Thirsty evil, p.1
Thirsty Evil, page 1
part #1 of Peter Chard Series
THIRSTY EVIL
Gerard Verner
© Gerard Verner 1945
Gerard Verner has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1945 by John Westhouse Ltd.
This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
PHASE ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PHASE TWO
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PHASE THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PHASE ONE
BUBBLING CAULDRON
Chapter 1
“Our natures do pursue, like rats that raven down their proper bane, a Thirsty Evil…”
William Shakespeare: “Measure for Measure”
Peter Chard stopped in the welcome shadow of a tree to mop his perspiring face. It was very hot. The scorched road, dipping steeply before him between parallel hedges, to join the narrow High Street, reflected the glare of the sun and made his eyes ache. “One ha’porth of shade to an intolerable deal of blazing sunshine,” he thought, and wished again that he had not promised his sister, Margaret, to attend the vicarage garden party that June afternoon. The green coolness and quiet of his own garden at the Gate House would have been so much more pleasant. But the Reverend Harold Banbury’s annual tea party was an event in the village of Bishop’s Thatcham, ranking in importance with the flower show and the cricket match with Little Pagton, and Margaret had been insistent.
“You needn’t stop,” she said firmly, when he offered the last of rather feeble excuses at luncheon. “But you must put in an appearance. After all, we live in the place and these things have to be done.”
To avoid further argument, Peter had weakly capitulated.
The clock in the tower of St. Giles’ Church, striking four, warned him that he must tarry no longer in the comforting oasis of shade, if he wished to reach the vicarage in reasonable time. He plunged resolutely into the burning desert of the dusty road. In a few seconds he was as hot as he had been before. Even the fresh young leaves of the hedges on either side of the road had lost their greenness and looked shrivelled and withered.
The High Street, when he eventually reached it, was devoid of life except for a large tabby cat that was cleaning itself on the doorstep of a cottage. It looked up from its ablutions to stare at him with surprised resentment as he went by.
It was early closing day and the half-dozen, narrow-fronted, and pokey little shops that supplied Bishop’s Thatcham with its sustenance, were all closely shuttered. Peter walked up the length of the short street without seeing anyone, and concluded that such of the inhabitants as had not gone to the vicarage were sensibly sheltering from the abnormal heat in their own homes.
He passed the comparatively new building of the United Capital Bank at the corner and came out onto the Green. The grass felt soft and soothing under his feet after the blistering pavement. He would have been grateful for the smallest breeze, but there was none.
By the shallow pond four small and scantily clad children were playing rather lackadaisically with a homemade boat, pushing it from one to the other with sticks, for there was no wind to catch the tiny paper sail. Two of the children had taken off their shoes and were paddling in the muddy water, happily oblivious of the mess they were getting in. Peter crossed the oblong stretch of grass at a tangent, looked with longing eyes at the closed doors of ‘The Mitre’ that conjured up tantalising visions of tankards of cool foaming ale, and turned into Church Lane. Before him, towering up into the molten arc of the sky, was the Church of St. Giles, the one notable feature which Bishop’s Thatcham had to offer, a lovely example of early English architecture with some fine old stained glass in the West Window and a beautifully carved chancel screen. The gate to the vicarage was only a short distance along on the right, set in a high hedge of ancient yew, and when he reached it he could hear the faint chatter of feminine voices, and the rattle of tea cups. Pausing for a moment to wipe his damp face, Peter pushed open the gate and went in.
The Vicarage of Bishop’s Thatcham was a very old house, and its garden had matured and mellowed through the years until it had reached that state of perfection which only time and careful tending can achieve. The emerald green lawns were thick and soft to the foot, and there were roses everywhere — great masses of colour that flung waves of scent into the airless afternoon.
Peter walked slowly up a smooth gravel path and through an arch of clipped yew. Beyond, under the widespread branches of a magnificent cedar, detached groups of people were sitting or standing about, sipping tea and eating sandwiches and cakes served by a small servant from an extemporary buffet presided over by the vicar’s wife, Mrs Banbury.
Everybody was talking at once, a ceaseless, unintelligible twittering, like a gigantic aviary, punctuated at intervals by little giggles of laughter. All the colours of the spectrum were represented in the dresses of the women, and against the roses they looked harsh and garish, as if an artist had accidentally spilled crude pigment on a lovely painting.
Peter looked about for Margaret, and presently saw her sitting between little Trimble, the bank manager, and the angular Miss Sweetwater, the postmistress. He was going over to her when the Reverend Harold Banbury caught sight of him, and bore down like a clerical grey galleon in full sail.
“My de-ah Chard — how kind of you to come to our little gathering,” he said, and extended a plump white hand which he allowed to rest limply in Peter’s for one brief moment. “What delightful weather, is it not?”
Peter remarked that it was certainly very hot. He detested the Reverend Harold Banbury; his smooth white flabby face, his carefully waved black hair, which he combed artistically to try and disguise the tonsure-like baldness on the crown of his head, and everything about him. He was so like a large fat slug. “And how,” went on the vicar, beaming benignly through his rimless pince-nez with a faintly condescending expression, “is the new — ah — work progressing?”
Nothing annoyed Peter so much as having his novels referred to as ‘works’. He was a professional writer who wrote for a living and had achieved a certain amount of success, but the suggestion conveyed that he was engaged on some monumental tome that posterity awaited with bated breath infuriated him. He answered, as politely as he could, that the new book was “coming along fairly well”.
“Splendid — splendid!” said the Reverend Harold Banbury, ecstatically. “A great gift, my de-ah fellow. The joy that only the creator knows, eh? I used to dabble a trifle myself — an essay or two, a few verses… small things but mine own… But I’m neglecting my duty as a host. You would like some tea, of course? There is a vacant chair over there by Miss Miggle and Mrs Rushingham-Brown. I will send Susan over to you… Yes, my dear, what is it?” Olive Banbury, a lumpy girl of nineteen, who was almost a replica of her father, had come up breathlessly and touched him on the arm.
“Mr Spodkin and Miss Pettal want to play tennis,” she said, adenoidally, “and we can’t find the balls… How do you do, Mr Chard?”
Peter bowed, wondering, as he always did whenever he saw her, why she didn’t have the large and unsightly mole removed from the corner of her mouth.
“Ah, yes, the balls?” The vicar frowned. “Dear me, now, let me see… The potting shed, I think…”
“I’ve looked there,” said his daughter.
“Then they must be in the cupboard in the hall,” declared Mr Banbury, triumphantly. “Go and look there, my dear… You will excuse me, Mr Chard? I think — ah — my wife wants me…”
He sailed serenely away towards the improvised buffet and Mrs Banbury, who was beckoning peremptorily.
“It’s always the same,” grumbled Olive, scowling at Peter as though it were his fault. “Every year. Nobody ever thinks of looking for the balls until somebody wants to play, and then they can never be found. Why anyone wants to play tennis in this heat I don’t know.”
She hurried away, still grumbling, towards the house, an ungainly figure in a shapeless white muslin frock. The way she walked reminded Peter of an overgrown duck. He strolled across to where Margaret was sitting.
“So you have got here?” she greeted him, raising her pencilled eyebrows quizzically. “You look hot.”
“I am hot,” said Peter. “Everything is sticking to me most unpleasantly… How do you do, Miss Sweetwater?” The angular postmistress, uncertain whether she ought to laugh or not, compromised with a genteel simper, and answered him that she was “very well, indeed”.
“And you, Trimble?” The little man in the shabby grey flannel suit on the other side of Margaret, blinked up nervously with brown monkey-like eyes.
“I’m… I’m quite well, thank you, Ch-Chard,” he stammered. “Qui-quite well.” He didn’t look it. His small wrinkled face looked harassed and oddly pathetic. Peter always felt sorry for Horace Trimble. He seemed to be perpetually apologising for his existence — a man whose personality, obviously never very strong, had been sucked completely away by the woman he had married. It was as though the sleek, well-made Mrs Trimble had devoured her husband at a gulp and regurgitated nothing but the skin and bone. He worked slavishly to scrape together sufficient money to keep his selfish wife and extravagant daughter in the way they considered necessary to their position, putting in such spare time as his duties at the bank allowed, by acting as accountant for the village tradespeople, Doctor Pratt, and any others who were willing to hire his services, and barely receiving civility from his family in return.
He both worshipped and feared his handsome, flamboyant wife and affected daughter and meekly accepted their doormat treatment as a matter of course, lacking the backbone to assert himself. “If you want tea,” said Margaret, leaning lazily back in the deck chair and stretching out her long, nicely moulded legs restfully, to the obvious disapproval of Miss Sweetwater whose own skirt reached sedately to her bony ankles, “you’d better grab Susan now before it’s all gone.”
Peter looked round, following the direction of her eyes, and saw that the small maid, hot and flustered, and staggering under a large tray filled with sandwiches and cups of tea, was passing close behind him.
“Do you want anything more?” he asked, including Miss Sweetwater and Trimble in his question. They shook their heads, and he helped himself to a sandwich and a cup of weak tea. Horace Trimble struggled to his feet.
“H-have my chair, Ch-Chard,” he invited, hesitantly.
“No, no,” said Peter, “stay where you are…”
“Oh… really… please,” said the little man, with agitated politeness. “It’s quite all right…” He blinked uncertainly, and ambled away towards a little cluster of people comprising of Mr Boggs, the butcher, Miss Sligh, who kept the fancy shop, Mr Billing, the verger, and Mr and Mrs Sliptoe, of no particular occupation, who lived in a cottage facing the Green.
“He looks more worried every time you see him, poor little man,” remarked Margaret, as Peter sat down beside her with a sigh of relief, and Miss Sweetwater sniffed.
“It is not surprising with all the responsibility he has,” she said, glancing with compressed lips to where Mrs Trimble and her daughter, Gloria, were standing talking to Alec Pinpenny, the curate. “That is another new dress the girl has on.” There was a spicing of envy mixed with her disapproval. Although Gloria Trimble looked like something that had stepped out of the advertisement pages of Vogue, and altogether unsuitable to her surroundings, Peter thought that she was a distinct improvement on the bony and dowdy Miss Sweetwater.
“That dress must have cost a good deal of money, too,” Margaret murmured. “It’s a model.”
“I think it is disgraceful,” snapped Miss Sweetwater, getting up quickly and smoothing down her faded lavender skirt. “Mr Trimble should know better than to pander to such unchristian vanity.”
She walked away rather crossly, and Peter turned to his sister with a wry grimace.
“Sour grapes?” he suggested,
“Not entirely,” she said. “I think she’s genuinely annoyed that poor little Mr Trimble is so put upon. I rather agree with her…”
“So do I.” Peter drank his tea and set down the empty cup on the grass. “So does everyone in the village. But it’s his affair, isn’t it? They’re his wife and daughter.”
“It may have been his affair once,” said Margaret, “but I doubt if it is any longer. He hasn’t any mind of his own left. He just does as he’s told. It’s rather sad really…” She got up with an easy graceful, movement. “I’m going to powder my nose,’ she said. “I shan’t be long.”
“Don’t worry about me,” murmured Peter, with his mouth full of cress sandwich. “The proper study of mankind is man — or woman as the case may be. I’ll fill in the time by doing a little studying.” He finished his sandwich, and lighting a cigarette, let his eyes rove lazily from group to group. People interested him, and the people of Bishop’s Thatcham in particular. During the six years he had lived among them he had had ample time and opportunity to catalogue their individual characteristics and had come to the conclusion that they were a queer lot on the whole, seething with inhibitions and repressions and odd idiosyncrasies. A bigoted and uncharitable bunch, always watching their neighbours and seizing avidly any tit-bits of scandal that their watchfulness brought to light — so busily engaged with the possible delinquencies of others that they had no time to examine their own. He wondered, speculatively, what they were all talking about…
*
“You don’t really mean it,” said Miss Miggle, and made a clucking sound with the tip of her tongue against her badly-fitting false teeth.
“I certainly do mean it,” asserted Mrs Rushingham-Brown in her deep, rather masculine voice and nodding vigorously. “Two nights ago, along by the wall at the end of Church Lane…”
“I know just where you mean,” broke in Miss Miggle, eagerly, her faded blue eyes almost popping out of their sockets. “Where the bushes grow…”
“I don’t mean anything of the sort,” snapped Mrs Rushingham-Brown, crossly. “If you would listen instead of interrupting, it would be much better. It was further along.”
Miss Miggle, a little chastened by the rebuke, clucked again and waited in excited anticipation.
“They were standing there as bold as brass,” went on that formidable lady, strong disapproval in every line of her heavy, forbidding, face. “Clasped in each other’s arms, and at eleven o’clock at night, as brazen as you please.”
Miss Miggle was so horrified at the enormity of this offence that her teeth dropped and for a moment she was unable to speak.
“How really very dreadful!” she gasped, when she had diplomatically managed to push them back into place. “What would the dear vicar say if he knew?”
Mrs Rushingham-Brown sat back in her chair and clasped her hands in her capacious lap.
“I shall make it my business to see that he does know,” she announced, grimly. “The gal ought to be discharged. She had no right at all to be out at that hour, I’m sure. Much less behaving in that disgraceful manner with the milkman.”
“Were they — kissing?” inquired Miss Miggle, leaning forward with parted lips and wide eyes.
“I should imagine so,” said Mrs Rushingham-Brown, brushing away some crumbs which had lodged on her ample bosom. “I was in my car and therefore unable to see exactly what they were doing. The point is that she was in his arms, and that is sufficient.”
Miss Miggle expelled her pent up breath slowly.
“How — how very disgusting,” she said, shaking her narrow head. “I really think the dear vicar should be told.”
“He will be,” said Mrs Rushingham-Brown, with great determination. “That sort of thing must be put a stop to…”
*
“She came into the shop and grumbled about the meat,” said Mr Boggs. “In a rare temper she was, too. Said it was tough an’ too fat, an’ it was the nicest bit o’ lamb you ever did see. There’s no pleasin’ some people.”
He turned a red and shining face, not unlike one of his own undercuts, to where Mrs Rushingham-Brown sat.
“I had some trouble with her too, the week before last,” said Miss Sligh, a thin little woman with grey hair dragged into a bun at the nape of her neck, and a high piping voice.
“Over some cotton it was. I hadn’t the exact shade she wanted and she was really most rude.”
“Too much money an’ not enough to do,” said Mr Boggs, shaking his head. “That’s what’s the matter with ’er, if you ask me.”
“She makes plenty to do,” put in Mrs Sliptoe, maliciously. “Always poking her nose into other people’s business instead of minding her own…”
“Now, now, Mary,” broke in her husband, giving her a little warning pat on the arm. “That’ll do.”
“Well, it’s true.” She looked up at him, and her still pretty face relaxed into a smile. “You don’t like to hear, or say, anything bad about anybody, do you, Bert?”
He shrugged his shoulders in slight embarrassment.
“We’ve all got our faults,” he said, “some more than others.”
“That’s right, Mr Sliptoe,” remarked the large and florid Mr Billing. He spoke with great deliberation as though his opinions were the outcome of much thought and were worth listening to. “Mrs Rushingham-Brown ’as done a lot of good for the Church. No one can’t deny that. Very generous she’s been in one way or another.”
