Jeeves and the Wedding Bells(66)

Outside stood Mrs Tilman. To my surprise, the good woman was neither sobbing nor distraught; in fact she wore a benign, almost cheerful expression.

‘Mr Wooster,’ she said, ‘Sir Henry would like to see you in the library.’

‘Mr Woo-Woo-Wooster?’

‘You won’t remember me, sir. We met some years ago when I was chief housemaid at Sir Henry Dalgleish’s house in Berkshire. My name is Amy Charlton. I was married to Mr Tilman soon afterwards. He was Sir Henry’s butler.’

‘I’d like to say I remember, Mrs Tilman, but the truth is—’

‘It doesn’t matter, love. Everything’s been sorted out downstairs. Sir Henry knows who you are and who Mr Jeeves is.’

‘But isn’t he furious?’

‘Sir Henry is unpredictable, sir. It’s his nature. But he’s a kindly man underneath. He’s become fond of Mr Jeeves. If he takes to someone, he takes to them. His best friend for years was the chauffeur. It broke his heart when he had to let him go.’

‘And Lord Etringham? The real one?’

‘He’s an elderly gentleman, sir. Very mild-mannered. And he’s interested in history as well as fossils. He and Sir Henry seem to have taken a shine to each other already.’

This was all rather a turn-up for the book, of course, but I can’t pretend there was much of a spring in the step as I crossed the mighty hall, as bidden, and for the first time entered the library under my own name.

Assembled in that bookish room were, reading from left to right: G. Meadowes, looking more spry, less like patience on a monument, as I’ve heard Jeeves put it, than she had an hour earlier; R. Jeeves, the valet lately known as Lord Etringham, inscrutable, yet visibly at ease; Sir H. Hackwood, foxy, animated; A. Hackwood, flushed and a-tremble; and a white-haired old cove with horn-rimmed glasses, barely five feet tall, with the fussy air of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

‘Ah, Wooster. Glad to meet you properly,’ said Sir Henry, extending the hand of friendship from the cuff of his smoking jacket. ‘May I now introduce Lord Etringham?’

A second handshake followed. The ensuing explanations rambled over an hour or more, lubricated by the contents of that hospitable ottoman. The salient points, which were few, went as follows.

Lord Etringham (the bona fide one, not Jeeves) had for some time been treated for aggra-something by the well-known loony doctor, Sir Roderick Glossop. Progress was now so marked that he was proposing to join an expedition to Egypt with Howard Carter the following spring. As part of the limbering up, Sir Roderick encouraged his patient to travel in England – beginning with a trip on foot to the village post office and coming to a peak with a steam-train excursion to the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, some few miles from Melbury Hall. Lord E had planned to visit in August, but decided to come at once when an old friend in Sherborne sent him a copy of the Melbury Courier with a photograph of a cricket team under which the caption revealed that his lordship was being impersonated by a stranger.

In the course of the peer’s story, Sir Henry established that Lord Etringham had booked into a modest bed and breakfast at Lyme Regis and insisted that he stay on at Melbury Hall, in the corner room that his namesake had previously occupied, using the house as a base for his expeditions. The nervous Lord E was obviously relieved to find himself enveloped in such a welcome rather than take pot luck with a seaside landlady. They had further discovered a shared interest in the Hundred Years War, though Lord Etringham drew the historical line at the Battle of Bosworth – later events, in his view, falling into the ‘modern’ period.

It was clear to me that not only had Sir Henry turned on the charm he generally kept hidden under a pretty all-obliterating bushel, but that Georgiana had also not been backward in dishing it out. If you had spent the best part of half a century in a draughty Westmorland house with only bits of old rock for company, it must have come as quite something to find yourself caught in the beam of that girl’s twin headlights as she discovered a sudden interest in geology. The old boy was clearly wondering whether the Pleistocene era was quite all it was cracked up to be when the modern day seemed to have so much more to offer.

‘So, Wooster, Bobby Etringham and I are friends already,’ Sir Henry concluded. ‘By the way, Bobby, you must feel free to take the car for your fossil-hunting.’

‘Most kind of you, Henry, but I have never learned to drive. My condition, you see …’ The old boy’s voice was reedy, and the words hard to distinguish.

‘Then Georgiana shall be your chauffeur!’

‘With pleasure, Uncle Henry. So long as I’m here.’