Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  The table was laid, the tea was stirred, the leaves were left to settle: a strainer, while undoubtedly practical, still becomes clogged if used too early in the proceedings. Tina tried not to wince as Miss Seeton produced a tin of her favourite chocolate biscuits and arranged some on one of the larger plates. The girl’s shudder did not go unnoticed by Miss Seeton, quickly though it was suppressed. As she poured tea, Miss Seeton’s brain made swift calculation. It was several days—no, blessedly more than a week—since Antony Scarlett had been seen in Plummergen. She had begun to hope he might have abandoned his ridiculous notions; that his last visit had been, well, his last. She had, however, a strong suspicion that her hopes were about to be blighted by the intelligence Tina, once a cup of tea had soothed her nerves, would impart.

  “I see you have been sketching again,” said Miss Seeton, searching for a neutral topic and smiling towards the block her guest had released from that frenzied grip only once her duty as a crockery-fetching guest had been made clear.

  Tina burst into tears.

  Miss Seeton was shocked. “Have some tea,” she said and held out the cup. Automatically Tina took it. Her eyes met those of Miss Seeton. Something in their calm regard made her gulp twice, sniff, and force a grin. “Before it gets cold,” urged Miss Seeton, and obediently Tina drank.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled into her cup. Miss Seeton said nothing. Tina drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said again, sitting upright. “I’m better now, thanks. It was ... shock, I suppose. Partly. I mean, I know that I came here on purpose to see him, so you’d think I wouldn’t be surprised when I did, but honestly, Miss Seeton, I meant what I said before—about not caring one way or the other any longer—and if only he hadn’t been so—so sneering—so rude—so full of himself ...”

  Miss Seeton sighed. Her suspicion had been all too correct. “Mr. Scarlett?” she asked, just to make sure.

  Tina gulped and nodded. “I was on my way up to the garage and stopped to look across at the forge—the sparks from the fire were bouncing off the flagstones in the most beautiful arcs—and when I turned round, there he was!” It was obvious that she did not mean Dan Eggleden. “He’d had plenty of time to notice me, of course, before I noticed him. Time to ... to work out something ... clever to say.” Having said which, Tina closed her lips and said no more.

  Miss Seeton gave her an encouraging smile. She knew the girl did not care to repeat Antony’s words, no matter how clever—or (which was more probable, from what she herself knew of the young man) not. “I’m sure you behaved with great dignity, my dear,” she said.

  Tina smiled back, a little shakily. “I tried, honestly I did. I said hello, and what a coincidence, and I gathered he was working on something special and—and so ... and so was I, and he ... laughed at me, Miss Seeton. But it was the way he laughed that made it worse! He was so horribly pleased with himself, as if ... as if I didn’t count for anything—and I couldn’t bear to have him sneering at me, and I told him so.” She blushed. “I wouldn’t like to tell you what I called him. Before he was so rude, I’d even been prepared to ... apologise for having made such an exhibition of myself earlier in the year, but afterwards ...” Her expressive hands writhed together on her lap. “It was all so ... undignified,” she said sadly. “Humiliating. I thought I could cope, and I ... couldn’t. I’ve let myself down, Miss Seeton—and you, too, when you’d been so kind ...”

  “Nonsense,” said Miss Seeton. “I wouldn’t say you have let anyone down, my dear, least of all yourself. All you’ve had to do is ... readjust your ideas a little, perhaps, but then your first encounter with Mr. Scarlett was always likely to be somewhat awkward, wasn’t it? And with the particular circumstance of his seeing you before you noticed him, your feeling of shock is quite understandable. But now that it’s all over, I’m sure you won’t need to worry any longer.”

  She sounded so very sure that Tina’s eyes, after a few uncertain moments, began to glow at her across the table, and she smiled. “Oh, Miss Seeton, thank you! Listening to you puts it all into perspective somehow.”

  To avoid further embarrassing gratitude, Miss Seeton was quick to twinkle at her young friend. “Years of practice, my dear,” she said with a wise look. “As a teacher of art, that is to say. Will you have some more tea?”

  Tina smiled. “And a chocolate biscuit, if I may,” she began, but was interrupted by the doorbell. Miss Seeton, in the act of passing the plate, stayed her hand. “What a busy afternoon I am having,” she remarked, rising to her feet. “I expect this time it is the telephone man. Do, please, help yourself while I’m gone.”

  She was not gone long; and when, smiling, she came back she was not alone, for Nigel Colveden followed her into the kitchen. At first he was almost incoherent with delight at recognising Miss Seeton’s other guest. “Tina! Oh, gosh—I say, what luck to find you here. It’s seemed ages—and it just goes to show how virtue is its own reward, because if I hadn’t been doing my mother a good turn I wouldn’t have seen you at all.” Tina blushed again, this time less from embarrassment than from pleasure.

  Miss Seeton nodded amiably as she offered tea and biscuits, which the future baronet did not scorn. “I hadn’t forgotten,” she said, “but it was kind of you to take the trouble to remind me, Nigel. I’m having supper tonight at the Hall,” she explained as Tina looked puzzled. “And with the telephones still out of order—I tried twice this afternoon, but with no success ...”

  “Ah,” said Nigel, looking wise. “Well, as I was coming down The Street I did happen to spot a couple of chaps up a ladder, doing things to the overhead wires with spanners and so on.” Tina brightened. Nigel grinned. “Yes, another of your British Workman possibilities—if only the sun wasn’t on its way down, fast. By the time you got there ... well, would blobs of torchlight have the same effect?”

  Tina thought they probably wouldn’t. Miss Seeton felt that pale hands in darkness might have as striking an effect as heavy boots protruding from beneath a car, but accepted that everyone saw things in a different, as it were, light. Tina giggled. Nigel guffawed politely. Miss Seeton beamed. She had rather more romance in her soul on behalf of others than others sometimes realised, and her mind was working as she looked from Nigel, munching cake and describing the antics of the telephone repairmen, to Tina, modestly glowing at him across the table. Miss Seeton’s general rule was not to interfere, but there were times ...

  Such as now. Miss Seeton addressed her words with care to the baronet’s son. “I have had a great deal to occupy me in and around the house for most of the day. I know you were kind enough to agree to collect me tonight, Nigel, but the weather is so much better than it has been of late that a stroll on a frosty night has its appealing side, if one is wrapped up warm, which of course I would be. Should you think me very ungracious if I were to refuse your kind offer and, well, to walk?”

  Nigel’s academic record might not be impressive, but he was a far from slow-witted young man. He swallowed a gleeful mouthful, grinned, and said that he wouldn’t think her in the least ungracious: but would she think him ungracious if he said he might not, as he’d first thought, be dining with her at the Hall? He smiled at the beautiful girl sitting opposite. “Remember you promised to have dinner with me again one night soon: well, why not tonight? You aren’t too full, are you?”

  “Of course she isn’t,” said Miss Seeton, as Tina, still a little shaken from her confrontation with the Rubens of Refreshment, hesitated at the idea of a three-course meal in public, no matter how agreeable the escort. “I’m sure,” said Miss Seeton, sounding even more certain than on previous occasions, “you’ll have a lovely time.”

  Tina’s sudden laughter was a rippling cascade of golden notes. “Oh, dear—oh, no, it’s not you,” she told Nigel, “it’s me. Do you know what I was just thinking? What on earth shall I wear?” She glanced at Miss Seeton, rippling again. “Oh, dear ... I’d say I was over it, wouldn’t you?”

  As Nigel, puzzled, stared from
one woman to another, a smiling Miss Seeton agreed that she would.

  Nigel arranged to collect Tina from the George at seven o’clock sharp, gulped his tea, excused himself, and rushed home in so rapturous a daydream that he forgot to switch on his car headlights. Tina, her eyes brighter than the early stars by whose rays her swain was navigating the length of Marsh Road, once more thanked Miss Seeton for her support, and, quite as rapturous as Nigel, hugged her elderly friend before pecking her on the cheek and floating out of the door back to the hotel. “I’ll come and tell you all about it tomorrow,” she promised, waving her hands eloquently in the air. “What I wore and where we went and what we ate ...”

  It was a promise she was not, sadly, destined to keep.

  Antony Scarlett had been quite as startled to see Tina in Plummergen as she, concentrating on blacksmith Daniel Eggleden, had been to see him. He’d had several yards’ warning before the necessity to address her had arisen: he had, he thought, acquitted himself well in the verbal stakes—but she hadn’t responded in the way he’d expected to his crushing repartee. It was galling to remember how she had ... defied him as she did. Antony had grown accustomed to the adoring doormat Kristeena, sinking into oblivion once her time was over. Liberated Tina, oblivious of her oblivion, was ... an unnerving experience.

  But what was worse, far worse than the girl’s newfound independence, was the way she and that irritating old woman were evidently in league against him. No wonder Miss Seeton had been so firm in refusing him the rights to her cottage when Tina—Kristeena—had filled her mind with poison! He had watched his former model turn and run from him down The Street and up the short front path of the cottage into which he himself had been welcomed only twice—and Miss Seeton had invited her in without a qualm! How many times had she been there before? What plot were the two of them now hatching? Was his prize-winning design—his “Briars Sweet”—doomed beyond all hope because of a vengeful young woman his Art, and his alone, had raised from obscurity? Was he to be blamed—was he to suffer—simply because he had outgrown her—because she had been unable to accept the fact that Genius Must Be Served?

  Tina’s presence in the house he had come to think of as his was a difficulty he had not foreseen. Until she was no longer inside, he would be unable to approach Miss Seeton with his renewed request that she reconsider her refusal: the idea that his artistic fate might be decided on the opinions of one whose sympathy with his creative spirit had long since faded was anathema to him. Any sign that Miss Seeton might be weakening would be noticed not only by himself, but by Tina, who would all too quickly encourage the old woman not to yield to his entreaties, no matter how well presented. Kristeena—Christina—Holloway was, in short, a damned nuisance, and the sooner she was gone, the better.

  As for being gone, he himself could not yet be so until he had justified his journey to the wilderness of Kent by speaking again with Miss Seeton. The woman must be brought to realise that only under the greatest artistic provocation would the cosmopolitan Antony Scarlett deign to visit her hayseed village more than once. She should be flattered that he thought her—or rather her house—worth his consideration; she must understand just how necessary that house was in his great design: she must bow to his demands; she must, in short, agree to sell him Sweetbriars—and the sooner, the better.

  Antony strode up and down, brooding, and benefiting not at all from the fresh country air as he did so. On the contrary, his head began to ache as his jaw and neck muscles went into slow spasm with repeated grindings of his teeth. The door of Miss Seeton’s cottage remained resolutely shut. As the sun drew near to the western horizon, lengthening shadows darkened and chilled The Street. Antony consulted his watch, scowled, and sighed. The last bus had gone: he would have to take a taxi, at this rate. So much for his public appearance.

  A red sports car rattled merrily past to pull up outside Miss Seeton’s front door. Antony, whose head had shot up on observing the car’s colour, then recognised its make as an MG and its driver as the one who had refused him a lift on an earlier visit to Plummergen. Antony scowled as Nigel Colveden jumped with easy grace from the MG and marched up Miss Seeton’s path to join the party, then ground his teeth again. This young man had the bearing of an athlete, or at least of someone not unused to the ... physical side of life. It would be ... undignified for an artist to risk tangling with such a man, especially a man from such a village as Plummergen. Why, he probably chewed straws in his spare time! Only once this miserable place had been put on the map by the Scarlett masterpiece would any dignity or honour pertain to the Plummergen name ...

  Antony shivered as a sunset breeze shook the folds of his cape. He cursed, swung on his heel, and headed for the public bar of the George and Dragon. He had come to a decision. If it was going to prove as impossible as now seemed likely to speak to Miss Seeton this evening, then he would make the supreme sacrifice. He would not return to London, to civilisation: he would stay here overnight and catch her first thing tomorrow morning. There was nothing else, after all, to be done.

  “Mr. Mountfitchet likes us to take the full deposit for folks who arrive without luggage,” reiterated Doris, whose stint behind the reception desk had seldom been so exasperating.

  “I assure you,” proclaimed Antony Scarlett in ringing tones, “I have every intention of paying my way tomorrow morning like any honest citizen.” Even if, he added in thought, I am far from being as they. I am no bourgeois, hidebound by convention: I am a free thinker! I am Antony Scarlett! “My good woman,” he went on as Doris opened her mouth to repeat her instructions for the fourth time, “have you no idea who I am?”

  “I know who you are,” said Doris.

  Antony preened himself. This was more like it.

  “You,” said Doris, “are the bloke who’s going to pay a deposit—in cash—before I let him have a room.”

  “Ignorant provincial!” boomed Antony, flinging out his arms in a studied gesture of frustration. His cape, billowing behind him, enveloped and tipped over the enormous cheese plant standing in its heavy earthenware pot beside the desk. Doris uttered a horrified cry. If Charley, who doted on that plant, saw what had happened ...

  “Well, go on,” she snapped as Antony recoiled and prepared to condemn the management for its policy of over-intrusive greenery. “Pick it up!”

  Antony caught her eye, remembered that he really did want that room, and bent to make a few vague sweeping movements with his hands. Housework was not something in which the True Artist often indulged: why else did so many men of genius insist on live-in models?

  Doris, in whom the flame of women’s liberation burned faint but willing, overheard a few of the things he muttered as he swept. She was not pleased: but her efficient nature could not bear to watch his clumsy attempts at tidiness. “Never mind, I’ll fetch a dustpan and brush,” she said at last. “After we’ve settled the room,” she added as Antony stood up and dusted his palms with another studied gesture, this time of satisfaction. Doris, however, had no intention of letting him think he’d pulled the wool over her ignorant provincial eyes. “Cash,” she reminded him and glared at him again.

  Ten minutes later Antony was in the bar, ensconced in a seat near the window overlooking the southern end of The Street and, by extension, the front gate of Sweetbriars on the corner. Deflated by Doris, he had tried to boost his self-esteem by asking Charley Mountfitchet for a Brandy Alexander, which (to his irritation) the landlord knew exactly how to mix. Charley, like most of the village, had learned a few tricks since Miss Seeton took up residence in Plummergen. Far too many smart-alec reporters appeared from London when she was engaged in one of her little exploits for the locals not to have developed a fine sense of self-preservation: and on this particular occasion Charley had heard from Doris while Antony was upstairs washing earth off his hands. With no more than a nod he had shaken together brandy, fresh cream, and (Antony’s automatic choice) chocolate flavoured crème de cacao with ice and, after straining them into a
glass, had sprinkled them with nutmeg. “Put it on your bill, shall I?” he enquired: and Antony had ground his teeth again.

  “Strong stuff, this.” Charley, who didn’t care to have people drink too much on an empty stomach, was shaking and straining for the third time of asking. “Rich.” He pushed the glass across the counter. “Will you be eating here?”

  Antony gazed about him. He had no way of knowing, but food at the George was generally considered good, if plain: Plummergen did not approve of fancy foreign cuisine. Alexander and his twin, however, had given the artist some Dutch courage. “Eating here?” He frowned into the cream-smeared depths of his glass. “Is it recommended?”

  “It won’t kill you,” said Charley in tones that suggested some other cause just might, if Antony kept on the way he was going.

  “Oh, I’ll have a packet of crisps,” said Antony, doing this yokel barman a favour. “While I’m making up my mind.”

  “Crisps,” echoed Charley, his mouth set. “Right. And what size would you like ’em?”

  Antony blinked over the rim of his glass. “What size?”

  Charley shot out a hand to one of the tall pint glasses favoured by some of the younger set for lager or shandy. His fingers closed on the slender cylinder—and kept on closing. Antony gulped as the glass shattered into a thousand pieces in Charley’s powerful grip. “Crisps,” said Mr. Mountfitchet, as glittering splinters fell from his open palm to the wooden surface of the bar. “Large ones, those are.” He reached for another glass. “Or we can do you the small size, if you’d prefer ...”