Lady Molly of Scotland Yard | Page 8

Mary saw that she had betrayed herself. She gave Lady Molly a look of
agonised horror, then turned as white as a sheet and would have fallen
had not the Reverend Octavius Ludlow gently led her to a chair.
"It wasn't me," she repeated, with a heart-broken sob.
"That will be for you to prove," said Lady Molly dryly. "The child
cannot now, of course remain with Mrs. Williams; she will be removed
to the workhouse, and--"
"No, that shan't be," said the mother excitedly. "She shan't be, I tell you.
The workhouse, indeed," she added in a paroxysm of hysterical tears,
"and her father a lord!"
The reverend gentleman and I gasped in astonishment; but Lady Molly

had worked up to this climax so ingeniously that it was obvious she had
guessed it all along, and had merely led Mary Nicholls on in order to
get this admission from her.
How well she had known human nature in pitting the child against the
sweetheart! Mary Nicholls was ready enough to hide herself, to part
from her child even for a while, in order to save the man she had once
loved from the consequences of his crime; but when she heard that her
child was dying, she no longer could bear to leave it among strangers,
and when Lady Molly taunted her with the workhouse, she exclaimed
in her maternal pride:
"The workhouse! And her father a lord!"
Driven into a corner, she confessed the whole truth.
Lord Edbrooke, then Mr. Lydgate, was the father of her child. Knowing
this, her sister Susan had, for over a year now, systematically
blackmailed the unfortunate man--not altogether, it seems, without
Mary's connivance. In January last she got him to come down to
Ninescore under the distinct promise that Mary would meet him and
hand over to him the letters she had received from him, as well as the
ring he had given her, in exchange for the sum of £5,000.
The meeting-place was arranged, but at the last moment Mary was
afraid to go in the dark. Susan, nothing daunted, but anxious about her
own reputation in case she should be seen talking to a man so late at
night, put on Mary's dress, took the ring and the letters, also her sister's
purse, and went to meet Lord Edbrooke.
What happened at that interview no one will ever know. It ended with
the murder of the blackmailer. I suppose the fact that Susan had, in
measure, begun by impersonating her sister, gave the murderer the first
thought of confusing the identity of his victim by the horrible device of
burying the body in the slimy mud. Anyway, he almost did succeed in
hoodwinking the police, and would have done so entirely but for Lady
Molly's strange intuition in the matter.

After his crime he ran instinctively to Mary's cottage. He had to make a
clean breast of it to her, as, without her help, he was a doomed man.
So he persuaded her to go away from home and to leave no clue or
trace of herself or her sister in Ninescore. With the help of money
which he would give her, she could begin life anew somewhere else,
and no doubt he deluded the unfortunate girl with promises that her
child would be restored to her very soon.
Thus he enticed Mary Nicholls away, who would have been the great
and all-important witness against him the moment his crime was
discovered. A girl of Mary's type and class instinctively obeys the man
she has once loved, the man who is the father of her child. She
consented to disappear and to allow all the world to believe that she
had been murdered by some unknown miscreant.
Then the murderer quietly returned to his luxurious home at Edbrooke
Castle, unsuspected. No one had thought of mentioning his name in
connection with that of Mary Nicholls. In the days when he used to
come down to Ash Court he was Mr. Lydgate, and, when he became a
peer, sleepy, out-of-the-way Ninescore ceased to think of him.
Perhaps Mr. Lionel Lydgate knew all about his brother's association
with the village girl. From his attitude at the inquest I should say he did,
but of course he would not betray his own brother unless forced to do
so.
Now, of course, the whole aspect of the case was changed: the veil of
mystery had been torn asunder owing to the insight, the marvelous
intuition, of a woman who, in my opinion, is the most wonderful
psychologist of her time.
You know the sequel. Our fellows at the Yard, aided by the local police,
took their lead from Lady Molly, and began their investigations of Lord
Edbrooke's movements on or about the 23rd of January.
Even