The Grub-and-Stakers Pinch a Poke

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Wilhedra had a crutch leaning against the arm of her chair and her bad ankle propped up on a hassock. When she saw her visitors, she tried hard to smile and reached for her crutch. They were urging her not to get up when her father bustled into the room.

  “Ladies, I do most humbly beg your pardon. For some unfathomable reason, Norah failed to tell me you were here.”

  “I expect that’s because we asked for Wilhedra, not you,” Dittany told him flat out.

  Wilhedra wasn’t her favorite person, but she was beginning to wonder what sort of life this rich man’s daughter must have been leading all these years, and whether she’d been giving any serious thought to the advisability of landing her dear old penny-pinching, spotlight-hugging daddy a poke in the ego with that handy crutch. Arethusa must be wondering too; she made rather a protracted business of giving Wilhedra a peck on the cheek and bestowing the flowers and cookies they’d brought her.

  Jenson chose not to be deceived by any charitable ruse. “Oh, come now, my dears. Kind of you to show an interest in Wilhedra, of course, but I know what you’re actually here for is to enjoy a good, long gloat over the treasures you’ve won for the Architrave. I’m quite at your disposal. As for Wilhedra, the only cheering up she needs is good news of her beloved Carolus. How is the dear lad this morning?”

  “Well, I can tell you there’s nothing much wrong with his appetite,” said Dittany. “He polished off three fried eggs and a stack of toast for breakfast and complained because we were out of ham. That’s why we came over to Scottsbeck so early, as a matter of fact, instead of waiting to make a more seemly afternoon call. We have to go shopping at the supermarket because he’s eaten us right down to the nubbins.”

  “Ah, yes. I can see my daughter will have her hands full cooking for her bridegroom. Now come along, come along. I know you’re absolutely thirsting to examine the whole collection piece by piece.”

  “Dittany can thirst,” said Arethusa. “I’d fainer stay and talk to Wilhedra.”

  “Not on your life,” Dittany retorted. “I baked the cookies so I get to stay with Wilhedra. You’re chairman of the board of trustees; you can darn well do the thirsting yourself.”

  Arethusa emitted a regal snort but consented to being led from the sickroom. Jenson would no doubt rather be alone with Arethusa, but couldn’t help himself from snapping, “Then join us in the exhibition parlor as soon as you feel you’ve done your duty. Wilhedra, don’t keep Dittany too long.”

  He took Arethusa’s arm and hustled her from the depressing room. Dittany raised her eyebrows.

  “What happens if I don’t go?” she asked with her usual tact and finesse. “Will he take away your teddy bear?”

  She was sorry she’d said it. A dark flush rippled up and down Wilhedra’s wrinkles.

  “You have to understand, Dittany, that Father’s a bit upset with me just now. My being laid up through my own clumsiness makes a lot of extra work and he’s not used to coping. Besides, I’m afraid he’s none too happy about being forced to part with his collection.”

  “But who’s forcing him? He didn’t have to run the contest, did he? Wasn’t it all his own idea in the first place?”

  “Oh yes, you may rest assured of that,” Wilhedra answered in a tone dry enough to sour milk. “It’s been a long, long time since anybody tried to persuade Father into anything he didn’t choose to do.”

  She fiddled with the fringe of a somewhat motheaten tartan rug that was spread over her lap and legs, the room being none too warm. Dittany could feel a dank chill even through her boots and the coat she hadn’t been invited to take off.

  “Father’s always been something of an autocrat,” Wilhedra went on rather shyly, as if she wasn’t used to sharing confidences. “The—imperiousness, I suppose you might call it—seems to be growing on him as he gets older. Sometimes I wonder if he’s altogether—” She fell silent and went on picking at the fringe. Dittany thought maybe it mightn’t be an unkind idea to change the subject.

  “How did you sprain your ankle? Did you fall on the ice? We noticed your front walk hadn’t been shoveled lately.”

  “I know, isn’t it awful? The neighborhood kids ask so much more for shoveling nowadays than they used to that Father gets angry with them and won’t have it done. He still thinks fifty cents is enough to pay.”

  Wilhedra essayed a merry laugh, but she certainly hadn’t inherited her father’s histrionic talent. “Actually what I did was trip yesterday morning going downstairs to breakfast. Don’t ask me how I managed to do such a stupid thing.”

  “You weren’t wearing a long bathrobe, by any chance?”

  “To sit at the table with Father? Perish the thought! No, I had on my usual daytime clothes and sensible low-heeled shoes. Those back stairs are rather poky, I will admit, and I did have my hands full. Father likes his cup of tea first thing in the morning, so Norah brings it up as soon as she gets the kettle boiled. When I go down, I take the tray with me to save her the steps.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve done that every morning for more years than I care to count and never so much as rattled the cup on the saucer, but yesterday I don’t know what happened. It felt as if something had caught at my ankle and tripped me, but Father said that was nonsense. He even went to the bother of checking the stairs and said there was nothing I could possibly have tripped over. He was quite put out that any daughter of his didn’t know how to get down a staircase without falling over her own feet. The tray went flying, of course, and one of his good Crown Derby cups had its handle knocked off.”

  “Can’t you glue it back on?”

  “I suppose so, but what’s the use? Father hates mended china.”

  How did he feel about mended daughters? Dittany managed to refrain from asking and confined herself to sympathetic murmurs. Wilhedra asked about Carolus again as if she hadn’t heard the first time, and Dittany assured her he was getting along as well as could be expected, all things considered. She didn’t say what things. Wilhedra probably was in no mood to hear about cobras, and Dittany couldn’t remember which lethal poison it was that the sharpened wire of the rat trap had turned out to be smeared with.

  She did mention the ex-Mrs. Bledsoe and the basket of lemons because it made a pretty funny story. She kept quiet about Leander Hellespont’s visit. That had been even funnier, but she had a strong feeling Wilhedra wouldn’t see the humor. Conversation languished. Wilhedra was patently uneasy about keeping Dittany away from the exhibition parlor. Her fringe-plucking took on a more accelerated tempo. Dittany caught the hint.

  “Well, I expect I’d better go play chaperone. You don’t really want Arethusa for a stepmother, do you?”

  “God, no!” Wilhedra blurted. Then she flushed again. “But of course that’s up to Father.”

  “I should say it was equally up to Arethusa,” Dittany retorted.

  “That’s because you don’t know my beloved parent the way I do.” Wilhedra was too far gone to hide her bitterness. “Thank you for coming. In case you don’t remember, you go down the front stairs and turn right.”

  But Dittany chose to go down the back stairs, the ones on which Wilhedra had taken her toss. They were indeed poky, she noticed, and neither well lit nor well maintained. Probably Jenson never used them. Luckily the former Mrs. Henbit, gadget-minded as ever, had stuffed a little flashlight on a key chain into her daughter’s Christmas stocking. Dittany used it now to scrutinize the woodwork as she picked her way down.

  Three steps from the bottom she found what she’d been looking for. The tack driven into the wall on the left-hand side must have been pulled out when Wilhedra tripped; all Dittany could find was the tiny hole. The right-hand tack, with a wisp of transparent fishline still clinging to it, was hard to spot against the varnished woodwork, but it was definitely there.

  So the Thorbisher-Freep mansion was under attack, too. Was Carolus’s would-be assassin trying to get at him through his intended second wife, or had Wilhedra been tripped on her own
account?

  Jenson couldn’t have bothered to look all that hard for the cause of his daughter’s so-called accident, but then he didn’t seem to be much concerned about Wilhedra in general, except as the prospective wife of a divorced man with a shady background and a lawsuit hanging over his head. Why was a pompous old coot like him so heck-bent on marrying her off to Carolus Bledsoe when neither of them seemed to be all that keen on the match?

  From the front of the house, Dittany could hear Jenson declaiming about Minnie Maddern Fiske and Arethusa interjecting an occasional zounds or forsooth. She must be bored stiff. Well, that was what she got for being a femme fatale. Dittany had no intention of being likewise bored. She had different fish to fry.

  During their earlier visit to the mansion, Jenson had given them a quick peek into what he’d called his library. This was, she recalled, a relatively unpretentious room at the back of the house that contained a good many books, a carved walnut desk with a big swivel chair behind it, and not much else. Dittany crept along the hallway, sticking to the somewhat threadbare runner so her boots wouldn’t clunk, let herself into the library, and shut the door behind her.

  Jenson was not a tidy man or, it would appear, a diligent one. His desk was awash in unanswered correspondence. Dittany knew it was ill-bred to read other people’s mail, but this was no time for scruples. Anyway, she could hardly avoid seeing all those big red PLEASE REMIT stickers on the unpaid bills, of which there were more than anything else. The only letters she could find were duns. A particularly sniffy one from the Scottsbeck Bank reminded Mr. Thorbisher-Freep that his checking account was grievously overdrawn, his savings account was down to nil, and unless he deposited sufficient funds forthwith to cover all those rubber cheques he’d been writing, steps would have to be taken.

  What could this mean? Was Jenson turning into a pathological miser? Was that why he wouldn’t pay to have the front walk shoveled or buy his daughter a new bathrobe? But he’d been treating Arethusa to all those lunches and dinners, and the reigning queen of regency romance was no cheap date when it came to food.

  Rummaging further, Dittany came upon a letter from the same stockbroking firm Osbert’s father used. In answer to Mr. Thorbisher-Freep’s complaint about their failure to follow through on his orders, Mr. Thorbisher-Freep was reminded that over the past several years he’d been steadily creaming off the choicer stocks in his portfolio. The ones he was unsuccessfully trying to peddle now were, not to put too fine a point on it, junk. Mr. Thorbisher-Freep might be further reminded that the said stocks had been purchased over the stockbroker’s strenuous protest. The letter didn’t come straight out and call Mr. Thorbisher-Freep a pigheaded old fool who had nobody to blame but himself, but the intimation was definitely there.

  So Jenson wasn’t a miser, he was broke. That was why he’d been trailing Arethusa like a big-game poacher after an elephant. He wanted her tusks!

  More specifically, he wanted her money, her jewels, her glass-topped dining room table with the gilded crocodiles holding it up. He wanted that imaginary crystal and gold fishbowl Dittany had improvised at their first meeting, when she’d got so annoyed at being upstaged by poor old Wilhedra in that elderly and balding mink, as she now knew it to be. It must have been the fishbowl that set him to stalking Arethusa. This was all Dittany’s own fault.

  No it wasn’t, how could it be? Arethusa was quite capable of attracting men on her own hook, as witness the fact that she’d also collected Andy, Carolus, and Archie without even trying. But maybe Carolus was after her money, too, and maybe Archie was hoping to annex her as a client. Was it only Andy McNaster who loved her for herself alone? Or was Andy, too, working some dark and devious scheme with Arethusa as his cat’s-paw or gull?

  Dittany experienced an increasing sense of alarm. She’d better get into that exhibition room fast, before Jenson decided to abduct Arethusa to the attic and exercise his evil wiles on her. And also before Jenson came looking to see why Dittany hadn’t appeared as bidden in the exhibition room. She inched the library door open, made sure the coast was clear, and scuttled down the hall.

  She was in the nick of time. Jenson had Arethusa backed up against one of those glass display cases Mr. Glunck so coveted, and was pouring out his soul.

  “Surely, dearest lady, you cannot but be aware of the deep regard in which I hold you. Ah, could I but find words to express the fervor which enkindles this throbbing heart when I gaze into those limpid pools of mystery and feel my being thrill with a rapturous tremor of—dare I say passion?”

  Arethusa blinked. “Sorry, I was thinking about Minnie Maddern Fiske. Would you mind repeating the question?”

  “He was wondering if he dared say passion,” Dittany took it upon herself to explain.

  Arethusa considered the matter, then frowned slightly. “I find passion a sadly overworked word. He might consider vehemence, infatuation, or fervor.”

  “He’s already used fervor.”

  “In what context?”

  “In the context of its enkindling his throbbing heart when he gazes into your limpid pools of mystery.”

  “Limpid pools of mystery isn’t so bad, though I’d be inclined to substitute fathomless orbs of inscrutability, myself. Did Wilhedra enjoy the cookies? Speaking of which, hadn’t we better be going? We don’t want to miss lunch, you know.”

  “It’s only eleven o’clock,” Dittany protested. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t I run on ahead and buy the groceries while you and Jenson get on with your interesting exercise in vocabulary-building? Oh, and I’d better stop at the bank while I’m out. I have all those cheques of yours to deposit.”

  “What cheques, prithee?”

  “Those royalty cheques I found scattered all over your office while we were looking for that emerald-studded silver paper knife you mislaid.”

  Dittany turned to Jenson with an amused little chuckle. “That’s so like Arethusa, she never remembers to cash half her royalty cheques. They come in so fast that she can’t keep track of them. She just uses them for bookmarks or grocery lists or stuffs them away and forgets where she put them.”

  “Ah, you famous writers.” Jenson edged even closer and boldly seized one of Arethusa’s hands in both of his own. It was, Dittany noticed, the hand on which Arethusa wore that nice diamond ring she’d inherited from her Aunt Melissa who married the railroad baron. “It’s plain to see you need somebody to handle those dull, mundane business details so you can devote yourself more fully to your muse.”

  Arethusa turned her fathomless orbs of inscrutability first on Jenson, then on Dittany. Although one could never be sure what might be going on in that strangely convoluted brain of hers, Dittany thought it quite possible Arethusa was reflecting that (a) she didn’t own an emerald-studded silver paper knife and wouldn’t mislay it if she did, because Arethusa was surprisingly chary of her personal possessions, and (b) she would be most unlikely to use a royalty cheque for a bookmark or a grocery list because she was even charier about her financial returns, as her beleaguered agent could testify. Therefore (c) Dittany must be telling these egregious lies for some useful purpose and it behooved Arethusa to play along with them or risk having to cook her own meals for a week or two. Arethusa Monk knew which side of the toast her beans were on. She nodded.

  “Jenson, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us for a moment. I gather I’m constrained to endorse some cheques. One does endorse them, doesn’t one? I seem to recall having done something of the sort at various times in the past.”

  Jenson assured her that endorsement of cheques was in fact standard procedure and that he’d be delighted to excuse her. “Certainly, my dear. Why don’t I leave you two to yourselves while I nip down to the kitchen and tell Norah to fetch us a cup of tea? We’ll have our elevenses while Dittany does her errands. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Lovely. With perchance a morsel of toast or a bun? Or two?”

  Arethusa was fishing in her handsome leather purse for her
gold pen, dredging up a tortoiseshell and gold comb case and a compact paved in brilliants as she fished. They were only rhinestones, but Jenson didn’t know that. Positively licking his chops at this casual display of wealth, he left the exhibition parlor, shutting the door behind him lest his prey escape.

  “Now what’s all this balderdash about royalty cheques, ecod?” Arethusa hissed.

  “It’s a delaying tactic,” Dittany hissed back. “Arethusa, you’ve got to stall him along. Employ your feminine wiles.”

  “What wiles?”

  “Any wiles that will keep him here in this room till I get back. Let him draw you out about how much money you have stashed away.”

  “What business is that of his?”

  “He plans to make it his business. Lead him on. You needn’t tell him anything. Just hint vaguely of accounts in banks from here to Halifax and thousand-dollar bills tucked under the dining room carpet. But for Pete’s sake don’t commit yourself to anything. Ask yourself what Minnie Maddern Fiske would do in a case like this and act accordingly.”

  “For how long, egad? Where are you going?”

  “Not far. I’ll be back before lunch, never fear. Here he comes, start batting your eyelashes.”

  Jenson breezed into the room, all smiles. Dittany made a feint of stuffing a handful of cheques into her pocketbook.

  “All finished with your tiresome little bit of business, ladies? Norah has the kettle on, Arethusa my dear.”

  “I’m all set.” Dittany patted her handbag and buttoned her coat. “I’ll pop up and see whether Wilhedra needs anything from the drugstore while I’m out, then I’ll be on my way rejoicing. Do try to remember what you did with that lot of bond coupons, Arethusa. Bye for now. Have fun.”

  Chapter 21

  DITTANY RAN HEAVILY UP the front stairs, then lightly down the back. In accordance with the popularly-held belief of an earlier generation that servants were better adapted to climbing stairs than the gentry, the Thorbisher-Freeps’ kitchen was in their basement. There, she located a middle-aged woman wearing a faded print cotton dress, a much darned worsted cardigan, and a silly white cap. The woman was setting out a tray for two people and looking none too pleased about it.