Unholy Alliance (9 page)

“Snow’s too deep, even though it stopped
before noon. But in the morning, if you like, we’ll put on some big
boots and have a go. Bergeron has expressed an interest in seeing
my racehorses.”

“You’re on,” Marc said as they approached the
door to the front parlour on the left, directly across from the
library. Just beyond it was the foyer and the butler’s office. Its
door was ajar, and Marc could see Graves Chilton seated at an
elegant davenport, poring over some papers.

“Alfred used to keep my household accounts,”
explained Macaulay, “and Chilton has offered to do the same, for
which I’m extremely grateful. Chilton seems a bit unctuous, and
overly firm with the staff perhaps, but he’s very, very
competent.”

They entered the parlour and sat down in
comfortable chairs near the French doors. Beyond the verandah that
lay just outside them the bright moonlight danced crystalline on
the rolling, unblemished landscape of snow, rimmed by a dozen blue
spruce, their lower branches pillowed in drifts. The two men sat
companionably for half an hour, consciously avoiding the
afternoon’s events and smoking their pipes with slow satisfaction.
Macaulay began to talk about his collection of rare books and his
interest in Britain’s latest writing sensation, novelist Charles
Dickens.

“My Beth is a great admirer of his,” Marc
said.

“Well, then, Marc, tell her I have his new
work,
Nicholas Nickleby
, just arrived from New York. I’ve
got it beside my bed. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll give it
to you to take home to her when you go.”

“That’s awfully good of you, Garnet, but
there’s no hurry – ”

“I’ve also got a Shakespeare folio you might
want to browse through while you’re here. It’s only a valuable
facsimile but – ”

“I’d love to see it,” Marc said.

They left the parlour and walked slowly down
the central hall towards the rotunda and the northwest wing. The
library was now dark, but as they passed the billiard-room they
heard the glassy click of billiard balls and a whoop of triumph
from Daniel Bérubé.

“Hincks and Bérubé are getting along well,”
Macaulay said.

“I wonder if LaFontaine plays whist or
piquet.”

“I should think poker would be his game.”

They were crossing the tiled rotunda towards
the master bedroom at the near end of the northwest wing when they
were stopped in their tracks by a loud crash, as of crockery
breaking, followed by a high, female cry.

“My God!” Macaulay said. “What was that?”

“It came from the servants quarters,” Marc
said.

“We’d better have a look,” Macaulay said, but
Marc had already wheeled and made for the door to the northeast
wing.

“Straight ahead and down the steps,” Macaulay
shouted. “It has to be in the kitchen!”

The servants wing was entered through a
narrow hallway and down four steps. Marc noticed to his left, in
passing, what appeared to be a pantry or storeroom. Just past it,
an even narrower hallway opened at right angles, but he plunged
straight ahead and found himself abruptly in Elmgrove’s
kitchen.

In the middle of a very large, low-ceilinged
room – ringed by metal sinks, polished wooden benches, thick-legged
tables, racks of cooking pots and utensils, and an enormous
woodstove – sat Mrs. Blodgett on the floor amid the remains of a
shattered crockery pot. Her round blue eyes in her plump pink face
looked permanently startled, as if any attempt to relax their
rigidity might unleash the frustration, pain and pure chagrin that
lay penned up behind them. She was struggling to slide her short,
bare legs far enough under her so that she could lever her bulk
upwards with the splayed fingers of both hands, but the slimy
contents of the pot were rendering this effort futile.

“
Please
, Mrs. Blodgett, let me help
you up,” pleaded the skinny young woman pawing at her right elbow.
“You’ll do yerself some damage!”

“Leave off, Tillie! You’ll disrupt my
arthritis!”

“It’s yer arthritis that got you down
there!”

“Don’t get snippy with me, missy, I – ooh.”
At this elongated sigh Mrs. Blodgett sat fully upright and grasped
her right elbow with her left hand.

“Come and help me get her up,” Macaulay said,
brushing by Marc and moving to the stricken cook. “It’s all right,
Mrs. B., the gentleman and I will get you into your chair.”

“Oh, Mister Mac, I didn’t want you to see me
like this! I’m such a stupid old woman, I – ”

“No need to apologize,” Macaulay said as he
and Marc gently raised her to her feet. “Tillie, fetch a towel so
we can wipe the wet off your mistress’s legs.”

While Tillie scooted over to a nearby
towel-rack, Marc and Macaulay helped Mrs. Blodgett into a padded
rocking-chair in one corner of the room. Macaulay, ever the
gentleman, introduced Marc to his cook and handed her his silk
handkerchief. Her bosom rose and fell beneath her spattered apron.
As she rubbed her hands together in agitation, Marc noticed the
ugly nodes of arthritis on every joint – swollen and painful.

“That was me best crock, too,” she said, “and
them was pickles I planned to serve at luncheon tomorrow.”

“There, there, Mrs. B., we’ve got lots of
crocks and a cellar full of preserves. It’s
you
we can’t
replace.”

“Oh, Mister Mac, you’ll make me cry,” she
said as a single tear squeezed out and rolled over one pink cheek.
“An’ that ain’t a pretty sight – at my age.”

Tillie arrived with a towel and began drying
Mrs. Blodgett’s legs. “You shouldn’t’ve been carryin’ that pot,
should she?” Tillie said.

At this moment someone else rushed into the
room from the hallway. “Carryin’
what
pot?”

“Now don’t
you
start, Hetty Janes,”
Mrs. Blodgett said. “I got enough worries without you girls wastin’
time fussin’ over an old woman who’s well past it!”

“This is Hetty,” Macaulay said to Marc.
“Tillie’s sister.”

Almost her twin, Marc thought, as he
introduced himself. The kitchen maids were both stick-thin with big
brown eyes and shrivelled chins.

“I begged her to stop liftin’ things,” Hetty
said to her master.

“I won’t be begged,” Mrs. Blodgett said.

“There is no need for you to lift anything in
here heavier than a scone,” Macaulay said. “You are my cook and a
valued member of this household. Your cooking alone may win the
French guests over to our cause. Let Hetty and Tillie
help.
You’ve trained them well enough, haven’t you? And if anything heavy
needs carting about, call Bragg. Or, better still, I’ll have
Struthers’ lad, Cal, come in here from the stables after four
o’clock and be at your beck and call till bedtime.”

Mrs. Blodgett snorted, “We’ll just trip over
him!” Then she clutched her elbow and released a slow moan.

“I want you to let Tillie tuck you in right
now, Mrs. B.,” Macaulay said. “And on Saturday, I’m going to bring
the doctor back here to have a closer look at you.”

“I won’t have no truck with witch doctors!”
she cried.

Macaulay then did an unexpected thing. He
leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “Try to get some sleep,
if you can.”

As Marc and Macaulay turned towards the door,
Mrs. Blodgett called after them, “It ain’t been the same since
Alfred left us, has it?”

The hallway was dark and Marc picked his way
up the steps. As they passed the pantry on their right, Marc heard
a giggle, very much female and undeniably sexual. Bragg and
Priscilla, he thought, behaving like servants everywhere. Perhaps
the new butler, however, had not approved, which might explain the
tension among the three in the dining-room earlier. If Macaulay
heard the giggle, he did not let on.

Seconds later they were back in the well-lit
rotunda.

“Mrs. B. and Alfred Harkness were very
close,” Macaulay said. “They came here as young employees in my
father’s time, one a widower, the other a widow.”

“Didn’t he have a brother?” Marc asked,
recalling some gossip he had heard from Charlene’s beau, Jasper
Hogg.

Macaulay’s face darkened. “He did. Giles
Harkness worked in the stables. He was my coachman and a wizard
with the horses.”

“
Was
?”

“He left in a great huff when he learned that
Graves Chilton was on his way here to take Alfred’s place.”

“But Chilton’s your butler, not the
coachman.”

“Indeed. But believe it or not, Giles had
thoughts of taking over from Alfred. But I wouldn’t let him near a
china cup or a scullery maid. I may have let him know that a bit
too sharply. At any rate he’s gone off somewhere, and I’m short a
man in the stables.”

“If anyone might have been envious of
Chilton’s appointment, I’d have thought it would be Bragg.”

“True enough. But Bragg likes it where he is.
The fellow hasn’t an ounce of ambition in him.”

They were at the door to the master bedroom.
Through the nearby door to the bathroom they could hear someone
singing lustily, in French.

“Well, it’s nice to see Mr. Tremblay likes
something
in Upper Canada,” Macaulay said.

They entered the bedroom, and Macaulay went
over to a table beside the four-poster bed and brought back two
large tomes. “Tell your Beth that she can keep the Dickens as long
as she likes. She may find little time for reading once the baby
arrives.”

“It’s not due for another six weeks,” Marc
said.

“That’s what Elizabeth thought when our
firstborn surprised us.”

“I’ll have a leisurely gander at this
Shakespearean treasure in my spare moments here,” Marc said at the
door. “You’re not concerned about its security?” he added, stroking
the leather cover of the rare folio.

“Not at all. I trust my servants as I would
my family. Leave it beside your bed. It’ll be there whenever you
get back.”

Marc thanked Macaulay and wished him
good-night He crossed the hall to his own bedroom door opposite. As
he was easing it closed, he sensed some movement on the other side
of the rotunda. It was Graves Chilton. He had just emerged from the
stairwell to the servants quarters. His jacket was buttoned
crookedly and his pomaded orange hair poked up in unintended
disarray. He glanced about warily, then scuttled into his rooms a
few feet away. That’s odd, Marc thought; Chilton had not been in
the kitchen or within earshot during the noisy incident with Mrs.
Blodgett. Where had he been skulking? Just then Marc spotted Austin
Bragg descending the marble stairway from the upper floor of the
northwest wing, an empty scuttle in his hand. Marc now had a pretty
good idea where Chilton had been, and whom he had been with.
Intrigue amongst the servants: that’s all they needed this
week!

Marc crawled into bed and opened the
Shakespeare folio. Halfway through
Twelfth Night
he fell
asleep.

***

Breakfast at Elmgrove was offered English-style.
Sausages, pancakes, scrambled eggs and French toast were placed
over chafing-dishes on the sideboard in the dining-room and
replenished periodically by the staff. The guests were free to
wander in as they pleased and help themselves. The Thursday meeting
was scheduled for eleven o’clock, which left plenty of time to
sleep in, or rise early to prepare for the event or take some
exercise outdoors. Marc awoke at eight, made his ablutions (with
hot water supplied promptly by the ‘amorous’ parlour-maid,
Priscilla Finch), dressed himself in casual clothes, and made his
way to the dining-room. He expected he might find Macaulay already
there, as they had arranged to go walking at nine-fifteen. As Marc
approached the half-open door, he was startled by a sudden burst of
invective, loud and in unintelligible French. The voice was that of
Maurice Tremblay, shaking with rage. Next came a low, cautioning
response, unmistakeably the voice of Louis LaFontaine. The only
word that was clear to Marc had been uttered by Tremblay:
vendu
– sell-out, traitor.

Marc deliberately rattled the door-handle,
paused until the voices ceased, and then entered the room with a
booming, “
Bon matin, messieurs! Un bel jour,
n-est-ce-pas?”

LaFontaine had quickly regained his aplomb,
and greeted Marc politely. Tremblay had turned away and was trying
to spoon some scrambled egg out of its dish with a trembling left
hand. Fortunately for all concerned, Macaulay and Bergeron came
into the room at this point, already talking about the racehorses
awaiting their admiration in the stables. LaFontaine excused
himself, and a minute later, with his breakfast untouched, Tremblay
left also. Bérubé apparently had decided to sleep in.

“I could hear him snoring away in there,”
Bergeron said to Marc in French. “Sleeps like a hog. I barely got a
wink.”

After their breakfast, Marc, Macaulay and
Bergeron dressed warmly, put on a pair of snowboots, and headed out
the front door. Chilton was back at his desk in the little office
off the foyer, thumbing through his master’s accounts. In the
crisp, nipping air of the morning, the delegates walked along the
winding trail that eventually met the Kingston Road. No fresh snow
had fallen overnight, so it was obvious to them that no man, beast
or vehicle had come into Elmgrove via the main drive. They had gone
only a few hundred yards when Macaulay steered them towards a
pleasant path – again untrodden – that took them through a spruce
grove and back out to the east side of the manor house. Farther off
to the east and slightly to the north, the horse-stables and
cow-barn lay hunched down in the snow. A well-used, cleared path
linked these outbuildings with the back door of the house, along
which the hired help would make their way, hauling firewood,
bringing in fresh milk for breakfast, or scurrying off to the
privies to empty the chamber-pots.

Undeterred by the language barrier, and with
an occasional assist from Marc, Macaulay and Bergeron strolled
along this path, discussing the pedigree and unmatchable qualities
of Macaulay’s pair of prize Arabians, who awaited them in the barn
just ahead. Marc noticed two things: halfway to the stables a thick
grove of cedars acted as a welcome windbreak; and beyond the
cow-barn sat a stone cottage with smoke curling out of its
chimney.