To Say Nothing of the Dog (40 page)

“It’s not your fault,” Verity said. We were arranging items in the jumble sale stall the next morning, our first chance to talk since the “thrilling news,” as Mrs. Mering put it.

“It was my fault,” Verity said, setting out a china wooden shoe with a blue-and-white windmill on it. “I should never have let T.J. send me on so many drops.”

“You were only trying to find out something that might help us,” I said, unwrapping an egg-boiler. “I was the one who left Terence and Tossie alone.” I set it on the counter. “And gave him the idea. You heard him last night. He wouldn’t have proposed if I hadn’t spouted that nonsense about ‘fleeting time’ and ‘miss’d opportunities.’ ”

“You were only doing what I told you to,” she said, opening a Japanese fan. “ ‘Turn the
Titanic,
Ned,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t hit the iceberg.’ ”

“Not set up yet?” Mrs. Mering said, and we both jumped. “It’s nearly time for the fête to open.”

“We’ll be ready,” Verity said, setting out a soup tureen in the shape of a head of lettuce. Mrs. Mering looked worriedly at the overcast sky. “O, Mr. Henry, you don’t think it will rain, do you?”

Of course not, I thought. Fate is against me.

“No,” I said, unwrapping an etching of Paolo and Francesca, another couple who had come to a bad end.

“O, good,” she said, dusting off a bust of Prince Albert. “O, there is Mr. St. Trewes. I must go speak to him about the Pony Ride.”

I watched her interestedly as she swooped down on Terence. She was wearing a blue garden party dress, with all the requisite Victorian puffs and frills and rosettes and insets of lace, but over it she had flowing robes striped in red, yellow, and purple, and round her forehead was a wide velvet band with a large ostrich feather stuck in it.

“She’s the fortuneteller,” Verity explained, setting out a pair of sewing scissors in the shape of a heron. “When she reads my fortune, I intend to ask her where the bishop’s bird stump is.”

“It may well be here,” I said, trying to find a place to set the Widow Wallace’s banjo. “It would fit right in.”

She looked at the array of things on the counter. “It certainly is a jumble,” she said, adding a mustache cup to the mess.

I looked critically at it. “It still lacks something,” I said. I went and snatched a penwiper from Tossie’s stall and stuck it between a paperweight and a set of tin soldiers. “There. It’s perfect.”

“Except for the fact that Tossie and Terence are engaged,” she said. “I should never have assumed she’d stay at the Chattisbournes’ all afternoon.”

“The question is,” I said, “not whose fault it is they got engaged, but what we’re going to do now.”

“What
are
we going to do now?” Verity said, rearranging a pair of Harlequin and Columbine figurines.

“Perhaps Terence will get a good night’s sleep, come to his senses, and decide it was all a horrible mistake,” I said.

She shook her head. “That won’t help us. Engagements in Victorian times were considered nearly as serious as marriage. A gentleman couldn’t just break an engagement without a dreadful scandal. Unless Tossie breaks it herself, there’s no way Terence can get out of the engagement.”

“Which means her meeting Mr. C,” I said. “Which means our finding out who he is, and the sooner the better.”

“Which means one of us reporting back to Mr. Dunworthy and finding out if the forensics expert has managed to decipher his name yet,” she said.

“And that will be me,” I said firmly.

“What if Lady Schrapnell catches you?”

“I will take that risk,” I said.
“You
are not going anywhere.”

“I think that’s probably a very good idea,” she said, putting her hand to her forehead. “I’ve been remembering some of the things I said in the boat yesterday.” She ducked her head. “I want you to know that I only said those things about Lord Peter Wimsey and your hat because of the time-lag and the hormonal imbalance, and not because—”

“Understood,” I said. “And I do not, when in my right mind, see you as a beautiful naiad, drawing me down and down into the deep to drown in your watery embrace. Besides,” I said, grinning, “Pansy Chattisbourne and I are already promised to one another.”

“Perhaps you’d like to buy her an engagement gift then,” she said and held up a ceramic affair decorated with gilt lace, pink ceramic gillyflowers, and an assortment of small holes.

“What is it?” I said.

“I have no idea,” she said. “You realize you’ll have to buy
something,
don’t you? Mrs. Mering will never forgive you if you don’t.”

She held up a wicker basket in the shape of a swan. “How about this?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “Cyril and I are not fond of swans.”

Verity set out a small lidded tin box that sugared violets had come in. “No one will buy this.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, unwrapping a waterstained copy of
An Old-Fashioned Girl
and setting it between two marble bookends carved in the likenesses of Dido and Aeneas, another couple who had gone up in smoke. Didn’t history have any famous couples who had got married, settled down, and lived happily ever after?

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,” I said. “At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.”

“Don’t look now,” Verity said, and her voice dropped to a whisper, “but here comes your betrothed.”

I turned to see Pansy Chattisbourne bearing down on me. “Oh, Mr. Henry,” she said, giggling, “do come help me set up the fancy goods stall,” and dragged me away to arrange antimacassars and tatted handkerchief cases.

“I made these,” Pansy said, showing me a pair of slippers crocheted in a design of pansies. “Heartsease. It means, ‘I am thinking of you.’ ”

“Ah,” I said, and purchased a bookmark embroidered, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moths corrupt and thieves break in and steal. Matthew 6:19.”

“No, no, no, Mr. Henry,” Mrs. Mering said, swooping down on me and my cross-stitched tea cloths like some colorful bird of prey, you’re not supposed to be here. I need you over
here.”

She led me down the lawn past the knitted and crocheted goods stall and the fishing pond stall and the coconut shy and the tea tent to a spot at the end of the lawn where a plot of sand had been laid out inside a wooden frame. Baine was dividing the sand into foot-wide squares with the blade of a small shovel.

“This is our Treasure Hunt, Mr. Henry,” she said, handing me a stack of folded pasteboard squares. “These are for numbering the squares. Have you any shillings, Mr. Henry?”

I fished out my purse and tipped it into my cupped hand.

She scooped up all the coins. “Three shillings for the minor prizes,” she said, plucking out three silver coins and handing them back to me, “and the rest of this will do excellently for change at the woolen goods booth.”

She handed me back a single gold coin. “And you’ll need this,” she said, “for purchasing treasures at the jumble sale.”

Definitely related to Lady Schrapnell.

“I will let you choose which squares to bury the shillings and the Grand Prize in. Take care no one sees you, she said. “Avoid the corner squares and all the lucky numbers—Three and Seven and Thirteen—people always choose those first, and if someone finds the treasure early, we shan’t make any money for the restoration. Also, avoid the numbers under twelve. Children always choose their age. And Fourteen. Today’s the fourteenth of June, and people always choose the date. Make certain they only dig in one square. Baine, where is the Grand Prize?”

“Right here, madam,” Baine said, handing her a brown-paper-wrapped parcel.

“The price for digging is tuppence a square or three for fivepence,” she said, unveiling the parcel, “and here is our Grand Prize.”

She handed me a plate with a painting of Iffley Mill and the words “Happy Memories of the Thames” on it. It looked just like the one the mobcap in Abingdon had tried to sell me.

“Baine, where is the shovel?” Mrs. Mering said.

“Here, madam,” he said, and handed me a shovel and a rake. “For smoothing the sand down after you’ve hidden the treasure,” he explained.

“Baine, what time is it?” Mrs. Mering asked.

“Five minutes to ten, madam,” he said, and I thought she was going to swoon.

“O, we’re not nearly ready!” she cried. “Baine, go and explain the fishing pond stall to Professor Peddick and bring out my crystal ball. Mr. Henry, there’s no time to waste. You must bury the treasure immediately.”

I started for the sand.

“And not Twenty-eight. That was last year’s winning square. Or Sixteen. That’s the Queen’s Birthday.”

She swept off, and I set about hiding the treasure. Baine had laid out thirty squares. Eliminating Sixteen, Twenty-eight, Three, Seven, Thirteen, Fourteen, and One through Twelve, to say nothing of the corners, didn’t leave very many choices.

I took a sharp look round, in case there were any “Souvenir of the Thames” thieves lurking in the hedge, and stuck the three shillings in Twenty-nine, Twenty-three, and Twenty-six. No, that was a corner. Twenty-one. And then stood there, trying to decide what the least-likely looking square was and wondering if I had time to go through and report to Mr. Dunworthy before the fête started.

While I was debating, the bell from Muchings End Church began to toll, Mrs. Mering gave a screamlet, and the fête was declared officially open. I hastily buried the Grand Prize in Eighteen and began raking it over.

“Seven,” a child’s voice said behind me. I turned round. It was Eglantine Chattisbourne in a pink dress and a large bow. She was carrying the lettuce soup tureen.

“I’m not open yet,” I said, raking several other squares and then stooping to place the cardboard numbers in them.

“I want to dig in Number Seven,” Eglantine said, shoving fivepence at me. “I get three tries. I want seven for my first one. It’s my lucky number.”

I handed her the shovel, and she set down the lettuce and dug for several minutes.

“Do you want to try another square?” I asked her.

“I’m not
finished
yet,” she said, and dug some more.

She stood up and surveyed the squares. “It’s never in the corners,” she said thoughtfully, “and it can’t be Fourteen. It’s never the date. Twelve,” she said finally. “That’s how old I am on my birthday.”

She dug some more. “Are you certain you put the prizes in?” she said accusingly.

“Yes,” I said. “Three shillings and a Grand Prize.”

“You could
say
they were in there,” she said, “and truly you’d kept them for yourself.”

“They’re in there,” I said. “Which square do you want for your third try?”

“I don’t,” she said, handing me the shovel. “I want to think for a little.”

“As you wish, miss,” I said.

She held out her hand. “I want my tuppence back. For my third try.”

I wondered if she were somehow related to Lady Schrapnell. Perhaps Elliott Chattisbourne, despite appearances,
was
Mr. C after all.

“I haven’t any change,” I said.

She flounced off, I raked the squares flat again, and leaned against a tree, waiting for more customers.

None came. They were apparently all hitting the jumble sale first. Business was so slow for the first hour I could easily have sneaked off to the drop, except for Eglantine, who hovered nearby, plotting which square to use her last tuppence on.

And, as it developed when she had finally decided on Number Seventeen and dug to no avail, keeping her eye on me. “I think you move the prizes when no one’s looking,” she said, brandishing the toy shovel. “That’s why I’ve been watching you.”

“But if you’ve been watching me,” I said reasonably, “how could I have moved the prize?”

“I don’t know,” she said darkly, “but you must have. It’s the only explanation. It’s always in Seventeen.”

Now that she was out of money, I’d hoped she would move on, but she hung about, watching a little boy choose Six (his age) and his mother pick Fourteen (the date).

“Perhaps you never put the prizes in at all,” Eglantine said after they’d left, the little boy sobbing because he hadn’t found a prize. “Perhaps you only said you did.”

“Wouldn’t you like to have a nice pony ride?” I said. “Mr. St. Trewes is giving pony rides over there.”

“Pony rides are for infants,” she said disdainfully.

“Have you had your fortune told?” I persisted.

“Yes,” she said. “The fortuneteller said she saw a long journey in my future.”

The sooner the better, I thought.

“They have some lovely penwipers in the fancy goods stall,” I said shamelessly.

“I don’t want a penwiper,” she said. “I want a Grand Prize.”

She kept an eagle eye on me for another half hour, at which point Professor Peddick came over.

“Looks exactly like the plain at Runnymede,” he said, gesturing to include the lawn with its stalls and tea tent. “The lords, with their marquees and their banners spread out across the plain, waiting for King John and his party to arrive.”

“Speaking of Runnymede,” I said, “shouldn’t we be going on downriver and then back to Oxford to see your sister and your niece? No doubt they will be missing you.

“Pah!” he said. “There’s plenty of time. They’ll be staying all summer, and the Colonel’s ordered a red-spotted silver tancho that is to arrive tomorrow.”

“Terence and I could run you home tomorrow on the train, just to check on things at home, and then you could come back to see the red-spotted silver tancho.”

“Not necessary,” he said. “Maudie’s a capable girl. I’m certain she has things well in hand. And I doubt Terence would be willing to go, now that he’s engaged to Miss Mering.” He shook his head. “I can’t say I entirely approve of these hasty engagements,” he said. “What’s your opinion of them, Henry?”

“That little pitchers have big ears,” I said, looking at Eglantine, who was standing next to the Treasure Hunt, her hands behind her back, looking earnestly at the squares.

“Pretty little thing, but knows scarcely any history,” Professor Peddick went on, not taking the hint. “Thought Nelson lost his arm fighting the Spanish Armada.”