To Say Nothing of the Dog (64 page)

“Who?” the Colonel said, confused.

“Lord Dunsany. Dreadful man, but he has a nephew who will inherit half of Hertfordshire and Tossie could have been received at Court, and now . . . now . . .”

She swayed and Terence reached for the smelling salts, but she waved them irritatedly away. “Mesiel! Don’t just sit there! Do something! There must be some way to stop them before it’s too late!”

“It’s too late,” Verity murmured.

“Perhaps not. Perhaps they only left this morning,” I said, gathering up the pages of the letter and scanning them. They were covered with Tossie’s flowery hand and dozens of exclamation points and underlinings and badly blotted in places. She should have bought a penwiper at the jumble sale, I thought irrelevantly.

“ ‘It is no use to try and stop us,’ ” I read. “ ‘By the time you receive this we shall already have been married in Surrey at a registrar’s office and will be on our way to our new home. My dearest husband—ah, that most precious of words!—feels that we will thrive better in a society less enslaved to the archaic class structure, a country where one can have whatever name he likes, and to that end, we sail for America, where my husband—ah, that sweet word again!—intends to earn his living as a philosopher. Princess Arjumand is accompanying us, for I could not bear to be separated from her as well as you, and Papa would probably kill her when he found out about the calico goldfish.’ ”

“My split-tailed nacreous ryunkin?” Colonel Mering said, starting up out of the chair. “What about it?”

“ ‘She ate the calico. Oh, dear, Papa, can you find it in your heart to forgive her as well as me?’ ”

“We must disown her,” Mrs. Mering said.

“We certainly must,” Colonel Mering said. “That ryunkin cost two hundred pounds!”

“Colleen!” Mrs. Mering said. “I mean, Jane! Stop snuffling and fetch my writing desk at once. I intend to write to her and tell her from this day forward we have no daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said, wiping her nose on her apron. I stared after her, thinking about Colleen/Jane and Mrs. Chattisbourne calling all her maids Gladys, and trying to remember exactly what Mrs. Mering had said about Baine. “ ‘I used it when I worked for Lord Dunsany.’ ” And what had Mrs. Chattisbourne said that day we went to fetch things for the jumble sale? “I have always felt it is not the name that makes the butler, but training.”

Colleen/Jane came back into the room, carrying the writing desk and sniffling.

“Tocelyn’s name shall never be spoken again in this house,” Mrs. Mering said, sitting down at the writing table. “Henceforth her name shall never cross my lips. All of Tocelyn’s letters shall be returned unopened.” She took out a pen and ink.

“How will we know where to send the letter telling her she’s disowned if we don’t open her letters?” Colonel Mering said.

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” Verity said bleakly to me. “There’s nothing we can do.”

I wasn’t listening. I gathered up the pages of the letter and turned them over, looking for the end.

“From this day forth I shall wear mourning,” Mrs. Mering said. “Jane, go upstairs and press my black bombazine. Mesiel, when anyone asks you, you must say our daughter died.”

I located the end of the letter. Tossie had signed the letter, “Your repentant daughter, Tocelyn,” and then scratched “Tocelyn” out and signed her married name.

“Listen to this,” I said to Verity, and began reading.

“ ‘Please tell Terence that I know he will never get over me, but that he must try, and not to begrudge us our happiness, for Baine and I were fated to be together.’ ”

“If she’s truly gone and married this person,” Terence said, the light dawning, “then I’m released from my engagement.”

I ignored him. “ ‘My darling William does not believe in Fate,’ ” I persisted, “ ‘and says that we are creatures of Free Will, but he believes that wives should have opinions and ideas of their own, and what else can it have been but Fate? For had Princess Arjumand not disappeared, we should never have gone to Coventry—’ ”

“Don’t,” Verity said, “please.”

“You have to hear the rest of it,” I said, “ ‘—to Coventry. And had I not seen the footed firugeal urn, we should never have come together. I will write when we are settled in America.
Your repentant daughter,’
”
I read, emphasizing each word,
“ ‘Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ ”

“
Look here! I’ve an idea we’ve been working this thing from the wrong end.”

Lord Peter Wimsey

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S I X

An Anticlimax—How Mystery Novels End—Mrs. Mering Blames the Colonel—Realizing What It Means—A Happy Ending for Cyril—Mrs. Mering Blames Verity—A Séance Proposed—Packing—Premonitions—Mrs. Mering Blames Me—Finch Is Still Not at Liberty to Say—Waiting for the Train—Disappearance of the Bishop’s Bird Stump—Realizing What It Means

Well, it wasn’t exactly the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, with Hercule Poirot gathering everyone together in the drawing room to reveal the murderer and impress everyone with his astonishing deductive powers.

And it definitely wasn’t a Dorothy Sayers, with the detective hero saying to his heroine sidekick, “I say, we make a jolly good detectin’ team. How about makin’ the partnership permanent, eh, what?” and then proposing in Latin.

We weren’t even a halfway decent detectin’ team. We hadn’t solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we’d had to be packed off out of the way before the course of history could correct itself. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.

Not that there wasn’t whimpering. Mrs. Mering was doing a good deal of that, not to mention weeping, wailing, and clutching the letter to her bosom.

“O, my precious daughter!” she sobbed. “Mesiel, don’t just stand there.
Do
something.”

The Colonel looked around uneasily. “What can I do, my dear? According to Tossie’s letter, they are already afloat.”

“I
don’t know. Stop them. Have the marriage annulled. Wire the Royal Navy!” She stopped, grabbed her heart, and cried, “Madame Iritosky tried to warn me! She said, ‘Beware of the sea!’ ”

“Pah! Seems to me if she’d truly had any contact with the Other Side, she could have given a better warning than that!” Colonel Mering said.

But Mrs. Mering wasn’t listening. “That day at Coventry. I had a premonition—oh, if I had only realized what it meant, I might have saved her!” She let the letter flutter to the floor.

Verity stooped and picked it up. “ ‘I will write when we are settled in America,’ ” she said softly. “ ‘Your repentant daughter, Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ William Patrick Callahan.” She shook her head.

“What do you know?” she said softly. “The butler did it.”

As she said it, I had the oddest sensation, like one of Mrs. Mering’s premonitions, or a sudden shifting underfoot, and I thought suddenly of anti-cathedral protesters and Merton’s pedestrian gate.

“The butler did it.” And then something else. Something important. Who had said that? Verity, explaining the mystery novels? “It was always the least likely suspect,” she had said in my bedroom that first night. “For the first hundred books or so, the butler did it, and after that
he
was the most likely, and they had to switch to unlikely criminals, you know, the harmless old lady or the vicar’s devoted wife, that sort of thing, but it didn’t take the reader long to catch on to that, and they had to resort to having the detective be the murderer, and the narrator, and . . .”

But that wasn’t it. Someone else had said, “The butler did it.” But who? Not anyone here. Mystery novels hadn’t even been invented, except for
The Moonstone. The Moonstone.
Something Tossie had said about
The Moonstone,
about being unaware you were committing a crime. And something else. Something about disappearing into thin air.

“And the neighbors!” Mrs. Mering wailed. “What will Mrs. Chattisbourne say when she finds out? And the Reverend Mr. Arbitage!”

There was a long moment during which only the sound of her sobbing could be heard, and then Terence turned to me and said, “Do you realize what this means?”

“Oh, Terence, you poor, poor boy!” Mrs. Mering sobbed. “And you would have had five thousand pounds a year!” and allowed herself to be led weeping from the room by Colonel Mering.

We watched them climb the stairs. Halfway up, Mrs. Mering swayed in her husband’s arms. “We shall have to hire a new butler!” she said despairingly. “Where shall I ever find a new butler? I blame you entirely for this, Mesiel. If you had let me hire English servants instead of
Irish—”
She broke down, weeping.

Colonel Mering handed her his handkerchief. “There, there, my dear,” he said, “don’t take on so.”

As soon as they were out of sight, Terence said, “Do you Realize What This Means? I’m not engaged. I’m free to marry Maud. ‘Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ ”

Cyril clearly Realized What It Meant. He sat up alertly and began to wag his entire body.

“You do know, don’t you, old fellow?” Terence said. “No more sleeping in the stable for you.”

And no more baby talk, I thought. No more putting up with Princess Arjumand.

“It’s the soft life for you from now on,” Terence said. “Sleeping in the house and riding on trains and all the butcher’s bones you like! Maud adores bulldogs!”

Cyril smiled a wide, drooling smile of pure happiness.

“I must go up to Oxford immediately. When’s the next train? Pity Baine’s not here. He’d know.” He leaped up the stairs. At the top, he leaned down over the railing and said, “You do think she’ll forgive me, don’t you?”

“For being engaged to the wrong girl?” I said. “A minor infraction. Happens all the time. Look at Romeo. He’d been in love with some Rosalind person. It never seemed to bother Juliet.”

“ ‘Did my heart love till now?’ ” he quoted, extending his hand dramatically down toward Verity. “ ‘Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.’ ” He disappeared down the upstairs corridor.

I looked at Verity. She stood with her hands on the newel post and was gazing sadly after Terence.

By tomorrow she’ll be back in the 1930s, I thought, Realizing What It Meant. She would be back to documenting the Depression and reading mystery novels, her beautiful red hair in a pageboy, and her long legs, which I had never seen, encased in silk stockings with a seam down the back. And I would never see her again.

No, I would probably see her at the consecration. If I were still allowed to come. If Lady Schrapnell didn’t permanently assign me to jumble sale duty when I told her that the bishop’s bird stump hadn’t been in the cathedral.

And if I did see Verity at the consecration, what exactly was I supposed to say to her? All Terence had to apologize for was thinking he’d been in love. I had to apologize for being such a liability in the scheme of things that I’d had to be shut up in a dungeon during the denouement. Not exactly something to be proud of. It was just as well I’d be stuck behind the fancy goods stall.

“I’m going to miss all this,” Verity said, her eyes still on the stairs. “I should be glad it’s all worked out so well, and that the continuum’s not going to collapse . . .” She turned her beautiful naiad’s eyes on me. “You do think the incongruity’s repaired, don’t you?”

“There’s a train at 9:43,” Terence said, racketing down the stairs with a valise in one hand and his hat in the other. “Baine thoughtfully left a Bradshaw in my room. Arrives at 11:02. Come along, Cyril, we’re going to go get engaged. Where’s he got to? Cyril!” He disappeared into the parlor.

“Yes,” I said to Verity. “Completely repaired.”

“Ned, you can arrange to have the boat sent back to Jabez, can’t you?” Terence said, reappearing with Cyril. “And the rest of my things sent to Oxford?”

“Yes,” I said. “Go.”

He pumped my hand. “Goodbye. ‘Friend, ahoy! Farewell, farewell!’ I’ll see you next term.”

“I . . . I’m not certain about that,” I said, and realized how much I was going to miss him. “Goodbye, Cyril.” I leaned down to pat him on the head.

“Nonsense. You’re looking much better since we’ve been at Muchings End. You’ll be entirely cured by Michaelmas term. We’ll have such jolly times on the river,” Terence said, and was gone, Cyril trotting happily after him.

“I want them out of this house immediately,” Mrs. Mering’s voice said, overwrought, and we both looked up the stairs.

A door slammed overhead. “Absolutely out of the question!” Mrs. Mering said, and then the low sound of voices murmuring. “. . . and tell them . . .”

More murmuring. “I want you to go downstairs immediately and tell them. This is all due to them!”

More murmuring, and then, “If she’d been a proper chaperone this would never ha—”

A door shutting cut her off, and a minute later Colonel Mering came down the stairs, looking extremely embarrassed.

“All been too much for my poor dear wife,” he said, looking at the carpet. “Her nerves. Very delicate. Rest and absolute quiet is what she needs. Think it best you go to your aunt in London, Verity, and you back to—” He looked at a loss.

“To Oxford,” I said.

“Ah, yes, to your studies. Sorry about this,” Colonel Mering said to the carpet. “Glad to arrange for the carriage.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said.

“No trouble,” he said. “Will have Baine tell—” he stopped, looking lost.

“I’ll see that Miss Brown gets to the station,” I said.

He nodded. “Must go see to my dear wife,” he said, and started up the stairs.

Verity went after him. “Colonel Mering,” she said, following him halfway up the stairs. “I don’t think you should disown your daughter.”

He looked embarrassed. “Afraid Malvinia’s quite determined. Dreadful shock, you know. Butler and all that.”

“Baine—I mean, Mr. Callahan—
did
prevent Tossie’s cat from eating your Black Moor,” she said.

Wrong thing to say. “He didn’t prevent it from eating my globe-eyed nacreous ryunkin,” he said angrily. “Cost two hundred pounds.”