Strong Poison: Chapter 11 - Cremorna Garden's Vindictive Will and a Telltale Typewriter

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Chapter 11 Wimsey presented himself at Mr. Urquhart's house at nine o'clock the next morning and found that gentleman at breakfast.

Lord Peter Wimsey (0:09)

I thought I might catch you before you went down to the office, said his lordship apologetically.

Thanks awfully, I've had my morning nose-bag. No, really, thanks. I never drink before eleven. Bad for the inside.

Norman Urquhart (0:22)

Well, I've found the draft for you, said Mr. Urquhart pleasantly. You can cast your eye over it while I drink my coffee, if you'll excuse my going on.

It exposes the family skeleton a little, but it's all ancient history now.

SPEAKER_1 (0:38)

He fetched a sheet of typescript from a side table and handed it to Wimsey, who noticed mechanically that it had been typed on a Woodstock machine, with a chipped lowercase p and an a slightly out of alignment.

Norman Urquhart (0:50)

I'd better make quite clear the family connection of the Boyeses and the Urquhartses, he went on, returning to the breakfast table. So that you will understand the will. The common ancestor is old John Hubbard, a highly respectable banker at the beginning of the last century. He lived in Nottingham, and the bank, as usual in those days, was a private family concern. He had three daughters, Jane, Mary and Rosanna. He educated them well, and they ought to have been heiresses in a mild way. But the old boy made the usual mistakes, speculated unwisely, allowed his clients too much rope. The old story. The bank broke, and the daughters were left penniless. The eldest, Jane, married a man called Henry Brown. He was a schoolmaster and very poor, and quite repellently moral. They had one daughter, Julia, who eventually married a curate, the Reverend Arthur Boyes, and was the mother of Philip Boyes. The second daughter, Mary, did rather better financially, though socially she married beneath her. She accepted the hand of one Josiah Urquhart, who was engaged in the lace trade. This was a blow to the old people, but Josiah came originally of a fairly decent family, and was a most worthy person. So they made the best of it. Mary had a son, Charles Urquhart, who contrived to break away from the degrading associations of trade. He entered a solicitor's office, did well, and finally became a partner in the firm. He was my father, and I am his successor in the legal business.

The third daughter, Rosanna, was made of different stuff. She was very beautiful, a remarkably fine singer, a graceful dancer, and altogether a particularly attractive and spoilt young person. To the horror of her parents, she ran away and went on the stage. They erased her name from the family Bible. She determined to justify their worst suspicions. She became the spoilt darling of fashionable London. Under her stage name of Cremorna Garden, she went from one disreputable triumph to another.

And, mind you, she had brains. Nothing of the Nell Gwynn business about her. She was the take-it-and-keep-it sort. She took everything — money, jewels, apartments, mooblays, horses, carriages, all the rest of it — and turned it into good, consolidated funds. She was never prodigal of anything except her person, which she considered to be a sufficient return for all favours. And I dare say it was. I never saw her till she was an old woman, but before she had the stroke which destroyed her brain and body, she still kept the remains of remarkable beauty.

She was a shrewd old woman in her way, and grasping. She had those tight little hands, plump and narrow, that give nothing away except for cash down. You know the sort.

Well the long and the short of it was that the eldest sister, Jane, the one who married the schoolmaster, would have nothing to do with the family black sheep. She and her husband wrapped themselves up in their virtue and shuddered when they saw the disgraceful name of Cremorna Garden billed outside the Olympic or the Adelphi. They returned her letters unopened and forbade her the house, and the climax was reached when Henry Brown tried to have her turned out of the church on the occasion of his wife's funeral.

My grandparents were less straight-laced, they didn't call on her and didn't invite her, but they occasionally took a box for her performances, and they sent her a card for their son's wedding, and were polite in a distant kind of way. In consequence, she kept up a civil acquaintance with my father and eventually put her business into his hands.

He took the view that property was property, however required, and said that if a lawyer refused to handle dirty money, he would have to show half his clients the door.