All Bedlam Courses Past (part forty-five)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Two

Avarice Creeping On

(part forty-five)

“Myra, go sit.”

“You here,” Regina said next to Élucide, placing her at the table’s cabin end. “Now I wonder if you all can help.”

She added this with hopeless handwork…what a chore, seating guests, but we’re not fussy about it…

 The Sartains found their cards; Manfred made a show, too, at discovering his, and at the honor of the table’s head. Their hostess, in a large sigh, lowered herself at his right.

They were served a compote; their glasses were filled with lemonade.

“Should Manfred ask the blessing?” Myra said.

“I am a rusty Christian, I confess. Perhaps…” He looked Élucide’s way. She returned him a devilish smirk. “I, if not God…though He too, no doubt…ahem, will be enchanted to hear one of the ladies give the grace.”

Myra gave it, with an encore of blushing cheeks, and a certain truculence. The goods would have to be got. Whatever time it was safe, and Élucide could get close enough to Manfred: “Now, which are you really playing to?”

“A werewolf,” small Bertrand said.

This was in the way of a private thought spoken aloud. He had been busy with every article of cutlery, applied as a test of engineering to the melon balls. Élucide dished what remained of her own into his bowl.

“Yes, Bertrand?”

“It was night, and the policeman was talking to the doctor, and the doctor said it’s becoming an epidemic, I can’t explain it, and the policeman said, Doctor, it was blood I saw wash down the gutter, I’m sure of it, and then…and there was a scream, and they ran to see, and the policeman came out and said, no, no, don’t go in the alley, nothing can be done…”

“Well, that must have been fun.”

He seemed to be enjoying his story.

“But the curtain closed, and it was some lady in a house, next.”

A pink-hued galantine arrived. Bertrand viewed this squint-eyed. The child had mischief in him, waiting to be encouraged.

“Try it. They aren’t always as bad as they look.”

Manfred’s voice, intimate (yet not) rose in a lull. “No, really, no harm in the world. Have it out.”

“Well, I will. Luce! I took the train down to St. Augustine, myself with Mrs. Unversaght. She has that place down there, that villa, and Moult was at New Brunswick to see to it about the Zandrine. He was going to captain her down to Florida…that was our little steam yacht we had built. There in New Jersey.”

Her comments bounced bright-faced from Élucide to Manfred.

Élucide, at the name’s invocation, had sat up straight. “Oh, the Unversaghts. I thought they were from Philadelphia.”

50

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part forty-six)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)