Lord Foxbridge Butts In

by Manners, Robert

  “Yes, my lord,” he sighed, “Very good, my lord. Will your lordship be dining out?”

  “I don’t think so, Pond,” I patted him on the back and headed for the sitting-room, “I’ll have dinner downstairs. I won’t need to change.”

  “Your lordship is not dining in a suit on my watch,” he said with extremely Nanny-like authority, heading me off at the door, “Into the bath, my lord.”

  I’d created a monster.

  *****

  Twister was absolutely gorgeous in white tie when, two nights later, he met me at the Ritz for dinner. I thought I looked rather nice, myself, in a crisp new shirt and waistcoat, and the most dashing tailcoat you ever saw, which had just arrived from the tailors’ moments before I was to step out of my room.

  “So, are you going to tell me how you figured it out?” Twister asked as he poured the champagne that was to be a perfect partner to the Whitstable oysters the waiter was industriously shucking beside the table. He was sparing no expense, and I felt as giddy as a deb at her first ball.

  “You have to tell me first what happened when you went to see Jacques de Vienne.”

  “He ran,” Twister shook his head in disbelief, “He took one look at the constables when we tracked him to a restaurant in Soho, and I guess realized we’d made the connection between him and Pavel. He dashed out the through the kitchen. Unfortunately, he ran right into the path of a lorry. He’s dead.”

  “Oh!” I gasped, loudly enough to startle the waiter, “How awful!”

  “It was rather ghastly,” he conceded with a sad tilt of his head, “But he did confess before he died, to me and the entire circle of onlookers who’d gathered at the scene. He was a Catholic, of course, I suppose he didn’t want to meet his maker with a murder on his conscience. He even had the dressing-gown belt on him, under his shirt like a rosary.”

  “That’s just so...ick” I shivered a little, partly from disgust and partly from dissatisfaction.

  “At least it prevents the necessity of a public trial, which would require the testimony of the night porter and the kitchen-boy at least, so your hotel is quite safe for the time being — provided the Press don’t get hold of it; but they haven’t yet, so probably won’t.”

  “How disgustingly tidy,” I remarked. It was much too convenient, all the evidence exposed in one go, all the action happening off-stage, to characters I’d not even met, “What about Horrocks?”

  “He’s done a bunk. His office and flat are empty, and we’ve had no sign of him.”

  “Well, that’s a little more realistic, at least,” I turned my attention to the oysters, which were delicious.

  “I’m glad you think so,” he laughed at me indulgently, “Now tell me how you figured out the entire thing in a couple of hours without leaving your hotel. I’m dying to know your methods.”

  “I didn’t solve it,” I admitted, “Agatha Christie did. Or Dorothy Sayers, or maybe Austin Freeman: I can’t remember, I read so many of those kinds of books.”

  “You got the solution out of a novel?” he was amazed.

  “Well, I remembered the plot when some of the features of the case reminded me of it, when I asked the Count if Pavel had been a rival. No brilliant feats of deduction, I’m afraid. It was a lucky guess based on a single word, abetted by a questionable taste in literature.”

  “I think you underestimate yourself,” he decided after a long silence, “You asked all the right questions, you convinced the Count to tell me the truth, you sent Pond to spy in the basement, and you made a half-dozen connections that I doubt anyone else could have made in the same amount of time.”

  “Every connection was a wild guess,” I felt oddly reluctant to accept a compliment from Twister, when with anybody else I’d be basking in the admiration, if not actually tooting my own horn, “And I asked dozens of idiotic questions, some of them were bound to be the right ones. I wouldn’t have been able to convince the Count to tell you the real story if I hadn’t already known you could be discreet about it. And I sent Pond to the basement because I’m too grand to go myself; servants always know more about what’s going on than they tell; when I was a child, I used to worm secrets out of the servants all the time, because servants will talk to a little boy. They wouldn’t talk to me now.”

  “Well, even if you think what you did was nothing special, I hope you don’t mind if I come along and pick your brains whenever a case like this one comes up.”

  “You?” I leaned over a little to put my face closer to the candle and looked at him seductively through my lashes, “You, Sir Oliver Paget, fifteenth baronet and Sergeant of the Yard, you can pick any part of my body you like.”

  “Filthy beast,” he laughed; but I could tell I’d heated him up under the collar, and called that a good day’s work.

  *****

  The Adventure of the Walls That Talked

  It was the last Friday of June, and I was prowling around my sitting room in a state of faintly anxious boredom; Andrjez had moved out of Hyacinth House the day before, having taken a bedsit in Belgravia to be closer to his work, and I was missing my morning playmate — he had been crawling through my window every day for the last week, waking me in the most entertaining manner, to which I had become all too accustomed.

  Also, it was one of those achingly gorgeous summer mornings that you get sometimes, sunny but not hot, with sweet-smelling breezes and multitudes of sparrows chirping their little heads off. The birdsong-laden breezes even penetrated to my little courtyard, filling me with a longing for the wide-open spaces. I wished I was at Foxbridge Castle, frolicking in the ferny woods and the dapple-shaded pools alongside the river.

  I could have gone frolicking in any of the numerous parks within a stone’s throw of my rooms, of course; but Pond would have made me wear a suit, if not a morning coat, and the idea of being fully dressed was anathema. I had to wait him out, hoping he’d go on an errand, or undertake a chore in the basement, whereupon I could escape to the Green Park in flannels and an open-necked shirt.

  Pond must have suspected my plan, though, as he couldn’t possibly have so many tasks in the bedroom and bathroom, where he had been pottering for the last hour or more. How many times could he rearrange my collars before he got bored? I was already crawling the walls, another fifteen minutes and I would meekly put on my suit so I could go out and play.

  But if he could waste time rearranging things, so could I — in a last ditch effort to out-potter my own valet, I started rearranging my bookcases. Pond, when replacing the hotel’s books with my own, had arranged them by size: the tallest on the bottom shelf and the shortest on top, widest on the outside and narrowest in the middle. It looked very nice, but it made finding a book impossible. When I want to look something up, I think of titles, and sometimes authors, not relative sizes.

  It gave me a thrill of naughty joy to undo his work — not out of hostility toward the man so much as playfulness, like teasing Nanny or setting up a practical joke on a beloved schoolmaster. However, I soon realized that Pond’s organizational skills were vastly superior to mine: once I’d completed my more idiosyncratic system, I found I was unable to get all the books back on the shelves; I had to do a little pruning to the collection in order to keep the volumes to which I most frequently referred visible, and put the rest in the cupboard underneath.

  The cupboard on the left of the fireplace was mostly empty, holding little more than a spare box of writing-paper, miscellaneous stationery, and some dusty white candles, leaving me plenty of space to store the extra books. Even more interesting, though, I noticed that it was substantially deeper than the shelves above — it was so deep, in fact, a child could have slept in it fairly comfortably. I crawled into the space to gauge its depth, estimating it at about three feet, a good bit deeper than the fireplace; it must have been recessed quite a way into the back wall.

  I briefly considered crawling into the cabinet and pulling the doors closed, in order to jump out at Pond and scare ten years off
his life; but I am and have always been averse to small enclosed spaces, and I was afraid the doors might latch shut from outside and I’d be trapped.

  While I was lying there, half in and half out of the cupboard, I was startled by the sound of voices coming through the wall. Nosiness is as much a part of my nature as breathing or eating, so I didn’t even pause to consider my options before leaping out and snatching a water-glass from the sideboard, diving back in and pressing it to the wall like a stethoscope so I could hear the conversation.

  I was momentarily thwarted, however, by the fact that the speakers weren’t speaking English; but I was not thwarted for long: one of the numerous useful skills I learned at Oxford, which had nothing to do with the subject I was reading (Modern Greats) but suggested numerous applications for the amateur detective, was the art of phonetic writing.

  There was this lecturer in Linguistics, you see, who was as dazzlingly handsome as one of those chaps who advertise shirt collars, and I used to attend his lectures solely for the pleasure of mooning after him for two hours every Wednesday morning. During one of those lectures, though, the handsome professor introduced us to the phonetic alphabet, which is used to record the sounds of languages independent of the various forms of writing with which they are usually expressed. Turning to the large chalkboard on the wall behind him, he scribbled out a series of hieroglyphs, which looked almost like Roman letters but with all sorts of squiggles and lines and dots, and asked us to guess what the writing meant. Many humorous solutions were put forward, from foreign quotations to comic verses, but it was actually the lyrics to “God Save the King.”

  Aside from their scholarly applications, these symbols could be used (the lecturer told us) to record conversations when we did not know what language was being spoken, as well as provide an almost-secret code that we might use to keep our correspondence private. That struck me as the perfect thing for an amateur detective to know, and so I applied myself to memorizing that alphabet with zeal (giving myself plenty of opportunities to chat with the lecturer, who was named Albert ffinch-Winship and who had no interest whatever in me).

  And so, crouched in a cupboard with my ear pressed against a glass pressed against a wall, I scribbled down several pages of writing-paper from the stationery boxes with my handy hieroglyphs. The language sounded Slavic, but not Russian; and though it’s difficult to tell with Slavic languages, which always sound angry to an English ear, they seemed to be having a bit of a shindy. As I eavesdropped and scribbled, I wondered what they looked like, whether they were indeed both young men as I thought or if they were deep-voiced women, and of course what in the world they were talking about. I’d have to take my pages of code to someone who could read them and knew languages, to have them transcribed. Sometimes my curiosity was a lot of work.

  The discussion ended rather abruptly, and I heard a door slam farther away, and that was it. I crawled out of the cabinet to find Pond watching me with a look of wild bemusement on his face.

  “What in the name of God are you doing in that cupboard?” he asked, his astonishment knocking the formality out of his voice.

  “Eavesdropping,” I said truthfully, “Do you know what’s on the other side of this wall?”

  “Another building, of course,” he frowned at the dust on the lapels of my dressing-gown.

  “Do we have an Ordnance Map?” I asked as I got to my feet and dusted myself off, “I want to know what building, what address.”

  “I’ll remember to pick one up next time I go out,” he said with an unusual amount of sarcasm, which made me smile.

  “Never mind, I’ll find out the old-fashioned way,” I headed for the bedroom to get dressed. He followed hot on my heels and put me into the fawn suit with a faint lavender stripe he’d had out all morning. I was thankful it wasn’t a morning-coat, but I still chafed a bit at the necktie and spats and gloves.

  Once encased in the garb of the proper English gentleman, I picked up my old walking-stick, the birch one I had made when I was back in Oxford, which was marked in inches with a compass in the head, like the fictional Peter Wimsey’s. It certainly wasn’t as elegant as the silver-headed malacca that Pond wanted me to take, but it would answer my purposes.

  I figured out, by measuring my own steps (an average stride covered two and a half feet) and then walking from the outside wall of my bedroom to the outside wall by the service stairs, that the house was forty-eight feet wide inside, and that my fireplace was just about dead center in the rear wall; then pacing out the public rooms on the ground floor, I discovered the depth of the building was a hundred and thirty feet. I also figured out, by measuring the height of the steps and counting them as I went downstairs, that my sitting-room floor was thirty-eight feet above the street. All of this was worked out in tidy equations in a notebook, which would have made my old mathematics master at Eton very proud.

  Once on St. James’s Street, I positioned myself dead center to the facade of the building, and counted thirty-six steps to the corner of Jermyn Street (ninety feet), where I turned right; counted eighty-four steps to Bury Street (two hundred and ten feet), where I turned right again; then took exactly thirty-six steps down Bury Street and turned the final right.

  I found myself facing an eight-storey building of plum-coloured brick and Portland stone, five bays wide and vaguely Gothic in style, with a shop on the ground floor and offices above. I was relieved that it wasn’t a house or block of flats, which I wouldn’t be able to investigate freely, but was slightly disappointed by how commonplace it looked — I’d hoped for something a little more mysterious and perhaps even sinister, an opium den or the lodge of a mysterious brotherhood. What made me think I’d find such a thing in a back street in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, I couldn’t say. One of those romantic fancies of youth.

  The building wasn’t quite in line with Hyacinth House, my thirty-six steps had brought me to the entrance of the shop, on the far right of the building; the entrance to the offices was at the far left, and the center was occupied by three large bowed show-windows blazoned with the legend Monsieur Alcide ~ Fine Gifts for Gentlemen; the windows were filled with elegant masculine fripperies, from silver boutonnières and hairbrushes to silk mufflers and dressing-gowns.

  I decided to begin with the shop, as my willingness to spend money would forgive a great many eccentricities, like asking to measure the premises and poke around in the back rooms. Pushing through the door, I found myself in a quite large, beautifully-appointed emporium filled with more luxurious trifles like those in the windows; what made the place unusual, though, was the display of the merchandise: rather than stacks of folded garments on dark wood counters and shelves, as one would find in a haberdasher’s, the goods were artfully arranged on linen-covered tables, draped across plaster busts and porcelain vases, with fresh flowers everywhere — just like in a dress shop. It was a place for ladies to buy things for their husbands and brothers, rather than for gentlemen to buy for themselves.

  “Good morning, monsieur,’’ I was greeted immediately by a plump but very attractive and obviously French gentleman with an elegantly curled mustache, brilliant black hair, and immaculate morning-clothes, “I am Monsieur Alcide. How may I assist you?”

  “A couple of things, “ I smiled as ingratiatingly as I knew how, “My father’s birthday is coming up, and I have no idea what to give him.”

  “What sort of man is your father?” he inquired courteously, “a sporting gentleman, perhaps, or more interested in scholarly pursuits?’’

  “He’s in politics,” I answered after a moment of thought, trying to decide how much truth to tell, “though he calls it ‘service to the State.’ He’s rather a pompous old stick. Looks like a stuffed buzzard with a slight case of moult.”

  “Ah, I see,” he smiled diplomatically, “A good necktie and tie-pin are always appropriate for a member of Parliament, as it will show above his robes.”

  “I was thinking of something, well...bigger. Something impress
ive and expensive-looking.”

  “Perhaps a dressing-gown or a smoking jacket?” the man gestured toward an elaborate display of mannequins against the back wall, an eerie gathering of faceless wooden men in various states of elegant deshabille.

  “Oooh,” I cooed, making a beeline to a gorgeous claret velvet smoking jacket with navy satin lapels and frogs, “This one is lovely!”

  “I am sure monsieur’s father will enjoy that model. And very reasonably priced at fifteen guineas.”

  “Pater? He wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something so colorful. No, this one is for me. My valet will kick like a mule, but I must have it. That one over there will do better for the Pater,” I gestured off-handedly at a similar tobacco-coloured jacket with black lapels and frogs, “and maybe some nice carpet-slippers to match?”

  “Would monsieur care to have either of the jackets, or the slippers, embroidered with monograms?” he pulled a sales-book out of his inside pocket and began scribbling with a little gold pencil, “The service is only one guinea extra, but will take two days to have done.”

  “Oh, absolutely! I love monograms. We’ve both got a lot of initials, though. How are they done? In a row or one of those curlicue arrangements?”

  “Whichever monsieur prefers, our embroiderer can sew anything, her creation or your own design.”

  “Well, Pater’s initials are A.E.M.S., or should Saint-Clair be two letters? And does one refer to one’s title in a monogram?”

  “The V might make a lovely frame for the initials, milord,” he smoothly elevated my honorific once he connected the mentions of Saint-Clair and a title to the Earl of Vere, and pegged me as the heir; he sketched something in his little book as he spoke, “And the Saint-Clair can be represented with a small abbreviated Saint attached to the initial C. Something like this?”