Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  Wordlessly, he had handed the paper back to Madrun. She had regarded him over the rims of her spectacles with not a little expectation and curiosity, but he could only offer her a noncommittal shrug. All he had was speculation, and it was thin and cursory, and might well be without foundation. He didn’t want any of his dark musings speeding along the bush telegraph and causing needless insult and injury. That he couldn’t confide his speculations to his housekeeper brought him no joy. She was the only other adult in his household (how he missed Lisbeth!) and a font of information—and wisdom—about the village, but he was uncertain of her abilities in the great circumspection challenge. Perhaps, he thought, it was his own fault. When he had asked her kindly but very firmly in the past to keep something to herself, she had done. When he had been less direct, she hadn’t. And in an instance when it never occurred to him to ask her to keep mum, as it had the day before when he had confided to her Màiri’s information, and assumed she would be too shattered to share it, she had indeed shared it—with Judith Ingley, who had promptly passed it along to the Daintreys. Had Madrun not thought it would go farther? And did she know—he watched Fred inspect another raisin biscuit—that word of the taxine poisoning had got about? Did she not think about who would condemn her, who would doubt her, who would wonder how she could have made such a fatal mistake?

  The tongue is afire, he recalled the apostle James saying. For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind.

  But the tongue can no man tame, James continued. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

  Tom’s eyes wandered to the ceiling. A bright centre light flooded the room, casting short, sharp cruel shadows on the figures around the table. He turned his head towards the two uncurtained mullioned windows overlooking Church Walk, stark black lozenges against the night fracturing and distorting the movements of their heads and shoulders, as in a fun-house mirror. The air seemed close, entrapping. It had been cool when they’d first gathered. Now, gusted by palpable jets of heat from an electric heater rotating with a tiny mosquito whine, the air felt sultry. Yet despite this, he could feel his skin drawing into gooseflesh. A harbinger of something? Cold or flu. No, he thought. It was what awaited. For days, pummelled by snow and ice, Thornford had been suspended in a limbo of time, very much at the mercy of events beyond any human agency. With no incessant demands of school and work, most villagers had spent stolen days in paradise. For a few, however, the days spent were in hell. But the snowploughs had opened the lanes to Thornford. Through the afternoon barometers rose. The weather vane atop Thorn Court Hotel’s tower veered towards the southwest. In his study that afternoon, beginning work on his Sunday sermon, he had heard the snow slithering from the roof with a rushing sound, and as he walked to the Old School House in the dark he could hear, though not see, rivulets of water trick along the cobbles. The snow was melting. This freakish episode in the village’s history was ending. Thornford would return to its normal rhythms, but for this: After supper, as he was about to leave the vicarage, a phone call came through from Màiri White. Whatever can this be about, he thought with a frisson of pleasure, taking the receiver from Madrun, who cast him a gelid eye. But it was no bid to chat. Màiri was between Totnes Police Station and her car and had but a moment to pass along a bit of information: An inquest into Will Moir’s death was set for Thursday morning at ten o’clock.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Violet tells me you’ve taken to writing.” Tom eased into the subject as he eased his hands into the sink and groped for the washcloth. Only he and Mark remained in the Old School Room, “New Men” doing the tidying and washing-up in the tiny kitchen at the back.

  “Yes.” Mark stepped behind him and placed more used plates on the counter. “Shouldn’t the Scrappers put away their things before they leave? The kids will be back here in the morning. There’s scissors lying about and that paper cutter …”

  “I think they got lost in what they were doing and didn’t notice when it was time to get home and put a meal on. Ruth Brody was here when I came in.” Ruth supervised the crèche. “She said she’d be here early to lock the Scrappers’ things away. Anyway, tell me about your writing.”

  “Oh, that. Well, I took a creative writing course in town last spring, which was really great fun, and so I’ve been having a bash at writing a novel. I’m really enjoying it.”

  “What are you working on?” Tom lifted a plate from the warm, soapy water and rinsed it under the cold faucet. He felt a sudden nostalgic pang for washing-up conversation with Lisbeth. Typically, she washed, he dried. Neither pressed to install a dishwasher; each too much savoured the snatched time, the shared task, the cosy domesticity, at times even the forced sequestering that fostered bouts of problem-airing.

  “Well,” Mark replied, “it’s a story about boy wizard who’s an orphan and goes to this marvellous, magical school for … well, other wizards.”

  “I see. Interesting.” Tom put the plate on the draining board. “And do you have a name for the boy wizard?”

  “I was thinking perhaps ‘Harvey Porter.’ ”

  “Mmm, yes,” Tom murmured. “I see. And the school?”

  “For some reason ‘Pigblisters’ popped into my head.” Mark reached for a tea towel. “I don’t know quite why. Fun, I thought.”

  Tom swished the cloth around a second plate, lifted its soapy surface to his eyes, and affected to look for bits of food still adhering. He took a fortifying breath. He knew all about Harvey Porter and Pigblisters—and Clytemnestra Tranger and the Bumblebore family, too. Violet Tucker had told him. She had it firmly in her head that Mark was prepared to chuck his job and plunge into a grafter’s life of writing fiction for a living—of all the ridiculous things, she added.

  Tom could hardly countenance the idea. Mark seemed born to figures, not to words. Since stepping in as PCC treasurer in the summer, he had worked wonders with the accounting, introducing new systems and streamlining old. The previous treasurer had been a long-retired banker, accomplished in accounting certainly, but compromised in his abilities, in part by his advanced age (he had served in the Second World War) and in part by some very nasty events in the village. Mark, too, was busy pursuing moneys belonging to St. Nicholas’s from the illegal sale of a valuable Guercino painting purloined from the Lady chapel during a previous incumbency. He was really very good. Tom would hate to lose him from the church council, and told Violet so. She pleaded with him to talk to her husband, and he agreed, in principle, but only to feel him out: It was not his place to advocate for one spouse over another. And besides, he was loath to puncture another man’s dreams, however impossible their realisation might seem in the beginning. He knew that Dosh, who adopted him when his first adoptive parents died in a plane crash, was hardly chuffed when he decided to pursue a career in magic, and that Kate, her partner, was less than thrilled when he found his true calling in the Church—but each in her own way managed to conquer her misgivings.

  “You know,” he said, giving the plate a second wash. “It sounds a little, just a tad—don’t you think?—like Harry Potter?”

  “Funny, that’s what Violet said, but it’s really quite different.”

  “Mmm. Have you read the Harry Potter books?”

  “No, have you?” Mark picked up the plate and frowned as water dripped on his shoes.

  “Bits. Miranda has read some of them, though she prefers Alice Roy—the French version of Nancy Drew.”

  “I’ve seen the Potter films. We have some of the DVDs.”

  “You don’t think, Mark, you might be infringing, just a bit, just a touch, perhaps just a hair, on J. K. Rowling’s territory?”

  “The author? But she’s richer than the Queen!”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure getting rich was her ambition. She just wanted to write her story, and all the lolly sort of happened along.” He turned his head to look at Mark, who was drying the plate with exceptional thoroughness
, his plain face concentrated over the task. Tom tried to suppress a smile. Mark really was a bit of an anorak, naïve, awkward, and a bit obsessive, puppyishly eager to muck into any task. Perhaps with diligence, he could accomplish the feat of writing a novel. He had learned the bagpipes on his own, had he not? The only thing the boy—and for some reason, though only about a dozen years separated them, he couldn’t help thinking of Mark as a boy—seemed to lack was a sort of individuated imagination. “You’re not keen on writing as a get-rich-quick scheme, are you?”

  Mark’s eyes widened. “Oh! No, golly, I couldn’t imagine …” His voice trailed off as he slipped the clean plate onto the wall rack. “It would be nice, though.”

  Silence descended a moment. As he plunged his hands once again into the sink, Tom glanced into the window, which looked into a courtyard shared with the Church House Inn and the verger’s cottage (empty for the time being), and saw his own face, and Mark’s, darkly reflected.

  Mark’s face seemed to brighten: “I could pay for the church roof myself! That would be something, wouldn’t it.”

  “Still …”

  “She’s not litigious, is she?”

  “Miss Rowling? I have no idea. But I think I’m safe in saying the publishers may sort of push away anything too much like hers with a long stick.”

  “So, then, do you think perhaps I should give up the idea of writing?”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that. I just think it might be best if you—I don’t know—hone your ideas a little more. Do have another one?”

  “Gosh, yes, heaps.”

  “Well …?”

  “Let’s think. Oh! How about this one. I’m sure it’s a winner!” Tom looked over at Mark as he dug his chin into his neck and set his features into a serious frown. “Set against the background of the Civil War …,” he said in a strained basso profundo.

  “You sound that fellow that does all the voice-overs on film trailers.”

  “Yes! Set against the background of the Civil War …” Mark rain-barrel-bottomed again. “Gosh, that hurts. Anyway”—he resumed his normal timbre—“you’ll like this one. It begins at a manor house outside of London somewhere. Hampshire should do—one of the Home Counties—and the heroine is this vivacious young woman whom all the men fancy absolutely rotten. She really could have the pick of the litter—they’re fine fellows, upper-crusty, you know—but she’s very set on this chap who has a big house in the next parish. He’s actually a bit wet, so it’s hard to know why she’s so keen on him.” He paused. “Difficult to know a woman’s mind sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “Well, that will be one of your challenges writing the story, won’t it.”

  “Yes, I expect so. Anyway, this chap is engaged to his cousin—bit racy, don’t you think, marrying your cousin—?”

  “Yes, I suppose …”

  “—but there’s this other guy—a dashing Cavalier—who really really fancies our heroine. Are you following?”

  “Er … yes. Sort of one of those romantic triangles.” Although—he paused in his chore—something vaguely familiar about this triangle was beginning to tease at him.

  “Exactly!” Mark whipped his tea towel into a twist and flicked it into the air. “So our heroine—”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Well, I thought she could be Irish, or part Irish.”

  “Would there have been many Irish with manor houses in Hampshire in the seventeenth century?”

  Mark paused as he untangled his towel. “Perhaps not. I can always change that. It’s not really that important. Anyway, I’ve been calling her Pinkie O’Shea. What do you think?”

  “That is very Irish. The last name at any rate.”

  “Pinkie Stewart?”

  “Scottish.”

  “Pinkie Jones, then.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Tom rubbed the next plate a little impatiently. “You can call it a placeholder and decide later. Tell me more. Go on.”

  “Well, let’s see. Pinkie’s a Royalist—”

  “An Irish Royalist?”

  “Yes, I can see the Irish bit isn’t going to work. Anyway, Pinkie goes up to London and is more or less stuck there after a time as the city is run over by Cromwell and all these disagreeable Roundheads. She yearns to go back to the safety of Bailemór—that’s the name of the big house in Hampshire—but … remember the wet fellow? Well, he married his cousin then went off to join the Royalist forces, and Pinkie ends up caring for this cousin and delivering her baby for her. It’s all very dramatic.”

  “Yes.” Tom drew out the word thoughtfully.

  “They think they’ll never get out of London, and there’s this terrible fire—”

  “But the Great Fire of London was in 1666, after the Restoration.”

  “This is another terrible fire, an earlier one. It’s fiction, Tom.”

  “Of course, sorry.”

  “Anyway, as the flames lick their terraced house in Chelsea, the dashing Cavalier comes along and rescues them and smuggles them out of London, though he does leave them halfway—somewhere outside Basingstoke, say—which isn’t quite on, but he has his reasons. He’s still enormously attracted to Pinkie, but she doesn’t give a toss. She’s still in love with the wet chap who’s married.”

  The penny dropped. “Ashley?” Tom said tentatively.

  “The wet chap? That could be his name, I suppose. I hadn’t settled on one.”

  “And then,” Tom continued, swiftly picking up the story, “after the Civil War, after Charles II is crowned king, does Pinkie return to London, become a wealthy businesswoman, and marry the Cavalier, whom she still doesn’t love, and then, in the end, after much agony and miscommunication, she realises she does love him, but it’s too late …?”

  “Yes! More or less. How did you guess?”

  Tom looked up to see Mark’s reflection move into the main room and pick up some of the coffee cups. “You haven’t read the novel Gone with the Wind by any chance?” he called over his shoulder.

  “I’ve seen the film.”

  “Ah. Hmm. I wonder, though, if your story doesn’t bear a certain … likeness.”

  “But that one’s set in the American Civil War. Mine’s the English Civil War.”

  “Still …”

  “Oh, I suppose.” Mark was back and placing the used cups on the counter. “But I thought it would be all right. I’m told artists sometimes do such things now. I heard Colm once say in music it was called ‘riffing.’ Or was it ‘sampling’?”

  “ ‘Homage,’ perhaps?” Tom dropped some of the cups in the dishwater and squirted in some more Fairy Liquid. “Well, it … could work, I suppose. It’s very ambitious, though, don’t you think? Have you thought of starting with something, you know, less … epic?” He swirled the dishcloth inside the cup. “Something more here and now. ‘Write what you know.’ Isn’t that what they tell you in these writing courses?”

  “Yes, the instructor did say something along those lines. But what do I know?” His tone turned glum. “I live in a village. I work in town …”

  “You have a lovely wife and a sweet little baby …”

  “And another one on the way.”

  “Really? That’s brilliant!” Tom turned to him. “Congratulations. You must be enormously pleased.”

  “Over the moon.” Mark’s face flushed suddenly—with pride, Tom thought at first, but he heard a catch in the younger man’s voice.

  “And Violet is well? Happy? No complications? Sure?”

  Mark’s head made appropriate bobbings.

  “You’ll cope, you know,” Tom said gently. “You do. Look, you’ve already had experience.”

  “I know. But Violet’s only just told me. I suppose I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. Ruby’s barely two.”

  “There you go. That’s the sort of thing you could write about.” When you have a minute between feedings and nappy changes.

  “But, Tom, all sorts have babies and such.”

&nb
sp; “Yes, but that’s the very stuff of life—the kind of domestic particulars and local doings Jane Austen wrote about—from Hampshire, by the way, the very county your Pinkie O’Shea comes from.”

  “Isn’t Austen the one who writes about all those husband-hunting sisters?”

  “Pride and Prejudice, you mean?”

  “I watched a bit on television. Violet was devoted to it.”

  “Lisbeth loved Jane Austen. Though Emma was her favourite.” Tom stared unseeingly at his reflection in the glass. He’d suddenly thought of poor Miss Bates, the kindhearted spinster in the novel, worried that word should get to the wrong ears that her apples were but twice-baked, not thrice-baked. “You might have something incidental, something like a woman in the village becoming deeply troubled when her Yorkshire pudding stubbornly refuses to rise.”

  Mark frowned. “Like Mrs. Prowse’s?”

  “Well, that’s just a for-instance. It could be anything, really.”

  “Or,” Mark said after they worked silently for a moment, “someone in the village dies under mysterious circumstances.”

  “Or that, yes.”

  “Like Will.”

  Tom started. “Do you think the circumstances of Will’s death mysterious?”

  “I didn’t at the time, but …”

  “You’ve heard the rumours about the tartlets, then.”

  “Oh, yes. I guess most of the village knows by now. Sorry.” He shot Tom a rueful look.

  “No one said anything this evening. Usually—at least at the beginning of the meetings—everything is discussed but the points on the agenda.”

  “I think everyone’s a little frightened that Karla might bite our heads off if we talk about Mrs. Prowse that way.”

  “True.” Karla Skynner was Madrun’s great friend in the village. The same age, they had grown up together, gone to the same school; neither had ever married. “Anyway.” Tom landed another wet cup on the draining board. “Your story. A village, a mysterious death. How might it have happened? Means?”