Funny, how all of Sir Adrian’s children had let him down in that regard. It was, in her opinion, the real reason behind all this messing about with the will, like Henry VIII fiddling with papal bulls. A grandchild, especially a male, would have put an end to all that nonsense. His posterity assured, Sir Adrian might have been a happy man.
Albert had found the liquor cabinet, but he had found it locked, perhaps in anticipation of his visit. Mrs. Romano, he felt, and not for the first time, took a bit more upon herself than met her official job description. But Albert knew where the cellars were, and moreover, he had long ago taken the precaution of having an extra key made.
Getting to the cellar itself posed no problem, as it opened off the main hall, with entry through a narrow door, designed for tiny medieval priests, built into the paneling under the stairs. Looking exaggeratedly to left and right like a burglar in a silent film, Albert painfully opened the creaking door, exposing the stone stairway to the bottom. Good thing, he thought, he was usually sober on his way down. Coming up was another story.
The cellar, the inspiration for which might have been Tales from the Crypt, was original to the house, and Sir Adrian’s pride. Collected in temperature-controlled rooms and cabinets fitted snugly against the cold stone walls were vintage bottles-some, Albert reflected, worth more than his annual income in a bad year. Most years, he amended.
The small keys to the cabinets containing the most expensive bottles remained firmly in the care of Mrs. Romano. Albert suspected they nestled all day somewhere in the vicinity of her redoubtable cleavage. For all Albert knew she slept with them dangling from a chain around her neck. She did not appear to have a man in her life to object to that-odd, when he thought about it, because she exuded such an earthy appeal. Maybe giving birth to a shit like Paulo had put her off sex forever.
But for Albert’s purposes, the keys to the actual cabinets didn’t matter. There were plenty of good-quality spirits lying about that were not deemed worth locking up. They would do just fine. With any luck he’d be awake and sober in time for the cocktail hour.
It was a little early for whiskey, even for Albert, but he spied several cases of Guinness stout tucked against the wall. He reached up to drag a case off the top of the stack. As he did, he dislodged the case underneath, tumbling it to the floor. Bracing himself for the inevitable crash of broken glass, Albert was surprised when the box fell with a delicate thud on the stone tiles. Setting aside the top crate of beer, he bent down and pulled back the cardboard flaps of the fallen box.
Paper. A small stack of thin blue paper, slightly disarranged by the fall. The top page carried only a few words. A title page, laboriously printed in capital letters. Albert held it up to the light from one of the crenellated windows high in the wall.
“A Death in Scotland,” he read aloud. “By Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk.” It bore a recent date across the bottom of the page.
His latest manuscript, presumably. He flipped through the pages. Page after page of scrawl. Perhaps the light would be better in his room. Albert tucked the pages in his pockets, hoisted a case of the beer, and headed back upstairs.
8. HELLO MOTHER
AS ALBERT CARTED AWAY his treasure, Jeffrey was writing to his mother back home.
In coming to Waverley Court, Jeffrey had found himself in an Anglophile’s heaven. Having completed his B.A. in English back in the United States, he had found himself in the same position as all newly minted English majors-that is, unemployed and unemployable. He had mooned around his mother’s house in Minnesota for a while-Jeffrey’s father, who had emigrated from Britain, had died when Jeffrey was a toddler-implementing various of her DIY projects with decidedly mixed results. Then one day, bored and broke, he had joined the Air Force, beguiled by a recruiting poster showing hard-jawed men and women at the controls of F-15s. The Air Force had taught him Russian and transported him and his duffel bag to England, where he spent the next four years with headphones clamped to his head, translating risqué jokes swapped by Russian pilots cruising over the Baltics.
Not surprisingly, four years of this experience also left him unfit for gainful employment. But his first May week in England-one of those flawless, golden weeks only England could produce-had made him decide he must remain in the country forever-somehow. He responded to every promising advertisement in the Times without result until one day he saw an ad posted by the recruitment agency employed by Sir Adrian. That had led, by some miracle of good fortune, to his current position in the Beauclerk-Fisk household.
The woman at the agency had done her best to quell Jeffrey’s enthusiasm for the post.
“You’re the fifth one this year, you know.” It was then July.
“Then I’ll be the last,” Jeffrey had replied, with all of the optimism and determination imbued in his blood by pioneer ancestors.
The woman, Mrs. Crumpsall-middle-aged, tired, and ready for her afternoon tea-had removed her glasses, regarding him with basset-hound eyes. She felt it must be something in the American diet-all that corn, perhaps-that made them this way. But then-Sir Adrian had flattened every British specimen she’d sent his way. Perhaps Jeffrey’s unbounded, puppyish enthusiasm would see him through.
The building provided Jeffrey for his lodging predated the main house by many decades. It was a wattle-and-daub, timber-framed building that may once have housed people before being turned over to livestock in a later century. His rooms had only recently been nicely modernized into a self-contained unit over what were now the Waverley Court garages. The little flat came complete with kitchen, washing machine, and the snarl of cables required for television and Internet communication. Apart from the fact he still drove an American-model car the size of a UFO, Jeffrey had adapted admirably to his new environment.
He stared now at his laptop screen, rereading what he had written, not quite satisfied that he had conveyed in full the adventure of his new life in England:
Dear Mother:
How are you? I am fine. I just received your letter…
(This was not quite true, but she would blame the delay in his response on the overseas mail service, which she seemed to believe was still being conducted via whaling ship.)
… and was, as always, glad to hear you are feeling well…
(This was also not quite true, as Mrs. Spencer’s letters tended to be one long and tedious recitation of her various imagined ailments.
Jeffrey had found that sympathizing with these ailments only made the recitations in her toilsomely penned replies longer.)
… You asked what kind of ‘boss’ Sir Adrian was. Liege Lord is more like it, with myself in the role of vassal. Let’s just say Sir Adrian is quite a challenging employer. He cannot write a line without rewriting it a dozen times, which makes him cross. I must be the only living person who can decipher the resulting mess of a manuscript, which does at least offer me some form of job security. Yes, he writes everything by hand, unbelievable in the era of the PC…
(Here Jeffrey backspaced, realizing that she probably wouldn’t know what PC meant, substituting the word “computer” instead.)
…and passes along the resulting chicken scratch to me. I think sometimes I will go blind from trying to decipher what it is he means to say, but whatever he’s been working on lately he’s been keeping awfully close to his vest, which gives me some free time.