Spider Light(82)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Antonia was grateful when a thin morning sunlight eventually filtered in through the cottage’s windows, because the night had seemed endless. She got up and went into the kitchen, discovering Raffles composedly seated on the windowsill outside. Invited in, he padded round the kitchen a couple of times, paused rather dubiously at the corner Antonia thought of as the haunted corner, then came back to accept a saucer of milk.
‘So you know about the ghost, do you?’ said Antonia to him. ‘But it certainly wasn’t a ghost who left that grisly hangman’s noose here for me to find yesterday.’
She waited until nine o’clock and then phoned Jonathan Saxon, who had better be told that she had used his name and department to the local police yesterday. It was annoying to find that she ended in telling him more than she had intended.
‘So there’s some weird character playing sick jokes,’ he said, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, and I don’t know if I need a psychic investigator or a psychiatrist, or even a private detective. I don’t even know if I simply need a smack in the face.’
‘I don’t know about the psychic investigator or the private detective,’ he said. ‘But the psychiatrist we can manage. Shall I come up there to hold your hand?’
For a perilous moment, Antonia thought she might burst into tears. So she said, very sharply, ‘Certainly not. I don’t need anyone to hold my hand.’
‘Antonia,’ he said, with extreme patience, ‘my clinic finishes early tomorrow–I could drive up then and stay until the following day. You can pour it all out and have a beautiful psychotic crisis.’
‘It really isn’t—’
‘And I’ll behave like a maiden aunt,’ said Jonathan. ‘I’ll come to the cottage, and we’ll go out to dinner somewhere. But I don’t need to stay at the cottage; if there’s a pub in the village I’ll book in there for the night. Does that persuade you?’
‘There is a pub in the village,’ said Antonia slowly.
‘Ah. Oh well, I was afraid there would be. But you’re calling the tune, so the pub it shall be, although I will continue to hope, like a languishing nineteenth-century swain. You can give me a lock of your hair to wear next to my heart. But before giving me that, give me the directions to your haunted cottage–Yes, I have got a pen, I’m in my office, what do you expect?’
Antonia gave suitable directions.
‘OK, I’ve got all that. And I’ll be with you tomorrow evening as soon after six as I can manage. All right?’
‘All right,’ said Antonia and rang off. An apology to Dr Toy and Professor Remus for yesterday’s melodrama had better be part of today’s agenda–she would walk across to Quire and do that now, before she got cold feet.
Godfrey Toy had been exceedingly busy since breakfast, on the track of a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century cookery book. Somebody from the BBC–actually the BBC!–had written to Quire House to ask about availability and cost of authentic recipe books. It seemed a television programme of eating habits down the ages was being envisaged, and they wanted bona fide recipes for it. There was no guarantee the programme would actually be made, they explained politely; this was just preliminary and very tentative research.
But Godfrey, reading this letter, had instantly renounced his plan for a scholarly best-seller about Bernard Shaw, and thought he might instead make his mark on television. (‘And now here is our resident specialist, Dr Godfrey Toy, who is going to tell us how people lived and ate in the eighteenth century…’)
He abandoned the tedious task he had assigned to the morning (cataloguing some early editions of Byron’s poetry which he himself had bought because he had liked the binding, but which Oliver said would never sell), and scuttled hither and yon to see what Quire’s current stock had in the way of cookery books. It was not something they would normally deal in, but Godfrey had a feeling there was just the thing somewhere, and it turned out he was right. There, neatly reposing on a back shelf, was the exact book, published in 1725 and beautifully divided into different dishes for the seasons of the year, according to your standing in life.
There was a recipe for Lenten Pottage which Godfrey thought sounded shockingly dreary, but then there was a really lavish one for lobster, although it was unnecessarily explicit, telling how to prevent the live lobster from trying to climb out of the vat of boiling water while you were cooking it. Godfrey, who normally enjoyed lobster, shuddered, and turned the page to an entry for Sod Eggs, which would probably cause some ribaldry if it were to be included in the programme. But on closer inspection Sod was a corruption of the word seethed or boiled, and the dish itself was a tarted-up version of boiled eggs.
It was at this point that Antonia Weston arrived, apparently to apologize for the fracas of yesterday. This threw Godfrey completely, partly because he had not expected to see her, but also because it was a touch difficult to know what to say to someone who seemed to have suffered such a bizarre hallucination. It was even more difficult to adhere to Oliver’s edict about not letting Miss Weston get her hands on any more of Quire’s archive material. Godfrey thought he would not actually mention this, in fact he thought he would give her the cardboard folder of stuff on Latchkill, and be blowed to Oliver.