Help the Poor Struggler (10 page)

“Where's the spanner?” Jessica leveled her eyes at his thick brows.

The spoon, which had but an inch to travel from bowl to mouth, stopped. “You not be foolin' with them cars, Miss!” Mulchop also took care of the cars; he and Jessie spent what little time they spent together haggling over Uncle Robert's cars.

While Mrs. Mulchop went prattling on about Mr. Robert's sad marital status, Jessie took the spanner from Mulchop's tool box and stuck her tongue out at both of their backs.

“ . . . a nice wife, that's what he needs.”

Not if the Lady Jessica Mary Allan-Ashcroft had anything to do with it.

 • • • 

She lay with the spanner and some old rags on a mechanic's creeper underneath the Zimmer Golden Spirit. It was a good car for thinking under; some of the others, like the Lotus and the Ferrari were a little too close to the ground for her to get comfortable unless she jacked them up, and Mulchop would always come out and raise a fuss. The Zimmer was one of her favorites, an astonishingly long white convertible, for which Uncle Robert had paid over thirty thousand pounds. Or Jess had paid. It took a platoon of solicitors to keep account of her money. Not that it made any difference to her if Uncle Robert used up all of it on his cars.

Jessie saw a bolt that looked loose and she tried to tighten it. That's what happened when someone went away. . . . Everything just fell apart. Her eyes widened. Forgetting where she was she sat up and bumped her forehead on the exhaust pipe. The cars.

 • • • 

“Well,
I
don't know, do I?” the Dreadful Dru was saying, as Jess stood there in the drawing room in her oil-stained overall. “You been muckin' about with those cars?”

“They're all
there!”
Jessie shouted. In a sort of ritual chant, she ticked off each one of the nine on her fingers.

Drucilla Plunkett tossed aside the fashion magazine she'd been reading and stuffed another chocolate in her mouth. Drucilla knew her days were numbered, so she wasn't being at all careful about what she did with them. The box of chocolates — a huge heart — Drucilla had said she'd got from an “admirer” down the pub. Most of her spare time was spent with one or another mystery man “down the pub,” as she put it. “What do I know about those old cars?” Her bowlike mouth bit into a chocolate truffle.

“If he went to London, how did he go?”

“Say it once again and I'll
scream!”

Jessie said she could scream the house down. All she wanted to know was where Uncle Rob was. “He's missing.” Jessie turned and leaned her forehead against the cold glass, saw the ghost of her face in the slanting rain.

The Dreadful Dru screamed. Not long and loud, but a shriek nonetheless. Having exhausted her eyes with the latest fashions, Drucilla was now exhausting her mind with a newspaper. “God!” She sat up straight. “Look here, there's a prisoner let out of Princetown several days ago. The Axmurderer — that's what they call him.”

Drucilla's little scream might have come from the ghost out in the rain, trying to get in.

 • • • 

Nobody cared, that was clear.

Victoria Gray was a cousin educated well beyond the means of the jobs that might have come her way. Thus Jess's father had employed her in the ambiguous role of “housekeeper,” and Victoria did perform what duties she could find. With Mrs. Mulchop, Mulchop, and Billy (the stable-lad), the household was top-heavy with servants. Victoria's servitude was minimal, the line between housekeeper and long-standing guest somewhat blurred.

 • • • 

“Wonder how old she is?” Uncle Robert had said one morning before they had moved from Eaton Square to Ashcroft. He was slitting open the morning post, letter after letter from banks and solicitors. “I believe we've inherited Victoria along with the heirlooms. Still, she's all right.” He stopped in the act of opening a letter and said, reflectively, “Actually, she's quite attractive.”

Because Victoria Gray had been around ever since Jessie could remember, she hadn't expected trouble from that quarter. “Fifty,” she said, beheading her boiled egg smartly with the clipper.

Robert frowned. “Fifty? Surely not. She doesn't look forty to me. Did she tell you, then?”

Jessie had looked at him with cool eyes. “Would
you
tell if you were that old?” With her uncle looking at her that way, now she would have to come up with an explanation as to how she knew Victoria's age. Inspired by the letters lying on the table, she said, “It was a birthday card. She left it on a table. There was a great, big fifty —” Here Jess drew a 5 and
o
in the air, huge numbers, in case her uncle thought fifty wasn't all that much. Satisfied, she dipped a toast finger in her egg.

Uncle Robert was looking at her with his head slightly cocked. And then came that bemused smile that bothered her. “If that's so, she must take wonderful care of herself.”

Jessie concentrated on dabbing tiny bits of plum preserve on her toast. “She does. Victoria has lots of those little pots of colors and jars of cream and stuff. Before she goes to bed she wears the cream and a hair net.”

Instead of being put off by this odious picture, he was fascinated and completely forgot about his mail. “Well, she certainly has beautiful skin. It must all pay off.”

“That's from the mud.”

“Mud?”

“Sometimes ladies put it on their faces when they're old to make their skin tight.” Here, Jess pressed her fingers to the sides of her own flawless face, pulling the skin back.

Uncle Rob shook his head. “Poor Victoria. Paint, cream, mud.”

Quickly, the
Times
came up in front of his face, but Jessie thought she might have seen just the beginning of a smile, snatched away.

She studied the beads of jam on her toast and wondered if she should have left out the mud.

 • • • 

That evening of the fourteenth, Victoria Gray broke into Jess's reflections on the weather, the fog, the condition of the roads. Night had descended on the moor like a black-gloved hand. But he hadn't take a car — that was the trouble.

“You're being childish, Jess. Better you go to bed and stop all this morbid worrying.”

“I
am
a child, aren't I?” A fact she denied most of the time, using it only when it suited her. She watched Victoria collect the balled-up wrappers that the Dreadful Dru had aimed at Henry, now napping on a chair by the fire. He was always napping. She supposed she loved Henry, but he was getting boring.

Victoria was going on about the Dreadful Dru: “ . . . glad to see
that
one leave. The only thing she's good at is penmanship. Probably a forger in her youth.”

None of them seemed to understand the monumental importance of what had happened. “Did you see him leave?”

Victoria sighed.
“No,
for the tenth time. No. He obviously left early in the morning — he's done it before — when we were all asleep. You know your uncle is impulsive.”

But that didn't explain the absence of a Valentine, the lack of a note.

“Jessie, dear.” Victoria stood directly behind her now, doubling the reflection in the window. “Go to bed and stop worrying. Can't you allow your uncle to forget just
once
—?”

“No!
Come on, Henry!” Jessie ordered the dog before she ran from the room. Henry, looking tired and sad, had to obey this injunction, as it was usually the only one he ever got from his mistress.

 • • • 

But she didn't go to bed directly. First, she took down her yellow slicker from the peg beside the overall and jammed her arms in it before she opened the heavy door leading out to what used to be all horse-boxes.

The stable now provided room for garaging nine cars. There were two horses boxed on the other side. Victoria loved to ride; Jessica hated it. She'd told her uncle there were so many ponies on the moor, just looking at a pony made her want to throw up. And she certainly wasn't going to some stupid riding school, only to go round and round in a ring.

 • • • 

“I want a car,” she had said, as his collection grew.

“A
car?
Jess, you're seven years old.”

She sighed. How many times had she heard that? “In a month I'll be eight. I want a Mini Cooper. You know. The one Austin Rover made.” She was rather proud of having come upon this minuscule bit of information.

“Police don't look kindly on eight-year-olds driving.”

 • • • 

The Mini Cooper was there. Henry slogged behind her, stopping when she stopped. He yawned, unused to this nocturnal inspection of cars in the dark and the rain. Rain blew the hood of her slicker as Jessica walked round the old stables, beaming her torch on each one, touching the bonnet — almost
patting
the car, as if each were indeed a favorite horse.

J
ESSIE
lay in bed in the pre-dawn hours, with Henry like a heavy duvet at her feet. She stared up at the tracery of light that the blowing branches etched on the ceiling. Then she turned on her side. Instead of counting sheep (which was horribly dull), she started counting off the rooms at Ashcroft. Her thoughts lingered on the long, dark hall beyond her bedroom door, and on Uncle Rob's room, two doors down, full of leather and chairs and books and a high mahogany chest where he kept the pictures of her father and mother.

But she couldn't think of that room and sleep. Her mind traveled on to Dreadful Dru's — the room on the other side of hers. Dru was living the life of Laura Ashley (which didn't fit her a bit) — tiny flowers on wallpaper, tiny sprigs on curtains that made Jessie think of thorn-thickets. Whenever she went into the Dreadful Dru's room, she felt trapped by stinging nettles. Next to Dru was Victoria Gray, whose room matched her perfectly. It was rather mysterious, with its silky velvet drapes that lay in heavy folds upon the floor.

None of this was helping her sleep. She counted the rooms in the servants' wing where Mr. and Mrs. Mulchop and Billy
had their rooms. The other six rooms in that wing were empty.

Like a potential buyer viewing a property, her mind was led down the dark hall outside her room and down the sweeping Adam staircase to what was now a well of darkness: the big entry room that on sunny days was bright, its floor of Spanish tiles, its circular table in the center pungent with the smells of roses or jasmine.

She opened her eyes and saw that the black panes had lightened to purple. The casement windows rattled in rain. Jessie turned on her other side and took her mind through the tiled hall, into the morning room where, at the dreary age of twenty or so, she would most likely have to talk to people like the local vicar or Major Smythe. . . .

 • • • 

“I don't want to grow up,” she had told Uncle Robert a year ago. “To get old like sixteen and have to go to some boring boarding school like All Hallows.”

It was a misty September morning. They had taken the Zimmer and a basket of lunch to Haytor.

Jess had held her breath, waiting for him to say something like
But you must grow up
, or
You'll love school.
Only, he couldn't say that, could he? Not after his own awful schooldays.

What he did say was, “I don't see why you have to do anything before you feel like it.”

She looked up at the sky that had changed from a sluggish gray to clear pearl. “But I
have
to.”

“Go away? When you're ready. Otherwise, it just makes misery.”

Now she felt adult and indignant at his lack of knowledge of the Real World. “Don't you know people are
always
having to do things they don't like to? Lucy Manners — she had to go to All Hallows whether she liked it or not.”

“She's got spots, hasn't she?”

Jessica was trying to be serious. “What's that got to do with it?”

Uncle Rob was lying on the rock, an arm thrown over his face. “Don't they all have spots, the boarding school ones? Either spots or teeth that stick out? I don't think you should go because you're much too pretty. I'd hate to see you with spots and stuck-out teeth.”

And she began to think of school in more kindly terms. “Lucy Manners would have spots
anywhere,”
she said reasonably.

Jessie lay on her back and watched the shadows of the branches comb the ceiling in the gathering light. She was still debating what to do. She got out of bed.

Although Henry had no desire to rout himself from the foot of the warm bed and follow, follow he did.
Come on, Henry,
were the three worst words in the language.

 • • • 

She could not reach the telephone in the kitchen because it was high up on the wall. Jess pulled over the cricket stool that Mulchop liked to sit on and smell the soup cooking.

The operator took forever to answer. Jess hung up twice, each time being careful to dial 100. Finally, she got one of them, frosty, far-off in her wired-up ice castle. Jess cleared her throat. “My name's Jessica Ashcroft and I live at Ashcroft. That's fifteen miles outside Exeter. My uncle's missing. I want the police.”

The operator talked to her in that sort of slow, loud way that people used with deaf people and dumb children. When Jessie explained that her uncle had been missing five days, the operator asked her why she thought he was “missing.”

“Because he isn't
here!”
Jessie hung up. It was hopeless. How could she ever make the operator understand that he'd
never go anywhere without leaving a note — and, especially, a Valentine. Today — well, just yesterday, was St. Valentine's Day. Uncle Rob always remembered every holiday. And how could she make the operator understand about the cars? Jessie leaned against the black telephone and came close to crying. She gulped to stop the tears. Henry shook himself out of his lethargy and pawed at her leg and whined in sympathy. But his eyes closed like shutters and he dozed off again.