The Old Contemptibles

by Grimes, Martha

  . . . and, good Lord, the young man was telling them that it wasn’t just the poet and his sister who occupied the house; the Coleridges, the Southeys and their various children had all free-loaded here, and all at one time.

  Melrose looked about him. This little place had at one brief period housed thirteen people? Thirteen? And at one point, De Quincey, too? Sitting here having a smoke, no doubt.

  Then he thought, Well, it wouldn’t seem any more crowded than having tea with Agatha in Plague Alley.

  His small fund of knowledge about one of the greatest of his country’s poets embarrassed him. Oh, yes, he admired The Prelude and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” He’d have to be an idiot not to.

  Melrose had to admit it, though.

  He preferred Sam to Wum.

  • • •

  Coleridge was a voyant, somewhat in the manner of Rimbaud, although not so conscious of it and certainly not so extreme. As Melrose hit the narrow road in the Langdales called Wrynose Pass, he thought of Rimbaud. He thought of Jim Morrison, mysteriously buried in that grave in Paris.

  And he thought, most of all, of his friend Jury. How had he stood it? To be on the point of actually marrying and to have the woman either kill herself or be murdered? To come under suspicion oneself as the killer?

  As he negotiated a bend, Melrose tried not to think of himself and Marshall Trueblood doing their silly act in Venice, making up that absurd story. . . .

  Perhaps it was as well that he was driving a killer road. It stopped him thinking about anything but getting off the damned thing.

  • • •

  Once out of danger, he pulled his Japanese car into the car park of one of those Inns mentioned by Wordsworth, and simply let his head fall against the steering wheel.

  That was the lady’s idea of “iffy”?

  The Swaledale rams he’d passed, smitted with blue blobs, would have had even more fun staring if he’d been driving his Bentley.

  2

  What car to take had presented a problem. If one were applying for post of librarian, one probably wouldn’t arrive in a Bentley or Rolls. He supposed he should be grateful to the Japanese, even though he couldn’t get the damned thing up much over ninety on the M6. And it made noises. But it hugged the road like the fell sheep.

  His clothes had presented another problem. Last evening, he had instructed Ruthven to pack old clothes, tatty ones.

  “My Lord, you do not own any tatty clothes,” the butler had replied, seeming offended that he might allow His Lordship’s suits and sweaters to stagger downward, like old drunks, into the gutters of pulled threads and pills.

  “Hell’s bells, there must be something that would make me look like an out-of-work librarian.” Melrose was inspecting one of his hand-sewn shirts; he tossed it on the bed in disgust; it was a masterpiece of tailoring. Why was he so self-indulgent? Why hadn’t he bought from the Oxfam shops, like a sensible person?

  Ruthven pursed his lips and ran his fingers over jackets, trousers, robes. He pulled out a suit, holding it away from him with a frown. “This one might do, my lord. It’s all shapeless. Deconstructed, I’d say.”

  Melrose heaved a sigh. “Ruthven, that’s an Armani.”

  Ruthven, a disciple of Savile Row and Bond Street, was not about to be awed by some foreign tailor. He gave a few little tugs to sleeves and long lapels, as if by way of improving the cut, shrugged, and stuck it back in the closet. “Here’s one of your blazers, sir. Double-breasted and ten years old. This might do.” He held it up for inspection.

  “It doesn’t even look ten weeks old. I always knew you took good care of my clothes, but this is a revelation.” While Ruthven simpered with pleasure, Melrose said, “Nothing to do but rub some life out of this Harris tweed.” He tossed the jacket to Ruthven. “Get Martha to pull out some threads and put patches on the elbows. And I’ll take the Armani and hope the Holdsworths aren’t fashion freaks.”

  Ruthven walked out starchily, chin up, but holding the Harris tweed as if it were a dying baby.

  3

  He needed a drink, and here finally was Boone, and here was a small pub whose overhanging sign he might kill the owner for, so that he could nail it outside of Agatha’s cottage: the Old Contemptibles.

  It was a sign in every sense of the word. It whistled to him, called to him, crooked its wooden finger at him, drew him like a magnet.

  There appeared to be only the one bar, entered by way of a darkish hallway with a thread of oriental carpeting far more rubbed than the patches on his sleeves. A desk in the hall beneath some dusty prints of geese and pheasants held a registration book and a sign above that said Accommodation.

  The public bar would have been as dark as the hall except for the bronze-shaded fixtures and the shaded fluorescent light above a long, gilt-framed mirror in need of resilvering, overly ornate for such a simple room of deal tables and hardwood benches.

  A framed document on the wall just inside the door announced that one O. Bottemly was licensed to serve alcohol and food.

  It must have been O. Bottemly who came down the length of the bar, for he swaggered toward the newcomer with a proprietorial air. Sorry, sir, no Old Peculier, but there’s Jennings, very nice and rich that is, O. Bottemly assured him.

  Obviously, such an out-of-the-way pub got few transients, for the half-dozen people rooted to their bar stools were certainly getting their fill of this one. Given the villagers he had seen outside on his way down the street (three of them bent over canes) and the ones seated here, Melrose wondered if there was anyone in the place under fifty. Age was an epidemic in Boone for which no one had found a vaccine.

  Not even the woman who came in through a curtained doorway had been successful in creating the illusion of youth. But she’d certainly tried hard enough, with her plump breasts and buttocks stuffed into a frilly, flowered dress, her beads and bangles, rouge and carmine lipstick overflowing the natural line of the mouth. She turned to the optics and drew off a glass of sherry, at the same time introducing herself over her shoulder as Connie Fish. Manageress, she made sure to add. O. Bottemly harumphed and sucked a toothpick.

  “The old Con,” said one of the regulars, lifting a near-empty glass.

  Another framed document on the wall had given the origin of the pub’s name: when the B.E.F. first landed in France at the outbreak of World War I, the Kaiser had dismissed them as those “old contemptibles.” That should teach one, Melrose thought, not to make easy assessments.

  Melrose looked at the row of faces and smiled brightly. One of them had his head on the bar, asleep and snoring, but the other five smiled back, including Connie Fish, who really put her heart into it as her fingers went to her overmoussed and color-leached hair. It looked like bleached grass.

  The gentleman sitting next to Melrose said, “Hoo do, squire?” and inspected him carefully.

  Melrose returned the greeting and asked if he lived in the village.

  This man nodded and then asked, surprisingly, “You be police?”

  Melrose was surprised. “Not at all. Are you expecting police?”

  When they all started talking at once, it was as if waters suddenly foamed in forces and ghylls down craggy slopes. He all but drowned in their rush of words.

  An old, wet-eyed man, called “Rheumy” by the others, told him, “There’s that bairn gone missin’ . . .”

  “. . . Holdsworth. Mum murdered.”

  “. . . London, ’twas.”

  The fattish woman named Mrs. Letterby leaned across three of her compatriots and called to Melrose, “ ’Twarn’t murder. The mum done hersen in.”

  A bag of bones in a brown suit shook his head. Melrose couldn’t tell whether this was in disagreement with Mrs. Letterby or the result of the palsy that also inhibited him from lifting his pint. The hands couldn’t make it to the mouth. The straw went back in the glass, making bubbles in its emptiness.

  Suicide and disappearance didn’t quaff their thirst for excitement. They also wa
nted something liquid. They turned their heads rhythmically in his direction and fondled their empty glasses.

  He ordered drinks for all and, after they arrived, asked, “When did all of this happen?”

  “Few days ago,” said a man named Billy, hoisting his fresh pint to toast his benefactor.

  “It sounds very bleak for the family. I expect that you know them?” Melrose took out his cigarette case and motioned to Billy Mossop to pass it along the row.

  “The Holdsworths?” asked Connie Fish, beads dangling over the bar, sherried breath wafting over Melrose. “Tragedy, they are. Something always happening. Lost their son, isn’t that so, Mrs. Letterby?”

  “Aye.” She made a gruesome gesture with her two hands curved round her throat and her tongue stuck out. “ ’Ung up, ’e were. From a beam.”

  17

  A careful assessment of his clothes had been made before he left the pub; Melrose wanted to make sure he looked properly seedy. The elbows of the tweed jacket were rubbed and the cuff was darned—nearly invisible, but you could still make it out. The freshly polished shoes could not hide the scuff marks on toes and heels. And the collar of his expensive white shirt was almost, not quite, frayed. But the new handkerchief in his jacket pocket showed that he was keeping up appearances, this aristocrat fallen on hard times.

  He had decided to leave the car at the pub, and to walk to Tarn House.

  The corner where stood a little post-office store appeared to mark the end of clustered cottages and he kept on walking and trying to breathe deeply in this rarefied and cleansing air with the glorious views of fells and mountains. But he didn’t feel nearly as healthy and robust as he would have sitting in his chair at Ardry End smoking and drinking Graham’s ’44.

  Melrose passed, about an eighth of a mile farther along, a walled-in drive that swept in and out of deciduous trees up to a turreted and towered building on a high rise of ground and with a backdrop of misty fells and mountains that the Lake poets had loved but that made him feel agoraphobic. At first, he thought he must have finally come to Tarn House (a Poe-esque name, he thought), but a brass plaque embedded in the stone announced this to be Castle Howe. Refined Retirement. Translation: Rip off the Relations.

  According to his new drinking companions, this was the place where Adam Holdsworth had chosen to live, rather than in his own home, so that must say a lot about his relations. Melrose struck out again down the road. At least that was the picture he would have liked to present, himself the country gentleman with knobbed stick and trusty dog. He should have brought Mindy. Mindy? She would have taken one step and crawled back into that rattletrap Japan called a car.

  He sighed and looked down the narrow road. Not a house, a cottage, a smoking chimney stack in sight. But there were signs of life coming toward him in the persons of three, no, four, back-packing tourists who, as they passed him, waved and gave him the thumbs-up sign as if they had met on one of the poles and lived to tell about it. One of them looked twice his age, her leathery skin set in deep crevices, and smiling (smugly, he thought) because she was walking faster than the whippet she had on a lead.

  That thumbs-up sign was the giveaway: just who did they think they were kidding, all of these people who came up here to this area known for its execrable weather, its dozen lakes, its smoking mountains, its fells full of sheep? He was not passing judgment on the place, merely thinking that it really would take a person of a poet’s or painter’s sensibility to appreciate it. But for some reason or other, droves of tourists would race up here in the summer, slog about in waterproofs and Wellingtons, and give you the thumbs-up sign of pantheism. That lot he had just passed had probably just had a high tea up the road somewhere, talking six-to-the-dozen while the poor whippet twitched beneath the table. Oh, he was sure that there really were those few who blew cold breath in caves and cabins, wrestled crocodiles, let the North Sea spray them in the face while they crested mile-high waves and truly communed with Nature. But he thought there were very few of them and, looking at the enormous peaks of Scafell and Great Gable ringed in mist, marveled at Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s interminable walks.

  He finally caught a glimpse of the house. Within less than five minutes he was there and wondered why Jury hadn’t told him it was a good mile from the village. Of course, how would Jury know, since he’d never seen it?

  How could he know that Tarn House, from its surrounding wall to its main structure, was a mysterious mass of dun-colored and weathered stone that had found an expedient setting in a large expanse of weedy, boggy, vapor-covered ground with those mountains as a backdrop. Melrose had to walk across peaty ground through dull brown bracken for some little distance on an old footpath after the proper driveway stopped. Wheeling above him were what he wanted to believe were peregrine falcons but which he knew were buzzards. Waiting.

  The old iron gate was flanked by stubby pillars (fortunately unlioned) and he had passed a gatehouse, apparently tenanted. The main house was manorial, but not at all as impressive as Refined Retirement back down the road. Tarn House had taken its name from the dark pools—lakelets?—of water that sat on either side of the overgrown drive. The grounds were not impressive, merely brooding, nor was the house—a flat-fronted, slate-roofed, dark structure whose tall windows were neither leaded nor firelit, nor hung with any curtain that drew back and quickly fell again at the sight of him. He knew his problem: free association. It should have been the House of Usher, and E. A. Poe, and Baltimore in Maryland where Ellen Taylor was zipping through rain-darkened streets on that damned BMW. Or the setting for a Praed mystery. When had he last seen Polly Praed? Not that she cared.

  Melrose sighed heavily, pushed the uncreaking gate closed, and walked toward the house. How much he would have preferred to be back at Ardry End, ah! That fire, that Graham’s. That aunt. Forget it.

  Someone must have watched his approach, for the door was opened almost before the knocker fell.

  Melrose quickly drew in breath at the sight of the little girl and sent up a prayer to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She seemed proof of the positive alchemical interchange or magical transposition or whatever was going on in “Kubla Khan.” It was as if Ardry End appeared before him in human form. Plain dress of green and hair the color of Graham’s ’44, irises in which tiny coals burned and at her feet the blackest cat Melrose had ever seen, a cat from Hell.

  The girl looked up at him. Unfortunately, she was probably no more than eleven or twelve, which would put her entirely outside his conversational jurisdiction.

  And that tilt to her mouth was not a smile, but a study in exasperation mastered. She then turned and went, apparently to summon an older person. When he didn’t follow, she stopped and put her hands on her hips.

  No thumbs up here, he thought.

  • • •

  “That was Millie,” said Madeline Galloway, as if that explained all of Melrose’s questions.

  Madeline Galloway was attractive, a look heightened by her nervousness; it was as if it were she, not Melrose, who was seeking this modest employment.

  They were in the much-touted library, and Melrose had to admit it was quite impressive. As if she wanted to get the bad news over first, she plunged right into an accounting of the position of librarian, saying, “I’m awfully afraid the pay isn’t much.”

  “I really wasn’t expecting much.”

  There was a tapping at the door before Millie entered with a tray on which were a decanter of sherry and two glasses. Silently, she looked at Madeline.

  “Why, Millie. Where’s Hawkes?” She explained to Melrose that Hawkes was the manservant. She smiled. “We can’t exactly call him a butler.”

  Judging from Millie’s face, they certainly couldn’t. Millie turned to leave.

  “But you haven’t said where he is. This is his job.”

  Millie chewed the inside of her cheek and said, “Down cellar. With Cook. Looking at wine.”

  Melrose thought he detected in those pauses something that su
ggested butler and cook were doing more than looking.

  Millie left; Madeline turned to Melrose. “Your friend Superintendent Jury said you sometimes picked up a job here or there that suited your interests.”

  Derelict Plant, apparently, shuffling about in baggy trousers tending to the philodendron cuttings or searching the dustbins. He’d have preferred, if not a nobler, at least a more mysterious cover . . . and now she was saying something about “eccentric,” lifting an eyebrow, smiling as if they shared a secret, Melrose, Madeline and the Superintendent.

  Eccentric. He was tempted to remove the silk-fringed lampshade and put it on his head.

  “We’ve known each other for a long time.”

  “Yes. Well, the job won’t last very long, I’m afraid. Of course, it depends how fast you can do the cataloguing. Since you were a librarian, I understand, it should go very well.”

  A down-at-heel, eccentric librarian. “Not for very long.”

  “I hope we can find arrangements that suit you. You’re welcome to live at Tarn House or if you prefer I could find a room for you in the village. The Old Contemptibles does rooms, I believe.”

  “I’d much prefer the house.” He rubbed his hand over his knee and thought of Crutch and Cripple. “Bit of a game leg, so I avoid doing too much walking.” He had forgotten the car.

  She looked down and frowned. “I didn’t notice anything.”

  “Comes and goes.” He wanted to get off gimpy legs and pursue more interesting paths; he picked up the picture and waited for her to comment but she had walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up a Staffordshire figurine, a shepherd leaning on his staff, looked at it blankly and held it probably without knowing she held it. Obviously, she had other things on her mind.