Chapter Text
February, 1930
Jem was deep in the throes of inspecting the unfortunate Pelorous Choke when the surgery telephone rang. For a moment he almost ignored it. It seemed bad manners to leave the late Mr Choke half-investigated, his insides gaping for just anyone to see. But the phone went on, so Jem dried his hands fastidiously and said, 'Sorry, about this. Do forgive me for taking the call. Only it might be an emergency, you know.'
Pelorous Choke, being dead, said nothing in reply. Jem hadn't really expected him to. He still grimaced sympathetically at his patient and answered the phone.
It was as well he did, because the call came in from a harried Faith, who was stuck at the office, couldn't get hold of Teddy, had tried Geordie and had no better luck.
'No,' said Jem, 'you wouldn't. They're out chasing down the culprit behind the death of Pelorous Choke.'
'Right,' said Faith, brisk as she ever was up at the hospital. 'Course they are. And Benwick wasn't on the desk because…'
'Oh, that's a rare one, that,' said Jem. 'He's only been delegated to investigate a break-in at the Natural History Museum. God knows what they took, if anything, but obviously Geordie hadn't got time to spare.'
'So, enter Benwick. Got it. And Kitty's unreachable as ever, too, but that's not exactly breaking news. It's not even yesterday's news. Look, Jem, do me a favour and stop at the butcher on the way home, will you? I'd do it but something's come up, and obviously Teddy – '
'Couldn't you get hold of Helen? Christopher?'
'Mara reckons they've gone haring off on one of their Expeditions. They came by for Iain about an hour ago, and there's no answer at Larkrise.'
'Ah,' said Jem. 'Right, and the cupboard is bare?'
"Hm,' said Faith. 'And fish and chips from Penrose was yesterday's dinner.'
'And you can't face it again,' said Jem. 'Well, in that case, consider it done.'
'Thanks,' said Faith. 'And good luck with Mr Choke. Tell the others I said so.'
Jem assured her that he would and rang off. Then he turned back to the desiccated body of Pelorous Choke and resumed his work.
'You poor chap,' he said, 'dead and your dignity compromised for the sake of a telephone call. I really am sorry. But it was an emergency after all. Domestic one, as it turns out. No one maimed or mutilated or, I don't know, hunting vampires…'
A further half hour passed and Jem finished finally, mercifully with the body. He shrouded Choke with a sheet, washed his hands, and coat in hand set out for the butcher. Too late he realized he didn't know where Faith and Teddy bought the meat, but did remember having once or twice run similar errands with Geordie Carlisle under not wildly dissimilar circumstances. Nattie must have been a babe-in-arms at the time, Jem thought. Or possibly Ben. Or perhaps it had been…One of Geordie's gremlins, anyway. Jem picked his way cautiously through increasingly narrow streets, squinting at signs and peering at windows for hints.
He was halfway to giving up and proposing a pick-up supper of whatever could be cobbled together from the larder, when a hand closed around his elbow and a voice like Waterford crystal said, 'Jem! What are you looking for? Can I help?'
Jem turned with relief to face Judith Carlisle, basket on one arm, several dispirited gremlins at her knee.
'Cold still ongoing?' he asked them sympathetically, and a chorus of sniffles confirmed his diagnosis. Judith offered him a smile equal parts exhausted and warm; Jem recognised it for the universal signal of overworked mothers everywhere.
'I won't hold you up,' he said. 'Though if you could point me towards the butcher's, I'd be grateful.'
'I'll come with you,' said Judith and linked her arm through his. 'We were going that way anyway.'
'Thanks,' said Jem, and gestured towards the basket. Judith parted with it willingly, and Jem understood why as he shuffled it onto his arm. The thing certainly had heft to it.
'Just what sort of errands are you running?' he wanted to know. 'Food for the five thousand, or what?'
Judith made a noise of amusement back in her throat. 'And how much food do you think my household gets through in a week?'
Mentally Jem tried to estimate, running through various overgrown gremlins, young cold-ridden ones, the inspector, Judith, various unsolicited guests in the shape of his own gremlins, his brother's, said brother, himself, Teddy, Kitty, Faith, Mara…
'Fair point,' said Jem.
Judith must have seen something of dawning understanding in his face because she laughed a warm glissandi of mirth.
'Here we are,' said Judith.
Jem stumbled, brought up short. It smelled disarmingly like the police surgery and for a wild moment he thought Judith had made a mistake. But then he saw the carcasses hanging in the window and saw that they were animal. Dear Lord, he thought, it's a half step from here to the police surgery. Judith reclaimed her basket, and opened the door, a tinkling bell prefacing her arrival. Jem hung back a minute, breathing deeply and bracing himself against the smell of offal. Metallic. Iron-rich.
'Uncle Jem!' from one of the gremlins and he hastened to catch up with them.
The bell brought a ruddy-cheeked man to the counter, who was even now conversing amicably with Judith.
'You'll want chicken liver,' he said, 'and also brisket, lamb mince…' he seemed to know her order by heart. 'Salt, too.'
Jem wondered idly why on earth Judith Carlisle couldn't buy salt at the usual place, but supposed it was probably still another culinary quirk of her kitchen. It was that or she was particularly loyal to this particular butcher. He was certainly good at his job, even now he was saying, '…chicken fat. I can do you a good offer. The children will love it…'
'Mendel,' Judith said, perforce cutting him off, 'I've brought you a customer. One of Geordie's, from the station house.'
'Ah,' said the man called Mendel, clapping his hands, 'You are Teddy's family?'
For a moment Jem stood gaping there in the shop, with the papered floor and the smell of blood and blinked. Then his brain caught up with the conversation and he said that yes, yes he was Teddy Lovall's family.
'Lovely boy, your Teddy,' Mendel said. 'A very good customer.' He clapped his hands again and called over his shoulder, 'Minah, help our Judith, will you?'
A woman appeared from a back room and commenced noisily preparing meat. She did not look happy about it. If it came to that, Judith didn't look all that thrilled to be having to deal with her either. Jem noticed particularly, because he'd always supposed nothing bar nothing ruffled Geordie's sharp-witted wife. But she was like a fish out of water among the offal and blood of the shop.
'Honestly,' Jem said to Mendel, who was still at the counter, 'I can wait.'
If he didn't know better, the woman, Minah, was mincing lamb with great pointedness. Jem hadn't realised before now that that was possible. Oh, what was he talking about? He'd grown up with Susan Baker. Of course he'd known it was possible. He'd just never witnessed it before.
Mendel began to rattle off Teddy's usual order with gusto. As he spoke, he pulled out pieces of meat and began weighing and wrapping them as appropriate. And all the while he went on chatting with Judith and Jem, now about Teddy, now about their gremlins – Jem was shocked to discover he knew the names of the Larkrise contingent – asking here and there about Kitty.
'We are very interested in her column,' he said, while his wife – she must be his wife, Jem thought, reading the body language between them – snorted derision.
'Mama,' said a boy hitherto unnoticed by Jem, sounding vexed.
He was at the tall, awkward and scrawny stage, with spots on his face and a crick in his neck. Occasionally he rubbed it in a way he thought was surreptitious but wasn't. He was busily occupied stocking the shelves with sundry dry goods, and paused here to hand Judith a box of salt.
At the counter, the woman – Minah, the butcher had called her – snapped something back in answer. Jem didn't understand it, it not being English, but Judith flinched visibly. It was perhaps the most surreal experience of Jem's life and that took doing. Mother and son went back and forth for a bit in the Not-English, whatever it was, Jem not trying to listen but beginning to feel oddly cold and clammy. The smell of blood wasn't helping. His leg, the bad one, began to seize with pain and he thought any moment he would be back in that terrible camp, the one he'd fought so hard to get out of…how the hell had he ended up back there?
'All right?' said Judith.
Simultaneously, the boy said, 'English, Mama.'
She fell silent instead. The boy got off his stepping stool and offered it to Jem. 'Here,' he said. 'You should sit.' Then, awkwardly, his shoulders hunched, 'Sorry about that. Her English – well, hers and Papa's – it's not great. They forget how it sounds.'
Jem shook his head. He was beginning to realise that whatever-it-was was nothing more than Judith's contribution to the gremlins' patois. Not German, he thought, scrabbling frantically for the name. Inhaling blood. Almost choking on the astringent smell. Yiddish. That was it. He was in a Yiddish-speaking butcher's shop because Judith Carlisle had led him there, and if Teddy came here regularly it was probably because he had learned housekeeping at the knee of Judith Carlisle, once Jewish.
The boy handed Jem a glass of water and he sipped it gingerly. He thought, If that lad doesn't fancy the family business, he might yet become a doctor.
Judith counted out the money for her order carefully, and Jem fished in his pocket likewise. The butcher waved the money away. Teddy, he said, would take care of it next time he was in. Anything for Teddy's family. He turned to Judith before Jem could argue.
'You must come over Friday evening. Dinner. Join us.'
Behind him Minah was dicing meat with zeal that was frankly terrifying. Judith must have thought so too, because she blanched.
'No,' she said, but without her usual Waterford-Crystal conviction. 'No. We couldn't impose. Far too many of us for that.'
'But the children!' Mendel cried, jovial as ever. 'It will be good for them! How old is Nesha? She must say a blessing.'
Minah's meat preparations were beginning to verge on the murderous. Jem registered this even while mentally cycling through the rolledex of gremlin names he kept on tab. Who in God's name was Nesha? Ah – Nattie. Wee Iain's Nattie. Of course. But no one had called her that since…another trip through the rolledex. Nothing. Years, anyway. Had they ever called her that? Jem thought it was entirely possible that it was just Nattie's paper name.
The butcher wouldn't take no for an answer. 'I insist,' he said, still jovially.
It was possible Jem hadn't fully recovered from that weird timeslip of seconds ago, because the formidable Judith now looked perilously close to fainting. She opened her mouth to say what was probably supposed to be Absolutely not but nothing came out.
Jem stuffed his money clip back in a trouser pocket and proffered an arm. 'Better make it another time, eh?' he said. He tucked the parcel under one arm and Judith's hand under his elbow. It felt amazingly delicate. Like a bird's or a mayflower.
Mendel looked on the verge of arguing further, but Jem wasn't taking it. If a trip to the butcher's could reduce Judith to stricken silence, God alone knew what a protracted dinner with the man's family would be like. With a jerk of the head to the gremlins, Jem propelled them out of the shop in double-quick time.
Half a pace on, Judith slipped from his grasp and leaned as one exhausted against hte crumbling stone exterior of a be-ivied wall.
'All right?' asked Jem.
'I should be asking you,' said Judith. 'Sorry, I didn't think - your war -'
'Yonks back,' said Jem with a wave of his hand. 'I should be well over it. Anyway, I wasn't the one that came over all curds-and-wey just then. What was that about?'
Jem wasn't sure if he meant Minah's vehement and unconcealed dislike or Mendel's invitation. To Jem's shock, Judith waved both away with a gloved hand in her turn.
'Old hat,' she said. 'Mendel's always inviting us, and Minah's always objecting. I should be over that, too.'
Jem couldn't help himself. So curiosity had killed the cat. But when you spent years as a police surgeon, you learned that sometimes satisfaction really did bring it back. So he asked, 'What was all that about, anyway? She looked furious.'
'Oh, that's easy,' said Judith. 'It's only what my family said from the beginning about Geordie – too old, wrong class, and entirely the wrong religion. How would Cornelia Eliot have taken it if that girl of hers had married a Methodist?'
'Badly,' said Jem. 'Spectacularly badly.'
'There you are then. Families are the same the world over.'
She pushed away from the wall, coralled her children and recommensed walking, still at a clip. Her heels clacked to themselves as she went. This time Jem let himself smile; Judith was many things, but she would never make a cat burglar in shoes like that.
'If you want to know,' said Judith, 'I committed the cardinal sin, converting. Minah's never forgiven me, despite never knowing me before I was anything other than the card-carrying Anglican of St Margaret's you met at the 's in good company, too. Her husband's. Thank you, by the by. I didn't say before.'
'For what?' asked Jem as they rounded the corner of the high street.
'I couldn't see a graceful way out,' said Judith. 'The easier thing was to go along with it, from where I was standing.'
'Ah,' said Jem. 'And in galumphs me with all the tact of an inebriated elephant. One of my specialities - you ask my sisters. Faith too, I'm sure.' He grinned. Judith laughed. Jem felt obscurely the world was settling back in its orbit.
They walked on in silence until the high street disappeared into Church St and past an antique shop with its jumble unseasonably amassed outside and gathering frost.
'Walter was like that,' said Jem, thoughtfully. 'Very big on...Forms, I guess I mean. It's why I always thought - well, he always thought he'd suit Faith, but I always reckoned him a better match for Una, and not just because I fancied Faith from the word go.'
Jem shook his head and grinned again. The sun came tumbling out of a cloud and tumbled back. 'I never understood that, though,' Jem confessed. 'Walter got himself all tied up in knots with his social forms. So, I figured...well, I figured if the easy thing was going to cost you untold agonies and private discomfort, it probably wasn't the easier thing. Sorry to undo all your best efforts to teach the gremlins manners.'
Judith laughed again, a sound as full and clear as the February sun. 'Horse bolted, stable door locked,' she said when she recovered. 'Years ago, I shouldn't wonder.'
They were at the turn for Larkrise now. Jem planned to pass it and see Judith and family home, but she wasn't hearing of it.
'I'm fine now,' she insisted. 'I'll prove it. You tell the others they're coming for dinner Friday. It won't be Mendel's rite, but that's probably just as well. I haven't done a Friday Shabat in years. I wouldn't know where to start. And -' this presumably in case Jem was thinking of objecting 'you accepting graciously gives me an opportunity to demonstrate manners after all.'
'To those gremlins?' said Jem. He shielded his eyes and squinted at where the cold-ridden gremlins cavorted up ahead. 'They're never listening.'
Judith laughed. 'But you'll come anyway,' said Judith.
'And talk murder over your supper preparations, in all likelihood,' said Jem.
'I'd expect nothing less,' said Judith.
Friday came. Teddy fussed noisily about the kitchen chatting simultaneously murder and early dinner preparations. Kitty was working late and he was determined she come home to a hot meal, even if everyone else was out.
'Reckon rice pudding will be enough, Doc? Or had I better put a casserole on to simmer, do you think? She's got such an impossible appetite to predict… And incidentally, is it true that our body was killed by a snake?'
'Pelorous Choke,' said Jem, feeling unequal to tackling the question of sustenance for Kitty, 'was killed by a venom commonly found in asps, yes.'
'But how on earth,' said Teddy, 'did the unfortunate man get access to an asp?! They don't exactly go walk-about in Kingsport.'
'I was hoping you'd tell me,' said Jem.
Teddy, obviously having opted for the casserole, brandished a cutting board. 'Reckon that's enough onion?' Jem shrugged.
'I expect so. Incidentally, the asp didn't do the biting, I can tell you that, too. Not unless it left syringe marks in Mr Choke's forearms.'
Teddy grimaced. 'Right,' he said. 'Good to know.' He set the lid on the casserole, turned the wick of the hob down as low as he could get it, and wiped his hands on a towel.
'Guess we'd better be going,' he said. 'If we're going.'
'Definitely,' said Faith, manifesting in the doorway in a swish of boatlegged trousers and rosy blouse. 'The children are climbing the walls.'
'Are they" said Jem, stepping from the warmth of the kitchen into the cooler subclimate of the sitting room. He took Faith's arm. 'Here I thought they'd gone ahead ages back.'
'Doctor's orders,' said Faith, grinning wickedly. 'No supper without their schoolwork done. The looks they gave me. Murderous doesn't begin to cover it.'
Jem could believe it. He sat, later, at Judith's polished kitchen table, picking bones out of the fish on his young daughters' plates, and listened to them pitching in with the Choke investigation. Someone had let slip about the asp, and they were dying to see one. All too possible, apparently, because the Natural History Museum had a visiting exhibition. Perhaps, when the case was over, Jem would take them.
Probably, he thought, as his son launched into a violent and lurid description of just what the asp did to Cleopatra, this wasn't quite normal. On the other hand, no one was doing a convincing impression of the bedsheet that once masqueraded as dead Henry Warren. Opposite Jem, Geordie joined in with the gremlins, making asp noises, and miming at slithering up the plates of those who did not eat their vegetables. Jem found himself thinking of what Judith had said the other day - too old, wrong class, and entirely the wrong religion. He wondered if the people who'd said it would still say it, seeing him like this, the well-fed children in paroxysms of youthful high-spirits, guests happy, the table burdened with the Good China.
'Penny for your thoughts,' said Judith as she leaned across Jem for one of the pieces of said Good China.
'Just thinking,' said Jem, 'what a good thing we're on to, here. You, Geordie, the rest of us.'
Judith smiled sunny indulgence. 'And not at all about asps?' she asked.
'Oh, well,' said Jem. 'Asps, too. Can't be too dangerously normal, you know. The world's more interesting when you can give it something to talk about.'
He meant it to be flippant, but he was surprised to find, as the clack of silver and china continued, that it was true. There was a poem for it. Surprised by joy? Walter would have known. Ah well, Jem would honour the spirit of his brother by living it still. They all would - even Judith with her scrupulous manners. Even the half-wild gremlins. And that was exactly as it should be.