King Devil

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Simply because she had to get busy or start howling like a trapped wolf, Lavinia stuck her brown paper to the next headstone she came upon, and began scribbling frantically with her messy crayon. Back and forth. What to do? Back and forth? What to do? She was sick of asking that question and finding no answer.

  The rubbing was coming up nicely, though. Old Mr. Bostwick—Miss Plomm knew better than to turn a young drawing master loose among her flock—would commend her neatness and diligence. For a moment, Lavinia almost wished she were back at the Academy with the elderly artist standing behind her smelling of cigars and peppermints; not yet faced with the prospect of becoming a lifelong hanger-on like Tetsy Mull.

  Tetsy, at least, was earning her keep and had been doing so ever since she and Zilpha were graduated together from that same Academy over twenty years ago. It was this endless, jealous, ferocious devotion of hers that would make life here so impossible for another woman. She would leave no way for Lavinia to justify her existence, no way to be able to feel less dependent on Zilpha’s bounty, no way to pay back even a fraction of what had already been spent on her.

  In a way, it was silly to worry about the money. Zilpha had more than she could ever spend and it was all family money, anyway. As Jack’s daughter, Lavinia ought to be well-conditioned to ignore the snide remarks, the slurs and slights, and take what she could get. Still, the ghost of Old Man Slocum kept whispering to her inner ear, “Don’t take anything from anybody. Get out and scratch for yourself.”

  But what to do? What to do? Doggedly, she scrubbed at the gravestone. Now a name was beginning to appear. Jonah Josiah Jenks, why did it strike her as being vaguely familiar? Had Zilpha mentioned it in her letters? Perhaps there was a Jonah Josiah Jenks among Zilpha’s throng of workmen. They were Dalby folk, most of them, and Jonah Josiah sounded like the handle that got tagged on one generation after another, each heritor no doubt hating his name worse than his father before him.

  Lavinia Leonora belonged in the same category. The first to bear the name must have been a sweet little bonnet-and-shawl lady who passed on the mellifluous syllables to her own sweet bonnet-and-shawl babe because they were so pretty. How could she know what would happen to the Tabard jaw down through the generations, so that the last of the Lavinias emerged from her swaddling-clothes looking rather like a thoroughbred colt?

  Basically, Lavinia didn’t much mind being homely. Had she resembled her flighty mother, even the minor sociabilities of sewing bees and birthday parties might have been closed to her. Looks wouldn’t have brought Minnie back, or kept her father at home, or done much to enhance her chances in the marriage market since she wasn’t likely to get enough of Zilpha’s money to paper over the blot on her escutcheon. Still, it might have been nice …

  Gripped by the sudden rage of total frustration, Lavinia rubbed too hard and marred her work. Smearing at the lampblack in an attempt to even the tone, she succeeded only in blurring the lines and getting her sleeve filthy to the elbow. Was there nothing in this world she could do right?

  Because there was nobody to see, Lavinia leaned her head against Jonah Josiah Jenks’s gravestone and gave way to the tears she had been trying so hard not to shed. She didn’t cry long. What good would it do? The sensible thing would be to take a fresh sheet of paper and start another rubbing, but there wasn’t much time. The dainty gold watch pinned to her bosom warned that she must soon get back to the Hollow. She might as well finish this one, so that at least she wouldn’t return without some justification for her absence.

  The breeze died. Gnats swarmed around her damp cheekbones. She brushed them away, then realized that she’d smudged her face in the process. She must look an absolute fright by now.

  In fact, she looked almost beautiful. The hot sun had brought color into her pale, clear skin, her disheveled hair hung about her face in softening loops. In her simple waist and skirt, Minnie’s daughter could have posed for one of the illustrations which DuMaurier and Gibson offered as the new ideal of modern womanhood: long-limbed, strong-featured, supple and vigorous. If anybody had said so, Lavinia would have assumed she was being made fun of.

  A little more scribbling and she could read Jenks’s epitaph:

  “Life’s a blessing can’t be sold.

  Death cannot ransom’d be with gold.

  Be thou rich or be thou wise

  In Death thou will wilt close thine eyes.”

  Yes, this was precisely the sort of lugubrious doggerel Great-Uncle Arthur doted on. She must come back and do him a proper rubbing. It would be good diplomacy. After a few weeks with Tetsy, she might be glad to escape to that plush-draped mausoleum of his. At least she’d find occupation there, polishing his mourning rings and dusting the ornate urn that held Great-Aunt Cecelia’s ashes.

  Chuckling grimly, Lavinia hunkered down among the weeds, knuckles rasping against rough stems as she plied her half-melted lump of wax. Great-Uncle Arthur would want to know the date when Jonah Josiah paid his ransom.

  To do this job successfully, she’d have to weed a bit. These plants would be no loss, they were ugly things with naked stems sticking up from ragged clusters of nondescript leaves and bulging out at their tops into warty excrescences. It was odd that so many were clustered on this one grave, when she couldn’t see a single other plant like them in the burying ground.

  “I wonder what they’re called.”

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until she got an answer.

  “King devil.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lavinia spun around, her heart pounding.

  “Oh. You’re Peter Smith.”

  “I scared you.”

  The boy made the statement not impishly but ponderously, as though he had accomplished something important. “I scared you good.”

  She forced a laugh, trying to pretend they were sharing a joke. Peter might be harmless, but she didn’t relish finding herself alone with him in a deserted graveyard. Lavinia wet her lips and tried to talk calmly.

  “Do you know the name of this plant?”

  “I told you. King devil. I know.”

  “I’m sure you know many things, Peter. That’s a funny name for a flower, don’t you think?”

  If only he weren’t quite so burly! Surely he must be more than fourteen, although his mother still dressed him like a little boy in middy blouse and short trousers with long black stockings. She hadn’t even cut his hair yet. Long, blondish corkscrew curls hung down to shoulders broad as a coal-heaver’s, as though to advertise that a child’s mind dwelt in that man-sized body.

  “King devil is an odd name for a flower, isn’t it?” she repeated inanely. “I wonder why they’re all growing on this one spot?”

  “Twenty-seven. Nine times three is twenty-seven. Nine times twenty-seven is two hundred and forty-three. Nine times two hundred and forty-three is two thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven.”

  So Tetsy was right about Peter’s uncanny ability to do sums in his head. She’d read somewhere that otherwise subnormal people did sometimes show rare ability at doing things that very bright people might not be able to do at all. She’d said so once in arithmetic class when she was caught counting on her fingers. Being scolded for pertness and made to write out the multiplication tables twenty times hadn’t cured her of the counting habit, because she still couldn’t add any other way.

  Perhaps if she ignored Peter, he’d leave. Sure enough, he soon got bored watching her scribble and wandered off among the graves. Lavinia could see his blubbery lips moving, computing endless strings of numbers to no purpose. The sight did something to the woman inside her. Yes, a mother might well feel a special kind of love for a boy like Peter.

  Her rubbing went from bad to worse. Working among the king devils was next to impossible, but she could hardly pull any up now that she knew he had every plant counted and multiplied. Anyway, she was managing to get the birth date. Glad as she had been to see him go, Lavinia couldn’t resist calling the lonely youngster ba
ck.

  “Peter, come and see! I’m making numbers appear by magic.”

  He rushed to kneel at her side, almost knocking her over in his eagerness.

  “Nine times sixteen hundred and ninety-one is fifteen thousand, two hundred and nineteen.”

  “I’m sure it is, if you say so. Now what’s nine times this number?”

  Lavinia hastily scribbled over the date of death and rocked back on her heels to let him see better.

  “Seventeen thousand, one hundred and nine.”

  “Oh, Peter!” Even Lavinia’s arithmetic wasn’t this bad. “That would have made him older than Methuselah. You must have read it wrong. Try again.”

  “Seventeen thousand, one hundred and nine.”

  Lavinia gave up asking and began peeling off the tapes that held her paper to the stone. Peter stayed beside her, counting the king devils again, touching each warty cluster with a fingertip far cleaner than hers to make sure he hadn’t missed any. When he completed his tally, the boy reached out to her rubbing.

  “Careful,” she warned. “If you touch that lampblack, you’ll get as dirty as I did.”

  Obediently, he kept his finger clear of the sheet but continued to point at the date.

  “Nine times ninteen hundred and one is seventeen thousand, one hundred and nine,” he whined again, then glared at her with his lip pushed out.

  “Oh, Peter, you’re a tease!”

  To humor him, Lavinia pretended to study her unattractive handiwork. “Why, how strange! That seven does look like a nine. What on earth?”

  Not believing what she saw, she bent lower and tried to push the stems away from the bottom of the stone. It was no good. Between the bushy leaves and the late afternoon shadows, the figures were unreadable. Vexed and puzzled, Lavinia tore a strip off the bottom of her paper, held it over the date of death, and made as careful a rubbing as she could of that one small area.

  Peter was absolutely right. As far as she could tell, the date originally read June 8, 1761, but it had been scratched and gouged to look like Jan. 18, 1901. That meant—she did a little surreptitious finger-counting—either that Jonah Josiah Jenks had lived to be over two hundred and thirty years old, or else that somebody had gone to considerable trouble for no apparent reason.

  “Peter, do you know who changed this date?”

  He didn’t answer. Looking up, she found that Mrs. Smith’s son had vanished as silently as he’d come upon her.

  If this was somebody’s idea of a joke, it was a strangely pointless one. Had Peter done the carving, out of some mathematical vagary, then got scared and planted the twenty-seven king devils to hide his mischief? Had he the intelligence to carry out such a prank? Who else would bother?

  Senseless or not, here it was. Someone had worked with little skill but much care to alter a date that nobody was likely to read, and not too many years ago because the lichen that covered the stone was much thinner here. Jan. 18, 1901 must mean something to somebody.

  It meant something to her, now she thought of it. Wasn’t that the day Uncle Neill had died? Or was it the seventeenth? Anyway, it was right around that time because she’d only been back to school from her Christmas vacation a little over two weeks, which was Zilpha’s reason for not letting her go to the funeral. However, it was certainly not the reason why this gravestone had been defaced.

  Where had that boy gotten to so fast? Was he hiding behind another stone, waiting to jump out and frighten her again? Lavinia suddenly realized how fervently she did not want to be pounced on by that overgrown youth, here in this deserted place of the dead. She crammed the puzzling scrap of paper into her skirt pocket, rolled up her smudgy rubbing, and left the graveyard at a pace that violated all Miss Plomm’s rules of decorum.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The walk back took closer to twenty minutes than ten. Raging at herself for being fool enough to believe anything Tetsy told her, Lavinia hiked up her petticoats and ran. She was late already, thanks to Peter Smith and Jonah Josiah Jenks. Please, God, let her sneak in and wash her face before she had to face her guardian! Scattering hairpins to the four winds, she plunged pell-mell into the Hollow and through the back door.

  The kitchen was empty, but luck went against her. She slipped on a mat and clattered some milk cans, making a fearful racket. At once, Zilpha caroled from the back parlor, “Lavvy, is that you? Do come here. We’ve been wondering where you’d got to.”

  Regardless of dirt and dishevelment, Lavinia had to obey. She was aghast to find that Miss Tabard and Miss Mull were not alone.

  This was more of Tetsy’s doing. “That little business later on,” so carefully left unexplained, was company to tea. She’d let herself be deliberately maneuvered into making a spectacle of herself, and now she must apologize for what was not her fault.

  Trying to keep her voice from shaking with fury, Lavinia did what she had to. “I do beg abject pardon, Zilpha. I was trying to do a rubbing for Great-Uncle Arthur and lost track of the time. May I put away my things before I meet your guests?”

  “Oh, but these are no mere guests.”

  Zilpha must have been longing to skin her alive, but the sweet tones were light as ever. “These are our neighbors, or should I say our tenants? Or are we theirs? Goodness, we do have a Situation, don’t we?”

  Her laugh was a peal of pure sterling silver. One of the two men dutifully laughed with her.

  “Miss Lavinia Tabard, may I present Mr. Roland Athelney and Mr. Hayward Clinton?”

  The young man who had laughed was already on his feet, acknowledging the introduction with a graceful bow. The other one half rose and gave her a sort of ducking nod, as though he found the formality a ridiculous waste of time. Lavinia herself was too flustered to do more than back off into the shadows, murmuring, “How do you do? Please, Zilpha, may I be excused?”

  “You may. Please hurry.”

  She got out of the parlor not even knowing which was Mr. Athelney and which Mr. Clinton. One was tall, dark, and if not quite handsome at least better-looking than most of the young men Minnie’s daughter ever got to meet. The other was the man she’d seen when she peeked through the drafting-room window. They were, of course, the architects. Did the ginger cat realize it was she who’d caught him in his yellow suspenders? Was that why he looked so fed up?

  No time for wondering. She must scrub up and button herself into a fresh shirtwaist. The golf skirt was too short and much too shabby for a party, but it couldn’t be helped. Her hair was a mess, but a dab with the brush, a hasty thrusting-in of side combs, and a fervent prayer that Tetsy wouldn’t take a notion to light the lamps must suffice.

  If it occurred to Miss Mull that Lavinia didn’t want the lamps brought in, she would assuredly bring them. What difference did it make? The men weren’t here to visit the poor relation. She hurried back to the parlor and tried to slip into a chair without attracting attention. Tetsy, as she might have expected, was alert to thwart her.

  “What did you find in the burying ground, Lav? Any interesting stones?”

  “Yes, very interesting.”

  “Whose did you rub?”

  “The name was Jonah Josiah Jenks.”

  “How charming,” tinkled Zilpha. “Don’t you love it?”

  “No.”

  The ginger cat’s one rude syllable took them all by surprise, himself included. He turned a deeper shade of orange and shot a frantic glance at the ormulu clock on the mantelpiece. Miss Tabard forestalled the excuse to leave he was about to make. She must be enjoying her party.

  “Tetsy, do offer Mr. Clinton some refreshment.”

  Ah, so now she knew which was which. Lavinia sipped at the thimbleful of Madeira that Tetsy finally got around to pouring for her and watched the men having their whiskey glasses refilled; the Byronic Athelney with obvious pleasure, Clinton with something close to agony.

  Zilpha bubbled on. “What a coincidence that you should have chosen that particular stone, Lavvy! Jonah Josiah happens to have been th
e given name of the gentleman I was telling you about earlier. I had not realized the Jenkses were such an old family in Dalby. What were the dates on the stone, do you recall?”

  The tale of her strange find might enliven the gathering, but Lavinia was learning to be extremely careful of everything she said and did. “I believe he was born around sixteen-ninety. The date of death was—not clear.”

  Clinton choked on his drink. Athelney threw him an anxious glance. Lavinia began to wonder.

  “Mr. Clinton, when did your particular Mr. Jenks die? Was he the last of the Jonah Josiahs?”

  Before the man could answer, Tetsy cut in. “Imagine saddling a whole succession of innocent babes with a handle like that! Did people actually call him Jonah?”

  “Nobody that I know of,” Athelney replied. “He wasn’t the sort you’d get familiar with. I expect you ladies would call him a gentleman of the old school.”

  Clinton made another noise. Athelney looked uncomfortable.

  “Don’t mind my partner, Miss Tabard. He thought Mr. Jenks was pretty much of a back number.”

  Lavinia couldn’t resist asking, “Then why did you work for him, Mr. Clinton?”

  “Because nobody else around here could give me the job I wanted,” he snarled.

  But how did he know what to want? Maybe she could get up courage enough to ask him, someday. It must be glorious to have a real goal, an identity of one’s own, not to be hanging like a snared fly from the spiderweb of one’s family connections.

  Which of these two was the driving force in the business? Athelney made the more impressive appearance, but it was Clinton who’d been up at the shop working soon after sunrise.

  The madeira and the stuffiness of the over-furnished parlor were doing things to her eyelids. Lavinia relaxed as far as propriety and her stiff corset would allow and drifted along on top of the voices: Zilpha’s fluting and elegant, Tetsy’s over-hearty and a trifle slurred, Athelney’s a pleasant light baritone, Clinton’s no more than an occasional gruff monosyllable.