Baked to Death

by Dean James

  “Come again, sir,” the man called after us.

  “Really, Giles, why on earth did you drink so much mead?” I muttered as we stumbled out of the tent I was strong enough to carry him, if need be, but that would have been a pretty spectacle. If his mother happened to see him like this, she would be mortified. I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t take him home after all. I decided instead to take him to Laurel Cottage, and Lady Prunella need never know what happened.

  Giles was singing in an undertone. It sounded like an old ballad, but it wasn’t one I could readily identify.

  This was most aggravating. I really should have collected our belongings from Totsye Tltchmarsh’s pavilion, but I didn’t want to drag Giles all the way there and then on to where my car was parked. Our things should be fine there until later on. Once Giles had slept it off, we could come back. So deciding, I half-dragged Giles down the path toward the entrance to the encampment.

  Ignoring the good-natured chuckles and sniggers from passersby, we made steady progress. Once I had Giles a little way up the hill, out of sight of the encampment, I picked him up in my arms and cradled his head on my shoulder. He smiled and flung an arm around my neck, then started trying to nuzzle me.

  “Giles, stop that immediately, or I’ll dump you on the ground,” I said, exasperated.

  “C’mon, Simon, be a sport,” Giles said, then giggled. But he stopped trying to kiss my neck and in moments was snoring loudly in my ear. I put on a burst of speed and in moments had rounded the corner of Blitherington Hall onto the forecourt where my Jag was parked. I hoped no one could see us from inside as I maneuvered Giles into the car.

  He kept up the snoring on the short drive to Laurel Cottage, but he roused long enough to walk, with my assistance, into the sitting room. I got him situated on the sofa, found a thin blanket to cover him with, then left him to snore and sleep it off.

  “What on earth is that noise?” Tris asked from behind me.

  I turned. “Giles had a bit too much mead, and I brought him here to sleep it off.”

  Tris’s mouth twisted in distaste. “The young blighter. He shouldn’t drink if he can’t hold his liquor. You should have dumped him at Blitherington Hall, where he belongs.”

  “He’s not used to strong drink,” I said, holding on to my temper. “I doubt he realized just how strong the mead was. And I brought him here so he wouldn’t have to deal with his potty mother. She’d have a fit if she saw him like this.”

  “And I see you’ve appointed yourself his minder,” Tris said nastily.

  “If you like,” I said. “Though what business it is of yours, I haven’t the least idea.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him to have done this on purpose, just so you would look after him.”

  “Oh, Tris, don’t be so bloody silly,” I said, tired of both of them suddenly. I brushed past him and stalked into my office.

  Tris followed me. “I’m sorry, Simon,” he said, and he sounded as if he really meant it. He sat down in the chair across from my desk and regarded me with a sober gaze. “I’m not used to being jealous of a boy like that, and I suppose I am behaving rather childishly.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said, too annoyed with him to be anything other than blunt.

  “I suppose you’re enjoying having the two of us competing for your attention?” Tris gave me an arch smile.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “If you must know, I find the whole thing tedious.”

  “I’m sorry, Simon,” Tris responded. “But if you didn’t matter so much to me, I wouldn’t be behaving like this, I suppose. I hadn’t thought you would replace me in your affections so quickly.”

  “I suppose you thought I would swoon with delight the moment you said you wanted me back?” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice. I knew him well enough—that’s exactly what he had thought. Tris had a colossal ego.

  At least he had the grace to appear abashed. “I realize I took a number of things for granted, Simon. But I promise you I shall never do that again. Please, forgive me.”

  By now my fit of pique had begun to wear off, and his contrition, very real as far as I could judge, affected me more strongly than I would have guessed. “It’s okay, Tris,” I said, my voice gruff. “Let’s just forget it for now, okay?”

  “Fine,” Tris said. He started to rise from his chair, but I waved at him to remain where he was. He sat down again. “What is it, Simon?”

  “I need to talk to you about Luke de Montfort,” I said. “Or Luc d’Amboise, if you prefer.”

  “What about him?” Tris held himself very still.

  “He told me what you were arguing about,” I said. “And he even tried to enlist my aid in persuading you to grant his wish.”

  “The bloody idiot!”

  “Yes,” I said, “no doubt he is, in some ways. But why won’t you grant his request? Surely it can’t matter all that much to you.”

  “Have you forgotten what it entails for one of us to bring someone across, as it were?” Tris frowned at me.

  I thought back to my own experience with Tris. To “bring me across,” as he called it, he had had to stop taking his pills for two months and revert to the old ways long enough to be able to drain me almost completely of blood. Then, at the very brink of death, I had drunk from him and become a vampire. The experience had been fairly easy for me, but now that I thought about it, I could understand Tris’s reluctance, up to a point.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s rather uncomfortable for you, and more than a bit messy, but you’ve done it before.”

  “I have,” Tris said, “but at a considerable cost.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, completely puzzled.

  Tris looked away from me. “You don’t realize, Simon, what it’s like, tasting the blood again. You never really became accustomed to it because you were able to start taking the pills after a couple of days. I, on the other hand, remember all too well what it was like before the pills.” He paused for a moment. “It’s intoxicating, incredibly pleasurable, even more than the best sex you’ve ever had. It’s addictive, too.”

  “And you’re afraid of that feeling, aren’t you?” I asked.

  Tris returned his gaze to mine, and his eyes burned with lust. Not lust for me, but for blood. “Yes, Simon, I am,” he said simply. “And I don’t want to risk it, ever again. You never realized it, but after I brought you across, I had a devilish hard time going back on the pills.”

  “Tris, I had no idea,” I said, feeling suddenly, and horribly, guilty. “And there’s no reason you have to give into Luke’s demands. Just tell him to piss off.”

  Tris snorted with laughter. “I tried that, Simon, but you’ve talked to Luke. You could see how determined he is. I can tell you from past experience, Luke is rarely thwarted from getting what he wants.”

  “Are you afraid of his attempting to blackmail you?”

  “What’s to stop him?” Tris said. “He thrives on power, or hadn’t you noticed that? That’s what this playing at medieval dress-up is all about. Luke fancies himself as a monarch, and being part of that loopy society is all the means to an end. I don’t think he’s completely rational any longer. He’s just as barmy as that fellow Knutson, if you ask me.”

  “Then what are you going to do to stop him?” I asked. “Short of killing him. And you can’t do that.”

  Tris didn’t answer. He simply sat and stared at me. For the first time since I had become a vampire, I was afraid.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You can’t kill him, Tris,” I said, when I could trust my voice not to quaver. “Surely there has to be some other way out of this.”

  “There is another way,” Tris finally spoke. His voice was so dead it chilled me even further, if that were possible. “I could fake my death and disappear, and start over somewhere else. I’ve done it before.”

  “That’s drastic,” I said, wincing as I realized the inanity of what I had said. It wasn’t so drastic as killing someone.
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  Tris laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. “I confess I have little liking for either option, Simon, but if Luke gives me no choice, I can’t answer for what I might do. I like my existence as it is, and I have no wish to jettison it all because I refuse to give in to his wish to become one of us.”

  “I can’t blame you for that, Tris,” I said, “but maybe there is a way out of this after all.” An idea was taking shape in my mind. It just might work.

  “What, Simon?” Tris demanded when I fell silent.

  “What if you went to Luke and told him that you were willing to fake your death and disappear, rather than give in to his demands?”

  “Call his bluff, you mean,” Tris said. “I’ve thought of that, Simon, but you don’t know Luke as well as I do. He’s vindictive. He would ‘out’ me just for the hell of it. He’d throw my bluff right back in my face.”

  “Maybe,” I said, unwilling to concede my plan. “Why don’t you at least talk to him about it?”

  “Simon,” Tris said, “if I have to talk to him again, I can’t answer for what I might do. But that might be the simplest, most efficient thing to do. Wait until late tonight and visit him. I could be in and out of his pavilion quickly, and no one would be the wiser. I could snap his neck, and he would never know what hit him.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing Tris discuss murdering someone so calmly. He was dispassionate, as if he were talking about the weather.

  “You wouldn’t betray me, Simon, would you?” Tris’s eyes bored into mine, and I was transfixed, unable to look away.

  “Tris, you can’t be serious about this. You can’t kill him. I won’t let you,” I said, desperately wishing I could dissuade him, if he had truly made up his mind to do it.

  “My dear Simon,” Tris said, “there’s really nothing you can do about it. But I haven’t decided on my course of action yet. I might try your plan, though I have little faith it will work.”

  There was no use in my continuing to argue with him about it. I thought Tris was implacable, and at the moment, I had no idea what I could do to resolve the situation without murder.

  “In the meantime,” Tris said, “I need to do some research for this asinine film Millbank is making. I’m hoping you have some of the books I need to consult, Simon. That would save me a trip to Cambridge.”

  How he could switch so easily from talking about murder in one breath to doing research in the next was beyond me. I couldn’t afford to let him rattle me, however. “What books do you need, Tris?”

  “Books on medieval cookery,” he said. “Do you have an edition of Hieatt’s Pleyn Delit or Henisch’s Fast and Feasd?”

  I got up from my chair and faced the wall of books behind me. I reached up to a shelf near the top and pulled both books down, along with Maggie Black’s Medieval Cookbook and Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts. I turned and handed them to Tris.

  “Ah, excellent, Simon,” Tris said, smiling. He took the books and wandered out of my office. I slumped back in my chair and stared into space.

  What on earth was I going to do about Tris and Luke? I could go to Luke myself and try to persuade him that Tris would simply disappear rather than grant Luke’s request. I could even go so far as to tell Luke that Tris was willing to kill him if he persisted in his demands and threats. Would Luke back down? Tris seemed to think not.

  Based on my experiences today, I would have said that Knutson was the true nut. But if Tris were right, Luke was just as dotty in his way as Knutson. Luke had seemed perfectly reasonable to me, if a bit caught up in playing his role as the Duke of Wessex and pretender to the throne.

  I stood up, feeling as if I should do something, anything, and I remembered that I was still wearing the medieval garb I had bought this morning. While the houppelande was actually pretty comfortable, I decided to change into my ordinary working togs. Maybe if I focused on work for a while, the effort at creativity would stimulate ideas to resolve the Tris-Luke situation.

  From the smell of pipe smoke wafting about in the hall, I deduced that Tris must be in the kitchen. I hoped he’d stay there for quite some time. Giles was still snoring softly on the sofa as I went upstairs to change.

  Once back in my office, I turned on the computer and tried to direct my thoughts to my work in progress. It took a few minutes to get my mind to focus on the task at hand, because visions of Tris standing over Luke’s lifeless body kept intruding. By sheer force of will I banished those thoughts and concentrated on my book.

  ***

  A couple of hours later I was still immersed in my work when the phone rang. Absentmindedly I reached out a hand for it and picked up the receiver. “Laurel Cottage,” I said.

  A woman’s voice barked into my ear so loudly I almost dropped the receiver. “Is that you, Dr. Kirby-Jones?”

  Gingerly I held the earpiece away from my head, but I spoke slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. “Yes, Miss Titchmarsh, it is, and please, call me Simon.” I really wished the woman would get herself a hearing aid. It would be an anachronism while she was playing at being the Wife of Bath, but at least it would make communication easier.

  “I’d be delighted, Simon. So charmingly American of you. You must call me Totsye. I looked around for you,” Totsye said, “for quite some time, then someone told me you had left with Giles. He appeared to be a bit under the weather.” She brayed with laughter.

  “Er, yes,” I said, trying not to wince at the assault on my eardrums. “He had a bit too much sun, so I brought him home to rest and recover.”

  “Sun, eh?” Totsye laughed again. “That’s not what we called it in my day! But I suspect you were just trying to keep Prunella from hyperventilating.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Just out of curiosity, Totsye, where are you calling from?”

  “On my mobile,” she said. “Many of us have them, just in case. You never know what might happen.”

  “Certainly,” I said, though I had to smile at my sudden mental image of the Wife of Bath chatting away on a mobile phone.

  “I’m calling, Simon,” she said, “to invite you and Giles to dinner this evening in my pavilion. Seven o’clock. I’ve spoken with Prunella, and she’s coming as well. And bring along that handsome Professor Lovelace if you like. Plenty of good, old-fashioned medieval grub for everyone.” She cackled again. “Besides, you need to collect your things.”

  I had planned to go back sometime that evening to the encampment anyway, so I thought I might as well accept. “Thank you for keeping our things for us, Totsye. Giles and I will certainly be there. I don’t know whether Tris will be available, but I’ll ask.”

  “Ask me what?” Tris said from the doorway, his pipe clenched between his teeth and smoking away.

  I motioned for him to be quiet and I concluded my conversation with Totsye Titchmarsh. I set the phone back in its cradle, then explained the invitation to Tris.

  He strode forward and dropped the books he had borrowed onto my desk, then sat down in the chair across from me. He removed the pipe from his mouth and said, “Why not? Could be amusing. I haven’t seen the fair Prunella in quite some time. Is she still as bloody annoying as ever?”

  I felt unaccountably irritated on Lady Prunella’s behalf. Yes, she could still certainly be annoying, but Tris’s tone was altogether too condescending. My voice was a bit stiff as I replied. “Lady Prunella has her moments, Tris, but actually she’s rather a nice old thing, some of the time, anyway.”

  “I see,” Tris said, examining me shrewdly. “You’ve somehow managed to get her to lower her guard. Don’t count her as a loving mother-in-law just yet, Simon. I haven’t given up, you know.”

  I had no answer to that. Tris had spooked me badly over his talk about killing Luke de Montfort, and I had tried not to think about how I felt about him now. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I wanted to think about it tomorrow.

  “Speaking of food,” I said, wanting to change the subject a bit, “what’s with the interest in medieval
cookery? I suppose it’s something to do with this film you’re advising on.”

  “Yes,” Tris said. “Partly that. But Millbank has some other ideas, and he asked my opinion on some of them.” He paused to relight his pipe. After he had it going again to his satisfaction, he continued. “What I’m going to tell you, Simon, is strictly sub rosa for the moment. Millbank is working on a deal, and he doesn’t want it to go public until he’s ready.”

  “Fine,” I said, shrugging. “I can’t see myself running about, shouting the details of Millbank’s business doings to all and sundry.”

  Tris cocked an eyebrow at me. “You haven’t heard what the deal is, Simon.”

  “Well, what is it?” I said, trying to remain patient. “I won’t go bruiting it about, Tris. Either tell me or forget it.”

  He laughed. “Very well, Simon. I’ll tell you. Millbank wants to make this medieval faire a semi-permanent installation on his property. He thinks it would bring in a lot of tourist money, particularly in the summer, when so many Americans are visiting England.”

  There are a number of such faires in America,” I said, “but as far as I know, they only run a few weeks a year. I can’t see one being economically viable year-round.”

  “No,” Tris said, “but Millbank isn’t proposing that the faire itself run year-round. That would be mostly in the summer. But he does want to build a restaurant, a kind of medieval banqueting hall, and serve medieval food and period-style entertainment. He thinks it would be a big draw in the area.”

  “It could be,” I said, “and the people in the village might welcome some new jobs. But I don’t think Lady Prunella and Giles will be too thrilled to have all that going on in their backyard, so to speak. ”

  “I rather doubt there’s anything they can do about it,” Tris said, exhaling smoke as he talked. “They sold the land to Millbank, and now he can do whatever he likes with it.”

  “Wouldn’t he need planning permission before he could develop this scheme of his?”