The Avram Davidson Treasury (19 page)

There was a stir of interest. “He writes thrillers.” Another stir. “He is none other than—” a dramatic pause—“
Mr. Rodney Stirrup!
”

The reaction was immense.

Three men jumped to their feet, one dropped a lit cigar, one snapped the stem of his wine glass, another crashed his fist into his palm.

“I told Mr. Stirrup—” Blenkinsop lifted his voice; the hum subsided—“that few writers, if any, have received the attention which we have given to the works through which his name became famous. We followed his tales of crime and detection very carefully here, I told him.”

Peebles said, “You told him no more than the truth, Mr. Blenkinsop. Do us the honor, sir, of taking a glass of wine. This is a great occasion, indeed, Mr. Stirrup.” He poured, proferred.

Stirrup drank. It was a good wine. He said so. The company smiled.

“We have kept a good cellar here, Mr. Stirrup,” said Peebles. “It has been well attended to.” Stirrup said that they must have a good butler, then. A good butler was hard to find, he said. Between the men there passed a look, a sort of spark. Mr. Peebles carefully put down his glass. It was empty. “How curious you should mention butlers,” he said.

Stirrup said that it was not so curious, that he was, in a way, very fond of butlers, that he had put them to good use in his books. Then he turned, surprised. A noise very like a growl had come from a corner of the room where stood a little man with a red face and bristly white hair.

“Ye-e-es,” said Mr. Peebles, in an odd tone of voice. “It is generally conceded, is it not, that you, Mr. Stirrup, were the very first man to employ a butler as the one who stands revealed, at story’s end, as the murderer? That it is you who coined the phrase which so rapidly became a household word wherever the English tongue is spoken? I refer, of course, to:
‘The butler did it.
’?”

Rather proudly, rather fondly, Stirrup nodded. “You are correct, sir.”

“And in novel after novel, though the victims varied and the criminal methods changed, the murderer was almost invariably—a butler. Until finally you were paid the supreme compliment one writer can pay another—that of imitation. A line of thrillers long enough to reach from here to London—to say nothing of short stories, stage plays, music hall acts, movie and television dramas—each with a murderous butler, poured forth upon the world, Mr. Stirrup—beginning, if I am not mistaken, with Padraic, the butler of Ballydooly House, in
Murder By The Bogs.
”

Stirrup was pleased. “Ah, do you remember Padraic? Dear me. Yes, that was my very first detective novel. Couldn’t do it today, of course. Irish butlers are dreadfully passé, obsolete. De Valera and Irish Land Reform have extinguished the species, so to speak.”

The red-faced little man dashed from his corner, seized a poker, and brandished it in Stirrup’s face. “The truth is not in ye!” he shouted. “Ye lie, ye scribbling Sassenach!” Stirrup could not have said with any degree of accuracy if the brogue was that of Ulster, or Munster, or Leinster, or Connaught—the four provinces of Northern Ireland—but he recognized as being of sound British workmanship the heavy iron in the speaker’s hand.

In a rather quavering tone, Stirrup demanded, “What is the meaning of this?”

“Allow me to introduce you,” Peebles said, “to O’Donnell, for fifty years butler to Count Daniel Donavan of Castle Donavan. O’Donnell, put that away.”

Still growling, O’Donnell obeyed. Stirrup, regaining his aplomb, said: “
Count?
Surely not. The peerage of Ireland, like other British peerages, contains countesses, but no counts. The husband of a countess is an earl.”

“The count’s toitle, sor,” said O’Donnell, looking at him with an eye as cold and gray as Galway Bay in winter, “is a Papal toitle. Oi trust ye’ve no objections?”

Stirrup hastily said he had none, then retreated to the other side of a table. The man whose wine glass had snapped in his hand finished wiping port from his fingers with a monogrammed handkerchief, then spoke in mellowed, measured tones.

“We must, of course,” he said, “make due allowances for Celtic—I do not say, West British—exuberance; but the matter now before us is too serious to permit any element of disorder to enter.” There was a general murmur of agreement. “Gentlemen, I move that the doors be locked. Those in favor will signify by saying ‘Aye.’ The ayes have it.”

He locked the doors and pocketed the key. “Thank you, Mr. Piggot,” said Peebles.

“Mr. Arbuthnot,” Stirrup said, loudly, “since I am here in response to your invitation, it is from you that I must demand an explanation for these actions.”

Arbuthnot smiled his slant smile again. Peebles said, “All in good time. By the way,” he inquired, “I trust you have no objections if I refer to you henceforth as the Accused? Protocol, you know, protocol.”

Stirrup said that he objected very much. “Most vehemently. Of what am I accused?” he asked plaintively.

Peebles flung out his arm and pointed at him. “You are accused, sir,” he cried, “of having for over thirty years pursued an infamous campaign of literary slander designed to bring into contempt and disrepute a profession the most ancient and honorable, dating back to Biblical days and specifically mentioned—I refer to Pharoah’s chief butler—in the Book of Deuteronomy.”

Knuckles were rapped on tables and the room rang with murmurs of, “Hear, hear!” and, “Oh, well said, sir!”

“Pardon me, Mr. Peebles,” said Blenkinsop. “The Book of Genesis.”

“Genesis? H’m, dear me, yes. You are correct. Thank you.”

“Not at all, not at all. Deuteronomy is very much like Genesis.”

Stirrup interrupted this feast of love. “I insist upon being informed what all this has to do with you, or with any of you except O’Donnell.”

Peebles peered at him with narrowed, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Are you under the impression, Mr.—is Accused under the impression that our esteemed colleague, Mr. Phelim O’Donnell, is the only butler here?”

Stirrup licked dry lips with a dry tongue. “Why, ah, yes,” he stammered. “Isn’t he? Is there another?” A growl went round the circle, which drew in closer.

“No, sir, he is
not. I
was a butler.
We were all of us butlers!
”

A hoarse scream broke from Stirrup’s mouth. He lunged for the open windows, but was tripped up by the watchful Piggot.

Peebles frowned. “Mr. Blenkinsop,” he said, “will you be good enough to close the windows? Thank you. I must now warn the Accused against any further such outbursts. Yes, Accused, we were all of us, every one of us, members of that proud profession which you were the first to touch with the dusty brush of scorn. Now you must prepare to pay. Somehow, Mr. Stirrup, you have pushed aside what my former lady—the justly-famed Mme. Victoria Algernonovna Grabledsky, the theosophical authoress—used to call ‘The Veil of Isis.’ This room wherein you now stand is none other than the Great Pantry of the Butlers’ Valhalla. Hence—”

“May it please the court,” said Piggot, interrupting. “We find the Accused guilty as charged, and move to proceed with sentencing.”

“Help!”
Stirrup cried, struggling in O’Donnell’s iron grasp. “
He-e-e-l-l-p!
”

Peebles said that would do him no good, that there was no one to help him. Then he looked around the room, rather helplessly. “Dear me,” he said, a petulant note in his voice; “whatever shall I use for a black cap while I pronounce sentence?”

A silence fell, broken by Richards. “In what manner shall sentence be carried out?” he asked.

Piggot, his face bright, spoke up. “I must confess, Mr. Peebles, to a fondness for the sashweight attached by a thin steel wire to the works of a grandfather’s clock,” said Piggot; “as utilized (in the Accused’s novel of detection,
Murder In The Fens)
by Murgatroyd, the butler at Fen House—who was, of course, really Sir Ethelred’s scapegrace cousin, Percy, disguised by a wig and false paunch. I recall that when I was in the service of Lord Alfred Strathmorgan, his lordship read that meretricious work and thereafter was wont to prod me quite painfully in my abdominal region, and to inquire, with what I considered a misplaced jocularity,
if my paunch were real!
Yes, I favor the sash-weight and the thin steel wire.”

Peebles nodded, judiciously. “Your suggestion, Mr. Piggot, while by no means devoid of merit, has a—shall I say—a certain degree of violence, which I should regret having to utilize so long as an alternative—”

“
I
would like to ask the opinion of the gentlemen here assembled,” said Blenkinsop, “as to what they would think of a swift-acting, exotic Indonesian poison which, being of vegetative origin, leaves no trace; to be introduced via a hollowed corkscrew into a bottle of Mouton Rothschild’12? Needless to say, I refer to the Accused’s trashy novel
The Vintage Vengeance
. In that book the profligate Sir Athelny met his end at the hands of the butler, Bludsoe, whose old father’s long-established wine and spirits business was ruined when the avaricious Sir Athelny cornered the world’s supply of corks—thus occasioning the elder Bludsoe’s death by apoplexy. The late Clemantina, Dowager Duchess of Sodor and Skye, who was quite fond of her glass of wine, used frequently to tease me by inquiring if I had opened her bottle with a corkscrew of similar design and purpose; and I am not loath to confess that this habit of Her Grace’s annoyed me exceedingly.”

“The court can well sympathize with you in that, Mr. Blenkinsop.” The Great Pantry hummed with a murmur of accord.

Blenkinsop swallowed his chagrin at this memory, nodded his thanks for the court’s sympathy, and then said smoothly, “Of course we could not
force
the Accused to drink without rather a messy scene, but I have hopes he would feel enough sense of
noblesse oblige
to quaff the fatal beverage Socraticlike, so to speak.”

Stirrup wiped his mouth with his free hand. “While I should be delighted, under ordinary circumstances,” he said, “to drink a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’12 I must inquire if you have on hand such an item as a swift-acting, exotic Indonesian poison, which, being of vegetative origin, leaves no trace? Frankly, I have neglected to bring mine.”

A mutter of disappointment was followed by a further consultation of the assembled butlers, but no sooner had they begun when a shot rang out, there was a shattering of glass, and O’Donnell fell forward. Richards turned him over; there was a bullet hole in the exact center of his forehead. Everyone’s eyes left Stirrup; his captor’s grip perceptibly loosened. Stirrup broke away, snatched up the poker, smashed the window and, jumping forward onto the terrace, ran for his life.

He reached the road just in time to see the headlights of an automobile moving away.
“Help!”
he shouted.
“Help! Help!”

The car went into reverse, came back to him. Two men emerged.

“Oh, a stranger,” said the driver. He was a man with long gray hair, clad neatly, if unconventionally, in golf knickers, deerstalking cap, and smoking jacket.

“The most fantastic thing—” Stirrup gasped. “My life was threatened by the inhabitants of that house back there!”

The other man cried, “Ah, the scoundrels!” He wore a greasy regimental dinner jacket and a soft, squashed hat; he shook a clenched fist toward the house and slashed the air with his cane. Deep-set eyes blazed in a gaunt face. Then, abruptly, his expression changed to an ingratiating smile. “It is at a time like this, sir,” he said to Stirrup, “that I am sure you must ask yourself, ‘Are my loved ones adequately protected in case of mishap, misadventure, or untoward occurrences affecting me?’ Now, the Great South British Assurance Company, of which I happen to be an agent, has a policy—”

“Stop that, you fool!” said the driver. “Can’t you ever remember all that’s over with now?” He took a revolver from his pocket, and Stirrup—suddenly recalling the bullet in O’Donnell’s head—trembled. But as the other man’s face creased with disappointment and petulance, the driver said to Stirrup, “Pray do not be alarmed, sir. But in the matter of butlers one simply
must
be prepared with strong measures.
They
stop at nothing. Fancy threatening an innocent, inoffensive gentleman such as you! My motto, when confronted with butlers, is: ‘St. George and no quarter’!”

A trifle nervously, Stirrup said, “If you could drive me to the nearest town—”

“All in good season, sir,” the man answered, waving his weapon carelessly. “I was once tried for shooting my butler; did you know that? I am not ashamed; in fact, I glory in the deed. It was during the grouse season in Scotland. I’d caught the swine pilfering my cigars. I gave him a fair run before bringing him down, then claimed it was an accident.” He chuckled richly. “Jury returned a verdict of Not Proven. You should’ve seen the face of the Procurator-Fiscal!”

“
I
was never even indicted,” the man in the dirty regimentals and crushed hat observed, with no small amount of smugness. “When I discovered that
my
butler had been selling the wine to the local pub, I chased him with hounds through the Great Park. Would have caught him, too, only the cowardly blighter broke his neck falling from a tree which he had climbed in trying to escape. ‘Death by misadventure’ was all the coroner could say. Hah! But then these damnation taxes obliged me to sell the Great Park, and reduced me to a low insurance broker.
Me!
” He ground his teeth.

Scarcely knowing if he should believe these wild tales, Stirrup said, “You have all my sympathy. Now, my book,
The Vintage Vengeance—
to give you only a single example—brought me in twenty-one hundred pounds clear of taxes the year it was written; whereas last year—”

The driver of the car turned from his revolver. His brows, which were twisted into horny curves of hair at the ends, went up—up—up. “
You
wrote
The Vintage Vengeance? You
are that fellow Rodney Stirrup?”

Stirrup drew himself erect. It was recognition such as this which almost made up for treacherous publishers, ungrateful mistresses, and a declining public. “I am. Did you read it? Did you like it?”

“Read it? We read it twen-ty-sev-en times! We were par-
tic
ularly interested in the character of Sir Athelny Aylemore, the unfortunate victim: an excellently-delineated portrait of a great gentleman. But you will recall that Sir Athelny was a baronet. Now, baronets possess the only hereditary degree of knighthood, and hence should be accorded an infinite degree of respect. And yet we feel your book failed to show a correct amount of respect.”