Too Many Coins: A Jewish Regency Short Mystery

Too Many Coins

A Jewish Regency Mystery Story

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LIBI ASTAIRE

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ASTER PRESS

First published 2013

Copyright 2013 Libi Astaire

Cover photo: Copyright Libi Astaire

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Published by:

Aster Press

Kansas-Jerusalem

asterpressbooks@gmail.com

CONTENTS

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TOO MANY COINS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TOO MANY COINS

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WE SHALL PUT Mrs. Mandelbaum next to you, Rebecca. That way, if she cannot hear, you can tell her what she has missed. Mrs. Rose Lyon gave the dining table a satisfied look, now that the difficult task of arranging the seating of the guests invited to the evening’s dinner party had been accomplished.

Miss Rebecca Lyon, a young lady not quite at the marriageable age, would have liked to object, but she was torn between two equally strong opposing forces. The young part of her personality wished to loudly exclaim that she would not sit next to Mrs. Mandelbaum, who would bother her with a thousand questions about the soup and the sauces and not care a whit for what was being said at the other end of the table, where the gentlemen would be seated.

A large dinner party on an ordinary weeknight was not a common occurrence at the Lyon family’s home on Devonshire Square. However, that evening Rebecca’s father, Mr. Samuel Lyon, clockmaker to the fashionable world, would be playing host to a most important visitor from the Holy Land. This gentleman had been invited to Devonshire Square in order to tell the assembled company—some of the more esteemed members of London’s Ashkenazic Jewish community—all about life in the holy city of Safed and how the newcomers from Poland were faring in their new home. It was certain to be a most interesting discussion for any person of sensibility, and Miss Lyon prided herself upon being a young person with more sensibility than most. How could she therefore spend those precious hours engaged in conversation with Mrs. Mandelbaum, who always fussed over her food, either because she was worried about how it would affect her digestion or because she must have a copy of the recipe?

Yet Rebecca dared not protest too loudly to the matriarch of the family about the seating arrangements. Her mother might decide to send her and her good friend, Miss Harriet Franks, to the nursery to eat their dinner there with Rebecca’s younger brother and sisters—which would be a banishment too embarrassing for two young ladies to bear.

Rebecca therefore lowered her eyes and said, with her most demure and ladylike voice, Yes, Mama.

Mrs. Lyon gave Rebecca a queer look—she never entirely trusted the sudden docility of her usually spirited second eldest daughter—but there was too much to do and too little time to stand there conversing. Meshullam Mendel, a family servant who performed the weightiest work about the Lyon home, had brought up a large tray filled with the heavier items of polished silver, while his daughter Perl carried the chest with the silverware.

Is the new girl working out? asked Mrs. Lyon. They had had to borrow a servant from the household of Mr. and Mrs. Franks, who lived just a few doors away, to help out in the kitchen. And Mrs.