“Hallo, Elspeth. We did decide not to stand upon ceremony,” Augusta said.
Elspeth looked at me uncertainly. “Veronica,” I reminded her. “I hope the hour is not inconvenient for callers.”
“Not at all,” she said, stepping back. “I was just putting up some jam. Brambleberry. It is Timothy’s favourite, although I cannot abide the pips.”
She gestured towards the doorway immediately to her left and we entered a small, neatly kept parlour. Everything was polished and shining, neither crumb nor hair marring the gleaming perfection. A tiny sofa and two armchairs stood in the middle of a freshly brushed carpet, and a bowl of roses took pride of place in the center of a table that had been set for tea. There was no cloth, no embroidered linen or fine embellishments, but the tea things were good—old Wedgwood, mended skillfully.
“What a pretty room!” I exclaimed.
It was only a slight exaggeration on my part. The room was not precisely handsome; the flower-patterned plates hung upon the walls were a trifle too fussy, the bits of souvenir glass and china a bit too garish. But there was a homeliness that had clearly been accomplished with a great deal of care, and I assumed Elspeth took pride in her little nest.
She smiled tightly. “It fills the time.” She glanced to the little plate of thinly cut bread and butter on the tea table. “I shall go and put the kettle on. I won’t be a minute.”
She hurried away and Augusta and I settled ourselves onto a hard, narrow sofa. Behind us, the cat in the window stared balefully. “Shemust have been expecting someone,” I ventured. “The table is already laid for tea.”
Augusta shook her head. “Not necessarily. I suspect Elspeth spends much of her time dispensing tea and sympathy to the villagers. I’ve known many a lady like her—so busy with Good Works they’ve no time for their own pursuits. Look around, my dear. Everything neat as a pin and polished to within an inch of its life. That will be at Timothy’s insistence.”
“You think?”
“Depend upon it. There is no one so pernickety as an aging, unmarried man.”
“Indeed.” I studied the room, curious about our hostess. A statue of a shepherdess carrying a lamb stood upon a bookshelf. It was lettered in gilt with the mottoa souvenir of lyme regis.I had not realised they were so fond of their sheep in Lyme, and the shepherdess’s expression was entirely vapid.
“That belongs to Timothy,” Elspeth said as she came into the room bearing the steaming teapot. She lifted a cloth off a plate of freshly cut bread and butter and another of thinly sliced seedcake. “He is forever filling the room with bits and bobs and I am forever clearing them away.”
I looked at the assorted bric-a-brac jostling with the shepherdess for pride of place. A model of Wellington’s head, the articulated skeleton of a small bird, a spray of shells artfully arranged on a bit of driftwood, a broken ammonite. His interests seemed as varied as his taste was questionable, I decided.
“He has never even been to Lyme,” she said as she settled in over the teapot. “He bought that at a sale of bric-a-brac at St. Frideswide’s.”
Augusta smiled. “James is entirely the same. The castle in Scotland is of course furnished completely in stag’s heads and miles of tartan carpet, but he wants to do the same in the London house and it is all I can do to keep him from serving haggis to the guests.”
They fell to gently abusing their menfolk while I sipped and munched contentedly at the bread and butter. There are few pastimes as uninteresting to me as listening to women complain, but it is often highly instructive. In this case, I learnt that in spite of Elspeth’s frequent scolding, Timothy often forgot to change his muddy boots for slippers, spoiling three carpets this year alone. And I learnt that James could not be trusted to handle the ordering of the wines, no matter how often Augusta attempted to leave the matter in his hands.
“If it is not good Scots whisky, he has no interest whatsoever,” she said in affectionate exasperation. “I could pour him out a measure of cough syrup and tell him it was the most exquisite vintage from Bordeaux and he would believe me. He simply has no palate.”
I do not know what reply Elspeth made, for the cat had leapt to the mantelpiece and I went to scratch its chin. I am not usually fond of cats, but I had unwisely helped myself to a piece of rather foul seedcake and I thought a little sleight of hand might permit me to fling it into the fire undetected. I stood with my back to the others and dropped the cake into the fire as I raised my hand to pet the cat. It was a surefooted creature, for it had stepped around another collection of Timothy Gresham’s miscellanea—a marble model of a child’s hand, a bird’s nest complete with ossified eggs. And then I saw it, tucked behind the nest, barely visible: a handful of small bones so distinctive I knew them at once.
They were the bones of a dinosaur.
CHAPTER
19
I pondered the implications of those bones as the conversation flowed gently past. They burbled on about village affairs and the demands on their time whilst I considered Timothy Gresham and his little bones. That they were ancient, I had no doubt, and I knew them to be the remnants of a prehistoric beast. Of what kind, I could not say. Dinosaurs had never held much fascination for me except as an abstraction. I preferred living creatures, particularly my beautiful butterflies that fluttered and flapped, animated and quixotic.
But these bones were of interest thanks to Lorenzo d’Ambrogio. Had they come from his specimen, excavated from the very cliff that had been the scene of his death?
I could not put the question to Elspeth without betraying my interest, and before I could devise a stratagem, Augusta rose, dusting her fingertips of crumbs.
“This has been so pleasant, Elspeth, but I know you must be longing to return to your handwork,” she said with a nod towards a basket sitting on the sofa. It was filled with balls of thin yarn and four pointed needles which held the beginnings of a sock.
“Never enough hours in the day,” Elspeth said a trifle wearily.
“I knocked at the dispensary, but Timothy was not in,” Augusta told her.
Elspeth nodded. “A confinement case. Had him up before cockcrow and he still hasn’t returned.”
“Ah, well,” Augusta said kindly. “Another time.”
