Tea with Jam and Dread (4 page)

‘Mind your mother, dear,’ I said in a fair imitation of Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass’s delightful accent. ‘We haven’t got all day. Soon it will be teatime, and then dinner, and after that your first big hunt.’

But it was too late; Lady Celia had planted her heels into my gravel walkway and crossed her arms defiantly. Her lower lip was stuck out so far that a near-sighted pigeon might have mistaken it for a perch.

‘
You
can’t tell me what to do,’ she said. ‘You’re only an innkeeper.’

‘And you, dear,’ I said evenly, ‘don’t get to tell me what it is that I
can’t
do; you’re only a child.’

‘Bravo,’ said Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass.

‘Mother!’ Lady Celia said as she stomped a ridiculous excuse for a shoe. It was something Julius Caesar might have worn home from a battle.

Unfortunately, I ran with what I thought was parental encouragement. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘you’re a foreigner.’

My guests gasped in unison, but given that they were English, and aristocrats in particular, their combined sound was scarcely more audible than a bee’s burp. To my surprise, it was Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass who seemed the most put out by my accusation.

‘Why, that’s practically racist,’ he roared. ‘An Englishman
cannot
be a foreigner; that is simply impossible.’

I tried to scoff softly, but
that
was simply impossible. Instead I whinnied like a mare in heat. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘Surely you jest.’

‘Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass jests with no one,’ His Pomposity had the nerve to say. ‘Least of all a tavern maid.’

Moi?
A tavern maid? The maid part was pure flattery, given that I was thirty, now that thirty was supposed to be the new fifty – or was it the other way around? Never mind; the thing is I have never in all my born days put as much as one toe over the line that is the threshold of a bar, pub, tavern, ‘watering hole,’ or any other place that might serve alcoholic beverages.

We Mennonites believe that drinking alcohol leads to sin. I have a personal reason for not imbibing. To quote the Bible, ‘
wine is a mocker.
’ Believe me, anyone who was born with a face that looks like that of a Kentucky Derby Winner has been mocked enough without having some fermented grapes adding to the torment. Now where was I? Oh, yes, I was about to remind the snobbish nobs which side of the pond they were on.

First, I inflated my scrawny chest as far as it would go. ‘Look here, Lord Such-and-Such. You lost the Revolutionary War, the one that we began in seventeen seventy-six. We celebrate our independence from Britain every July the fourth. That makes
you
people the foreigners – we share a special kinship, to be sure, but
you
are still on
foreign
soil. Get it? And by the way, this is an inn, not a tavern. We don’t serve booze. The strongest drink you’ll get is buttermilk.’

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass huffed. ‘An Englishman is
never
foreign, no matter where he is. He is
English
, for heaven’s sake. It is the
rest
of the world that is foreign. Don’t
you
get it?’

‘I dare say that Americans have a right to feel at home in their own country,’ Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass said, smiling wanly. ‘Now then, please have someone show us to our suite of rooms so that we might have a little rest before it is time to dress for dinner.’

I returned her wan smile with a sweet one. ‘
Garçon
,’ I said and snapped my fingers. ‘
Allez, Pierre!
’ When nothing happened, I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. ‘It is so hard to get good help these days, isn’t it?’

Somehow the earl, who sounded quite bored, managed to focus both his eyes behind his monocle. ‘Rally, my dear,’ he said, ‘your quips aren’t in the least bit amusing. Perhaps they lose something in translation.’

My daughter Alison poked me. ‘Mom, are we going to have a rally like he says? What kind of rally, and how come no one told me?’

‘He can’t pronounce the word “really,” dear.’

‘And another thing, Mom. How come Lord Grimsley-Snotgrass is wearing a Donald Trump wig? He ain’t allowed to vote, is he?’

‘That is
Snod
grass with a “
d
,”’ His Lordship said through teeth clenched so tightly that he might well have been able to bite a steel cable in two – had he just happened to have one in his mouth at the moment. This, of course, was something that rarely happened.

‘Ya sure about the “d”?’ Alison said. ‘Because, if ya are, then it don’t make no sense. Like, what is Snodgrass supposed ta mean?’

‘You are a very rude child,’ Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass said.

‘Hey, I ain’t no child,’ Alison said. ‘I’m a rising eighth-grader at Hernia Junior High. And it ain’t none of your business, but I’m officially a woman now, so there!’

‘
You?
A woman?’

‘Yes,
me
a woman. Lots of girls in my grade had visits from Mrs Monthly over the summer.’

‘Bother,’ said Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass, ‘we must have a translator who speaks this colonial gibberish. Where is Viscount Rupert? Didn’t he once date an American harlot?’

Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass placed a gloved hand gently on her husband’s arm. ‘She was a
starlet
, not a
harlot
, darling.’

‘Oh, a rose by any other name,’ he sniffed. ‘Somebody get the viscount,’ he ordered.

‘I’ll
get His Lordship,’ said Mr Sebastian, and practically stomped back to the limousine.

‘Don’t trip on your lower lip, Sebastian,’ his father called after him.

‘And tell your chauffeur to start unloading,’ the Babester added.

‘We don’t have a chauffeur,’ said Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass. ‘One would have thought that one came with the car, but apparently that is not the way it works when you hire an automobile in this country. Upon signing the rental agreement, all one gets are the keys and a useless map.’

‘Why was the map useless?’ Gabe asked. ‘Wasn’t it for the State of Pennsylvania?’

‘Well I suppose it was, but what good is that when the map unfolds to just under a meter, and your damn state is so big. The distances here are simply outrageous. Why, I wager that Pennsylvania alone is as large as England.’

I am ashamed to say that I felt my pigeon chest puff with pride. ‘Almost. Actually, Pennsylvania is smaller, but only by ten percent.’

Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass wagged a finger at each of us in turn. ‘What utter hubris you Americans possess. Grabbing great fistfuls of land like greedy pups at their mother’s teats—’

‘Ahem,’ I said. ‘For one thing, there are children present; for another thing, it was you English who initially did the grabbing in your mixed metaphor.’

Agnes, who had hitherto been as silent a partner to me as the Colossus of Rhodes, and every bit as useful, sputtered to life like a long-neglected tractor. ‘Perhaps we should begin our tour of this
genuine
reproduction of an eighteenth-century Amish farmhouse.
Condor Nest Travel
magazine calls it “an experience you won’t forget, at a price you can’t afford.”’

‘Indeed,’ said Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass, ‘it was that last bit that caught my eye. People in our set never inquire about prices. We find it so terribly gauche, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, teh-blee,’ I said.

Agnes shot me a look that could have devilled raw eggs. ‘Tally ho, pip pip and all that sort of rot,’ she chirped, drawing on her knowledge of old Hollywood depictions of Briticisms. She even made the shocking mistake of grabbing Lord Touch-Me-Not’s elbow. His Lordship recoiled like cellophane placed next to a candle.

‘I am not an invalid,’ he growled. ‘I lost one eye during the war but everything else works as it should. By this time tomorrow I’ll be showing
you
around this place. Then all your secrets will be revealed.’

‘Goody,’ Alison cried. ‘Then finally I’ll get to see what’s in the elevator.’

‘Oh, Peregrine,’ Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass said with a purr and a wink, ‘you’re too much.’ Then she turned to Alison. ‘Whatever do you mean, dear?’

‘Well, lady,’ Alison said, ‘it’s like this: a long time ago this tourist from Tokyo got stuck in our rinky-dinky elevator, like halfway between the floors, but nobody noticed for like three days on account of some holiday or somethin’ going on, and then there was this terrible smell – kinda like a dead rat in the wall, only a whole lot worse, so these men came in with power tools, cut through the bottom of the elevator, and do you know what they found?’

‘What?’ Aubrey said breathlessly.

‘Nothing! Leastways there was nobody in it – only a lady’s purse.’

‘No way!’ Lady Celia said, but her eyes were as big as basketball hoops.

‘Oh, it’s true,’ I said. ‘Go on, Alison, tell her the rest of the story.’

Alison beamed. ‘Well, the police – even the FBI – searched everywhere for this lady. They lifted dogs up into the elevator, they looked
everywhere
, but they never did find her. But sometimes when you’re going down them impossibly steep stairs that wind around the elevator, ya can hear pounding coming from the wall and a woman crying.’

‘Darling, did you hear that?’ Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass said to her husband.

There followed a muffled response, and I got the feeling that Her Ladyship might have erred by voicing an endearment in front of us commoners. She turned quickly to me, her English skin already the colour of an uncooked brisket.

‘We Brits do love our ghosts,’ she hastened to assure me. ‘Every castle and manor house in the realm is haunted. In our own home, Gloomsburythorpe, we have three documented and named ghosts, and two in the “quite possible” category.’

Now this was a woman after my own heart. Clearly we were simpatico. Had she been a sensible American, I could pinpoint this as the day that a lifelong friendship had taken root.

‘I have a friend,’ I confessed, ‘who refers to ghosts as
Apparition
Americans.’

Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass threw back her well-bred head and laughed graciously. ‘Charming! You Americans have such a way with words.’

‘
Rally?
’

Startled, I looked over to see an exact copy of Mr Sebastian sauntering towards us from the limousine. That is to say, his features and build were the same but he was wearing a grey flannel sports jacket, a navy ascot and a red leather driving cap pulled cockily down over one eye as one might see in a magazine ad. Perhaps they had a chauffeur after all.

‘Swithamiens,’ said Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass to the newcomer, ‘I see that you have roused yourself, but now, where is your brother?’

‘He saw a bright yellow bird, Mother, and went charging after the poor creature. You know how he is about birds.’

‘Forgive me,’ Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass said, acknowledging all of us with a slight dip of her noble head. ‘I’d like to introduce my firstborn by two minutes, Rupert, the Viscount Swithamiens.’ For the record what she actually said was ‘Vee-cun Swify,’ in that curious British tradition of omitting half the sounds in one’s surname and then throwing in a couple of new ones, just to throw off the Devil, lest He be nosing around one’s genealogical record in hopes of stealing one’s errant progeny.

‘How delightful,’ I said. ‘I just love irony, don’t you? Well then, let us all troop into my miniscule office and register. You sure don’t want to lose your places for the hunt tonight.’

I would have thought that as a good Christian woman, Agnes would keep her fingernails trimmed to a modest length, but
au contraire
, she maintained the claws of a heathen. As my guests began to file past, Agnes pinched an inch of subcutaneous fat above my hip and kept pinching until her two poisonous blades of keratin practically met.

‘Mags,’ she hissed, ‘why are you speaking so loud? They may be foreigners but they speak
English
.’

‘Maybe,’ I conceded, ‘but they speak
British
English, not regular,
real
English like God intended.’

‘Pshaw,’ Agnes said. ‘Why, that’s just the silliest thing that I ever heard.’

‘I think
pshaw
is the silliest thing that I ever heard, except maybe for
psalm
, which should be pronounced
p-salm
, and nobody seems to know why it’s not. Look, Agnes, you’re the worldly woman who watches television all the time. Think back to your favourite TV program when you were a girl. What was it?’

‘
I Love Lucy
.’

‘Was it in British or in proper English?’

‘Point taken,’ Agnes said, and so we filed into the PennDutch on the heels of a heap of trouble.

O
ur blue-blooded guests were surprisingly c
ooperative and signed up for every available activity, including church. While we were still in my miniscule office, however, concluding our business, Lady Celia and Alison wandered off into the sitting room. Upon entering they immediately began screaming bloody murder.

Blue blood and bumpkin alike, we raced to the rescue, and whereas the others were most certainly confused by what they saw, I understood the situation at once. For there, in her favourite, century-old, straight-back rocking chair, sat the rigid figure of my long-dead Granny Yoder. It was obvious to me that Lady Celia could see Granny, and Granny could see the girl. Alison, on the other hand, has had to take Granny’s ghost, along with germs and Santa Claus, all on good faith.

Thank heavens I got to Lady Celia first. ‘She’s harmless,’ I said quickly.

‘Boogers, I am,’ Granny said.

‘You see,’ I said. ‘She can’t even swear right in British.’

‘But I saw her walk through that wall. She’s a ghost, I’m telling you; a
real
ghost.’

‘But I was under the impression that you had ghosts at Gloomandoo‌mbucktooth‌onthemoors, dear.’

‘Yes, but – but this one is
real
. Look!’ In her hysteria, Lady Celia sounded almost as though she were an American.

Music will do that too, you know – that is, make one sound like an American. Of course, that doesn’t surprise me; I should think it would be difficult to sing whilst shaping one’s mouth to fit the strange sounds of those British brogues. Why, even the Beatles sang in American. I am told that Adele does too. And as for hymns – you can take Granny Yoder’s word for it – the angels sing in American English. So of that I have no doubt.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, the littler Lady had seen a ghost. She really had; Granny Yoder is a real, live, Apparition American – except that she’s
dead
. However, until Lady Celia had screamed like a Highland banshee, no one else had ever been able to see her. Not even my sister’s mangy mongrel, Shnookums, had ever sensed the presence of another spirit at the PennDutch. This revelation, then, was so exciting to me that I may have gotten a little carried away.

‘Granny,’ I cried, ‘you mind your manners and say “hello.” This young lady – and I mean Lady with a capital “L,” has come all the way over from the motherland for a visit.’

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Granny. ‘It isn’t
my
motherland. I was born right here, in this very room. And
our
people came from Switzerland – every last one of them.’

‘Actually, you weren’t born in this
very
room, Granny, because the original farmhouse was blown to smithereens by a tornado and I had to rebuild it. Remember?’

‘Don’t be silly, child,’ Granny said. ‘I was already dead by then. How could I remember?

‘Because the tornado picked me up, carried me out into the north pasture and planted me face down in a cow pie. I had to sleep in my barn that night. You paid me a visit and told me that I’d never looked prettier than I did then with cow dung on my face.’

‘What the devil is a cow pie?’ said my new best friend, the Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass.

The parlour was not built to host a crowd and it was now filled to capacity. Therefore I was understandably annoyed when Agnes piped up with what was to be
my
clever retort.

‘Magdalena keeps two Holstein cows, Matilda and Gertrude, which she will give you the privilege of milking for the small fee of only one hundred American dollars. Anyway, her cows are grass-fed, which is why they produce such high quality, hormone-free milk. But as you all know, what goes in … Well, let’s just say that the
end
product is cow pies.’

Believe me when I say that I am not judging harshly, merely stating the facts when I relate that the Viscount Swithamiens had a laugh that would have appealed to a female donkey in heat. Why, in that small, crowded and overheated room, even I, who was just beginning ‘the change’ and prone to strange mood swings, felt something akin to a primal urge to jump the young man’s bones. I say ‘akin,’ lest one infer from the word ‘primal’ that I believe in evolution, which I cannot, alas.

‘Stop with that bloody braying,’ I hollered above the din.

Not only did the braying stop immediately, the Brits stopped breathing.

‘Now you’ve done it,’ Agnes said. ‘I warned you about
that
word.’

‘What’s wrong with the word “blood”?’ Alison said. ‘We all have it. I got a nosebleed at camp when it got hit by a tennis ball. And that’s how Daddy likes his steaks, isn’t it? Bloody.’

‘He likes them
rare
, dear.’

‘You see, darling girl,’ Agnes said, ‘it’s a cultural thing.’ Sweet woman that she is, Agnes possesses a tin ear. She’d adopted an accent so affected and so supposedly posh that even palace officials wouldn’t recognize her words as belonging to an Indo-European language. For all they knew, she could have been speaking a dialect from the highlands of Papua New Guinea while chewing on a mouthful of betel nuts.

‘Mom, what did she say?’ Alison asked, proving my point.

I crossed my fingers so as not to tell a lie. ‘She said that there are free refreshments in the dining room – but for the next half hour only. After that the guests should collect their keys and start toting their luggage up my impossibly steep stairs. That’s good for at least two hours, which will take them all the way up to dinnertime.’

‘That’s not what she said,’ Alison whined.

‘Well, that’s what she
should
have said. Also, folks, don’t be counting on any help from us: Agnes, bless her heart, is too portly to be a porter, Alison is still growing her girl parts and my husband is susceptible to hernias. As for
moi
, have you ever seen such long and gangly limbs on a primate that is neither a gibbon nor an orangutan? Not that we’re remotely related, mind you, for the Good Lord spoke them into being out of nothing, whereas we humans were created out of clay.’

‘Does that make us dirt bags, then?’ the impudent viscount said.

‘Well I never!’ Agnes said. ‘Magdalena,’ she whispered, ‘I am beside myself with embarrassment.’

There wasn’t enough space in that crowded room for a woman her size to be beside herself in embarrassment.

‘That’s all right, Agnes,’ I said. ‘I can handle this. You, sir,’ I said to the viscount, ‘undoubtedly find it strange that we Americans are so religious, given that you Europeans have all but abandoned organized religion. I have heard that your churches are empty. I assure you, though, that on that glorious day when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more, you will be singing a different tune. And don’t you be shaking your noble noggin, and snickering like that, because when the fires of Hell—’

‘Mags,’ the Babester said gently, ‘can you move it along, please?’

Now Granny Yoder snickered. ‘A woman who has been through the “curse” is a woman with a cause,’ she quipped. Maybe she had something there. After all, Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel … they all seemed to be women beyond their days of child-bearing.

I shook my head to clear it of cobwebs. ‘Now, where was I?’

‘You were giving him hell,’ Alison said.

I smiled wanly at her double entendre. ‘That too. But I was enjoining all to adjourn to the dining room, or else to check in. Mr and Mrs Grimsley-Snodgrass, I am assigning you rooms three and four, on account of Agnes tells me that even you
pseudo
-royals prefer separate quarters. These rooms have an adjoining door, should you desire to exercise your base needs, Mr Grimsley-Snodgrass—’

‘
Lord
Grimsley-Snodgrass to you, Mrs—’ said Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass.

‘No can do,
Mister
Grimsley-Snodgrass,’ I said. ‘There is only one
Lord
, and his name is Jesus Christ. That is
not
the name printed in your passport.’

‘Cheeky woman,’ Lord Grimsley-Snodgrass muttered into his moustache.

‘Do you know what?’ Lady Grimsley-Snodgrass said. ‘I have changed my mind again. I have decided that you may call me by my Christian name after all.’

‘Fabulous,’ I said, beaming. ‘What is it?’

‘Aubrey, of course.
That’s
in my passport.’

‘Aubrey is a
biblical
name?’

Her Ladyship’s delicate English skin dimpled as she contemplated my question. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see how your question is relevant,’ she said at last.

‘Well, you know,’ I said, ‘the Bible – Christian – in some circles the two words kind of go together.’

‘
Oh
,’ she said. ‘Like that. I’ve often wondered why it was called a christening gown. Well, in that case I’m sure that Aubrey was the name of a saint. Yes, I remember now, Saint Aubrey: she was the patron saint of girls with invalid mothers. My mother had polio, you see.’

‘How awful,’ I said.

‘Mother,’ said the viscount, ‘does her Bible forbid lying as well?’

‘Forsooth, you impudent youth,’ I said, and gave him a righteous scowl. Perhaps it wasn’t my place to chastise him, but he was
in
my place, and one of the big Ten Commandments is that one should honour one’s parents. My house; my rules.

Aubrey’s aristocratic features turned a lovely shade of pink, quite reminiscent of a pregnant sheep’s udder. ‘I was only trying to be polite by playing along. Rally, Rupert, why must you always correct Mother?’ She turned to me. ‘I never paid attention in church school and haven’t the foggiest knowledge of saints – although we sometimes spend Christmas in St Tropez – and my mother is perfectly healthy.’

‘Ta da!’ said Rupert.

‘Listen, dear,’ I said, ‘if you were
my
son—’

‘Which he is
not
,’ the Babester said.

Rupert twisted his lips into a smirk which even Satan could envy. Mercifully – for him – he said nothing.

‘But he taxes my Christian soul,’ I wailed.

I don’t know what I would have done had not my dear, dear Jewish husband, Dr Gabriel Rosen, aka the Babester, put his arm firmly around my shoulder and whispered his wintergreen-scented breath in my ear. It was better than being held in my mother’s arms, as hers were bony, her bosom non-existent and her mood slightly more pleasant than a disturbed hornet’s nest.

‘Remember that they’re your guests,’ he said so softly that even my guardian angel had to strain in order to hear. ‘And they’re foreigners to boot. It’s not
their
fault that they’re
heathens
and that they can’t speak proper English. Just be grateful if they turn out to be housebroken. You did put that on your questionnaire, didn’t you?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ the earl growled. ‘We are Englishmen,
not
French! I may have just one good eye but my ears have compensated for my visual impairment. You would be well-advised to remember that.’

My hero squared his broad shoulders. ‘Then perhaps you should inform your son that in this house we show our elders respect.’

‘Harrumph,’ the earl said.

‘Hooray,’ I said. ‘Now where were we – before we got side-tracked by all this unnecessary unpleasantness? Oh, yes, we were working out the matter of names.’ I turned to the youngest and fairest of us all. ‘So, what do you wish to be called, Miss Grimsley-Snodgrass?’

‘If we
have
to go common,’ Lady Celia said with a sigh and a slump, ‘then remember to call me Cee-Cee.’

‘Will do, dear. By the way, you get room six, which has the best view. If you lean way out the window – but take care to hang on to the shutter super tight, so that you don’t fall – you can see Stucky Ridge. Not only that, but the part that you can see is Lover’s Leap, where legend has it that an Indian maiden leaped to her death along with her white colonial boyfriend. Their love was, of course, forbidden in the year 1768. The settler was my great, great, great, great, great-grandfather, Elias Yoder.’

‘Say what?’
Mister
Grimsley-Snodgrass said. ‘He was probably some stowaway vagrant from the sewers of London.’

‘He was a Swiss farmer,’ I said. ‘His Christian name was actually Christian, unlike yours, which is Peregrine. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Christian charity, I believe that I shall call you just plain Peregrine. After all, if you were to fall down my impossibly steep stairs, and I needed to call for outside help, it would be much quicker to say: “Help, Peregrine has fallen and he can’t get up,” than it would be to explain that you were an English nobleman who has taken for himself a title that belongs only to the Lord God Himself, for you see, dear, everyone on our volunteer rescue squad is either a devout Christian or recently descended from one, and will have no truck with such highfalutin ways, although they all own trucks, so go figure.’

‘Magdalena,’ said Aubrey softly, calling me by name for the first time, ‘do they teach grammar in American schools?’

‘Of course!’

‘Hmm. But do they teach one how to diagram sentences?’ Aubrey said.

‘Man, them English schools must be somethin’ else!’ Alison said. ‘We learnt about them diagrams in sex education class, but we didn’t learn nothin’ about putting them into sentences. You sure that you got them facts right, Auntie Aubrey?’

There were snickers all around, and not the delicious American kind, which is a brand of candy bar. A good deal of exception was taken, along with some umbrage.

‘My mother is
not
your auntie!’ The viscount was obviously quite vexed by my presumptive daughter’s claim to kinship.

Aubrey reached out and pulled Alison into a motherly embrace which, I must admit, I thought very American of her. ‘You must forgive my son, dear,’ she said. ‘He is a bit full of himself, I’m afraid. On account of his rude behaviour, I am giving all of you permission – seeing as we are on American soil, anyway – to call my first born by his Christian name: Rupert. And I am quite sure that Rupert comes straight out of the Bible.’