‘He’s one of us, Hugo,’ explained Lady Amanda, with a rather smug smile.
‘What do you mean, one of us? Are you sure you don’t mean one of them, breaking in on a man when he’s in the lavatory?’
‘Were you actually conducting any business, Hugo? And don’t be so bigoted!’
‘No, I was just hiding. And I’m not! Bigoted, that is.’
‘Well, there you are then. That proves it, doesn’t it?’
‘Proves what?’
‘That he’s one of us. He came to see me yesterday, you know.’
‘When?’ asked Hugo, his voice high with indignation that he had not been apprised of this visit.
‘When you were off drinking toxic tea with that old devil Grundle.’
‘You could still have told me when I got back.’ Hugo felt quite huffy about this clandestine visit, and his total lack of knowledge of it.
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t. If you remember, you spent the afternoon sleeping off your cup of ‘tea’, snoring like a grampus in the library, until I got Beauchamp to put you to bed.’
‘You could’ve told me when I woke up,’ he challenged her.
‘Well, I didn’t. You were too grumpy. Now, shut up, and let’s work out today’s plan of action. We’ve only got the afternoon and evening left, and three other households to infiltrate.’
‘At least we won’t be sneaking about like thieves in the night again.’
‘Thieves in the night do not bang gongs with their walking sticks, Hugo.’
‘Fair point, Manda. Fair point.’
After a lot of discussion, which necessitated Beauchamp joining them at table, it was decided to split the work up thus: Hugo was to go off into the woods and ‘pump’ Sir Montacute Fotherington-Flint’s gamekeeper, hoping that he wouldn’t be off in the family’s woods somewhere doing something incomprehensible and gamekeeper-ish.
‘As a boy, when he first started there as a boot-boy, he was a favourite of the housekeeper, so it would be a good idea to see if you can get him reminiscing about when he first came to the house. He, no doubt, picked up endless bits and pieces of household gossip, just because he was so unimportant,’ she informed him.
‘Beauchamp, I’d like you to just drop in for a chat with Major Mapperley-Minto’s man. Old Monty likes a drink or ten, and he can be very confiding when he’s in his cups. It will have been his man’s duty to make sure he got to bed safely, and many a confidence has been shared after dark with a close member of one’s staff, with a bellyful of booze.’
‘Very good, my lady, and that’s Beecham, if you don’t mind,’ chanced the manservant.
‘It’s Beauchamp, or I’m a Chinaman, and I don’t speak a word of Mandarin. Now, I, meanwhile,’ she swept on, without a second thought for her manservant, who was standing directly behind her, repeatedly mouthing ‘Beecham’ silently to the back of her head, ‘shall pay a polite call on the Featherstonehaugh-Armitages. Stinky and Donkey,’ she clarified, as Hugo was not very good at remembering names, which was ironic, considering the clunking great moniker he himself possessed, and I have a few other little calls to make, before the afternoon is out. All clear about what you’re doing?’
‘Yes, Manda,’ agreed Hugo, nodding his head in a vague way.
‘Yes, my lady,’ concurred Beauchamp, and turned to leave the room.
‘One moment, Beauchamp. Just a word before you go.’
‘Yes, my lady?’
‘I presume you had forgotten about the mirror facing where I was sitting, when you were behind me.’
‘I had, indeed, my lady,’ said Beauchamp. ‘Very remiss of me,’ he added, turning a nice shade of pink.
‘Dis-missed!’ The troops were dispatched.
Beauchamp needed no excuse to call at The White House, as he often dropped in to see the valet/butler, Mr Tinker, when he had a half-day free, and was, therefore, welcomed without question, and shown into Tinker’s sitting room.
‘Hey, there, Beechy! How are you doing?’ he was hailed, before he was fully through the door.
‘I’m doing fine, Tinker. How are you? I haven’t seen you since well before Christmas,’ replied Beauchamp, suddenly coming over all ‘hail fellow, well met’.
‘All the better for seeing your smiling face. Now, what can I do for you, or have you just come over for one of our little chats?’
‘On the button, as usual, Tinker. At this time of year I find I get very nostalgic, and I thought, if there’s another man in Belchester who would understand how I feel, it’s good old Tinker at The White House.’ Lady Amanda would not have recognised this Beauchamp.
‘I know just what you mean. You get to thinking about all those other Christmases and New Years you’ve spent in the same place, and it really does get you remembering old times, doesn’t it?’
Accepting a tankard of ale, Beauchamp prepared to steer the conversation around to the possibility of dark doings in the household, way back in the past.
Tinker had, to a certain extent, picked up some of his habits from his employer, and it was while he was pouring Beauchamp’s second pint, and his own fourth, that he came over all confidential, and told the other a story that he had heard no hint of in any of the other residences of quality in the county.
‘My two are getting on a bit, just like yours. Funny the way your old lady just ran into old Chummy, wasn’t it? There’s some tales I could tell you, though, that have never passed these lips before, and would make your hair curl.’
‘Really, Tinker? Like what?’ asked Beauchamp, flashing his hip flask for the fourth time and obligingly pouring a little soupcon – quite a large soupcon, actually – into Tinker’s tankard, then waving it over his own, so that he served himself nothing more substantial than fumes.
‘Very hospitable of you, Beechy. Wait up there!’ the other requested, and toddled, slightly drunkenly, over to the door, to make sure that no one was eavesdropping. ‘Can’t be too careful, these days,’ he added, and tapped the side of his nose with his right forefinger in a knowing gesture.
‘There’s a story about this fambly would fair knock you out, old son, an’ I’m gonna share it with you today, cos you’re my bes’ mate, and I’m thinkin’ of retiring’ soon, so it don’t matter a flyin’ fig ter me wot anyone finks.’ Tinker’s speech was becoming a little slurred, not only because of the strength of the beer, but because of the constant addition of large measures of brandy to his drinking vessel.
‘It ’appened when I was but a bit of a boy, ’ere, long, long ago.’ A tear of alcohol-inspired emotion quivered at the corner of one eye, as he said this. ‘It was when the major was only a captain, and ’e was posted abroad, but the missus wouldn’t go wiv ’im. Don’ know if you rem-em-em-ember tha’’
‘Of course I do, but you weren’t quite a boy were you, because I’d just started as boot boy at Belchester Towers, and you’re a good bit older than me,’ replied Beauchamp, unable to completely stop himself from aiming for some accuracy.
‘Wha’ever! Nearly two years, ’e was gorn, and ’er all alone ’ere. I got called out to do for ’im after only a coupla months – ’e ’ad a sort of local bungalow-y building ’e lived in by then – and you couldn’t even make up what I saw when I was out there, with ’im, in forrin parts.’
‘Only went and got ’isself married again, di’n’t ’e. To a native girl wot wasn’t more ’n seventeen years old. Would you believe it, ol’ son, ol’ Beechy, ol’ friend?’
‘He didn’t, Tinker! So what happened to her, this little foreign stunner?’
‘She only went an’ ’ad ’is baby, di’n’t she.’
‘Good grief!’ exclaimed Beauchamp, trying not to let his voice boom out in his astonishment.
Tinker merely nodded sagely and drunkenly. ‘Big-igamy, tha’s wha’ i’ was. Big-ig-igamy!’
‘So what did he do? Just leave her there when he got posted back to Blighty?’ Beauchamp really was all ears. He’d never expected anything of this magnitude to come of his visit to see his old
friend. What a motive for murder!
‘Nuffink! Di’n’t ’ave to. Arter she ’ad the nipper, ’er fambly sent ’er orf into the mountains, too ashamed to look their friends in the face again, what wiv ’er avin’ a forrin baby an’ all tha’. An’ ’e just came swannin’ back ʼere like nothin’s ’appened. I reckon ’e was a right Pinkerton, don’t you, Beechy?’
Beauchamp, who knew his Madama Butterfly but was surprised that Tinker did, nodded his head sagely in agreement, thinking that that little bombshell could be alive and well, and liable to burst on to the scene at any time, with no warning whatsoever. ‘And has he never looked for them?’ he asked, listening as intently as an Archers fan for the next instalment of the story.
‘Nah! Said it was just a forrin bint, and that the marriage was a sham anyway, not bein’ in English, like.’
‘Well, bless my soul!’ ejaculated Beauchamp, shocked to his very roots. This would make Lady Amanda’s hair stand on end, when he told her later. ‘I won’t divulge this to another living soul,’ he promised earnestly, his fingers crossed behind his back. And if Popeye had got wind of this, he wouldn’t have to watch his tongue for much longer. That book really could be dynamite!
Hugo was also to be offered the roots of a family scandal by the wily old gamekeeper on the Fotherington-Flint land, but had a harder time finding his quarry. He knew where the gamekeeper’s hut in the woods was, but, after squelching through the mud created by the thaw, earning himself boots that felt like they belonged in the Somme, so heavy were their soles, he found no one at home.
He stood rather disconsolately, as the trees dripped on him, calling out in his loudest voice, ‘Rodgers! Rodgers!’ that being the gamekeeper’s name, but answer was there none. After a few efforts in this manner, with no answer whatsoever, he decided he’d better make for the house, but when he tried to walk, he found he couldn’t get his shoes out of the ground. The thick covering of mud on the soles had melded into the mud below them, and stuck him faster than he had the strength to fight.
At this point, he changed tactics slightly, and began to shout, ‘Help! Help!’ Within less than a minute, a man had materialised like magic from a clump of trees and was walking towards him calling out, ‘Hang on in there. I’m just coming.’
‘Are you Rodgers?’ asked Hugo, of this newly arrived stranger.
‘I am, that,’ replied the man, taking a good look at Hugo’s predicament. ‘You stay there a moment, and I’ll just go and get something to release you. Very clayey, is this ground,’ and disappeared off into the trees again.
By the time that Hugo had begun to wonder if the man had been a mirage born of panic, he returned with a spade in an old wheelbarrow. ‘Soon have you out of there, old man. I’ll take you back to the house, and we’ll get your shoes cleaned up. Who have you come to see?’
‘You actually,’ answered Hugo, eyeing up the wheelbarrow suspiciously. He had a nasty idea that he knew what it was for.
‘Deftly sliding the spade under Hugo’s feet, one at a time, and trying to keep it as close to the actual sole as possible, Rodgers manage to break the suction and, having given Hugo a freedom of sorts, put the wheelbarrow behind him and gave him a deft little shove in the chest, so that he collapsed neatly into its interior.
‘Quickest way, old man,’ he consoled the humiliated Hugo, who merely sat in his new place of imprisonment, sighing and tutting. This was the second time he’d taken an undignified ride in a wheelbarrow this December, not to mention a barely remembered trip in the bucket of a mechanical digger, and it had to stop. He was feeling distinctly like a potato!
Lady Amanda, meanwhile, had tried to contact old Lady Mumbles, who had once been a big noise in the county before her husband lost everything gambling. She had had to sell up eventually, but made a game attempt to keep her property going by selling off the contents, bit by bit, and now lived with her niece just outside Belchester.
She was very chagrined indeed to find out, when she telephoned, that Lady Mumbles had, in fact, succumbed to an attack of influenza at the end of November, and had not survived the experience. She did find out from the niece, however, that her aunt had sold a lot of her possessions to F A Antiques in Belchester itself.
Thanking the niece and passing on her condolences, Lady Amanda ended the call and sat tapping a pen on the top of her desk, as she let her memory go for a stroll down its own personal lane. The name she wanted was in there somewhere; she just had to wait for it to surface before she could do anything else.
After a quarter of an hour of tapping and waiting, she suddenly shouted, ‘Aha!’ and dialled the number for Directory Enquiries. Within less than five minutes she was in contact with an auction house about a hundred and twenty-five miles from Belchester and, within another ten minutes, was in possession of the information that confirmed her, up to then, unsubstantiated suspicions.
Her next move would be to casually drop in on Donkey, on the pretext of seeking some feedback about the house tour that now seemed like years ago, instead of only a few days.
Hugo found himself in the pleasant fug of a large kitchen in the throes of baking day, and had gladly swapped his clay-caked shoes for a cup of (non-alcoholic) tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits – to raise his spirits after his unfortunate mishap, Mrs Hipkiss, the elderly housekeeper had said, as she set them before him on the kitchen table.
Hugo decided to play this hand perfectly straight, and he laid his cards on the table without a qualm. ‘I’ll be perfectly honest with you, Rodgers, Mrs Hipkiss, I am here to see if you have any knowledge whatsoever of a family scandal that would be ruinous, should it ever be made public.
‘I don’t do this alone. Lady Amanda and I are checking out several families of good name and status, because that wretched Capt Leslie Barrington-Blyss has written a book that he claimed would blow the lids off many of the families of this type.
‘As you know, he was murdered on Boxing Day in Lady Amanda’s library, and we have taken it upon ourselves, now that he’s dead, to try to uncover what he might have found out. We are absolutely certain that his widow will halt publication. What we would like to do, however, as the only known copy of it, other than the one with his erstwhile publisher, is in the hands of the police, is to get there first, as it were, as any information you may be able to impart may be instrumental in uncovering the identity of his murderer.
‘We don’t want to leave Inspector Moody, whom we consider to be incompetent, to muddle the case up, then let out details of what is contained in the book, to try to uncover the murderer. It would be advantageous to everyone if we could solve the case first, and save many families untold embarrassment. At the very least, it will give those involved sufficient time to take out an injunction against the contents of this execrable tome being made public.’
Hugo finished his speech just before the point where he talked himself into a state in which he didn’t understand, any more, what he was talking about, and was surprised when his audience of two began to clap their hand in appreciation.
‘Noble words! Fine fellow! And Lady Amanda, too!’ Rodgers congratulated Hugo’s sentiments.
‘May God bless you, Mr Hugo!’ added Mrs Hipkiss, before looking at Rodgers to see if he had anything to offer.
‘Sorry,’ the gamekeeper apologised. ‘I’m afraid I can’t think of anything that would count as a big scandal likely to do damage to the Fotherington-Flint name. I wish I could help you, but I can’t.’
Hugo sighed, and transferred his gaze to Mrs Hipkiss, who was looking doubtful. ‘Well,’ she mused, ‘there’s nothing in my time, and I’m as old as Mrs Methuselah; but my mother worked here before I did, and I think, if you give me a minute or two to get my head together about it, I might – I just might – nothing definite – have something for you.’
Hugo, ever a patient soul, dunked his biscuits happily, and accepted a refill of his teacup, as Mrs Hipkiss wracked her brains to recall a tale told to her decades ago, and which she hadn’t thought
much about since. Eventually, she gave a yell of, ‘Got it!’ and pulled up a chair opposite the unexpected visitor to her kitchen.
‘Oh, it was donkey’s years ago, ducky,’ she began, ‘and it wasn’t to do with the present Sir Montacute, but his parents, young lovers that they were, then. Still teenagers, and not married, although betrothed and properly engaged, his mother-to-be suddenly disappeared from sight. She never left her parents’ house for months on end, and a story was circulated that she was gravely ill.
‘Meanwhile, the wedding was planned, but there were those that believed she’d never be well enough to attend the ceremony.’ Hugo was already enthralled, and sat with his chin in one hand, his mouth slightly open, with what Lady A referred to as his ‘catching flies’ face.
‘My mother was good friends with her mother’s maid at the time – they used to spend all their half-days together – and her friend told her of the awful weeping and screaming that had gone on about a week before that girl was seen in public once more. Her friend had been convinced that she was in her death throes.
‘My mother, she was altogether more sceptical, and she remembered how that girl’s mother had called at this house the same night that her friend reported the weeping and screaming, and my mother distinctly heard her mother say just a few words. ‘It’s a girl. It’s already gone for private adoption.
‘Well, I can tell you what my mother deduced. That the young couple had put the cart before the horse, and now the mess was being sorted out for them by their parents. The wedding went ahead about three months later, and it was less than a year before they produced our own Sir Montacute, but none of this has got anything to do with him. He wasn’t even born at the time.’
‘Eh?’ grunted Hugo. ‘Is that the end of the story? Couldn’t you tell me another one, please? I was really enjoying myself there.’
Lady Amanda was shown through immediately to the drawing room of The Old Convent, where she found Angelica Featherstonehaugh-Armitage already in the arms of a cocktail, and thoroughly enjoying the experience.
Belchester Box Set Page 32
