Free Death and the Cyprian Society by Pamela Christie

go to bruit these days. Anyway, what do you mean, you’re ‘not surprised’? Why aren’t you?”
    “Why aren’t I? Didn’t I apprehend Miss Round Heels with my own goggles, dancing the mattress jig with Lady Ribbonhat’s footman?”
    “You mean, you saw her?”
    “Me and half-half a dozen other coves!” (Arabella mentally did the arithmetic for this and decided that he meant “three.”)
    “Where were you?”
    “Haven’t the foggiest. All of us were very much the worse for wear. I just remember Snoodles gathering everybody together at the club and herding us somewhere like so many goats.” Charles wiped the sauce from his mouth. “Turned out to be a peep shew! A cove and a mort going at it in a back room, and we looking down on them from above, through peepholes! Ha! I nearly laughed out loud when I realized I’d seen Cunny’s cunny! It was a most instructive quarter of an hour, I must say—her enthusiasm more than compensates for her want of decorum.”
    Arabella was livid.
    “Do you mean to say you watched Constance do the four-legged frolic?”
    “Yes. Isn’t that what I’ve just been—”
    “You stood there, with your chums, and watched her play hide the bone, without paying her?!”
    “I expect Snoodles paid something to somebody. Cunny probably got her cut, all right. Besides,” he added, “I didn’t even realize it was her, till it was all over.”
    “And why was that?”
    “Well, she hadn’t any clothes on during the performance, and all naked women look alike, you know, more or less. Besides, the light was dim.” He paused to take a sip from his glass. “But when she was halfway dressed again, she started complaining that her partner’d stained her green-and-purple-peau-de-soie-slipper-with-silver-ribbons-and-charming-gold- embroidered-fleur-de-lis-toe-decoration. She spoke in a particular sort of gobbling fashion, the way a turkey would, were it suddenly granted the gift of human speech. ‘Hello,’ says I to meself. ‘I know that moon-eyed hen! Either that’s Cunny Worthington, or I’m a nanny house gnarler!’ Then when they’d finished dressing and I saw the cove in his livery, I recognized him as well! What a lark! ’Twas Lady Ribbonhat’s fart catcher!”
    “Well, well!” said Arabella. “What a sad pack of cads! I am certain poor Constance had no idea you idiots were up there, and now one of your number seems to be blackmailing her!”
    “What makes you think it was one of us?”
    “The blackmailer makes reference to Constance’s tryst with the footman.”
    “Good luck to him, then, if he has no other proof than his own eyes!”
    “He claims to have their love letters, also.”
    “Bell,” said Charles, spearing a potato, “how could one of us have got hold of her love letters?”
    “That remains to be seen,” said Arabella. “I want you to give me the names of everyone who attended that performance!”
    “Sorry; no can do. Clubmen don’t rat on one another!”
    “Oh, don’t they? Well, you had better think again, Mr. Rat! You have already told more than you ought, and there is cheese all over your whiskers! If you are not forthcoming with those names, I shall go round to your ‘gentlemen only’ club, force my way in, and announce your betrayal to one and all before they can gather their feeble wits together to eject me!”
    Charles paled. “You wouldn’t do that!”
    “No? Would you care to test that hypothesis?”
    “Oh, very well, then: Snoodles, Bumpy, and Arsy-Varsey.”
    “Thank you,” said Arabella.
    “Don’t mention it. You know,” he said, spooning up a second liberal helping from the serving dish, “these little nobbly things in here are awful good! What are they?”
    “Snails,” said Arabella.
    Charles grabbed his throat and retched, before stumbling to his feet and knocking over his chair. Fielding stepped adroitly aside from the doorway as he lunged out of the dining room, and both she and Arabella subsequently heard the