Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas)

by Benison, C. C.

  “Me?”

  “Of course you. Now here’s your ball, and it’s your turn again. Listen to Daddy, regardes-moi: Don’t hide your light under a bushel.”

  Eggescombe Hall

  8 AUGUST

  Dear Mum,

  I hope your sleep was better than mine. I had the worst nightmare. In the one I can remember, I was being chased around and around a labia labyrinth in my nightie only there weren’t the nice bordering hedges they have here—it was all twisting chimney pots and towers and turrets instead, like the ones on the roof of Eggescombe Hall, looming and lurching towards me and trying to block me, which they didn’t do, though as much as I ran I never got to the centre. I only kept running and running in a panic! I couldn’t see who was chasing me either as it was nearly dark, but I sensed who it was, the way you do in dreams. It was DS Blessing, who I’ve mentioned before. I went to school with his older sister Sandra. He was nearly upon me like some great awful dog (not like Bumble) when I seemed to burst out of the dream and found myself in my bed in the Gatehouse, heart pounding, quite relieved, but very vexed with DS Blessing. I couldn’t think why he was being so disagreeable. His sister was always perfectly nice to me. I can’t think what the dream means, Mum. I’d ask Mr. Christmas, but at breakfast in the past when I’ve told him about a haunting dream, he always looks at me very seriously and says it means Thornford Regis shall have 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine which is silly. Joseph told that to Faroh Phar the king of Egypt in the Bible, of course, but at least there were 7 things in the king’s dream so it was easy-peasy for Joseph to work out. I have said before to Mr. C. that in the Bible, God likes to use dreams when He fancies a natter with one of His creation, but Mr. C. says as far as he knows God’s rather gone off that practice now, which I suppose is true, as anyone whom who whom God talks to in his dreams these days is usually thought completely daft. Anyway, the bad dreams and poor sleep are probably because there’s a bit of an atmosphere here at Eggescombe, including at the Gatehouse. You wouldn’t credit it, what with all the sun we’ve been having, but a kind of woe has settled over the place. At least the children don’t seem to be too bothered, which I suppose is good all right. Miranda and Maximilian, Lord Boothby, are having a grand time doing their own investigation. Maximilian even has a deerstalker hat, though it doesn’t fit properly. Mum, you wouldn’t believe how many times a day he changes clothes! He is a bit of a show-off. The only thing that doesn’t seem to be in his wardrobe at the minute is an Inverness cape, but I expect that’s coming now that he and Miranda are “on the case,” so to speak. We see a fair amount of the two of them “below stairs” as it were. Ellen and Mick have been staff to Lord and Lady Fairhaven less than a year, but Maximilian seems to have very much taken to them. Poor lad is shunted off to boarding school most of the year, of course. His father is gruff with him and Lady Fairhaven as distant as a stone. Ellen’s gone a bit stern and stout, as I’ve said, but she does pay mind to the lad’s witterings, and Mick goes all soft for children. He’s quite the proper butler-valet to the household, but below stairs he can be quite the comedian, really. It’s almost as if he and Maximilian are in a conspiracy together. Perhaps Maximilian reminds Mick of Dominic fforde-Beckett when he was a boy. They’re a bit alike. (I think I told you Ellen and Mick worked for the Anthony fforde-Becketts. I’m including a rough family tree with this letter. Should help.) Anyway, I’m writing all this in aid of what’s happened since yesterday afternoon’s letter—which by the way I was able to post, as the nice PC let me out the gate. (Some journo ran up to me and asked what I could tell them about Lord Morborne’s murder. “No comment,” I said, smart as you please.) As I said, it’s all gone a bit gloomy here. The police assmembled assembled the household at teatime yesterday and asked some very pointed questions about what we’d all been up to in the wee hours of Sunday morning, which made me think that THEY think that one of us had something to do with Lord Morborne’s death. Anyway, it’s put everyone off their feed AND their good manners. Supper was cold beef, a sorrel, leek, and mushroom tart, and a tomato, corn, and avocado salad, which Ellen put out on the sideboard in the dining room for self-service, but half of everybody took their food off to their rooms or somewhere else in the Hall with some excuse, but really so as not to have to talk to one another. Maximilian brought Miranda with him to eat with us in the kitchen, the warm heart of a home, I always say, even at grand Eggescombe, but the kitchen wasn’t last evening. Mum, something dreadful has happened between Ellen and Mick but I haven’t a clue what. After we’d cleared the tea things, Ellen said she was going to the kitchen garden to gather some tomatoes only she was gone a very long time and then stumbled into the kitchen where I was making the pastry for the tart looking like her world had collapsed. “Madrun,” she said, “I’ve learned something awful.” Oh, my heart went out to her, but she wouldn’t tell me a blessed thing! Thank heaven it was a simple supper we were preparing as I don’t think she could have got through anything fussy. When her back was turned into the fridge I saw Mick across the corridor nip into the wash-house—which still serves as a laundry room—so I went to have some words with him as it is usually husbands that make wives unhappy but I could tell instantly that he was in a state, too. White as a sheet he was, had the big iron out, his jacket off, and had started into cleaning and pressing His Lordship’s shirt, trousers, tie, and handkerchiefs, etc. etc. in advance of some Conservative Association meeting next weekend, which seemed a bit far-off, but I expect he finds work calming as I do. He wouldn’t tell me anything either, used quite strong language in fact that I won’t record here, and so as you might imagine, Mum, supper with the Gaunts and the children was a bit strained, to say the least, but I got them, the kids at least, onto the details of their croquet game, which Miranda’s team won by a squeak. She’s awfully good. The rest of the evening went a bit flat, really. Ellen and I were to walk around the grounds, as the weather is so pleasant, but she begged off, and so I went on my own, and nearly jumped out of my skin when a large man in a dark suit jumped out from behind a tree. Well, I’m done for, I thought—here’s Lord Morborne’s murderer. But it seems Lord Fairhaven has already put a few private security in place to keep out all the nosy folk, including the media, although I think he’s hired them mostly to appease his wife. I can’t think how successful that will be. It’s not as if there’s a wall topped with razor wire around Eggescombe Park, and there’s lots of secret paths, according to Max. When I returned to the Gatehouse, Mick was nowhere about and Ellen had already gone to bed. I know it’s silly, but my bedroom door doesn’t lock, so I put a chair up against the knob. You mustn’t worry, Mum. I’m quite safe here really. There’s police about and private security, as I said and if one of the weekend guests really is a murderer, he won’t be after little me! Anyway, I was going to say when I started this letter that when I woke from my nightmare, I could hear Ellen and Mick’s voices raised in the sitting room downstairs, but as the chair was against the door as I was tucked up in bed I thought better of opening the door a hair to see if I could hear anything. I’m so worried. I’m very worried about them. I can’t imagine what the day will bring. Poor Mr. Christmas. It’s his 40th birthday today and he was meant to be in Gravesend with his family, and then there’s his poor ankle. I thought to suggest to Ellen yesterday afternoon that we bake a cake, but then it seemed not the best idea in the circumstances. I’m sure he’ll soldier on. He always seems to. Which reminds me—our Mr. C.’s eyes have been roving once too often in Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett’s dreiction direction, if you ask me, especially when the CID were grilling interviewing us in the great hall. I can’t think what he’s thinking. She’s been married and divorced twice. “Manifold sins and wickedness” there as the BCP would say, I venture, though now I’m sounding a bit like Ellen! Anyway, it makes me think that we in the village must find him a wife soon, as who knows what he might get up to. It won’t do! Not in his instance. I’ve just looked out the window, Mum. There’s more light now, an
d I can see one of those television vans with one of those big dishes on the roof parked in the forecourt. ITV West Country News, I can read on the side. Surely Lord Fairhaven can have it removed. I thought Abbotswick was part of the Eggescombe estate, but perhaps I’m wrong. I must sign off, Mum. I could murder a cup of tea. If only I had my trusty Teasmade with me, but I’ll have to go down to the kitchen and put the kettle on if I’m to be refreshed. I do hope Ellen and Mick have patched things up, otherwise I shall have to put up with an “atmosphere.” It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t ask Mr. C. to talk with them, as he is so good at consilly pouring oil on troubled waters.

  Much love,

  Madrun

  P.S. For a while yesterday we thought Lord Morborne’s murder solved! DI Bliss was called away when everyone was helping him with his enquiries in the great hall. A man who last week had been found wandering the grounds and frightening Ellen in the kitchens confessed to the crime! Poor man was barmy, of course. DI Bliss was not best pleased!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Tom said to Lord Fairhaven, feeling the pew’s silky wood beneath his fingers. It was a lie, but not an extravagant one. He was a little surprised to find Hector in slumber, and in Eggescombe’s chapel, of all places. It wasn’t yet midmorning. But on second reckoning he suspected His Lordship had suffered a disturbed sleep.

  As had he.

  The evening before, an uneasiness seemed to settle over the great mansion as the August sun sank below the low hills and evening shadows stole across the lawns to stain Eggescombe’s red brick black and swallow the great pile into the night. The library, where Tom had retreated with a few of the other guests, took on a fortress glow, a sanctuary, in which they affected to keep up an appearance of Sunday-evening languor, though the air simmered with tension and unspoken thoughts. Tom partnered with Jane against her husband and Dominic in a near-wordless hand of bridge while Max and Miranda grappled on the library table, out of earshot, with a Ouija board. Lord and Lady Fairhaven had each found an excuse—paperwork in the estate office, a migraine, respectively—to absent themselves. Lucinda, after flipping through a magazine, retreated through doors to the adjacent music room, bringing Tom a modicum of relief, for he found her presence unsettling. Moments later the melancholy throb of the piano sounded through the half-opened door—Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” Tom realised as his mind drifted towards the languid tempo, drawn to its tinge of regret. Her rendering of the familiar piece seemed skilled and heartfelt, and he found himself mellowing in his harsher assessment of her—and himself—until the Rachmaninoff tipped into Chopin’s Funeral March interpreted as a frenzied boogie-woogie.

  “She’s remarkably good, isn’t she,” Dominic had murmured over his hand of cards.

  “She’s in remarkably poor taste,” Jamie snapped, slapping his cards to the baize and pushing his chair back. But he was stopped in his movements at the sound of a piano lid crashing and the clacking retreat of shoes along the floor. The outburst did nothing so much as acknowledge their cheerlessness. The children were shooed to bed. Shortly after, the card game ended, none keen for another rubber—or any other diversion.

  Tom had told Miranda to take her night things to his room. He didn’t think himself an unduly cautious parent—he wasn’t fond of the fashion for a helicoptering involvement in a child’s life—but the unease the day had wrought had been inflamed for him by his troubling conversation with Miranda about ghosts. Most adults would dismiss a child’s witterings about a paranormal sighting, but some certain adult, one among those at Eggescombe this weekend, who possessed a terrible secret, who listened attentively to her description of the ghost—wearing pas beaucoup or tout blanc—might have reason to be fearful. Who wore pas beaucoup? Who wore tout blanc? Who might shine with ghostly sheen in a burst of lightning or passing through a motion-sensor light? Roberto stripped and wreathed in marble dust? Pallid Dominic in cream trousers and shirt? Perhaps Hector in his terry-cloth robe, witnessed too (perhaps) by Jane Allan. Or that maligned intruder who had made a false confession? What might he wear at night? Too late Tom realised he had sent Miranda back onto the croquet court armed with a counterargument to Maximilian’s assertion that the manifestation on the lawn was of Sir Edward Strickland. Would it spread? Would someone seek to do her harm?

  When he got to his room, Miranda had been already tucked up on one side of the four-poster, eyes drooping with sleep, head nodding over her copy of Alice au manoir hanté. The door he could only leave as he had found it, unsecured—there was a lock, but he had been given no key. He craved a cool breeze in the room, but he lowered and locked the window instead. Miranda perked up as he readied himself for bed. Striving for light conversation he solicited the wisdom of the Ouija board.

  “We asked who strangled Max’s uncle.” Miranda yawned and readjusted the book on her lap.

  “Really, darling, I don’t want to harp on this but there is something very serious and sobering about a man’s death—any human being’s death.”

  “I know, Daddy. But it was Max who wanted to ask Ouija the question.” She rubbed her eyes and yawned again.

  Tom undressed behind a Chinese screen in silence, but he could feel the question rising in his mind like a bubble. Finally, despite his best intentions, he couldn’t help himself: “Well, what did it say, then? The Ouija.”

  “It spelled LUCY.”

  Occult twaddle! “Max was pushing the whatsit, the planchette, wasn’t he,” Tom said as he removed his cast boot. “The way Grannie Kate does when you play in Gravesend.”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s nonsense anyway.”

  “Why couldn’t it be her?”

  “Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett? Well, because …” Tom could feel a blush rising from his neck, which he fought to suppress. Because she had been disporting with your shameful father on this very bed. “Because … she’s a woman.”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “What I mean is, I don’t think she would be strong enough to … you know.”

  “I’m going to be strong when I grow up.” Miranda affected a biceps pose. “I’ll beat any boy. You said not to hide my light under a bushel, Daddy. And I didn’t. I won at croquet. Max didn’t really mind, though.”

  “Well done, you.”

  “All us girls in Year Four think women should be able to do anything men do.”

  Tom decided for the pajamas Gaunt had left out the night before. “But is it really an advance for women if they behave as badly as men—who can behave very badly indeed.”

  “Shouldn’t women have the right to have the chance to?”

  Clever child. “Yes, you’re right, of course,” he sighed, tying the string of the pajama bottoms. “But Ouija boards aren’t … right, I mean. They’re silly.”

  Very silly, he’d thought as Miranda fell quickly into sleep and his mind instead roiled over the day’s events. The moon followed much the same path as the night before, silvering the bedspread, reminding him of his weakness, though his thoughts were not unalloyed with memory of the pleasure. A near hour of sleeplessness later, he had stooped to the strategy of sliding a chair under the doorknob, to stop intruders or at least wake him if an attempt were made. Was he being paranoid, he thought, and what sort of intruder was he barring? A strangler or a scarlet woman? The jabber of anxious dreams, transmuted vicarishly, punctuated his restless sleep when he finally tumbled into it: He had prepared no sermon, he was late to church, he was in the pulpit with no underpants. When he awoke, the sun was in his room. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, looked around. His heart lurched.

  No Miranda.

  The chair was returned to its place, the door open a crack. His mind raced over labyrinthine Eggescombe Hall, its myriad rooms, staircases, corridors, and crannies, almost all of them unexplored by him, alarmed as to where she might be. He flung back the bedspread and snatched up his dressing gown from the bedside chair. One arm into one sleeve later and Miranda’s head was po
king through the door.

  “Daddy, go back to bed.”

  “Why?” he replied, suppressing a gasp of relief, wrapping the gown around himself.

  “Because I said.”

  “Are you coming in?” He perched on the edge of the bed, puzzled, vaguely conscious that standing earlier had not brought a burst of pain from his ankle.

  “Close your eyes.”

  A scraping sound in the hall signaled her intent. He closed his eyes, smiled in expectation (and a little relief), the acrid odour of sulphur penetrating his nostrils as she drew near and the words to “Bonne Fête” came to his ears.

  “Happy Birthday, Daddy! You can open your eyes now.”

  “Wherever did you get that?” Tom feigned surprise at the plate containing four petit fours, each with one tiny twisty candle flickering with yellow flame.

  “From Mrs. Gaunt, down in the kitchen. It’s left over from Saturday.” She frowned at it. “And my present’s in the car. I forgot it there, sorry.”

  “Doesn’t matter. This is lovely. Thank you. You’ve made my birthday memorable—in a very nice way,” he added.

  “Make a wish, Daddy. What did you wish for?” she asked after he’d blown out the candles.

  “That you’ll be with me for every birthday of my life, darling. Come here.” She sat on the bed and he hugged her, smelling her hair. “I hope you’ll have some of this?”

  Miranda reached into her dressing gown pocket and pulled out two forks. She grinned.

  After a moment’s quiet dining, she asked, “Will we be able to leave soon?”

  “I shouldn’t think much longer. There’s little that we can contribute, you and I, I don’t think.”

  “Then we can go to Gravesend?”