Two small moles and a piece of brown alpaca
This week we have Wragge at his most tactically ingenious and Mrs Lecount more than a match for him. The pace has accelerated, and strike is followed by counter strike. As Leslie has highlighted in his post this week, and as we’ve seen in earlier instalments, the war between them is reported as a game of cards:
‘I mark the trick, ma’am … The trump card in your hand is a sight of my niece; and I’ll take care you don’t play it!’
The stakes are getting higher, and the tension of this instalment is palpable. Wragge and Lecount both regard Noel Vanstone — weak, vain, by turns imperious and easily manipulated — as their secret weapon. ‘We have caught our man at last’ Wragge exults, and yet ironically he gives Lecount the very opportunity she needs by advising Vanstone to try the ‘suaviter in modo’ before commiting to the ‘fortiter in re’. How many of AYR’s readers understood that bit, I wonder?
Noel V leaves Sea View Cottage determined to show Lecount who is the boss, and ends up agreeing to take a piece of paper to his early morning meeting with Magdalen, a meeting Lecount can only guess may take place. As the narrator concludes : ‘With a daring ingenuity which even Captain Wragge might have envied, Mrs Lecount had found her instrument for exposing the conspiracy in the unsuspecting person of the victim himself’.
All the cards would seem to be stacked in Lecount’s favour (the card analogy is infectious). She has a piece from Magdalen’s dress, and Miss Garth’s letter will identify the two moles on Magdalen’s neck. She also has one further trick up her sleeve. In the previous instalment we were told that she reckoned she had ‘three different ways’ of arriving at the truth. The first was to confront Magdalen, which she has been prevented from doing. The second was to write to Norah, which she has now done, with spectacular results. The third was to ‘penetrate the mystery of Mrs Bygrave’s seclusion’ to see whether ‘the invalid lady’s real complaint might not possibly be a defective capacity for keeping her husband’s secrets’. So is Mrs Wragge, currently tucked away in Magdalen’s room trying to make the oriental robe a bomb waiting to go off?
I can’t wait until next week.
Collins No Name Reading Project 
Remarkable pacing these past few weeks. After months of Magdalen not trusting Wragge, or holding him back, it’s glorious to now see him unbound and relishing the game as he makes one spectacular flourish after another. Is it supposed to be comic? The continued audacity of Wragge certainly encourages enjoyment over concern, and whatever threat the arrival of Pendril or Magdalen’s description may bring next week, this week Wragge holds the upper hand for the majority (save that last teasing twist) allowing us to smile our way through this instalment. And I may have just embarrassed myself on the train by sniggering audibly at Wragge’s bewilderment that anyone would *choose* to spend time with his wife. What a rogue, what a wag (Collins really didn’t look too hard for the name, did he?).
On the subject of comedy, all this back and forth, and the resulting use of Noel as shuttlecock, makes me wonder what we are to make of him right now. Any aspects of his villainy or threat in previous instalments is something of a distant memory now, leaving a harmless, comic fool. Perhaps that’s a side-effect of serialisation that characters have the capacity to be many different, even contrasting, things with the passage of time stopping us from viewing the whole but rather encouraging to focus on just the current prevailing aspect of that character.
I agree with Pete that over the course of the serial, we’ve had different aspects of the characters brought forward. This is especially true of Mrs. Lecount, with whom one can develop a certain sympathy, and whose skill in the battle with Wragge can be admired, almost forgetting that it’s in the service of villainy.
It’s also true that Noel Vanstone emerges as more and more of a fool, though I don’t know that that’s a change so much as an elaboration. Also, I don’t find his villainy a distant memory, and Collins tries to bring it back to the fore in the scene in which he thinks about dismissing Mrs. Lecount. His “sordid nature” actually makes him recoil from the idea because he would then have to pension her off, and he’s too much of a miser for that.
It’s hard to feel sympathy for Noel, because we seldom share his point of view, and when we do, ugh, he seems slimy. Also stupid, I grant you.
I’ve been meaning to say all week (bit late now as I should be on the next instalment!) that I was particularly struck by the re-circulation of the description of Magdalen’s physical appearance. This takes me back to the interesting discussions we had when Wragge found the ‘Wanted’ poster, especially Sheldon’s points about the circulation of descriptions of criminals. The intimacy of detail, which Joanne picks out in her heading, makes me feel very uneasy about the spectacle of Magdalene’s body, which gives evidence against her notwithstanding her abilities in acting and disguise. Noel is now in the same position as us, suspending his reading until a particular moment, when perhaps all will be revealed.
I share your sense of unease, Holly, just as I was amazed by the audacity of Mrs Lecount kneeling behind Magdalen to snip off a piece of her skirt. Thinking of the day dresses worn by young Victorian women at mid-century with their high necklines and collars, plus their usually long and elaborately styled hair you would need to be very close to spot two moles on someone’s neck, I’d have thought.
“For the first time in his life, he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterwards without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem.”
Voila! I think this is the trump card. The truth will come out, and I believe Mr. Vanstone will disregard it, and marry the real Madge, not the character she now plays. All the meddling, conniving, and as Pete rightly says, comic players hovering around this couple don’t stand a chance.
(sung) “The guy’s always doin’ it for some doll!”
I thought we’d been too long without a song! I like this anticipation of events pstacey, but I think that would give Noel a kind of nobility of feeling, or at least an ability to stick to his guns, which we’ve not seen in him so far. He might surprise us though, and buck the family trend.