The Withdrawing Room Page 3

  Without batting an eyelid, Charles replied, “Thank you, sir. I will convey them on your behalf.”

  They adjourned to the library to drink their coffee, they dispersed, and Sarah went upstairs to take off her dress and collapse. The first major hurdle was over.

  For the rest of the week Sarah was kept as busy as she’d been getting ready for her lodgers. Now she must find out their needs and crotchets, keep the larder stocked, think up ways to feed Professor Ormsby and still wind up on the profit side of the ledger. As he never showed any sign of noticing what he ate provided he got enough of it, this was not too difficult.

  As for the others, Jennifer LaValliere tended to pick and nibble. Mrs. Sorpende always said she shouldn’t, then did. Mr. Porter-Smith was so overcome by the grandeur of Charles and the value of the Kelling silver and china that he’d no doubt have eaten a slice of old boot with relish if it were served to him elegantly enough. Mr. Quiffen gobbled, glared around the table to make sure nobody got a better portion than he, quarreled with anyone who’d quarrel back, and made himself generally obnoxious at every opportunity.

  Letting the Protheroes bully her into taking George’s old buddy in as a boarder had been a sad mistake. Worse, it was a mistake she need not have made. Only a day or so after Sarah had got herself trapped into putting up with Barnwell Augustus Quiffen, she was visited by William Hartler.

  Mr. Hartler was as cheery as Quiffen was nasty, which was saying a good deal. He beamed, he chuckled, he reminded Sarah of those delightful parties at Aunt Marguerite’s where he and she had got acquainted and Sarah recalled that Mr. Hartler himself had been the main reason why those particular gatherings had been less Godawful than the rest.

  On those occasions, he’d always had his sister with him. Sarah recalled her vaguely as a gentle, self-effacing soul, even shorter than he and a good deal thinner. Her name was Joanna, but she and William had called each other by ridiculous nursery nicknames even though they must both be seventy or close to it. She’d appeared devoted to her brother and it was Sarah’s impression that she’d kept house for them since neither, to the best of Sarah’s knowledge, had ever married. Then why was William alone now?

  “Oh, Joanna’s flown the coop,” Mr. Hartler told her. “She deserted me to spend the winter in Rome with an old friend from boarding school. Do her good to get away for a change, but it’s pretty ghastly for me, I can tell you. We got rid of our place in Newport and put our things in storage. We plan to find an apartment here in Boston when she returns. In the meantime, I’m bumming around on my own and making a poor job of it. I tried a hotel but that cost a fortune, so now I’ve got a room over on Hereford Street, which means I have to go trailing out to a restaurant to get anything to eat. It’s no fun. No fun at all. Living here with you would be ideal for my purposes. Good food, good company, lovely home, ground floor. I’m not supposed to climb stairs, you know. Doctor’s nonsense about my heart. Other than that, I’m fit as a fiddle.” Sarah believed him. Mr. Hartler could have posed for Thomas Nast’s drawing of St. Nick with his tummy and his twinkle, except that he was clean-shaven and not smoking a pipe and withal as spruce and tidy an old gentleman as any landlady might want occupying her front parlor suite.

  “And it would be so convenient for my work,” he sighed.

  “Your work?” Sarah asked in some surprise. “Volunteer work, of course, but it’s important. Most important! I’m tracking things down for the restoration of the Iolani Palace. In Honolulu, you know.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do know. Edgar Driscoll had a fascinating feature story about it in the Boston Globe a while ago and we had a letter back when my husband was alive, asking whether we had anything to donate from the royal visit in 1887.”

  “And did you?” cried Mr. Hartler eagerly. “Nothing of consequence. Queen Kapiolani and Princess Liliuokalani never stayed with us, but they did pop in for tea one afternoon.”

  “Here? In this very room?”

  “Oh no. They’d have been entertained in the formal drawing room.”

  “Mrs. Kelling, could I see that room? Just for a moment?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m terribly afraid you can’t because it doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve had to turn it into a bedroom. That’s the room you’d have had if you’d only come a little sooner.”

  For a moment, Sarah thought Mr. Hartler was going to burst into tears.

  “I feel as if St. Peter had just slammed the pearly gates in my face,” he said with a rueful smile. “To think that I might have been sleeping in the very same room where those two wonderful, vibrant ladies sat and drank teal Mrs. Kelling, I’m shattered, utterly shattered. I only hope the fortunate person who occupies it now realizes his great good fortune. Would it be someone I know, by any chance?”

  “His name is Quiffen, and he’s a friend of the Protheroes. You’ve met them, surely?”

  “The Protheroes, yes, though only in passing as it were. But Quiffen? No, I can’t say that name rings a bell. Perhaps I could find a way to scrape his acquaintance,” he added, brightening a little. “If I were to explain what it would mean to me—I don’t suppose he’d be amenable to a spot of bribery and corruption, by any chance?”

  He said it with a whimsical smile, but Sarah wasn’t altogether sure he didn’t mean it. “I’m afraid not,” she said firmly. “Mr. Quiffen is very well off and he appears to be perfectly satisfied with his accommodations. For the moment, at any rate.”

  Mr. Hartler took the hint she couldn’t resist throwing in. “Ah, then if you think there may be any chance whatever, I implore you to keep me in mind. The Harvard Club will always find me. They’ll take a message at the switchboard. Wonderful people. Most obliging. You’re quite sure it wouldn’t do any good for me to explain the circumstances to this Mr. Quiffen?”

  “Quite sure. I really shouldn’t try it if I were you, Mr. Hartler.”

  If old Barnwell Augustus thought anybody else wanted the room that badly, he’d dig himself in like a badger for sheer cussedness, and she’d be stuck with him forever. One could only wait and pray.

  Chapter 4

  SARAH HAD ESTABLISHED THE pleasant routine of gathering her boarders in the library half an hour before dinnertime for sherry and chat. This helped her get them to the table on time in a mellow mood, and gave Charles breathing space to change from working clothes into his butler’s rigout. It also provided an opportunity to dull people’s appetites with some inexpensive but hearty hors d’oeuvres if the meal was going to be a trifle on the lean side, as it was on this particular occasion.

  Mariposa was circling the room with a tray of Sarah’s hot, delicious, filling, and surprisingly economical cheese puffs. Sarah was pouring wine for Mrs. Sorpende out of a cut-glass decanter she’d been tempted to sell but was now glad she’d held on to. Though they were filled from gallon jugs of the cheapest drinkable sherry she could find, the decanters did seem to have a favorable psychological effect on the flavor.

  All of a sudden it occurred to her that the gathering was several degrees more amicable than usual. Nobody was fighting with anybody. No whiny voice was pontificating about some niggling point in which nobody else except possibly the encyclopedic Mr. Porter-Smith had the vaguest interest. Momentarily puzzled, Sarah stopped short with the decanter in mid-air and looked about. Mrs. Sorpende continued to hold out her glass with an air of sweet patience. Sarah recollected herself.

  “I’m sorry. It just this moment dawned on me that Mr. Quiffen isn’t here. He’s usually so punctual.”

  “Been hoping he’d get stuck in the subway again, myself,” grunted Professor Ormsby, taking several more cheese puffs and settling himself where he could ogle Mrs. Sorpende’s décolletage in comfort.

  Tonight, that elegant lady had enlivened her favorite black gown with a huge red silk poppy, and set a high-backed Spanish comb in her hair. Sarah thought not for the first time that Mrs. Sorpende would make a far more impressive landlady than she, and asked her to do the honors with the d
ecanter.

  “Could I ask you to take my place for a moment? I want to run out to the kitchen and see how things are getting on.”

  Actually she was wondering if Mr. Quiffen might have sent a message that nobody had remembered to give her. As a rule, both members of her multi-talented staff were punctilious about such things. In fact, Charles liked nothing better than to make a stately entrance with a slip of paper on a silver tray as if he were carrying the good news from Ghent to Aix. Tonight, though, he might have got held up at the factory while Mariposa was preoccupied with the cheese puffs.

  No, she found Charles bustling up the cellar stairs, white-gloved and ready to roll. There had been no message.

  “Then we shan’t hold dinner for him,” said Sarah crossly. “Mr. Quiffen knows the house rules. He’d be the first to squawk if anybody else kept him waiting.”

  Mr. Quiffen did not call and he did not come. They ate without him and found the experience a most agreeable change. Only Sarah could not escape the little worry that was nagging at her. It was so very unlike Mr. Quiffen not to make any kind of fuss whatever.

  Perhaps she ought to call Anora Protheroe after dinner and see if Barnwell Augustus was out there. He might have got waylaid into hearing George’s bear story, which went on for hours and from which once a victim was trapped there could be no escape. Sarah’s nerves were still too raw from her own recent tragedies to tolerate any unexplained absence, even Mr. Quiffen’s, without some degree of apprehension.

  After dinner they went back to the library for coffee. Sarah used the Export China that had been brought back by one of her seafaring ancestors after a successful deal in nutmeg graters, chamber pots, and other products of an advanced Western technology. The cups had the double advantage of being so small that they saved a good deal on coffee and of giving Sarah an excuse to drop an occasional nugget of family history, thus contributing to the atmosphere her lodgers were paying for.

  Jeremy Kelling had already joined them twice for dinner. On those occasions the anecdotes had been a good deal more picturesque. Sarah wished Uncle Jem could be here tonight to help her out of her preoccupation. However, he’d gone to some kind of old Barflies’ Reunion at a suitably disreputable saloon for which the group had been forced to search far and wide, urban renewal having hygienized all their old haunts out of existence or into respectability.

  Luckily, she could escape before long. Sarah had let it be known that exactly half an hour after she’d served the coffee, she would either adjourn to her upstairs lair or go out to whatever social engagement she might have, though since she’d opened her boardinghouse she hadn’t been invited anywhere. She did so tonight, leaving the others to continue socializing in the library or get on with their own plans for the evening.

  As it happened, nobody was going anywhere. The lodgers were all still in the library enjoying their unaccustomed congeniality when the telephone rang at about a quarter past nine. After several rings, when it became clear that Charles and Mariposa must be in their basement quarters reading good books, listening to Bach partitas, or more probably doing something else, Sarah came back downstairs to answer it.

  According to old-fashioned custom, the original instrument had been installed in the front hall. This was the one she answered. As the library door was open, her boarders could hear, and the babble of conversation died suddenly as she gasped, “The police station? Yes, this is Mrs. Kelling. Yes, he does. Mr. Quiffen is one of my boarders. No, I’m not acquainted with his family, but I can find out who they are. Why? What’s happened to him?”

  They told her. She put down the receiver and entered the library with a face as white as the linen damask tablecloth she’d have to iron tomorrow. “I’m afraid we have some bad news. Mr. Quiffen has been in an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” demanded Mr. Porter-Smith.

  Sarah swallowed hard. “He appears to have fallen under a subway train at Haymarket Station.”

  “What the hell was he doing at Haymarket Station?” That was a stupid question. Oddly enough, it was Professor Ormsby who asked.

  “I have no idea,” she replied.

  “Is he badly hurt?” was Mrs. Sorpende’s more reasonable inquiry.

  “He—” Sarah found she could not go on.

  “You mean he’s dead?” squealed Miss LaValliere.

  “I—I believe it happened very quickly.”

  “Naturally it would have to,” said Mr. Porter-Smith. “When you consider the weight and velocity of a subway train—”

  Sarah had no desire to consider any such thing. “Excuse me,” she interrupted. “I must call some friends and see if they can tell me who are his next of kin. Mr. Porter-Smith, you might pour us each a little brandy, if you will. I’ll get the decanter.”

  “Please allow me.” The young pontificator switched without effort to his role as mountain climber. He was out of his chair and across the room in a bound. Sarah showed him where to find the brandy and the liqueur glasses. Then she escaped to the kitchen, where there was an extension telephone, and dialed the Protheroes’.

  George was, as she’d expected, three sheets to the wind and fast asleep by this time. Anora was awake and every bit as shocked as Sarah had thought she would be.

  “Barney wasn’t such a bad old wart when you got to know him,” she snuffled, “and we’d known him forever. George is going to take it hard.” As to relatives, Anora had to stop and think. “Barney never married. Or anything else,” she added forthrightly. “He could never find a woman to suit him, and if he had, she’d have known better than to get stuck with such a pest. I expect you’ve had your hands full. But Barney wasn’t any worse than a lot of others, no matter what they say.”

  The parents were long gone, of course. There had been a brother, but he was dead, too. However, Anora was pretty sure she could produce a nephew and a cousin or two.

  “I hope you can,” sighed Sarah. “Otherwise this may wind up as my responsibility. Frankly, Anora, I don’t think I could cope.”

  “Of course you couldn’t and why should you? George is one of the executors. Poor old Barney was going to be one of his. They used to go on about which would get to plant the other. George can stir his stumps for a change. Maybe it will buck him up a bit to learn he’s the survivor instead of the survivee. I hope Barney’s rent was paid up.”

  “Until the end of the week. If his heirs are anything like him, I daresay they’ll demand a refund, since today is only Wednesday. I’m sorry, Anora. I know you cared for him.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t cut any ice. I know what Barney was like. You should have heard the way he carried on after your Uncle Fred died and he found Dolph had been given the chairmanship of one of those ridiculous foundations instead of him. Anyway, whatever the nephew says, don’t give him a nickel. You’ve got to be tough if you’re to succeed at that landlady wrinkle of yours, Sarah. As soon as we’ve got poor Barney safely underground, I’ll see whom else I can dig up for you.”

  “That’s sweet, Anora, but I already have one. Do you recall that nice Mr. Hartler we met at Aunt Marguerite’s? His sister is in Rome and he’s alone here in Boston, desperate to get the room. I’m sure he’d move in tomorrow, unless this thing about Mr. Quiffen turns him off.”

  “Why should it? Old people know other old people are going to die. We know we are, too, though we don’t believe it till it happens and maybe not then, if you can put any stock in that parapsychology twaddle. What do you want to bet Barney’s lodging a complaint with St. Peter right now? Or more likely trying to hunt up a nasty-minded medium to put a hex on the Secretary of Transportation. Whatever happened, I’m sure he brought it upon himself. No doubt he was bending over to inspect the rails or something that was none of his business in the first place, and wondering whom he should write to about it. Now, Sarah, you go lock his bedroom door right this minute. Don’t let a soul set foot over that threshold until George and Barney’s lawyer get there. Especially the relatives. Those Quiffens are
all cut from the same bolt of cloth, and pretty shoddy material it is, if you ask me.”

  “Darling Anora, I do love you so!”

  Sarah had been properly brought up not to get sloppy with people, but she’d also learned the hard way that it was no good bottling up your feelings until suddenly you had nobody to tell them to. Maybe that fat old woman out there in her overheated, overfurnished cavern of a house with her fat old servants and her fat old drunk of a husband would forgive being told she was loved.

  At any rate, Mrs. Protheroe replied in a gruff but not snappish tone, “Now don’t you fret yourself about this business for one minute, Sarah. Take a little brandy and a hot bath, and get some rest.”

  Sarah obeyed and was glad later that she had. Almost at the crack of dawn, a sharp-nosed, thick-waisted, middle-aged man who could be nobody else but Barnwell Augustus Quiffen’s nephew was on the doorstep, set to go through his uncle’s possessions before the landlady pinched all the goodies. Or so his supercilious expression implied until Charles, who had taken the day off from the factory because he thought Mr. Hudson would have wanted him to, proffered a silver salver and straightened out the caller with a lofty, “I will tell the mistress you are here. Would you care to present your card?”

  As Mr. Quiffen did not have a card and was much shorter, less attractive, and infinitely less impressive than Charles, he was thus put at a disadvantage and meekly allowed himself to be herded into the library.

  Sarah, having anticipated an early-morning visit, was ready and waiting, but she let the man cool his heels for five minutes or so before she descended the stairs, correct in black-and-gray tweed and a discreet strand of pearls. Having picked up a few tricks from Charles, she entered the room with exactly the right degree of hauteur.

  “Mr. Quiffen?” She held out a limp hand and permitted him to touch the first two fingers. “Allow me to express my sympathy on your sad loss. This has been a shock to us all.”

  “I’m going to write a mighty stiff letter to the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority, I can tell you.” No question about it, here was a Quiffen. “Now would you show me his room?” the nephew added almost in the same breath.