Part 24 (1/2)

FORTY-TWO.

THE PENULTIMATE ENDING.

Alice, St. Ives, Tubby, and Gilbert had eaten a late supper at the Half Toad, and now the port decanter made another circuit, along with a mountain of Stilton cheese and a plate of biscuits. Alice felt sleep settling over her mind, and Langdon had dozed off twice in the last ten minutes and was making an effort to attend to what Tubby was saying to Gilbert. Mother Laswell, Bill Kraken, Clara, and Finn Conrad had elected to return to Aylesford, although it meant traveling most of the night and arriving in the early morning. Within minutes of ascending the stairway in Narbondo's abandoned house they had rattled away in Mr. Klingheimer's Berlin carriage, Finn Conrad driving and Ned Ludd trotting along behind. Mr. Klingheimer had no more need of a carriage then he'd had need of a rifle, Bill Kraken had explained to Tubby with impeccable logic, whereas Hereafter Farm had need aplenty. Possession, as every right-minded person knew, was nine-tenths of the law.

”It was the most astonis.h.i.+ng thing,” Gilbert said now, looking at the fire in the hearth through the ruby liquid in his port gla.s.s. ”When I saw Tubby shaking his cudgel at us from the heights, and I heard him hailing us, my memory was restored entirely and on the instant.”

”That was almost certainly a result of post-traumatic amnesia, or so a medical man would tell us,” St. Ives said. ”You had taken a shrewd knock on the head, which resulted in a concussion. Do you have a clear memory of the time you spent in the stone hut?”

”It's tolerably vague,” Gilbert said. ”No day or night down below, you know. My stomach was my only clock far more accurate than my mind. It astonishes me that it was so short a time, however. Would you be so kind as to pa.s.s that plate of cheese, Tubby?”

The cheese crossed the table, and Gilbert spooned up a mountain of it and dumped it on his plate. ”I do recall Miss Bracken going off with this dwarf, however, who pa.s.sed himself off as Commodore Nutt, which is errant nonsense, of course. I was quite unaffected by her leaving, aside from finding it strange. The dwarf had dug up a fat bag of treasure from under some rocks, do you see, and had enticed her with it. I don't harbor any ill will toward her, nor him neither. I was a mere walking halfwit. There was nothing I could offer her, and she could have no notion that I would recover the lost half of my wit any time soon. It seems to me now that Tubby was correct that she was not whom she claimed to be. I wanted badly to think otherwise.”

”Still and all,” Tubby said, ”I behaved shamefully. Love should be above suspicion, after all. You, on the other hand, behaved gallantly, Uncle. It was I who was in the wrong.”

”Don't talk nonsense out of a mistaken sense of duty, Tubby,” Gilbert told him, piling a heap of Stilton onto a biscuit with great care and wolfing it down.

”There's nothing nonsensical about it,” Tubby said, following his uncle's example with the cheese. ”Desiring to be in the right of something is one of the great human weaknesses. It's true that I did not believe her to be any sort of Miss Bracken, as she claimed, but that mattered little. 'What's in a name?' as the poet asked. The woman was a rose of some variety, or a fern, and if her name was not Bracken, why then it was something else.”

”That's a remarkably philosophical statement,” Alice said, before Gilbert could contradict him. ”And here's a happy thought for you, Gilbert. If our Miss Bracken was indeed not the authentic Miss Bracken's daughter, then what she told you about the death of her mother was no doubt false. The Miss Bracken of your youth might still await you somewhere in the world.”

”A toast to you, Alice,” Gilbert said, winking heartily at her, and Alice drank off the rest of her port. She pushed the empty gla.s.s away from her and waved Tubby off when he offered to refill it.

”I have something not quite so pleasant to relate, Uncle,” Tubby said, setting down the decanter. ”To put it succinctly, your jewel box was stolen with the jewels inside it. It had been in my portmanteau, but it is not there now.”

”The Castellani box?” the old man asked.

”Yes, sir.” Tubby glanced at Alice, who was observing him closely, and said, ”Apparently it was stolen by two of Klingheimer's cut-throats, named Penny and Smythe, not to put too fine a point on it. Both are dead. Finn Conrad told me that the dwarf murdered them for attempting to have their way with Clara and Miss Bracken.”

”By G.o.d I'm developing a high regard for that dwarf,” Gilbert said. ”Castellani is dead these past twenty years, of course, but I have a pa.s.sing acquaintance with his son Augosto, whom I met in Rome some time ago. I'll have another box fas.h.i.+oned and the trinkets reproduced. Think nothing of it, Tubby. We've got out of a tight spot with our skins intact, save for sundry wounds that people like us don't give a d.a.m.n for. Hasbro, of course, is another matter, but the medicos tell us that he'll live to fight another day. Our enemies, on the other hand, are routed, beaten, destroyed, or have run off in terror. The rest doesn't matter, Tubby neither stolen jewels nor stolen women.” He looked sheepishly at Alice, as if thinking that he might have phrased this last bit more carefully.

”You're right,” Alice said to him. ”But what matters to me at the moment is sleep.” She stood up and went around the table to St. Ives, who was dozing in his chair again. She put her hands on his shoulders to awaken him, and the two of them said goodnight to Tubby and Gilbert. As Alice ascended the stairs, she looked back with fondness at the two men, who remained at the table in an atmosphere of great good will, the decanter and the cheese and biscuits between them, both of them with stories left to tell.

EPILOGUE.

THE FIRST SNOWFALL.

St. Ives and Alice sat in the dining room at The Spaniards, a log fire roaring in the brick fireplace, casting a yellow glow on the paneled walls, the air cheerfully warm. ”I'm just saying that I feel as if I failed Mother Laswell,” St. Ives said. ”I misjudged things, do you see?”

A short waiter with bowed legs and with a red bow as a tie brought a small decanter of cognac to the table, along with a plate of toasted cheese. ”Vittles is up shortly,” he said, setting down the plate and decanter, and then he went away again. It was Alice who picked up the decanter and poured a healthy dram into their gla.s.ses.

”To us,” she said.

And then St. Ives said, ”May our family prosper.”

They both said, ”Cheers” before they tasted it. It was entirely up to the standard set by Loftus's half keg, St. Ives was happy to find a perfect stimulant to precede the roast beef and potatoes that were being prepared in the kitchen. There were onions, too, sauteed in b.u.t.ter in the French style, and mushrooms braised in broth.

”I admit that I have a rather violent compulsion to twist your nose when you condemn yourself,” Alice said, ”except that you would tell me that it was nothing more than you deserve, and then I'd be compelled to twist it in the other direction. Humility is sometimes of limited value, as is guilt. I'll ask you this: why regret not doing what you didn't know you should do?”

”I'm simply saying that this was a test in... in morality, if you will, and that I failed it. I would that it weren't so, but there you have it.”