restrained myself out of concern for my head, which had been good to me over the years. “This isn’t a situation that invites the grand passion, Mrs. Malloy, it’s a reality show. Which some people might consider vulgar.”
Understandably, she bridled. “You’re saying that his lordship-my intended-lacks refinement?”
“No, no!” I protested hastily. “I’m sure only dire necessity drove him to this course…”
“Coarse?” Her voice rose, along with the rest of her, but fortunately she sank back down without grabbing my throat.
“Course of action. I suppose it could even be said that there is something noble in his desire to save his ancestral home. What really worries me is the thought of your being hurt when… if, he doesn’t select… choose you as his bride.”
“Well, that’s the chance I’ll be taking. Tomorrow we’ll get to size up the other candidates, won’t we?”
“We? But Ben and I will be going home first thing.”
“What? Rush off before you’ve had breakfast?” She eyed me as if I had just produced a stake to thrust through her heart. “Or lunch. Well, I must say, that wouldn’t be treating his lordship very nice after all he’s done for you.”
“He didn’t say anything to me or Ben about his arrangement with you.”
“And why should he?”
Why indeed? It was unreasonable of me to feel left out in the cold. Perhaps, despite Tommy’s assurances to the contrary, I had injured my brain when I fell.
“It’s not like I’m under age, needing a guardian’s approval,” Mrs. Malloy pointed out.
“I’m sorry. This house must be getting to me.”
“What’s wrong with it? I think it’ll be lovely and comfy with a little tweaking.”
Make that demolition, I thought.
“Although,” Mrs. Malloy addressed the wall behind the bed, “being the gentleman he is, his lordship said as he wouldn’t make the agreement final until he had a word with you and Mr. H. I suppose, despite me mature charms, he saw the vulnerable girl inside.” Her purple-lipsticked mouth flickered like a butterfly landing on a dewy rose. Then her eyes hardened, giving off an iridescent sparkle to match her shadow. “But that doesn’t go giving you license to stand in me way. Of course, I understand how you’ll miss my slaving away for you at Merlin’s Court, but it’s not like I won’t come over to visit you and Mr. H and the kiddies when I can find time away from opening the summer fete or hosting a ball.”
“What about our partnership as amateur detectives?”
“Well, we still could-no, I suppose it wouldn’t do.” Faint sigh. “A proper husband wouldn’t want his wife risking her life getting mixed up in the sordid.”
So much for Ben!
“I didn’t mention that aspect of me life to his lordship and I’d rather you didn’t neither, Mrs. H; I wouldn’t want him thinking I’d be the snooping sort. And then there’s that requirement of his that the contestants all come from ordinary lives, not the glamorous pampered-puss sort. I’ve even wondered about keeping dark having been three times chairperson of the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association. That sort of office could come across as being snooty.”
Before I could answer this one, Ben came though the doorway carrying a tray. While he was settling it in front of me and asking me to taste the tomato soup, which regrettably came from a tin, and sample the Marmite toast and fruit salad, also tinned, she teetered out of the room on her high heels, brazenly humming “Here Comes the Bride.”
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“Better.”
“The tablets the doctor ordered are on that saucer. He said to take them as soon as you’ve eaten. That beverage in the glass is evaporated milk thinned with water. My poor darling, it seemed safer than what was in the bottle.”
“Everything looks delicious.” I smiled up at my husband while striving to keep my legs rigid in order not to create a tsunami.
“Georges wasn’t so appreciative. There weren’t any eggs. It looks as though the contestants are expected to prove their survival skills by going out and foraging in the woods.” He shrugged expressively. “I suppose they think they know what they’re getting themselves into.”
“At least Mrs. Malloy has the advantage of having met Lord Belfrey and getting a glimpse of the reality involved.” I studied his face as I went on to explain. When I concluded with the statement that I would hate to leave her behind when we set off in the morning, I was surprised that he merely said we would have to take tomorrow as it came.
4
I awoke in the night to the alarming sensation that I had wandered out of my life into someone else’s disordered world. I had read enough books about time travel to make this seem perilously possible, if in this particular instance undesirable. Yes, it would be intriguing to discover oneself back in a past century, but what as? Certainly not someone compelled to sleep in a nasty chill on a lumpy bed the width of a plank in a room which in the shifting moonlight resembled a cell.
Fortunately, before clutching my throat in terror and watching my eyes roll down my cheeks, I spied the charcoal-edged shape of my suitcase, which Ben had brought into the room. Memory shifted its way out of the murky morass. Before his return to the lower regions to find himself something to eat, he had watched me dutifully swallow the tablets sent up by Tommy Rowley and instructed me tenderly to get off to sleep as quickly as possible. A likely prospect, I had thought, given his evasions when I tried to get him to talk further about Mrs. Malloy’s determination to throw herself into the matrimonial fray. After a brief excursion to a bathroom that belonged in the Dark Ages, I returned to the room, inspected Ben’s cubbyhole where he had deposited his own case, took grateful note that it was blessed with a window, albeit one not much bigger than a table napkin, got out my nightdress, and decided on also wearing my flannel dressing gown into bed. The water bottle was by then cold, but I was suddenly too sleepy to toss it onto the floor. What exactly were those tablets Tommy had given me?
My dreams thrust me into an episodic chaos fraught with impending doom. Up one flight of turret steps and down the next, through mazes and tunnels stripped of color I fled, hampered by feet that wanted to go the other way, knowing that beyond every locked door waited something even more unspeakable than that which padded silently behind me. At the moment of waking, I realized that the fog had liquefied and was spreading in puddles with hideously distorted human faces around my ankles.
Now, having somewhat regained my bearings, I discovered what had prompted that specific. My feet and legs were chillily damp. The cause didn’t take prolonged pondering. The hot-water bottle had leaked. The cause? Either it was so ancient the rubber had perished or (more likely in my opinion) Mrs. Foot had failed to tighten the stopper. Shivering as much from aggravation as cold, I wiggled my way to the top of the bed to sit with my knees drawn up to my chin and try to find a bright spot.
Begrudgingly, I admitted there was one. My headache was gone. Tommy’s tablets had done their work. If Mother Nature had made her contribution, I wasn’t about to thank her. But for her fun and games I wouldn’t be currently incarcerated at Mucklesfeld. That Wisteria Whitworth had endured far worse did nothing to mellow my feelings. I was done with Gothic novels. The former wife who wasn’t quite as dead as the master had hoped-having reinvented herself as the vicar’s repressed spinster sister. The portrait of the cavalier in the ancestral gallery that came to life on the anniversary of Charles I’s beheading. The… the-my insides buckled-the evil black dog that came hurtling through the window to land on the bed of a woman who was already suffering all the emotional and physical trauma of a leaked hot-water bottle! The mattress bounced, once, twice, thrice, before flopping back like a dead flounder.
I must be imagining the animal’s thunderous leap onto a bed that had only been designed for half a person, not one full one and a dog. This appalling visitation was a delayed reaction to Tommy’s tablets. The black dog with the yellow eyes and stalactite teeth was standard in the Gothic genre. I remembered how the ambience of Mucklesfeld
