The Red Lacquer Case

Chapter Three

Chapter ThreeFour and a half hours later Sally became aware of daylight, Mrs. Callender, a rapid flow of conversation, and a bitterly cold draught. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, yawned, and said, “Good morning”—adding hastily, “For goodness’ sake, shut something, or I shall freeze, Cally.”

“Door or window, Miss?” inquired Mrs. Callender.

“Both,” said Sally.

Mrs. Callender fastened the window and banged the door. Everything that could creak and rattle was doing so with great zest. There was a stinging wind and an unbelievably brilliant sun.

Sally detached her mind with a jerk from the prospect, and bent her startled attention upon Mrs. Callender’s steady stream of talk.

“What did you say?” she asked sharply.

“At half past seven,” said Mrs. Callender without appearing to take a breath, “I knocked at the old gentleman’s door like you told me to. And for five blessed minutes if I didn’t go on a-knocking and a-standing there like a poor dumb woodpecker which, if you’ll remember, Miss Sally, it was only yesterday I told you that there was a tree damaged shameful up at Squire’s, and my nephew Bill’s eldest son he vows and declares as the ’ole tribe of them did ought to be shot and done away with, only Squire he’s fair mushy over birds and animals, and, as my niece Ellen’s ’usband ’as often said, if we Christians got the ’arf of it, we’d be well off and no mistake. But I says to him, ‘If you’d ’ave known Squire’s father, you’d know as you was well off now, for a more ramping, rampageous old devil never cursed a Christian family. No man’s job wasn’t safe, nor no woman’s character, so to speak, not when old Squire was about.’ And so I’ve told my niece Ellen’s ’usband many’s the time.”

Here she drew breath and continued without the slightest change of voice.

“So there’s the old gentleman’s bed not slept in, and a letter for you a-propped against the lamp downstairs. So I suppose as ’ow he’s been called away sudden.”

“What?” said Sally with a gasp.

“Just what I’ve been a-telling of you all along,” said Mrs. Callender with an air of virtue. “Sitting late at night means lying late in the morning, and a thing I never did ’old with.”

But Sally had leapt from bed and was halfway down the narrow cottage stair.

Fritzi gone! But how? Where? Fritzi whom she had left quite fairly soothed and peaceful. Impossible!

She stood barefoot in her thin nightdress, and tore open the letter which bore her address. The wind whipped in through the open window, but Sally did not feel it. What on earth did it all mean? What on earth was Fritzi up to?

She clutched the letter in one hand, the table with the other, and read:

“Sally, my child, I am going away. This decision, it is too great for me; I cannot make it. I am like a man who is blind; I cannot see which way I should go. But, if I am blind, others have eyes. I think you have the eyes to see and the courage to choose. Choose, then, and God be with you. For me, I go. Good-bye, little Sally whom I love.

Fritzi.

P.S. The lacquer case, it is behind the second volume of Tillotson’s Sermons in your Cousin Eliza’s bookcase.”

Sally found herself breathing very fast. The hand that held the letter was shaking. She was angry, and she was afraid. With a rush of furious resentment she told herself that there was nothing to be afraid of. She turned the letter over; on the back was yet another postscript slanting right down across the page in an almost illegible scrawl:

“It is impossible that I can stay to meet him.”

Sally crumpled the letter up, and flung it on the floor. Meet him? Meet whom? Had Fritzi gone mad? Then, in a faint whisper somewhere just beyond her control—had anything dreadful happened? She stamped her foot. Of course it hadn’t—of course, of course it hadn’t. What a perfect fool she was.

Very slowly she went across to the window and shut it. She stood with her hand on the hasp for a moment, looking out. It was the middle window which was open last night, and the man must have stood just there on the edge of the gravel path. A horrid little shiver went all over her. If anything had happened to Fritzi!

With a jerk she drew the curtains, and ran over to the glass-fronted bookshelf which flanked the fireplace. Kneeling on the brick, she flung the doors wide, and dragged both Tillotson’s sober volumes from their place on the lowest shelf. There was nothing behind them.

Sally began to feel very cold. She pulled out Jeremy Taylor and Izaak Walton, and there was nothing behind them either. With stiff fingers she added The Reverend Thomas Moggridge’s Remarks on the Uncertainty of Human Existence, and Bishop Hannington’s Life to the pile beside her, and gazed in horror at the emptying shelf. Some bound volumes of Good Words remained, but there was nothing behind them; and on the next shelf nothing; and on the one above nothing either.

Mrs. Callender opened the door upon a scene of indescribable confusion.

“Enough to make Miss Eliza walk, that it were,” as she assured her niece Ellen when she next had tea with her. “Every blessed book on the floor, and Miss Sally, as you may say, ’ardly decent, for her nightdresses is a deal more like what I should think fit and proper for a ballroom, all low in the neck, and short in the sleeve, and no protection at all against those cold bricks, as I said to her at the time. ‘Oh, Lor’, Miss Sally my dear,’ I says. ‘What a scramjandrum,’ I says. And blest if Miss Sally didn’t burst out laughing in my face, and her own as white as a sour curd.”

“What’s a scramjandrum?” said Sally, scrambling to her feet and sending the books flying.

“I never want to see a worse one,” said Mrs. Callender, “not if I was to see a hundred, I don’t. Oh, it’s all very well to say, ‘Go away, Cally,’ and you with your bare feet and nothing on.”

“Well, put the books back,” said Sally shortly.

The gust of laughter which had swept her was gone.

She went over to the crumpled ball, which was Fritzi’s letter, and picked it up. The envelope was still on the little table. She took it and turned it over. She had not broken the seals, but had opened it by tearing the top.

She went now to the window, drew back the curtain, and looked long and steadily at Fritzi’s three blobs of violet wax. The edges were sharper than they should have been.

Half turning, her eyes went quickly to the little writing table set at an angle between door and window. A small paper knife, dagger-shaped and made of metal, lay on the blotting pad. She picked it up, brought it to the light, and looked closely at it. A little smear of violet wax dimmed the blade. Someone had been here, then, after Fritzi had written his letter and gone away, after she herself had gone to sleep. Someone had been here in this room, and had found the letter and opened it. Quite easy, of course, with a metal paper knife, especially if you heated it.

On the other side of the room Cally was thumping books back into place and grumbling all the time; nice, safe Cally, with her flat back and flatter chest, and the frizzy fringe of a dead Victorian day. She could have kissed her for being so cross, and safe, and respectable.

What a perfectly horrid thing to have happened. The hand, large, pale, and darkly scarred, rose up in Sally’s memory. With a rush, the thing that she had been keeping at bay became a clamorous fact, impossible to resist. Fritzi’s secret was stolen; the lacquer case was gone!