Page 73 of The Virtues of Christmas
That man being young Harry, apparently. “Mr. MacHugh should be back shortly. He went to the chophouse.”
“And himself didn’t even start the stove,” Harry groused, hanging his cap, coat, and scarf on a hook. “My auntie would box Dougal’s ears for leaving a lady to freeze, but Dougal is ever one to keep his mind on business. That’s a great lot of snow out there, isn’t it? Did you have any trouble making your way here?”
“It was slow going at first,” Patience said, opening the stove and finding only a few coals still burning. “Will the others be in soon?”
She wanted to have the place to herself and Dougal, but she also wanted the professor to know that MacHugh and Sons wouldn’t let a little thing like a snowstorm stop them from publishing their broadsheets.
“Poor old professor,” she muttered, pushing the coals to the back of the stove with the poker. Whatever else might be true of Pennypacker, he hadn’t had as lovely a night as Patience had. “Where are the spills, Harry? This fire will take a little help to get going.”
“I put them in Detwiler’s desk,” Harry said from Dougal’s office. “George gets up to mischief when he’s left here by himself for too long.”
Harry came to the doorway of the office, George cradled in his arms.
“That cat shredded some of my columns, Harry MacHugh, and I rewrote them so I’d have the last word with the professor. We all have to do things we’d rather not.”
“Hear that, cat?” Harry said, scratching George under the chin. “You’re on dangerous ground. Any more bad behavior, and old Dougal P. MacHugh, publisher, will banish you to the tavern next door.”
The cat was no more impressed with that threat than he was with anything else. Patience left off hunting for the spills.
“Harry, what does the P in Mr. MacHugh’s name stand for?”
“P is for Pennypacker,” Harry said, moving off toward the front door. “My auntie’s people are Pennypackers. Have a farm south of Dunkeld. Shakespeare passed through there once upon a time, so they say. C’mon, George. The Bard got all his ideas for The Scottish Play while he was in the area, so my auntie claims.”
Patience subsided into Mr. Detwiler’s chair, struck by the coincidence of her nemesis having the same name as her prospective mother-in-law. The publishing community was close-knit—all of the publishers belonged to the same clubs, and they regularly met for meals, for example. One of Dougal’s competitors could easily have learned of his mother’s antecedents and chosen the name to plague him when devising anom de plumefor the professor.
“Such teasing is a bit juvenile,” she muttered, opening the last of Detwiler’s drawers. A neat stack of paper sat inside the drawer with a layer of spills peeking from beneath it. “Hidden from bored tomcats.”
Patience put the papers on the desk and set about encouraging the fire in the parlor stove back to life. It took kindling, fresh coal, and a trip to Dougal’s office to light the taper, but she managed.
Ten years ago, she would not have known how to light a decent fire, even with all the tools right at hand.
She tidied up the stack of papers she’d taken from Detwiler’s drawer and saw Dougal’s handwriting. He had beautiful penmanship, such as she would have expected from a former schoolteacher. No blotting, crossing out, inserting, or revising. She might have been looking at a final copy of one of her own…
The piece was signed:Professor D. Pennypacker.
Patience was still sitting at Detwiler’s desk several minutes later when Dougal bustled through the door, bringing a gust of cold air with him and the scents of bacon, toast, and coffee.
“You’re up and about. I’m almost sorry—no, I am sorry. Good of you to get the stove—Patience?”
She didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to see the truth in his eyes.
“I found these,” she said, brandishing the pages. “The signature is Pennypacker’s, but the name is your mother’s, and the penmanship is yours.Dougal, how could you?”
He set his parcels on Detwiler’s desk and hung up his coat and scarf, while Patience wrestled with the screaming need to pitch his infernal pages into the parlor stove.
“You’re angry,” he said when his coat was hung just so on a hook next to Harry’s. “I can explain.”
He wasn’t starting with an apology, or with a denial, the two strategies that might have allowed Patience to hold on to her temper.
“You have lied to me, manipulated me, played me for a fool, and probably laughed at me all the way up those stairs, Dougal MacHugh. You are Professor Pennypacker, am I right?”
The doorbell jingled again, and Harry came in, stomping loudly.
“Am I right, Dougal? Did you lie to me?”
“I dissembled,” Dougal said, “but if you’ll listen, I can provide some perspective, and perhaps then you’ll see—”
Patience marched up to him and struck him across the chest with his papers. “I’llseethat I misheard you, I was mistaken, I misinterpreted, I misconstrued, though I have it from the most self-assured authority that my command of English is superb. You never once told me that you were Pennypacker, and this whole exercise has been a farce at the expense of my dignity.”
