“Sensible bloke,” I said with feeling. “If I were him I’d stay that way.”
Her musical laughter followed like a hound on my heels.
« ^ »
—— 15 ——
That evening I struck out of my mental cocoon. It was definitely becoming time to rock the boat. Over a frothy frozen thing which tasted of lemons, I asked about Robert. I badly wanted a phone but wasn’t even sure if Tachnadray had one.
“It’s a question of money, folks,” I announced, mostly to Elaine. “We ought to get Robert in to help us.”
Shona looked up quickly but it was Michelle who countered. “He’s no furniture man, Ian.”
“He’s a pair of hands, love,” I corrected, thinking: So Michelle wants Robert kept out of Duncan’s hair. Does Shona?
“No,” said Elaine as Duncan drew breath to chip in. “Robert’s already got too much to do.”
Duncan subsided. Happily I clocked up another fact: Robert was busily occupied, on Elaine’s orders.
“Money,” I said. “There’s a lesson here. Me and Duncan have labored long and hard, and finished the ‘antique’ piece this afternoon. It’s good, but now we’re stuck. We must start looking for wood, materials, decide on the next—”
“You can’t start one till the first’s finished, Ian,” Elaine said.
“Wrong. It’s bad fakery, Elaine.” I leaned forward on the mahogany, eager from certainty. “Even genuine workshops work by overlapping. Sheraton, Chippendale, Ince, Mayhew, Lock. Do one at a time and you end in the workhouse.”
“It’s dangerous, Elaine,” Michelle said. Shona gave her a look, normally not this quiet.
“Ian’s inclined to be bull-at-a-gate,” Duncan added. I don’t like being apologized for and said so.
“Let him speak.” Elaine was in a lace blouse with a blue velvet neck ribbon. Some pudgy lady serf was helping tonight. New to me, but she was clearly a Tachnadray veteran and called Elaine “pet,” to Michelle’s evident annoyance. “I’ve already disappointed Ian once today. He wants to make us an Olde Worlde Disneyland.”
“How much does running the estate cost?” I asked, ignoring Duncan’s warning frown to go easy. “Say it’s X, for rates, wages, food, heating, clothes. And what’s the income?
Say it’s Y, from Duncan’s reproductions, sheep, crops—do you grow crops?” I enthused into their silence, “It’s Mr. Micawber’s famous problem: Happiness is where X is less than Y. What’s wrong with not being broke?”
Duncan cleared his throat. “Like you, Ian?”
“Touché,” I said, beaming. “We hire a promotions man for plans to make the estate solvent.” I gazed round at them all. “It’d take one single phone call.”
“I won’t have Tachnadray a mere tourist stop.” Elaine had spoken. “I couldn’t have dinner ogled by tourists at so many dollars a head.”
“It’s degrading for a noble house,” Shona said.
“Not even a Clan McGunn coat-of-arms on head scarves, wooden plaques?” I pleaded.
“Pride’s expensive. Christ’s sake, Elaine. Have you never seen a Manchester mill on the go? For a percentage they’d do thousands a bloody day—tea towels, traveling bags, all in McGunn tartan. Cups, mugs, silver brooches, Tachnadray deer. And Duncan’s workshop’d turn out phony shields—” I was in agony. “Can’t you see?”
“No.” Elaine calmly pronounced over my distress, and with utter serenity gestured the serf to pour coffee. “I’m becoming rather tired of your schemes, Ian.”
One last try. “Then it’s your dreaded Tachnadray secret.”
Everybody stilled, even the beverage-toting peasant.
“Secret?” Michelle made a too-casual search for sugar, which anyway was within easy reach.
“What secret?” It wasn’t until Duncan demanded point-blank, his voice harsh and his pipe like a clutched weapon that the penny dropped and I thought in sudden jubilation, God, there really is something.
“Wine,” I explained, cerebrating at speed.
“Establishing a vineyard,” from dear innocent Michelle, “takes centuries.” She’d dressed in lovely harebell blue.
“So we don’t,” I explained, thinking, Give me strength. “We never even see the bloody wine, see? A vineyard simply bottles us up Tachnadray Special. Prints new labels, ships it to a distributor.”
“Outsiders!” Shona spat.
“No, Ian.” Another royal imperative. “Too long-term.”
“Then you don’t need money,” I concluded with angry finality. For a second I thought I’d overacted, but not for Michelle.
“You’re wrong, Ian. We’re in dire straits.” She really did say it, “dire straits,” straight out of her English lessons.
“Michelle,” Duncan warned, too late.
I said, acting driven to the brink, “Then we sell up.”
Outrage. Horror. The lackey almost dropped the coffeepot. Duncan almost swallowed his pipe. Michelle gave a Gallic squeal of turmoil-powered indignation. Shona paled.
Even Elaine’s smile wilted somewhat, a case of needle reversed. Robert would have inverted me in the nearest soufflé.
“At an auction. Here, in Tachnadray.” It was my turn to smile now. “We sell every damned thing. Even,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “even some things we haven’t got.”
Well, what works for Sidoli’s traveling fairground can work for Tachnadray’s immobile gentility, right? Elaine looked and said nothing. The rest tried to argue me into the ground. They hadn’t bothered to listen to a word I’d said, so I just noshed, nodded, muttered “You’ve got a point there” sort of responses, and started working out the scale of the operation. Barefaced robbery, lies, and immoral usury are the tools of the work world’s greatest auction firms. They’d be just as useful in Tachnadray.
Because of Elaine’s telepathic swiftness in mind guessing, I carefully didn’t think of my other scam, which was to find this oh-so unimportant cottage and raid the damned thing.
Theft, I often say to myself, is often in a good cause. It’s especially beneficial when it happens to somebody else. Oh, I don’t mean the great Woburn Abbey silver haul, though even that netted mind-bending reward money when those two workers found the cache in that Bedfordshire water-pumping station. Somebody always does well out of it, even when theft goes wrong. One problem is Finance Law, the great rip-off of modern times. Those lucky enough to be in on it—police, lawyers, estate agents—are of course all for it and want us, the oppressed majority, to join in their hearty approval.
We don’t. Reason? Because the Law costs us a fortune. All we can do is try to exist in spite of it.
That evening, aware now of the strong differences of opinion around the table, we separated with Elaine saying she’d “take advice” and that we’d have a conference about it all in a day or so. Money was obviously Tachnadray’s old battleground where Shona and Michelle fought daily. Very serious stuff. Solvency’s a perennial laugh, though a rather moaning sort of laugh, at Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. But I’ve always managed by having friends I can rely on, borrow from, or otherwise sponge off, and Tachnadray only had this gaggle of clan innocents.
Up in my converted garret I easily worked out the solution, how to hold an important auction sale of the many valuable antiques we hadn’t got. The idea wasn’t new, but the actual sin would have to be. In immorality, freshness is always important, like in fruit. I shelved it, and settled down to examine the Ordnance Survey map I’d brought. This cottage Hector had mentioned was niggling.
Scattered thinly among the colors and contours of the uplands round Tachnadray were black rectangles that indicated buildings. The mansion was clearly marked. I’d work outwards, and start with the cottage on the valley road. I’d noticed it standing maybe a mile beyond the end of the drive.