Айзек Азимов - The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

“Confound it, Emmeline,” he roared, “why on earth do you let the cook put glass in the pudding?”

“Glass!” cried Mrs. Lacey, astonished.

Colonel Lacey withdrew the offending substance from his mouth. “Might have broken a tooth,” he grumbled. “Or swallowed the damn’ thing and had appendicitis.”

He dropped the piece of glass into the finger-bowl, rinsed it, and held it up.

“God bless my soul,” he ejaculated. “It’s a red stone out of one of the cracker brooches.” He held it aloft.

“You permit?”

Very deftly M. Poirot stretched across his neighbour, took it from Colonel Lacey’s fingers, and examined it attentively. As the squire had said, it was an enormous red stone the colour of a ruby. The light gleamed from its facets as he turned it about. Somewhere around the table a chair was pushed sharply back and then drawn in again.

“Phew!” cried Michael. “How wizard it would be if it was real .”

“Perhaps it is real,” said Bridget hopefully.

“Oh, don’t be an ass, Bridget. Why, a ruby of that size would be worth thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds. Wouldn’t it, M. Poirot?”

“It would indeed,” said Poirot.

“But what I can’t understand,” said Mrs. Lacey, “is how it got into the pudding.”

“Oooh,” said Colin, diverted by his last mouthful, “I’ve got the pig. It isn’t fair.”

Bridget chanted immediately, “Colin’s got the pig! Colin’s got the pig! Colin is the greedy guzzling pig !”

“I’ve got the ring,” said Diana in a clear, high voice.

“Good for you, Diana. You’ll be married first, of us all.”

“I’ve got the thimble,” wailed Bridget.

“Bridget’s going to be an old maid,” chanted the two boys. “Yah, Bridget’s going to be an old maid.”

“Who’s got the money?” demanded David. “There’s a real ten-shilling piece, gold, in this pudding. I know. Mrs. Ross told me so.”

“I think I’m the lucky one,” said Desmond Lee-Wortley.

Colonel Lacey’s two next-door neighbours heard him mutter, “Yes, you would be.”

“ I ’ve got a ring, too,” said David. He looked across at Diana. “Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

The laughter went on. Nobody noticed that M. Poirot carelessly, as though thinking of something else, had dropped the red stone into his pocket.

Mince-pies and Christmas dessert followed the pudding. The older members of the party then retired for a welcome siesta before the teatime ceremony of the lighting of the Christmas tree. Hercule Poirot, however, did not take a siesta. Instead, he made his way to the enormous old-fashioned kitchen.

“It is permitted,” he asked, looking round and beaming, “that I congratulate the cook on this marvellous meal that I have just eaten?”

There was a moment’s pause and then Mrs. Ross came forward in a stately manner to meet him. She was a large woman, nobly built with all the dignity of a stage duchess. Two lean grey-haired women were beyond in the scullery washing up and a tow-haired girl was moving to and fro between the scullery and the kitchen. But these were obviously mere myrmidons.

Mrs. Ross was the queen of the kitchen quarters.

“I am glad to hear you enjoyed it, sir,” she said graciously.

“Enjoyed it!” cried Hercule Poirot. With an extravagant foreign gesture he raised his hand to his lips, kissed it, and wafted the kiss to the ceiling. “But you are a genius, Mrs. Ross! A genius! Never have I tasted such a wonderful meal. The oyster soup” — he made an expressive noise with his lips — “and the stuffing. The chestnut stuffing in the turkey, that was quite unique in my experience.”

“Well, it’s funny that you should say that, sir,” said Mrs. Ross graciously. “It’s a very special recipe, that stuffing. It was given me by an Austrian chef that I worked with many years ago. But all the rest,” she added, “is just good, plain English cooking.”

“And is there anything better?” demanded Hercule Poirot.

“Well, it’s nice of you to say so, sir. Of course, you being a foreign gentleman might have preferred the Continental style. Not but what I can’t manage Continental dishes, too.”

“I am sure, Mrs. Ross, you could manage anything! But you must know that English cooking — good English cooking, not the cooking one gets in the second-class hotels or the restaurants — is much appreciated by gourmets on the Continent, and I believe I am correct in saying that a special expedition was made to London in the early eighteen hundreds, and a report sent back to France of the wonders of the English puddings. ‘We have nothing like that in France,’ they wrote. ‘It is worth making a journey to London just to taste the varieties and excellencies of the English puddings.’ And above all puddings,” continued Poirot, well launched now on a kind of rhapsody, “is the Christmas plum pudding, such as we have eaten today. That was a home-made pudding, was it not? Not a bought one?”

“Yes, indeed, sir. Of my own making and my own recipe such as I’ve made for many, many years. When I came here Mrs. Lacey said that she’d ordered a pudding from a London store to save me the trouble. But no, madam, I said, that may be kind of you but no bought pudding from a store can equal a home-made Christmas one. Mind you,” said Mrs. Ross, warming to her subject like the artist she was, “it was made too soon before the day. A good Christmas pudding should be made some weeks before and allowed to wait. The longer they’re kept, within reason, the better they are. I mind now that when I was a child and we went to church every Sunday, we’d start listening for the collect that begins ‘Stir up O Lord we beseech thee’ because that collect was the signal, as it were, that the puddings should be made that week. And so they always were. We had the collect on the Sunday, and that week sure enough my mother would make the Christmas puddings. And so it should have been here this year. As it was, that pudding was only made three days ago, the day before you arrived, sir. However, I kept to the old custom. Everyone in the house had to come out into the kitchen and have a stir and make a wish. That’s an old custom, sir, and I’ve always held to it.”

“Most interesting,” said Hercule Poirot. “Most interesting. And so everyone came out into the kitchen?”

“Yes, sir. The young gentlemen, Miss Bridget and the London gentleman who’s staying here, and his sister and Mr. David and Miss Diana — Mrs. Middleton, I should say — all had a stir, they did.”

“How many puddings did you make? Is this the only one?”

“No, sir, I made four. Two large ones and two smaller ones. The other large one I planned to serve on New Year’s Day and the smaller ones were for Colonel and Mrs. Lacey when they’re alone like and not so many in the family.”

“I see, I see,” said Poirot.

“As a matter of fact, sir,” said Mrs. Lacey, “it was the wrong pudding you had for lunch today.”

“The wrong pudding?” Poirot frowned. “How is that?”

“Well, sir, we have a big Christmas mould. A china mould with a pattern of holly and mistletoe on top and we always have the Christmas Day pudding boiled in that. But there was a most unfortunate accident. This morning, when Annie was getting it down from the shelf in the larder, she slipped and dropped it and it broke. Well, sir, naturally I couldn’t serve that, could I? There might have been splinters in it. So we had to use the other one — the New Year’s Day one, which was in a plain bowl. It makes a nice round but it’s not so decorative as the Christmas mould. Really, where we’ll get another mould like that I don’t know. They don’t make things in that size nowadays. All tiddly bits of things. Why, you can’t even buy a breakfast dish that’ll take a proper eight to ten eggs and bacon. Ah, things aren’t what they were.”