Bodies from the Library 5, page 3
As for Madame Lesoulier, she pulled up her roots and went away to a flat in Paris. She dined with them before she left; and they knew by her smiling tranquillity that she was as content with the transaction as they were. After that they forgot her.
He finished his book and made a good job of it; and after its success as a film they never looked back. All their three children were born in the house, all their friends visited it. Other love affairs began there, and other marriages were made. It was a place saturated with sunlight and happiness.
It was ten years before either of them saw Madame Lesoulier again. Alan was flying back from a conference with his London publisher and stayed overnight in Paris; at a café in Montmartre he found her watching the passing world over the rim of a vermouth, hardly changed at first sight from what she had been when first he encountered her.
On a second glance she seemed to have lost the ten years—and more. Her hair was expertly tinted, her eyes gleamed, and her fair skin bloomed. She was alone and highly content.
‘I saw your new book reviewed last month,’ she said amiably. ‘You’ve done well in the world.’
He admitted it, still a little amazed. ‘We feel we owe it all to you. You started us ahead, and we’ve never looked back.’
She asked after his wife, and opened her eyes wide to hear of the three children. ‘And are you living in Paris now?’
‘Oh, no, I’m only here overnight, on my way back from England. I’m off home to the Villa des Rosiers in the morning.’
‘You mean,’ said Madame Lesoulier blankly, ‘that you’ve hung on all this time? You could have got nearly a quarter of a million francs for it any time you cared.’
Alan stiffened accusingly. ‘Then so could you,’ he said.
‘Of course, if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to.’ She caught his eye and held it; in a moment she relaxed, smiling. ‘Don’t worry, you never owed me anything. I got my money’s worth in return. You did me a favour. You’ve no idea how most people shy away from a bargain they can’t understand.’
For the first time he looked back narrowly and coolly, and saw that the motives they had attributed to her had never been adequate. You may give a house out of pure benevolence, perhaps, if you’re rich enough to be able to do that kind of thing. But you don’t sell it for fifty francs, not without a reason.
Alan said, ‘I’m grown-up now, I’m old enough to be told the facts of life. Why did you do it?’
And she saw that he was, and saw, moreover, that what she told him now could not in any way damage the security and happiness that had never been her gift to them.
‘My husband brought me home to the house,’ she said with deliberation, ‘after our wedding here in Paris. I spent twenty years in hell there. He had vices by the dozen, mistresses by the score. At first I stayed, and stayed faithful because I loved him, and then because I hated him. He’d married me, and I was going to get something out of it if I had to wait years for him to die. When he did die he left me comfortably off. Very comfortably.
‘But he got in one dig at the end. I’d suffered from his last mistress for five years. He left me my portion on condition that I sold the villa and handed over the proceeds to “our dear friend Madame Hermine Franck”.’
She drank with slow enjoyment, and licked her lips like a cat.
‘I was always a dutiful wife,’ She purred. ‘With my own hands I conveyed to “our dear friend Hermine” the proceeds of that sale. It was worth a quarter of a million francs, believe me. Well worth it!’
ELLIS PETERS
Edith Mary Pargeter was born on 28 September 1913 at 26 Wellington Road in the village of Horsehay, Shropshire—a house now known as Cadfael Cottage. Pargeter’s father Edmund was a clerk at the local ironworks, and her mother Edith an amateur antiquarian and talented musician who fostered in her children a love of music and a keen interest in local history. Pargeter loved the district where she had been born and although in later years she travelled to Europe, India and eventually America, her home was never more than three miles from her birthplace. She attended Dawley Church of England School where the self-styled ‘girl who never stopped writing’ contributed poetry and stories to the school magazine, and won first prize in a nationwide essay competition run by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She also won a scholarship to Coalbrookdale school in 1924 and the following year, when she was only twelve, began her first novel. When she finished it three years later she sent it to William Heinemann, the London publishers. They rejected it for publication but nonetheless asked that she let them see any other novels she might complete.
In 1931 Pargeter left school and after a brief spell working at a labour exchange she became a pharmacist’s assistant in the dispensary of Bemrose’s, a chemist in the nearby village of Dawley. In the evenings she wrote short stories and worked on a richly detailed novel about ancient Rome. Never shy, she sent the completed typescript to literary agent Gilbert Wright, who placed the novel, Hortensius—Friend of Nero (1936), with Lovat Dickson Ltd but sadly did not live to see it published. Pargeter’s second novel, Iron Bound (1936), was inspired by her father’s employment and also appeared from a small publisher, but her third, The City Lies Four Square (1939)—an extraordinary ghost story with homoerotic undertones—was published by William Heinemann. Edith Pargeter had achieved her teenage ambition.
Pargeter’s first short story to appear in print was ‘Mightiest in the Mightiest’, published in 1936 in Everywoman’s. The magazine would feature many more of her stories in the next few years, including a series of rural romances set in the fictional village of Brambleridge. Prompted by her agent, Pargeter tried her hand at writing a romantic novel, albeit pseudonymously to protect her growing reputation as a serious novelist. Day Star (1937), inspired by the life of Greta Garbo, appeared under the pen-name of ‘Peter Benedict’, and Pargeter used the same pseudonym for three newspaper serials: Rents Are Low in Eden (1938), a romance centred on a property dispute; a detective story entitled What Happened at Montalban? (1939); and Masters of the Parachute Mail (1939), a light-hearted thriller that subsequently appeared in hardback as by ‘Jolyon Carr’, a pseudonym that Pargeter had already used for Murder in the Dispensary (1938), a novel that drew on her experience of working at Bemrose’s. As ‘Jolyon Carr’, she also wrote a light-hearted thriller, Freedom for Two (1939), and a mystery, Death Comes by Post (1940), while a third pseudonym, ‘John Redfern’, was employed for The Victim Needs a Nurse (1940).
At Munich in 1938, out of naïvety or blind hope, Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain effectively ceded Czechoslovakia to Germany, an action that left Pargeter desolated. She had been born on Czechoslovakia’s national day and had developed a strong interest in the country. As would so often be the case, she felt driven to ‘do something’, and so she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She received the British Empire Medal for her war work in Liverpool as a teleprinter operator, which she drew upon for She Goes to War (1942) and she also completed a trilogy about the war service of a British soldier called Jim Bennison. In 1947, she attended a summer school in Prague where she met various Czechs including Václav Havel, who was the basis for Václav Havelka, the central character of Pargeter’s Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Heart (1967). Havel would eventually become the country’s President in 1989. At the summer school she also met Jiří Edelmann, with whom she would remain close friends for the rest of her life.
In 1948, after the Communist Party seized power, Czechosolvakia fell under the control of the Soviet Union. Despite the difficulties, and ‘continually walking a tightrope in order to avoid harming people I wanted only to serve’, Pargeter continued to visit Jiří Edelmann and his wife until it became impossible. Nonetheless, determined ‘to serve’ in some way, she became fluent in Czech and over the next ten years translated at least sixteen notable works, including a volume of stories by Jan Neruda, Josefa Slánská’s controversial memoir Report on My Husband (1950) and Josef Bor’s Terezin Requiem, which reduced her to tears as she worked on the translation. Bor’s memoir recounts the true story of a production of Verdi’s Requiem, organized and conducted by a young Czech, Raphael Schachter, whom the Nazis subsequently slaughtered beside the musicians and choir. In 1968, the Czech Society for Foreign Relations awarded Pargeter the Gold Medal and Ribbon for her services to Czechoslovakian literature.
As well as translating Czech books, Pargeter also wrote The Coast of Bohemia (1950), a semi-fictional amalgam of travel book and history lesson in which she contrasted the serenity of Prague with the horrors of Terezín and the village of Lidice, which had been razed by the Nazis. And in Fallen into the Pit (1951), her first detective story for ten years, the unsympathetic victim was a former Nazi. After Holiday with Violence (1952), Pargeter once again seemed to abandon crime fiction until the appearance in 1961 of ‘Ellis Peters’, named for her older brother, an engineer with whom she lived for many years and nursed until his death in 1985, and Petra, Jiří Edelmann’s daughter (whose own daughter would be named Edith). Fallen into the Pit had featured a conventional detective, the dull but reliable Inspector George Felse, and between 1961 and 1978 he and members of his family variously appeared in a dozen more novels by ‘Ellis Peters’. Two were inspired by a visit to India and one, Death and the Joyful Woman (1962), won Pargeter an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America and, much to her delight, was later the basis of a Czech film, Smrt a Blazená Paní (1980).
The 1960s and early 1970s were Pargeter’s most productive period. As well as the Felse series, numerous short stories and half a dozen non-series crime novels, she wrote a large number of historical novels, including the Heaven Tree trilogy (1960–1963), which she regarded as her best work, and the Brothers of Gwynned quartet (1974–1977). Then, inspired by Owen and Blakeway’s two-volume History of Shrewsbury (1825), which she had been given as a child, and details of monastic life at the 900-year-old Benedictine abbey, she conceived a new novel built around the character of a medieval herbalist called, simply, Cadfael. ‘Ellis Peters’, crime writer, had finally arrived.
Pargeter’s ‘one sacred rule’ for crime novels was that they must be moral, reflecting her own Anglican sensibilities, and in the worldly Cadfael, named for a Welsh saint, she found the ideal character to fulfil that rule. While she had intended A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977) to be a one-off, the enthusiastic response of readers and critics alike ensured that the character would return. And he did, again and again. As she would say in interviews, the twenty Cadfael books and a handful of short stories gave her ‘more pleasure than anything else’ she wrote in her long career, with her favourite among them being his debut. The books were similarly admired by her peers, with Monks Hood (1980) winning the Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association. Historical detective stories had existed before her, but their popularity today undoubtedly owes much to Pargeter. In later years she was understandably irritated by the suggestion that the notion of a medieval whodunit was created by Umberto Eco whose global bestseller The Name of the Rose (1980) had been published two years after the first of the Cadfael novels.
Pargeter continued to write well into her seventies. In 1993 she was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger for her lifetime achievements, and she went on to publish Brother Cadfael’s Penance in 1994, the same year she was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in the New Year Honours.
In 1995 the girl who ‘never stopped writing’ finally stopped. On 14 October, shortly after returning from hospital where she had been suffering from a stroke following a leg amputation, she died in her sleep at her home, a bungalow in Madeley named Troja after the suburb where her friends the Edelmanns lived in Prague. By her bedside was Jiří Edelmann, the man to whom she had dedicated The Fair Young Phoenix (1948), a semi-fictional love story set in the aftermath of the Second World War.
‘Villa for Sale’ was published in the Australian Women’s Weekly on 7 December 1966.
THE GINGER KING
A. E. W. Mason
Monsieur Hanaud was smoking one of Mr Ricardo’s special Havanas in the dining-room of Mr Ricardo’s fine house in Grosvenor Square. The trial which had fetched him over from Paris had ended that morning. He had eaten a very good lunch with his friend; he had taken the napkin down from his collar; he was at his ease; and as he smoked, alas! he preached.
‘Chance, my friend, is the detective’s best confederate. A little unimportant word you use and it startles—a strange twist of character is provoked to reveal itself—an odd incident breaks in on the routine of your investigation. And the mind pounces. “Ping,” you say, if you play the table-tennis. “Pong,” you say, if you play the Mahjong. And there you are! In at the brush.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
For the moment Mr Ricardo was baffled.
‘I said, “You are in at the brush,”’ Hanaud repeated amicably.
Mr Ricardo smiled with indulgence. He too had eaten his share of an admirable saddle of lamb and drunk his half of a bottle of exquisite Haut-Brion.
‘You mean, of course, that you are in at the death,’ he said.
‘No, no,’ Hanaud protested, starting forward. ‘I do not speak of executions. Detectives are never present at executions and, for me, I find them disgusting. I say, you are in at the brush. It is an idiom from your hunting-field. It means that when all the mess is swept up, you are there, the Man who found the Lady under the thimble.’
Mr Ricardo was in no mood to pursue his large friend through the winding mazes of his metaphors.
‘I am beginning to understand you,’ he answered with resignation.
‘Yes.’ Hanaud nodded his head complacently. ‘I speak the precision. It is known.’
With a gentle knock, Mr Ricardo’s incomparable butler Thomson entered the room.
‘A Mr Middleton has called,’ he said, offering to Ricardo a visiting-card upon a salver.
Ricardo waved the salver away.
‘I do not see visitors immediately after luncheon. It is an unforgivable time to call. Send him away!’
The butler, however, persisted.
‘I took the liberty of pointing out that the hour was unseasonable,’ he said, ‘but Mr Middleton was in hopes that Monsieur Hanaud was staying with you. He seemed very anxious.’
Ricardo took up the card reluctantly. He read aloud.
‘Mr John Middleton, Secretary of the Unicorn Fire Insurance Company. I am myself insured with that firm.’ He turned towards his guest. ‘No doubt he has some reason to excuse him. But it is as you wish.’
Monsieur Hanaud’s strange ambition that afternoon was to climb the Monument and after to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower, but his good nature won the day, and since he was to find more than one illustration of the text upon which he had been preaching, he never regretted it.
‘I am on view, he said simply.
‘We will see Mr Middleton in the Library,’ said Mr Ricardo; and into that spacious dormitory of deep armchairs and noble books Mr Middleton was introduced.
Hanaud was delighted with the look of him. Mr Middleton was a collector’s piece of Victorian England. Middle-aged, with dangling whiskers like lappets at the sides of an otherwise clean-shaved face, very careful and a trifle old-maidish in his speech, he had a tittering laugh and wore the long black frock-coat and the striped trousers which once made the City what is was. He was wreathed in apologies for his intrusion.
‘My good friend Superintendent Holloway of Marlborough Street, whose little property is insured with us, thought that I might find you at Mr Ricardo’s house. I am very fortunate.’
‘I must return to Paris tomorrow,’ Hanaud replied. ‘For this afternoon I am at your service. You will smoke?’
From his pocket Hanaud tendered a bright blue packet of black stringy cigarettes, and Mr Middleton recoiled as if he suddenly saw a cobra on the carpet ready to strike.
‘Oh no, no!’ he cried in dismay. ‘A small mild cigar when the day’s work is done. You will forgive me? I have a little story to tell.’
‘Proceed!’ said Hanaud graciously.
‘It is a Mr Enoch Swallow,’ Mr Middleton began. ‘I beg you not to be misled by his name. He is a Syrian gentleman by birth and an English gentleman by naturalization. But again I beg you not to be misled. There is nothing of the cunning of the Orient about him. He is a big, plain, simple creature, a peasant, one might say as honest as the day. And it may be so. I make no accusation.’
‘He has a business, this honest man?’ Hanaud asked.
‘He is a furrier.’
‘You begin to interest me,’ said Hanaud.
‘A year ago Enoch Swallow fitted up for his business a house in Berwick Street, towards the Oxford Street end of that long and narrow thoroughfare. The ground floor became his showrooms, he and his wife with a cook-general to wait on them occupied the first floor, and the two storeys above were elaborately arranged for his valuable stock. Then he came to us for an insurance policy.’
‘Aha!’ said Monsieur Hanaud.
‘We hesitated,’ continued Mr Middleton, stroking one of his side whiskers. ‘Everything was as it should be—the lease of the house, compliance with the regulations of the County Council, the value of the stock—mink, silver fox, sables—all correct, and yet we hesitated.’
‘Why?’ asked Hanaud.
‘Mind, I make no suggestion.’ Mr Middleton was very insistent upon his complete detachment. ‘It was held to be an accident. The Société Universelle paid the insurance money. But Mr Enoch Swallow did have a fire in a similar establishment on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris three years before.’
‘Enoch Swallow? The Boulevard Haussmann?’ Hanaud dived deep amongst his memories, but came to the surface with empty hands. ‘No, I do not remember. There was no case.’
