Annie Haynes Premium Collection – 8 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Annie Haynes
you that I am Garth Davenant.”
Charlotte did not seem in the faintest degree discomposed; her clear grey eyes met his frankly with just a touch of amusement in their glance.
“I guessed as much from the first,” she said equably, “and I am glad to tell you to your face, Mr. Davenant, how things look to me. I say to myself, times and again, that only some very strong motive could have taken Mary out of this house that night. How she could reconcile it to her duty to her patient to go at all I cannot imagine, but some one must have had a pretty strong influence over her—the motive must have been urgent to induce her to do so. Now from her letter, as well as from her mother, I know that she would do a good deal for Mr. Garth Davenant, and I am told that only the week before she came here she was engaged on some private business with Mr. Garth Davenant in Exeter. It seems to me that it is possible that that same business might require more attention later on, and that Mary might have been persuaded to go away to look after it, and kept away. That is the only other theory that I have been able to evolve.”
Garth had taken up his favourite position with his elbow against the mantelpiece, one hand shading his eyes, the other playing absently with his watch-chain. Was it Mavis’s fancy, she wondered, or did his face pale as Nurse Gidden spoke?
There was a long pause. At last Davenant raised his head and straightened himself.
“Would it be any use my giving my word of honour that I have not heard one word of Nurse Marston since she left this house, that my business—the subject of which I was talking to her in Exeter—is entirely at an end, and had absolutely no connection with her disappearance—could have had none?” he added vehemently.
Charlotte looked at him doubtfully.
“Well, I am glad to hear you say so, though I can’t say that I mean to place implicit reliance on what anyone else tells me,” she remarked frankly. “I intend to thrash matters out for myself. But—well, I don’t mind saying that I am glad I have seen you and spoken to you, Mr. Davenant.” She rose. “I wanted to ask Miss Hargreave if her ladyship would allow me to see Mary’s room, the one she was to have slept in.”
“Oh, certainly! I am sure she would not have the slightest objection,” Mavis said with a distinct touch of hauteur in her tone. She moved towards the bell, then, with her hand on it, paused. “I think I had better go with you myself. The servants seem afraid of opening the doors of those two rooms. In fact I hear that my maid will not go past them alone. I dare say you have heard that they say her ghost is seen? It has troubled us all very much lately.”
“Yes, I have heard that,” remarked Charlotte. “A pack of moonshine! As I say, if they have seen Mary at all they have seen her alive, not dead. But I expect they have fancied it. Her mother has dreams and thinks a lot of them, but, bless you, Miss Hargreave, I don’t put any faith in such things! However, I mean to find Mary!”
“I hope you will,” Mavis said as she led the way up the front stairs, the visitor’s keen eyes glancing round her as they went along and taking mental notes of all she saw. “But I am quite certain when the truth is known it will be found that neither Mr. Garth nor Hilda has anything to do with it.”
“Well, all persons have a right to their own opinions,” Miss Gidden said calmly. “When we do know I dare say it will not much matter what any of us have thought.”
Mavis made no further comment as they walked down the corridor. She opened the door of the larger room first.
“This is where the patient was—she was there some time after Nurse Marston went, but we had her moved out as soon as we possibly could.”
“Nothing could be found here, then, I expect,” was the comment of Miss Gidden as she looked round.
“This,” Mavis said as they came out and she unlocked the next door, “is Nurse Marston’s own room. All her things are still just as she left them. Her cloak and bonnet are just where every one who has been here believes she put them herself.”
Charlotte went up and laid her hand on them.
“Poor thing! Poor Mary! I wonder where she is now?” she said. Then a shudder shook her from head to foot and her face turned white.
Mavis sprang forward.
“Oh, what is it?”
The older woman’s eyes slowly filled with tears, and as the girl touched her she looked strangely pale and shaken.
“I—I do not know, but I feel afraid,” she confessed, looking round in a furtive, terrified fashion. “I am not in the least a nervous person usually, Miss Hargreave. I came here believing that all would come right in time, and that we should have Mary back, but when I touched her clothes the oddest feeling came over me—a sort of dread of something unutterably evil, and with it a sure foreboding that I shall never see Mary again. Some terrible fate has overtaken her. I—I feel as though for one moment I had stood in an atmosphere of awful wickedness,” with an irrepressible shudder.
Mavis looked bewildered and half frightened as she drew the other away gently.
“You are overwrought, over-excited, that must be it. I have been in the room ever so many times and touched her things often, and I never had the feelings you describe. But”—closing the door behind them—“I am sure you ought not to stay longer to-day. You can come again another time, you know. You will be only too welcome to any help we can give you. We should be delighted to have the mystery cleared up.”
Some of the colour was coming back to Charlotte’s face.
“I am ashamed of myself for having such fancies,” she said energetically, “and for giving way to them and talking about them to you. It was as clear a case of nerves as I ever saw. I can’t understand it, but I suppose the fact of the matter is that I have been overworked lately.”
“That was it, I expect,” Mavis agreed, glancing at her companion a little curiously as she came down the stairs. With her usually florid colour returning and her brisk, decided walk she scarcely looked a likely subject for a nervous attack, Mavis thought.
“Can you tell me which door she went out by?” Charlotte resumed abruptly.
Mavis shook her head.
“That is one of the points we have never been able to make out; but you shall hear. Jenkins!” she called out to the old butler, who was crossing the hall. “Nurse Gidden wants to ask you a question.”
Charlotte stepped forward.
“I should like to know how Nurse Marston went out of the house—I mean, by what door.”
The old man raised his hands.
“I wish I could tell you. All I know is that at sunset by her ladyship’s orders, ever since last autumn, I have locked all the doors except the front one, and kept the keys myself, and fastened the windows. They were all closed that night as usual.”
Charlotte looked amazed.
“But how did she go—”
Jenkins shook his head.
“I don’t know how. It’s one of the things I have never been able to fathom. Seeing that the young woman did not put on her outdoor things it didn’t look as if she meant to go away, and I have sometimes been tempted to think—saving your presence, Miss Mavis—as she never did go out of the house.”
“What do you mean? ‘‘Charlotte stared at him.
Jenkins passed his hand over his white hair.
“Sometimes when I’m by myself, I think as she is still in the Manor. There’s queer holes and hiding-places in these old buildings, and who knows but she may have tumbled into something that we none of us know of? There, I mustn’t talk to you young ladies like this—and Mr. Garth is coming out.”
“Will you come in and rest a while?” Mavis said, turning towards the morning-room.
Charlotte drew