Dorothy Sayers - Busman’s Honeymoon

In the meantime, Mr Puffett, having cleared the kitchen chimney from above and assisted at the lighting of the fire, had taken his fee and gone home, uttering many expressions of sympathy and goodwill. Finally, Miss Twitterton, tearful but nattered, was conveyed to Pagford by Bunter in the car, with her bicycle perched ‘high and disposedly’ upon the back seat. Harriet saw her off and returned to the sittingroom, where her lord and master was gloomily building a house of cards with a greasy old pack which he had unearthed from the whatnot.

‘Well!’ said Harriet, in unnaturally cheerful tones, ‘they’ve gone. At last we are alone!’

‘That’s a blessing,’ said he, glumly.

‘Yes; I couldn’t have stood much more. Could you?’

‘Not any more… And I can’t stand it now.’ The words were not said rudely; he sounded merely helpless and exhausted.

‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Harriet. He made no reply, seeming absorbed in adding the fourth storey to his structure. She watched him for a few moments, then decided he was best left alone and wandered upstairs to fetch pen and paper. She thought it might be a good thing to write a few lines to the Dowager Duchess.

Passing through Peter’s dressing-room, she found that somebody had been at work there. The curtains had been hung, the rugs put down and the bed made up. She paused to wonder what might be the significance of this-if any. In her own room, the traces of Miss Twitterton’s brief occupation had been removed-the eiderdown shaken, the pillows made smooth, the hot-water bottle taken away, the disorder of washstand and dressing-table set to rights. The doors and drawers left open by Kirk had been shut, and a bowl of chrysanthemums stood on the window-sill. Bunter, like a steam-roller, had passed over everything, flattening out all traces of upheaval. She got the things she needed and carried them down. The card house had reached the sixth storey. At the sound of her step, Peter started, his hand shook, and the whole flimsy fabric dissolved into ruins. He muttered something and began doggedly to rebuild it.

Harriet glanced at the clock; it was nearly five, and she felt she could do with some tea. She had coerced Mrs Ruddle into putting the kettle on and doing some work; it could not take very long now. She cat down on the settle and began her letter. The news was not exactly what the Duchess would expect to receive, but it v/as urgently necessary to write something that she might get before the headlines broke out in the London papers. Besides, there were things Harriet wanted to tell her-things she would have told her in any case. She finished the first page and looked up. Peter was frowning; the house, risen once again to the fourth storey, was showing signs of imminent collapse. Without meaning to, she began to laugh.

‘What’s the joke?’ said Peter. The tottering cards immediately slid apart, and he damned them fretfully. Then; his face suddenly relaxed, and the familiar, sidelong smile lifted the corner of his mouth.

‘I was seeing the funny side of it,’ said Harriet, apologetically. ‘This looks not like a nuptial.’

‘True, O God!’ said he, ruefully. He got up and came over to her. ‘I rather think,’ he observed in a detached and dubious manner, ‘I am behaving like a lout.’

‘Do you? Then all I can say is, your notion of loutishness is exceedingly feeble and limited. You simply don’t know how to begin.’

He was not comforted by her mockery. ‘I didn’t mean things to be like this,’ he said, lamely.

‘My dear cuckoo-’

‘I wanted it all to be wonderful for you.’

She waited for him to find his own answer to this, which he did with disarming swiftness.

‘That’s vanity, I suppose. Take pen and ink and write it down. His lordship is in the enjoyment of very low spirits, owing to his inexplicable inability to bend Providence to his own designs.’

‘Shall I tell your mother so?*

‘Are you writing to her? Good Lord, I never thought about it, but I’m dashed glad you did. Poor old Mater, she’ll be horribly upset about it all. She’d got it firmly into her head that to be married to her white-headed boy meant an untroubled Elysium, world without end, amen. Strange, that one’s own mother should know so little about one.’

‘Your mother is the most sensible woman I ever met. She has a much better grasp of the facts of life than you have.’ Has she?’

‘Yes, of course. By the way, you don’t insist on a husband’s rights to read his wife’s letters?’

‘Great heavens, no!’ said Peter, horrified.

‘I’m glad of that. It mightn’t be good for you. Here’s Bunter coming back; we may get some tea. Mrs Ruddle is in such a state of excitement that she has probably boiled the milk and put the tea-leaves into the sandwiches. I ought to have stood over her till she’d finished.’

‘Blow Mrs Ruddle!’

‘By all means-but I expect Bunter is doing that already.’ The precipitate entry of Mrs Ruddle with the tea-tray gave weight to the supposition.

‘Which,’ said Mrs Ruddle, setting down her burden with a rattle on a small table before the fire, ‘I’d a-brought it before, if it wasn’t the policeman from Broxford come abusting in, jest as I was makin’ of the toast. Me ‘eart come into me mouth, thinkin’ summink ‘orrible ‘ ad ‘appened.

But it ain’t only summingses from the coroner. Quite a bunch of ‘em ‘e ‘ad in ‘is ‘and, and these ‘ere is yours.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Peter, breaking the seal. ‘They’ve been pretty quick. “To wit-To Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey. By virtue of a Warrant under the Hand and Seal of John Perkins”-all right, Mrs Ruddle, you needn’t wait.’

‘Mr Perkins the lawyer, that is,’ explained Mrs Ruddle. ‘A very nice gentleman, so I’m told, though I ain’t never seen ‘im to speak to.’

‘ “… one of His Majesty’s coroners for the said county of Hertfordshire to be and appear before him on Thursday the tenth day of October”… you’ll see him and hear him tomorrow all right, Mrs Ruddle… “at 11 o’clock in the forenoon precisely at the Coroner’s Court at the Crown Inn situate in the parish of Paggleham in the said County; then I and there to give Evidence and be examined on. His Majesty’s behalf, touching the death of William Noakes, and a not to depart without leave.”’

I ‘That’s all very fine,’ observed Mrs Ruddle, ‘but ‘oo’s to give my Bert ‘is dinner? Twelve o’clock’s ‘is time, and I ain’t a-goin’ to see my Bert go ‘ungry, not for King George nor nobody.’

‘Bert will have to get on without you, I’m afraid,’ said Peter, solemnly. ‘You see what it says: “Herein fail not at your peril.”’

‘Lor’ now,’ said Mrs Ruddle. ‘Peril of what, I should like to know?’

‘Prison,’ said Peter, in an awful voice.

‘Me go to prison?’ cried Mrs Ruddle, in great indignation. ‘That’s a nice thing for a respectable woman.’

‘Surely you could get a friend to see to Bert’s dinner,’ suggested Harriet

‘Well,’ said Mrs Ruddle, dubiously, ‘maybe Mrs ‘Odges would oblige. But I’m thinkin’ she’ll want to come and ‘ear wot’s going on at the ‘quest. But there! I dessay I could make a pie tonight and leave it out for Bert.’ She retreated thoughtfully to the door, returning to say, in a hoarse whisper: ‘Will I ‘ave to tell ‘im about the paraffin?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Ruddle. ‘Not as there’s anything wrong in borrowin’ a drop of paraffin, w’en it’s easy replaced. But them there pleecemen do twist a woman’s words so.’

‘I shouldn’t think you need worry,’ said Harriet. ‘Shut the door, please, as you go out.’