No Good Deed 78

As I looked at the garish colours of the buildings - the bright yellows, greens and reds a seeming homage to the most exotic of parrots - the taste of bitter leaf soup remained in my mouth and I had wished a circumspect refusal of the tin cup, when it had come my way. I turned to Miss Pardoner,

‘Still another moon-struck son of first cousins awaits us inside, no doubt.’

Miss Pardoner, after such long - if interrupted – acquaintance, showed that she could yet take me by surprise: she summoned up a huge bolus of phlegm and projected it with venom at her feet.

‘Oh no, Sir, very far from that.’

The plantation house itself was a fine example of its type, save for the eccentric colour scheme from which neither the Greek-influenced colonnades, nor the Italianate asymmetrical massing were spared. Marble and stucco had never suffered such chromatic indignities. Still worse, other parts of the building were of wooden construction in a Gothic style. It offered an emetic and dizzying contrast. Some of my distaste may have been revealed in my face. Miss Pardoner raised an eyebrow,

‘Striking, is it not? I wonder if Jackson Davies, Jackson Downing or Sloan himself could have imagined their design books would produce such a monstrosity. Carpenter Gothic. Of course, it is less bruising to the eye when painted in the customary white. Naturally, none of these farmers can resist a little Greek and Roman addition to flavour the gumbo.'

‘And how is it called, this feat of architectural melange?’ I asked.

It startled me when Compair Lapin replied,

‘Iss called New Walden, Missuh Northrup,’ and he gave a short bark of laughter before leading the way to the plantation house itself.

If Molasses had led me to expect informality and ill-kempt inhabitants from New Walden, it was a pleasant surprise to be greeted - on pulling the bell – by a pair of tall footmen. Elegantly turned out in a style perhaps belonging more to my youth than current tastes, the effect was rather spoiled by the one livery being as yellow as a canary bird and the other as green as the Duke of Devonshire’s Emerald.

‘Unu ah wekkum, Missus Tremayne de a bat’room. Shi kian com rait nah. Com in, please.’

I was disappointed in my hope of seeing Miss Pardoner looking perplexed at the Jamaican plantation dialect. Moreover, I was amazed when Compair Lapin made the careful enunciation,

‘We will enter, in that case, and await the end of Mrs. Tremayne’s indisposition.’

He waved an arm to the interior of the house and gave Miss Pardoner a slow wink.

We followed the malachite and flavous pair through a long passage whose decoration favoured similar colours. The servants led us to a large and somewhat overfurnished parlour whose walls boasted a different colour each. Naturally, green, yellow and red were in evidence: one wall, blessedly, was painted a calm ecru. However, the effect was somewhat spoiled by a large flag which covered a large part of it. It was a saltire, the cross being a vibrant red, and two triangles each of the colours sported by the lofty footmen. It was not a flag that I recognised: perhaps it was some sort of snook cocked at the flag of the Confederacy. Or perhaps, like the rest of New Walden, it was merely an insult to good taste.