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A Hidden Letter in the Lavender Box | Miss Marple Sleep Stories · Miss Marple Sleep Stories

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Speaker 1: Linen, lavender, and a letter never sent to Miss Marple.
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Speaker 1: Puzzle Section 1. The Mourning of the Fete. The body
0:07
Speaker 1: was found, as bodies so often are in villages, by
0:11
Speaker 1: the person least suited to find one. Young Rose Tully,
0:14
Speaker 1: the maid at Lavender House, who had gone up to
0:17
Speaker 1: the drying barn before breakfast to fetch down the last
0:20
Speaker 1: of the muslin bunting for the church fete, and who
0:23
Speaker 1: came down the ladder backwards, white as the linen she carried,
0:26
Speaker 1: and was sick into the hydrangeas. It was the 14th
0:30
Speaker 1: of June, and Kingham Abbott had woken that morning to
0:33
Speaker 1: one of those perfect English days which seem, in retrospect,
0:37
Speaker 1: to have been arranged by a malicious dramatist. The sky
0:40
Speaker 1: was the pale, washed blue of an old apron. The
0:43
Speaker 1: church bells were practising for the afternoon. Along the high
0:47
Speaker 1: street the smell of baking drifted from Mrs. Peddle's ovens,
0:50
Speaker 1: and on the vicarage lawn the trestle tables were already out,
0:54
Speaker 1: awaiting the bran tub, the white elephant's stall, and— the
0:57
Speaker 1: pride of every parish fate for thirty years, the linen
1:01
Speaker 1: and lavender stall of Miss Honoria Bell. Miss Honoria Bell was,
1:05
Speaker 1: at sixty-eight, one of those women whom a village does
1:08
Speaker 1: not so much contain as orbit. Lavender House, her narrow,
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Speaker 1: wisteria-covered dwelling at the end of Church Lane, supplied the
1:15
Speaker 1: whole of Kingham Abbot with lavender water, lavender sachets, lavender
1:19
Speaker 1: vinegar for the faint, and those little embroidered bags of
1:22
Speaker 1: dried buds which the ladies of the parish tucked among
1:25
Speaker 1: their sheets as their mothers had before them. Honoria grew
1:28
Speaker 1: the lavender herself in the walled garden behind the house,
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Speaker 1: a particular pale, long-stemmed variety her grandmother had brought from
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Speaker 1: the Auvergne, which grew nowhere else in the county, and
1:39
Speaker 1: which she refused, yearly and with increasing firmness, to sell, lease,
1:44
Speaker 1: or even discuss. She also kept the parish linen cupboard.
1:48
Speaker 1: This was a sacred office. The altar cloths, the communion linen,
1:52
Speaker 1: the fete bunting, the best ironing cloths, all lived in
1:56
Speaker 1: the great press in her front parlour, laundered by her
1:59
Speaker 1: own hands, folded in her own particular way, each layer
2:04
Speaker 1: parted by a sprig of lavender, as thin and grey
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Speaker 1: as a ghost. And now Honoria Bell was dead at
2:10
Speaker 1: the foot of her own drying loft, in the barn
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Speaker 1: behind the house, with the June lavender hanging in green
2:16
Speaker 1: and purple drifts from the rafters above her, and a
2:19
Speaker 1: single fresh-cut sprig, cut that morning by someone with a
2:24
Speaker 1: knife rather than the garden scissors, laid across her open
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Speaker 1: palm as neatly as a signature. A fall, said Sergeant Bunch,
2:33
Speaker 1: arriving breathless on his bicycle, twenty minutes after Rose Tully's
2:36
Speaker 1: screams had emptied the high street. He said it with
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Speaker 1: the hopeful firmness of a man who has a fate
2:42
Speaker 1: to police at two o'clock. Poor lady climbed the loft
2:45
Speaker 1: ladder to check the drying racks, same as every year,
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Speaker 1: and the third rung's gone clean through, rotten. You can
2:51
Speaker 1: see it splintered. She'd no business climbing ladders at her age,
2:55
Speaker 1: and that's the truth of it. It was a truth
2:57
Speaker 1: the village received with relief. Kingham Abbott had been fond
3:01
Speaker 1: of Honoria Bell, in the way one is fond of
3:03
Speaker 1: a landmark, with affection, irritation, and the comfortable assumption of permanence,
3:09
Speaker 1: and it preferred its grief tidy. A fall from a
3:12
Speaker 1: ladder was tidy. It was the kind of death a
3:15
Speaker 1: village could fold away, like a laundered sheet. between one
3:19
Speaker 1: sprig of lavender and the next. The fete, it was
3:22
Speaker 1: announced by the vicar at eleven o'clock, with tears standing
3:25
Speaker 1: in his eyes, would go forward, because Honoria would have
3:29
Speaker 1: wished it. This was universally agreed to be true, chiefly
3:32
Speaker 1: because nobody wanted to waste the bran tub. So the
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Speaker 1: bunting went up, and the trestles were dressed, and the
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Speaker 1: linen and lavender stall was manned, with a strangeness nobody
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Speaker 1: quite acknowledged, by Miss Priscilla Anstruther, Honoria's companion of twenty years,
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Speaker 1: a small, grey, fine-boned woman of perhaps fifty-five, who stood
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Speaker 1: behind the piles of sachets with a face like a
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Speaker 1: folded letter, and sold lavender water to the neighbours of
3:56
Speaker 1: her dead employer, with steady, unshaking hands. Poor Pris, said Mrs. Dane,
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Speaker 1: the vicar's sister, buying two sachets she did not want. Devoted,
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Speaker 1: you know, utterly devoted. Twenty years. They say Honoria found
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Speaker 1: her through an advertisement, half-starved, some dreadful situation in Cornwall,
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Speaker 1: and made her whole life over. One wonders what will
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Speaker 1: become of her now.'' One wonders what became of her before,'
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Speaker 1: said old Mrs. Carraway, who was eighty-one, and had earned
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Speaker 1: the right to say such things.' Nobody ever knew. That's
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Speaker 1: the thing about devotion, Lettice. It always begins somewhere.' It
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Speaker 1: was at this point in the afternoon, the tea-urned sighing,
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Speaker 1: the band of the Kingham Abbott Friendly Society embarking upon
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Speaker 1: its second attempt at the floral dance,' the shadows of
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Speaker 1: the chestnut trees lengthening across the vicarage lawn, that Miss
4:48
Speaker 1: Jane Marple was observed to be sitting very quietly in
4:51
Speaker 1: the shade of the cedar, with her knitting on her
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Speaker 1: lap and her eyes on the linen stall. Miss Marple
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Speaker 1: had known Honoria Bell for forty years. They had not
5:00
Speaker 1: been intimate. Honoria was not a woman one was intimate with.
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Speaker 1: She was a woman one consulted, as one consults a barometer.
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Speaker 1: But they had exchanged, across decades, the particular currency of
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Speaker 1: elderly ladies. bulbs, patterns, remedies, and a steady two-way traffic
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Speaker 1: of observation. Miss Marple had come to the Fete, as
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Speaker 1: she came every year, to judge the preserves and to
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Speaker 1: buy a lavender sachet for her own linen drawer. She
5:26
Speaker 1: was doing neither. She was watching Priscilla Anstruther sell lavender water,
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Speaker 1: and there was something in her mild blue eyes that
5:34
Speaker 1: was not, at present, mild at all. Wool-gathering Jane, said
5:38
Speaker 1: Colonel Harker, lowering himself onto the bench beside her, with
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Speaker 1: the careful stiffness of a man whose knee remembers Flanders.
5:46
Speaker 1: He was a handsome ruin of a man, seventy if
5:48
Speaker 1: he was a day, and his usually pink face had
5:51
Speaker 1: a greyish cast. Terrible business, terrible. I can't take it in.
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Speaker 1: I spoke to her yesterday evening, yesterday, mind you, over
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Speaker 1: the wall, about that confounded hedge of hers, and now,
6:05
Speaker 1: quarrelling about the hedge, Miss Marple asked gently. Her needles clicked.
6:09
Speaker 1: How like you, Arthur! You've quarrelled about that hedge for
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Speaker 1: six years. We didn't quarrel. The Colonel's jaw worked. We discussed.
6:18
Speaker 1: She said, she said something very odd, as a matter
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Speaker 1: of fact. She said, After tomorrow, Arthur, the hedge will
6:24
Speaker 1: be the least of it. I thought she meant the FET.
6:27
Speaker 1: You know how she was about the FET. After tomorrow,
6:30
Speaker 1: Miss Marple repeated, in the tone of a woman filing
6:33
Speaker 1: away a recipe. How very interesting. And how is your lumbago, Arthur?
6:38
Speaker 1: I saw you wince when the band started. The Colonel,
6:41
Speaker 1: who knew better than to follow Miss Marple's changes of subject,
6:45
Speaker 1: talked about his lumbago for ten minutes, and Miss Marple listened,
6:49
Speaker 1: or appeared to, and her needles moved, and her eyes
6:53
Speaker 1: returned again and again to the grey woman behind the
6:56
Speaker 1: linen stall. Pris Anstruther did not weep. That was noted,
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Speaker 1: in due course, by everyone, and held against her in
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Speaker 1: the way villagers hold things, loosely, idly, without malice and
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Speaker 1: without mercy. She sold her sachets. She folded her money
7:13
Speaker 1: into the Japaned box. She folded, in a lull, an
7:17
Speaker 1: altar cloth that had been used as a tea-cloth on
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Speaker 1: the stall, and she folded it in a way that
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Speaker 1: made Miss Marple's needles stop, for just a moment, quite still.
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Speaker 1: It was a particular fold. The cloth doubled in thirds,
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Speaker 1: the ends turned under, the whole parcel squared and pressed flat,
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Speaker 1: so that a sprig of lavender could be slid into
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Speaker 1: its heart. and lie invisible until the linen was opened.
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Speaker 1: Honoria Bell folded linen that way. Nobody else in Kingham
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Speaker 1: Abbot folded linen that way. Honoria had once told Miss Marple,
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Speaker 1: over tea, that it was her mother's way. The Yorkshire fold,
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Speaker 1: we called it, though my mother had it from a Frenchwoman,
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Speaker 1: and where the Frenchwoman had it from, nobody living knows.
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Speaker 1: Pris Amstruther folded the cloth in thirds, turned the ends under,
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Speaker 1: squared the parcel, and slid a sprig of lavender into
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Speaker 1: its heart in one movement, as unconscious and as fluent
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Speaker 1: as a prayer. Miss Marple looked at her for a
8:13
Speaker 1: long moment, then she looked down at her knitting, and discovered,
8:17
Speaker 1: without surprise, that she had dropped a stitch. Across the lawn,
8:21
Speaker 1: the shadow of the church tower crept over the trestle tables.
8:25
Speaker 1: A breeze came through the walled garden of the lane
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Speaker 1: and brought with it, over the cakes and the brass
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Speaker 1: band and the tiarn, the smell of lavender, sharp, clean
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Speaker 1: and funereal. and somewhere behind the stalls, unheard beneath the music,
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Speaker 1: Rose Tully was telling Sergeant Bunch for the fourth time,
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Speaker 1: through chattering teeth, about the sprig of fresh-cut lavender laid
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Speaker 1: across the dead woman's hand.' The cut end, Sergeant. It
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Speaker 1: was still wet. The sap was still wet on it.
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Speaker 1: And I know what you're going to say, but I'll
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Speaker 1: say this till I die. Miss Bell never cut lavender
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Speaker 1: with a knife in her life. She said a knife
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Speaker 1: bruised the stem. She said lavender remembers how it's cut.'
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Speaker 1: Section 2. What the Village Said. Lavender remembers how it's cut,
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Speaker 1: Rose Tully repeated, with the air of a girl delivering
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Speaker 1: a scripture, and Sergeant Bunch, who had been about to
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Speaker 1: snap his notebook shut, found that he could not quite
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Speaker 1: bring himself to do it. Now see here, Rose, he said,
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Speaker 1: lowering his voice, for the band was between tunes and
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Speaker 1: voices carried on the vicarage lawn. You've had a shock.
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Speaker 1: A sprig of lavender is a sprig of lavender. Miss
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Speaker 1: Bell handled lavender every day of her life. There's nothing
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Speaker 1: in it, and I'd thank you not to go about
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Speaker 1: the village talking of knives and sap, or we'll have
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Speaker 1: half-Kingham Abbott in hysterics by suppertime. But Sergeant Bunch might
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Speaker 1: as well have asked the river lark to flow uphill.
9:48
Speaker 1: By the time the brand tub was empty and the
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Speaker 1: friendly society band had packed away its brass, the village
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Speaker 1: had the whole story, enlarged and ornamented in the telling.
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Speaker 1: It passed from the tea urn to the coconut shye,
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Speaker 1: from the white elephant stall to the church porch, changing
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Speaker 1: shape at every hand like a note in a parlour game.
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Speaker 1: They say she was found with lavender in her hand,
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Speaker 1: laid out like a corpse in a picture, said Mrs. Peddle,
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Speaker 1: the baker's wife, to anyone who would buy a bun.
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Speaker 1: They say the ladder was tampered with, said Mr. Golightly,
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Speaker 1: the saddler, who had not been near the barn, and
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Speaker 1: never would be. They say, whispered Miss Euphemia Hartnell, the
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Speaker 1: doctor's sister, that Colonel Harker was heard quarrelling with her
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Speaker 1: only yesterday, over the hedge, actually quarrelling, in a raised voice,
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Speaker 1: and the Colonel such a violent-tempered man when roused, though
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Speaker 1: of course one wouldn't wish, but there it is. It
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Speaker 1: is a curious thing, and Miss Marple had remarked upon
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Speaker 1: it often, that a village will always fasten upon the
10:47
Speaker 1: quarrel it can see, The hedge between Lavender House and
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Speaker 1: the Colonel's Garden had been a six years' war, conducted
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Speaker 1: with secateurs and stiff little notes, and the whole parish
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Speaker 1: knew it. By four o'clock the hedge had grown, in
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Speaker 1: the general mind, from a boundary dispute into a motive.
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Speaker 1: Arthur Harker wouldn't hurt a fly, said Mrs. Dane stoutly,
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Speaker 1: but she said it with a small, pleased shiver, as
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Speaker 1: one defends a character in a novel one is enjoying.
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Speaker 1: People always believe the quarrel they can see, Miss Marple
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Speaker 1: observed to her knitting. She was still sitting under the cedar,
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Speaker 1: and her chair had become, in the gradual way of
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Speaker 1: such things, a kind of confessional. One after another the
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Speaker 1: ladies of the parish drifted past it, paused, sat down,
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Speaker 1: and unburdened themselves of what they had heard, what they
11:34
Speaker 1: had always thought, and what they would never say to
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Speaker 1: anyone but dear Miss Marple, who was so discreet. Miss
11:40
Speaker 1: Marple listened to all of it. She nodded over the
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Speaker 1: dropped stitch she was quietly retrieving. She made small, vague,
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Speaker 1: encouraging sounds. Dear me, and how very odd, and but then,
11:53
Speaker 1: people are so strange, aren't they? And behind the mild
11:56
Speaker 1: blue eyes the filing went on, neat and relentless. Mrs.
12:01
Speaker 1: Carraway came last, lowered into the adjacent chair by her great-niece,
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Speaker 1: and disposed of the village's theories in a single crackle
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Speaker 1: of old laughter. A fall from a ladder at sixty-eight,
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Speaker 1: and the whole parish wants a murderer, You'd think we'd
12:15
Speaker 1: never buried anyone, honestly. Though I'll say this, Jane Marple,
12:19
Speaker 1: since it's you. The old lady's eyes, still black and
12:22
Speaker 1: bright as a rook's, turned toward the linen stall, where
12:25
Speaker 1: Pris Anstruther was counting the day's takings into the Japaned box.
12:30
Speaker 1: That woman has not shed one tear today. I've watched her.
12:34
Speaker 1: Honoria Bell took her out of the gutter, so we're told,
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Speaker 1: gave her twenty years of a good home, and there
12:40
Speaker 1: she stands selling lavender water with a face like a milestone.
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Speaker 1: If that were my companion, I'd want to know why.
12:47
Speaker 1: Grief takes people so differently, said Miss Marple mildly. Grief,
12:51
Speaker 1: said Mrs. Carraway, takes some people to the mirror. That
12:55
Speaker 1: one hasn't been near a mirror. There's a difference, Jane,
12:58
Speaker 1: between being numb and being careful. Miss Marple's needles paused. Careful,
13:04
Speaker 1: she repeated thoughtfully. Yes, that is a very interesting word, Emily.
13:09
Speaker 1: Interesting be bothered. It's the word. She's a woman being careful.
13:14
Speaker 1: and I'd stake what's left of my teeth on it. Mrs.
13:17
Speaker 1: Carraway gathered her shawl. And another thing. All this talk
13:21
Speaker 1: of the Colonel and the hedge. Honoria told me herself,
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Speaker 1: not a month ago, that she'd made up her mind
13:28
Speaker 1: to settle something. Put my house in order, Emily, she said.
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Speaker 1: Every sprig of it. And I assumed she meant her will.
13:36
Speaker 1: She said it the way a person says a thing
13:37
Speaker 1: they've been afraid of for a long time and have
13:40
Speaker 1: stopped being afraid of. Now you may make what you
13:43
Speaker 1: like of that, because I am eighty-one and past caring
13:46
Speaker 1: who repeats it. Miss Marple made a great deal of it.
13:50
Speaker 1: It was not the words themselves she valued. People in
13:53
Speaker 1: villages were always putting their houses in order, and usually
13:56
Speaker 1: meant nothing more alarming than the attic. It was the
13:59
Speaker 1: way Emily Carraway said they had been said, like a
14:02
Speaker 1: person laying down a weight. But she only said, put
14:06
Speaker 1: her house in order. Yes, people do say that, don't they?
14:09
Speaker 1: And how is your lumbago, Emily? Mrs. Carraway cackled and
14:13
Speaker 1: was led away. The fet wore itself out, as fets do.
14:17
Speaker 1: The trestle tables were stripped, the urn emptied, the last
14:21
Speaker 1: of the bunting taken down, the muslin bunting that Rose
14:24
Speaker 1: Tully had been sent to fetch that morning, which no
14:27
Speaker 1: one had quite liked to use, so that the vicarage
14:29
Speaker 1: lawn was dressed, at the last, in bunting borrowed from
14:33
Speaker 1: the schoolroom instead. The shadows came long and blue across
14:37
Speaker 1: the grass. The chestnut trees rustled with the first cool
14:41
Speaker 1: of evening. Miss Marple remained in her chair until the
14:44
Speaker 1: lawn was nearly empty. From there she had a clear
14:47
Speaker 1: view down Church Lane, and she watched Miss Priscilla Anstruther
14:51
Speaker 1: walk home to Lavender House with the Japaned money-box in
14:55
Speaker 1: one hand, and, under the other arm, the folded altar-cloth
14:59
Speaker 1: that had served all day as a tea-cloth on the stall.
15:03
Speaker 1: She watched the grey little figure pause at the gate
15:05
Speaker 1: of the walled garden, and stand for a moment quite
15:08
Speaker 1: still with her face turned toward the drying barn at
15:12
Speaker 1: the back of the house, not avoiding it, as a
15:15
Speaker 1: numb woman avoids, but measuring it, as a careful woman measures,
15:19
Speaker 1: and then go in and shut the door behind her,
15:22
Speaker 1: very gently, as though someone inside were sleeping. The breeze
15:26
Speaker 1: had died. Over the lane the smell of lavender hung
15:29
Speaker 1: heavier than ever, distilled by the day's heat out of
15:32
Speaker 1: the walled garden and the barn and the stalls and
15:35
Speaker 1: the sachets in every woman's basket. until the whole village
15:39
Speaker 1: seemed to lie steeped in it, like linen in a drawer.
15:42
Speaker 1: It was then that Sergeant Bunch, peddling home past the church,
15:46
Speaker 1: found that he could not get Rose Tully's white frightened
15:48
Speaker 1: face out of his mind, nor the words she had
15:51
Speaker 1: kept repeating with such obstinate terror. He was a conscientious
15:55
Speaker 1: young man, and the sprig with the wet sap weighed
15:58
Speaker 1: on him out of all proportion to its size. A
16:01
Speaker 1: sprig of lavender is a sprig of lavender, he had
16:04
Speaker 1: told her, but a sprig cut with a knife on
16:07
Speaker 1: the morning of a death, laid across a dead woman's
16:09
Speaker 1: palm like a signature. It was at that moment, with
16:13
Speaker 1: the band gone and the lamps beginning to come on
16:15
Speaker 1: along the high street, that Sergeant Bunch made up his
16:18
Speaker 1: mind and turned his bicycle toward the police house to
16:21
Speaker 1: telephone the county. Section 3. The Detective from Melford The
16:27
Speaker 1: telephone at the police house was an old-fashioned affair with
16:29
Speaker 1: a separate earpiece, and Sergeant Bunch had to shout into
16:33
Speaker 1: it twice to before the county station at Melford understood
16:36
Speaker 1: that he was not, in fact, reporting an accident. I
16:39
Speaker 1: know how it sounds, sir, he said, cupping the mouthpiece,
16:43
Speaker 1: as though the empty police house might overhear him. A fall, yes,
16:47
Speaker 1: that's what I thought myself. But there's the matter of
16:50
Speaker 1: the ladder rung, and there's the, well, sir, there's a
16:53
Speaker 1: sprig of lavender, cut fresh, laid across the dead woman's hand,
16:58
Speaker 1: and the maid swears the old lady never used a
17:00
Speaker 1: knife on lavender in her life, and, no, sir, I
17:04
Speaker 1: am quite serious. Lavender, sir, yes. I'll hold the line.
17:09
Speaker 1: He held the line for a long time. When he
17:11
Speaker 1: put the earpiece back on its hook, his face had
17:14
Speaker 1: the pink, slightly winded look of a man who has
17:16
Speaker 1: just been told, in official language, that he has either
17:20
Speaker 1: done something very sensible or made a perfect fool of himself,
17:24
Speaker 1: and that an inspector will be along in the morning
17:26
Speaker 1: to decide which. Inspector Druitt arrived at half-past nine the
17:30
Speaker 1: next day, in a black Wolseley, that raised the dust
17:33
Speaker 1: of Church Lane and the expectations of half the parish.
17:37
Speaker 1: He was a large, deliberate man, with a moustache like
17:40
Speaker 1: a clothesbrush, and the unhurried manner of someone who has
17:44
Speaker 1: learned that villages, like suspects, tell you the most when
17:48
Speaker 1: you let them talk. He went first to the drying barn.
17:51
Speaker 1: It was a good-sized building of old brick behind Lavender House,
17:55
Speaker 1: joined to the walled garden by a door in the wall.
17:58
Speaker 1: Inside it was dim and sweet. the air so thick
18:01
Speaker 1: with the smell of drying lavender, that Druitt, a man
18:05
Speaker 1: not given to poetry, found himself thinking uncomfortably of churches.
18:09
Speaker 1: Great sheaves of the stuff hung from the rafters in rows,
18:13
Speaker 1: grey-green and purple, turning slowly in the warm air. The
18:17
Speaker 1: loft ladder stood against the upper staging where it had
18:19
Speaker 1: stood for thirty years. The third rung lay on the
18:23
Speaker 1: floor in two pieces. Druitt picked them up, turned them over,
18:27
Speaker 1: and looked at the broken ends for a long time
18:29
Speaker 1: without speaking. Rotten, sir, said Sergeant Bunch helpfully. You can
18:34
Speaker 1: see where it's gone soft. I can see where it's gone,
18:38
Speaker 1: said Druitt. That's not quite the same thing. He held
18:41
Speaker 1: the two ends to the light from the doorway. The
18:44
Speaker 1: wood at the break was dark and crumbling along one side,
18:47
Speaker 1: clean and pale along the other. Rot spreads, Bunch. It
18:51
Speaker 1: doesn't keep to a line. This rungs rotten half across
18:54
Speaker 1: and sound the other half. A saw going partway through,
18:58
Speaker 1: and a hammer, and a bit of dirt rubbed in.
19:01
Speaker 1: It would look very like this. It would hold a lightweight.
19:04
Speaker 1: It would not hold a woman of eleven stone climbing
19:07
Speaker 1: it with her arms full of linen. Bunch swallowed. Then
19:10
Speaker 1: it was arranged, sir? It was arranged that the ladder
19:14
Speaker 1: should fail, said Druitt. Whether it was arranged that Miss
19:17
Speaker 1: Bell should die of it is another matter. Ladders are
19:21
Speaker 1: chancy things to kill with. She might have broken a
19:23
Speaker 1: leg and told us all about it. He looked about
19:26
Speaker 1: the barn, at the hanging sheaves, the benches— the bundles
19:30
Speaker 1: of cut lavender waiting to be stripped, the little heap
19:33
Speaker 1: of fallen buds beneath the loft that Dr. Finch had
19:36
Speaker 1: photographed the evening before around the body. Where is the sprig?
19:40
Speaker 1: The one the maid made such a fuss about. It
19:43
Speaker 1: was produced in an envelope. Druitt looked at it through
19:46
Speaker 1: the paper without opening it. A single sprig of the
19:49
Speaker 1: long pale lavender seven inches of stem, cut clean across
19:52
Speaker 1: at a shallow angle. Shears would crush this, he said.
19:56
Speaker 1: Knife cut it. Sharp one. And the garden scissors, I
20:00
Speaker 1: take it, are where they always are. They were, hanging
20:03
Speaker 1: on their nail inside the potting shed, with Honoria Bell's
20:07
Speaker 1: own whetstone beside them, and a little bunch of rosemary
20:10
Speaker 1: tied to the handle, as she had always kept them.
20:13
Speaker 1: Whoever had cut the sprig had walked past the scissors
20:16
Speaker 1: to do it. Now, said Druitt, lowering himself onto the
20:19
Speaker 1: bench with the air of a man preparing to be
20:22
Speaker 1: patient for a very long time, the household, there's the companion, Anstruther,
20:28
Speaker 1: there's the maid, the girl who found her, there's a
20:31
Speaker 1: gardener comes twice a week, and a woman who does
20:34
Speaker 1: the rough, and there's a nephew in London, I'm told,
20:37
Speaker 1: and a solicitor, and a will. We'll begin with the will, Bunch.
20:41
Speaker 1: We always begin with the will. The will was read
20:44
Speaker 1: to him at eleven o'clock by Mr Herbert Finch of Finch,
20:47
Speaker 1: Son and Marlow, in the front parlour of Lavender House,
20:51
Speaker 1: among the folded altar cloths and the smell of beeswax.
20:54
Speaker 1: It was dated three years previously, and it was short.
20:58
Speaker 1: To Priscilla Anstruther, in gratitude for twenty years of faithful companionship,
21:03
Speaker 1: the sum of two hundred pounds. To the nephew, Mr
21:06
Speaker 1: Gerald Bell of Grey's Inn, the residue, the house, the garden,
21:10
Speaker 1: and the famous lavender beds, which a nurseryman from Norwich
21:14
Speaker 1: had once offered to buy outright for a sum that Mr.
21:17
Speaker 1: Finch described, with loyally relish, as startling. Two hundred pounds,
21:22
Speaker 1: said Druitt. Twenty years of service, and two hundred pounds.
21:26
Speaker 1: Miss Bell was not a sentimental woman, said Mr. Finch.
21:30
Speaker 1: She regarded Miss Anstruthers' keep, over twenty years, as the
21:33
Speaker 1: substance of the gift. The money was a token. She
21:36
Speaker 1: was quite clear about it. He shuffled his papers. I
21:40
Speaker 1: should add, Inspector, since you will hear it from someone
21:43
Speaker 1: else within the hour, this being a village, that Miss
21:46
Speaker 1: Bell came to see me a fortnight ago. She wished
21:48
Speaker 1: to make a new will. She gave me her instructions
21:51
Speaker 1: and I drew it up. Druitt's eyes came up slowly
21:54
Speaker 1: from the will. And, and it was never signed. I
21:58
Speaker 1: sent the draft to her last Monday. It was to
22:00
Speaker 1: be executed this week, Tuesday in fact, the day after
22:04
Speaker 1: she died. Mr. Finch removed his spectacles and polished them
22:08
Speaker 1: Under the new will, Inspector, the house and the lavender
22:12
Speaker 1: beds went to Miss Anstruther. Outright. Everything save small legacies.
22:17
Speaker 1: When I telephoned to confirm the appointment, on the morning
22:20
Speaker 1: of the... of the death, Miss Anstruther answered. She told
22:24
Speaker 1: me Miss Bell had gone to the barn and was
22:26
Speaker 1: not to be disturbed. There was a silence in the parlour. Outside,
22:31
Speaker 1: in the walled garden, someone was moving about among the lavender.
22:35
Speaker 1: The gardener, Roe, going on with his work, because work
22:38
Speaker 1: is what gardeners do when the world comes apart. She
22:41
Speaker 1: knew then, said Druitt at last, Miss Anstruther knew about
22:45
Speaker 1: the new will. She must have done, said Mr. Finch.
22:48
Speaker 1: Miss Bell told her everything. They were, as everyone will
22:52
Speaker 1: tell you, devoted, devoted. The word went round the room
22:56
Speaker 1: like a draft. Druitt got up, thanked the lawyer, and
23:00
Speaker 1: stood for a moment with his hand on the parlour door,
23:03
Speaker 1: looking at the great linen press in the corner. Its
23:06
Speaker 1: doors open, its shelves of folded whiteness parted every few
23:10
Speaker 1: inches by a thin grey sprig. One thing more, Mr. Finch.
23:14
Speaker 1: The new will. Did Miss Bell say why? After twenty
23:18
Speaker 1: years of the old arrangement, why change it now? Mr.
23:21
Speaker 1: Finch hesitated, the hesitation of a cautious man deciding how
23:25
Speaker 1: much honesty he can afford. She said something I did
23:28
Speaker 1: not entirely understand, Inspector. She said, I have had a letter, Herbert.
23:33
Speaker 1: and it has occurred to me that I have been
23:34
Speaker 1: punishing the wrong person for a very long time. I
23:38
Speaker 1: assume she meant the nephew. There had been some estrangement,
23:41
Speaker 1: I believe. I did not press her. One does not
23:44
Speaker 1: press Miss, one did not press Miss Bell. A letter,
23:47
Speaker 1: said Druitt. What letter? Who from? She didn't say. And Inspector?
23:52
Speaker 1: I never saw it among her papers. When I came
23:55
Speaker 1: this morning to put things in order, I looked. There
23:58
Speaker 1: is no letter in this house less than six months old.
24:01
Speaker 1: Druitt stood very still. From the walled garden came the
24:04
Speaker 1: snip of rose shears, steady as a clock, and through
24:07
Speaker 1: the open window drifted the smell of the cut stems,
24:10
Speaker 1: sharp and clean and strangely sorrowful, as though the garden
24:13
Speaker 1: itself were being stripped for the funeral. Bunch, said the
24:17
Speaker 1: inspector quietly, find me that letter. Section 4. The Nephew
24:21
Speaker 1: from London. Find me that letter, said the inspector, and
24:26
Speaker 1: Sergeant Bunch, who had been waiting all morning for an
24:29
Speaker 1: order he could get his teeth into, saluted with such
24:31
Speaker 1: energy that that he knocked a pile of funeral cakes
24:34
Speaker 1: off the hall table and had to apologise to the
24:37
Speaker 1: empty house before hurrying out into Church Lane. He searched
24:41
Speaker 1: for three days. He searched the desk in the parlour
24:44
Speaker 1: and the bureau in the bedroom and the pockets of
24:47
Speaker 1: every garment in the lavender-hung wardrobe. He searched the potting
24:50
Speaker 1: shed and the linen press, disturbing, to his visible discomfort,
24:55
Speaker 1: forty years of folded whiteness, and the drying barn, where
24:59
Speaker 1: the police photographer's chalk marks on the floor were already fading.
25:03
Speaker 1: He interviewed the postman, who remembered nothing, and the postmistress,
25:07
Speaker 1: who remembered everything except anything useful. He found no letter.
25:12
Speaker 1: By Friday the letter had joined the sprig of lavender
25:15
Speaker 1: and the part sawn rung in the small, stubborn heap
25:17
Speaker 1: of things in the case that did not behave like
25:19
Speaker 1: an accident, and Inspector Druitt sat in the front room
25:23
Speaker 1: of the police house, with the heap spread before him
25:25
Speaker 1: in his notebook, and turned his attention, as a practical
25:29
Speaker 1: man does, from the thing he could not find to
25:32
Speaker 1: the person he could. Mr. Gerald Bell arrived from London
25:36
Speaker 1: on the four o'clock train, in a suit too dark
25:39
Speaker 1: and too warm for the weather, and was shown into
25:42
Speaker 1: Lavender House, where he stood in the parlour of his
25:45
Speaker 1: late aunt, with the stiff, blinking air of a man
25:48
Speaker 1: who has mislaid an emotion and is too proud to
25:51
Speaker 1: ask for it back. He was forty-two, a barrister of
25:55
Speaker 1: no great practice and considerable debts. Druitt had had that
25:59
Speaker 1: from London within the day. and he had not set
26:02
Speaker 1: foot in Kingham Abbot for nine years. You quarrelled with
26:05
Speaker 1: your aunt, Mr. Bell. I did not quarrel with her.
26:08
Speaker 1: Gerald Bell's voice was careful. Barrister trained. Each word set
26:13
Speaker 1: down like a chess piece. We differed. Nine years ago
26:17
Speaker 1: she asked me to come home and take up the lavender,
26:20
Speaker 1: the beds, the drying, the whole trade of it. She
26:23
Speaker 1: had no one else. I declined. I had a career.
26:27
Speaker 1: She took it as a betrayal. and she was not
26:29
Speaker 1: a woman who forgave betrayal. We did not write, he
26:33
Speaker 1: looked round the parlour, at the press, the sheaves of
26:36
Speaker 1: cut lavender drying on the sideboard, the Japaned box from
26:39
Speaker 1: the FET still standing on the table, with the parish
26:42
Speaker 1: takings counted and wrapped. I should tell you, Inspector, that
26:45
Speaker 1: I knew nothing of any new will until Mr. Finch
26:48
Speaker 1: telephoned me. And I should tell you also that I
26:51
Speaker 1: am not sorry to inherit. I am sorry for how
26:54
Speaker 1: it happened, and I am sorry we did not write.
26:57
Speaker 1: but I won't perform a grief I don't feel, not
27:00
Speaker 1: even for you. My aunt would have despised it. She
27:03
Speaker 1: despised hypocrisy above everything. Where were you? said Druitt. On
27:07
Speaker 1: the morning of the 14th, between six and eight o'clock,
27:11
Speaker 1: in my chambers in Grey's Inn, preparing an opinion. My
27:14
Speaker 1: clerk can confirm I was there by eight. Before that
27:18
Speaker 1: I was in my rooms, alone. A pause, precise as
27:22
Speaker 1: a full stop. You will note, Inspector, that I do
27:25
Speaker 1: not say I was asleep. I was awake from five.
27:29
Speaker 1: I often am. But I was alone, and I cannot
27:32
Speaker 1: prove it, and we both know it. Druitt studied him.
27:36
Speaker 1: He had interviewed a great many people with motives, and
27:38
Speaker 1: he had long ago stopped believing that guilt had a look.
27:41
Speaker 1: But he had a policeman's appetite for convenience, and Gerald
27:45
Speaker 1: Bell was convenient in every particular. The estranged air, the debts,
27:50
Speaker 1: the unprovable mourning, the open admission that he was not
27:53
Speaker 1: sorry— The part sawn rung wanted a strong arm and
27:56
Speaker 1: a sharp saw. A barrister's clerk could place his master
27:59
Speaker 1: in London at eight, but the distance from London to
28:02
Speaker 1: Kingham Abbot was three hours by the early train, and
28:06
Speaker 1: a man could be in two places in one morning,
28:08
Speaker 1: if he was willing to rise before the lark. The
28:11
Speaker 1: letter your aunt mentioned to her solicitor, said Druitt, the
28:14
Speaker 1: letter that made her change her will, do you know
28:17
Speaker 1: anything about it? For the first time, something moved behind
28:21
Speaker 1: Gerald Bell's careful face, not fear. Druitt thought. Something older
28:26
Speaker 1: and rawer than fear. No, he said, but I can
28:29
Speaker 1: guess what it was about. My aunt spent forty years
28:33
Speaker 1: being angry about something, Inspector, and she never told a
28:36
Speaker 1: living soul what it was. Not me, not the vicar,
28:40
Speaker 1: not that woman in there. He nodded toward the kitchen,
28:43
Speaker 1: where Pris Anstruther could be heard, faintly, making the tea
28:47
Speaker 1: she made for everyone, policeman and undertaker alike, with the
28:50
Speaker 1: same steady hands. If someone finally wrote to her about it,
28:54
Speaker 1: then they knew the one thing about Honoria Bell that
28:57
Speaker 1: the whole of this village never knew, and I'd like
29:00
Speaker 1: to read that letter myself, Inspector. I'd give a good
29:03
Speaker 1: deal to read it. So would I, sir, said Druitt grimly.
29:07
Speaker 1: So would I. By Sunday, the county constabulary had committed itself,
29:12
Speaker 1: in the comfortable, settling way of institutions, to a theory.
29:16
Speaker 1: The theory had Gerald Bell at its centre, the debt-ridden heir.
29:20
Speaker 1: the London alibi with a hole in it before eight o'clock,
29:23
Speaker 1: the quarrel nine years old that money could forgive. It
29:26
Speaker 1: was a good theory. It explained the will, and it
29:29
Speaker 1: explained the haste. For if the new will were signed
29:32
Speaker 1: on Tuesday, the old will and its heir died with it,
29:36
Speaker 1: and Monday's dawn visit to a drying barn became, in
29:39
Speaker 1: the theory, not cruelty but arithmetic. Druitt did not entirely
29:43
Speaker 1: believe his own theory, but it fitted the shape of
29:46
Speaker 1: the evidence the way a ready-made coat fits. Nowhere exactly,
29:50
Speaker 1: well enough to wear, and he had a chief constable
29:53
Speaker 1: to answer to. He went, on Sunday evening, to call
29:57
Speaker 1: upon Miss Marple. He found her in her garden, deadheading
30:00
Speaker 1: the roses with a pair of scissors older than Sergeant Bunch,
30:04
Speaker 1: and he sat on her rustic bench and laid the
30:06
Speaker 1: whole case before her, for this was known, in the county,
30:10
Speaker 1: to be the thing one did, and she listened with
30:12
Speaker 1: her head, a little on one side, snipping.' It all fits,'
30:17
Speaker 1: said Druitt, with a trace of defiance.' The will, the debts,
30:21
Speaker 1: the mourning he can't account for.'' Oh, it fits,' said
30:24
Speaker 1: Miss Marple.' It fits beautifully. That is rather what troubles
30:27
Speaker 1: me about it, Inspector.' Things in real life so seldom
30:30
Speaker 1: fit beautifully. When something fits beautifully, it has usually been tailored.
30:36
Speaker 1: She snipped a spent bloom and let it fall into
30:38
Speaker 1: her basket. There was a case very like it in
30:41
Speaker 1: St Mary Mead. The sexton was found to have been
30:43
Speaker 1: dipping into the offertory, and everything fitted him beautifully. Opportunity, need,
30:49
Speaker 1: even a little past history. And it was all perfectly true,
30:53
Speaker 1: except that he hadn't done it. The vicar's wife had,
30:56
Speaker 1: for the kindest reasons in the world. The sexton had
30:59
Speaker 1: merely been made to wear it. She looked at him mildly.
31:03
Speaker 1: Your Mr. Bell has the air of a man wearing
31:05
Speaker 1: a coat someone else has brushed and hung up for him.
31:08
Speaker 1: And there is the letter, Inspector. You have a murder
31:12
Speaker 1: with a missing letter in the middle of it. In
31:14
Speaker 1: my experience, when a letter goes missing from a house,
31:18
Speaker 1: it has not been stolen by the person it condemns.
31:21
Speaker 1: It has been destroyed by the person it exposes. Exposes how? That,
31:26
Speaker 1: said Miss Marple, returning to her roses. is what the
31:30
Speaker 1: letter was for, isn't it? To expose something. And someone
31:34
Speaker 1: in this village, Inspector, has lived forty years inside whatever
31:38
Speaker 1: it was going to expose, and that is a very
31:40
Speaker 1: long time to practice being careful. The light was going.
31:44
Speaker 1: Across the lane the lamps of the vicarage came on,
31:47
Speaker 1: one by one, and from somewhere behind Lavender House, carried
31:51
Speaker 1: on the evening air, came the smell of the lavender beds,
31:55
Speaker 1: faint now, and the faint dry rustle of the sheaves
31:58
Speaker 1: still hanging in the dark of the barn, turning slowly
32:01
Speaker 1: in air nobody stirred. Section 5. The Sprig in the
32:05
Speaker 1: Linen The rustle of the sheaves in the dark of
32:08
Speaker 1: the barn was a sound Pris Anstruther had lived with
32:11
Speaker 1: for twenty years, and that night, for the first time
32:14
Speaker 1: in twenty years, she could not sleep for it. She
32:17
Speaker 1: lay in her narrow room at the back of Lavender House,
32:20
Speaker 1: the room that had been hers since the day Honoria
32:23
Speaker 1: brought her home. with its iron bedstead and its washing-stand
32:26
Speaker 1: and its smell, which was the smell of the whole house,
32:29
Speaker 1: of lavender pressed in linen, and listened to the drying
32:33
Speaker 1: sheaves turning overhead in the warm night air, and rehearsed,
32:37
Speaker 1: for the hundredth time, the morning she had already described
32:40
Speaker 1: to the police so carefully that she could no longer
32:43
Speaker 1: quite remember which parts of it were true. She had
32:46
Speaker 1: risen at six, she had told them. She had drawn
32:48
Speaker 1: the water and laid the kindling. She had taken Miss
32:51
Speaker 1: Bell's early tea up at half-past six, as always, and
32:55
Speaker 1: found the bedroom empty, the bed not slept in, and
32:58
Speaker 1: she had not been alarmed, she told them, because Miss
33:01
Speaker 1: Bell in lavender week rose before the dawn and went
33:04
Speaker 1: straight to the cutting, and had done so for fifty years.
33:08
Speaker 1: She had gone about her work, she had assumed the
33:11
Speaker 1: mistress was in the barn or the garden, she had
33:13
Speaker 1: not gone to look, because one did not disturb Miss
33:16
Speaker 1: Bell at the cutting. The first she knew, the first
33:19
Speaker 1: anyone knew, was Rose Tully's screaming from the barn at seven.
33:23
Speaker 1: Every word of it was true. She had practised it
33:26
Speaker 1: until it was true. On Monday morning, while Druitt's men
33:29
Speaker 1: turned the house once more for the letter that was
33:31
Speaker 1: not there, Pris Anstruther did what she had done every
33:35
Speaker 1: Monday of her life at Lavender House. She did the linen.
33:38
Speaker 1: It was a ritual older than her tenure. The week's
33:41
Speaker 1: cloths and napkins and altar linen came down from the press,
33:45
Speaker 1: went through the copper and the rinsing blue, came off
33:48
Speaker 1: the line in the walled garden smelling of wind and dune,
33:51
Speaker 1: and were ironed in the back kitchen on the great
33:54
Speaker 1: padded board, and then, last of all and most sacred,
33:58
Speaker 1: refolded and returned to the press, each shelf layered with
34:02
Speaker 1: the fresh-cut sprigs that kept the moth and the must away.
34:05
Speaker 1: Honoria had overseen the folding for twenty years, standing at
34:09
Speaker 1: Pris's elbow like a drill sergeant. Thirds, Pris, always thirds.
34:14
Speaker 1: The Yorkshire fold, my mother's way. though where my mother
34:17
Speaker 1: got it, God alone knows, for she never set foot
34:20
Speaker 1: in Yorkshire in her life. This Monday there was no
34:23
Speaker 1: one at her elbow. Pris did the linen alone, and
34:26
Speaker 1: the house was so quiet that she could hear Druid's
34:28
Speaker 1: men two rooms away, and her own breathing, and the
34:32
Speaker 1: tick of the clock Honoria had wound every Sunday night
34:35
Speaker 1: for forty years, and would never wind again, until Pris
34:38
Speaker 1: found herself, at nine o'clock on Sunday night, standing on
34:42
Speaker 1: a chair in the dark parlour to wind it. because
34:45
Speaker 1: silence from that clock was more than she could bear.
34:48
Speaker 1: She folded, thirds, ends under, the parcel squared. The sprig
34:52
Speaker 1: slid into the heart of the fold, invisible, where it
34:55
Speaker 1: would keep its scent against the winter, cloth after cloth.
35:00
Speaker 1: Her hands did it without her, as they had done
35:02
Speaker 1: it ten thousand times, and she stood at the board
35:05
Speaker 1: in the lamplight and wept. Finally, at last, alone, the
35:09
Speaker 1: tears she had not shed at the fete or the
35:11
Speaker 1: funeral or before any policeman falling straight down her face
35:15
Speaker 1: and spotting the clean linen, so that she had to
35:18
Speaker 1: do two of the altar cloths over again. It was
35:21
Speaker 1: while she was re-ironing the second of them that she
35:23
Speaker 1: found the letter. It was not hidden. That was the
35:26
Speaker 1: devil of it. It was simply inside the linen press,
35:29
Speaker 1: where it had been all along, folded into the heart
35:32
Speaker 1: of the bottom-most altar cloth, the oldest one, the heavy
35:36
Speaker 1: damask with the drawn thread border, that was never used
35:39
Speaker 1: now except at Christmas and Easter. folded in thirds, ends under,
35:44
Speaker 1: in the Yorkshire fold, with a sprig of lavender against it,
35:47
Speaker 1: as flat and grey as the year it was dried.
35:50
Speaker 1: Anyone searching the press had lifted out the cloths in
35:53
Speaker 1: armfuls and put them back. No one had thought to
35:55
Speaker 1: unfold one, because no one in Kingham Abbott except two
35:59
Speaker 1: women knew that the Yorkshire fold made a pocket. Pris
36:02
Speaker 1: stood with the iron cooling in her hand and the
36:05
Speaker 1: letter in the other, and she did not open it.
36:07
Speaker 1: She knew what it was. She had known for twenty
36:10
Speaker 1: years that someday a letter like it would come, the
36:13
Speaker 1: way people who live on a cliff know about the sea.
36:16
Speaker 1: She knew what Honoria had meant to do about it, too.
36:19
Speaker 1: Put my house in order, every sprig of it. Put
36:23
Speaker 1: it in order, after forty years of the opposite. The
36:26
Speaker 1: clock in the parlour ticked, the sheaves turned in the barn,
36:30
Speaker 1: and Pris Anstruther, standing in the lamplight with forty years
36:34
Speaker 1: folded around her in shelves of white, did the thing
36:37
Speaker 1: she had been careful for twenty years never to do.
36:40
Speaker 1: She stood still, and let herself be afraid. On Tuesday
36:44
Speaker 1: morning Miss Marple called at Lavender House with a jar
36:46
Speaker 1: of her own quince jelly, for Miss Anstruther, poor thing,
36:50
Speaker 1: who has no one to look after her now, and
36:53
Speaker 1: looking after people who look after everyone else, is quite
36:56
Speaker 1: the most necessary charity there is. She was given tea
36:59
Speaker 1: in the parlour, among the funeral cards. She admired the
37:03
Speaker 1: linen press. She asked, idly, in the way of old ladies,
37:07
Speaker 1: while her eyes rested on the ironing basket by the door,
37:10
Speaker 1: about the famous fold. My dear mother's way, Pris said,
37:14
Speaker 1: and her voice did not change at all. Miss Bell
37:17
Speaker 1: taught me. Thirds, always thirds. How clever, said Miss Marple.
37:23
Speaker 1: And how kind of Miss Bell, to teach you all
37:25
Speaker 1: her ways. She was not always kind, you know, Honoria.
37:29
Speaker 1: One says it with respect. But she was kind to you.
37:32
Speaker 1: Twenty years. One wonders why. The mild blue eyes came round,
37:37
Speaker 1: innocent as china. It is a great deal of devotion
37:40
Speaker 1: to repay, Miss Anstruther, and you repaid it so faithfully.
37:44
Speaker 1: I only hope she knew, before the end, how faithful
37:48
Speaker 1: you had been. She did know, I expect. She knew
37:51
Speaker 1: everything about you. The clock ticked. Somewhere a dove cooed
37:56
Speaker 1: in the walled garden. Pris Anstruther set down her cup
38:00
Speaker 1: with a hand that did not tremble, and folded her
38:02
Speaker 1: own hands in her lap, in thirds, as neat as linen.
38:07
Speaker 1: She knew everything, said Pris. That was the trouble. She
38:10
Speaker 1: always knew everything. Except one thing, said Miss Marple gently.
38:15
Speaker 1: Pris looked up. For a moment the two women regarded
38:18
Speaker 1: each other across the tea-tray, the old one soft and
38:21
Speaker 1: pink and woolly, the grey one folded tight as a letter,
38:25
Speaker 1: and what passed between them passed without a word, the
38:28
Speaker 1: way most things of importance in villages do. Except one thing,
38:32
Speaker 1: Pris agreed at last, very quietly. And now no one
38:35
Speaker 1: will ever know it. The letter is gone, you see.
38:38
Speaker 1: The police have searched the house three times. There is
38:41
Speaker 1: no letter, Miss Marple. There never was. And whatever it
38:44
Speaker 1: was going to expose is buried with her where it belongs.
38:48
Speaker 1: Miss Marple rose and gathered her gloves and thanked her
38:52
Speaker 1: for the tea. At the parlour door she paused with
38:55
Speaker 1: her hand on the frame and looked back at the
38:58
Speaker 1: linen press, the shelves of whiteness, the grey sprigs standing
39:02
Speaker 1: between the folds like bookmarks in a library no one
39:05
Speaker 1: was meant to read. What a beautiful fold it is,
39:08
Speaker 1: she said. One thing about a fold, Miss Anstruther, it
39:12
Speaker 1: always makes a pocket, and a pocket is a place
39:15
Speaker 1: to keep the thing you cannot bear to carry in
39:17
Speaker 1: your hand. She went out into Church Lane. The lavender
39:20
Speaker 1: was coming into bloom along the wall, and the whole
39:23
Speaker 1: lane smelled of it, sweet and sharp and secretive, and
39:27
Speaker 1: Miss Marple walked home very slowly, knitting it all over
39:30
Speaker 1: in her mind, the way one unpicks and reworks a
39:33
Speaker 1: pattern that has gone wrong in the middle, and she
39:35
Speaker 1: thought about a letter folded into the heart of an
39:37
Speaker 1: altar cloth, and about who in that house would know
39:40
Speaker 1: such a hiding place existed, and about why a woman
39:43
Speaker 1: might hide a letter in linen rather than burn it
39:45
Speaker 1: in the grate. She thought, because burning is a confession—
39:49
Speaker 1: and folding is a keeping. Section 6. Old Sins Cast
39:53
Speaker 1: Long Shadows Folding is a keeping, thought Miss Marple, all
39:58
Speaker 1: the way down Church Lane, and in at her own gate,
40:01
Speaker 1: and up the path to her own front door, where
40:03
Speaker 1: her parlour-maid Florence held the evening post, and a face
40:06
Speaker 1: full of news.' Oh, madam,' said Florence, before the door
40:10
Speaker 1: was fairly shut,' Mrs. Peddle's girl's been round, and Mrs.
40:14
Speaker 1: Dane's sent twice,' and they do say as the inspector
40:17
Speaker 1: from Melford has been asking questions about the Colonel, the Colonel, madam,
40:21
Speaker 1: and Mrs. Carraway's sent word you're to come to tea
40:24
Speaker 1: tomorrow without fail, as she remembers something. Miss Marple took
40:28
Speaker 1: off her hat, gave Florence the jar of empty jelly-pot,
40:31
Speaker 1: and said that people were so kind. She sat down
40:34
Speaker 1: by her own fire, for June evenings in Kingham Abbot
40:37
Speaker 1: could still be sharp, and she did not put on
40:40
Speaker 1: the lamp for a long time. Folding is a keeping.
40:43
Speaker 1: Someone had kept that letter. Someone had folded away, forty
40:47
Speaker 1: years ago, a child, and twenty years ago, a companion,
40:51
Speaker 1: and a fortnight ago, a letter, and someone in the
40:54
Speaker 1: village had folded away for forty years the knowledge of
40:57
Speaker 1: what they had done. The whole village was a linen press,
41:00
Speaker 1: Miss Marple thought, shelves and shelves of respectable whiteness, and
41:05
Speaker 1: between every layer a little grey sprig of something sharp
41:08
Speaker 1: and secret, keeping, keeping. Mrs. Carraway's memory, delivered the next
41:13
Speaker 1: afternoon over tea strong enough to stand a spoon in,
41:17
Speaker 1: was this. Honoria was engaged to be married. Forty years ago. More.
41:22
Speaker 1: Nobody under sixty remembers it, and most of them that
41:25
Speaker 1: do are dead or gaga, so they've sent you to me.
41:29
Speaker 1: The old lady's rook-black eyes snapped with satisfaction. It was
41:33
Speaker 1: hushed up very thoroughly. Her mother was a bell of
41:37
Speaker 1: the bells, the kind of woman who could hush a thunderstorm.
41:41
Speaker 1: The engagement was announced. The linen was being embroidered. I
41:45
Speaker 1: saw it myself, her initials on the sheet corners. And then,
41:49
Speaker 1: within a month, everything was off. The man went abroad.
41:53
Speaker 1: Honoria went to Cornwall for a year, for her health.
41:57
Speaker 1: And you may make of that what people made of
41:59
Speaker 1: it then, Jane, which was everything, and none of it provable.
42:03
Speaker 1: She came back with the lavender cuttings and a face
42:06
Speaker 1: like a door shut, and she never looked at a
42:08
Speaker 1: man again. And the name that was never spoken in
42:11
Speaker 1: that house from that day to this, Mrs. Carraway leaned forward,
42:15
Speaker 1: was her sister's. Edith. Edith Bell. Whatever happened in that year, Jane,
42:21
Speaker 1: Honoria blamed Edith for it, and Edith went to her
42:24
Speaker 1: grave in a rented room in Bournemouth, without one word
42:27
Speaker 1: from Lavender House. I know, because I wrote to Edith myself,
42:32
Speaker 1: and she wrote back, one line. I kept it. I
42:35
Speaker 1: keep everything. She rang for her great-niece. and the box
42:39
Speaker 1: was brought, and the letter found, forty years folded, a
42:43
Speaker 1: spidery hand, a Bournemouth postmark, Dear Emily, Honoria believes what
42:48
Speaker 1: she must believe. It is better so. I made my
42:52
Speaker 1: choice with my eyes open, and I would make it again.
42:55
Speaker 1: Do not try to reconcile us. Some things are not
42:57
Speaker 1: forgiven because they cannot be, and some because they must
43:00
Speaker 1: not be. E.B. Miss Marple read it twice. She made
43:04
Speaker 1: her choice, she murmured, with her eyes open. Emily, What choice?
43:10
Speaker 1: What did Edith do? That, said Mrs. Carraway, is what
43:14
Speaker 1: the whole village would have given its eye-teeth to know,
43:17
Speaker 1: forty years ago. The story that served, the story her
43:20
Speaker 1: mother put about, was that Edith had carried tales, talked
43:24
Speaker 1: of Honoria's affairs where she shouldn't, and the engagement broke
43:28
Speaker 1: on it. Gossip, Jane. Edith was condemned as a gossip,
43:32
Speaker 1: and a gossip is a curiously hard thing to forgive
43:35
Speaker 1: in a family, because it can never be unsaid. She
43:38
Speaker 1: drank her tea. I never believed it. Edith Bell couldn't gossip.
43:43
Speaker 1: She hadn't the gift. But Honoria believed it. Honoria chose
43:47
Speaker 1: to believe it. And Honoria's beliefs were load-bearing walls. Miss
43:52
Speaker 1: Marple sat very still, the forty-year-old letter in her lap,
43:56
Speaker 1: and somewhere at the back of her mind, a stitch
43:59
Speaker 1: she had dropped at the fet knitted itself silently up.
44:03
Speaker 1: The same afternoon, in the front room of the police house,
44:06
Speaker 1: Inspector Druitt was conducting an interview he had not wanted
44:09
Speaker 1: to conduct, with a man who had not wanted to come.
44:13
Speaker 1: Colonel Harker sat very upright in the uncomfortable chair, and
44:16
Speaker 1: his pink face had gone, at last, entirely grey. You see, Inspector,
44:22
Speaker 1: it has got about, these things do, that you have
44:25
Speaker 1: been asking where I was on Monday morning, and I
44:28
Speaker 1: should like to save you any further trouble. I was
44:31
Speaker 1: walking in the water meadows from five until seven, alone,
44:36
Speaker 1: I cannot prove it. I often walk early. The knee,
44:39
Speaker 1: you know. It won't let me sleep. And I should
44:42
Speaker 1: like to say, his jaw worked, that this business of
44:45
Speaker 1: the hedge is a great deal of nonsense. Honoria and
44:49
Speaker 1: I had known each other for forty years. We were.
44:52
Speaker 1: We knew each other very well, once. The hedge was
44:55
Speaker 1: merely what was left. He stopped. Druitt waited, with the
44:59
Speaker 1: patience of a man who has learned that silence is
45:01
Speaker 1: the best question. What was left? The Colonel repeated. more quietly,
45:06
Speaker 1: of something that was not always a hedge. Colonel Harker,
45:09
Speaker 1: said Druitt. Were you engaged to Miss Bell? The silence
45:13
Speaker 1: in the little front room was so complete that the
45:15
Speaker 1: clock on the mantle seemed to tick like a hammer.
45:18
Speaker 1: Who told you that? Harker said at last. No, don't answer.
45:22
Speaker 1: A village remembers what it shouldn't and forgets what it should. Yes,
45:27
Speaker 1: forty years ago, for one summer. It was broken off,
45:30
Speaker 1: it was broken, Inspector. Like that rung of hers, from
45:33
Speaker 1: the inside— by rot nobody could see from the outside,
45:37
Speaker 1: and I have lived two hundred yards from her front
45:39
Speaker 1: door for thirty years since, and we never once spoke
45:43
Speaker 1: of it. The hedge was— the hedge was what we spoke
45:46
Speaker 1: of instead. He got up, abruptly, and stood at the
45:49
Speaker 1: window with his back to the room, looking out at nothing.
45:53
Speaker 1: She said to me on Sunday evening, over the wall,
45:55
Speaker 1: her last words to me, Inspector, After tomorrow, Arthur, the
45:59
Speaker 1: hedge will be the least of it. I have thought
46:01
Speaker 1: and thought. I believe she was going to tell me
46:04
Speaker 1: something— I believe she had been waiting to tell me something,
46:07
Speaker 1: and whatever it was had ripened, and now I shall
46:11
Speaker 1: never know what it was, and I tell you frankly, Inspector,
46:14
Speaker 1: that I would rather you arrested me for her murder
46:17
Speaker 1: than that I should spend what is left of my
46:18
Speaker 1: life not knowing what she meant to say to me.
46:21
Speaker 1: Druitt let him go. There was nothing to hold him on,
46:25
Speaker 1: and Druitt was not a fool, and the Colonel's grief
46:27
Speaker 1: had the unmistakable weight of the genuine article. But the
46:30
Speaker 1: interview left behind it, like the scent of lavender in
46:33
Speaker 1: a room, one fact that would not disperse. Forty years
46:37
Speaker 1: ago something had happened to Honoria Bell in Cornwall. It
46:40
Speaker 1: had ended an engagement, exiled a sister, and shut a
46:44
Speaker 1: face like a door, and two weeks ago a letter
46:46
Speaker 1: about it had arrived, and Honoria Bell had been murdered
46:49
Speaker 1: before she could act on it, and the letter had
46:52
Speaker 1: vanished from a house searched three times. He went, that evening,
46:56
Speaker 1: to Miss Marple. She gave him sherry and heard the
46:59
Speaker 1: whole of it. Mrs. Carraway had forestalled him by an hour.
47:03
Speaker 1: The two accounts lay side by side in her mind now,
47:06
Speaker 1: like two halves of a torn pattern, and when he
47:09
Speaker 1: had done, she sat clicking her needles for a while
47:12
Speaker 1: in silence. Cornwall, she said at last. Honoria went to
47:16
Speaker 1: Cornwall for a year, for her health, and came back
47:20
Speaker 1: with lavender cuttings, and twenty years ago Miss Anstruther came
47:23
Speaker 1: to Lavender House from Cornwall, half-starved, out of some dreadful situation,
47:29
Speaker 1: through an advertisement. It is a great deal of Cornwall, Inspector.
47:33
Speaker 1: for one small story. Druitt stared at her. You think
47:37
Speaker 1: Miss Anstruther knows something about the— about whatever happened in Cornwall?
47:42
Speaker 1: I think, said Miss Marple, that we have all been
47:44
Speaker 1: asking who wanted Honoria Bell dead, and I think we
47:47
Speaker 1: should have been asking something much more ordinary and much
47:51
Speaker 1: more sad. I think we should have been asking who
47:53
Speaker 1: she was. She looked into the fire. There was a
47:57
Speaker 1: parlour-maid of my Aunt Fanny's, a Mrs. Tavistock it was
48:00
Speaker 1: in Torquay, who kept for thirty years a photograph in
48:03
Speaker 1: her jewel-case, face down, that she took out every birthday.
48:08
Speaker 1: Everyone assumed it was a lost lover. It was a child.
48:11
Speaker 1: It is always, Inspector, the thing folded flattest that is
48:15
Speaker 1: kept the longest. She had scarcely finished speaking when the
48:19
Speaker 1: front doorbell rang, and Florence came in, pink and gasping,
48:23
Speaker 1: to say that it was Sergeant Bunch, Madam, from the police-house,
48:27
Speaker 1: and would Miss Marple and the Inspector please to come
48:30
Speaker 1: at once?' for Colonel Harker had just walked in off
48:33
Speaker 1: the High Street, Madam, and confessed to the murder of
48:36
Speaker 1: Miss Honoria Bell. Section 7. The Colonel's Confession Colonel Harker
48:41
Speaker 1: had confessed to the murder of Miss Honoria Bell, and
48:44
Speaker 1: he did it again, formally, in the front room of
48:47
Speaker 1: the police house, in the presence of Inspector Druitt, Sergeant Bunch, and,
48:52
Speaker 1: at Druitt's particular and irregular invitation, for the Colonel had
48:56
Speaker 1: asked that she be sent for, Miss Jane Marple. He
48:59
Speaker 1: was perfectly composed, he had changed into his best suit.
49:04
Speaker 1: He had the air of a man who has finally
49:06
Speaker 1: put down something very heavy. I killed her, he said,
49:10
Speaker 1: on Monday morning, at a little before seven, in the
49:14
Speaker 1: drying barn at Lavender House. I had sawn the ladder
49:17
Speaker 1: rung partway through the week before. I had the run
49:20
Speaker 1: of the place, God knows, thirty years of coming and going.
49:24
Speaker 1: I carried the parish linen up to the loft for
49:26
Speaker 1: her more dunes than I can count. On the Monday
49:30
Speaker 1: I went across at dawn. I knew her habits in
49:32
Speaker 1: Lavender Week. The whole village knew them. She went up
49:36
Speaker 1: the ladder, and it broke, as it was meant to.
49:38
Speaker 1: She— It was quick, I think. I pray it was quick.
49:42
Speaker 1: I cut a sprig of the fresh lavender and laid
49:44
Speaker 1: it in her hand, because, because I could not leave
49:47
Speaker 1: her on that floor with nothing. And then I came home,
49:50
Speaker 1: and I have been waiting, I think, for someone to
49:53
Speaker 1: knock on my door ever since. He folded his hands.
49:56
Speaker 1: The clock ticked. Sergeant Bunch's pencil had stopped moving, for
50:00
Speaker 1: he was a humane young man, and he had played
50:03
Speaker 1: billiards with the Colonel at the club. Why, said Druitt,
50:07
Speaker 1: I should prefer not to say. Colonel Harker, you must
50:10
Speaker 1: see that I should prefer not to say will not serve.
50:13
Speaker 1: You confess to a murder and decline a motive. I
50:16
Speaker 1: decline nothing. I killed her. Take that, and let the
50:20
Speaker 1: rest alone. The Colonel's voice was steady, but the hands
50:23
Speaker 1: folded in his lap had gone white at the knuckles.
50:26
Speaker 1: The law requires a confession, not an explanation. I have
50:29
Speaker 1: given you the first. You will not get the second.
50:33
Speaker 1: Druitt tried him every way, gently, then sharply. then with
50:37
Speaker 1: the long flat silences that had opened better men than
50:40
Speaker 1: Colonel Harker. Where had he sawn the rung? In the barn,
50:44
Speaker 1: on the Saturday. With what? A saw from his own
50:47
Speaker 1: potting shed. They would find the sawdust on its teeth.
50:51
Speaker 1: Where had he stood when she fell? By the door.
50:54
Speaker 1: Had she cried out? He did not answer that one,
50:57
Speaker 1: and for the first time his eyes went somewhere private
51:00
Speaker 1: and stayed there. It was Miss Marple who broke it,
51:03
Speaker 1: in the end, and she did it in the way
51:05
Speaker 1: she had— by appearing, to all intents and purposes, to
51:09
Speaker 1: wander off the subject altogether. Arthur, she said gently, the sprig.
51:14
Speaker 1: You cut it with a knife, you said. Rose Tully
51:17
Speaker 1: noticed it. The sap was still wet, she said, and
51:20
Speaker 1: she said something else. She said that Honoria never cut
51:23
Speaker 1: lavender with a knife in her life, because a knife
51:26
Speaker 1: bruises the stem. Lavender remembers how it's cut. It was
51:30
Speaker 1: a strange thing for a frightened girl to keep in
51:32
Speaker 1: her head, but she did keep it, and she was
51:35
Speaker 1: right to, because it is the truest thing anyone has
51:38
Speaker 1: said in this whole sad business. The needles which she
51:41
Speaker 1: had brought with her, as naturally as her handbag, clicked once, twice.
51:46
Speaker 1: You see, Arthur, if you had truly laid that sprig, you,
51:50
Speaker 1: who knew her for forty years, who carried her linen,
51:53
Speaker 1: who quarrelled with her over the hedge because the hedge
51:56
Speaker 1: was what was left, you could not have done it
51:58
Speaker 1: with a knife. Your hands would not have let you.
52:01
Speaker 1: You would have used the scissors on the nail in
52:03
Speaker 1: the potting shed, the ones with the rosemary tied to
52:06
Speaker 1: the handle, because you knew what she believed. The person
52:10
Speaker 1: who cut that sprig with a knife was someone in
52:12
Speaker 1: a desperate hurry, or someone to whom the lavender was
52:16
Speaker 1: only lavender. The Colonel said nothing. But the private place
52:20
Speaker 1: his eyes had gone to grew, somehow, nearer the surface,
52:24
Speaker 1: and what was in it was not, Druitt now saw clearly, guilt.
52:28
Speaker 1: It was grief, and under the grief, immovable as rock, resolve.
52:33
Speaker 1: And there is the ladder, Miss Marple went on, mildly,
52:37
Speaker 1: as though pointing out a flaw in a pattern.' The
52:39
Speaker 1: inspector will forgive me, but a sawn rung is a
52:42
Speaker 1: coward's weapon, Arthur. It is the weapon of someone who
52:45
Speaker 1: dared not be in the barn at all, who needed
52:48
Speaker 1: the thing to happen in their absence, who needed never
52:51
Speaker 1: to see her face. You were at Waterloo's centenary dinner
52:54
Speaker 1: in my hearing, and you said— I remember it, because it
52:58
Speaker 1: was like you— that a man who could not look at
53:00
Speaker 1: what he had done had no business doing it. Whoever
53:03
Speaker 1: killed Honoria Bell could not look at her. You have
53:07
Speaker 1: spent thirty years doing nothing else. I confess, said the Colonel,
53:12
Speaker 1: and that is all I have to say. You confess,
53:15
Speaker 1: said Miss Marple, to protect someone. There is only one
53:18
Speaker 1: person in this village you would do that for, Arthur,
53:21
Speaker 1: and until this week you did not know she existed
53:24
Speaker 1: to be protected. The clock ticked. Outside a late blackbird
53:28
Speaker 1: was going at the evening with everything it had, Colonel
53:31
Speaker 1: Harker looked at Miss Marple for a long moment, the
53:34
Speaker 1: mild pink face, the white hair, the gentle, terrible blue eyes,
53:38
Speaker 1: and something in his own face, some long-held parade-ground formation,
53:42
Speaker 1: broke step at last. You know, he said, it was
53:46
Speaker 1: not a question. I suspect, said Miss Marple, it is
53:50
Speaker 1: not the same thing, and we neither of us have proof.
53:53
Speaker 1: But Arthur, think, if you confess to protect her, and
53:57
Speaker 1: she did not do it, then you have done two
53:59
Speaker 1: harm instead of none, And if she did do it,
54:02
Speaker 1: the needle stopped, then a confession from you will not
54:05
Speaker 1: save her from the one thing she cannot escape, which
54:08
Speaker 1: is not the law. Let the police do their work.
54:11
Speaker 1: The truth is not always the cruelest thing in a room.
54:14
Speaker 1: Sometimes it is the kindest thing left. The Colonel was
54:17
Speaker 1: silent for a full minute. Then he got up and
54:20
Speaker 1: straightened his best suit and asked Sergeant Bunch, in the
54:24
Speaker 1: ordinary voice of a man asking for the time, whether
54:27
Speaker 1: he might go home, and drew it, who had listened
54:30
Speaker 1: to all of this with his moustache working like a caterpillar,
54:33
Speaker 1: nodded slowly. The confession is withdrawn, sir, and will say
54:37
Speaker 1: no more about it to anyone. But Colonel, Druitt leaned forward,
54:42
Speaker 1: you know something, or you've guessed something, about Miss Anstruther.
54:46
Speaker 1: I'd rather have it from you than dig it out
54:48
Speaker 1: of Cornwall Parish registers, but I'll dig if I must.
54:51
Speaker 1: Then dig, Inspector, said Colonel Harker quietly from the doorway.
54:55
Speaker 1: Dig and God forgive all of us, and when you
54:58
Speaker 1: have found it, Come and tell me what she was
55:00
Speaker 1: going to say to me. That was all I asked.
55:03
Speaker 1: All I have asked for forty years. He went out
55:06
Speaker 1: into the lamplight of the high street, an old soldier
55:09
Speaker 1: upright under a weight no one could see, and the
55:12
Speaker 1: door shut softly behind him. Druitt looked at Miss Marple.
55:16
Speaker 1: Miss Marple looked at her knitting, and found, without any
55:19
Speaker 1: surprise at all, that she had dropped another stitch, and
55:23
Speaker 1: that this time, for the first time, she knew exactly
55:26
Speaker 1: where in the pattern it had gone. Inspector! she said.'
55:29
Speaker 1: I should like to give a little tea-party, on Thursday,
55:33
Speaker 1: if the weather holds. Just a few ladies, Mrs. Carraway, Mrs. Dane,
55:38
Speaker 1: Miss Hartnell, Miss Anstruther, at the vicarage, if the vicar's
55:42
Speaker 1: wife will lend us the parlour. And I should like you,
55:45
Speaker 1: if you will, to be somewhere near at hand.' She
55:49
Speaker 1: picked up the dropped stitch neatly.' And I should like
55:52
Speaker 1: one thing more. I should like it mentioned, quite casually,
55:56
Speaker 1: quite accidentally.' within the hearing of everyone in that room,
55:59
Speaker 1: that the police have found a letter at Lavender House,
56:02
Speaker 1: folded away in the most curious place, and that it
56:05
Speaker 1: is being read at this very moment. But we haven't
56:08
Speaker 1: found any letter, said Bunch, bewildered. No, said Miss Marple,
56:13
Speaker 1: but somebody in this village believes there is one, and
56:16
Speaker 1: that somebody has been afraid of it for a fortnight.
56:19
Speaker 1: Fear is a great deal heavier than lavender, Sergeant. When
56:22
Speaker 1: you shake the cloth, it is the first thing that
56:24
Speaker 1: falls out. Section 8. Miss Marple's Tea When you shake
56:28
Speaker 1: the cloth it is the first thing that falls out,
56:31
Speaker 1: Miss Marple had said, and the vicar's wife, who adored
56:34
Speaker 1: both Miss Marple and any excuse to use the good teacups,
56:38
Speaker 1: was only too happy to help with the shaking. The
56:40
Speaker 1: vicarage parlour on Thursday afternoon was a picture of everything
56:43
Speaker 1: Kingham Abbott did best. The French windows open on the lawn,
56:47
Speaker 1: the late roses leaning in at them, the silver tray,
56:51
Speaker 1: the good lace mats, the little sandwiches with the crusts off, Mrs.
56:55
Speaker 1: Carraway was installed in the best chair like a black-eyed
56:58
Speaker 1: queen bee. Mrs. Dane poured. Pris Anstruther sat very upright
57:02
Speaker 1: on the edge of a Sheraton chair, grey and neat
57:05
Speaker 1: and folded, and contributed to the conversation exactly as much
57:09
Speaker 1: as was required and not one syllable more. And Miss
57:13
Speaker 1: Euphemia Hartnell, the doctor's sister, thin and rustling and full
57:17
Speaker 1: of little darting kindnesses, handed the sugar and the cream
57:20
Speaker 1: and the gossip with the same small, quick, white hands.
57:24
Speaker 1: It was Mrs. Dane, prompted, though she never knew it,
57:28
Speaker 1: by a word Miss Marple had let fall to the
57:30
Speaker 1: vicar's wife that morning, who set the cloth shaking. Such
57:34
Speaker 1: a thing, she said, refilling Miss Hartnell's cup, that the
57:37
Speaker 1: police should still be hunting about in that sad house.
57:41
Speaker 1: Though Lettice tells me they have found something at last,
57:44
Speaker 1: some paper or letter, folded away in the queerest place.
57:48
Speaker 1: Did you not say so, Miss Marple? Folded into the
57:50
Speaker 1: linen itself, or some such thing. They are reading it now,
57:54
Speaker 1: I believe. There was a tiny pause, the kind of
57:57
Speaker 1: pause that in a village parlour is as audible as
57:59
Speaker 1: a shot. Into the linen, said Miss Hartnell. How very,
58:03
Speaker 1: how macabre, what sort of letter? Her voice was exactly
58:07
Speaker 1: the same, Miss Marple noted, and that was wrong. Everyone
58:10
Speaker 1: else's voice had risen with interest. Miss Hartnell's had gone down,
58:15
Speaker 1: just a semitone, just for four words, the way a
58:18
Speaker 1: hand closes. They have not said, said Miss Marple placidly.
58:23
Speaker 1: These things take so long, drying and photographing, and what
58:27
Speaker 1: I believe is called handwriting experts. One would think a
58:31
Speaker 1: letter was a simple thing, but a letter that someone
58:33
Speaker 1: has searched a house three times to find, that is
58:37
Speaker 1: not a simple thing at all. That is a thing
58:39
Speaker 1: somebody was afraid of. She beamed round the circle, woolly
58:43
Speaker 1: and vague and mild. I always say a letter is
58:46
Speaker 1: like lavender, it keeps whatever was folded into it, for years,
58:50
Speaker 1: and the moment it is opened, the whole room smells
58:53
Speaker 1: of it. Really, Jane, said Mrs. Carraway, you do say
58:57
Speaker 1: the most. Miss Anstruther, said Miss Marple, turning with a
59:01
Speaker 1: little flutter of apology, you must find all this very painful.
59:05
Speaker 1: We will talk of something else. How do you find
59:08
Speaker 1: the house now? It must be very quiet. I always
59:11
Speaker 1: think a house where someone has folded linen for twenty
59:13
Speaker 1: years must feel inhabited, all those shelves, all that keeping.
59:19
Speaker 1: And then, gently, absently, as though the words had simply
59:23
Speaker 1: drifted out of her. It was kind of you, by
59:25
Speaker 1: the way, the sprig of lavender in her hand. It
59:28
Speaker 1: was wrongly done, you know. and that is how I
59:31
Speaker 1: know it was lovingly done. A knife, when she never
59:34
Speaker 1: used a knife. But you were in such haste, and
59:37
Speaker 1: the scissors were all the way down in the potting shed,
59:40
Speaker 1: and there was no time, there was so little time,
59:43
Speaker 1: that morning, to do the last thing for her before
59:46
Speaker 1: Rose came screaming up the ladder. I have wondered and
59:49
Speaker 1: wondered who could have loved her enough to lie to
59:51
Speaker 1: the police about it, and there was only ever the
59:54
Speaker 1: one answer, was there? The person who had been lying, kindly, gently,
59:59
Speaker 1: for her sake, for twenty years. The parlour had gone
1:00:02
Speaker 1: stone silent. Mrs. Daines sat with the teapot tilted, frozen. Mrs.
1:00:08
Speaker 1: Carraway's eyes were black saucers, and Pris Anstruther, who had
1:00:12
Speaker 1: been folded tight as a letter for six weeks of
1:00:14
Speaker 1: police and pity, unfolded, not with tears, not with protest,
1:00:19
Speaker 1: but with a slow, awful straightening, like a cloth shaken out.
1:00:24
Speaker 1: I did not kill her, Pris said. Her voice was
1:00:27
Speaker 1: low and perfectly clear. a voice nobody in the room
1:00:30
Speaker 1: had ever heard her use. I want that understood, and
1:00:33
Speaker 1: I shall not say it again. I found her, before Rose,
1:00:37
Speaker 1: before anyone. I had taken up her tea, and the
1:00:40
Speaker 1: bed was not slept in, and I knew the way
1:00:43
Speaker 1: you know frost has come, before you look. She was
1:00:46
Speaker 1: at the foot of the ladder with her basket spilled,
1:00:48
Speaker 1: and the sprigs all, all scattered round her on the floor, like,
1:00:53
Speaker 1: the voice did not break but it thinned, and the
1:00:56
Speaker 1: rung in two pieces, and I am not a fool,
1:00:59
Speaker 1: and I have done heavy ironing for twenty years, and
1:01:02
Speaker 1: I know the smell of fresh sawn wood when I
1:01:04
Speaker 1: kneel in it. Someone had murdered her, and I knelt there,
1:01:07
Speaker 1: and I could not, she looked so undone, Honoria Bell,
1:01:11
Speaker 1: on a barn floor, with her hair down, she would
1:01:14
Speaker 1: not have borne it, the whole village crowding in, to
1:01:17
Speaker 1: look at her, undone. So I took one of the
1:01:20
Speaker 1: sprigs she had cut herself, it was her own lavender,
1:01:23
Speaker 1: her own cutting, whatever the police make of their knife,
1:01:26
Speaker 1: and I laid it in her hand, and I closed
1:01:28
Speaker 1: her eyes, and I went home and made the tea,
1:01:31
Speaker 1: and I let Rose find her, because Rose finding her
1:01:34
Speaker 1: was an accident, and I finding her was a story,
1:01:38
Speaker 1: and I would do it again. And the letter, said
1:01:40
Speaker 1: Miss Marple very softly. There is no letter, said Pris,
1:01:44
Speaker 1: and her eyes came up, grey and level and utterly exhausted.
1:01:48
Speaker 1: I told you before, there never was. Whatever she was
1:01:51
Speaker 1: going to do, whatever she had found out, it died
1:01:54
Speaker 1: with her, and it should stay dead, because it is
1:01:57
Speaker 1: the only thing of hers I have any power to
1:01:59
Speaker 1: protect now. She spent forty years keeping that door shut.
1:02:04
Speaker 1: I will not be the one to open it, not
1:02:06
Speaker 1: for police, not for anyone. Not even, said Miss Marple gently,
1:02:11
Speaker 1: if opening it is the only way to catch the
1:02:14
Speaker 1: person who soared through her ladder. Pris's hands closed slowly
1:02:18
Speaker 1: in her lap. That, she said, is between me and God.
1:02:23
Speaker 1: Then I am afraid, said Miss Marple, that God must
1:02:26
Speaker 1: wait a little, because someone else in this room does
1:02:28
Speaker 1: not intend to wait at all. And she turned, still mild,
1:02:32
Speaker 1: still pink, still with her knitting in her lap, and
1:02:35
Speaker 1: looked for the first time directly at Miss Euphemia Hartnell.
1:02:39
Speaker 1: You have not asked, Miss Hartnell, what was in the letter.
1:02:43
Speaker 1: Everyone else asked. Mrs. Dane asked. Mrs. Carraway asked. Miss
1:02:47
Speaker 1: Anstruther asked. You asked only what sort of letter, and
1:02:52
Speaker 1: you asked it before anyone had said it was found
1:02:54
Speaker 1: folded into the Christmas altar cloth. Because, you see, no
1:02:58
Speaker 1: one had said that. I had not said it. It
1:03:01
Speaker 1: is not the sort of detail the police give out.
1:03:03
Speaker 1: The needles clicked, once. You knew it was in the linen.
1:03:07
Speaker 1: You have known for a fortnight that it was in
1:03:09
Speaker 1: the linen. Because you searched that house twice yourself, didn't you?
1:03:14
Speaker 1: On your guild errands, on your kind visits to poor
1:03:17
Speaker 1: Pris with broth. And you never thought of the fold.
1:03:20
Speaker 1: You never knew about the fold. Only two people in
1:03:23
Speaker 1: the world knew about the fold, and one of them
1:03:25
Speaker 1: was dead. Miss Hartnell stood up. The little white hands
1:03:29
Speaker 1: were not quick now. This is a disgusting performance, she said,
1:03:33
Speaker 1: and her voice shook like paper. I shall not stay
1:03:36
Speaker 1: to be insulted by a meddling old woman and a— a
1:03:40
Speaker 1: servant with heirs. If the police have found a letter,
1:03:43
Speaker 1: let them produce it. There is no letter. There is nothing.
1:03:46
Speaker 1: There has been nothing for forty years. There you are wrong,
1:03:50
Speaker 1: said Miss Marple. There is a letter. There has always
1:03:53
Speaker 1: been a letter. And I am very much afraid, Miss
1:03:56
Speaker 1: Hartnell— that tonight you will go and look for it
1:03:58
Speaker 1: one last time, because you must, don't you see? That
1:04:02
Speaker 1: is the terrible thing about forty years of keeping. You
1:04:05
Speaker 1: cannot stop, and when you do, she folded her knitting
1:04:09
Speaker 1: away into her bag, and rose, and her voice was kind,
1:04:13
Speaker 1: which was the worst of it. Sergeant Bunch will be
1:04:16
Speaker 1: in the shrubbery. Section 9. The Letter at Last. Sergeant
1:04:20
Speaker 1: Bunch will be in the shrubbery, Miss Marple had said,
1:04:23
Speaker 1: and he was, from dusk until half-past eleven that night.
1:04:27
Speaker 1: cramped and damp and bitten, hidden in the laurels at
1:04:30
Speaker 1: the end of the vicarage garden, with a clear view
1:04:32
Speaker 1: across the lane of the side gate of Lavender House.
1:04:35
Speaker 1: Inspector Druitt was in the church porch. Miss Marple was
1:04:39
Speaker 1: at home, doing the thing she did best, which was
1:04:42
Speaker 1: sitting quite still by her fire and letting the pattern
1:04:45
Speaker 1: finish itself. It came at twenty minutes past eleven. The
1:04:49
Speaker 1: figure came up church lane without a light, keeping to
1:04:52
Speaker 1: the shadow of the wall, a small, thin figure, quick
1:04:56
Speaker 1: and noiseless, in a dark coat with something over its head.
1:05:00
Speaker 1: It let itself through the side gate of Lavender House
1:05:02
Speaker 1: with a key. A key, Bunch noted, which meant a
1:05:06
Speaker 1: great deal, for the house had been locked and re-locked
1:05:09
Speaker 1: by the police, and only three keys existed, his own,
1:05:13
Speaker 1: Miss Anstruthers, and the old duplicate that had hung for
1:05:16
Speaker 1: forty years on a nail in the church vestry. For
1:05:19
Speaker 1: the linen guild's use, the parlour window of Lavender House
1:05:23
Speaker 1: showed a faint moving glow, a shaded candle. carefully kept low.
1:05:28
Speaker 1: Bunch gave it the five minutes Druitt had drilled into him,
1:05:31
Speaker 1: and then he and Druitt crossed the lane together, and
1:05:34
Speaker 1: went in through the side gate and the unlocked kitchen door,
1:05:37
Speaker 1: and stood, at last, in the parlour doorway. The linen
1:05:41
Speaker 1: press stood open. The shelves were bare, every cloth and
1:05:45
Speaker 1: napkin and altar frontal taken out and shaken and thrown down.
1:05:49
Speaker 1: Forty years of folded whiteness in great soft drifts on
1:05:52
Speaker 1: the floor, so that the little parlour looked as though
1:05:55
Speaker 1: it had snowed, and in the middle of the snow,
1:05:57
Speaker 1: on her knees, with the candle beside her and the
1:06:00
Speaker 1: great Christmas altar cloth, the heavy damask one with the
1:06:03
Speaker 1: drawn thread border, spread across her lap, knelt Miss Euphemia Hartnell.
1:06:09
Speaker 1: In her hand was a letter. She did not start
1:06:12
Speaker 1: or scream or drop it. She looked up at them
1:06:14
Speaker 1: over the candle flame, and her thin face in that
1:06:17
Speaker 1: light was not frightened at all. It was something much worse.
1:06:21
Speaker 1: It was relieved. Folded, she said, in a conversational tone.
1:06:26
Speaker 1: In the hemfold of the Christmas cloth, all this time,
1:06:30
Speaker 1: I shook out forty cloths, and it was in the
1:06:32
Speaker 1: fold of the one I was taught to fold, by
1:06:35
Speaker 1: her mother, when I was seventeen. She looked down at
1:06:38
Speaker 1: the envelope, old, creased, softened at the folds like a
1:06:42
Speaker 1: thing long carried. It is addressed to her. From the
1:06:46
Speaker 1: convent of St. Tudy, in Cornwall. I have never seen it,
1:06:50
Speaker 1: I only ever heard of it, two weeks ago, when
1:06:53
Speaker 1: she sent for me, and told me what it said.
1:06:56
Speaker 1: She read it to me. She made me stand in
1:06:59
Speaker 1: her parlour, and she read it to me aloud, like
1:07:01
Speaker 1: a sentence. Which it was. Miss Hartnell folded the letter, once, twice,
1:07:08
Speaker 1: in thirds, neatly, the way the dead woman's mother had
1:07:11
Speaker 1: taught her when she was seventeen, and held it out
1:07:13
Speaker 1: to Druitt. You had better read it. You will hang
1:07:16
Speaker 1: me or you won't. I find I no longer greatly care.
1:07:20
Speaker 1: But read it first. She would have wanted it read aloud.
1:07:23
Speaker 1: Druitt read it that night, and again in the morning.
1:07:26
Speaker 1: and at half-past ten he carried it, in an evidence envelope,
1:07:30
Speaker 1: to Miss Marple's garden, where she was waiting for him
1:07:32
Speaker 1: among the roses with the air of a woman who
1:07:35
Speaker 1: has finished a piece of knitting, and is only now
1:07:37
Speaker 1: looking at the whole of it. It was written in
1:07:39
Speaker 1: a fine, foreign-looking hand, on convent paper, dated the 2nd
1:07:44
Speaker 1: of June. Dear Miss Bell, I write because I am dying,
1:07:48
Speaker 1: and because a sin kept is a sin doubled, and
1:07:50
Speaker 1: I have kept yours— no, not yours, God knows— for forty-one years.
1:07:56
Speaker 1: In 1885 your mother brought you to us, and in
1:07:59
Speaker 1: the March of 1886 you were delivered here of a daughter,
1:08:03
Speaker 1: and your mother gave orders that you be told the
1:08:05
Speaker 1: child was stillborn. It was not so. The child lived,
1:08:09
Speaker 1: and was strong. She was given to a childless couple
1:08:12
Speaker 1: of this parish, Tregarthen by name, and christened Priscilla. Your
1:08:17
Speaker 1: mother paid, and we kept silence. That was the way
1:08:20
Speaker 1: of it then, and I do not excuse it, and
1:08:23
Speaker 1: I have had forty years to learn what silence costs.
1:08:26
Speaker 1: There is more, and it is the hardest. It was
1:08:29
Speaker 1: not your sister who told your mother where you were.
1:08:32
Speaker 1: It was a friend of your girlhood who had seen
1:08:34
Speaker 1: you in the lane with the young man, and who
1:08:37
Speaker 1: went to your mother, whether from jealousy or misguided duty
1:08:40
Speaker 1: I cannot judge. And your sister Edith, learning of it,
1:08:44
Speaker 1: claimed the fault herself, believing your mother would deal more
1:08:47
Speaker 1: gently with a daughter's tattling than with an outsider's betrayal,
1:08:51
Speaker 1: and that your friendship at least might be spared. Your
1:08:55
Speaker 1: sister paid your friend's debt all her life, and forbade
1:08:58
Speaker 1: us ever to tell you, saying you must. be allowed
1:09:00
Speaker 1: to hate her, as hate was lighter than what you
1:09:03
Speaker 1: would feel toward the truth. She sent money for the
1:09:06
Speaker 1: child's keep for nineteen years. The friend I will not
1:09:09
Speaker 1: name to you, you will know her, she lives, I believe,
1:09:13
Speaker 1: in your village still, and she has prospered, and I
1:09:16
Speaker 1: pray daily that it has been a prosperity of the
1:09:18
Speaker 1: purse only. The child, Priscilla, left this parish some twenty
1:09:23
Speaker 1: years ago. I do not know where she went. I write,
1:09:27
Speaker 1: in dying, what I should have written long since. Burn this,
1:09:31
Speaker 1: or keep it, as your conscience dictates. Sister Mary Anselm,
1:09:36
Speaker 1: for the community of St. Tudy. The garden was very quiet.
1:09:39
Speaker 1: A white butterfly settled on the lavender at Miss Marple's feet,
1:09:43
Speaker 1: and opened and shut its wings like a page turning. Edith,
1:09:46
Speaker 1: said Miss Marple at last. All those years— I made
1:09:50
Speaker 1: my choice with my eyes open and I would make
1:09:52
Speaker 1: it again. She chose to be hated so that Honoria
1:09:56
Speaker 1: could go on loving the wrong person and hating a
1:09:58
Speaker 1: safe one. Emily Carraway said Honoria's beliefs were load-bearing walls.
1:10:04
Speaker 1: Edith made herself into a wall and let Honoria lean
1:10:07
Speaker 1: on hating her for 40 years. She shook her head
1:10:10
Speaker 1: slowly and Honoria read this letter a fortnight ago and
1:10:14
Speaker 1: learned in one page that she had been punishing the
1:10:17
Speaker 1: wrong person for a very long time. her exact words
1:10:20
Speaker 1: to Mr. Finch, and that the child she had mourned
1:10:23
Speaker 1: for forty years was alive, and that the child was
1:10:27
Speaker 1: twenty years gone from Cornwall, with no trace. Except, Miss
1:10:32
Speaker 1: Marple looked up, except that twenty years ago a half-starved
1:10:36
Speaker 1: woman from a dreadful situation in Cornwall answered an advertisement
1:10:41
Speaker 1: and came to Lavender House and was made whole. Honoria
1:10:45
Speaker 1: read this letter and looked across her own parlour and
1:10:48
Speaker 1: understood who had been folding her linen for twenty years.
1:10:52
Speaker 1: And Miss Hartnell, said Druitt heavily, the friend, you will
1:10:56
Speaker 1: know her, she lives in your village still. Honoria sent
1:10:59
Speaker 1: for her, and read it aloud, and gave her a
1:11:02
Speaker 1: fortnight's grace, said Miss Marple. That was Honoria all over,
1:11:06
Speaker 1: she did not go to the police or the parish.
1:11:09
Speaker 1: She told Mr. Finch she would put her house in order,
1:11:12
Speaker 1: the new will, everything to her daughter, and she told
1:11:15
Speaker 1: Emily she had stopped being afraid, and she told Arthur
1:11:19
Speaker 1: that after tomorrow the hedge would be the least of it.
1:11:22
Speaker 1: She was going to acknowledge it, all of it, the daughter,
1:11:26
Speaker 1: the sister's innocence, the friend's betrayal, openly at last in
1:11:30
Speaker 1: her own time. And she gave Euphemia Hartnell that fortnight
1:11:34
Speaker 1: as a condemned person is given time to put their
1:11:36
Speaker 1: affairs in order, because Honoria Bell, even in mercy, was
1:11:41
Speaker 1: a bell of the bells. The butterfly lifted off the lavender,
1:11:44
Speaker 1: but a condemned person with a fortnight's grace, Inspector, and
1:11:48
Speaker 1: forty years of respectability to lose, and a key to
1:11:51
Speaker 1: the linen press hanging in the vestry. That is not
1:11:54
Speaker 1: a penitent. That is a woman with time to find
1:11:57
Speaker 1: a saw. Druitt looked down at the letter in its envelope.
1:12:01
Speaker 1: She denies the sawing, he said. She admits the searching,
1:12:05
Speaker 1: admits the confrontation, admits everything except the thing itself, says
1:12:10
Speaker 1: the rung was part cut when she went there that
1:12:12
Speaker 1: Sunday night, says she went to look for the letter,
1:12:15
Speaker 1: found the barn door open, went up. He stopped, because
1:12:19
Speaker 1: Miss Marple had held up one small hand, and was
1:12:22
Speaker 1: smiling for the first time that morning, sadly, into the
1:12:25
Speaker 1: middle distance. Ah, said Miss Marple softly. Then we must
1:12:29
Speaker 1: look again, Inspector, at the one thing none of us
1:12:31
Speaker 1: has questioned. We have all assumed the ladder was sawn
1:12:34
Speaker 1: to bring Honoria down. But suppose, suppose it was sawn
1:12:38
Speaker 1: to bring someone up. Section 10. The Whole of the Pattern.
1:12:43
Speaker 1: Sawn to bring someone up, repeated Miss Marple. and she
1:12:46
Speaker 1: let the words hang in the rose-smelling air, until Druid,
1:12:49
Speaker 1: despite himself, leaned forward. But no, Inspector, I am afraid
1:12:54
Speaker 1: I was being fanciful, and at my age one should
1:12:57
Speaker 1: not indulge it. Let us be plain. The ladder was
1:13:00
Speaker 1: sawn to bring Honoria down, and the person who sawed
1:13:03
Speaker 1: it was the person who knew three things. That she
1:13:06
Speaker 1: climbed that ladder every dawn of Lavender Week, that the
1:13:09
Speaker 1: rung would hold a lightweight but not eleven stone, and
1:13:12
Speaker 1: that no one locks a barn in Kingham Abbot. That
1:13:15
Speaker 1: narrows the field to the whole village, except for the
1:13:18
Speaker 1: fourth thing. The person who sawed it knew that the
1:13:21
Speaker 1: letter existed, what it contained, and that Honoria meant to
1:13:25
Speaker 1: act on it, and that inspector narrows the field to one.
1:13:29
Speaker 1: Miss Hartnell denies. Miss Hartnell, said Miss Marple, confessed to
1:13:34
Speaker 1: everything except the crime, in a room knee-deep in other
1:13:37
Speaker 1: people's linen, holding the letter she had killed to find.
1:13:41
Speaker 1: It was a very beautiful performance, the best she has
1:13:44
Speaker 1: ever given, and it was a performance, Inspector, from the
1:13:47
Speaker 1: first word to the fold of that letter, in thirds,
1:13:51
Speaker 1: which she made such a point of showing you. The
1:13:53
Speaker 1: fold I was taught by her mother when I was seventeen.
1:13:57
Speaker 1: She wanted you to see that fold. She wanted you
1:14:00
Speaker 1: to understand that she too had once been folded into
1:14:03
Speaker 1: that family. The almost daughter, the girl who was taught
1:14:06
Speaker 1: the fold, and then watched Honoria chosen for everything she
1:14:10
Speaker 1: was not. Miss Marple's needles were still, Jealousy in a
1:14:14
Speaker 1: girl of seventeen is a common thing, and passes. Jealousy
1:14:18
Speaker 1: kept for forty years, watered, tended, pressed flat between the
1:14:22
Speaker 1: leaves of a respectable life like, like a sprig in linen,
1:14:26
Speaker 1: does not pass, it keeps. That is the thing about
1:14:30
Speaker 1: pressing things flat, Inspector. They keep forever, and they never
1:14:34
Speaker 1: lose their strength. The vicarage parlour was lent again that afternoon.
1:14:39
Speaker 1: The vicar, haggard and kind, said that if it must
1:14:42
Speaker 1: come out, let it come out in a Christian room,
1:14:45
Speaker 1: and by four o'clock they were assembled. Druett and Bunch,
1:14:49
Speaker 1: very quiet by the door, Mrs. Carraway, black-eyed, in the
1:14:53
Speaker 1: best chair, Colonel Harker, grey as ash, sitting as far
1:14:57
Speaker 1: from everyone as the room allowed, Pris Anstruther, folded and upright,
1:15:01
Speaker 1: with her hands in her lap, and Miss Euphemia Hartnell,
1:15:05
Speaker 1: brought in between a policewoman and the doctor her brother,
1:15:08
Speaker 1: sat with her thin face turned to the wall, like
1:15:11
Speaker 1: a woman at a sickbed, Miss Marple sat by the
1:15:14
Speaker 1: French windows with the letter on her lap, and told
1:15:17
Speaker 1: them the whole of it, plainly, gently, as one unpicks
1:15:20
Speaker 1: a piece of work row by row to show where
1:15:23
Speaker 1: the error went in. Forty years ago, she said, there
1:15:26
Speaker 1: were two girls, and they were friends as girls are friends,
1:15:30
Speaker 1: one of them admired, one of them the admirer. Honoria
1:15:34
Speaker 1: Bell had everything, the looks, the inheritance, the lavender, and,
1:15:39
Speaker 1: that one summer, Arthur Harker. Euphemia had what the admiring
1:15:43
Speaker 1: friend always has, which is everything second-hand, the confidences, the
1:15:48
Speaker 1: letters to carry, the happiness to watch at close quarters.
1:15:52
Speaker 1: And then Honoria's engagement was announced, and there was no
1:15:55
Speaker 1: more carrying of letters. And Euphemia saw Honoria and Arthur
1:15:59
Speaker 1: in the lane one evening, and understood that there was
1:16:02
Speaker 1: now something that would be taken from her even sooner
1:16:05
Speaker 1: than marriage would take it. So she did the one
1:16:07
Speaker 1: thing that would stop the marriage and could never be
1:16:10
Speaker 1: traced— she went to Mrs. Bell. Not in malice, that
1:16:13
Speaker 1: is what makes it so dreadful and so true. I
1:16:16
Speaker 1: have seen it a dozen times. A word dropped for
1:16:19
Speaker 1: the girl's own good, a mother's duty invoked. One does
1:16:23
Speaker 1: the irreparable thing and tells oneself it is kindness. And
1:16:27
Speaker 1: then Edith, Miss Marple looked down at the letter. Edith,
1:16:31
Speaker 1: who could not gossip, who had not the gift, stepped
1:16:34
Speaker 1: forward and took the blame on herself, so that Honoria
1:16:37
Speaker 1: would lose a sister rather than a faith in people.
1:16:40
Speaker 1: and Honoria chose to believe her, because Honoria's beliefs were
1:16:44
Speaker 1: load-bearing walls, and the truth would have brought the whole
1:16:47
Speaker 1: house down. And Euphemia let her. For forty years she
1:16:51
Speaker 1: let her. You cannot prove, said Miss Hartnell, to the wall.
1:16:55
Speaker 1: I can prove, said Miss Marple, without raising her voice,
1:16:58
Speaker 1: that you knew where the parish linen was kept, that
1:17:01
Speaker 1: you carried it to Lavender House every Friday of your
1:17:04
Speaker 1: adult life, that the vestry key was signed out to
1:17:07
Speaker 1: you on the Saturday before the fete. Mrs. Peddle keeps
1:17:10
Speaker 1: the book. And you forgot that, because people like you
1:17:13
Speaker 1: always do forget the one homely thing, and that on
1:17:16
Speaker 1: the Sunday night before the fete, you were seen from
1:17:19
Speaker 1: the church tower by the verger's boy, crossing the vicarage
1:17:22
Speaker 1: garden toward church lane, at a time when you had
1:17:25
Speaker 1: told your brother you were in bed with a headache,
1:17:28
Speaker 1: and I can prove the thing that no performance can
1:17:31
Speaker 1: explain away. She paused. When Honoria lay dead, and the
1:17:35
Speaker 1: village began to talk, there was one voice, from the
1:17:38
Speaker 1: very first afternoon, pointing the talk at Arthur Harker. They
1:17:42
Speaker 1: say Colonel Harker was heard quarrelling with her. They say,
1:17:46
Speaker 1: It was you, Miss Hartnell. Before the ladder was photographed,
1:17:50
Speaker 1: before the sprig was in an envelope, before anyone but
1:17:53
Speaker 1: the killer could possibly have wanted a suspect, you had
1:17:56
Speaker 1: one ready. You have been preparing for that week for
1:17:59
Speaker 1: forty years, and when it came, you knew exactly what
1:18:02
Speaker 1: everyone should think. The room was perfectly silent. Outside, the
1:18:07
Speaker 1: chestnuts moved. and a drift of lavender came in at
1:18:10
Speaker 1: the windows from down the lane, sharp and clean, and
1:18:13
Speaker 1: no one stirred.' And the sprig!' said Pris suddenly, her
1:18:17
Speaker 1: own voice, low and clear, the voice from the tea-party.'
1:18:20
Speaker 1: Miss Marple, the sprig! You said at the tea that
1:18:24
Speaker 1: the knife meant I had done it in haste and
1:18:26
Speaker 1: in love. But I did not cut that sprig. I
1:18:29
Speaker 1: took it from her basket, from the floor, where the
1:18:32
Speaker 1: basket had spilled. She had cut it herself, that morning,
1:18:36
Speaker 1: with her knife.' She turned, slowly, and looked at the
1:18:40
Speaker 1: assembled faces, and something like the ghost of a smile
1:18:44
Speaker 1: moved on her grey face for the first time in
1:18:46
Speaker 1: six weeks. You see, she had stopped. All those years
1:18:51
Speaker 1: of scissors, because a knife bruised the stem, because lavender
1:18:55
Speaker 1: remembers how it's cut. And that last morning she took
1:18:59
Speaker 1: her knife to the lavender beds instead. I noticed it
1:19:02
Speaker 1: when I knelt in the wreck of her basket, and
1:19:04
Speaker 1: I thought I had gone mad to notice such a thing,
1:19:07
Speaker 1: but I understand it now, She had read the letter.
1:19:10
Speaker 1: She had stopped being afraid. She told Mrs. Carraway so.
1:19:14
Speaker 1: She was going to acknowledge her daughter, and confess her sister,
1:19:18
Speaker 1: and forgive, or punish, her friend, and burn forty years
1:19:22
Speaker 1: of pretense. She was cutting everything with a knife that morning.
1:19:26
Speaker 1: The old rules were done with. She didn't care what
1:19:29
Speaker 1: she bruised. She was free. It was then that Miss
1:19:32
Speaker 1: Euphemia Hartnell stood up. The doctor her brother half rose.
1:19:36
Speaker 1: and she put him aside with one of the little
1:19:38
Speaker 1: white hands, and she faced the room, thin, rustling, respectable, finished,
1:19:45
Speaker 1: and her voice, when it came, was as dry and
1:19:47
Speaker 1: level as a woman reading out a shopping list, which was,
1:19:51
Speaker 1: in its way, the most terrible sound heard in that
1:19:54
Speaker 1: parlour in living memory. She read it aloud to me,
1:19:58
Speaker 1: said Euphemia, in her parlour, with the door shut, like
1:20:01
Speaker 1: a sentence, and at the end she said, she was
1:20:04
Speaker 1: not cruel, That is what no one will understand. Cruelty,
1:20:08
Speaker 1: I could have answered, she said. Euphemia, I shall not
1:20:12
Speaker 1: expose you. I shall simply stop pretending. What the village
1:20:15
Speaker 1: makes of the difference is its own affair. Forty years
1:20:18
Speaker 1: I had built, and she was going to stop pretending.
1:20:22
Speaker 1: She gave me a fortnight to put my affairs in order,
1:20:24
Speaker 1: so I did. She picked up her gloves and folded them,
1:20:28
Speaker 1: in thirds, the way Mrs. Bell had taught her when
1:20:30
Speaker 1: she was seventeen. I should like to go now, Inspector.
1:20:34
Speaker 1: There is a great deal to put in order, and
1:20:36
Speaker 1: I find I have very little time. Section 11. The
1:20:40
Speaker 1: Keeping I find I have very little time, Miss Hartnell
1:20:44
Speaker 1: had said, and the parlour emptied around her going the
1:20:47
Speaker 1: way a room empties after a storm has passed, slowly
1:20:50
Speaker 1: and in silence, and with everyone careful not to look
1:20:53
Speaker 1: at the wreckage. Druitt and the policewoman took her out
1:20:56
Speaker 1: through the vicarage garden, because she asked that they might
1:20:59
Speaker 1: not go up the high street, and it was granted.
1:21:01
Speaker 1: The doctor her brother followed, a broken man in a
1:21:04
Speaker 1: good coat, and Mrs. Dane went with him, because someone
1:21:07
Speaker 1: had to. Sergeant Bunch stayed to gather up the letter
1:21:10
Speaker 1: and the gloves she had folded and left lying on
1:21:13
Speaker 1: the Sheraton chair. In thirds, squared, like everything else she
1:21:17
Speaker 1: had ever put down. And Mrs. Carraway was helped out
1:21:20
Speaker 1: by her great-niece, and said nothing at all until she
1:21:22
Speaker 1: was in the lane, and then said only,' Forty years,
1:21:26
Speaker 1: and I never once asked her what she was so
1:21:28
Speaker 1: angry about.' That is what a village is for, Jane,
1:21:31
Speaker 1: and I forgot it. Miss Marple did not go at once.
1:21:34
Speaker 1: She sat by the French windows while the light changed,
1:21:38
Speaker 1: and Pris Anstruther sat in her straight chair with her
1:21:41
Speaker 1: folded hands, and neither of them spoke, until at last
1:21:45
Speaker 1: Pris said, not looking up, in the low clear voice
1:21:48
Speaker 1: that was hers now, and would remain so, she knew me.
1:21:52
Speaker 1: For a fortnight she knew me, and she never said
1:21:55
Speaker 1: a word. No, said Miss Marple. All those years I
1:21:59
Speaker 1: used to imagine it, I won't pretend I didn't. Every
1:22:02
Speaker 1: companion in every book gets told, in the end, my child.
1:22:06
Speaker 1: I used to think the word would be enough, just once,
1:22:09
Speaker 1: just to have heard it. And instead she read me
1:22:12
Speaker 1: no letter and said no word. And she cut her
1:22:15
Speaker 1: lavender with a knife, and changed her will, and wound
1:22:18
Speaker 1: her clock on Sunday. And on Monday she was dead.
1:22:22
Speaker 1: Pris's hands turned over in her lap, the palms up, empty.
1:22:27
Speaker 1: I have been very angry with her, Miss Marple, this
1:22:29
Speaker 1: last fortnight, angrier than I have ever been with anyone.
1:22:33
Speaker 1: She had a fortnight of knowing, and she spent it
1:22:36
Speaker 1: putting her house in order, and not one minute of
1:22:38
Speaker 1: it on me. Is that— was that not wanting me? I
1:22:42
Speaker 1: have to know. I have come twenty years, and waited
1:22:46
Speaker 1: twenty years, and I cannot go the rest of the
1:22:49
Speaker 1: way not knowing. Miss Marple was quiet for a moment.
1:22:52
Speaker 1: Then she said, gently, My dear— You have it exactly backwards,
1:22:57
Speaker 1: and it is the most important thing you will ever
1:22:59
Speaker 1: learn about her, so I shall say it plainly. Honoria
1:23:03
Speaker 1: Bell despised hypocrisy above everything. Gerald told the police so,
1:23:08
Speaker 1: and it was the truest thing said in this case.
1:23:11
Speaker 1: Words to Honoria were pretense. She had spent forty years
1:23:14
Speaker 1: among words, stillborn, for her health, gossip, devoted, and every
1:23:19
Speaker 1: one of them a lie, and she knew it now.
1:23:22
Speaker 1: So when it came to you, she did not give
1:23:24
Speaker 1: you a word She gave you the house. Pris looked up, sharply.
1:23:29
Speaker 1: The new will, my dear. Everything. Lavender house, the garden,
1:23:33
Speaker 1: the beds, outright. She could not say my daughter. So
1:23:38
Speaker 1: she did the thing that, in her language, only ever
1:23:41
Speaker 1: meant one thing. She put it in writing, and folded
1:23:44
Speaker 1: it away, and left it where it would be found
1:23:47
Speaker 1: when she was gone. She was not a woman who
1:23:49
Speaker 1: loved in words. She loved the way she kept, in linen,
1:23:53
Speaker 1: in thirds, with the lavender slid into the heart of
1:23:56
Speaker 1: the fold where nobody could see it. You, of all people,
1:23:59
Speaker 1: should have read her. She taught you the fold herself.
1:24:02
Speaker 1: For a long time there was no sound in the
1:24:04
Speaker 1: parlour but the clock and the chestnuts. Then Pris Anstruther,
1:24:08
Speaker 1: who had not wept at the fete, nor at the funeral,
1:24:11
Speaker 1: nor before any policeman, put her face down into her empty,
1:24:14
Speaker 1: upturned hands, and wept for her mother at last, in
1:24:17
Speaker 1: the way she had earned. Twenty years' worth, all at once,
1:24:21
Speaker 1: without a sound. The law took its course, as the
1:24:24
Speaker 1: law does, and the village, having talked of nothing else
1:24:27
Speaker 1: for a summer, did what villages do with grief. It
1:24:31
Speaker 1: folded it, and put it away, and slid a sprig
1:24:34
Speaker 1: of something sharp between the layers to keep it. There
1:24:37
Speaker 1: were consequences, of course, small and decent and unspectacular. The
1:24:42
Speaker 1: new will had never been signed, and the old one stood,
1:24:45
Speaker 1: and Lavender House and the Lavender Beds came to Gerald Bell,
1:24:48
Speaker 1: who came down from Grey's Inn for a fortnight. walked
1:24:51
Speaker 1: the drying barn and the walled garden with the air
1:24:54
Speaker 1: of a man inspecting a life he had declined, and
1:24:57
Speaker 1: then did the thing his aunt would have despised him
1:24:59
Speaker 1: for doing loudly, and forgave him for doing quietly. He
1:25:03
Speaker 1: settled the house and the beds upon Miss Priscilla Anstruther
1:25:06
Speaker 1: for her life, with the residue after her to whoever
1:25:08
Speaker 1: she named, and went back to London, and wrote, thereafter,
1:25:13
Speaker 1: every Christmas, stiff barrister's letters, which Pris answered on lavender-scented
1:25:18
Speaker 1: paper and in a hand as fine and foreign-looking, Gerald
1:25:22
Speaker 1: always thought, as a nun's. Colonel Harker's lumbago improved, though
1:25:27
Speaker 1: nobody believed the two things were connected. He took, that autumn,
1:25:31
Speaker 1: to having his mending done at Lavender House, as it
1:25:34
Speaker 1: had in fact been done for fifteen years without his
1:25:36
Speaker 1: ever troubling to learn by whose hands, and he was observed,
1:25:40
Speaker 1: on the first occasion, to stand a long time in
1:25:43
Speaker 1: the parlour among the shelves of folded whiteness, and to
1:25:46
Speaker 1: say nothing at all, and to come away with his
1:25:49
Speaker 1: collar very straight. What passed between him and Pris thereafter
1:25:53
Speaker 1: was conducted, in the true Kingham Abbot manner, over the hedge,
1:25:57
Speaker 1: which was cut, that September, for the first time in
1:26:00
Speaker 1: six years, from both sides at once, and has been
1:26:04
Speaker 1: kept low ever since, low enough to talk over, which
1:26:07
Speaker 1: was all it had ever been for. The linen and
1:26:10
Speaker 1: lavender stall at the next year's fate was the making
1:26:13
Speaker 1: of the parish, and Mrs. Dane said to every one,
1:26:16
Speaker 1: that it was just as Honoria would have wished, and
1:26:19
Speaker 1: for once it was true. The sprigs for the press
1:26:22
Speaker 1: were cut with scissors, from the beds behind the house,
1:26:25
Speaker 1: by a grey, fine-boned woman, who folded in thirds and
1:26:29
Speaker 1: taught the fold to Rose Tully's younger sister, saying only
1:26:33
Speaker 1: that it was an old way, older than anyone knew,
1:26:36
Speaker 1: and that a fold always made a pocket, and a
1:26:39
Speaker 1: pocket was a place to keep the thing you could
1:26:41
Speaker 1: not bear to carry in your hand. And Miss Marple,
1:26:44
Speaker 1: sitting under the cedar with her knitting, judging the preserves
1:26:47
Speaker 1: and watching the village go about its mended business, was
1:26:51
Speaker 1: asked by Mrs. Carraway whether she had known from the
1:26:53
Speaker 1: very beginning the sprig, the ladder, all of it, and
1:26:57
Speaker 1: Miss Marple considered, honestly, and shook her head. Not from
1:27:01
Speaker 1: the beginning, Emily, from the fold. When I saw Pris
1:27:05
Speaker 1: Anstruther fold that altar-cloth at the stall, the day of
1:27:08
Speaker 1: the fete, in thirds, with the ends turned under, the
1:27:12
Speaker 1: day after her, her employer, was found dead, It was
1:27:15
Speaker 1: not the calm that struck me. Grief takes people so differently.
1:27:20
Speaker 1: It was that she did it exactly as Honoria did it,
1:27:23
Speaker 1: as unconsciously as breathing, the way one does the things
1:27:26
Speaker 1: one's mother teaches one before one can read. And I thought,
1:27:30
Speaker 1: that is not a fold you learn from an employer,
1:27:32
Speaker 1: however devoted. That is a fold that comes down through
1:27:35
Speaker 1: a family, like the lavender itself, which Honoria's grandmother brought
1:27:40
Speaker 1: from the Auvergne, and which grows, they say, nowhere else
1:27:43
Speaker 1: in the county. Things that are kept go on, Emily.
1:27:46
Speaker 1: That is all. Lavender and folds and love and lies.
1:27:51
Speaker 1: We press them flat between the years and think them finished.
1:27:54
Speaker 1: And they keep and keep. And the moment the cloth
1:27:57
Speaker 1: is shaken out, the whole room smells of them. She
1:28:00
Speaker 1: rolled her knitting and rose to judge the cakes. Lavender
1:28:04
Speaker 1: remembers how it's cut, she said. So do we all.
1:28:07
Speaker 1: The trick of a life, the only trick there is,
1:28:10
Speaker 1: I sometimes think, is to choose, before the end, what
1:28:14
Speaker 1: you are willing to bruise. Over the vicarage lawn the
1:28:17
Speaker 1: bells were practising, and the long shadows lay blue across
1:28:20
Speaker 1: the grass, and from down Church Lane the smell of
1:28:23
Speaker 1: the lavender came up sharp and clean and unforgotten, the
1:28:27
Speaker 1: way it came up every June, and would, long after
1:28:30
Speaker 1: everyone who remembered why, was gone. The End