Unholy Alliance (28 page)

“What can you do there tonight that you
couldn’t do in the morning?” Bessie asked, keeping her blue-eyed
gaze locked onto Cobb.

“I’m sorry, really, I am, but – ”

Cobb’s apology was cut short by a sharp bang
from the direction of the kitchen. A door was being roughly slammed
by the sound of it.

“That’ll be Brutus at the side door,” Bessie
said, launching herself upright. “He’s finished with your horse,
most likely.”

Brutus Glatt came to the archway and brushed
aside the beaded curtains. What Cobb saw was a huge bear of a man
with an ungainly, large head, ape-like brows, deep-set eyes with a
feral glint in them, and enough facial hair to carpet Graves
Chilton’s pate twice over.

“What is it?” Bessie said to him softly.
Apparently she was accustomed to his arriving thus,
unannounced.

A gargling noise, spittled and repulsive,
erupted from his thick lips, and his hands began to jerk and
spasm.

“He says your horse is knackered, Cobb. He’s
fed him and bedded him down for the night.” She smiled at Brutus,
and he backed out of the archway and shambled off towards the
kitchen.

“He don’t talk?” Cobb said, puzzled.

“Got no tongue, poor devil,” Bessie said
solemnly. “But he gets his meaning across just the same.” She
grinned at Cobb and added, “And I think you ought to follow your
horse’s example, don’t you?”

Cobb heaved a big sigh, as much in relief as
resignation. Perhaps Bessie Jiggins was right. He was certainly
exhausted and hungry. He could be back in Cobourg by daybreak, and
start his inquiries there refreshed and mentally alert.

“All right, then, Mr. Cobb from Toronto, I’ll
get Cass to serve us our supper, and have Brutus bring in your
grip, if he hasn’t already done so.”

As if on cue, Cassandra poked her head
through the curtains of the archway. “You ready fer supper,
ma’am?”

“I am, dearie. Why don’t you grab a bite of
your own in the kitchen, and then go on out to the taproom and tell
those bumpkins to drink up and go on home to pester their
long-suffering wives.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cass said meekly, and
vanished.

Bessie winked at Cobb, and chuckled. “If
they’re still
able
to pester
any
body.”

***

Cobb managed two helpings of chicken and dumplings,
and made no protest when a second bottle of claret appeared on the
table as if by magic. He was pleasantly drowsy, and considered just
closing his eyes and spending the night in the comfortable chair is
this cosy chamber – with this warm, motherly woman somewhere at
hand and on watch.

“I like a man with character in his face,”
she was saying as she leaned across the table – with a generous
rippling of cleavage – to refill his goblet. “You can have your
fancy gentlemen with their pasty cheeks and button noses and weak
chins. Give me a man with a Roman beak like yours, purple as a
peony and proud as punch; with eyebrows you want to rub yourself
against; with a chin that won’t take no for an answer! A man of
substance and girth, eh?” As she enumerated Cobb’s peerless
features, her amorous blue gaze – enhanced by five glasses of
claret – lingered lovingly on each.

There was no other sound in the inn but their
voices. Cassandra had eaten, turned out the tipplers, and departed.
“She’s off home,” Bessie informed him, “to the wretched cabin her
family squats in, unless one of her customers has other plans for
her.” Brutus, it seemed, had
his
living-quarters in the barn
near his belovèd horses. Ben would be in good, if wordless,
hands.

“I don’t think I can stay awake a minute
longer,” Cobb said, starting a second yawn before the first one had
finished.

“It’s only eight o’clock, and it’s not every
day I get to break bread with a true gentleman.”

“Just this one glass of wine, then, or you
might haveta carry me to my bed.”

“Now, wouldn’t that be naughty?”

“You talk like a lady that’s been to school,”
Cobb said, trying not to stare at the pink swell of her bosom and
wishing to steer the conversation towards less perilous ports.

“Surprised, are you?” she said mischievously.
“A lot of folks are.”

“An’ you run this place yerself?”

“Without a husband, you mean?”

“We don’t get many lady innkeepers in this
part of the world.”

“Well, there hasn’t been a
Mister
Jiggins for over twenty years now. I’ve been on my own since I was
twenty – though I don’t look a day over thirty, do I?”

“Not a minute more,” Cobb agreed
willingly.

“And you’d never guess I was born and raised
on a miserable homestead in the Ohio bush country. My folks came up
there from Kentucky.” She paused as her eyes misted over, blew her
nose into her handkerchief, and continued, while Cobb struggled to
keep his eyes open and the fire in the hearth began to falter. “We
got caught in the Indian wars down there, the savages against the
bluecoats and the bluecoats against the redcoats.”

“So you had to move up here?”

“We had to flee up here with only the clothes
on our back. The Shawnees burned our barns and torched our crops –
all that was left of them, that is, after the so-called Yankee army
marched past scouring for forage. I was just a toddler, but I can
still hear those mad cries and whoops. Not that I blame the
Shawnees any more, after what the civilized folk did to them first.
So we had to flee to our neighbours, but it wasn’t long before a
band of renegade Indians found all of us. My parents got me into
the woods, where we hid and watched another barn go up. The next
day, my father told me many years later, he crept back to our
neighbours’ charred cabin. The Glatt family were charred with it,
six of them. Only one survived, seven-year-old Brutus.”

“An’ he’d had his tongue cut out so he
couldn’t tell what he’d seen?” Cobb said, suddenly awake.

Bessie finished off her wine and sat staring
at the bottom of the empty goblet. “We brought him up here with us.
We started over again along the Thames River. My parents saved
enough to send me to school in Sandwich.”

“So, how’d you end up in the hotel business
hundreds of miles east?”

“I married Howard Jiggins, that’s how. He was
eighteen years older than me, he owned a store in Windsor, and he
occupied a brick house with glass windows. Fortunately for me, he
had the good sense to get himself killed whilst out slaughtering
deer. I inherited the store, and a mortgage on the brick house.
It’s a long story, but ten years later I put what money I had left
into this place.” She sighed theatrically. “It, too, is mortgaged
to the hilt, but still thriving, I’m proud to say.”

“An’ Brutus gets to care fer horses?”

Bessie beamed a smile at Cobb that suggested
she had found him, despite the odds, as insightful as he was
handsome. As groggy and disoriented as he felt, Cobb was able to
beam a smile back at her.

“I gotta hit the sack before it hits me,” he
sighed.

“Then I’ll put you up in the room across the
hall, the one I save for visiting royalty and American presidents.
It’s got a feather mattress and a genuine china chamber-pot.”

***

While some of the heat had migrated from the
fireplace in the dining-area to his bedroom, Cobb could still see
his breath as he struggled into the flannel nightshirt Macaulay had
packed for him. His long underwear and wool socks remained in
place. He felt a bit foolish putting on Alfred’s nightcap, but did
so anyway. He could hear Bessie Jiggins clearing away the clutter
in the kitchen. He decided he had better christen the china
chamber-pot before collapsing under the thick comforter, and was
fishing around in the dark for it when he heard a whispered female
curse close by. He eased open his flimsy door, and peered out into
the narrow hall.

Bessie was standing outside the door to her
private quarters, bending over a candle she had placed on the
floor. (As she had shown him to his room a few minutes earlier, she
had given him a full description of the layout of The Pine Knot:
the stairs beside his chamber led to a pair of rooms-to-let on the
second floor; and at the far end of this hall she kept a
sitting-room and a bedroom for her own use.)

“I stubbed my toe,” Bessie called out when
she spied Cobb’s nightcap in the dark. “Sweet dreams,
constable.”

Cobb said goodnight again, but something made
him remain in the hall long enough to see Bessie reach down into
her cleavage past the handkerchief there and draw out a metal
object which, Cobb surmised, was attached to a chain or string
around her neck. A treasured trinket of some sort? A family
heirloom? A loving miniature of Howard Jiggins who had died so
thoughtfully?

The answer came immediately as, using the
glow from the candle, Bessie inserted the object into the lock on
the door to her quarters. She unlocked it, dropped the key back
into its haven between her breasts, picked up the candle, and
disappeared inside. Well, Cobb thought, a lady with a figure like
that and good grammar to boot could not be too careful.

***

Cobb was in the midst of a heavenly dream. It was
one of those rare, absorbing dreams where you know you are dreaming
and yet tempted to remain forever trapped in its sweet amnesia. He
was naked. He knew it was him because the head and expression were
his own. The body, however, was that of Adonis or Dionysus or Don
Juan – all glistening limb and taut flesh. And this particular
Cobb-Adonis lay cocooned in a cloud of swan’s feathers that soothed
and titillated simultaneously. All this serenity and titillation
was disturbed (though ever so soothingly) by something softer than
swan’s-down, something he could feel but not see, easing up behind
him as he lolled onto one side. Soon he could feel its presence
along his shoulders and back and buttocks and thighs, a warm shadow
moulding its form and curvature to his own, settling like a lover’s
cloak all over him now, generating heat and prickles of light where
it touched and tantalized and – oh, my! – what an erection Adonis
was boasting . . .

“Oh, Dora, luv, I thought you was out on a
call,” he heard himself say, and suddenly he was not so sure he
ought to keep the dream going, there were other imperatives and
obligations, and Dora wasn’t often in the mood of late. And then,
as a set of female fingers closed upon the very instrument of
passion, he knew it was time to awake – and do his duty.

He rolled over and wrapped his right arm
around the ample, loving flesh of the fine woman he had married and
remained faithful to all these years. He heard her moan breathily,
and slid his hand down to squeeze her oh-so-generous rump and
silky-soft thighs – only to find his fingers fondling a leg no
bigger than a spindle.
Jesus
! He was entangled in the most
compromising position possible with Bessie Jiggins!

He had just sucked in enough breath to shout
something – anything – that might break the death-grip she had on
his erection when he realized that she was asleep. Deeply asleep,
and snoring away like a sow with plugged nostrils. Evidently she
had slipped in beside him with dishonourable intent, for her
nightdress was bunched up around her throat, and she wore nothing
else. Unfortunately (from her point of view) her own fatigue had
seized her at the most inappropriate moment, and she had
succumbed.

Cobb was now beginning to breathe more
easily, and was soon able to disengage his reconnoitring fingers
and bring them safely back to his side without interrupting the
steady stutter of Bessie’s snoring. However, a more serious problem
loomed: how to detach his stiff member from her grasp without
jarring her awake or doing damage to its future performances. He
squeezed his eyes shut, and commanded it to stand-at-ease, but
Bessie’s fingers, on their own initiative, kept kneading their
catch, and the heat radiating from her exposed, vulnerable flesh
kept the treacherous thing rigidly alert. He cursed his own lusty
nature. He thought about his sweet, innocent son and daughter. He
pictured Constable Ewan Wilkie gorging a jam tart. At last he was
pliant enough to pull slowly away and roll onto his back –
completely detached.

Now he had to figure out a way to avoid a
rematch. It was obvious he could not stay here. She was immovable
and unlikely to abandon the hunt, should she wake up before
morning. He would find some nook or other and bunk down there. What
sort of excuse he could come up with for fleeing her charms he’d
worry about later. He was still bone-weary, and the moon, high and
bright in the eastern sky, indicated that the night had barely
begun. Apparently Bessie hadn’t waited long before making her move.
With extreme care he eased himself up to the side of the bed,
cursing its slats as they squeaked and squawked. He made certain no
blast of icy air disturbed her as he slid the comforter aside.

Bessie’s snoring stopped. Some unintelligible
sounds began bubbling out of her slack mouth. There was enough
moonlight for him to see her eyelids flutter. What could he do if
she woke up now and saw him standing beside the bed with the flies
of his long-johns open? Without taking his eyes off her face above
the coverlet, he began to back out of the room, ignoring the cold
draft shooting up the folds of his nightshirt, and taking a moment
to tuck his penis back into its proper pouch.

“Where’re you goin’, lover?”

Cobb froze. And waited. The snoring started
up again, just audible. She was talking in her sleep. As he backed
into the hall, he heard her mumble something else, something that
sounded like “brave . . . brave” – and repeated several times.
Well, women had their fantasies too, didn’t they?

Beginning to shiver mightily with the cold,
Cobb trotted down the hall to the door of Bessie’s quarters at the
far end. He thought he might find a blanket in there that he could
use to cover himself. But when he tried the door, he found it
locked. He padded back down to the dining-area. The room was still
relatively warm, but cooling rapidly. He dragged the two armchairs
close together, slumped down in one, pulled Alfred’s fancy overcoat
across his shivering body, and curled his legs up on the other
chair.