“To be fair to George,” I added, “his mother was the main culprit. She put him up to the idea of the duel because she thought he needed to get his jealousy of Karisma out of his system.”
“Sort of like fighting it out on the school playground?”
I nodded at Bunty. “According to Mrs. Malloy, George got his underpants in a twist because he’s engaged to Vanessa and he thought Karisma fancied her.”
“Oh, surely not,” exclaimed Eudora. “I can’t believe Mr. Magnificent would be unfaithful when he’s already heavily involved.”
“Don’t tell me that! How did I miss reading about it in the tabloids?” Bunty’s lower lip protruded and she dug her knuckles into her eyes.
“I was talking about Karisma’s long-term love affair with himself.” Eudora did not hang her head even when she added, “Please forgive me for my uncharitable attitude.”
“I get it”—Bunty winked at me—“being in the church—and married to boot—our friend here is in bloody torment trying to come to terms with her intense physical feelings for a sex object. It’s all clear as could be now.”
“What is?” I asked.
“Why Gladstone wasn’t gung ho when the Library League talked about inviting Karisma to make an appearance, and why he’s now at a parish meeting with Ben instead of being here asking people if they want a big or a little piece of cake. The man has to be riddled with jealousy, just like George Malloy.” Bunty heaved a sympathetic sigh. “But you mustn’t blame yourself, Eudora, if you’ve been talking in your sleep about the love god. You’re a woman. And it won’t do a bit of good telling yourself you’re too old for emotional high jinks. You should have seen Mrs. Poucher yesterday.” A flutter of the eyelashes. “There’s a woman who should be in a museum as an archaeological exhibit! Instead, she was all over Karisma. And I’ll bet money that when the old bat finally dragged herself away from him, she hopped on the bus and went shopping for a vibrator.”
“Bunty!” I glanced around, fervently hoping that no one in the ever-swelling crowd was listening in on this exchange.
“I bet the old bird said she needed the latest model to help relieve muscle tension or a pinched nerve in her neck,” came the irrepressible reply. “You see them advertised in magazines all the time as life-savers for sufferers of chronic neuralgia.”
“I must bone up on my reading,” said Eudora with a half-smile.
“You’re a busy woman,” Bunty excused her. “Honestly, I’m amazed you have time to get your nose stuck in anything except the Bible. I’ve been meaning to read it myself”—here she looked momentarily virtuous—“but
someone kind of spoiled it for me by telling me how it ends. And I must say, Eudora, I’d never have figured you—no offence meant—for a person who reads romances. What are your favourites? Regencies? Or the doctor-and-nurse ones—where she’s the junior on the ward, forever running afoul of Matron for not pinning her cap on straight, and he is Sir Somebody-or-Other, whiz pathologist, who drives a grey Rolls-Royce and has a dear old nanny who keeps house for him.”
Eudora opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out, Bunty giggled mischievously.
“Don’t tell me you go for the hot and heavy ones by authors like Zinnia Parrish? I’m not what you’d call naïve by a long shot, but let me tell you, I’ve learned a thing or two from reading
that
woman’s books.”
I think it occurred to Eudora and me at the same moment that we had been slacking off long enough. And this was particularly naughty given the fact that we were short so many Library League members. I had yet to see Mr. Poucher. No one could expect poor widowed Sylvia to show up. And I did not have any great hopes that Brigadier Lester-Smith would change his mind about not coming.
It was time to elbow our way through the panting press of humanity and assist Sir Robert and Mrs. Dovedale in any last-minute preparations for Karisma’s imminent arrival. When we reached the reception desk, Bunty left us to go upstairs to the reading room to make sure, she informed us, that the lemonade had not gone off. I was tempted to offer my services in sampling the cream cakes, for the purpose of determining that they did not pose a health risk to the unwary. But just as Eudora left me and headed for the main door to offer to spell Sir Robert at collecting the admission fees, I turned and collided with Mr. Poucher.
He did not seem overly enthused to see me. Indeed, I had never seen him look more like a wet washday in November. His raincoat was too big for him, suggesting he had dropped a couple of sizes since yesterday. His eyes were sunk in his head and he shuffled his feet as he went to move past me as if I were invisible to him in the fog that swirled around him.
“Hello, Mr. Poucher!” I caught hold of his elbow as he was about to incur the ire of the tyrannous lady librarian by bumping into the desk and sending her Overdue stamp flying.
“Oh, it’s you,” he responded in a voice that was devoid of inflection and stared through me into the bleak beyond. “I’m late, but I don’t guess everyone’s been breaking their hearts.…”
“What’s the matter?” I matched my tread to his halting steps while leading him towards a gap in the crowd. “Something has happened. Is Heathcliff”—my mind conjured up the unsettling image of an entire roomful of furniture being devoured in a single lip-smacking gulp, to be followed shortly thereafter by a request for a canine indigestion tablet—“is Heathcliff the problem?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the dog; he’s the one comfort left to me.” Mr. Poucher trod on a woman’s foot and vouchsafed no reaction to her yelp of pain. “The problem, if you must know, Mrs. Haskell, is my mother.”
“She’s been taken ill?”
“Worse than that!”
“Oh, Mr. Poucher!” I pressed a hand to my throat. “You have my deepest sympathy.”
“I’m going to need it, right enough.” His eyes suddenly snapped to life. And while I was still thinking rigor mortis, he enlightened me. “Mother’s suffered a serious setback. She’s relapsed into good health.”
“What?”
“She bounded out of bed this morning like she was a slip of a girl and she’s been on the go ever since. Singing like a lark all the time she was scrubbing the kitchen floor. Then, when she was done with that, she turned out the front room, took down the curtains to wash, polished the brass, made a batch of potato scones, milked the cows, and dug over the patch of garden I’d given over to weeds. All before I was done shaving.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Then, when we sat down to our midday meal. Ma made some very ugly threats.” Mr. Poucher’s face clouded over to the extent that I expected it to start raining inside the library. And I’m almost sure I saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes. “She told me she’d changed her mind about
dying anytime in the near future. And if I didn’t do like she told me, when she told me, she may up and decide not to die at all.”
I was speechless.
“And we know, don’t we, Mrs. Haskell, who’s to blame?”
“Her doctor?”
Mr. Poucher’s weary shake of head suggested I was the one in need of medical attention. “That buggering chap Karisma, he had to make over Mother, didn’t he? Fussing and cooing at her like she was the first rose of summer. Going on, fit to make you spit, about how he loves all women irregardless of whether they was nineteen or ninety-two. He brought her back to life with a kiss on the lips, she says, like she was Sleeping Beauty and he was Prince Charming. Can you believe such vile talk?” Mr. Poucher drew an ugly breath. “Just wait till I set eyes on the interfering bounder!”
The hot words had not cooled on his lips, when a frenzied roar of
“Karisma!”
went through the room like a gale-force wind, and the mob surged forward intent, I thought with a flicker of alarm, on all the excesses of idolatry. My eyes sought out Mrs. Swabucher without success. In the process I lost sight of Mr. Poucher, and anyway I forgot about him instantly in the shock of seeing Sylvia Babcock, just two women away from me. I didn’t get to speak to her there and then because the Nazi librarian rose to the occasion. Mounting the reception desk, she stood feet apart and gave three blasts of the whistle Miss Bunch had been known to keep handy for the purpose of scaring a book thief into dropping his stash. The crowd hushed, though eyes everywhere gleamed with lust.
Order being peremptorily restored and a warning delivered that no further outbursts would be tolerated, Mrs. Harris resumed her seat. With creditable aplomb Sir Robert Pomeroy paraded Karisma down the aisle formed between rows of people lined up like trees, to the desk where he was going to sign books. The desk was to the right of the arch, the one that led into Nonfiction. And above that arch was the bust of Shakespeare. It suddenly struck me as funny that William Shakespeare should be looking over Karisma’s muscled shoulders while he was autographing.
Funny and … I never got to decide what else, because a heavily made-up woman in a sequined hat and a crushed-velvet frock glared at me from under pencilled brows and told me that if I was thinking of jumping the queue, I had another think coming.
“Mrs. Malloy!” I stepped backwards in case she decided to make her position clearer yet by bopping me on the head with her armload of paperbacks. “I thought you might have decided not to come.”
“Am I to take that as meaning you’d just as soon I’d stayed away, Mrs. H.?” Bridling, so that a button popped off the front of her frock and scored a hit. The woman in front of us nipped smartly out of the queue, making for only forty-five heads currently in front of us.
“Of course I wanted you to come,” I said.
“Well, that does ease me mind.” A sigh that produced another bull’s-eye, moving us up yet again. “For a moment there I thought I’d become something of an embarrassment to you, on account of my George winning that sword fight all fair and square. I suppose, Mrs. H., you think I should have told him it was only good manners to let his opponent win, seeing as the other lad didn’t have his mother there to buck him up.”
“The only reason I thought you might stay away,” I said, “was that it occurred to me you would possibly prefer to spend the afternoon with George; especially as Vanessa was going to be gone for a while and he had kindly volunteered to look after the twins.”
“What, and miss me outing?” Mrs. Malloy looked suitably shocked. “Just what sort of a parent would I be, when all’s said and done, if I didn’t know the difference between mother love and smother love? The day comes, Mrs. H., when it’s time for mummy bird to fly the nest.”
“And not leave a forwarding address? You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Malloy. Believe me, I’m getting ready to cut the bib strings any day now.” We were now close enough to the front of the queue to see a woman in a strident orange frock lunge across the desk to grab at a handful of Karisma’s flowing tresses and press them to her cheek.
“I can’t believe I’m seeing you in the flesh!” Her voice was choked with emotion … and possibly a hank of
hair. “You’re even more fabulous than in your pictures. I’ve read every book you’ve ever been on. Miss Bunch used to phone me whenever the library got a new one in. A friend gave me your exercise tape for Christmas and I’m going to splurge and buy your calendar.”
“When it comes out in paperback, I’ll bet.” Mrs. Malloy nudged me with her elbow.
“I
lorve
women.” Karisma was beginning to sound as if he were rubber-stamping the words. But who could blame him? Certainly not the woman in orange, who told him (at considerable length) that he had helped her through a bad marriage, the death of a beloved Pekingese, and a rift with her next-door neighbour. Finally, in all likelihood after getting a kick in the shins, she was supplanted by an equally loquacious fan.
“I’m beginning to think I’ve got it easy scrubbing other people’s toilets for a living,” sighed Mrs. Malloy. “This celebrity business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, I’m on the brink of changing me mind about going on the stage. Strictly between you and me, Mrs. H., because I wouldn’t want George upsetting himself, it was a shock when Karisma went flying into that ditch.”
“It’s a blessing he wasn’t badly hurt.”
“Well,
I
was!” Mrs. Malloy’s glower told me what she thought of my gross lack of sensitivity. “Something in me died at that moment, but I don’t suppose you’ve got a clue what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, I have!” I fired back at her. “I’d been working up to the realization ever since he arrived at the house; but until the moat incident, I hadn’t fully acknowledged that in meeting Karisma I’d lost”—I blinked back tears—“my first true love. Being me, I had a little more trouble than some getting over him, even after I married my wonderful Ben. The great thing about the dream lover is there’s no emotional risk. Should you ever get angry with him, or heaven forbid momentarily bored, you can close the book on him whenever you choose. Face it: You’re committed to the relationship only for several hundred pages.”
“And now here’s me wondering if Karisma has a mother who understands him.” Mrs. Malloy inched forward in the queue. “Oh, I know he’s got his Mrs.
Swabucher, but that’s not the same, is it? By the way, where is she?”
“Somewhere around.” I peered into the crowd, but my only glimpse of pink was Eudora’s cardigan. Just as I was about to say that perhaps Mrs. Swabucher made a point of keeping in the background at these events, Mrs. Malloy gave me another of her nudges.
“Now, this is a surprise!”
“What is?”
“Use your eyes, Mrs. H.!” Exasperated snort. “That’s Ione Tunbridge, all in black as usual, about a dozen places ahead of us. Imagine her showing up in broad daylight! Could be that little talk with you the other night, Mrs. H., helped her clear away some of the cobwebs from that spooky old attic she calls a mind.”
“One legend meets another.” I watched as Miss Tunbridge stepped up to the desk and inclined her black-bonneted head to speak to Karisma.
“She does look like a bloody bird of prey.” Mrs. Malloy shifted the load of books in her arms. “I’ll bet she’s got talons six inches long under those crocheted gloves of hers, but I don’t see as why you’ve got that look on your face, like she just walked over your grave.”
“I think I’m ready for a cream cake,” I told her, not wishing to dwell on the point, even in my own mind, that Miss Tunbridge who lived at Tall Chimneys might have brought something of its disturbing past into the library with her. Surprisingly, I hadn’t thought about Hector Rigglesworth until now. And there was a reason for that, I realized. When Karisma had gone crashing into the moat, I’d had no doubt that he was dead. But when he was found to have suffered no injuries beyond the bump on the head and the mark on his throat, my reaction was more than straightforward relief on his behalf. I was able to tell myself that the deaths of Miss Bunch and Mr. Babcock were an unhappy fact of life and in no way related to a century-old curse. But here I was, suffering a setback. What I had to do, I decided, was get out of this queue before I began wondering if Miss Tunbridge had been telling the truth the other night about murdering her bridegroom-to-be and burying him on what had once been Hector Rigglesworth’s property. Although, I brightened up, if one were
to go by the old adage that the third time is the charm, it would be reasonable to suppose that with the death of Mr. Babcock, Hector Rigglesworth would be ready to set aside old grudges and vanish permanently into the next world.