After this, a half day had passed.
“Sure you don’t want lunch or a sandwich for the road?” Sister asked.
“No. Again, I apologize, but I must obey the ordinance. I can’t promise that this is nipped in the bud and you know I can’t tell you who lodged the complaint, but I can hint that there are those who are anti-hunting, more and more of them.”
“Well, I’m glad we got to visit a bit, no matter what the circumstances. This does seem like so much exhaustive effort burned to deal with something that is a deep part of our history.”
John shook each person’s hand then left by the back door. Gray, teapot at the ready, poured tea.
“What a host you are.” Betty thanked him as she put cookies on the table.
“Cookies. I wouldn’t dirty my mouth with a cookie,” Golly complained.
“I would.” Rooster sat by Sister’s knee, the picture of devotion. Raleigh leaned on Betty, who gave in.
“How did it go?” Gray asked.
“He saw everything. The odd thing is, we have a record and now a recent visual one, for he took pictures. Actually, I believe masters should have an animal control visit at least once a year. Doesn’t have to be like this, but John had no choice and neither did we.”
“It’s the new people.” Betty pronounced this with gusto.
Gray broke a peanut butter cookie in half. “Betty, maybe, but even without this new influx flooding Virginia, there have always been people opposed to hunting. Some are adamant about not killing animals.”
“We don’t,” Betty interrupted.
“Of course, Betty, but who knows that? Foxhunters have been rotten about educating the public.” Gray, having worked in Washington, D.C., for years, possessed insight into the urban and suburban mind.
“He’s right, Betty.” Sister turned to Gray. “But remember we were taught that our names should only appear in the newspaper when we were born, when we married, and when we died. Anything else was considered vulgar.”
“It is.” Betty stood up, poured herself more tea, and topped off Sister’s and Gray’s cups. “It truly is.”
“What about Facebook?” Gray’s eyebrows rose.
“You don’t see me doing it. Exposing yourself in that way is vain. Why would anyone assume they are that interesting?”
Sister laughed, dropping her forehead into her hand for a moment. “Betty, you have just offended millions of Americans, plus whoever else in the world is taking a selfie at this moment.”
“Betty, you’re younger than we are. I’d think you’d be part of this,” Gray teased her.
Betty leaned back in the kitchen chair. “I suppose writing a letter is a form of exposure, but that’s private, and if you take the time to actually write using good paper, which my husband and I carry, in case you forgot,” she smiled mischievously, “you think a bit. Simply going to your iPad or your computer and firing off what comes into your head without reflection, I believe it does more harm than good. I need time to think things through.”
“Not when you’re whipping-in.” Sister meant this as a compliment.
“That’s different. That’s action. We think on our feet out there. Actually, we think on four feet.”
“You’d imagine that people would find that a challenge.” Sister liked running after an animal who could think and turn at a ninety-degree angle, who could make a complete fool out of horses, humans, and hounds. Who could and did.
“They don’t grow up in the country. A house on a two acre lot is the country to them. Riding on a lawnmower that costs five thousand dollars is doing your chores. They live in a different world. They could care less about country people, if they even know we exist.”
“Well, Betty, they do, or they wouldn’t be passing anti-barking ordinance laws.” Sister sighed as the phone rang.
Gray walked over to pick up the landline. He listened. “She’s right here.” He held out the phone, whispering, “O.J.”
Sister took the phone while Gray seated himself and the two dogs kept pressing for cookies. Betty noticed the look on Sister’s face.
“I am so sorry. I know she was one of your oldest and most supportive members. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. I know you have a lot to do. Let’s talk when you’re not so pressed.” She listened then said, “Bye. Love you.”
“What’s going on?” Betty held her cup midair, focused on whatever the news would be.
Sister returned to the table. “Remember me telling you about the Munnings painting being stolen in Lexington? The painting of the beautiful Mrs. Oliver Filley riding sidesaddle? It was owned by Delores Buckingham. She’d supported the hunt club for years, was in her eighties. Well, she was strangled leaving her house. No one saw a car or a person. Or no one says they did. Oh, another lead shank. Fennell’s.”
Gray said, “It may be the old story, who has most to gain? The lead shank method seems unnecessary.”
“Quite.” Sister added, “But there are different kinds of gain. We’re focused on money. What if this is about something else?”
Later, settled in the library, dogs asleep at their feet, Golly snuggled next to Sister on the sofa, both humans finally home, each reading a magazine that interested them.
On the coffee table, Michael Hicks’s detailed biography of Richard III lay, the bookmark at page 93. Sister would tackle it again tomorrow. Mr. Hicks’s knowledge, deep and wide, impressed her, but she had to rev her mental energy to read it. At this moment her engines were slowing down. It had been a long day.
“What are you hmming about?” she asked as she glanced up from her Garden and Gun magazine filled with enticing photographs.
Looking up from his Economist, he replied, “This bug in Wuhan, China. Spreading.”
“Bugs do that. Then again, China has so many people crammed together, has to be a field day for bacteria and viruses. A form of pestilential paradise.”
He folded the magazine in half. “Doesn’t matter where something starts, all those things travel easily. It’s creeping into Italy, Europe. Think of Ebola.”
“I’d rather not,” she teased him. “I remember the day the polio vaccine was hailed; 1955. Mother said it was a miracle and it was. I remember one of the boys at school coming down with polio. He lived but was crippled. Think of all the diseases that have been conquered or greatly reduced.”
“You’re right. I take a lot for granted. I eat good food, there’s an abundance of it. We have central heating and air-conditioning. We can move about freely. I think restoring the home place has made me appreciate what my ancestors did. Tough people, the Lorillards and the Laprades.”
“Still are.”
He placed the folded Economist in his lap. “I wonder. Think how our ancestors worked, used their bodies. Even baking bread takes effort, and women did it every morning. If rich, they had a cook who did it. Can you imagine getting a toothache? When we worked on the flue…well, there are two of them, in decent shape, but you can’t fool around with a chimney…it reminded me that twice a day the fires needed to be stoked. The only insulation was horsehair. Honey, they were tough. No wonder men started splitting wood in the middle of the summer. Then you had to stack it, it needed a year to cure. The cured wood from the prior year had to be brought into a woodshed near the house. No one wants to fetch wood in a blizzard, so there had to be places inside the house that were safe to store flammable material, and I haven’t even gotten to food storage.”
“Not much. Well, canning, and if a family built a smokehouse, that helped with meat. We are spoiled. On the other hand, most people unless disgustingly rich had fabulous bodies.”
He laughed. “Vanity. I expect some of the disgustingly rich had pretty good bodies, too. How did we get off on this?”
“China.”
“Oh, well, how is your Garden and Gun?”
She sighed. “One temptation after another. I am so glad my mother curbed my impulsiveness or I’d buy most of what I see in the magazine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The Louis XV desk.”
“Now, Gray, Harry Dunbar willed me that.”
“If he hadn’t died, you would have found a way and snookered me into helping.”
“Well—-maybe. I mean, what’s the point of loving someone if you don’t spoil them a little?”
He left his chair by the fireplace, leaned over her as she sat on the sofa. “You can spoil me anytime you please.”
CHAPTER 15
February 20, 2020 Thursday
“When was the last time you had contact with Delores Buckingham?” Ben Sidell questioned Carter Nicewonder.
Both did not hunt this Thursday.
“A year and a half ago.” The slightly overweight Carter replied, then leaned forward. “The woman possessed sophisticated taste. I knew her preferences, of course, and I had acquired from a Richmond estate a perfect pair of sapphire and diamond earrings and a bracelet to match; 1890s. Couldn’t be made today.”
Ben couldn’t help a half smile, for Carter was always selling if he could. “Did you go to Lexington?”
“I did. I brought some other jewelry, as I have clients there. Delores tried on the earrings and bracelet. For an eighty-something woman, she looked good.”
“Your card was in her secretary. When the chief of police called, I volunteered to question you.”
“That secretary, French, was remarkable. Buddy Cadwalder, the Philadelphia dealer, knew Delores, too. He would kill for that secretary.” Carter stopped. “Sorry.”
“An expression. Do you remember the Munnings?”
“Who wouldn’t? Once seen you never forgot Mrs. Filley.”
“Did Mrs. Buckingham ever mention her painting?”
“Only that Mrs. Filley was such a great beauty in her day and a strong rider. We focused on, uh, personal adornment.”
“Delores Buckingham was a good client?”
“A delight. Yes, she was good. The great wealth of her family diminished over the generations, but she lived at ease, don’t get me wrong. She inherited the farm, the furniture, everything, but she was careful.”
“How so?” Ben smelled someone making coffee in Carter’s home in Ivy, a sort of subdivision west of Charlottesville itself.
Carter smelled it, too. “Would you like a cup?”
“No, thank you.”
“That’s my houseman making it. What the English might once have called a batman. I have him and a maid. Given my odd schedule I need to have the house covered.”
“Odd?”
Carter smiled. “People often think a long time before selling family jewelry. It’s so personal. It represents the deceased. Either that, or they sell the minute Momma has died. Greed,” he said with a little smack of his lips. “When they call I need to get there.”
“The seven deadly sins.” Ben closed his notebook.
“Accurate,” Carter agreed.
“Can you think of anything, a conversation? An offhand comment? A feeling?”
“With Mrs. Buckingham?” Carter put his fingers to his lips. “She had two daughters. Well married or married well. Once she said the oldest daughter would take over the farm. The younger, sixty-something by now, would remain in Phoenix. They all seemed to get along.”
“Can you think who might have stolen her Munnings?”
“No, but as you know, the value is astronomical.”
“Crawford’s painting as well as the work stolen in New Jersey were, too. Have you any idea why she was killed?”
“No. It was after the painting had been stolen. She wasn’t in the way.”
“She was killed in the same manner as Parker Bell. We’re at the point where we have to consider some connection. It is possible Mrs. Buckingham knew too much. For Parker, a blank. A total blank.”
“Yes.” He then sighed. “Fennell’s makes indestructible leather tack. This is dreadful proof of that.”
“The chief has questioned the Fennells. Kit, her son, and his wife, Marguerite. They are sick about it, of course. The chief said they are part of Lexington. People adore them, his exact words.”
“Well, I don’t doubt that they are sick about it, but I guarantee you, sales will go up.”
Ben tucked his small notebook in his pocket. “People are funny that way. There is no such thing as bad publicity. I bought one of their bridles for Nonni and a lead shank with a brass plate with her name on it. I know how good they are.” He stood up, asked one last question. “Let me come back to Mrs. Buckingham. Is it possible Mrs. Buckingham figured out who stole her Munnings?”
“Well…” A long pause followed this. “She was a woman of high intelligence. It is possible.”
CHAPTER 16
February 21, 2020 Friday
“It was one of the best-attended events ever,” Claudia Pfeiffer, the George L. Ohrstrom, Jr., Head Curator at the National Sporting Library & Museum, said to Sister as they walked through the museum. “We had hoped it would be a success but it exceeded our dreams.”
Sister noticed a small Dorothy Chhuy painting, work she liked very much and was glad the National Sporting Library did, too.
Ms. Pfeiffer was referring to the “Sidesaddle” exhibition, which ran from September 8, 2018 to March 24, 2019.
“Wonderful. The two women riding sidesaddle from Colonial Williamsburg certainly were a smash hit. I had never truly seen habits from the early eighteenth century, the beautiful dark blue and the other red with facings like military uniforms. The woman in blue wore a tricorn hat. You know, women look dazzling in a tricorn hat with one’s skirt flowing over the left leg.
“I’m sorry you missed Dr. Ulrike Weiss’s lecture. She flew from Scotland to present it and she helped us with the research for the exhibition. She’s at the University of St. Andrews and she studied here during her John H. Daniels Fellowship in 2016. We’re quite proud.”
“You have every reason to be. What surprised me is that people, and I mean people in universities, don’t realize that one of the best ways to approach a culture or a century is through sports and fashion. Well, in sidesaddle you have both and I thought your bracketing the exhibit with the years 1690–1935 opened a door.”
“You’re kind.” Ms. Pfeiffer smiled. “We love what we do. There isn’t a day that I come to work that something new, insightful, possibly exhausting isn’t happening.”
“You are good to see me. I know you all are preparing your ‘On Fly in the Salt’ exhibit. We have so many highly skilled and interesting sports here, so much water, fly-fishing isn’t for the lazy although it looks calm. Well, it is calm, but you know what I mean. My father would cast in the backyard just to keep his hand in, as he would say.”
“You saw that great movie with Brad Pitt, A River Runs Through It?”
“Did. What a way into a brotherly and paternal relationship, alcohol and real racism. Some people, well, some truly talented people like Norman Maclean can pull that off. I’m babbling on here.”
“Not at all. We’re always glad to see you.” Claudia sat on a bench in the museum; Sister sat beside her. “You called me about the Munnings. The theft of the first painting, which as you know we have exhibited here thanks to Crawford’s generosity…we do have the best people around us…but well, it was a shock, and then another and now another and a murder.”
“Which is why I wanted to drive up here. Was there anyone who kept returning to the sidesaddle exhibit? Anyone who began to attract your attention?”
“We’ve all talked about this. When we hosted the roundtable on sidesaddle horsemanship, you may recall the speakers were Devon Zebrovious, Amy Jo Magee, and Sarah O’Halloran, which was great fun s
ince they compete sidesaddle against one another. I thought the audience would be only women but there were a few men, but not anyone who seemed at all suspicious, questioning. I don’t know, I mean I don’t know what we would have been looking for at the time.”
“Given the attractiveness of the three ladies, I don’t wonder that a few men showed up. I’d like to see them try sidesaddle.”
“Interesting you should say that because I think our ‘Sidesaddle’ exhibition, more than anything we have ever done, highlighted the position of women without being politicized, if you know what I mean?”
“I do. I remember Laura Kramer, Penny Denegre, and Amy Webb, now Walker, competing what, twenty-five years ago? The men certainly hung on the rail but I doubt they thought about the demands to be feminine, where it started, how a lady could only ride in the hunt field if so attired. No one really talked about those things.”
“You know Penny is out there competing and beating people now, riding astride.”
“I do. Some people just have it, you know? Look at Ellie Wood Baxter, still rides at ninety-nine. She’s mostly blind, still going. Flawless on a horse, as are the ladies we are discussing. Kay Blassic, Betty Oare. Effortless, and then you think about sidesaddle. They say Phyllis Longworth, and Lady Astor, her sister, were unbelievable on a horse, sidesaddle.”
“Or the Empress of Austria, Sissy,” Ms. Pfeiffer added. “Again, think of the politics and the pressure.”
“Do you have any thoughts about who’s behind all these crimes? I’ve been thinking all this is connected to the value of Munnings’s work.” Sister folded her hands in her lap, the space was conducive to quiet and thought.
“In 2016 Sotheby’s auctioned Winter Sunshine: Huntsman by a Covert, which was painted in 1913. Not an especially large work, it went for two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. The sidesaddle paintings that have been stolen…well, all three of them, the bidding would begin above that. And if sold on the black market, it wouldn’t be any less.”
“Is it possible some obsessed person of wealth would pay more?” Sister queried.
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