Jerusalem Inn (14 page)

“ . . . twelve
of us, don't you see? You can hardly get away from that, now can you?”

Not if you can count, thought Melrose.

“We're like that book where all those people are fetched up on an island and go killing one another off —”

“Ah, yes. Well, I shouldn't worry. There were only ten of them, but we'll probably find a body stuffed up a chimney or out in the potting shed. No footprints in the snow, of course.”

MacQuade laughed and gestured toward the windows behind him. “It's like the Yorkshire Moors out there — dark footprints on all that white . . . just the sort of symbolism I love.”

“I'm afraid murder will not bow to your taste for imagery, Mr. MacQuade.” Melrose smiled. “How would those nice, black prints have landed there —?”

Lady Assington shivered. “Oh,
do
stop all this talk of murder —”
Susan having forgotten, apparently, it was she who started it. “I don't read thrillers, not really, Lord Ardry.” She had suddenly decided to cultivate more literary tastes, looking around Seaingham's table.

“I do,” said MacQuade, leaving Susan Assington to shift for herself. He rolled the wine around in his glass. “I've even tried to write one, but it's no good. I don't have the mind for murder. All of those loose ends one has to tie up . . . ”

Melrose thought of Polly Praed, his mystery-writer friend, and said, “Some of them are good. And it's not ‘Lord Ardry,' Lady Assington. Just ‘Melrose Plant.' ”

How stupid of him, he realized, when her widened gazelle-eye fixed on him. If there was one thing Susan Assington loved, it was a title — it had taken her long enough to get one. Susan (née Breedlove, he had discovered in conversation with Beatrice Sleight) had clerked in a milliner's until Money walked in one day. Loss of title far outstripped loss of life on Lady Assington's list.

“But if you're the Earl of Caverness — well, it's clearly ‘Lord.' ” If there was one book she'd read within an inch of its life, he was certain it was Debrett's. “I don't understand,” she said.

Agatha bellowed from her end of the table, “Who
does?
Can you imagine
giving up
being an earl? But, then Melrose always has been a queer duck.” She sighed and had a second helping of soufflé from Marchbanks's silver spoon, as she signed to Ruthven for wine. Plant's man had been graciously permitted to second Marchbanks, fortunately for Agatha, who thought she owned him.

Melrose wondered if the visa he had used to cross the border were now found to be invalid, as eyes turned on him, expecting him to explain his queer duck behavior. Not everyone, though: MacQuade smiled one of his rare smiles. Vivian had her eyes turned ceilingward. And Bea Sleight, across the table from him, leaned so far into the candles he
was sure she'd melt the combs in her hair. The ruby eye of the dragon glittered.

“It's simple enough,” said Melrose, who had no intention of explaining anything, “I didn't want it. Them,” he added for good measure.

Tommy Whittaker joined in the conversation for the first time. “You mean you can just —
stop?”
It was as if Melrose had been slave to the demon rum or opium.

“Of course. In 1963 an act was passed that allows us to disclaim our titles. Unless one is Irish. Then one is, unfortunately, in for the long haul.”

Beatrice Sleight leaned even farther into the candlelight, probably to show her décolletage to its best advantage. Her tone, when she spoke, suggested that Lord Ardry's motives for giving up those titles that she presumably hated had to be ulterior. “Well, then, why did you?” She went on with heavy-handed sarcasm. “To enjoy all of the advantages of us commoners? I mean, did you want to
vote,
or something?”

“For whom?”

Parmenger laughed, Vivian smiled down at her dessert plate, and Susan Assington drew her sleek hair behind her ear and looked as if she would answer the question if she could.

But Bea Sleight was not for letting Melrose off so lightly. In her book, a belted earl was stuck with wearing it. “The trouble with You People,” she said, dribbling cigarette ash in the Christmas-rose-and-candle centerpiece, “is that you simply wink at the decadence of the peerage.” Her eye slid from Melrose to Tom Whittaker to Lady St. Leger to Sir George to an appalled Susan Assington.

“No more decadent than the rest of the world, surely,” said Charles Seaingham, reasonably, from the other end of the table where he had sat Agatha next to him. (The man really did have strength of mind.) It was rumored there might be a title in store for him, though a knighthood would condemn only Seaingham and not his progeny.

“No? Look at people like Lucan and Josyln Erroll.”

Lady St. Leger said coldly, “Hardly
representative
of the peerage. There's always the bad apple in the lot.”

Bea Sleight's laugh was unpleasant. “Bad
apple?
That's what you'd call them? You all stick together, don't you? You can go round murdering nannies and running roughshod over everyone —”

“I think we can do without this rehearsal of the indiscretions of the nobility,” said Lady St. Leger.

“I'd hardly call Erroll's conduct simply ‘indiscreet' — after all, he —”

Melrose tried to lighten the onslaught by offering up one or two examples of mild peer-madness among the nobility — better, at least, than Lord Lucan's murderous tendencies. “I rather like old Poachy — Lord Ribbenpoach is his courtesy title; he's heir to a dukedom or something. He's a bit mad. Gets out in his own woods and poaches his own game. Or so they say.”

Charles Seaingham mentioned the trouble they'd had with poachers on their own land, probably as much to turn the conversation round as anything.

“A lot of you are mad —” began Bea Sleight. A murmur from the other end of the table suggested Agatha couldn't agree more. “It's all that inbreeding.”

“Oh, really,” said Melrose with a laugh. “All that gets us is look-alike noses and protruding teeth.” He heard Parmenger, down the table, apologize abruptly for spilt wine. They were on Stilton and port by now (Grace Seaingham refusing to stand on the tradition of the ladies' retiring for this reverential act), and MacQuade, seeming to enjoy all of this immensely, passed the bottle to Melrose, who went on. “Pity that I shall die d.s.p.”

His aunt stopped eating long enough to say, with a kind of horror, “If you've not made a
will,
Melrose, you must do so immediately.”

Beatrice Sleight laughed. “He means ‘without children.' ”

Grace Seaingham broke in: “I should think Mr. Plant's title is strictly his own business.” She pushed back her dessert plate, untouched.

Melrose smiled his thanks to Grace, and said to Beatrice, “It appears to be your forte, bringing the peerage to heel. Glad I'm not one of them anymore.”

“You
really fascinate me.”

Melrose sincerely hoped not.

“I've looked you up in Burke's.”

“Already? I only just got here.”

Bea Sleight smiled. “Charles told us you were coming. You're in all of them, aren't you? Debrett's and Burke's and
Landed Gentry.”

“You didn't check the
Almanach de Gotha?”

“I would do. Only it's in French.”

“Pity.”

The subject of Melrose's titles having arisen, Agatha was only too ready to tell the table, naming all the lost titles sadly and sonorously as if they were a lot of drowned babies:
Baron Mountardry of Swaledale . . . fifteen hundreds . . . Viscount of Nitherwold, Ross and Cromarty . . . Clive D'ardry De Knopf, fourth Viscount . . .

She droned on. Melrose had the feeling he was listening to an announcer at the Royal Ascot calling off the names of the entries as they slipped into place at the starting gate:
They're off! It's Viscount of Nitherwold leading.
 . . . Melrose yawned as the conversation was carried into the historical/political arena of the Wars of the Roses. He studied the pinkish white centerpiece — there were Christmas roses all over the house.

While the House of Lancaster and the House of York battled on around the table (Parmenger wasn't adverse to fighting a war, even an old war, and championed, in his wonderfully perverse way, Richard III), Melrose talked gardening
and roses with Lady St. Leger to get her mind off the remarks of Beatrice Sleight.

“Susan brought them,” she said, looking at the centerpiece. “Sweet of her. She's quite the gardener, though one might not think it.” Lady St. Leger's tone was wry. “Our own gardens at Meares are extensive. I used so much to like to get my own hands in the earth. But now —” She shrugged. “I don't like formal gardens, do you?”

“No, but I can't keep my gardener from trying to punish the hedges into all sorts of shapes.”

“Oh, dear. I do loathe topiaries. What an awful thing to do with hedges and bushes.”

“I'll bet Aunt Betsy knows more about parks and pleasaunces than Miss Sleight ever will about peers,” said Tommy Whittaker, in a low voice.

His aunt smiled fondly. But Beatrice Sleight heard it. “I wouldn't count on it, sweetie.”

Her eyes, sparked by candlelight, were quite vicious. Melrose began to think Susan Assington was right: they really ought to have a murder.

F
IRST
the piano, then the oboe. The others in the drawing room, where they had retired with their drinks and cigars, finally, had clearly had their fill of this musical mélange; besides Lady St. Leger, only Grace Seaingham had listened to Tom's recital, sure proof of her saintliness.

Rather fascinated by her pale, madonnalike beauty, Melrose took his brandy over to sit beside her. “Thanks for rescuing me,” he said.

Grace Seaingham laughed. “I don't think you need anyone to do that.” She looked toward Beatrice Sleight, who was
doing everything she could to capture Parmenger's attention. “We've known Bea for years. She can be rather awful.” But Grace Seaingham said this in a totally nonjudgmental way, as if they could all be fond of “awfulness” if only they'd try. “Do you know Freddie Parmenger? I mean, have you seen his work?”

“I've heard of him, yes. He's got a show on in London, hasn't he, at the Academy? I must admit to a total lack of grasp of modern art.”

“Oh, Freddie wouldn't like
that.
” Her crystalline laughter rang out. “He doesn't consider himself modern; he considers himself immortal.”

“Is he that arrogant?”

“Arrogance has nothing to do with art, does it? I mean art of the caliber of Freddie or Bill MacQuade. Though one could hardly fault
him
for vanity.” Her head inclined toward MacQuade, who smiled at her. Then her look turned to Parmenger, still in his chair, reading. “Look at him refusing to be social.”

Considering it was Bea Sleight he was refusing to be social with, Melrose could easily overlook Parmenger's bad manners. Her pretense of interest in his book was quickly rebuffed, and she moved off like a dark cloud to the side of Charles Seaingham.

The look, the way she slipped her arm through his, answered the question of why she had been invited. And Melrose also saw that Grace Seaingham's eyes were locked on the pair of them — Charles and Beatrice — with a look not of anger but of total bereavement.

He couldn't stand that look on such a face and very quickly reverted to her comment on art. “Arrogance has nothing to do with it? You're probably right. Do you allow artists then to operate on a different moral plane —?” Melrose was immediately sorry for such a gaffe.

She smiled slightly. “I don't think my ‘allowance' has anything
to do with it, really. Anyway, my own morals probably wouldn't bear scrutiny.”

To that surprising statement, Melrose could think of no reply.

Putting down her glass of silvery Sambuca, she said, “Would you excuse me, Mr. Plant. I'm just going to get my cape and go to chapel.”

“Your cape? You're going
outside?
Is there no domestic chapel —?”

She laughed a bit at his distress. “To the Lady Chapel. Don't worry: the walk's covered. It's only just outside the East Wing. There's nothing in that wing, really, except my husband's little study and the gun room. And at the far end, a solarium I had put in. Tomorrow I must show you round.”

He looked after her as she went to get her cloak, finding himself unaccountably irritated. He wondered, indeed, what it would be like being married to her. Would all of that goodness — and he didn't doubt it was genuine — wash over and over one through the years, eroding, like the ocean, the coastal shelf of one's outline?

 • • • 

“Despite what you must be thinking, Mr. Plant, I really don't have a tin ear.”

Melrose smiled, surprised at Lady St. Leger's rather impish look at him. “The marquess probably just needs a little practice.”

“Only a little? You're as kind as I daresay you would be candid, were I a friend.” In her lap was an embroidery hoop. She was working an intricate design. “I'm sure everyone thinks
I've
forced Tom into these music lessons. Actually, it's Tom who wants to take them. I can't imagine what he has in mind. But I don't mind playing along with it — please pardon that ghastly pun.”

“Both the pun and the piano, Lady St. Leger.”

With her eyes fixed on her needlework, she said, “But not the oboe.”

“Ah, no. I'm afraid not — but your nephew will no doubt find some appropriate outlet for his talents.”

“I certainly hope so. Unfortunately, he shows little inclination to do well in his schoolwork — except, apparently, in ancient history, for some reason. The headmaster of St. Jude's —”