Patricia Wentworth, The Black Cabinet

I just read a 1924 novel by Patricia Wentworth, The Black Cabinet, and thought I would jot down my thoughts about this 95-year-old suspense novel. I have been reading mysteries written by the authors who gained fame in the British Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and although this does not actually qualify as it has no detective, it was a lot of fun to read. Beware, spoilers are throughout this piece, so if you want to read the book, quit reading this right now.

In this mystery, pretty, poor 20-year-old Chloe Dane works for a dressmaker and is given the ticket and dress to go to a society ball, where her mysterious old distant cousin Mitchell Dane observes her and approves of her appearance of good breeding. She accepts his invitation to Danesborough, the family seat, but declines to accept living there as his heir. She had lived there as a child when her grandfather owned it. Mitchell Dane shows her the safe he has had installed inside an old family heirloom, a Chinese lacquer black cabinet and teaches her how to open it and tells her he will send her the combination. Which he does.

Meanwhile, she has met Michael Foster, the chauffeur of a terrible old lady, a few times: first when she bicycles to Rambourne to a tea dance held by Monica Gresson, her old schoolfellow, and she stops to help the broken-down car occupant by taking a spoiled Pekinese to Rambourne in her bike basket. She likes the looks of that chauffeur. Second, when she goes to tea with her old schoolmistress, Miss Tankerville, he comes to tea too, and he is revealed as the son of a former pupil who married into minor aristocracy. Third, he waits for her to come out of work and they decide to go to the pictures with her roommate Rose and Rose’s fiance.

Two big clues are buried in these early chapters. First, Martin Fosseter dances with Chloe at the tea dance and thinks to himself that this is the Chloe Dane whom Mitchell Dane is going to come and look over. We should keep it in mind—that he knows and is familiar with the plans of Mitchell Dane—when Martin reappears near Danesborough. Second, after the tea at Miss Tankerville’s, Michael Foster writes to his mother and includes his business plans for putting his Uncle Horace’s money into the car business where he’s been acting as a chauffeur. These facts make it clear who is on whose side. But we lose track because of the complexity of the following events, and especially because the next night after work, in Michael’s place stands Mitchell Dane, and the juxtaposition of the two names in the same place sets up a mistaken impression. Furthering the mistaken impression is Chloe’s attraction to Martin at the ball and Martin’s seeming indifference, after his undeniable warmth at the tea dance.

When Mitchell Dane shows Chloe the black cabinet, he provides several more clues we need to keep in mind as Chloe does. He tells her the handling of his stock in trade is something he does not want to fall into any of his former business partners’ hands. He also says that his secretary, Mr. Wroughton, knows about the cabinet because he helped build it. He says that “Stran” is rendered harmless by the receipts in the safe. He warns Chloe not to trust anybody.

Two weeks after Chloe rejects Mitchell Dane’s offers and returns to working for Miss Allerdyce, Dane dies and leaves everything to her anyway. It’s November and she won’t turn 21 until February, so Dane’s solicitor and secretary assume responsibility for her. She has to live at Danesborough, and the oppressive atmosphere becomes overwhelming. She has discovered the contents of the black cabinet safe are heaps of compromising letters that Dane used for blackmail to build up his fortune of half a million pounds. She is horrified and seeks to destroy some of the letters. Wroughton seeks to block her and tries to get her to give him access to the safe. He and his wife and cronies tell her there’s a quarantine on the house, they send away all the cars and disconnect the telephone so she is a prisoner. Their Plan A is to marry her to Martin Fosseter and have him “persuade” her to give them the contents of the safe. Plan B is to have her committed to an asylum.

Chloe successfully empties the safe of the letters and hides them until she can escape the house with Martin Fosseter, whose role she doesn’t know yet, but as soon as they get to London she catches him trying to deceive her. She gives him the slip and hides with the niece of her old governess. Comic scenes and cat-and-mouse chases ensue, with Michael Foster turning up to rescue and hide Chloe at his old nanny’s place when the Baduns find her address. Chloe gives Michael the receipt for the suitcases and he destroys the letters. She loses her job and ends up marrying Michael for support, protection, and also because he loves her and she loves him. But in signing the marriage register, she finds out he’s actually “Michael Stranways Fosseter.” She thinks he must be the “Stran” that Mitchell Dane warned her was a devil, so she runs away and hides. She comes to her senses and goes back, asking for his side of the story, and they reconcile.

Stuff I wonder:

• Aren’t there a lot of important male characters with similar first names? Michael, Martin, Mitchell. It almost requires a chart. Hm.
• Classism is rampant in the society of the time. Chloe’s “breeding” tells, first in her overall appearance at the ball, and then in her speech and demeanor in applying as a charwoman, then in the ease of her changing jobs to that of a secretary. But would they really accept a charwoman who could speak like a lady? See My Fair Lady. See also note about Hiding Places, below. Everybody allows a “lady” to get away with anything in this world.
• The villains’ plans are unclear. Plan A (my name for it) is explicit, but suddenly Plan B pops out while Chloe is living at Danesborough, with no reason why it was going into effect and why Plan A was apparently being discarded, especially as Plan A seems to be in fine shape when Martin persuades Chloe to “escape” with him.
• How is it that Chloe mistakes Michael’s last name and not Martin’s? Where would she have seen Martin’s name written down? As far as we know, she is introduced to him, so she should have heard the same last name, “Foster,” at the tea dance as she hears the next day at Miss Tankerville’s when Michael comes and is introduced to her. Is this fair of the author to deceive us by writing one name with its correct spelling and the other name with its pronunciation?
• HOW do the villains find her address when she hides in London? Do we assume they spotted her and kept her under surveillance? Wasn’t that awfully lucky, to spot this one girl out of the whole of London and not have her spot them, and not tell the readers either? Is that fair??
• Same with Michael. What a convenient coincidence that he should spot her in London in time to come to her rescue!
• Also, how did they find out the compromising letters were in the two suitcases at Victoria Station’s Left Luggage? Hm, since Chloe escaped Danesborough and Martin helped her with a) two suitcases, and b) a cardboard clothes box, and she kept the clothes box with her, he could deduce she didn’t need the suitcases, ergo, they were Something Else.
• For a girl who knows “nobody” in London, doesn’t Chloe have a lot of hiding places? First the niece of her nanny or whoever-that-was who moved to Australia. Loved this comic relief. Then Michael turns up and can let her live in the flat of HIS old nanny. Here we see Old Nannies Provide Hiding Places. Finally, she throws herself on the mercy of the relative of the girl at the organization where she worked for a short time, and this relative takes her in without references or anything (see note about Classism above, also about Looks, below).
• Why does Chloe trust her intrinsic reactions to people—liking Michael Foster at first sight, disliking Mitchell Dane and Mr Wroughton—and so suddenly turning against her feelings about Michael? Okay, there’s some experience to justify her. At first she liked the doctor in the village near Danesborough, but then she finds out he’s one of the Bad’uns. At first she liked Martin Fosseter, but then she finds out he’s lied to her and she reacts immediately by suspecting him, rightly as it happens, of being a Bad’un too. So when she sees the fatal name “Stranways” on the register, she’s shocked into reacting without thinking, just as she did with Martin.
• Chloe certainly gets to trade on her looks a lot. She definitely has merit underneath, but still. People accept her at face value because she’s pretty and apparently can look sincere. She should have become a master criminal herself; she has the talent for it: acting ability, innocent looks, resourcefulness, quick thinking, and hubris. Yes, hubris. How else does she so self-justifyingly reject Michael and then come back and barely apologize and instead turn the scene into a pity party for her own broken heart?
• Yeah. That reconciliation scene. It could have been so much better had Chloe humbled herself to the point of accepting that she bore equal blame for breaking Michael’s heart first by rejecting him and running away, before she got her own heart broken when he rejected her apology. As it stands, he has to assume most of the responsibility for the situation, which I thought was really unfair when it was so obvious that Chloe owes him the effort of becoming more understanding.
• Feminism takes a hit when Chloe, after exhibiting exceptional brains in foiling and eluding the Bad’uns all that time, falls back on allowing herself to be rescued by the Man and Marriage. Just because she marries Michael, she’s not suddenly safe, except from having to marry Martin. The Bad’uns could still have kidnapped her and gotten her committed to an asylum under a false name and then faked her death, going to a lot of trouble before they discover the destruction of all the letters and before Michael could find her (doesn’t this now remind you of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White?) and come to the rescue. All she really has to do is to write a letter to Danesborough that the contents of the safe have been destroyed, and the persecution would all end. Then we could have had a feminist win if Chloe had chosen the Man and the Marriage at the end of her adventures, not for any other reason than her own happiness.
• How could this much happen and it’s STILL NOT February???