Free Murder In The Motor Stable: (Auguste Didier Mystery 9) by Amy Myers

room.
    ‘And what is the trouble today?’ he inquired solicitously. ‘Tarragon, perhaps?’
    Neither enlightened him.
    ‘Please excuse me, Monsieur Didier,’ Luigi said stiffly withhis best maître d’ bow. ‘A personal difference of opinion.’ The air crackled with hostility.
    Auguste, his mission and opinion of those who could waste time when the delights of preparing banquets beckoned having been made clear, returned to the kitchen puzzled. The few words he had understood had borne a remarkable similarity to ‘Dolly Dobbs’, ‘Hester Hart’ and ‘Lady Bullinger’. He supposed it was only natural that the passions of the establishment for which they worked should transmit themselves to the staff, but it was strange that this particular motorcar should be quite so eagerly discussed. He could not recall the kitchens at Stockbery Towers, where he had worked for some years, coming to blows over the merits of the ducal horses and carriages.
    The mood in the kitchen improved as the morning progressed, including Pierre’s, to Auguste’s relief. By the time he met Tatiana for luncheon at Queen Anne’s Gate, however, he was still carrying a nagging grievance with him that his staff did not seem to appreciate the delights of preparing a banquet fit for a king. Luncheon was an informal meal to which he usually looked forward, for it could produce delightful surprises concocted from the fertile paradise of Mrs Jolly’s creative brain. Today it was her chicken pie, but even the magic of discovering a new taste in it – could it be ginger? – failed to produce a sense of all being right with the world.
    ‘You’re troubled, Auguste,’ Tatiana remarked at last.
    ‘Aren’t you?’ He could not explain why the thought of Thursday still loomed like an enormous pile of unwashed saucepans, much higher than the prospect of meeting the King normally engendered. After all, Egbert had reluctantly agreed to accompany the cavalcade to Canterbury, andknowledge of his job and rank should put paid to the possibility of untoward events.
    ‘Yes, but I don’t have a black bear sitting on my shoulders like you.’
    It occurred to Auguste that his wife seldom did. ‘Why not? It’s a wife’s duty to share her husband’s ill humour.’
    ‘I spent the first thirty-three years of my life without you, of which six separated us by a ridiculous barrier because I was a princess and you were the cook. Now I can be with you all the time. What have I to be in an ill humour about?’
    The chicken pie regained its full glory. The footman entering five minutes later was scandalised to find his employers locked in a passionate embrace. He reluctantly excused them this improper behaviour on the grounds that neither of them was English.
    ‘All the same,’ Tatiana added, sedately resuming her seat, ‘I have plenty of reasons for bad temper. Harold Dobbs came to see me
and
Judith . . .’
    The Dobbses’ breakfast table in Upper Norwood was usually a noisy affair. Judith Dobbs firmly believed, against normal practice, that the gentleman of the household should benefit from proximity to his children instead of being forced to leave for his work before the family breakfasted. Harold had no objection, since his mind was mostly absent anyway; it was glorying in far-off fields where the name of Dobbs took its place beside those of Newton, Watt, Stevenson, Maxim, Hancock, and possibly da Vinci. Harold did not include Cugnot, de Dion or Daimler in the list of those who had served the world on wheels or wings, for to his mind foreigners played little part in the miracle of the motorcar. As far as Harold was concerned, the motorcar was conceived andperfected in England, despite the unfortunate hiccup of the Red Flag Act which drove cars off the road for thirty years. Progress had leapt from William Murdoch’s 1784 steam carriage to Harold Dobbs, and in two days’ time the full glory of the Dolly Dobbs would be revealed to the world. The tiny fly