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Over the mantelpiece, amongst other odds and ends of pictures and photographs, hung a water-colour drawing of Braden Medworth and to him presently entered an old, silver-haired clergyman whom he at once took to be Braden Medworth's former vicar, and who glanced inquisitively at his visitor and then at the card which Bryce had sent in with a request for an interview. "Dr.
Mary Bewery was our governess at Braden Medworth. She came to us when she was nineteen she was married four years later. She was a girl who had no friends or relatives she had been educated at a school in the North I engaged her from that school, where, I understood, she had lived since infancy. Now then, as to Brake and Ransford.
"Well," he answered after a moment's thought, "I'll qualify that by saying that from the evidence I have, and from what I know, I believe it to be an indisputable fact. What I do know of fact, hard, positive fact, is this: John Brake married a Mary Bewery at the parish church of Braden Medworth, near Barthorpe, in Leicestershire: I've seen the entry in the register with my own eyes.
His best man, who signed the register as a witness, was Mark Ransford. Brake and Ransford, as young men, had been in the habit of going to Braden Medworth to fish; Mary Bewery was governess at the vicarage there. It was always supposed she would marry Ransford; instead, she married Brake, who, of course, took her off to London. Of their married life, I know nothing.
In Bryce's opinion, it was something of a wild-goose chase to go there, but the similarity in the name of the village and of the dead man at Wrychester might have its significance, and it was but a two miles' stroll from Barthorpe. He found Braden Medworth a very small, quiet, and picturesque place, with an old church on the banks of a river which promised good sport to anglers.
"Never!" said Glassdale. "Never mentioned such a man!" Bryce reflected again, and suddenly determined to be explicit. "John Brake, the bank manager," he said, "was married at a place called Braden Medworth, in Leicestershire, to a girl named Mary Bewery. He had two children, who would be, respectively, about four and one years of age when his we'll call it misfortune happened. That's a fact!"
Gilwaters anxiously. "Shall you " "I shall do nothing whatever in any haste," replied Bryce. "Rely upon me to consider her feelings in everything. As you have been so kind, I will let you know, later, how matters go." This was one of Pemberton Bryce's ready inventions. He had not the least intention of ever seeing or communicating with the late vicar of Braden Medworth again; Mr.
The Mary Bewery whom Bryce knew in Wrychester was just about twenty this Mary Bewery, spinster, of Braden Medworth, was, then, in all probability, her mother. But John Brake who married that Mary Bewery who was he? Who indeed, laughed Bryce, but John Braden, who had just come by his death in Wrychester Paradise? And there was the name of Mark Ransford as witness. What was the further probability?
Not as Braden, of course but as who he really was John Brake. That was at a place called Braden Medworth, near Barthorpe, in Leicestershire." He paused there, watching Folliot. But Folliot showed no more than close attention, and Bryce went on. "Not much in that for the really important part of the story," he continued. "But Brake had other associations with Barthorpe a bit later.
By the merest chance accident, in fact I discovered yesterday at Braden Medworth that some twenty-two years ago you married one Mary Bewery, who, I learnt there, was your governess, to a John Brake, and that Mark Ransford was John Brake's best man and a witness of the marriage. Now, Mr. Gilwaters, the similarity in names is too striking to be devoid of significance.
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