by EQM
There was a snuffling sound from the next room.
“Gavin doesn’t like me abusing the Royals. He’s grateful to be given a job, just like the poor skivvy, I suppose. Fawn, grovel, lick arse—that’s Gavin’s natural frame of mind. Now we’re not far off the king’s bedchamber. Come on—you can’t be interested in pictures like that—not gods and goddesses in a state of undress ... there’s nothing worth seeing here.... But this is the bedchamber. And I’d have to admit it’s quite a bedroom. All that pink velvety stuff, and the four posts so you can draw curtains around you and have as much privacy as you like. This appeals to you, doesn’t it, Simon.”
“Simeon. It is a very fine bed.”
“I always feel it’s not large enough. Charlie Two, my Gavin said, was a bit of a one for the ladies, and you can just about imagine three in a bed, but with four you’d be cramped, and if you’re royal and that’s your taste you don’t want to be cramped. Still, I don’t think Charlie Two came to Scotland after he became king. I expect that was the reason: He knew they didn’t make the beds large enough for his appetites.”
“It was a long way to come,” said Simeon.
“I suppose so. Would they have had the royal train then?”
Not waiting for a reply, Marge made her clattering way through a couple of rooms which she didn’t feel worthy of a commentary before they landed up in a long, well-lit room stretching almost the width of the palace.
“Now—don’t laugh—this is the room I call the Gallery of the Nose. See all these portraits? What strikes you about them?”
“All the people have large noses.”
“Exactly. It must have been a bit of a status symbol in olden days. These are all supposed to be kings of Scotland, but nobody’s ever heard of some of them. Well, the artist—the same bloke painted the whole lot of them, which is a bit of a giveaway, I’d say—he gave every one of them a family resemblance in the form of a long nose. It doesn’t enhance their beauty, does it? Imagine when they have a state dinner here—the poor old queen having to explain why all her ancestors had been given that family feature, whether they really had it or not.”
“So they have great banquets here, do they?”
“Yes—the ones that are too big for the dining room. Gavin is often involved in the preparation. You’ve no idea how finicky everything is, every little thing has to be just so, and that’s over six or seven courses. Ordinarily you’d call it gluttony, wouldn’t you? But I don’t suppose anyone could enjoy their food in a situation like that. It would be all ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No ma’am,’ and never a joke cracked.”
“I can imagine the atmosphere, the elegance,” said Simeon. “It must be very splendid.”
“Oh, you’ve really got the Royal bug, haven’t you? What you’d usually have at these dos is a collection of frowsty Scottish ladies in their best dresses and smelling of mothballs, and red-faced Scottish husbands smelling of Glenfidditch. And the poor old queen and duke nodding off to sleep with the boredom of it all. Come on—I’ve got a last treat for you.”
She hurried him ahead through rooms she wanted him to ignore, and which he only managed to get a passing glimpse of, until they found themselves at the bottom of a cramped stone staircase. Marge stopped. From above there was a scrambling sound, a cry, and then steps.
“BAD LUCK, GAVIN,” shrieked Marge. “NEARLY FALL, DID YOU?”
“Why do you hate your husband?” asked Simeon.
“Hate Gavin? Not at all. He hates me. I DESPISE him.”
They began carefully up the stairs, Marge talking the whole way.
“These are the rooms Mary used when she had Rizzio around.”
“Who was he?”
“Officially secretary. Really toy-boy. Do you understand ‘toy-boy’?” Under her breath but audibly she muttered, “You bloody well should.”
“That’s an Italian name,” said Simeon. “What was an Italian doing in Edinburgh in the sixteenth century?”
“Probably selling ice cream, I should think,” said Marge blithely. “That’s what half the Ities in Edinburgh do today.”
They came to a large room, rich in pictures, with extra portraits on flat screens and a burly attendant keeping guard. “Darnley,” said Marge. “And his brother.”
“Who was Darnley?”
“Mary’s husband. English. Not long married. And a real plonker—just like mine.”
“Which one is him in the picture?”
“Don’t remember. Pick the one who looks a total dead loss and that’ll be him.... Now, this is where they were on the night.”
They had come to a stop at the entry to a tiny room. It was really a sort of window in the castle’s turret. There was hardly room for two, and the inevitable closeness of the people there struck Simeon most forcibly. He stood, for the first time wonderstruck.
“Imagine,” said Marge, “what the pair of them got up to in this cosy little room.”
“They couldn’t have done much,” protested Simeon, “not with courtiers waiting and listening in the bigger room—here.”
“Ah, but you forget, royalty does everything with the eyes of the world on them—just like footballers today. The skivvies see and hear them, the courtiers do, too—a snooty lot, I should think, then and now. So you couldn’t do anything if you were worried about who was looking on at what you were up to. What do you think they did—their foreplay, let’s call it. Did they alternate in licking their ice-cream cornet that David Rizzio had brought up from his horse-drawn van?”
“I think you wrong about ice cream. Not invented then. You didn’t have refrigerators then.”
“You had the Scottish climate. That could freeze anything, and keep it frozen. Well, forget about ice cream. What would you imagine they might have been eating in—when was he killed?”
“Early March,” said Simeon, who had been reading the rubrics.
“Brrr. Not ice cream, definitely. What about a nice treacle sponge? Both of them have spoons, they look into each other’s eyes, lovingly, lustfully. And when the dribble of treacle slips down Rizzio’s chin, Mary bends down and licks it off.”
They jumped at a noise behind them. Peering round one of the screens on which pictures were hung was Gavin, and Simeon had his first sight of him: big, shambling, clutching a mobile, and peering through rimless spectacles at them.
“Oh Lord, it’s my Darnley,” said Marge.
Not much of a Darnley, thought Simeon. He did not say so, but Gavin saw him looking over to the double portrait of the Darnley brothers.
Marge was not to be interrupted, though, and once again came on in full flood.
“ Mary’s Darnley was followed by three or four macho noblemen, or clan chiefs, or whatever they called themselves. They no sooner got to this point than they took out their knives.”
“What did Rizzio do?”
“Clung to Mary’s skirts—and a lot of good that did him! They dragged him through this room and over to the Outer Chamber, and that’s where they killed him. You can see his blood to this day. But clutching her skirts! Doesn’t that tell you something? Lousy judge of men, Mary. Just like me, I often think.”
“Watch out!” came a cry. Marge turned. It was the burly attendant. He was running forward and pointing at Gavin. Gavin had drawn from his pocket a deadly-looking carving knife, probably procured in the dining room. The attendant ran straight at Simeon and tackled him to the floor. Then he realized with horror that Gavin was running straight past him: He had not been aiming at the foreign lover, but at his wife. The attendant grappled with the lumbering ankles but Gavin kicked him away and continued to where his wife was gazing at the little window-room with an odd smile on her face. She liked being fought over. As she began to turn towards her husband, disdain on her face, she felt the knife go through her shoulder and back. Running footsteps came from the poky staircase, tripping and stumbling, as attendants from the lower floor, alerted by the noise, were coming up to see. By the time they arrived outside the tiny love-
nest Marge was lying on her back, her eyes glazing over, and the attendant had Gavin’s arms pinned behind his back, the right hand dripping blood.
It was the material for a thousand stories in the newspapers and the weekly magazines for the feeble-minded. “Palace Love Triangle,” whooped the Sun newspaper. “Royal Slaughter Gets Repeat Showing,” said the Daily Mail. “Slaughter in Queen’s Love-Nest,” said the Express. It didn’t worry them that the wrong person had got killed. Perhaps in their blundering, ignorant, sensation-seeking way they sensed that this time it was the right one.
Copyright © 2010 Robert Barnard
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Fiction
LOON LIFE
By Brendan DuBois
Art by Mark Evans
A writer who so impressed two other great EQMM contributors, Edward D. Hoch and Clark Howard, that each once named him among their favorite short story writers and possibly the best of his generation, Brendan DuBois also continues to be recognized by the field at large. He is currently nominated for a Barry Award for a story that appeared last year in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, “The High House Writer.” The New Hampshire author has more stories coming up in EQMM soon.
The Honda SUV I had been dumped in had a handrail up above the door, to assist elderly passengers in getting in and out, but I’m sure the SUV’s designers would have been shocked to see how it was being used this evening: My hands were in stainless-steel handcuffs looped through the handrail, stretching my arms above me. I also wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but I wasn’t complaining. Earlier complaints about being cuffed had led to the man sitting behind me placing a 9mm pistol against the base of my skull and saying, “Shut your mouth. Just be glad you’re riding while you’re still breathing.”
The man who was driving had laughed. I hadn’t. Not much to laugh at.
And all because I wanted to write a book.
My escorts had taken me from a summer cottage I’d been renting along Lake Walker, in a remote part of northern New Hampshire. During my time there I had swum a lot, canoed, and learned about the wildlife that lived in and around the lake. But I wasn’t some back-to-nature creature, and coming to Lake Walker hadn’t been an accident. You see, a resident on the northern side of the lake was someone famous—infamous, rather—and after my layoff from the Providence Journal, I’d started researching a book about said resident, to pass the time before I had to find a real job, and maybe, if I was very lucky, to get a book contract before my severance package was exhausted.
But luck hadn’t been with me this summer. My severance package was within a week or two of being depleted, and the rise of the Internet and the decline of newspapers meant nobody was hiring experienced journalists, so now I really was counting on this book project and the infamous resident to save the day.
However, said resident obviously had other ideas.
The SUV’s driver took us along the main dirt road that circled the lake, and despite the uncertainty and the terror of being where I was, I recognized that there was also an element of the ludicrous in it all: Within several yards of me as we drove along were people who were having a barbeque or were watching the Red Sox or playing Scrabble with their grandchildren, and they had no idea that a man was going by in a Honda, handcuffed, with a 9mm pistol pointed at the back of his head.
The motto of this odd state is Live Free or Die. I was hoping the evening would end with me following the first half of this saying, and not the second.
After a while the number of houses and cottages thinned out, and those remaining looked as if they belonged in a pricier neighborhood. I’d only been on the lake for a short while but I’d quickly learned about the conflict between those who liked having small homes and cottages along the lakefront and those who feel there’s nothing wrong with building a three-story mansion and cutting down all the surrounding trees. And the funny thing is, this argument isn’t always between old-timers and newcomers. Sometimes it’s the newcomers who are most adamant about keeping things the way they were, and the old-timers—if they come into some money—who splurge on building something huge and overpriced.
And my destination this evening was the hugest and most overpriced house on Lake Walker.
The driver made a quick turn to the right, where two stone pillars flanked a dirt driveway. A tall, black, wrought-iron fence stretched out on both sides of the pillars, and the gate between the pillars was made of similar iron. From past experience, I knew that there were small signs on the gate—not legible from my present vantage point—that said NO TRESPASSING, NO SOLICITORS, PROPERTY UNDER SURVEILLANCE, but those signs weren’t going to halt my intrepid driver. He pressed a button on the Honda’s dashboard and the gate slid open, and after passing through the gate, another press of the switch closed it up.
And it was like entering some sort of playground or fairyland, for the driveway was now paved and curved up to the left, rising up to a huge home. Beyond a line of trees, a manicured lawn was exposed, and little recessed lights on both sides of the driveway illuminated the way. There were two stone fountains and a couple of statues of lions and cherubs. At the top of the rise of land, the driveway widened into a parking area, just before the large house, which had separate wings on each side, big bay windows, and lots of wood and brickwork. The thought of having to haul all those bricks from halfway across the state made me shake my head.
The Honda came to a stop and the doors were opened. I waited. I let my fingers play a bit with the handle and roof. No escape was possible, of course. These guys—while not very polite—were very good at what they did.
The first guy reached up and undid my cuffs with a twist of a small key, and I got out. I wanted to show these guys how tough I was by not rubbing my wrists and hands, but I couldn’t help myself. But if they had any reaction to my apparent weakness, they didn’t mention it.
The guy with the pistol made a move with his head, looking like a nervous horse trying to shake off a fly. “You go in there. There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”
I looked at him and his companion, dressed alike: khaki slacks, black turtleneck shirts, dark blue blazers, polished shoes. “Really? Just like that?”
The first one shrugged. “Yeah. Just like that. Look, get going, or we’ll drag you in, and the result will be the same, ’cept your clothes and your face will get a little dinged.”
My wrists ached. After a nanosecond of reflection, I decided I had reached the “dinged” limit for the evening.
So I walked up to the large wooden doors, my legs shaking a bit, knowing that the next few minutes would determine if I would leave through these doors on my own two legs, or be carried out, wrapped in plastic. I nervously pressed my fingertips on one door handle, and then the other, and then I opened one carved door and walked in.
Inside was a tiled anteroom, opening up to a large living room with a stone fireplace off to the left. The floor was polished hardwood, and couches and easy chairs and a couple of coffee tables were scattered about. The walls bore mirrors, bookcases, and framed artwork of flowers and landscapes. On the opposite side from the fireplace were French doors that opened to a balcony, which overlooked the lake. I could hear some of the night sounds, and from out on the cold waters of the lake, the haunting wail of a loon. From one of the couches came the next biggest surprise of the evening, when a woman got up and came over to me.
She was in that odd age range that could be twenty-five years in one kind of light, thirty-five in another. She was slender, wearing tight jeans, black low-heeled shoes, and a sleeveless white knit sweater. Her upper arms had the definition of someone who spent a considerable amount of time in the gym, and her black hair was cut close and styled by someone who had never once set foot in New Hampshire. Gold jewelry adorned her wrists and fingers, and she held out one manicured hand to me as she walked over.
“Stuart Rowland,” she said. “So nice to meet you.”
“Sure,” I said,
giving her hand a quick squeeze and release. “And you are ...?”
She nodded. “Melanie Caprica. I appreciate you seeing me on such short notice. Would you like to sit down?”
I sat down in a cushioned chair with wooden armrests, using both hands to lower myself down. She took a seat across from me on a couch, crossing her legs in what looked to be a practiced move.
I took a deep breath, tried to ease the hammering in my chest. “Excuse me for being dense, but could you repeat what you just said?”
“Repeat what?”
“The part about me seeing you on such short notice. I don’t recall I had a choice in the matter.”
She gave me a pert smile. “I know Alonzo and Pat can be ... decisive when they seek to do something for their boss. I apologize if their methods ... were disturbing.”
Disturbing. Cute way of saying that, and I decided to let it be for now. The hammering in my chest seemed to slow down. “So who’s their boss? You or Frank Spinnelli?”
The pert smile remained. “We all work for Mr. Spinnelli. Just as you, Mr. Rowland, used to work for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. And prior to that, a daily newspaper in New Hampshire, and prior to that, a semi-weekly newspaper in Massachusetts. And now you’re unemployed, working on a nonfiction book for which you have no agent or contract, living in a cottage for which you’ve paid five thousand dollars for three months’ rent, and your combined checking and savings account currently totals just over three hundred dollars.”
I scratched at the back of my head, felt a couple of bits of hair come away in my nervous, twisting fingers. “Very thorough.”
“Thank you. That’s what we’re known for.”
“Among other things.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But we’re not here to talk about me, now, are we?”
“Depends,” I said. “If I want to talk about you, will Alonzo and Pat come in and tune me up?”
She held out a hand. “Please. Let’s just keep it quiet and civilized, all right?”