Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18)

by Hamilton Crane

  “Er, Miss,” came the second attempt, forced out of the speaker by a nimble prod in the small of his back. “Miss, the other day, when it was so windy ...”

  Miss Seeton nodded again. “I remember, yes.”

  “We was wondering ... with it bin a rare old mess on account o’ dust, and tumbling about, and us having to catch it afore it blew away again ...”

  Miss Seeton blinked.

  “Please, Miss, could we have your hat?”

  chapter

  ~ 6 ~

  MISS SEETON BLINKED again.

  “With it bin,” went on the small petitioner, warming to his explanation, “not so long to go now, Miss—an’ us’ve collected the sacks, an’ the straw—”

  “An’ made the notice, too,” chimed in someone else, with obvious proprietorial pride in this achievement.

  “An’ made the notice.” The first speaker scowled at his companion. “An’ got most of the clothes, Miss, as folks was happy to throw out—all of ’em save the hat, Miss, acksherly. So—well, we was wondering ...”

  Miss Seeton looked a little startled: but then, after a pause, as realisation dawned, smiled once more. Waste not, want not. Of course. An admirable precept—and with so many applications, although it was remarkable how many of these were not necessarily convenient to one’s immediate purpose. Remarkable, for instance, how frequently what would at first glance appear to be the exact article required could not be used for that purpose because there was still good wear in it: which surely explained why—having asked, one assumed, their parents—they had come to her. Naturally—one’s small part to play in village life—one was pleased to be able to help; flattered, in some ways, to have been asked, to have so won their confidence and trust that they had turned next to one who was, on occasion, their teacher. One could not—indeed should not—suppress their creative urges, though one had certainly never expected that one might be so—one could hardly call it complimented ... yet the opposite—which would be, if deliberate, an insult—was far from their minds, as was any spirit of mockery, she was sure ...

  Miss Seeton twinkled down at the eager faces raised in anxious anticipation to her own. “I believe,” she said slowly, “that I may well be able to help you. I had, you know, intended to try a few repairs—but really, when I come to consider the matter, I have had several years’ wear out of it. And though one is not, I trust, a slave to current fashion, the wind was, as you rightly point out, very strong the other day. And it would perhaps be a trifle selfish of me to refuse when I do, after all, have others.” She uttered a small sigh. “Indeed, I suspect that even if I had remembered my hat-pin it would have been unable to hold it on, or at least not without being rather uncomfortable. If you would wait there for just one moment ...”

  Miss Seeton—blessing her yoga-nimble knees—trod lightly up the stairs and into her bedroom, where she quickly retrieved from her mending basket the battered black felt with its woebegone feather trimmings. Clicking her tongue, she shook her head one last time for the loss of a Monica Mary creation. The celebrated Brettenden milliner would not, she hoped, be offended at such an unusual fate, should she hear of it, for the child of her imagination ...

  Miss Seeton blushed at herself in the glass for so very fanciful a notion, then hurried out of the room and back down the stairs to her front door. Here, she found that the original daring few had been joined by their less courageous companions from the gate.

  Miss Seeton smiled on them all. The young: so full of energy, and such a sense of fun, if only one could channel it correctly. Their undoubted energy. Constructive play she believed was the term she’d heard mentioned ...

  “But remember,” warned Miss Seeton, as her offering was received with squeals and grateful giggles into the grubby, eager hands, “I expect to see something—something special, when the time comes. Something more than a little out of the ordinary, you know. This is, after all, a Monica Mary hat.” Her twinkle was disarming, her tone amused, and the youngsters found themselves twinkling back as she went on:

  “If you come back tomorrow after school, I might have found some more feathers to replace these—but not now,” as further squeals suggested that tomorrow was a long way away. “The chickens, you know, have been put inside for the night, and I’ve no wish to disturb them by taking a torch down to the hen-house in the dark. Tomorrow, after school, and we will see what can be done.”

  “Ooooh, Miss,” came the obedient chorus. “Thank you very much, Miss!”

  “Um—pins, Miss,” said the leader, made even more bold now the trophy was safe in his hands. “Allus have ’em on hats, do they?”

  Warily, Miss Seeton confirmed that many persons did, but added the swift rider that many others did not. Pinning (or an absence of pins) was partly a matter of personal preference, and partly dependant on the style of hat; no, she wouldn’t say there was any hard and fast rule about it, and certainly not always. And, of course, on the availability of the right sort of pin. No, she wouldn’t call them rare, exactly, though she would certainly agree that there weren’t as many around as there had been some years ago ...

  Miss Seeton’s wariness increased. Service to one’s community was all very well: one was only too happy—indeed, proud—to play one’s modest part: but surely one was not expected to play it to such an extent that one was required to sacrifice one’s prized personal possessions? Dear Cousin Flora, old-fashioned though some might call her—not that her god-daughter would ever dream of such a thing—had left many charming and unusual items of jewellery—though not valuable, of course—to her heir; and Miss Seeton took a pride in wearing them on suitable occasions, enjoying the memories which the wearing brought to mind as well as the aesthetic pleasure it gave. A hat-pin, of course, could not be considered in the same class as the quaint glass necklace with its yellow beads, or the tiny silver brooch in the shape of a flying swallow, but ...

  “If there was a lot of ’em around, Miss, then you could wear more’n one at once,” suggested he of the hat. “Couldn’t you? A bit prickly, but more—more prongs, Miss, to hold it on. Like a fork.”

  “Or just one big one, Miss,” ventured somebody else, when it was clear Miss didn’t mind folk saying things. “Bigger ’n’ thicker, I mean, like a—like a skewer, ’cept you’d have to take care of hurting yer head, but it’d be stronger by far nor any old fork in a wind like that ...”

  “Let us hope,” said Miss Seeton, hiding a smile for the curious—and gratifying; one’s teaching was perhaps bearing a little fruit—imaginative powers of her pupils—“that it will not be so windy again for a very long while. Fresh air is like so many things, acceptable in moderation but—”

  She broke off. Fresh air? She sniffed. Sniffed again, nose twitching. “The scrambled eggs!” she cried; and, with a hurried farewell, closed the door on her young visitors before turning to trot, as fast as she could, down the hall to the kitchen, from which ominous curls of smoke were starting to drift.

  Miss Seeton gasped, snatched her apron from the chair, wrapped it around her hand, and dragged the pan from the heat to rest on the coolness of the tiled kitchen table. Seized tea towels from the rack and threw them with a smothering motion over the sizzling skillet, then wrenched the red-and-white striped hand towel from its wall-mounted roller and added it to the rest. She darted to the cooker and switched off the ring; she turned back to the table, holding her breath. With a spitting, spattering, hissing sound, a vicious, roaring sigh, the danger seemed at last to be over.

  Miss Seeton released her breath, inhaled too deeply with relief; coughed. She moved on trembling legs to the window, and threw it open. She breathed again, feeling the welcome draught. Her next cough was less hacking. Perhaps, thought Miss Seeton, she could now relax.

  Except that one could hardly relax when, thanks to one’s carelessness, the house had very nearly burned down about one’s ears. It could be no excuse that the children at the door had been a distraction: perhaps one was, for all one’s high hopes
of the yoga, starting to feel—and, worse, to act—one’s age. One’s memory, concentration, clarity of judgement seemed to have been woefully at fault ...

  Or maybe—Miss Seeton brightened at the thought—one was just a little tired; though memory added that the day had, in all conscience, hardly been exhausting. A little gardening—deadheading, some light pruning, half-an-hour’s gentle hoeing between rows of over-wintering vegetables ... And one could not deny that one was not—well, not quite as young as before. Perhaps, before starting a second attempt at supper, a few of one’s favourite postures—it was always best, as the book said and as Miss Seeton had learned by experience, to perform these on an empty stomach—for the alleviation of fatigue would improve matters ...

  The Headstand or Sirsasana was the most beneficial, she knew, to the brain and thought-processes, to the pineal and pituitary glands which, the author of Yoga and Younger Every Day explained to his readers at some length, controlled the growth and mental health of one’s body. Seven years ago, one would never have dreamed of attempting such control: but seven years had made an amazing difference to far more than one’s knees. Starting from the Salamba Sarvangasana, or Shoulder Stand, one could move up smoothly to the Headstand, to hold it for as long as comfortable before tipping slowly over into the Halasana, or Plough Posture, all the while doing one’s deep breathing. Ten or fifteen minutes’ practice, Miss Seeton hoped, would work wonders. She would slip upstairs now, and see how she felt after a brief workout followed by five minutes in the restful Savasana, or Dead Pose.

  She had to admit that she felt better: refreshed, one could almost say. Miss Seeton opened her eyes, stretched, and rolled over on the travelling rug to arch her spine before rising nimbly to her feet. Refreshed, indeed: but she had somehow lost her appetite for scrambled eggs, normally one of her favourite dishes. The very idea of whisking eggs in a bowl with a fork made her fingers tingle, made them twitch and fidget in a most peculiar way ...

  Or maybe not so peculiar, after all. As if on automatic pilot, Miss Seeton adjusted her clothing, folded away the fringed tartan blanket, and made her way back downstairs. She found herself ignoring the kitchen, heading for the sitting room, for her bureau; for the drawer in which she kept her sketching implements ...

  With a swift pencil, Miss Seeton sketched a hat: but no ordinary hat. This was a black, broad-brimmed hat, high in the crown, almost as if the traditional witch’s headgear had been lopped off halfway. A wide band decorated the crown, an enormous buckle decorated the band, and a tall, curling feather stood proudly at one side ...

  Miss Seeton blinked. This was not her hat, the hat she had given the children: this was—good gracious ...

  Smiling to herself, Miss Seeton drew a face beneath the hat: a man’s face, dark, saturnine, intense of gaze, with some suggestion of the Spaniard; more than a suggestion of the fanatic in the set, the stare of the eyes. A short, trim beard on the determined chin. The hint of a collar about the neck: then more than a hint, as Miss Seeton grew inspired with her creation, enlarging it to show strong, cloth-clad shoulders ... from which, to her surprise, sprang arms, not of flesh and blood under fabric, but arms of cold, cruel metal—straight, firm, gleaming; and ending not in fingers, but in sharp, curved, predatory prongs. A muscled body invisible within a belted tunic, close buckled on wide leather; legs, like arms, not of flesh and blood and bone, but of pronged metal, fourfold. Four limbs, four prongs on each: not fingers and toes, but tines.

  Not arms and legs, but forks.

  Guy Fawkes.

  Miss Seeton, recognising the face if not the remainder of the personage, the suggestion of seventeenth-century costume, nodded. The woodcut of Guy, otherwise Guido, Fawkes was well known to those with any interest in history, and even to those who had little or none. Every November found that face reproduced on countless boxes of fireworks, on advertisements for Grand Public Displays, on posters warning children to take care when playing with matches and—even in this small way—with gunpowder. Guy Fawkes. Forks. Her cast-off hat—the children—her promise of feathers for tomorrow ...

  And the coils of smoke which wreathed about his head were, of course, only because of her carelessness with the skillet of hot fat. One must be thankful one had not gone so far as to add the eggs. A little longer for the air to clear, and maybe one might venture a second attempt. Just long enough, perhaps, to try a more, well, serious approach to a portrait of the nation’s most famous, although one ought really to say infamous, terrorist ...

  The hat, the face, the beard and costume were much as Miss Seeton had drawn them in her first sketch. And surely it could not be so very unrealistic to have shown him with a dark lantern in one hand? There had been no pocket flashlights, no electricity, in the time of King James the First—as one was hardly able to forget, when the annual basement searching of the Houses of Parliament by the Yeoman of the Guard, in their renowned—although, one believed, misnamed—Beefeater uniforms, was always carried out using candle lanterns. Guy Fawkes: with coils of smoke again around his head ... but that was no egg, dark-shelled, in his other hand. It was much darker, rounder; spherical. That was no string of albumen trailing from one side, but ...

  “Oh, dear.”

  A fuse.

  A bomb.

  And the fuse already alight ...

  “Melodramatic self-indulgence,” Miss Seeton scolded herself, even as she sketched sparks and flames spurting from the fuse to the distant piles of ... of what, she wasn’t able to decide, since the explosion which had destroyed it—it them—had enveloped the entire background in smoke, and in further flame: which was foolish. Guy Fawkes had not (she knew very well) succeeded in his wicked intention of blowing up the Houses of Parliament, of murdering King James and his ministers. Why should she suppose that she, Emily Dorothea Seeton, had the power—even on best-quality cartridge paper—to re-write, or rather re-draw, history? The King and Parliament had all been saved, and nobody could have wished it otherwise—not even those who, for one reason or another, had little faith in politicians: which one could in some ways understand, even if one knew one’s knowledge of the finer points of politics to be, well, limited. One voted, of course, but ...

  But so few of them appeared to talk sense, at least not for very long; though it certainly could not be denied that they talked. Indeed, most of the politicians one saw on the television, or heard on the wireless, seemed to be so fond of the sound of their own voices it was the only thing they ever did—talk—which meant they were so desperate to keep talking they often ran out of good ideas, and didn’t. Talk sense. Or if they did it was far too wrapped up in rhetoric and—and “Flapdoodle,” said Miss Seeton, out loud.

  She smiled, sighed; frowned. One had to have politicians, of course, to pass laws and govern the country and—she sighed again—to put up taxes—one couldn’t remember the last time they’d come down—but, though one could not wish to return to the bad old days of King John, before the Magna Carta, or of Henry the Seventh and his Star Chamber, there had been, she supposed, something to be said for the system whereby the monarch—always provided that he or she had courage and kindness and wisdom, mercy and common sense—did not merely reign, but ruled. Exercising a benevolent, not a despotic, power ...

  “Off with his head,” murmured Miss Seeton, doodling a tiny playing-card in one corner of her second sketch, thinking of Alice and the Queen of Hearts. Queen of Hearts. Did not Queen Elizabeth the Second, so dear to the hearts of her people with her obvious common sense, her great love of her country, with her family about her to help and support—the Queen Mother in London throughout the Blitz; Prince Philip with his Royal Navy training—make an excellent ruler? Nobody would ever wish to harm Her Majesty, Miss Seeton felt sure: she would never do anything foolish enough to deserve such harm. Neither (she felt equally sure) would anybody distress Her Majesty by harming those close to her. The Prince of Wales, an admirable heir—though not to inherit, one most fervently hoped, for many years. The Queen must be so p
roud of the way her young relatives had grown up to take their places in the public eye. Good training, firm principles. No wonder they were so popular. There was no chance of a modern Guy Fawkes with a Royal Family like this. Violence, revolution, anarchy ...

  “Not nowadays, thank goodness,” said Miss Seeton. “Not in England.”

  And, tunelessly humming “God Save the Queen” to herself, she packed away her sketch-block and pencils with fingers that no longer twitched or tingled; and headed happily back to the kitchen, and her supper, having dismissed all thought of violence completely from her mind.

  chapter

  ~ 7 ~

  “HEDGING AND DITCHING,” said Nigel Colveden, receiving the loaded plate from his mother with a nod of acknowledgement. “And jolly tiring it can be, too. Hundreds of calories, I should think I’ve used up today.”

  With a gentle sliding motion, he insinuated the plate underneath the pages of British Beekeeping, which rustled at the table’s top end in the hands of one the knowledgeable onlooker must have assumed to be Major-General Sir George Colveden, KCB, DSO, JP. “And me still a growing lad,” went on the baronet’s only son, a mere—albeit lusty—infant in his middle twenties. “Could I have another couple of spuds on that, please?”

  “I do think it’s unfair.” Lady Colveden spooned two more potatoes from the dish to her son’s plate, handed it across, and enviously watched him pour gravy in a thick, rich, fattening flood. “How you manage to eat so much without putting on weight, I really don’t know. You certainly didn’t inherit it from my side of the family. Even in summer, with salads and things ...”

  She sighed. Nigel grinned. “Mayonnaise,” he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear. “Come out with us,” he invited, more loudly, “tomorrow, and work some of it off. I’m sure we could find you a set of overalls and a spare hedge-trimmer. Heaving one of those around for an hour or so must be easily as good as a keep-fit class—if not better. And a great deal more productive.”