16. A Wee Dram

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Was the bottle allegedly containing poison another red herring?

At precisely the same moment that the Bishop was staring in horror at his elderly lady friend and the seemingly empty bottle she was clutching the Reverend Barnaby Pickle (together with Emma Dresden) was being addressed by Father Teatrader in the latter’s office.

Father Teatrader, it turns out, was the head monk in the weirdly named Cowslip Retreat, and he had the look of someone who takes life very seriously indeed, almost as seriously as he takes death which, to him, is the ending of all days.

“Welcome to our humble retreat here at Cowslip,” he said, his voice little more than a low gurgle, “let me introduce myself. I am known in this holy place as Father Teatrader and I think it might be appropriate if I explained to you how the brotherhood came about in the first place. It was a long time ago, so long ago I can’t remember the date and need to look it up if it’s seems important, which it doesn’t now, but a group of our distant antecedents, I think that must be the right word, gathered together under an oak tree by a babbling brook and had a joint brotherly and very afectionate hug. Then they decided to become a holy group and discussed what they should call themselves. They were, it was decided, a group of very different members of society and therefore decided to call themselves by their previous occupation, so I am Father Teatrader, and named their order after the one thing they could think of that had many layers just like they did with their many and varied previous occupations, so they became members of the order of the Onion. Do you get it?”

“It makes thorough and beautiful sense,” smiled Emma.

“And I would be known as something Vicar,” nodded Barney’s, “how beautiful.”

“And sister Kitchen-slave,” almost giggled Emma.

“There are no daughters of Eve in our membership,” gurgled Father Teatrader, “we decided right at the beginning that women are no more than a distraction to serious minded men. So women who agreed with us started their own organisation and it exists to this day as the Princesses of Motherhood. And they’re well named. They are all mothers with babes in arms hanging from their teats. Yet they are, to a sister, quite adorable. Mother Milkgiver visits quite often and always carries with her a sample of her own milk from her own teats, and it is heavily disguised as a toxin in a bottle marked POISON just in case some moron takes to stealing it.”

“You mean,” asked Emma, “that you drink her own breast milk?”

“I don’t think I’d like that,” mumbled Barney, eyeing Emma’s adequate bosom suspiciously.

“That’s why that order is for the gentle sex,” burped the Father. “Now let me see, what else is there? Ah, I see: whilst in this Retreat there are very few rules for you to observe for we are a liberal group of fellows. But I di insist that you don’t practice self-abuse. You know what I mean by that, vicar?”

Barney did and he looked horrified that it should even be mentioned inside the sacred walls of a religious retreat, but he nodded in order to reduce any chance of the strange Father elaborating.

“Alcohol, in moderation, is accepted and if you don’t have any was have stocks left by previous retreatees. It eases the routes to debate and we all like to gurgle a drop, don’t we?”

Barney occasionally sipped from the communion wine, not very much because he didn’t want to end up like his own father with a red face, a bulbous nose and a penchant for thrashing those too young to have any hope of being able to thrash back at him. Anyway, hadn’t that same father, in his treatment of the young Barney made sure that there was precious little chance that he would engage in the afore-mentioned sin of self-abuse?

Maybe, he thought, this strange Father Teatrader and his own father, had he still been alive, which he wasn’t, might have had quite a lot in common.

“Stealing,” continued the rumbling voice of the head of the Retreat, “goes against the grain and is regarded as a mortal sin, taking what does not belong to us, which means the thief gets shown the exit as soon as I’ve thrashed the living daylights out of him. You understand? Taking what does not belong to you involved half a dozen of our brothers holding the thief down while I thrash him. Or her. The occasional female guest has been skinned alive too, for thievery. It is never tolerated. Wwe have a small graveyard should the punishment prove to be fatal.”

Barney shook his head. “Isn’t discipline best left to our Lord to administer?” he asked.

Father Teatrader looked at him with contempt. “You believe that twaddle?” he asked. “I tell you what. Get you back to your rooms and if you wish to communicate don’t shout. I can’t abide shouting, and you have a connecting door between your rooms so that discourse can be quiet. Feel free to use it. I am no prude and have no interest in what you may or may not get up to…” And for the first time he blinked, winked and grinned at Barney.

“Yes sir” stammered an embarrassed vicar, and he led Emma back towards their rooms.

“What do you make of that?” he asked.

“I’ll lock the door behind me,” grinned Emma, “how about you, sir?”

She’d never called him sir before, and he wondered if the sudden deference had a significance beyond his own understanding..

Meanwhile, much later in the day the Bishop, in his palatial home several miles from Brumpton and in a pleasantly rural little backwater where he could say his prayers in peace, found himself answering his door to Superintendent Williams.

“What can I do for you, Philip.” he asked, “are the twins all right?”

“That borders on what I’ve come to tell you,” muttered the Superintendent with half a smile on his face. “They’re doing fine and feeding well, the pair of them. Which brings me to the poison bottle rescued from the dead woman… it had nothing to do with poison. Not, that is, unless we feed our infants of toxins! No, the pathology boys rushed through an analysis and the only liquid they detected inside the bottle was milk. And not just any milk. There were only a few drops left but it seems that the lady who sadly passed away before we could interrogate her had a fondness for breast milk. Because that’s what was in the bottle. I may even have been human breast milk, they’re looking closer at it, but it wasn’t any kind of poison and we’ve had to let the two Scumbag boys go. We couldn’t keep hold of them because there wasn’t any sort of murder committed, not their granny (she was their grandmother, you know, they stayed with her from time to time…)”

“And she died of natural causes?”

“It’s been suggested that she slowly woke up and saw, through half-closed eyes that her house had been invaded by, of all people, an important clergyman, and thought that maybe she was being summoned to the afterlife…”

“But she knows me!” protested the Bishop, “it wouldn’t have come as a surprise to see me there!”

“Or she might simply have passed away, Jossop. She was getting on you know, and it comes to us all. Anyway, she wasn’t poisoned unless the small sherry she had before she nodded off had something nasty in it, and the lab boys say that it didn’t…”