The Gladstone Bag (4 page)

“I beg your pardon, madame, but could this possibly belong to you?”

The Gladstone bag! Emma felt ten years younger. “Oh, thank you! Wherever did you find it? I’ve looked absolutely everywhere.”

“I think not, madame. It was in the one place where you would not have looked.”

He had a slight foreign accent and a lovely voice, deep and mellow. Just now it held an undertone of amusement. Emma couldn’t have helped smiling up at him even if she’d wanted to.

“The men’s room, I suppose. Excuse me, I’d just like to see whether my things are still here.”

She was relieved to find her blue silk scarf, rudely handled though it had evidently been. The coronets, necklaces, and bangles had been jumbled about, but she thought nothing had been taken.

“I’m afraid some would-be diamond thief has suffered a sad disappointment. This is stage jewelry, as you’ve doubtless guessed. I brought it along to do some badly needed repairs. It’s for the fairies actually, our local Savoyards will be doing
Iolanthe
next season.”

“How delightful.” He really did have the most devastating voice. “And you yourself are one of the singers?”

Emma shook her head. “I used to be, but I’m past it now. And you must be one of the guests for Pocapuk. My name is Kelling; I’m your substitute hostess. Mrs. Sabine’s doctor has forbidden her to make the trip.”

He made her a nice little bow, neatly combining regret and pleasure. “I am sorry to learn that Mrs. Sabine is ill, but I rejoice in the good fortune that has sent you in her place.”

This had to be Count Radunov. Emma had rather hoped for a fancy waistcoat and a monocle, but he was quite delicious enough in gray flannels and a taupish brown tweed hacking jacket. Savile Row, beyond a doubt, made for him twenty or thirty years ago, when he was a few pounds heavier and had not yet begun to shrink. The tan Brooks Brothers sport shirt was just right. The only touch of anything approaching the bogus was the almost invisible pattern of double-headed eagles on the dark brown silk ascot tucked in under his open collar. The ascot itself was dashing, appropriate, and merciful to an aging throat. Which reminded her. Emma took out the Liberty silk, smoothed out the wrinkles as best she could, and tied it around her own neck.

He nodded approval. “That scarf must have been chosen to match your eyes by someone who loves you very much. Excuse, I am Alexei Radunov.”

“I thought you must be.” Emma had in fact snatched the scarf out of a heap on a sale table during one of her rare forays into Filene’s Basement, but she was too seasoned a trouper to step on so glorious a line. “Are you Count Alexei or Count Radunov? I’ve never been able to manage Russian titles.”

“What is there to manage? Imperial Russian titles are, alas, a joke that has long ago lost its point. I am, since you ask, Count Radunov. With you, I should prefer to be simply Alexei.”

He would, would he? Once she started calling him Alexei, he’d feel free to call her Emma and others would pick it up. She preferred to remain Mrs. Kelling until she found out what she had to deal with.

“I expect we’ll all get to using first names once we’ve had a chance to become well acquainted.” This should put him neatly in his place among the pack. “Are there others of our party on board?”

“There are five people on the upper deck, most of whom appear to know one another. One fellow, with the sort of bushy black beard that back in the twenties and thirties would have been the trademark of the stage Bolshevik, is sitting apart from the rest. He has a jug of red wine between his knees, of which he drinks, I have noticed, almost none. I myself do not know any of them.”

“Then we may as well go up and introduce ourselves,” said Emma. “I shouldn’t be surprised if the man with the jug turns out to be Black John Sendick. He writes mystery stories, I’ve been told.”

“Ah, that would explain everything.”

“You yourself are a poet, Mrs. Sabine tells me.”

“I am a scribbling mongrel. One does not, you understand, make a living from poetry. I write critiques of the ballet and the opera for a number of publications under several different noms de plume, offering a variety of opinions to suit every taste. I write articles with many profound hypotheses and very few certifiable facts about the paintings in the Hermitage and the expensive whimsies of the late Monsieur Fabergé.”

“Really?” said Emma. “Then perhaps you’ve met my nephew-in-law, Max Bittersohn. He’s doing a book on antique jewelry.”

“Bittersohn is writing a book?” For an instant, the count almost lost his aplomb. “Mr. Bittersohn is a man of many parts.”

“A few too many just now,” Emma replied. “He was so unfortunate as to get his leg broken in three places during one of his business trips. The doctors put steel pins in it, and my niece had to go over to Gdansk and fly back with him. They had a terrible time getting his cast through Customs. Those steel pins kept beeping when he went through the scanner thing, and the inspectors thought he was carrying a concealed weapon.”

“That could only happen to Bittersohn. Then that exquisite young woman he married is in fact your niece? I see the resemblance.”

He saw no such thing, of course. There was no blood tie whatsoever between Sarah and her late uncle’s wife, although there easily might have been, since Kellings had a habit of marrying their more distance connections rather than scatter the family fortune among outsiders who might want to take it out and spend it. However, Emma was willing to give Radunov good marks for effort.

“You’ve met my niece, then?”

“Only once, to my regret, at the French Embassy in Washington. She was the best-dressed woman there, and it wasn’t even a designer model. I also cover the haute couture, you comprehend. This summer, through the generosity of Mrs. Sabine, I expect to make my fortune and release myself from the toils of hack journalism. I plan to write a best-seller under yet a different assumed name. This will be a searing romance about passion and intrigue in the court of Imperial Russia of which, in confidence, I know nothing except what I have read in other red-hot romances. It is a splendid thing Mrs. Sabine does here, to take in the beggars from the gates.”

“I’m sure that’s not how the Sabines have always regarded it,” Emma demurred. “Sharing their cottages has been partly a way of ensuring stimulating companionship for themselves.”

“But for you, madame? I find it impossible to believe you could lack for stimulation at any time.”

“No, I can’t honestly say that I do. In my case it’s been more a matter of overstimulation.”

Emma gave Radunov a thumbnail sketch of everyday life in Pleasaunce, to his sympathetic amusement. “So you see what I’m looking for on the island is simply a chance to get some rest while you clever people are exercising your brains and talents. Shall we?”

She moved toward the companionway. The count reached for the Gladstone bag.

“May I? I promise not to let it be snatched away again. Heaven forbid that your queen of the fairies should lose her crown as did our lamented czarina, with whose home life I am planning to take some shocking liberties. You see? Those must be our fellow guests.”

And a scruffy lot they were was Emma’s first reaction. Why did people of all ages, sexes, shapes, and conditions delude themselves that blue jeans were the ideal traveling garb?

Her mind flitted back to the girls’ camp she’d attended more years ago than she was counting nowadays. Her parents would have driven her to the train, where she’d have been met by a counselor and introduced to those of the other girls whom she didn’t already know. Nobody would have overdressed for the train: a plaid cotton dress with a blazer jacket or a summer-weight suit with a Peter Pan blouse would have been the thing, along with lisle knee socks and sensible shoes. Hair would have been bobbed or shingled; occasional braids or long curls were the sign of an oversentimental father. And naturally everyone would have worn a hat: a perky little cloth beret, a broad-brimmed straw, or a cloche run up by one’s mother’s milliner from the same material as one’s suit.

Once they got to camp, they’d have changed into short-sleeved white middies with green ties and baggy green gym bloomers. Green was the camp color, of course. The chic thing had been to wear one’s uniform with bare legs and not-too-new white canvas sneakers. A knot in a lace or a hole at the toe stamped one as an all-around sport and veteran camper. One had to take out the laces and dab them and the canvas with whiting once a week under the counselor’s watchful eye, then set one’s sneakers on the long wooden porch outside one’s cabin to dry while one went bathing in rubber bathing shoes and bathing cap and a green wool one-piece bathing suit with
CAMP SEETONKA
embroidered across the area where one’s bosom would one day be. Nobody said swimsuit in those days, although everyone was expected to master the back float, the dead man’s float, the frog kick, and the dog paddle. Top girls went on to the side stoke, the back stroke, and what was modestly called the front stroke.

Life had been simpler then. Young girls didn’t agonize about dates; they went to parties chaperoned by their parents and danced with the boys they’d always known. Nobody wore makeup except by stealth. Nobody read risqué books, mainly because nobody ever had the chance to get her hands on one. Nobody had any firm idea of what was supposed to happen on her wedding night, though everybody knew for a positive fact that she must on no account allow it to happen sooner.

She must really be getting old. Emma pulled herself together, put on her good-hostess smile, and walked over to the cluster of chairs. “Good afternoon. Am I correct in assuming you people are all to be guests of Mrs. Sabine?”

Various murmurs and a couple of grunts assured her that she was, and they were.

“Then may I introduce myself? I’m Mrs. Beddoes Kelling.” None of that Emma stuff. “Mrs. Sabine has asked me to give you her regrets. Her doctor decided at the last minute that she’s not fit to travel just now. Rather than upset everyone’s plans, I’ve offered to fill in for her as hostess. She’s given me complete instructions, and everything will go on pretty much as she’d planned.”

“Well, that’s a real surprise for us all,” said a gray-haired woman, probably the eldest of the group, who’d had sense enough to wear a matching wraparound skirt with her blue denim jacket but erred, Emma thought, in her choice of a pink-and-yellow sun hat shaped like a parasol and tied on with a string.

The man with the jug, who’d by now evidently decided to integrate with the group, emitted a hoarse guffaw. “Mean to say you didn’t know already?”

“All I knew was that Mrs. Sabine’s a lady well along in years who’s been ailing for quite some time,” the woman replied with perfect good humor. “She had a real bad time with her chest along about February, and they thought they were going to lose her, but she pulled through. She was well enough last week to go to some kind of a big outdoor picnic. That’s where she fixed it up with this lady about the island. They were having tea inside a big red-and-white-striped tent with a lot of other people around. She’s not a bit sorry she’s not coming; she’s tickled pink to get out of it, and don’t let her kid you, Mrs. Kelling. She’d been willing you to take her place even before the doctor told her she couldn’t come. She has a lot of power, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her. Not that you’ve let her pull you around by the nose. Anybody who’s fool enough to try that will get his comeuppance pretty darn quick, and don’t say I didn’t warn you all.”

T
HE WOMAN GLANCED AROUND
the circle. One or two were smirking, but that didn’t appear to bother her. “Why were you wearing that funny outfit, Mrs. Kelling? Was it because you had to jump out that high window with the black smoke coming out?”

Count Radunov was among the smilers. “And what do you say to that, Mrs. Kelling?”

“I say I’d be interested to know where this lady was last Thursday afternoon about four o’clock.”

“I was in Cape May, New Jersey, giving a talk to a club there, which you can check out any time you like. I’ll give you the name and address of the program chairman. Don’t think I read about you in the newspaper. I can’t make out the fine print, and I wouldn’t have known which one to read because I don’t know where you’re from. The fire wasn’t enough to make the news, anyway. In fact, I can’t see any fire at all, just that one big puff of smoke. There’d been another fire a while before that, though. The firemen were still around. A lot of firemen. What was it, some kind of firemen’s picnic?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Emma was still skeptical but willing to go along until she got this odd person sorted out. “It was a benefit for a local fireman who’d been killed at a fire.”

“Kicked by a horse,” the woman finished for her.

“Oh, come on.” Perhaps it was the red wine that was making the man with the Bolshevik beard so contentious. “They don’t have fire horses these days.”

“They had one at the picnic,” she told him calmly. “A two-headed one. From your side of the family, Mrs. Kelling?”

The remark got a good deal of rather startled laughter but not from Emma. “Yes,” she said.

“Favor your husband, don’t they? That’s his picture you’ve got in your handbag, I expect. He was a fireman, too. Or was he?”

“Not really. My husband was a spark, one of those enthusiasts who go chasing after the fire engines just for the fun of it. He was active in starting our local Firemen’s Relief Fund, so they made him an honorary member of Ladder One as a thank-you.”

“But what about the two-headed horse?” demanded an intense younger woman who actually looked good in her jeans.

“There wasn’t one. It’s just that two of my grandsons dressed up as the front and back halves of a comedy horse for a skit some of the young people put on. My third grandson played a dalmatian.”

“Oh. How dreary. I was hoping for a marvel. Then what about that other horse the fireman got killed on? What did he do, try to ride it up a ladder?”

Nasty little beast! “On the contrary,” Emma replied coldly. “He was trying to rescue the horse from a burning building. Fire sends them crazy; the fireman was pulling its bridle and it was rearing and lashing about with its feet. I don’t know whether or not the horse actually kicked him, but it well may have.”