Jerusalem Inn (8 page)

Melrose assumed he meant furniture and not colonialism.

“You're an endangered species, Melrose. And I think it's terribly boring of you —
both
of you — to be going away so close to the Christmas hols, and to County
Durham.
Good heavens, you must be mad. It's near Newcastle and all sorts of roughs prowl the streets and brawl and break beer bottles at football matches. And it snows there.”

“It snows here, too. It's that white stuff that was coming down this morning,” said Plant, working quickly through two ups and three downs.

“I'm talking about
snow,
darling. Tons of it.
Walls
of it. It doesn't do that here — what's the matter Viv-viv? You look a bit pale.”

Her face did look waxen in the firelight. “All that talk about snow. It reminds me of the big one we had years ago. And the murders.” She turned to Melrose. “Have you heard from Superintendent Jury lately, Melrose?”

Known him for years and still won't call him by his first name, thought Plant. Mistress Formality. “Phone calls, mostly. Jury hasn't much time to write, I imagine.”

Trueblood slapped his hand on the table, jumping the pints and glasses. “Now
there
was a perfectly
divine
man! Stopped by his digs once or twice whilst I was in London. But he's never there. Let's murder someone and get him back here. . . . ” He looked around at the old lady by the fire. “Withers, old trout,” he called out, “would you be willing to be done in for a lifetime supply of gin-and-it?” He turned back and said, “Not terribly logical, I expect, but . . . like a cig?” He held out his black box of Sobranies to the others.

“No thanks, I don't smoke crayons,” said Melrose, getting out a thin cigar.

Mrs. Withersby, hearing the magic word
gin,
shifted gears from her Cinders-by-the-ashes to her social persona, and struggled toward the table, carpet-slippers slapping on bare oak. Mrs. Withersby's idea of “social” did not, however, quite square with the norm, and even as she shoved her glass toward Trueblood, she said, “Gin-and-lager, Marigold. The Pansy Palace'll be thieved one a these fine days, you sittin' over here.” She hooked her thumb in the direction of Trueblood's Antiques. She then turned her attention to Melrose Plant, who had thus far bought her three drinks, and her dented face broke, thin blue mouth like a bat trying to smile.

“Oney I must say, this 'un” — she looked toward Trueblood, who had gone to get her drink — “at least don't sit about all day in some great lump of house doin' nothin' when others is workin' theirsen to skin and bone.”

“Withers, old bean,” said Trueblood, handing her her freshly filled glass, “we were all planning a rave-up at Harrogate. Orchestra laid on and everything. Black tie. You could wear your chiffon, the lemon yellow —”

“Piss off, Marigold,” said Mrs. Withersby, by way of thanks, as her slippers slapped away.

Trueblood shrugged, examined his perfectly manicured nails, and said, “So
tell
me.
Why
are you going up to the Northeast? You never go anywhere at Christmas; you always sit in your socks and drink Cockburn's port in front of your blazing fireplace. And whatever will dear Auntie Agatha do without her Christmas goose?”

“We could take her along,” said Vivian.

Melrose ignored that comment. If Vivian insisted on being idiotic . . .

A
WORD
which might better have been saved for the dear auntie who was now filling the door of the saloon bar in her black cape.

“Agatha, old sweat,” said Marshall Trueblood, shoving out the fourth chair with the toe of his highly polished shoe. “Do join.”

Lady Agatha Ardry, who disliked nearly everyone in Long Piddleton except herself and the new vicar, especially loathed Marshall Trueblood. To her nephew, Melrose Plant, she had often expressed the opinion that Trueblood should be tarred and feathered and run out of town.

Melrose had replied that they did that sort of thing in her
native America but over here they suffered fools to live. His glance (he hoped) had been full of meaning.

“I see the Withersby person is here. No, thank you.” So she stood as she said, “What's all this nonsense about going up to the North now Christmas is coming?”

As if it hadn't come around for years. Without looking up from his crossword, Melrose said, “For once I agree, dear Aunt. It is nonsense.” He ignored Vivian's black look.

“Thought so.” Apparently this was such good news she plumped herself down in the proffered chair.

But her face fell when Melrose continued: “Nonsense, but true, nonetheless.”

Clearly, the announcement whetted her thirst, if not her mind. She called to Dick Scroggs for a double shooting sherry. His parted and oiled head looked up from his newspaper spread on the bar, saw who it was, and kept on with his reading.

“I don't understand this at all. You never go anywhere on holidays. Confirmed bachelor. Set in your ways . . . Mr.
Scroggs!”
she called again.

“A bachelor, perhaps, but as yet unconfirmed. Nor, apparently, set in my ways if I'm willing to go to a house party. But since it's Vivian who's asked me —” He looked up and gave his aunt a darling smile, designed to turn her blue. She had always been afraid that something might happen between Melrose and Vivian. That Vivian had got herself engaged to another did little to alleviate Agatha's anxiety, since the other was in Italy. “A weekend in the country. Some sort of artsy soiree. Vivian, not satisfied with suffering on her own, has landed me an invitation to suffer along with her.”

Agatha turned her guns on Vivian, neither thanking nor paying Dick Scroggs, who set her sherry before her. Those sorts of things were left up to others. “Why? Plant doesn't do anything artsy. Who's invited you?”

Vivian pulled a letter from her pocket: raised writing on
cream-laid paper. “Charles Seaingham. You know, the critic. He does things on art and books for the papers.”

He must not have done much for them, for Agatha denied all knowledge of the man.

“I met him at that little party the publisher had — you know, when my book of poetry came out —”

Always the morale-booster, Agatha snorted.
“That.
Poetry doesn't sell, Vivian, as I've told you. You should write those romances like Barbara Cartland.” She took the letter from Vivian's hand and read it through the lorgnette she occasionally affected, thinking it made her look stately and dignified.

Difficult, thought Melrose, for Agatha to look like anything else but a stump. Indeed, as she sat there, solid and square in her dark brown tweed suit, that was just what she reminded him of. Birds could have nested in her hair.

“MacQuade. Who's he?”

“A writer. He won —”

Agatha was not interested in what he wrote or won. “Parmenger? Never heard of him,” thereby reducing the man's size to a pea.

“A painter.”

“Nudes, probably. Or big squares of color. Never did understand that sort of stuff.” She frowned. “This name. St. Leger.
Lady
St. Leger . . . now I
know
her —”

“No, you don't,” said Melrose, without looking up from his puzzle.

She frowned. “And just how do
you
know?”

“If you knew her you'd know how to say her name: ‘Sel-in-ger', not ‘Saint Leger.' As ‘St. John' is pronounced ‘Sinjen.' ”

“And how would you pronounce Saint Francis of Assisi, then? Sinfrenass? I don't know why you people don't spell your names the way they sound.”

She thrust the letter back into Vivian's hands, and tried another line of attack: “I would like to know, Vivian, how it
is you aren't spending the holidays with your fiancé.
That
seems most peculiar.”

“Because, frankly, I just don't feel like traveling all the way to Venice and, also, frankly, I don't get on too well with his family, and —”

“And, also, frankly,” said Melrose, “Count Dracula doesn't like Christmas. All those crosses —”

Vivian's face went a fiery red. “Would you
please
stop calling him ‘Count Dracula'!” She slammed down her half-pint, spewing up droplets of ale. Melrose thought it quite a display of anger for mild-mannered Vivian, although she had picked up a little Mediterranean temperament in those months in Italy.

Trueblood said, “Actually, Dracula wasn't an Italian, Melrose; he was Transylvanian.”

“He traveled a lot, though.”

“Oh, shut
up!”
Vivian turned her chair away.

Smiling wonderfully, Trueblood said, “But he
is
a count, isn't he, Viv-viv.”

“Stop calling me ‘Viv-viv,' and, yes, he
is
a count.”

“Foreigner,” said Agatha with distaste, forgetting Milwaukee, city of her birth. “He'd have to give way over here, title or no. He's a foreigner.”

“Italians usually are, dear Aunt.”

Trueblood plucked up a cigarette that matched his ascot, waved the match out as elaborately as a catherine wheel, and said, “
I
found him quite charming.”

That was no recommendation, thought Melrose.

Agatha had clearly decided that Vivian was having entirely too much good fortune — what with Italian counts plucked from blue Mediterranean shores and house parties with the literati. “I told you to watch out for fortune hunters. Especially foreign ones.”

She had told her nothing of the kind, Melrose knew.
Indeed, Agatha was only too happy to get her nephew out of harm's way. “No one who knew Vivian would ever marry her merely for her money,” said Melrose, smiling wonderfully.

“I've told you time and again to marry one of your own sort —” Agatha could have bitten off her tongue, that was clear, since Vivian's “sort” was sitting right there doing a crossword. Melrose could see his aunt's mind totaling up the fittings and furniture, the grounds and gardens at Ardry End like an adding machine. She was his only living relative and had no intention of having that number swelled by things like wives and children. Quickly, she amended her statement. “But it's true, you are getting on, and the man does seem a perfectly respectable Italian —”

As if, thought Melrose, she'd known a gondolaful of unrespectable ones.

“ — who will probably have the sense to hold on to his title. Unlike Some Others We Know.”

Melrose felt rather than saw the look as he filled in five words, one right after another, saw immediately what the others must be in the way of a chess player looking ahead several plays, put his pen away and said, “Tell him to hold on for dear life, Vivian. It will sound quite grand, your being the Countess Giovanni —”

Vivian looked so distressed that Melrose stopped and changed the subject, frowning at Agatha. “Incidentally, how did you know about this trip? We've only just been sitting here planning it ourselves.”

“I've come from the house —”

Meaning
his
house, not hers. Hers was a thatched cottage in Plague Alley.

“ . . . speaking to Martha about the Christmas goose.”

Melrose's cook had hinted once or twice something about giving notice if Lady Ardry didn't stay out of her kitchen. Of course, Martha wouldn't leave. Both she and Ruthven had been in service to the Earls of Caverness for what seemed like
centuries. “Martha does not like you in her kitchen.” He drank the dregs of his beer and said, “I don't know why she'd be talking about goose, anyway. We weren't having goose.”

As if this had suddenly become the bone of contention, Agatha sat back, astonished. “Don't be absurd; we always have goose.”

“Times are hard. It's to be shin of beef, cold potatoes and Queer-times pudding.”

“Where are you having this Dickensian repast?” asked Trueblood. “The Old Curiosity Shop?”

They had their Old Curiosity Shop right there, as far as Melrose was concerned. “That still doesn't explain where you heard about this trip.”

“It was Ruthven. That man has
never
liked me. I just happened to overhear him talking to Martha as I was going into the kitchen.”

Agatha would have listened at the door of a cage of baboons, if it came to it. “I'm taking Ruthven, too,” said Melrose.

Would it be apoplexy? A seizure? Or merely that sputtering out of shooting sherry as she gagged.
“Ruthven!
Plant, what on earth —! You must leave him here.”

Melrose's butler might have been excess airplane luggage. “No, I can't do. You see, it's very complicated. Martha wants to spend the holidays with her relatives in Southend-on-sea. He really has never got on with her family” — here Melrose looked at Vivian, who was studying her hands — “but, being a gentleman, he, of course, wouldn't absolutely
refuse
to go to Southend. So I shall just say I need him.”

“You don't need him! What do you need him for?”

“To draw my bathwater.”

“Bathwater! You become, every day, a bit more of a snob, Plant.”

“Why don't you have a little trip yourself?” Melrose suggested. “Go to Milwaukee or Virginia and visit those
Randolph Bigget people you were running round Stratford-upon-Avon with last year.”

“Why not, Agatha?” said Vivian, coming back from her fevered and unhappy reflections of Venetian canals and fat dowager countesses.

“Fine for
you
to talk! Going off at Christmas this way.” Rooting through her large bag, she produced a handkerchief and held it to her eyes. “Leave me here to fend for myself.” She glared at Melrose. “Who'll cook my goose?”

The last in the line of the Earls of Caverness studied the air above her head and smiled, too much of a gentleman to answer.