Mary's Christmas
Page 3
The innkeeper stood up to go around behind his bar, coming back with a heavy ring of keys. He unthreaded one and dropped it into his pocket, tossing the remainder atop his bank notes and coins.
He sat down. But just as he reached for his cards, there came a crash and a cry from where Levi had been sleeping. Everyone turned to look, and I detached myself from Uncle Jake’s shoulder to scurry around the table to his rescue. The card players, seeing that the damage was more to the boy’s dignity than his person, laughed and resumed their glasses, or their cards…
The Evil Publican’s shock sent an almost palpable wave through the room. He pawed his cards in confusion, then disbelief, before slapping them face-up onto the table and rising in fury. His chair crashed to the floor. Drinks were spilt, curses emitted, and Jake’s own cards went flying as he scrambled away from the table, where the enraged innkeeper looked about to launch himself across it. “What the hell did you do, you little bastard?” the man snarled. “I had a straight flush with a jack on top! How the hell did you—”
“Language!” Jake protested.
“Look!” The man jabbed a finger at his five cards, which could only have been mistaken for a straight flush if one read the eight of hearts as a jack of spades. As it was, all he had was a pair of eights.
Jake looked with the others, then lifted his gaze. “You need your eyes checked, man,” he taunted.
The publican did come for him then, starting around the table with a roar while Jake circled nimbly ahead of his meaty outstretched hands. Levi and I joined the tumult with voices raised (me pausing briefly at the two fallen chairs to set them aright) until the other men had extricated themselves from their own seats to seize the Evil Publican, pressing him back into his chair with a glass full enough to sedate a rhinoceros.
Jake returned cautiously to his place, stooping to retrieve his cards. He laid them out deliberately, one at a time, beside the emeralds.
I thought the innkeeper would explode when the jack of spades appeared. He demanded the whole deck be collected for counting, but there were 52, with no duplicates. And although in the confusion, any number of cards could have traded places, there was no doubt that his claim to a seven, eight, nine, ten, and jack of spades was absurd. How could Jake have touched his cards? He’d been sitting right there until the innkeeper picked them up.
Perhaps if the others actually liked the Evil Publican, his claims might have held a bit more weight. However, his hosting of this card game had always been more avaricious than sociable, and no one put his claimed straight flush against Jake’s mere pair of queens. (Two of the four others ruefully admired the skilful bluff, having themselves held hands that could have won.) If they had to lose to someone, make it Jake. At least it made for a good story.
Bank notes, coins, and the set of keys dutifully crossed the table. Jake Russell was now the owner of a derelict public house in rural Sussex.
He gave the inn’s former proprietor thirty pounds and an hour to load the shiny motorcar with personal belongings. Before first light the following morning, while five mostly contented London poker players snored in their beds above, three Russells stood in the inn’s ancient doorway and watched the car’s lights fade in the direction of Lewes.
* * *
“Quite a gamble,” Holmes remarked. “There were any number of hands that would have beaten your uncle even after losing a card. And others that your thrown eight of hearts would actually have improved.”
“Credit Jake’s guardian angel. And I suppose if he’d lost, the emeralds would simply have disappeared from the inn’s strongbox, and Jake from Sussex.”
“Which, I suspect, would not have been the first time the police were notified as to his activities?”
“Nor the last. But you’re right, it was a gamble. It wouldn’t have worked at all, had I not been a child.”
“A highly intelligent, cool-headed, left-handed child.”
I laughed. “With a brother who could fall off a bench on command.”
“The Russell gang: Scotland Yard’s despair. So what cards did your uncle have?”
“It wasn’t bad—a full house, three eights and a pair of queens, so he ended up with two pairs and that jack of spades. It was all a bluff, including his nervous leg.”
“He indicated to you the eight of hearts in his own hand, then stretched out play while you stepped aside to fetch that card from a matching deck you’d brought. When you returned and were propped on his shoulder, your little brother conveniently fell off his makeshift bed. Your card toss kicked the jack of spades out of the publican’s hand, leaving it on the floor.”
“I retrieved it when I bent down for his chair, then left it with those Uncle Jake had dropped, when I set his chair upright. The fellow knew the change had been made somehow, but since no one saw anything, the only faintly suspicious act was Jake dropping his cards—and even then, everyone else had jumped, too, when the innkeeper came out of his chair. In the end, they decided it was the empty claim of a losing blowhard.”
“I always wondered about that inn’s abrupt change of ownership. I was away at the time.”
“Jake sold it for next to nothing to a lady in Eastbourne whose cooking he was fond of.”
“Tillie Whiteneck.”
“She wanted to call the place ‘Jake’s Hand’ but he said no, so she dusted off the oldest name she could find for it. Thus, the Monk’s Tun.”
“What did your parents say?”
“They didn’t find out until after Christmas. Levi nearly let it slip twice, but fortunately I was there to kick his shins under the table. And then Jake was gone—he didn’t even stay for Christmas, to our vast disappointment. He never came back to Sussex, although the presents continued for a couple of years, and the occasional letter.”
Before he left, however my uncle had left behind a gift for each of us. Levi received a set of magician’s props, with joining rings, a magic bouquet, and a genuine child-sized folding silk hat.
And for me? An object that I carry to this day, despite my father’s disapproval and my mother’s dismay: a slim piece of wickedly sharp steel with a rosewood handle that was just a fraction large for my eleven year-old hand. It rested in a curious sort of sheath with straps at both ends which, after some thought, I fitted to my ankle. There it lay, invisible beneath trouser legs, a long skirt, or a pair of high boots.
Still lies. Now, all these years later, my eyes came to rest on the pile of logs beside the fire. My hand went down to the sheath, and with the flick of a hand, I let the wicked, brilliant little knife throw itself at the target.
Every young woman should have had an Uncle Jake.