46

A Priestess of Delphi

Mary Glasscastle would have stayed quietly in his memory’s cold storage if she had not been murdered. Charlton Mackrell almost said to himself ‘got herself murdered,’ but this would not have been just, and Charlton Mackrell specialized in being just—in seeing both sides of a question, giving the Devil his due, stating the other man’s case, allowing that to err is human, and never committing himself to any opinion till he had made quite sure there were no signs of error or prejudice about it. It was by this caution that he had attained such eminence, both as a judge of Shorthorn cattle and as a literary critic. It was this that made his damnations so damning and his approvals so icily divine. A man often spoken of as the nearest thing to Thomas Aquinas since the death of Thomas Aquinas could not allow himself, even privately, to exaggerate or misstate the facts. Mary Glasscastle had been murdered—very brutally, very regrettably, very conspicuously. And the murderer was still at large.

With wrongheaded zeal, the police had arrested a tramp so ignorant of the sumptuary laws of the Church of England that it was not until the case was being tried and the noose hanging over him that the witness to his alibi could be produced in court. The tramp had persisted in saying that on the night of the murder he helped a gentleman to push his 47car out of a ditch some hundred miles away from where the murder was committed, and that the gentleman wore old-fashioned boots with buttons. The gentleman was, in fact, a gaitered Dean, a humane and scholarly man, who, after inattentively reading about the case in The Times and deploring the spread of violence, happened to see the tramp’s photograph in a cheap newspaper which the fishmonger was wrapping round a purchase of shrimps for Melusine, the deanery cat. Recognizing the man who had pushed the car, the Dean realized his own part in the story and gave evidence. But the mischief was done; a murderer, an ignoramus, the police and the Dean had amongst them kindled a blaze of sensationalism, and there was not a daily paper that did not rake up the fact that, thirty years before, Mary Glasscastle had been ‘a celebrated poetess and a well-known figure in London’s Bohemian circles’.

Thirty years before, Charlton Mackrell was also writing poetry and figuring, though obscurely, in those circles. Mary Glasscastle had called him Stiggins, a dreadful Dickensian endearment, but this had not prevented him from becoming her lover—one among many—or from writing her a number of very long letters. He was already through with her, and only writing apologies for overlooking her invitations, when, because of some illness or other, she became stone-deaf. Too vain to be seen wearing a hearing aid, she had gone back to her native Midlands and set up house with an aunt. After the publication of a novel, which Charlton had an opportunity to review and chivalrously didn’t, nothing more was heard of her. 48Presumably, she and the aunt were badly off. When the murder happened, the aunt was in a public ward of a local hospital recovering from an operation, and Mary was alone in a bungalow called Buttercups, living in a manner that the press described as quiet and that evidence at the trial revealed as squalid. She was eating her supper in the kitchen when she was attacked, and a tin of pilchards was open on the table. Charlton did not know much about pilchards beyond their cultural association with Cornwall, but he knew that by the time they are tinned they are low. Besides eating pilchards, Mary was reading through old letters.