A Quintessence Of Dust

“I suffer in a country where all of the trees are black and where the flowers have no perfume.”

Brittaine set the soft, pink azaleas in the shadow of the still-fresh stone, where the soil stayed upturned some few months on. Molloy was just behind her, with a low-hanging head, and she turned to him with a wide, affected gesture.

“The last time we saw Barker!” she declaimed. “What a hearty meal that was! And we talked, Molloy, do you recall? Gourmands philosophising, we talked richly, with many, o’er wooden, tawny ports and salmon tightly rolled, fois gras, thick and phlegmy, freshly choked that morning. What a generous home was Barker’s! Such a feast that those baked meats boldly furnished forth four more night’s eating.”

A drop of moisture slowly rolled along Molloy’s knave jowl. They had not eaten now for days and talk of such fine food had made him salivate. “What I remember best about old Barker,” he began, “was the little sausage rolls.”

“They were most succulent,” his friend agreed. “And most succinct. It would be hard to fault dear Barker on such a score as that.”

The gravestone praised the former host for fidelity and faithfulness, faithfully survived by Elsie, the lady of the house. The sorry pair could hardly disagree. “It seemed to me that Barker… He… would never let his dear friends go without,” Brittaine declared.

“No, nor strangers,” said Molloy.

“No, nor strangers neither,” agreed Brittaine. “He was very good to us, that time that we were here. If only people took him as example. What a paragon of animals he was! So, let us raise…” she then affirmed, fishing vaguely through her pockets. “For Barker, let us raise a… well, I’ve nothing much to raise. Molloy, you had better tip your hat. To Barker!”

“To Barker!” Molloy concurred, baring his pate to the swelling sun; the two smiling broadly over the narrow plot.

“Ya nyew tha boul Barker, then?” came a voice from behind. It belonged to a thickset gardener or, perhaps, he was a gravedigger, a spade set, work-end up, over an unveiled shoulder. He kept an easiness about him, as if it were his property, and the grave were not.

“We were at the funeral,” Brittaine explained.

“Up at tha house,” the gardener added, turning a thumb towards a homestead, just beyond the great, wide flowerbeds and a spatter of trees. At this distance, even, it seemed to tower over the grounds.

“The patio doors were open,” said Molloy. “So we thought we’d wander in.”

“Owt,” corrected the groundsman, as much for his own sake as theirs. “Ya wundered owt to pay yer respects.”

“Just while we were passing through,“ Brittaine replied. “We had such fun the last time we were here, you see. There was a chocolate fountain, I recall, into which one could dip all sorts of things; like lychees, jackfruits, rambutans and mangosteens and melanos and durians. And by a cut-glass punchbowl, some cubit in diameter, there was a Scottish terrier, a statue, made from sugar and we were all spurred on to break off strands of hair into our tea or our thin glasses of absinthe. It was quite something of an evening”

“Aye, that was after Baker’s funeral, so it was,” nodded the gardener, although, perhaps, he was a gravedigger professionally. “But her ladyship’s, int like that. It‘s right‘an misrible, ainit?”

“Up at the house?”

“That’s tha wun.”

Molloy glanced at the great Victorian building. “Well, of course, the funeral at the house. With all the free food at it.”

“It’s nat so fancy as tha las wun thoh. ‘Er ladyship threw away all her dough sendin’ off the poor, wee dog, on account a her bein’ so aggrieved, that there was hardly enough fer a few sassage rolls at ‘er own wake.”

“But there are sausage rolls?” Brittaine hoped to make clear.

“So yous’ins say,” said the gardener. “But, yah cuddin have a wake wee-out sassage rolls. Wenn yer as deep as she was, even.”

“And she’s deep now, is she?” Molloy inquired.

“Aye, quare an’ deep, G-d rest ‘er,” the gravedigger replied, his faced bowed down and dipping his corduroy cap. “Sheda sold the whole place off, the oul doll, an’ ah think sh’was tryin te, but she weren’t up til it. Nat in that respect.”

“Speaking of which,” Brittaine cut in. “We should head back to the house and pay those same respects again.” The gardener nodded his consent, letting the pair make off towards the house; its broad French doors open wide and, from within, the clack of teeth, half open to speak, half closed to chew.

But, they had barely started on a canter, when the fossor, at the graveside, called them to immediate halt. “Houl on ,” he beckoned, pointing to the shady sepulchre. “Are they azaleas?” And it seemed that with the question came an important answer: the man was not a gardener.

Brittaine crouched to survey the simple posey she had dropped, earlier, by the graveside. The gravedigger seemed somewhat confused or, perhaps, annoyed; it would not do to admit acquaintance with the bold bouquet. “I would dare say,” she answered, with a pin-point vagueness, “That it’s the right time of year for them. And, yes, those leaves are dark enough and they’re grown inside the usual range… but…,” with a cough, “I’ve never before seen a bunch of azaleas exactly like that one there.” Coolly, behind her, Molloy offered no one a reassuring grin.

The shovel met the ground with a thud, not a slurp, as the gardener threw it down in discomposure. “See her, shez always doin’ that, that Ms. Crozier, so sh‘is.” There was a tritone of displeaure in his voice. “An’ ahm s’posed t’be head gardener,” grumbled the gravedigger. “It was her had m’plant thim in tha firs place, but she’s gone an’ pulled up halfa them anyway.”

“She must really miss the dog,” stated Molloy.

“She may an’ all,” the gardener pondered, momentarily. “But it happened before that. Y’see, shez this thing bout bringin’ in the tourists and she brung mee in t’make up all them flowerbeds. Loadsa different coloured ones an’ makin‘ up wee wurds an‘ all. But shez always changin’ ‘im. Ah wish sheed jus make up ‘er bloody mind.”

“Well,” Brittaine confessed. “It was the flowerbeds and their colours that drew our attention from the first.”

And Molly felt he must say: “I noticed quite a curious one, reading ‘AID ME HAROW’ beneath a two-leafed shamrock.”

The gardener shrugged his shoulders with a sigh: “Shez always correctin’ m’spellin’ an’ all.”

“Why, what did it say originally?”

“CAID MEELA FAWLCHA ROWUTT,” he said. “Tha’s part a her plan fer the tourists, so it is. Tha oul Irish stuff an’ all that. Cute. But ah dun m’knees in plantin’ that lot an’ there’s her takin’ up mosta thim. Ah dunno were sh’throws thim all, anyway. At ‘er arse, probably. G-d knows, ah haven’t found tha half a thim. That’ll hardly bring folk to tha house, dead azaleas lyin’ everywhere.”

“Well, we hate to prove you wrong,” Brittaine broke in, “but, with that thought of graceful flowers wilted sadly, we should return to the house, for the end of her ladyship’s wake, before she goes cold.”

“Ar tha food.”

“Yes, I almost forgot about the buffet,” she replied, her back to the gardener already and her legs building up to an impressive feat. Molloy, she could see, had taken brisk strides to the nearest of the flowerbeds, passing the one, in strict martial meter, and brushing loose petals up into the air. She stumbled to catch him without losing grace in front of the gardener. But, she was so hungry, now, that she hadn’t the strength to look eager and ravenous.

The great house bobbed into middle-distance, much sadder now on close inspection. The baronial style, so dour and so Scottish, seemed not so alive as at Barker’s memorial; the clear-paned doors in the old façade creaked open on their whining hinges and, from inside, no song nor story, but the jarring jabber of gentle chatter. A century of northern weather had worn a graveness on its walls, but for repair from fire or lightning or a rather recent weathervane, which kept it off the list of buildings that make the listed building list. Noble dust, ground by squall and mistral, met clay that stopped the gaping holes; from dust it came and would return.

“Even if they are slim pickings,” said Molloy, in puffing flight. “I think it wise to free our pockets of anything that weighs them down. Or fills them up.” And so, with that, he tossed a notebook to the ground, then a tweezers and a magnifying glass; a glass he could have proudly raised in memory of Barker.

Hearing no admonishment, he turned to see his colleague stopped, briefly by a flowerbed, its soil turned and thinned of blossoms. It was just a momentary pause and soon she’d ambled, thoughtfully, back to her partner’s side.

“What did it say?” he questioned her, starting again for Norecastle House.

“It posed a most interesting question,” she said. “Why hire that invidious idea of a man, if you need him to spell or to know about flowers?”

“I thought he seemed nice,” objected Molloy.

“No, it’s not the man’s fault, he did not, after all, build the stereotype.” This was Brittaine’s most reasoned response. “Such a clichéd character is only employed if it serves somebody’s scheme. People with broad Belfast accents do not exist out here. They barely scrape an existence there. No, no, Molloy, if this man is here, he was brought with a very good cause.”

“But what?”

“I think it is really quite simple, Molloy, if one thinks of her ladyship. So simple, in fact, it should not take first prize over our more pressing hunger.”

They strode together, linking arms, up the marble steps, where great French windows opened on a coldly clinking party. Over the murmur of mumbled condolence and half-masticated chicken in bread, the faint strain of strained disapproval carried through the parlour, with the stony scrape of stiff shirt collars swivelling to view them. But Brittaine, in her great certainty, bent towards the voul-au-vents, only for a hand to come between the plate and mouth.

“You two,” cried a red-haired woman, whose blood struggled to show her anger through the dusty pallor of her face. She swatted them with her neat palms and pushed them with the leverage of legs pinioned tightly by a black, funereal skirt. “Get out!,” she yelled. “Get out!”

The male guests moved uncomfortably to help her, some unsure of why they might be helping. Amidst their bashful flapping, Brittaine kept her composure. She took Molloy’s arm, proudly, turning to the waiting window and, in perfect time, they stepped back down into the garden. “It’s quite alright, Ms. Crozier,” quipped Brittaine, as if casting a champagne flute over her shoulder. “We know when we’re not wanted.”

“Again!” shouted the red-haired lady, drawing the doors to a shuddering close.

“That was the same one as last time,” Molloy said, with a twitch, when they were safely amongst the flowerbed again. The nearest one read ‘RAT F ORT‘ in pink letters.

“No doubt, that Ms. Crozier,” answered Brittaine. “Who, as I was saying, before that disturbance, was the one that most certainly did it.”

“Did what?” asked Molloy.

“It is really quite simple, if one thinks of Ms Crozier,” she dryly explained to her colleague. “What do we know about her already? She is eager to turn this place into a show place, when Lady Norecastle was desperate to sell. See that iron weathervane, it went up in the eighties and those reconstructions have changed most of the face; no government order could spare this old building. It would be no sooner flats. Or apartments, at worst.”

“So, to save her position as head of the household, Crozier would have to prevent the whole sale.”

“And, thus, why she hired the gardener, Molloy.”

“To make the old house more attractive to tourists, securing an income that kept her in work.”

“There’s such stuffing in your thoughts, Molloy,” Brittaine, smugly, snapped. “That’s exactly what your finite faculties would think, if the man were qualified. But, purposefully, she picked the man because he could not spell and because he knew nothing of azaleas. It was some ignoble reason. He was mere device in her dire plot, for no professional gardener plants azaleas, in such number, when there’s a canine running round. It wouldn’t run much longer.”

“Because they’re toxic.”

“Azaleas are, in the right amount. And we know already half have been uprooted. And it requires just two percent of the dog’s own weight in blossom to send the poor thing into death or coma. If the giant sugar terrier, we saw at Barker’s wake, was in anyway to scale, the figures work themselves out for themselves.”

Molloy eyed the fallen petals that lingered at his feet with a more than just professional suspicion. “So, she didn’t kill the lady of the house,” he stated, to be sure.

“Not directly, no. But leave a vase in a low place… Or, to reach the dark quintessence of the bloom, grind a dust of it, sprinkle over food or rub it in an ear, a wound, a snout. Then here are we, some few months later and her ladyship has died of grief.” The aging slewfoot pulled, from her pocket, a sausage roll, she’d secreted in the brief furore. She tore it in two pieces.

“You know,” Molloy munched savagely. “She’ll have a tough time bringing tourists here. She doesn’t seem to know how to treat house guests.”

“Not at all,” said Brittaine, with a dainty slurp. “She’s not so generous as Barker.”

“Was there ever such-a-one.”

“Yes, Barker, we know, would make the ultimate sacrifice for a friend.”

“Or a stranger.”

Brittaine wiped a pastry fleck from off upon her jacket. “And she is a fool, you know,” the old sleuth slowly mused, “to think the sale would go ahead. No developer would take the risk to build on an animal graveyard.”