Dorothy Cannell - The Importance of Being Ernestine

Had anyone been passing he would have jumped into his or her arms. “I assumed… under the circumstances… that they might be sending some up. After all, poor Aunt Maude’s rather been through it.”

“Aunt who?”

“Sorry! I’m making a real hash of explaining.” He didn’t sound as though he expected any argument on this. “I’m talking about Lady Krumley. I’m her nephew by marriage. Niles Edmonds.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting!” Mrs. Malloy gave a sigh of pure satisfaction. “I was sure you’d show up sooner or later. And here you are looking just like I pictured you. Now tell me, just for the record like, do you happen to know if your dear kind Auntie has left you a nice lot of money in her will?”

“What my colleague means to say,” I got in before Mrs. Malloy could spout off another word, “is that we hope her ladyship’s condition will not create any financial problems for you. That’s what social workers are for.” I squeezed out a laugh. “To try and sort through these potential difficulties.”

“Oh, quite!” He looked as though he yearned to fade into the paintwork.

“Good!” I brightly smiled. “Then I hope we’ll talk later, Mr. Edmonds. In the meantime we do,” I continued, latching on to Mrs. Malloy’s arm, “need to see Lady Krumley before the doctors do another round.”

“Absolutely.” He stood working his hands together. “Must put Aunt Maude first. She’s in the next room to this. Please tell her I’ve just arrived and will be in to see her as soon as is convenient. Cynthia, my wife, is with me, or will be when she finishes parking the car. I don’t drive. Regrettably I never could get the hang of it.”

“We all have our individual gifts,” responded Mrs. Malloy with a girlish giggle that was meant to go with the powder pink raincoat and the false eyelashes, one of which had come slightly askew.

“Yes, well… off we go,” I prodded her forward.

“My dearest love to Aunt Maude,” Mr. Edmonds murmured faintly in our wake. “And tell her not to upset herself over Vincent, just think of him as off on another adventure.”

“Who? What?” I turned to ask, but he was already halfway down the corridor. Life, I thought sourly, got more complicated by the minute. Here I was pretending to be a private detective pretending to be a social worker, when all I wanted was to have a make-up session with my husband. It was all getting to be rather too much. And I hadn’t even had lunch. There was one person who was primarily to blame, and if I’d had a mean bone in my body I would have said something really snippy.

“There’s no need for all that nasty breathing down my neck,” Mrs. M. complained. “Course I understand you being jealous because of how I was the one what figured out from the start there’d be a nasty nephew somewhere in the picture. But look at it this way, Mrs. H., you still get to play Milk’s partner and my boss.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I should think so, seeing that means you’re the one what gets to open that door and take a peek inside to see just how horrible her ladyship looks before giving me the okay. All them machines and tubes hooked up to that other old girl made me insides go all queer.”

“Very well, you stay out here and keep guard in case Mr. Edmonds comes creeping back to have a listen at the door.”

“Not on your Nelly!” she fumed, and was on my heels as I went into the room that was the right one this time. To say I was shocked by Lady Krumley’s appearance is putting it mildly. No one looks their best in a hospital bed under lighting that is worse than that found in department store changing rooms, but even so the woman I had been visualizing clinging to a life raft bobbing its way toward death’s portals looked remarkably… bobbish. She wasn’t flat on her back; she was sitting up with a crocheted shawl around her shoulders and her mahogany hair, far from hanging drearily around her shoulders, was tidily pulled back in a coil. As for her hooded black eyes, they had lost little of their intensity as they turned toward the door.

“So you came.” She beckoned Mrs. Malloy and me over to a pair of stiff-looking armchairs positioned at the side of the bed. “The circumstances are not what I expected for our second meeting. You did make sure that door is closed? Good! One wouldn’t wish to invite passers-by to listen in on our conversation, given how very odd it would all sound. And yet if there was anything needed to convince the skeptical of the validity of my fears concerning Flossie Jones, I would think it must be this new tragedy.”

“Nasty things, car accidents.” Mrs. M. took the more comfortable looking of the chairs and sat with legs crossed at the ankles for the best display of her fishnet hose. “But it don’t look like you took too bad a pasting.”

“I am not talking about myself. I’m sure I would have been perfectly fine if I hadn’t allowed myself to become so upset, which I wouldn’t have done under other circumstances. After all, not wishing to be callous, I hadn’t seen Vincent in twenty years. Not until he showed up at Moultty Towers so unexpectedly the night before last. However, blood being thicker than water, one could do no less than make him welcome, and I encouraged him to stay for a few days. Regrettably, he had not been in the house two minutes before he offended Watkins’s, the butler, sensibilities by being too familiar.” Her ladyship drew the shawl up around her chin. “Watkins is not cut from the same cloth as his predecessor Hopkins. But even so, servants do not care for that sort of thing. My late husband Sir Horace did not approve of Vincent. Went to Eton together. Thought him a blot on the old school tie. Unfortunate, considering they were first cousins, but there it is and now… he has been added to Flossie’s list of casualties.”

“You mean he’s…?” I began.

Mrs. Malloy finished for me: “Dropped off the family twig?”

Lady Krumley folded her hands. “I had just begun the drive home last night when I heard a ringing from somewhere under the dashboard. I had forgotten there was a phone in the car. I am rarely in the vehicle these days. Watkins drives it two or three times a week when I have some commission for him. Otherwise, for the most part, it remains garaged. At all events, I was sufficiently startled to almost go off the road. When I did locate the receiver, it was to hear my nephew Niles Edmonds’s, informing me in his sad little voice that Vincent had met with a fatal accident.”

“Oooh! Nasty!” Mrs. Malloy batted her eyelashes in horror. “What sort of accident?”

“He had fallen into a well…”

“What? One of them fancy wishing well types? With a bucket hanging from its little wooden roof?” Mrs. M. looked most unsuitably entranced. “Me and me first husband met at one of them. I was wishing he’d stop looking up me skirt as I bent over to drop in a penny for luck and…” on catching my eye she continued smoothly, “just thought we should know for the record like.”

“The well is as you describe, although it is not located in a public place.” Lady Krumley shivered despite the fierce central heating. “It is in the garden of a cottage on the Moultty Towers property. They are kept for longtime family retainers. A Mrs. Hasty, who was the kitchen maid in Flossie’s time, lives in it. If she is deceased by the time Watkins retires he will be offered it. As I told you yesterday, it has long been viewed a duty by the Krumleys to honor the promise inscribed on the family crest.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have my notes with me,” I hedged. “What is the exact wording?’

“Serve Well Thy Servitors.” Her ladyship leaned back on her pillow, looking all at once like a woman who needed a nurse with a syringe at her side. “It dates back to the early thirteenth century when Hugh de Krumley took a blow on the head in a skirmish against King John. He wandered about the country for a year thinking he was a peasant, until rescued by his ever-faithful jester, a fellow by the name of Lumpkin who brought him back to his senses with another blow by way of a juggling skittle that went astray. Overjoyed, Hugh rewarded Lumpkin by not having his hands cut off. Upon his return to the manor, after taking a long hot bath one would hope, Hugh swore upon his sword and his father’s beard-or it may have been his mother’s (the Krumleys all tend to be hirsute)-to deal mercifully with those who served him. He also vowed that should this pledge not be kept, by himself or future generations, the house of Krumley would fall. One may assume that none failed in their duty until”-her ladyship’s dark eyes seemed to sink into her head-“I so cruelly wronged Flossie Jones.”