Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

She stood up. “But since we’re speaking plainly — I would stay in of an evening in future, if I were you. All this nonsense when you took to going out... Didn’t do you a scrap of good, not in the long run. There is television and your stamps, you haven’t done your stamps for ages. And three library books, weeks overdue. I keep seeing them upstairs. Thoughtless; sorry to be personal, but it is — others may be waiting for what you can’t be bothered with.”

Esme wanted to laugh at his expression, guarded blankness succeeded by hope, giving way to incredulous gratitude. She experienced a complex pang of half-irritated toleration — men! — and covert amusement at his transparency.

“You’re right,” said a fervent Mr. Shale. He moved to the other room in an awkward, experimental fashion, like a far older man or an invalid. “I must catch up on my reading. Absolutely right, as usual, Mrs. Huddle.”

Adding, with a wan trace of his former, hand-rubbing zeal, “I do believe I could eat something. A bloater is a bloater is a bloater, eh?”

Which reminded her... She might as well get everything settled before they returned to safe ground; there would never be a better time to impose her will. “There is just one thing, Mr. Shale.”

His face registered defeat settling once more. “I thought there might be.”

Esme’s lips tightened. Trust a man to get sarky just because his meal wasn’t ready the minute he walked in. But she kept her voice reasonable. “I wish you wouldn’t make such a to-do about what I put on the table. Nobody ever said I wasn’t a fair cook, for anything plain and wholesome. There’s no need for comments, ‘Thank you’ would do, though I take that for granted. It gets on my nerves a bit, frankly. I know you don’t intend to, but it does.”

There, she had said what she wanted to. If he didn’t like it, he could lump it.

Mr. Shale said wonderingly, “Praising your cooking too much. That’s it?”

“I can’t think of anything else. It probably seems trivial, but we can’t help the way we are. ‘Over-egging the pudding,’ my father called that kind of thing. It’s only plain cooking when all is said and done, and you pay me for it.”

“Good God,” Mr. Shale mouthed dazedly. He struggled for further words, thought better of them, and nodded humbly.

Time would tell, she reflected. A few days later she gave the still-subdued lodger a little test when he sat down to tea, warning briskly, “Mind out, your plate’s very hot.”

Back turned while she reached through the serving hatch for salt and pepper, Esme waited for his once-inevitable rejoinder: “Well, it came from a hot plate, Mrs. Huddle.” But waiting politely for her to sit down before taking up his knife and fork, Mr. Shale spoke not a word.

She felt no sense of victory, though she was gratified to find her character assessment justified. Whatever David Shale had done to that bad woman, he would always behave himself under her roof, not to mention her eye. And he was an undeniably quick learner.

Little Caesar and the Pirates by Steven Saylor

The eight published short stories in Steven Saylor’s Gordianus series, all set in the period between the Roman civil wars, fill in the temporal gap between the first two Gordianus novels, Roman Blood (which begins in79 B.C.) and Arms of Nemesis (72 B.C.). Mr. Saylor plans eventually to use short stories to cover other periods skipped over as he continues Gordianus’s adventures in his novels. His current offering remains in the period between the wars, when Julius Caesar was a young man. Readers who would like a look ahead in time might try the latest Gordianus novel, The Venus Throw (St. Martin’s Press).

* * *

“Well met Gordianus! Tell me, have you heard what they’re saying down in the Forum about Marius’s young nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar?”

It was my good friend Lucius Claudius who called to me on the steps of the Senian Baths. He appeared to be on his way out, while I was on my way in.

“If you mean that old story about his playing queen to King Nicomedes while he was in Bythinia, I’ve heard it all before — from you, I believe, more than once, and with increasingly graphic details each time.”

“No, no, that bit of gossip is ancient history now. I’m talking about this tale of pirates, ransom, revenge — crucifixions!”

I looked at him blankly.