Shadow of a Spout Read online

  Thelma glanced ahead at Rose again, still clutching that dumb metal pot that she had bought at some dealer’s shop in Ithaca. You’d think it was solid gold or something, the way she mooned over it! Rose had told them all that there was going to be a “Stump the Expert” portion at the end of today’s talk; she was presenting her new prize to be looked over by Zunia Pettigrew. Rose said the Ithaca antiques dealer had told her it was likely Chinese, but Sophie, Rose’s granddaughter, had done some research and didn’t think it was.

  Rose wanted to know if Zunia Pettigrew, who had a PhD in historical objects identification, could tell her about it. Thelma could have saved her the trouble and told her it was a hunk of junk, but everyone would get their unders in a knot if she said that. Folks just didn’t want to know the truth.

  Walter Sommer wound up his lengthy speech by giving the floor back to Zunia Pettigrew, a sour-faced, dark little elf if ever Thelma had seen one. Zunia minced back up to the dais in her five-inch heels, thanked Walter effusively, and said, “And now we come to the most interesting part of the day! We will soon adjourn to the dining room for afternoon tea, but I see a few folks in the audience who have brought teapots for me to look at.”

  A fellow in the front row stood and applauded, shouting, “Bravo for Zunia!”

  “Who in tarnation is that fool?” Thelma muttered.

  “Shh! That’s Pastor Frank Barlow; he’s a member of the Niagara Teapot Collectors Group, Zunia’s club,” Laverne whispered.

  Pastor? Looked more like a crooked accountant at an audit, and sweating just as bad, too.

  “Who’s first?” Zunia chirped, looking around. She smiled thinly at Pastor Frank, but it looked more like a grimace to Thelma.

  * * *

  Rose, who was excited that she was finally going to learn something about her teapot, was about to stand, but one of the Monroe Tea Belles was quicker and approached the lectern holding out a teapot in the shape of a cottage. Zunia took it, turned it around in her hands, then handed it back. “Well, of course, that is a Price Brothers teapot . . . Ye Olde Cottage. Very common. It’s cracked, almost worthless. Next!”

  The Tea Belles member returned to her seat among her friends, her face slightly red and her shoulders slumped. Rose felt for her and eyed Zunia with distaste. The woman was voted New York State division president just a year ago. Laverne had attended that convention with her father, along with Helen and Annabelle, two of their friends, while Rose stayed behind to look after Auntie Rose’s Victorian Tea House. So though Rose knew Zunia slightly from her attendance at the convention the year before, she hadn’t been there when the choice was made to elect her with no opposition.

  “Is she always like this?” Rose whispered to Laverne.

  Her friend, dark eyes narrowed with anger, nodded. “Drunk on power. Only reason everyone voted for her last year was they were afraid not to. And there was no one else standing against her! Ran a smear campaign against Rhiannon Galway. Poor girl withdrew and Zunia was elected just like that.”

  Rose nodded. She knew some of that from their discussions when Laverne came back from the convention last August. Rhiannon Galway, of Galway Fine Teas in Butterhill, was her supplier, making up packets of Auntie Rose’s Tea-riffic Tea Blend in bulk for her, a black tea blended with Chinese and Kenyan leaves, creating a strong yet mellow brew. But the girl was reserved and Rose didn’t know her well.

  She glanced over at Rhiannon, who sat alone near the door, her lips compressed into a thin line and her gaze distant. Sophie had struck up a friendship with Rhi, as she called her. They were close in age and refugees from New York City, where Rhiannon had tried to open a shop to extend her mother’s tea business. It had failed miserably. Poor girl had been through a lot, it was rumored. No one quite knew what it was that Zunia had against her, but she had hinted at scandals that would hurt the image of the ITCS if they got out. According to Laverne it appeared that Rhiannon had backed down rather than force a confrontation, as if Zunia had some kind of hold over her.

  She didn’t actually belong to any of the groups but was still a member of the society and acted as its tea supplier. That was a lot of business, when you considered that the ITCS had over a thousand members, many of whom ran tearooms or bed-and-breakfast establishments and so bought a lot of tea. As they arrived Rhiannon had handed out gift bags with various tea-related items, donated by her shop. However, it had been whispered among the groups, as they gathered before the meeting, that Zunia was going to try this year to oust Rhiannon as the official tea supplier to the ITCS, thus severing her only real connection to the society, since she was not a teapot collector, nor did she belong to a collecting group. No one knew why other than their run-in at the last convention the previous summer.

  One of the Tea Totalers approached the dais and held out a bird-shaped figural teapot. Zunia took it and turned it over and over, her dark eyes pinched and her brow furrowed. “This is . . . uh . . . well, it’s definitely English. Victorian. Worth a couple of hundred, perhaps. Next!”

  “Excuse me,” the woman, a tall, gaunt, gray-haired senior, said. “I believe you’re mistaken. The pot is clearly marked on the bottom ‘Bavaria’—in other words, German. I’m not asking the country of origin, I was merely wondering what era the pot might be from, and if you’d ever seen the pottery mark before.”

  Zunia’s face, framed in a dark bob, reddened. She pushed the pot back into the woman’s hands and folded her arms over her prominent bosom. “If you’re going to argue about it, you can just sit down. Next!”

  The whispers became a steady murmur. Even Walter looked uneasy, though little fazed him, Rose had observed at past conventions. He exchanged a glance with his wife, Nora, who sat in the front row of the audience. From Rose’s angle it appeared that she didn’t meet his glance, instead remaining stone-faced and unresponsive, staring straight ahead at the wood-paneled front wall. Zunia’s husband, Orlando, appeared anxious, scanning the crowd. His daughter, Emma, a sullen teen, tried to get up but he held on to her arm firmly with one hand, while he pulled out a handkerchief, flapped it open, wiped his red eyes and blew his nose.

  Laverne nudged Rose. “You going up there or what?” she muttered. “Come on, old friend, you can best her.”

  No one else appeared to have anything more, so it was now or never. Though she no longer cared what Zunia Pettigrew had to say, nor did she have much confidence the woman knew what she was talking about, she was not going to back down without even doing what she came to do. Rose stood and approached the lectern with her teapot presented.

  Zunia stared at it, squinted, frowned and seemed reluctant. She finally took it from Rose and turned it over and over in her hands. She was a small woman, but with a big attitude. Rose had seen her quicksilver changes in temperament, from smiling and laughing to lashing out in anger. She looked sour in that moment, but perhaps the previous trouble had made her cautious. “What can you tell me about it?” she asked, glancing over at Rose as she thumbed the elaborate silvery braided decoration that overlaid the copper belly and spout. “I’d like to see how much you know.”

  “I bought it from an antiques dealer in Ithaca. He thought it was Chinese, but my granddaughter doesn’t believe that’s so.” Rose hesitated. Sophie had done a lot of research, and believed that it was not a teapot at all, but a Buddhist holy water vessel. Rose had decided that she would have a teapot “expert” evaluate it, but now she thought she might not know anything more when Zunia was done than when she had begun. “One thing I do know is, it’s old. Silver over copper, we think.”

  Zunia turned it over and over, squinted over at Rose, then picked up her jewelers’ loupe, examining the bottom closely. She then made a noise between her teeth. “Hah! Not an antique at all. The hallmarks are fake, even the patina is fake. It’s a cheap repro made in Hong Kong.” She shoved it back at Rose and looked around the room. “They’re designed to fool unwise collectors who don’t
know what they’re doing. Is that it?” She looked around, as Rose stood stunned, with her piece cradled in her arms. “Then we can go to the dining room for afternoon tea.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Rose demanded, arresting the crowd as folks obediently stood, with a rustle and murmur. The noise stopped, and it was as if the group collectively held its breath. “I may not have a degree, but this is no reproduction,” she said to Zunia. “It’s at least a couple of hundred years old, maybe more!”

  The murmuring of the group began again, whispers and mutters of interest.

  “Rose Beaudry Freemont, right?” Zunia said, eyeing her. “You always were a know-it-all.”

  Rose heard Thelma snicker and shot her a look. As Zunia Pettigrew turned away, Rose snapped, “Don’t you speak to me like that, young lady!” and grabbed her arm to keep her in place.

  “Ow, ow!” Zunia cried, jerking her arm away. “You hurt me! I won’t be manhandled. Orlando, will you behave like a proper husband and help me out here?!”

  Orlando Pettigrew leaped up from his chair and moved toward the pair as his daughter, Emma, began to laugh. It was an unpleasant sound filled with malice, ugly from such a young girl. Rose caught Josh’s expression as he stared at Emma. He came from a happy family and seemed puzzled by the resentment Emma apparently had toward her stepmother.

  “Zunia Pettigrew, I did not hurt your arm!” Rose said, refocusing on the chapter president. “For heaven’s sake, I’m eighty, and you’re fifty. I’m not strong enough to hurt you!”

  “Fifty?” Zunia shrieked. “I’m thirty-eight, I’ll have you know. Fifty! Of all the insults . . .” She reached out, grabbed Rose’s shoulder and gave it a shove.

  Rose staggered but found her footing as the room buzzed with shocked conversation and even an outcry of distress. Laverne stood, moved swiftly down to the aisle and then strode forward, saying, “Zunia Pettigrew, you calm down and don’t you dare lay your hands on Rose again.”

  Walter Sommer stepped up to the embattled trio, stuck out both hands, palms outward, and cleared his throat. “Ladies, tempers, tempers!”

  Rose, clutching her teapot to her chest, said, “Walter Sommer, as ITCS president, why don’t you tell Zunia Pettigrew to stop being such a petty tyrant?”

  Walter shook his head, reached toward Zunia, then stopped, cleared his throat again, surveyed the chattering group with a sweeping glance, and said, “We will now adjourn to have tea and everyone will calm their nerves with the bewitching brew, as poets call it.”

  His mixture of pomposity and oily solicitude was grating. Zunia tossed her head and stormed off, grabbing Orlando’s arm and dragging him after her as Emma followed, snickering at her stepmother’s anger.

  Chapter 2

  The dining room at the Stone and Scone Inn was across the small, dark lobby from the conference room. Though about the same size, it was lighter and brighter, paneled in white wainscoting and with dusty gilt chandeliers dangling from the high ceilings. It would be set for dinner in just two hours, but in the meantime the inn serving staff had set it up for afternoon tea for the conventioneers. Round tables layered in white-and-pink damask tablecloths dotted the room; fresh flowers in bowls adorned the center of each table. The tea ware was restaurant-quality Villeroy & Boch, but at least it was patterned in green and looked fresh against the pink tablecloths.

  The dining room, cooler than the convention room had been, was abuzz with chatter. Zunia and the other members of the ITCS national executive committee, which consisted of Walter Sommer, his wife, Nora, and other ITCS members from different chapters, sat at a table in the center. Penelope Daley, a large blonde woman with frizzy hair in a cut that emphasized a long jaw, was bent toward the pastor, talking at him. He cleaned his glasses and watched Zunia, who chatted with a pair of sixtyish twin sisters.

  Rose and her group sat at a big round table near the back, her grand teapot, or whatever it was, on the table in front of her. Laverne examined a scone then spread it with fruit preserve and bit into it. “Not bad,” she mumbled. “Not as good as ours, but not bad.”

  The tea, a strong mix of black teas, was excellent, of course, a special ITCS blend from Rhiannon Galway’s shop. It should have been refreshing but wasn’t doing the trick for Rose, who was still upset about the confrontation with Zunia. She tried to soothe herself by people-watching, a favorite pastime of hers. For the most part the groups stayed within their own tight circles. Rose knew many of the members but it was a superficial acquaintance, revived only every two years. It seemed that many of the members she had known for years had drifted away, canceling their memberships just in the past twelve months.

  “I know it’s just Friday afternoon and that more will arrive tomorrow, but it seems to be a smaller gathering this year,” she said, and sipped her tea. “We’re missing at least ten or twelve ladies who used to arrive for the Friday introductory meeting every year. And one entire club is missing in action; where are the Catskill Collectors?”

  “Remember I told you about the trouble Zunia had last summer?”

  Rose nodded. Laverne had given her the whole scoop: Zunia Pettigrew, her sights firmly set on the chapter presidency, had taken over every meeting as if it were her due, even though she was a relative newcomer to the ITCS.

  “I guess I forgot to also tell you that the CC group was especially critical of her, since their club founder was the outgoing chapter president. They threatened to quit en masse if she was elected and I guess they did just that.”

  Saddened by the fracture in a formerly peaceful and fun-loving group, Rose scanned the room. One bad apple really did spoil the whole barrel, sometimes, she supposed. SuLinn Miller, a newer member of the Silver Spouts, was sitting at a small table near the door into the lobby chatting with Rhiannon Galway. SuLinn, who had recently moved to Gracious Grove with her husband, architect Randy Miller, had started out shy with no local friends. She now seemed to be getting into the swing of living in a small town, as opposed to New York City, where she was from. Sophie and SuLinn had become fast friends over the last couple of months. Rhiannon was in that same age group, which was perhaps why SuLinn gravitated to her in a group of mostly older folks, middle-aged and beyond.

  Rose was grateful that her granddaughter had friends her own age in Gracious Grove. No one knew as well as Rose how Sophie had been shattered by the closure of her beloved restaurant. It had been the dream of a lifetime, and she had put every bit of her bountiful energy into it, as well as all her saved cash and every waking moment of her time. When it went belly-up, the other investors refused to do a thing to save it. Sophie’s own efforts to make the changes she felt In Fashion needed to survive the difficult New York City food climate weren’t enough and it crushed her. She had limped back to Gracious Grove and Auntie Rose’s Victorian Tea House with a wounded spirit, like a beautiful bird with a broken wing.

  SuLinn and Rhiannon, as well as Cissy Peterson, who was an old friend from the summers Sophie spent in Gracious Grove as a child and teen, and Dana Saunders, another friend from that time, had given Sophie back the camaraderie that she had lost while working too hard and long on a doomed dream. Rose glanced over at Laverne, who was surveying the group with dark, intelligent eyes. Friends were the glue that held a lifetime of memories together. Rose would never have survived the loss—many years ago now—of her husband, and that of her son in the Vietnam War, if not for Laverne.

  Her thoughts drifted back to her granddaughter and Jason Murphy, a local boy and Sophie’s first boyfriend when she was just sixteen and he eighteen. Rose never knew what went on between them when Sophie’s mom, Rosalind, came to get her to take her to boarding school that August, but she and Jason broke up on bad terms and were just now, thirteen years later, making amends. Rose had a feeling her granddaughter still had a soft spot for Jason, now a professor of English at Cruickshank College, but Sophie didn’t talk about it much. As far as Rose knew they were just f
riends.

  “Excuse me, Rose Freemont?”

  Rose looked up to see the woman from the Tea Belles, the first to be put down by Zunia. “Hello! We’ve met here before, have we not?”

  “Yes, two years ago, my first year at the ITCS convention. I’m Jemima Littlefield.”

  She was a plump woman, in her seventies, Rose judged, with a lined, round face, a worried expression and a habit of wringing her hands. “Why don’t you sit for a moment, Jemima; rest your bones!”

  She sat down next to Rose and said, “I was so happy to hear you put that awful woman in her place!”

  “I don’t feel like I put her in her place,” Rose said. She looked across the room, where Zunia, with her circle of fellow committee members, was holding court, gesticulating and shooting malevolent glances around the room. “I should have held my tongue. No good comes of talking in anger.”

  Laverne murmured, “Some women need to be told.”

  “I wouldn’t have had the nerve to say what you did,” Jemima admitted to Rose.

  At that moment the other woman who had brought a teapot to the talk joined them. She and Jemima greeted each other as old friends, with air kisses and pats on the shoulder, and she hovered over them as serving staff brought around urns of hot water to heat up the individual pots of tea at each table. “That woman is a poisonous menace,” she said, after introducing herself as Faye Alice Benson. “I know for a fact she is the sole reason the Catskill Collectors quit the ITCS. Zunia Pettigrew makes a bad enemy, though. I was not going to stir that particular pot, even though I had to say my teapot was clearly German porcelain. I don’t know if she is missing her glasses or her medication,” she finished, acidly.