Tom Brown's Body

'Yes, that is an old superstition. What made boys come here?'

'One sought his love and another his lust.'

'Would you call the latter a boy?'

'It is no matter,' said old Mrs Harries. 'He is dead now. Drowned in the pool of his own darkness.'

'I know whom you mean. How long did he rent your room? And how many women did he bring to it?'

The witch shook her head.

'There was a golden voice and a silver voice and a voice of lead,' she answered. 'And the leaden voice was the marrying voice. Ah, but she meant to have him!'

'And the golden voice?'

'I think she was beautiful. They laughed together. He brought the mask and the stilts for her to see.'

'How do you know?'

'They were happy. They called me in and told me all about it.'

'And the silver voice?'

'She was the wife of my dark gentleman. They hid from him when he came to consult me one evening.'

'What did he do with the head of the cock?'

'How should I know? The cock crew and the spirits glided back to their graves. Called by Hecate! Galled by Hecate!'

'Who stole the cock. Do you know?'

But the witch shied away from the subject of the cock. Gavin had already interviewed the angry farmer who had attempted to chastise Scrupe, and the man had grudgingly agreed that there was no evidence against the boy but that he had been a frequent and annoying visitor to the farmyard.

'My view is that Kay stole the cock to practise this black magic he was interested in,' Gavin had said to Mrs Bradley; but Mrs Bradley suspected that the actual theft had been carried out by a hireling.

*

'You are still with us, then?' Miss Loveday remarked, when next she encountered Mrs Bradley. 'I thought you had left for good just before the Christmas holiday.'

'I have been asked to treat Mr Poundbury, who seems to be indulging in a nervous breakdown,' replied Mrs Bradley, 'and I am still partly in attendance on Mrs Poundbury, whose recovery seems to be slow. I think she has had a bad shock.'

This leading gambit was pointedly ignored. 'She suffers from self-pity,' said Miss Loveday. 'And that is a bad sort of medicine. What she needs is an airing.'

'What kind of an airing?' Mrs Bradley enquired.

'Why, she needs to tell somebody how she came to be struck on the head. She knows very well who did it, and why,' said Miss Loveday positively. 'She should be made to unburden herself. Not for nothing was the Confessional invented. Leo the Isaurian knew that.'

'Did he?' said Mrs Bradley, somewhat puzzled by this last reference. 'We have tried to get from Mrs Poundbury how she came to meet with her accident, but she declares she does not know.'

'Shielding him, I suppose,' said Miss Loveday, with a virtuous, spinsterly snort. 'Thank heaven, there is only one man I'm foolish about, and that is my brother. Brothers, I find, are the only satisfactory members of their sex. They can drive the car, and climb step-ladders, and do not require one to waste time and strength in procreation.'

'The Poundburys have no children, though,' Mrs Bradley felt compelled to point out.

'Ah, but they cohabit,' proclaimed Miss Loveday. 'You can see it in their faces.'

This diverting and debatable assertion intrigued Mrs Bradley very much, but she wanted to get on with the business in hand; so she abandoned, although with great reluctance, the subject under discussion, and said that at any rate it had come to light that the mask used by the second idol had once been the property of Mr Conway, and that it had been made with the assistance of Mr Pearson.

'I don't like that man,' said Miss Loveday decidedly, referring, obviously, to Mr Pearson, as her next speech made clear. 'Widowers' Houses, you know. It would not surprise me if Mr Pearson knew a great deal more about Gerald Conway than he has told you. I suppose he mentioned that that flighty miss of his had entangled herself?'

'Flighty?' said Mrs Bradley. 'I thought that Miss Pearson was rather hard-headed and sensible.'

'Oh, well, so she is,' Miss Loveday agreed, 'but some of our boys broke bounds at the beginning of the term, and were caught by Gerald Conway, and were forgiven by him. There must have been conditions attached to that forgiveness, don't you think?'

'Which boys were those?' asked Mrs Bradley; but Miss Loveday shook her head.

'No, no. I can be a gentleman myself when the spirit moves,' she said. 'Bygones are bygones with me.'

'But how did you come to know anything about it?' Mrs Bradley persisted.

'Lucius Apuleius knew of more than one witch,' was Miss Loveday's smug but enlightening rejoinder. She contrived to make this statement sound like the utterance of a minor prophet. 'That's all I know and all I need to know. But in case my reply should seem to be discourteous, I will tell you, in your private ear, when wind of Gerald Conway's goings-on first came to my notice, I realized at once his necessity for a strategic base. A close study of his migratory habits led me in the right direction, and I was soon in possession of the information I sought.'

'You love knowledge for its own sake?' Mrs Bradley enquired. Miss Loveday nodded vigorously.

'Exactly,' she said. 'For its own sake, and, of course, for a sense of the power it gives me. I love power. I would like to have absolute power. I should not misuse it.'

'All power corrupts,' began Mrs Bradley.

'And absolute power corrupts absolutely,' concluded Miss Loveday. 'Yes, I know. But if one did not realize that one was corrupt? Do you think the jiggery-pokes, the place-men, the pocketers of boroughs, the financial jugglers, the tax-dodgers, the pimps, trulls, trollops, and macaronis, know that they are corrupt?'

'Were the macaronis corrupt? I should have thought they were chiefly silly and perhaps a little stupid and cruel,' said Mrs Bradley, ignoring the major issue although she realized its intrinsic importance.

'Perhaps I should have said murderers,' Miss Loveday good-temperedly responded. 'Where, in your galaxy of wrong-doing (which is, by interpretation, wrong-thinking), do you place murder, I wonder?'

'Below rape, and above grand larceny,' Mrs Bradley promptly replied. 'Where do you?'

'Real murder is the most terrible of crimes,' pronounced Miss Loveday. 'But there is such a thing as essential elimination.'

'Under which heading comes the death of Mr Conway?'

'Oh, surely, under neither. Why should anybody desire to cut off in the prime of life so comparatively innocuous a youth?' Miss Loveday demanded. 'And yet, did he not rush, as it were, upon self-elimination?'

'Well, I can think of several people who were glad to see the end of him,' said Mrs Bradley. 'Who do you think hit Mrs Poundbury over the head?'

'So we are back where we started,' said Miss Loveday, comfortably. 'Suppose you tell me the answer.'

'Mr Poundbury seems to have had but little opportunity; the murderer of Conway may have had the motive. Mrs Poundbury was carrying about with her a note her husband received the day before Conway's death. It has disappeared,' said Mrs Bradley, disobligingly.

'It contained a clue, you think, to the identity of the murderer?'

'Hardly that; but it might contain a clue to his typewriter.'

'The note was typewritten, then?'

'That much I could see, although I was not shown the contents, of course.'

'Foolish woman!' said Miss Loveday indignantly. 'I'll tell you what you ought to do. You ought to go and see Marion Pearson. She might know the kind of thing he used to write when he wished to make tryst with young women.'

'So she might,' Mrs Bradley agreed, without discussing Marion further.

'Talking of all that,' pursued Miss Loveday, suddenly tapping the window to attract the attention of a passing youth, 'it seems that because of their antics, both Kay and Semple have laid themselves open to being suspected of