Much Ado About Muffin

by Victoria Hamilton

  The drive wasn’t long enough to get it all sorted out, and just forty minutes or so after leaving the airport we turned onto the winding lane and drove up to Wynter Castle.

  Wynter Castle. It was almost noon, and the slanting sunlight of late September gave a golden hue to the beautiful old stone of my early nineteenth–century real American castle. It is so lovely to me now, but when I first arrived it seemed desolate; the ivy creeping up the stone walls, the huge Gothic diamond-paned windows that line it, and the arched double oak doors seeming giant-size after the compact apartments of Manhattan.

  Virgil pulled to a stop on the gravel drive, right by the flagged terrace, hopped out, and grabbed my bags out of the trunk. His radio crackled to life again, as it had intermittently on the drive, this time with a dispatcher’s voice squawking something about a disturbance at the Vale Variety and Lunch.

  “I gotta go,” he said, rounding the car and slamming into the driver’s seat.

  “Wait, Virgil, when can we talk?”

  “Gotta take this call. I’ll call you. Later,” he said, waving out the driver’s-side window as he backed around, skidding off down the drive with a spray of gravel.

  “Well, hello to you, too!” I stood for a moment, and breathed deeply, letting the quiet of the country, the smell of warm grass, the sound of the slight breeze tossing the treetops, calm me. I was home.

  I toted my bags up to the fieldstone terrace and pulled open the oak door, hit by a wave of sound. Pish’s expensive audio system, which he had installed as a gift to me—or to the castle—blared some opera singer belting “O Mio Babbino Caro,” a glorious Puccini aria with soaring high notes, one of the few opera pieces that most folks recognize. I had heard the singer before; the trembling top notes sounded familiar.

  I let the door close behind me as I stood in the cavernous great hall, turning slowly and taking in the tapestries that covered some of the stone walls, the grand staircase that swooped up, splitting in two, and the galleries above that let onto multiple rooms, and the glorious rose window above the stairs. I felt tremulous and emotional, ready to burst into tears.

  Until the opera singer did it for me. Just then the opera CD took an odd turn, the singer breaking into a storm of weeping. As I set my carry-on bag on the big round table in the center of the great hall she spoke.

  “Pish, darling, I can’t do it, I can’t!”

  Huh?

  The storm of weeping again, then Pish’s soothing murmur. Not a recording, then, but what was going on? I stood silent. The speaking voice was even more familiar than the singing. I located the source of the sound despite the amplified version piped through the sound system, turned, and headed into the dining room, a long room with the arched diamond-paned windows that looked over the drive and lane, and off of that, the library, one of the turret rooms. I went to the door and looked in.

  Tears welled in my eyes. There was my darling Pish, my sixty-something, lean, brown-haired, best friend and kind-of father figure. And he was with another woman! She was an auburn-haired beauty, lush figure (not quite as voluptuous as my own), medium height, with lovely hands that fluttered as she wept on Pish’s shoulder. A microphone hooked up to a bank of audio equipment on an ugly modern stand took up the center of my library.

  “I’ll never get the high notes again, I swear it, Pishie! Much less perform in front of people!”

  I cleared my throat, and you would have thought I’d caught them in flagrante delicto, the way they leaped guiltily apart, and how Pish stared, his blue eyes wide. She, her fluttering hands pressed to her bosom, well exposed in a low-cut tank top, stared at me with gorgeous false-lashed contact-fake green eyes.

  Roma Toscano. Oh, yes, I remembered her all too well. She had tried to steal my husband, Miguel.

  “Merry, darling!” Pish yelped after a moment. He skipped across the room, taking me into a hug, his slender frame pressed to my more ample body.

  After a babble of welcome and our teary reunion, he reintroduced me to Roma Toscano, though I reminded him that we had met. She was a minor-league opera singer, a friend of Pish’s. We had met about ten years before at one of Pish’s opera galas in support of the Lexington Opera Company. Roma had virtually ignored me while she flirted outrageously with Miguel. I learned later that she had stalked him, to some degree, showing up at one of his shoots in St. Barths and retaining his talent agency as her own.

  All—supposedly—a coincidence. Miguel laughed it off, but I knew the truth. She had tried to encroach on my territory, and I didn’t appreciate it. Still, that was ten years ago.

  We repaired to the kitchen and sat at the long trestle table that centered the work area, which I affectionately examined, having been absent from it for so long. The kitchen was designed and modernized, astonishingly, by my late great-uncle, who had thought to make a professional kitchen for an inn, into which he had at some point considered making the castle. The work area is long, with stainless steel surfaces, a deep professional sink, a six-burner stove, and a huge stainless steel fridge. At the other end of the long space is a more homey seating area, with big wing chairs in front of a fireplace. It is my favorite room in the castle.

  I wanted nothing more than to catch up with my dearest friend, to ask after all our mutual acquaintances, hear every little detail of the last two months. But instead I had to listen to Roma as Pish coaxed her into telling me her story and how she had ended up at Wynter Castle.

  “This darling, darling man came to me in my hour of greatest need!” she explained, clutching his arm and laying her head on his shoulder, which in the past had been available for only my head.

  Pish explained that in late July he took Lush, his aunt who had been staying at the castle, back to the city. She missed her friends terribly. That was when he connected with some of his old friends in the arts community. “Roma is the principal soprano of the Lexington Opera Company in the city.”

  So she had worked her way up. When I knew her she was one of the minor singers and a stand-in.

  “Or at least she was principal soprano until she had a little problem.”

  She chuckled, a warm, throaty sound, and patted Pish’s upper arm, flirtatious as usual. I surmised that she was one of those women who flirt with everyone: male, female, gay, straight.

  “He’s being far too kind, as usual,” Roma said, fluttering her fake eyelashes. She hugged him harder, making her cleavage bloom over the low-cut tank top until it was as if two mounds of pale bread dough were struggling to escape a loaf pan. “I had a breakdown of epic—I might say, operatic—proportions.” She threaded her fingers through his longish hair and mussed it. “I had an incident of stage fright, my voice locked up, and I ruined an LOC performance of Linda di Chamounix.” She looked across the table at me. “That’s a Donizetti piece; you wouldn’t know it. Anyway . . . I was let go.”

  “Most unfairly!” Pish said, patting her hand and gazing at her with fondness. “Poor dear had been working too hard.”

  “Not fair,” I agreed. “Maybe if you went back to them and—”

  “Ah, but you haven’t heard all of it,” she said, wagging her finger at me and giving a trilling laugh that lightly tripped on a descending scale. “As a soprano I’m high-strung. That was not the end of it.” Wryly, she explained that she ended up threatening the LOC conductor with graphic violence, though she made it seem like a comic scene in an operetta, merely a charming flight of fancy on her part. The conductor unexpectedly (in her telling) took it personally, especially when she added some insulting language toward his wife and ugly children. She was about to be charged but fled and ended up on the GWB (the George Washington Bridge) threatening to jump.

  “I wasn’t really going to jump,” she said. “I just needed to think.”

  “Poor darling,” Pish said. “I talked to the LOC conductor, got the police to drop any thought of charges, and after a little bit, brought her
back here. This is the best place for her to recover. And now we are working on her voice, and her confidence.”

  I got up to make a pot of tea, not wanting Pish to read my mind. I turned on the jet under the kettle and stared out the window, which looked off toward the forest, just beginning to get that tinge of rusty brown and gold that is a precursor to full-on upstate autumn. I was being totally unfair—and after he had been so good as to watch over the castle while I was away—but I had been looking forward to having the place just to us. I knew he was taking Lush back to the city, but he hadn’t, in all the times we spoke, told me about bringing Roma to Wynter Castle. I felt blindsided and slightly resentful, especially given my own personal history with her, which he may have forgotten. I struggled to push those feelings back. I’d acknowledge and deal with them later.

  When I came back, full teapot in hand, I was composed. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to welcome you to Wynter Castle, Roma, but I hope you’re enjoying your stay.”

  “I am, though it’s taking longer than I thought to . . . to regain my confidence.” She fluttered her lashes and cast down her gaze, the first real sign I had seen of her lack of self-assurance.

  Pish put his hand over hers on the table. “And that is why I have decided that the Autumn Vale Community Players’ next work will be a little opera piece, something obscure, nothing anyone has heard before. Our mistake last time was in trying something too big, too well-known.” He spoke of them tackling Die Zauberflöte, Mozart’s incredibly challenging opera.

  That was not their only mistake, or even their most grievous; the biggest mistake had been giving “Der Hölle Rache,” one of the most supremely difficult soprano arias of all time, to a dear friend, Janice Grover, who couldn’t hit high C with any tone. “Too well-known? Pish, no one in Autumn Vale has heard any opera before—except Janice, of course.” She was our local bank president’s wife and the owner of Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles; her slaughter of the Queen of the Night aria in their last production had been an epic fail, though it had generated enough talk and laughter to keep everyone smiling for weeks at her expense. “And Gogi, and maybe Doc.”

  “Ah yes, but we’re going to tackle an opera version of Much Ado About Nothing. It has some lovely bits, and we’ve started working on it.”

  Shakespeare’s romantic comedy as an opera? Who knew? “So why were you working on ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’?”

  “That was Pish’s idea,” Roma said, with an affectionate glance at her new impresario. “He thinks that if I record a few pieces and he puts them on the Internet, he can make me a sensation!”

  “I’ve got Zeke working on making a video to back her singing, and we’re going to take some footage or photographs of her in costume, out in the woods, and set it to the video and put it online.”

  “And how is your writing going, Pish?” He had been working on a follow-up book to his NYT bestseller, Cons, Scams, and Flimflams, using as inspiration the banking scandal that had plagued the Autumn Vale Community Bank.

  He shrugged. “I’m stalled right now, but it’ll come.”

  Stalled because he was putting all his creative energy into a diva? I eyed Roma with distaste. Maybe I wasn’t being fair, but she is one of those women who suck up every little bit of attention and still crave more. Was there more to his writers’ block? Pish had been hurt by his last romantic fling and subsequent breakup with a senior federal agent, Stoddart Harkner, so perhaps this distraction was what he needed.

  I spent the rest of the day unpacking, doing laundry, and napping after the long flight. I ordered a new cell phone, which would arrive by courier the very next day. I went out briefly to look for Becket, my uncle’s orange tabby, who Pish said had spent most of the summer outdoors. I called and called, and thought I saw him on the edge of the Wynter Woods, but he didn’t come home. It was just us for dinner, and after, Pish and Roma retreated to the library to attempt the song again. I felt oddly lonely.

  I went to bed early, determined to make an apology round of visits the next day. I had been out of touch and totally self-focused for weeks; it was time to expend some energy outward. Not that I had been wrong to stay away so long. I felt more at peace in my heart. I now had a handle on what many thought was excessive grief and mourning for my husband and understood why it had gone on so long, and what I now was ready for.

  I had plans.

  * * *

  The next morning I tried to call Shilo; I wanted to get together with my best female friend, have tea, and visit, but there was no answer at her home. All I got on Jack’s real estate line was a recorded message. I’d try again later. My cell phone arrived by courier, and I set it up immediately, relieved to be back in contact with my world.

  The Merry Wynter Apology Tour would have to start in Autumn Vale. I took a brief walk toward the woods, calling Becket, but the grass and weeds had gotten too long, and though I tried my best, I couldn’t see anything near the woods but a brief flash of orange. I was heartsick; poor Becket must have thought I’d abandoned him. After my uncle died, Becket spent most of the year in the woods, and he’d gone back to those habits after I left. I thought I wasn’t important to him, that I was someone handy who made sure he had fresh food and water, but it seemed that my “abandonment” had affected him more deeply than I could have expected.

  Maybe some of my humans—like Shilo—felt the same?

  My gorgeous old boat of a car, a Cadillac Fleetwood left to me by my great-uncle Melvyn Wynter, started up with a cough and a hesitation, like an old person getting up in the morning. As I drove along the road toward Autumn Vale I remembered the morning, more than a year ago, when I had first approached the village to ask directions to my castle. I had met Doc English (an old friend of my great-uncle’s) in the village, though then I just knew him as an odd, scuttling, weirdly dressed elderly gentleman. I also encountered Sheriff Virgil Grace, who had ogled my cleavage then led me out to Wynter Castle, where I met Jack McGill, the real estate agent who had been trying to sell it for me. From there, I encountered the dozens of wonderful, odd, happily strange people who had become friends and, in some cases, enemies.

  It took me a while to get used to the castle and village but now, driving along Abenaki, the main street in Autumn Vale, which still had some boarded-up shops, along with the various businesses that fed, clothed, and entertained the townies, I felt that I had come home. I pulled into a street parking spot outside of Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles and, since I was right there, I opened the door to the antique shop and edged in past the fire hazards—also known as her stock—Janice Grover has piled in the way. As I crab-walked in, I heard a shriek and a crash.

  I hurriedly threaded my way through the junk toward the noise and saw a huge, framed antique mirror on the floor, cracked from side to side, with Janice, in a colorful floor-length dashiki, standing over it, staring. Her face was ghostly white, and she said, “Seven years of bad luck! Oh Lord, as if I haven’t had enough of that.”

  “Janice, it’s okay,” I said. “You don’t believe that superstitious nonsense, do you?”

  She looked toward me through the dust-specked gloom. “Oh, Merry, you’re back. About bloody time. I was beginning to think you’d gone for good. Poof, a disappearing act!” she said, waving her hands.

  “I never intended to stay that long, but things happened.” I started helping her clear up the big shards of mirror.

  “Hmph. So now that you’re home, what are you going to do about that awful woman Pishie’s taken up with?” she said, her voice fading in and out as she disappeared to get a broom and came back. “Kick her out of the castle?”

  Not a fan of Roma Toscano, apparently. “I know her from years ago. I’ll tell you how if you come to the Vale for a coffee,” I said, giving the short local name of the Vale Variety and Lunch, which was, as it sounded, a variety store and luncheonette.

  She sighed and nodded. As we cleaned
up the glass I listened to her complaints about Roma, who she said was pushy and snobbish, then we walked down to the Vale. I felt like dancing my way down, I was so happy to be back. But I had to wonder, had my time away changed perceptions of me? I hadn’t been in Autumn Vale long enough to be considered a fixture, and folks could view my two-and-a-half-month runner as a symbol of how uncommitted to the place I was. I’d have to work my way back into their good graces.

  We wove through the variety store aisles, mounted the two steps to the coffee shop in back, and nabbed a table, the same funky fifties diner–style ones that had been there since the fifties, when they were new. I eyed the domed glass dessert containers on the lunch counter and noticed muffins, not mine. So someone was baking muffins, but who?

  Mabel Thorpe, the manageress, a tiger lady with a redoubtable beehive of stiffly sprayed curls (often gray, but at that moment radiantly orange and yellow, like autumn leaves), came over to the table and threw down the gauntlet in the shape of the specials of the day sheet. “We have muffins; really, really good muffins,” she said, glaring at me. “You want one? On the house.”

  Good Lord, I hadn’t thought she would be angry at me. “I’m happy you have someone baking them for you. Did Binny finally break down and start baking normal stuff?” Binny Turner, who owned the only bakeshop in town, was rigid in her insistence on making European-style treats to suit international palates. Of which there were few in Autumn Vale. Or none.

  “Nope. Pattycakes has taken over where you left off.”