“What?”
“I said that I like him.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“I don’t know what love is, Mama. I just know that I like him. I feel sorry for him. Especially after what I did to him.”
“You’re one piece of work, Netty.”
“I know, Mama. I know.”
Chapter the Nineteenth. Saturday, June 28, 2003
ntonia Bocker stood in the doorway to her stationer’s shop and smiled. It was nearing noon and the doors would soon be closed, not to open again until Monday morning, and here were so many customers clamouring for the attention of her lone Saturday clerk, Miss Hexam, that Antonia could scarcely believe her eyes. Miss Abbey Hexam — a serious young woman with plain and simple features that vanished from memory once out of sight — was pulled this way and that by the determined men and women bunched about the counter, each apparently desirous of making Miss Antonia Bocker the most successful ornamental and practical stationer in the history of the Dell.
Abbey Hexam looked up from writing in her sales book to see her employeress silhouetted in the open doorway, and gave a smile. Antonia had never been one to put her salesclerks in a difficult way when it was quite easy for her to step in and don the mantle of salesclerk herself to alleviate a customer crush-and-rush. And so Miss Antonia Bocker let the door close behind her and marched with a singularity of purpose up to the crowded counter and thereupon became clerical partner to her young employee, much to Miss Hexam’s situationally-restrained delight.
“What is this?” Antonia marveled to her clerk in an underbreath. “You would think that there was a sudden shortage of ink blotters and sealing wax in the Dell.”
“And clasped morocco diaries. I’ve sold three just this morning.”
“That all of our lives should be so interesting as to be documented between pebbled leather! Good morning, Mr. Meagles, I hope that you have not been kept waiting long.”
“Not long at all,” said the short balding man standing, slightly stooped, before Antonia. Mr. Meagles smiled, his mouth drooping on one side from a bout of apoplexy from which he had largely recovered save the facial wilt. Job Meagles was bailiff and clerk to the honourable Judge Price FitzMarshall, chief justice and administrative magistrate of Dingley Dell, and though quite devoted to his employer, was generally undeserving of the frequently levelled sobriquet “Mr. Toad.”
“And how is Judge Fitz-Marshall?” asked Antonia, whilst withdrawing a sales book from a shelf below the counter.
“Never better. I have my shopping list here somewhere. Ah, yes.”Meagles extracted a slip of paper from his coat pocket and presented it to Antonia.
Antonia conned the paper, then looked up. “But Mr. Meagles, this is the list of what was needed last month. Do you not have a different list for to-day?”
“Oh, dear me,” said the absent-minded bailiff, patting all of his pockets. “I do. Of course I do.” Mr. Meagles eventually produced a second list that contained only one item: red tape — for tying up paper bundles.
“How extraordinary,” said Mr. Meagles, scratching his head.
“Most extraordinary,” said Antonia. “I’ve never known the judge to require so little from my stores. Has there been a recent contraction in his caseload?”
Mr. Meagles shook his head. “We’re actually quite busy. And it is not in the judge’s nature to be improvident about keeping stationery supplies on hand. But then look about you, Miss Bocker. With all the customers here to-day, I see not a single one who is affiliated with either the PetitParliament or the Inn-of-Justice.”
“I would not have taken notice if you hadn’t pointed it out, Mr. Meagles. Business continues to thrive for all of us positioned several rungs down the ladder of power and prestige in the Dell, but it has come to a standstill for those at the top. It is very curious, my good man. Quite a puzzlement. But let us not become obsessitors about it. And since you are come to buy a spool of red binding tape, at least, may I impose upon you to know if the judge has made his ruling on the death of Mrs. Pyegrave? I understood that there was to be no inquest, but what was the exact ruling of the judge?”
“It was published just this morning. The death of that poor woman was adjudged to be an accident — a terrible accident that might have been avoided had she not been drinking heavily and in a most self-abasing state.”
“But that would make a case for suicide, would it not, Mr. Meagles?”
The diminutive man gave a slight nod, worked his slanted mouth a little as if he would answer, then looked about with some nervous concern upon his brow and withheld his reply.
Antonia took the arm of the judge’s bailiff and escorted him back into her private office. “We will not be heard here, Mr. Meagles,” she said with quiet assurance as she bolted the door. “Pray tell me, as you feel inclined, why Judge Fitz-Marshall, given evidence that poor Mrs. Pyegrave was in such a dismal state of mind as to take her own life, did not rule thusly.”
Meagles put his lips near to Antonia’s ear and said in a sunken, confiding voice: “To spare the family from public humiliation, for suicide, as you know, Miss Bocker, carries a stigma with it. To think that a couple so blest as the Pyegraves could have its distaff half of the union so unbearably unhappy whilst the husband continued in his affable, hail-fellow-well-met fashion was too much for Pyegrave and his brothers to put out for public consumption, and so the fall was ruled an accident, and the cause severe intoxication.”
Antonia nodded and tossed a nugget of coal, which served upon her work desk as paperweight, back and forth between her hands. This empty occupation gave her time to think of what next to say, though she later confessed to me that the thought which proved the most impertinent within her mind at that moment was that Janet Pyegrave could not have been the depressed sort of person that Pyegrave had described, for she had given her heart to a young stableboy who most certainly put a youthful glow upon her cheeks and a spring to her step. (It only stood to reason!)
“And Mr. Pyegrave and his brothers find no measure of disgrace in the fact that the depression was either induced or attended by drunkenness? Is not inebriety also stigmatic?”
“Somewhat, I’ll grant you, Miss Bocker. But ‘attended’ would be closer to the correct characterisation, for a good many who drink do so to find respite from depressive thoughts. It is a natural and readily available anodyne, is it not?”
Miss Bocker nodded, thinking, as she later confessed to me, that the judge’s ruling was a pile of horse excrement. Not that her casual questionings of the Pyegraves’ neighbours had given her anything with which to refute either the judicial finding or Pyegrave’s account of that tragic evening! And Miss Bocker had nearly given off speaking to those others who lived on Park Lane save a quiet and retiring woman of Antonia’s light acquaintance who occupied the house just next door to the Pyegrave’s townhouse. The woman, who was nearing her dotage, rarely left her home, except to take her little dog each week to have a different-coloured bow fixed to his head.
The private interview concluded, Miss Bocker bid the bailiff good day at the shop door, returned to the counter, and turned her attention next to she who was standing closest to her in the buzzing queue: Maggy Finching, a robust, if slightly flushed, large-figured woman in her middle years who served as cook for the Chowser School. Miss Finching wore a peach-coloured velvet bonnet that instantly captured the eye.
“Good morning to you, Miss Finching, and what brings you so far afield of that quaint boys’ school in the distant heather?”