Title: Dumb Witness
Author(s): Agatha Christie
Publisher(s): Berkley
Pages: 272
Year: 1986
Format: EPUB
Language: English
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Odd about the Boule cabinet, thought Emily Arundell as she got into bed. She smiled grimly as she remembered the scene of long ago. The key that had come to light after Papa$prime;s death, and the cascade of empty brandy bottles that had tumbled out when the cabinet had been unlocked! It was little things like that, things that surely neither Minnie Lawson nor Isabel and Julia Tripp could possibly know, which made one wonder whether, after all, there wasn$prime;t something in this spiritualistic business….
She felt wakeful lying on her big fourposter bed. Nowadays she found it increas»igly difficult to sleep. But she scorned Dr. Grainger$prime;s tentative suggestion of a sleeping draught. Sleeping draughts were for weaklings, for people who couldn$prime;t bear a finger ache, or a little toothache, or the tedium of a sleepless night.
Often she would get up and wander noiselessly round the house, picking up a book, fingering an ornament, rearranging a vase of flowers, writing a letter or two. In those midnight hours she had a feeling of the equal liveliness of the house through which she wandered. They were not disagreeable, those nocturnal wanderings. It was as though ghosts walked beside her, the ghosts of her sisters, Arabella, Matilda and Agnes, the ghost of her brother Thomas, the dear fellow, as he was before That Woman got ahold of him! Even the ghost of General John Laverton Arundell, that domestic tyrant with the charming manners who shouted and bullied his daughters but who nevertheless was an object of pride to them with his experiences in the Indian Mutiny and his knowledge of the world. What if there were days when he was «not quite so well» as his daughters put it evasively?
Her mind reverting to her niece$prime;s fiance, Miss Arundell thought, «I don$prime;t suppose he$prime;ll ever take to drink! Calls himself a man and drank barley water this evening! Barley water! And I opened Papa$prime;s special port.» Charles had done justice to the port all | right. Oh! if only Charles were to be trusted.