Sadie Lemesurier

In the short story The Lemesurier Inheritance, Sadie Lemesurier is the American wife of Hugo and the mother of Ronald and Gerald. She was a music comedy actress in a small part in America when she met Hugo. She had heard the the Lemesurier family had a curse on it to the effect that the eldest son would never inherit. She did not at first believe in the curse. It was just fun, and the kind of colour appropriate to an old family, a nice story to tell around the fire.

However events soon forced Mrs Lemesurier to seek out Poirot for help. She told Poirot that her eldest son had had three narrow escapes from death, now were they all accidents. "Can a legend saw through an ivy stem?" she asked. Ronald had survived a fall while climbing ivy. She examined it and found the ivy partly sawn through. Her husband dismissed her concerns with fatalism, saying it was the curse and one could not fight it.

As Poirot would discover, Mrs Lemesurier's son was under threat, but not in the way she expected.