A/N: Miss Marple (who is the creation of Agatha Christie and the property of whoever now owns her, which isn't me) has an interesting slate of servants, relatives, and neighbors at Christmas 1942. Other ownership credits are at the end. Day 15 (presents) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge.
The latest housemaid stared at the mass of wool coils as if she had no idea what it was. Perhaps in the Welsh coal-mining town she'd come from—one of those places with an abundance of L's and a paucity of vowels—people wrapped themselves in tarps or simply painted themselves blue.
Or were those Scots who painted themselves blue? Memories of a long-ago Victorian governess' lessons blurred so, with the years.
"It's a warm sweater, dear," Miss Marple said gently. "A token of appreciation for all your hard work."
"I don't like being grateful. Ma'am."
Miss Marple had never been one to like sullen, ungrateful servants—particularly after she'd unraveled an entire moth-eaten blanket to get proper yarn in any quantity—but with the war on, she was fortunate to get household help at all.
Since Katniss had brought to St. Mary Mead her sulky lower lip, her indifferent skill at dusting, and her entire disregard for any cooking more complicated than roasting or boiling, there'd been meat on Miss Marple's table. It might be tough or gamey, but meat it was, though no one had ever seen Katniss standing in line at the butcher's shop.
The baker's shop, now—the girl lingered there on any excuse. The baker's blond boy was a looker, with good manners that brought the girls like flies to honey and a gimpy leg to keep him out of the Army.
"Bring in tea when my niece arrives, Katniss, and slice the Christmas cake very thin. You can do it if you try. And send in the gardener on your way out, please."
Miss Marple patted the pile of presents beside her comfortable chair and settled her shawl more closely around her shoulders. Coal for fires was as scarce as anything else these days. Snow might be lovely and sentimental on the other side of her cottage's broad front window, but its chill was out of place among the parlor's bibelots and antimacassars.
"You called, ma'am?" The gardener—not her gardener, that was too much to ask these days—bowed himself into the room, rubbing gnarled hands together. The top of his head was barely level with the mantlepiece—no secret how he failed to qualify for the Army.
His hairy feet were bare again, tracking snow across her rug.
Miss Marple picked the heaviest of the boxes from the stack. "Merry Christmas, Baggins. A little something for all your hard work."
"Aye." The little man pulled open the box and looked quizzically at its contents. "Shoes, ma'am? I mean, thank you very much, ma'am."
Before Miss Marple could expand upon the virtues of wearing shoes, Katniss opened the parlor door without knocking. "Constable Cullen here to see you, ma'am."
That young man moved entirely too fast for someone who'd failed his physical. He had the paper-white skin and deeply shadowed eyes of an opium-eating poet. Miss Marple's hands itched to confiscate his hash and spoon a restorative tonic down his throat.
"The new vicar's cousin's sister's husband's nephew is having crazy visions from poisoned mushrooms," the constable said. He shot a look at Baggins, who'd been backing around him toward the door. To Miss Marple's surprise, the little man's shoulders relaxed, while Katniss' eyes widened.
"Katniss, dear, were you in the woods yesterday?" Miss Marple asked.
"Why'd I be in the woods anyway?" the girl mumbled.
The constable squared his shoulders and stiffened his upper lip. "It's not like the whole village doesn't know who steals mushrooms from Farmer Maggot. Baggins."
Miss Marple sighed. "Constable, ask the baker's boy if he helped the vicar's girl with gathering mushrooms for the vicar's Christmas dinner."
"Peter wouldn't poison anyone," Katniss protested.
"Baggins knows a good mushroom from a bad one, don't you, Baggins? Young Peter would pick toadstools because they're pretty, especially if he's distracted by Delly Cartwright's big blue eyes." Let the girl mull that over.
"It's not Peter Mellark who robbed the Draco Consolidated Bank," the constable muttered.
"All I did—" Baggins started to protest.
Miss Marple cut off that nonsense as the doorbell chimed. "He's reformed. Quite reformed. And he'll buy Farmer Maggot's mushrooms properly in the future, won't you, Baggins?"
"Aye, ma'am."
"The door, Katniss, if you don't mind. Show Baggins and Constable Cullen out. Bring the tea and cake if that's Bella, and if the odd-jobs man walks by, bring him in for a moment."
The gasp and flurry of coats in the hallway implied that the visitor was indeed Bella, a conclusion confirmed when the girl herself slumped into the parlor, tripped over a corner of the rug, said a word no lady should know as she stubbed her toe on a chair leg, and plopped onto the sofa.
"How is your hospital work going, dear Bella?" Miss Marple inquired.
Bella held up a bandaged hand. "I cut myself on a scalpel and bled all over a soldier having an appendectomy. Matron put me on changing bedpans and I had to go home for a fresh uniform three times in a single day. Now it's all changing bed linens, and I hate it."
Something in her tone didn't quite ring true. Miss Marple peered more closely at her niece's face—partly hidden beneath a lank fall of dark hair, as the current privations had done nothing to improve modern girls' disdain for grooming—and saw a blush.
"When I worked in hospital in the last war," Miss Marple mused as she reached for a gift, "there were quite a few handsome soldiers. They flirted outrageously, and half of them had girls back home, but there wasn't a dull moment in the wards."
"I'm not. . . it's just. . . Constable Cullen is so distant sometimes." Bella fumbled a package from her bag, dropped it, and banged her head on the tea table in retrieving it. "I feel the emanations of his soul, but it's not always. . ."
"What's the boy's name, dear?"
"Jacob Black. He's American. Tall, dark, and handsome. . . with a grin that's downright wolfish, sometimes. I don't know what to think. . ."
"Is he missing any body parts that might be. . . vital?" Miss Marple didn't mean legs or arms, but a proper gentlewoman could only hint.
Bella opened her box and pulled out a long fall of crimson fabric. "Oh. Oh my. It's a cape. With a hood and everything. Auntie Jane, thank you." Rising to kiss Miss Marple's cheek, she collided with the opening parlor door and sent Katniss' tea tray sloshing. "No, Jacob's just running a fever."
"The odd-jobs man is here," Katniss announced.
"It's goodbye, farewell, adieu, and auf wiedersehen," the odd-jobs man said. "Or maybe not the last, unless I'm switching sides, which I'm not. I'm just going. Elsewhere."
He had the goatee and mustache of a pantomime devil and the concentrated energy of a battery. Miss Marple could manage a flicker of gratitude that Stark wore shoes, as she'd seen him forget to bathe, eat, and put on pants when he was in the midst of a project.
Nonetheless, the windmill he'd rigged in the garden to run the lights was proving to be a great expense saver, and so reliable, too.
"I wouldn't want you to leave without your present," Miss Marple said.
Stark opened the box, examined the lid, rubbed his hand along the surface, and set the lid on his head at a jaunty angle before he stuck his hand into the box. The knitted muffler had taken every bit of extra wool Miss Marple could find—and its coloring was frankly random—but she somehow couldn't imagine Stark being deeply concerned about fashion.
"Thank you, thank you kindly, Miss Marbles. This will keep me warm at Bletchley Park, which I did not say and is not where I'm going, just a random place name. Happy Easter. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night."
"I think he drinks," Bella said when he'd bowed himself from the parlor. She passed her aunt a box tied with a red ribbon.
"I'm sure he does," said Miss Marple. "Oh, how sweet, dear. Five Little Pigs. I do love a good mystery novel."
Katniss opened the parlor door again, still without knocking. "Constable Cullen's back. Ma'am."
Bella pushed back her hair and simpered as the pale policeman strode into the parlor. This time, he was brandishing a dead duck.
"Dear me," said Miss Marple. "Are you inviting yourself for Christmas dinner?"
"No, ma'am." The constable's peculiar amber eyes strayed to Bella with an expression that was downright hungry. "I am on the trail of a poacher."
Katniss would have slipped backward through the door if she hadn't stepped on Bella's toes.
"Katniss, dear, what sort of eggs did we have for breakfast?" Miss Marple asked mildly.
"Boiled, ma'am. You said it's the only kind I can make right."
"That's so. Constable, there are no poachers here. Try the manor. There are always travelers lurking about in the woods up there."
Katniss' gasp was, fortunately, lost in the exchange of sighs between Bella and Constable Cullen. For once, Miss Marple was glad that her niece was a bit. . . obsessive about the young policeman.
"Bella, dear, could you see the constable out, please? You can try your new cloak out, if you like. Katniss, stay a moment. We need to discuss the tea."
"It's not boiled again, is it?" The girl's lower lip was out and her eyes narrowed. Miss Marple often had the feeling Katniss would as happily shoot her as pour her tea.
Change would be all for the best, really.
"Perhaps I should have asked earlier. Are you the poacher?"
"Sometimes. Not that duck, though." Katniss' color was high and her pale eyes defiant. She had the look of the Markhams' parlor maid when she'd been trying to conceal how the Major Gray's valet was pilfering pocket watches from the houseguests.
"But you know who shot it."
"No."
"He must be a good-looking lad. One of the travelers?"
"Gale can't go to jail! He'll die if he's locked up."
"No doubt he will." Miss Marple would have to see if Delly Cartwright was available, at least for the heavy cleaning. Delly would not be allowed to do the marketing. "Could you please get me Bella's handbag from the sofa?"
Bella was always saying she meant to do more for the poor and oppressed. There was no time like the present. Miss Marple pulled out a five-pound note and pressed it into Katniss' grubby paw.
"A girl might be excused for taking her quarter's wages, putting on her warm sweater, and going to warn her young man," Miss Marple said. "If she didn't come back, well, it's war-time. People move about."
"But what will Peter do?"
"Peter will do fine without you, no matter what pretty words he's been dripping in your ear. He has just the manner of the lad who used to work at the garage. He was engaged to Maisie Dobbs at the post office until her twin sister turned up in the family way, naming him as the father. Never trust a young man with eyes that pale shade of blue."
"I can't—" From her awed and speculative expression as she stared at the five-pound note, it was quite clear that she could. She was just determined to argue about it first.
"Being the baker's wife behind a shop counter would be as much as cage for you as jail would be for your young man," Miss Marple said firmly. "Now put on your sweater and go before the constable decides to walk my niece back here and invite himself for dinner."
"Yes, ma'am." It was the closest to a smile she'd ever seen from Katniss. "Thank you, ma'am. This is. . . it's the best Christmas present ever."
The patter of footsteps in the hall, followed by a crash and a series of yelps, suggested Katniss had collided with a returning Bella.
"Leave your red riding hood on, dear," Miss Marple said as Bella burst into the parlor. "We're going to take a nice winter walk before dinner. I think I'd like to visit your young American with the fever."
A/N: Let's see. Katniss, Peter/Peeta, Delly Cartwright, and Gale are the property of Suzanne Collins. Baggins and Farmer Maggot belong to the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien, as presumably do the mushrooms. Stark the odd-jobs man is presumably the property of Marvel Comics. Niece Bella and the pale Constable Cullen belong to Stephenie Meyer. The Markhams are a shout-out to Ally Condie's Matched trilogy; Major Grey is the ne'er-do-well younger brother of Earl Grey of the tea fortune; and Miss Marple's remarks about pale blue eyes are a shout-out to Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair. The novel Miss Marple receives from Bella, Five Little Pigs, would at Christmas 1942 have been Agatha Christie's most recent Hercule Poirot mystery.