The Santa Klaus Murder Read Free Page A

have nothing to worry about.”
    â€œI can’t live my own life; that’s just the trouble!” Jennifer protested. “Father won’t let me drive the Sunbeam alone at night, though I’m perfectly competent. He won’t let me have a small car of my own and he always seems to arrange things so that Bingham isn’t available when I want to go to a meeting.”
    â€œThose are details!” declared Edith, dismissing them airily. “You can’t expect to have everything perfect and the fact remains that you ought to be here for the next few years.”
    As soon as Sir Osmond had recovered from his illness and the family had dispersed, Jennifer and I discussed the situation and decided to be married in the spring. When Hilda came to Flaxmere for Christmas we were going to tell her our plans and urge her to think out some way acceptable to Sir Osmond of installing herself in Jennifer’s place. That wouldn’t be easy, because Hilda was too proud to beg her father to give her a home. Of course the arrangement, if it could be brought about, would solve some of Hilda’s problems, but she was so accustomed to the impossibility of getting any help from her father, that she would find it difficult to believe in a change of fortune.
    I believe that Hilda, as well as Jennifer, was genuinely unconcerned about the question of how much Sir Osmond would leave and how he would allot it. She had given up any hope that money might come from him just when she most desperately needed it for Carol’s training, and was not very interested in what might come later on. She was too fond of her father to allow herself even to think how his sudden death might help her daughter, and she accepted Jennifer’s judgment that their father was likely to live for many years.
    Jennifer and I realized that if we married in the spring we should be throwing away all chance of a dowry, but that couldn’t be helped and we tried not to think of it though, goodness knows, we couldn’t afford to turn up our noses at it.
    Jennifer said: “It’s no good thinking about it, because there simply isn’t any money as far as you and I are concerned. For us it’s non-existent. It may come along by the time we are middle-aged and probably we, like Hilda, shan’t want it then.”
    My salary in the publishing firm would be considered by many people as a nice little income for a young married couple, but it wasn’t going to provide an easy existence for Jennifer “in the state to which she had been accustomed.” Her little inheritance from her mother, which she had saved carefully, would help and she had decided that economy would be amusing, and was ready to make a good job of our new life.
    This was the state of affairs at Christmas, when all this crowd gathered at Flaxmere. It was the usual custom. Sir Osmond thought that a family gathering was the correct thing at Christmas and no one dared to object, though they generally had a pretty grim time. Aunt Mildred was always included in the party and was probably glad enough to enjoy the luxury of Flaxmere again for a short time. Oliver Witcombe was there, too, and even I was invited, partly because there was a preponderance of women in the party anyway and partly in pursuance of Sir Osmond’s policy of comparing me unfavourably with Oliver. I guessed that the old man would be planning for one of the evenings some sort of diversion at which Oliver would be sure to shine and I would not; an easy matter, for Oliver is full of party tricks.
    Hilda, with her daughter Carol, was coming as usual. I believe Sir Osmond liked to have her there, both from a genuine affection for her—though that’s hard to believe in the light of his meanness to her—and also to throw it all in her teeth, as it were. “Just see what you’ve missed by going against my will!”
    So there we all were; and, as we were so unpleasantly