“You mean the schoolchildren, of course.” Miss Maynard and Mr. Jessyp had dismissed their pupils for the day, and a giggling, chattering, shrill-voiced crowd could be heard approaching from the north as it made its way in the direction of one or other of the Plummergen shops selling sweets, crisps, and fizzy drinks.
“I’ve never understood,” continued Mrs. Blaine crossly, “how Mr. Jessyp can possibly believe That Woman is fit to teach such very impressionable youngsters whenever Miss Maynard’s away. One would suppose he’d know better by now, with all the peculiar things that happen whenever she’s around, but he doesn’t seem to. It’s too strange. Suspicious, even.”
The shrill giggles had turned suddenly to squeals of excitement, accompanied by the thunderous patter of fifty pairs of feet as the children rushed to Miss Seeton’s aid. They hurled themselves in gleeful pursuit after the wayward, wind-tossed hat, and ignored her cries of warning lest her young helpers should, in the heat of the moment, forget all about their Kerb Drill and leap out into the road under the wheels of some passing car.
“Lady Colveden,” Miss Nuttel reminded her. “Board of governors. Different if any of them had children there, of course, but they haven’t.”
“Oh, Eric, you’re so right. One would have supposed that Lady Colveden—not that Sir George is exactly the squire, too old-fashioned and forelock-tugging, but somehow one does still expect them to set a good example, and not to go encouraging people who ...”
“Ought to know better,” supplied Miss Nuttel, as Norah Blaine drifted to a halt. She had just remembered that she wasn’t talking to Eric, and was feeling a little embarrassed about having been the one to initiate the conversation.
She accordingly uttered only the faintest of murmurs in response to Miss Nuttel’s remark, and stared even harder through the window at the frenzied scene without. The capricious breeze, which had bowled Miss Seeton’s hat in tantalising fits and starts all the way up The Street just a few yards in front of her eager hands, had allowed itself a short breather, sufficient to drop the hat almost to the ground at the feet of the foremost child: but it had then changed its mind again and sent the by now battered bonnet in a high-flying parabola right across The Street to rest, its proud feathers crumpled, its crown covered with dust, on the striped canvas awning over Mr. Stillman’s window.
“Oh, dear,” breathed Miss Seeton, as the canvas bounced and bulged beneath the unexpected weight. Mr. Stillman, she feared, was not going to be pleased. The awning was new, a replacement for the curved brown-and-orange canopy which had shielded the post office window from the sun since the heady days of the Best Kept Village Competition, in which Plummergen had come second. With thoughts even now turning to next year’s contest, Mr. Stillman had recently exchanged autumnal stripes for mock Tudor black and white, with a smartly scalloped border ...
And nobody could call crumpled feathers and dusty crown—midnight sable, overpowdered by dingy grey—any great improvement on the original intent.
“Oh, dear ... Children—do take care!” Miss Seeton, still lamenting the unorthodox resting-place of her hat even as she patted her hair automatically back into shape, caught her breath in a sudden gasp at the sight of the fifty Junior Mixed Infants who from time to time came under her pedagogic sway running pell-mell across The Street, crying that they would throw stones or jump up to bring the fugitive feathers down.
“Children—no, please ...”
But by the time Miss Seeton, looking carefully to right, left, and right again before setting even one foot on the metalled surface of the road, had reached the post office pavement, the area under the awning had become a mass of laughing, leaping figures swinging satchels upwards on their leather straps to bump against the canvas, attempting to jab pointing fingers and optimistic fists into the underside of the hat to slide it over the edge and into their waiting hands ... And from inside the shop, Mr. Stillman’s customers stood and stared, astounded.
Miss Seeton, blushing, raised her voice above the cries of “Out the way, Henry!” and “My turn now!” to request—to insist—that the children, grateful though she was for their assistance, should stop, and allow her to think the problem through. Recognising the voice of command, they duly stopped; but the effort of stopping them, hard upon the exertion of the chase, had left their commander too frazzled even to start thinking what she should do next.
Giggling, shuffling, digging one another in the ribs, Plummergen’s youth watched Miss Seeton ponder, her anxious eyes upturned to the dark, circular shadow visible among the stripes. Whispers of “Dare you, Helen!” and “Go on, Katy, you thought of it first” did not reach her worry-deafened ears, and in the depths of her concentration she failed to observe the curious crowd pressing against the glass of the post office window.
At last: “Use yer brolly, Miss!” came the advice from the school’s recognised wag, dared by his friends and with his position to maintain. Leader of the Bigguns, he was already as tall as Miss Seeton, though by more than half a century her junior. “Do it for you, shall I?”
“Ooh yes, Miss!”
“Hold yer satchel while you jump?”
“Betcher don’t do it first time!”
The clamour seemed to rouse Miss Seeton from her contemplative trance. She blinked, shook her head, and, sighing with relief, smiled kindly on her young gallant.
“I don’t think it will be necessary for anyone to jump, thank you. Mr. Stillman, as I now recall, has a set of aluminium steps behind the grocery counter, so that he may more easily reach items on the higher shelves. I am sure that, once I explain, he will let me borrow them—the steps, that is—and then, with my umbrella, as you suggested, it should be an easy enough matter to ...”
It was a sadly dilapidated headpiece which was at last tumbled from the striped awning by Miss Seeton, standing tip-toe atop the borrowed steps, poking and prodding with her umbrella. She had refused Mr. Stillman’s kind offer of assistance, saying that it was her own fault for having forgotten a hatpin; she had poked and prodded, and had at last achieved success. Fifty pairs of grubby young hands reached out to grab as the battered bonnet tumbled to earth; more feathers fell off in the subsequent scrimmage. Miss Seeton, blessing the yoga which, taken up over seven years earlier for the benefit of her knees, had endowed her with remarkable agility and an excellent sense of balance, hopped sadly to the ground to retrieve her handbag from one child, and her hat—after some confusion—from the midst of a scrabbling horde of the child’s companions.
“Reckon it’s had it, Miss,” someone said, as Miss Seeton surveyed the sorry wreckage of her property, and sighed.
“I rather fear you may be right.” She sighed again: one could do—one regularly did—one’s best with trimming and decoration, but there was a limit beyond which even the most skilful needle—which she acknowledged that hers was not—was unable to renew the old, restore the ruined. “It is,” said Miss Seeton again, “nobody’s fault but mine, for having neglected, in my hurry to catch the post, to use a pin to secure my hat, in such very windy weather—which,” she added, “is a lesson from which we might all learn. More haste, children, means less speed, in the end.”
Fifty small, serious faces nodded their understanding, then hid smiles as Miss Seeton, realising what she’d just said, dropped the hat on the ground and opened her bag to begin fumbling inside for her letters. As some bent to retrieve, yet again, the peripatetic headpiece, others cocked their heads on one side, listening. In the distance, an approaching diesel whine ...
“Miss, hurry up!”
“Here comes Bert!”
And Miss Seeton slipped her letters through the official scarlet slot just ten seconds before red-haired Bert, Plummergen’s expatriate Cockney postman, pulled up in his van outside the letter-box, and prepared to unload its contents into his brown hessian sack.
“Well!” was the general opinion within the post office, as Bert in his van rattled at last on his way and Miss Seeton, having once more thanked t
he children, trotted off on hers, bearing the sad remains of her windblown hat in her hands.
“Well,” somebody promptly enlarged, “if that ain’t just what you’d expect o’ Miss Seeton, egging on the kiddies to mischief—and her supposed to set them a good example!”
“As good as pulled Mr. Stillman’s new awning down on top o’ their heads with that brolly of hers—the poor little mites,” chimed in someone else, having checked that none of the children was present to overhear this unusually fond turn of phrase. “As if any of us’d ever dream o’ doing such a thing! I’ve allus said,” she added, “as there’s summat strange about Miss Seeton.”
“Which ain’t to say,” said Mrs. Flax, “as she’s the only strange one around these parts.” The Wise Woman, perennially jealous of Miss Seeton’s reputation against her own, steered the conversation artfully away from her rival, and back to the topic previously under discussion. “If there’s anyone here,” said Mrs. Flax, in challenging accents, “as can tell me what cause Miss Nuttel’s got to go buying cheesewire, of all things, them Nuts being vegetarian, or so they’ve allus said, then I’d like to know what it is.”
“And a fishing reel,” said Mrs. Skinner.
“Not to mention snare wire,” said Mrs. Henderson.
They stared at each other, astonished that their thought processes should be running so plainly in parallel. It was too much, of course, to suppose that parallel lines could ever meet: but both ladies felt a certain frisson as they hastily averted their eyes, and gazed anywhere but at the face opposite.
“And Mrs. Blaine,” said Mrs. Spice, “a-barging in here not ten minutes after, for a breadboard—as if anyone needs two breadboards! Not as if you’d wear ’em out, is it? Take a powerful thick crust on a loaf for a knife to cut through to the surface.”
“An ordinary knife,” said Mrs. Flax, and put her finger to her lips, looking over her shoulder and lowering her voice. “It’s not so long since Halloween, remember—as who should know better than me?” She cleared her throat, preparing for gnomic utterance, and everyone held horrified breath, and waited in gleeful expectation.
Expectation was not in vain.
“There’s kitchen steel,” Mrs. Flax, in thrilling tones, reminded her audience, “and there’s cold iron ...”
And as pent-up breath was released in an ecstatic sigh, a shiver ran down the spine of everyone within earshot.
Next morning’s first lesson was History, and Miss Maynard knew that, in the first week of November, there could be no choice as to the historical event covered.
“The Gunpowder Plot,” announced Miss Maynard, writing on the blackboard as she spoke. “Which was also known as the Gunpowder Treason. I’m sure you all know the rhyme,” she added, as twenty small hands waved in the air, and twenty treble voices begged to recite.
“Remember, remember the fifth of November—
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot!”
came the full-throated response, in an excited chorus. Miss Maynard smiled.
“And what is so special about November the fifth?”
“Guy Fawkes Night!” roared the chorus, more excited still. Miss Maynard smiled again, and nodded.
“And who was Guy Fawkes? Doesn’t anyone know?” as there was silence. “Come on, think. Try to remember,” she coaxed those who had been in her class the previous year.
“Burn ’im on the bonfire,” offered someone at last, to the accompaniment of sniggers from everyone else, who knew this very well, and said so.
“Indeed we do, in effigy—that means,” said Miss Maynard, “as a model, a representation. But Guy Fawkes was a real person. The bonfire and fireworks we have each year on Guy Fawkes Night commemorate the explosion Guy and the other conspirators—the Gunpowder Plotters—hoped to cause when they tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament when the King was going to be there ...”
Miss Maynard proceeded to narrate the thrilling story of how Robert Catesby, with fellow Roman Catholics Thomas Percy and Thomas Winter, headed a deadly conspiracy to murder the Protestant King James I when he came, with his Lords and the ordinary Members of Parliament, to open the new session in the House of Lords on the fifth of November, 1605.
Catesby and his friends hoped to seize the king’s nine-year-old daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, and put her on the throne in his place as a puppet, pro-Catholic queen: Sir Everard Digby, Ambrose Rookwood, and John Grant were brought in to oversee her capture from the house where she was staying at the time, many miles from London.
“Some of them,” said Miss Maynard, “would have preferred to take the young Duke of York prisoner instead, but then they heard that he would probably be accompanying his father to the State Opening of Parliament, so they had to choose the princess. The Duke of York,” she added, “in fact was destined to become King Charles the First ...”
The plotters found other people to join them. Thomas Winter recruited his brother Robert; Thomas Percy brought in his brother-in-law, John Wright. Robert Keyes was given the job of keeping watch on Catesby’s house in London, where the gunpowder was stored, and to arrange the boat trip when it was to be ferried across the Thames from Lambeth to the Palace of Westminster ...
“Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder,” said Miss Maynard, “would make a tremendous bang, once they blew up. The man chosen to light the fuse was Guy Fawkes ...”
The conspirators, having acquired their gunpowder—and that, said Miss Maynard, was as difficult then as collecting thirty-six machine guns would be nowadays—began to dig a tunnel from the house of a man called John Whynniard. This man lived—he was the official Keeper of the Wardrobe—within the precincts of the actual Parliament building, as you could still do, in those far-off days when people were not so security-minded. Whynniard was happy to rent out his house, and the finished tunnel ran from there to a coal-cellar owned by a merchant called Bright—a cellar which was directly under the chamber where King James would attend the State Opening. The plan was to cram the cellar full of gunpowder, and to time the explosion for the exact moment when most of the country’s rulers would be above it.
“But they had made a big mistake,” said Miss Maynard. “Between them, they completely misjudged the sincerity and commitment of one of the newer conspirators, Francis Tresham. Nobody quite knows why, but Tresham betrayed the Plot to his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle. Lord Monteagle told the authorities what he had learned, and a small party went to check the cellar.
“And there,” said Miss Maynard, “instead of coal as they might have expected, they found piles of wood, ready for burning—and they found a man who called himself Johnson, who was really Guy Fawkes. But he sounded so plausible that they moved on, and left him in peace—only the next day, November the Fifth, another group of men came, and one of them was a magistrate. And when the magistrate told them to search the cellar, they found the barrels of gunpowder, and they arrested Guy Fawkes ...”
The lantern-light searching of the Parliament cellars (Miss Maynard told her pupils) still takes place every year in commemoration of the saving of the King, his Lords, and his Commons. A scarlet-and-gold detachment of the Yeomen of the Guard is sent for this purpose from the Tower of London, and not a single square inch of ground is missed. Only when the Yeomen pronounce the vaults and basement empty of any bomb or infernal device is it thought safe for Parliament to be opened: there must be no repetition of the narrow escape of 1605, when Guy Fawkes, tortured, revealed the hideous plot against the throne, and betrayed the names of his fellow conspirators. After his betrayal, some were taken alive, some died in the fighting—these last being, said Miss Maynard, probably better off, in the long run, for those who were taken were tortured, and stood trial, and were found guilty; and were executed in a public and very horrible manner.
“They may have been cowards,” said Miss Maynard, “in the cold-blooded way they tried to kill innocent people when they thems
elves were nowhere nearby—but they showed the courage of their convictions in the brave way they met their deaths. They were drawn on hurdles, head-down, through the streets of London to the scaffold, and people threw things at them, and insulted them. But Ambrose Rookwood asked his captors to tell him when they passed the place where his poor wife was waiting, so that he could smile at her just once more, and ask her to remember him in her prayers. Guy Fawkes was the last to be executed, and because he had been so badly tortured he was too weak to climb the scaffold without help ...”
King James and his Parliament, thankful for their escape, ruled that, from then on, the Fifth of November should be celebrated as a holiday, with bells ringing, cannon firing, and special services in church; and (as Miss Maynard said in conclusion) with parties, and with bonfires. The fireworks came later ...
“But nobody wants to blow up the Queen now, Miss?” asked one youngster, whose imagination had been caught by the tale, and who was of a naturally anxious cast of thought. “And they don’t want to—to go around stealing princesses, or putting gunpowder in places, or—or bombs?”
Miss Maynard smiled kindly as Sally’s friends sniggered. “You needn’t worry, Sally. It was all a long time ago, more than three hundred and fifty years—besides, as I told you, they search the cellars in the Houses of Parliament for bombs very carefully, every year.”
“And,” ventured someone, “you said it was treason, Miss. Which ain’t treason against the law?”
“Indeed it is,” said Miss Maynard. “Treason is a crime, a very serious crime against the government and the Queen—the Sovereign, or the Sovereign’s family. And it’s so very serious that nobody would ever dream of committing treason, because nobody would want to go to prison ...”
But small Sally did not look altogether convinced.
chapter
~ 5 ~
INSPECTOR HARRY FURNEUX of Rye was not a happy man.
Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18) Page 4
