Ruth Downie - Ruso and the Root of All Evils

The ‘Yes, miss’ was not enthusiastic.

‘He is always in a bad temper when his foot hurts. He is not usually rude to people who do not deserve it.’

The lad paused to consider this for a moment, then said, ‘Fair enough, miss.’

‘The master has many things on his mind today.’

‘Could you ask him what he wants done with the horse, miss? I don’t want to be in more trouble. Only nobody asked about it, and I didn’t like to interfere.’

Tilla must have looked baffled, because he explained without prompting that the guest who had died — ‘You heard about that, miss?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was the horse he come over on. I was going to give it a rest and take it back in a day or two.’

Tilla felt sorry for the lad, who was obviously desperate to get his hands on a high-class animal again.

‘But if the master thinks it ought to go back now, I could walk it over. I don’t want to get him in no more trouble.’

‘You think he really is in trouble?’

The stable lad reached up and pulled a section of mane straight. ‘I wouldn’t know, miss.’

‘Did you see the man who died yourself?’

The lad explained that he had heard the dog barking and realized nobody was around. He had opened the gate himself to let in the visitor and his horse and gone to fetch someone — Mistress Cassiana was the only one he could find — from the house.

‘I’ll say the man was ill when he got here if that’s what the master wants me to say, miss,’ he offered, ‘but it’s not true. Like I told the master, the horse was lame, but I didn’t notice nothing wrong with the man on top.’

‘Want, want, want!’ exclaimed the cook, waving a vegetable knife towards the kitchen ceiling. ‘Always somebody wanting something. You don’t need a cook, you need a magician.’

‘That’s the nature of cooking, I believe,’ said Ruso. He had arrived back from town hot and tired and banished the protesting Marcia and Flora to their room. He was not in the mood for another argument.

‘First mistress wants a grand dinner,’ exclaimed the cook. ‘With what, I’d like to know? I can’t show my face in town till the bills are paid. Then after I’ve gone to all the trouble she decides everyone’s too upset to eat it, and she just wants a tray in her room.’ The knife sliced down through the air and stabbed into the tabletop, narrowly missing the startled kitchen-boy. ‘How can I work if nobody makes their minds up? The fire’s gone out …’ In case Ruso could not see this for himself, the point of the knife was now jabbed towards the dead coals under the grill. ‘And we’ve washed up. If you’ve changed your minds again, it’s no good. It’s too late.’

‘All I’m after is something simple and quick to eat,’ said Ruso, leaning back against the doorpost and folding his arms, ‘and some information about what happened to our visitor this afternoon.’

‘I see. Blame the staff, eh?’

‘Information,’ repeated Ruso. ‘And put the knife down first.’

‘I don’t know a thing about it.’ The knife flashed towards the kitchen-boy, who was cowering in the corner. ‘He doesn’t know a thing either. It’s no good asking him.’

‘The knife?’ Ruso reminded him, wondering if the man was genuinely deranged or just an out-of-work actor.

The cook looked at the knife as if it had just appeared in his hand, turned it over to inspect it, then wiped it on his apron and put it back down on the table beside the sharpening-stone. ‘We don’t know anything. We were getting ready for a dinner. We didn’t have time to hang around gawping. Try asking the cleaning girls.’

‘When the visitor arrived this afternoon, someone gave him a drink.’

‘That one with all the children — Mistress Cassiana. Not us.’

Ruso frowned. ‘She must have got the crockery from here. Where is it now?’

The cook gestured to the kitchen-boy, who stepped forward and pulled a stool out from beneath the table. He clambered on to it and reached up to a shelf that housed a set of slender glasses and a matching jug wisely stored out of harm’s way. He retrieved the jug and one glass.

‘You’ve washed them?’ asked Ruso.

‘Straight away,’ said the cook. ‘The man dropped dead. I’m not letting somebody else drink out of that glass without washing it first. If they dropped dead too it’d be my fault, wouldn’t it?’

Ruso turned to the kitchen-boy. ‘I suppose you washed the jug as well?’

His pessimism was justified. Apparently keeping the crockery clean was all part of maintaining standards in the modern kitchen.

Ruso examined the glass and the jug. He sniffed them. He ran his forefinger along the smooth inner surfaces, peered at the finger and then gave it a tentative lick.

‘Clean?’ demanded the cook, as if he were daring Ruso to say otherwise.

‘Pristine,’ agreed Ruso, unhappily. His household’s cavalier attitude towards evidence was not going to look good. ‘What was in it?’

Apparently the visitor had wanted nothing but water. The boy had been despatched to the well to fetch a cool supply, but he had not seen the visitor. Mistress Cassiana had taken it to the hall herself.

‘So there must have been a time when she was waiting here for the water and Severus was alone?’

The cook looked as if this was a trick question. ‘I don’t know. I’ve got enough to cope with in here, without worrying about everybody else. It’s not my fault.’

‘I didn’t say it was,’ said Ruso, wondering how many times he had heard that phrase since he arrived home. He put the glassware back on the shelf and helped himself to some sort of pastry from a baking-tray on the table. ‘Sorry about the mix-up over dinner. We’ll try not to have any more visitors drop dead. In the meantime, what else is there to eat?’

The cook looked around at the barren surfaces of the modern tidy kitchen. Then he lifted the lid off a clay pot. ‘Testicle?’

*

‘I hope he came cheap?’ inquired Ruso, meeting Lucius in the corridor outside the kitchen. ‘What happened to what’s-her-name?’

‘Part exchange,’ explained Lucius. ‘What’s-her-name went to the contractor as payment for the paint job in the dining room. Don’t look at me like that, Gaius. She was quite happy to go.’

‘I’d rather have what’s-her-name in the kitchen than a bunch of cupids dancing round the walls of the dining room. Can’t we sell him and get somebody more suitable?’

Lucius sighed. ‘Gaius, when was the last time you bought a cook? Have you any idea how much a good one costs?’

‘No,’ conceded Ruso, who had only discovered what Tilla’s cooking was really like when it was too late to get rid of her.

‘He’s perfectly all right if you don’t upset him,’ said Lucius. ‘You haven’t been in there accusing him of poisoning Severus, have you?’

‘No,’ said Ruso. ‘And now I’m going to go round not accusing everybody else. Including you. Did you see or hear anything of Severus between the time he arrived and the time he was taken ill?’

‘I was busy in the winery. I didn’t even know he was here. Cass dealt with him.’

‘I’ll talk to her later.’ Cassiana had gone to fetch the children from one of the neighbours. ‘In the meantime we need to get all the servants except the kitchen staff and the stable lad lined up, and I’ll interview them in the study one by one.’

‘You mean I need to get them lined up so you can interview them?’

It was exactly what Ruso had meant, but only now did he realize how it sounded. He said, ‘This sort of thing seems to be part of my job over in Britannia.’

‘Poisoning people?’

‘Investigating unexplained deaths.’