“The gin seems fine, thanks.”
St. Clair raised a curious eyebrow. “Really? Well . . .” With some doubt he went about refilling the glasses as he continued talking about gardens here and there. “Of course your gardens in Northants would be considerably finer than ours —”
Melrose laughed. “Now there you are absolutely wrong, Mr. St. Clair. Sussex is the place for gardens. Always has been.”
Handing Melrose his glass and reseating himself he said, “Oh, yes indeed. Certain parts of Sussex. But here in Somers Abbas the wet just drowns everything in its path.” He tasted his fresh drink and frowned.
“That’s ridiculous, Sinjin. And let’s stop all this talk about gardens —”
“Heavens, yes,” said Divinity, as if the word had come down from there.
“We did want the Winslows to come this evening —” In the midst of studying over the label on the bottle of malt whiskey, St. John said, “I can understand why poor Marion would not want to socialize —”
“Poor Marion?” said Lucinda. “I should think it would be poor David.”
Sybil leaned forward and said to Melrose eagerly, “You heard what happened?”
“Really, Mother,” said Divinity. “We shouldn’t be talking common gossip.”
Replacing the bottle with a frown, St. John said, “I’ve nothing against gossip, nor rumor, just so long as there’s no truth in it and, therefore, cannot damage a reputation through repetition.” He sighed. “But in this case, one does wonder. David Marr has always been unlucky — well, but haven’t they all? The unluckiest family I believe I know, even more so than my own. Edward had a bad marriage, didn’t he, my dear? Wasn’t her name Rose? And didn’t she leave him flat? Yes, I believe she did. And there was the little girl, poor little Phoebe, who was killed in that accident. And we mustn’t forget Hugh. Hugh is Marion’s husband, but we seldom see him. Hugh keeps to himself in that house in Knightsbridge and does not come down.” St. John sat there, sinking deeper into gloom and finally stopping, like a man in a cave striking match after match, only to watch each one, and finally the last one, gutter out.
“Hugh does not keep precisely to himself,” said Sybil. “I don’t think Marion will have him down —”
“Oh, but we shouldn’t go talking about that, my dear. We do not absolutely know that Hugh has other women. Not more than one, surely. And now here’s poor David, with his fiancée murdered.”
“He wasn’t engaged to her, Daddy,” said Lucinda.
“How do you know that?” asked her mother.
“Marion told me. She met her the one time. At the London house. David and some others were there for drinks.”
“You mean the girl was at the house?”
“Well, what’s so odd about that?” asked Lucinda, incensed. “He was going round with her.”
St. John was closely inspecting the plate of canapés. “It is too bad about those boys; they both should settle down. I don’t care for this fish paste; it’s not the brand we usually buy.”
Pearl had left her seat to arrange herself before the fire, catching whatever she could of the leftover light spilling from Divinity’s person. “Edward was supposed to have come this evening. He was to bring me his new book.”
“But I’ve got it, my dear,” said her father. “I believe it’s in the car.”
She pouted. Apparently, since Edward Winslow had not come with it, better it had not come at all. Now she would have no excuse for running to the Winslow house and collecting it herself. “Mr. Winslow is a writer?”
“A poet, yes,” said St. John. “Unfortunately, poetry doesn’t sell.”
Sybil laughed. “It hardly needs to, with all of their money. Now, Mr. Plant, I’m sure you’ll reconsider and stay with us.”
This so caught Melrose by surprise he hadn’t time to muster his forces before she continued.
“There’s simply no reason why you should stay at the Mortal Man when we’ve a half-dozen perfectly lovely rooms.”
“He wants to stay there, Mother,” said Lucinda. She looked unhappily at Melrose as her mother continued, obviously deaf to any attempt to scotch her plan.
“Oh, Lucinda, don’t be ridiculous. You think you’re putting us out,” she said to Melrose, “but you aren’t at all and I can’t imagine why Lucinda didn’t insist you stay here —”
“Mother, he doesn’t want —”
“Lucinda, please. I’ve had the maid fix up a room with a perfectly marvelous fireplace —”
“It smokes,” said St. Clair, putting his whiskey aside.
Melrose was actually becoming alarmed when he saw Sybil St. Clair ring for their servant. “The inn is fine, Mrs. St. Clair, please don’t —”
“It does not smoke, Sinjin. The fireplace was seen to by Parkins just this summer —”
“Parkins doesn’t do a good job, my dear.”
“Mother—”
“The Mortal Man is an architectural gem,” said Melrose quickly, as the servant Peters came through the double doors. “And as I told Lucinda —”
“We can just have Peters get your things for you. He can take the car.”
“I told Lucinda” — Melrose was practically strangling his whiskey glass — “I’ve a special interest in inns, and the Mortal Man is a remarkable example of the old coaching inn —”
“I shouldn’t think so,” said St. Clair, who was staring up at the ceiling. “I shouldn’t think the Mortal Man was much of an example of anything.”
“It’s no trouble at all Mr. Plant. And it won’t take more than a moment. Peters —”
Melrose’s paean to the English inn rushed ahead (he hoped) of Peters’s leaving for it. “You see I always stay at an inn whenever there’s the chance. As a matter of fact, I’m doing a sort of study of the English inn. Why, only the church has a richer history —”
“Oh-ho!” said St. Clair, with a crimped little smile. “Not our St. Mary’s I assure you —”
“— to sit before an open fire and see the copper catching the light; to drive through the coaching archway into the cobbled yard and imagine the strolling players of Elizabethan times —”
“Not the Mortal Man’s, I shouldn’t think. The milk-float lost a wing and got its sill torn off there; and as for strolling players, well . . . unless one thinks of the Warboyses in that way. They do tell me he sings . . . .”
Melrose hoped not. “The timbered frontage, the fittings, the cellars, the carved woodwork, the rafters and beams —”
“Dry rot and rising damp,” said St. Clair, pleasantly.
Into this overlapping conversation came the ringing of a telephone from deep in the house, and Peters, duty calling him elsewhere, nodded and begged to answer the sound.
Melrose leaned back, as breathless as if he’d run the mile, and feeling between the Warboyses and the St. Clairs like an object to be sent here and there, bag and baggage, dropped and collected, dumped and thumped on, and generally traded for a mess of pottage.
11
BREAKFAST was an occasion involving the usual hazards. He should have known that the juice would spill, the porridge tilt, and the mackerel slide and taken the precaution of wearing a bib.
As Melrose ate the mackerel he had rescued from his lap, he listened to the keening sound coming from the kitchen. It increased and diminished each time Sally Warboys slapped open the door to bring him another dish. It might have been the screech of a kettle forgotten on the hob or the youngest Warboys (there was a baby, too) with some intractable demand. There had already come from the kitchen the clatter of breaking crockery and the usual assortment of angry voices as the Warboyses took their battle stations.
Sally Warboys, in washboard gray, came out of the kitchen in her half-run, half-walk, to deposit Melrose’s pot of tea, which struck the table edge and sent hot water splashing down the cloth, just missing his hand by an inch. To call the Warboyses accident-prone would have been to do them an injustice, he thought; there was something here that smacked o
f deeply rooted tribal behavior.
As he blotted a bit of grease from his cuff, he noticed that the lad who had done porter duty and dropped his bag had come into the dining room. This room was undergoing a Warboysian transformation, with Bobby up on his ladder swinging his hammer.
William sat at the table across the room. In another this might have been called a “respectful distance,” but in a Warboys it looked like the first step in a campaign from which Melrose doubted he would emerge the victor. The boy sat stiff and staring, with a gaze so intent it pried Melrose’s eyes up like a lever. He was assisted in this scrutiny by Osmond, who lay on the floor with his head on his paws, eyes unflinching. Melrose assumed this was tactical necessity on the dog’s part, like a falling back of troops readying for a surprise attack. He wondered if there had ever been guests at the Mortal Man before he happened along, for none of them seemed to know what to make of one — whether to hold him hostage or kill him outright.
“Good morning,” said Melrose cheerily. “It’s William, isn’t it?”
The boy responded swiftly and came over to the table. He sat down and placed a small notebook and pencil, or the stub of a pencil, beside the plate of buttered crumpet that Melrose had not ordered. When Melrose invited him to have one, he pulled the plate and marmalade pot over with an alacrity that would have made one think he’d been on prison rations up to now.
Melrose pointed toward his notebook. “Are you writing something?”
Mouth full of marmaladed crumpet, William nodded energetically. The Warboyses had trained themselves never to waste a gesture, apparently.
“What?”
“A story.” He mounded some currant jelly on another crumpet. “I wrote one once and it won a prize.”
“It did?”
“Ten pound. Mum bought a new frock.”
“That’s very generous of you, to give her your prize money.”
“I didn’t. She took it.”
Since there was no rancor in the boy’s tone, Melrose assumed that this was the usual Warboys transaction. “What’s this story about?”
“Chillington’s has this contest going and there’s fifty pound prize money —”
Melrose frowned. “The only Chillington I know is a brewer.”
William nodded. “They’re the ones that have all of them pubs with squirrels in them —”
As William paused to put another dollop of jam on his crumpet, Melrose tried to imagine a pub filled with squirrels.
The boy continued. “You know, the Squirrel and Pickle, the Squirrel and Mouse . . . everyone has a squirrel. So they want a story about a squirrel they can put a little bit of on their beermats each month. Here —”
He reached in his pocket and brought out a square of cardboard, somewhat stained. There was a picture of a squirrel sitting snugly inside its tree cave, wrapped in a checkered bathrobe, reading.
“It’s fifty pound prize money. Mum wants to put heat in the toilet. I hate it when I’m still sleepy and have to go down to the toilet. This morning there was ice on the chain.”
“That is pretty rum.”
“Can I have some tea?”
“What? Oh, yes. It still seems hot.” Melrose took the precaution of pouring. “What have you got so far?” He nodded toward William’s notebook.
William stopped slurping his tea and opened the notebook.
“ ‘Sidney reared back. There was blood on his anorak. The strange shape disappeared into the bushes.’ Sidney’s the squirrel.”
“An exciting story. Where did the blood come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he dead? Or dying?”
“I don’t know.”
Melrose wondered if this was the way Polly Praed wrote her mysteries.
“Maybe his friend Weldon is dead,” said William, licking marmalade from his knife.
“Who’s Weldon?”
“A weasel.”
It was beginning to sound like an X-rated version of The Wind in the Willows. “Did somebody kill Weldon?”
“I don’t know. Probably. It could have been with a knife,” he said, using his own for demonstration purposes.
Melrose moved his chair back. “Well, what’s the body doing in the bushes?”
“I don’t know.”
Better that a Warboys work off the inherited tendency toward destruction even if his narrative did have a few holes in it. “I must say you’ve not much to be going on with. Anyway, you might be quite rich some day if you keep to your story-writing.”
William said he cared nothing for riches; just that he would like some heat in the toilet.
“That seems reasonable. I wish you’d stop playing with that knife.”
“I had a weasel once. It’s out back. With the others.”
“ ‘The others’?” Melrose was beginning to wonder if this was not an inn but a Hitchcock motel.
“That’s right. In the graveyard. They die and I bury them.” William dusted his hands of death and crumbs and rousted Osmond. “There’s a lady and man wants to see you.”
He nodded backwards. “Out there in the hall.”
“You mean they’ve been out there all of this time?”
“Told me to give you a message.” William had got up, clearly bored and with an eye on the headier environs of the kitchen.
Melrose was on his feet. “What message?”
William studied his notes. “Don’t remember. But you can just as well ask them.” And he was off, followed by Osmond, who took a swipe at Melrose’s ankle before his paws click-clicked off.
• • •
The man was Edward Winslow, and Melrose had come in on the tail end of a conversation he was having with Nathan Warboys, who left for the hangings and hammerings of the saloon bar.
They had come, said Lucinda, to collect Melrose for morning coffee. David was down from London.
Her expression when she spoke the name David reaffirmed Melrose’s belief that love must surely be blind. He did not have to meet David Marr to wonder how any young woman could prefer another man to Edward Winslow.
He was extremely handsome — hair the color of tawny port, eyes like burning brandy. Perhaps it was their proximity to the bar and Nathan’s fixation on his happy family of ales and liquors that put Melrose in mind of these spiritous metaphors. But the coloring was Winslow’s, nonetheless. And the rest of him lived up to that richness. He was the type who’d be any man’s mirror: you couldn’t help looking at him without wanting to straighten your tie and curse your tailor. There was nothing fashionable about Winslow, and certainly nothing trendy. In his dark gold cashmere jacket and plain brown silk tie, he was the paradigm of unself-conscious elegance. He would wear a trench coat over evening clothes and think nothing of it.
And that the man could find conversational possibilities in a Warboys monologue was a mark of extraordinary inventiveness, even for a published poet.
As Edward Winslow smiled and shook his hand, Melrose could understand why Pearl nearly strangled on her necklace when Edward had failed to present his book personally.
Though thoughts of strangling were perhaps not in the best of taste, Melrose thought, as they walked out into the cold and the wet to Edward’s car — a black BMW, of course, the Savile Row of cars. Not ostentatious, just well made and made to stick it. Melrose slid down in the back seat as the doors clunked shut, thinking of his Flying Spur, his Silver Ghost. Well, perhaps they could talk about poetry.
12
DAVID Marr was in the library getting himself drunk at ten o’clock. He was standing by a commode of lacquer and gilt bronze that looked as if it should have been in a museum instead of doing service as a drinks table.
Indeed, the entire Winslow library looked like a place in which Marshall Trueblood could have happily expired. If the house had seemed depressingly stark from the outside — rock-faced granite with all the weight of medievalism upon it overlooking a choked and tangled woods — this severity was not repeated here in the libra
ry. An Italian marble fireplace was flanked by panels of bas-relief; the upholstery was Italian cut-velvet; the wallpaper and draperies, William Morris; around the walls were family portraits, oils, watercolors, Belgian tapestries. Melrose would have liked to spend several hours with these bound volumes in arched recesses, and a few more hours studying the paintings and portraits. Beside a Belgian tapestry was what looked like a Pissaro, beside that a Millet. It was a warm and peaceful scene of a thatched-roofed inn, quite lovely, he thought, in spite of his present doubts that thatched-roofed inns could contribute to the general happiness of the world.
David Marr held up a bottle of vodka. “Care for a saltwater?” he said, as soon as they were introduced.
Melrose smiled. “Never heard of it.”
“Two goes of vodka, same of ginger, splash of grenadine.” He poured more than two measures of vodka into his glass. “It’s romantic, makes me think of the sea. Of course”— he set down the bottle—“I leave out the grenadine. Actually, I leave out the ginger, too. Sure you won’t join me? Ned? Lucinda?”
“No, thanks,” said Edward Winslow. “I see you switched from brandy.”
David Marr sank down on one of a pair of Queen Anne sofas, sliding down on his spine. He was a handsome man, and he looked like his nephew despite the difference in coloring. Edward was fair; he was dark, eyes glitter-black, chips of the night sky, intense. Too intense to make the drunken-playboy manner believable, the slouching position on the sofa anything but self-conscious.
As he measured out his drink with a frown of concentration, David said, “Lucinda says you’re staying at the Mortal Man. And here you are, alive to tell about it.” He put down the bottle, turned, and smiled at Melrose.
“Here I am, yes. Aren’t people always swearing out complaints or suing them, or something? So far I’ve had three narrow escapes — my carpet very nearly caught fire, my suitcase fell on me, and my breakfast landed in my lap. The place is a minefield. But the Warboyses take it all in stride and soldier on.”
“No one’s sued them yet that we know of,” said Lucinda. “But I don’t think they get many overnight guests. How about that coffee, then?”
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