The Importance of Being Ernestine (7 page)

“That puts the case in a different light. Someone who isn't Flossie Jones seems to be up to tricks. And something's got to be done about it. You can't get away from that now, Mrs. H.”

Six

The moon huddled behind a threadbare blanket of cloud. It was no longer raining, but the wind shook the trees as if intent on rattling some sense into their leafless heads. It was well after midnight when I dropped Mrs. Malloy off at her house in Herring Street close to the center of Chitterton Fells. And I did so without making any promises. Wasn't it enough that I had allowed her to talk me out of contacting the police in regard to the man we called Have Gun Will Travel, on the grounds that Mr. Jugg would not appreciate official interference? Her posture as she went up the path to her front door let me know in no uncertain terms what she thought of my saying I would sleep on the Lady Krumley situation. The wind slammed the front door behind her causing the forsythia bush to cower against the wall.

Feeling exhausted but strung up, I drove on home through the square with its tower clock and jostle of Tudor-style buildings. At the corner of Market Street and Spittle Lane I passed Abigail's. Shortly after Ben and I were married he had opened it as a restaurant serving fabulous French food. A year or so ago, when he decided he wanted to spend more time writing his cookery books, he had turned the ground floor into a coffee shop and let the upstairs to an elderly man in Edwardian dress with a dusty moustache who specialized in the sale of botanical and ornithological prints. The two businesses complemented each other nicely.

Driving up the Cliff Road I thought about Lady Krumley's obsession with Flossie Jones's deathbed curse. Was there some connecting piece of information her ladyship had withheld from Mrs. Malloy and me? Something that would explain the arrival of Have Gun Will Travel? Nudging around a bend in the road I thought about the flower pots thrown at her ladyship's car. In the new light of things it would seem someone had tried to prevent her from keeping her appointment with Milk Jugg. But Lady Krumley had not turned around and gone home as might have been hoped. Presumably, she had found a place to temporarily deal with her shattered window, making her several hours late in reaching Mucklesby. Was Have Gun responsible for that act of vandalism? Or had someone contacted him afterward to say that Plan A had failed and he was to proceed with Plan B?

The road grew darker as it climbed the cliffs. A spatter of rain hit the car windows and with the sound of the windscreen wipers going irritably into action I became suddenly aware that every bone and muscle in my body ached from the work I had done shifting furniture and lifting boxes in Ben's study.

Fortunately I was now almost home. St. Anselm's Church came into sight on my left. The vicarage looked cold and pinched-face in the drizzle. The veiled moon cast an eerie light on the graveyard. Its tombstones had life and movement to them as if they were staggering with excruciating slowness toward me through the tufted grass, which also moved in waves as if to suggest that beneath the ground old bones stirred and stretched and skeletal hands reached upward to claw their way to the surface. Where, I wondered, was Flossie Jones buried.

A moment later I was driving through the gates of Merlin's Court and parking the car in the old stables. I let myself in through the garden door. In the hall I took off my raincoat and tossed it onto the trestle table. There was, I thought, setting down my handbag, the distinct possibility that Ben would already be in bed and asleep, giving me the whole night to lie awake and worry myself sick rather than face up to our quarrel and get it behind us. If it could be put into the past? Remembering his face when he looked at the new computer I wasn't overly optimistic. Would Kathleen Ambleforth kill me if I rang her up at this late hour and explained my dilemma and the urgent need for the immediate return of my husband's old manual typewriter? At a pinch the rest of the stuff could wait until morning.

My hand reached for the phone, but the twin suits of armor standing against the staircase wall suggested by the very blankness of their expressions that I would be making a big mistake in dragging Kathleen away from her hot water bottle. Or worse, I might get the vicar himself on the phone and he—being the dear befuddled soul that he is—would get everything mixed up. A vanload of pews along with the church organ, and possibly the organist herself in flannel nightie and curlers, could show up at my door to be disposed of, causing Ben to accuse me of making a further mess of things.

The kitchen light, along with the ones in the hall, had been on when I came in, and narrow strips of light gleamed beneath the closed doors of the dining room and drawing room. I couldn't bring myself to look toward the study. But this excess of electricity did not necessarily mean that Ben was still up. He was inclined to be careless about switching off lights. A peek into the drawing room found it empty. When I came out I saw a man winding the grandfather clock that stood in an alcove facing the front door. He had his back to me, but there was no mistaking my cousin Freddy for a madman who broke into people's houses to make sure that they kept time with Big Ben under the illusion that any discrepancy would permanently disrupt Greenwich Mean Time. Freddy's straggly ponytail and dangling skull and crossbones earring were always a dead give-away.

“Hi coz!” He shifted his lanky six-foot frame in my direction and stuck his hands in his ragged jeans pockets. “Where did you spring from?”

“I spent the evening with Mrs. Malloy. Where's Ben?”

“In the study.” Freddy stood tugging at his scroungy-looking beard. “Ellie, I think you've made a really big mistake this time.”

“You mean,” my voice trembled, “he's sitting in there . . . wallowing?”

“More a case of a man in a trance. I don't want to be overly pessimistic,” Freddy said, shaking his head so that the earring rattled, “but I've got the feeling that it could be a long time before Ben comes out of this. I've been sitting with him for an hour or more and he didn't seem to know I was there.”

“Oh, Freddy!”

“Maybe he'll snap out of it.” He spoke with a complete absence of conviction. “Perhaps you could exert your feminine wiles, Ellie. Light some candles, put on some soft music, play the pitiful little woman to the hilt. It's a shame,” Freddy flapped an arm around my shoulders, “that you don't have some alarming crisis to drop in his lap to make him realize that he can't let anything come between you.”

“I suppose I could mention that a man pointed a gun at Mrs. Malloy and me,” I responded despondently. “But would that be enough to do it? It's not as though he shot us. I'm not staggering around with a bullet in my head with the possibility of only fifteen minutes to live.”

“A man with a gun?” Freddy looked as he had done when we were children and he had accused me of having all the fun when I came out with some weird rash and couldn't go to school until a medical name could be found for it.

“Forget it,” I muttered. Ben had come out into the hall. Suddenly I was all at sixes and sevens about mentioning the incident to him. He'd be horribly alarmed and concerned for my future safety, which would push my revamping of his study into the background where it would molder and perhaps never be properly addressed, thus leaving a permanent scar. There was, it must be admitted, another reason for my keeping quiet. Knowing all, Ben would insist on my keeping my nose out of the Krumley affair. And I wasn't sure I could do that. Not because of how Mrs. Malloy would feel about my defection, but because I felt a certain responsibility to her ladyship. I wished now that I hadn't said anything to Freddy. But more than anything else I wished Ben would look as though he was thrilled out of his mind to see me.

“So you're back,” he smiled at me. A pleasant enough smile. But one that reminded me of the vicar's benign bafflement at the sight of someone with whom he had been talking not five minutes before.

I could feel myself sinking waist deep into despondency. Freddy in an unusually tactful attempt to ease into the background went clanking up against one of the suits of armor. Ben didn't blink let alone glance in the direction of the ensuing cacophony. Neither did he relax that fixed smile. Which set me to babbling about not having expected to be gone so long and my need to check on the children.

“No need for you to worry. I looked in on them several times, Ellie.”

I was consoling myself that he hadn't blocked me out to the point of forgetting my name when Freddy corrected him. “You talked about going up, but remember . . . I went instead?”

“So you did.”

“It doesn't matter which one handled the spot checks,” I responded heartily. “So long as they're snugly tucked in for the night.”

“How about I make us all a cup of cocoa?” My cousin's helpfulness was truly heartwarming, but I wished very much that he would trot back down to his cottage and leave me to try put things right with Ben. It was no use. Upon his offer of a night-cap being declined he followed us into the drawing room and planted himself in a chair with every appearance of remaining there until a van showed up to collect him for one of Kathleen Ambleforth's charities.

It was, in my opinion, a lovely room with latticed windows at each end, a rose and turquoise carpet in the middle of the parquet floor and a pair of ivory damask sofas and several Queen Anne chairs grouped around the fireplace. Above the mantel hung a portrait of Abigail, who had been mistress of Merlin's Court almost a century ago. Her restful pose and serenity of expression added to the tranquility of the muted color scheme. Even when the children were fighting over a ball that bounced off the secretary desk onto the top of the glass-fronted bookcase or playing hide and seek under the coffee table or behind the brocade curtains I felt anchored in this room—to its history and my present life. This evening was different. I was cast adrift, buffeted by waves of unease, sinking ever deeper into a whirlpool of uncertainty. Ben was pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. Once or twice he glanced to where I sat on the edge of a chair, but he had yet to ask how my evening with Mrs. Malloy had gone. Nor had he said a word about the study.

Freddy shifted his feet onto a footstool, yawned hugely, scratched his beard and closed his eyes. I waited a few moments for him to start snoring and plunged into a garbled apology of the sort that would have brought a husband in a romance novel to his knees with a rose from the nearest flower vase between his teeth.

“I'm so sorry, Ben! I was completely out of line in bringing in all that new stuff and getting rid of the old. You were quite right in saying I was thinking about how I wanted your study to look. I didn't see that at the time, but I should have done if I'd taken the time to consider how you felt about that dear old typewriter and the easy chair and the . . .”

“Darling, don't give it another thought!” He interrupted his circuit to place a hand on my shoulder and kiss the air two inches above my head. “I went off the deep end without appreciating all the time and effort you put into surprising me. I'm a monster and I don't know how you put up with me.”

“You really mean it?” I was enormously relieved by the throb of sincerity in his voice and the fact that he lingered beside me, even holding my hand for a moment or two before pacing off again.

“Absolutely!” He gave me a sideways smile. “How was Mrs. Malloy?”

“Intent on turning private detective.”

“For that outfit where's she been working?”

“Her boss went on holiday this evening, and one of his clients showed up too late to see him. And you know, Ben, how Mrs. Malloy is inclined to take over. This time she's all fired up to impress Milk.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Jugg. And because he wasn't there and I was . . . well, you can imagine how things went. I got roped into listening to the client—Lady Krumley's story and writing it all down in shorthand.” I took a breath and made up my mind to tell him the rest, including the arrival of Have Gun. There must be no more secrets between us. If Ben told me to keep my nose out of the situation so be it. Feeling confident and virtuous I was about to expound when he stood stock still, before leaping a foot in the air and clutching at his head as if about to rip out every wavy black lock.

“What's the matter?” I shot off my chair.

“I forgot to turn off the computer.” He was already halfway out the door. “I spent the evening figuring out how to turn it on. And now what happens if it burns itself out? It's not like I have my typewriter to fall back on till we get it fixed. Just give me some quiet time, Ellie, to work through the manual.” The door swung closed behind him, and I saw that Freddy's eyes were open and his ears on the flap.

“Men and their computers,” he murmured consolingly.

I fell back in my chair. “That's why Ben was in the study all evening. He wasn't staring into space. He was scowling at the screen trying to blink it into life. I have to get his typewriter back.”

“Not in the middle of the night, coz.” Freddy wagged a remonstrating finger. “Neither,” he added, as I inched forward, “should you go blundering into the study offering unwanted advice.” He locked his hands behind his head, shifted his lanky legs to get a better foothold on the stool and leaned back. “Far better, Ellie, to tell me all about your evening with Mrs. Malloy leading up to the man with the gun.”

“Perhaps you're right,” I sighed. “A little lighthearted chatter to help me forget my troubles.” Clearly there was no hope Freddy would remember that he had left the iron on or that he needed to leave a note for the milkman, so I rambled away about Lady Krumley. Tobias appeared out of nowhere to land on my lap as I was detailing Flossie Jones's deathbed curse. Freddy heard me out with only one or two gurgles of rude mirth and even wrinkled his brow in concentration when I spoke about having seen Have Gun in the café and his mercifully brief visit to Jugg's Detective Agency.