Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (12 page)

… and was, as always, glad to hear you are feeling well …

(This was also not quite true, as Mrs. Spencer’s letters tended to be one long and tedious recitation of her various imagined ailments.

Jeffrey had found that sympathizing with these ailments only made the recitations in her toilsomely penned replies longer.)

… You asked what kind of ‘boss’ Sir Adrian was. Liege Lord
is more like it, with myself in the role of vassal. Let’s just say Sir
Adrian is quite a challenging employer. He cannot write a line
without rewriting it a dozen times, which makes him cross. I
must be the only living person who can decipher the resulting
mess of a manuscript, which does at least offer me some form of
job security. Yes, he writes everything by hand, unbelievable in
the era of the PC …

(Here Jeffrey backspaced, realizing that she probably wouldn’t know what PC meant, substituting the word “computer” instead.)

…and passes along the resulting chicken scratch to me. I think
sometimes I will go blind from trying to decipher what it is he
means to say, but whatever he’s been working on lately he’s been
keeping awfully close to his vest, which gives me some free time.

His family are all at Waverley Court at the moment—quite
interesting for me, of course, to see them all together at last. They arrived last night.

Ruthven, Sir Adrian’s eldest son, arrived first, with his wife,
Lillian. She looks a bit standoffish …

(Jeffrey didn’t feel he could tell his mother Lillian looked like a prize-winning Rottweiler.)

… but Sir Adrian’s daughter, Sarah, is quite a jolly girl.

(Well, Jeffrey felt she had the potential to be jolly, although rather skittish at the moment.)

There is George, who is the second son, and Albert, the
youngest. Both are quite well-known in London circles. George
brought a young friend with him. She’s extraordinarily beautiful,
perhaps in her early-to-mid thirties, sensible-looking, yet
graceful as a swan.

Satisfied with what he had so far written, he resumed typing:

But the person here who is causing the most speculation is
Sir Adrian’s ‘intended.’ I wrote you about her earlier. Her appearance,
at long last, has been an occasion for rampant speculation
among the staff. She arrived just hours before the others,
which is odd in itself—that I hadn’t seen her before. I caught just a glimpse, but there is no question she is a strikingly attractive
woman, for her age, slim and dark-haired …

He paused. Something had raised a flag in his mind, but he couldn’t think what the matter was—what elusive thought or memory had surfaced as he tapped away unselfconsciously. It had submerged itself again so quickly he couldn’t spear it now, whatever it was. Then he remembered his mother was probably the same age as the bride and backspaced diplomatically over the potentially offending phrase referring to her age.

Jeffrey paused, rereading, hoping he had failed to convey the toxic atmosphere he felt brewing within the house. Mrs. Romano had told him at length about her own trepidations. She had taken a liking to Jeffrey ever since she’d learned he’d been in the service. In her mind, Jeffrey was one with the World War II American servicemen who had marched through her native Italy, dispensing food, chewing gum, and hope.

“I never,” she had told Jeffrey “saw anything like this family. I suppose Sir Adrian can marry who he wants, but … She cannot possibly love him—do you think?”

They had sat in the kitchen late the night before over a brandy and coffee, a ritual they occasionally shared when there was gossip to go around.

He found himself wondering if there weren’t a little jealousy behind her words. She and Sir Adrian had been together a long time.

“How did they meet?” he asked.

“He says in London, at a dinner party given by his publisher.”

“He says?”

“You know Sir Adrian. It may or may not be true. But however they met, it is clear this is what they call a whirlpool romance.”

“Whirlwind. I rather think the word you want is whirlwind.”

“I think I had it right the first time.”

Jeffrey laughed.

“Well, you know, Mrs. R, at his age, it’s not right he should be alone.”

“He’s not alone. He has his work. He has people he can trust around to take care of him.”

“You mean his family? Yes, of course, that’s a blessing—”

“No,” she said simply. “I mean me. And Paulo, of course. This family of his, it is no blessing.”

Jeffrey, who had yet to speak with most of the key players in this drama, wasn’t quite sure what she meant. But he trusted Mrs. Romano’s instincts, and some of her anxiety had rubbed off on him as well.

“I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that,” he’d said.

But now, having seen them all and gained some definite first impressions, he wondered. George, he felt sure, was no prize. And he rather had the idea Albert drank.

Omitting these impressions, he was concluding his letter with a reiterated promise to return home at Easter for a visit, a promise he had only vague intentions of keeping. He liked being just where he was, more so than before. As he reached across his desk for an envelope, his eye caught a movement beyond the sheltering evergreen trees outside his window. It was Paulo, carrying a plastic bag of rubbish out to the gardening shed.

He didn’t pause to wonder why Paulo would be carrying rubbish to, not from, the shed: There was a dumpster affair hidden near the kitchen wall. But he did pause to think that Paulo, despite his mother, was a man he wouldn’t trust an inch.

LAST MEAL
EN
FAMILLE

_______________________

DINNER THAT NIGHT WAS
the kind of extravaganza at which Mrs. Romano excelled. Where one entrée would do, she offered three. Where two savories would have sufficed, she produced four.

But as Paulo cleared course after course, bringing down the plates for washing by the local girl brought in for the occasion (her name was Martha, and she seemed to suffer from adenoids), he thought only Sir Adrian might entirely be enjoying the repast.

Jeffrey, who sat in chummy silence watching Mrs. Romano and Martha work, occasionally offering a helping hand with the heavier dishes, listened to Paulo’s bulletins with increasing interest. Really, it was like one of those nighttime soap operas.

Sir Adrian had emerged from his bedroom at seven
PM
, a cumberbund stretched like a rubber band to breaking point around his colossal perimeter. Trotting into the drawing room, he found his family already amassed, and stretched his rosebud lips into a semblance of a welcoming smile. He skipped over to Violet—it would seem in his present good mood his gout wasn’t troubling him as much—and made too big a fuss of noisily kissing her cheek. Or so it seemed to Sarah, who, with Albert, warily watched the pantomime from near the fireplace.

George sat snaked across one of the Queen Anne sofas, which Natasha stood behind, both of them managing to look disheveled, but in an interesting, expensive way, like an advertisement for Ralph Lauren bed linens. Natasha wore a silk poet’s blouse with long sleeves ending in ruffles at her wrists; George, a velvet coat that recalled Lord Byron about the time England was asking him never again to darken its shores.

Ruthven and Lillian stood apart, looking like the same advertisement aimed at a somewhat older demographic.

Violet, rising to the occasion, was sheathed in gray silk falling to mid-calf, flapper style, with a long string of pearls knotted at her navel. (Lillian spent part of the evening trying to tell if the pearls were real, decided that they were, and the rest of the evening calculating their retail value.) She stood alone beneath the traceried ceiling-high windows, her graceful form framed by French doors. It seemed a deliberate choice; the discreetly lighted formal garden outside provided a dramatic backdrop that drew the eye to her slender, solitary silhouette.

Only Albert and Sarah had been latish in arriving. Albert to all appearances was sober, to the surprise of his family. Albert sober was a rare event, somewhat like a comet sighting. He also appeared to be feeling rather chipper, a slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Both George and Ruthven eyed him with suspicion.

“Won’t Jeffrey be joining us?” Sarah asked, her voice so studiedly casual it immediately raised eyebrows among the women in the group, with their special radar for love in bloom. For the occasion Sarah wore an embroidered caftan of African origin, unaware that the design included fertility symbols of a particularly explicit and ribald nature.

Her father raked her with a wintry stare, all traces of good humor vanished.

“No. Nor will Watters nor any of the other servants. Good heaven, what an idea.”

Sarah, still smarting from her earlier adventure in the kitchen, said: “I don’t see why not. After all, according to the Bible we are all brothers.”

“Surely that didn’t include Americans,” said George.

Ruthven smiled appreciatively at this witticism over the top of his sherry glass.

“Nor the French,” he said. “Really, Sarah. Lighten, as they say, up. You really can be such a prat.”

“I think you’re just being horrid,” said Sarah sulkily. “He’s quite nice, actually.”

George seemed to twig the situation for the first time.

“Oh, I see.” He chanted the sing-song of the playground: “
Sarah
fancies Jeffrey. ”

“Stop it. I feel sorry for him, that’s all. Being so far from home and—”

Sir Adrian cut in: “You can all stop it. I get enough of the man during the day. All that perkiness: it’s like having Meg Ryan scampering about the house.” He cast eyes upward, beseeching an indifferent heaven, then glared at each of his offspring in turn. “Whatever did I do to deserve this quarrelsome family?”

“It rather begs the nature versus nurture question, doesn’t—” began Albert.

“That’s enough!” Sir Adrian could bellow, when he wanted to, loud enough to shatter glass. “This is a joyous family gathering and you are all, for once, going to behave yourselves. What must Violet be thinking of us?” He gave her a little hug; her narrow form seemed to disappear somewhere into the folds of the cummerbund.

“It’s just that it’s nearly the holidays, and he’s far from home, that’s all,” repeated Sarah.

Now even Sir Adrian began to twig. He turned on her—or rather, maneuvered twenty degrees more in her direction, like a submarine.

“Don’t even think it,” he said. “No daughter of mine is going to get involved with an
American secretary
.” From his tone, he might have been contemplating her elopement with a Bedouin tribesman.

For perhaps the first time in her life, real defiance welled up in Sarah. She drew herself up in what she hoped Jeffrey would think of as a queenly posture.

“You think to tell
me
with whom I may or may not get involved? Under these circumstances?” She cocked her head in Violet’s direction. “Are you forgetting why we’re all here?”

It was the first time any of them had referred even indirectly to the happy occasion which had brought them together. Her siblings stirred uneasily.

“At least he’s not a mur—”

“Not a what?” Violet could match Sir Adrian’s frosty tone, icicle for icicle, thought Lillian.
Bravo
.

Having come to the edge of the cliff, Sarah found she couldn’t leap.

“Under these circumstances?” Sir Adrian repeated slowly. “Yes. Under these or any other circumstances I will tell you exactly what to do. You’re my daughter and if you expect to ever see a penny from me you’ll drop the whole subject right now.”

“I don’t want—”

Ruthven, seeing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with his father at Sarah’s expense, cut in. “He’s only after your money, Sarah. Don’t be such an ass.”

The fear that what Ruthven said might be true made her lash out. With a nod in Lillian’s direction, she said:

“You should know all about that.”

Albert, who had only been half-listening to the conversation up to this point, said, “I say. That is rather rich, coming from you, Ruthven. I doubt you’ve ever done a deed in your life that wasn’t motivated by money. Same goes for you, George. Just leave Sarah alone for once.”

“Coming from me?
Me
?” said George. “As if
you
hadn’t spent all your life sucking up to Father over money.”

“
I?

”

Sir Adrian roared: “
I said that’s enough
.”

He looked at each member of his rancorous brood in turn with steely eyed displeasure, his face contorted like a gargoyle’s on a Gothic cathedral. It had the hoped-for, withering effect.

“Not another word or I’ll see you all regret it.”

To Violet’s amazement, they all—including Natasha—exchanged quicksilver glances, as if relaying some pre-arranged signal. In unison, they clapped their mouths shut, like a perfectly orchestrated firing squad having used up its round.

Paulo, who had been lurking in the hall outside, admiring his long, dark hair in the Louis Quinze mirror while eavesdropping on the conversation, judged it a good moment to step inside and announce, in perfect imitation of the perfect servant, “Dinner is served.”

Sir Adrian offered his arm to Violet and without a word began heaving his slow way in the direction of their meal.