“Knock it down,” repeated Miss Seeton and explained.
“He’s mad,” said Foxon as she came to the end of her tale. “Stark, staring bonkers.”
“A little ... overenthusiastic, perhaps.” Miss Seeton’s instinctive pedagogic approval of enthusiasm must, as ever, be tempered by a gentlewoman’s innate disapproval of excess. “Or merely fashionable. Modern art ... But, as we know, fashions change.” The prospect seemed to please her. “With luck, it may not be long before some other idea occurs to him for the competition, and then he will stop appearing on my doorstep for good.”
“Yes, well, until he does think of something else, you just carry on not letting him in the house, MissEss. With these nutters, and you here on your own, you can’t be too careful.”
“I am fortunate in my friends,” said Miss Seeton gently. “It is kind of you to be concerned, but I assure you there is no necessity.”
“Other people aren’t so fortunate,” Foxon said, grateful for the lead. “Which is really why I came to see you today, Miss Seeton ...”
“Not for some first aid?” enquired Miss Seeton with another studied look at her visitor’s battered countenance.
“Oh, I got in a slight argument with a lampshade. It lost.” Foxon grinned to show her again that he would survive, then sobered. “No, why I’m here’s because ... well, it’s a bit complicated, but ...”
He knew, of course, that he could rely on Miss Seeton’s discretion. Were he to tell her every detail of every victim’s bank account (if known), he was confident she would repeat those details to nobody else. Money, politics, and religion: the likes of MissEss just never talked about them; and she wasn’t one to gossip, in any case.
But it was more because Brinton had no idea he meant to take Miss Seeton along with him to talk to Addie Addison that Foxon hesitated to elaborate on the reasons for his visit. His superior’s ignorance—and the feeling that if he wanted MissEss to do her stuff in her own particular way, then the less he told her, the better. Not that he’d know what to make of her sketches (if she did them) the way the Oracle always seemed able to do; but he could have a damned good shot at it. And even if it didn’t work, which knowing his luck it probably wouldn’t, it’d still be an elderly lady putting another elderly lady at her ease, which, fond of the old girl as he was, he couldn’t say his gran was all that good at doing, friend or not. When you’d just come out of hospital you needed rest and soothing, not someone bossing you about telling you how silly you’d been and that you ought to eat three square meals a day; she’d just nip round with a duster and the broom to make things nice for you and ask if there was any shopping you wanted. Gran Biddle’s tongue, even her nearest and dearest had to say, wasn’t so much hung in the middle as completely freewheeling, like the rest of her. Perpetual motion—and then some.
“A bit complicated,” said Foxon slowly. “Let’s just say I’m taking my gran to see a friend of hers the other side of Brettenden. This friend’s a bit under the weather, and I think a little of your common sense, Miss Seeton, would, uh, help to keep the peace.”
Miss Seeton blushed for the compliment, then smiled. “You want someone to talk to while your grandmother and her friend are chatting, of course. I am flattered, Mr. Foxon, that you should consider me a suitable companion ...” The twinkle was back in her eye. “One whose presence will not give rise to any family pressures.” Foxon blinked. It was the one argument he hadn’t thought of. “When one is still in the early stages of one’s career,” Miss Seeton went on, “it is quite conceivable that one should lack the inclination to settle down, although one’s relatives sometimes fail to understand this. Not every young man is as fortunate as dear Nigel Colveden.”
Foxon grinned. “Yes, but his dad gives him a hard time if he dates anyone more than twice, I know. Drops hints about top hats and speeches—drives Nigel wild.”
“Sir George’s teasing is meant in the kindest way, as I’m sure Nigel knows. His father has always had an eye for a pretty girl and of course is happily married himself. It’s only natural he should wish his son to be similarly happy. But it is equally natural that, at the age you young men are, there seems no great urgency to marry.” This was said with complete innocence; Foxon took it in the spirit in which it was said.
“You’re quite right, Miss Seeton. My gran’s always on at me to find some nice girl and get married, but I want to put in for sergeant before too long.” Use your initiative. “I’m glad you don’t mind being used as ... camouflage. You don’t, do you?”
“I shall enjoy my little excursion and the company,” said Miss Seeton firmly. “It will be a great pleasure to meet Mrs. Biddle at last—and a change of scene, in weather like this, is always welcome. I believe I will take my sketchbook if you don’t mind.”
Foxon assured her that he didn’t mind in the least.
Once he’d introduced them, Foxon popped the two ladies in the back seat of his car, saying how much it would impress Miss Addison with the quality of her visitors if they came sweeping up to the house driven by a chauffeur. Mrs. Biddle chuckled; Miss Seeton smiled. So tactful. Mrs. Biddle, as the family matriarch, must expect to take precedence; but Miss Seeton was an invited guest. The etiquette was tricky. For herself, she wouldn’t mind at all sitting alone in the back, but Mr. Foxon evidently thought it best to avoid any little difference of opinion by treating both his passengers the same.
Not for one minute did she suspect Foxon of wanting to give her time to become comfortably acquainted with his grandmother so that there would be less chance of her feeling uncomfortable with Miss Addison. Her remarkable talent for seeing to the heart of things might be suppressed by the effort of making perpetual courtesies and stilted small-talk. He wanted her at her ease; he wanted her instincts to be given full rein, not to be held back.
Mrs. Biddle was certainly not holding back. Always a chatty soul—even Martha Bloomer, of whom it was often said that she must have been born in midconversation, would have come a poor second in a prattling contest—she appreciated any new audience, especially one so willing to listen and to make polite reply as occasion required.
“Yes, poor Addie. Skin and bone, she was—nothing but skin and bone.” Mrs. Biddle, of whose skin there was a more than ample covering on the well-fleshed bone, clicked her tongue. “The hospital said she couldn’t have had a decent meal for weeks, silly girl, but they’ve been feeding her up, and she’s got the district nurse now she’s out, though it’s not the same as having your friends pop in to see you, is it? Strangers round the place, I mean—no offence, dear.” A plump hand hastily patted Miss Seeton on the shoulder. “I can’t seem to think of you as a stranger, being as my boy’s told me so much about you, not to mention what I’ve read in the papers, of course.”
Miss Seeton sighed quietly; Foxon winced. While having earlier given her a brief character sketch of Miss Seeton, he had obviously failed to convince his grandmother that not everyone had the high regard for press coverage readers of the tabloids might suppose they did.
“I fear,” murmured Miss Seeton, “that the newspapers do tend to exaggerate.” She considered her dear friend Amelita Forby of The Daily Negative. “It makes a—a good story, of course, which is their job, but one should always take these things with a—a generous pinch of salt. Several pinches,” she added rather mournfully.
“Mum’s the word, dear, if that’s the way you want it.” Mrs. Biddle patted her on the shoulder again. Who would’ve thought the Battling Brolly’d be so ... well, shy? World famous, she was, but you’d never know it to look at her—mind you, it took some nerve to wear a hat like that—or to hear her talk. Might be anyone’s old auntie, really. Nice and quiet and restful: do Addie a power of good. Mrs. Biddle was not entirely unaware that her bracing personality could sometimes overpower those less robust than herself.
“’Course, she never was all that strong,” she said aloud. “Never seemed to have that much gumption, neither, always on the quiet side. Never one to let
you know what she’s thinking—but then she don’t moan all the time about her aches and pains the way some folk do. I wouldn’t have worried half so much about her tumbling herself into hospital like she did if it hadn’t been for Philly Byng the other day, swallowing all them pills and doing herself in, and the very last person you’d expect. Depression, they called it—and her always bright as a button until recent! These doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, do they?”
Whatever Miss Seeton’s reply, Foxon did not hear it.
He was too busy wondering what Brinton would make of Gran Biddle’s unexpected mention of the late, suicidal, Miss Philippa Byng.
chapter
~ 7 ~
“SHE AND ADDIE knew each other from the old days, you see,” Mrs. Biddle was saying as Foxon finally surfaced from his wondering. “Good pals for years, they were, only they fell out over something ...” Maud Biddle’s tone showed how dearly she would love to know what the cause of that falling out had been. “And then it’s cross the street rather than talk to her, dear, when both of them you’d think would have more sense. Years it went on, would you believe?”
Miss Seeton, while deploring the sad breaking of a long-held friendship through what must surely have been a simple misunderstanding, could.
“And then she opens the paper one day to read Philippa Byng’s killed herself, coroner’s inquest and everything they had. Balance of the mind disturbed, they said, and thin as a rake besides. Shook Addie Addison up something cruel, it did. But that,” said Mrs. Biddle, “wasn’t more than a week ago, and they say she’s been starving herself for as long as Miss Byng, if not longer. Which, seeing as they weren’t speaking to each other and I don’t believe in mind-reading, it’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it?”
Miss Seeton, who shared Mrs. Biddle’s disbelief, agreed that it was. In the front seat, Foxon, his face hidden from those in the back, grinned with relief that the conversation had been grandmother-led in exactly the direction he’d hoped it would go.
“We must be almost there,” he said, seeing in the mirror how Mrs. Biddle agreed with Miss Seeton’s agreement and the pair regarded each other with approval. It was an unlikely friendship, if you went by the book: but MissEss got along with all sorts of people in that happy-go-lucky innocent way of hers, and Gran Biddle was a law unto herself. He crossed mental fingers as his physical fingers flicked the indicator for the turn into Miss Addison’s street, and sent up a short prayer that his gamble would soon pay off.
“That’s the house, on the left. She’s let the place go,” observed Mrs. Biddle. In a lesser woman her tone might have been thought smug. “I’d hardly have known it. The gate could do with a good lick of paint—and there’s a hinge coming loose. And for all that asphalt drive looks new, the grass came through in great clumps, see? And I wouldn’t care to say whether she cut the lawn at all last year, and if this was my garden, I’d do something about the weeds, I really would.”
“Well, she’s got a broken leg right now,” said Foxon. “Which is why we’re here, to cheer her up. So we won’t mention mowing the lawn, hoovering the carpets, or digging the garden, will we? We don’t want to upset her.”
“That’s what friends are for,” came his grandmother’s ambiguous reply as she fumbled with the handle of the car door. “You and Miss Seeton can have a nice chat with poor Addie while I fix us a cup of tea and find out where she keeps the keys to her shed. We wouldn’t want to make extra work for you and your friends, lad, having burglars think the house is empty and they can break in when they feel like it and help themselves. You never know,” she added darkly, “if that’s not the sort of thing wouldn’t send poor Addie after Philippa Byng as quick as wink.”
She grumbled all the way up the drive about the state of Miss Addison’s garden. Miss Seeton silently agreed with her, while accepting that not everyone was as fortunate in matters of fitness (her yoga, so beneficial) and domestic help (dear Martha and Stan) as she. Foxon, whose horticultural expertise was such that if told tulips bloomed in July he would believe it, repeated his warning about not upsetting Miss Addison by reminding her of the many jobs about the house she hadn’t, for whatever reason, managed to do. So busy was he with his little lecture that, without thinking, he mounted the steps in front of his grandmother and rapped on Miss Addison’s door with the all briskness of the professional caller.
“Manners,” snapped Mrs. Biddle, but was then sidetracked by a knot of groundsel in what should have been a weed-free bed and marched across to root it out. Miss Seeton, whose trained eye was even quicker than her new friend’s, watched with wistful approval, but deemed it discourteous to move from her place two steps lower than Foxon at the door.
“Somebody’s coming,” Foxon said. “Dot-and-go-one, by the sound of it. That’ll be the crutch. Amazing what they can do with broken ankles nowadays.”
“Indeed, yes.” Miss Seeton remembered long-ago visits to hospital for the benefit of air-raid victim acquaintances in their monumental plaster casts and the splints bulging with cotton-wool padding. “Strapped bandages and a type of lightweight plastic cast are used now, I believe, for less serious injuries. So much more pleasant for people to be able to convalesce in their own homes. One makes much faster progress.”
Miss Addison’s progress to her front door was far from fast, but she arrived in the end. There was a rattle at the latch, and the door swung slowly open.
“Oh.” The faded little lady now revealed gasped as Foxon’s smiling face met her gaze and he prepared to introduce himself. “Oh, no! No!” One hand supported her against the jamb; the other, trembling, swept the aluminium elbow-crutch up from the floor. “Go away!” shrilled Miss Addison and poked her visitor in the chest. “Leave me alone!”
The thrust was so unexpected that Foxon leaped backwards down the steps, in his fall bumping against Miss Seeton, who, with yoga-nimble reflexes, contrived to hop sideways out of range, flinging out her arms to keep her balance. Her handbag, bulging with sketchbook, pencils, and other essential paraphernalia, plopped straight to the ground. Her umbrella, more streamlined, flew several horizontal feet before yielding to gravity and plummeting, ferrule first, to land quivering in the black asphalt of the drive like some sinister silken arrow.
“Addie!” screeched Mrs. Biddle, brandishing her bunch of groundsel from the flower bed. Miss Addison’s eyes swivelled in the direction of the screech. “Adelaide Addison,” cried Mrs. Biddle, stamping to the bottom of the steps, “what on earth do you think you’re playing at?”
“Maud!” squeaked Miss Addison, aghast. “Oh, Maud—you mean it’s—it’s all right?”
Mrs. Biddle dropped the groundsel, plucked Miss Seeton’s umbrella from its sticky black confinement with one sturdy wrench, and strode up the steps to confront her friend at the top. “A fine way to greet visitors, I must say,” said Mrs. Biddle. “Here’s me got my grandson on his day off to bring me over to see you, and you try to give him a broken ankle, if not worse! Never mind Miss Seeton”—with a brisk nod, she handed the brolly back to its owner—“that’s been brought here special on account of you always liking pictures, and her being an artist my boy’s known for years, so we thought you’d like to meet her. But if pushing people down the steps is all the thanks we get, we’ll be off this very minute and leave you to yourself.”
Miss Addison gulped. “Oh,” she said meekly. “Oh, Maud, I’m so sorry. I didn’t ...”
“You didn’t mean it.” Foxon bounded back up the steps to give his anxious hostess the full benefit of his smile. “We quite understand that it must have startled you, opening the door to find a pair of complete strangers outside, with you not being in the best of health, if you don’t mind my saying so. How about taking my arm, Miss Addison, and I’ll help you inside to sit down and rest your ankle, and Gran can do the honours properly?”
Ten minutes later, Miss Addison was sipping tea from one of her best sprig-patterned cups and asking Miss Seeton’s expert opinion of the age-dark oi
l of her grandfather over the mantelpiece and of the dainty watercolour of her dear grandmother beside the sofa. Mrs. Biddle was clattering happily in the kitchen, running taps, slamming cupboard doors, and giving conflicting orders to Foxon, who grumbled that he couldn’t cope with more than one thing at a time, and if he had known what it would be like doing her a favour he’d have gone to work after all.
Not even his grandmother could guess at the enormous grin of satisfaction he was trying not to show. Miss Seeton was performing as required without even realising it; she’d be dashing off one of her doodles next, the way Miss Addison was chattering on about pictures and portraits and how she’d done a bit of sketching when she was young, and how she supposed it was like riding a bicycle, which you never really forgot. MissEss wasn’t one to ignore a hint. She’d let the poor old girl have a go, then she’d show her, ever so politely, where she wasn’t getting it quite right. And the next thing’d be a full-blown Drawing, which with luck and a following wind might just explain—among other things—why this Addie had been so scared when she opened her front door ...
“And while we’re about it,” said Mrs. Biddle, “you can run the mower across the lawn, if it’s not too wet. And if it is, you can help me with some more of the weeds.”
Foxon sighed. What he suffered in the cause of justice. “It’s rained a lot these last few days,” he said hopefully. “Won’t it be bad for the soil to have me tramping about all over it with a mower? And I’m a sick man,” he added, pointing to his empurpling eye. “I shouldn’t go bending with a shiner like this.”
“The Foxons were always slackers,” returned Mrs. Biddle. “When your mum said she wanted to marry your dad, I warned her if she wanted anything done she’d spend the rest of her life nagging if she didn’t do it herself. You get in there right now and find out where Addie keeps the shed key while I finish this floor.”
Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20) Page 9
