The Grub-And-Stakers Pinch a Poke (21 page)

“Ill send Osbert down to set the table. You did say the turkey would be ready in half an hour or so?”

“Actually I didn’t, but it probably will be. Ask Carolus what he wants to drink that isn’t alcoholic.”

“Silly wench. If it isn’t alcoholic, Carolus won’t want it.”

Arethusa took a sip of her own sherry and went upstairs, carrying a separate plate of crackers and a hefty wedge of cheddar to tide her over. Archie gazed after her like a lovelorn whippet.

“You know, it seems totally incredible that a woman like her could be Osbert’s aunt.”

“Osbert often finds it so,” Dittany agreed. “You don’t mind if we eat supper here in the kitchen? We always do, when it’s just family.”

“Not at all.” Archie proved his point by sitting down again.

“Agents count as family, pretty much. This Bledsoe fellow, has Arethusa known him long?”

“Only since she was crowned reigning queen of the roguish regency romance. They happened to sit together on the plane coming back and he gave her his smoked peanuts. But it wasn’t the start of something beautiful, if that’s what you’re wondering. Don’t you remember Jenson ThorbisherFreep mentioning this morning that Carolus is going to marry his daughter?”

“Did he really? I must have been thinking of something else at the time. So the fact that Bledsoe happened to be playing Arethusa’s husband in Dangerous Dan has no bearing whatsoever on their real-life relationship.”

Archie, who’d shown no appetite hitherto for the cheese and crackers, now helped himself to a lavish handful. “Merely the easy camaraderie of the stage,” he amplified, spraying a few crumbs in his eagerness to get his point across. “Just a couple of ships passing in the night.”

“That seems to be the drift,” Dittany agreed. With a what-theheck gesture, she dumped the rest of the turkey into the pan. “Has Daniel said anything yet about the play?”

“Not the kind of anything you mean. He’s talked a great deal about acting techniques and so forth, mostly with Andy. Arethusa rather seems to prefer to talk with me.”

The poor, deluded fish, Dittany thought sympathetically. The only person Arethusa genuinely enjoyed talking to was herself.

What she’d probably been doing all day was lolling around with a queenly smile playing about her ruby lips, letting Archie natter on as he pleased while she spun herself yet another sugary fantasia about her dauntless though often boring hero, Sir Percy, and his pea-brained light of love, Lady Ermintrude; which she’d subsequently write down and expect Dittany to type for her. Archie burbled on about Arethusa’s astonishing depth of understanding while Dittany allowed a queenly smile to play about her lips and wondered whether to serve noodles, rice, or potatoes with the turkey.

Noodles, she decided, those were quickest. She was in the pantry trying to discover whether in fact she had any on hand when Archie interrupted himself to remark, “Somebody’s at the door, Dittany.”

Roger Munson with the Chinese checkers board? No, Roger knew better than to come calling just at suppertime. Dittany started to wipe her hands on her apron, realized she wasn’t wearing one, took a quick swipe with a paper towel instead, and went to find out who it was. She found herself staring at a solid mass of black wool broadcloth.

“Jenson!” she exclaimed. “Why aren’t you home with Wilhedra?”

“Well may you ask.”

The sepulchral voice was not Jenson ThorbisherFreep’s. Nor, for that matter, was the cloak. The inopportune visitor was unequivocally Leander Hellespont.

“For goodness’ sake,” was her reaction. “You’re the last person I expected to see. What can I do for you, Mr. Hellespont?”

“You can lead me to Cleopatra.”

He stalked into the kitchen like the statue of the Commendatore coming to dine with Don Juan. When he was directly under the light, he flung back his head, contorted his gaunt visage into an expression that might be intended to depict the extremity of emotional suffering or a bad case of gastritis, and clenched his two fists against those upper breadths of his cloak under which his breast was presumably located.

“I am dying, Egypt, dying; only I here importune death awhile, until of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips.”

“Are you sure you’ve got the right house, Mr. Hellespont?” said Dittany. “Cleopatra isn’t here.”

“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got’st thou that goose look?”

Archie leaped up from his chair to Dittany’s side without appearing to touch the linoleum in between. “Now look here, you-“

“No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that! You mar all wf this starting.”

“I’ll mar you with some finishing if you don’t quit insulting my client’s wife. What do you think you’re raving about?”

“Some say he’s mad; others that lesser hate him do call it valiant fury; but for certain he cannot buckle his distemper’d cause within the belt of rule. What I am talking about, sirrah, is that I crave utterance with my Lady Macbeth, my Desdemona, my Gertrude, nay, e’en perchance my Iphigenia!”

“You said you were looking for Cleopatra.”

“O ye that have ears and hear not! I seek her in histrionic association with whom my loftiest aspirations as a thespian may yet be fulfilled. Twas but yestreen I did observe her strutting and fretting a wasted hour upon the stage in a paltry melodrama penned, I was told, by one who styles himself her nephew, resident of this dwelling.”

Light began at last to glimmer. “Would you by any chance be looking for my husband’s Aunt Arethusa?” Dittany asked him.

“Yes! Yes, i’ sooth, ‘tis she!” Hellespont flung himself to his knees, letting his cape swirl artistically about him regardless of the fact that the linoleum was by now somewhat badly tracked up, and lifted clasped hands in the classic gesture of supplication. “Oh, lead me, lead me to her!”

Dittany shook her head. “Sorry, she’s busy just now. Mr. Hellespont, I don’t like to seem inhospitable but you’ve called at an awfully inconvenient time. I was starting to get supper on the table and I’m afraid I can’t ask you to join us, eh, because there’s just about enough to go around as it is.”

“Food!” He dismissed the entire subject of gastronomy with a disdainful wave of his hand. “I offer food for the spirit, food for the intellect, and five percent of the gate.”

“Ten,” Archie replied automatically as a conscientious agent naturally would. “Mr. Hellespont, are you trying to tell us you want Miss Arethusa Monk to join you in some theatrical enterprise?”

“I will elevate her to the heights!”

“She’s already elevated,” said Dittany.

The actor did a commendable job of registering amused disbelief, considering that his Irvingesque features were not well adapted to levity. “Not as Arethusa Monk, surely. I’ve never come upon that name in Variety.”

“Try the Hearts and Flowers Gazette. She’s the reigning queen of regency romance, didn’t you know that?”

“Pah! Who does regency drama these days?”

“Who’s talking about drama? Arethusa’s an author.”

“A what?”

“She writes books.”

“Books!” He dismissed the entire subject of bibliography, too. “I will make her rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“She’s already richer than she needs to be and she doesn’t dream of avarice. She dreams of being abducted by a member of the Hellfire Club.”

“I’ll abduct her!”

“You’ll be sorry if you do. She’ll eat you out of house and home.”

“I will bring the world to her feet,” the would-be Pygmalion insisted, though Dittany detected just a hint of lessening fervor.

“It’s already there,” she assured him. “Some of it anyway. Mr.

Hellespont, you don’t seem to understand. Arethusa Monk has achieved a position of preeminence in her chosen sector of the literary field.”

“Writing sentimental drivel.”

Then he did understand. However, Dittany was not about to give ground. “If you want to talk business with my husband’s aunt, why don’t you telephone her some day this week at her own house and ask her for an appointment?”

“Appointment? Faugh! I come as a harbinger of immortality and you try to fob me off with an appointment.”

Hellespont turned away from her in haughty disdain, whipping his cloak in so wide a circle that it almost knocked the pans off the stove. He’d had dress weights sewn into the hem, the old popinjay, was Dittany’s surmise. But where was this other whirl coming from?

All of a sudden, the kitchen had become a veritable maelstrom of flapping black broadcloth.

“Ungh!”

“Urffl”

“Confound-“

“You!”

Jenson ThorbisherFreep was first to recover his aplomb. “Sorry, Dittany, I should have knocked before I barged in. Leander, I never expected to find you here.”

“He was looking for Cleopatra,” Dittany took it upon herself to explain, as Hellespont seemed completely preoccupied with getting his cloak untangled from the towel rack.

The thespian furled the last breath of his cloak and gave her a cold look. “I was looking for a leading lady,” he amended. “Surely, Jenson, you must agree that the superb actress who chooses for some reason I cannot fathom to let herself be known as Arethusa Monk was grievously miscast in that trumpery bit of fustian we were constrained to sit through last night. And yet there were moments of transcendence. That ineffable gesture, for instance, when she clasped the dying feedbag man to her bosom! Tender, protective, ferociously possessive! The eternal mother! The anguished spouse! Venus toute entiere d sa proie attach^.”

“Actually, Carolus was squirming around and Arethusa was trying to make him lie still,” said Dittany.

“Ah yes, Carolus.” Jenson became all solicitude. “How is the dear fellow?”

“Bearing up, more or less. He’s playing cribbage with Osbert.

And Archie is helping me get supper.” She hoped Jenson would take the hint and leave, preferably accompanied by Hellespont. She could do without what would no doubt ensue should the two discover that Arethusa was actually in the house.

Jenson did get her message, though he got it wrong. “No, no, my dear, I can’t stay. I wouldn’t dream of imposing on your hospitality twice in one day. I came out to get Wilhedra’s prescription filled and thought I might as well pop over for a moment to see how our other patient is doing. You’re quite sure Carolus is resting comfortably?”

“I’m sure he’d let us know if he weren’t,” Dittany assured the putative father-in-law. “Carolus isn’t the bashful type, we’ve discovered.

Wilhedra’s doing all right, I hope? I spoke with her on the phone a while back.”

“You are the soul of kindness, dear lady. I’m sure your call was a great comfort to her. But I mustn’t keep you from your cooking. I’ll come again at a more convenient time. Leander, can I offer you a ride back to Scottsbeck?”

“Thank you, Jenson. My own conveyance awaits. Yet I shall not return to my ancestral soil until I have achieved my sworn purpose.”

“You mean persuading Arethusa Monk to join the Scottsbeck Players?”

“Nay, more! Far more! I will mold her, I will shape her. I will-“

“You will do no such thing!” Jenson thundered. “Arethusa Monk will have nothing to do with you or your claptrap crew of bumbling amateurs. If you try to badger her, Leander, you’ll answer to me!”

Hellespont bristled, but it was Archie who yelled. “How dare you take it upon yourself to speak for Miss Monk? She’s not your client.

You don’t own her!”

Jenson ThorbisherFreep drew his black cloak about him, threw back his hoary head, and gave Archie the kind of smile Sir John A.

MacDonald might have given Louis Kiel if they’d happened to meet in the kitchen of a very tired young housewife who was trying to warm up a panful of leftover turkey in giblet gravy. “That, my good man, is what you think. A bientdt, Dittany.”

Dittany picked up the glass of sherry she hadn’t yet got to taste, and took a calming sip. It failed to calm.

Archie shook his head and drained the last of his whiskey. That didn’t seem to be doing much good, either. “It can’t be true! Can it?”

“That would depend on what you mean by it,” Dittany replied cautiously.

“You know perfectly well what I mean. That Arethusa could have -that she and that fatuous lump of affectations-“

“Which fatuous lump of affectations? Want me to pour you another drink?”

“I’ll get it, thanks.”

Archie retired to the pantry. Perhaps he needed to be alone with his thoughts. Dittany checked the noodle water, discovered it was boiling, and put in the noodles. It was a good thing she’d decided on noodles; by now the half hour Arethusa had stipulated with such misguided optimism was well past.

Dittany herself was feeling the need of a good, hot, sit-down supper in contrast to the snacks she’d been subsisting on all day. She started to suggest that Archie hurry along the preparations by bringing some plates out with him, then decided she hadn’t better.

She was fond of the ancestral ironstone and he was pretty shaky at the moment.

So was she, now that she had a moment’s peace to take stock of her condition. The possibility of Arethusa’s becoming stepmother to Wilhedra was not one Dittany cared to contemplate with any degree of seriousness. Even Andy McNaster’s cobra would, as far as she was concerned, be a more acceptable addition to their family circle.

Taking things all around, she was sick and tired of the ThorbisherFreeps. She was sick of having backwater thespians barge in and emote all over her kitchen while she was trying to get a meal on the table. She was sickest of being niece-in-law to the reigning queen of regency romance.

Why couldn’t life be the way it used to be back in those halcyon days before Jenson ThorbisherFreep decided to get rid of his collection?

Even now, she and Osbert could be sitting side by side at their respective typewriters, he chasing a gang of rustlers down some sun-baked arroyo, she answering his fan mail. She adored writing long, chatty letters back to those kind readers who’d taken the time to pour out their admiration for Lex Laramie’s books and their own secret yearnings to be literary cowboys, too. Osbert adored having her write them because he himself always got bashful and couldn’t think of anything to say.