Nell brought Lili’s head around; the horse was looking at a particularly attractive patch of vegetation. “Seeing as there are no telephones anywhere else.”
“You’re coming with me.”
Her eyebrows raised. “That’s an order?”
“Uh-huh. Are you going to do anything else with the mares?”
“Just bring them out for a walk round.”
While she went to tend to the horses, Vernon rode Aqueduct to the old horse ring. He was glad he’d come to the farm occasionally to ride. He began at a gentle gallop, went around once at a canter and then he got the horse up to speed.
They blitzed the hard-packed earth. It was utterly exhilarating. He thought of nothing but speed and wind. Nothing else, not even money, not even Nell.
FORTY-ONE
Melrose was standing by the horse stall, presently horseless, wondering what Momaday was doing with Aggrieved. He was doing something, certainly, un-caring of Melrose’s explicit instruction that he was not to take the horse out. Momaday’s very touch put a blight on a thing.
I’m going to fire him, Melrose thought. Then he thought, No. I’ll get Ruthven to fire him. He knows how to do these things. Who was he kidding? No one ever got fired at Ardry End. His father, of course, left “all of that domestic nonsense” up to Melrose’s mother, who couldn’t even fire a mouse. Indeed, Melrose had come upon her one day, kneeling by a hole in the study baseboard, shoving something into the hole. Embarrassed she’d been caught out, she blushed and said, “It’s just a bit of cheese. I don’t think they eat properly.”
As Melrose had been six at the time, and already thought his mother a glorious person, her glory was thus made even more manifest. He grabbed her hand and told her she was nice and he’d never tell. Momaday was her polar opposite.
Melrose tramped over sodden ground to the hermitage to see how his new employee was doing. He had hired Bramwell to occupy the hermitage because he thought it might be a way to thwart Agatha, who had taken to spending some time tramping to the horse stall and participating in close colloquy with Momaday (who, heretofore, she wouldn’t give the time of day to) about the care and feeding of the horse. If he couldn’t bar her from the house, he at least wanted her off the land. God knows what the two of them would think up with regard to the fate of Aggrieved.
The hermitage was left over probably from the last couple of centuries and as it was a distance from the house and pretty much hidden by trees, he had forgotten its existence. How he could have forgotten it for two minutes running, he couldn’t imagine, not with a skull and MEMENTO MORI carved on the lintel. He could hardly wait to show Richard Jury! A great place to stuff a body and he was close to stuffing Mr. Bramwell’s into it.
Right now, Mr. Bramwell, hermit-in-residence, was out of his den-a substantial grotto, made of stones, tree limbs and moss, surprisingly warm and snug in winter, though Bramwell was constantly complaining about the lack of heat and light and had been since his arrival several days ago.
All of this hermit business had come about when he’d been talking about the eighteenth-century notion of hermits living on one’s property. Landowners, wanting to be thought both richer and more worldly-wise than they actually were, and certainly more fashionable, often were on the lookout for a hermit. There were, of course, rules to be followed: never set foot off the property, never shave or cut the beard.
“You should get one-an ornamental hermit,” Diane had said. “That’s a marvelous idea. I daresay one would put Agatha off her feed.” She waved her empty martini glass toward the bar and Dick Scroggs. He took his time.
“Withersby!” said Trueblood. “A perfect candidate.”
“She’s a woman: hermits were men,” said Melrose. “Hired by the landed gentry to give the impression of bucolic idleness, or whatever.”
Scroggs came with his small and ice-cold jug of vodka and an eye blink of vermouth and poured this into Diane’s glass, popping in an olive on a toothpick. “You know, I could find you one,” said Diane. “Put an ad in my paper.” “Her” paper because she wrote the astrology column, to everyone’s great amusement “That’s what they did back then. Advertised.”
“Why do I find this proposal hard to believe?” said Vivian.
Diane shrugged. “Lack of imagination?”
Trueblood said, “It’s a great idea. Diane and I can interview the applicants.” He nodded from Melrose to Diane. “I think it would be great fun.”
“Oh, really?” said Vivian, swirling her sherry round in her glass. “Perhaps so. Considering what you two think fun.” Vivian was still smarting over the Franco Giappino incident, when their combined cunning (a force to reckon with) had got him out of Long Piddleton. No one had ever told Vivian what ruse had accomplished this.
So that’s what they had done. They’d come up with Bramwell. People willing to hire out as ornamental hermits were not too thick on the ground. Mr. Bramwell had turned up with two suitcases and a chip on his shoulder as if his last stint as a hermit had left him with a bad taste in his mouth.
Today, Melrose gave him a cheery “Hullo, there, Mr. Bramwell. How are you keeping?”
“How’d you be keepin’ if it was you sleepin’ on moss?” Short and stocky, Mr. Bramwell was somewhat more aggressive a person than Melrose would have preferred in a hermit, but Diane had insisted beggars can’t be choosers when it came to hermits and she and Trueblood had had a hard enough time convincing the applicants that this was indeed a serious offer and their employer would indeed pay the king’s ransom stipulated.
Artificially, Melrose laughed. “Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it? We’ve put in a very nice cot for you and plenty of warm blankets.”
Bramwell gave him one of those hmph-y gestures of his square jaw, narrowed his eyes and took out his stubby pipe (tobacco also having been supplied) and generally did little to project hermitlike subservience. “Not much o’ a job, is it, mate? And when do them cameras start rollin’? I ain’t seen hide nor hair o’ Russell Crowe.”
Well, it had been rather an outlandish lie that a major production company was making Ardry End the scene of a blockbuster film, but Bramwell was driving him nuts with his constant demands to know just what he was doing here, and he bet it was something to do with drugs, and there was no entertainment. He had quite a list of complaints.
“The production company’s been held up by, oh, the star. Crowe is finishing another picture.”
“Them film people’s too coddled all their lives. Not like me, no, I’ve ’ad it plenty rough, me.”
Bramwell appeared to be roping him in to hear the story of the hermit’s life. He was tamping down tobacco preliminary to setting things afire.
“Mr. Bramwell, I’ve got things to do.”
Bramwell made a dismissive, blubbery sound with his lips: “You? You’re one of them titled that’s been waited on hand and foot all yer life, like Russell-bloody-Crowe, on’y ya ain’t as good-lookin’.” He scratched behind his ear. “Now what’s the name of that foxy blond-headed woman he goes wiff-?”
“Why don’t I get you a subscription to Entertainment Weekly? Only now-”
Bramwell, guided by voices Melrose was not privy to, was off on another avenue of conversation, this about a childhood on the dole, and some female whom Bramwell referred to as “My Doris”-wife? sister? cousin?-who had wretchedly died during some routine operation, which explained his detestation of doctors and hospitals. “Now, my Doris had nuffin’ wrong wiff ’er-”
Melrose, who had always been too much the gentleman to shut up anyone, was relieved to see Ruthven coming along the path with the cordless telephone.