Martha Grimes - The Old Silent

"You are being excessively rude, Melrose."

"Hmm?" He looked up from the plight of Aubrey Adderly, dressed as a harlequin and dashing down some waterlogged alleyway. "Sorry, but I did promise Polly I'd finish this manuscript to let her know my opinion."

Agatha mumbled something about "cheap thrillers" and said, "Honestly, you have, over these last months, become wretched company."

"Then why do you desire my wretched company for a week in Harrogate?" He sipped his sherry and resettled himself in the crusty brown wing chair he favored for cold winter afternoons by the fireplace. His dog Mindy slept on a small prayer rug she had dragged in from another room.

In his mind's eye, Melrose enjoyed envisioning this scene when he was shoving his bicycle along in the bitter cold, or standing sodden in rain on the railway platform in Sidbury, or fighting his way through a blinding snowstorm… Actually, he couldn't remember doing any of these things. Still, he liked thinking of himself in these surroundings of Adam ceilings, Georgian silver, crystal chandeliers, and the long vista of the drawing room in which they now were seated, as the rain lashed the casement windows, lightning seared the privet hedges-

He really must stop reading Polly Praed's mysteries. The elements were always in league with the blackguard criminal, huge ghostly faces appearing suddenly on rain-drenched fens, hands scrabbling about in bogs-

"Teddy and I shall need an escort."

Naturally, his purpose was utilitarian. "Whatever for? Nothing goes on in Harrogate except conventions. Large groups of people are always convening there. I don't know what about."

"Nonsense. Harrogate is a perfectly charming place with lots to do: there're the gardens, the Stray, the Baths. You're such a stick-in-the-mud, Melrose. Never used to be."

He didn't? He would have thought, over the years, to hear her talk, the mud was up to his eyeballs.

"… rather dull. You know, I almost preferred you when you were going through that stage of thinking about marriage."

Knowing he should have resisted any temptation to respond, still Melrose lowered the manuscript and glared at her. If his aunt said things like this merely to get a reaction, he wouldn't have answered. But she was entirely too complacent to bother about baiting him.

"And just what makes you think I've stopped considering it?"

"Don't be silly. With Vivian gone, there's no one about to marry." Now she was up and yanking at the bellpull. "What in heaven's name is keeping Ruthven?"

Anything Ruthven can think of, Melrose supposed. Vivian Rivington had always been the principal threat to his aunt's "expectations" and Agatha, despite her references to the "odious Italian," must have breathed a sigh of relief when the wedding date was set.

"Especially since you ruined your chances," she continued, letting the statement hang in the air much like the silver pot she held while inspecting the last morsels on the cake plate.

Completely disoriented-not an unusual state of mind when Agatha was hard by-he said, "What? What chances?"

"With Lady Jane Hay-Hurt. At the Simpsons' garden party."

"I don't even remember speaking to Jane Hay-Hurt. Indeed, I don't even remember the Simpsons' garden party."

"Ha! That doesn't surprise me. You were in one of your churlish moods. Refusing to speak to people, off by yourself, brooding and feeding the ducks."

All he remembered was a garden, colorful frocks, and aimless chatter. That was all. Perhaps he was given to blackouts. Or brownouts. He wished he were in the middle of one right now.

As if Polly Praed's setting had come suddenly to life, curtains of rain lifted and fell across the french windows. His aunt was going on with evident satisfaction about Vivian's forthcoming marriage and the opportunities she seemed to think this event allowed for foreign travel. "Oh, it will be so pleasant to get out of Northants for a while." She leaned back with her teacup and the last of the muffins and rattled on about palazzos and palaces, doges and loggias, canals and campaniles. (She must really have been rooting in her Italian guidebook, he thought.) "So pleasant to be in a place cool, and tiled, and watery."

"If that's all you want, go back to Plague Alley and take a shower."

He returned to the plight of Aubrey Adderly, who apparently thought his thin disguise impenetrable. How many mysteries, Melrose wondered, had been set in Venice during Carnivale? How many bodies went floating down the Grand Canal? It was all the fault of Edgar Allan Poe and his godforsaken "Cask of Amontillado."

"There isn't a shred of romance in you, my dear Plant. It's no wonder you've had so little success with women." Now that Vivian had finally decided to marry the "dissolute Italian," the count's prospects had risen considerably in Agatha's eyes. He was no longer "that impoverished fortune-hunter," but "the Count Franco Giopinno of some prominence in Italian politics" (a contradiction in terms, Melrose thought). That was now her report to her acquaintances, her char (Mrs. Oilings), and the seamstress who was whipping up a dress for the great event. That the event was near to hand and Vivian had as yet to issue invitations made no odds to Agatha.

"Oh, I don't know," said Melrose, studying his empty sherry glass and reaching for the bellpull. "I wouldn't mind bobbing around in a canal with Ortina Luna, she of the liquid eyes."

Munching the end of the brandy snap, she looked at him narrowly. "Who're you talking about?"

Melrose didn't answer. Unable to induce in himself a fugue state or go into a coma, he dipped once again into the pages of Die Like a Doge , marveling at Polly Praed's ability to accommodate her plot, which originally took place amid the narrow streets and chimney pots of Biddingstone-on-Water, to the waterier byways of Venice. The original denouement that saw a blind man and his Seeing-Eye dog chased over the old stone bridge of Biddingstone had translated itself into the protagonist's fleeing his pursuers across the Accademia Bridge.

Melrose was fascinated, not by the book (which could only be appreciated by a blind man), but by its intrepid author and her prodigious imagination: it did not take wings and soar; it just bulldozed everything in its path, spewing up concrete and gravel and clumps of hard earth with no regard at all for the willing suspension of disbelief. Willing or not, Polly couldn't seem to care less:

Misfortune had been Aubrey's lot ever since the moment in the Gritti Palace when he had first set eyes on the mysterious Orsina Luna

…

Melrose kept his finger as a marker in the manuscript and looked up. The voice-over of his aunt had been sounding all along, rabbiting on about the trip to Harrogate.

"… a cold luncheon. I think we might take what's left of the Chicken Kiev we're to have for dinner tonight, and perhaps a bottle of muscadet."

Blackly, Melrose regarded her. "Crubeens, marrow pie, and tripe and onions is what we're having. The chicken's off."

The last of the maids-of-honor stopped halfway to her mouth. "What are crubeens? Never heard of them."

"Pig's trotters. Martha does them with an excellent sauce-"

"Oh, be serious."

That, unfortunately, was what he was being. The coppery-haired Orsina Luna on the vaporetto had turned his mind quite seriously to thoughts of the coppery-haired Vivian Rivington who soon might be.

Melrose looked off down the vista. "Let me remind you, Agatha, Vivian isn't married yet." A clap of thunder, a dagger of accompanying lightning obliged Melrose by underscoring this (to Agatha) sinister announcement.

She fairly jumped, either at the onslaught of noise or the implied threat.

Melrose went back to Aubrey, not so easily intimidated.