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

Linen, lavender, and a letter never sent to Miss Marple. Puzzle Section 1. The Mourning of the Fete. The body was found, as bodies so often are in villages, by the person least suited to find one. Young Rose Tully, the maid at Lavender House, who had gone up to the drying barn before breakfast to fetch down the last of the muslin bunting for the church fete, and who came down the ladder backwards, white as the linen she carried, and was sick into the hydrangeas. It was the 14th of June, and Kingham Abbott had woken that morning to one of those perfect English days which seem, in retrospect, to have been arranged by a malicious dramatist. The sky was the pale, washed blue of an old apron. The church bells were practising for the afternoon. Along the high

street the smell of baking drifted from Mrs. Peddle's ovens, and on the vicarage lawn the trestle tables were already out, awaiting the bran tub, the white elephant's stall, and— the pride of every parish fate for thirty years, the linen and lavender stall of Miss Honoria Bell. Miss Honoria Bell was, at sixty-eight, one of those women whom a village does not so much contain as orbit. Lavender House, her narrow, wisteria-covered dwelling at the end of Church Lane, supplied the whole of Kingham Abbot with lavender water, lavender sachets, lavender vinegar for the faint, and those little embroidered bags of dried buds which the ladies of the parish tucked among their sheets as their mothers had before them. Honoria grew

the lavender herself in the walled garden behind the house, a particular pale, long-stemmed variety her grandmother had brought from the Auvergne, which grew nowhere else in the county, and which she refused, yearly and with increasing firmness, to sell, lease, or even discuss. She also kept the parish linen cupboard.

This was a sacred office. The altar cloths, the communion linen, the fete bunting, the best ironing cloths, all lived in the great press in her front parlour, laundered by her own hands, folded in her own particular way, each layer parted by a sprig of lavender, as thin and grey as a ghost. And now Honoria Bell was dead at the foot of her own drying loft, in the barn behind the house, with the June lavender hanging in green and purple drifts from the rafters above her, and a single fresh-cut sprig, cut that morning by someone with a knife rather than the garden scissors, laid across her open palm as neatly as a signature. A fall, said Sergeant Bunch, arriving breathless on his bicycle, twenty minutes after Rose Tully's

screams had emptied the high street. He said it with the hopeful firmness of a man who has a fate to police at two o'clock. Poor lady climbed the loft ladder to check the drying racks, same as every year, and the third rung's gone clean through, rotten. You can see it splintered. She'd no business climbing ladders at her age, and that's the truth of it. It was a truth the village received with relief. Kingham Abbott had been fond of Honoria Bell, in the way one is fond of a landmark, with affection, irritation, and the comfortable assumption of permanence, and it preferred its grief tidy. A fall from a ladder was tidy. It was the kind of death a village could fold away, like a laundered sheet. between one

sprig of lavender and the next. The fete, it was announced by the vicar at eleven o'clock, with tears standing in his eyes, would go forward, because Honoria would have wished it. This was universally agreed to be true, chiefly because nobody wanted to waste the bran tub. So the bunting went up, and the trestles were dressed, and the linen and lavender stall was manned, with a strangeness nobody quite acknowledged, by Miss Priscilla Anstruther, Honoria's companion of twenty years, a small, grey, fine-boned woman of perhaps fifty-five, who stood behind the piles of sachets with a face like a folded letter, and sold lavender water to the neighbours of her dead employer, with steady, unshaking hands. Poor Pris, said Mrs. Dane,

the vicar's sister, buying two sachets she did not want. Devoted, you know, utterly devoted. Twenty years. They say Honoria found her through an advertisement, half-starved, some dreadful situation in Cornwall, and made her whole life over. One wonders what will become of her now.'' One wonders what became of her before,' said old Mrs. Carraway, who was eighty-one, and had earned the right to say such things.' Nobody ever knew. That's the thing about devotion, Lettice. It always begins somewhere.' It was at this point in the afternoon, the tea-urned sighing, the band of the Kingham Abbott Friendly Society embarking upon its second attempt at the floral dance,' the shadows of the chestnut trees lengthening across the vicarage lawn, that Miss

Jane Marple was observed to be sitting very quietly in the shade of the cedar, with her knitting on her lap and her eyes on the linen stall. Miss Marple had known Honoria Bell for forty years. They had not been intimate. Honoria was not a woman one was intimate with. She was a woman one consulted, as one consults a barometer.

But they had exchanged, across decades, the particular currency of elderly ladies. bulbs, patterns, remedies, and a steady two-way traffic of observation. Miss Marple had come to the Fete, as she came every year, to judge the preserves and to buy a lavender sachet for her own linen drawer. She was doing neither. She was watching Priscilla Anstruther sell lavender water, and there was something in her mild blue eyes that was not, at present, mild at all. Wool-gathering Jane, said Colonel Harker, lowering himself onto the bench beside her, with the careful stiffness of a man whose knee remembers Flanders.

He was a handsome ruin of a man, seventy if he was a day, and his usually pink face had a greyish cast. Terrible business, terrible. I can't take it in. I spoke to her yesterday evening, yesterday, mind you, over the wall, about that confounded hedge of hers, and now, quarrelling about the hedge, Miss Marple asked gently. Her needles clicked.

How like you, Arthur! You've quarrelled about that hedge for six years. We didn't quarrel. The Colonel's jaw worked. We discussed. She said, she said something very odd, as a matter of fact. She said, After tomorrow, Arthur, the hedge will be the least of it. I thought she meant the FET. You know how she was about the FET. After tomorrow, Miss Marple repeated, in the tone of a woman filing away a recipe. How very interesting. And how is your lumbago, Arthur?

I saw you wince when the band started. The Colonel, who knew better than to follow Miss Marple's changes of subject, talked about his lumbago for ten minutes, and Miss Marple listened, or appeared to, and her needles moved, and her eyes returned again and again to the grey woman behind the linen stall. Pris Anstruther did not weep. That was noted, in due course, by everyone, and held against her in the way villagers hold things, loosely, idly, without malice and without mercy. She sold her sachets. She folded her money into the Japaned box. She folded, in a lull, an altar cloth that had been used as a tea-cloth on the stall, and she folded it in a way that made Miss Marple's needles stop, for just a moment, quite still.

It was a particular fold. The cloth doubled in thirds, the ends turned under, the whole parcel squared and pressed flat, so that a sprig of lavender could be slid into its heart. and lie invisible until the linen was opened. Honoria Bell folded linen that way. Nobody else in Kingham Abbot folded linen that way. Honoria had once told Miss Marple, over tea, that it was her mother's way. The Yorkshire fold, we called it, though my mother had it from a Frenchwoman, and where the Frenchwoman had it from, nobody living knows.

Pris Amstruther folded the cloth in thirds, turned the ends under, squared the parcel, and slid a sprig of lavender into its heart in one movement, as unconscious and as fluent as a prayer. Miss Marple looked at her for a long moment, then she looked down at her knitting, and discovered, without surprise, that she had dropped a stitch. Across the lawn, the shadow of the church tower crept over the trestle tables.

A breeze came through the walled garden of the lane and brought with it, over the cakes and the brass band and the tiarn, the smell of lavender, sharp, clean and funereal. and somewhere behind the stalls, unheard beneath the music, Rose Tully was telling Sergeant Bunch for the fourth time, through chattering teeth, about the sprig of fresh-cut lavender laid across the dead woman's hand.' The cut end, Sergeant. It was still wet. The sap was still wet on it.

And I know what you're going to say, but I'll say this till I die. Miss Bell never cut lavender with a knife in her life. She said a knife bruised the stem. She said lavender remembers how it's cut.' Section 2. What the Village Said. Lavender remembers how it's cut, Rose Tully repeated, with the air of a girl delivering a scripture, and Sergeant Bunch, who had been about to snap his notebook shut, found that he could not quite bring himself to do it. Now see here, Rose, he said, lowering his voice, for the band was between tunes and voices carried on the vicarage lawn. You've had a shock.

A sprig of lavender is a sprig of lavender. Miss Bell handled lavender every day of her life. There's nothing in it, and I'd thank you not to go about the village talking of knives and sap, or we'll have half-Kingham Abbott in hysterics by suppertime. But Sergeant Bunch might as well have asked the river lark to flow uphill.

By the time the brand tub was empty and the friendly society band had packed away its brass, the village had the whole story, enlarged and ornamented in the telling. It passed from the tea urn to the coconut shye, from the white elephant stall to the church porch, changing shape at every hand like a note in a parlour game.

They say she was found with lavender in her hand, laid out like a corpse in a picture, said Mrs. Peddle, the baker's wife, to anyone who would buy a bun. They say the ladder was tampered with, said Mr. Golightly, the saddler, who had not been near the barn, and never would be. They say, whispered Miss Euphemia Hartnell, the doctor's sister, that Colonel Harker was heard quarrelling with her only yesterday, over the hedge, actually quarrelling, in a raised voice, and the Colonel such a violent-tempered man when roused, though of course one wouldn't wish, but there it is. It is a curious thing, and Miss Marple had remarked upon it often, that a village will always fasten upon the quarrel it can see, The hedge between Lavender House and

the Colonel's Garden had been a six years' war, conducted with secateurs and stiff little notes, and the whole parish knew it. By four o'clock the hedge had grown, in the general mind, from a boundary dispute into a motive. Arthur Harker wouldn't hurt a fly, said Mrs. Dane stoutly, but she said it with a small, pleased shiver, as one defends a character in a novel one is enjoying.

People always believe the quarrel they can see, Miss Marple observed to her knitting. She was still sitting under the cedar, and her chair had become, in the gradual way of such things, a kind of confessional. One after another the ladies of the parish drifted past it, paused, sat down, and unburdened themselves of what they had heard, what they had always thought, and what they would never say to anyone but dear Miss Marple, who was so discreet. Miss Marple listened to all of it. She nodded over the dropped stitch she was quietly retrieving. She made small, vague, encouraging sounds. Dear me, and how very odd, and but then, people are so strange, aren't they? And behind the mild blue eyes the filing went on, neat and relentless. Mrs.

Carraway came last, lowered into the adjacent chair by her great-niece, and disposed of the village's theories in a single crackle of old laughter. A fall from a ladder at sixty-eight, and the whole parish wants a murderer, You'd think we'd never buried anyone, honestly. Though I'll say this, Jane Marple, since it's you. The old lady's eyes, still black and bright as a rook's, turned toward the linen stall, where Pris Anstruther was counting the day's takings into the Japaned box.

That woman has not shed one tear today. I've watched her. Honoria Bell took her out of the gutter, so we're told, gave her twenty years of a good home, and there she stands selling lavender water with a face like a milestone. If that were my companion, I'd want to know why. Grief takes people so differently, said Miss Marple mildly. Grief, said Mrs. Carraway, takes some people to the mirror. That one hasn't been near a mirror. There's a difference, Jane, between being numb and being careful. Miss Marple's needles paused. Careful, she repeated thoughtfully. Yes, that is a very interesting word, Emily.

Interesting be bothered. It's the word. She's a woman being careful. and I'd stake what's left of my teeth on it. Mrs. Carraway gathered her shawl. And another thing. All this talk of the Colonel and the hedge. Honoria told me herself, not a month ago, that she'd made up her mind to settle something. Put my house in order, Emily, she said.

Every sprig of it. And I assumed she meant her will. She said it the way a person says a thing they've been afraid of for a long time and have stopped being afraid of. Now you may make what you like of that, because I am eighty-one and past caring who repeats it. Miss Marple made a great deal of it. It was not the words themselves she valued. People in villages were always putting their houses in order, and usually meant nothing more alarming than the attic. It was the way Emily Carraway said they had been said, like a person laying down a weight. But she only said, put her house in order. Yes, people do say that, don't they?

And how is your lumbago, Emily? Mrs. Carraway cackled and was led away. The fet wore itself out, as fets do. The trestle tables were stripped, the urn emptied, the last of the bunting taken down, the muslin bunting that Rose Tully had been sent to fetch that morning, which no one had quite liked to use, so that the vicarage lawn was dressed, at the last, in bunting borrowed from the schoolroom instead. The shadows came long and blue across the grass. The chestnut trees rustled with the first cool of evening. Miss Marple remained in her chair until the lawn was nearly empty. From there she had a clear view down Church Lane, and she watched Miss Priscilla Anstruther walk home to Lavender House with the Japaned money-box in

one hand, and, under the other arm, the folded altar-cloth that had served all day as a tea-cloth on the stall. She watched the grey little figure pause at the gate of the walled garden, and stand for a moment quite still with her face turned toward the drying barn at the back of the house, not avoiding it, as a numb woman avoids, but measuring it, as a careful woman measures, and then go in and shut the door behind her, very gently, as though someone inside were sleeping. The breeze had died. Over the lane the smell of lavender hung heavier than ever, distilled by the day's heat out of the walled garden and the barn and the stalls and the sachets in every woman's basket. until the whole village

seemed to lie steeped in it, like linen in a drawer. It was then that Sergeant Bunch, peddling home past the church, found that he could not get Rose Tully's white frightened face out of his mind, nor the words she had kept repeating with such obstinate terror. He was a conscientious young man, and the sprig with the wet sap weighed on him out of all proportion to its size. A sprig of lavender is a sprig of lavender, he had told her, but a sprig cut with a knife on the morning of a death, laid across a dead woman's palm like a signature. It was at that moment, with the band gone and the lamps beginning to come on along the high street, that Sergeant Bunch made up his mind and turned his bicycle toward the police house to

telephone the county. Section 3. The Detective from Melford The telephone at the police house was an old-fashioned affair with a separate earpiece, and Sergeant Bunch had to shout into it twice to before the county station at Melford understood that he was not, in fact, reporting an accident. I know how it sounds, sir, he said, cupping the mouthpiece, as though the empty police house might overhear him. A fall, yes, that's what I thought myself. But there's the matter of the ladder rung, and there's the, well, sir, there's a sprig of lavender, cut fresh, laid across the dead woman's hand, and the maid swears the old lady never used a knife on lavender in her life, and, no, sir, I am quite serious. Lavender, sir, yes. I'll hold the line.

He held the line for a long time. When he put the earpiece back on its hook, his face had the pink, slightly winded look of a man who has just been told, in official language, that he has either done something very sensible or made a perfect fool of himself, and that an inspector will be along in the morning to decide which. Inspector Druitt arrived at half-past nine the next day, in a black Wolseley, that raised the dust of Church Lane and the expectations of half the parish.

He was a large, deliberate man, with a moustache like a clothesbrush, and the unhurried manner of someone who has learned that villages, like suspects, tell you the most when you let them talk. He went first to the drying barn. It was a good-sized building of old brick behind Lavender House, joined to the walled garden by a door in the wall.

Inside it was dim and sweet. the air so thick with the smell of drying lavender, that Druitt, a man not given to poetry, found himself thinking uncomfortably of churches. Great sheaves of the stuff hung from the rafters in rows, grey-green and purple, turning slowly in the warm air. The loft ladder stood against the upper staging where it had stood for thirty years. The third rung lay on the floor in two pieces. Druitt picked them up, turned them over, and looked at the broken ends for a long time without speaking. Rotten, sir, said Sergeant Bunch helpfully. You can see where it's gone soft. I can see where it's gone, said Druitt. That's not quite the same thing. He held the two ends to the light from the doorway. The

wood at the break was dark and crumbling along one side, clean and pale along the other. Rot spreads, Bunch. It doesn't keep to a line. This rungs rotten half across and sound the other half. A saw going partway through, and a hammer, and a bit of dirt rubbed in. It would look very like this. It would hold a lightweight.

It would not hold a woman of eleven stone climbing it with her arms full of linen. Bunch swallowed. Then it was arranged, sir? It was arranged that the ladder should fail, said Druitt. Whether it was arranged that Miss Bell should die of it is another matter. Ladders are chancy things to kill with. She might have broken a leg and told us all about it. He looked about the barn, at the hanging sheaves, the benches— the bundles of cut lavender waiting to be stripped, the little heap of fallen buds beneath the loft that Dr. Finch had photographed the evening before around the body. Where is the sprig?

The one the maid made such a fuss about. It was produced in an envelope. Druitt looked at it through the paper without opening it. A single sprig of the long pale lavender seven inches of stem, cut clean across at a shallow angle. Shears would crush this, he said. Knife cut it. Sharp one. And the garden scissors, I take it, are where they always are. They were, hanging on their nail inside the potting shed, with Honoria Bell's own whetstone beside them, and a little bunch of rosemary tied to the handle, as she had always kept them.

Whoever had cut the sprig had walked past the scissors to do it. Now, said Druitt, lowering himself onto the bench with the air of a man preparing to be patient for a very long time, the household, there's the companion, Anstruther, there's the maid, the girl who found her, there's a gardener comes twice a week, and a woman who does the rough, and there's a nephew in London, I'm told, and a solicitor, and a will. We'll begin with the will, Bunch.

We always begin with the will. The will was read to him at eleven o'clock by Mr Herbert Finch of Finch, Son and Marlow, in the front parlour of Lavender House, among the folded altar cloths and the smell of beeswax. It was dated three years previously, and it was short. To Priscilla Anstruther, in gratitude for twenty years of faithful companionship, the sum of two hundred pounds. To the nephew, Mr Gerald Bell of Grey's Inn, the residue, the house, the garden, and the famous lavender beds, which a nurseryman from Norwich had once offered to buy outright for a sum that Mr.

Finch described, with loyally relish, as startling. Two hundred pounds, said Druitt. Twenty years of service, and two hundred pounds. Miss Bell was not a sentimental woman, said Mr. Finch. She regarded Miss Anstruthers' keep, over twenty years, as the substance of the gift. The money was a token. She was quite clear about it. He shuffled his papers. I should add, Inspector, since you will hear it from someone else within the hour, this being a village, that Miss Bell came to see me a fortnight ago. She wished to make a new will. She gave me her instructions and I drew it up. Druitt's eyes came up slowly from the will. And, and it was never signed. I sent the draft to her last Monday. It was to

be executed this week, Tuesday in fact, the day after she died. Mr. Finch removed his spectacles and polished them Under the new will, Inspector, the house and the lavender beds went to Miss Anstruther. Outright. Everything save small legacies. When I telephoned to confirm the appointment, on the morning of the... of the death, Miss Anstruther answered. She told me Miss Bell had gone to the barn and was not to be disturbed. There was a silence in the parlour. Outside, in the walled garden, someone was moving about among the lavender.

The gardener, Roe, going on with his work, because work is what gardeners do when the world comes apart. She knew then, said Druitt at last, Miss Anstruther knew about the new will. She must have done, said Mr. Finch. Miss Bell told her everything. They were, as everyone will tell you, devoted, devoted. The word went round the room like a draft. Druitt got up, thanked the lawyer, and stood for a moment with his hand on the parlour door, looking at the great linen press in the corner. Its doors open, its shelves of folded whiteness parted every few inches by a thin grey sprig. One thing more, Mr. Finch.

The new will. Did Miss Bell say why? After twenty years of the old arrangement, why change it now? Mr. Finch hesitated, the hesitation of a cautious man deciding how much honesty he can afford. She said something I did not entirely understand, Inspector. She said, I have had a letter, Herbert. and it has occurred to me that I have been punishing the wrong person for a very long time. I assume she meant the nephew. There had been some estrangement, I believe. I did not press her. One does not press Miss, one did not press Miss Bell. A letter, said Druitt. What letter? Who from? She didn't say. And Inspector?

I never saw it among her papers. When I came this morning to put things in order, I looked. There is no letter in this house less than six months old. Druitt stood very still. From the walled garden came the snip of rose shears, steady as a clock, and through the open window drifted the smell of the cut stems, sharp and clean and strangely sorrowful, as though the garden itself were being stripped for the funeral. Bunch, said the inspector quietly, find me that letter. Section 4. The Nephew from London. Find me that letter, said the inspector, and Sergeant Bunch, who had been waiting all morning for an order he could get his teeth into, saluted with such energy that that he knocked a pile of funeral cakes

off the hall table and had to apologise to the empty house before hurrying out into Church Lane. He searched for three days. He searched the desk in the parlour and the bureau in the bedroom and the pockets of every garment in the lavender-hung wardrobe. He searched the potting shed and the linen press, disturbing, to his visible discomfort, forty years of folded whiteness, and the drying barn, where the police photographer's chalk marks on the floor were already fading.

He interviewed the postman, who remembered nothing, and the postmistress, who remembered everything except anything useful. He found no letter. By Friday the letter had joined the sprig of lavender and the part sawn rung in the small, stubborn heap of things in the case that did not behave like an accident, and Inspector Druitt sat in the front room of the police house, with the heap spread before him in his notebook, and turned his attention, as a practical man does, from the thing he could not find to the person he could. Mr. Gerald Bell arrived from London on the four o'clock train, in a suit too dark and too warm for the weather, and was shown into Lavender House, where he stood in the parlour of his

late aunt, with the stiff, blinking air of a man who has mislaid an emotion and is too proud to ask for it back. He was forty-two, a barrister of no great practice and considerable debts. Druitt had had that from London within the day. and he had not set foot in Kingham Abbot for nine years. You quarrelled with your aunt, Mr. Bell. I did not quarrel with her.

Gerald Bell's voice was careful. Barrister trained. Each word set down like a chess piece. We differed. Nine years ago she asked me to come home and take up the lavender, the beds, the drying, the whole trade of it. She had no one else. I declined. I had a career. She took it as a betrayal. and she was not a woman who forgave betrayal. We did not write, he looked round the parlour, at the press, the sheaves of cut lavender drying on the sideboard, the Japaned box from the FET still standing on the table, with the parish takings counted and wrapped. I should tell you, Inspector, that I knew nothing of any new will until Mr. Finch telephoned me. And I should tell you also that I am not sorry to inherit. I am sorry for how

it happened, and I am sorry we did not write. but I won't perform a grief I don't feel, not even for you. My aunt would have despised it. She despised hypocrisy above everything. Where were you? said Druitt. On the morning of the 14th, between six and eight o'clock, in my chambers in Grey's Inn, preparing an opinion. My clerk can confirm I was there by eight. Before that I was in my rooms, alone. A pause, precise as a full stop. You will note, Inspector, that I do not say I was asleep. I was awake from five.

I often am. But I was alone, and I cannot prove it, and we both know it. Druitt studied him. He had interviewed a great many people with motives, and he had long ago stopped believing that guilt had a look. But he had a policeman's appetite for convenience, and Gerald Bell was convenient in every particular. The estranged air, the debts, the unprovable mourning, the open admission that he was not sorry— The part sawn rung wanted a strong arm and a sharp saw. A barrister's clerk could place his master in London at eight, but the distance from London to Kingham Abbot was three hours by the early train, and a man could be in two places in one morning, if he was willing to rise before the lark. The

letter your aunt mentioned to her solicitor, said Druitt, the letter that made her change her will, do you know anything about it? For the first time, something moved behind Gerald Bell's careful face, not fear. Druitt thought. Something older and rawer than fear. No, he said, but I can guess what it was about. My aunt spent forty years being angry about something, Inspector, and she never told a living soul what it was. Not me, not the vicar, not that woman in there. He nodded toward the kitchen, where Pris Anstruther could be heard, faintly, making the tea she made for everyone, policeman and undertaker alike, with the same steady hands. If someone finally wrote to her about it, then they knew the one thing about Honoria Bell that

the whole of this village never knew, and I'd like to read that letter myself, Inspector. I'd give a good deal to read it. So would I, sir, said Druitt grimly. So would I. By Sunday, the county constabulary had committed itself, in the comfortable, settling way of institutions, to a theory. The theory had Gerald Bell at its centre, the debt-ridden heir.

the London alibi with a hole in it before eight o'clock, the quarrel nine years old that money could forgive. It was a good theory. It explained the will, and it explained the haste. For if the new will were signed on Tuesday, the old will and its heir died with it, and Monday's dawn visit to a drying barn became, in the theory, not cruelty but arithmetic. Druitt did not entirely believe his own theory, but it fitted the shape of the evidence the way a ready-made coat fits. Nowhere exactly, well enough to wear, and he had a chief constable to answer to. He went, on Sunday evening, to call upon Miss Marple. He found her in her garden, deadheading the roses with a pair of scissors older than Sergeant Bunch,

and he sat on her rustic bench and laid the whole case before her, for this was known, in the county, to be the thing one did, and she listened with her head, a little on one side, snipping.' It all fits,' said Druitt, with a trace of defiance.' The will, the debts, the mourning he can't account for.'' Oh, it fits,' said Miss Marple.' It fits beautifully. That is rather what troubles me about it, Inspector.' Things in real life so seldom fit beautifully. When something fits beautifully, it has usually been tailored.

She snipped a spent bloom and let it fall into her basket. There was a case very like it in St Mary Mead. The sexton was found to have been dipping into the offertory, and everything fitted him beautifully. Opportunity, need, even a little past history. And it was all perfectly true, except that he hadn't done it. The vicar's wife had, for the kindest reasons in the world. The sexton had merely been made to wear it. She looked at him mildly.

Your Mr. Bell has the air of a man wearing a coat someone else has brushed and hung up for him. And there is the letter, Inspector. You have a murder with a missing letter in the middle of it. In my experience, when a letter goes missing from a house, it has not been stolen by the person it condemns.

It has been destroyed by the person it exposes. Exposes how? That, said Miss Marple, returning to her roses. is what the letter was for, isn't it? To expose something. And someone in this village, Inspector, has lived forty years inside whatever it was going to expose, and that is a very long time to practice being careful. The light was going.

Across the lane the lamps of the vicarage came on, one by one, and from somewhere behind Lavender House, carried on the evening air, came the smell of the lavender beds, faint now, and the faint dry rustle of the sheaves still hanging in the dark of the barn, turning slowly in air nobody stirred. Section 5. The Sprig in the Linen The rustle of the sheaves in the dark of the barn was a sound Pris Anstruther had lived with for twenty years, and that night, for the first time in twenty years, she could not sleep for it. She lay in her narrow room at the back of Lavender House, the room that had been hers since the day Honoria brought her home. with its iron bedstead and its washing-stand and its smell, which was the smell of the whole house,

of lavender pressed in linen, and listened to the drying sheaves turning overhead in the warm night air, and rehearsed, for the hundredth time, the morning she had already described to the police so carefully that she could no longer quite remember which parts of it were true. She had risen at six, she had told them. She had drawn the water and laid the kindling. She had taken Miss Bell's early tea up at half-past six, as always, and found the bedroom empty, the bed not slept in, and she had not been alarmed, she told them, because Miss Bell in lavender week rose before the dawn and went straight to the cutting, and had done so for fifty years.

She had gone about her work, she had assumed the mistress was in the barn or the garden, she had not gone to look, because one did not disturb Miss Bell at the cutting. The first she knew, the first anyone knew, was Rose Tully's screaming from the barn at seven. Every word of it was true. She had practised it until it was true. On Monday morning, while Druitt's men turned the house once more for the letter that was not there, Pris Anstruther did what she had done every Monday of her life at Lavender House. She did the linen.

It was a ritual older than her tenure. The week's cloths and napkins and altar linen came down from the press, went through the copper and the rinsing blue, came off the line in the walled garden smelling of wind and dune, and were ironed in the back kitchen on the great padded board, and then, last of all and most sacred, refolded and returned to the press, each shelf layered with the fresh-cut sprigs that kept the moth and the must away.

Honoria had overseen the folding for twenty years, standing at Pris's elbow like a drill sergeant. Thirds, Pris, always thirds. The Yorkshire fold, my mother's way. though where my mother got it, God alone knows, for she never set foot in Yorkshire in her life. This Monday there was no one at her elbow. Pris did the linen alone, and the house was so quiet that she could hear Druid's men two rooms away, and her own breathing, and the tick of the clock Honoria had wound every Sunday night for forty years, and would never wind again, until Pris found herself, at nine o'clock on Sunday night, standing on a chair in the dark parlour to wind it. because silence from that clock was more than she could bear.

She folded, thirds, ends under, the parcel squared. The sprig slid into the heart of the fold, invisible, where it would keep its scent against the winter, cloth after cloth. Her hands did it without her, as they had done it ten thousand times, and she stood at the board in the lamplight and wept. Finally, at last, alone, the tears she had not shed at the fete or the funeral or before any policeman falling straight down her face and spotting the clean linen, so that she had to do two of the altar cloths over again. It was while she was re-ironing the second of them that she found the letter. It was not hidden. That was the devil of it. It was simply inside the linen press, where it had been all along, folded into the heart

of the bottom-most altar cloth, the oldest one, the heavy damask with the drawn thread border, that was never used now except at Christmas and Easter. folded in thirds, ends under, in the Yorkshire fold, with a sprig of lavender against it, as flat and grey as the year it was dried. Anyone searching the press had lifted out the cloths in armfuls and put them back. No one had thought to unfold one, because no one in Kingham Abbott except two women knew that the Yorkshire fold made a pocket. Pris stood with the iron cooling in her hand and the letter in the other, and she did not open it.

She knew what it was. She had known for twenty years that someday a letter like it would come, the way people who live on a cliff know about the sea. She knew what Honoria had meant to do about it, too. Put my house in order, every sprig of it. Put it in order, after forty years of the opposite. The clock in the parlour ticked, the sheaves turned in the barn, and Pris Anstruther, standing in the lamplight with forty years folded around her in shelves of white, did the thing she had been careful for twenty years never to do.

She stood still, and let herself be afraid. On Tuesday morning Miss Marple called at Lavender House with a jar of her own quince jelly, for Miss Anstruther, poor thing, who has no one to look after her now, and looking after people who look after everyone else, is quite the most necessary charity there is. She was given tea in the parlour, among the funeral cards. She admired the linen press. She asked, idly, in the way of old ladies, while her eyes rested on the ironing basket by the door, about the famous fold. My dear mother's way, Pris said, and her voice did not change at all. Miss Bell taught me. Thirds, always thirds. How clever, said Miss Marple.

And how kind of Miss Bell, to teach you all her ways. She was not always kind, you know, Honoria. One says it with respect. But she was kind to you. Twenty years. One wonders why. The mild blue eyes came round, innocent as china. It is a great deal of devotion to repay, Miss Anstruther, and you repaid it so faithfully.

I only hope she knew, before the end, how faithful you had been. She did know, I expect. She knew everything about you. The clock ticked. Somewhere a dove cooed in the walled garden. Pris Anstruther set down her cup with a hand that did not tremble, and folded her own hands in her lap, in thirds, as neat as linen.

She knew everything, said Pris. That was the trouble. She always knew everything. Except one thing, said Miss Marple gently. Pris looked up. For a moment the two women regarded each other across the tea-tray, the old one soft and pink and woolly, the grey one folded tight as a letter, and what passed between them passed without a word, the way most things of importance in villages do. Except one thing, Pris agreed at last, very quietly. And now no one will ever know it. The letter is gone, you see.

The police have searched the house three times. There is no letter, Miss Marple. There never was. And whatever it was going to expose is buried with her where it belongs. Miss Marple rose and gathered her gloves and thanked her for the tea. At the parlour door she paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at the linen press, the shelves of whiteness, the grey sprigs standing between the folds like bookmarks in a library no one was meant to read. What a beautiful fold it is, she said. One thing about a fold, Miss Anstruther, it always makes a pocket, and a pocket is a place to keep the thing you cannot bear to carry in your hand. She went out into Church Lane. The lavender was coming into bloom along the wall, and the whole

lane smelled of it, sweet and sharp and secretive, and Miss Marple walked home very slowly, knitting it all over in her mind, the way one unpicks and reworks a pattern that has gone wrong in the middle, and she thought about a letter folded into the heart of an altar cloth, and about who in that house would know such a hiding place existed, and about why a woman might hide a letter in linen rather than burn it in the grate. She thought, because burning is a confession— and folding is a keeping. Section 6. Old Sins Cast Long Shadows Folding is a keeping, thought Miss Marple, all the way down Church Lane, and in at her own gate, and up the path to her own front door, where her parlour-maid Florence held the evening post, and a face

full of news.' Oh, madam,' said Florence, before the door was fairly shut,' Mrs. Peddle's girl's been round, and Mrs. Dane's sent twice,' and they do say as the inspector from Melford has been asking questions about the Colonel, the Colonel, madam, and Mrs. Carraway's sent word you're to come to tea tomorrow without fail, as she remembers something. Miss Marple took off her hat, gave Florence the jar of empty jelly-pot, and said that people were so kind. She sat down by her own fire, for June evenings in Kingham Abbot could still be sharp, and she did not put on the lamp for a long time. Folding is a keeping.

Someone had kept that letter. Someone had folded away, forty years ago, a child, and twenty years ago, a companion, and a fortnight ago, a letter, and someone in the village had folded away for forty years the knowledge of what they had done. The whole village was a linen press, Miss Marple thought, shelves and shelves of respectable whiteness, and between every layer a little grey sprig of something sharp and secret, keeping, keeping. Mrs. Carraway's memory, delivered the next afternoon over tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, was this. Honoria was engaged to be married. Forty years ago. More.

Nobody under sixty remembers it, and most of them that do are dead or gaga, so they've sent you to me. The old lady's rook-black eyes snapped with satisfaction. It was hushed up very thoroughly. Her mother was a bell of the bells, the kind of woman who could hush a thunderstorm. The engagement was announced. The linen was being embroidered. I saw it myself, her initials on the sheet corners. And then, within a month, everything was off. The man went abroad.

Honoria went to Cornwall for a year, for her health. And you may make of that what people made of it then, Jane, which was everything, and none of it provable. She came back with the lavender cuttings and a face like a door shut, and she never looked at a man again. And the name that was never spoken in that house from that day to this, Mrs. Carraway leaned forward, was her sister's. Edith. Edith Bell. Whatever happened in that year, Jane, Honoria blamed Edith for it, and Edith went to her grave in a rented room in Bournemouth, without one word from Lavender House. I know, because I wrote to Edith myself, and she wrote back, one line. I kept it. I keep everything. She rang for her great-niece. and the box

was brought, and the letter found, forty years folded, a spidery hand, a Bournemouth postmark, Dear Emily, Honoria believes what she must believe. It is better so. I made my choice with my eyes open, and I would make it again. Do not try to reconcile us. Some things are not forgiven because they cannot be, and some because they must not be. E.B. Miss Marple read it twice. She made her choice, she murmured, with her eyes open. Emily, What choice?

What did Edith do? That, said Mrs. Carraway, is what the whole village would have given its eye-teeth to know, forty years ago. The story that served, the story her mother put about, was that Edith had carried tales, talked of Honoria's affairs where she shouldn't, and the engagement broke on it. Gossip, Jane. Edith was condemned as a gossip, and a gossip is a curiously hard thing to forgive in a family, because it can never be unsaid. She drank her tea. I never believed it. Edith Bell couldn't gossip.

She hadn't the gift. But Honoria believed it. Honoria chose to believe it. And Honoria's beliefs were load-bearing walls. Miss Marple sat very still, the forty-year-old letter in her lap, and somewhere at the back of her mind, a stitch she had dropped at the fet knitted itself silently up. The same afternoon, in the front room of the police house, Inspector Druitt was conducting an interview he had not wanted to conduct, with a man who had not wanted to come.

Colonel Harker sat very upright in the uncomfortable chair, and his pink face had gone, at last, entirely grey. You see, Inspector, it has got about, these things do, that you have been asking where I was on Monday morning, and I should like to save you any further trouble. I was walking in the water meadows from five until seven, alone, I cannot prove it. I often walk early. The knee, you know. It won't let me sleep. And I should like to say, his jaw worked, that this business of the hedge is a great deal of nonsense. Honoria and I had known each other for forty years. We were.

We knew each other very well, once. The hedge was merely what was left. He stopped. Druitt waited, with the patience of a man who has learned that silence is the best question. What was left? The Colonel repeated. more quietly, of something that was not always a hedge. Colonel Harker, said Druitt. Were you engaged to Miss Bell? The silence in the little front room was so complete that the clock on the mantle seemed to tick like a hammer.

Who told you that? Harker said at last. No, don't answer. A village remembers what it shouldn't and forgets what it should. Yes, forty years ago, for one summer. It was broken off, it was broken, Inspector. Like that rung of hers, from the inside— by rot nobody could see from the outside, and I have lived two hundred yards from her front door for thirty years since, and we never once spoke of it. The hedge was— the hedge was what we spoke of instead. He got up, abruptly, and stood at the window with his back to the room, looking out at nothing.

She said to me on Sunday evening, over the wall, her last words to me, Inspector, After tomorrow, Arthur, the hedge will be the least of it. I have thought and thought. I believe she was going to tell me something— I believe she had been waiting to tell me something, and whatever it was had ripened, and now I shall never know what it was, and I tell you frankly, Inspector, that I would rather you arrested me for her murder than that I should spend what is left of my life not knowing what she meant to say to me.

Druitt let him go. There was nothing to hold him on, and Druitt was not a fool, and the Colonel's grief had the unmistakable weight of the genuine article. But the interview left behind it, like the scent of lavender in a room, one fact that would not disperse. Forty years ago something had happened to Honoria Bell in Cornwall. It had ended an engagement, exiled a sister, and shut a face like a door, and two weeks ago a letter about it had arrived, and Honoria Bell had been murdered before she could act on it, and the letter had vanished from a house searched three times. He went, that evening, to Miss Marple. She gave him sherry and heard the whole of it. Mrs. Carraway had forestalled him by an hour.

The two accounts lay side by side in her mind now, like two halves of a torn pattern, and when he had done, she sat clicking her needles for a while in silence. Cornwall, she said at last. Honoria went to Cornwall for a year, for her health, and came back with lavender cuttings, and twenty years ago Miss Anstruther came to Lavender House from Cornwall, half-starved, out of some dreadful situation, through an advertisement. It is a great deal of Cornwall, Inspector.

for one small story. Druitt stared at her. You think Miss Anstruther knows something about the— about whatever happened in Cornwall? I think, said Miss Marple, that we have all been asking who wanted Honoria Bell dead, and I think we should have been asking something much more ordinary and much more sad. I think we should have been asking who she was. She looked into the fire. There was a parlour-maid of my Aunt Fanny's, a Mrs. Tavistock it was in Torquay, who kept for thirty years a photograph in her jewel-case, face down, that she took out every birthday.

Everyone assumed it was a lost lover. It was a child. It is always, Inspector, the thing folded flattest that is kept the longest. She had scarcely finished speaking when the front doorbell rang, and Florence came in, pink and gasping, to say that it was Sergeant Bunch, Madam, from the police-house, and would Miss Marple and the Inspector please to come at once?' for Colonel Harker had just walked in off the High Street, Madam, and confessed to the murder of Miss Honoria Bell. Section 7. The Colonel's Confession Colonel Harker had confessed to the murder of Miss Honoria Bell, and he did it again, formally, in the front room of the police house, in the presence of Inspector Druitt, Sergeant Bunch, and,

at Druitt's particular and irregular invitation, for the Colonel had asked that she be sent for, Miss Jane Marple. He was perfectly composed, he had changed into his best suit. He had the air of a man who has finally put down something very heavy. I killed her, he said, on Monday morning, at a little before seven, in the drying barn at Lavender House. I had sawn the ladder rung partway through the week before. I had the run of the place, God knows, thirty years of coming and going.

I carried the parish linen up to the loft for her more dunes than I can count. On the Monday I went across at dawn. I knew her habits in Lavender Week. The whole village knew them. She went up the ladder, and it broke, as it was meant to. She— It was quick, I think. I pray it was quick. I cut a sprig of the fresh lavender and laid it in her hand, because, because I could not leave her on that floor with nothing. And then I came home, and I have been waiting, I think, for someone to knock on my door ever since. He folded his hands.

The clock ticked. Sergeant Bunch's pencil had stopped moving, for he was a humane young man, and he had played billiards with the Colonel at the club. Why, said Druitt, I should prefer not to say. Colonel Harker, you must see that I should prefer not to say will not serve. You confess to a murder and decline a motive. I decline nothing. I killed her. Take that, and let the rest alone. The Colonel's voice was steady, but the hands folded in his lap had gone white at the knuckles.

The law requires a confession, not an explanation. I have given you the first. You will not get the second. Druitt tried him every way, gently, then sharply. then with the long flat silences that had opened better men than Colonel Harker. Where had he sawn the rung? In the barn, on the Saturday. With what? A saw from his own potting shed. They would find the sawdust on its teeth.

Where had he stood when she fell? By the door. Had she cried out? He did not answer that one, and for the first time his eyes went somewhere private and stayed there. It was Miss Marple who broke it, in the end, and she did it in the way she had— by appearing, to all intents and purposes, to wander off the subject altogether. Arthur, she said gently, the sprig.

You cut it with a knife, you said. Rose Tully noticed it. The sap was still wet, she said, and she said something else. She said that Honoria never cut lavender with a knife in her life, because a knife bruises the stem. Lavender remembers how it's cut. It was a strange thing for a frightened girl to keep in her head, but she did keep it, and she was right to, because it is the truest thing anyone has said in this whole sad business. The needles which she had brought with her, as naturally as her handbag, clicked once, twice.

You see, Arthur, if you had truly laid that sprig, you, who knew her for forty years, who carried her linen, who quarrelled with her over the hedge because the hedge was what was left, you could not have done it with a knife. Your hands would not have let you. You would have used the scissors on the nail in the potting shed, the ones with the rosemary tied to the handle, because you knew what she believed. The person who cut that sprig with a knife was someone in a desperate hurry, or someone to whom the lavender was only lavender. The Colonel said nothing. But the private place his eyes had gone to grew, somehow, nearer the surface, and what was in it was not, Druitt now saw clearly, guilt.

It was grief, and under the grief, immovable as rock, resolve. And there is the ladder, Miss Marple went on, mildly, as though pointing out a flaw in a pattern.' The inspector will forgive me, but a sawn rung is a coward's weapon, Arthur. It is the weapon of someone who dared not be in the barn at all, who needed the thing to happen in their absence, who needed never to see her face. You were at Waterloo's centenary dinner in my hearing, and you said— I remember it, because it was like you— that a man who could not look at what he had done had no business doing it. Whoever killed Honoria Bell could not look at her. You have spent thirty years doing nothing else. I confess, said the Colonel, and that is all I have to say. You confess,

said Miss Marple, to protect someone. There is only one person in this village you would do that for, Arthur, and until this week you did not know she existed to be protected. The clock ticked. Outside a late blackbird was going at the evening with everything it had, Colonel Harker looked at Miss Marple for a long moment, the mild pink face, the white hair, the gentle, terrible blue eyes, and something in his own face, some long-held parade-ground formation, broke step at last. You know, he said, it was not a question. I suspect, said Miss Marple, it is not the same thing, and we neither of us have proof.

But Arthur, think, if you confess to protect her, and she did not do it, then you have done two harm instead of none, And if she did do it, the needle stopped, then a confession from you will not save her from the one thing she cannot escape, which is not the law. Let the police do their work. The truth is not always the cruelest thing in a room.

Sometimes it is the kindest thing left. The Colonel was silent for a full minute. Then he got up and straightened his best suit and asked Sergeant Bunch, in the ordinary voice of a man asking for the time, whether he might go home, and drew it, who had listened to all of this with his moustache working like a caterpillar, nodded slowly. The confession is withdrawn, sir, and will say no more about it to anyone. But Colonel, Druitt leaned forward, you know something, or you've guessed something, about Miss Anstruther.

I'd rather have it from you than dig it out of Cornwall Parish registers, but I'll dig if I must. Then dig, Inspector, said Colonel Harker quietly from the doorway. Dig and God forgive all of us, and when you have found it, Come and tell me what she was going to say to me. That was all I asked. All I have asked for forty years. He went out into the lamplight of the high street, an old soldier upright under a weight no one could see, and the door shut softly behind him. Druitt looked at Miss Marple.

Miss Marple looked at her knitting, and found, without any surprise at all, that she had dropped another stitch, and that this time, for the first time, she knew exactly where in the pattern it had gone. Inspector! she said.' I should like to give a little tea-party, on Thursday, if the weather holds. Just a few ladies, Mrs. Carraway, Mrs. Dane, Miss Hartnell, Miss Anstruther, at the vicarage, if the vicar's wife will lend us the parlour. And I should like you, if you will, to be somewhere near at hand.' She picked up the dropped stitch neatly.' And I should like one thing more. I should like it mentioned, quite casually, quite accidentally.' within the hearing of everyone in that room, that the police have found a letter at Lavender House,

folded away in the most curious place, and that it is being read at this very moment. But we haven't found any letter, said Bunch, bewildered. No, said Miss Marple, but somebody in this village believes there is one, and that somebody has been afraid of it for a fortnight. Fear is a great deal heavier than lavender, Sergeant. When you shake the cloth, it is the first thing that falls out. Section 8. Miss Marple's Tea When you shake the cloth it is the first thing that falls out, Miss Marple had said, and the vicar's wife, who adored both Miss Marple and any excuse to use the good teacups, was only too happy to help with the shaking. The vicarage parlour on Thursday afternoon was a picture of everything

Kingham Abbott did best. The French windows open on the lawn, the late roses leaning in at them, the silver tray, the good lace mats, the little sandwiches with the crusts off, Mrs. Carraway was installed in the best chair like a black-eyed queen bee. Mrs. Dane poured. Pris Anstruther sat very upright on the edge of a Sheraton chair, grey and neat and folded, and contributed to the conversation exactly as much as was required and not one syllable more. And Miss Euphemia Hartnell, the doctor's sister, thin and rustling and full of little darting kindnesses, handed the sugar and the cream and the gossip with the same small, quick, white hands.

It was Mrs. Dane, prompted, though she never knew it, by a word Miss Marple had let fall to the vicar's wife that morning, who set the cloth shaking. Such a thing, she said, refilling Miss Hartnell's cup, that the police should still be hunting about in that sad house. Though Lettice tells me they have found something at last, some paper or letter, folded away in the queerest place.

Did you not say so, Miss Marple? Folded into the linen itself, or some such thing. They are reading it now, I believe. There was a tiny pause, the kind of pause that in a village parlour is as audible as a shot. Into the linen, said Miss Hartnell. How very, how macabre, what sort of letter? Her voice was exactly the same, Miss Marple noted, and that was wrong. Everyone else's voice had risen with interest. Miss Hartnell's had gone down, just a semitone, just for four words, the way a hand closes. They have not said, said Miss Marple placidly.

These things take so long, drying and photographing, and what I believe is called handwriting experts. One would think a letter was a simple thing, but a letter that someone has searched a house three times to find, that is not a simple thing at all. That is a thing somebody was afraid of. She beamed round the circle, woolly and vague and mild. I always say a letter is like lavender, it keeps whatever was folded into it, for years, and the moment it is opened, the whole room smells of it. Really, Jane, said Mrs. Carraway, you do say the most. Miss Anstruther, said Miss Marple, turning with a little flutter of apology, you must find all this very painful.

We will talk of something else. How do you find the house now? It must be very quiet. I always think a house where someone has folded linen for twenty years must feel inhabited, all those shelves, all that keeping. And then, gently, absently, as though the words had simply drifted out of her. It was kind of you, by the way, the sprig of lavender in her hand. It was wrongly done, you know. and that is how I know it was lovingly done. A knife, when she never used a knife. But you were in such haste, and the scissors were all the way down in the potting shed, and there was no time, there was so little time, that morning, to do the last thing for her before Rose came screaming up the ladder. I have wondered and

wondered who could have loved her enough to lie to the police about it, and there was only ever the one answer, was there? The person who had been lying, kindly, gently, for her sake, for twenty years. The parlour had gone stone silent. Mrs. Daines sat with the teapot tilted, frozen. Mrs. Carraway's eyes were black saucers, and Pris Anstruther, who had been folded tight as a letter for six weeks of police and pity, unfolded, not with tears, not with protest, but with a slow, awful straightening, like a cloth shaken out.

I did not kill her, Pris said. Her voice was low and perfectly clear. a voice nobody in the room had ever heard her use. I want that understood, and I shall not say it again. I found her, before Rose, before anyone. I had taken up her tea, and the bed was not slept in, and I knew the way you know frost has come, before you look. She was at the foot of the ladder with her basket spilled, and the sprigs all, all scattered round her on the floor, like, the voice did not break but it thinned, and the rung in two pieces, and I am not a fool, and I have done heavy ironing for twenty years, and I know the smell of fresh sawn wood when I kneel in it. Someone had murdered her, and I knelt there, and I could not, she looked so undone, Honoria Bell,

on a barn floor, with her hair down, she would not have borne it, the whole village crowding in, to look at her, undone. So I took one of the sprigs she had cut herself, it was her own lavender, her own cutting, whatever the police make of their knife, and I laid it in her hand, and I closed her eyes, and I went home and made the tea, and I let Rose find her, because Rose finding her was an accident, and I finding her was a story, and I would do it again. And the letter, said Miss Marple very softly. There is no letter, said Pris, and her eyes came up, grey and level and utterly exhausted.

I told you before, there never was. Whatever she was going to do, whatever she had found out, it died with her, and it should stay dead, because it is the only thing of hers I have any power to protect now. She spent forty years keeping that door shut. I will not be the one to open it, not for police, not for anyone. Not even, said Miss Marple gently, if opening it is the only way to catch the person who soared through her ladder. Pris's hands closed slowly in her lap. That, she said, is between me and God.

Then I am afraid, said Miss Marple, that God must wait a little, because someone else in this room does not intend to wait at all. And she turned, still mild, still pink, still with her knitting in her lap, and looked for the first time directly at Miss Euphemia Hartnell. You have not asked, Miss Hartnell, what was in the letter.

Everyone else asked. Mrs. Dane asked. Mrs. Carraway asked. Miss Anstruther asked. You asked only what sort of letter, and you asked it before anyone had said it was found folded into the Christmas altar cloth. Because, you see, no one had said that. I had not said it. It is not the sort of detail the police give out.

The needles clicked, once. You knew it was in the linen. You have known for a fortnight that it was in the linen. Because you searched that house twice yourself, didn't you? On your guild errands, on your kind visits to poor Pris with broth. And you never thought of the fold. You never knew about the fold. Only two people in the world knew about the fold, and one of them was dead. Miss Hartnell stood up. The little white hands were not quick now. This is a disgusting performance, she said, and her voice shook like paper. I shall not stay to be insulted by a meddling old woman and a— a servant with heirs. If the police have found a letter, let them produce it. There is no letter. There is nothing.

There has been nothing for forty years. There you are wrong, said Miss Marple. There is a letter. There has always been a letter. And I am very much afraid, Miss Hartnell— that tonight you will go and look for it one last time, because you must, don't you see? That is the terrible thing about forty years of keeping. You cannot stop, and when you do, she folded her knitting away into her bag, and rose, and her voice was kind, which was the worst of it. Sergeant Bunch will be in the shrubbery. Section 9. The Letter at Last. Sergeant Bunch will be in the shrubbery, Miss Marple had said, and he was, from dusk until half-past eleven that night.

cramped and damp and bitten, hidden in the laurels at the end of the vicarage garden, with a clear view across the lane of the side gate of Lavender House. Inspector Druitt was in the church porch. Miss Marple was at home, doing the thing she did best, which was sitting quite still by her fire and letting the pattern finish itself. It came at twenty minutes past eleven. The figure came up church lane without a light, keeping to the shadow of the wall, a small, thin figure, quick and noiseless, in a dark coat with something over its head.

It let itself through the side gate of Lavender House with a key. A key, Bunch noted, which meant a great deal, for the house had been locked and re-locked by the police, and only three keys existed, his own, Miss Anstruthers, and the old duplicate that had hung for forty years on a nail in the church vestry. For the linen guild's use, the parlour window of Lavender House showed a faint moving glow, a shaded candle. carefully kept low.

Bunch gave it the five minutes Druitt had drilled into him, and then he and Druitt crossed the lane together, and went in through the side gate and the unlocked kitchen door, and stood, at last, in the parlour doorway. The linen press stood open. The shelves were bare, every cloth and napkin and altar frontal taken out and shaken and thrown down.

Forty years of folded whiteness in great soft drifts on the floor, so that the little parlour looked as though it had snowed, and in the middle of the snow, on her knees, with the candle beside her and the great Christmas altar cloth, the heavy damask one with the drawn thread border, spread across her lap, knelt Miss Euphemia Hartnell.

In her hand was a letter. She did not start or scream or drop it. She looked up at them over the candle flame, and her thin face in that light was not frightened at all. It was something much worse. It was relieved. Folded, she said, in a conversational tone. In the hemfold of the Christmas cloth, all this time, I shook out forty cloths, and it was in the fold of the one I was taught to fold, by her mother, when I was seventeen. She looked down at the envelope, old, creased, softened at the folds like a thing long carried. It is addressed to her. From the convent of St. Tudy, in Cornwall. I have never seen it, I only ever heard of it, two weeks ago, when she sent for me, and told me what it said.

She read it to me. She made me stand in her parlour, and she read it to me aloud, like a sentence. Which it was. Miss Hartnell folded the letter, once, twice, in thirds, neatly, the way the dead woman's mother had taught her when she was seventeen, and held it out to Druitt. You had better read it. You will hang me or you won't. I find I no longer greatly care.

But read it first. She would have wanted it read aloud. Druitt read it that night, and again in the morning. and at half-past ten he carried it, in an evidence envelope, to Miss Marple's garden, where she was waiting for him among the roses with the air of a woman who has finished a piece of knitting, and is only now looking at the whole of it. It was written in a fine, foreign-looking hand, on convent paper, dated the 2nd of June. Dear Miss Bell, I write because I am dying, and because a sin kept is a sin doubled, and I have kept yours— no, not yours, God knows— for forty-one years.

In 1885 your mother brought you to us, and in the March of 1886 you were delivered here of a daughter, and your mother gave orders that you be told the child was stillborn. It was not so. The child lived, and was strong. She was given to a childless couple of this parish, Tregarthen by name, and christened Priscilla. Your mother paid, and we kept silence. That was the way of it then, and I do not excuse it, and I have had forty years to learn what silence costs.

There is more, and it is the hardest. It was not your sister who told your mother where you were. It was a friend of your girlhood who had seen you in the lane with the young man, and who went to your mother, whether from jealousy or misguided duty I cannot judge. And your sister Edith, learning of it, claimed the fault herself, believing your mother would deal more gently with a daughter's tattling than with an outsider's betrayal, and that your friendship at least might be spared. Your sister paid your friend's debt all her life, and forbade us ever to tell you, saying you must. be allowed to hate her, as hate was lighter than what you would feel toward the truth. She sent money for the child's keep for nineteen years. The friend I will not

name to you, you will know her, she lives, I believe, in your village still, and she has prospered, and I pray daily that it has been a prosperity of the purse only. The child, Priscilla, left this parish some twenty years ago. I do not know where she went. I write, in dying, what I should have written long since. Burn this, or keep it, as your conscience dictates. Sister Mary Anselm, for the community of St. Tudy. The garden was very quiet.

A white butterfly settled on the lavender at Miss Marple's feet, and opened and shut its wings like a page turning. Edith, said Miss Marple at last. All those years— I made my choice with my eyes open and I would make it again. She chose to be hated so that Honoria could go on loving the wrong person and hating a safe one. Emily Carraway said Honoria's beliefs were load-bearing walls.

Edith made herself into a wall and let Honoria lean on hating her for 40 years. She shook her head slowly and Honoria read this letter a fortnight ago and learned in one page that she had been punishing the wrong person for a very long time. her exact words to Mr. Finch, and that the child she had mourned for forty years was alive, and that the child was twenty years gone from Cornwall, with no trace. Except, Miss Marple looked up, except that twenty years ago a half-starved woman from a dreadful situation in Cornwall answered an advertisement and came to Lavender House and was made whole. Honoria read this letter and looked across her own parlour and understood who had been folding her linen for twenty years.

And Miss Hartnell, said Druitt heavily, the friend, you will know her, she lives in your village still. Honoria sent for her, and read it aloud, and gave her a fortnight's grace, said Miss Marple. That was Honoria all over, she did not go to the police or the parish. She told Mr. Finch she would put her house in order, the new will, everything to her daughter, and she told Emily she had stopped being afraid, and she told Arthur that after tomorrow the hedge would be the least of it.

She was going to acknowledge it, all of it, the daughter, the sister's innocence, the friend's betrayal, openly at last in her own time. And she gave Euphemia Hartnell that fortnight as a condemned person is given time to put their affairs in order, because Honoria Bell, even in mercy, was a bell of the bells. The butterfly lifted off the lavender, but a condemned person with a fortnight's grace, Inspector, and forty years of respectability to lose, and a key to the linen press hanging in the vestry. That is not a penitent. That is a woman with time to find a saw. Druitt looked down at the letter in its envelope.

She denies the sawing, he said. She admits the searching, admits the confrontation, admits everything except the thing itself, says the rung was part cut when she went there that Sunday night, says she went to look for the letter, found the barn door open, went up. He stopped, because Miss Marple had held up one small hand, and was smiling for the first time that morning, sadly, into the middle distance. Ah, said Miss Marple softly. Then we must look again, Inspector, at the one thing none of us has questioned. We have all assumed the ladder was sawn to bring Honoria down. But suppose, suppose it was sawn to bring someone up. Section 10. The Whole of the Pattern.

Sawn to bring someone up, repeated Miss Marple. and she let the words hang in the rose-smelling air, until Druid, despite himself, leaned forward. But no, Inspector, I am afraid I was being fanciful, and at my age one should not indulge it. Let us be plain. The ladder was sawn to bring Honoria down, and the person who sawed it was the person who knew three things. That she climbed that ladder every dawn of Lavender Week, that the rung would hold a lightweight but not eleven stone, and that no one locks a barn in Kingham Abbot. That narrows the field to the whole village, except for the fourth thing. The person who sawed it knew that the letter existed, what it contained, and that Honoria meant to

act on it, and that inspector narrows the field to one. Miss Hartnell denies. Miss Hartnell, said Miss Marple, confessed to everything except the crime, in a room knee-deep in other people's linen, holding the letter she had killed to find. It was a very beautiful performance, the best she has ever given, and it was a performance, Inspector, from the first word to the fold of that letter, in thirds, which she made such a point of showing you. The fold I was taught by her mother when I was seventeen.

She wanted you to see that fold. She wanted you to understand that she too had once been folded into that family. The almost daughter, the girl who was taught the fold, and then watched Honoria chosen for everything she was not. Miss Marple's needles were still, Jealousy in a girl of seventeen is a common thing, and passes. Jealousy kept for forty years, watered, tended, pressed flat between the leaves of a respectable life like, like a sprig in linen, does not pass, it keeps. That is the thing about pressing things flat, Inspector. They keep forever, and they never lose their strength. The vicarage parlour was lent again that afternoon.

The vicar, haggard and kind, said that if it must come out, let it come out in a Christian room, and by four o'clock they were assembled. Druett and Bunch, very quiet by the door, Mrs. Carraway, black-eyed, in the best chair, Colonel Harker, grey as ash, sitting as far from everyone as the room allowed, Pris Anstruther, folded and upright, with her hands in her lap, and Miss Euphemia Hartnell, brought in between a policewoman and the doctor her brother, sat with her thin face turned to the wall, like a woman at a sickbed, Miss Marple sat by the French windows with the letter on her lap, and told them the whole of it, plainly, gently, as one unpicks a piece of work row by row to show where the error went in. Forty years ago, she said, there

were two girls, and they were friends as girls are friends, one of them admired, one of them the admirer. Honoria Bell had everything, the looks, the inheritance, the lavender, and, that one summer, Arthur Harker. Euphemia had what the admiring friend always has, which is everything second-hand, the confidences, the letters to carry, the happiness to watch at close quarters.

And then Honoria's engagement was announced, and there was no more carrying of letters. And Euphemia saw Honoria and Arthur in the lane one evening, and understood that there was now something that would be taken from her even sooner than marriage would take it. So she did the one thing that would stop the marriage and could never be traced— she went to Mrs. Bell. Not in malice, that is what makes it so dreadful and so true. I have seen it a dozen times. A word dropped for the girl's own good, a mother's duty invoked. One does the irreparable thing and tells oneself it is kindness. And then Edith, Miss Marple looked down at the letter. Edith, who could not gossip, who had not the gift, stepped

forward and took the blame on herself, so that Honoria would lose a sister rather than a faith in people. and Honoria chose to believe her, because Honoria's beliefs were load-bearing walls, and the truth would have brought the whole house down. And Euphemia let her. For forty years she let her. You cannot prove, said Miss Hartnell, to the wall.

I can prove, said Miss Marple, without raising her voice, that you knew where the parish linen was kept, that you carried it to Lavender House every Friday of your adult life, that the vestry key was signed out to you on the Saturday before the fete. Mrs. Peddle keeps the book. And you forgot that, because people like you always do forget the one homely thing, and that on the Sunday night before the fete, you were seen from the church tower by the verger's boy, crossing the vicarage garden toward church lane, at a time when you had told your brother you were in bed with a headache, and I can prove the thing that no performance can explain away. She paused. When Honoria lay dead, and the village began to talk, there was one voice, from the

very first afternoon, pointing the talk at Arthur Harker. They say Colonel Harker was heard quarrelling with her. They say, It was you, Miss Hartnell. Before the ladder was photographed, before the sprig was in an envelope, before anyone but the killer could possibly have wanted a suspect, you had one ready. You have been preparing for that week for forty years, and when it came, you knew exactly what everyone should think. The room was perfectly silent. Outside, the chestnuts moved. and a drift of lavender came in at the windows from down the lane, sharp and clean, and no one stirred.' And the sprig!' said Pris suddenly, her own voice, low and clear, the voice from the tea-party.' Miss Marple, the sprig! You said at the tea that

the knife meant I had done it in haste and in love. But I did not cut that sprig. I took it from her basket, from the floor, where the basket had spilled. She had cut it herself, that morning, with her knife.' She turned, slowly, and looked at the assembled faces, and something like the ghost of a smile moved on her grey face for the first time in six weeks. You see, she had stopped. All those years of scissors, because a knife bruised the stem, because lavender remembers how it's cut. And that last morning she took her knife to the lavender beds instead. I noticed it when I knelt in the wreck of her basket, and I thought I had gone mad to notice such a thing, but I understand it now, She had read the letter.

She had stopped being afraid. She told Mrs. Carraway so. She was going to acknowledge her daughter, and confess her sister, and forgive, or punish, her friend, and burn forty years of pretense. She was cutting everything with a knife that morning. The old rules were done with. She didn't care what she bruised. She was free. It was then that Miss Euphemia Hartnell stood up. The doctor her brother half rose.

and she put him aside with one of the little white hands, and she faced the room, thin, rustling, respectable, finished, and her voice, when it came, was as dry and level as a woman reading out a shopping list, which was, in its way, the most terrible sound heard in that parlour in living memory. She read it aloud to me, said Euphemia, in her parlour, with the door shut, like a sentence, and at the end she said, she was not cruel, That is what no one will understand. Cruelty, I could have answered, she said. Euphemia, I shall not expose you. I shall simply stop pretending. What the village makes of the difference is its own affair. Forty years I had built, and she was going to stop pretending.

She gave me a fortnight to put my affairs in order, so I did. She picked up her gloves and folded them, in thirds, the way Mrs. Bell had taught her when she was seventeen. I should like to go now, Inspector. There is a great deal to put in order, and I find I have very little time. Section 11. The Keeping I find I have very little time, Miss Hartnell had said, and the parlour emptied around her going the way a room empties after a storm has passed, slowly and in silence, and with everyone careful not to look at the wreckage. Druitt and the policewoman took her out through the vicarage garden, because she asked that they might not go up the high street, and it was granted.

The doctor her brother followed, a broken man in a good coat, and Mrs. Dane went with him, because someone had to. Sergeant Bunch stayed to gather up the letter and the gloves she had folded and left lying on the Sheraton chair. In thirds, squared, like everything else she had ever put down. And Mrs. Carraway was helped out by her great-niece, and said nothing at all until she was in the lane, and then said only,' Forty years, and I never once asked her what she was so angry about.' That is what a village is for, Jane, and I forgot it. Miss Marple did not go at once.

She sat by the French windows while the light changed, and Pris Anstruther sat in her straight chair with her folded hands, and neither of them spoke, until at last Pris said, not looking up, in the low clear voice that was hers now, and would remain so, she knew me. For a fortnight she knew me, and she never said a word. No, said Miss Marple. All those years I used to imagine it, I won't pretend I didn't. Every companion in every book gets told, in the end, my child.

I used to think the word would be enough, just once, just to have heard it. And instead she read me no letter and said no word. And she cut her lavender with a knife, and changed her will, and wound her clock on Sunday. And on Monday she was dead. Pris's hands turned over in her lap, the palms up, empty.

I have been very angry with her, Miss Marple, this last fortnight, angrier than I have ever been with anyone. She had a fortnight of knowing, and she spent it putting her house in order, and not one minute of it on me. Is that— was that not wanting me? I have to know. I have come twenty years, and waited twenty years, and I cannot go the rest of the way not knowing. Miss Marple was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, gently, My dear— You have it exactly backwards, and it is the most important thing you will ever learn about her, so I shall say it plainly. Honoria Bell despised hypocrisy above everything. Gerald told the police so, and it was the truest thing said in this case. Words to Honoria were pretense. She had spent forty years among words, stillborn, for her health, gossip, devoted, and every one of them a lie, and she knew it now.

So when it came to you, she did not give you a word She gave you the house. Pris looked up, sharply. The new will, my dear. Everything. Lavender house, the garden, the beds, outright. She could not say my daughter. So she did the thing that, in her language, only ever meant one thing. She put it in writing, and folded it away, and left it where it would be found when she was gone. She was not a woman who loved in words. She loved the way she kept, in linen, in thirds, with the lavender slid into the heart of the fold where nobody could see it. You, of all people, should have read her. She taught you the fold herself.

For a long time there was no sound in the parlour but the clock and the chestnuts. Then Pris Anstruther, who had not wept at the fete, nor at the funeral, nor before any policeman, put her face down into her empty, upturned hands, and wept for her mother at last, in the way she had earned. Twenty years' worth, all at once, without a sound. The law took its course, as the law does, and the village, having talked of nothing else for a summer, did what villages do with grief. It folded it, and put it away, and slid a sprig of something sharp between the layers to keep it. There were consequences, of course, small and decent and unspectacular. The new will had never been signed, and the old one stood,

and Lavender House and the Lavender Beds came to Gerald Bell, who came down from Grey's Inn for a fortnight. walked the drying barn and the walled garden with the air of a man inspecting a life he had declined, and then did the thing his aunt would have despised him for doing loudly, and forgave him for doing quietly. He settled the house and the beds upon Miss Priscilla Anstruther for her life, with the residue after her to whoever she named, and went back to London, and wrote, thereafter, every Christmas, stiff barrister's letters, which Pris answered on lavender-scented paper and in a hand as fine and foreign-looking, Gerald always thought, as a nun's. Colonel Harker's lumbago improved, though

nobody believed the two things were connected. He took, that autumn, to having his mending done at Lavender House, as it had in fact been done for fifteen years without his ever troubling to learn by whose hands, and he was observed, on the first occasion, to stand a long time in the parlour among the shelves of folded whiteness, and to say nothing at all, and to come away with his collar very straight. What passed between him and Pris thereafter was conducted, in the true Kingham Abbot manner, over the hedge, which was cut, that September, for the first time in six years, from both sides at once, and has been kept low ever since, low enough to talk over, which was all it had ever been for. The linen and

lavender stall at the next year's fate was the making of the parish, and Mrs. Dane said to every one, that it was just as Honoria would have wished, and for once it was true. The sprigs for the press were cut with scissors, from the beds behind the house, by a grey, fine-boned woman, who folded in thirds and taught the fold to Rose Tully's younger sister, saying only that it was an old way, older than anyone knew, and that a fold always made a pocket, and a pocket was a place to keep the thing you could not bear to carry in your hand. And Miss Marple, sitting under the cedar with her knitting, judging the preserves and watching the village go about its mended business, was asked by Mrs. Carraway whether she had known from the

very beginning the sprig, the ladder, all of it, and Miss Marple considered, honestly, and shook her head. Not from the beginning, Emily, from the fold. When I saw Pris Anstruther fold that altar-cloth at the stall, the day of the fete, in thirds, with the ends turned under, the day after her, her employer, was found dead, It was not the calm that struck me. Grief takes people so differently.

It was that she did it exactly as Honoria did it, as unconsciously as breathing, the way one does the things one's mother teaches one before one can read. And I thought, that is not a fold you learn from an employer, however devoted. That is a fold that comes down through a family, like the lavender itself, which Honoria's grandmother brought from the Auvergne, and which grows, they say, nowhere else in the county. Things that are kept go on, Emily.

That is all. Lavender and folds and love and lies. We press them flat between the years and think them finished. And they keep and keep. And the moment the cloth is shaken out, the whole room smells of them. She rolled her knitting and rose to judge the cakes. Lavender remembers how it's cut, she said. So do we all.

The trick of a life, the only trick there is, I sometimes think, is to choose, before the end, what you are willing to bruise. Over the vicarage lawn the bells were practising, and the long shadows lay blue across the grass, and from down Church Lane the smell of the lavender came up sharp and clean and unforgotten, the way it came up every June, and would, long after everyone who remembered why, was gone. The End

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

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