Torsade Literary Space All Bedlam Courses Past (part thirty-nine)
All Bedlam Courses Past
Chapter Two
Avarice Creeping On
(part thirty-nine)
But no, he would not.
He set a waiter at Buckley’s club to come running whenever Buckley arrived at the oyster bar. Alerted, he accosted Buckley and demanded a meeting. Buckley, as before cronies one so accosted must, accepted, sending for Rowan.
Parker walked already in the company of his barnacle and brother-in-law, Osmond Simmonds.
“An interesting name, but one outside this story you will never hear again.”
Thacker laid a tick next to the juiciest bit disclosed so far, a reminder of the visit he would pay to Elizabethtown. Fingers crossed that Rowan (now aged fifty-one) had siblings, or the old side-wife herself still lived and sat lonely for a chinwag.
But bland as British ancestry and Mother Nature had molded it, Thacker’s face reacted only to such quips as LeBeau’s. He chuckled for him, adding: “Spell that if you don’t mind, sir.”
“Now it happened,” Quackenbush took up, “Parker was at his house, when a lady’s carriage stopped on the street, and a footman, or what passes for a footman, baffled the housemaid with a card. The lady was Mrs. Cloughman. Parker asked her indoors at once. Mrs. Cloughman, to give you the nub in a hurry, wasn’t having it with her father’s nonsense. She let Parker know she’d ordered Papa to give up his schemes, return his investors’ money…the lovebirds sweet’ning the deal with a sinecure for Demrose in the Buckley empire. You get an idea of Mrs. Cloughman. She was masterful, too, in dispatching Parker. Told him she could carry him round to Buckley that very hour, and on good authority guarantee her fiancé would apologize and retract.”
Buckley, charged with the second prong of this offensive, called for Simmonds, sending him newsbreaking to Rowan. Young Rowan took him for the perpetrator of a cowardly fraud.
“The New Democrat does not retract.”
Admirable in principle, yes…and too much of it, rising to his feet, speechifying as indignation warmed him up. Simmonds flapped Buckley’s signed directive under Rowan’s nose.
There are a few minor notes to which the pampered tycoon is tone-deaf. Thacker lacked the poor, ambitious man’s quickness (and depth of vision), in perceiving a slight. He accepted commands even from Owen McClurkin, when the hotel clerk was Rutherford’s handiest flunky.
But Owen was happy-go-lucky; time to waste was a gift to him, and he shared it by wasting yours. Simmonds sounded like that combination of curses, the know-it-all sponger.
“Just plumping up his feathers. Had the note, should’ve gone straight inside and hand it over.” Quackenbush shrugged. “Whatever it is makes some men need the little triumphs, put a fellow in the wrong and crow over him. Well, I’m not giving away much if I tell you that for Simmonds, being sly like that was the choice of a lifetime.”
43
Thacker gave a half-headshake. He had let the old doc’s loquacity get the better of him…that part of his mind setting the house in order, while the other part listened. More than the dénouement, he should have divined this:
Quackenbush, who didn’t practice, but sometimes did, was one of those society medicos.
Babies begun that ought not be birthed into this world, errant uncles in the mad stage of syphilis, failures who’d “died unexpectedly”, needing a certificate to disappoint prying eyes…
On such occasions, a Buckley seeks his Quackenbush. Rowan had managed to kill Simmonds. “They fought, after all?”
LeBeau answered. “Rowan was too fresh making a fool of himself. Raw, and didn’t look ahead, just flung out that Simmonds could’ve forged it. Crossed his arms and stood back. Simmonds said—cool that time—I’d have thought you seen that signature often enough. On your mother’s letters.”
“Oh, well,” muttered Thacker, not grinning. “Man can take so much.”
44
Bedlam
All Bedlam Courses Past (part forty)
(2023, Stephanie Foster)