All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred seventeen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred seventeen)

He puffed his cheeks at last, ending a struggle. Did it take chalking on a marquee your last remark had been sarcasm, that you were not a friend to any Gremot, least of all the Crownhaven specimen…

Infuriating. The woman’s avarice struck a true and unadulterated vein, of ire, of outrage.

“You don’t need me,” he said, “to help you get money.”

This was pulling a switch, but the blue eyes made a first, then a second adjustment. “So true. Remember that. I will.”

Still, he had got ahead of her in clues. What did you need a man like Allen—

Greener, say, seven years ago. Thinness not the sickly, but the mobile, the shifty-footed kind. Dark hair and eyes, coloring enough. The game had called for the actor’s pep, the rouge box’s bloom, against the original’s lethargy and pallor.

And Allen’s gift for portrayal… Hmm. The smile annoyed her.

She made off, jostling him with a practiced hip. “Go with me. We’re done here.”

“So you knew Honoré up in New York?”

“No.”

If anything more Romish could be implied upon, than that a particular priest went to Crownhaven—not the circuit one who supplied Our Lady in town, but a glossier type for the use of Unversaght and Signorelli—Rowan would have implied it into hay, as Rutherford made hay with the Simmonds story.

Thomas Jerome was a cousin after all, and the people who knew, also were cocksure they did. “I’m gonna ask the streetcar man if he knows a place to eat lunch.”

She burred onto Richard’s coattails as his heel turned, strafing that heel with her shoe. “Uncle Schnelle will give us lunch.”

“Stupid,” she added, under breath. Calling him this. “Do the job you were paid.”

While Mrs. Allen sat cozy in a parlor, Richard went descending in search of Rowan’s man. The matron of the house had put him at a table with a plate and pot of coffee, and of this Richard had no complaints. Plain food was enough to ask, if it could be free…

It seemed free, on the surface, though Aunt Schnelle had wanted him gone in a hurry.

“Go out and take those stairs. Then you get to the bottom of the street, ask for Schnelle.”

Out, yes…but the house looked attached both sides. Richard peered with the coolness he could muster, seeing at the window the women’s downturned mouths, holding off laughter.

These were hill-straddling dwellings, where all the living was up a story. But some door or gate clanked unlatched, and a girl ran up to him.

“Ma’am,” he said, touching his cap.

“You get out!” That, and a giggle, were her answer, plus a smack on the knee. She ran to the corner, eyed him like a sharp terrier. He followed, and here were steps, every few intact.

“What kind of way down is this?” he asked.

The child giggled again and forsook him.

125

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred eighteen)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)