The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (21 page)

“Oh, all right, if you say so. At least now I know what Joan of Arc went through.”

Arethusa was halfway through her second sandwich and casting wistful eyes at the pickle jar when Hunding Paffnagel staggered down to the kitchen, clutching a red nylon jersey bathrobe about her and looking like something left over from a brisk session at the sacrificial altar.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any black coffee, Mrs. Monk?”

“Coming right up. Take a chair.”

“Next to all that food? Ughl”

Hunding went over to the walnut rocker Gram Henbit had set next to the black iron stove when she’d come to the house as a bride, and plunked herself down like a sack of scratch feed. “God, why did I drink that camomile tea?”

“You’ll know better next time. Here, try this.”

Dittany put a full mug into the palsied hand Miss Paffnagel had stretched out in mute appeal. Arethusa leaned over and whispered to Osbert.

“I don’t think I’d better tell her about my visitation.”

“Perish the thought,” he replied earnestly. “Her vibrations are in no shape to cope with the higher level. Well, I must get back to work. You, too, eh?”

“Not now. I think I’d better go see what’s happening at the museum, if anything. Are you coming, Dittany?”

“Why not? You’ll be all right, won’t you, Miss Paffnagel?”

“Some day, perhaps. Whatever happened to Berthilde and Jehosaphat?”

“They left,” Arethusa told her.

“God, what fortitude. I think perhaps I’ll go back to bed for a while.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” said Dittany. “Osbert will be downstairs if you need anything. I’ll be back in a while.”

She put the last cup in the dishwasher, set the pickles in the refrigerator, and announced she was ready to travel. Arethusa rearranged her silken robes, untangled her strings of beads, and said, “So am I. Wherefore lookst thou so glum, prithee?”

“I’m just wondering if we’re having a visitation over there.”

They were. They’d no sooner set foot in the Architrave’s door than those bright pink gums were flashing at them.

“Ah, there you are. I’d been wondering whether anybody was going to show up today. The plumber hasn’t come.”

Arethusa turned to Dittany. “Henchperson, why hasn’t the plumber come?”

“Because he’s in jail.”

** A 1~ **

Ah.

“Then have you ladies given any further thought as to how I’m going to get my sink fixed?” demanded Mrs. Fairfield.

“Not I,” said Arethusa.

“Miss Monk, I hate to complain, but really, how do you expect me to get anything accomplished around here unless I get a little cooperation from the trustees?”

“We don’t.”

That stopped her, but only for a moment. The gums flashed again. “I don’t believe I quite understand. What do you mean, you don’t?”

“I mean,” Arethusa replied, speaking slowly and enunciating with all her might and main, “We don’t. Do not. Have not. Shall not. Our expectations with regard to your performance are nil.”

“Oh.”

Mrs. Fairfield stood absolutely still for perhaps half a second, then shook her head and essayed a pathetic attempt at another smile, with hardly a vestige of gum showing. “I see. You think I ought to be in a darkened room with a smelling bottle and a cologne-soaked handkerchief, sobbing my poor, tired eyes out. I know you mean to be kind, Miss Monk, but that’s not what Peregrine would have wanted.”

“No?”

“Not at all. Carry on, Evangeline, that’s what he’d have said to me. I can almost hear him now. We were always such close partners, you know. Side by side through thick and thin, through joy and sorrow, sickness and health, till death-but I mustn’t dwell on my personal tragedy when there’s so much to be done, must I?”

“Why not, in sooth?”

“Miss Monk, I thought I’d just got through explaining.”

“So did I. It appears we have some kind of communication gap here.”

“Then perhaps we ought to change the subject and see if we can do better,” said Mrs. Fairfield with a jarring laugh. “You may be pleased to know I’ve just finished authenticating those seventeenth-century Dutch brass candle sconces Mrs. Burberry’s mother-in-law sent us.”

“How remarkable. What did you authenticate them as?”

“Seventeenth-century Dutch, of course.”

“Vraiment? And had you some particular reason for doing so?”

“Certainly. Reference books, my personal expertise.”

“Along with the letter from the elder Mrs. Burberry’s cousin Georgina which she’d enclosed with them when she wished them off on Mrs. Burberry, perchance?”

“Family records are always helpful, naturally.”

“Georgina?” said Dittany. “Oh, yes, the brass molder’s widow.

Wasn’t she the one Samantha was telling us about, who tried to institute a breach of promise suit against Lord Tweedsmuir while he was off at a Presbyterian conference?”

“Egad, yes,” said Arethusa. “Also the Duke of York, if memory serves me, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. How Samantha happened to mention her was that the last time they visited her at the Eventide Home, they saw a steel engraving of the Prince Regent on her dressing table. In his earlier, handsomer, and summer days, naturellement. It had To Georgy Girl with love from Georgy-Porgy’ written on it.”

“That’s right. Samantha said Georgina was having a heck of a time trying to get a lawyer to take on the case. The thing of it is, eh, Georgina’s always been addicted to what you might call romantic embroidery.”

“Ah, like that bridal quilt.” You really had to hand it to the old trout. “My niece-in-law mentioned last evening that you’d been showing her the pieces. I must say I was a little surprised at that, when poor Peregrine didn’t even get to see them before he died.

I’ve been hoping to get a peek at them myself. They’re not still spread out on your dining room table, by any chance?”

“Pas du tout,” said Arethusa. “They’re all safely-mon Dieu/”

Mon Dieu, Dittany thought, hardly covered it. Over the threshold came, first, a box of tools and second, a foot wearing a cutaway shoe revealing the pink and white striped sock of Cedric Fawcett.

These were followed in rapid succession by the rest of Fawcett and by Andrew McNaster.

Mrs. Fairfield stepped right up to them, ready for battle. “Well, this is a pleasant surprise. I was led to believe you weren’t coming back at all. Now, you get this and get it straight, Fawcett. I want that sink fixed. I want it fixed right, and I want it fixed now. I’m not shelling out good money-“

“That is quite correct, Mrs. Fairfield.” Arethusa could be the grandest of grandes dames when she chose, and she chose now.

“Any disbursement of museum funds is handled by our treasurer, Mrs. Coskoff, under my personal direction. In any case, we are obtaining Mr. Fawcett’s services through the disinterested generosity, or so we perhaps naively believe, of Mr. McNaster. Is that not correct, Mr. McNaster?”

Andrew McNaster laid a large, beefy hand on that region of his waistcoat where his heart might be presumed to reside, assuming he had one after all.

“That is wholly and entirely correct, Miss Monk. And may I take this opportunity of saying I deem it an honor and a privilege to be associated, however distantly and humbly, with a lady whom I-I -aw, shucks.”

McNaster turned as pink as Cedric Fawcett’s sock and floundered himself into silence. Arethusa bowed her gleaming freight of jetty tresses in gracious acknowledgment. Dittany gaped in wild surmise. What the heck was going on here? She essayed a tactful inquiry.

“How come you’re on the loose, Mr. Fawcett? My husband said you’d had one Labatt’s too many and wound up in the slammer.”

Fawcett jerked his head toward McNaster. “He sprung me.”

“How come?”

“For her.”

“Her who? Mrs. Fairfield?”

Fawcett gave her a cold look. “Not her. Her.”

“You mean Arethusa? Miss Monk? My husband’s aunt?”

Fawcett grunted, picked up his tool box, and disappeared sinkward.

Arethusa was left face to face, or vis-a-vis as she herself would perhaps have expressed it, with Andrew McNaster.

“Mr. McNaster, am I to place any credence in the word of that man with the bunion?”

“Jailbird though he may be,” McNaster replied in a voice choked with emotion, “Cedric Fawcett does not lie.”

“He says you got him out,” Dittany protested. “Last I heard, you were determined to press charges.”

“I was, but I didn’t.”

“Why not? He crowned you with a plunger.”

McNaster winced at the recollection. “He did. He offered me the supreme insult. Nevertheless, I dropped the charge. It was a far, far better thing I did than ever I have done before. I know, Miss Monk. I have been a reprobate. I have indulged in chicanery and malfeasance. I have schemed. I have dallied with the truth. I have looked upon the wine when it was red. I have consorted with loose women. I have risked my all at the gaming tables.”

“You have?” Arethusa was looking at him with a strange dawning of interest.

“I have. Just like Sir Percy, before he fell under the redeeming influence of Lady Ermintrude. Well, maybe not quite like Sir Percy, but I used to play the slot machines a lot.”

He turned his eyes bashfully floorward. “You scowl, Miss Monk, and I am powerless before your glance. Your very frowns are fairer far than smiles of other maiden ladies are. Even as I stood there with that plunger crammed down over my ear, something inside me kept saying, ‘Miss Monk wants that sink fixed.’ Even as those two deputies of Sergeant Mac Vicar were putting the collar on old Ceddie and I was yelling for his head as any red-blooded member of the landed gentry would naturally do, that little voice kept saying, ‘How the heck is Miss Monk going to get that sink fixed if I allow my baser nature to prevail and exact my petty revenge on old Ceddie?’ It was like there were two Andrew McNasters, each clamoring for supremacy over the other one. You know what I mean?”

“You might think of them as self A and self B,” Dittany suggested.

“I never heard such drivel in my life,” said Evangeline Fairfield.

It was the most injudicious remark she’d ever made. Arethusa turned on her like a wounded tigress.

“Madam, I write such drivel!”

“Hear, hear,” Dittany murmured, but nobody was paying any attention to her. Andrew McNaster was goggling at Arethusa much as Sir Percy might have goggled at Lady Ermintrude in a similar instance. So was Mrs. Fairfield, only hers was a goggle of consternation. It must be dawning upon her that she had finally and irrevocably cooked her goose with the Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum. If it hadn’t, Arethusa’s next utterance left no room for doubt.

“Mrs. Fairfield, go away.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Granted. Now go away.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Fairfield haughtily. “If you wish to continue this conversation in private, I shall be in my office.”

“Mrs. Fairfield, you do not have an office. You do not have a position at the Architrave.”

“What do you mean, I have no position? You can’t just fire me out of hand.”

“Correct. I can’t fire you because you were never hired. The only contract we had was with your husband, and that was terminated on his death.”

“And what, pray, does a writer of trashy romances know about contracts?”

“A great deal more than you do about antiques. I sign one about every three months. Now go away.”

Mrs. Fairfield, without another word or so much as a backward glance, went. Arethusa raised a shapely hand to toy idly with her Venetian glass beads.

“Please forgive the interruption, Mr. McNaster. You were explaining the supreme soul-searching struggle that led you to discover the essential nobility of your character beneath the false veneer of the hardened rake.”

“Yeah, that was it. Somehow when Ceddie zonked me with that plunger, it sort of made everything come into focus. Miss Monk, I will confess all. Ever since the day when you walked past the parking lot wearing your Spanish shawl with a rose between your teeth, I have-maybe your little niece here better step aside.”

“Heck, no,” said Dittany. “I’m a married woman. You mean you lusted after her flesh?”

“Well, I was going to put it more genteel, but that was the general idea. But you snooted me, Miss Monk. I was desperate. I even thought of-well, you know in Vilest Villainy in Velvet where the wicked baronet comes along in his barouche landau and puts the snatch on Lady Ermintrude while she’s taking a bucket of soup to the poor widow lady?”

“An abduction?” Arethusa’s bosom was heaving much as Lady Ermintrude’s would have done in a similar circumstance, making the Venetian beads rattle like castanets.

“Devil-may-care rogue that I was, I entertained that notion, Miss Monk. I thought of using your little niece here as a decoy, even called up a car-hire place and found out how much it would cost me to rent a Rolls Royce limousine. What the heck, I might be a villain and a rotter, but I wouldn’t have wanted you thinking I was a chintzy cad.”

“Why, you swashbuckling scoundrel.” Arethusa was still trying to look haughty, but a hint of a smile was playing about her rosaceous lips. “But your better nature prevailed,” she said with the merest tinge of regret.

“I saw the light just in time, Miss Monk. What happened was, I picked up a copy of Saving a Swine at the drugstore. Then I realized I must not aspire to capture your favor but rest content to worship you from afar, like a moth trying to get inside a light bulb but it can’t on account of the glass is in the way. That was me, beating my wings in vain against the cold disdain of which my rotten ways had made me so contemptibly deserving. But I can still serve you, Miss Monk. I ask no greater boon than to fork out union wages to Ceddie Fawcett to sit out there under your sink trying to figure out which end of the wrench is up.”

“Nobly spoken, Mr. McNaster. I will confess that I am not insensible of the esteem in which you appear to hold me, but you must give me time. Time to think. Time to study my heart. Time to ponder whether there might be a usable plot in this. Excuse me, I have to find a pencil.”

McNaster gazed after her, his heart bulging out of his eyes.