The Importance of Being Ernestine Page 8

  “The one you just said I almost hit.” I rounded a corner and drove under a short brick tunnel and emerged into a parking lot. “It’s an ambulance. And this is the Cottage Hospital.”

  “Well, I could have told you that! There’s the door to outpatients. Don’t see as we can go too far wrong if we go in that way.”

  It sounded sensible. But after fifteen minutes of wandering green hallways that hadn’t been updated since the 1940s and not having spotted one handsome young man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling around his neck, the fact that we were hopelessly lost became my fault.

  “Thanks a lot, Mrs. H.! Me feet are killing me. In the time we’ve been here I could have had me insides taken out and put back in again. That’s five times, as I’ve counted, we’ve been around this way. Even them pictures on the wall are beginning to look at us funny.”

  She had a point. The expressions on the faces of the illustrious personages who had served this hospital over the past hundred years appeared to have grown increasingly stern. The directions given to us at the information desk had seemed straightforward at the time. We had taken the lift to the second floor as instructed and turned left at the maternity unit. After that it was pretty much all a blur. But it wasn’t my fault that Mrs. M. was wearing her customary four-inch heels. Neither was I to blame because her miniskirted powder pink raincoat now reeked of disinfectant, or so she claimed. I was about to explain that I wasn’t happy at the prospect of wandering these labyrinths for all eternity, when a man in hospital attire came up behind us wheeling a gurney. Mrs. Malloy immediately brightened. The man wasn’t bad looking and the gurney was unoccupied. Stepping away from the wall she stretched her butterfly lips into her most engaging smile and hooked up a thumb. Hadn’t her mother ever told her she was liable to end up in the morgue if she hitchhiked lifts from strange men in hospital corridors?

  Luckily his mother must have warned him about the sort of women he was liable to encounter in the course of a day’s work. Or maybe he had a bad back and couldn’t risk hoisting Mrs. Malloy onto the gurney and making off with her into the sluice room. (From what she had told me sluice rooms had figured prominently in Emergency Ward 10.) At any rate he chuckled in appreciation of what he obviously took to be her little joke and escorted us a short distance to where personnel were occupied behind a desk area talking into telephones, bustling about with notepads or issuing instructions in a kind of verbal shorthand. Feeling like a lion singling out one deer from the herd to pounce upon I caught the eye of a woman in a floral cotton jacket that seemed to indicate she might be a nurse or possibly a member of the housekeeping staff. She came toward me, while Mrs. M. was still muttering in my ear.

  “It’s not like I was ready to go off with a perfect stranger. His name was Joe; it was right there on his jacket pocket. And whatever you’re thinking I know he was dying for a moment alone with me so he could tell me all about his bunions. It was there in his eyes-the deep quiet knowledge of a man who has just met the woman of his dreams. But it was all ruined because you had to insist on tagging along. The very least you could have done was stay behind and pretend you was looking out the windows.”

  Clearly in addition to her enthusiasm for Emergency Ward 10, Mrs. Malloy had been reading too many of those nurse doctor books. I little doubted that in next to no time Joe would be transformed into a well-built, well-heeled senior consultant-probably a titled one at that-and instead of wanting to talk about his bunions he would be casually mentioning his three ancestral homes and his silver gray Rolls Royce. I was wondering what sort of car Lady Krumley had been driving, while explaining to the woman in the floral jacket that we had received a phone message requesting we visit her ladyship.

  “Let me see what I can find out for you, Mrs. Haskell.” She gave me a brisk smile before going into a huddle with the other assorted jackets and coats. After what seemed ages she came around the counter to escort me and Mrs. Malloy the length of the corridor. “You’re to be allowed ten minutes. The doctors are due back to examine her ladyship shortly. I’m sure I don’t need to caution you that our object is to keep her calm, so please restrict the conversation to general chitchat-nothing to get her the least bit worked up.” A beep sounded and with an exclamation of apology that she was needed elsewhere, the woman pointed a finger to our left and made off at a fast walk.

  “Go on.” Mrs. Malloy nudged me. “I’m right behind you.”

  “Okay.” I pushed open the closest door and tiptoed into a small square room with a generic landscape print on the wall. Otherwise it was all beige and gray. The figure in the hospital bed did not move. The folded hands appeared glued to the sheet. An oxygen mask covered a good part of her face, and everywhere there were tubes, hooked up to machines that flashed and beeped as if carrying on personal conversations.

  “Oh, the poor duck!” Mrs. M. inched her nose over my shoulder. “Why, it don’t even look like her.”

  “That’s because it isn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t Lady Krumley. We’re in the wrong room.”

  “Now you tell me!”

  We were backing out, hopefully before the machines set off the alarm and several very large men arrived to cart us away in straitjackets, when we collided with someone. Turning, we faced a man of medium height and middle years, with a receding hairline and eyes set rather too close together above a long thin nose.

  “So sorry,” I said, “we’re looking for Lady Krumley’s room.” My nervousness was heightened by the fact that he was staring at us as if we were a pair of German shepherds, readying to leap at his throat if he tried to edge past us. But perhaps he was a man who always looked frightened. His voice when he spoke sounded as though it might be habitually timid.

  “Pardon me for asking, Are you the social workers?”

  “What’s that to you?” Mrs. Malloy barked back at him.

  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?”

  Nine

  “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.”

&nbs
p; “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.”

  “Is it known how your cousin Vincent came to fall into the well?” I asked.

  “He had gone out into the grounds in search of his dog, a Maltese terrier that he had brought down with him and had insisted be allowed to dine at the table. It was discovered missing from the house shortly after I left for Mucklesby. A tiresome, yapping creature. One would think no one could regret its absence. But Vincent was quite besotted. Credited it with having helped him stop drinking, by threatening to walk out if he ever touched another drop. One could never tell if Vincent was serious or joking. And I suspected upon this visit that he had grown addled in his wits.”

  “Was he very elderly?” I inquired.

  “In his nineties, close in age to what Sir Horace would have been.” Her ladyship lay plucking at her shawl. “So I suppose there is some excuse. He kept saying Niles’s wife looked like a go-go dancer and something about Daisy Meeks, another relation who was present on the evening of his arrival, having a twin. He’d chortle in a silly way. It was all extremely tedious. And I must say I was happy to get out of the house.”

  “Family!” Mrs. Malloy sat looking soulful. “It’s never all it’s cracked up to be, is it, your ladyship ducks? Still, I’m sure you wasn’t pleased to hear he’d kicked the bucket… on the way down the well.”

  “When I put down the phone after receiving the news from Niles I must have gone into shock. The realization that the deathbed curse of Flossie Jones had been again at work was too much for me. For I have no doubt that it was my breaking the family code of honor that empowered her. The doctors here suspected I had suffered another heart attack, but I knew such was not the case. I had merely fainted-something I had never done before in my life-thus precipitating the crash.”

  “
That’s all it was?” Mrs. M. looked seriously aggrieved. “No one had done nothing nasty to the brakes, or run you off the road.”

  “I merely lost consciousness for a few moments.” Her ladyship sat back up with a surprising bounce. “I should have been allowed to go home instead of being kept imprisoned in this most uncomfortable bed and woken up in the night to be made to take a sleeping pill. And this morning they were talking about having me examined by a cardiologist to be brought down from London. So much nonsense. I detest having poor, sensitive Niles…”

  “We met him,” I said, looking toward Mrs. Malloy, “just now outside in the corridor. He thought we were social workers and agreed to let us come in and see you first. He said he would go back to meet up with his wife who had parked the car. You didn’t mention yesterday, your ladyship, that they live with you at Moultty Towers.”

  The black eyes darted my way. “I was distracted after being so late for my appointment, distressed over those flower pots being thrown at the car, uncertain as to the advisability of dealing with Mr. Jugg’s associates. My head was in something of a muddle.”

  “Understandably you were agitated. It is why you smoked those cigarettes.” There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t stopped her even after she mentioned those heart attacks. And what if, despite her protests, she had suffered another? How much of the fault lay at my door? The question was enough to make me vow silently that I would take on her case, however madcap it seemed, and see it through to what I hoped would not be the bitter end. There was Ernestine to be located and perhaps a villain to unmask. I still had serious doubts of the latter’s existence. The advent of Have Gun might mean nothing. He could have been a mad prankster, out for a night’s fun at her ladyship’s expense. But how could it hurt me to spend a few days helping an ill and troubled old woman?

  Lady Krumley shifted a leg, and I’m sure that only by exerting her formidable will did she restrain herself from getting out of bed and marching up and down the room. There were no tubes to restrain her, no crisply starched nurse rustling forward to instruct her to be a good girl.