Ngaio Marsh

Died in the Wool

PROLOGUE

1939

“I am Mrs. Rubrick of Mount Moon,” said the golden-headed lady. “And I should like to come in.”

The man at the stage-door looked down into her face. Its nose and eyes thrust out at him, pale, all of them, and flecked with brown. Seen at close quarters these features appeared to be slightly out of perspective. The rest of the face receded from them, fell away to insignificance. Even the mouth with its slightly projecting, its never quite hidden, teeth was forgotten in favour of that acquisitive nose, those protuberant exacting eyes. “I should like to come in,” Flossie Rubrick repeated.

The man glanced over his shoulder into the hall. “There are seats at the back,” he said. “Behind the buyers’ benches.”

“I know there are. But I don’t want to see the backs of the buyers. I want to watch their faces. I’m Mrs. Rubrick of Mount Moon and my wool clip should be coming up in the next half-hour. I want to sit up here somewhere.” She looked beyond the man at the door, through a pair of scenic book wings to the stage where an auctioneer in shirt-sleeves sat at a high rostrum, gabbling. “Just there,” said Flossie Rubrick, “on that chair by those painted things. That will do quite well.” She moved past the man at the door. “How do you do?” she said piercingly as she came face to face with a second figure. “You don’t mind if O- come in, do you? I’m Mrs. Arthur Rubrick. May I sit down?”

She settled herself on a chair she had chosen, pulling it forward until she could look through an open door in the proscenium and down into the front of the house. She was a tiny creature and it was a tall chair. Her feet scarcely reached the floor. The auctioneer’s clerks, who sat below his rostrum, glanced up curiously from their papers.

“Lot One-seven, six,” gabbled the auctioneer. “Mount Silver.”

“Eleven,” a voice shouted.

In the auditorium two men, their arms stretched rigid, sprang to their feet and screamed. “Three!” Flossie settled her furs and looked at them with interest. “Eleven-three,” said the auctioneer.

The chairs proper to the front of the hall had been replaced by rows of desks, each of which was labelled with the name of its occupant’s firm. Van Huys. Riven Brothers. Dubois. Yen. Steiner. James Ogden. Hartz. Ormerod. Rhodes. Markino. James Barnett. Dressed in business men’s suits woven from good wool, the buyers had come in from the four corners of the world for the summer wool sales. They might have been carefully selected types, so eloquently did they display their nationality. Van Huys’s buyer with his round wooden head and soft hat; Dubois’s, sleek, with a thin moustache and heavy grooves running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth; old Jimmy Ormerod who bought for himself, screamed like a stallion, and turned purple in the face; Hartz, with horn-rimmed glasses, who barked; and Mr. Kurata Kan of Markino’s with his falsetto yelp. Each buyer held printed lists before him, and from time to time, like a well-trained chorus ensemble, they would all turn a page. The auctioneer’s recital was uninflected and monotonous yet, as if the buyers were marionettes and he their puppet master, they would twitch into violent action and as suddenly return to their nervously intent immobility. Some, holding the papers before their eyes, stood waiting for a particular wool clip to come up. Others wrote at their desks. Each had trained himself to jerk in a flash from watchful relaxation into spread-eagled yelling urgency. Many of them smoked continuously and Flossie Rubrick saw them through drifts of blue tobacco clouds.

In the open doorways and under the gallery stood groups of men whose faces and hands were raddled and creased by the sun and whose clothes were those of the countryman in town. They were the wool growers, the run holders, the sheep cockies, the back-countrymen. Upon the behaviour of the buyers their manner of living for the next twelve months would depend. The wool sale was what it all amounted to: long musters over high-country; nights spent by shepherds in tin huts on mountain-sides; late snows that came down into lambing paddocks; noisy rituals of dipping, crutching, shearing; the final down-country journey of the wool bales— this was the brief and final comment on the sheepman’s working year.

Flossie saw her husband, Arthur Rubrick, standing in a doorway. She waved vigorously. The men who were with Arthur pointed her out. He gave her a dubious nod and began to make his way along a side aisle towards her. As soon as he reached the steps that led from the auditorium up to her doorway she called out in a sprightly manner. “Look where I’ve got to! Come up and join me!” He did so but without enthusiasm.

“What are you doing up here, Floss?” he said. “You ought to have gone down below.”

“Down below wouldn’t suit me at all.”

“Everyone’s looking at you.”

“That doesn’t embarrass me,” she said loudly. “When will he get to us, darling? Show me.”

“Ssh!” said her husband unhappily and handed her his catalogue.

Flossie made play with her lorgnette. She flicked it open modishly with a white-gloved hand and looked through it at the lists. There was a simultaneous flutter of white paper throughout the hall. “Over we go, I see,” said Flossie and turned a page. “Now, where are we?”

Her husband grunted urgently and jerked up his head.

“Lot One-eighty,” gabbled the auctioneer.

“Thirteen.”

“Half!” yelled old Ormerod.

“Three!”

“Fourteen!”

The spectacled Mr. Kurata Kan was on his feet yelping a fraction of a second quicker than Ormerod.

“Top price,” cried Flossie shrilly. “Top price! Isn’t it, darling? We’ve got top price, haven’t we? That dear little Jap!”

A ripple of laughter ran through the hall. The auctioneer grinned. The two men near the stage-door moved away, their hands over their mouths. Arthur Rubrick’s face, habitually cyanosed, deepened to a richer purple. Flossie clapped her white gloves together and rose excitedly. “Isn’t he too sweet?” she demanded. “Arthur, isn’t he a pet?”

“Flossie, for God’s sake,” Arthur Rubrick muttered.

But Flossie made a series of crisp little nods in the direction of Mr. Kurata Kan and at last succeeded in attracting his attention. His eyelids creased, his upper lip lifted in a crescent over his long teeth and he bowed.

“There!” said Flossie in triumph as she swept out at the stage-door, followed by her discomfited husband. “Isn’t that splendid?”

He piloted her into a narrow yard. “1 wish you wouldn’t make me quite so conspicuous, my dear,” he said. “I mean, waving to that Jap. We don’t know him or anything.”

“No,” cried Flossie. “But we’re going to. You’re going to call on him, darling, and we shall ask him to Mount Moon for the week-end.”

“Oh, no, Flossie. Why? Why on earth?”

“I’m all for promoting friendly relations. Besides, he’s paid top price for my wool. He’s a sensible man. I want to meet him.”

“Grinning little pip-squeak. I don’t like ’em, Floss. Do you in the eye for tuppence, the Japs would. Any day. They’re our natural enemies.”

“Darling, you’re absolutely antediluvian. Before we know where we are you’ll be talking about the Yellow Peril.”

She tossed her head and a lock of hair dyed a brilliant gold slipped down her forehead. “Do remember this is 1939,” said Flossie.

1942

On a summer’s day in February, 1942, Mr. Sammy Joseph, buyer for Riven Brothers Textile Manufactory, was going through their wool stores with the storeman. The windows had been blacked-out with paint, and the storeman, as they entered, switched on a solitary lamp. This had the effect of throwing into strong relief the square hessian bales immediately under the lamp. Farther down the store they dissolved in shadow. The lamp was high and encrusted with dust: the faces of the two men looked cadaverous. Their voices sounded stifled, there is no echo in a building lined with wool. The air was stuffy and smelt of hessian.