The Rose and the Yew Tree. Агата Кристи

       CHAPTER 3

      It was soon afterwards that we moved to St Loo in Cornwall. Teresa had just inherited a house there from a great-aunt. The doctor wanted me to be out of London. My brother Robert is a painter with what most people think is a perverted vision of landscapes. His war service, like most artists’, had been agricultural. So it all fitted in very well.

      Teresa went down and got the house ready and, having filled up a lot of forms successfully, I was borne down by special ambulance.

      ‘What goes on here?’ I asked Teresa on the morning after my arrival.

      Teresa was well-informed. There were, she said, three separate worlds. There was the old fishing village, grouped round its harbour, with the tall slate-roofed houses rising up all round it, and the notices written in Flemish and French as well as English. Beyond that, sprawling out along the coast, was the modern tourist and residential excrescence. The large luxury hotels, thousands of small bungalows, masses of little boarding houses—all very busy and active in summer, quiet in winter. Thirdly, there was St Loo Castle, ruled over by the old dowager, Lady St Loo, a nucleus of yet another way of life with ramifications stretching up through winding lanes to houses tucked inconspicuously away in valleys beside old world churches. County, in fact, said Teresa.

      ‘And what are we?’ I asked.

      Teresa said we were ‘county’ too, because Polnorth House had belonged to her great-aunt Miss Amy Tregellis, and it was hers, Teresa’s, by inheritance and not by purchase, so that we belonged.

      ‘Even Robert?’ I asked. ‘In spite of his being a painter?’

      That, Teresa admitted, would take a little swallowing. There were too many painters at St Loo in the summer months.

      ‘But he’s my husband,’ said Teresa superbly, ‘and besides, his mother was a Bolduro from Bodmin way.’

      It was then that I invited Teresa to tell us what we were going to do in the new home—or rather what she was going to do. My role was clear. I was the looker-on.

      Teresa said she was going to participate in all the local goings-on.

      ‘Which are?’

      Teresa said she thought mainly politics and gardening, with a dash of Women’s Institutes and good causes such as Welcoming the Soldiers Home.

      ‘But principally politics,’ she said. ‘After all, a General Election will be on us any minute.’

      ‘Have you ever taken any interest in politics, Teresa?’

      ‘No, Hugh, I haven’t. It has always seemed to me unnecessary. I have confined myself to voting for the candidate who seems to me likely to do least harm.’

      ‘An admirable policy,’ I murmured.

      But now, Teresa said, she would do her best to take politics seriously. She would have, of course, to be a Conservative. Nobody who owned Polnorth House could be anything else, and the late Miss Amy Tregellis would turn in her grave if the niece to whom she had bequeathed her treasures was to vote Labour.

      ‘But if you believe Labour to be the better party?’

      ‘I don’t,’ said Teresa. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to choose between them.’

      ‘Nothing could be fairer than that,’ I said.

      When we had been settled in at Polnorth House a fortnight, Lady St Loo came to call upon us.

      She brought with her her sister, Lady Tressilian, her sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, and her grand-daughter, Isabella.

      After they had left, I said in a fascinated voice to Teresa that they couldn’t be real.

      They were, you see, so exactly right to have come out of St Loo Castle. They were pure fairy story. The Three Witches and the Enchanted Maiden.

      Adelaide St Loo was the widow of the seventh Baron. Her husband had been killed in the Boer War. Her two sons had been killed in the war of 1914–18. They left behind them no sons, but the younger left a daughter, Isabella, whose mother had died at her birth. The title passed to a cousin, then resident in New Zealand. The ninth Lord St Loo was only too pleased to rent the castle to the old dowager. Isabella was brought up there, watched over by her guardians, her grandmother and her two great-aunts. Lady St Loo’s widowed sister, Lady Tressilian, and her widowed sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, came to join her. They shared expenses and so made it possible for Isabella to be brought up in what the old ladies considered her rightful home. They were all over seventy, and had somewhat the appearance of three black crows. Lady St Loo had a vast bony face, with an eagle nose and a high forehead. Lady Tressilian was plump and had a large round face with little twinkling eyes. Mrs Bigham Charteris was lean and leathery. They achieved in their appearance a kind of Edwardian effect—as though time had stood still for them. They wore jewellery, rather dirty, indubitably real, pinned on them in unlikely places—not too much of it. It was usually in the form of crescents or horseshoes or stars.

      Such were the three old ladies of St Loo Castle. With them came Isabella—a very fair representative of an enchanted maiden. She was tall and thin, and her face was long and thin with a high forehead, and straight-falling ash-blonde hair. She was almost incredibly like a figure out of an early stained-glass window. She could not have been called actually pretty, nor attractive, but there was about her something that you might almost call beauty—only it was the beauty of a time long past—it was most definitely not at all the modern idea of beauty. There was no animation in her, no charm of colouring, no irregularity of feature. Her beauty was the severe beauty of good structure—good bone formation. She looked medieval, severe and austere. But her face was not characterless; it had what I can only describe as nobility.

      After I had said to Teresa that the old ladies weren’t real, I added that the girl wasn’t real either.

      ‘The princess imprisoned in the ruined castle?’ Teresa suggested.

      ‘Exactly. She ought to have come here on a milk-white steed and not in a very old Daimler.’ I added with curiosity, ‘I wonder what she thinks about.’

      For Isabella had said very little during the official visit. She had sat very upright, with a sweet rather faraway smile. She had responded politely to any conversational overtures made to her, but there had not been much need for her to sustain the conversation since her grandmother and aunts had monopolized most of the talk. I wondered if she had been bored to come, or interested in something new turning up in St Loo. Her life, I thought, must be rather dull.

      I asked curiously, ‘Didn’t she get called up at all during the war? Did she stay at home through it all?’

      ‘She’s only nineteen. She’s been driving for the Red Cross here since she left school.’

      ‘School?’ I was astonished. ‘Do you mean she’s been to school? Boarding school?’

      ‘Yes. St Ninian’s.’

      I was even more surprised. For St Ninian’s is an expensive and up-to-date school—not co-educational, or in any sense a crank school—but an establishment priding itself on its modern outlook. Not in any sense a fashionable finishing school.