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Ivy elbows me again. I gently elbow her right back.
“You’re related to Hendricks Pottinger?” Braithwaite pauses, looking impressed.
“Yes!” I agree. “Dickie, they called him. At least, that’s what I’ve been able to find out.” I put a hand over my heart, and try to look serious. “It’s a long-lost branch of the family tree, I only discovered recently. Tragic, really.”
Luckily, Ivy woman thinks on her feet.
“Genealogy is a modern marvel, don’t you think?” she pipes up. “We sent off his sample to one of those DNA matching companies, and voila, find out he’s the long-lost great-nephew of the great Hendricks Pottinger himself.”
“And a three-time axe-murderer from Pensacola, but we don’t need to go into that,” I add cheerfully, getting into the swing of the role. “Anyway, I’d just love to take a look around, and see how dear old Dickie lived.”
“And died,” Ivy adds. “It was in this house, didn’t your great-aunt say?”
“Consumption.” I nod. “Poor guy was coughing up blood.”
“Blood everywhere,” Ivy agrees, her lips twitching as she tries not to laugh. “Gallons of blood.”
“And there was a room upstairs—”
“His favorite room—”
“Where he was born!”
“Always talked about the wallpaper—”
“And the woodwork!”
“And the view out the windows!”
“So we figured—”
“We’d be like, ten minutes—”
“You wouldn’t even notice us—”
“In and out—”
“It would mean so much to the memory of poor Dickie—"
“If we could maybe—”
“Take a look?”
Cummings Braithwaite the Third looks back and forth between our improv double-act, and gives a long-suffering sigh. “As I have made perfectly clear,” he says, as he steers us back to the front door. “The house is closed today. And even if it wasn’t, the family quarters on the upper levels are completely off-limits. Good day!”
The door slams behind us with an unceremonious thud.
* * *
“You think it was the blood?”I muse, as we grab coffees at a cafe across the street from the Pottinger house. “Maybe we shouldn’t have gone on so much about all the blood.”
“Or being related to an axe-murderer?” Ivy arches an eyebrow.
I grin. “I was getting into the spirit of things!”
“Well, personally I found you very convincing,” Ivy teases, as I order us some consolation cinnamon rolls. We take our coffee over to big couch by the windows, and settle in to regroup.
“So much for your historian’s understanding,” I say. “When does the house next open for official tours?”
