“Help?” Mr. Norton crossed the threshold to regard the canvas sack beside her. “Please step in and explain your difficulty.”
I sighed, seeing that Mr. Norton’s native sympathy had snared him once again.
“Miss Huxleigh, perhaps you could fetch some tea.”
I sighed more loudly. Now that I had weaned Mr. Norton from the routine brews of Lipton’s tea chain and acquainted him with the rarities of Twinings, I was loath to lavish them on every indigent caller, for such the old lady clearly was.
Two steaming cups were shortly before them. I prepared to withdraw, when Mr. Norton addressed me again.
“Perhaps you could bring back a cup of this delicious tea for yourself, Miss Huxleigh, and some foolscap so that you may note down what Mrs. Mutterworth has to say.”
“Oh, why, there would be nothing to it,” I replied, my tone implying quite the opposite.
“Cut the cackle,” the old lady murmured in a rough sotto voce only I could hear.
“Not merely muddled but rude,” I complained beneath my breath as I collected my tea, paper and pencils and returned to Mr. Norton’s office.
“You are a widow, ma’am?” Mr. Norton was inquiring.
“Widow!” she hooted. “I’m no Old Lady at Windsor. Never wed, not once. Not even twice.”
“Well, then, Miss Mutterworth, what is your problem?”
“What is yours, young man, that you cannot see it plain before your eye? If I must have a solicitor, I should like one who can see and hear. You seem to have difficulties in both areas.”
“Then please point out the obvious, Miss Mutterworth,” Mr. Norton suggested with more patience than I could have mustered, forbearing to remind her again that he was not a solicitor and that he was in no way obliged to hear her woes; indeed, it violated professional protocol to do so.
The old lady gestured to the awkward parcel huddled at her skirts. “This. This is all my only brother has left me. Can you imagine such a turn of events? Not dead two days and his solicitor”—she fairly spat the word in a croak of contempt—”sits me down and says I’m to have nothing for my old age but this!”
Mr. Norton and I stared at the green canvas heaped on the floor, as though covering a beehive.
“Solicitor!” the beldame mumbled under her breath in an uncivil croak. “Solicitor!”
“Mr. Norton is a barrister,” I reiterated in my employer’s defense. The distinction meant nothing to Miss Mutterworth.
“The house will have to be sold,” she went on. “I’ve not a penny now to keep it with, not with Cavendish gone. I shall have to sleep in the lanes... with this for company.”
“What is... that?” Mr. Norton inquired delicately, not looking as if he cared to know.
“Nasty, foul thing!” The old lady shuddered until the jet beads on her bonnet rim chattered. Her gloved hand lifted the canvas at arm’s length, like an oversize, tainted teapot cosy.
“Cut the cackle!” a voice screeched at us. “Cut the cackle!”
Behind the stained brass tines of a cage a lurid green parrot shuffled its clawed feet along a wooden perch.
“Quite a ferociously articulate bird,” Mr. Norton said.
“Casanova,” Miss Mutterworth named it, in tones of loathing. “I put up with it when the old fool bought it. Hours he spent with it. Taught it to ‘walk the plank’ into a soup tureen for a bath. Taught it every foul phrase to be heard on the streets, things even a cart-house pins back its ears to blot out. Cavendish knew I couldn’t tolerate the beast, and now he’s left it to me.”
“Tippecanoe and treasure, too. Tippecanoe and treasure, too,” the parrot screamed amiably. “Cut the cackle.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Mr. Norton’s face wore the bemused look of man who—for quite benevolent reasons— realizes he has invited the fates to play topsy-turvy with his sanity. He now not only had the eccentric Miss Mutterworth to placate, but the rough-tongued bird as well. It was clear that neither’s voice had ever been, like Cordelia’s, been “soft, gentle and low,” an excellent thing not only in a woman but a parrot. I’m sure the Bard would have concurred had he ever met Casanova.
“What was there for your brother to leave?” Mr. Norton inquired hopefully.
“A great deal! All our annuity from father. Cavendish always got most of the income, but a portion was for my use. Now it has apparently vanished, and all I am left by law is this abomination!”
Apparently “abomination” was a favorite word of Miss Mutterworth’s, for the parrot immediately cocked its gaudy head and cawed, “Abomination, abomination. The Fenians come, the Fenians come,” or some such nonsense.
Mr. Norton frowned, though not at the bird’s chatter. “So your brother had tangible assets which are missing?”
“Indeed. His solicitors say that Cavendish kept custody of it all, save for the miserable will. But where is it?”
“I don’t know, Miss Mutterworth. Unless the solicitors are delinquent—”
“Brackenberry, Fettiplace and Mumbray, some such muddle that only a blasphemous parrot could pronounce.”
I recognized the names of an eminent firm, and so did Mr. Norton. “No, I think not the solicitors,” he said. “Then—” He stood, brisk and abstracted at once. “Perhaps you would not mind leaving your late brother’s, er, legacy with me for a time. I’d like to see this house that you risk losing. May I meet you there tomorrow?”
“Hmph. Tomorrow’s like as long as I’ll be in it. As for keeping this ab—” She eyed the bird and it eyed her. Miss Mutterworth searched for a description of her nemesis that would not trigger a coarse monologue: “this absolutely useless creature.”
The parrot shivered its feathers, shuffled its feet and gargled a razor-harsh sound. Mr. Norton seized the opportunity to drape the cage again.
“Here’s the address on my late brother’s card, Mr. Norton. Two tomorrow then; I need my nap before tea.”
I saw her out and returned to find Mr. Norton squinting at the card. “Something of an eccentric, the late Cavendish Mutterworth. What do you make of this scribble?”
A drawing ran across the card’s face, an address printed conventionally beneath it. I examined the sketch: a sort of cavern suspended over a china dish next to a pound of... butter and a pile of coins.
“A cavern, a dish...” I began.
“A cave in dish!”
“Butter next to money—money’s worth?”
“Money... butter... Mutterworth.” Mr. Norton smiled broadly. “I have seen my share of wills in my time, Miss Huxleigh, and have a notion that what we face here is an example of the vengeful will. Now that I see that the late Mr. Mutterworth was possessed of a bizarre sense of humor and a weakness for word games, I know how to proceed.”
“ ‘We’ face here?” I repeated, dazed.
“Miss Huxleigh, I’m afraid I must prevail upon your good nature.”
I heard echoes of Irene’s most cajoling moments, when she urged me to actions diametrically opposed to my best instincts. Mr. Norton’s eyes widened in boyish mischief as he waited and watched me, a nigh-irresistible expression in a man of his age and appearance.
He lifted the covered cage from the floor. “The vocabulary of this remarkable bird requires thorough study. Notes must be made. I will help convey, er, Casanova here, to your rooms if you will record all that he might reveal by, say, one o’clock tomorrow, when I collect you?” He smiled the smile of Lancelot to Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat, and every reader of Tennyson knows what became of her.
“That... beast,” I answered weakly.
“I would be most grateful. It might help deflect an injustice—”
Like many barristers, Mr. Godfrey Norton knew not only where to start, but just when to stop. I was left to either turn my back on Dame Justice with her scales, blindfold and sword, or to embrace the company of the profane Casanova.
I shrugged and went to the outer office to collect my jacket. Mr. Norton followed with the oddly silent cage.
A hansom speedily brought us to Saffron Hill. Because the neighborhood was so casual, no voice lifted to protest Casanova’s installation in my quarters—-save for several rude squawks from within while the cage swung pendulum-like from Mr. Norton’s stiff arm as we climbed the four narrow flights of stairs.
“You have left things as they were,” Mr. Norton marveled, surveying the room when we arrived.
It startled me to realize how much of Irene still occupied the lodgings; I had not noticed.
“She took very little with her,” I explained. “Material objects are expendable to her, for all her love of beauty.”
He lifted the cage and unveiled Casanova like a magician producing a rather rainbowed dove. “What would she say of this particular material object?”
“I have no idea. Put the croaking thing down on that table. He might as well have a window view, I suppose. The important thing is not what Irene would say to this new lodger of ours, but what the bird will say. You wish me to notate everything it articulates?”
“Everything.”
“Then you had best withdraw and let me get on with it. I suspect this feathered Lothario has quite a roster of lines to deliver.”
I put fresh water in the creature’s cage when Mr. Norton had gone. One cannot expect even a parrot to sing without wetting his whistle. Then I sat down with paper and pencil, secretly intrigued by my assignment of evoking the bird’s full range of phraseology. I decided to start with the basics, as I did with my children during my governess days.
“Polly want a cracker?” I chirped brightly.
“Cut the cackle,” Casanova shrilled back, honing his intimidating beak on the bars. No wonder the brass was rubbed raw.
I dutifully transcribed “cut the cackle.” One had to start somewhere.
Chapter Fifteen
THUS SPAKE CASANOVA
Godfrey Norton read my list of the parrot’s chatterings, which I had satirically titled Casanova Contemplating the Dearth of Modem Expression,” as our hired carriage made for an address in Hammersmith.
“Apparently you were obliged to transcribe some expressions not fit for the ears of a lady,” he noted.
“As luck and my sequestered upbringing would have it, I am ignorant of the more vulgar connotations, Mr. Norton, so the bird could scream his worst and I was no worse for it.”
“I imagine the cant would be lost on Miss Mutterworth also.”
“Even more so,” I hazarded. I at least have had the benefit of an association with—”
“Irene Adler?” he interrupted.
‘I was about to say, with a barrister’s office where one often glimpses life’s unseemlier side,” I responded dryly.
“Yes, I suppose that most actions that require the law to untangle them are unseemly.”
“You know quite well that it is unseemly for a barrister to meddle unsolicited in such a private matter at all, but like Irene, you will do what you will.”
“No doubt that where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
His roguish smile was wasted on me. “How do you propose to unravel this Mutterworth will?” I asked.
“I am relying on my infallible instincts about character,”
I stared at him, having many times made clear my belief that he had utterly misjudged Irene. Mr. Norton smiled as if reading my thoughts.
“Here, Miss Huxleigh, I have male character to study; allow me some superiority on that score. The late Cavendish Mutterworth was a bitter man, a bachelor tied to an unmarried sister all his life until they became a kind of estranged couple sharing only the same house. I suggest that the parrot—the aptly named Casanova, for there was also a harem of lady parrots that Miss Mutterworth dispersed during her brother’s fatal illness, say the solicitors—was bought purely to ruffle Miss Mutterworth’s feathers, so to speak.”
“What other reason could there be for acquiring such a beast?” said I grimly.
“Ah, you found him as ingratiating as Miss Mutterworth did, then?”
“Mr. Norton, I have spent half the night past cajoling the roster of verbal ‘poltroonery’ you have perused from that bird’s lips—er, beak. No properly reared gentlewoman would tolerate an hour in his company.”
“Nor pay any heed to his ravings?”
“Certainly not. Had I not been forced to endure them in the performance of my duty—”
“And most kind of you to accept this unpleasant task. Yet once you had begun listening to the creature, did not certain words and phrases recur?”
“Yes, and all of them foul.”
“I perceive that you have marked the most common ones. When we see the Mutterworth house and grounds, we may gain a better sense of direction, I think.”
At this juncture a strangled squawk of agreement issued from the shrouded cage at my feet, causing me to wonder whether stewed parrot would have any culinary appeal.
I recognized in my employer the same curious symptoms I’d observed in Irene: impatience, the alert posture of a hound about to slip its leash to follow the fox, and a certain air of intellectual intoxication that has nothing to do with strong spirits.
With a mild stirring of these same emotions, I leaned toward the carriage window to watch Mr. Mutter-worth’s residence loom into view.
“An isolated, foreboding sort of place,” Mr. Norton commented in the dramatic tones he employed to such fine effect before the bar.
“Quite a Wuthering Heights,” I noted.
“Withering, Miss Huxleigh,” he said sharply, glancing my way, “for Cavendish Mutterworth withered away here. Even the eminent Casanova had to watch his harem shrink to nothing under Miss Mutterworth’s instructions.”
“You seem bent on making the woman the villain of the piece,” said I.
“Not I. Old Mutterworth. He put it into his will: To my sister, Jezebel—’”
“Jezebel?!”
“Not as aptly named as the parrot, I fear. At any rate, ‘To my sister, Jezebel, I leave my prize possession, the parrot Casanova, that she may not have to hear herself talk.’”
The coach drew through the wrought-iron gate that stood ajar and along a driveway to the house. Chimneys bunched against the somber sky like huddled street Arabs. A rook cawed disconsolately from a leafless beech tree down the lane. I shivered.
“The house disturbs you?”
“A draft,” I said smartly, and descended the carriage with the driver’s aid.
Miss Mutterworth awaited us in the receiving room, to which a housekeeper showed us.
“The house looks Jacobean,” Mr. Norton said.
“Looks are not everything,” the elderly lady sniffed. “My brother had it built forty years ago to fool just such upstarts as you.”
He glanced about in apparent innocent pleasure. “What a fine job he did, too. Is everything newly made, even the fence and gardens?”
“Forty years ago, all of it.” Miss Mutterworth leaned toward the round table upon which Mr. Norton had set the parrot’s cage. “They say these birds can live as long as that—even longer,” she added with deep melancholy.
“How long did your brother have the bird?”
“Only the past few years, perhaps five.”
“Yet he taught it a great many phrases.”
“Dozens, though the tongue-waggling beast came with a whole litany of catchwords. Some say he’d been a sailor’s pet. Certainly my brother made a bosom companion of him, feeding him seeds and whispering new abominations to his imitative ear as if they were partners in crime.”
Mr. Norton raised an expressive dark eyebrow at me, a gesture he had mastered in the cradle, I warrant. “Might we explore the house and grounds?”
“All you wish, though it will not be mine to admit you to before long.”
“We shall see,” Mr. Norton said, lifting the parrot’s cage from the table. He led me toward the entry hall where the stair forked into two flights before meeting on the landing and forking again.
“His own building,” he whispere
d at me, and winked.
I followed him upstairs, resting my hand on the walnut railing until I discovered at each turn of the stairs that a grotesque carved face grimaced from every newel post. When I mentioned the gargoyles to Mr. Norton, he merely nodded and pointed to the plaster frieze beneath the hall ceiling.
The design was that odd pictograph of “Cave-in-dish Mutter-worth,” traced in the plaster over and over.
On the second floor a maid led us to the late master’s quarters, where even the chamber pot wore a twisted ceramic face, and its handles were two uplifted hands. I hesitated to direct Mr. Norton’s attention to it.
He was busy unveiling the parrot and installing its cage on the empty stand that stood ready for it.
“Awk!” Casanova cleared his throat, sidling down the perch until his seamed foot brushed the bars. “Awkward,” he said, cocking a hidden ear my way.
“Most awkward,” I agreed.
“Quick study,” Mr. Norton approved, rubbing his palms together. “You used the word in the coach and it suits the bird’s natural voice.”
“It is awkward being here.” I glanced around the bedchamber, struck by the recent presence of death, however naturally delivered.
The air held that sickroom tang of age and decay. I noted a cane leaning into a dark corner, the old man’s nightshirt and cap folded at the foot of the testered bed.
“Let me have a look at your list again,” Mr. Norton said.
The paper crackled as he unfolded it and Casanova edged nearer to absorb every snap.
“Tippecanoe and treasure, too,” Mr. Norton mused.
“Go soak your head in it,” the bird croaked. “Go soak your head in it.”
“Tippecanoe,” I mused in turn, feeling obliged to contribute something to this expedition. “Isn’t that American?”
“Pertaining to an American political contest, I believe. A campaign slogan that became a popular song years ago, ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’. But the canoe is also an Indian boat of sorts, long and thin and made of birch-bark.”
“Tippecanoe and treasure, too. Nonsense then, just like Mr. Mutterworth.”
“Mutterworth. I wonder if he was so enamored of making puns upon his own name—”
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 17
