A maid at Wildshott, Sir Calvin Kennett’s estate, is murdered with the shotgun Kennett’s own son Hugo had carelessly left leaning against a tree when he stopped to chat with her earlier—is it an assignation? Neither of the men who imagine themselves her beaux—the valet of the Baron Le Sage, who has come to play chess with Sir Calvin, nor the butler Cleghorn—seems to have had a tryst with her. But they were both out and about and both are arrested on suspicion.
No one seems to know anything about the maid, Annie Evans, who had a written recommendation when she was hired two months previously, though the writer of the recommendation cannot be traced, and no one knows of any family of the murdered girl. Nor does anyone know anything about the background of Baron Le Sage, whom Sir Calvin met by chance abroad, as did Vivian Bickerdike, Hugo’s friend, who is surprised to run into the Baron again in London, and then to find they are both on their way to Wildshott by invitation.
Sergeant Ridgway, a Scotland Yard man closing up a recent case in the vicinity, accepts Sir Calvin’s invitation to take up this case. Ridgway and Bickerdike suspect that the girl may have been pregnant—the autopsy report at the inquest was very coy on this point—and that Hugo may have been responsible.
The Baron departs, leaving his valet to his fate, but Ridgway comes up with an alibi for the servant, witnesses who put the gunshot earlier, at a time only Hugo could have fired it, and Cleghorn is also released, while Hugo is arrested.
In Paris, the Baron learns information that enables him to work out the mystery. He takes no particular credit for this, claiming to have been by coincidence at the center of a web of clues. “The Key I found in a skeleton Key,” he says, “of the usual burglarious pattern,” underneath the murdered woman’s body.
Ridgway has a socialist bent, and thinks “if…things were properly distributed…there’d be no need perhaps for police-officers at all.” Imagination is another sort of key in the narrative. One chance remark is that “charity is as much a matter of imagination as of feeling.” A turn of phrase or even a whole sentence or paragraph occasionally reminds me of Meredith: “Grievance, mutely felt, had thrown her into another camp than that of her order,” the author says of Audrey, Sir Calvin’s daughter. The vocabulary is Victorian educated, with plenty of French and Latin words and phrases. I did a lot of dictionary work with this one. Hipped= depressed; Bashaw=Pasha or bigwig; Macuba snuff and Rapee (fr. “grated”) a coarse, pungent, dark snuff; jimp=slender; lenitive=laxative; à la sourdine=muted; distinctions are made among a bunch of words for a group of trees or shrubs: coppice=one that’s frequently cut to the ground for firewood; copse=a small group of trees; grove=such a group without underbrush such as an orchard; thicket=one with underbrush; spinney=copse planted as cover for game birds; dingle=a deep wooded valley or dell; list slipper=one made of cloth and usually worn for quiet; objurgation=scolding; wyvern=a winged two-legged dragon with a barbed tail; fanfaron=swagger; facula=a lighted or bright spot on surface; espalier=a fruit tree or ornamental shrub trained to grow along a wall or lattice; spraint=the dung of the otter; frit=frightened; boggle=bogey=specter or phantom.
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