The Monogram Murders(43)
The servant told Harriet Sippel that Patrick Ive was a swindler of the most cruel and sacrilegious kind: he was, she claimed, luring villagers to the vicarage late at night whenever his wife Frances was elsewhere helping parishioners, as she often was, and taking their money in exchange for passing on communications from their deceased loved ones—messages from the afterlife that these departed souls had entrusted to him, Patrick Ive, to deliver.
Harriet Sippel told anybody who would listen that Patrick was practicing his charlatan trickery upon several villagers, but this might have been her attempt to enlarge his wrongdoing in order to make a more shocking story. The servant girl insisted later that she had only ever mentioned one name to Harriet: that of Nancy Ducane.
Nancy was at that time not a famous portrait painter but an ordinary young woman. She had moved to Great Holling in 1910 with her husband, William, when he took a job as headmaster of the village school. William was much older than Nancy. She was eighteen when they married and he was almost fifty, and in 1912 he died of a respiratory illness.
According to the wicked rumors that Harriet Sippel began to circulate in the snow-beleaguered January of 1913, Nancy had been seen several times entering and leaving the vicarage at night or in the evening, always when it was dark, always looking furtive, and only on nights when Frances Ive wasn’t at home.
Anyone with a grain of sense would have doubted the story. It is surely impossible to observe a furtive expression, or indeed any expression, on a person’s face in the pitch-darkness. It would have been hard to ascertain the identity of a woman leaving the vicarage in the dead of night unless she had a particularly distinctive gait, and Nancy Ducane did not; indeed, it is more likely that whoever saw her on these several occasions followed her home and found out who she was that way.
It is easier to accept the account of a person more zealous than yourself than to challenge it, and that is what most people in Great Holling did. They were content to trust the rumor and to join Harriet in accusing Patrick Ive of blasphemy and extortion. Most believed (or, to avoid Harriet’s vitriolic scorn, pretended to believe) that Patrick Ive was secretly acting as a conduit for exchanges between the living and the souls of the dead, and taking substantial sums of money from gullible parishioners as recompense. It struck the villagers of Great Holling as eminently plausible that Nancy Ducane would be unable to resist if offered a means of receiving messages from her late husband, William, especially if the offer came from the vicar of the parish. And, yes, she might well pay handsomely for such an arrangement.
The villagers forgot that they knew, liked and trusted Patrick Ive. They ignored what they knew of his decency and kindness, and they disregarded Harriet Sippel’s relish for sniffing out sinners. They fell in with her campaign of spite because they were afraid to attract her wrath, but that was not the only thing that persuaded them. More influential still was the knowledge that Harriet had two substantial allies: Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury had lent their support to her cause.
Ida was known to be the most pious woman in Great Holling. Her faith never wavered, and she rarely opened her mouth to speak without quoting from the New Testament. She was admired and revered by all, even if she was not the sort of woman you would seek out if you wanted to have a riot of a time. She was far from being gay company, but she was the closest thing the village had to a saint all its own. And she was engaged to be married to Richard Negus, a lawyer who was said to have a brilliant mind.
Richard’s considerable intellect and air of quiet authority had earned him the respect of the whole village. He believed the lie when Harriet presented it to him because it tallied with the evidence of his own eyes. He too had seen Nancy Ducane—or at least a woman who might have been Nancy Ducane—leaving the vicarage in the middle of the night on more than one occasion when the vicar’s wife was known to be away visiting her father, or staying in the home of one of her parishioners.
Richard Negus believed the rumor, and so Ida Gransbury believed it too. She was shocked to her core to think that Patrick Ive, a man of the cloth, had been carrying on in such an unchristian fashion. She, Harriet and Richard made it their mission to remove Patrick Ive from his position as vicar of Great Holling, and to see him expelled from the Church. They demanded that he appear in public and admit to his sinful behavior. He declined to do so, since the rumors were untrue.
The villagers’ hatred of Patrick Ive soon expanded to include his wife, Frances, whom people said must have known about the heretical and fraudulent activities of her husband. Frances swore that she did not. At first she tried to say that Patrick would never do such a thing, but when person after person insisted that he had, she stopped saying anything at all.
Only two people in Great Holling declined to participate in the hounding of the Ives: Nancy Ducane (for obvious reasons, some said) and Dr. Ambrose Flowerday, who was particularly vociferous in his defense of Frances Ive. If Frances knew about the unsavory activities that were taking place at the vicarage, he argued, why did they only happen when she was elsewhere? Surely that suggested she was entirely innocent? It was Dr. Flowerday who pointed out that it is impossible to see a guilty expression on a person’s face in the pitch dark, Dr. Flowerday who declared that he intended to believe his friend Patrick Ive unless and until someone produced undeniable evidence of his wrongdoing, Dr. Flowerday who told Harriet Sippel (one day on the street, in front of several witnesses) that she had very likely packed more wickedness into the last half hour than Patrick Ive had committed in his entire life.