by Van Reid
There was a knock on the door. Sundry had heard enough silence to grow concerned, and he listened for Mister Walton’s soft “Come in.”
“Just wanted to be sure that you hadn’t fallen asleep,” said Sundry.
“What is she committing?” said Mister Walton.
“Phileda?” said Sundry. “She seems pretty rash to me,” he said.
Mister Walton chuckled. “Let us hope she doesn’t come to her senses in the next few hours.”
“We’ll see if we can’t distract her,” suggested Sundry.
7. A Rum Business
A riddle arrived just before noon. The back door was thrown open, and two men rolled the impending quandary across the floor, then propped it up in the corner without a word. Horace McQuinn, who (along with Maven Flyce) seemed content to linger in the kitchen, recognized these fellows but asked no questions. One of them did nod to Horace, and then they were gone. Mrs. Spark had returned to the Faithful Mermaid, but the daughters had stayed behind to serve the reception, and they were amazed to see this intemperate object in such a respectable kitchen.
For the moment the rest of the house remained ignorant of the matter and solely concerned with the coming ceremony. Not long after this arrival, Sundry came down the front hall stairs and found the members of the club in the parlor. They had the appearance of men who await profound tidings, hands behind their backs or folded before them, faces solemn. Ephram compared the clock on the mantel with his own three or four watches. He was troubled to find Mister Walton’s timepiece a minute or two fast; it seemed ungracious to contradict the chairman’s chronometer, so Ephram busied himself with setting his own watches forward to correspond with the mantel clock.
Eagleton, meanwhile, discussed with Felton P. Deltwire the portrait of a Waltonian ancestor that hung upon the wall. “They only had brooms in those days,” said Felton P. Deltwire. His and Eagleton’s conversation had run from apogees and conjunctions to carpet sweeping to sextiles and quartiles and lunar contradictions and back to carpet sweeping. (Eagleton was not very familiar with sextiles and quartiles and several other words and phrases, so he was not always sure what they were talking about.)
Thump simply stood with his hands folded before him, and when Sundry entered, the bearded Moosepathian looked up and nodded.
“Sundry?” came the sweet voice of Lucinda Baffin. She peered into the parlor from the dining room, where she had been arranging the crystal upon the sideboard. “There seems to be something unusual in the kitchen,” she said. Sundry could see Minerva Spark standing behind the elderly woman.
Puzzled by their mysterious demeanor, Sundry stepped into the kitchen, where his gaze fell upon Horace McQuinn standing by the corner cupboard, arms folded, pipe in hand, barely smoking. Horace shrugged when he met Sundry’s inquiring gaze, and when Sundry looked at Annabelle and Minerva Spark, they looked away. He did not immediately see anything unusual, Horace and Maven notwithstanding. Then he caught sight of Maven Flyce’s perpetual expression of surprise and followed the path described by those wide eyes to the current object of their astonishment.
Something protruded from the other side of the baker’s cabinet and Sundry crossed the room to consider the low barrel—and not just a barrel but a keg which had, stenciled across the top, the single surprising word: RUM.
“That wasn’t there before,” said Sundry.
“It walked in about half an hour ago,” explained Horace.
“I was so amazed!” said Maven.
“Half an hour ago?” Sundry looked to the Spark girls for corroboration. The Faithful Mermaid served beer and small beer, stout and ale (and that against the exact laws of the state), but their mother would never allow anything stronger in the house, and consequently rum carried with the Spark children a wild reputation. Annabelle nodded. Minerva shrugged. Whatever arrived in Mister Walton’s kitchen was hardly their business to discuss.
“Half an hour ago?” said Sundry again to Horace McQuinn.
“I don’t know whose it is, but I was startled to see it.”
Sundry frowned at the keg. “Rum?” he said. He couldn’t imagine that Mister Walton knew about this—no, he knew that Mister Walton didn’t know about it. “Someone’s having fun with us,” he said quietly.
“Someone expects some fun, is my guess,” said Horace.
Minerva Spark laughed nervously.
Cedric Baffin poked his head into the kitchen and announced that Mr. Seacost and his wife had arrived.
“Am I straightened out?” Sundry asked Mrs. Baffin. She walked across the kitchen to study his appearance more closely, but Annabelle Spark was quicker (not to say bold), and she reached out and adjusted his tie. “Thank you,” he said, only briefly glancing at her before heading for the front door. A moment later he stuck his face back into the kitchen and pointed a forefinger at the keg. “I’ll take care of that in a moment.”
The Reverend Seacost and his wife had arrived, and the members of the club were solicitous, informing the elderly folk what might be expected of the climate and the tide and also what time it was. “Mister Walton’s clock,” said Ephram. Without further explanation, this statement was mysterious to the minister and his wife, but they smiled and nodded.
“Indeed?” said Mrs. Seacost. She thought that they were supposed to admire the clock on the mantel (perhaps it was a wedding gift), and she studied the instrument with a degree of seriousness that Ephram admired.
“Is someone here?” came Mister Walton’s voice from above.
“Mr. and Mrs. Seacost,” replied Sundry.
“Please inform the reverend that I am in need of spiritual counsel and an opinion regarding which tie I should wear.” So, leaving Mrs. Seacost to the kind attentions of the Moosepath League, Sundry and the minister went upstairs to offer their assistance in these two fields of discipline.
“I suppose,” Mr. Seacost said, “you will not require the standard lecture concerning the properties of marriage and the business of life”
“Am I to miss the standard lecture?” said Mister Walton, giving his best worst appearance of solemn regret. He held out two ties before Mr. Seacost.
“I don’t know that anyone has ever benefited by it,” returned Mr. Seacost, who pointed to the tie on the left.
Sundry heard this happy repartee indistinctly. Another carriage had just pulled up to the gate, and he had a distinct feeling about it.
“What are you seeing?” asked Mister Walton, like a child at Christmas.
“Nothing for your eyes,” said Sundry. “Yet.”
“Oh,” said Mister Walton, suddenly earnest.
“I’ll go down and let them know the coast is clear,” said Sundry.
“Sundry,” said Mister Walton, still with that abrupt seriousness in his face and his bearing. Sundry turned, his brow raised in question. Mister Walton opened his mouth, looking ready to ask some profound question or favor or perhaps to forward some significant message to the new arrivals. In the next moment, however, he closed his mouth and laughed quietly. “Thank you,” he said, for (perhaps) nothing at all or for everything.
Sundry was still smiling when he opened the door for the bridal party—Miss McCannon: her tall brother, Jared; her maid of honor, Miriam Nowell; and Mrs. Nowell’s husband, Stuart, who carried the wedding dress in a long box.
“Is this the right house?” asked Miss McCannon puckishly.
There was something so very definite about her, so very of itself as if she furnished her own source of light, that Sundry was startled. He simply bowed and extended a hand toward the back of the house, where they would find the birthing room just off the pantry. Mrs. Nowell took the dress box, and the women hurried off, leaving Sundry and Mr. Nowell in the hall and a stunned silence in the parlor. The Moosepath League had seen the bride pass.
“Hmmm,” said Mr. Thump.
Sundry was going to see Stuart Nowell and Jared McCannon to the parlor, when Mrs. Baffin tremulously spoke his name again. She stood at the other end of
the hall, looking anxious. “There’s a policeman in the backyard.”
“Is there?” said Sundry.
“I think he’s going to come in,” she said.
“Oh, he’s a curious one,” said Horace when they reached the kitchen.
Bravely, if uncertainly, the Spark girls stood their ground. Sundry suggested that Mrs. Baffin escort them to the parlor, there to await the guests and avoid any association with rising matters. “Who marks a keg rum, when rum is illegal?” he said when they were gone. He saw a flash of the policeman’s hat pass the kitchen window and wondered which was more incriminating—the presence of the keg or that of Horace McQuinn and Maven Flyce. He considered rolling the offending object into the pantry and down the cellar steps, but then there was a knock at the kitchen door.
The officer was tall and broad-shouldered. He held his hat at his breast, and he ran a speculative hand through his reddish blond hair. “Good afternoon to you, sir,” he said, looking Sundry’s best man’s outfit up and down. “Are you the master of the house, then?”
“I’m not,” said Sundry.
“I’m Officer Rye. Would you mind if I took a look about?”
“I thought you had been,” said Sundry easily.
The officer was pleasant enough, if a little stiff. He had a stiff pair of reddish mustaches, in fact, that bristled over his cheeks. “Inside, if you take my meaning, sir,” he said.
“We’re having a wedding in about half an hour,” informed Sundry. The appearance of this police officer after the keg’s mysterious arrival touched him with vague misgiving.
The officer looked surprised. “I regret the intrusion, but I have been sent by Sergeant Frith to investigate.” His search past Sundry’s shoulder was snagged by the sight of Horace McQuinn. “Well!” he said. “Well!”
“Cuthbert, how are you?” drawled Horace.
“McQuinn,” said the officer tersely.
“What are you looking for?” asked Sundry.
“I’m not at liberty to divulge that at this hour,” explained the policeman, sounding like a quote in the court news.
“You’re not?” replied Sundry. “I might be able to help you if I knew what this was about.”
The policeman shifted his feet, took a breath, and said, “Actually, the sergeant was small on detail.”
“I think,” said Sundry with a nod toward the baker’s cabinet, “that what you’re looking for is in the corner over there.”
“What?”
“You’re looking for a keg, I guess.”
Officer Cuthbert Rye didn’t ask for further authorization but pressed past Sundry and into the kitchen. He let out one or two low gasps as the keg hove into view, and he stood a few feet away from it, peering at it as if it were a bomb about to explode.
“Who marks a keg ‘rum’ when rum is illegal?” asked Sundry again.
“What’s that you say?” said the gaping officer. “You stay right there, and don’t you move.”
Sundry simply folded his arms.
The officer let out a derisive snort. “You get the owner of this house, and be quick,” he added, countermanding his previous order, though perhaps he didn’t realize it.
“He’s to be married in half an hour,” said Sundry, more seriously.
The officer was large with suspicion, but it occurred to him that he had put his hat back on. Looking rueful, he took it off again and stuck it under one arm. “Yes, well—you had better go find the owner.”
The last thing Sundry wanted to do was to put any sort of cloud over Mister Walton’s day, and almost the last thing he wanted to do was put himself in trouble with the law by claiming (for Mister Walton’s sake) any culpability regarding the object in question. “You mean the owner of the house or the owner of that barrel?” he said, and when the officer gave him a glare, he added, “I’d really like to keep Mister Walton out of this.”
“Walton, eh?” Officer Rye found a notebook and a pencil in his jacket.
“Mister Walton, and he doesn’t know anything about this. We don’t have any notion where it came from, and he doesn’t even know it’s here.”
“I guess I know where it came from,” said the officer. He gave Horace McQuinn the hard stare.
“Who’d have thought!” said Maven Flyce.
“I’m as much in the dark as anyone,” professed Horace.
“You spend enough time skulking around in it,” replied Officer Rye.
Horace returned the officer’s stare with an expression of profound bemusement. He hardly blinked.
“If he didn’t bring it with him, who did?” the policeman asked Sundry.
“Horace said two men came in with it about half an hour ago.”
“What did they look like?” asked the policeman, plainly dubious.
“One had hair,” said Horace slowly, “and one had a hat.”
Cuthbert Rye ceased scribbling in his notebook and considered what he was going to say. “I’m sorry to interrupt a man’s wedding, but I was sent down here to see what was up, and I must speak to the head of the house.”
“Now why would anyone mark a keg ‘rum’ when rum is illegal?” said Sundry for a third time.
“I guess you’d know something about it.”
“I guess I wouldn’t have to know much to understand that contraband would generally be delivered unmarked. How about you, Horace? Have you ever seen a barrel marked ‘rum’ before? Here in Portland?”
“I’ve never heard tell of it,” avowed Horace.
“What are you trying to convince me of?” said the officer, looking almost ready to be convinced.
“Wouldn’t it be a shame to spoil a man’s wedding,” offered Sundry, “simply on account of someone’s bad judgment by way of a joke?”
“A joke? I don’t know that illegal liquor is a joke, there, fellow.”
“Mister Walton would consider it serious indeed,” said Sundry.
“He knocked down old Adam Tweed with a single shot last fall,” said Horace out of the blue.
“Adam Tweed?” said the policeman. “Is it that Mister Walton?”
“It is,” said Sundry simply. Sundry wasn’t the sort of man to curry favor for himself and he was sorry he hadn’t thought to do so for Mister Walton.
“Hmmm,” said the policeman. “We’re not to show favoritism, you know. We were taken to task for that business with the mayor’s brother-in-law.”
“Once the wedding is over,” said Sundry, adding fuel to the fire of the policeman’s nascent decision, “and after I stand up with Mister Walton, I’ll come back and we’ll deal with this.”
“Knocked down Adam Tweed, eh?” said Officer Rye. “That was a good piece of work. We’d been wanting that one for some time.”
“Oh, he was poison, was Adam Tweed,” asserted Horace.
“A joke, eh?” said the officer. Clearly he was a fair-minded man. “All right then. I’m waiting here with the keg, and Mr. McQuinn will wait with me, notwithstanding his declaration of innocence.” Cuthbert Rye was fair-minded, but he wasn’t above irony. “You go ahead and stand up with your friend now.” He nodded curtly and with a frown.
“I’m much obliged,” said Sundry. He turned back toward the front of the house and was startled to see that Mr. and Mrs. Baffin had come into the kitchen during the preceding dialogue. Their own expressions of elderly concern and shock had perhaps aided him in his campaign. “Let’s not speak to Mister Walton about this if we can help it,” he said as he passed them.
“But what are we to do?” she wondered aloud.
Sundry tapped the side of his head and said, “I have a thought.”
“Gory, Hod!” pronounced Maven, when Sundry had left the room. “Isn’t it something!”
“I guess probably it is,” agreed Horace.
8. Gathered on That Day
Truthfully, Sundry did not have a thought, but it seemed too bad to worry the Baffins. For the span of a breath or two, he paused before the door to the birthing room or sickro
om; near the pantry, and with its own fireplace, this smallest room in the house had been used to both purposes. Several people (Mister Walton included) had been born in that room, and some (such as Mister Walton’s Aunt August) had died there; but Sundry did not consider the significance of a bride’s donning her wedding dress there.
With no more than a general idea of what was being accomplished behind that door, he was abashed to hear, indistinctly, Mrs. Nowell express Miss McCannon’s Christian name with the sort of pleasure and wonder that could only mean the bride was dressed and ready. Feeling that he had heard something, however unremarkable or oft repeated, that had not been meant for his ears, he strode into the hall and mounted the stairs at a clip.
“Ten minutes before the hour of two,” came the voice of Mr. Ephram.
Mister Walton waited nervously in the master bedroom. “There you are,” he said when Sundry came in. Mr. Seacost stood to one side, looking amused and meditative.
“Sorry,” said Sundry, giving his own tie an extra pull.
“No, no,” insisted the grand fellow. “I don’t think you could call it a wedding if the groom wasn’t ready to faint dead away.”
“You might not call it a wedding if he does,” suggested Sundry.
“Never fear,” said Mister Walton. “You’ll get me to the altar. I have every faith.” He patted his brow with a handkerchief while Sundry led the way downstairs.
“Is it two yet?” asked the groom.
“I don’t think so,” said Sundry. He expected news of the hour to rise from the parlor at any moment.
“I think a breath of air is in order,” said Mister Walton. Sundry opened the front door, and he and Mr. Seacost stepped out with the groom.
The day had become everything they could have wanted and an Edenic instance of summer on the coast of Maine. The sun was high and warm, the ocean breeze soft and restorative. The greens of the oaks and maples and chestnuts along Spruce Street could almost hurt the eye, and past roofs and the crowns of other trees on streets below them there was a glint of separate green from the harbor itself. Mister Walton appeared incapable of moving till he had taken it in.