The Curse Of The Diogenes Club (17 page)

“There’s too much damn
saddlery,” General de Merville was pontificating. “A horse lasts
less than six weeks in the Transvaal.”

“I can probably provide a
hundred horses,” offered Mr Blague generously. “How will that go
over with the committee?”

“Good fellow!” praised the
general. “That will definitely improve your membership chances once
that amendment goes through.”

“Will it go through?” asked
Damery dubiously. “I heard…”

“What the blazes is this!”
interrupted the general, spotting the butler with the tray standing
by the door. “We didn’t order whiskey!”

“You must have made some sort
of mistake,” said Damery with more tact, noting the six
glasses.

De Merville rolled his eyes.
“It’s the new butler. Take it away and bring…”

“Don’t be too hasty,
gentlemen,” intervened Mr Blague. “Have you seen the label? I’ve
been hankering to sample that Scotch for years. Cannot be got for
love nor money in Charleston or Florida.”

“Who instructed you to bring
that in here?” asked Damery abruptly.

She adopted a throaty timbre.
“I was told to bring it to the meeting room, sir, by the old butler
in the pantry, sir.”

“That’s old Colchester,”
explained de Merville. “He’s seventy if he’s a day and long past
it. Very well, leave it here and we’ll deal with it. What’s your
name?”

“Grimsby, sir.”

She was ready to leave the room
when she decided to pour the whiskey instead. A measure of two
fingers was considered sufficient, so she made sure to make it
three. No one quibbled.

“Cheers, gentlemen!” said de
Merville, raising a glass. “And don’t worry about that amendment;
it will go through like a shot unopposed.”

“Mycroft is for it too?”
checked Damery.

“Yes, but as primus baro he has
right of veto on individual applications. Not every American or
Irishman who applies will get in. That young colonel you seem to be
so fond of, Damery, hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. But
don’t worry, by the time your applications are received there won’t
be any…What are you doing, Grimsby?”

“Checking the humidor, sir. I
thought it might need topping up with fresh cigars, sir.”

“Not now, Grimsby. Close the
door on your way out.”

Unable to argue, she did as
instructed but before the door closed she heard de Merville say in
a lower tone, somewhat conspiratorially. “I just heard something
extraordinary, gentlemen. You will be the first, apart from
Scotland Yard and our own Machiavelli, to learn they just found the
man who set the three bombs.”

She forgot herself and slammed
the door harder than necessary.

When she returned to the
butler’s pantry Pettigrew was waiting for her and the dark storm
cloud hanging over him did not bode well.

“Where have you been, Grimsby?”
His voice was a thunderous rumble.

She remembered to adopt a manly
refrain. “The Stranger’s Room, sir.”

“What were you doing…Never
mind! Mrs Babcock, the cook, is furious. We endeavour to keep Mrs
Babcock happy because our members adore her plain English cooking.
They do not want a fancy French or Swiss chef. They want food like
their nanny used to make, made by someone who reminds them of their
nanny. Cook has tipped three cups of perfectly good tea down the
plug-hole and her ginger cake has gone cold. Don’t bother
explaining yourself. Just get to the kitchen. Grab the tea tray for
Major Nash and get it up to his room without fail. And do it
without getting side-tracked.”

Right this minute her
well-balanced humours were teetering on the edge. Why couldn’t the
cook-cum-nanny have allocated someone else to deliver the tea tray?
There were a dozen butlers on duty, though half of them seemed to
have disappeared.

Desperate to get back to the
Stranger’s Room to hear about the bomb man, she resolved to give
the tea tray to the first butler she passed on the stairs but as
luck would have it there were none. It forced her to personally
complete the task. Nonetheless, as soon as she dumped the tray she
would grab a box of cigars from the pantry and return to the
Stranger’s Room to refill the humidor despite what de Merville
said. Hopefully, she would not be too late to overhear something
vital.

She didn’t bother knocking but
barged straight into Major Nash’s office, ready to dump the tray
and rush away, but the room was devoid of life.
Tant pis
!
All she had to do was deliver the nanny tray, not feed him morsels
of ginger cake with a silver spoon! Cook might enjoy playing nanny
in this lunatic asylum but she wasn’t about to encourage the
lunatics.

He had apparently eaten his
lunch for the other tray was resting on his desk. The Matryoshka
doll was nowhere to be seen. She placed the tea tray on the drum
table, ignored the lunch tray, and was about to flee when she heard
a familiar voice on the other side of the jib door, once again
ajar.

“Bring it in here,
Grimsby.”

Here
turned out to be a
bedroom decorated in masculine tones and Major Nash was sitting up
in bed looking masculine. The lower half of his body was thankfully
covered with a feather quilt but the rest of him was naked from the
waist up.

She dropped her gaze and tried
not to drop the tray.

“Put it here on the bedside
table, Grimsby, and stir the tea for me.”

She was about to tell him to
stir his own tea when she remembered herself and gave the brew a
vigorous anti-clockwise spin.

“Hand me my dressing-gown,
Grimsby. It’s hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door.”
He indicated a second door with a cavalier wave of his hand.

She located a shabby
dressing-gown with a frayed cord and wondered if he would throw
back the quilt and step naked out of the bed to put it on, or ask
her to run his bath and soap his back! Upon returning to the
bedroom, she braced for the worst, but what happened took her
breath away.

Major Nash threw back the quilt
with a flourish to reveal he was wearing his trousers and even his
socks and shoes. She was feeling unbelievably confused when he
moved fast and pinned her up against the wall and she felt four
stinging sensations across her face that made her cry out four
times in quick succession.

“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

In a flash he had torn off her
carefully glued moustache, beard, and eyebrows.

“Hello, Countess,” he grinned
triumphantly, backing off.

Her face was stinging and her
head was spinning. “When did you guess?”

He located a clean shirt with a
winged collar and thrust his arms through the sleeves. “I admit I
was slow. I can normally spot a dupe in less than five minutes but
I doubted myself. Doubting oneself is deadly in my line of work.
There’s no room for second guessing. The disguise was good and the
wig is convincing, I’ll admit that.”

“So what gave it away?”

He began to do up the buttons
of his shirt. “The way you closed the door.”

“Closed the door?”

“A man steps through a door and
then just pulls it after him. It is one action, performed without a
break. A lady accustomed all her life to wearing a number of
petticoats and swishy skirts steps through a door and then turns
back to close it. She cannot risk catching the train of her gown in
the door. It is two separate actions.”

“I will bear that in mind for
next time.”

“Next time?”

“Next time I go undercover
dressed as a man.”

“I presume Mycroft Holmes knows
of your charade?”

“Yes, I and I need to speak to
him urgently. Is he upstairs in the dome room?”

“How do you know about the dome
room?” He slapped the side of his head and gave a mock laugh.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been here before?”

“You missed the last
button.”

“I never do the last button –
stop changing the subject. Have you been inside the Diogenes Club
before today?”

“I refuse to answer,” she
pouted.

“That means yes. Are you and
Mycroft Holmes husband and wife?”

She burst out laughing.

He closed the distance between
them in a single breath. One hand clamped the back of her head; the
other covered her mouth. “Shut up,” he hissed, aiming a dangerous
glance at the bedroom door that opened to the landing. “Are you
married to Mycroft?” he repeated, removing his hand from her mouth
but still brusquely hanging onto the back of her head.

“No,” she said, feeling anger
radiate off his body like a wave of heat. “He’s my…” She was almost
going to say ‘uncle’ but remembered herself in the nick of time.
“Friend.”

He knew she was going to say
something else and few interesting alternatives ran through his
mind. “Friend is good because I would hate to kiss Mycroft’s
wife.”

“What?”

Sensuously, seditiously, he
helped himself to a searing kiss that caught her by surprise.

“Happy New Year,” he whispered
breathily when he’d finished.

This was too much! He was
running rings around her and if she wasn’t careful the next one
would be on her finger. It was time to put a stop to it before she
found herself on her honeymoon. She had been kissed desirously for
most of her life, the first time when she was just eight years old
by the woodcutter’s son in a larch forest. Major Nash was rather
better than most but that did not excuse her pathetic acquiescence.
Her vow to be scandalously remembered for what she did, rather than
who she slept with, would turn into empty rhetoric if she did not
meet male expectation head on.

“I presume you have been saving
that up since the New Year’s Eve ball?”

“Yes,” he confirmed as he
tucked his shirt into the waistband of his trousers, looking more
than pleased with himself. “So what are you doing here inside the
club?”

She located her eyebrows, beard
and moustache where he had carelessly dropped them on the floor by
the tallboy. “I’m hoping to learn something about the identity of
the man trying to kill Mycroft.”

“You think he’s a club member?
Can you see my waistcoat anywhere?”

“Don’t you? Do you mean the
navy and green striped one?”

“Yes and yes.”

“It’s hanging on the end of the
trouser press in the bathroom.” She disappeared into the bathroom
and tossed it to him from the door. “Catch!”

He had excellent reflexes. By
the time she had re-glued her hairy caterpillar bits with the aid
of the bathroom mirror and returned to the bedroom he was wearing a
waistcoat, neck tie and frock coat and was washing his ginger cake
down with a cup of cold tea.

They repaired to the adjoining
office and that’s when she noticed one of those new telephonic
devices. It was a wall-mounted wooden box with a bell crank, large
mouthpiece and an earpiece attached to an electric cord. She had
not noticed it earlier because it blended into the wooden panelling
and was positioned behind the door.

“You were speaking to someone
on the telephone just before I delivered your lunch?” she
prompted.

“What of it?” he said
defensively, moving onto the back foot.

“I think General de Merville
might have been listening on the other side of the jib door.”

He looked alarmed. “Are you
sure?”

“Not really, it’s an educated
guess. I deposited the lunch tray on the drum table and when I
reached the top of the stairs he was hurrying down and had almost
reached the hall but he hadn’t previously been on the landing and
there are no other doors except the door from your office and
bedroom.”

He rubbed his chiselled jaw and
looked genuinely worried. “Do you know if he signed himself out
after he reached the hall?”

“He didn’t sign himself out. He
went to the Stanger’s Room. Sir James Damery and Mr Blague joined
him. I served them some Scotch – by the way if anyone accuses
Colchester of pilfering the most expensive bottle of Scotch from
the bar he is innocent; I’ll happily replace it – anyway I heard de
Merville talking about the amendment. He was saying it would go
through, that Mycroft was in favour, and that the membership
applications of both Damery and Blague would be approved. He said
Mycroft had right of veto but it was not a problem. Blague is
donating a hundred horses to the war effort to win favour with the
committee Are you on the committee?”

“No, it is made up of the six
founding members, one of whom has recently died.”

“Admiral Quantock?”

“I won’t bother asking how you
knew that. I might not want to know the answer,” he jibed, still
thinking about the pilfered Scotch he didn’t want to know about
either.

“Is de Merville a founding
member?”

“Yes, but if you want to know
any other names you can ask your
friend
, Mycroft.”

She ignored the cynical
intonation. “Who votes for a new committee member to join the group
of six?”

“The remaining five.”

“Any member can be voted in no
matter how new?”

“Yes.”

“It would not be too difficult
to stack the committee with cronies,” she observed.

“It has never been attempted in
the past.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Are you suggesting de Merville
is plotting some sort of coup d’etat?”

“He missed out on being primus
baro by one vote – that would rankle. And the deciding vote was
yours.”

“How the hell do you – ! Forget
I said that! I don’t want to know that either! Are you sure you’re
not married to Mycroft Holmes?”

“Quite sure – the last time I
checked I was still a desperate widow.”

He smiled wryly. Desperate is
not a word that sprang to mind. Even dressed as a butler, with her
breasts flattened beneath a sexless jacket, the rich chestnut hair
tucked under a plain wig, bushy eyebrows, moustache and beard he
found her exasperatingly desirable. It had taken every ounce of
willpower he possessed to resist throwing her onto his bed and
giving her a proper foretaste of things to come.