XXXIV

“Dead! Jane Groat dead?”

To Lady Mary the news came as a shock.

Jim, gaunt and hollow-eyed, sitting listlessly by the window of Mr. Salter’s office, nodded.

“The doctors think it was an overdose of morphia that killed her,” he said shortly.

Lady Mary was silent for a long while, then:

“I think perhaps now is a moment when I can tell you something about the Blue Hand,” she said.

“Will it assist us?” asked Jim, turning quickly.

She shook her head.

“I am afraid it will not, but this I must tell you. The person against whom the Blue Hand was directed was not Digby Groat, but his mother. I have made one grave mistake recently,” she said, “and it was to believe that Digby Groat was dominated by his mother. I was amazed to discover that so far from her dominating him, she was his slave, and the only explanation I can give for this extraordinary transition is Digby Groat’s discovery that his mother was a drug-taker. Once he was strong enough to keep the drug from her the positions were reversed. The story of the Blue Hand,” she said with her sad little smile, “is neither as fantastic nor as melodramatic as you might expect.”

There was a long silence which neither of the men broke.

“I was married at a very early age, as you know.” She nodded to Salter. “My father was a very poor nobleman with one daughter and no sons, and he found it not only difficult to keep up the mortgaged estates which he had inherited, but to make both ends meet even though he was living in the most modest way. Then he met Jonathan Danton’s father, and between the two they fixed up a marriage between myself and Jonathan. I never met him until a week before my wedding-day. He was a cold, hard man, very much like his father, just to a fault, proud and stiff-necked, and to his natural hardness of demeanour was added the fretfulness due to an affected heart, which eventually killed him.

“My married life was an unhappy one. The sympathy that I sought was denied me. With all his wealth he could have made me happy, but from the first he seemed to be suspicious of me, and I have often thought that he hated me because I was a member of a class which he professed to despise. When our daughter was born I imagined that there would be a change in his attitude, but, if anything, the change was for the worse.

“I had met his sister, Jane Groat, and knew, in a vague kind of way, that some scandal had attached to her name. Jonathan never discussed it, but his father, in his lifetime, loathed Jane and would not allow her to put her foot inside his house. Jonathan hadn’t the same prejudices. He knew nothing of her escapade with the Spaniard, Estremeda, and I only learnt of the circumstances by accident.

“Jane was a peculiar mixture. Some days she would be bright and vivacious, and some days she would be in the depths of gloom, and this used to puzzle me, until one day we were at tea together at our house in Park Lane. She had come in a state of nerves and irritability which distressed me. I thought that her little boy was giving her trouble, for I knew how difficult he was, and how his cruel ways, even at that tender age, annoyed her. I nearly said distressed her,” she smiled, “but Jane was never distressed at things like that. We were having a cup of tea when she put her hand in her bag and took out a small bottle filled with brown pellets.

“ ‘I really can’t wait any longer, Mary,’ she said, and swallowed one of the pills. I thought it was something for digestion, until I saw her eyes begin to brighten and her whole demeanour change, then I guessed the truth.

“ ‘You’re not taking drugs, are you, Jane?’ I asked.

“ ‘I’m taking a little morphine,’ she replied. ‘Don’t be shocked, Mary.” If you had my troubles, and a little devil of a boy to look after, as I have, you’d take drugs too!’

“But that was not her worst weakness, from my point of view. What that was I learnt after my husband sailed to America on business.

“Dorothy was then about seven or eight months old, a bonny, healthy, beautiful child, whom my husband adored in his cold, dour fashion. One morning Jane came into my room while I was dressing, and apologizing for her early arrival, asked me if I would go shopping with her. She was so cheerful and gay that I knew she had been swallowing some of those little pellets, and as I was at a loose end that morning I agreed. We went to several stores and finished up at Clayneys, the big emporium in Brompton Road. I noticed that Jane made very few purchases, but this didn’t strike me as being peculiar, because Jane was notoriously mean, and I don’t think she had a great deal of money either. I did not know Clayneys. I had never been to the shop before. This explanation is necessary in view of what followed. Suddenly, when we were passing through the silk department, Jane turned to me with a startled expression and said to me under her breath, ‘Put this somewhere.’

“Before I could expostulate, she had thrust something into the interior of my muff. It was a cold day and I was carrying one of those big pillow muffs which were so fashionable in that year. I had hardly done so before somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a respectable-looking man who said sharply, ‘I’ll trouble you to accompany me to the manager’s office.’

“I was dazed and bewildered, and the only thing I recollect was Jane whispering in my ear, ‘Don’t give your name.’ She apparently was suspect as well, for we were both taken to a large office, where an elderly man interviewed us. ‘What is your name?’ he asked. The first name I could think of was my maid, Madge Benson. Of course, I was half mad. I should have told them that I was Lady Mary Danton and should have betrayed Jane upon the spot. My muff was searched and inside was found a large square of silk, which was the article Jane had put into it.

“The elderly man retired with his companion to a corner of the room and I turned to Jane. ‘You must get me out of this; it is disgraceful of you, Jane. Whatever made you do it?’

“ ‘For God’s sake, don’t say a word,’ she whispered. ‘Whatever happens, I will take the responsibility. The magistrate⁠—’

“ ‘The magistrate?’ I said in horror. ‘I shall not go before a magistrate!’

“ ‘You must, you must; it would break Jonathan’s heart, and he would blame you if I came into court. Quick.’ She lowered her voice and began speaking rapidly. ‘I know the magistrate at Paddington and I will go to him and make a confession of the whole thing. When you come up tomorrow you will be discharged. Mary, you must do this for me, you must!’

“To cut a long story short, the manager came back and, summoning a policeman, gave me into custody. I neither denied my crime nor in any way implicated Jane. I found afterwards that she explained to the proprietor that she was a distant relation of mine and she had met me in the shop by accident. How can I depict the horror of that night spent in a police-court cell? In my folly I even thanked God that my name had not been given. The next morning I came before the magistrate, and did not doubt that Jane had kept her word. There was nobody in the court who knew me. I was brought up under the name of Madge Benson and the elderly man from Clayneys went into the witness-box and made his statement. He said that his firm had been losing considerable quantities through shoplifting, and that he had every reason to believe I was an old hand.

“Humiliating as this experience was, I did not for one moment doubt that the magistrate would find some excuse for me and discharge me. The shame of that moment as I stood there in the dock, with the curious crowd sneering at me! I cannot even speak of it today without my cheeks burning. The magistrate listened in silence, and presently he looked at me over his glasses and I waited.

“ ‘There has been too much of this sort of thing going on,’ said he, ‘and I am going to make an example of you. You will go to prison with hard labour for one month.’

“The court, the magistrate, the people, everything and everybody seemed to fade out, and when I came to myself I was sitting in a cell with the jailer’s wife forcing water between my teeth. Jane had betrayed me. She had lied when she said she would go to the magistrate, but her greatest crime had yet to be committed.

“I had been a fortnight in Holloway Gaol when she came to visit me. I was not a strong woman and they put me to work with several other prisoners in a shed where the prison authorities were making experiments with dyes. You probably don’t know much about prisons,” she said, “but in every county gaol through England they make an attempt to keep the prisoners occupied with some one trade. In Maidstone the printing is done for all the prisons in England⁠—I learnt a lot about things when I was inside Holloway! In Shepton Mallet the prisoners weave. In Exeter they make harness. In Manchester they weave cotton, and so on.

“The Government were thinking of making one of the prisons a dye-works. When I came to the little interview-room to see Jane Groat, I had forgotten the work that had stained both my hands, and it was not until I saw her starting at the hands gripping the bars that I realized that the prison had placed upon me a mark which only time would eradicate.

“ ‘May, look!’ she stammered. ‘Your hands are blue!’

“My hands were blue,” said Lady Mary bitterly. “The blue hand became the symbol of the injustice this woman had worked.

“I did not reproach her. I was too depressed, too broken to taunt her with her meanness and treachery. But she promised eagerly that she would tell my husband the truth, and told me that the baby was being taken care of, and that she had sent it with her own maid to Margate. She would have kept the baby at her own house, she said, and probably with truth, but she feared the people, seeing the baby, would wonder where I was. If the baby was out of town, I too might be out of town.

“And then occurred that terrible accident that sent, as I believed, my darling baby to a horrible death. Jane Groat saw the advantage which the death gave to her. She had discovered in some underhand fashion the terms of my husband’s will, terms which were unknown to me at the time. The moment Dorothy was gone she went to him with the story that I had been arrested and convicted for shoplifting, and that the baby, whom it was my business to guard, had been left to the neglectful care of a servant and was dead.

“The shock killed Jonathan. He was found dead in his study after his sister had left him. The day before I came out of prison I received a note from Jane telling me boldly what had happened. She made no attempt to break to me gently the news of my darling baby’s death. The whole letter was designed to produce on me the fatal effect that her news had produced on poor Jonathan. Happily I had some money and the property in the City, which my husband, in a moment of generosity, which I am sure he never ceased to regret, had given to me. At my father’s suggestion I turned this into a limited liability company, the shares of which were held, and are still held, by my father’s lawyer.

“Soon after my release my father inherited a considerable fortune, which on his death came to me. With that money I have searched the world for news of Dorothy, news which has always evaded me. The doubt in my mind as to whether Dorothy was dead or not concentrated on my mistrust of Jane. I believed, wrongly, as I discovered, that Jane knew my girlie was alive. The Blue Hand was designed to terrorize her into a confession. As it happened, it only terrorized the one person in the world I desired to meet⁠—my daughter!”

Salter had listened in silence to the recital of this strange story which Lady Mary had to tell.

“That clears up the last mystery,” he said.