She Shoots to Conquer (14 page)

“Were there children from her marriage to Sir Giles?” Livonia wanted to know. And who could blame her for attempting to brush up on the family history, if she had begun to picture Lord Belfrey as a man who reverenced the female . . . in other words, the antithesis of the horrid Harold.

“No, Celia Belfrey is the daughter by the first wife.” Mr. Plunket sounded as though he were reading from a guidebook. He had taken on an air of pleased importance that was rather touching. For a man who had not initially seemed all that glad to have met up with us, he now appeared, having landed on a favorite topic, willing to chat on forever. “Mrs. Foot and Boris agrees with me that when Sir Giles married Eleanor something, anyway it was one of those hyphen names—oh, now it’s come back to me, Lambert-Onger, my mother had a friend Mrs. Lambert as lived in Ougar—he must have had high hopes of getting an heir second time around. Her being almost thirty years his junior. Younger than his daughter, I’ve heard Dr. Rowley say . . . not disapprovingly—never a word said against the family by him, just a statement of fact. But as it turned out, Sir Giles, sad to say, wasn’t to reap the fruits of his labor. The marriage was over before the year was out. His young wife did a bunk—vanished overnight—and to make matters even more wicked took the family jewels with her.” Mr. Plunket stood, every nodule protruding, awaiting the gasps of consternation that were his due.

“Oh, how dreadful,” breathed Livonia. “Where did she go? Was there another man?”

“Never sight nor word of her from that day to this.”

“And the jewels?” Judy sounded as though to her this was the pertinent point.

“Never surfaced. Leastways, that’s what Dr. Rowley says. His nibs don’t talk about them, but you can be sure that things would have been different at Mucklesfeld if they’d been available for selling. And his nibs wouldn’t find himself reduced to . . .”

“Quite!” Judy said.

Mr. Plunket now stood removing his foot from his mouth . . . or perhaps he was chewing on it while mulling over the evils of Lord Belfrey’s situation.

“Perhaps Sir Giles was the sort of man who would have turned any wife of his into a villainess,” said Livonia with surprising spirit. “What if he was constantly critical and never kissed her as though he meant it?”

Mr. Plunket looked uncomfortable, suggesting that he might have heard rumors to this effect from persons not one hundred percent loyal to the Belfrey family . . . unpaid tradesmen, dismissed employees, Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d had the door slammed in their faces. He remarked that it was beginning to rain again. Thumper looked nervously around for his tail as if the talk of theft had him wondering if someone had pinched it, before joining the rest of us in heading toward the house.

“The villainy I see,” said Judy, eyeing the lopsided, moss-coated fountain sunk deep in its tangled dell, “is the way these grounds have been neglected. Even with money short, something could have been accomplished with a spade and a lawn mower.”

“The weeds look healthy enough,” I consoled her, as Mr. Plunket led the way through a door that looked better suited to a dilapidated garden shed than an ancestral home. Thumper kept close to my heels, for which I was eminently grateful. Should a rodent scurry to meet us, I was reasonably confident Thumper would get it while I was screaming my last breath. If this were one of the doors the ghost of Eleanor Belfrey had been spied entering rather than exiting, I admired her (no pun intended) spirit. My foot caught on a flagstone in the hallway, which smelled dismally like a tomb. Not that I had ever been in a tomb . . . I stumbled again as a question reared up belatedly.

How could Eleanor be a ghost if she wasn’t dead? According to Mr. Plunket’s account, she had departed from Sir Giles’s life, not from this earth. Of course, anything could have happened in the meantime, but Mr. Plunket had said that nothing had been heard of her since her sneaky departure. Were the sightings a result of wishful thinking on the part of Mrs. Foot and Boris because of their resentment that the Vanishing Bride had robbed the family jewel box?

Livonia grabbed my arm, causing the thought to flee and the suitcase to drop from my hand onto my foot. A specter was drifting our way with a gait that suggested a rattling assortment of bones hastily thrown together—oversized in height, parchment white of face. I was fortunate in that this was not my first sighting of Boris. Judy had impressed me as a woman capable of dealing with a roomful of vampires with aplomb—possibly to the point of inquiring into what blood types were most nutritious—but Livonia understandably emitted a pitiful screech.

“Boris,” I whispered to her.

“Oh.” Relief flowed out of her and not only, I thought, because she had feared that here was Lord Belfrey. Poor Boris; I picked up the suitcase and gazed upon him with compassion. It was a cruelty of fate for a man to look more dead while he was walking around than he would do in his coffin.

“Looking for me?” Mr. Plunket asked with a sprightliness that had the effect of increasing the gloom of the passageway. “I’ve been out for a morning constitutional.”

“A what?” Boris, arms dangling to his knees, intoned out the side of his mouth.

“Walk. I felt a weird urge.”

“Agghh!” The blank stare would have bored a hole in the ozone.

“And on the way back in, I met this lady.” Mr. Plunket nudged an elbow my way.

“Ellie Haskell.” I retrieved the suitcase.

“You’ll remember her from last night.”

“Agghh!”

“And these two other ladies that are among the contestants for the marriage show. I’ve been filling them in about the family history.”

“Most interesting.” Judy, snippet of a woman though she was and faded of coloring as if having been through the wash too many times, exuded a warmth that should have countered the chill that oozed up from the flagstones and out of the stone walls. She introduced herself and Livonia bravely did likewise.

“Agghh!”

Suddenly I saw what seemed to be a struggle for intelligent thought working its tortuous way from Boris’s brain down his forehead and into his eyeballs. His arms battled rigor mortis to allow him to scratch the side of his nose with a reasonably lifelike-looking finger. “It was, I hope,” he painstakingly produced the words with robotically even spacing, “a good walk this morning, Mr. Plunket. I hope you saw other things of interest to you besides these . . .” I expected him to say
creatures
, but he left the sentence hanging.

Mr. Plunket gave him a quelling look before turning to Livonia, Judy, and me. “Boris and Mrs. Foot keep hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of Eleanor Belfrey so I won’t go on feeling left out. But much as I appreciate their feelings,” he redirected his gaze to Boris, speaking slowly and distinctly, “talking about it makes it worse. No, I didn’t see anything, but I wasn’t keeping my mind and eyes properly open to a . . . a sighting.”

“Agghh!” Boris receded into his corpse to ebb out of the passageway. Thumper heaved a sigh of what sounded like profound relief and Mr. Plunket said rather snappishly that he didn’t know what Mrs. Foot would say, seeing that she wasn’t at all keen on dogs, but we’d find out about that right now. He pushed open a door to reveal a large room with a brick wall facing us.

Set into it was an archaic cooker that looked as though it would require arduous blacking to combat rust. As old-fashioned kitchens went, this one was not invested with an excess of charm. True, the
heavily timbered ceiling and the same flagstones that had been in the passageway had their appeal, as did the vast deal table surrounded by an assortment of elderly chairs, but the sink looked like a pig’s trough and the wall cupboards were lopsided and needed a fresh coat of paint. Back to a positive note, the place was appreciably more orderly and somewhat cleaner than I would have expected of a domain ruled by Mrs. Foot.

She came through one of several doors scattered around the room, with a jug in hand, the housewifely flowered bib apron contrasting quite horribly with her insane asylum wardress appearance. The hulking form and mangled gray locks fared even less well in daylight than they had done in the murky gloom of the past evening. Mr. Plunket hastened to take the jug from her before making the introductions. I set Livonia’s suitcase down in a corner while she sank blindly into a chair. Judy also deposited her overnight bag, but I didn’t get the feeling that at any point since setting foot in Mucklesfeld she had felt burdened either physically or emotionally. It was Mrs. Foot who looked as though she had been clobbered from all sides.

Mr. Plunket helped her to a bench by the side of the cooker and continued to anxiously hover over her to the accompaniment of ominous creaking. It wasn’t a stone bench and clearly she wasn’t made of that substance, either. Her features shifted as if formed out of Plasticine by a nasty-minded child. She waved a hand, almost taking out a cupboard that looked equally unhinged with its door hanging open.

“I came down to find the place looking like this, everything put away where I’ll never be able to find anything. All my favorite slop cloths and the soup tins for keeping vegetable scrapings in—gone. Everything off the floor where I could find what I needed at a glance or by stepping on it. We all have our own ways, like I used to explain when I was a ward maid and preferred taking my tea cart up the stairs to using the lift.” She made this pitiful statement with a fixed smile that compressed her cheeks upward, forcing her eyes to pop.

I gave no thought to Livonia’s sensitivity or Judy’s imperturbability. I was picturing with painful clarity the deflated look on the face of the wardress when discovering that Wisteria Whitworth had escaped her clutches by fleeing Perdition Hall with Carson Grant. Back into a world of sunlight and hope—where far from being sneered at by the arbiters of fashion for the hair that had turned white from all she had endured, Wisteria set a trend that would one day be called platinum blond.

“Who was it that did this?” Mr. Plunket asked Mrs. Foot while patting her shoulder. “Who turned your nice cozy kitchen into an empty warehouse, the sort we used to hole up in when you, Boris, and me was homeless?”

Before I could absorb this information, the cry “Them!” broke from Mrs. Foot’s lips. It carried with it a fearsome weight suggestive of mutant life-forms intent on reducing Earth to a series of crop circles, or an annual convention of euthanasia enthusiasts, or . . . Thumper, who had been standing discreetly behind me, gave a whine that indicated his guess was a truckload of dog-catchers.

“Them?” Livonia whispered.

“Georges LeBois was the steamroller.”

“Who?” Judy asked in the voice of one not wishing to be overly nosy.

“The director of
Here Comes the Bride
,” I told her.

“And the other one. Only too eager he was to shove in his oar.” Mrs. Foot reached up to pat the hand with which Mr. Plunket was still patting her shoulder.

“Dr. Rowley?” I assumed she wouldn’t have used that barbed inflection if she meant Lord Belfrey.

“Not him, sensible hardworking man that he is, he went home to get his rest. No, your husband—it was him that stole my kitchen.”

“Stole” was an odd way of putting the matter. But then, Mrs. Foot had struck me as being on the far side of odd from our first encounter. It was Thumper who took umbrage. Coming out
from behind me, he sat at my side and stared down the offender, to no effect because she gave no sign of being aware of his presence. Well, I thought, so that was why Ben hadn’t been to bed or turned up after I was awake. I pictured him preparing my supper and putting together a meal of sorts for Georges LeBois under conditions that must have revolted his professional chef’s soul. After which he would have felt morally obliged to work at restoring the kitchen to some degree of hygienic acceptability without going so far as to burn it down and start from scratch.

The look Mrs. Foot directed my way was not a pleasant one; gone was all affability and eager servitude as befitted a representative of Lord Belfrey’s household. The eyes that I had thought colorless burned with a greenish-yellow fire. I felt certain that had there been a straitjacket to hand she would have bundled me into it and yanked the cords tight enough to give me the eighteen-inch waist Carson Grant had so admired in Wisteria Whitworth. Except in my case that elusive measurement would also become my bust and hip size.

“I’m sure my husband didn’t mean to offend . . .” I began.

“Offend!” She spat the word across the room, causing Judy to duck her head and Livonia to cower in her chair. Thumper so far forgot his status as an unwanted guest to issue a growl, which brought a glower to Mr. Plunket’s face but did nothing to put a dent in Mrs. Foot’s rage. “Offend! That doesn’t say nothing to how I felt. Heartbroken is what I was, and still am that your husband that his lordship took in along with you, Mrs., made off with Whitey right under my nose without so much as a
How do you feel about having your beloved pet marched away like he’s vermin
?”

“And Whitey is?” said Judy.

“Her rat,” responded Mr. Plunket mournfully.

“Cat?” Hope that I had misheard kept my knees from buckling.

“Yes, yes,” Livonia pleaded, “do let it be a dear little kitty.”

“Rat!” Mr. Plunket speeded up his patting of Mrs. Foot’s shoulder. “Bought for her three Christmases back by Boris and
me. Part Abyssinian, part Polish, with a little Italian on his father’s side, the pet shop owner told us, and he’d have given us the pedigree papers to prove it if he could have laid his hand on them right there and then. A dear little fellow is Whitey, always cheerful and chirpy in his cage when he’d go in it.”

“Where’d he hang out the rest of the time?” In my opinion, Judy didn’t exude the requisite amount of horror, even in the face of Mrs. Foot’s lugubrious response.

“Up among the saucepans that till last night hung from them hooks above the stove—when he wasn’t in my apron pocket, that is. Loved to swing his self dizzy from the frying pan, did the little darling. You should have seen how Boris’s face would melt watching him. Said Whitey’s antics was better than any trapeze artist in any circus!”