The Haunted Season (7 page)

“I'd step carefully around Eugenia if I were you,” Bruce had warned his sister. “No one has much time for her, but I think she could be a fearless and formidable enemy. There's something not quite right about her.”

Suzanna had jumped in before her brother could get atop his favorite hobbyhorse, which she and others had titled “The Killer Amongst Us.”

“Yes, yes, of course you're right.” But too late. Bruce and his horse had already left the gate.

“Have you seen,” he'd continued, “the way she looks at Max Tudor?”

“They all look at him like that,” said Suzanna, carefully distancing herself from the charge of which she was equally guilty. Max had been the village's prime bachelor catch until Awena had come along and hooked him.

Without even trying, she thought with an inward sniff. It really was galling. Suzanna was the village's Delilah, a temptress operating at full tilt, a woman who admitted no competition. But even she saw the perfection of the “Maxena” pairing, and was reconciled to its inevitability. Mostly.

Bruce had said, as they continued their conversation over dinner, “Eugenia seems to ignore the fact he's a married man now with a child. It's like it doesn't register with her. Even if she'd ever had a chance with Max, that ship has sailed.”

“Don't I know it,” said Suzanna. “I mean, yes. You're right.”

“That sort of willful blindness, that inability to face reality, combined with a thwarted sexuality—it can be dangerous. Perhaps more dangerous than anything I can name.”

“Perhaps you could have a word with her when she comes for a checkup.”

“Like she'd listen! Besides, I never really see her in my professional capacity. She's healthy as a horse.”

And likely to live forever, worse luck, thought Suzanna now. She returned her attention to the work at hand at Bowls for Souls, which seemed more useful than wrangling any further with Saint Eugenia. The conversation across the table from her had drifted to the whereabouts of the dowager, which soon led to a rehash of the woman's checkered past.

“She came here to help her son out when his wife died,” said a plump woman with a topknot. “Devoted to him she was, they say in Nether Monkslip.”

“Came over like a shot once the first wife was out of the picture, you mean.” Others, seeming to agree with this hypothesis, nodded their heads. “She never seemed to like the first Lady Baaden-Boomethistle all that much—until she saw what the second one was like. But then, no woman would have been good enough for her boy.”

“Hardly a boy, although he likes to act like it.”

Universal nodding at this sentiment.

“No fool like an old goat,” said someone sagely.

“They are very close, mother and son?” Suzanna asked.

“Only in the sense that rich people always stick together.”

“The folk at Tot Hall don't have much time for the likes of us,” continued the woman with the topknot, who seemed to be sampling as many of the biscuits as she was setting out on plates. There was a telltale smear of chocolate at one corner of her mouth. The biscuits were donated every week by Elka Garth of the Cavalier Tea Room and Garden, and they were always fresh, never day-old, and of the same high quality as the products she sold in her shop. Eugenia definitely approved.

“I hear they live as high on the hog as drug lords in a Mexican prison,” said Suzanna.

“I hear they're going broke.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“But no wonder if they are!” This from a slender dark woman with a pixie haircut. “The new Lady Baaden-Boomethistle sees to that.”

“She only cares about them horses of hers. Still, it's an expensive hobby.”

“I think the gentry should try joining the twenty-first century. Come down off that high horse and see how the other half lives. That dowager is—”

But this speaker, with her back to the kitchen entrance, was shushed by the others, who had spotted her topic surging through the door. The conversation stilled and polite masks were applied.

Lady Caroline Baaden-Boomethistle smiled at the little group. She was in rare form, reveling in her role as the titular head of various committees, raised like many such to that high estate not because of merit but for the name recognition she brought to whatever worthy cause was in play. In truth, the Dowager B-B, as she was called (behind her back), had trouble telling one worthy cause from another, and frequently would rise to give a little speech in aid of those less fortunate, to the bewilderment of those who thought they had gathered to promote the hunt, save the forests, or protect the dormouse. One thing of which she was certain, however, was her position in the village, which meant she was expected to be on the Parish Council even though more often than not she ended up sending elaborately invented regrets when she could not attend—regrets that generally included a plug for her latest book.

Now Suzanna, also with her back to the door, said, “Viscountess Baaden-Boomethistle is running late. Let's start serving this lot without her.”

Eugenia drew back, horrified. Her mouth, generally settled into a straight and unforgiving line, peeled itself open into a shocked O of dismay.

“A viscountess is never to be addressed as such in conversation. It is always
Lady
Baaden-Boomethistle. In any event, she is, since the passing of her husband, the dowager viscountess.”

“Who gives a sh—” began Suzanna, interrupted at that moment by loud shushings and throat clearings and eye rollings, and finally noticing the Lady herself.

In she swept, trailing scarves and perfume, shellacked and false-eyelashed and completely out of place at what was, after all, a charitable working environment. The rest of them were dressed casually in jeans and exercise pants or flowered shirtdresses. Possibly to indicate her lack of interest in work or exercise, or in flowers, for that matter, the Dowager B-B wore blue shot silk, black gloves, a strand of matching pearls of incalculable worth, and a great deal of eyeliner. To the further puzzlement of all, she wore a matching blue hat with a bit of netting falling coyly over one eye—a hat at first glance resembling a hedgehog caught in a lobster trap. She looked as Kate Middleton might look in forty years on her way to a royal christening.

Given that the dowager was fresh from her manor house, a homestead of terraced lawns with tinkling fountains, small artificial lakes, and a private tennis court, it was difficult for even the keenest observer to posit exactly what she thought she might bring to the proceedings.

Her daughter-in-law, Lady Baaden-Boomethistle, generally would by now have breezed in and out, wearing pinks and shouting encouragement on her way to the hunt. She would park her horse outside, like a cowboy stopping off for a beer at the local saloon. Actually, she'd leave the horse waiting with a groom or trainer, as it was too valuable a piece of property to be left alone.

But today, despite Bree's stated intentions at breakfast, she was mysteriously absent.

Now the dowager, pasting on a smile, braced herself to do good in a vague way. Hers was an all-encompassing brand of do-goodery, for she was the type to cut ribbons and make gushing little speeches of hope, flapping her scarves and jangling her bracelets and adjusting her rings, and generally trying to look beneficent, while her eyes rather desperately sought the whereabouts of the drinks tray. Rather to everyone's surprise, she was an avid participant in the whist drive, a key social event of village life. It was assumed the game gave her a safe outlet for the gambler's instincts that were said to run in her distinguished family and to have brought it near ruin more than once.

Suzanna dragged her head around to observe the new arrival. Really, comparisons with Barbara Cartland were inevitable—the Queen of Romance who had also had an uncanny knack for minting coin from the dreams and marital aspirations of women of all ages. One wondered how someone like the Dowager B-B, who had led by all accounts such a cosseted youth, had come to know so much about the wars between the sexes.

The dowager had early on rejected the home-county style of her peers and contemporaries. Not for her the sensible skirt, flat shoes, and padded jacket of the Tory, worn with pearls and a silk neck scarf. Not for her the dogs trotting at her heels as she surveyed her grand estate. She, in fact, made herself very scarce on National Gardens Scheme days, when tourists were permitted into the grounds of Totleigh Hall to be shown about by the head gardener. Even the opportunity to flog her books to the waiting masses could not compete with her innate horror at seeing common folk in cargo pants and flip-flops traipsing about the gardens and parklands of her precious home. Those ill-shod fans (and she did have legions of fans, ill-shod and otherwise) who had purchased a ticket with the hope of meeting the famous dowager in person were regularly disappointed.

Now she gravitated to one corner of the kitchen, where she soon could be heard braying at the one woman in the room reputed to have a drop of blue blood in her veins. The dowager began doing one of her bloodstock tallies: “She was a Witherspoon—one of the Derbyshire Witherspoons, of course I mean, not the other branch, who were something in packaging. Her orchids were magnificent, but she was largely known for her tulips.”

“But I mustn't keep you,” finished the dowager, and neatly sidestepping any attempts to get her actually to help with the food preparation, she swanned her way into the dining room to mingle with the peons.

She paused in the doorway for a moment before charging in, gushing sincerity and flinging compassion in the general direction of the downtrodden. Noticing a family of three—two young parents and a smiling baby less than a year old—she lobbed herself at them, warbling exclamations of delight in her upper-class drawl. Grabbing the baby (not without a struggle of protest from its mother), she proceeded to dandle the child at arm's length until it began to cry (it wouldn't do to get peasant drool, or worse, on her dress). It was, had anyone but known it, a reprise of her role as mother to Lord Baaden-Boomethistle, a blend of engulfing affection interrupted by very long stretches of bored disinterest. She had not realized her son had learned to walk until one day he escaped from the nanny and, totally nude and trailing his blue blankie, interrupted one of her cocktail parties. She had had to speak
quite
sharply to the nanny about that.

Now she returned the squalling baby to its rightful owners and, literally dusting the talcum powder from her hands, proceeded to dance around the room, chatting at, rather than with, the great unwashed, who were unfailingly polite in their turn. When one of them addressed her as “Old Duck” she smiled bravely, lips atremble, and moved on. Here and there the dowager extended a gloved hand to one of the men, much as if she expected him to kiss the outsize ring on her index finger. It was a queenly act she had modeled on newsreel footage of the Queen Mother touring the bombed-out East End during World War II. In the case of the Dowager Baaden-Boomethistle, it was an act hollow at the core, and was, reflected Suzanna, like watching Gloria Swanson auditioning for a role in
The Song of Bernadette.
The dowager simply could not damp down her fundamental self-interest and self-regard.

Suzanna managed to intercept the dowager's circuit around the room, interrupting the cascade of baroque platitudes and inanities, for she wanted a word about the duck race.

Still in Gracious Chatelaine mode, the duchess inclined her head to listen.

“Oh!” she breathed down into her bosom, ruffling her own feathers. One is so
very
busy, her manner seemed to say, and constantly importuned by fans and other supplicants. Still, she allowed as how this little duck race was important to the villagers, who lacked for other rustic outlets. She raised her eyes to meet Suzanna's, and now a new mask of condescension was in place: One must make allowances for the less fortunate, who wish to bask if only for a moment in the refracted limelight of a
Famous Author.

“We also were wondering if we could host the after-party on the grounds of Tot Hall,” continued Suzanna.

The mask slipped. “The grounds of—
what
did you call it?”

“Tot Hall.”

“Oh,” the dowager said again, and drew back, her glossy painted mouth pulled into a grimace of distaste. Suzanna was wondering how the woman kept all that lipstick from seeping into the powdered wrinkles around her mouth, but she rather supposed the dowager was not one to stand around swapping beauty tips. “If you mean Totleigh Hall, my ancestral home, the manor house where the Baaden-Boomethistles have resided nearly since the time of William the Conqueror, producing luminaries to dominate the world stage, well, you shall have to ask my son.”

“I was thinking of getting the vicar to ask him, actually,” said Suzanna, unfazed by this attempt to shove her down to her place on the lower rungs of the world order. “Since the funds from the duck race are going to help with repairs to the church organ.”

“Yes, that would be much more the appropriate thing to do. The Baaden-Boomethistles are always quite happy to benefit our delightful little church, of course. And we have a long history of doing so. Still, I leave all practical matters to the men.”

“A recipe for disaster if ever I heard one,” said Suzanna.

 

Chapter 4

MAX AND THE LORD OF THE MANOR

Totleigh Hall, one of the great estates of southwest England, sat atop a swell of rolling parkland south of Nether Monkslip, cushioned side and back by the lush foliage of ancient oaks and sited at the end of a long, stately tree-lined drive. At some distance from the back of the house was a large man-made lake, a lake long rumored to be a source of bad luck to the manor's occupants, although no one alive today could remember why. The legend was as real as Robin Hood to the local villagers.