way these grounds have been neglected. Even with money short, something could have been accomplished with a spade and a lawn mower.”
“The weeds look healthy enough,” I consoled her, as Mr. Plunket led the way through a door that looked better suited to a dilapidated garden shed than an ancestral home. Thumper kept close to my heels, for which I was eminently grateful. Should a rodent scurry to meet us, I was reasonably confident Thumper would get it while I was screaming my last breath. If this were one of the doors the ghost of Eleanor Belfrey had been spied entering rather than exiting, I admired her (no pun intended) spirit. My foot caught on a flagstone in the hallway, which smelled dismally like a tomb. Not that I had ever been in a tomb… I stumbled again as a question reared up belatedly.
How could Eleanor be a ghost if she wasn’t dead? According to Mr. Plunket’s account, she had departed from Sir Giles’s life, not from this earth. Of course, anything could have happened in the meantime, but Mr. Plunket had said that nothing had been heard of her since her sneaky departure. Were the sightings a result of wishful thinking on the part of Mrs. Foot and Boris because of their resentment that the Vanishing Bride had robbed the family jewel box?
Livonia grabbed my arm, causing the thought to flee and the suitcase to drop from my hand onto my foot. A specter was drifting our way with a gait that suggested a rattling assortment of bones hastily thrown together- oversized in height, parchment white of face. I was fortunate in that this was not my first sighting of Boris. Judy had impressed me as a woman capable of dealing with a roomful of vampires with aplomb-possibly to the point of inquiring into what blood types were most nutritious-but Livonia understandably emitted a pitiful screech.
“Boris,” I whispered to her.
“Oh.” Relief flowed out of her and not only, I thought, because she had feared that here was Lord Belfrey. Poor Boris; I picked up the suitcase and gazed upon him with compassion. It was a cruelty of fate for a man to look more dead while he was walking around than he would do in his coffin.
“Looking for me?” Mr. Plunket asked with a sprightliness that had the effect of increasing the gloom of the passageway. “I’ve been out for a morning constitutional.”
“A what?” Boris, arms dangling to his knees, intoned out the side of his mouth.
“Walk. I felt a weird urge.”
“Agghh!” The blank stare would have bored a hole in the ozone.
“And on the way back in, I met this lady.” Mr. Plunket nudged an elbow my way.
“Ellie Haskell.” I retrieved the suitcase.
“You’ll remember her from last night.”
“Agghh!”
“And these two other ladies that are among the contestants for the marriage show. I’ve been filling them in about the family history.”
“Most interesting.” Judy, snippet of a woman though she was and faded of coloring as if having been through the wash too many times, exuded a warmth that should have countered the chill that oozed up from the flagstones and out of the stone walls. She introduced herself and Livonia bravely did likewise.
“Agghh!”
Suddenly I saw what seemed to be a struggle for intelligent thought working its tortuous way from Boris’s brain down his forehead and into his eyeballs. His arms battled rigor mortis to allow him to scratch the side of his nose with a reasonably lifelike-looking finger. “It was, I hope,” he painstakingly produced the words with robotically even spacing, “a good walk this morning, Mr. Plunket. I hope you saw other things of interest to you besides these…” I expected him to say
Mr. Plunket gave him a quelling look before turning to Livonia, Judy, and me. “Boris and Mrs. Foot keep hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of Eleanor Belfrey so I won’t go on feeling left out. But much as I appreciate their feelings,” he redirected his gaze to Boris, speaking slowly and distinctly, “talking about it makes it worse. No, I didn’t see anything, but I wasn’t keeping my mind and eyes properly open to a… a sighting.”
“Agghh!” Boris receded into his corpse to ebb out of the passageway. Thumper heaved a sigh of what sounded like profound relief and Mr. Plunket said rather snappishly that he didn’t know what Mrs. Foot would say, seeing that she wasn’t at all keen on dogs, but we’d find out about that right now. He pushed open a door to reveal a large room with a brick wall facing us.
Set into it was an archaic cooker that looked as though it would require arduous blacking to combat rust. As old-fashioned kitchens went, this one was not invested with an excess of charm. True, the heavily timbered ceiling and the same flagstones that had been in the passageway had their appeal, as did the vast deal table surrounded by an assortment of elderly chairs, but the sink looked like a pig’s trough and the wall cupboards were lopsided and needed a fresh coat of paint. Back to a positive note, the place was appreciably more orderly and somewhat cleaner than I would have expected of a domain ruled by Mrs. Foot.
She came through one of several doors scattered around the room, with a jug in hand, the housewifely flowered bib apron contrasting quite horribly with her insane asylum wardress appearance. The hulking form and mangled gray locks fared even less well in daylight than they had done in the murky gloom of the past evening. Mr. Plunket hastened to take the jug from her before making the introductions. I set Livonia’s suitcase down in a corner while she sank blindly into a chair. Judy also deposited her overnight bag, but I didn’t get the feeling that at any point since setting foot in Mucklesfeld she had felt burdened either physically or emotionally. It was Mrs. Foot who looked as though she had been clobbered from all sides.
Mr. Plunket helped her to a bench by the side of the cooker and continued to anxiously hover over her to the accompaniment of ominous creaking. It wasn’t a stone bench and clearly she wasn’t made of that substance, either. Her features shifted as if formed out of Plasticine by a nasty-minded child. She waved a hand, almost taking out a cupboard that looked equally unhinged with its door hanging open.
“I came down to find the place looking like this, everything put away where I’ll never be able to find anything. All my favorite slop cloths and the soup tins for keeping vegetable scrapings in-gone. Everything off the floor where I could find what I needed at a glance or by stepping on it. We all have our own ways, like I used to explain when I was a ward maid and preferred taking my tea cart up the stairs to using the lift.” She made this pitiful statement with a fixed smile that compressed her cheeks upward, forcing her eyes to pop.
I gave no thought to Livonia’s sensitivity or Judy’s imperturbability. I was picturing with painful clarity the deflated look on the face of the wardress when discovering that Wisteria Whitworth had escaped her clutches by fleeing Perdition Hall with Carson Grant. Back into a world of sunlight and hope-where far from being sneered at by the arbiters of fashion for the hair that had turned white from all she had endured, Wisteria set a trend that would one day be called platinum blond.
“Who was it that did this?” Mr. Plunket asked Mrs. Foot while patting her shoulder. “Who turned your nice cozy kitchen into an empty warehouse, the sort we used to hole up in when you, Boris, and me was homeless?”
Before I could absorb this information, the cry “Them!” broke from Mrs. Foot’s lips. It carried with it a fearsome weight suggestive of mutant life-forms intent on reducing Earth to a series of crop circles, or an annual convention of euthanasia enthusiasts, or… Thumper, who had been standing discreetly behind me, gave a whine that indicated his guess was a truckload of dog-catchers.
“Them?” Livonia whispered.
“Georges LeBois was the steamroller.”
“Who?” Judy asked in the voice of one not wishing to be overly nosy.
“The director of
“And the other one. Only too eager he was to shove in his oar.” Mrs. Foot reached up to pat the hand with which Mr. Plunket was still patting her shoulder.
“Dr. Rowley?” I assumed she wouldn’t have used that barbed inflection if she meant Lord Belfrey.
“Not him, sensible hardworking man that he is, he went home to get his rest. No, your husband-it was him that stole my kitchen.”
“Stole” was an odd way of putting the matter. But then, Mrs. Foot had struck me as being on the far side of odd from our first encounter. It was Thumper who took umbrage. Coming out from behind me, he sat at my side and stared down the offender, to no effect because she gave no sign of being aware of his presence. Well, I thought, so that was why Ben hadn’t been to bed or turned up after I was awake. I pictured him preparing my supper and putting together a meal of sorts for Georges LeBois under conditions that must have revolted his professional chef’s soul. After which he would have felt morally obliged to work at restoring the kitchen to some degree of hygienic acceptability without going so far as to burn it down and start from scratch.
