Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18)

by Hamilton Crane

  There were, of course, times when the Fiery Furnace could be the most genial of men: but this was not one of them. The telephone wires between Rye (in Sussex) and Ashford (across the border, in Kent) were red-hot proof of his misery. He had spent the previous fifteen minutes moaning without pause to his colleague and county neighbour Superintendent Brinton; and Brinton—who could sympathise only too well—was growing restless. Old Brimstone would have liked an opportunity to let off some of his own head of steam. Even a few words would have done, they’d be better than nothing: but the Furnace was roaring away at full throttle, and all Brinton could do on the other end of the line was nod sympathetically, and suck peppermints, and roll despairing eyes at the ceiling.

  “You seriously think you’ve got problems? With just one lousy royal visit?”

  The suffering superintendent groaned. Inspector Furneux had now come full circle for the seventh time, but he still didn’t seem to realise that Brinton might want to indulge in a spot of moaning on his own account.

  “One half-pint princess,” snarled Harry Furneux, “that’s all you’ve got to worry about—and you get help, which is a damned sight more than I do—”

  “Only a couple of toughs from MI5,” Brinton—to his eternal surprise—managed to chip in. “And the odd bod or two from Special Branch, but—”

  Furneux ignored him. “You’ve got it made, believe me! What’ve you got to worry about? You know as well as I do, the build-up that young woman’s had since she smashed her first bottle of fizz against a battleship’s backside, if a bloke so much as harmed a hair of her royal head he’d have the whole damned country down on him like twenty tons of brick. It’s a waste of public money—my blasted taxes, and yours—sending more than a lady-in-waiting, if you ask me. Our Georgy Girl doesn’t need sharpshooters and body armour and sniffer dogs on the hunt for bombs—”

  “Glurp!” Brinton was so horrified at this suggestion that a peppermint tried to go down backwards.

  Harry Furneux again ignored his friend, though the sounds coming along the wire from Ashford were alarming, to say the least. “Oh, no, she just flutters those blue eyes of hers and flips her curls, and all the chummies go weak at the knees and say, ‘Terribly sorry, but we promise to go straight from now on, and Gawd bless yer for being so forgiving, marm,’ and the next thing you know the blighters’re handing out tracts and free meals to—”

  “Mam!” cried Brinton, goaded beyond endurance, spitting the wayward mint into his handkerchief. “Mam, dammit!”

  “What?” The interruption had been so loud, and so sudden, that the Furnace applied an automatic damper. “Sorry, sir,” simmering down, “I didn’t quite catch what you said. Something about jam?”

  “Mam,” said Brinton, in more measured tones, after he’d cleared his throat once or twice. “We’ve had the briefing from Buck House, plus HRH’s private secretary. Snowed under with memos, we’ve been. Reams of bumf—young Foxon’s made paper darts out of half of it—but one thing they said was that the first time, you call her ‘Your Royal Highness,’ then it’s ‘Ma’am’ to rhyme with jam, not smarm, the rest of the time.”

  “Ma’am,” said Furneux, experimentally.

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh.” Furneux brooded briefly, and Brinton was about to seize his chance when his colleague added:

  “Tell you how to curtsey as well, do they?”

  “For the women police officers,” said Brinton primly, “yes, they do. Maggie Laver’s been practising her one-foot-behind-the-other-and-bob bit for days now.”

  “D’you have to buy your own Union Jacks for waving, or is there a sort of central store of the things they send ahead and you send back once it’s all over?”

  “I wish,” said Brinton, now the chance had come round again, “it was all over.” Glumly, he tried with a dampened finger to rub fluff from the peppermint’s surface: it didn’t look so appetising now. “I’m the old-fashioned type, I am. Give me solid fuel any day—coal, or gas, or even oil, if you can afford it the way the price keeps going up—but the idea of neutrons and electrons and heaven-knows-what bumping about together inside a hunk of uranium gives me a nasty feeling, Harry. Someone drops a match or a fag-end in the wrong place, and you’ve got something’ll make Hiroshima look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic—and not twenty miles from here, so it’d be right on my patch. Yours as well, come to that, except there’d be nothing much of either left once that power station’d gone up in smoke and a helluva lot worse—”

  “Young Georgina doesn’t smoke,” broke in Furneux, so appalled by this grim scenario that he temporarily forgot his own woes. “Never been known to drink, come to that, and you can bet the lady-in-waiting won’t if Georgy doesn’t. Anyway, I’ve been on a tour of the place—well, not this new one, but Dungeness A, it’s the same design, another Magnox reactor—and they’re a pretty careful bunch, these nuclear generating types. Got to be, of course—but there’re great No Smoking notices up almost before you’re through the first lot of gates, and—”

  “Gates!” groaned Brinton. “What use’d gates be if some terrorist or other got the idea of planting a bomb and lighting a fuse and skedaddling before the place went up? Or turned suicidal and thought he’d chuck a grenade into the reactor, or whatever it’s called—and don’t tell me,” hearing Furneux clear his throat, suspecting a lecture was about to begin. “I don’t want to know. Chain reaction? Nuclear pile? I’ve seen Dr No like everyone else—and,” grimly, “Dr Strangelove, so you needn’t think I don’t know what I’m worried about, because I damned well do.”

  “If you say so.” Furneux sounded almost cheerful now: he knew very well that his friend’s misery was not so much caused by fear of some maniac-begotten cataclysm as by anticipation of the horrendous traffic problems likely to attend so public an event as the official opening of a new centre of local employment by a young, pretty, and popular princess.

  “And another thing,” growled Brinton, making the most of it now the younger man seemed to have given up for a while, “why D, I’d like to know?”

  “Wye Dee?” echoed Furneux, puzzled. “The rivers, you mean? Or is there some sinister oriental element in all this you haven’t told me about before?”

  “Why,” enlarged Brinton, through gritted teeth, “is this one D, if the other bally thing’s called A? I thought your average egghead types were meant to be logical! There’s precious little logic if you go missing out B—or even C, dammit. Why’s it D?”

  “Haven’t the faintest idea, I’m afraid. You could try,” suggested Furneux, with a quiver in his voice, “ringing the Central Electricity Generating Board to ask them—or maybe if you unfold some of young Foxon’s paper planes you’ll find the stuff from Buckingham Palace tells you. They brief their stars pretty thoroughly, I gather.”

  “Ha! We’ll be seeing stars, all right, if anyone puts a match to that damned Dungeness construction. Talk about Guy Fawkes Night—it’d be the whole blasted three hundred and seventy years rolled into one, and that’s just for starters, because—”

  “It’ll be more the end of everything, rather than the start,” interposed Furneux swiftly. “At least it’d stop you worrying, because there’d be nothing left to worry about. But when it comes to Guy Fawkes Night, well, you should have my worries for a bit and then you’d know what worry really means ...”

  And Harry Furneux was off on the old, old story for—to Brinton’s irritation—the eighth time, which had to be a record. Most years, he’d managed to shut him up around the fifth or sixth run-through. By now, he could recite it from memory, though he still couldn’t see how the Bonfire Boys of Rye—dragging their boat through the streets of the little town, tearing down official notices of prohibition as they went, escorted by a selection of Guys in every shape and size, assembling for a gigantic bonfire on the Town Salts with the products of their riotous journey—could compare in the anxiety stakes with a royal visit. Traffic congestion? Furneux didn’t know the meaning of the word.
A few bob more on the rates to pay for replacing the No Parking signs? Peanuts. A handful of drunks in the cells, the odd window smashed? Worse had happened when the local football team went on the rampage after a win.

  “... dead from the blast, then it’d be the radiation, and if that or the fallout didn’t get you then the nuclear winter pretty soon would,” Furneux was saying, as Brinton reluctantly tuned back into the miserable monologue. “Now, if you were to tell me anyone’d been monkeying around with shrapnel, I might just think you’d got a point. An ounce or two of big-bang mixture in a metal box—weedkiller, sugar, easy enough to find—pack a few nuts and bolts round it and light a fuse—yes, that’s nasty. Or clockwork,” he added, as Brinton, grinding his teeth on peppermint, bit his tongue and was rendered speechless. “Yes, if anyone tries a trick like that anywhere around young Georgina, I agree you’ve got problems—but they won’t,” said Furneux, firmly. “She’s everyone’s favourite girl, and they’d be lynched if they so much as hinted at hurting her. You’ve got nothing to worry about, sir, believe me. Everything,” said Harry Furneux, “will be fine ...”

  The Brettenden bus had left Plummergen with Miss Nuttel, but with no Mrs. Blaine, on board.

  This unwonted nuxial schism thrilled the entire village, both on the bus and off it. Those who stayed behind felt in duty bound to maintain surveillance on Bunny; those who went with Eric to Brettenden knew they faced a harder task, but, in the true Plummergen spirit, faced that task undaunted. It might be thought difficult, if not impossible, to remain unobtrusive when following someone into an ironmonger’s: yet a small and determined detachment managed somehow to achieve this laudable end, thereby encouraging others to emulate their achievement in the hardware shop and, shortly after, in the electrician’s.

  The three groups found it more than frustrating that they were unable to discuss the matter with their friends on the return journey. Miss Nuttel, brown-paper-parcelled to the eyebrows, was, inevitably, their fellow traveller; for which reason, on their arrival in Plummergen, they repaired at once to the sanctuary of the post office. Having seen Miss Nuttel stalk up Lilikot’s garden path and enter the house through a grudgingly-opened (and viciously-closed) door, everyone heaved heartfelt sighs of relief. Only now could they present their report to the Home Front, demanding in exchange the full details of Mrs. Blaine’s activities during the absence of Miss Nuttel ...

  “Not seen hide nor hair of her all day,” said young Mrs. Newport, with a sigh.

  “Popped out once for a new washing-up bowl,” young Mrs. Scillicough volunteered, then flushed at the look of scorn on her sister’s face. “Well, at least I saw her—not to speak to, though. Regular Hot Cross Bun today, she was, and no mistake—you ask Emmy,” turning to Miss Putts on Groceries. “Hardly a civil word did she say, and nothing else did she buy beyond the bowl—eh, Em?”

  “That’s right.” Emmy Putts was pink with pleasure at being the centre of attention, even though, with little to tell, she knew it couldn’t last long. “Not even a tin o’ them mock meatballs they’re so fond of—and very brisk about it she was, too.”

  In fact, Norah Blaine had almost bitten Emmy’s head off when the shop assistant had in all innocence expressed the view that Mrs. Blaine might risk breaking her glass and fine china washing up, and wouldn’t a plastic bowl be better than enamel. “Told me,” said Emmy, “as I oughter be ashamed of meself encouraging folk to—to deplete the world’s natural resources, plastic bein’ made of petrol or summat, she said. And off she went in a huff, and not seen since beyond shaking a duster out of the landing window,” concluded Emmy, who had been fortunate enough to witness this exciting episode when popping home for her midday meal.

  Public opinion did not take long to decide that washing-up bowls, whether plastic or enamel, lacked the glamour and intrigue of what Miss Nuttel had bought in the ironmonger’s, the electrician’s, and the hardware shop. Plummergen understood the necessity to clean crockery, cutlery, and glass, to wash dirtied dishes and kitchen utensils ...

  But it had—even after much racking of its collective brain—absolutely no idea why Miss Nuttel should wish to purchase (among other items) three yards of triple five-amp cable, three feet of bare copper earth wire, a conduit box, a sewing-machine belt (when everyone knew it was Mrs. Blaine as did all the needlework in that house!), ten sheets of asbestos board, a length of asbestos rope, eight steel angle joints, eight Jubilee clips, and a large selection of nuts, bolts, nails, screws, and metal washers.

  After considerable discussion, it fell to Mrs. Flax to summarise the general opinion.

  “Well,” said the Wise Woman, “if you ask me, she’s Up To Summat ...”

  And there, for the present, the matter had to rest.

  Miss Seeton was busy in her kitchen with a fork, a bowl, and a waiting slab of rich, golden butter. Scrambled eggs, she had decided, were on the menu for tonight’s supper. After all, since one had one’s own chickens, and thanks to dear Stan these always laid so well ...

  When Cousin Flora had left her house and all her worldly goods to her grateful god-daughter Emily, she left also the perhaps more valuable bequest of Stan and Martha Bloomer; or rather (lest it be supposed that the old lady had approved the unwholesome practice of slavery) the bequest of their skilled horticultural and domestic services. Farmhand Stan had for some years past tended the gardens, both front and back—flowers, fruit, vegetables—of Sweetbriars, Old Mrs. Bannet’s, now Miss Seeton’s, cottage at the southernmost end of The Street, on the corner where it divides sharply in a right-angled bend to form Marsh Road, running west towards Rye, and narrowing to run between high brick walls down to the bridge over the Royal Military Canal.

  One of these bridge-bound brick walls belongs to Sweetbriars, for the garden is of considerable length. As Flora Bannet, long widowed, increasingly deaf, and depressingly arthritic, was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the size of her responsibilities, Stan Bloomer, who lived in a cottage in the shadow of the Sweetbriars wall, made the providential suggestion that he should take over caring for the entire outside area of the property, Mrs. Bannet to select the pick of such crops as it produced, himself to sell the remainder at a profit, such profit to be in lieu of wages.

  As for the inside as worrited her so much, well, there was his wife, London born and sharp as a needle, more than willing to come twice a week to cook and clean and do aught else the old lady might require, not just for the money but because they were neighbours, good as family living so close—and Miss Emily, popping down from Town to visit every now and then, like family as well, and no denying. Martha and him, they’d take a pleasure and more in looking after the place and the folk as belonged to it ...

  The folk belonging being in turn Mrs. Bannet and, for the past seven years, Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton.

  Miss Seeton, blissfully contemplating, as she so often did, her great good fortune, sighed with mingled pleasure and regret as she prepared her supper. Pleasure as she pondered the sweet, smooth curves of the speckled shells; regret, as she destroyed their mellow brown perfection by cracking them, one at a time, into the glass bowl. She set the empty shells aside to be crushed for the compost heap, then whisked with an energetic fork until yolks and whites had combined in a froth of late summer sunshine. Pepper, a sprinkle: but no salt until later, for salt before scrambling made eggs sadly tough.

  A dab of butter in the heavy metal pan; an aromatic sizzling. Miss Seeton’s nose twitched. She picked up the bowl, preparing to tip its contents into the skillet—

  “Bother.” She set the bowl down again. Could one ignore the doorbell? Even at supper-time it would be, she supposed, discourteous. Whoever it was must know, from the kitchen light reflected on the wall at the side of the house, that one was at home. Besides, the matter might be one of some importance, even if one’s friends, on these darker evenings, were given more to telephoning first than to turning up on the doorstep ...

  The bell pealed a second time. Miss Seeton clicked her to
ngue for her tardiness, pulled off her apron, dropped it neatly over a chair, hurried down the hall; heard strange scuffling sounds outside as she turned the handle, and the door swung slowly open.

  “Evening, Miss.”

  “ ’Lo, Miss.”

  A clustering giggle of children stood on the mat, nudging one another as they piped their youthful courtesies before falling into an awkward silence.

  Miss Seeton, smiling, greeted her visitors in reply, her eye drifting momentarily over their heads as it was caught by further scuffling and giggling at the end of the garden, where more children hovered by the gate.

  Miss Seeton was normally the most prompt of hostesses to invite her guests into her home. Her guests, however, were seldom so many in number, or so young, or in so obviously mischievous a mood—which one recognised, of course, from one’s years in teaching. Children—mused Miss Seeton—as this particular group continued to giggle without utterance, did so enjoy laughter, which was, of course, so good for them. For anyone, indeed, especially after practical jokes, which—always provided they were not of a malicious or unpleasant nature—could often amuse even the adult mind, and certainly helped them to let off steam. The children, that was to say, not the adults, although dear Sir George and Lady Colveden had sometimes spoken in most, well, eloquent terms of the antics of dear Nigel and his cronies from the Young Farmers ...

  Miss Seeton’s kindly smile grew wider as she thought of the aristocratic owners of Rytham Hall, for they were among her closest friends. She smiled; and the leader of the little giggling group on her doorstep was emboldened, with nudging elbows his support and prompt, to clear his throat.

  “Er—Miss ...”

  Miss Seeton smiled on him as he fell silent again, and nodded encouragement. Evidently it had been proposed that she, as one sympathetic to the needs of the young—and, without being immodest, perhaps in some ways better qualified than others in the village to be their recipient—should, well, receive them. Or it. The joke, or jokes, not the children, or their needs. As guests, because although one tried to be hospitable, one’s cottage was hardly ...