Verity Sparks, Lost and Found Read online

  She lay back panting, and I hoped she would rest, but she started to speak again.

  “But then – well, Mr Alan was in love, it stuck out a mile he wasn’t after her money. They got engaged and she had no call to read his letters any more. I started to wonder what she was up to. It was wrong of me, I know it was wrong – but I thought I could get a bit more money out of her. I opened one of Mr Alan’s letters to his brother to see what was in it and it said that he suspected Mrs Honeydew of horrible crimes. He’d found something in an old newspaper. A nurse that killed her employer and got away with it. Even though the name were different, he was convinced it was Mrs Honeydew. He was worried about Mrs O’Day – he thought Mrs Honeydew was drugging her – and the poor lady had some bee in her bonnet about being haunted …”

  “So what did you do, Miriam?”

  “I did another wrong thing. I should have made sure that letter got to Mr Andrew, but I thought I could get some more money out of her. So I hid the pages of the letter separately in the house, where she couldn’t get them, and I told her I knew all about her and I wanted some more money.”

  “You blackmailed her?” Poor Miriam. It was never going to work, for Mrs Honeydew was far cleverer than she was.

  “Yes. I did. And she started giving me money, each week, and then you and Miss Deane and Poppy came along, and she was in and out the house and she found the first envelope. Then I couldn’t find the second one and I didn’t know who had it. She said she did. Then I suppose she felt she had to get rid of me.”

  “But how did she do it?”

  “Oh, she can make you do things. She made me stick my arm on the iron once, to teach me a lesson. She can make you sleepwalk and steal things and … and …”

  Mrs Honeydew, always smiling, so kind and serene … And all the time there was murder in her heart. How lucky for me that a gumtree broke my fall and ruined Mrs Honeydew’s plan.

  Miriam’s head suddenly lolled sideways. Her eyes looked sunken. Had she fainted? I knew I needed to get help, or Miriam would surely die.

  I looked around, trying to work out where we were. The Australian bush looked all the same to me. I was a city girl, after all. Yes, I thought, but how did you steer yourself around London all those years? Landmarks, that was how. There was always something to remember and recognise, a fountain or a church or a bridge. I looked around again, more carefully. Then I looked up. I could see the tree whose branch, sticking out at a right angle, had broken my fall, and the massive boulders all tumbled down the hillside like a child’s building blocks. At the top, there was a rocky ledge. Was that the lookout? Was it my landmark? If I was right, we weren’t far from Forest Edge.

  I didn’t think I could climb back up through the rocks. Perhaps if I walked a little way along, I’d find an easier path.

  “I’ll be back soon, Miriam,” I said. She heard me, because she murmured something. I gave her hand a gentle squeeze. Before I set off, I tied Miriam’s apron to a tree near to where she lay. There was no use me getting help if I couldn’t find her again.

  There was a narrow path, more like an animal track, leading along the base of the hillside. It was rough and rocky, edged with low prickly shrubs and dry grass. Clouds of brown and orange butterflies, disturbed by my passing, fluttered around me, and I would have been delighted by their beauty if my feet hadn’t hurt so much. They were so cut and grazed and bruised that every step was now agony. I gritted my teeth. I had to keep walking; Miriam’s life depended on me. My nightie snagged on a bush and ripped, and that gave me an idea. I tore another strip off the hem and wrapped it tightly around my right foot and ankle. Now my nightdress was now more like a smock, just reaching my knees and barely decent, but there was no time for modesty. I ripped off another strip and bound my other foot. I hobbled along for a few steps, and then froze. Was that a snake lying across my path? I laughed shakily when I realised it was only a stick. But it gave me another idea. I picked it up and used it to help me walk along. And if I should meet a snake, I could give it a whack too.

  I don’t know how long I toiled along that path, or how far I got. But the sun was high in the sky when I heard something apart from crows and wind and the rustling of creatures in the undergrowth. It was a voice. A child’s voice, chattering away to someone. It must be a man, for I heard a deeper tone in reply. A man and a child out for a walk.

  “Help!” I called. “I’m here. Help!”

  And around the bend came Poppy.

  “Blimey Joe and bend over backwards! He said yer was ’ere but I thought it was all rubbish.” She rushed up to me and nearly knocked me down with her hug. Then she turned and called out, “She’s ’ere!”

  There was no answer.

  “Hey! Hey, you! Where’ve yer gorn to?” She ran a little way back, but quickly returned. She shook her head. “Bloody hell, ’e’s gone and varnished.”

  “Vanished? Who?

  “The gent. The gent what led me ‘ere. ’E was tall and good-lookin’, wif yellow hair. Wearin’ a white shirt. A funny way o’ talkin’ – very la-di-da, ’e was, but nice.” Her sharp eyes turned to my bandages. “What yer done to yerself?”

  “I’ve cut my feet,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter. Miriam’s back there in the bush. She fell off the lookout onto some rocks, and I think she’s broken some bones.”

  “Looks like I’d better get movin’, eh? I’ll run back up an’ get the Bobbses an’ Miss Deane.”

  “I’ll go and wait with Miriam,” I said. “Be as quick as you can, Poppy.”

  “I’ll go like the bloomin’ wind,” she said. “An’ I’ll see if I can find that gent. ’Ow rude, not to say goodbye.” With a cheery wave of her hand she was gone.

  A gent. Tall and good-looking. Fair-haired. It was Alexander. She had described Alexander. Alexander had walked along the bush track with Poppy and led her to me. I’d heard them chatting. I’d heard his voice.

  I struggled back along the path. It wasn’t long until I saw Miriam’s white apron waving like a flag. I hadn’t got very far at all. Miriam was unconscious now, but I reached for her hand anyway.

  Her hand. I relived the instant where, in a flash, I’d had a vision of that limp white hand and known where it was. As I scrambled down the rocks, my gift had returned. Out of the blue, with no warning. But why? How? I didn’t know, just as I didn’t know why I’d lost it in the first place. Perhaps I’d never know. I remembered something Miss Lillingsworth once said to me; “Life is not a problem to be studied or solved, it’s a mystery to be lived.” Somehow, mysteriously, I’d been chosen to save Miriam’s life. And Alexander had helped me.

  I must have been very tired then, for I began to cry.

  30

  WHERE THERE’S LIFE, THERE’S HOPE

  I don’t know who told Mrs Honeydew that Miriam, with a broken leg and arm, had been brought by stretcher up from the gully underneath the lookout. Perhaps Ellen told the baker’s boy, or one of the men who helped Mr Bobbs might have gossiped with Kitty or Dorrie. Miriam was brought back to Forest Edge in a terrible state. Mrs Gravenstein, who was an experienced nurse, came to advise on her care, and the doctor from Woodend was called. By the time I’d explained the whole story to Miss Deane, Mrs Honeydew had gone.

  She’d taken Mrs O’Day’s diamond ring and the string of pearls, packed a small bag, walked down to Nettleton’s Livery Stables and asked to be driven to the station. From there she caught the train to Melbourne. After that, there was no more Bertha Honeydew. Perhaps there never had been.

  A message was sent to the police, but the nearest station was in the township of Gisborne – miles away – and it would probably be a few days till they turned up. However Andrew Ross, unannounced, arrived around midday.

  He was shocked at my appearance.

  “They’re only scratches and scrapes,” I told him. “The one to worry about is Miriam.”

  But she and I were forgotten as soon as he heard about Mrs Honeydew. For that was why he’d caught a train, on
a Saturday morning, to Mount Macedon. He knew who and what she was.

  “But I’m too late!” he moaned. He did a lot of moaning, mainly about what a fool he’d been and how could he have thought that Lavinia was a murderess. You know the sort of thing.

  “How could I have? I must have been mad to suspect her. Poor Lavinia! How she has suffered.” He ran his hands through his hair and made it stick up on end. “How could I have been such a–”

  “Yes, yes, you’ve been a fool,” said Miss Deane.

  A bloomin’ idiot, I added silently.

  “Why don’t we go over to Greystones after lunch, and you can tell her all about it,” said Miss Deane.

  Miss Deane, Poppy and I drove over to Greystones with Mr Ross. As soon as we got through the door, Toby rushed up to Poppy and dragged her off to play without so much as a “good day” to the rest of us. I could hear his little piping voice as they disappeared down the hall together.

  “That child needs a firm hand,” said Mr Ross.

  “He needs a father,” said Miss Deane.

  “Yes, he does.” Mr Ross stopped in his tracks and frowned, as if thinking hard.

  “Shall we go in?” said Miss Deane.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said. But he didn’t move. He put his hand to his forehead and sighed. “How can I face her? How can I–”

  I’d had more than enough of this malarkey. “For Gawd’s sake, just go in!” I said, opening the door and giving him a push so that he stumbled into the room.

  “Andrew!”

  Mrs O’Day was lying on that sofa again, and in a flash he’d pulled up a chair next to her and had hold of her hand.

  “Lavinia!”

  “It’s been such a shock,” she quavered. “So hard to believe. I trusted her.”

  Andrew brought her hand to his lips. “My dear, my dear,” he said, looking into her eyes. “How I wish I’d been here to look after you.”

  “Oh, Andrew …” She dissolved into tears and I handed her a clean handkerchief.

  There were more tears and kisses and handkerchiefs. Finally, we were able to get down to brass tacks, as the saying goes. Remember how Alan’s letter mentioned the reading room? It turned out that the reading room at the public library in Swanston Street was the key to the case.

  Andrew was still stewing over the missing letter. Despising the whole Confidential Inquiry Agency as a pack of incompetents, he decided to continue the investigation himself. He followed up the mention of the library, and luckily one of the librarians remembered that, besides medicine, Alan Ross had had a passion for criminology. He regularly read the library’s back copies of the London Police Gazette and Court Digest. Sitting in silence, Andrew had flicked through page after page after page. And at last he struck gold. He told us what he found in the Summer 1875 issue.

  “There was a report about a sensational trial. The accused was called Annie Cushing, but she was known as the Nasty Nightingale – that is a joke, you see,” he explained. Though Miss Deane and I were bright enough to understand, Mrs O’Day was clearly bewildered by almost everything. “A reference to Miss Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse. The long and short of it is that this Annie Cushing had been nurse companion to an elderly lady, who fell downstairs while sleepwalking and died. She left Annie a substantial legacy. Her nephew thought it was all very suspicious, especially since Annie’s former employer, an elderly gent, tripped into a fishpond and drowned. He too, left her money in his will.

  “Anyway, the prosecution couldn’t make it stick. She was acquitted and was believed to have left the country.”

  “So you think this Annie Cushing is my Mrs Honeydew?” said Mrs O’Day, looking faint again. I passed her the smelling salts.

  “I do. But there’s more. The Digest’s reporter uncovered some evidence that wasn’t presented at the trial. Under the name of Dorothy Carter, she was nurse companion to the writer Miss Harriet Motley.”

  “The famous spiritualist?” I asked. I’d heard of her from the Professor.

  “The very same. Dorothy was originally a maid, but old Miss Motley was keen on testing out her servants for psychic abilities, and Dorothy turned out to be a perfect subject for mesmerism.

  “Mesmerism – sometimes called hypnotism – is the faculty of putting someone into a trance. Now, in the early forties, everybody was mad about it. There were public displays and demonstrations, and Miss Motley herself wrote several short books. A Scottish magician called Archibald Spry was renowned for his sensational performances. He took only a few minutes with a susceptible subject. He simply asked his victim – I mean subject – to concentrate on his watch, which he swung slowly back and forth on its chain. Anyway, this Dorothy, once in a trance, could diagnose illnesses and prescribe treatments … and as Miss Motley was forever imagining herself to be ill, she became–”

  I finished the sentence for him. “Nurse companion,” I said. It all made perfect sense.

  “Of course. It would have been much better than scrubbing floors. Miss Motley was also fascinated by spirit photography. Anyway, it seems that Miss Motley and Dorothy had a falling out, and the girl was dismissed. That would have been around 1842.

  “Soon after that, Archibald Spry changed his act to include a young woman. She was blond, very pretty, and had remarkably big blue eyes. She was famous for her jewellery – gifts from her admirers – and always sapphires to match her eyes. Her stage name was Sapphira Swan.”

  I thought of Mrs Honeydew’s earrings and her bright blue eyes. I pictured Miriam putting her hand on the iron, me sleepwalking off the lookout, Alan falling into the lake. And poor Mrs O’Day becoming more and more helpless, dependent on Dr Hartmann’s mixture and her wicked nurse.

  “What an evil woman!” I burst out. “Oh, it’s such a pity we didn’t catch her.”

  “She might get caught yet,” said Andrew. “Don’t forget the jewels she took. The police will circulate a description and – who knows?” He reached across and clasped Lavinia’s hand. “You may get them back, after all.”

  “In the end, we can only guess at what happened,” I said. “I think that Mrs Honeydew – with the help of an obliging photographer – created that ‘spirit photograph’ which showed you with your two husbands. She convinced you that you must not marry again, didn’t she?”

  Mrs O’Day nodded, close to tears again. “I believed her every word.”

  “And she also intercepted the letter you sent to your father, and sent a false reply, saying he didn’t want to see you. Mr Ecclethorpe is desperate to see you. He loves you very much.”

  “I felt that I was being punished,” she sobbed. “That I didn’t deserve to be happy. And then when Alan came along …”

  “Even the thought of your ghostly husbands wasn’t enough to stop you, was it?” I said.

  She nodded. “I showed Alan the spirit photograph. He said it was a load of rubbish. He told me he could get a photographer to make one just like it …”

  “And he did, dear Lavinia,” said Mr Ross. “Only he never got to show it to you.”

  “It’s clear that Alan became suspicious of Mrs Honeydew,” I said. “He may even have threatened her. Certainly, he was on her trail – the letter that Miriam took proves it. Did she mesmerise him, and instruct him to walk into the lake, or did she drug him and give him a push? We’ll never know.

  “Next, Miss Deane, Poppy and I arrived. I think that at first, Mrs Honeydew thought Miss Deane was a threat. Remember that first afternoon tea, when you asked her all those questions?”

  Miss Deane gave a low sigh. She too had been deceived by Mrs Honeydew. “I think Bertha must have decided she needed to keep her eye on me, and what better way than to make me her friend? I don’t think she saw Verity as anything other than a child until much later. It was the letter. The letter to Andrew, containing envelope number 2.”

  “You see, I wrote and signed a covering note,” I said. “She must have realised then that I was a problem. And so … my accidents. The near
fall from the balcony, a dizzy spell in front of the train, a walk to the lookout. ‘She could make you do things,’ was what poor Miriam said.”

  “After those years with Archibald Spry, she was a very skilled mesmerist,” said Mr Ross.

  Her hand on mine, her honeyed voice, which sounded so full of love and care … Oh, the thought of it still made me shiver. How long had Mrs Honeydew – or whoever she was – been with Mrs O’Day? Three years? And all that time, only for the money. Mesmerist, thief, murderess – and an actress so convincing she fooled everyone. Even me. I suppose I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen through her.

  “I still can’t believe it …” murmured Mrs O’Day. “It’s horrible, just horrible! Oh!”

  “Can I get you anything, Mrs O’Day?” I asked. I didn’t want her getting all worked up again. “Some Dr Hartmann’s mixture perhaps?”

  “No,” she said with a shudder. “Dr Ramsay was very cross about that. It’s a sedative; he said it’s no wonder that I’m so weak and confused. That woman had me constantly in a daze. The doctor said I need good food, fresh air and exercise. He told me …” and here she gave a weak little smile, “… that I must get up off the sofa.”

  “Well, my dear – are you ready for your walk?” said Andrew. “Doctor’s orders, you know.”

  “Yes, Andrew,” said Mrs O’Day, obediently. “I will go upstairs to change.”

  Andrew watched her out of the room as if he could hardly bear to see her go.

  “What a fool I’ve been,” he said, for the fiftieth time.

  “They say we’re all fools in love,” said Miss Deane to me later.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Andrew Ross and Mrs O’Day – I wouldn’t be surprised if they make a match of it one day.”

  It would have been unsuitable if Andrew had stayed at Forest Edge, what with Miss Deane – an unmarried young lady – there. He talked about asking for a bed at the Gravensteins’, or even at the hotel. But Miss Deane, Poppy and I were ready to go. Lucifer was popped, swearing like a trooper, into his cage and we packed our things in a rush. There was an evening train to Melbourne, and we intended to be on it. Now that the case was solved, Andrew was no longer cross with Miss Deane and me. Indeed, he begged us to return to Mount Macedon as soon as we could, and to bring Poppy with us.