Run Afoul (24 page)

It was Sir Patrick Palgrave. His smile exposed square, strong teeth, while his protruberant brown eyes gleamed, and Wiki was reminded again of a squirrel, except that he smelled of wine and soap. The Englishman's grip on his elbow was tight, and Wiki had to control himself not to pull his arm away.

Palgrave said, “I hope you didn't mind being drafted for the survey.”

“Of course not,” replied Wiki, but wondered if his father had told his friend about their conversation. One of the maids progressed toward them, a tray held high, and Wiki stepped to one side so the food would not pass over his head, managing to detach himself from Sir Patrick at the same time. Then the tray was lowered, while the maid smiled prettily at him, and Wiki contemplated an array of little plates. Some were loaded with enticing tidbits, while others were invitingly empty, each fitted out with a little fork.

Very conscious that Sir Patrick was watching, Wiki took over an empty plate, and then helped himself to a small fried rice ball, carefully wriggling it onto his plate with a serving fork. Then, with equal care, he snared it with his own fork, and popped it into his mouth. It was filled with ground meat, and quite delicious. He looked for another, but the maid had moved on.

He finally glanced back at his host, and said, “It will be an adventure.”

“That's how I hoped you would feel. Your fluent Portuguese will be a great help.”

“But Captain Couthouy speaks good Portuguese—didn't you know?” Wiki watched the bright eyes blink, and said, “He was a shipmaster before he joined the expedition, and a brilliant scholar before that. He went to the Latin school in Boston, he told me.”

Palgrave seemed confounded. Then he waved the hand that was not holding a wineglass, and said, “Do you like my garden?”

“It seems quite magnificent.”

“You must see it in the daytime. I designed the layout myself.”

Wiki hesitated, took a mental gamble, and said, “I suppose you learned a lot from Grimes when he was your father's gardener?”

“Probably—though I disliked him intensely,” said Sir Patrick Palgrave, without even a blink of surprise. He paused to drink wine, watching Wiki over the rim of his glass, and then said, just as candidly, “I was only seventeen when I ran off to Montevideo, and old Grimes was one of the prime reasons I went.”

“You had that much to do with him?”

“I was always keen on horticulture—what a pity he was such a nasty creature! He could have been like a father to me, considering that we had so much in common. Instead, I remember him chasing after me with a spiky hawthorn stick because I had accidentally knocked the first blossom of the season from a two-year-old magnolia sapling—as if it were a major calamity!”

“I thought he was more of an orchid fancier.”

“Why do you say that?”

Sir Patrick's query was sharp. The maid with the tray of food arrived again, and Wiki, deliberately taking his time, concentrated on selecting a little pastry package, fiddling from fork to fork as he got it from one plate to another and then at last into his mouth. It was stuffed with shreds of chicken in a mouthwatering savory sauce.

Swallowing crumbs, he said, “I heard you were an orchid collector.”

Sir Patrick laughed, and exchanged his empty glass for a full one as another maid went by. “That's not quite the truth. My first sight of tropical jungle convinced me that all I wanted to do in this life was find new species, and have plants named after me. Accordingly, I wrote home to announce that I was stopping on in Uruguay to become a famous naturalist. My father was a businessman to the bone, so instead of ordering me to come back home he made up his mind to wrest a profit from my rebellion, and decided on orchids.”

“Why orchids?”

“There was a craze for orchids in London at the time. My father—Sir Roger—set about the business in a very well organized manner, too, which was quite typical of him. He sent me the wherewithal to pay expenses while I searched the jungle for choice plants, but, unbeknownst to him, I declined to do any of the collecting myself. I simply set up a little trading post in a town on the upper reaches of the Rio de la Plata, posted a notice saying that cash would be paid for orchid plants in good condition, hired an agent to look after the shop, and used the rest of the money to ride south and roam the pampas. I'm a passionate horseman, and once I learned to get along in Spanish the pampas proved irresistible.”

“I've ridden the pampas myself,” said Wiki reminiscently. A year ago, he and George, having met up in Montevideo, had taken off for a month to ride with the gauchos, an amazing and memorable experience.

“Wonderful, ain't it,” Sir Patrick said with enthusiasm, and continued. “When I got back to the post it was to find that enough for a shipment had been collected, and so I carried the plants to England, thus resuming my relationship with the dreadful Grimes, who had been ordered to adapt a barn for their reception. Despite his awful nature, he was a clever fellow, you know—he even invented steam machinery to keep the barn warm and moist inside. Later on, he designed propagation houses entirely made of glass.”

The maid with the tray of little edibles came by again, and this time Wiki selected something crunchy and golden. It was quite an art to get it from one plate to another, but when he finally sampled it, he found it to be a deep-fried pork crackling, dusted with salt and spices. It was so good he would have liked another, but the maid had gone, so he said, “The plants thrived?”

“Not only did they thrive, but they made a lot of money. Grimes was still the same miserable, complaining, bullying creature, though. That cough preceded him when I was working, echoing down the aisles of plants like an oncoming ghost. I hear that ghastly hacking cough in my nightmares!”

Wiki had nightmares about Grimes, too. “Was he born with that cough, do you think?”

“I'm sure of it!”

“What were his circumstances? Was he married?”

“Can you imagine any woman marrying that man?” Palgrave demanded, and laughed. “The next time I went home, he wasn't there, thank God. He'd gone to America with a famous astronomer—exactly what my father deserved, having had him taught to grind optical glass! And if my father hadn't been dead by the time I arrived, I would have told him that, too.”

“And now Grimes himself is dead,” murmured Wiki.

“It was certain that cough would kill him.”

“I was there when he died,” Wiki said soberly. Again, he remembered Dr. Gilchrist's exclamation:
“This man has been poisoned!”

“How terrible! Was it awful?”

“I wouldn't wish a death like that on my worst enemy.”

There was a pause, during which Wiki became conscious that his host had moved into the shadows, so that it was hard to see his face. Then he said, “Are you enjoying the food?”

“It's delicious.”

“I was fortunate enough to be able to borrow Robert Festin from the House of the Ewer.”

Wiki was amazed. “Festin! You mean that he's here?”

“In the kitchen, of course—in a supervisory capacity. The whole town was aghast when he was arrested for the so-called murder, so you can imagine the general relief when he was acquitted. Don't you agree that it was lucky for him that Dr. Tweedie confessed?”

“Dr. Tweedie's honesty was quite remarkable.”

Palgrave's stare flickered. Then he stepped into the light, and said, “The ladies have been trying to get your attention for quite some time, you know. Come, let me introduce you before we all go in for dinner.”

He said it so smoothly that Wiki wondered if he had imagined the expression of cold hatred that had so briefly crossed the shadowed face.

Eighteen

The dining room was as beautiful as everything else about the house. Italian frescoes decorated the walls, and the floors were made of inlaid wood. Apart from the long table and the chairs around it, there was very little furniture, so that the voices of the animated diners echoed up to the ornately plastered ceiling. The French doors to the colonnaded patio and garden were wide open, letting in a balmy breeze, the scent of many blooms, and distant strains of music.

Wiki, toward the head of the table, was seated among strangers who gossiped together, and ate his meal in virtual solitude, so unnoticed that he felt relaxed enough to pluck up the occasional tidbit with his fingers. Then he saw that Madame de Roquefeuille, halfway down the table, was watching him with a secret smile. Her white gown did not suit her pale skin, but she still managed to look bewitching. He wondered which of the men was her husband. When their eyes met, she twinkled mischievously instead of looking away. A creased-up grin got an answering smile. When he winked, she put up a slender hand to hide her giggle—and so the silent conversation went on.

It was little wonder that Madame de Roquefeuille was bored enough to flirt with her eyes, he thought. Like himself, she was being neglected. Lieutenant Forsythe, on her right, wasn't bothering with southern gallantry, having other things on his mind. Dr. Olliver was seated on the Virginian's other side, while Captain Coffin, with Couthouy, Pickering, Dyes, Drayton, and Agate, sat opposite, and it was obvious that Forsythe had grabbed the opportunity to instruct them about the responsibilities of the land-based survey party.

Captain Couthouy, though, was not paying proper attention, as he and Captain Coffin had their heads together as they continued to gossip. Wiki could hear their roars of laughter. This, he also discerned, was beginning to annoy Forsythe, because the southerner snapped something, and both shipmasters glanced at him dismissively before turning away. A quarrel was developing, Wiki thought with great misgiving, but then was distracted by the woman on his left, who was trying to pose a question in rudimentary English.

He turned. She was a pleasant, plump, middle-aged person who looked at him fully in the face, in the frank Brazilian way. Her name—or as much of it as he remembered from the introductions—was Senhora Mercedes. When he greeted her in Portuguese she laughed with relief, and immediately embarked on a lively conversation.

While Wiki appreciatively sampled as much as he could of the gigantic meal that arrived in numerous courses, he heard how desolated the whole port had been when the genius behind this repast—“Maestro Festin himself!”—had mysteriously disappeared—“Stolen by a ship!”—and then returned to the fold in shackles—“An astonishing error of justice!” His acquittal had been achieved by the angels of heaven, truly. What a triumph of Sir Patrick's, to obtain the maestro's services for this banquet! A true compliment to his guests.

Then she said, “I hear you are the son of Captain Coffin.”

Wiki admitted it.

“Aha,” she said. They all knew Captain Coffin well. “What a rascal, to keep his interesting son such a secret!” Was Wiki really a New Zealand native, as well as American? When he confessed to that, too, she produced many questions about his exotic background that became more personal as she grew bolder, and which Wiki fended off with the expertise of long experience.

At the same time, he ate, selecting judiciously. Side dishes had arrived with various relishes to garnish the meats—sliced fresh oranges, shredded kale sautéed with onion, dressed rice, manioc, eggs that had been fried in garlic—and he sampled them all with great interest.

“That is very hot and spicy,” she said, breaking off the interrogation to point at a bowl of harmless-looking sauce that smelled of lemons.

“Obrigada,”
said Wiki, and took care to avoid it. The next hour passed very pleasantly indeed, except for ominous signs that Lieutenant Forsythe was becoming more irritable by the moment. When he glanced in that direction, he saw Madame de Roquefeuille roll her eyes.

For her, no doubt, the arrival of the little cups of warm chocolate that signaled the end of the banquet came as a relief. Forsythe, too, looked as if he were glad it was over. He was assembling a pile of scrap notes from various places about his person, undoubtedly getting set to lead the discussion when the women left the table, and the men got down to work. Then, just as Lady Palgrave was glancing meaningfully from one of the female guests to another, and was picking up her skirts ready to stand and lead the way out of the room, Senhora Mercedes found another personal question.

In the silence as everyone looked at their hostess, her voice rang out in the echoing room. “Tell me, Senhor Coffin,” she said prettily, “why do you wear your hair so long? Is it a custom with your people?”

Wiki, who was halfway out of his chair, sat down again with a sense of entrapment. His thick black hair had been braided for the occasion, knotted at the bottom of the plait and tied with a black bow into the nape of his neck, but he realized now that over the months of voyage it had grown very long.

He saw Forsythe turn to his companions to ask what Senhora Mercedes had said. Then, to his horror, he heard him say, very clearly indeed, “Because there ain't anyone of high enough rank to cut it for him.”

Dead silence, as all those who understood English absorbed this, and the rest wondered what he had said. Then the southerner turned to Captain Coffin and said smugly, “You didn't think I knew that, did you.”

Senhora Mercedes said, “What did he say?”

Someone translated it for her. She turned back to Wiki, looking very impressed. “You are of very high rank in your society back home?”

The whole room listened for the answer. When Wiki looked helplessly at his father, Captain Coffin was no help at all, merely lifting his glass in an ironic salute, so he prevaricated by saying, “My mother was of high rank—the daughter of a chief, and the granddaughter of one, too.”

“And Captain Coffin is a famous Salem shipmaster, so your ranking is high, indeed!” exclaimed Senhora Mercedes with a naïve and sunny smile.