Fear Stalks the Village (Murder Mystery Classic). Ethel Lina White
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the invitation of Lady d'Arcy—Joan's employer—the novelist had been entertained at the Court, a massive biscuit-hued Georgian pile, surrounded with lush parkland, and about a mile from the village. During their tea they had both been conscious of mangled strands of friendship, as they talked of impersonal matters.
Each viewed the other from the detached standard of criticism. Joan thought her friend's lips suggested that she had been affectionately kissing a freshly-painted pillar-box, while the novelist considered that the girl had run to seed badly. But when they walked back to the village they had been insensibly welded together in harmony, by the waving beauty of the fields, ripening for hay and steeped in the glow of sunset. Joan's sunburnt face proclaimed the fact that she never wore a hat, but the novelist, too, took off her tiny mesh of crocheted silk, without a thought of the set of her wave. Smoking as they sauntered, they entered the shady tunnel of the Quaker's Walk, half a mile of chestnut avenue.
"Like it?" asked the novelist.
"Love it." Joan's blue eyes glowed. "I know you think I'm buried. But this corpse hopes the Trump won't sound just yet. I've never been so happy."
"Pray it may last...Any social life?"
"Tennis and garden-parties, later on. The three big houses are the Hall, the Towers and the Court. The Court is ours. The Squire lives at the Hall. The rich people of the neighbourhood live at the Towers, but they're always away."
"Any men?"
"Two. The parson and Major Blair. The Major's a manly man and he belongs to Vivian Sheriff, the Squire's daughter. Vivian and I are the only girls here."
The novelist raised her painted butterfly brows.
"Let me get this straight," she said. "There's the Vivian-girl and the biological specimen. That leaves you and the padre. What's he like?"
"Rather a thrill. Big and black, with a voice like a gong. You should hear him hammer and bellow on Sundays. But I believe he's the genuine thing."
"Going to marry him?"
Joan was conscious of a slight recoil, so that she had to remind herself of her former standard of modern frankness.
"If he doesn't break away, I may," she replied. "After all, I've had to submit meekly to employers all my life, and I'd like to do some bossing myself, for a change. Purely, can't you see me telling the cottagers to boil their potatoes in their skins, and not to have any more babies?"
"I'd believe anything of you, Brook," remarked her friend. "By the way, what's your Lady d'Arcy like?"
"Big and vague, and drifts about aimlessly. I've nothing to do but to act as some sort of anchor. I get a big salary which I can't spend here. But it's not wasted at home. They're nearly sunk, bless 'em."
The novelist's face was not painted to be revealing, but she nodded to show her sympathy with the prevailing economic depression as she studied Joan through her monocle. The girl was tall and strong, with a face expressive of character, and fearless eyes. She wore a sleeveless white tennis-frock and silver slave-bangles on her brown arms. Although she had grown more solid, she seemed to be of compact virtues and charm.
"Well? The verdict?" asked Joan.
"Guilty!" replied her friend. "You're a last year's model. You've put on weight. Your lips look indecently like lips. And—darling, I'm jealous as hell."
"I know I wouldn't swap jobs with you." Joan gave a contented laugh. "This is really a marvellous place, Purley. Everyone has a pedigree and a private income. Everyone's kind. And, my dear, everyone's married."
"I get it. No love-babies, no drains. Gosh, what a picture!" As the two women emerged from the gloom of the avenue they saw the village with its ancient cottages and choked flower-gardens, all steeped in the carnation glow of sunset. At each step they seemed to turn a fresh page of a fairy-tale, with illuminated borders jumbled with box-edging, sage, damson-trees, beehives and a patchwork quilt of peonies, pinks and pansies. Golden girls and boys skipped in the street, while cats were growing mysterious as they awaited the herald—twilight. Soon their real life would begin.
The novelist surrendered herself to the enchantment, although her lip curled at evidence of the survival of the Feudal System, for all the children bobbed to the 'quality'.
As they lingered on the green, Joan pointed to a solid house of buff stucco, adorned with a clock-tower.
"That's 'Clock House'," she said. "The Scudamores live there. I hope we'll meet them, for they're types. They're terribly nice and terribly happily-married. I call them 'The Spirit of the Village'. You'd find them 'Copy'."
The novelist stifled her groan, as Joan proceeded to do the honours of the village. She waved her cigarette towards a grey stone house which was backed by the Norman church.
"The Rectory. My future home." She forced the note of impudence. "Just behind us is the doctor's house, but the walls hide it. It's Queen Anne and rather sweet. He and his wife always play tennis after dinner. You can hear them."
As they stood, listening, the dull thuds behind the rose-red bricks mingled with the faint laughter of children and the cawing of rooks in the elms. Suddenly, the novelist fell prostrate before the cumulative spell of the village.
"It's perfect," she declared. "I wonder if I could rent a cottage for the summer."
"If you did you'd never go back to London," Joan told her. "Nobody ever goes away, not even for holidays. Look out. Here are the Scudamores."
She guiltily hid her cigarette behind her back, as a middle-aged couple advanced, arm-in-arm, over the cobbles. The man had a clean-shaven, long-lipped, legal face, to proclaim him a lawyer with the best County connection, together with a nose which had been in his family for centuries.
His wife was also tall, and possessed of bleached beauty and elegance. Her luxuriant fair hair was fast fading to grey, and her draperies were indefinitely grey-green in colour, like a glacier-fed river.
She greeted Lady d'Arcy's companion with a gracious bow, but did not even glance at her companion.
"She didn't really like me," murmured the novelist when the Scudamores had passed. "Do I look like a fallen woman? Tell her I'm respectable, if painted."
"My dear," gurgled Joan, "she's so charitable that she would not take a chance of disliking you. That's why she wouldn't look. She's a bit overwhelming, but a real Christian...I say, Purley."
As Joan paused and regarded her friend intently, the novelist braced herself to meet the inevitable question.
"Can't you make a story out of this village?"
"You would say that." The novelist's tone was acid. "But, my good woman, what possible copy could I find here? Jane Austen's beaten me to Cranford. The truth is, my child, if there'd been no Fall, there'd be no Publishers and no Lending Libraries."
"But there must be a story everywhere," persisted Joan.
"Not for me."
"Oh, come, Purley, have a shot at it. I want to be amused."
The novelist puckered up her painted lips in a whimsical smile.
"All right," she conceded. "But I'll have to follow my own special line. Something like this. This village seems an earthly paradise, with a population of kindly gracious souls. But the flowers are growing on slime. When twilight falls, they light their lamps and draw down their blinds. And then—when no one can see them they lead their real lives."
"For example?" urged Joan.
"Well, to begin with, that highly-respectable married couple, who disapproved of my lips, are not really married to each other, but are living in sin."
"You priceless chump. Tell me the story of their double life."
"No, I must outline my synopsis first and collect my characters...Hum. The Parsonage is hidden by those discreet yews, so the Rector hasn't got to wait until dark. I think, at this moment, he's throwing a bottle-and-pyjama