The Tale of the Tenpenny Tontine (Anty Boisjoly Mysteries Book 3) by PJ Fitzsimmons

Author:PJ Fitzsimmons [Fitzsimmons, PJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Alleged from the Edge of a Wedge Hedge Ledge

If they ever strike the right chemical balance and manage to bottle that specific combination of springtime, blossoms, breeze, horses, and tar, it will be called, simply, ‘London’. Until that blessed day, however, the only place to find it is in the wild and in the moment, and the morning after my interview for entry to the Swashbucklers Society, Wedge Hedge Square had it in buckets.

The fenced garden appeared to have cast aside all reservations and wrapped itself in its brightest seasonal fashion. Pink and white honeysuckle blooms peeked with unguarded anticipation through the bars. The delightfully unkempt grasses hushed and swooned with the light wind. The hulking elms displayed a full consignment of all the essentials — bugs, buds, birds, and the like — and, less typically, one dubious solicitor.

“Hullo, Chancy,” I called up to the broad, accommodating branch on which he sat. “Lovely day for it, at least.”

“Hello, Anty.” Chancy smiled and ventured a slight wave that nearly cost him his balance. “I’m up a tree.”

“I see that, Chancy old man, and I applaud it, thoroughly. We would all of us do well to remember that the boyish joy of grand adventure to be found in streams and up trees doesn’t abandon us, it is we who push it away.”

“I was chased here by that rabid dog.”

“Young Asmodeus, you mean?” I asked. “He’s the sanest of us all, Chancy. You probably veered from the prescribed path. He has a very firm policy with regards to points A and B, and the avenues in between.”

“I was just lingering.”

“Ah, well, there you go,” I said. “The dog has many duties to which to attend, and cannot tolerate loitering. Are you coming down, at some point? I would share with you some developments.”

“Can you give me a hand?”

“I can but try, Chancy, but it’s my experience — hard-won, I should add — that getting down from trees is largely a one-man job.”

“I used that bench to climb up,” Chancy looked down at, presumably, the aforementioned bench, obscured by the foliage, “but I kicked it over in the effort. Could you upright it?”

“That I can do, with almost no further direction.”

I found the gate and was instantly lost. The grass and weeds and saplings were so thoroughly in the laissez-faire tradition of the English garden that, had it not been for Chancy functioning as a beacon, I’d have been forced to return to base camp.

“There you are, old man,” I said, righting a rustic wooden bench beneath Chancy’s branch.

“Ta, very.” Chancy slipped gingerly and, dare I say it, expertly, the two or three inches that remained between his feet and the bench. Then he stepped to the ground and sat down for a well-deserved breather. “What brings you by? Have you figured out what happened to the tontine?”

“Yes.”

Judging by his swivel-eyed reaction, this was not the answer Chancy expected.

“Not really.”

“Oh, yes. I spotted the solution straight away,” I assured him. “Why? You didn’t continue looking for it, did you?”

“Only for a bit,” said Chancy, somewhat sullenly.

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