Harriet

  ABOUT HARRIET

  Harriet has long been famous as one of the most powerful “chillers” ever written. Without blood, without violence, with nothing supernatural or melodramatic, it is filled with pure horror. Very quickly one realizes that the charming people who surround Harriet are likely to become ruthless murderers. And this knowledge doubles the interest in each character. The hapless mother, who is cannily trying to prove that the guilty are guilty, is pitted against the cold-blooded, inexorable and twisted minds of her own relatives. The quiet, suffocating and thoughtless cruelty which the innocent and passionate Harriet suffers seems unbearable, until the dreadful climax is reached.

  Copyright 1934 © Elizabeth Jenkins

  Table of Contents

  Cast of characters

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  About Elizabeth Jenkins

  Bibliography

  Harriet

  Cast of characters

  Harriet: A passionate and wealthy young woman, whose intelligence seemed perfectly normal, at least where food and clothes were concerned.

  Mrs. Ogilvy: Her understanding mother, who did everything possible to provide happiness for her daughter.

  Mr. Ogilvy: Harriet’s stepfather, a shy and unsociable Unitarian minister.

  Mrs. Hoppner: Harriet’s aunt.

  Alice Hoppner: Harriet’s spoiled and attractive cousin,

  Elizabet Hoppner Oman: Alice’s sister, was, ordinarily, a kind young woman.

  Patrick Oman: Her husband, demanded absolute quiet and peace while he painted.

  Lewis Oman: Patrick’s brother, was a young man with an overwhelming singleness of purpose.

  Clara Smith: A sixteen-year-old cousin who talked too much.

  One

  AT HALF-PAST FIVE ON A JANUARY EVENING OF the year 1875, Mrs. Ogilvy’s drawing room was a pleasant place; it was a small first-floor room and, though it could not be said to be furnished with taste, there was a warmth and brightness about it which made it very comfortable on such a raw evening. The mantelpiece under the ornate gilt glass was looped with rose-red velvet: the curtains were a white chintz covered with enormous roses and carnations in alternate rows connected with wide-flung sprays of green; the sofa was a similar medley of red and white, but the armchair in which Mrs. Ogilvy was sitting was a deep crimson, and this, with the moss-green carpet, was pleasantly mellowed by the bright-burning fire, and the lamplight which glowed on the many pictures framed in plush and gilt, and on the piles of oranges, apples, and grapes which covered the sideboard.

  Mrs. Ogilvy, knitting with the precise click of shining needles, had the room to herself except for her little nephew, who was playing with marbles and a solitaire board on the floor, half under the sleek white fall of tablecloth. He was a retiring child, always slightly uneasy when addressed by a grown-up person. He was not, in fact, Mrs. Ogilvy’s own nephew, but that of her second husband, a Unitarian minister; Mr. Ogilvy was shy and unsociable, and little Tom took after the family. Mrs. Ogilvy’s only trial in connection with her husband was that it was so difficult to make him really comfortable. He never seemed to notice what there was for dinner or to find any pleasure in his wife’s pretty, comfortable household arrangements; however, she did not complain; she was a lucky woman, she thought, as she sat knitting before the fire, just glancing at the tea table with its flowery china, its silver muffin dish, and a dark plum cake, thickly iced. She was considering whether that tea had stood too long, or whether it would do for Harriet when she came downstairs; she had not had tea with them, since she had been upstairs packing to go on a visit to their relations.

  Some people would have thought Mrs. Ogilvy, despite her husband and her housekeeping, a very unfortunate woman, and there were moments when she gave way to the idea herself, though it could not often prevail against the cheerfulness of her disposition. Harriet, her only child, was what the villagers in Mrs. Ogilvy’s old home would have called a natural. Her intellect was not so clouded that intercourse with ordinary people was out of the question; the deficiency showed itself rather in a horrid uncouthness, the more noticeable in that she had a vigorous and powerful zest for such aspects of existence as were intelligible to her; she was not easy to put out of the way. In fact, her continued presence in any household was a strain, and consequently, since her mother’s second marriage, an arrangement had been made by which she spent a month at a time with various relations; Mrs. Ogilvy had been comfortably “left” by the departed Mr. Woodhouse, and Harriet also had her own money: three thousand pounds at present, and a contingent reversion of two thousand more; so that some of their less well-to-do connections were glad to put up with the slight awkwardness of having her in the house for a short space, in consideration of the handsome boarding fee which was paid them for it.

  Mrs. Ogilvy’s feelings were not exalted, but they were strong in every kind, and she had not only the mother’s special affection for an unfortunate child, but she often lost her temper with Harriet when she encountered in her an obstinacy and full-blooded determination the counterpart of her own. She had neither the enlightenment nor, for all her forcefulness, the self-control to preserve any detachment towards her daughter; but, not infrequent as the disturbances were, they were always lost sight of as one of Harriet’s temporary absences drew near, and it was an eye of fond affection that Mrs. Ogilvy turned on her as she came downstairs to have a cup of tea before departing in a cab to Norwood.

  “Now, girlie!” cried Mrs. Ogilvy, “I’ve let the tea stand, but Hannah shall bring you another pot if it’s got too black.” Harriet came with little bouncing steps towards the tea table and looked into the teapot.

  “This is do, Mama,” she said; she sometimes confused small words, though she could always make her meaning clear. At the age of thirty-two she had a sallow countenance, with strongly marked lines running from the nostrils to the corners of the lips; her chin receded, and her eyes were the glutinous black of treacle. Apart from her expression, and the slightly slurred enunciation of her words, however, her appearance was one of rather particular neatness and cost. Her scanty brown hair was crimped in a fringe and elaborately bunched at the back of her head in a series of small wiry plaits. She was wearing garnet earrings and a shield-like brooch of pinchbeck pinned to the front of her dress, which was a handsome blue silk; it had just come home, and Mrs. Ogilvy looked at it critically and approvingly.

  “Miss Marble makes up very well,” she said; “that silk wants justice doing to it, and it has it, in my opinion.”

  Harriet looked down complacently as she sat drinking her tea and eating a piece of cake; but suddenly her expression changed to one of peevish anxiety. “My boots!” she said, and stared about her.

  “There, bless me, I was forgetting,” said Mrs. Ogilvy, rising in rustling amplitude and fetching a parcel from under the sideboard. “Here they are, now. Tom fetched them on his way home from the dentist, didn’t you, Tom?” Tom, still half under the tablecloth, pursuing his solitaire, raised his head and assented shyly. Harriet snatched the parcel and tore off the wrappings. Inside, were two elaborately cut button boots with narrow toes which had been neatly though heavily soled in shining leather. As she turned them over, her face relaxed into a smile, showing almost the whole depth of her teeth.

  “A really nice job he’s
made of it, that I will say,” said Mrs. Ogilvy; “I’ll put them on the hearth, dearie, to warm while you finish your tea.” She took the boots and herself turned them over, examining them with satisfaction. One of the points of warmest sympathy between her and Harriet was the latter’s acute enjoyment in anything concerned with food or dress; on these topics her intelligence was perfectly normal, and Mrs. Ogilvy’s pleasure in promoting her enjoyment and in sympathizing with it was the more intense for being restricted in other respects. She now returned to her armchair and watched Harriet finishing her tea; to her eye, misted by affection and use, the traits in Harriet’s face which shocked a stranger appeared hardly more than a slight blemish, rather endearing than otherwise. She was called to the door by the maid’s bringing down Harriet’s box. “Fetch a cab for Miss Hatty, Hannah,” she said, and went upstairs to make sure nothing had been forgotten. Harriet meanwhile was eating and drinking in great content; Tom, crawling cautiously out of his semi-concealment, glanced up at her and inadvertently caught her attention; she was about to take a currant bun onto her plate, and something, perhaps, in its glossy roundness struck her drolly. She held up the bun to him and gave a loud laugh. What goes on around and above the heads of young children is seldom comprehended by them except in a series of striking vignettes; in after life the most vivid impression of his cousin which Tom Ogilvy retained was the sight of her holding up a bun and laughing with great heartiness but apparently with no meaning.

  “Now, Papa,” Mrs. Ogilvy was saying as her husband came out of his study into the hall, “you’ll tell the cabby where to go, won’t you? You know I don’t like them to see Hatty without someone at the back of her.” Mr. Ogilvy said yes, in an unenthusiastic manner; he opened the front door and saw the cab coming up the street; it drew up at the door while Mrs. Ogilvy was saying all the usual farewells to Harriet and recapitulating the instructions Harriet was to give as to her own comfort once she arrived at the destination, concluding with a perfunctory message of goodwill to their cousin Mrs. Hoppner. The cab lamps shed a misty radiance across the humid dark, and Harriet, in a pelisse and a smart straw hat, bundled in while the luggage was hoisted onto the roof. Mr. Ogilvy directed the man to drive to Norwood, and they drove off, Mrs. Ogilvy watching the last of their disappearance from the lighted hall door.

  Two

  ALICE HOPPNER WAS SULKILY ARRANGING dresses of her own behind the curtained space which was already occupied by her mother’s, and jerking open dressing-table drawers to find a hiding place for various little matters that she did not care to have under anyone’s eye but her own. Her mother, faded and harassed, came into the room behind her with a nightgown and a brush and comb which she had brought from Alice’s own bedroom.

  “I was fetching them myself in a minute,” said Alice with suppressed irritation.

  “Well, I’ve got to get on with the room,” said Mrs. Hoppner defensively; “I can’t get the bed made and the dressing table done with your things lying about.”

  “It’s detestable,” Alice burst out. “Having her in the house at all is bad enough, but being turned out of my own room is beyond anything. Just when—just when I want somewhere to dress myself properly.”

  “You can dress yourself properly in here; what’s to hinder you?” Though usually she shrank from arguments with Alice, Mrs. Hoppner was too tired with endless house-work to resist the opportunity of leaning against the wall for a moment.

  “The glass is in the wrong place,” complained Alice; “besides, I can’t, with another person in my way the whole time.”

  Mrs. Hoppner might have said that she could hardly be much in Alice’s way, unless Alice had chosen to dress herself at the kitchen table or the sink; but she was too much occupied with the imminent incursion of visitors to trouble about self-justification; she merely advanced the argument most likely to pacify the girl.

  “You know as well as I do,” she said, “it’s the money we can’t do without, if you’re to have that dress you want. I’m sure it’s no pleasure to me to have Harriet in the house—extra to do for, and no help either; but Jane Ogilvy pays well to get her off her hands, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. It’s a good thing for her she’s got the money to do it, and eight pounds for the month is what I can’t do without, not if you’re to have all your flummeries.” She straightened herself and moved off to the linen cupboard.

  That dress! Whenever Alice had devised a toilette, the whole of her existence seemed narrowed down to its achievement. It was now January, and though she had wanted a stiff silk dress to wear in the house—a claret color or blue—she had decided to forgo it and to concentrate all her resources on one which she would wear indoors during the early spring and outside with the first warm weather; it was to be of crêpe, in that faint but clear lilac known as soupir étouffe; the skirt, as was all the way just now, looped in front to suggest an apron, and caught up at the back in a bunch of drapery that stood out behind the waist, giving the wearer the tournure of a swan. With this, when she wore it out of doors, she would have a small white straw hat, tilted up at the back and pulled well down over the eyes, encircled by a wreath of wild roses. It was cruel that she should have to do without a silk dress, a watered silk that would rustle in that way that seemed to inspire every movement with grace, but the sacrifice must be made if she was to have this delicate, heavenly creation for the coming year. Her mother could not afford to give her any regular allowance for dress, and all her clothes were obtained by her own examining and apportioning of the family exchequer. Mrs. Hoppner did not demur; she accepted it that Alice was to have the best of everything their meagre income allowed, and Alice herself was too hard-headed to run into foolish extravagance or debt. Mrs. Hoppner acquiesced in her passion for self-adornment, but she did not altogether approve the forms it sometimes took. She supposed she could hardly object to the girl’s covering her face with cold cream at night, nasty, messy habit though it seemed; and Alice’s dark hair was touched with something that smelt strongly of heliotrope: well, there was no harm in that, perhaps; bandoline she had always thought dirty and unhealthy, but, all the same, there did seem something a little fast about this mysteriously fragrant compound with which Alice coaxed the smooth waves over her temples and the small clusters of curls that rested, delicately intact, behind her ears. A skin like creamy milk she knew her daughter had by nature; but that coral bloom in her cheeks, could that be natural too? Mrs. Hoppner refused to contemplate the idea of Alice’s painting, a practice indulged in only by actresses and street-walkers, so she merely shut her mind to the question when it now presented itself again as she began laying clean sheets on the bed.

  Alice meanwhile was emptying the corner of a drawer, and arranging in it, behind glove box and handkerchief sachet, a paper of Spanish wool, which, when passed over the cheek, left that transparent flush, above which her excited eyes shone like peridots. Beside the paper was a small pot of red paste for the lips. She hid these appliances, not from any fear of the objections she knew her mother would make, but rather prompted by a savage dislike of interference.

  She had much to think over just now, so that to be deprived of a separate bedroom was a real hardship. The reason she had had to vacate her own was the unfortunate coincidence of Harriet’s arrival with that of Alice’s married sister and her husband. Elizabeth Hoppner had married an impecunious young artist of twenty-two, four years younger than herself; they had been living with Patrick’s brother Lewis in a small villa at Streatham; but, the lease having now expired, circumstances combined to make them feel that living in the country would be in every way better—more economical and more suited to the pursuing of Patrick’s profession. A small brick house, scarcely larger than a workman’s cottage, outside the Kentish village of Cudham, had been fixed upon; and while the two children, born of the first two years of the marriage, had been packed off down there, in the charge of a general servant, to settle in, their parents had come to spend a few days at Elizabeth’s home.

  Patric
k’s brother Lewis, who was employed as clerk to an auctioneer, was coming over, it being Saturday, to spend the afternoon and evening with them; and it was Lewis Oman who was occupying Alice’s thoughts and making her particularly difficult to live with just at present. The Omans were, without being socially of a different order from Mrs. Hoppner’s family, exciting in that they were both worldly and unusual, though the former quality preponderated in Lewis and in Patrick the latter. Mrs. Hoppner was inclined to be slightly awed by her son-in-law, but, as he made scarcely a penny and kept Elizabeth in such a poor way, she felt more able to stand up to him than she would otherwise have done; and if Lewis thought he was going to marry Alice, she supposed that could hardly be done on what he earned, either, unless she herself made some sacrifices. Still, Alice seemed set on him, and he was the sort of man likely to make his way; the only wonder was that he had not bettered himself already. Besides, if she had Alice off her hands, she could dispose of the house and find some comfortable rooms where she would be waited on; in any case, it was no use determining against what the younger people wanted.

  Mrs. Hoppner washed up the tea things in the scullery while the others sat in the firelit parlor; Elizabeth usually helped her mother when she was at home, but she had arrived looking so pale and exhausted that Mrs. Hoppner had made her keep still. She now sat, wan and with dark rings round her eyes, and her hair, which she wore loose behind her ears, hanging lusterless. None the less, she was a beautiful woman, with large features and brooding blue eyes; she sat in perfect silence and repose; the animation of the party was supplied by Lewis and Alice. The latter, in a pea-green merino gown, twisted and turned with all the grace of her long delicate limbs as she sat by Lewis’s side on the sofa, sometimes with her arm on the sofa behind his neck, sometimes leaning her elbow on his knee; when she gave him a light for his cigar her hand curled over his; her charming shrill laughter was constant, and at every second word she turned her little face towards him. She was not beautiful like her sister, but the perfect roundness of the apricot cheek, the long neck, and full reddened lips made her ten times as seductive; that her countenance betrayed no evidence of mind whatever did not detract from her charm; she was an exquisite little brute, and Lewis Oman liked her the better for it.