Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was while he was eating his last bites of breakfast that Octavius realized he had one more task to perform before he left Rumpole Hall. Accordingly, he didn’t linger at the table with Dex and Newingham, but went searching for a footman. He found a housemaid instead. When he described the man he was looking for, the maid said, “You mean Malcolm, sir?”
“Is he tall and thin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s him. Can you tell him I want to see him? I’ll be in the library.”
The library smelled faintly of urine. Someone had scrubbed the carpet where the port had spilled, but a mark remained if one knew where to look for it, hidden among the acanthus leaves.
Octavius stared at that dark blotch and remembered Rumpole’s terror, remembered him begging and weeping and pissing himsel
