A Body at the Midsummer Fete | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

Death at the Midsummer Fate. A Miss Marple Mystery. Section 1. The Garland Makers. St Mary Mead never looked so innocent as it did on the morning of the Midsummer Fate, and it was Miss Marple's habit to be most watchful when everything looked most innocent. She sat on the vicarage lawn before ten o'clock that Saturday, her knitting in her lap, and heard of the disturbance before the church clock had finished striking, for there was a disturbance already, though nobody yet called it by so serious a name. It arrived— as village disturbances so often do, in the person of a parlourmaid bursting with news. Elsie Biggs from Hazeldean came across the lawn with her hat on crooked, and stood over the trestle table where the garlands were being made,

and could contain herself no longer. A box come by the first post, she announced to the table at large. Flowers it was, done up nice like a florist's, only there wasn't no florist's name, and there wasn't no card, and the mistress opens it, and goes white as the tablecloth, and says, very quiet, take them away. Only then she says, no, put them in water, and then she says, burn them.

Three times she changed her mind, and her breakfast not touched. How very singular, said Griselda Clement, the vicar's wife, who was threading daisies and wishing, not for the first time, that she were better at it. Who sends flowers without a card? What sort of flowers? inquired Miss Hartnell, who liked her information exact. Nasty little things, said Elsie. Rue, Cook says the bitter one is, and rosemary. and a bit of foxglove, and a sprig of lavender, not what you'd call a cheerful bunch. There was a small silence at the garland table. It was Miss Marple who broke it, gently without looking up from her knitting. Rue, she observed, means regret. I remember that from my girlhood, when young ladies still sent one another posies with meanings in them.

Rosemary is for remembrance, we all know that. Lavender, I am afraid, stands for distrust. And the foxglove, she paused and clicked her needles. The foxglove, dear Elsie, stands for insincerity, but I dare say it was only someone's idea of a joke. Nasty kind of joke, said Elsie, and went home to Hazeldene to tell Cook the latest from the vicarage lawn. The garland makers returned to their work, but a faint chill had been laid over the morning, as though a cloud had passed before the sun, and thought better of it. The vicarage lawn was at its loveliest.

The roses heavy, the limes in flower, the long tables already set with cloths for the afternoon. Colonel Bantry could be heard hammering tent pegs beyond the laurels, and complaining about the boy who had been sent to help him. His wife Dolly moved from table to table with lists, a general disguised as a matron. The vicar himself, Leonard Clement, came out with a stack of hymn sheets to be used as programmes, and stopped to ask whether anyone had seen his sermon, which he had put down somewhere, and which, Griselda remarked, would be a pity to find now that it was too late to use. Old Job Crick, the gardener from Hazeldene, shuffled past with an armful of greenery for the arch over the gate. He was seventy if

he was a day, bent like a bill-hook, and he had gardened at Hazeldene since boyhood, through old Mr. Vines-Time, and through the years the house stood empty, and now through Mrs. Mallory's. He paused by the garland table and looked at the heap of cut flowers, and something moved in his old face. Roo, he said, to no one in particular. Funny thing to send a body. Roo and Rosemary.

That's a burying bunch, that is. Job, said Griselda kindly. You are the most depressing man in three counties. I, said Job, unmoved and shuffled on. The last to arrive before the clock struck eleven was Mrs. Hobbery, the district nurse, who leaned her bicycle against the hedge and came apologising across the grass, still pinning her cap. Everybody was glad to see her. Everybody always was. Alice Hobbery had nursed half the village into the world and a good many out of it, and there was no one, from Colonel Bantry down to the carrier's boy, who would hear a word against her. She was a quiet, comely woman of five-and-forty, with gentle hands and a way of tipping her head when she listened that made you feel what you said

mattered to her. I've only twenty minutes, she said, taking her place at the table. I must be up at Hazelden by half-past. Mrs. Mallory will have her drops before the excitement, and no argument. She smiled as she said it, the smile of a woman used to managing the obstinate, and took up a handful of daisies. They're saying, said Miss Weatherby, who had been waiting for exactly this audience, that Mrs. Mallory had a horrid anonymous posy this morning.

and went white as a sheet. Nurse Horbury went on threading daisies. She threaded them, Miss Marple noticed, with every stalk cut to exactly the same length, which was the way she trimmed bandages, and her expression did not change at all. Poor lady, she said, her heart is not strong, you know. I have told her the fate is too much for her, but she will have her way. She has looked forward to it so, she said to me only yesterday. Nurse, I mean this to be a midsummer nobody forgets. A singularly unpleasant trick to play on an invalid, said Griselda. Rue and rosemary, whoever would. When I was a girl, said Miss Marple, in the soft wandering voice that made people feel she had lost the thread of things,

there was a young woman at Muchbenham who received just such a posy rue and rosemary I remember, and I think tansy, which means a declaration of war, and it upset her dreadfully, because she knew at once who had sent it. That is the thing about a message in flowers, you see. It is only frightening if you understand it.

She smiled round the table with an air of innocent mildness. It was Nurse Hallbury who stood up and said she really must be going. The fate opened at three o'clock under a sky of unbroken blue, and by half past the vicarage lawn and the meadow beyond it were as full as Miss Marple could ever remember them. The Morris men from Much Benham stamped and capered with their bells.

The tombola did a roaring trade. Children shrieked over the bowling for a pig. The Women's Institute tea-tent was besieged. At the cordial table Miss Weatherby presided over an enormous glass jug of elderflower cordial made to her mother's receipt, with sprigs of mint and lemon balm floating in it, pale and cool, and smelling of the hedgerows. Mrs. Mallory came down from Hazeldean at a quarter past three, leaning a little on her stick, dressed in mauve with pearls at her throat. Honoria Mallory was sixty-three years old, tall and handsome in the severe old-fashioned way, and she had come back to St. Mary Mead five years before, and bought Hazeldean, the house where, as the village never tired

of remembering, she had been born Honoria Vine, she moved through the fate like a queen being gracious, and bought a bottle of bath salts she could not possibly want, and gave ten shillings to the church roof fund with a little speech that made Mrs Price Ridley say it was just like the old days, yet Miss Marple, watching from her chair in the shade, thought there was something odd about Mrs Mallory's gaiety, a stillness underneath it, like the stillness at the centre of a turning wheel, and when Nurse Horbury came to her side, Mrs, Mallory turned and looked at her, and the two women regarded one another for a long moment in a way that Miss Marple could not read at all. You will not forget your drops in all this, Mrs Mallory, said the nurse, smiling. No,

my dear, said Honoria Mallory, you never let me forget them, do you? It was twenty minutes later that Gerald Vine walked through the arch of greenery and stood blinking in the sun like a man who has dreamed a place and woken to find it real. The word passed through the fate faster than the Morris bells. Gerald Vine, old mister, Vine's son, home from Kenya after twenty-two years, thinner and greyer and shabbier, but unmistakable. Old Job Crick, who was standing by the gate, took off his hat, and then oddly put it on again. Mrs. Mallory, hearing the murmur, turned quite slowly, and looked at her brother across the crowded lawn, and what passed between them nobody could afterwards describe, but Miss Hartnell, who was nearest, declared that Mrs. Mallory

said only, Oh, there you are, as though he had been gone twenty-two minutes. They talked later, everyone agreed, behind the marquee, and it was not a comfortable talk. Miss Hartnell, retrieving a dropped ticket, heard fragments, a woman's voice raised, rose, and then, twenty-two years, and a man's voice rough. Mean to pay, and then Mrs Mallory's laugh, which was not, Miss Hartnell insisted, an unkind laugh, which was the strangest part of all. At four o'clock Miss Weatherby pressed a glass of cordial on Mrs Mallory, who refused it, Not for me, thank you. It is too sweet, and the day too hot. And at half-past she refused again, quite sharply, when Colonel Bantry offered to fetch her something. And then,

at a quarter to five, Nurse Horbury came through the crowd carrying a cup. Your drops, Mrs. Mallory, she said. I have brought them in a little cordial. It will do you good in the heat. Honoria Mallory looked at the cup, and then at the nurse. And for the second time that afternoon Miss Marple saw that long, unreadable regard pass between the two women. Then Mrs. Mallory took the cup in both hands and drank it down. It has a bitter taste today, she said. The lemon balm, perhaps, said Nurse Holbury gently. Eight minutes later, standing by the coconut, shy with one hand raised to her pearls, Honoria Mallory fell.

She fell without a cry, heavily, as a tree falls, and the cup dropped from her fingers and rolled away across the grass. The Morris men's bells went on ringing, because no one had told them to stop. Miss Marple, sitting quite still with her knitting in her lap, watched the cup until it stopped rolling. Section 2. A murmur on the green. The cup came to rest against the toe of Job Crick's boot, and Job stood looking down at it, as though it were a snake. Then the crowd surged and closed, and Dr. Hadock was thrusting through with his bag, calling for room, and somebody's child began to cry, and the vicar's voice could be heard saying, Stand back, please. Please stand back, in the tone of a man saying a prayer he does not expect to

be answered. The Morris bells faltered and stopped, one by one, like birds going quiet before a storm. Nurse Horbury was already kneeling. She had Mrs. Mallory's head on her arm, and her fingers on the pulse, and when Dr. Haydock knelt beside her she looked up and said, quite steadily, it is her heart, doctor. I have been expecting it, but not today. Her voice carried. It was a nurse's voice, trained to be heard across a sick room, and a dozen people heard her and repeated it, and by six o'clock the whole of St Mary Mead knew that Mrs.

Mallory had died of her heart, poor lady, in the middle of her own fate, which just showed. They carried her up to Hazeldine on a hurdle fetched from the home farm, decently covered with a union flag that Colonel Bantry produced from the scout tent, and the fate, after a stunned interval, did what fetts do. It wavered, and consulted, and went on at half volume, because the teas were all paid for, and the pig could hardly be unbowled for, but the joy had gone out of it. The bunting looked suddenly foolish, like a party dress on a widow.

On the green and under the tea-tent awnings, the village assembled its theories the way it assembled everything, out of small pieces, gossiped from hand to hand. Her heart, said Miss Weatherby positively. Nurse said so before the doctor had so much as touched her, a heart like hers, she should never have been allowed to stand about in the heat.

She would not touch my cordial, said Miss Weatherby, a moment later, to a different listener, and with a different inflection. Twice she refused it, and then, they say, she drank a whole cup down at a draught. Now I call that odd. The heat, said Mrs. Price Ridley, is very bad for elderly hearts, though I must say, and I only say what everyone is thinking. that a woman does not receive an anonymous posy of horrid bitter herbs in the morning, and drop dead in the afternoon without its meaning something. I read a book once, Gerald Vine, said Miss Hartnell, in the voice of a woman laying down the ace of trumps. Home after twenty-two years, quarrelling with his sister behind the marquee within the hour, and she

dead before tea-time. I heard them, Mrs. Price Ridley. I heard the name Rose. Nobody said, in so many words, Rose who. There was no need. In St. Mary Mead the dead are not forgotten. They are only rested, like Sunday china, and brought out when occasion offers. A few of the older women exchanged glances, and one or two crossed themselves, though the village was solidly Church of England.

Miss Marple sat in her chair in the shade and knitted, and listened, and said things like, Dear me, and how very strange, and did she really, now? Her pink, wrinkled face was all mild attention. Nobody noticed how rarely her needles stopped, or how her eyes went, again and again, to the table where the used cups were being gathered.

for the fate must be tidied even over a death, and it was Nurse Horbury, back from Hazeldean, pale but composed, saying the doctor had everything in hand, who tidied it. She gathered cups and carried them to the trestle where the washing-up bowls steamed, and washed them herself, capably, one after another, and it was the most natural thing in the world, the district nurse, helping, as she always helped.

Only Miss Marple, making her slow way to the cordial table on the pretext of wanting a little water, saw the cup that had rolled against Job Crick's boot, set apart from the rest, she noticed, and then, when she looked again, not apart but among the others, washed and drying, but not before Miss Marple had seen the dregs, elderflower cordial as Miss Weatherby made it, was pale as straw.

The dregs in that cup had been darker, amber, almost brown, and there had clung to the side of the cup a few dark flecks, like tea leaves, only they were not tea. Nurse Horbury is so capable, said Miss Marple softly to Griselda, who had come up beside her, I always think capable hands are such a blessing. One never has to ask them to do a thing twice. She is a treasure, said Griselda warmly. She nursed my mother, you know. I don't know what this village would do without her. No, said Miss Marple. That is just what I was thinking. Inspector Slack arrived from much venom as the light began to thicken, driving up in a hurry as though a death at a fate were a personal affront to the police. He was a bustling, suspicious man

who looked at everyone as though they had probably done it and would certainly lie about it. He took statements in the vicar's study briskly, and emerged after an hour wearing the expression of a man who has found the case exactly as troublesome as he expected. Heart failure, he was overheard to say to Doctor. Hey, Doc, on the vicarage steps. That's your certificate, and that's my report, and I don't mind saying so. Woman of 63, bad heart, hot day, drops dead, happens every week. All this talk about posies and whatnot, village nonsense. I sign nothing yet, said Doctor. Hey, Doc. who was an old friend of Miss Marple's and had not survived twenty years in St Mary Mead by being hurried. I said I would look

at her again in the morning. There was a funny look about her lips, slack, that I didn't care for, and I'd like to know what was in that cup. The cup, said Inspector Slack heavily, which has been washed up with all the others by some helpful soul, along with every blessed cup at the fete. But the village did not hear that exchange. The village was going home through the long midsummer dusk, carrying its unused raffle tickets and its tired children, and telling itself that it was a sad business, and that Mrs Mallory had been a real lady, and that it just showed. Already the story had begun to smooth itself, the way water smooths over a stone. Only two people in St Mary Mead were not smoothing anything. One was old Job Crick, who stood

for a long time by the deserted cordial table, after everyone had gone, turning something over and over in his earthy hands, and if anyone had been near enough to see, they would have seen that he was not looking at the table at all, but at the figure of Nurse Horbury cycling away down the lane, and that his old face was working like a man trying to remember something he has known all along. The other was Miss Marple.

She went home to her little house on the corner of the High Street, and had her tea, and answered her door to Elsie Biggs's cousin, who wanted to tell her all over again about the posy and the cardboard box, and agreed with everything, and heard her out. But when she was alone again she sat by her window in the summer dusk, and did not turn on the lamp, and her knitting lay forgotten in her lap. Rue, she was thinking, means regret. Rosemary means remembrance. A woman receives such a message in the morning, and changes her mind three times about it, away, water, fire, and goes out to her fate in mauve and pearls like a queen, and tells her nurse she means the day to be a midsummer nobody forgets, and drinks her medicine down, and dies,

and says beforehand, to her own brother, home after twenty-two years, something about rose, and something about paying. Miss Marple rose at last to draw the curtains, and as she did so she saw a bicycle lamp pass along the high street, moving not toward the nurse's cottage on the Muchbenham Road, but the other way, toward the church. It turned in at the lightgate, and the little light went out among the graves. There was one grave in St Mary Mead churchyard that was always tended, though nobody in the village would tell you who tended it. It was a plain stone, and the name on it was Rose Ray, and the date beneath it was twenty-two years old that midsummer. Miss Marple stood for a while longer by the window, with

her shawl round her shoulders, and thought about Roo. Section 3. The Inspector Asks Questions Nurse Horbury's bicycle lamp passed out of sight among the graves, and Miss Marple drew her curtains and went to bed, but not to sleep. She lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the Midsummer Night, an owl in the vicarage elms, the church clock striking the quarters, and arranging, with the patience of a woman sorting wool, the things she knew from the things she merely felt. By morning the village had rearranged itself into a village with a scandal, and it did so with the efficiency of long practice. The postmistress had it from the baker's boy, who had it from Dr.

Haydock's maid that the doctor had refused to sign the certificate, and the fishmonger's van carried the news to Little Worsley, and brought back in exchange the intelligence that Inspector Slack had been seen going up the drive at Hazeldane, with a sergeant and a black notebook, which was never a good sign. The investigation, such as it was, settled upon Hazeldane like weather, Inspector Slack worked through the house in his methodical, affronted way. He interviewed Cook, who had opened the cardboard box and confirmed the posy. Nasty little herbs, sir, done up with black ribbon, if you'll believe it. And the parlour maid, who had taken Mrs. Mallory her tea on the morning of the fete, and found her already

dressed and sitting by the window, like a lady expecting callers, though no callers were expected. He examined the little row of bottles on Mrs. Mallory's washstand, her drops, her sleeping mixture, her salts. He asked who had access to them, and was told what he might have known already, that Nurse Horbury had access to everything in the way of medicine in that house, as she did in half the houses of the parish. And where, said Inspector Slack, is the bottle now? There was a small silence. The bottle of drops, Cook said, stood always on the washstand. It was not there now. It was Nurse Horbury who answered, arriving at that moment with her bag, calm as ever, cap a little crooked from the ride. The drops went down to

the kitchen on the day of the fate, Inspector, she said. I measured the dose myself in the morning, as I always do, and the bottle was put by in the cool cupboard, out of the light. Mrs Mallory was particular about that. You will find it there. And there it was, a brown glass bottle with a glass stopper, half full of a clear, faintly yellow liquid, labelled in an old apothecary's hand. Digitalin, BP1 minim to the dram. The dose.

Twelve drops. Inspector Slack held it up to the light and looked at Nurse Horbury over the top of it, and she looked back at him with her mild, attentive, listening look. You gave her her medicine at the fete, Nurse, I understand. In a cup of cordial. I did, Mrs. Mallory would forget her drops when she was excited, and her heart could not afford forgetting. The cordial was only to make it pleasant. I have done the same at a dozen fates. And where did you get the cordial?

From the jug on Miss Weatherby's table. There were a dozen people watching. I poured it in front of them all. This was true, and a dozen people said so eagerly to the sergeant with the notebook, and it was at this point that the investigation, which had been drifting, took on direction, because it was Miss Hartnell, never backward with a fact, who told Inspector Slack about Gerald Vine. She told him about Kenya, and the twenty-two years, and the quarrel behind the marquee, and the word rose, and the word pay. She told him with relish. that Gerald Vine had not written to his sister in all those years, nor she to him, that old Mr. Vine had cut him off without a shilling. But with Mrs. Mallory dead

unmarried and without a will that anyone knew of, Gerald Vine stood to inherit Hazelden and everything in it, and that if that was not a motive, Miss Hartnell would like to know what was. Inspector Slack went to see Gerald Vine at the Blue Boar, where he had taken a room, and found a lean, sunburnt man of fifty-five with the faded, bewildered air of someone who has come home too late. Vine answered the questions in a low voice, looking mostly at his hands. Yes, he had come back without warning. Yes, he had quarrelled with his sister, or rather, she had quarrelled with him. He had never been good at quarrelling. No, he would not say what it was about. Yes, He knew he inherited if she died without a will.

He said this last in a tone of such flat distaste that Inspector Slack, who believed everyone wanted money, disliked him for it. It is a strange thing, sir, said Slack, leaning back, to come home after twenty-two years on the very day your sister dies. It is a strange thing, said Gerald Vine, that I came home to tell her something, and that someone else arrived before me. He would say no more than that, and Slack went away dissatisfied, with the dissatisfied man's conviction that dissatisfaction means guilt. Miss Marple, meanwhile, pursued her investigations in her own way, which looked to the untrained eye like a morning's shopping and an afternoon's calls.

She bought wool at the post office, and learnt from the postmistress that no parcel or box addressed to Hazeldine had passed through St. Marymead's hands in a fortnight. So that posy Miss Marple never came by our post at all, whatever Elsie Biggs says, and you may tell Inspector Slack so, for he's been round and was quite short with me.

It had come then by the rural post from Muchbenham, or by hand. Miss Marple filed this away. She called upon old Mrs. Sims, who had been cook general at Hazeldean in old Mr. Vine's day, and now sat by her fire with her memories laid out around her like mending. And there, over a cup of stewed tea, gently and by degrees, Miss Marple drew out the old story, the story the village had rested like Sunday China. Rose Ray had been the underhousemaid at Hazeldean, thirty years and more ago, when Honoria Vine was the young lady of the house, and Gerald was a boy home from school. A pretty girl, Mrs … Sims said, in the tone of a woman who has thought about it a great deal. Not a village beauty, but something better. Quick and warm and always laughing,

with a cloud of dark hair that would come down from its pins. She wasn't a bad girl, Miss Marple. I'll say that to anyone. There was nothing bad in Rose. She was the kind things happen to. What happened to her was the usual thing. She was found one March morning, twenty-two years ago, at the foot of the old quarry on the Muchbenham Road. and the coroner's jury brought it in as death by misadventure, walking home across the fields in the dark, the way she was forbidden to go, and missed the style in the frost. She was nineteen, she had left Hazeldine's service six weeks before, suddenly, in the middle of the night, without her month's money, and gone nobody quite knew where, and come back to the

village a fortnight later, to lodge with her aunt on the much-benham road, in a state that Mrs. Sims would only describe as brought very low poor lamb. It was put about, said Mrs. Sims, dropping her voice, that it was the young master, Mr. Gerald. It was the year he went abroad, you see, packed off to Kenya within the month, and never home since, and folk will put two and two together. But I was in that house, Miss Marple, and I'll tell you what I told nobody at the time, for what good would it have done.

It wasn't Mr. Gerald that girl used to meet in the garden. I heard them once, from the still room window. It was a woman's voice I heard with her, quarrelling, low and quick and angry. and the next day Rose went. A woman's voice, said Miss Marple. Did you know it? I couldn't swear, said Mrs. Sims, and I wouldn't. But there was only the one woman in that house besides me that Rose Ray had any business quarrelling with, and that was the young mistress, Miss Honoria, as was, Mrs. Mallory, as we must learn to say. Miss Marple walked home very slowly through the lanes, where the honeysuckle was out and the dust lay white on the nettles, and she thought about a girl with a cloud of dark hair lying at the foot of a quarry in the frost.

Twenty-two years ago, and about a posy of rue and rosemary delivered on the morning of the day Honoria Vine died. Rue. Regret. Rosemary. Remembrance. Someone, thought Miss Marple, had not forgotten Rose Ray. Someone had sent Honoria Mallory a burying bunch on the last morning of her life, and Honoria had known at once what it meant and from whom it came. That is the thing about a message in flowers. It is only frightening if you understand it. She understood, too, something that Inspector Slack did not. that the question was not who had wanted Honoria Mallory dead. The question was why, after twenty-two years, someone had wanted her dead now, this midsummer, this week, this day. And she thought about a cup of cordial,

carried through a crowd by the one person in the village whom nobody would ever suspect of anything, and about dregs that were darker than elderflower, and flecks that were not tea. Digital Inn, Miss Marple knew from her own doctor's warnings over the years, was itself made from foxglove, the foxglove in the posy, insincerity. That was the polite name the flower-books gave it. But the old country people had another name for Foxglove altogether. They called it Dead Men's Bells. Section 4. The Convenient Nephew The suspicion that had settled on Gerald Vine by Monday morning was not at first the doing of the police so much as the doing of the village, which had tried him over Sunday dinner tables and found him wanting. A man who

stays away twenty-two years and returns on the day of his sister's death is a man the village does not need evidence against. His absence is the evidence, the way a gap in a hedge proves something has been going through it. Inspector Slack, to do him justice, resisted this for nearly a day. Then two things came to his hand, and resistance ended. The first was a letter. Mrs Mallory's solicitor, a mister, Petherick of much venom, a dry old man who had known Miss Marple for forty years and was not too proud to be seen talking to her on the vicarage lawn, came forward with the information that his client had summoned him to Hazeldean on the Friday, the day before the fete, that she had dictated a new will,

and that it had been executed that afternoon before witnesses. The old will, made years before, left everything to Gerald Vine for want of nearer kin. The new will, Mr. Petherick permitted himself a thin, significant pause, revoked it entirely. Hazeldean and the whole estate, some forty thousand pounds, was left to Alice Horbury, district nurse of this parish, in gratitude for devotion beyond the terms of duty. The sensation this caused was of the kind that makes a village fall silent before it begins to talk. To Nurse Horbury, said Mrs Price Ridley, and sat down. But that is absurd, said Colonel Bantry. The woman's a saint. Everyone knows Alice Horbury wouldn't. And then he stopped, because what everyone knew

had suddenly become a great deal less certain, and he looked, for a moment, like a man who has put his foot through the drawing-room ceiling. The second thing was a youth called Alf Biggs, Elsie's nephew, who came to inspect a slack with the air of a boy who has been turning something over, and finds it heavy. Alf worked up at the Hazeldean Gardens under old Job, and on the afternoon of the fete he had been sent round the back of the marquee for the empty bottles, and he had seen Mr. Vini, him as come from foreign parts, standing by the hedge at the corner of the vicarage lawn where the cordial table stood, quite near the cups, like, not five minutes before Nurse Horbury came through with the

cup for Mrs. Mallory. He hadn't thought anything of it at the time, Alf said shuffling. Only what with everyone talking. That will do, said Inspector Slack, who had heard enough, and wrote it down. It hung together, as Slack explained that evening to Doctor. Haydock over a glass of the vicar's inferior sherry, to which he had helped himself with freedom.

Gerald Vine, cut off and bitter, comes home after twenty-two years, comes home, mark you, the very day after his sister makes a new will cutting him out. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps he knew. Perhaps someone had written to him. He quarrels with his sister behind the marquee. He is seen loitering by the cordial table. The woman dies of something the Doctor doesn't like the look of. and the medicine bottle she was dosed from stood in a cool cupboard anyone in that kitchen could reach. Slack had been on to Kenya. There was a cable due. Gerald Vine had left Mombasa five weeks ago, and no one knew why.

And the posy, said Dr. Haydock. Village theatricals, said Slack. Some fool's idea of a scare. I dare say it has nothing to do with anything. I wonder, said Dr. Haydock, whether you are right about that. I wonder very much. Miss Marple heard all of this on Tuesday. piece by piece, in the course of a day that took her from the butcher's to the vicarage to tea with Dolly Bantry, and at every stop she said, how very distressing, and I am sure the police know best, and her needles never stopped, but it was at Dolly Bantry's tea-table, with the scones going round and the shadow of the cedar lying long across the lawn at Gossington, that Miss Marple said the first thing that made anyone look at her twice.

I was so sorry, she said, to hear about the will, not because of Mr. Vinnie though one is sorry for him too, in a way, but because of what it tells us. Tells us? said Dolly. Mrs. Mallory changed her will on Friday afternoon, said Miss Marple, and on Saturday morning the posy came, and on Saturday afternoon she died. Now, if a person kills for an inheritance, dear, they do not usually kill the day after the inheritance is taken from them. There would be no point, would there? The horses bolted. Unless, she paused and counted stitches, unless the person who killed her did not know about the new will.

and that, you see, narrows it a little. Whoever poisoned her, if she was poisoned, either did not know the will had been changed, or did not care about wills at all. Or knew perfectly well, said Dolly slowly, and killed her because of it. Miss Marple looked at her with mild faded blue eyes. Because of it, she repeated. Yes, Dolly, that is what frightens me. There was a little silence at the tea-table, and a thrush sang in the syringa, and Dolly Bantry, who was not a fanciful woman, found that she had got cold, and said so, and rang for more hot water. The police, meanwhile, did what police do when a theory has taken hold of them. They set about furnishing it. Gerald Vine's room at the Blue Boar was searched, quietly, but in St Mary Mead quietness

is relative, and the barmaid told her sister, and her sister told everybody. Nothing was found, unless you count a packet of letters tied with string, which Slack opened with a sense of duty rather than hope, and which proved to be from Rose Ray. They were twenty-two years old, and there were nine of them. written in a round, unformed, cheerful hand that grew less cheerful as the months went on, and they were all addressed to Jerry, care of the post office, Mombasa, and they were all of them returned, unopened, the envelopes stamped and re-stamped until the paper was grey.

Gerald Vine had never read them. He had kept them unopened for twenty-two years, the way a man keeps a wound he cannot bear to dress. Slack read them, because he was that kind of policeman, and what he read made him sit for a long time at the little table in the Blue Boar's Best Bedroom, smoking, and looking at nothing. The first letters were full of a village girl's gossip, the fate, the new calves, her aunt's rheumatism, with a shy, fierce tenderness breaking through in every line.

I do not mind the waiting, Jerry, if you do not. Then, in the fourth letter, the ground shifted. There is something I must tell you, and I cannot write it, only I must see you. She has said things to me, Jerry, terrible things, and I do not know what is true any more. She says you are to go away and forget me, and that it is all arranged. I said I would never believe it of you. Only come home, or write, and I will believe nothing but what you say.

And the eighth letter, the last but one, was only four lines. Jerry, I am to have a child. Do not be angry. I am not angry, only frightened. She has been to see my aunt. I do not know what she told her, but my aunt has turned on me, and I have nowhere to go that is not her doing or her undoing. Come home, R. The ninth letter was never written. Rose Ray was dead within the fortnight.

Inspector Slack put the letters down and lit another cigarette off the end of the last one, and the theory in his mind underwent a quiet, total revision, the kind a man does not announce, because if Gerald Vine had never opened these letters, then he had never known about the child, and if he had never known about the child, then the story the village had told itself for twenty-two years, Gerald and Rose, Gerald packed off, Gerald the seducer, was wrong, or only half right, and the woman who had said terrible things and been to see my aunt, was, she, Rose had not named her, she had not needed to.

Slack went out to the churchyard that evening, though he could not have said why, and stood looking at the plain stone with the name Rose Ray on it. The grave was tended, it was always tended, there were fresh flowers on it now, even at the end of a hot day, rosemary, he saw, and lavender, and a single late rose, and standing there, Inspector Slack had the uncomfortable feeling that the whole case was standing just behind his shoulder, looking at him, and that it had been looking at him all along, and that it was not wearing Gerald Vine's face at all. He drove back to Muchbenham, and asked for the post-mortem results to be telephoned the moment they came. Miss Marple, that same evening, sat at her

little table with a sheet of writing paper, on which she had written a list, she believed in lists, and under the heading, Who Tended the Grave, she had written nothing at all, but had drawn, thoughtfully, a small five-petalled flower, and beside it a sprig that could only be rue. Section 5. The Pressed Flower. Miss Marple's little five-petal drawing was still on the paper when she went to bed on Tuesday, and it was there when she came down on Wednesday morning, and by ten o'clock she had put on her second-best hat and her better gloves, and set out to call on Nurse Horbury. The nurse's cottage stood a little way along the much-benham road, a neat pink-washed place with a hive of bees at the end of

the garden and a rope of onions drying under the eaves. Nurse Horbury was in her front parlour, mending a stocking, and rose to greet Miss Marple with the exact degree of quiet welcome she gave everyone. No more warmth for a visitor she was fond of, no less for a stranger. Miss Marple noted this, as she noted everything, and made her little apologies for calling unannounced. It is only, she said, settling herself, that I have been troubled in my mind, my dear, and I thought that you, of all people, would understand. This dreadful business of Mrs. Mallory! One does not like to think ill of anyone, and yet I confess I have not slept well. Nor I. said Nurse Horbury.

She said it simply, without emphasis, and went on with her mending. Miss Marple looked at her over the tops of her spectacles. Alice Horbury was a comely woman, she thought again. That was the word, comely. A face that had been pretty in a soft way, and had grown, in middle life, into something calmer and stronger. Grey eyes, a steady mouth, hands that had held a great many dying people by the wrist, and been the last thing they had felt. You were with her at the end, of course, said Miss Marple. That must be a comfort.

It is a comfort, said Nurse Horbury, and it is not. I have been over it a hundred times in my head, whether her drops were the right strength, whether the cordial was too cold, whether I ought to have made her sit down sooner. One does that, you know, after any death. It is the price of the profession. Yes, said Miss Marple gently, one does that with any death one cares about.

There was a small pause in which the bees could be heard through the open window, and a cart went by in the lanes. Nurse Horbury did not look up. I understand, said Miss Marple, that Mrs. Mallory has been very good to you, in her will. The stocking-mending did not falter. Nurse Horbury set another stitch, and another. I did not know until Mr. Petherick came to see me on Monday morning, she said. I had not thought of such a thing. It has, I will not pretend, Miss Marple.

It has troubled me exceedingly. I have already written to Mr. Petherick to say that I do not feel able to accept it. There will be some proper way, he says, to see it goes back to her brother. whom it should have gone to. That is generous of you, said Miss Marple. It is not generous, said Nurse Horbury. It is only that I could not sleep for it. Money that comes to one that way. One always wonders, and the village will wonder too. I have my work, and my cottage, and my bees, and I have never wanted more.

Miss Marple sat quietly for a moment, admiring, or seeming to admire, the geraniums on the windowsill. Nurse Horbury, she said at last, do you remember Rose Rae? If Miss Marple had been watching for a start, she would have been disappointed. Nurse Horbury looked up, and her steady grey eyes did not change. Only, Miss Marple thought, they became a little more steady, as a pool becomes still when a hand is held over it. Rose Ray, said Nurse Horbury, was before my time in this village, Miss Marple. I came here twelve years ago, from Trumpington, but of course I have heard the name. One hears everything, in a district like this. She was the girl who fell at the quarry. Yes, said Miss Marple. She was the girl

who fell at the quarry. She rose to go. Thank you, my dear. You have set my mind at rest on several things. I shall not trouble you again. At the gate she paused, and turned, and said, as though it had only that moment occurred to her, and the flowers on her grave. Do you know who tends them? For the first time Nurse Horbury's face altered, minutely. It was as though a shutter, standing very slightly open, closed all the way. I could not say, she said. The sexton, perhaps.

Of course, said Miss Marple. How silly of me. She walked home along the lane with her thoughts going before her like a flock of sparrows. She did not think Nurse Horbury had lied about the will. She thought Nurse Horbury had told the exact truth about the will, and had told it in a way that made the truth do more work than truth ordinarily does. And she thought about the sexton, who was seventy-eight, and had rheumatism, and had not put a spade in the churchyard for two years except at a burying. That afternoon Miss Marple went down to the churchyard herself, in the drowsy heat of a July afternoon, and knelt as though at a family stone, and looked at the plot where Rose Ray was buried.

The flowers on the grave had been renewed within the day, the soil at the base of the vase had been freshly disturbed, and thrust down into the earth beside the vase, half hidden, as though someone had begun to pull it out and been interrupted, was a single wilted stem of rue. Miss Marple took the stem between her fingers and turned it, and beneath the leaves she felt the little roughness of a piece of thread. It was black. It had once, she thought, tied a small posy of herbs. She stayed on her knees for a long time, and it was not, in the strict sense, a prayer. Motif, she thought. The word had been in her mind since the fate. Motif, the word one used in the old flower dictionaries her mother had loved, for a design that repeated Rue, Rosemary, Foxglove, Lavender.

But motif meant more than that. It meant the thing that ran through a piece of music from beginning to end and made it one thing. Rue had come three times now, in the posy, in the dregs of the cup she had not been meant to see, In the earth of Roseray's grave, someone in Saint, Mary Mead was writing a piece of music in bitter herbs, and Miss Marple was beginning to think she knew who the audience had been meant to be. When she went home, she took down from her bookshelf a small brown album her mother had given her at fifteen, on the occasion of her confirmation. It was a pressed flower book, filled with her girlhood, bluebells from Danmid, primroses from Elaine in Kent, a sprig of white heather from Scotland the summer she

had been twenty. She turned the pages carefully, for the paper was brittle. At the very back, between two blank leaves, was a flower she had forgotten she had. It was a single-pressed foxglove bell, purple-brown with age, and beneath it, in her own girlish hand, she had written, Given me by A.M., who said its old name was Dead Men's Bells, and laughed. Much Benham, June 1899. A.M. Miss Marple sat with the album in her lap and thought about A.M.

Alice Meridue, who had been her cousin's governess for a summer, forty and more years ago, a bright, laughing, strong-handed girl who had gone into nursing afterwards. the girl who had shown her how to tie a bandage and how to press a flower and how to tell foxglove leaves from comfrey. You must be careful, Janie. The one will kill you and the other will not. That is the only difference that matters. Alice married you who had married a man called Horbury and been widowed young and gone on nursing.

Alice married you who had once in Miss Marple's dining room four years ago said, I nursed a family called Vine once, at Trumpington. The daughter had married a soldier, a Mallory, and been widowed too. Curious, is it not, How the World Doubles Back. Miss Marple closed the album and sat still. Alice Horbury had come to St Mary Mead twelve years ago from Trumpington. She had nursed a Mallory at Trumpington, and she had, at some earlier time, how much earlier, known Rose Ray's story from the inside, from the family, from the woman whose voice misses, Sims had heard in the stillroom quarrel. She had known it not as a village legend, not as gossip smoothed like Sunday China, but as it had really happened. The evolving

motif of rue and rosemary was not, Miss Marple realised, the murderer's signature. It was a message, one the murderer had made sure Mrs Mallory received and understood and had time to be afraid of before she died. It was punishment being made legible, which meant, thought Miss Marple, that the person who had killed Honoria Mallory was a person to whom it mattered, above all things, that Honoria Mallory should know why. She rose and went to her writing desk and wrote a short note to Mr Hetherick. and another, shorter still, to Dr. Hadock. Then she sat by the window in the fading light and thought about a stem of rue thrust into the earth of a girl's grave, half hidden as though the hand had been interrupted, and

about a bicycle lamp that had turned in at the light gate on the night of the fate and gone out among the stones. Motif, she thought. Not signature. Motif. Section 6. Cracks in the china. Miss Marple's two notes went out with the morning post on Thursday, and by the time she had finished her breakfast egg, the village had come to her. as it always did when there was trouble, on a variety of pretexts. Griselda Clement came first, ostensibly to borrow a pattern, but really because she had heard that Mrs Price Ridley had heard that Colonel Bantry had said that Inspector Slack had said that Gerald Vine was to be arrested by lunchtime. It was untrue, but it was the kind of untruth that had begun to

feel true, and Griselda wanted, as she said, to know what to think. I think, my dear, said Miss Marple, that we shall none of us have to think at all in a day or two, because things are moving. though not perhaps in the direction one might suppose. They say, said Griselda, dropping her voice, though there was nobody in the room to overhear, that the letters Inspector Slack found at the Blue Boar were from her, from Rose Ray, and that Gerald Vine had never opened them, not one of them, in twenty-two years. I did hear something of that, said Miss Marple. Do you know what I think? said Griselda.

She was flushed, and there was a fine glitter of anger in her that made her, for a moment, look very like her boy Timothy in one of his tempers. I think it is monstrous to have kept those letters unopened all that time, knowing they must contain what they contained, is a kind of cowardice I cannot even bear to imagine.

If he had opened them, Miss Marple, if he had opened even one, that girl would not have died. No, said Miss Marple, she would not have died. I have thought about that too. Griselda went home to think about it some more, and Colonel Bantry came in her place, with the ostensible object of returning a book that Miss Marple had never lent him. He stood on the hearth-rug with his hands behind his back and cleared his throat several times in the manner of a man conducting a difficult interview with himself.' Look here, Miss Marple,' he said at last.' I' m no gossip, never was, but there's a thing I ought to say, and I don't know who else to say it to. It's about Honoria Mallory.'' Sit down, Colonel,'

said Miss Marple,' and have a glass of my elderberry.' He sat down and had a glass of the elderberry, which was strong, and it worked upon him in the way she had intended. When she came back to this village five years ago, said the Colonel, and bought Hazeldean, she came to see me. Wanted advice about the timber, she said. I gave it her, and when she was leaving she stopped in the hall and said, quite out of nothing, Colonel Bantry, you are the churchwarden, I believe.

Is Rose Ray still buried at St. Mary Mead? Just like that, as though she was asking about a linen cupboard. I said yes, she was, and she said, ah, then I have come home to the right place. And she smiled. Miss Marple. I did not care for that smile at all. It was the smile of a woman who has been carrying something for a long time and knows now where she means to put it down. Thank you, Colonel, said Miss Marple. That is exactly what I needed to know.

Dolly Bantry rang up at eleven, and Miss Hartnell called after lunch with a fresh instalment of what she had overheard behind the marquee. The words twenty-two years, she was now certain, had been Mrs. Mallory's, not Gerald's, and had been followed by and now you know why. and by three o'clock Miss Marple felt she had received the whole village through her drawing-room, like a receiving line at a bad wedding, and she went out into the garden to be quiet. She was pinching off dead heads from her roses when Mr. Petherick came up the path, precise and dry as ever, with his umbrella under his arm, although the sky was cloudless.' You wrote to me,' he said, without preamble.' I did,' said Miss Marple.' Come and sit

under the pear-tree. It is cooler. Under the pear-tree, without ceremony.' She asked him three questions, and he answered them. The first was whether Mrs. Mallory, on the Friday, had said anything about why she was changing her will. Mr. Petherick coughed. He was not, he said, in the habit of repeating what his clients said in their private capacities. Then he added, dryly, that Mrs. Mallory had said, when he pointed out that the disinheritance of a brother was a serious step, Mr. Petherick, I am not disinheriting my brother, I am paying a debt.

I have owed it a great many years, and it grows no smaller for the waiting. The second was whether Mrs Mallory had known she was ill. She told me, said Mr Petherick, that her heart was not strong. She told me that she did not expect to make old bones. She was, however, in no immediate expectation of death, or so she said. And the third question, said Miss Marple, is whether she gave any indication, anything at all, that she was afraid. Mr Petherick looked at her for a moment.

He was a man who did not use large words carelessly. Yes, he said. When she signed the will, her hand shook. I remarked upon it, pleasantly, and she said, Mr. Petherick, I have been afraid of one person all my life. I intend to stop being afraid this weekend. I confess it puzzled me at the time. It puzzles me a good deal more now. He rose to go, and paused at the gate, and looked back. Miss Marple, he said, I have known you a very long time. If you have any notion what all this means, I hope you will not carry it about alone. I shall not, said Miss Marple, carry it about alone for very much longer.

He went. and she sat under the pear tree with the shadow of the leaves moving on her lap, and thought about a woman who had been afraid of one person all her life, and had come home to pay a debt. One person all her life. Not Rose Ray, then. Rose Ray had been nineteen when she died. She had not been in Honoria Vine's life always. Not Gerald, whom she had bullied and dismissed like a small boy. Not the servants. Not the village. Someone else. Someone earlier. Someone who had been there when Honoria was a child. and who had been there still on the day she came back to some time, Mary Mead as an old woman.

And now Miss Marple, sitting very still under the pear tree, remembered a thing Mrs. Sims had said, and had not thought important at the time, and neither had she. There was only the one woman in that house besides me that Rose Ray had any business quarrelling with, and that was the young mistress. Only the one woman besides Mrs. Sims.

But there had been another woman in the house, not one Mrs. Sims had thought of as a woman, perhaps, because she had been so much a part of it, There had been Honoria Vine's old nurse. The village had always spoken of Nanny Pruitt, and everyone had assumed she had died years ago. But had she? Had she really?

Miss Marple rose so quickly that her knitting fell from her lap, and she left it, and went into the house, and took down the parish register from its shelf. She turned the pages of burials for the last thirty years, and she did not find the name Pruitt. Then she turned to the pages of marriages twenty years back, and she read down the columns, and stopped. The 24th of September. 1906.

James Alfred Horbury, widower of Trumpington Cams, aged 41, and Emily Jane Pruitt, spinster of this parish, aged 46. Emily Jane Pruitt, Nanny Pruitt, married a widower called Horbury at 46 and gone to live at Trumpington, and had presumably no children of her own but a stepdaughter, a stepdaughter called Alice, who had grown up calling her mother and had gone into nursing and had come, in her time, to St Mary Mead. Nurse Alice Horbury was not the woman who had been in the still room with Rose Ray twenty-two years ago. Nurse Alice Horbury had been a schoolgirl at Trumpington then, but her stepmother had been, and her stepmother had gone on doubtless in some quiet corner of Trumpington, alive or dead, keeping the secret and the

shame of it. And Nurse Alice Horbury, when she had come as a young woman to nurse a family called Vine, as she had once mentioned to Miss Marple in casual conversation, had come to a house where an old woman lay dying, and had, perhaps been told at last, by the dying, what had really happened to a village girl at the foot of a quarry twenty years before. Told by whom?

Miss Marple asked herself, and who else, in that Trumpington sick-room, had heard? She sat with the parish register open on her knee, and the answer arranged itself slowly, as everything did in her mind, until it stood clear. Honoria Vian, Mrs Mallory as she then was, widowed young, had been nursing her old nurse at Trumpington, Alice Horbury had been the district nurse who came in to help, and in that sick room, in the last delirium of Nanny Pruitt, the whole story of Rose Ray had been told aloud, perhaps by the old nurse to relieve her conscience, perhaps by Honoria herself to a woman she trusted, perhaps in a whispered accusation of one to the other. with the young nurse listening in the corner and understanding, at last,

what she was hearing. And afterwards, when the old woman was buried, the young nurse had come, quietly, unremarkably, over the course of a year, to St. Mary Mead, not to punish, not yet, only to watch. Twelve years of watching, twelve years of tending a grave in secret, twelve years of giving Honoria Mallory her medicine with steady hands. She has been very good to you, thought Miss Marple, and a woman who has been very good to another woman for twelve years, without ever exchanging a cross word, is a woman who has been holding her breath. She closed the register very gently, as though it were something breakable, and went to find her hat. Section 7. The Second Blow Miss Marple found her hat where she had left it,

and put it on, and was standing in her own doorway with her hand on the latch when the telephone bell rang in the little hall, an event rare enough to be alarming, and alarming enough, that Friday morning, to be portentous. It was Dr. Haydock. His voice had the careful flatness of a man who has decided how much he is going to say before he picks up the receiver.

Miss Marple, I have had the post-mortem results from the county analyst. Digital in poisoning, massive, unmistakable, and far beyond any therapeutic dose. It was in the cordial without question. I have telephoned Slack. He is on his way to the Blue Boar now with a warrant for Gerald Vine. There was a pause, and the line crackled with summer static.

But that is not why I rang you, said Dr. Haydock. Slack's sergeant got to the blue boar first, to keep an eye on things. Miss Marple, Gerald Vine is gone, his bag is gone, his room is paid up to this morning, and the landlord's boy saw him walking out along the much-benham road at half-past five with his coat over his arm. He has run for it, and Slack is saying, in the way Slack says things, that innocent men do not run. Miss Marple stood in her hall with the receiver in her hand, and through the open door she could see her roses, and the blue sky.

and the quiet high street where nothing ever happened except everything. Hey, Doc, she said. She never called him that except when it mattered. Gerald Vine has not run for it. Gerald Vine has gone to Roseray's grave, and if I am not very much mistaken, he will not be alone there for long. She put down the receiver and went out, without her shopping bag and without her umbrella, at a pace that would have astonished the village had the village been watching.

But she was not the first to the churchyard, and she knew, even as she turned in at the light gate, that she was not in time to prevent what had been set in motion, only perhaps to witness it, and witnesses, as she had told Inspector Slack a hundred times in her gentle way, are what the truth requires. The churchyard lay baking in the late morning sun, all long shadows and yew smell and the drowsy sound of bees, and there, by the plain stone that bore the name Rose Ray, the second shock of that midsummer was already in progress.

Gerald Vine was standing by the grave with his hat in his hand, and in front of him, between him and the stone, stood old Job Crick. Job had a shotgun under his arm. It was an ancient fowling piece, older than Job's tenancy at Hazeldine, kept for rabbits, and he was not pointing it. He was simply holding it, the way an old soldier holds a rifle on parade, and his bent old body had straightened, and his voice, when Miss Marple came within earshot, was not the mumble of the Hazeldine gardener, but the voice of a man who has waited twenty-two years to say a thing and finds it comes out whole.' You never opened them,' Job was saying.' Nine letters she wrote you, and I posted every one of them for her myself, walked into much

venom with them so the village postmistress shouldn't see the direction, and you never opened one. She watched that post, Mr. Gerald, every day for a month she watched it, and then she stopped watching it, and a fortnight after that she was dead at the bottom of the quarry, and they called it misadventure, and I have kept my mouth shut twenty-two years because keeping my mouth shut was all I could do for her. But I seen you come home, and I seen her fall at the fate, and I know what I know, and I'm an old man and I don't care any more. Job, said Gerald Vine. His voice was very quiet. I never knew. I swear to you on that grave I never knew she wrote. The letters were returned. I never had them. Someone sent them

back unopened. Do you understand? Someone intercepted. Aye, said Job. Someone. The house was full of someones, wasn't it? The young mistress who found her in the garden with you and turned her off without a character. The old nurse who told her aunt God knows what. They were all someones. and you went off to Africa like a good boy because your father told you, and she waited for a letter that was never coming, because it had never been sent.

Miss Marple came forward then through the long grass, and neither man heard her until she was quite close, and then Job turned, and the shotgun swung an inch, and she looked at it with mild blue eyes and said, Good morning, Job. It is going to be hot again, I think. Miss Marple! The old man's face worked. You'd best go home, ma'am. This isn't women's business. On the contrary, said Miss Marple. sitting down on the low wall of the next plot with the air of a woman settling herself at a sewing circle. It has been women's business from the beginning. That is rather the point. Job, I want you to tell me something, and I want the truth.

Who has been tending this grave? The old man was silent. The bees went on. Somewhere beyond the wall a wood pigeon called. She was my niece, Job said at last, and the words came out of him like something drawn with hooks. Rose, my sister's girl. No one remembered, or no one said. a gardener's niece, an underhousemaid, same thing, both invisible. I planted the yew by that wall the year she was born, did anyone know that? And I've tended this grave for twenty-two years, and every year I told myself, next year it'll matter less, and every year it mattered more. And then, his voice changed, and then I found out I wasn't the only one tending it. No, said Miss Marple softly, you were not the only one.

The flowers, said Job, fresh ones, always, and never mine. Rosemary, mostly, and sometimes rue. For years I thought it was some soft-hearted village soul. Then this spring I came early, with the mist, and I saw the bicycle at the gate, and I saw who it was kneeling here, and I said nothing because, because what does an old man say, Miss Marple, when he finds that the person who has been mourning his girl all these years is the person who, he stopped, he could not say it, is the person who knew all along what was done to her, said Miss Marple gently, and had been waiting all those years to do something about it. Yes, Job, I know. I have known for a little while now. What I did not know, what I still need you to tell me,

is what happened on the morning of the fate. You were by the gate when the cup rolled to your boot. You looked at it. You have been carrying something ever since. Job Crick looked at her for a long moment, and then, slowly, from the pocket of his ancient coat, he drew out a twist of paper and unfolded it with earthy, trembling fingers.

Inside was a sprig of rue, dried, pressed almost flat, but unmistakable. It was lying by the cup, he said. where it rolled, just this, lying on the grass, like it had been dropped, and I picked it up, because rue was roses, not hers to like. It wasn't a liking, rue was what her mother grew by the door, my sister, for the sorrow of it, after, and I knew that whoever dropped this by that cup had sent the burying bunch in the morning, and I knew that the mistress's heart had been bad for years but not that bad, and I picked it up and I kept it, because I didn't know what else an old man does with a thing like that. He held it out on his palm.

and it lay there between the three of them, small and grey-green and terrible. The whole story of that midsummer reduced to one sprig of bitter herb. Job, said Miss Marple. Who else was near the cordial table when the cup was carried through? You see everything. You have seen everything in this village for sixty years. The old man's jaw worked.

Gerald Vine had sunk down onto the grass beside his sisters, beside Roses, Grave, and was staring at nothing. Everyone was near it, said Job. That's the devil of it. Miss Weatherby pouring, and the Colonel fetching, and the children underfoot. But there was one as come up beside the nurse while she carried the cup through the crowd, and walked a dozen yards with her, and spoke to her smiling, and went on. And I thought nothing of it, because what was there to think? It was only, the church clock struck the half hour, and its sound rolled over the graves, and Job Crick said the name. And Miss Marple, who had been expecting it, who had, in truth, known it since she found the black thread in the grave earth,

felt her heart turn over all the same, because knowing a thing in the mind and hearing it spoken aloud by an old man with a shotgun are two very different degrees of knowledge. Ah, said Miss Marple. Yes, of course, it was only... And she said the name too, quietly, as one confirms an entry in a ledger. From beyond the lych gate came the sound of a bicycle being leaned against the wall, and unhurried footsteps on the path, and the three of them turned, as one, to see who had come to the grave. Section 8. Miss Marple's Snare The footsteps on the path belonged to Inspector Slack, who came through the light gate with his sergeant at his heels, and stopped dead at the sight before him.

Miss Marple seated on a grave wall like a robin on a spade handle, Gerald Vine sitting on the grass with his hat in his hands, and old Job Crick with a shotgun under his arm, and twenty-two years of grief standing upright in his face.' Here,' said Inspector Slack, with the air of a man whose day has exceeded its allocation of irregularities.' Here! What is all this? Crick, put that gun down! Vine!' I've been looking for you since six o'clock, and I'd like to know what a man means by walking out of his lodgings the morning a warrant. Inspector, said Miss Marple, do come and sit down, or stand if you prefer. I dare say you will prefer it. Job has something to give you. and I have something to ask you, and I think if we

are all patient for ten minutes we may save the county a very embarrassing arrest. Inspector Slack had known Miss Marple for fifteen years, and had learned, slowly, reluctantly, the way one learns that the tide will come in regardless of one's opinion of tides, that when she used that particular tone Patience was the cheapest option available. He stood his ground, but he did not bluster, and his sergeant, who was young, produced his notebook, and then, under Slack's eye, thought better of it. Job Crick held out the twist of paper. Slack unfolded it, looked at the dried sprig within, and looked up. Roo, said Miss Marple helpfully. It means regret.

Job found it on the grass beside the cup Mrs. Mallory drank from, the cup that rolled away, you remember, before it was so thoughtfully washed. Whoever poisoned that cup dropped this beside it. Not by accident, Inspector. I do not believe anything about that day was an accident. It was left there as the posy was sent in the morning.

A signature. A message. Rue, for regret. The same hand that sent the burying bunch held the cup. Then it wasn't in the cordial jug, said Slack slowly. We've been going at it as though someone poisoned the jug, or the bottle of drops up at the house. But if the rue was dropped beside the cup, Then the poison was in that cup and no other, said Miss Marple, which means it was put there after the cup was poured between the cordial table and the place where Mrs Mallory stood, a matter of a dozen yards and a dozen seconds, with the whole village watching and nobody seeing, because the one person carrying that cup was the one person nobody in St Mary Mead would ever look at twice.

Slack's eyes went to the bicycle leaning against the churchyard wall and back to Miss Marple, and something in his face rearranged itself. The nurse, he said. You're telling me Alice Horbury poisoned her own patient in front of four hundred people? I am telling you nothing of the kind, said Miss Marple mildly. I am telling you that the cup was poisoned in transit, and I am telling you that Nurse Horbury carried it, and that Mrs... Mallory drank it, and that between those two facts there is a space of about a minute in which someone else, someone walking beside her, smiling, saying a few pleasant words, that both the opportunity and, I am afraid, a very much older motive than anyone has yet examined. You mean Mrs...' Mallory,'

said Gerald Vine suddenly from the grass. His voice was rough.' You mean my sister did it herself? The posy, the rue, the poison in her own cup? You mean she—'' No, Mr. Vine,' said Miss Marple.' I do not mean that. Your sister was a hard woman, and a frightened one, and she had a great deal on her conscience. But she did not kill herself. She drank that cup because she had spent twelve years learning not to be afraid of the woman who brought it to her. That was the cruelty of it, you see. The trust was the weapon.' She turned back to Slack, and her voice lost, for a moment its wandering gentleness. Inspector, I am going to ask you to do something irregular, and I am going to ask you to trust me. This afternoon, at four o'clock,

I want you to be within earshot of the nurse's cottage on the Muchbenham Road, concealed if you please. I believe policemen can be concealed when they try, with your sergeant and with Dr. Haydock if he will come, and I want you to wait whatever you hear until you hear me drop my knitting. I shall be knitting, and I shall drop it, and that will be the moment.

And what, said Slack, with enormous suspicion, are you proposing to do at the nurse's cottage at four o'clock? I am proposing, said Miss Marple, to take tea. Nurse Horbury has invited me, or rather, she will have invited me by luncheon time, because I intend to call on her this morning and make myself so gently, mildly, thoroughly informative, that she will have no choice but to ask me to stay. I am going to tell her a story, Inspector, a village story, About a parallel, I am very fond of parallels. They are my one talent, and I am going to watch her face while I tell it. And if you're wrong, said Slack, you'll be taking tea with a poisoner. Oh, I am not wrong, said Miss Marple, rising from the wall and shaking the grass seeds from

her skirt. But there is one more thing you should know before this afternoon, and you should hear it now, because it changes the shape of the case. Job, will you tell the inspector who it was that walked beside Nurse Horbury and spoke to her smiling while she carried the cup? The old gardener looked at the ground. It was the mistress's own maid, he said, Elsie Biggs. Only walked with her a dozen yards, like I said. Laughing and chatting, bold as brass, with her hat still crooked from the morning. And I thought nothing of it. Why would I? A parlour maid and a nurse, gossiping at a fate. Elsie Biggs, repeated Slack, in the voice of a man trying to fit a new piece into a puzzle he thought was finished. The girl who found the posy.

The girl who told the whole vicarage lawn about it. Miss Marple. What in heaven's name does a twenty-year-old parlour maid? Elsie Biggs, said Miss Marple, is Mrs. Sims' granddaughter, and Mrs. Sims, as I learnt this week, was cook general at Hazeldean twenty-two years ago, and heard a quarrel in the garden from the still-room window, and never forgot it. And Elsie Biggs, Inspector, is also, though she does not use the name, because her mother married a Biggs of Little Worsley, the daughter of Martha Ray. The churchyard was very quiet. The wood-pigeon had stopped calling. Rose Ray, said Miss Marple, was not the only daughter her mother bore. There was a younger girl, Martha, sent away to an aunt in Yorkshire when the scandal came,

and the village forgot her as it forgets everything inconvenient. Martha married, and had a daughter, and named her Elsie, and told her on her deathbed three years ago about the sister she had lost at the bottom of a quarry, and the house that had destroyed her, and the woman who had done it. And Elsie Biggs came to St Mary Mead eighteen months ago, and took service at Hazeldine, as a parlour maid, in the house where her aunt had been an underhousemaid. Waiting, Inspector. The way this whole case has waited. It has been waiting twenty-two years, and it came to harvest this midsummer, at a fate, in a cup of elderflower cordial. She picked up her knitting from the wall. She had brought it, of course. She

always brought it, and looked round the little company. The policeman, the brother, the old gardener with his useless gun. The snare this afternoon is not for Nurse Holbury, she said. It never was. The nurse is the only innocent person in this wretched business, and she has been living twelve years beside a secret she half knew and could not speak, tending a grave for a girl she never met because her stepmother's dying voice told her where the guilt lay. No, Inspector.

This afternoon I am taking tea with Nurse Horbury because Elsie Biggs will be there. She has been there every afternoon this week, comforting the nurse, and I want to watch Elsie's face just once, when someone says aloud, in an ordinary drawing-room voice, the word Roo. She paused at the light gate. A soft snare, she said, almost to herself.

That is all one needs for a conscience that has been waiting twenty-two years. It wants, more than anything in the world, to be sprung. Section 9. The Quiet Assembling The light gate swung shut behind her, and Miss Marple walked back along the high street in the white noon heat, and the village she moved through was the same village it had always been. The baker's van, the ducks on the pond, Mrs. Price Ridley airing a grievance at her gate, and yet it seemed to her, as it sometimes did, that she was seeing it with the varnish off, the way one sees a familiar room when a piece of furniture has been taken away. She had one more call to make before four o'clock, and she made it at the vicarage, where she found Griselda in the garden pretending

to deadhead the sweet peas, and actually, Miss Marple suspected, hiding from the parish magazines. My dear Griselda, she said, I want to ask you a favour. This afternoon at about half-past four, I want you to take your little boy for a walk along the much-benham road. past Nurse Horbury's cottage, and I want you to walk slowly, and to stop and look at the bees in the nurse's garden.

Timothy likes bees, does he not? And I want you not to hurry away, whatever you hear. Griselda, who had lived in St Mary Mead long enough to know an instrument of providence when one sat down beside her, looked at Miss Marple for a long moment. Miss Marple, she said, is someone going to be arrested this afternoon? I hope, said Miss Marple, that someone is going to be freed this afternoon. There is a difference. Will you do it?

Of course I shall do it, said Griselda. Timothy shall see more bees than any child in England. The second call was at the Blue Boar, where Miss Marple sent up a message, and presently Gerald Vine came down into the little private parlour, looking ten years older than he had at the churchyard, which was itself a day in which he had lived twenty years. Mister! Vine! said Miss Marple.

You came home to tell your sister something. You said so to Inspector Slack, that you came home to tell her something, and that someone else arrived before you. Will you tell me now what it was? He sat down heavily in the horsehair chair, and turned his hat in his hands, and for a moment she thought he would not speak. Then he said, I got a letter, five weeks ago in Kenya. It had followed me round three farms.

It was from my sister, the first word she'd written me in twenty-two years. Do you want to know what it said, after twenty-two years of silence? It said, Gerald, I have made my will. Come home before midsummer. There is something that must be put right. and I find I cannot die with it where it is. Harsh. And you came. I came. Six weeks on ships and trains, turning it over. What must be put right? And I got here on the day of the fate, and she looked at me across the lawn, and I went to her behind the marquee, and I said, I said, Honoria, I've come. And she said, He stopped and cleared his throat.

She said, You came too late, Jerry. You always did come too late. But you may as well know it all now. And she began to tell me about Rose. about that night. She had got as far as, as far as the garden, the quarrel in the garden, when Miss Hartnell came round the corner of the marquee after her dropped ticket, and Honoria stopped and stood up and said, Afterwards, come to the house tonight and I'll tell you the rest.

Only there wasn't any tonight, there wasn't any afterwards. She was dead within the hour, and the rest of it died with her. Not quite all of it, said Miss Marple. Some of it was written down, some of it grew in a garden, and some of it, Mr. Vine, has been walking about this village in a parlour maid's cap for eighteen months. I should like you to be at Nurse Horbury's cottage at half-past four this afternoon. Walk in without knocking. She will think you have come about the will, and it will seem quite natural. Come after me, not before.

And when I drop my knitting, say what I tell you to say. Nothing else. Only that. What am I to say? That, said Miss Marple, will depend entirely on what happens when I drop it. She walked home and ate a slice of cold ham and a tomato, with the attention she always gave to solitary meals, and then she sat down in her drawing-room with her diary of engagements.

She kept one. It was nearly empty, which was, she often remarked, the advantage of a well-ordered life, and she turned back through the pages of the past fortnight and read the entries with care, as though the little pencilled words were entries in a ledger she meant to balance. Fate Committee, Vicarage Lawn, 10am Elsie Biggs with News of the Posey, Hat Crooked, Fate, 3 o'clock, Mrs M in Morve, Nurse H at her elbow, you never let me forget them, 4.45, The Cup, The Fall, The Cup Rolling, Jobs Boot, Nurse H.

Gathering Cups, Dregs Darker, Flex, Bicycle Lamp, Lichgate, Rue in the Grave Earth, Black Thread, Mrs. Sims, The Stillroom Window, A Woman's Voice, Register, Hobbery, Prewitt, Trumpington, Job's Niece, The Yew Planted the Year She Was Born, Elsie, Martha Ray's Daughter, and there, on the last page, she wrote, in her small upright Victorian hand, the sentence she had been travelling towards since a cup rolled across the vicarage lawn, and stopped against an old man's boot. The poisoner is the person for whom the message was written, and the message was not written to Honoria Mallory. It was written by her.

She sat looking at it for a long time. That was the thing the whole village had got backwards, the thing Inspector Slack had got backwards, the thing she herself had got backwards for four days. The posy of Rue and Rosemary had been found in Mrs Mallory's hands on the morning of the fete. Everyone had assumed it was sent to her, as a threat. But Honoria Mallory's behaviour that morning, the white face... The three changes of mind, away, water, fire, was not the behaviour of a woman receiving a threat.

A threatened woman burns the thing at once, or shows it to the police, or gives it to her nurse. She does not put it in water. She does not. And this was what Miss Marple had seen and not understood, sitting on the vicarage lawn while Elsie Biggs told her tale with her hat on crooked. She does not keep it alive. You put in water the thing you want to keep. Honoria Mallory had sent that posy herself. She had wrapped it in a florist's box, without card, without name, and sent it to her own house by the rural post, to be found there on the morning of her death, to be talked of at the fete, to be remembered afterwards, to be understood, rue for regret, rosemary for remembrance, foxglove for the manner of her dying, told in advance, lavender

for distrust, of whom? Of the woman who had held her medicine for twelve years. It was a confession and an accusation in one, addressed to the only audience that mattered, the village, afterwards. She was arranging her own death like a fate, thought Miss Marple. She meant it to be a midsummer nobody forgets. She told Nurse Horbury so. She told her the exact truth. But Honoria Mallory had not poisoned herself. Miss Marple was as sure of that as she had ever been sure of anything. The woman who drank that cup had spent twelve years refusing to be afraid of her nurse, had built a whole life on that refusal, had come home to St Mary Mead to put it right, had made a will to pay the debt, had summoned her brother to hear the story. Such a

woman does not drink her own death in a cup of cordial at 4.45 on a Saturday afternoon. Such a woman was executed by someone who had learned what she intended and could not permit it to be said aloud. Someone who had been in the house that Friday, when the will was signed. Someone who had heard, servants always heard. Mrs.

Sims had heard, 22 years ago, from the stillroom window, what Honoria Mallory meant to tell her brother when he came to the house that night. Someone for whom that story, spoken aloud at last, was not a confession longed for but a catastrophe arriving. Someone who stood, if the story were told, in the place where murderesses stand. Not the nurse.

The nurse was innocent, had been innocent for twelve years, knowing half and dreading the rest. The person who could not permit the story was the person the story was about, and Honoria Mallory, who had been afraid of one person all her life, who had said so to her solicitor with a shaking hand, had not been afraid of her nurse, her brother, or any living soul in St Mary Mead.

She had been afraid of the girl at the foot of the quarry. She had been afraid of Rose Ray, of her name, her grave, her memory, her family's quiet, patient, twenty-two-year tending of all three. And she had come home at last to buy the fear off with forty thousand pounds and a deathbed confession, and someone in that house had decided that the price of her peace was her silence.

Miss Marple closed the diary, and took her knitting, and her second-best hat, and her little beaded bag, and went out into the afternoon. The much-venom road lay white and dusty under the sun, and the hedgerows were loud with insects, and at the end of it the pink-washed cottage stood with its bees and its drying onions, looking exactly like what it was, the home of a woman everyone trusted.

Miss Marple walked up the path at four o'clock precisely, and as she reached the door she saw, through the open parlour window, that the tea-things were set for three, she had expected that. Elsie Biggs was always there comforting the nurse. Dear Miss Marple, said Nurse Horbury opening the door, how kind of you to come. Elsie has just brought over some of her shortbread. Do sit in the cool.

And Elsie Biggs, sitting by the window with the sun in her dark hair, smiled at Miss Marple with her Aunt Rose's smile, and Miss Marple sat down and took out her knitting, and began very gently, very mildly, in her soft wandering voice, to tell a story. Such a sad business, she said, and it has put me so in mind all week of a parallel. I am very fond of parallels, my dears. They are my one talent.

It happened at St Mary Mead too, oh, many years ago, before either of you was born, a girl in a great house, and a young master, and an old nurse who knew more than was good for her. And the strange thing about it, the thing I have never forgotten, was the flowers. It was all done with flowers. She smiled round the little parlour, and her needles clicked, and she said the word. Roo. Roo. Section 10. The flowers speak.

The word lay in the quiet parlour like a stone dropped into a well, and Miss Marple went on knitting, and waited for the ripple to come back. It came, but not from the quarter she had half expected. Nurse Horbury sat very still, her teacup halfway to the pot, and her mild grey eyes went, not to Miss Marple, but to Elsie Biggs. And Elsie Biggs, who had been cutting her shortbread with a steady hand, did not look up, but the knife stopped, and after a moment she laid it down on the plate with a small, precise sound, the way one sets down a piece in a game one has been winning. Roo, repeated Elsie pleasantly. That's the herb of grace, isn't it, Miss Marple? My mother grew it by the door. She said it was for the

sorrow of the house. Yes, said Miss Marple. Your mother would know. She was Martha Ray before she married. Rose Ray's sister. Your aunt, my dear, was the girl at the bottom of the quarry. The parlour was silent. Through the open window came the sound of the bees, and the church clock far off, striking the quarter. Nurse Horbury had set down the teapot, and her hand, Miss Marple noticed, was not quite steady, the first unsteady thing she had ever seen those hands do.' How long have you known?' said Elsie. There was no pretense left in her voice.

It had gone flat and hard and much older than twenty. It was, Miss Marple thought, the voice of Martha Ray's deathbed, a family voice, kept like the Sunday china.' Since yesterday, said Miss Marple, though I began to wonder on the day of the fate, when you came across the vicarage lawn with your hat on crooked, and your news all ready, you found the posy Elsie, you told us so, but the postmistress tells me no such box came through the village post, and the rural postman from Muchbenham tells Inspector Slack, told him this morning, at my suggestion, that he delivered nothing to Hazeldane on the Friday or the Saturday. There was no box, my dear, there was only a bunch of bitter herbs, cut fresh, tied with black thread, and

carried into Hazeldame by the one person who could carry anything anywhere in that house without being asked a question, and then found, very dramatically in the morning, so that the whole Vicarage lawn should hear of it by ten o'clock. You needed the village to know about the posy. You needed us all watching Mrs Mallory's face when the news went round. It was your signature, Elsie, your motif. Rue, rosemary, foxglove, lavender, regret, remembrance, insincerity, distrust.

You wrote it all out in flowers, the way your grandmother wrote it out in a garden bed, and you made her drink it. Elsie Biggs looked at her then, and smiled, Rose Ray's smile, warm and quick and terrible, the smile that had made a whole village love a dead girl it barely remembered. Prove it, she said. I cannot prove it, said Miss Marple simply. Not the cup.

You are too clever for that, and I do not think anyone will ever prove the cup. But I can tell you the rest of it, shall I? And you may tell me where I am wrong. and without haste, in her soft, elderly, wandering voice, Miss Marple told it. Twenty-two years ago your Aunt Rose was under housemaid at Hazeldane, and she and Gerald Vine loved one another, truly, I believe.

They were that kind of young. And old Mr. Vine's daughter, Honoria, found them in the garden one night, and quarrelled with Rose, Mrs. Sims heard it from the still-room window, and never knew, poor soul, that what she was hearing was not a mistress dismissing a forward maid, but something much colder. Honoria Vine did not dismiss your aunt for impropriety, Elsie. She dismissed her because she was jealous, not of Gerald. but of what Rose had, warmth, laughter, the power of being loved.

Honoria had none of it, and she was the kind of woman who destroys what she cannot have. She turned Rose off without a character, in the middle of the night, and then, and this is the part the village never knew, she went to Rose's aunt, your great-aunt on the much-benham road, and told her the girl was with child, and that it was Gerald's, and that the family would deny it, and that the best thing was for Rose to go away somewhere and be forgotten. It was Honoria who arranged the forgetting. She had a talent for arranging. But Rose did not go away quietly. She wrote to Gerald nine letters, and Honoria, who had allies in that house still, saw to it the letters never reached him. And when Rose

found herself alone, and shamed, and waiting for a word that was never coming, One frosted March night she walked home across the fields by the old quarry, the short way, the forbidden way. And I do not know, Elsie, nobody will ever know, whether she missed the style in the dark, as the coroner said, or whether she simply stopped caring where she put her feet. But I know whose doing it was that she was on that road, in that dark, alone.

And so do you. Your mother told you. She told you on her deathbed, the way these things are always told, too late, to the wrong person, as a burden instead of a warning. Elsie had not moved. Her face was like a mask of her aunt's face, the same bones, the same warmth, all hardened into patience. And you came here, said Miss Marple, eighteen months ago, and took service in the very house, and waited. You were very patient. Patience is a family virtue of yours, I think. Your uncle Job has tended that grave for twenty-two years without speaking a word, and your mother carried the story for twenty years without telling it. You watched Mrs. Mallory, You learned her habits, and when you found her drops, the digital inn,

kept in the cool cupboard, in a house where the parlour maid comes and goes as freely as the cat, you understood, I think, that you would never need a better instrument. Because digital inn is foxglove, Elsie. It is the flower itself. You could kill her with her own medicine, and sign the death with her own motif, and everyone would say her heart. Poor lady. It was always her heart.

She paused. The needles clicked. And then, on the Friday before the fete, everything changed. Mrs Mallory made a new will. She left everything, Hazeldean, forty thousand pounds to Nurse Horbury, and you were in that house, and servants hear everything, and you understood what it meant, that she was making her peace, that she meant to tell her brother the whole story that night, and die easy, and be remembered kindly, the benefactress, the penitent, the real lady who paid her debts, and that was the one thing you could not permit, not the money, I don't believe the money meant anything to you, the story, she was going to confess, and be forgiven, and take the meaning of your aunt's death away from you, and make it into a chapter of

her redemption. Twenty-two years of your family's grief, all bought up and signed away in a solicitor's office on a Friday afternoon, so it could not wait for her heart. It had to be Saturday, at the Fate, in public, before the night came, before she could speak. You're guessing, said Elsie. I am deducing, said Miss Marple gently, which is only guessing with better manners, and I have one thing more, Elsie, that is not a guess. Job found the sprig of rue by the cup, You dropped it there.

You had to have it there. The motif required it. The message was not complete without it. And Job has kept it, wrapped in paper, in his coat pocket, since a quarter to five on the day of the fate. There is black thread on that sprig, my dear. The same black thread that is in the mending basket at Hazeldean, where you turned the hem of the housemaid's afternoon dress last Tuesday week. Cook will remember it. Thread is thread, and I dare say a dozen reels of black would match.

But juries are made of village people, Elsie. and village people understand about thread, and about who carries it. It was at that moment, exactly then, with the girl's eyes fixed on her and the hatred in them coming up like water in a well, that Miss Marple dropped her knitting. It fell with a soft sound, and rolled, and the ball of wool ran a little way across the parlour floor, and at that signal, prearranged, irrevocable, two things happened at once.

The garden gate clicked, and Gerald Vine came up the path without knocking, as he had been told to do, and appeared in the parlour doorway. thin and grey and shabby, rose-raised letters in his breast-pocket like a breastplate, and from the laurels at the side of the cottage, where they had stood for forty minutes in the heat, came Inspector Slack and his sergeant, their boots loud on the path, and past them on the road, walking very slowly with her little boy, came Griselda Clement, who stopped, as she had been asked to stop, to look at the bees.

Elsie Biggs looked round the parlour at all of them, the old lady gathering up her wool, the policeman in the doorway, the dead girl's sweetheart with his hand against his heart, and what happened then was the thing Miss Marple had feared, and hoped for, and known, in the way she knew everything, would come. The girl did not run, she did not deny it again. She turned instead to Nurse Horbury, who had sat through all of it, as white as her own cap, and she said, in a voice suddenly young again, suddenly twenty and frightened, and unbearably tired, You knew, all these years, tending her grave, wearing your cap and your kind face, you knew what that house did to her, and you nursed her, You gave her

her drops. You held her hand. You made her comfortable. And she was going to buy you two, wasn't she? With her forty thousand pounds. Devotion beyond the terms of duty. I was devoted beyond the terms of duty. I devoted eighteen months. Nobody left me anything. And then she put her head down on the parlour table, among the tea things and the shortbread, and wept, not like a murderess, but like Martha Ray's daughter, like Rose Ray's niece, like a girl who had carried a burying bunch for three years and finally set it down. Inspector Slack came in and did his duty, kindly enough, in his rough way.

Nobody looked at anybody else. Outside, the bees went on, and Griselda lifted Timothy up to see them, and the church clock struck five. Miss Marple picked up her knitting, and counted her stitches, and found to her mild satisfaction that she had not dropped one. It was Gerald Vine who spoke last, standing in the doorway with his hat in his hands, looking not at the girl but at the empty chair where his sister used, at Fett's in the old days, to sit. She came home to put it right, he said, to no one in particular. Forty thousand pounds, and a confession, and she thought that would put it right. And the strange thing is, the terrible thing is, it would have done. If she had lived one more day, it would have done. That's what none

of you understand. He turned then, and looked at Elsie, and his face was very old. She was going to tell me the night she died, and I've wondered ever since what the rest of it was. But I don't wonder any more. The rest of it was you. Section 11. The Flowers Close The church clock went on striking five, and the sound faded over the cottages, and the summer afternoon took the little parlour back into itself the way the sea takes back a footprint. They took Elsie Biggs away quietly, through the back of the cottage and round by the lane, because Nurse Horbury asked, in a low voice, whether it need be done through the village, and Inspector Slack, who was not without his own rough kindness, said no,

it need not. The girl went without resistance, with her hat still crooked, holding her aunt's smile behind her face like something wrapped in paper. At the gate she stopped and looked back at the garden, at the bees and the rope of onions under the eaves and the geraniums in the window, as a person looks at the last ordinary thing. You'll tell my uncle, she said to Miss Marple.

It was not a question. I shall tell him myself, said Miss Marple. It will come easier from an old woman than from the police. And Elsie, he knows already. He has known since the fate. He picked up what you dropped, and he kept it, and he never once said your name. Twenty-two years of silence. and eighteen months of watching you, and in the end it was his silence that held longest. Remember that, my dear, in the time that is coming. Your family does not only avenge, it also keeps things. The girl looked at her for a long moment, and then she was gone, walking between the two policemen down the dusty lane, small and straight and ordinary, and the village did not see her go.

In the parlour, Nurse Horbury gathered the tea-things with hands that had remembered their steadiness, the way the hands of the capable remember everything. She set the cups on the tray one by one, and the small sounds they made were the only sounds in the room. I shall still refuse the will, she said at last, to no one in particular. More than ever now. It was never I hope you understand, Miss Marple. It was never what she thought it was. I did not stay in this village for twelve years to be paid for it. No, my dear, said Miss Marple. I know why you stayed. Nurse Horbury looked up then, and for a moment the two women regarded one another across the tea-tray. the young one who had carried a secret for twelve years, and the old

one who carried them as a vocation. My stepmother told me on her deathbed, said Nurse Aubrey, what she had heard in that house, what she had helped to do, the letters, the aunt, all of it, without ever letting herself know what it was she was helping to do. She asked me to forgive her, and I could not, and she died, and I thought, I will go to that village, and I will tend that grave, and I will watch that woman, and one day there will be a reckoning, and I will be there for it. She picked up the last cup. And I was there, wasn't I?

I was there for twelve years. And in the end the reckoning came from the other direction entirely, and all my watching was worth nothing, worse than nothing. She poisoned the cup I carried. She used my hands, Miss Marple. The whole village watched me carry that cup, and it was my hands she used. I shall think about that for the rest of my life. Then think about this too, said Miss Marple gently. Mrs. Mallory drank from your hand twelve years and never once doubted it. Do you understand what that was, from a woman who was afraid of everything?

It was the only trust she had left. She gave it to you. Whatever else was taken from her that day, that was not taken. You were the one thing in her life that was exactly what it seemed. Nurse Horbury stood quite still, holding the tray, and the steadiness of her broke at last, quietly, the way ice breaks in a thaw. from underneath without a sound, and Miss Marple sat with her and did not say anything more, because there was nothing more that saying could do. Gerald Vine went back to Kenya in September. Hazel Deanne was his, the will being contested on grounds that satisfied no one, and dissolved, as everyone had known it would, before it reached a courtroom. and he sold it within the month to a family from Birmingham, with four children and a spaniel,

which the village agreed was the best thing that could have happened to the place. He gave Job Crick a pension and a cottage for life, and he gave Martha Ray's other daughter, the quiet sister in Yorkshire, an annuity that was never spoken of at the post office, which in St. Mary Mead was the same as saying it was generous, and before he left he came to say goodbye to Miss Marple, and stood in her little drawing-room, turning his hat in his hands as he always did, and said the thing he had come to say. I read the letters, on the ship coming home. All nine of them, at last, twenty-two years too late. He was silent for a moment. She forgave me in every single one.

That's the thing nobody tells you about the dead, Miss Marple. It's not their anger that you can't bear. It's that they had already forgiven you, and you weren't there to be forgiven. You are there now, said Miss Marple. That is what the letters were for. She wrote them to a man she believed would come. You came. It was too late for everything except the cumming. But the coming, mister, vine, was the part that was yours. He went away down the garden path, and a fortnight later he was gone from England, and the village which had chewed on him for a summer, put him away with the Sunday china and the rest of its memories, and thought of him, when it thought of him at all, with a vague, uneasy kindness. Elsie Biggs was tried at the Assizes in November,

and the case was spoken of in the county papers with that hushed relish the press keeps for poisoning in picturesque villages. The black thread was produced, and the sprig of rue and old job crick gave his evidence in a voice so low the judge had twice to ask him to speak up, and the jury was out for four hours. She was found guilty, with a strong recommendation to mercy, on account of her youth and what the defence called, not inaptly, an inheritance of grief. She was not hanged. She went to prison, and the village, after the first delicious fortnight, found it difficult to keep hold of her. She had been, after all, only the parlour-maid.

and by Christmas her name had begun to go the way of her aunt's. Rested, like China, brought out less and less. Nurse Horbury stayed. That was the thing the village had not expected, and discussed at length over the winter fires, and finally approved. She stayed in the pink-washed cottage with the bees and the drying onions, and she went her rounds as she had always gone them, and if her patient's medicine tasted no different and her hands were as gentle as ever, there were some in the village who noticed that she tipped her head, now, when she listened, a little less often. and looked at people a little more directly, as though a person who had spent twelve years watching had at last been watched herself,

and found it did not kill her. She refused the inheritance formally, through Mr. Petherick, and the money went in the end to Gerald Vine, who sent back, from Kenya, a sum to build a nurse's fund for the county, in two names, Rose Ray's and Honoria Mallory's. The village thought this strange at first, and then, on reflection, exactly right, and then, being St. Mary Mead, ceased to reflect upon it.

The grave in the churchyard was tended that winter as it had always been tended. Job Crick planted snowdrops round the stone, and when they came up in February, white and bent and stubborn in the frost, someone else had been there before him, as someone always had, and there were rosemary and rue laid among them, fresh cut, tied with thread that was not black. Miss Marple saw them on her Sunday walk, and stopped, and looked at them a long time. The motif, she thought, had run its course.

Rue had begun as a weapon. a message written in bitter herbs to frighten a dying woman, and then to sign her death. But flowers are only ever what the hand means by them, and the hand that had laid these was not the same hand, and the meaning was not the same meaning. Rue for regret, but there was such a thing Miss Marple had always believed, as honest regret, regret that came at last and stayed and did its work, and rosemary for remembrance, which belonged by right to the dead and had never really belonged to the living at all.

The herbs had been a threat, and then a signature, and then a confession, and now at last they were only what they had been in her girlhood, in the old flower dictionaries, in gardens where they grew by cottage doors for the sorrow of the house, a message, and the message, this time, was to no one. She walked home through the lanes in the thin spring sunshine, past the pond where the first ducklings swam, past the vicarage where Griselda's daffodils were out in unregimented crowds, past the shop where Miss Weatherby was already speaking of the summer fate, such a pity about last year, but one must carry on, and this year Miss Marple, We shall have a proper cordial table. And the village lay about her in the

morning light, exactly as it had always lain, gentle and shabby and watchful. Its equilibrium restored the way water restores itself, closing over the stone without a ripple. That was the thing about villages, Miss Marple reflected, letting herself in at her own gate, and pausing, as she always paused, to look at her roses. People believed that a village was a place where nothing happened, and that was why they never understood it. A village was a place where everything happened, love and shame and patience and revenge, the whole of human nature under one church spire, and where, because nothing could be hidden, everything had to be carried, carried for twenty-two years, sometimes, carried in silence, in service, in a

nurse's steady hands, in a gardener's bent back, in letters that were never opened and flowers that were never explained, until one midsummer day the carrying stopped and what had been carried was set down, in public at a fete, in a cup of elderflower cordial, and the village looked at it, and shuddered, and took it up again, and went on. Miss Marple went indoors, and put the kettle on, and took her knitting from its bag, and sat down by the window where she could see the high street, the rue in her own little herb border, planted years ago, for no reason she had ever admitted, was coming into leaf.

She looked at it for a while, over the top of her glasses, with her needles clicking softly in the quiet room. and what she thought she kept, as she kept everything, behind her mild and faded blue eyes. The end.

A Body at the Midsummer Fete | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

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