Ladies' Bane by Patricia Wentworth, for the #1952Club

It’s time for the 1952 Club, featuring books published that year and hosted this week by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. The inimitable Miss Maud Silver, along with a young woman fighting for her sister’s happiness, are featured in my first selection, Ladies’ Bane.

Ione Muir is in London for the day to see the family lawyer when she gets lost in a dense and frightening London fog. She is trying to find refuge when she overhears a peculiar conversation, which concludes:

“All right, all right, I’m going! And I haven’t said I’ll do it yet, but I’ll give it my careful consideration and let ye know. But mind, ye’ll have to think again – about the remuneration. I’ll not do it for any less than two thousand, and I’m of the opinion that I’d be a fool to do it for that. It’s my neck I’ll be risking, and I’ll not risk it for a penny less than two thousand.”

Unnerved by what she has heard, which sounds criminal, but anxious to find her way anywhere else, Ione follows the man, who is singing loudly, from a safe distance. Fortunately, she bumps into a less frightening stranger, an architect who was inspecting a house for a client when the fog descended. All three take shelter in the house. The architect is Jim Severn and the drunken singer introduces himself as Professor MacPhail. When Ione wakes up, it is the middle of the night: the professor is gone and Mr. Severn brings her to his flat where his childhood nanny fusses over Ione. If one is going to get lost in London, it is nice to be rescued by a Tall Dark (and congenial) Stranger!

When she visits the lawyer, he reveals disapprovingly that her sister Allegra is trying to use money from her trust to buy a 14th century home in the country she and her husband are renting. He is relieved to hear Ione is going to visit Allegra and her husband, Gregory. Ione has barely seen her sister since the wedding two years ago. First, Ione was visiting relatives in America, then nursing a sick cousin, and recently Allegra has made excuses for Ione not to come. When Ione reaches the Ladies’ House, as it is known, she finds a peculiar household: Allegra, who seems alternatively passive or manic; her handsome husband, Gregory, who is obsessed with the house; Margot, Gregory’s teenage ward, who specializes in practical jokes; and Margot’s governess, Miss Delauny. Ione gets nowhere when she asks Gregory what is wrong with her sister. She is delighted when Jim Severn turns up to consult with Gregory on the structure of the house. When they slip away for lunch, she confides her concerns about her sister and tells him the maid frightened Allegra by telling her:

“Oh, some story about the house being called Ladies’ Bane because whoever was mistress there would lose what she cared for most in the world . . . .”

Jim tells Ione the man they encountered in the fog is also visiting this obscure town, which further worries her, although talking it out with someone she already likes and trusts is very reassuring. Until they get back to the house and discover a dead body!

Separately, Allegra’s godmother has become worried and goes to the Montague Mansions apartment building to hire a detective to find out what is up with Allegra and whether Gregory is mismanaging her inheritance:

With her eyes on Miss Silver’s face she said,

“I have come to see you on a – well, I don’t know how to put it, and I hate beating about the bush, but it’s – well – it’s a delicate matter.”

A great many delicate matters had been brought into that room and laid before Miss Silver – in doubt, in perplexity, in dreadful anxiety, or mortal fear.

Miss Silver discreetly (and cleverly) invites herself to stay as a paying guest with the actual owner of the Ladies’ House, which puts her in prime viewing of the household just as two murders take place and another is attempted. And, of course, she is the one who solves the mystery when the locals are baffled.

This is not the only Patricia Wentworth where the heroine and hero meet cute in the dark in dangerous conditions and more or less fall for each other (or start to) without seeing each other’s faces. Ione is a fairly self-confident character, and she is not afraid to take on her brother-in-law, but the stress of being lost in the fog or menaced by a stranger unnerve her. Jim is more essential to the first half of the book and Miss Marple to the second but, between them, Ione has pretty good backup.  Yes, it’s too much of a coincidence that the two men Ione randomly met in the fog turn up in her sister’s neighborhood but fiction needs these incidents.  Jim took the assignment because meeting her piqued his curiosity and the Professor - well, Ione thinks he was hired for a nefarious purpose.

This is Miss Silver’s 22nd venture and my thirteenth book for the Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.

Title: Ladies’ Bane
Author: Patricia Wentworth
Publication: J.P. Lippincott Company, hardcover, 1952
Genre: Mystery
Source: Personal copy, which appears to be the first American edition