The Pigeon Pie Mystery (4 page)

No one slept that night for fear of the train being missed. Even the canary in its cage draped with black velvet failed to put its head under its wing. Mink was still far from her dreams when Pooki came in with a tea-tray covered with a serviette, bearing a cup of tea, a small milk jug, a sugar basin, and thin slices of bread and butter. The Princess lifted her head to get a better look at her. Having succumbed to Western attire for the occasion, she was wearing servant’s mourning, a simple black dress with a crape collar and cuffs. Her hair, with its occasional flicker of silver, was coiled into a plump bun.

“How does the corset feel?” asked the Princess.

“Like I am being tortured, ma’am,” she replied. “I have made some mourning trousers for Albert,” she added, referring to the Maharaja’s tiny monkey.

“He’s been hiding in my father’s study ever since he passed away,” said Mink, sitting up.

“That is where I found him, ma’am,” said the servant, putting the tray on the Princess’s lap.

Mink looked down. “There’s something sticking out of your boot.”

“It is a bay leaf, ma’am. I put it there to ward off lightning. It is very inauspicious during a funeral. My grandmother was buried during a storm and her soul has never rested. She comes to see me at least once a week, all the way from India. I thought I was rid of her when she died. While I loved the Maharaja more than I can say, I do not want to see him ever again.”

Mink sipped her tea, hoping that the worst of it was over. “All those people who came to the house to pay their respects … I can’t say all of them were respectful of my father when he was alive.”

“Some just came out of curiosity after what was in the papers following the inquest, ma’am,” said the maid, attending to the fire. “Everyone was talking about it, and people are very nosey.”

“Thank God I didn’t go.”

Pooki had just laid out her mistress’s clothes when the peculiar noise sounded. They both assumed that it was Mrs. Wilson blowing her perpetually blocked nose. The servant, who suffered from an allergy to flour, had spent the last few days baking widow’s tears for the mourners, whose appetites for the small pastries dusted with icing sugar matched their inquisitiveness. Mink heard the noise again when she sat down for breakfast, unsettled by her father’s empty seat. “That sound is coming from a nose even longer than Mrs. Wilson’s,” she said, standing up. Abandoning her kidneys, she followed it to the hall and looked out of the window. Standing in the driveway was the undertaker. But instead of four horses, the open-mouthed Princess saw shackled to the hearse a caparisoned Indian elephant, plumes of black ostrich feathers mounted on its head.

The servants spent the next forty-seven minutes flicking their eyes to the clocks as they performed their duties, waiting for the
bearers to arrive. Despite the undertaker’s insistence that they were on their way, the Princess stood smoking at the morning room window with its view of the drive. Eventually they turned up, blaming a broken wheel for the delay. But the men turned out to be apprentices, which was entirely the fault of the deceased, who had stipulated an age limit for reasons of aesthetics. As slight as clerks, they found themselves unable to shoulder the devastating consequences of the Maharaja’s weakness for venison pie and shirt-sleeve pudding. During the struggle, two of their top hats were knocked to the ground, and a muddied gardener was called from his carpet bedding to assist. The coffin pitched and rolled as if on a high sea as it eventually found its way into the hearse. The mourners watched from their carriages, hands over their mouths, pretending not to look.

The procession moved out of the drive, headed by the undertaker dressed in a black overcoat, the crape weepers on his top hat fluttering in the breeze. Next came the mutes, finally extracted from their resolute position under the portico. They were now sunk in a depression as black as their coats, brought on by the drink some of the mourners had slipped them out of mischief behind the butler’s back. As they walked, what had started off as the odd fraudulent tear during their time at the front door progressed into a shoulder-shaking flood, which no turncock could halt. They were followed by three feathermen, holding four-foot confections of black ostrich feathers above their heads, who struggled to see where they were going. The elephant-drawn hearse followed, flanked by the exhausted bearers longing for their lunch, muttering that such a beast was the only thing strong enough for the job.

Mink sat alone in the family carriage, bitterly regretting her father’s showmanship, which would inevitably get into the papers. A number of the vehicles that followed were empty, a common practice indulged by those unable to attend. But the Princess
suspected that some of her father’s friends who had enjoyed his legendary indulgences were trying to avoid the taint of scandal. She glanced round, trying to see whether Mark Cavendish was in the cortège. Still uncertain, she stared ahead, and prayed that the lumbering procession would pick up speed so they wouldn’t miss the train.

But no one had foreseen the curiosity of the elephant. The bearers found themselves frequently goosed by an inquisitive trunk, which slowed the journey while decency was restored. The children en route sacrificed their penny buns to the colossal animal with wrinkly knees, its sudden halt causing the exasperated drivers behind to yank on their reins to avoid a shunt.

Finally they arrived at Waterloo, rattling over the cobbles of the private terminus of the Necropolis Railway. Its very name unsettled the souls of the living, for its principal passengers never returned from the journey to Brookwood Cemetery. The mourners eased themselves out of their carriages, the men fiddling with their black crape sashes across their left shoulders, an accessory stipulated in the Maharaja’s instructions that had subsequently gone out of funeral fashion. By now the Princess had begun to feel sick, as there were only two minutes before the train was due to depart. A whistle sounded, and for a moment she imagined the humiliation of having to return home with the coffin. A quietly furious station-master appeared at her side, his outrage completed by the elephant droppings in his courtyard. He marched them up a spotless stone staircase, flanked with palms, to one of the first-class waiting rooms opposite the platform. While the rest of the party remained standing, the mutes collapsed onto the seats and started to snore. Meanwhile, the coffin was heaved into a once steam-powered lift, which had been broken by the unrelenting weight of aristocratic indulgence. It was now hand-operated by Snub the turner, who set to work and offered up a prayer for a cure for corpulence.

Upstairs the train itched to leave its buffers, impatient smoke billowing down its green flanks. With its first-, second-, and third-class carriages, it looked like any other except for the hearse vans at the rear, one of the doors still open. The mourners for the other funerals were already on board, and a number stuck their heads out the windows, demanding to know the reason for the delay. But Snub was still labouring with his handle, invoking the help of gods in whom he didn’t even believe. Passengers in the third-class carriage, realising that the delay was due to the Maharaja’s contingent, gave up heckling the station-master, and shouted to them to get a move on. Heads turned away, pretending not to hear, which only increased their fury, and insults started to fly. A carriage door was flung open, and two mourners ran out, only to be herded into a waiting room by the terrified staff.

The foreign deities must have been listening, for the long-awaited coffin suddenly appeared like a divine apparition. The staff winced as they lifted it onto their shoulders and carried it to the hearse van. Eventually the boxed Maharaja slid onto the shelf bearing his name, and his friends, acquaintances, and daughter rushed to their allotted compartment.

As the train pulled out, they sat in silence, looking at their funeral gloves. The vicar, who had baptised the deceased all those years ago, tried to strike up conversation, resorting to the national obsession: “Isn’t it a lovely day?” But the only sound came from the slumped mutes muttering in their dreams. Ignoring Mark Cavendish’s empty seat, Mink rested her forehead against the window, and watched as men pulled off their caps on seeing the train, and crossed themselves in dread.

Forty long minutes later, they arrived at the cemetery built to alleviate London’s overcrowded graveyards. Said to be the largest and most beautiful in England, its five hundred acres of Surrey woodland and expanses of heather and rhododendrons sent the living into raptures. Much was made of the separate burial
grounds for certain members of society, including bakers, actors, and Swedes. The train stopped at North Station, where the mourners attending funerals in the Nonconformist and Roman Catholic grounds got out, and, with a backwards glance at the offending party, trooped into private waiting rooms. The train continued to the South Station in the Anglican ground, past sumptuous statuary that would make even an atheist sigh. Once the passengers had left the train, two gravediggers carried the collapsed mutes to a shed and shut the door. United by silence, the Maharaja’s party stood in a waiting room, where two women who hadn’t been invited joined them. The Princess glanced at their careful ringlets, wondering how they knew her father. She realised their provenance when an official came to escort the party to the chapel. For they blushed at the sign on the door that forbade vagrants, beggars, itinerant musicians, and females of doubtful persuasion to enter.

After the service, the mourners followed the bier down a path, the weak sun failing to warm them. But instead of the freshly dug grave Mink was expecting, she found herself in front of a Portland stone mausoleum resembling the palace of Prindur. They stepped inside, their feet uncomfortably loud on the cold marble floor. The Princess shivered in the frigid air, and watched with dread as the coffin was lowered into a brick hole in the ground that would shortly be sealed. Unable to leave him, she hung back when the mourners left for some cold beef in the refreshment room. As she gazed at the wreaths, her eye was drawn to one of neat white roses, which the Maharaja had feared would never come. Kneeling down, she looked at the black-edged card with a crowned royal cipher on which was written “In Sorrowing Memory.” It was signed “Victoria RI.”

A VISITOR WAS WAITING FOR
the Princess when she finally returned home, having slept through most of the journey. He sat
eating the last of the widow’s tears in the drawing room, where the furniture had been pushed back into position and the windows opened to clear the air. She had never liked seeing Bartholomew Grimes at the house, as the lawyer’s visits always left her father in a rage. As she sat down opposite him, she soon realised that his over-consumption of mourning cakes was a result of nerves rather than appetite. It took a while for him to get to the point, momentarily alighting on topics Mink knew had no relation to his visit, including the crisis in Crete and the proposed electric railway running from Kensington to Charing Cross.

Finally he brushed off a non-existent piece of fluff from his trousers, and said that for years her father had refused to listen to his advice, and that it was only out of concern for the family that he had kept returning to the house to give it. He then explained that the Maharaja had routinely spent more than the annual stipend the British Government had paid him since he signed the treaty following the annexation of Prindur. As a result of the Maharaja’s frequent appeals, the Government had given him a loan against the house to help repay his debts incurred at the gambling tables. The lawyer held up a sheaf of bills. “As well as at the draper’s, the gunsmith’s, the wine merchant’s, the carriage builder’s, the furrier’s, the hatter’s, the bootmaker’s, the goldsmith’s, the exotic animal dealer’s, and …” He squinted to read the piece of paper in front of him. “The corset maker’s.” The borrowing against the house was on condition that it would be sold on the Maharaja’s death, he added, at which point, according to the treaty, the Government pension would also come to an end.

“I trust he never told you?” the lawyer asked, gripping the edge of the papers. The silence confirmed his suspicion.

Eventually the man with crumbs in his whiskers picked up his hat and cane, and left without another word. The Princess continued staring at the floor, seeing the remains of her life finally collapse, having completely forgotten to ring the bell for the visitor to be shown out.

CHAPTER II
Albert Is Sold to a Travelling Zoo