Ill Met by Moonlight Read online

  ILL MET BY

  MOONLIGHT

  LESLIE FORD

  OBERON: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

  —A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.1. 60

  Ill Met by Moonlight

  Copyright © 1937, renewed 1965, by Zenith Brown.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’ve been trying to remember if there was anything different about April Harbor the Saturday Rosemary Bishop and her father came back for the first time in seven years. It was stiflingly hot, but it often is in August, especially when a thunderstorm is brewing over Chesapeake Bay. But whether there was any hint of the ghastly business that was to turn April Harbor inside out and scatter our private lives in a shower of printer’s ink over the front page of every newspaper in America—that’s what I’ve been trying to remember.

  I told Colonel Primrose not, the next morning, when he started asking me questions. In fact I was quite positive about it. But I think he sensed the reservations I was keeping carefully guarded in the back of my mind. He’d have been a fool if he hadn’t, and I never heard anyone call him a fool, except himself, and perhaps Elsie Carter. Elsie calls practically everybody a fool, so nobody bothers much about her.

  “Does everybody spend Saturday morning in the A & P, my dear Mrs. Latham?” he asked me.

  And of course they do. April Harbor is like any other village that’s been practically taken over by a group of city people who descend on it late in May when the schools are about to close and stay until school opens again in September. Some have been staying on till November, since 1929, and Bill and Louise Chetwynd even stayed a couple of winters, when their town place was being sold to pay up their margins. Everybody was hit, of course, because everybody virtually lives off stocks and bonds—the older people own them and the young crowd sell them. They sell other things too, mostly the sort of things everybody stopped buying immediately: architecture, divorces, ten-thousand-dollar portraits and unnecessary operations. Except Elsie Carter’s husband, who’s a glorified grocer of some sort and at April Harbor only because Elsie married him. Elsie’s father was my father’s law partner, and the two of them drew up the charter for the April Harbor Association thirty years ago when a group of young married people decided to buy three hundred acres of the Poplar Hill Estate and make a summer camp. They were mostly Baltimore and Washington and Philadelphia then. That was before the days of airplanes. Now most of the younger crowd live in New York and the men charter a plane to come down for week ends.

  Elsie Carter’s family lived at one end of the Estate and mine at the other, and Elsie and I got on just as well—which means no better—when she was thirteen and I was five as we do now that she’s forty-six and I’m thirty-eight. The fact that I’m a widow with two sons, and that Elsie might as well be one, with nothing to do but manage other people’s lives, doesn’t seem to have drawn us any closer. Possibly the fact that Ferney Carter never flies down for a week end except when he has to explain her constantly pointing out to me that if Dick hadn’t been in such a hurry one time, and had taken a train instead of a plane, I shouldn’t be a widow. Or perhaps I know it’s true and just can’t bear to be reminded of it so often. However, why I should object so much to Elsie’s minding other people’s business when the whole story of Jim Gould and his wife and Rosemary Bishop is a veritable epic of me as a busybody, I’m sure I don’t know. Except, I suppose, that in a way I wanted to keep April Harbor the romantic spot for my youngsters that it had been once for me, and Rosemary and Jim became sort of a test case.

  April Harbor is a tiny fishing village on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. In the winter it’s as dead as the people who sleep under the lichen-stained slabs and crooked headstones that cluster around the old ivy-colored red brick church at the top of its one street. Then from the end of May the street is alive with the summer colony. The quay at the bottom is a bright tangle of white boats and bronzed laughing people in all degrees of undress. April Harbor is a teeter-totter, balanced between Church Circle and Dock Street, winter and summer; dirty sails and oysters in winter and white sails and colonists in summer. All the shops along the sloping street, except Mr. Toplady’s, are boarded up in the winter. In the spring they’re painted and opened again, and alive with people, mostly laying in food for the influx of week-end husbands and guests from Washington and Baltimore.

  The morning of the Saturday when the Bishops were to come back wasn’t any different. Except for the fact that the Bishops were coming. They hadn’t been back to the Harbor since Chapin Bishop, Rosemary’s older brother, was drowned and Rosemary and her father had gone abroad.

  That, of course, was the thing about April Harbor that morning that I wanted to keep as quiet as I could, for a lot of reasons—even before the Bishops came; in fact, before anything was supposed to be known about their coming.

  I hadn’t, of course, counted on Elsie Carter’s extraordinary nose for news. Elsie is a large and efficient woman. She was standing in front of a bushel basket of cantaloupes, pressing them with her two thumbs and smelling them in the professional manner that when I try it always nets me perfectly green and tasteless melons. She caught sight of me in the long mildewed mirror over the bakery shelves and abandoned the cantaloupes immediately.

  “My dear!” she cried. “Isn’t it marvelous about Rosemary Bishop? I’ll bet you’re thrilled to death!”

  I’m afraid I looked blanker even than I’d intended to.

  “Oh, don’t try to pretend.—About her engagement to Paul Dikranov. He’s coming with them today. I expect she wants to show Jim Gould that she can marry a foreigner too if she wants to. I must say I’ve always thought that business about not coming back here on account of Chapin was a little farfetched.”

  She picked up a box of shiny blackberries and turned them out in her hand to see the bottom. I always spill them when I try it. “Still, as you say . . .”

  I’d said nothing, except from time to time for seven years that there was no use trying to make out that Chapin Bishop, aged twenty-five, had been murdered just because he’d been found one moonlight night face down in three feet of water at the cove. Everybody knew Chapin Bishop drank more than was good for any ten young men and had spent many a night lying face down somewhere or other where there’d just not happened to be any water.

  “It’ll be interesting to see how she and Sandra make out. Have they ever met?”

  I said I didn’t know. But I did. They’d never met. In a sense they never could meet, not on any common ground. Sandra Gould was Jim Gould’s wife, and Rosemary Bishop and Jim Gould had played together at April Harbor when they were babies, quarreled there when they were children, fallen in love there when they were adolescents, become engaged there when Rosemary was eighteen and Jim a midshipman home for a month’s leave, aged twenty-two. They hadn’t had their big quarrel there. That had been in China. It seemed horribly sardonic now that Rosemary Bishop should meet Jim Gould’s “foreign” wife at April Harbor.

  “I don’t really see what she wants to come here for,” Elsie Carter said.

  “It’s her home,” I said curtly, and was annoyed because I let Elsie Carter get under my skin the way I do.

  “They’ve been mighty anxious to sell for a long time.”

  She turned her attention to the problem of lettuce. I looked out into the street, filled with a gaily chattering crowd—on foot, in station wagons, in big cars and little ones, some properly dressed, a lot of girls and men in shorts, with dogs and children—all people I’d known all my life or all theirs. Except the girl now coming into the store.

  I’d
known Sandra Gould only four years, if indeed I could say I knew her at all. She was smiling, her fine white teeth gleaming between brilliant red lips slashed across a warm, incredibly petal-like face, with dark eyes, flashing now but always smoldering someway, and gorgeous smoky black hair, crowned now by an enormous dusty pink cartwheel of dull soft straw with a brown ribbon round the shallow crown. She had on a pink linen dress without much back. Her own was more than adequate. I could see Elsie Carter staring at it.

  I moved away quickly. I didn’t want to be a party to what I could see was bound to happen. It was cowardice, of course, but I simply didn’t want to know how Sandra Gould was going to take Rosemary’s return. Because I like Rosemary and I like Jim, and I’ve never particularly cared about Sandra. But there was never any getting away from the fact that she was bright.

  She came forward instantly now, like a lithe young panther about to confront a mouse. Elsie Carter did quake a bit.

  “Hello, Grace! Hello, Meeses Cahtair!”

  She shook a crimson-nailed forefinger at us. We both backed a little against a crate of spinach.

  “You were talking about me! Oh, I know, I read the face. You are all thinking ‘Poor Sandra, she’ll lose Jeem now that Rosemary Bishop is coming back!’ ”

  She tossed her head, clinging lightly to the edge of her hat with her fingers, and laughed happily.

  “No, no! You are all wrong. Look at my Jeem. Does he look so sad?”

  Dr. Potter, who was engaged in the business of buying a tin of prezels just behind Sandra, turned and gave me a sardonic half-smile as he caught my eye. We both followed Sandra’s finger pointing towards the street. Jim Gould, in an old gray sweat shirt and a pair of paint-spotted corduroy slacks, was out in the middle of the street with his brother-in-law Andy Thorp and a young chap from Wilmington refereeing a crap game for four minute colored boys. They all looked anything but sad.

  “I suppose Jim knows they’re coming?” Dr. Potter said. He looked at Sandra. There was no smile on his face. I remembered—but, thank Heaven, I never admitted it to Colonel Primrose, not even innocently, as I might so easily have done, and certainly not wittingly when I discovered it was decidedly significant—that he didn’t smile, and that Sandra clapped her hands with such a delighted little gesture that the contrast was quite marked.

  “Of course Jeem knows!” she cried. “I told heem myself—as soon as six, or”—she shrugged charmingly—“maybe thirteen, kind friends call me up thees morning to see eef I know!”

  One thing about Sandra Gould is that the more charming she wants to be the rottener her English gets. She can lambast the butcher like a native.

  “You are all ver’ ver’ weecked to poor Sandra,” she laughed mischievously, and added, suddenly very serious, her dark eyes flashing, “but I weel not let her ’ave my Jeemy. You weel see, Meeses Cahtair! In my country we do not let othair women take our husbands!”

  Since no one that I ever met knew just what Sandra’s country was, there was no use arguing the point. I extricated myself from the spinach and moved away. Adam Potter followed me.

  “Rather had us, what?” he remarked with a wry smile, as we came out together in the hot sun-baked street. “I only hope she’s right.”

  “She probably is,” I said. “After all, people don’t go on being in love seven years. Not these days. Anyway, it’s none of our business. Jim’s as decent as they come and so’s Rosemary.”

  Adam Potter looked at me a shade too steadily, I thought.

  “Meaning Sandra isn’t?”

  “Not at all. But I think that if anybody made a scene it wouldn’t be the other two.”

  “It’s too bad the child died,” he said slowly.

  “Not if—”

  “Nobody ever knew how true any of that was, Mrs. Latham,” he interrupted sharply, knowing the village gossip even better than I. “Anyway, she’s a damned attractive woman.”

  He turned on me with a sort of desiccated irascibility.

  “My dear man, have I said anything to the contrary?”

  He laughed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, pushing back his new wide-brimmed panama.

  “No, of course not, Grace. Anyway, I wish they weren’t coming back. It’s bound to make trouble.”

  “Not unless we all insist on it. They’ve never actually admitted their not coming back had anything to do with Rosemary and Jim.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s always been because Chapin was drowned here.”

  We were standing on the steps of Mr. Toplady’s general store in the shade of what the telephone company had left of the big sycamore near the old slave block. Both of us were quite unconsciously watching Jim Gould, bareheaded, sun-bronzed and healthy, there in the middle of the street blocking the road.

  “It’s been five years since they busted him out of the Navy,” Dr. Potter said after a moment. “Pretty hard medicine.—She’s not the same girl now, of course.”

  “They didn’t bust him out,” I said. “He resigned.”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “Worse. He doesn’t get any retired pay.”

  I followed his tired eyes up and across the sidewalk in front of the tea store. I remembered later how they’d lighted up a little, involuntarily. Sandra was coming out, barelegged in white sandals, moving lithe and sinuous, different, somehow, from the other women, so that you noticed the difference instantly.

  “Why, Jeem! Andy!” she cried in mock consternation. “Lucy Lee, make them stop! Please, Lucy Lee!”

  Lucy Lee is Andy Thorp’s wife and Jim Gould’s sister; hence, consequently, Sandra’s sister-in-law. More important at the moment, she is young Andy’s mother, and young Andy had just at that moment fallen off his tricycle at the curb and was yelling as if he had been killed. Lucy Lee was trying frantically to pick him up with one hand and hang onto the baby and her bundles with the other.

  One of the nice things about both Sandra and Andy is that it wouldn’t ever occur to either of them to help her. Lilies of the field both of them, each in his own fashion; Sandra the tiger, and Andy a lily only in that he toiled very little and did nothing so practical as spinning. The trouble with Andy is that he was brought up with too much money and never counted on his father’s marrying again.

  “Oh, do make them stop, Lucy Lee!” Sandra cried prettily. Lucy Lee threw her a look over her shoulder that was understandable, certainly, but that surprised me nevertheless.

  Most of us thought of Lucy Lee’s face as pretty without much in it except tired lines, these days. Nothing like the sudden pent-up anger—almost hate—that I saw there now, before Lucy Lee remembered herself and smiled.

  “Sorry, darling; you manage them,” she called, and went back into the little group of her own friends who’d come to her rescue.

  I glanced at Dr. Potter, expecting him to say what everybody at April Harbor had been saying all summer—“I wonder how long Lucy Lee and Andy will last.” But he wasn’t paying any attention to Lucy Lee. He was still watching Sandra and Jim and Andy. Lucy Lee’s problem, I suppose, was the kind of thing he sees every day, without the glamour of the girl with the dusty pink cartwheel hat and dusky eyes. I was annoyed. I suppose it was sort of an instinctive defending of my own kind against something from the outside, although it was absurd of me to identify it with Rosemary Bishop rather than Lucy Lee and little Andy. At that, our instincts are wiser than we are.

  “You know, Dr. Potter,” I said, “I think we’re all being pretty objectionable.”

  He looked a little surprised, and flushed almost as if I’d caught him being personally indiscreet. Which is quite unthinkable.

  “I mean, Jim doesn’t seem to be taking this very hard, and Rosemary’s been having a pretty exciting life in Washington and Europe all these years. I haven’t seen her, but I’ve seen pictures of her. She seems to be bearing up pretty well. After all, twenty-seven isn’t an appallingly great age. I mean, it isn’t as if she’d not married and was fifty, is it?
It’s quite conceivable that she just never met anyone she wanted to marry—until now.”

  “Now?”

  “She’s bringing her fiancé down. Didn’t you know?”

  Dr. Potter shook his head, definitely relieved, I thought.

  “So it seems to me that if we just act as if Sandra and Jim are well and truly married, and Jim’s forgot Rosemary, and Rosemary’s forgot Jim—except as sort of childhood sweethearts—and everybody’s forgot Chapin, and if we’d quit standing around like a lot of ghouls just out of the churchyard—well, it’d be a lot better.”

  He nodded. “You’re right,” he said soberly. “At least, I hope you are.—Well, I’ll be getting along. Drop in and see Maggie. She’ll want all the news.”

  I watched him cross the street, a lean stooped figure in a wrinkled seersucker suit, his bag of groceries in his hand, walking rather slower than he used to, as if he were tired too, like Lucy Lee. I wondered with a little shock just how long it had been since I’d dropped even the formality of inquiring about Maggie Potter’s health. It’s curious how callous one gets about people who are always sick with nothing much the matter with them. Maggie Potter hadn’t been out of the old red brick house on Church Circle for years—just moving from her chair by the front window to her bed and back again. Chapin Bishop’s funeral was her last public appearance. Not that anybody missed her. And Elsie Carter was the only person I ever heard suggest that the poor man kept her an invalid for purposes of his own. Just what they might be, besides the privilege of doing the marketing, not even Elsie could guess.

  I suppose I stood there grinning, because somebody behind my left shoulder said, “What’s so funny? I’d like a good laugh.”

  I started and turned to find Jim Gould beside me on Mr. Toplady’s steps, a bright new monkey wrench in one hand and a can of turpentine in the other. I had a horrible guilty feeling that he’d been there for some time, so that he must have heard what I’d said about him and Rosemary.