The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (14 page)

“True, dear. Perhaps the highwayman had a sick child at home and was just trying to rustle enough money to pay the doctor, though that raises the question of why he’d have been hanging around the saloon watching Hiram get bombed instead of home weeping by the sufferer’s bedside.”

“It may have been the custom of the time,” said Dittany.

“Gram Henbit used to sing a song about a wee tot trudging back and forth to the gin mill trying to get her father to come home because the fire was out and little Willie was freezing in his mother’s arms, but the old poop just stayed there lushing it up till Willie kicked the bucket.

If I’d been that mother, I think I might quite easily have grabbed a hatchet and gone around busting up saloons like Carry Nation. After I’d straightened out the geezer I’d been dumb enough to marry, that is.”

“You’d have been magnificent, darling.” Osbert sighed. “It saddens me to think you may have missed a brilliant career as a saloon smasher by marrying a nonalcoholic.

The trouble is, I tend to get hiccups after one glass of beer, as you know all too well. Are you quite sure you want to call on Aunt Arethusa?”

“Are you quite sure you want to go back and dig up that whole dad-blanged Hunniker meadow looking for a hypothetical second spring? We could wait for a sun shower, I suppose, and watch to see where the end of the rainbow hits.”

Osbert sighed again, a little louder. “It’s awfully late in the season for rainbows. We may as well bite the bullet and stop at Auntie’s. I hope she doesn’t come lunging at us with her rapier.”

“Don’t worry,” Dittany consoled him. “She’s probably forgotten where she put it.”

Perhaps Arethusa had indeed forgotten. Anyway, she didn’t have the rapier with her when she came to the door.

Neither had she remembered to dress. She was still in her pink robe and bedroom slippers with her luxuriant raven tresses hanging halfway down her back, even though the morning was long spent and the afternoon half in the bag.

Arethusa must have been abducting Lady Ermintrude today, Dittany decided. The authoress had kidnapped her ever-gullible heroine many times before, but it always took a lot out of her.

“No slavering suitors today, Auntie?” was Osbert’s amiable greeting.

“Don’t be disgusting, knave,” was Arethusa’s predictable reply. “Am I supping chez vous tonight?”

“I expect so. You generally do.”

“Good. I had a vague though evidently mistaken notion that I was committed to dining with somebody or other at the inn.”

“It wouldn’t be Pollicot James, by any chance,” Dittany suggested.

“No, it wouldn’t. Of that fact I am positively, decidedly, definitely, and unequivocally certain. Pollicot and his mother have gone to Toronto for the ballet.”

“What ballet?”

“Whatever ballet is there to be gone to, one assumes.

Mrs. James does not take me into her confidence.”

“Arethusa, was that a snippy remark?”

“Not at all, Dittany. I have no wish to be taken into Mrs. James’s confidence. I do have a wish for a cup of tea and a currant scone, of which I still have a fair supply because Pollicot appeared not to be particularly hungry yesterday afternoon. May I offer you the hospitality of the kitchen table? And do the infants take cream or milk with their tea?”

“Oh, don’t bother setting out cups for them. We have bottles with us if they start to howl.”

“Chacun a son gout. The procedure I had in mind was to split the scones and toast them, thus restoring their pristine esculence. Does that meet with everyone’s approval, or should one simply warm them in the oven?”

“I vote for splitting and toasting,” said Osbert, knowing full well that his aunt could easily spend the rest of the afternoon debating the issue if somebody didn’t settle it for her at the outset.

“So do I,” added Dittany, thus clinching the majority vote. “Would you like me to split them?”

“By all means. Osbert can fill the kettle and put on the cups, plates, butter knives, and napkins. And I,” Arethusa finished with a bravura flourish, “will get out the jam.”

“Bully for you. When will the Jameses be back?”

“Next week, I believe. Or is it the week after? Or the week after that? Whenever the ballerinas get sick of having to be on their toes all the time, one assumes. It seems an odd way to make a living. But then,” Arethusa added with a baleful glance at Osbert, who was trying to fold a napkin into the shape of a cactus, “so does rustling mongeese.”

“They’re mongooses,” her nephew replied hotly, “and I’ve never rustled one in my life. It wouldn’t be any use, they’d just sneak off between the horses’ hooves before the rustlers could lasso them. And bite their fetlocks in passing, like as not. Mongooses are feisty little critters. Dangbust it, now where are we going to get another dowser in a hurry?”

“Stap my vitals! What would be the point in getting one now, churl? We’ve already excavated Greatgrandmother’s china, haven’t we? Oh, and methinks I’ve uncovered the purloiner. Greatgranny’s diary contains some rather harsh words about an itinerant plasterer named Bulliver Spyte who’d pestered her with unwanted attentions even while he was plastering the walls of the nuptial chamber. At the very moment when she and Greatgrandfather stepped forth from the church as man and wife, Spyte managed to hiss in her ear that she’d rue the day.”

“And did she?” said Dittany.

“Never, not for one minute. But she did put quite a few question marks after Spyte’s name when she got home from the honeymoon and found her lovely china gone.

Come and see, Dittany, I’ve got it all washed and gloated over and set out on the dining room table. Whoever that rapscallion brigand was, one has to concede that he knew his trade. He appears to have purloined all Greatgranny’s embroidered napkins and bureau scarves to pack the dishes with; there’s ne’er a crack nor chip. I’ve put the linens to soak in mild bleach, but I don’t expect to salvage them all. They were badly yellowed and some have rotted in spots. Me thought the usable ones might be put away for Annie’s hope chest.”

“Arethusa, what a lovely thought! Margaret will be so pleased.”

“Margaret who, forsooth?”

“MacVicar, of course. We were thinking that Annie might be well advised to marry their youngest grandson, though of course we don’t want to rush her into it. Come on, baby, we may as well begin stimulating your aesthetic sensibilities. Osbert, do you want to see the china or toast the scones?”

“I’ve already seen the china. Toasting scones is men’s work. What do you say, Ren, want to help?”

Folding napkins into roughly the shape of cacti while toasting scones and riding herd on a somewhat squirmy infant required a high standard of hand-eye coordination and in fact didn’t work quite the way Osbert had anticipated at first, but he and Rennie enjoyed a good laugh together and tried again. Meanwhile, the distaff side of the family were admiring the Eliphalet Monks’ wedding china.

This was a full service for eight, including eight crescent-shaped dishes to hold the chop bones after they had been thoroughly gnawed and eight little round chips to set the tea cups on after the tea had been poured from the cups into the deep saucers from which it would have been drunk with genteel blowings and whiffings, according to the custom of the time. Arethusa had set it all out on her glasstopped dining table, which had gilded crocodiles forming the base. The Prince Regent had commissioned this table for Brighton Pavilion, but his friend Mrs.

Fitzherbert had thought it a trifle outre so the maker had sold it to a rich Canadian lumber merchant in 1786. At least that was what the antique dealer had told her, and Arethusa was far too much of a lady to have doubted his word, particularly when he was offering a ten percent reduction in price for cash on the barrelhead or, more specifically, the crocodile head.

Wherever they’d come from, the gleaming saurians certainly set off the handsome chinaware in grand style.

Dittany felt a twinge of envy and a moment’s irritation that Osbert had yielded so easily to Arethusa’s claim. Then she reflected that every one of those delicate hand-painted and lavishly curlicued pieces would have to be washed by hand every time they were used, and that therefore in her house they never would be. Here in Arethusa’s stately home was clearly where the china belonged. When she got old enough, Annie would have to be sent over once a week for lessons in gracious living and high-class housekeeping.

Rennie too, because times were changing and, as Mrs.

Coskoff the second had so neatly put it, you never knew.

The appetizing odor of toasting scones soon drew them all back to the kitchen. Arethusa, who’d been rather shy of the twins up to now, snuggled Annie into the folds of her fuzzy pink robe. Annie responded by cooing up at her and snatching a handful of her long, dark hair. Dittany split another round of scones, Osbert toasted them. The grown-ups had another cup of tea apiece. Rennie requested a bottle, so then Annie decided she’d have one too.

Arethusa’s elegant house was not generally thought of as a place to be cozy in, but cozy they undoubtedly were.

Fully an hour passed, during which time Arethusa didn’t once address Osbert as churl or knave and he made not a single slighting reference to her grammar or spelling. It was a jolt to them all when the clock struck five, and a far worse jolt to Arethusa when the doorbell rang and she remembered why.

“Stap my garters! That must be what’s-his-name. It comes back to me now with a sickening thud. I promised to do something or other for some reason that seemed to make sense at the time. He said he’d come and escort me to wherever we’re going. Stall the varlet off, Dittany, while I throw on a clothe or two. Here, take your moppet.”

She handed Annie back to Dittany, who handed her over to Osbert and went to see what Arethusa had let herself in for this time. To her surprise, she was confronted by the new innkeeper, Hedrick Snarf, with a great bunch of assorted flowers and a vastly self-satisfied smirk.

“Would you kindly announce me to Miss Monk?”

Snarf didn’t add the word serf, but serf was what he obviously assumed Dittany to be. She chose not to disabuse him.

“Prithee step into the withdrawing room, sirrah, while I go get the silver tray to put your calling card on.

Shall I relieve you of that shrubbery you’re toting, or were you planning to strew it at Miss Monk’s feet when she comes down?”

“Ah-will she be long?”

“Who knows? It depends on whether she gets to thinking about Sir Percy and Lady Ermintrude. Shall I run up and tell her not to think?”

“That might be helpful.”

Nonplussed was as good a word as any, Dittany decided, to describe the facial expression that had by now replaced the new innkeeper’s supercilious smirk. Total blankness could hardly be called an improvement, but at least it was a change. She gave Snarf an affable nod, left him juggling his mammoth bouquet from one arm to the other, and skipped up the rose-carpeted stairs to tap at Arethusa’s bedroom door.

“His Innship awaits below, Moddom. Shall I unleash the wolfhounds?”

“Quit clowning and come in here, wench. This accursed zipper’s got my hair all snarled up in its teeth.”

“Gadzooks, we may have to amputate. Quit wiggling, can’t you? What’s that gazookus here for, anyway? He looks like an undertaker’s assistant, coming to lay you out.”

“I trust no lewd innuendo was meant by that remark.

One gets enough purple-hued obliquity at romance writers’

conventions. As I recall, Mr. whoever-he-is-“

“Snarf. Given name Hedrick, or so I’ve been given to understand.”

“Thank you. Hedrick Snarf, eh? Too bad this gown hasn’t a cuff, I could jot down a note for easy reference. To answer your question, this whatever it is started when Archie and I were dining at the inn the last time he was here, whenever that was. Shortly after the boeuf bourguignon, I believe, or was it between the salad and the lemon souffle? In any event, at some time during the meal, Mr.

Snarf came loping up to our table and expressed the hope that everything was satisfactory.”

“As innkeepers are wont to do.”

“No doubt, but the point is that it was not. I explained to Mr. Snarf in some detail how the cuisine, the decor, the clientele, and the service had all been going to 1’enfer in a handcart since Andrew McNaster left for Hollywood and Lemuel Pilchard became incapacitated. I recall having added with some acerbity that Mr. Snarf’s policy of raising the prices did not in any way compensate for his lowering the tone, and that he’d jolly well better pull up his socks and straighten out the mess before Andrew came back and hurled him forth bodily into the exact center of the parking lot, as Andrew had been known to do on previous occasions when employees proved unsatisfactory.

Are you quite through pulling my hair, wench?”

“Almost. Ah, there we are, all zipped. And this was the start of something beautiful?”

“Not precisely. Toss me a handful or two of pearls, prithee. This was the start of Mr. Snarf’s pestering me with a spate of progress reports. By now, he avers, the inn has been totally regentrified and he has organized some kind of reception in my honor as a token of thanks for my solicitude on his behalf. A fallacious assumption on his part, since my solicitude was entirely directed toward maintaining a restaurant closer than Scottsbeck where one could rely on getting a halfway decent meal when a gentleman took one out.”

“There’s always the Kum-in Kafe and Live Bait Shop over in Lammergen,” Dittany pointed out. “I don’t think those pearls do much for this gown.”

“Nor do I, on reflection.” Arethusa was swirling her jetty mane into a heavy chignon at the back of her neck.

“Wouldst fetch the tourmaline brooch and the jeweled comb?”

“Sure I wouldst. Here, put on the bracelet that goes with it, and these droopy earrings that make you look like Mata Hari. There, now you’re gentrified as all heck. Go ahead down and knock Snarf’s eyeballs out.”

“A splendid suggestion, forsooth.”

Arethusa made sure the skirt of her claret-colored velvet dinner gown was hanging straight, adjusted her brooch, earrings, and bracelets, flung a long-fringed Spanish shawl about her, accepted without demur Dittany’s suggestion that she also put on a pair of shoes, and sailed downstairs.