desire to kill Harriet, Ida and Richard and the ability
to do it and get away with it. Don’t look so surprised,
Mr. Catchpool. Famous people aren’t exempt from
evil. Though I must say I can’t believe that Nancy
would do such a thing. She was a civilized woman
when I knew her, and no one ever changes all that
much . She was a brave woman.”
I said nothing. The trouble is, I thought, that some
killers are civilized for the most part, and only break
from their routine of civility once, to commit murder.
Margaret said, “I lay awake all of last night
wondering if Walter Stoakley might have done it, but,
no, it’s impossible. He can’t stand up without help, let
alone get himself to London. To commit three murders
would be quite beyond him.”
“Walter Stoakley?” I sat forward in my chair. “The
drunken old cove at the King’s Head that I spoke to
yesterday? Why should he want to murder Harriet
Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus?”
“Because Frances Ive was his daughter,” said
Margaret. She turned to look out of the window at the
Ives’ gravestone, and once again the line from the
Shakespeare sonnet came into my mind: For slander’s
mark was ever yet the fair.
“I would be glad if Walter had committed the
murders,” said Margaret. “Isn’t that dreadful of me? I
would be relieved that Nancy hadn’t done it. Walter’s
old, and there’s not much life left in him, I don’t think.
Oh, I don’t want it to be Nancy! I’ve read in the
papers about how well Nancy is doing as an artist.
She left here and really made a name for herself. That
was a source of comfort to me. I was happy to think of
her prospering in London.”
“Left here?” I said. “So Nancy Ducane also lived
in Great Holling at one time?”
Margaret Ernst was still staring out of the window.
“Yes. Until 1913.”
“The same year that Patrick and Frances Ive died.
The same year that Richard Negus also left the
village.”
“Yes.”
“Margaret . . .” I leaned forward in an attempt to
draw her attention away from the Ives’ gravestone.
“I’m hoping for all I’m worth that you have decided to
tell me the story of Patrick and Frances Ive. I’m
certain that once I have heard it, I will understand
many things that are a mystery to me at present.”
She turned her serious eyes toward me. “I have
decided to tell you the story, on one condition. You
must promise not to repeat it to anybody in the
village. What I say to you in this room must go no
further until you arrive in London. There, you may tell
whomever you wish.”
“No need to worry on that score,” I said. “My
opportunities for conversation in Great Holling are
limited. Everyone takes off as soon as they see me
coming.” It had happened twice on the way to
Margaret Ernst’s cottage that morning. One of the
gaspers was a boy of no more than ten years old: a
child, and yet he knew who I was and that he should
avert his eyes and hurry past me to safety. He would, I
felt sure, have known my Christian name, my surname,
and the nature of my business in Great Holling. Small
villages have at least one talent that London lacks:
they know how to ignore a chap in a way that makes
him feel terribly important.
“I am asking for a solemn promise, Mr. Catchpool
—not an evasion.”
“Why is there a need for secrecy? Don’t all the
villagers know about the Ives and whatever it was
that happened to them?”
What Margaret said next revealed that her concern
was for one villager in particular. “Once you have
heard what I have to say, you will doubtless want to
speak to Dr. Ambrose Flowerday.”
“The man you urge me to forget, yet remind me of
time and time again?”
She blushed. “You must promise not to seek him
out and, if you do happen to encounter him, not to
raise the subject of Patrick and Frances Ive. Unless
you can give me such an undertaking, I shan’t be able
to tell you anything.”
“I’m not sure I can. What would I tell my boss at
Scotland Yard? He sent me here to ask questions.”
“Well, then. We’re in a bind.” Margaret Ernst
folded her arms.
“Supposing I find this Dr. Flowerday and ask him
to tell me the story instead? He knew the Ives, didn’t
he? Yesterday you said that, unlike you, he lived in
Great Holling while they were still alive.”
“No!” The fear in her eyes was unmistakable.
“Please don’t speak to Ambrose! You don’t
understand. You can’t understand.”
“What are you so afraid of, Margaret? You seem to
me to be a woman of integrity, but . . . well, I can’t
help wondering if you intend to give me only a partial
account.”
“Oh, my account will be thorough. It will lack
nothing.”
For some reason, I believed her. “Then, if you’re
not intending to withhold a portion of the truth, why
must I not talk to anybody else about Patrick and
Frances Ive?”
Margaret rose to her feet, walked over to the
window and stood with her forehead touching the
glass and her body blocking my view of the Ives’
gravestone. “What happened here in 1913 inflicted a
grievous wound upon this village,” she said quietly.
“No one living here escaped it. Nancy Ducane moved
to London afterward, and Richard Negus to Devon,
but neither of them escaped. They carried the wound
with them. It wasn’t visible on their skin or on any
part of their bodies, but it was there. The wounds you
can’t see are the worst. And those who stayed, like
Ambrose Flowerday—well, it was terrible for them
too. I don’t know if Great Holling can recover. I know
that it hasn’t yet.”
She turned to face me. “The tragedy is never
spoken of, Mr. Catchpool. Not by anybody here, never
directly. Sometimes silence is the only way. Silence
and forgetting, if only one could forget.” She clasped
and unclasped her hands.
“Are you worried about the effect my question
might have upon Dr. Flowerday? Is he trying to
forget?”
“As I said: forgetting is impossible.”
“Nevertheless . . . it would be a distressing subject
for him to discuss?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Is he a good friend of yours?”
“This has nothing to do with me, ” came her sharp
retort. “Ambrose is a good man, and I don’t want him
bothered. Why can you not agree to what I’m asking?”
“All right, you have my word,” I said reluctantly.
“I will discuss what you tell me with no one in the
village.” Having made this pledge, I found myself
hoping that the residents of Great Holling would
continue to ignore me as assiduously as they had thus
far and not put temptation in my way. It would be just
my luck to leave Margaret Ernst’s cottage and run into
a garrulous Dr. Flowerday, keen to have a good old
chinwag.
From his three portraits on the wall, the late
Charles Ernst bestowed three warning glances upon
me: “Break your promise to my wife and you will
regret it, you scoundrel,” his eyes seemed to say.
“What about your own peace of mind?” I asked.
“You don’t want me to talk to Dr. Flowerday in case
it upsets him, but I’m worried I might upset you. I
don’t want to cause you any distress.”
“Good.” Margaret sighed with relief. “The truth is,
I would welcome the chance to tell the story to
another outsider like myself.”
“Then please do,” I said.
She nodded, returned to her chair, and proceeded
to tell me the story of Patrick and Frances Ive, to
which I listened without interruption. I shall now set
it down here.
THE RUMOR THAT STARTED all the trouble sixteen years
ago came from a servant girl who worked in the home
of Reverend Patrick Ive, the young vicar of Great
Holling, and his wife, Frances. Having said that, the
servant was not solely or even mainly responsible for
the tragedy that resulted. She told a spiteful lie, but
she told it to one person only and had no part in
spreading it more widely throughout the village.
Indeed, once the unpleasantness began, she withdrew
almost completely and was scarcely seen. Some
speculated that she was ashamed, as she should have
been, of what she had set in motion. Later, she
regretted her part in the affair and did her best to
make amends, though by then it was too late.
Of course, she was wicked to tell a lie of such
magnitude even to one person. Perhaps she was
frustrated after a particularly hard day’s work at the
vicarage, or it could be that, as a servant with ideas
above her station, she resented the Ives. Maybe she
wished to perk up her dreary life with a little
malicious gossip and was naïve enough to imagine
that no serious harm would be done.
Unfortunately, the person she chose as audience for
her heinous lie was Harriet Sippel. Again, maybe her
choice was easy to understand. Harriet, embittered
and vindictive as she was since the death of her
husband, could be relied upon to receive the lie with
great excitement and to believe it, because, of course,
she would want it to be true. Someone in the village
was doing something gravely wrong, and, even worse
(or, from Harriet’s point of view, even better) that
someone was the vicar! How her eyes must have
flashed with glee! Yes, Harriet was the perfect
audience for the servant girl’s slanderous story, and
no doubt that was why she was chosen.
The servant told Harriet Sippel that Patrick Ive
was a swindler of the most cruel and sacrilegious
kind: he was, she claimed, luring villagers to the
vicarage late at night whenever his wife Frances was
elsewhere helping parishioners, as she often was, and
taking their money in exchange for passing on
communications from their deceased loved ones—
messages from the afterlife that these departed souls
had entrusted to him, Patrick Ive, to deliver.
Harriet Sippel told anybody who would listen that
Patrick was practicing his charlatan trickery upon
several villagers, but this might have been her attempt
to enlarge his wrongdoing in order to make a more
shocking story. The servant girl insisted later that she
had only ever mentioned one name to Harriet: that of
Nancy Ducane.
Nancy was at that time not a famous portrait
painter but an ordinary young woman. She had moved
to Great Holling in 1910 with her husband, William,
when he took a job as headmaster of the village
school. William was much older than Nancy. She was
eighteen when they married and he was almost fifty,
and in 1912 he died of a respiratory illness.
According to the wicked rumors that Harriet
Sippel began to circulate in the snow-beleaguered
January of 1913, Nancy had been seen several times
entering and leaving the vicarage at night or in the
evening, always when it was dark, always looking
furtive, and only on nights when Frances Ive wasn’t at
home.
Anyone with a grain of sense would have doubted
the story. It is surely impossible to observe a furtive
expression, or indeed any expression, on a person’s
face in the pitch-darkness. It would have been hard to
ascertain the identity of a woman leaving the vicarage
in the dead of night unless she had a particularly
distinctive gait, and Nancy Ducane did not; indeed, it
is more likely that whoever saw her on these several
occasions followed her home and found out who she
was that way.
It is easier to accept the account of a person more
zealous than yourself than to challenge it, and that is
what most people in Great Holling did. They were
content to trust the rumor and to join Harriet in
accusing Patrick Ive of blasphemy and extortion. Most
believed (or, to avoid Harriet’s vitriolic scorn,
pretended to believe) that Patrick Ive was secretly
acting as a conduit for exchanges between the living
and the souls of the dead, and taking substantial sums
of money from gullible parishioners as recompense. It
struck the villagers of Great Holling as eminently
plausible that Nancy Ducane would be unable to
resist if offered a means of receiving messages from
her late husband, William, especially if the offer came
from the vicar of the parish. And, yes, she might well
pay handsomely for such an arrangement.
The villagers forgot that they knew, liked and
trusted Patrick Ive. They ignored what they knew of
his decency and kindness, and they disregarded
Harriet Sippel’s relish for sniffing out sinners. They
fell in with her campaign of spite because they were
afraid to attract her wrath, but that was not the only
thing that persuaded them. More influential still was
the knowledge that Harriet had two substantial allies:
Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury had lent their
support to her cause.
Ida was known to be the most pious woman in
Great Holling. Her faith never wavered, and she
rarely opened her mouth to speak without quoting
from the New Testament. She was admired and
revered by all, even if she was not the sort of woman
you would seek out if you wanted to have a riot of a
time. She was far from being gay company, but she
was the closest thing the village had to a saint all its
own. And she was engaged to be married to Richard
Negus, a lawyer who was said to have a brilliant
mind.
Richard’s considerable intellect and air of quiet
authority had earned him the respect of the whole
village. He believed the lie when Harriet presented it
to him because it tallied with the evidence of his own
eyes. He too had seen Nancy Ducane—or at least a
woman who might have been Nancy Ducane—leaving
the vicarage in the middle of the night on more than
one occasion when the vicar’s wife was known to be
away visiting her father, or staying in the home of one
of her parishioners.
Richard Negus believed the rumor, and so Ida
Gransbury believed it too. She was shocked to her
core to think that Patrick Ive, a man of the cloth, had
been carrying on in such an unchristian fashion. She,
Harriet and Richard made it their mission to remove
Patrick Ive from his position as vicar of Great
Holling, and to see him expelled from the Church.
They demanded that he appear in public and admit to
his sinful behavior. He declined to do so, since the
rumors were untrue.
The villagers’ hatred of Patrick Ive soon expanded
