“Very good advice,” Dogger said. “Very good advice, indeed. I hope you were comfortable on the bus?”
“Well, it is a bit of a jolter, but it was the only transportation Ilium Films could lay on to get us from the station in Doddingsley. Thank God the thing’s such a hulking old bulldog. It managed to hang on to the roads in spite of the snow.”
By now, Marion Trodd had shepherded the others away to the upper levels, leaving the foyer empty except for the three of us.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Dogger said, and Nialla gave me a happy twiddle of the fingers like Laurel and Hardy as he led her away.
They had barely disappeared up the staircase when the doorbell rang again.
Suffering cyanide! Was I to spend the rest of my life as a doorkeeper?
Another gust of frozen flakes and cold air.
“Dieter!”
“Hello, Flavia. I have brought some chairs from the vicar.”
Dieter Schrantz, tall, blond, and handsome, as they say on the wireless, stood on the doorstep, smiling at me with his perfect teeth. Dieter’s sudden appearance was a bit disconcerting: It was somewhat like having the god Thor deliver the furniture in person.
As a devotee of English literature, especially the Bront? sisters, Dieter had elected to stay in England after his release as a prisoner of war, hoping someday to teach Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to English students. He also had hopes, I think, of marrying my sister Feely.
Behind him, in the forecourt, the Cottesmore bus had now been replaced by a gray Ferguson tractor which stood putt-putting quietly in the snow, behind it a flat trailer piled high with folding chairs which were covered almost entirely with a tarpaulin.
“I’ll hold the door for you,” I offered. “Are you coming to the play tonight?”
“Of course!” Dieter grinned. “Your William Shakespeare is almost as great a writer as Emily Bront?.”
“Get away with you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
It was a phrase Mrs. Mullet used. I never thought I’d find myself borrowing it.
Load after load, five or six at a time, Dieter lugged the chairs into the house until at last they were set up in rows in the foyer, all of them facing the improvised stage.
“Come into the kitchen and have some of Mrs. Mullet’s famous cocoa,” I said. “She floats little islands of whipped cream in it, with rosemary sprigs slit for trees.”
“Thank you, but no. I’d better get back. Gordon doesn’t like it if I—”
“I’ll tell Feely you’re here.”
A broad grin spread across Dieter’s face.
“Very well, then,” he said. “But just one whipped-cream island—and no more.”
“Feely!” I hollered towards the drawing room. “Dieter’s here!”
No point wasting precious shoe leather. Besides, Feely had legs of her own.