done. I shall make Gloria you, you see, like I have made the villain Mr. Sinclair, and if you can do it, she can. Only of course I shan’t call her Valerie, because her name is already Gloria, which is a much prettier name. I am a little famous for my exactness of detail, if I do not puff myself off unbecomingly to say so. They may praise Mary Brunton to the skies all they like, I think Self-Control was a vastly overrated piece. How should it be possible for the heroine to escape in an Indian canoe down a wild, treacherous river in America? I doubt it could be done, and I’ll tell you this, Valerie, if Mrs. Beaton were to have written it, she would have tested it out first.”

  “Elleri liked the book,” I was so foolish as to say.

  “Walter Scott liked my book!” she retaliated. “As to Elleri, I never saw her open any book but the fashion magazines the whole time I was at your place. I had a most kind note from Mr. Scott, forwarded to me by my publisher. I wish he would have showed the book to Lord Byron instead, but he don’t care for novels. It may work its way into his hands yet. I know Byron’s has got into the hands of the butcher, for I got a flitch of bacon wrapped up in “Childe Harold,” which I thought ever so miserable an end for it. The poem, I mean, for the bacon ought to have been honored.”

  “What else does Gloria do?” I asked, to stem the tide of useless details from Auntie.

  “She jumps her mare over the tollgate booth, which I am sure you can do very well, for it is only five or six feet high. The gate you jumped at home is not much lower.”

  “Yes, but the gate at home is not five feet wide as well.”

  “I shall procure you an excellent jumper for the occasion, my dear. I have already arranged for that.”

  Any scheme that put an excellent jumper under me was not much argued. “We shall see. What else?”

  “You have to carry your hero for a mile over the wildest terrain in all of England. Devon, or possibly Cornwall. I have not quite settled on the locale. Which do you think more frightening, moors or rocks?”

  “Moors. How much does my hero weigh?” I asked, wondering if this too must be put to the test.

  “Sixteen stone. One hundred and sixty-eight pounds.”

  “Who is the hero in real life?” I asked with some interest.

  “Jeremy Welles, our local solicitor. He is a handsome fellow. I never could understand why he married that ugly patch of a wife, but he is to be a bachelor in our book, of course. He weighs sixteen stone; I asked him, in an innocent roundabout way so he would not know why I wished to know. If you can carry him across the meadow, I shall know it is all right, and if you cannot, then the hero must lose a good deal of weight while he is in prison. We can put the weight back on him before the book’s end. I would not want Gloria to be marrying a scarecrow in the last chapter.”

  “I wager Gloria would not like it either.”

  “I wonder if I should change Gloria’s hair color,” was my Aunt’s next irrelevant remark, while I wondered what was to be the pretext for me to carry Mr. Welles across a meadow. She was smiling fondly on my lionish locks. “I had her a blond-haired beauty, but as she is to be rather more vital than I originally intended, perhaps I shall brighten up her hair. And give her those strange yellow eyes you have got. Yes, I think Gloria may sparkle a little more than Debora.”

  Debora was the young lady in search of the unknown, you will recall. It would not be at all difficult to sparkle more than that watering pot. I encouraged this scheme strongly. “Oh, but I do not want her brassy, Valerie,” she declared, when I mentioned that more backbone would not go amiss. “She must rely on FitzClement to rescue her in the end. It would not be at all the thing for her to rescue herself. There would be no romance in that.”

  I soon understood, from further discussion, that this Amazonian heroine was to decline into a rasher of vapors in the end, like Debora, which I thought a great pity. Already I had managed to change her hair and eyes, and had some hazy intention of doing a similar switch on her personality before the book was all written. For the meanwhile, there was a little zest added to the visit in having to perform these feats of strength and daring. I am not a lioness for nothing. If I cannot clamber up a trellis, pull open a window, stab a victim, and haul a sixteen-stone carcass across the moors, I will be much surprised. I confess the jumping of the tollbooth raises an unworthy premonition of a vapor. We shall see.

  Chapter Two

  There is French blood from the days of the Normans in the Sinclair family. The name of the estate, Troy Fenners, is a corruption of Trois Fenêtres, which is presumably the number of windows in the original home. There are considerably more than that in the present building. I counted eighteen on the facade alone as we drove up to it.

  But before we get through the park, let me say that the setting was ideally gothic. Mrs. Radcliffe might well have been describing the place in any of her gloomy word
pictures. There were ancient oaks and elms to distribute the requisite tenebrous shadows, with a stand of willows to droop forlornly behind the house. The dark yews in front of the windows would do a good job of stealing light within, and the upper windows were being invaded by ivy to prevent a surfeit of daylight.

  The soaring lancet windows, the battlements, gargoyles, finials, the aging stone, the general spooky atmosphere were very evident in daylight. When evening shadows stretched, the place would be enough to frighten a witch. The whole of it was blasted with antiquity.

  Living in this house might well have incited my aunt to write her novels. It lacked only an uninhabited wing with mysteriously locked doors containing deep, dark secrets to be a perfect model of a haunted castle.

  “Uninhabited wing? Why, no, I live in the whole place. There are no locked doors, but only a secret passage, and of course the oubliette in the cellar.”

  “You mean—a dungeon?” I asked, enraptured,

  “A horrid old place, full of mice and spiders, with irons and chains rusting in the walls. I would like to have it all cleaned up, made into something useful, but it seems a waste of good money.”

  My aunt had plenty of good money, so the redoing of the oubliette must have been a passing whim, no more. Her staff, who lined up to welcome us, were distressingly modern and normal. There wasn’t a saturnine butler or a dour housekeeper in the lot. A squinting parlor maid was the closest we came to it, and she was not at all sneaky-looking, but only rather ugly. It was quite a disappointment.

  The house was dark and gloomy, however, with a long-case clock that had a haunting way of wheezing, emitting quite a human sound before it struck the hour. I suspected that on a windy night the chimney would belch smoke and distort the wind to a nice eerie pitch. The stairway too creaked, and the ivy tapped mysteriously at my windowpane. The canopied bed was done up in funereally dark shades of green, while the clothespress was of the proper size to hide a body or two.