Beware The Peckish Dead!

by William Stafford

  And the very thing that would have made my friend’s name immortal - that blasted beetle! - was lost. I resolved to do my utmost to retrieve it, although I had no clue how I might accomplish that feat.

  I was on the verge of turning around and retracing my steps to the inn - let Cuthbert dismiss me from his employ, I thought bitterly.

  But then I remembered the look he had given me and the words he had mouthed. It would be churlish of me to forsake the ruse at such an early stage - for ruse it must be. Whatever else he may be, my Cuthbert does not have an evil bone in him. It must be some jape he was playing on an elderly relative. Families have their own in-jokes, their own customs and practices. Who am I to spoil his fun?

  The blisters in my walking boots informed me the long walk was no fun for my feet. The streaky sky informed me it would soon be time for Phoebus to park his chariot for the night - an observation which made me pine for Bessie.

  Dash it all! I should have gone directly to the inn and retrieved my motor car - I would have reached my destination hours ago.

  Well, returning now were as tedious as going o’er - or whatever it was that fellow said in the Scottish play. I plodded on, ignoring the rustling of woodland creatures in the bushes at the side of the road - they were probably eyeing me up for a tasty teatime snack. The eerie hoots of owls made me shudder. I would not like to be a wee timorous beastie in such a setting.

  A shiver coursed through me. I blamed the kilt but my writer’s imagination told me it would be easy, in such a place of unseen beings in the deepening shadows, to believe in such things as the - what had Cuthbert called them? - the Peckish Dead.

  Hector, old man, I scolded myself. Put your imagination away lest you put the willies up yourself.

  ***

  At long, long, long, long, long, long last, I came to a turn in the road. The valley opened up before me into a huge expanse of cultivated - nay, coiffured - land, of clipped hedges, tonsured trees and rolling lawns. The grass was bisected by a wide gravel path as straight as anything the Romans ever laid, leading to a sprawling mansion that clearly had aspirations to be a castle. Turreted towers guarded the east and west wings and several of the windows were sharply arched after the Gothic tradition. The building was mostly fashioned from grey stone and it was all rather grand and imposing.

  In the absence of anywhere else to go and the aching agony of my feet, which were about to give up the ghost at any second, I trudged toward the main entrance. The gravel crunched its reproaches beneath every step I took.

  A figure was waiting for me on the front steps. I would recognise him anywhere.

  Cuthbert.

  “You took your time,” he laughed as I drew near, staggering like a lost soul emerging from the desert. I placed one foot on the lowermost stair. Cuthbert rushed to intercept me and pushed his hand against my breastbone. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he lowered his voice. “It’s the rear entrance for you.”

  “Perhaps later,” I groaned. “I am more than a little exhausted.”

  “No, I mean the back door - the tradesman’s entrance. You’re my valet, remember?”

  I blinked at him. The firm set of his jaw suggested he was determined to persist with the charade.

  “Do you mean to say that old coot really is your grandfather?”

  “That old coot is Laird Baird, and I’m afraid so,” Cuthbert grimaced. “I’m sorry, boss; I haven’t been entirely straight with you. Look,” he clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll fill you in later.”

  “I’m exhausted, I told you.”

  “It’s a long story. You go to the kitchen. Sally will sort you out with something to eat.”

  “But-”

  “Go on. You wouldn’t want me to dock your wages now, would you?”

  He winked. Clearly, he was enjoying himself. He directed me around the side of the house. My feet almost audibly complained at this addendum to their torment. I awarded Cuthbert my surliest pout and, in the corner of my eye, detected movement: twitching at the curtains of a first floor window. The old coot was watching!

  I decided to put on a show of bowing before my new master. I was on the point of dropping to my knees before him - for kowtowing purposes, you understand - when Cuthbert hissed angrily, “Don’t overdo it, you dreadful ham!”

  Put out, I stomped off. Cuthbert called after me. “I shall expect you later, Thomas, to turn down my bed.”

  Ah.

  Cuthbert’s bed is the one thing I can never turn down.

  ***

  I made my way around the sprawling building, like an insect (the Bickerses’ Beetle, perhaps) circumnavigating a sarcophagus. The rear entrance was neither as decorative nor as imposing as the front - that’s my experience anyway. I picked my way across a cobbled courtyard where a stable lad was shovelling horse droppings into a bucket, and followed the more enticing aroma that was emanating from the kitchen window.

  I entered a large, almost cavernous space, devoid of decoration save what was utilitarian. Copper pans hung like executed men above a huge slab of a table. Flames roared in a fireplace that was taller than I was, provoked to further fury by the efforts of an urchin strenuously pumping a set of bellows. A second lad turned a spit; the flames hissed and spat like aggravated snakes as juices dripped from the joint of venison turning and blackening overhead. The flames clutched at the meat like baby birds stretching to be fed.

  I was rather peckish myself - although not quite dead.

  “Here ye go.” A large, upholstered woman in a pinafore placed a tin dish of something steaming on the table. Her manner was offhand but her eyes were kind - bright raisins balanced on the tomatoes of her cheeks. (Food again in my imagery, you’ll notice. My stomach was rumbling in protest against its neglect) “Dinna fret. It’s no’ poisoned.” She laughed. A cloud of flour rose from her chest like a sofa being dusted.

  I approached both table and bowl. It was not the venison - far from it. The woman sensed my disappointment.

  “Broth’s good enough fae the help,” she declared, crossing her plump, pink arms. “Sit ye down an’ I’ll fetch ye some bread.”

  I pulled out a stool - the aroma wafting up from the dish drew me like a magnet. It wasn’t venison, true, but it was healthy and wholesome stuff: root vegetables and pearl barley, I believe - and very tasty.

  I was tucking into my third helping when the woman joined me at the table, cupping a - well, a cup of tea in her hands.

  “Ye must have been clammed,” she observed with an amused smirk. I had no idea what she meant by that expression.

  “I was rather hungry,” I felt it was the right thing to say. “It must be all the fresh air.”

  Her eyebrows twitched. I remembered I was supposed to be a lowly valet and so the accent I had cultivated and refined during my attempts to climb the elitist ranks of London society, was set aside in favour of Cuthbert’s broader vowels and glottal stops.

  “Lovely bit o’ grub, Mrs,” I nodded at the bowl. I wiped it around with the last chunk of bread. “And no mistake,” I added as an afterthought.

  This caused her frown to deepen. Perhaps I should also set aside my vague ambition of taking to the London stage.

  She watched me polish off the last of my supper - my enjoyment was genuine even if my speaking voice was not. I smacked my lips, licked my fingertips and patted my belly, as non-verbal signals of my appreciation. I did everything save belch in the woman’s face, which I believe is a culinary compliment in some cultures. You can go too far, you know.

  “How long have ye been wi’ the wee master?” she asked. “It’s so good to see him again. He allus was a handsome wee boy. Not so wee now though, eh?”

  I found it difficult to envisage Cuthbert as a ‘wee boy’ or anything other than the strapping fellow I had always known him to be.

  “So gui
d to have him home,” she continued - clearly, my answer to her question was unimportant. “Will it be long ye’re staying? Has he come to settle doon? His grandfather is not as well as he was - but we’re none of us getting any younger, are we, um - I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

  “Oh!” I realised she was leaving space for me to respond. “Hec - Thomas! My name’s Thomas, me old China.”

  “Oh, heck Thomas, eh? I’m Mrs Forth, but you can call me Sally. I think there’re some biscuits in the pantry.”

  She raised herself from her stool, a behemoth rising from the depths, and lumbered away to a corner, leaving me a minute to muse over her name.

  Sally Forth.

  But if I put that in a book, no one would believe it.

  She returned with a circular tin from which she prised the lid to reveal pale pieces of shortbread, sparkling with sugar. She encouraged me to take as much as I liked. After the initial crunch, the biscuit melted like butter. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

  “What was he like as a boy?” I asked, brushing crumbs from my chin. “My master, I mean.”

  “Och, he was a wee charmer,” Sally smiled fondly. If she had noticed I’d forgotten my fake accent, it didn’t show. “All the girruls from miles around were in love wi’ him. Oh, the balls he had!”

  I almost choked to death.

  “He would dance with every girrul in turn but they only got one chance. He showed no favourites. His grandfather was sure it was only a matter of time before he found the right one and made her his bride. The estate needs an heir, you see - and it’s not just the auld man who’s worried. I’ve worked here all my life. Started as a scullery maid and worked my way up to these dizzy heights. All of the staff here have been here for decades. Generations, some of them. We need to know the auld place is in safe hands.”

  Well, I didn’t know how to break it to her, so I didn’t.

  “And er - Cuth - er - the master’s parents?” I reached for another piece. Sally snapped the lid on the tin, almost taking my fingers off with it. Her face was clouded, her eyes shifting sideways.

  “Gone,” she sniffed. “Accident. The horse pulling their carriage pulled them in front of a railway train.”

  Oh! You won’t get that kind of thing happening when we all switch to the motor car, I’ll wager.

  Sally dabbed at her eyes and smiled sadly. “But enough gossip for one night. Your master will be wanting his bed.”

  She put the biscuit tin away and I felt instantly bereft.

  “Now, off wi’ ye,” she made shooing gestures as though I was a puppy she had indulged for too long. She directed me to a narrow spiral staircase that twisted its way to the upper floors. “Ye’ll find his room in the western tower, last door on the left.”

  ***

  Cuthbert made sure to close the door to his rooms before he enfolded me in his arms. I was not in the mood.

  “You’re tired, sir,” he diagnosed. “A nice long soak is what you need.”

  “Rather!” I dredged up what enthusiasm I could muster. “Bathroom through here, is it?”

  “It is,” he confirmed but he held onto my sleeve. “A - a - ah!” he stuttered. “Not so fast. You’re my valet, remember?”

  I rolled my eyes. “If you must persist with the charade...”

  “Oh, I must, I must!” he laughed. “Which means, Thomas, that I get first dibs on the bathwater.”

  I was stricken with horror. “No!”

  “Oh, yes! So, get in there and draw me my bath.” He slapped my backside to help me on my way. I lingered in the doorway of the en suite.

  “Couldn’t we - could we not, you know, share? Simultaneously, I mean, not consecutively.”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid there’ll be none of that, none of any of that, in my grandfather’s house. It’s too risky.”

  “You fear for your inheritance,” I said flatly.

  “Blow the inheritance!” he snapped. “Too risky for you, I mean. Grandfather’s rather old-fashioned. And I mean Old Testament old-fashioned. He’d have the law on you before you could pull your trousers up.”

  Dash it all.

  When you move in rarefied artistic circles, you forget that the rest of society is less than open-minded toward those of us who seek the love that will not show its face - Or is it ‘name’? Lift its head? Bend over backwards?

  Anyway, I, like a good valet, went to the bathroom to do my master’s bidding.

  The floor was tiled but dotted with mats. At the centre stood a huge enamel tub supported on clawed feet. On a table, an enormous copper urn was rumbling, heating the water to be transferred to the tub via a coiled tube. It was like a thing from the laboratory of a mad scientist. Coal-powered, it was, like the bulbous belly of a locomotive engine, but I soon fathomed its workings and set to filling the tub. I poured in aromatic bath salts from exotically stoppered bottles. The water steamed and foamed agreeably and was so inviting I almost stepped out of my kilt and got in. Hang the charade!

  Cuthbert came in, having changed out of his clothes and into a dressing gown. “Thank you, Thomas,” he nodded dourly. “That will be all.”

  So, this is how it feels to be dismissed!

  “You don’t want me to scrub your back for you? Or anything else?”

  “Are you still here?” he raised an imperious eyebrow. He opened his robe and shed it to the floor, giving me full view of what I was missing. “You may warm my bed, Thomas.”

  He climbed into the tub. “By which I mean, use the warming pan. I don’t want you soiling my sheets.”

  I sloped out. There was to be no soiling of sheets by any means. My sojourn at Cuthbert’s grandfather’s estate was unlikely to prove enjoyable - And what was going on with that whole business anyway? Why had he never mentioned any of this at all?

  I determined to have it out with him before bedtime. At least that was one thing I could have out with him, I supposed.

  The bed was a vast four-poster with thick, velvet curtains tied back at each corner. Closed, they would afford us privacy. Perhaps Cuthbert might relent and prove more amenable after his soak.

  Rather maladroitly, I filled the brass pan with hot coals from the fireplace, succeeding in only burning six or seven of my fingers in the process. It was only when the lid was closed that I espied a set of tongs hanging over the hearth.

  Who’d be a valet, eh?

  I slid the pan, long handle and all, beneath the covers and between the sheets, and felt a sudden stab of envy for the bally thing. It should be me warming Cuthbert in his bed tonight, not some contraption with a long wooden handle - that had me beat whichever way you looked at it.

  It occurred to me to draw the curtains - thick, heavy ones at the windows to match those around the bed. I was just about to close the second and last pair when my eye was caught by the flash of something white in the grounds below.

  A figure, a young man as far as I could make out, was stumbling around, traversing the lawns with no apparent purpose. His legs seemed stiff, his arms loose. How very queer, I thought! And, in an instant, the fellow had vanished and I was left wondering if he had been there at all.

  Cuthbert emerged, pink and damp from his bathing, naked but for a towel around his waist. “You’d better hurry up while it’s still warm,” he nodded at the bathroom door.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a hand with - well, just a hand, actually?”

  “I’ve told you no. Not here.” At least he looked disappointed too. He untied his towel and whipped me with it until I fled to the bathroom and shut the door against his chest, his thews, and his - other qualities. He laughed and told me not to be long.

  What did that mean? A reprieve?

  I peeled off my clothes and got into the rather turbid water. At least I shall smell of him, I reflected, l
owering myself into the tub. Rather than he smelling of me on bath night.

  I stretched out and relaxed. My legs and feet were grateful for the respite and it wasn’t long before the old eyelids - and a few other things - were beginning to droop and drowse.

  What a day it had been!

  Putting aside all that business with the moving hole and Auld Jock Hitchin and that blessed beetle, I was more concerned with the revelations about Cuthbert... Was he really the heir to a vast estate in the Scottish Highlands?

  I ransacked my drooping, drowsing brain for what I knew of Cuthbert’s past. I’m ashamed to say it was very little. I had met him on the Orient Express - of that I was certain - but before that the details were sketchy to say the least. There was some stuff about New York, I seemed to recall, that came up during our most recent adventure. None of it tallied with the Cuthbert in the next room right now.

  Something was going on and, like Cuthbert himself, I was determined to get to the bottom of it. I dried myself and went to the bedroom, wrapped in a towel. Cuthbert was either asleep or dissembling. I stood by the bed until he acknowledged my presence. He opened an eye; I let the towel fall.

  “I told you no,” he rolled over. “I sent to the inn. Your case is in your room. Put some clothes on.”

  Well, I must admit I did not care for his dismissive tone one jot.

  “My room?” Of course, I had expected to spend the night in this one.

  “The below stairs people have bunks in the attic,” he explained grumpily. He faced me with a pout. “Don’t make it hard for me.”

  “That is exactly what I had in mind.”

  He threw a pillow at my midriff.

  “The situation, I mean. I will explain it all, I promise. But for now - for tonight - be a good valet and bugger off.”

  I picked up the towel and hurled it at his head. Then I snatched it back, covered my modesty and found my way to the attic.

  My suitcase was in a dingy room under the eaves. The ceiling sloped almost to the floor and a high, curtainless window admitted moonlight onto a low and lowly cot with a flat straw mattress.