The Silver Shawl (5 page)

Mrs. Meade turned away from contemplating it.
“I would like your advice on a pattern, Miss Lewis,” she said. “You
see, the daughter of a dear friend of mine is going to be married
soon, and I want to send her a gift. She will have so many nice
things, so I would like it to be—not something large, but special.
I was thinking of—a shawl. Something like that lovely embroidered
brocade shawl of yours would be just perfect. May I look at
it?”

“Yes, of course,” said Diana Lewis, after
what might have been just a second’s pause. “I can make up a
pattern for you to follow, Mrs. Meade. It’s very simple,
really—”

“Oh, but I would like to look at your shawl
before I begin—the embroidery on the edges is so lovely, I would
like to see what stitches you used. It won’t take a moment.” She
smiled in such a happy expectant way that Diana Lewis could not
help smiling slightly herself, though she did not seem wholly
pleased. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Meade, but—I don’t believe I have it here
this morning.”

Mrs. Meade’s eyes grew innocently wide, in
what a sharp observer might have recognized with amusement as an
excellent imitation of Mrs. Henney. “Why, I don’t believe I have
ever seen you without it in the summertime. You wear it here to
your work every day, don’t you?”

“Really, this once I must have forgotten it.
I’ve left it at home. But that is no difficulty; I can make up the
pattern for you when I go home and send it to you in a few
days.”

“But there’s no time like the present!” said
Mrs. Meade brightly. A happy thought seemed to strike her, and she
fairly clasped her hands with pleasure. “Why not let me go to your
boarding-house and fetch it for you now? I have errands to run,
and—”

“No—Mrs. Meade, please don’t trouble
yourself,” said Diana Lewis. She twisted her thin hands tighter
together.

“Oh, it’s no trouble! I—”

“Mrs. Meade, please—I would much rather you
did not.”

She stopped, conscious of her words having
fallen rather loud and abruptly in the stillness that followed
them.

Mrs. Meade gave her a penetrating look. All
her affected lightness of manner had gone. “Because it is not at
your boarding-house, after all—is it, Miss Lewis?’

“I beg your pardon?” said Diana.

Mrs. Meade’s voice was still quiet, but
inflexible. “Because you do not have the shawl. You gave it to
Charity…didn’t you?”

There was another second’s pause, distinct
this time. “I—don’t understand you,” said Diana Lewis.

“Oh, you do,” Mrs. Meade assured her.

Before Diana Lewis could summon any words to
answer, there came a confused noise of feet on the stairs, and then
a loud knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Mrs. Meade in a clear
voice.

It was Sheriff Royal who entered, with a
harassed expression that declared belligerently to all the world
that he was there on compulsion. “What’s going on?” he demanded
with no attempt at ceremony.

“Well! I’m glad you decided to come, Andrew.
I rather thought you’d object. And Mr. Edgerton,” added Mrs. Meade,
looking past him to where the detective stood in the doorway, with
Randall Morris behind him.

Since the sheriff seemed to have been struck
mute by Mrs. Meade’s salutation, she added simply, with a gesture
toward the young lady in question, “I should like for you to meet
Miss Mary Taylor.”

Diana Lewis’ face had turned a duller shade
of white, but she did not move or speak. She looked at Edgerton as
he stepped into the room, surveying her with the amazement that all
Mrs. Meade’s actions seemed to call up in him.

“Miss Lewis, the seamstress?—Are you…are you
very sure, Mrs. Meade?” he managed to say, being, for once in his
successful career, unable to think of anything more to the
point.

“Oh, yes. Very sure. It was the shawl, you
see,” Mrs. Meade explained.

“Yes—Randall told me about it. That is, he
said something about your finding a shawl, but I’m afraid I don’t
quite understand the significance of it.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Meade, “to begin with, we
have all been relying a good deal on Miss Lewis’ statement, haven’t
we? That Charity never came to her shop that night. Really Miss
Lewis told a simple untruth: Charity
did
come here that
night as usual. You see, if her shawl were to be found in Miss
Lewis’ possession that would immediately give the lie to her story.
So she had to get rid of it. Charity’s little purse and its
contents were small enough to be destroyed or scattered, perhaps,
but she could not dispose of the shawl that quickly. She was
uneasy, perhaps; worrying that at length it might occur to someone
to question the truth of her story and examine her shop or
lodgings. So she took something of a risk, and returned the shawl
to Charity’s room at Mrs. Henney’s.”

“How?” blurted Andrew Royal very loudly, and
then immediately looked as though he would have liked to disappear
on the spot.

“She had the keys to the house and room from
Charity’s purse. All she had to do was go quietly enough not to
wake the household, and not show a light. That was what attracted
my notice to the hatbox. It was several inches to the right of
where it had been when I saw it yesterday morning, and half on top
of a flat parcel in the bottom of the wardrobe. Mrs. Henney said
that Mr. Edgerton put everything back the way he found it—and I
quite believed you would be so precise, Mr. Edgerton—so that meant
someone else had moved it. Mrs. Henney said she had not. I thought
perhaps someone could have taken it out and put it back in the
dark, not quite able to see where they were placing it.”

“I suppose the fault lies with me,” said
Edgerton, smiling a little, “for not recognizing the oddity of a
shawl kept in a hatbox in the first place.”

“Of course not,” returned Mrs. Meade. “Women
keep all manner of things in odd places. I once knew a young lady
who kept novels and sweetmeats in a hatbox, and got away with it,
too—most likely because she shared them with her maid. But what you
didn’t see was the significance of the shawl itself—it was
green.”

“Green?”

“Yes. Mrs. Henney in her perturbation didn’t
notice when she saw you handling it, but when I showed her later
she immediately recognized it, as I myself did, as the shawl
Charity was wearing the day she disappeared. But it wasn’t the one
she was wearing when she was seen on Main Street that night! Old
Mr. Hawkins was right—he really did see a ‘silver’ or ‘shimmery’
shawl. That sounded odd to me when I first heard about it, but I
didn’t understand it then. But when I found the green one in the
hatbox and realized why it was there, I remembered a certain white
brocade shawl immediately recognizable as belonging to Miss Diana
Lewis. A green knitted shawl isn’t shimmery. What Mr. Hawkins saw
was white silk brocade, shining in the light from some nearby
window.”

Randall Morris broke in: “But Mrs.
Meade—
where is Charity?
”

“She
was
kidnapped,” said Mrs. Meade,
“but for a very odd reason—because she was
mistaken
for Mary
Taylor—or rather, Diana Lewis.”

“Ha!” said Edgerton explosively, the glint in
his eye betokening instant comprehension and admiration.

“Yes. Miss Lewis deliberately arranged to
have Charity taken for her. That was the reason for the exchange of
shawls, which she somehow contrived while Charity was here with
her. If you will inquire among the ladies of this town you will
find that no one else has a shawl quite like that white one. And
there
is
a resemblance of sorts between Charity Bradford and
Diana Lewis. They are both nearly the same height, slight and
dark-haired—in short, the description you had to follow. In the
dark, with that shawl to guide them, who might not be
mistaken?”

“I don’t know how you know these things, Mrs.
Meade, but every moment I find myself more disposed to believe
you,” said Edgerton. “Miss Lewis—you have heard what has been said.
Do you have any kind of explanation to offer?”

The seamstress turned away from him. Her
former taut, nerve-bound expression was already gone, now that she
saw there was nothing for her to do; her attitude expressed only a
sort of resigned indifference.

“Yes,” she said in a voice that held no
regret, or even distress at her failure; “yes, it’s true—I am Mary
Taylor…or at least that is the name you call me.”

“And Charity Bradford? What has happened to
her, and why?”

“May I sit down? I am not strong, you know.”
She swallowed and moistened her lips, as though her mouth was
dry.

Edgerton inclined his head curtly, and Diana
Lewis sat down on the sofa by the window. Mrs. Meade, in the
meantime, took uninvited possession of one of the easy-chairs and
placed her reticule and her two hands in her lap, ready to listen
attentively.

Diana Lewis began in the same flat voice, “I
left New Orleans because I had received letters from people I did
not want to meet…other associates of Mr. Faraday’s. You know about
him, I imagine…yes. They wanted certain things of his that they
believed I had in my possession.” She swallowed again. “I—I did not
want to see them. I couldn’t get rid of the jewels on my own—and I
didn’t have the courage to simply throw them away. It was the
weakness of my old life. But I wanted to get away, and begin
something entirely different. But the letters kept coming, and they
gradually became threatening. So I left the city. These people
didn’t know me by sight, and I wanted to keep it so. I traveled
under assumed names, and wore a veil or a hat that shaded my face,
so that if they did manage to trace me they would not have a
distinct impression of what I looked like. They would hardly be so
foolish as to molest an unknown woman if they were not sure of her
identity.”

“But did you know the people who were
following you? Could you recognize them?”

“We had never met, but I had heard at least
one of them described. After leaving the city I never was sure if I
saw any of them—but I sometimes had the feeling of being
followed.”

“Why didn’t you simply turn the jewels over
to them, if you didn’t care about having them yourself?” said
Edgerton, frowning.

“Because I was afraid, I tell you—I believed
they would kill me after I had given them the jewels, to prevent my
incriminating them in the future. I had answered their letters—I
had unwisely made some remarks about wanting to be done with my
past life that made them think I could not be trusted. I knew what
they were capable of and I had every reason to fear the worst.”

She stopped, out of breath, clenching her
thin fingers together in her lap. She lifted her head and began
again, unevenly: “When I reached Sour Springs I believed I had
escaped them. I lived here quietly for a few months, and then one
day I saw a man on the street—a man who matched the description I
had heard, who seemed to be watching me. I managed to stay far
enough away from him to keep him from seeing my face. The next
night I saw from my window the shadow of a man lurking by the gate.
I began to be desperately afraid.”

“And so,” said Edgerton, with a hard sarcasm
that none of the others had thought to see from him, “you arranged
to put an innocent girl into their power in your place.”

“I only meant it to buy a little time! By the
time they were convinced of their mistake I meant to be gone from
Sour Springs, and not let them trace me again. I didn’t mean
Charity any harm. I chose her because of the superficial
resemblance between us, as Mrs. Meade has said, and because she had
reason to frequently come to my shop in the evening. I began
wearing light-colored dresses similar to hers; I re-trimmed my hat
in the same fashion as the one she wore; I did my hair the same way
she did hers. I imitated her way of walking. I was an actress once,
you know.

“All this time I was careful to walk outside
only in broad daylight, when there were people around me, and to go
nowhere but my shop and back to my boarding-house. I kept my face
shaded…and I wore a distinctive shawl. The shawl…the most important
part of all.” A strange light came into her eyes. “I had determined
that only the house where I was staying was watched; my shop was in
too busy a street for them to risk anything there.

“The night before last Charity came here to
work as usual. While she was busy I managed to abstract her shawl
and hide it. When it had grown completely dark I said I had left
some material for her wedding-dress at home, and asked Charity if
she could go and bring it, since I was not feeling well enough for
the walk. When she could not find her shawl at once, I offered to
lend her mine.”

Mrs. Meade’s lips were pinched very tightly
together. She looked at Randall Morris, who all this time had stood
opposite the sofa, staring in horrified incredulity at the
seamstress as her flat, listless voice laid out the whole of the
sickeningly practical design. As Diana Lewis pronounced these last
words the image rose before his eyes of a girl turning into a quiet
darkened lane, the white shawl around her shoulders shining in a
ghostly fashion in the dusk. As she reached the garden gate of a
silent house and put out her hand to open it, a black figure
separated itself from the other shadows and moved behind her…until
at the last instant some instinct made her sense another, silent
presence, but even as she whipped around startled it was too
late—

For an instant his mind reeled. His voice
shook as he said, low and fiercely, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” said Diana Lewis. “She didn’t
come back. That is all I can tell you.”

“I don’t think so, Miss Lewis! You’d better
tell us more and a good deal more, or I swear I’ll—”

“Now that’s enough,” said Andrew Royal,
putting out a hand to stop Randall as he made a threatening move
forward. “Charity’s all right. They think she’s Mary Taylor, they
won’t harm her till she tells them where those pearls are—and she
can’t
.”