Mrs. Blight’s question was this: had anyone heard anything of the condition of the Milltown woman named Mrs. Janet Pyegrave who had taken a tumble from her upper bedchamber window the previous night and had since lain insentient in the Milltown Respectable Hospital where she was not expected to recover?
Mrs. Fagin owned that the poor woman was “still alive as of two hours ago, though she remains unconscious. I know this, in part, because my daughter Susan came home this morning from her nurse’s night watch to say that her patient was still to be counted amongst the living, but only provisionally so. Had Susan not spoken of the pitiful creature at all, I would have known this for a different reason: her husband dropt by the shop this morning to bring in some of his wife’s jewellry for appraisal.”
This revelation prompted a mutual gasp on the part of Mrs. Potterson and Mrs. Venus. Mrs. Venus turned from browsing the leaves of the cookery book to proclaim that she had never in all of her days heard of such a vulturous act as this, that the wife was not yet dead and here was the husband seeking gain for himself from her anticipated passing.“And to think that he is an M.P.P! It is an absolute outrage!”
Mrs. Potterson nodded. “I had no idea that the Pyegraves were in such want of money. Why, he’s the most prosperous draper and upholsterer in the Dell. Every squab upon which you sit was stuffed and sewn in his shop.”
Mrs. Fagin shook her head. “No, he most certainly was not in want of money. What he was in want of was a trade: his wife’s jewellry, no doubt of Outland making, for some of the finest pieces my husband and I sell, all of which are crafted here within the Dell by our best local artisans.” Mrs. Fagin then dropt her voice and owned that it wasn’t her intent to kindle a scandal by retailing the details of the husband’s visit. “I merely found it queer that a man who should be sitting puffy-eyed at his wife’s imminent deathbed—” Mrs. Fagin stopped herself and shook her head despondently. “Let us forget it. I’m sorry that I ever brought it up.”
The florid Mrs. Fagin next turned to me and asked through her regretful gaze if I should be so good as to please change the topic. I made a clumsy attempt at obliging the dear woman by noting how motley and redolent was Mrs. Potterson’s cutting garden this year. The observation was roundly ignored by all present except for the garden’s owner, who nodded a gracious thank-you, and her dull daughter Betty, who negatived the statement with a shake of the head and the terse pronouncement, “Still there are toads.”
“What is more disturbing, my dears,” pursued Mrs. Venus, returning to her vise-like elbow chair, “is that Dr. Fibbetson — from what I hear — has done little to help the poor woman aside from setting a leg bone and administering — in a most bored and languid fashion — smelling salts without success. It is as if he does not even wish that she should be revived and restored.”
“From whom have you heard this?” asked Mrs. Potterson, whilst leaning forward in her chair nearly to the point of tipping herself over. Malvina Potterson was a thin woman whose spindle limbs looked brittle enough to break at this acute angle, and at this moment most resembled a winter-stripped tree bent forward in a heavy gust.
“It was told me by a friend whose daughter is also a patient at the hospital,” answered Mrs. Venus, bending slightly forward herself to meet Mrs. Potterson’s eye.
“I think, Frederick,” said Mrs. Potterson, righting herself and turning to me with a most earnest gaze, “that you should go to see the poor, dying soul, and if things are as they have been described, file a letter of complaint with the Medical Review Board. I think that Sir Dabber and the rest of the Board would be quite interested to know that Dr. Fibbetson is deliberately shirking his Hippocratic duties by this woman. Think of how terrible it should be for any of us to fall from an upstairs window and then be ignored except that smelling salts be passed beneath the nose in the feeblest attempt at restoration. Go, Mr. Trimmers, and for Heaven’s sake, learn if the intelligence be true.”
I nodded. It was most curious. I was most curious to know why the woman had not been better treated — she, the wife of a member of the Petit-Parliament, a Bashaw! It made little sense, and sleuthhound that I was, I could not have allowed such a mystery to pass without a thorough probe. “I’ll do it, of course,” I said, and then added, “in exchange for something of sustenance larger than this Lilliputian biscuit.”
I had tried with great difficulty to stanch my displeasure over how meagre were the victuals at this tea, but the battle was lost. I was starving. The clock gave still fifty more minutes for me to suffer through a nearly barren teaboard before I could take my leave without seeming too hasty to be gone, and as much as it shamed me to permit such an impudent suggestion to slip from my mouth, it was a mouth now fully enslaved to my empty maw of a stomach.
“Yes, yes,” said Malvina Potterson with a flutter. “I have cut the cakes and sweetbreads far too small. There is another plate in the kitchen with comestibles of much greater size. Betty, go and fetch the second plate. Can you not see that Mr. Trimmers is famished?”
Betty rose from the old, broken-spindled Windsor chair, which had been her most recent dozing spot, and quitted the room. She returned shortly thereafter with another tray, and making me feel sufficiently guilty for having ever made such a rude proposition, she looked over the tray’s contents and proclaimed it “the most filling collection of edibles ever put upon one tray, a suitable meal for a bear, in fact.”
“Betty, do set the tray down in front of Mr. Trimmers and keep yourself quiet.” Mrs. Potterson dabbed her handkerchief at her wet forehead — a forehead dripping, no doubt, both from the heat that had risen within the congested room and from the pressure of hosting a conclave of veritable malcontents (with Frederick Trimmers as their most vocal spokesman).
I apologised for my untoward remark and for my sullen behaviour as I pulled a three-cornered raspberry tart from its stack. I explained that I had been up for the greater part of two nights completing a rather longish article for the Dingley Delver on efforts by a coterie of concerned citizens to get the Petit-Paliament to outlaw the use of arsenic in the manufacture of artificial flowers — something that should have been done a good many years ago when lead content was reduced in our pewter casting and mercury removed from the fabrication of looking glasses and children’s pull-toys. I was forgiven by each of my mother’s friends except for the redoubtable Miss Antonia Bocker, who said without a mote of selfcensorship that such insolent behaviour was inexcusable under every circumstance, and that I should know better, and that a gentleman should be more like a lady and eat only what is put before him and then only sparingly, for proper etiquette and decorum requires it. Miss Bocker said this with an arch smile that undermined the full sincerity of the sentiment (for Miss Antonia Bocker, did, in fact, like me quite a bit and rarely stood upon prescribed ceremony and decorum herself). Having now seised the floor, this most candid of all of my mother’s friends took the liberty of airing an opinion that seemed upon its face quite unsuitable for such a light and convivial assembly as this — a rough and unvarnished opinion for which my companions and I were woefully unprepared.