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As Mrs. Norbert was twice Riley’s size (width-wise), and a paying guest, Riley hopped to, ready to serve, although it grated on him something awful, it really did. Mrs. Norbert was a pudding herself, a short, fat prawn with tiny, mean green eyes glinting out of a lumpy face, and with piss-yellow hair that frizzed here, curled there, but didn’t quite cover the shine of skin on the top of the behemoth’s head. She was no better than him. Maybe a whole lot worse.
“And it’s not me wanting you to try to cudgel that ugly brainbox of yours to think up a reason why, no, ma’am, it’s not,” Riley muttered under his breath as he turned to walk away.
Emma heard him, however, and kept her head down, to hide her smile. Mrs. Norbert might be crude, bordering on obnoxious most times, but she also had a point. When pinching the purse strings tight, the first thing to be sacrificed was meat. There had been many a meatless evening in the Clifford household until the next quarter’s allowance arrived from her father’s small estate.
“Um, Riley?” Daphne called timidly. “If…if I could also have this taken away? I…I think there may be eyes in it.”
“Oh, all right,” Fa
“I’ll check straightaway, madam,” Riley said, gathering up the “snail course” and piling the plates on his arm. “Just nip belowstairs to ask Mrs. Timon.”
“Evening, all. Started without me, I see. Riley, you rotter, you look better than me, and I consider that an insult, I truly do.”
Riley, and the rest of the company, turned in the direction of the sound, to see Clifford Clifford lurching into the room like a man who has been at sea for months and was just now touching down on dry land, holding on to chair backs until he could collapse into his own chair, beside his sister.
“About time you showed up, you pernicious little weasel,” Fa
And he did. Other than the lurching from chair to chair, Cliff’s dark hair appeared faintly greasy, and one lock hung down unflatteringly over his normally light gray but at the moment quite bloodshot eyes. His cravat was askew, his waistcoat misbuttoned, and his jacket still resided in his room rather than across his shoulders.
Daphne gasped at her beloved son’s disheveled appearance and rose from her seat, grabbing up her serviette and dipping it into the floral arrangement in the middle of the table. “Here, darling, cool water for your aching head,” she said, after racing around to the other side of the table, trying to dab her son’s forehead. “Mama will fix.”
Cliff fought his mother away by turning his head this way and that, and finally by grabbing the serviette and tossing it to the floor. “Don’t do that, Mama, I’m not a child,” he said, and Daphne, accustomed to taking orders from anyone in breeches, promptly returned to her chair and sat down. And proceeded to sulk. Over the course of her marriage, she had quite mastered the injured sulk.
“If you’re not a child, Cliff, I propose you stop behaving like one,” Emma said, resigned to her role as her brother’s keeper.
Cliff took great exception to his sister’s mild rebuke. “Child, am I? I’m head of this household, remember? I’m the man. So what’s he doing, sitting at the head of the table?”
Sir Edgar looked up from his plate—the one that now held three servings of escargot, because he was one, hungry, and two, sitting closest to Riley as he’d tried to leave the room with the rejected dishes.
“Forgive me,” he said, smiling at the ladies. “In an attempt to render myself politely deaf during a domestic upheaval that I, as a gentleman, have chosen to ignore—have I missed something? Oh, hallo there, Clifford. Mind if I pretend I didn’t see you join us?”
“Ha! Very good, Sir Edgar,” Fa
“My thanks, madam, for being compared to your beloved husband. I am honored, at least I think I am,” Sir Edgar said, smiling as Riley laid a plate groaning under the weight of roasted beef in front of him.
“Not if you knew him,” Fa
“Mother Clifford!” Daphne exclaimed, looking straight at Emma with a look meant to say “in heaven’s name, Do Something.”
“We missed you at luncheon today, Sir Edgar,” Emma broke in gamely, smiling at the man as she leaped toward the first thing to jump into her head. “Were you out, in this horrid fog?”
“Only for a few hours, Miss Emma,” Sir Edgar said, “and I chanced to meet a delightful man. Mr. John Hatcher. Is the name familiar to anyone?”
“No, I can’t say that it is,” Fa
“I fear not,” Daphne apologized, still looking at Cliff and mentally rebuttoning the boy’s waistcoat.
“I knows him,” Mrs. Norbert said, her mouth full of beef. “Sent his latest fillies to our shop, to dress ’em out. Great fondness for red satin he had, John Hatcher. Paid his blunt on time, sometimes with a little extra for us in the sewing room. A real toff.”
Thornley, who had decided it was cowardly to completely avoid the dining room, heard this last bit of wisdom from Olive Norbert as he pushed open the swinging door…and immediately retreated to the kitchens. And he’d tried so hard to fit together a comfortable group for the Season. Next year, he promised himself, he would require extensive references!
JOHN HATCHER STOOD in the middle of the enormous study holding the extensive library his family had collected over the years, and frowned as he approached the wall entirely devoted to blue and green covers.
“Anderson?” he called over his shoulder to his man of business. “Be a good fellow and find me a book on alchemists. We must have one. Lord knows we have everything else.”
Anderson put down the newspaper. “Alchemists, sir? I know what they are, or what they were purported to be.”
Hatcher snatched up his snifter of brandy and plunked himself down in the facing chair in front of the fireplace. “Purported? Is that good? Tell me.”
“Well, sir, the most venerable practice of alchemy is believed, by most scholars and devotées, to have been originally generated in—” He hesitated, realizing his life would be made immensely easier if he employed as few large words as possible. “That is, alchemists began their work a very long time ago, in a faraway country. Very wise men.”
His employer leaned his elbows on his knees, and gri
Anderson hadn’t kept his position for fifteen years without learning how to please his employer. “I…I think they wore pointy hats, sir.”
Hatcher nodded eagerly. “Yes, they would, wouldn’t they? With stars on them, I’ll wager. So where are they now? These alchemists?”
“Unless there are a few more recent adherents to the tenets, I think it would be safe to say that they’re all quite dead, sir. Although there are those who say that, before succumbing to their mortal ills, they may have succeeded in discovering a way to turn base metals into gold.”