Miss Seeton Quilts the Village

by Hamilton Crane

  “Say byan,” said Miss Seeton thankfully at last. “Eh...mercy.” Zuniga had produced a final clank and returned her bike to its usual position. He wiped the handlebars, and did his best to clean the remaining grease—there was a lot—from his fingers before offering the handkerchief back to its owner.

  “Muchas gracias, Remendado.” Zuniga addressed the chauffeur with what Miss Seeton, thinking back to some of her livelier pupils, recognised as a smirk.

  Remendado accepted his property with reluctance, and almost forgot to smile as he and Miss Seeton examined her bike. She pushed down a pedal. It moved. So did the bike.

  Miss Seeton smiled at Zuniga and nodded to Remendado. “Mercy,” she said again, wheeled the bicycle around the car and, mounting, pedalled back to Sweetbriars.

  Remendado returned to the driver’s seat and listened to a blast of angry eloquence from the back. Beside him, Zuniga continued to smirk.

  In Ashford, fifteen miles distant, Superintendent Brinton picked up his telephone. “Potter?” His voice turned wary. “By some lucky chance, a Potter we’ve only just recruited that I don’t know about—or by some evil mischance, Police Constable Potter from Plummergen?”

  At this the young man at the other desk abandoned the report on which he had been engaged. He looked at his superior. His superior groaned.

  “Plummergen. It would be.” He glared at Detective Constable Foxon, whose eyes were now as bright as his plain-clothes costume. “And you can stop your grinning and start listening, laddie. I might have known things were too peaceful to last.”

  Foxon quenched his grin and grabbed his extension. Brinton’s wary tones deepened.

  “Carry on, Potter. What’s she done now?”

  “It’s not so much Miss Seeton doing anything, sir,” came Potter’s voice along the line, “as things done to her, only they braked in time—and so did she—and she’s okay. But it’s not the first time, sir. You should’ve heard the postman—”

  “Potter!” Foxon’s ears were assaulted in stereo, one blast from the desk and one from the phone. Brinton ignored his pained expression. “Potter, calm down. Who braked? And when? And how does it involve Miss Seeton?”

  “It was that Spanish lot who’ve took Mrs. Venning’s house, sir. Driving on the wrong side of the road again, with Miss Seeton on her bike near as a touch having them run into her, only everyone braked in time and she just tumbled off and they fixed her bike for her, no trouble—and off she went back home. I kept behind her nice and quiet in my panda, but she didn’t seem to have took any harm.”

  “Mrs. Venning?”

  Brinton waved his puzzled sidekick to silence. “Later. So you were on patrol, and saw it all?”

  “What you might call the afterwards, sir, but it all looked pretty straightforward.”

  Brinton groaned again. “Nothing is ever straightforward when Miss Seeton’s in it.”

  Foxon opened his mouth to protest, but again Brinton waved him down. “Go on.”

  “Well, sir, far as I could tell these Spanish must of come rushing out of Mrs. Venning’s lane and turned towards Brettenden just when Miss Seeton was cycling back from—well, sir, I dunno, but there she was, and there they were. You couldn’t have slipped a playing-card between ’em,” exaggerated Potter. Mrs. Venning’s tenants might not be regular Plummergen, but Miss Seeton was. “She’s got good reflexes,” he finished, proudly.

  “And the Spanish lot?”

  “Watched ’em in the mirror, sir, pulling over to the right—the left—the proper side of the road and driving off nice and slow and steady. Sir.”

  “Hmm. Miss Seeton’s all right, then. Good.”

  “Saw her pedalling north again, sir, when I stopped off home for a cuppa. Her basket had a couple of packages in it. I reckon they’d be presents for young Anne and the baby.”

  The superintendent visualised the topography of Miss Seeton’s village. “Expect you’re right. Yes. But apart from their bad driving, there’s been no other trouble from the Spanish contingent?”

  “Oh no, sir. Very polite, or so we think because the lingo’s a problem—they use a phrasebook when they’re shopping—but doing their best to fit in, sir. Can’t be bad, can it?”

  Brinton made him a noncommittal reply, and hung up. He frowned, and pulled open the drawer where he kept his extra-strong mints.

  “Mrs. Venning, sir?” prompted Foxon.

  “That was before Maidstone kicked you over here and, heaven knows why, said you might do for plain clothes.” Brinton looked towards the younger man and winced. “I must have been mad. Plain? Those horrible stripes...”

  “My grandmother,” said Timothy Foxon, “knitted this tank top for my birthday. I take it as a personal insult that anyone, even you, sir, should disparage Gran Biddle’s labour of love.”

  “If someone knitted a thing like that for my birthday I’d think they hated me. Couldn’t you have asked for a nice quiet Fair Isle?”

  Foxon grinned. “I’d never dare, sir. You know Gran. You might ask her yourself?”

  Brinton grinned back as he inserted a peppermint. He knew Gran Biddle, for whom the word redoubtable might have been invented. He raised one hand in a gesture of surrender. “Peace, laddie. Wear your horrible stripes and leave me out of it. Mrs. Venning: Society widow, wrote children’s books. Daughter drugged, she’d been a supplier herself, retired to Plummergen hoping to sort things out. Your lady-friend Miss Seeton and her brolly helped smash at least that part of the supply chain, at the cost of the daughter’s life and a complete breakdown on the part of Sonia Venning. She’s in a Swiss nursing home now.”

  “And the house?”

  “Let out through a firm of London solicitors. Remember that Russian princess a while back? Some sort of cousin, stayed a few months, paranoid about assassins, after peace and quiet and security. The Meadows has high walls and, I suppose, the right sort of atmosphere.” He favoured his young colleague with a long, steady look. And sighed.

  “I’d better tell you—but if you’re thinking of putting in for sergeant, this will be a good test of how shut you can keep your mouth about things. Understand?”

  Foxon was serious now. “Yes, sir, I understand.”

  “They...aren’t Spanish.” Brinton paused.

  Even now, Foxon was not entirely suppressed. “And here’s me thinking they might be reclaiming the long-lost treasure of some sunken Armada ship.”

  “They might, but it’s unlikely. There’s plenty of silver in Costaguana.” Foxon blinked. “Where there’s just been a military coup, yes. And the dictator getting out with a few trusted members of his household, if dictators can ever trust anyone, and after some dodging about on assorted Atlantic coasts arriving in Plummergen.” Brinton crunched on peppermint as Foxon stared at him.

  “In Plummergen?” said the young man in the striped tank top at last. “That chap who got out of Latin America by the skin of his teeth with machine guns firing at the wheels of his plane? All the gin-joints in the world he might’ve gone to—even Casablanca—and he goes to Plummergen?”

  “Yes,” said Brinton. “The Venning place could well be getting known in certain circles as a good temporary refuge for a certain type of person.”

  Again he paused. Foxon, bright-eyed, was busily thinking.

  “You don’t suppose there could be a hoard of Armada gold somewhere around, sir? They sailed up the Channel, and lots of them sank when the storm came. The Santissima Nada was one of them—they say she lies not so very far from the coast, between Romney and Rye—which’d be dashed handy for anyone staying in Plummergen. And there have always been stories. Manville Henty wrote a book about it—her, I mean.” He coughed.

  “Never read one. Hearty Victorian adventure isn’t my style and never was, more-or-less local author or not.”

  “Or,” persisted Foxon, his imagination fizzing, “Julius Caesar! It was one of the reasons the Romans wanted Britain—the lead, the silver. And remember that temple they found in Plummergen the
other Christmas, and the hoard that was buried with it—more silver.” He sat bolt upright. “That’s why they’ll have come to Plummergen, sir, all the silver. They knew they’d feel pretty much at home in the place before they even arrived!”

  Chapter Nine

  OBLON OF THE Foreign Office was driving the chief superintendent mad by his prowling up and down, grumbling, between Delphick’s desk and that of the rigidly silent Bob Ranger.

  “The last we officially heard they were in London, keeping an understandably low profile. Suddenly, they disappear. Rumours of them at Charing Cross, then they turn up in this Plummergen of yours and ask if anyone minds. How can we say we do? They’ve paid the rent. They try to fit in with the locals. They’ve hired a car and, yes, nearly killed a couple of people, but they didn’t, and generally they’ve kept to the proper side of the road and done the tourist bit just as if they were on holiday. It’s...all wrong!”

  Delphick sighed. “Perhaps they really are on holiday. After a military coup and a hair’s-breadth escape from a show trial and a firing squad, followed by frantic rushing from one airport hotel to another in the hunt for political asylum, even the toughest dictator might fancy a rest.”

  “Possibly.” Oblon did not sound convinced.

  “All that packing and unpacking. Having to sweep the walls for bugs, check under the beds for explosive devices—always looking over their shoulders for assassins, even in London. An out-of-the-way house with a high wall round it in a quiet village in Kent might suit them very well.”

  “Getting away from London, I can understand.” Oblon prowled to the window and looked out from the umpteenth floor of New Scotland Yard at the vast expanse of the metropolis. “But why Plummergen? We’ve kept a discreet eye on them since we learned where they were, and we cannot make out what they’re doing. And not knowing the reason makes us uneasy. You two are the acknowledged experts. Why Plummergen, I ask you?”

  Delphick glanced at Bob, who remained silent. “There are historic precedents,” he said quietly, “and fairly modern history, what’s more.”

  Oblon the expert in foreign affairs looked peeved. Nobody likes to have their ignorance exposed, even with only one (tactfully still silent) witness. “Precedents?”

  “Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, later the emperor Napoleon III, settled in England for the first time in 1838.” As the Crassweller investigation failed to go anywhere in particular, Delphick had refreshed his overburdened mind with periodic dips into the office encyclopaedia. “After years of European to-and-fro pursuit of the French throne, in 1871 he ended up in Kent.” Oblon winced. “Chislehurst,” the Oracle added. “But undeniably Kent—where he died in 1873.”

  “Before my time.” Weakly, Oblon grinned. “Oh, well.” He pulled out the visitor’s chair, and sat down. “Go on. I’m intrigued.”

  “More recently Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, later Emperor of Ethiopia, fled his country after the Italian invasion and came to England in 1936.”

  “The same year we packed our Nazi-loving Duke of Windsor off to France.”

  “One in, one out,” murmured Bob.

  Delphick frowned. “I hope you’re not suggesting Haile Selassie had fascist sympathies. Abyssinia, after all, was invaded by the forces of Mussolini, who was very quick to join the Hitler bandwagon when the opportunity presented itself.”

  Oblon waved a dismissive hand. “I meant Edward. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but there was rather more support for the Nazis among our aristocracy than anyone these days cares to remember. What happened to Haile Selassie?”

  “He ended up in Somerset. Bath, eventually, but he went via a rather downbeat resort on the Bristol Channel called Burnham-on-Sea.”

  “Good God.”

  “No doubt saltwater paddling gave him a taste for the waters, for which Bath is so well known. More recently still, Her Imperial Highness the Princess Katerina Andreyevna Stakhova. She, I would remind you, not only went to Plummergen, but stayed in the very same house that El Dancairo is renting now.”

  “Precedents,” agreed Oblon. “The princess is a distant cousin of the owner, but—oh, very well. If you don’t know why he’s there, you don’t.” He favoured the chief superintendent with a piercing gaze. “Do you know anything yet about Gabriel Crassweller—?”

  Delphick exchanged looks with his sergeant. “We know nothing beyond what you already know that we know. Unless there is, somewhere, further information we have not yet seen.”

  Oblon seemed puzzled. His gaze swept the small room crowded with files and folders, the trays that could be classified as neither In nor Out now that all were full to overflowing. “I’d say you’ve got everything there is. What makes you think you haven’t?”

  Both Delphick and Bob noted the practised circumlocution. Neither said anything. Both regarded Oblon thoughtfully.

  He seemed unconcerned, but he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Thank you for your time. You have clarified my thoughts to a certain extent, but the Plummergen aspect remains...problematic. Please continue your efforts in the Crassweller case. Such matters cannot afford to go unresolved. Questions are being asked at the highest level, and time is becoming of the essence. The draft reports submitted over recent days have eliminated several possibilities, but there must still be aspects that could usefully be pursued.”

  Before he could say what those might be, he had whisked himself out of the room.

  “Ho, hum,” said Delphick to Bob.

  “He’s good at his job, sir. Didn’t tell us a bally thing, but picked your brains very nicely.”

  “Yes, I wonder why. He knew about the Russian princess. He must have known about Haile Selassie—barely forty years ago, and the FO has a long memory. He could probably have quoted chapter and verse on the military campaigns of the 1830s, and told us what Charles Louis had for breakfast in prison.”

  “Prison?” Bob was curious, but Delphick dismissed the query. “Irrelevant, Bob.” The sergeant made a note to check the encyclopaedia in his next breathing space.

  “Plummergen, however, may well be relevant,” Delphick went on, after a pause. He was frowning. “It may be.”

  “To an outsider,” said Bob, “I can see that it might look a bit...odd, sir.”

  “No doubt.” Delphick’s frown deepened. “Plummergen. Now, I wonder...”

  Miss Emily Seeton was taking tea with Miss Cecelia Wicks, and admiring the older woman’s delicate work for her contribution to the Plummergen Mural.

  “Hexagons,” hissed Miss Wicks, whose friends suffered torments when conversing with her. Sibilance was infectious. The ears of both Miss Seeton and Miss Treeves naturally suffered more than most: but everyone liked the old lady, and none would dream of upsetting her by suggesting she might spend more money than they suspected she could afford on new dentures. “Basted over separate pieces of paper and subsequently stitched by hand, as you can see.”

  She indicated a small basket, its blue lining faded after a lifetime’s use, at her side. It was full of dainty coloured shapes no more than an inch across. “Old correspondence,” said Miss Wicks. “A set of compasses from my schooldays to make six intersecting circles on one of last year’s Christmas cards and, once cut out, traced for all subsequent copies.”

  “As we did in handiwork...” Miss Seeton hesitated. Both lessons and classes held equal danger, but she gave up trying to suppress her hisses as everyone always did. “At school,” she temporised. “It is useful for children to learn that geometry has a practical value in real life, as well as teaching them to handle sharp instruments with care.”

  Miss Wicks beamed. “Scissors, too, can be sharp, yet despite a little stiffness first thing in the morning—” she wiggled her fingers “—I found it easy to prepare these shapes.”

  “And you sew them right sides together?” Miss Seeton’s eyesight was good, but she could barely make out the stitches. “Miss Wicks, how long do you think it will take?”

  “My dear,” said her elderly
friend, “one never knows the hour, so one must waste as little time as possible. Once I have finished piecing my small mosaic frame I can sew it to the central stitchery—a likeness in Spanish-work of my cottage, taken from one of Mrs. Welsted’s postcards.” Once more she indicated the basket with its tiny six-sided shapes tacked over scraps of old letters. “I baste these when my eyes need a rest, later in the day. They say it was brought to this country by Catherine of Aragon—the Spanish-work, that is.” Miss Seeton blinked. “Sometimes it is called blackwork. I’ve been sewing the basics of my history panel in my spare time. I had so many choices. For some days I was unable to decide between Queen Anne’s request for a glass of water, and Sir Philip Chute raising the standard for Henry VIII. Out of interest, which would have been your preference, Miss Seeton?”

  Miss Seeton blinked again at this second casual reference to the monarch who had in so dramatic a manner entered her life. First, his wife—one of his wives—then Henry himself. “Queen Anne,” she said promptly. “The clothes,” and really it was no more than true. “Such colour—such luxury.”

  “Such fun,” agreed Miss Wicks. “Those enormous sideways hoops, and the panniers—the silken stomachers, the lace fans, the jewelled shoes...” She touched her guest gently on the arm. “My little hexagons are mere cotton, Miss Seeton, and for the surround of my blackwork picture will do very well. But, although Mrs. Welsted stocks a surprising variety in so small a shop, for a queen I now realise that it must be something special...”

  Miss Seeton guessed the little hexagons had once belonged in garments for which Miss Wicks had no further need. Elbows wear out eventually, but other parts remain usable to a greater or lesser degree. “I fear that my own stock of fabric is far from extensive, and could hardly be thought luxurious...”