“Were you there alone?”
He shook his head, and wanted to know why she hadn’t looked after the place during the previous decades, why she’d let it go to ruin and still refused every offer for it. She didn’t answer. He asked whether she could imagine what might come of developing it.
Again she heard the insistent clack-clack of the paddles and the mighty hammering echoing beneath the massive roof. Had her father ever suspected that Karl would try to take the forge away from her? Just to hurt her?
“Yes, I can imagine it. But aren’t there enough ruins for the tourists?”
He smiled. Historic tourism was a big thing, and the area desperately needed every opportunity it could find to bring in money. Investing in the future. That was a language she could understand. She’d been an entrepreneur for decades. She remembered the sign on her former warehouse. Her name and her maiden name with a née in cursive. It looked so trustable. During the war and even afterwards it had protected her, put her above every suspicion, so that no one questioned her widowhood.
“By the way, we had to stop the water briefly to check the condition of the wheel. The millrace isn’t really as decayed as you’d think. The mechanism still works.”
She held her breath and looked directly into his eyes.
“And you know what we found?”
Time passed before her mind like a rushing flow, loud in her head.
“Under the mill wheel — I mean, he must have jumped right into it — we found a skeleton. It’s old and damaged and the clothes are in shreds. It must have been lying there for fifty years, the doctor said.”
Karl.
“And the ethnologist thought it might be a good idea to integrate it as a tourist attraction — ghost of the mill, that kind of thing. If you don’t have any objections, as the owner. Or think it’s irreverent.”
She started to laugh. At first it was just a tortured cough, right up in her throat. The boy looked up, startled. But then she felt it move lower, rumble in her still-mighty belly, and let loose, rolling out a trombone staccato just like years ago. Oh, Karl! You old skunk! You never could have imagined that they’d make money off you, you with your endless complaints about the financial loss! Especially right here, where all you could see was loss and hopelessness and the poverty of these dark valleys. The worries and troubles of the years between the wars. My troubles.
Her laughter broke new paths out of her body, rolled forth like thunder, wrapped itself around her dumbfounded visitor, and flickered through the room. It was a mighty echo of laughters of long ago, a great song about her past, her youth, her love, and, at long last, a fitting requiem. How surprisingly easy it had been to hit Karl and watch him fall down with his eyes wide open, not understanding anything. Now, after so many years, she had found the key to close the door on all those humiliations, fights, lost chances, and lies. A belly laugh.
The Perfect Knight
by Peggy Weed
The Butler Couldn’t Quite Do It
by William Bankier
A light-hearted tale this time from veteran short-story writer William Bankier. Shifting locales mid story, as he often — effectively — does, the Canadian-turned-Californian treats readers to a bizarre night at the Academy Awards. The range of subjects Mr. Bankier’s short fiction covers is wide, but he often weaves in material relating to two of his special interests, jazz music and movies.
“Come and work for me, Kincaid,” Margo Fletcher said. Margo found it irksome that this slim, handsome man was in the employ of her best friend, Lucy Jellicoe.
He bent towards her now, offering a tray of anchovies on quartered toast, and said, furtively, “You tempt me, Mrs. Fletcher. And not for the first time.”
Margo and Charles Kincaid remembered each other from their years together as members of the Hartfield Players, the leading amateur dramatic society in southwest London. Charles had played so many butlers in various productions on stage that his transition to the real-life occupation of servant seemed natural. Margo Fletcher, meanwhile, had opened a shop on Wimbledon High Street where intimate items of ladies’ lingerie were offered for sale. Her partner in this enterprise was none other than Lucy Jellicoe, her school chum at Roedean in the green years long ago.
And now, here she was attempting to hijack Lucy’s butler while enjoying a sunny afternoon on the Jellicoe patio. The cocktail party was in honor of Margo’s recently announced trip to Los Angeles, California. She and her late husband’s friend Desmond Wicklow would be traveling there to attend the Academy Awards ceremonies at which Wicklow’s novel, So Much for the Few, had been nominated for an Oscar. More accurately, the motion picture based on the novel had been so nominated.
Wicklow had written the book after retired squadron leader Calvin “Corky” Fletcher flew his privately owned Spitfire aircraft into one of the white cliffs of Dover. This happened during the filming of a BBC documentary about The Battle of Britain, and it left a nasty black smudge on one of the white cliffs.
Wicklow’s thesis in the book had to do with the sad plight of Britain’s war heroes who found themselves required to fly for wages to make a decent living. The premise was flawed in that Corky Fletcher would have flown his racy, camouflaged fighter plane anywhere at anytime for any reason at all. But Wicklow’s book was a good read and it made a fine movie.
“If I speak to Lucy,” Margo suggested, “and am able to persuade her to let you go, will you come with me?”
“Have I ever been able to refuse you?”
“I can recall late one evening following the cast party for Present Laughter.”
“We were great in Present Laughter.” The recollection of six curtain calls brought a wistful smile to the butler’s handsome face.
“We could have been just as great in my car on the drive home.”
“Feelings as powerful as ours,” Kincaid intoned, “should not be confined to the backseat of a motor vehicle.”
“You always know the right thing to say, darling. Now here comes Lucy. Buzz off while I tell her what I have in mind.”
Like any writer, Desmond Wicklow had nothing much to recommend him other than his next idea. He put mousse on his black hair and parted it in the middle. His green eyes appeared sleepy behind gold-framed glasses which turned a rosy hue in outdoor light. He wore a grey Harris Tweed sports jacket with pale blue jeans and white tennis shoes.
“Want me to scarper so you can talk to Lucy?” he asked. After the butler departed with his tray of anchovy toast, Wicklow had taken his place. He downed his gin and tonic.
“Stay. You can help me persuade her.”
“To do what?”
“We’re ad-libbing, Desmond. The way actors do when they have to perform one of your scripts.”