Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [66]
“Wal,” Chuck continues, “I said I’d go out and look his setup over. Turned out what they’d done was, they’d got one of the pumps hooked up wrong, so most of the water they took out was running right back into that excavation.
“So this guy, Professor Gilson his name is, got his team together, and we moved the pipes, and the water started to go down. I felt real set up with myself. I got my camera and took a load of pictures of them and the site and some of the stuff they’d found. Then we all went and had a beer to celebrate, and then we had lunch in the local pub. Better food than I ever got in my London hotel by a long shot, and a lot cheaper too. I told everybody what I was doing in Wiltshire, and how I was going to locate my ancestor the earl that afternoon. Asshole that I was. I should’ve known what was coming, with my luck.”
“Mm,” Vinnie says. The call is unmistakable now; Fido crawls out from under the sofa to lie at Chuck’s feet.
“What I did instead was kinda went back to the hotel and got all spiffed up; I was muddy from the dig, and I wanted to look like I was related to a lord. I was disappointed at first when I saw the Jenkins’ place: it wasn’t my idea of a castle. No towers or moat or anything. But it was a great big old stone house, over two hundred years old I found out later, with a pediment and columns and sculptures of Roman emperors on the lawn with two-hundred-year-old moss growing on them. And the grass was like Astroturf sprinkled with little flowers. I thought, yeh, this’ll do okay. My head was full of blown-up ideas. I knew Colonel and Lady Jenkins had only owned the house for thirty years, so I figured my ancestors must have sold the place sometime. Maybe they were living somewhere else grander, or maybe they’d all died off by now. That’d be too bad in a way, because I wouldn’t get to meet them; but then maybe I’d turn out to be the long-lost heir, why not? I mean it could’ve been like that, right?”
“I suppose so,” says Vinnie, distracted by her vision of Fido, who is now wagging his dirty-white tail and gazing eagerly up at Chuck.
“Only it wasn’t. Colonel and Lady Jenkins knew all about it. They took me to see the hermitage down in the woods behind the house. It was what they called a grotto—sort of a natural cave in the rocks next to a stream, built out with cement and pebbles and shells into a kinda little stone room. It had an arched door and one window, and the back walls were dripping wet. It was full of moss and dead leaves and spiderwebs and a couple old pieces of furniture made out of logs with the bark still on, like you see in national parks, y’ know.”
“Mm.”
“Of course nobody lives there now, but they said there was a hermit once upon a time. Only he wasn’t any lord, he was just some old guy that was hired to stay in the grotto. Rich people used to do that back then, Colonel Jenkins told me, the same way a Tulsa businessman with a ten-acre ranch will buy himself a coupla horses or a few head of cattle: not for profit, just to make the place look good, to decorate it, like. So they bought this guy. The Jenkinses showed me a picture of the grotto, when it was new, in an old book. The hermit was standing in front of it, with a scraggy beard and long hair and a droopy straw hat like some old bag lady.”
“Still, there’s no proof it was your ancestor,” Vinnie says.
“It was him all right. He was called Old Mumpson, and he got twenty pounds a year and his board, it was all in the book. He couldn’t even write, he had to sign his name with an x, he was just a dirty old bum.”
In Vinnie’s mind, Fido rises to his legs and places his front paws on Chuck’s knee. “But what about the story your grandfather told you?” she asks. “About your ancestor being a kind of wise man, and the cloak made out of a dozen kinds of fur?”
“Who knows? It coulda been fur in the picture, you couldn’t tell for sure. Colonel and Lady Jenkins’d never heard any of that stuff, though they were interested, said they were going to write it all down. They were real nice to me. They gave me tea and cake and muffins and