The Monogram Murders(44)
Ambrose Flowerday did not make himself popular by taking this view, but he is one of those rare people who does not care what the world thinks of him. He defended Patrick Ive to the Church authorities and told them that, in his opinion, there was not a grain of truth in the rumors. He was dreadfully worried about Frances Ive, who by now was in a pitiful condition. She had stopped eating, hardly slept, and could not under any circumstances be persuaded to leave the vicarage. Patrick Ive was frantic. His position as vicar and his reputation no longer mattered to him, he said. His only wish was to restore his wife to good health.
Nancy Ducane, meanwhile, had said nothing at all, neither confirming nor denying the rumors. The more Harriet Sippel goaded her, the more determined she seemed to remain silent. Then one day, she changed her mind. She told Victor Meakin that she had something important to say to put a stop to the foolishness that had gone on for long enough. Victor Meakin chuckled, rubbed his hands together, and quietly slipped out of the back door of the King’s Head. Very shortly afterward, everybody in Great Holling knew that Nancy Ducane wished to make an announcement.
Patrick and Frances Ive were the only people in the village who did not appear in response to the summons. Everybody else—even the servant girl who had started the rumor and whom no one had seen for weeks—assembled at the King’s Head, eager for the next phase of the drama to begin.
After a brief, warm smile at Ambrose Flowerday, Nancy Ducane assumed a cool and forthright manner to address the crowd. She told them that the story about Patrick Ive taking her money in exchange for communications from her late husband was completely untrue. However, she said, not all of what was being said was a lie. She had, she admitted, visited Patrick Ive in the vicarage at night more than once when his wife was not present. She had done this because she and Patrick Ive were in love.
The villagers gasped in shock. Some started to whisper. Some people covered their mouths with their hands, or clutched the arm of whoever was next to them.
Nancy waited for the hubbub to subside before she continued. “We were wrong to meet in secret and put ourselves in temptation’s way,” she said, “but we could not stay apart. When we met at the vicarage, all we ever did was talk—about our feelings for one another, and how impossible they were. We would agree that we must never be alone together again, but then Frances would go somewhere and . . . well, the strength of our love was such that we could not resist.”
Someone shouted out, “All you did was talk, was it? My eye and Betty Martin!” Once again, Nancy assured the crowd that nothing of a physical nature had taken place between herself and Patrick Ive.
“I have now told you the truth,” she said. “It is a truth I would rather not have told, but it was the only way to put a stop to the vile lies. Those of you who know what it means to feel deep, all-consuming love for another person—you will find yourselves unable to condemn me and unable to condemn Patrick. Those with condemnation in your hearts—you are ignorant of love, and I pity you.”
Then Nancy looked straight at Harriet Sippel and said, “Harriet, I believe you did know true love once, but when you lost George, you chose to forget what you knew. You made an adversary of love and an ally of hate.”
As if determined to prove her right, Harriet Sippel rose to her feet and, after a swift dismissal of Nancy as a lying harlot, began to denounce Patrick Ive more vociferously than ever before: not only did he profit from selling fraudulent encounters with the souls of the dead, but he also consorted with women of loose morals while his wife was away. He was a heretic and an adulterer! He was even worse than she, Harriet, had suspected! It was an outrage, she said, that a man so steeped in sin should be allowed to call himself vicar of Great Holling.
Nancy Ducane left the King’s Head halfway through Harriet’s rousing speech, unable to bear it. A few seconds later, the Ives’ servant girl ran for the door, red-faced and in floods of tears.
Most of the villagers did not know what to think. They were confused by what they had heard. And then Ida Gransbury spoke up in support of Harriet. Though it was unclear what was rumor and what was true, she said, it was surely beyond doubt that Patrick Ive was a sinner of some description and that he could not be allowed to remain in his post as vicar of Great Holling.
Yes, agreed most of the villagers. Yes, that was true.
Richard Negus said nothing, even when called upon to speak by Ida, his fiancée. He told Dr. Ambrose Flowerday later that day that he was worried by the turn events had taken. “A sinner of some description,” while apparently good enough for Ida, was not, he said, good enough for him. He declared himself disgusted by Harriet Sippel’s opportunistic attempt to portray Patrick Ive as guilty twice over, of two sins instead of one. She had taken Nancy Ducane’s “not this but that” and turned it into “this and that” without evidence or justification.
Ida had used the words “beyond doubt” at the King’s Head; what now seemed to Richard Negus to be beyond doubt, he told Ambrose Flowerday, was that people (including himself, to his shame) had been telling lies about Patrick Ive. What if Nancy Ducane had also lied? What if her love for Patrick Ive was unrequited, and he had met her in secret at her insistence, only to try to explain to her that she must desist from harboring these feelings for him?
Dr. Flowerday agreed: no one knew for certain that Patrick Ive had done anything wrong, which had been his opinion of the matter from the start. He was the only person the Ives would admit to the vicarage, and on his next visit, he told Patrick what Nancy Ducane had said at the King’s Head. Patrick simply shook his head. He made no comment on the truth or falsehood of Nancy’s story. Frances Ive, meanwhile, was physically and mentally deteriorating.