The FitzOsbornes in Exile

  I sighed. “She did say last week that it didn’t fit.”

  “Well, apparently it does fit, if one also wears some sort of laced-up whalebone thing that Barnes dug out of the depths of Aunt C’s wardrobe.”

  “What, a corset?” I asked, starting to giggle.

  “Aunt C called it ‘stays,’ and Veronica called it ‘a medieval torture device’ and claims she can barely move in it—but look, the matron of honor is ordering you over. How much do you want to bet she was a prefect at school? Well, I suppose we’re starting, then.”

  The ceremony went surprisingly smoothly, apart from Anthony dropping the ring, and the smallest page boy growing bored and crawling off under a pew. In an extremely short time, the newlyweds were wandering back down the aisle to the thundering chords of Mendelssohn, Anthony dazed with happiness, Julia clinging to his side and beaming round at the congregation. We spilled out into the gray London afternoon to find a small crowd of onlookers being held back by a harassed-looking policeman.

  “Oo is it, then?”

  “Lovely, ain’t she?”

  They were all women, except for a single gentleman in a Burberry coat, who stood on tiptoe and craned his neck for a glimpse of the bridal party. A romantically minded passerby, I thought—unless he was one of Julia’s spurned suitors, come for a final, tragic look before he threw himself off Waterloo Bridge. Julia sailed down the red carpet, tugging Anthony in her wake, waving away confetti and the flash of the newspapermen’s cameras, and then the two of them were carried off by the chauffeur.

  “Come on,” said Toby, appearing beside me. “We’re going in Rupert’s car.”

  “You’d better drive,” said Rupert. “Hello, Sophie, you look very nice.”

  “Thank you,” I said. The last time I’d spoken with him, I’d been bawling my eyes out, but it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as I’d feared, seeing him again—probably because it had been so long, and also, we weren’t alone. I was about to compliment him on the Bible reading he’d done during the service when I was distracted by his top pocket, which had suddenly … twitched. A small pink nose appeared, followed by some white whiskers. “Rupert, is that … is that a rat?”

  “No, no, a dormouse,” he assured me. “She’s due for a feed.” He took a tiny medicine bottle from another pocket and shook it.

  “Oh,” I said weakly. “Right.”

  Veronica hurried up, clutching her side, as I was climbing into the car.

  “Sorry, just wanted another look at that east door,” she panted. “There’s a marvelous window dedicated to William Caxton—he printed the very first English book, you know—and he’s said to have been buried in the churchyard.”

  “Samuel Pepys and John Milton got married here, too,” said Rupert, now holding an eyedropper to the little flannel-wrapped bundle he’d propped up in one hand. “Er, not to each other, obviously.”

  We moved off, surrounded by dozens of Rolls-Royces and Daimlers, as well as a couple of taxis, and made our slow way to the family’s town house, which they’d temporarily repossessed from their tenants. Veronica seemed to have recovered from any bad temper occasioned by the corset, and she chatted away cheerfully about whether the new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, would be any better than Stanley Baldwin (probably not, she decided) and whether Mrs. Simpson was already regretting having married the abdicated King Edward (very likely, judging by their gloomy wedding photographs).

  “Park over there, Toby,” said Rupert, tucking the baby dormouse back in his pocket as the house finally came in view. “We can go through the side gate.”

  Now, I’ve been careful to write everything I can remember up till this point, no matter how trivial, but this is where it gets confusing. There were such a lot of people milling about, most of the ladies wearing enormous straw hats laden with flowers and feathers, and the gentlemen in tall top hats, all of which made it rather difficult to see. I know a taxi pulled up behind us and someone got out—but was it someone visiting a house further down the street, someone entirely unrelated to subsequent events, or was it someone who followed us inside? We pushed through the crowds and made our way to an empty corner of the main hall, where Toby tried unsuccessfully to flag down a waiter. Through an archway, I caught a brief glimpse of Julia surrounded by babbling aunts before the whole group of them moved into a large drawing room to inspect the wedding presents. Then Simon, who’d escorted Aunt Charlotte to the house, appeared halfway up the first flight of the main stairs, clearly looking for us. I waved, but he didn’t notice. At that moment, a harsh voice cried out.

  “Veronica FitzOsborne!”

  Veronica, slightly apart from the rest of us, turned. There was a sudden pop, like that of a champagne cork, and the smell of fireworks. Then Veronica staggered backwards.

  “Oh,” she said, sounding more surprised than anything else. Her arm knocked against a marble pedestal, upon which was balanced a large and very ugly vase. Veronica and the vase hit the floor at the same time—the vase made rather more noise. There was a scream from near the front door, and then Simon’s voice, raised above everyone else’s, “Get him!”

  But all I cared about right then was Veronica. I threw myself down beside her, although she was already starting to sit up.

  “Veronica, are you all right?” I cried, taking her arm and helping her lean against the wall. She looked down at herself.

  “Well, I think so,” she said. “I mean, I don’t seem to be bleeding or anything. What was that? It felt as though I’d been punched in the side by an invisible fist.”

  “Good God,” said Toby, who’d gone white. “That’s a bullet.” He pointed at the floor with a trembling finger. We all stared. Then Veronica started shaking and gasping.

  “Don’t worry!” shouted Simon, running up. “There’s a doctor coming. We just need to—Someone get a blanket, she’s gone into shock!”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” spluttered Veronica, and I realized she was laughing. “It’s this corset. The bullet bounced off!”

  “It’s nothing to laugh at!” snapped Simon. “You could have been killed!”

  Rupert appeared with a cashmere wrap, which he tucked around Veronica, then he and Toby raised her to her feet—with some difficulty, as she was weak with mirth. Leaving her to Toby and me, Rupert darted off to unlock an empty drawing room. There we sat Veronica down on a chaise longue and she examined herself more carefully. There was a small charred hole in the left side of her dress, just above where her ribs ended.

  “Look, you can see where the whalebone’s cracked,” she said. “But the bullet can’t have been traveling very fast, otherwise it would have gone straight through. Let me see, Toby.” He held out his hand—he’d scooped up the bullet in his handkerchief before it could get lost. “Yes, the front bit is flattened. Isn’t it tiny? I always imagined bullets were bigger than that.”

  “You mustn’t touch it, there might be fingerprints,” said Simon. “I’ve marked the spot where it fell, and the butler’s roping off the area. The police have been called—no one caught that man.”

  “What exactly did you see?” I asked.

  He pushed his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “Just someone who seemed out of place. He wasn’t wearing a morning suit, just a coat and an ordinary hat, and he was looking around for someone. Then he shouted and pulled a gun out of his pocket—”

  Rupert came back in with a maid, who carried a robe of Julia’s and a silver ice bucket. “There’s a powder room through that door there,” he said. “You ought to put some ice on that, Veronica, you’ll have an awful bruise otherwise. I brought some arnica, too.” He pulled a bottle from his pocket, and the dormouse poked her nose out hopefully at the clink of glass. “Oh, and, Toby, your aunt wants to know what’s going on,” Rupert added apologetically. “She doesn’t know it involved Veronica, just that there’s been some sort of incident …”

  “Oh dear, I’d better try and head her off,” Toby said. “Can we keep all this from Julia
, do you think? It’s hardly what one wants to hear about on one’s wedding day.”

  “That’ll be difficult,” said Rupert. “There are ladies fainting all over the place, now that they’ve found out what happened.”

  “At least they’ll give the doctor something to do,” said Toby. “Veronica, are you sure you don’t need him to—”

  “Of course not,” came Veronica’s muffled reply from the powder room. “I’m perfectly—Ow! No, don’t worry, I just stabbed myself with a bit of whalebone. Sophie, can you give us a hand with this thing?”

  Aunt Charlotte stormed in five minutes later, just as we emerged from the powder room. Toby followed, sending us rueful looks from behind her back.

  “Really, Veronica!” our aunt said crossly. “If it’s not one scandal, it’s another! First Communism, then refugees—and now this!”

  “She didn’t do anything!” I cried indignantly. “It’s not her fault that—”

  We were interrupted by a portly policeman, who introduced himself as Inspector Sykes.

  “Who?” said Aunt Charlotte, glaring at the hapless inspector. “I’ve never heard of you. Where’s the Chief Inspector? In any case, I refuse to allow my niece to be interviewed. If you must ask questions, you may address them to me. She’s in shock, in a delicate frame of mind—”

  “I most certainly am not,” said Veronica, pulling Julia’s dragon-embroidered black-and-gold silk robe tighter around herself and sitting down on the chaise longue. The two constables who’d appeared behind the inspector goggled at her.

  “And is in a state of undress,” hissed Aunt Charlotte in Veronica’s direction.

  “Do have a seat, Inspector,” said Veronica, ignoring her.

  “Well, Your Highness, if you could explain—in your own words—the events as they transpired,” said the inspector. “Ahem!” He turned around and glowered at the constables, who stopped gaping at Veronica and hurriedly flipped open their notebooks.

  They took a statement from her, then from Toby, Rupert, Simon, and me. Phoebe was summoned by Aunt Charlotte to bring a change of clothes for Veronica and arrived looking far more upset and fearful than the victim of the crime. The policemen interrogated the waiters, the Stanley-Ross butler, and the two gentlemen who’d unsuccessfully pursued the mysterious assailant down the street. A footman handed round mushroom vol-au-vents, smoked salmon sandwiches, and glasses of champagne. Lord Astley came in to see how Veronica was and said he was no expert, but the bullet looked to him like a .41 rimfire cartridge, fired from one of those Remington double-barreled derringers. More policemen arrived to inspect the scene of the crime. Julia discovered what had happened after overhearing some waiters, rushed in, and threw herself upon Veronica with shrieks of alarm, until she was finally persuaded by everyone to go back upstairs for the wedding speeches.

  It was almost dusk by the time the policemen gathered back in the little drawing room, where we were all eating wedding cake—except for the dormouse, who was licking milk from the end of the eyedropper.

  “Well?” said Aunt Charlotte impatiently. “What have you discovered?”

  “It appears,” said the inspector, “that Her Highness was shot.”

  “Yes, we’d worked that out for ourselves,” said Veronica. “But have you identified the pistol? Can the owner be traced?”

  “It’s probably a small handgun,” he said, peering at his notes. “Likely to have been manufactured, and perhaps purchased, in America. Either single-barreled or else … not. A fairly old gun, if it’s single-barreled. If it were double-barreled, the assailant would have fired a second bullet.”

  “Or else he fired the first bullet outside, to test the gun was working,” said Veronica. “Or thought I was mortally wounded after one shot, and knew if he stayed any longer, he’d be caught. What about fingerprints?”

  The inspector shook his head. “Now, if the gun itself were found … but it doesn’t appear the assailant threw it away.”

  “So, you haven’t discovered anything useful?” said Simon, exasperated.

  “Well!” huffed the inspector in offended tones. “If certain persons hadn’t destroyed valuable evidence …” Toby had told them about the poison-pen letters.

  “And what would that have shown you?” snapped Veronica. “That they’d been typed using a small Olivetti that was probably purchased somewhere in Europe, on a brand of writing paper available throughout the world?”

  I did feel a bit sorry for the policemen. When they’d asked for the names of any person who might have reason to dislike Veronica, Simon said, “Anyone who’s ever sat next to her at a dinner party, the majority of this year’s debutantes, and the entire readership of the Fascist newspaper Action.” Toby, upon being informed that ladies who were shot were generally the victims of rejected suitors, provided them with the name of Lord Elchester’s nephew. Aunt Charlotte berated the youngest constable for spelling “FitzOsborne” incorrectly and nearly made him cry. And …

  Oh! I’ve just thought of something!

  Back again, hours later. Glancing over my journal entry, I suddenly had an idea about the man Simon had seen from the staircase, the man in the ordinary coat and hat. What if the gunman had been the same man I’d seen outside the church, and he’d been waiting for a glimpse of Veronica, not Julia? Comparing descriptions, Simon and I agreed that the men were of similar height and wore similar clothes, so Simon and Toby went off to the newspaper office to see if the wedding photographs had been developed. Luckily, they had. Even more luckily, the sub-editor accepted Toby’s improbable story about being the photographer hired by the Stanley-Rosses, having a whole roll of film over-exposed, and needing to purchase some newspaper photographs to save his professional reputation from utter ruin.

  “But couldn’t you just have told the police and had them requisition the photographs?” asked Rupert, who came round this afternoon for tea.

  “What, send PC Plod after them?” said Toby. “And have him drop them in the street or accidentally file them in the wastepaper bin?”

  “Anyway, we did give them the photographs, after we’d had a good look at them,” said Simon. “The man’s face wasn’t very clear—he had his hat pulled down low and his collar up—but Sophia recognized him.”

  “I said he looked familiar, but I couldn’t think where I’d seen him,” I corrected.

  “Yet none of us recognized his voice,” said Veronica, frowning. “Although I suppose he could have been trying to disguise it. It was rather hoarse, wasn’t it?”

  “And quite high-pitched,” said Simon.

  “Definitely English, though, not German or anything like that,” mused Veronica. “Of course, we only heard two words.”

  So, it’s as much of a mystery as before—but it was rather exciting, for a moment, to think that my journal had provided a clue, however small. And I might yet recall why he seems familiar …

  After that, Simon was summoned to the library to type some letters for Aunt Charlotte, and Veronica went off to telephone the Reverend Webster Herbert about the Basque children, two dozen of whom are due to arrive in Milford in a few days. Toby, Rupert, and I sat around the tea table, discussing the bits of the wedding we’d missed. Anthony, it turned out, had become rather drunk after his best man laced his champagne with vodka; an elderly aunt got her tiara caught in an elaborate floral arrangement, knocked over a candle with her elbow, and set fire to the tablecloth; and a scandalous divorced second cousin, whom nobody could remember inviting, had caught Julia’s bouquet.

  “Oh, and I forgot to ask,” said Toby. “How was the Fourth of June?”

  Apparently, this is some big day at Eton, when there are speeches and cricket matches and a procession of boats and fireworks, and all the families turn up with vast picnic hampers.

  “Everyone was busy with the wedding preparations, so it was just David and Penelope this year,” said Rupert with a sigh. “Well, I don’t blame the rest of them for wanting to stay away. Poor Mummy must have been to a dozen of
them by now.”

  “I suppose David loved it,” said Toby.

  “All those fellow Old Etonians slapping him on the back and reminiscing about the best days of their lives,” agreed Rupert. “If I ever have a son, I won’t be inflicting any of that rubbish on him. He can go to the local secondary school.”

  “Do you suppose even they have ridiculous, pointless rules?” asked Toby. “Remember that time I sat on the—”

  Whereupon both of them collapsed in giggles, and their gasping attempts at explanation just left me bemused. Apparently, Toby, in his second year, had sat upon a certain wall at Eton, causing widespread horror and disbelief because only a select few were allowed to rest their behinds on that particular stretch of brickwork. It all sounded rather silly to me.

  “Very silly,” said Toby, taking a deep breath and wiping his eyes. “Oh dear. Do you suppose Oxford will be as bad?”

  “It couldn’t possibly be,” said Rupert. “And even if it is, it’s only three years, not six.” He took the dormouse out of his pocket for a feed just as Toby was called away to the telephone.

  Rupert proceeded to tell me a lot of interesting facts about dormice—that they spend most of summer up in trees and most of winter fast asleep in nests on the ground; that they love honeysuckle and hazelnuts; and that their tails are so fragile that often the skin and bones fall apart, which is why some dormice seem to have such short tails. They’re really quite adorable, I’ve decided, with their enormous dark eyes and shell-like ears and extravagant whiskers—not at all rattish.

  “Sorry!” cried Toby, coming back in ten minutes later. “Aunt C suddenly realized you two were alone in here, so I’ve been ordered back to chaperone you. Don’t mind me, I’ll keep my eyes shut and my fingers stuffed in my ears. Carry on.”

  I started to laugh—both doors were wide open, and maids had been marching in and out to clear the tea things, so it was hardly the place for a bit of romance, even if the idea had entered either of our heads, which it most certainly had not—but Rupert went a bit pink and said he had to be getting along, anyway. Once he’d departed, I was sent for by Aunt Charlotte and subjected to one of her “little chats.”