The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  “The count’s toitle, sor,” said O’Donnell, looking at him with an eye as cold and gray as Galway Bay in winter, “is a Papal toitle. Oi trust ye’ve no objections?”

  Stirrup hastily said he had none, then retreated to the other side of a table. The man whose wine glass had snapped in his hand finished wiping port from his fingers with a monogrammed handkerchief, then spoke in mellowed, measured tones.

  “We must, of course,” he said, “make due allowances for Celtic—I do not say, West British—exuberance; but the matter now before us is too serious to permit any element of disorder to enter.” There was a general murmur of agreement. “Gentlemen, I move that the doors be locked. Those in favor will signify by saying ‘Aye.’ The ayes have it.”

  He locked the doors and pocketed the key. “Thank you, Mr. Piggot,” said Peebles.

  “Mr. Arbuthnot,” Stirrup said, loudly, “since I am here in response to your invitation, it is from you that I must demand an explanation for these actions.”

  Arbuthnot smiled his slant smile again. Peebles said, “All in good time. By the way,” he inquired, “I trust you have no objections if I refer to you henceforth as the Accused? Protocol, you know, protocol.”

  Stirrup said that he objected very much. “Most vehemently. Of what am I accused?” he asked plaintively.

  Peebles flung out his arm and pointed at him. “You are accused, sir,” he cried, “of having for over thirty years pursued an infamous campaign of literary slander designed to bring into contempt and disrepute a profession the most ancient and honorable, dating back to Biblical days and specifically mentioned—I refer to Pharoah’s chief butler—in the Book of Deuteronomy.”

  Knuckles were rapped on tables and the room rang with murmurs of, “Hear, hear!” and, “Oh, well said, sir!”

  “Pardon me, Mr. Peebles,” said Blenkinsop. “The Book of Genesis.”

  “Genesis? H’m, dear me, yes. You are correct. Thank you.”

  “Not at all, not at all. Deuteronomy is very much like Genesis.”

  Stirrup interrupted this feast of love. “I insist upon being informed what all this has to do with you, or with any of you except O’Donnell.”

  Peebles peered at him with narrowed, heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Are you under the impression, Mr.—is Accused under the impression that our esteemed colleague, Mr. Phelim O’Donnell, is the only butler here?”

  Stirrup licked dry lips with a dry tongue. “Why, ah, yes,” he stammered. “Isn’t he? Is there another?” A growl went round the circle, which drew in closer.

  “No, sir, he is not. I was a butler. We were all of us butlers!”

  A hoarse scream broke from Stirrup’s mouth. He lunged for the open windows, but was tripped up by the watchful Piggot.

  Peebles frowned. “Mr. Blenkinsop,” he said, “will you be good enough to close the windows? Thank you. I must now warn the Accused against any further such outbursts. Yes, Accused, we were all of us, every one of us, members of that proud profession which you were the first to touch with the dusty brush of scorn. Now you must prepare to pay. Somehow, Mr. Stirrup, you have pushed aside what my former lady—the justly-famed Mme. Victoria Algernonovna Grabledsky, the theosophical authoress—used to call ‘The Veil of Isis.’ This room wherein you now stand is none other than the Great Pantry of the Butlers’ Valhalla. Hence—”

  “May it please the court,” said Piggot, interrupting. “We find the Accused guilty as charged, and move to proceed with sentencing.”

  “Help!” Stirrup cried, struggling in O’Donnell’s iron grasp. “He-e-e-l-l-p!”

  Peebles said that would do him no good, that there was no one to help him. Then he looked around the room, rather helplessly. “Dear me,” he said, a petulant note in his voice; “whatever shall I use for a black cap while I pronounce sentence?”

  A silence fell, broken by Richards. “In what manner shall sentence be carried out?” he asked.

  Piggot, his face bright, spoke up. “I must confess, Mr. Peebles, to a fondness for the sashweight attached by a thin steel wire to the works of a grandfather’s clock,” said Piggot; “as utilized (in the Accused’s novel of detection, Murder In The Fens) by Murgatroyd, the butler at Fen House—who was, of course, really Sir Ethelred’s scapegrace cousin, Percy, disguised by a wig and false paunch. I recall that when I was in the service of Lord Alfred Strathmorgan, his lordship read that meretricious work and thereafter was wont to prod me quite painfully in my abdominal region, and to inquire, with what I considered a misplaced jocularity, if my paunch were real! Yes, I favor the sash-weight and the thin steel wire.”

  Peebles nodded, judiciously. “Your suggestion, Mr. Piggot, while by no means devoid of merit, has a—shall I say—a certain degree of violence, which I should regret having to utilize so long as an alternative—”

  “I would like to ask the opinion of the gentlemen here assembled,” said Blenkinsop, “as to what they would think of a swift-acting, exotic Indonesian poison which, being of vegetative origin, leaves no trace; to be introduced via a hollowed corkscrew into a bottle of Mouton Rothschild’12? Needless to say, I refer to the Accused’s trashy novel The Vintage Vengeance. In that book the profligate Sir Athelny met his end at the hands of the butler, Bludsoe, whose old father’s long-established wine and spirits business was ruined when the avaricious Sir Athelny cornered the world’s supply of corks—thus occasioning the elder Bludsoe’s death by apoplexy. The late Clemantina, Dowager Duchess of Sodor and Skye, who was quite fond of her glass of wine, used frequently to tease me by inquiring if I had opened her bottle with a corkscrew of similar design and purpose; and I am not loath to confess that this habit of Her Grace’s annoyed me exceedingly.”

  “The court can well sympathize with you in that, Mr. Blenkinsop.” The Great Pantry hummed with a murmur of accord.

  Blenkinsop swallowed his chagrin at this memory, nodded his thanks for the court’s sympathy, and then said smoothly, “Of course we could not force the Accused to drink without rather a messy scene, but I have hopes he would feel enough sense of noblesse oblige to quaff the fatal beverage Socraticlike, so to speak.”

  Stirrup wiped his mouth with his free hand. “While I should be delighted, under ordinary circumstances,” he said, “to drink a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’12 I must inquire if you have on hand such an item as a swift-acting, exotic Indonesian poison, which, being of vegetative origin, leaves no trace? Frankly, I have neglected to bring mine.”

  A mutter of disappointment was followed by a further consultation of the assembled butlers, but no sooner had they begun when a shot rang out, there was a shattering of glass, and O’Donnell fell forward. Richards turned him over; there was a bullet hole in the exact center of his forehead. Everyone’s eyes left Stirrup; his captor’s grip perceptibly loosened. Stirrup broke away, snatched up the poker, smashed the window and, jumping forward onto the terrace, ran for his life.

  He reached the road just in time to see the headlights of an automobile moving away. “Help!” he shouted. “Help! Help!”

  The car went into reverse, came back to him. Two men emerged.

  “Oh, a stranger,” said the driver. He was a man with long gray hair, clad neatly, if unconventionally, in golf knickers, deerstalking cap, and smoking jacket.

  “The most fantastic thing—” Stirrup gasped. “My life was threatened by the inhabitants of that house back there!”

  The other man cried, “Ah, the scoundrels!” He wore a greasy regimental dinner jacket and a soft, squashed hat; he shook a clenched fist toward the house and slashed the air with his cane. Deep-set eyes blazed in a gaunt face. Then, abruptly, his expression changed to an ingratiating smile. “It is at a time like this, sir,” he said to Stirrup, “that I am sure you must ask yourself, ‘Are my loved ones adequately protected in case of mishap, misadventure, or untoward occurrences affecting me?’ Now, the Great South British Assurance Company, of which I happen to be an agent, has a policy—”

  “Stop that, you
fool!” said the driver. “Can’t you ever remember all that’s over with now?” He took a revolver from his pocket, and Stirrup—suddenly recalling the bullet in O’Donnell’s head—trembled. But as the other man’s face creased with disappointment and petulance, the driver said to Stirrup, “Pray do not be alarmed, sir. But in the matter of butlers one simply must be prepared with strong measures. They stop at nothing. Fancy threatening an innocent, inoffensive gentleman such as you! My motto, when confronted with butlers, is: ‘St. George and no quarter’!”

  A trifle nervously, Stirrup said, “If you could drive me to the nearest town—”

  “All in good season, sir,” the man answered, waving his weapon carelessly. “I was once tried for shooting my butler; did you know that? I am not ashamed; in fact, I glory in the deed. It was during the grouse season in Scotland. I’d caught the swine pilfering my cigars. I gave him a fair run before bringing him down, then claimed it was an accident.” He chuckled richly. “Jury returned a verdict of Not Proven. You should’ve seen the face of the Procurator-Fiscal!”

  “I was never even indicted,” the man in the dirty regimentals and crushed hat observed, with no small amount of smugness. “When I discovered that my butler had been selling the wine to the local pub, I chased him with hounds through the Great Park. Would have caught him, too, only the cowardly blighter broke his neck falling from a tree which he had climbed in trying to escape. ‘Death by misadventure’ was all the coroner could say. Hah! But then these damnation taxes obliged me to sell the Great Park, and reduced me to a low insurance broker. Me!” He ground his teeth.

  Scarcely knowing if he should believe these wild tales, Stirrup said, “You have all my sympathy. Now, my book, The Vintage Vengeance—to give you only a single example—brought me in twenty-one hundred pounds clear of taxes the year it was written; whereas last year—”

  The driver of the car turned from his revolver. His brows, which were twisted into horny curves of hair at the ends, went up—up—up. “You wrote The Vintage Vengeance? You are that fellow Rodney Stirrup?”

  Stirrup drew himself erect. It was recognition such as this which almost made up for treacherous publishers, ungrateful mistresses, and a declining public. “I am. Did you read it? Did you like it?”

  “Read it? We read it twen-ty-sev-en times! We were par-ticularly interested in the character of Sir Athelny Aylemore, the unfortunate victim: an excellently-delineated portrait of a great gentleman. But you will recall that Sir Athelny was a baronet. Now, baronets possess the only hereditary degree of knighthood, and hence should be accorded an infinite degree of respect. And yet we feel your book failed to show a correct amount of respect.”

  The other man scowled and cut at the air with his cane. “Not at all a correct amount of respect,” he said.

  “The butlers,” Stirrup began, trying to shift the conversation.

  Again the driver ground his teeth. “I’m prepared for them! See here—a cartridge clip with silver bullets. My gunsmith, Motherthwaite’s of Bond Street, wriggled like an eel when I ordered them, and a similar set for shotguns, but in the end he had them made up for me. Lucky for him. Hah!” He snorted, aimed at an imaginary and refractory gunsmith, went Poom!, and—with an air wickedly self-pleased-blew imaginary smoke from the muzzle.

  Stirrup gave a nervous swallow, then said, with a half-convulsive giggle, “My word, but there’s a lot of superstition in this part of the country! That yokel in the smock—”

  The driver rubbed the muzzle of his revolver against his smoking jacket. “Yokel in a smock? Why, that’s Daft Alfie. He drowned in the mill pond about the time of the Maori War—or was it the Matabele? But they couldn’t prove suicide, so he ended up in the churchyard instead of at the crossroads. So Daft Alf’s been walking again, has he? Hah!”

  His friend came forward, turned his feverishly-bright eyes on Stirrup. “Now, in our case,” he said, “there was no doubt at all. Prior to crashing our car into the ferro-concrete abutment, we left in triplicate a note explaining that it was an act of protest against the Welfare State which had, through usurpatious taxation, reduced us to penury.”

  “And furthermore had made the people so improvident that they no longer even desired to purchase the insurance policies which we were obliged to sell. And we insisted upon crossroads burial as a further gesture of defiance. But the wretched authorities said it would be a violation of both the Inhumation and Highways Acts. So—”

  Stirrup felt the numbness creeping up his legs. “Then you are—then you were—”

  The man with the revolver said, “Forgive my boorishness. Yes: I, my dear fellow, was Sir Sholto Shadwell, of Shadwell-upon-Stour; and this was Sir Peregrine de Pall of Pall Mall, Hants., my partner in the insurance agency to which these degenerate times had driven us. We were well known. The venal press often said of us that in our frequent pranks and japes we resembled characters from the novels of Rodney Stirrup more than we did real people. They used to call us—”

  “They used to call us ‘The Batty Baronets,’” said Sir Peregrine; “though I can’t think why!”

  Their laughter rang out loud and mirthlessly as Sir Sholto snapped the safety catch off on his revolver and Sir Peregrine slid away the casing from his sword cane.

  “It grows so damn tedious back at the Baronets’ Valhalla,” one of them muttered sulkily, as they closed in.

  Rodney Stirrup, suppressing the instinct which rose in every cell of him to flee shrieking down the lonely road across the moors, raised his hand and eyebrows.

  “One moment, gentlemen—or should I not rather phrase it, ‘Sirs Baronet’?”

  “Hem. You should, yes.” Sir Sholto let his revolver sink a trifle. Sir Peregrine, prodding a turf with the point of the sword, nodded portentously.

  Straining very hard, Stirrup managed to produce the lineaments of gratified desire in the form of a thankful smile. “I am so glad to have that point cleared up. Burke’s Peerage was of no help at all, you know.”

  “None whatsoever. Certainly not. Burke’s, pah!” Sir Peregrine spitted the turf. A trifle uncertainly, he asked, “You had some, ah, special reason—”

  Never since that frenzied but glorious week at Monte in the year ’27, when deadlines of novels from three publishers were pressing upon him, had Rodney Stirrup improvised so rapidly. “A very, very special reason. I had intended, in my next novel, due to appear on Boatwright’s spring list, to urge the election of a certain number of baronets to the House of Lords, in a manner similar to that of representative Scottish peers. Such a proposal could not fail to be of benefit. (“Certainly not!” said Sir Sholto.) But then the question arises, how is such a one to be addressed? ‘The honorable member’ obviously won’t do. (“Won’t do at all!” said Sir Peregrine.) What, then? You, with that erudition which has always characterized your rank—” the two hereditary knights coughed modestly and fiddled their weapons with a certain measure of embarrassment—have supplied the answer: ‘Sir Baronet.’” Stirrup allowed the smile to vanish, an easy task, and sighed.

  “Mphh. I notice your use of the past pluperfect. ‘Had intended.’ Eh?”

  With a horrible start Stirrup noticed, just beyond the headlights’ brightness, the silent approach of a company of men. Temper obviously in no way improved by the hole in his forehead, O’Donnell scowled hideously.

  Speaking very rapidly, Stirrup said in a loud voice, “I am not to blame. The reading public little realize the small extent to which writers are their own masters. My own attitude in regard to baronets and, ah, butlers, was of no importance at all. It was my publisher! He laughs at butlers. Despises baronets. I give you my word. Indeed, I would freely admit how richly I deserve the punishment an ignoble government has failed to mete out to me for the slanders I have written—but I really could not help it. I was bound hand and foot by contracts. How many times have I stood there with tears in my eyes. ‘Another bad butler,’ demanded Boatwright. ‘Another silly baronet,’ Boatwright insisted. What could I do?�
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  There was a long silence. Then Peebles stepped forward. “It was very wrong of you, sir,” he said. “But your weakness is not altogether beyond exculpation.”

  “Not altogether, no,” conceded Sir Sholto, twisting a lock of his long, gray hair. “The second Sir Sholto, outraged by the filthy treatment accorded the proffered manuscript of his experiences in the Peninsular Wars, was in the habit of toasting Napoleon for having once shot a publisher.”

  “And quite properly, Sir Sholto,” said Peebles. “And quite rightly.”

  “Never would’ve been allowed if the Duke of Cumberland hadn’t been cozened out of the crown by Salic Law,” said Sir Peregrine, moodily.

  Peebles stiffened. “While it is true that a mere valet has not the status of a butler, and equally true that His Royal Highness (later King Ernest of Hanover) was absolved of guilt for having caused the death of his personal gentleman—”

  “Who was a foreigner anyway,” Stirrup put in; “taking bread from the mouths of honest British men, and doubtless richly deserved his fate…”

  Butlers and baronets, once the matter was put in this light, nodded judiciously.

  “Therefore,” said Peebles, “I propose a joint convocation of both Houses, as it were, to deal with the case of the Infamous Publisher Boatwright.”

  “Bugger the bastard with a rusty sword, you mean? And then splatter his tripes with a silver bullet or two?”

  Peebles said that that was the precise tenor of his meaning, and he much admired Sir Sholto’s vigorous way of phrasing it.

  “Mr. Boatwright is at his country place not far from here at this very moment,” Rodney Stirrup quickly pointed out. “The Mill Race, Little Chitterlings, near Guilford.” He held his breath.

  Then, “Fiat justicia!” exclaimed Peebles.

  And, “St. George, no quarter, and perish publishers!” cried the baronets. There was a diffident cough, and a large, pear-shaped man with prominent and red-rimmed eyes stepped forward. He looked at Stirrup and Stirrup felt his hair follicles retreat.