9780857527080

Armistead Maupin

A TALES OF THE CITY NOVEL

mona of the manor

Armistead Maupin

mona of the manor

A TALES OF THE CITY NOVEL

Memoir

Logical Family

Novels

Tales of the City

More Tales of the City

Further Tales of the City

Babycakes

Significant Others

Sure of You

Maybe the Moon

The Night Listener

Michael Tolliver Lives

Mary Ann in Autumn

The Days of Anna Madrigal

Collections

28 Barbary Lane

Back to Barbary Lane

Goodbye Barbary Lane

mona of the manor Armistead Maupin

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Armistead Maupin 2024

Armistead Maupin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identi ed as the author of this work.

This book is a work of ction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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FOR CHRIS FOREVER

As a woman, I have no country.

As a woman I want no country.

As a woman my country is the whole world.

THE MANOR AWAITS

According to her guidebook, they had already entered “the fabled heart of England,” but Rhonda Blaylock could see only a watery green blur from the window of the train as it rumbled through the countryside. The rain hadn’t let up since they’d left London.

“We’ll be nice and cozy at the manor house,” she said, keeping things light with her husband, who was already being grumpy about the weather. She loved hearing the words manor house trip so naturally off her tongue. She had never before even had occasion to say that, unless you counted Manor House Barbecue, where she and Ernie celebrated their silver anniversary back home in North Carolina. Now they were headed for a real manor house— one built in Elizabethan times— and she could barely contain her excitement.

“Did you tell them when we’re coming?” muttered Ernie, his face pressed sullenly against the window.

“Of course.” She had called from the station in Oxford for

just that reason. “A nice-sounding man said he’d heat up our bed pans.”

Her husband turned and gaped at her. “Do what ?”

She giggled at her mistake. “Bedwarmers . whatever. It’s something old-timey they do for guests when they turn down your bed. I think he was the butler.”

“Why?”

“He called himself Wilfred. No last name.”

“I thought butlers were always addressed by their last name.”

Now Ernie was just looking for a fight, and she would have none of that. This would not be the costliest accommodation on their ten-city European tour (that title went to a fancy Marriott in Paris), but it was the one that Rhonda had dreamed of ever since she’d received a postcard confirming receipt of their Diners Club payment. On one side there was a quaint pen- and-ink drawing of Easley House; on the other was a personal message from the lady of the manor. “Welcome to my home,” it said, and it was signed (in purple ink, no less) by Lady Roughton herself. “We’re so looking forward to your visit.”

That sounded sweetly personal to Rhonda. Not just looking forward but so looking forward, like an old friend from high school welcoming you to her beach cottage in Nags Head. But this was an English aristocrat, a total stranger really, whose family had lived in this house for almost five centuries. Such easy graciousness seemed above and beyond, even if it was costing the Blaylocks a thousand pounds for a three-night stay.

She was so glad she’d come across that little classified ad in Southern Living magazine. This was going to be something special.

They got off the train, as instructed, at Moreton-in- Marsh, a quaint village built of golden Cotswold limestone. The wind and driving rain played havoc with their collapsible umbrellas and sent Ernie into another tirade.

“We’ll get you a nice hot toddy at the Black Bear,” she said. hooking her arm into Ernie’s as they scrambled up the street, wheeling their luggage behind them. Wilfred had told her about the pub and how to ask the bartender for a driver to Easley House.

So that’s what they did when they got inside and shook off the rain.

“The driver’s name is Colin,” said the bartender. “Be here in twenty minutes. Bald fellow with big black eyebrows. Two hot toddies coming up. How ’bout some lovely Scotch eggs on the house while you’re waiting?”

“What’s that?” Ernie asked suspiciously.

Rhonda told him before the bartender could. “It’s a hardboiled egg wrapped in sausage and fried in breadcrumbs. C’mon, Ernie, you like all those things.” She had just read about Scotch eggs in an English romance novel, so it tickled her to be offered one in real life. “We’ll take two,” she told the bartender. “And never mind that face my husband is making. He’s been working too hard lately.”

Ernie had put his law practice on hold for the better part of a year so he could run the Jesse Helms Reelection Campaign in Eastern North Carolina. The experience had exhausted him, leaving him more ill-tempered than usual. The senator had won, of course (he always did), but he never sent so much as a

thank-you note to Ernie after the election, much less a hoped-for invitation to lunch with Jesse in the Senate cafeteria. Since then, for some reason, Rhonda had watched her husband grow increasingly irritable with people in service positions—whether it be their faithful maid, Alva, or this nice bartender, or the waiter in London at Simpson’s in the Strand, who didn’t carve the roast beef the way Ernie liked.

The bartender gave them a crooked smile as he set the eggs down in front of them. “So you’re friends of Lady Roughton’s?”

“No,” she replied. She was thrilled to be mistaken for a friend of Lady Roughton and wondered briefly if her Montaldo’s raincoat and Hermès fox-hunting scarf had created that impression. She had to ask: “Why did you think we were friends?”

The bartender just shrugged as he wiped the bar. “You’re Americans, aren’t you?”

Ernie’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Proud ones.”

Rhonda scolded her husband with a glance before turning back to the bartender. “Does Lady Roughton know a lot of Americans?”

Another shrug. “She’s American. I imagine she does.”

“She’s American ? I thought the family dated back to Elizabethan times.”

“It does. But she came along about ten years ago when she married Lord Teddy. Then the poor sod died and left her to run the place. Seems to enjoy it, though. Told me it’s her destiny to run a house. Said it ran in the family. Don’t know what she meant by that .. . but.”

“You know her, then?”

“Everybody knows her. She comes into the village to shop. So you’re just... paying guests?”

Rhonda murmured in the affirmative, feeling somehow shamed.

Their driver, the bald and bushy-browed Colin, was a man of few words. On the twenty-minute drive from the pub to Easley House he barely spoke at all, even when Rhonda made appreciative comments about the scenery: the rolling meadows, a wayside chapel with its windows glowing pink in the rain, an ancient wooden barn, ramshackle but somehow quite beautiful. Every cottage she saw along the way was made of the same golden limestone she had seen in the village. That uniformity made everything seem related, scattered offspring of the great house itself, which suddenly leapt into view as they rounded a sunken lane.

Rhonda gasped as she saw it. “Oh Ernie, look!”

“I see it,” said her husband.

Easley House was a rambling two-story structure with deep gables cut into a steep roof. The limestone here had darkened with weather and age to a variegated orangey-gray, like the hide of a tiger. There were wedding cake crenelations along the top and a front door so imposing you could see it from a great distance. Smoke curled from a gargantuan chimney as Colin pulled into a rutted driveway at the side of the house. The overall effect was one of storybook dilapidation. Rhonda felt her heart race as she imagined their entrance to this place.

“How do we get to the front door?” she asked as Ernie unloaded their luggage.

“They don’t use the front door.”

“He means guests don’t,” said Ernie.

“No sir. No one does. It’s nailed shut. Lady Mo says it’s a hassle.”

“Who?”

“Lady Roughton’s name is Mona, Some of us call her Lady Mo.”

“Well, isn’t that cute? Like Lady Di. Do you think she would mind if we called... ?”

“What do we owe you?” asked Ernie, obviously impatient with the chitchat.

“Ten quid even,” said the driver.

Ernie fished a bill from his wallet and handed it to the driver.

“Thank you, Colin. How the hell do we get in?”

“Right there, sir.” He indicated a nondescript door in front of the car. “Just follow that hallway until you reach the great hall. Someone will collect you.”

So she and Ernie, tugging their luggage, rattled down a moldy passageway lined with garden tools and rusty bicycles.

Ernie grunted audibly. “A thousand pounds,” he muttered.

“Shhhhh,” she commanded, pressing her finger to her lips. She could already sense that the hallway was about to end, and she didn’t want her Ladyship hearing their graceless entrance. Sure enough, the muddy hoes and rakes gave way to a dark- green wall filled with sullen ancestral portraits and murky landscapes and a tattered poster of a stained- glass window with the word Erasure at the top, which she assumed was religious in nature.

Then suddenly they were there in the great hall, a vaulting space with firelight flickering on the walls. The fireplace was enormous, high enough to stand in, she reckoned, as she grabbed

Ernie’s hand for a moment of awestruck appreciation. Lemony light from a huge stained-glass window created the illusion of sunshine on their faces.

“What’s that noise?” Ernie asked suspiciously.

She could hear it, too. An intermittent pinging sound that seemed to surround them.

It was Ernie, naturally, who figured it out. “The goddamn roof is leaking.” He pointed triumphantly to a saucepan on the floor as if he’d just uncovered a clue to an unsolved murder. It was already half filled with rain, and there were three or four others around the room, strategically placed to collect drips.

There was no one in sight to greet them. Not even a desk with a bell to ring.

“Helloo,” she called, trying to sound as pleasant as possible. “Company’s coming.” It instantly sounded foolish to her ears, but it was all she could think to say.

Ernie rolled his eyes with a labored sigh. She knew he was about to blow his top again, but he didn’t get the chance, thank goodness. A young man had rushed out of a swinging door with a tray full of tea things. He was sporting a plaid bow tie and a sleeveless argyle sweater with a noticeable hole in it. He had soft Afro- styled hair and a cafe au lait complexion that she would have described as mulatto before Oprah made it clear that they don’t like that.

He greeted Rhonda with a look of sweet mortification. He was in his midtwenties, she supposed, but his embarrassment made him seem younger. “You must be Mrs. Blaylock.” He set the tray down on a dark oak sideboard. “This was supposed to be your welcome tea. So sorry, got me signals crossed. Colin usually

honks when he leaves. Shall I set up in your room or . pour you a cuppa right here?”

She was touched by his flustered effort at setting things right.

“Why, I think we’d like a cup of tea right here,” she said. This is Mr. Blaylock .. . we’re both chilled to the bone. This was not at all how she expected a butler to look, but she recognized his voice from the phone. “You must be Wilfred.”

“Guilty as charged,” he said, setting up some delicate mismatched cups and saucers. His hand was shaking visibly as he tried to pour the tea. Then he lost his grip and dropped the tarnished silver teapot directly onto one of the cups, shattering it. “Bollocks!” he muttered, before looking at Rhonda with a look of sheepish contrition. “Pardon me Anglo- Saxon.”

“We don’t need tea,” Ernie said gruffly. “Just show us to our room, please.”

Rhonda felt awful for the young man, who was just trying to do his job, after all. “It was a lovely gesture,” she told him as he hastily collected fragments of china before picking up their luggage. “Lady Roughton will be down shortly to greet you,” he said. “Your room is up those stairs, third door on the left. I’ll put your bags there.”

And with that he was gone, leaving the Blaylocks alone in the great hall again.

“A thousand pounds,” grumbled Ernie.

“Just shut up,” said Rhonda under her breath.

“Are you telling your husband to shut up?”

“Yes, Ernie, I believe I am.”

“Well. I’m telling you that we should have had the goddamn

sense to stay two more days at the Dorchester, but no . you had to a have your la- di- da country house .. .”

He cut himself off when they heard footsteps on the stairs.

The woman who came into view had ringlets of red hair spilling down her head like lava. She was wearing riding breeches and a moss-green velvet off-the- shoulder top. She looked to be somewhere in her late forties. “Welcome to my little bordello,” she said as she strode noisily down the stairs. “I’m Mona Roughton. Sorry about the drippy-drips. They come every year no matter how much we patch the roof. I hope my son poured you a nice cup of tea.”

Her son? This pale-skinned white woman? Rhonda struggled for words. “Oh .. . well .. . yes .. . Wilfred, you mean. He was very nice .. . very considerate.” She shot a quick look at Ernie to make sure he wasn’t about to mention the shattered teacup lying in full view on the abandoned tray. She didn’t want to cause trouble for Wilfred.

“We’re a family operation,” said Lady Roughton, as if reading Rhonda’s mind. “You won’t find a lot of staff around here unless you count our gardener, Mr. Hargis, who knows how the old girl runs .. . or doesn’t run, as the case may be.” She extended her hand to Rhonda. “I take it you’re the Blaylocks. If you’re not ... get your ass out of my ancestral home.”

She knew this was meant to be friendly, so she managed a chuckle. Ernie, for the moment at least, seemed stunned into silence.

“C’mon,” said Lady Roughton, beckoning them to the stairs. “You’ll want a good soak and a nap, won’t you? Your room has the best clawfoot tub in the house and some fabulous lavender

bath salts. I’ll show you around before dinner, but you’re free to poke around on your own. There’s no one else in the house at the moment, and nothing’s off-limits. Consider this your own private Disneyland. That’s what I do every single day.”

So they followed her up the stairs to a large, high- ceilinged room with a threadbare oriental carpet and a canopied fourposter bed. There was an en suite bathroom off to one side that seemed to have recently been painted a lurid shade of purple.

Ernie, who’d been skulking about the room in silence, felt compelled to examine the label on a sleek glass bottle by the bedside. “‘Malvern Water,’” he read.

“The best there is,” said Lady Roughton, “The queen travels the world with it. Tastes a whole lot better than what comes out of these old pipes. That shit’s Jacobean at the very least. She moved to the window and flung open a damask curtain that must have been red at some point in its long life. “You have a stunning view of our folly. See? Up there?”

Rhonda joined her at the window. Before her lay a steep green hillside with a little dunce-capped pavilion at the top. Lady Roughton explained: “My late husband’s ancestor, the umpteenth Earl of Who-the-fuck-knows-what, built it to escape from his wife, who was deeply religious, if you know what I mean.”

Rhonda did not know what she meant, so she welcomed the distraction of a big yellow dog that had just loped into the room to nuzzle her leg.

“Well, who’s this sweet thing?”

“That’s Miss Vanilla Wafer, but you may call her Nilla. She has the run of the house. If she drops something dead in your room it just means she likes you.”

Ernie, who often preferred dogs to people, came over to squat and scratch the dog behind her ear. “You’re very good girl, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Nilla?” Rhonda liked seeing these rare displays of tenderness from her husband. It made him seem more human to outsiders. He looked up at Lady Roughton. “She’s a beauty, all right. Do you hunt with her?”

The lady of the manor looked aghast. “You mean go out and shoot things ?”

“Sure. It’s what they’re bred for. See that big soft jaw? He jostled the dog’s mouth. “It’s there so they can retrieve dead pheasant without mangling them.”

“Well . nice to know, but we don’t do that at Easley. Not on my watch anyway. No blood sports around here. Nilla has to make do with voles.”

There was tension in the air, so Rhonda tried to change the subject. “I’m afraid I don’t know what a vole is.”

“Just a sort of field mouse,” said Lady Roughton, heading for the door with the dog. “Time for me to bake bread. Dinner’s at eight in the great hall. If you hear barking, pay no heed. Nilla gets excited when she smells bread rising. She’s such a big ol’ lesbian, that one.”

And with that she charged off.

Ernie turned to his wife. “We’re getting out of here,” he said.

“I’m running a tub,” said Rhonda.

E AT THE FRIDGE

Wilfred was in the kitchen, presiding over a steaming cauldron of lamb stew, when Mona burst through the swinging door.

“That smells divoon,” she said.

“Well ... it’s me specialty, innit.”

Lamb stew was one of Wilfred’s three “specialties,” the others being cottage pie and battered haddock, but three was generally all they needed when it came to feeding guests. Most guests never stayed for longer than three nights once the novelty wore off and the damp set in. Once they realized there was one crappy little black- and-white TV in the whole joint and old Mr. Hargis with his lazy eye had a way of turning up when they least expected him. Easley House offered character over convenience. Some people got that: others, fuck ’em.

She asked Wilfred what he thought of the Blaylocks.

He shrugged, still stirring the stew. “Nice enough, I guess.”

“And tea service went well?”

Another shrug.

“You’re hungover, aren’t you?”

He stopped stirring and looked at her. “And why do you say that, your Ladyship?” He never used that term unless he was being snide.

“Well,” she replied, “it’s Monday, and you went into London this weekend, and you’re always a clumsy mess after you’ve done E at the Fridge .. . and there are incriminating shards of teacup out there with your fingerprints all over them. Will that do?”

A smile crept over his face. “Very good, Miss Marple.”

“Did you meet anybody nice?”

“Mmm.”

“He’s not upstairs, I hope?”

Wilfred shook his head. “He saw me off at the train station after breakfast.”

Wilfred’s last pickup had stayed overnight at Easley House, unbeknownst to anyone but Wilfred, so Mona had woken at dawn to a blood- curdling scream when a paying guest from Derbyshire— a retired librarian, no less—had crossed paths with a butt-naked Egyptian bodybuilder wandering the hallway in search of a loo. It had not been pretty.

“All I want is a little warning,” she said. “That poor woman was traumatized.” She hesitated a moment. “You’re being careful, aren’t you?”

“I promise you, Mo... there’s no one upstairs.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant about .. . you know, safe sex. E can make you feel invincible. If you get carried away in the moment, you’ll forget all about—”

“For God’s sake, Mo! We just wanked each other off in the alley.”

Mona blinked at him. “And he still put you on the train in the morning?”

“Yes!”

“That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Wilfred shrugged. “He liked me. Go figure.”

“You’re welcome to bring him home some time .. . and anyone else, for that matter.”

She was trying not to come off like a controlling mother, even though, technically, that’s what she was. Wilfred had lived at Easley for a decade, but she’d been forced to adopt him five years earlier when he was still underage and Thatcher’s immigration goons had come sniffing around with threats of deportation to Australia. That was ridiculous, of course, since Wilfred had been born in a squat in Brixton, but their intentions had been obvious: they didn’t want an undocumented Anglo Aborigine running around free in a stately home. So Mona had documented him. When he officially became her son, she gave him one of the dramatic rooms under the eaves.

“That room is obviously made for lurvvve,” she said, drawing out the word like Barry White to show she was cool about overnight guests. Wilfred had festooned the room with rugs and bedspreads he found in the attic, which, along with some candles and pillows and hanging incense burners, gave it the raffish air of a seraglio. And this, she had realized with a twinge of nostalgia, was exactly the sort of lair she would have created for herself back in the day in San Francisco (discounting, of course, the ubiquitous pinups of Wilfred’s idol, George Michael).

She wanted Wilfred to find someone, she really did, but she shuddered at the thought of him cruising London blissed out