“Archer. We were just wanting to pay our bill.”
They were supposed to have stayed another night. Wasn’t it awful enough that lean circumstances had forced him to turn Gun Lodge into a guesthouse (he refused to refer to it as a B&B) without those guests breaking their promises. “It was my understanding you were to stay two nights. Two.” The indictment made the husband redden, but the woman snapped shut her compact and said in her dreadful East End accent, “That room’s as cold as a virgin’s —”
Fortunately for her, the husband silenced her. An elbow in the side. Well, if they insisted on being difficult. . . “Checking-out time is at noon. It is now one o’clock.” A long case clock in the entryway bonged the fatal hour.
And as if in tune with the sounds of doom, the giant iron knocker was raised and lowered once with a deadly crash. That Fleet girl. No respect for anything. “I am sure that you would not wish to pay for a night’s lodging without the privilege of using it. No one has complained about the heat before,” (actually, quite a few complaints along those lines had reached his ear) and here he sighed wearily — “however, I shall see Midge puts an extra heater in your room. Now, if you will excuse me.”
• • •
Carrie Fleet stood on the wide doorstep and looked without expression into the eyes, hard as knuckles, of Sebastian Grimsdale. “I’ve come with the lady’s cat.”
There was a movement from within the box.
Grimsdale looked at both of them with the same disdain. “Just leave it.”
“Here on the doorstep?”
“I will see she gets it.”
Carrie, who seldom registered emotion, allowed herself the luxury of hating Sebastian Grimsdale, not only because she found him personally hateful, but doubly so because of his being Master of Foxhounds and taking the greatest pleasure in hunting anything (within the law) on the wing or on four feet — pheasant, rabbit, deer, grouse. Indeed, the only time she ever noticed him smiling was when he was tramping along with a gun in his hands.
“No,” said Carrie.
“No? No what?”
“I’ll see she gets it.” Her tone was merely determined, but the major would take it as rank insolence. His face turned beet red. “Can’t I come in and wait? I’ll sit in the kitchen.” If he let her in at all, she knew that’s where she’d have to sit, anyway.
He glared at her, nodded curtly, and told her to go round back and Cook would let her in.
The delivery boy’s entrance was okay with Carrie. She took the cat around to the back of the house, a big ramshackle brick place with a stone wall encircling it like an iron band.
• • •
When Polly Praed and Melrose Plant walked into the big kitchen of Gun Lodge, Carrie Fleet was drinking tea from a mug and Barney, out of his box, was dozing peacefully by the hearth. The cook, Mrs. Linley, had paid no more attention to the rules smartly laid down by Sebastian Grimsdale than did anyone else in Ashdown Dean: the greengrocer, the butcher, the librarian.
Polly rushed to the hearth and gathered up the intractable Barney, who seemed to prefer to sleep rather than be found. Barney had never been putty in Polly’s hands. It was a bit embarrassing the way he squirmed to get back down to the tattered little rug on which he’d been toasting himself at Carrie’s feet.
Polly momentarily put him down and said to Carrie, “Wherever did you find him?”
“On the heath.” She shrugged. “It’s near where I live. I guess he got out of your car and just wandered around.”
“How can I thank you —?” Polly, with the aid of Melrose’s handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose, which then looked frostbitten. She scrabbled about in her handbag, drew out her purse, and held out some folded notes.
Carrie frowned slightly. “I don’t take rewards for stuff like that. It’s against my principles.” She put down her mug and got up.
Melrose Plant had been about to take out his wallet when she said that. The frown disappeared like a shadow’s sudden passing and her face took on a lunar quality, something rather above it all, the expression calm as a nun’s, though he felt there was something very unnunlike in its placidity. He had to admit here was someone under thirty who held a certain interest for him. He looked at his wallet, and turned back to see her pale blue eyes look quickly away from him. “That’s certainly very kind of you.”
Barney was again in a death struggle in Polly’s arms, not impressed with the great reunion scenario. “He smells funny—well, soapy, or something.” Polly sniffed the cat’s fur.
“That’s the vet’s soap. Dr. Fleming. You can pay him if you want.”
“A veterinarian? Was he hurt?” Polly started inspecting Barney, who let out an ungrateful growl and managed to struggle down to the hearthrug.
Carrie Fleet seemed to be considering. “No. But I didn’t know whose cat it was; except for the bandanna, it could have been a stray. You don’t have tags on him.”
There was a definite reproach in that word tags.
“So I thought it’d be a good idea to take him to Dr. Fleming.”
The girl was chewing her lip, and her quicksilver glance from the one to the other of them suggested to Melrose that there might be more to her story than she was saying. But he let it pass.
“But — well, that was so good of you. What’s your name, then?”
“Carrie Fleet.” She brushed the pale hair back across her shoulder and started for the door.
Polly Praed didn’t know what to do about Carrie Fleet. “Where do you live? In Ashdown?”
Carrie Fleet turned. “Yes. With the Baroness.”
And with that as explanation, she walked out the door.
As Carrie walked back along Ashdown’s High Street, she realized how stupid her story had been and that the lady would go to Dr. Fleming and find out about the petrol.
Maybe a stranger’s going to Constable Pasco and complaining would finally convince him that Batty and Billy were holy terrors around anything that couldn’t defend itself. Maybe Batty couldn’t help it, being the way he was, but Billy ought to be in borstal.
A family of ducks rowed up to the edge of the pond, probably hoping for lunch, seeing her there. But she had no bread today. She turned out her pockets in mute explanation, but the ducks didn’t take the hint, and bobbed there, shoving one another about, each wanting to be first.
“No crumbs,” said Carrie. “I can’t always have crumbs, can I?”
She remembered Batty had been here one day, tossing in pieces of bread, and when the ducks came up close to the edge, he’d tried hitting at them with a stick until he saw Carrie and started backing off. She grabbed the stick and gave him a small whack across his bum, just the thing his aunt should have done. Even though she hadn’t hit him hard, this assault had landed her yet once again in front of P.C. Pasco, being lectured to by Amanda Crowley. “Poor Batty only trying to play with the ducks and you come along —”
“Billy probably told him to do it,” was Carrie’s answer.
That had not gone down well at all with the aunt, who had always considered herself a martyr first-class.
Carrie loathed this tall, slim, buckled-down woman. She always seemed to be wearing riding gear of some sort. Tight pants, tight boots, that day a jacket closed with metal clasps. She had a mouth like a clamp that barely opened when she spoke in angry little spasms. Her hair was metal-gray, but fashionably done, pulled back in a fancy chignon from a round face, slightly jaundiced from too much passing about of the hunt cup, probably. It reminded Carrie of a poached egg. Amanda Crowley considered herself very county, loved to hunt and shoot, and was rumored to have her eye on Sebastian Grimsdale.
A wonderful pair, Carrie had thought, listening to the spasmodic voice of Miss Crowley. The two of them might mistake the rustles they made in the woods and shoot each other.
“The Baroness will have to be told.” The Baroness was often approached by certain of the villagers who did not appreciate Carrie Fleet’s ministry. It was always with that you must
be told excuse, though no one apparently ever thought Amanda Crowley “must be told” about her own two.
This going to the Baroness always made Carrie laugh inwardly. The Baroness sometimes would, and sometimes wouldn’t, invite the complainants in. When she allowed them an audience, it was in her withdrawing room, where she promptly withdrew her attention.
Thus while Amanda or Mr. Geeson or whoever happened to be that day’s visitor was issuing an ultimatum, the mind of the Baroness was far away, strolling through an avenue of limes and plum trees, ripe fruit fallen underfoot, sunshade twirling slowly, milky hand lying on the arm of the Baron. That, or the faraway look had something to do with the gin in her teacup.
Carrie enjoyed imagining the Baroness’s imaginings. Perhaps she embellished upon them in her own mind, she didn’t know. But she had seen so many old photographs of what “La Notre” had once been — its summer house, its Grecian columns, its grounds and gardens completely out of place in Ashdown Dean.
There were times when Carrie’s own arm replaced the Baron’s as she accompanied the Baroness on her rambles through gardens long gone to seed or strangled with vines and grounds gone to moss and trees lichen-drowned. But the Baroness seemed to see in this adumbration of some garden Armageddon a mere need for the gardener to “see to” a few things. The cold stalks of dahlias she aimed her walking stick at and told Carrie to tell Randolph to see to them. Randolph was in his dotage and saw to nothing. Occasionally, Carrie had observed him leaning on a rake or a hoe and performing about as effectively as the crumbling statue at his back. Randolph also had a faraway look, but this was directed to the turf accountant’s in the market-town of Selby. He would roll out his rickety bicycle and wobble off down the long drive, headed for Selby.
Given the Baroness’s predilection to absent herself mentally from the felicity of the Crowleys of this world, it was left to Carrie herself to sit there and accept the hard coin of their complaints, like a parishioner passing the collection plate, as she literally passed the cake plate. And all the while marveling that none of the Ashdown Dean crowd had twigged it: the Baroness Regina de la Notre was either in a waking dream or dead drunk.
Although, of course, when she held her salons, Regina came up for air out of the past to join the present.
• • •
These were Carrie’s reflections as she looked blindly across the bright water at the Church of St. Mary’s and All Saints. The ducks, everlastingly hopeful, had been joined by two swans. She had the money for the Baroness’s gin in her shoe, and would buy a half-loaf and come back.
Carrie started toward the sub-post-office stores, her mind again on the lady and man at Gun Lodge.
She allowed herself the vain thought that she didn’t know which pair of eyes, deep violet or glittering green, she would have given her soul for. She had always hated her eyes, faded like her denim dress, hated her hair, her pale face — all of her. It was shameful, perhaps, in a world full of suffering, to want to be pretty. Carrie wanted to be absolutely smashingly beautiful. That was worse.
As she neared the store, she thought, well, at least she could buy bread, and that was more than a lot could do.
Ten
Try as she might, and huge as were the grounds of “La Notre,” it seemed impossible for Carrie Fleet to circumvent the Baroness Regina. At eleven-thirty, the Baroness should have been taking her late coffee and brioche on the vine-tangled terrace overlooking the duck pond.
The Baroness was as unpredictable as her history. Her maiden name was Scroop, a Liverpudlian. The Baron Reginald de la Notre had made himself a fortune in fine leather gloves and it was indeed behind a glove counter in Liverpool that he had discovered Gigi Scroop. And had been bewitched (according to the Baroness) by her hands. Carrie had often been treated to the look of her graceful, beringed fingers when pouring another tot of gin or lighting another cigarette.
It wouldn’t surprise Carrie at all if they’d married because of their names — Regina and Reginald — so they could call each other Reggie. “Gigi” had been the diminutive in Regina Scroop’s family. Carrie wondered how she had got the Liverpool accent out of her speech. She even knew French; or enough of it to make people believe she even knew French.
“La Notre.” What a stupid name in an English village, Carrie thought, as she walked through the deer park, one part of her mind checking for signs of poachers. (The only person allowed to carry a rifle on the grounds was Carrie, an allowance made to herself by herself.) Before the Baron had got his chubby fingers on the property, the old house had been called “The Grange.” The Baron (dead these fifteen years) had seen (according to the Baroness) the incredible possibilities of both house and grounds — the “estate” through whose history she had boringly sifted so many times that Carrie wondered there could be any more grains left on the mental beach. The Baron was a descendant of that famous gardener who had done Versailles. Carrie had been treated to enough pictures of famous gardens to make her feel like going out straightaway and trampling the lobelias.
Yet, she was sometimes sorry the Baron had passed on to his long line of flowery ancestors, for it would have been a lark to find someone else both as silly and determined as was the Baroness. To watch them take walks together, probably arm-in-arm, up and down the paths, past the Roman statuary, round the pools and ponds. What a team they must have been. She could not understand how anyone could have taken the simple before picture of “The Grange” and turned it into this enormous, ugly building of dark gray stone, bay windows bulging inappropriately underneath the battlements, a building that sat on a swell of ground overlooking the pretty green of Ashdown Dean, like a king of the toads on a lily pad.
Carrie walked in the covering shade of willows and immense dahlias, screened from the terrace, when suddenly a sun-hat popped up amongst the begonias and larkspur and asked her where she’d been.
Carrie answered with her own question. “What’re you doing out here gardening?” making it clear that no occupation of Carrie’s could match in idiocy the Baroness’s being caught with shears in her ringed fingers.
“One must have an occasional bout with exercise.” She made it sound like flu. “Gillian didn’t do the flowers again.” Snip. “You haven’t answered. What’ve you been up to? Here, take these, will you?” She handed Carrie a rough-cut bunch of wilting lupines.
“You always think I’m ‘up to’ something.”
“You always are. What’s in that box? Oh, God, don’t tell me.” The sun-hat disappeared, reappeared, a few roses browned at the edges like burnt toast in her hands.
“A stray. I found it in the woods.”
Beneath the sunshade of her giant hat, Regina squinted. “I think you call them like spirits from the vasty deep.” Her shears stopped, midair. “That could be poetry. Did I invent it? How wonderful.”
Although Carrie had quickly put it down so the Baroness wouldn’t notice, the kitten was mewling. To divert attention, she said, “You want me to get you some fags in the village?”
“Don’t use guttersnipe words like that. It’s moving.”
“What is?”
“You know what. Oh, never mind.” One of the cigarettes she ordinarily plugged into her ivory holder was dangling from the corner of her brightly painted mouth. The Baroness pulled some money from her coverall pocket. When she dressed for something, she dressed for it, and always, for some undisclosed reason, carried money. The diamond earrings seemed a bit out of place, however. “Did you bring the Tanqueray?”
Carrie nodded. “But there was a fight with Ida. Over me being too young to buy it.”
“So what? You always win.”
The first thing Carrie Fleet had seen of the Baroness Regina de la Notre two years ago was a silver-buckled shoe on a sheer-white-stockinged leg, followed by a mauve and gray-blue dress, and then a matching hat. This mannequinlike display had descended from a cab outside of the London Silver Vaults. The face above the dress, however, was running on a different time schedule fr
om the shoes, dress, and hat. It was painted and powdered to erase the difference, a good twenty years of it. The Baroness had (as for two years she had been advising Carrie to do) “taken care of herself.” Avoidance of sunlight was important, she was always saying. A similar avoidance of gin and cigarettes might have had the same effect, allowing the sixty-year-old face to run neck-and-neck with the forty-year-old body.
As the woman disengaged herself from cab and cabbie, Carrie was further intrigued by her having a Bedlington terrier on a rhinestone studded lead — mauve, like the dress. And since the Bedlington was grayish-blue, it blended perfectly: a dog chosen to complement the ensemble.
Carrie, seated on her portable canvas stool, had already taken on a whippet and a poodle. Round her neck was a plastic-covered card. “You can’t take the dog inside, madam.”
The formidable woman stared. “Who are you?”
“I mind animals.” The brief blaze of the look Carrie Fleet shot Regina de la Notre could have melted the glove leather shoes on her feet. “For a pound an hour.”
The Baroness looked the situation over. The Alsatian was having a nap in a pool of sunlight. The poodle was doing the same beneath the canvas stool the girl sat on. Neither seemed to care that its owner had gone. Nor would, apparently, the Bedlington terrier, straining at the lead when the girl held her hand toward it.
Probably a witch, thought the Baroness. Covens of them all over England. “I find this amazing and, surely, illegal.”
“Here’s a constable coming. You can ask him.”
Strolling slowly, hands behind him, seeming to enjoy the unearthly spring sunlight, the policeman looked as if he too might just curl up on the sidewalk and nap. The Baroness looked from him to the girl. “Kickbacks, probably. I suppose you want your money in advance. Or do you just hold the animals for ransom?”
“No, madam,” said the unflappable girl. “Like I said, pound an hour.”
As if to turn her words to gold, a handsome couple walked up the steps from the vaults and collected their whippet. The gentleman plucked two pound notes from his money clip. The girl took them and opened her little purse and returned fifty pence.
The Deer Leap Page 5