I Am the Only Running Footman by Martha Grimes Page B

with a perfectly marvelous fireplace —”
    â€œIt smokes,” said St. Clair, putting his whiskey aside.
    Melrose was actually becoming alarmed when he saw Sybil St. Clair ring for their servant. “The inn is fine, Mrs. St. Clair, please don’t —”
    â€œIt does not smoke, Sinjin. The fireplace was seen to by Parkins just this summer —”
    â€œParkins doesn’t do a good job, my dear.”
    â€œMother—”
    â€œThe Mortal Man is an architectural gem,” said Melrose quickly, as the servant Peters came through the double doors. “And as I told Lucinda —”
    â€œWe can just have Peters get your things for you. He can take the car.”
    â€œI told Lucinda” — Melrose was practically strangling his whiskey glass — “I’ve a special interest in inns, and the MortalMan is a remarkable example of the old coaching inn —”
    â€œI shouldn’t think so,” said St. Clair, who was staring up at the ceiling. “I shouldn’t think the Mortal Man was much of an example of anything.”
    â€œIt’s no trouble at all Mr. Plant. And it won’t take more than a moment. Peters —”
    Melrose’s paean to the English inn rushed ahead (he hoped) of Peters’s leaving for it. “You see I always stay at an inn whenever there’s the chance. As a matter of fact, I’m doing a sort of study of the English inn. Why, only the church has a richer history —”
    â€œOh-ho!” said St. Clair, with a crimped little smile. “Not our St. Mary’s I assure you —”
    â€œâ€” to sit before an open fire and see the copper catching the light; to drive through the coaching archway into the cobbled yard and imagine the strolling players of Elizabethan times —”
    â€œNot the Mortal Man’s, I shouldn’t think. The milk-float lost a wing and got its sill torn off there; and as for strolling players, well  . . . unless one thinks of the Warboyses in that way. They do tell me he sings . . . .”
    Melrose hoped not. “The timbered frontage, the fittings, the cellars, the carved woodwork, the rafters and beams —”
    â€œDry rot and rising damp,” said St. Clair, pleasantly.
    Into this overlapping conversation came the ringing of a telephone from deep in the house, and Peters, duty calling him elsewhere, nodded and begged to answer the sound.
    Melrose leaned back, as breathless as if he’d run the mile, and feeling between the Warboyses and the St. Clairs like an object to be sent here and there, bag and baggage, dropped and collected, dumped and thumped on, and generally traded for a mess of pottage.

11
    B REAKFAST was an occasion involving the usual hazards. He should have known that the juice would spill, the porridge tilt, and the mackerel slide and taken the precaution of wearing a bib.
    As Melrose ate the mackerel he had rescued from his lap, he listened to the keening sound coming from the kitchen. It increased and diminished each time Sally Warboys slapped open the door to bring him another dish. It might have been the screech of a kettle forgotten on the hob or the youngest Warboys (there was a baby, too) with some intractable demand. There had already come from the kitchen the clatter of breaking crockery and the usual assortment of angry voices as the Warboyses took their battle stations.
    Sally Warboys, in washboard gray, came out of the kitchen in her half-run, half-walk, to deposit Melrose’s pot of tea, which struck the table edge and sent hot water splashing down the cloth, just missing his hand by an inch. To call the Warboyses accident-prone would have been to do them aninjustice, he thought; there was something here that smacked of deeply rooted tribal behavior.
    As he blotted a bit of grease from his cuff, he noticed that the lad who had done porter duty and dropped his bag had come into the dining