Three Matronly Mysteries

C. S. Forester's Three Matronly Mysteries contains three short stories, each with its own intriguing twist.

In The Eleven Deck Chairs, a group of eleven distinguished and attractive women (ten with government officials for husbands) are being shipped to another location for some reason during a time of war. The captain happens to be on the opposite side of the war and chooses to abuse his power over these married women in a very unexpected and daring way, asking them to relieve him of the tedium of his routine.

Next, in The Bedchamber Mystery you meet three sisters in 1843 who have never been married, live together and look forward to their weekly whist game with a widowed doctor. After an unfortunate and very personal injury that might have been caused by a chamber pot, they devise an ingenious plan to use his medical expertise while at the same time avoiding utter humiliation while not endangering their favorite weekly event .

Modernity and Maternity is the story of an old maid at the end of the twentieth century who runs a farm using the latest in machinery. She not only is the first in town to have a dinner-cooker in her kitchen and flies a helicopter, but is also a pioneer in the test-tube baby frontier. As the villagers pointed out, if all a girl had to do was to say that she had bought a thirty shilling test-tube for all to be forgiven, what was going to happen to the world?