An antiquarian named Elin rented the rooms above the station, where she hoped to catalogue a neglected collection without becoming involved in the village's continuing arguments about its founder. (antiquarian: antiquary, antiquities specialist) Her first discovery was a compendium of local ceremonies, neatly arranged by year but oddly silent about the grand dinner that every elderly resident claimed to remember. (compendium: concise collection, digest, summary collection) In a cramped garret, she found a box of invitations that appeared never to have been sent, each addressed to a guest whose name had been carefully crossed out. (garret: attic, loft, attic room) Beneath the box lay a tome so heavy that the station porter insisted on carrying it with both hands, although its title promised only a brief history. (tome: large book, substantial volume, weighty book) A small missal had been used to support the uneven shelf, and Elin moved the liturgical book to a clean table before examining anything that might have fallen behind it. (missal: alternate name Mass book)
On the back of one invitation was a cipher, a line of substituted letters that suggested either a secret arrangement or an unusually unhelpful method of recording the menu. (cipher: coded message, secret writing, encrypted text) Beside it, a rebus combined a bell, a key, and a drawn pear, which the porter solved aloud before realizing that he had interrupted the historian's serious concentration. (rebus: picture puzzle, pictorial riddle) The resulting phrase was an allusion to an old play, and Elin began to suspect that the missing dinner had been a performance rather than a public occasion. (allusion: indirect reference, hinted reference, passing reference) A mention of an electric lift was an anachronism in a supposed eighteenth-century account, showing that at least one page had been written much later than its heading claimed. (anachronism: chronological mismatch, out-of-period detail, misplaced historical feature) The porter demanded the denouement immediately, but Elin explained that a satisfying ending was not something a careful reader should invent simply because the evidence had become interesting. (denouement: resolution, unravelling, final explanation)
The mayor sent an emissary to ask whether the discovery might embarrass the founder's descendants, a question that made the silent box suddenly seem rather important to everyone. (emissary: envoy, representative, messenger) Elin continued to decipher the notes, separating what the letters actually showed from what the villagers hoped they meant, while the porter kept an increasingly impatient watch over the kettle. (decipher: decode, interpret, make out) An extemporaneous speech by the emissary revealed more about present anxieties than past events, since every attempt at reassurance introduced another rumor that Elin had not heard before. (extemporaneous: improvised, unprepared, off the cuff) The diction in the invitations differed sharply from the founder's letters, with playful theatrical phrases replacing the practical language he normally used when arranging meals or repairing buildings. (diction: word choice, verbal expression, style of wording) At the end of his elaborate peroration, the emissary requested a plain answer, and the porter observed that a plain question would have saved them all considerable time. (peroration: concluding speech, closing flourish, final summation)
His final adjuration was to keep the discovery private, but Elin promised only to avoid publishing a conclusion that the surviving documents could not reasonably support. (adjuration: solemn appeal, earnest entreaty, urgent request) She refused to ascribe the playful invitations to the founder merely because they were stored near his papers, a distinction that disappointed those who had already prepared a commemorative plaque. (ascribe: attribute, assign, credit) A later inventory showed that the founder's niece had chosen to bequeath her dramatic scripts along with his letters, bringing two unrelated collections into the same crowded attic. (bequeath: leave by will, pass on, leave as a legacy) Costume had been de rigueur at the niece's rehearsals, explaining the impossible dates and extravagant names without requiring either a hidden banquet or a conspiracy among the older residents. (de rigueur: obligatory, customary, expected) By evening the porter had acquired the moniker Keeper of the Unsent Dinner, and Elin accepted an ordinary invitation to supper that required neither decoding nor a historical investigation. (moniker: nickname, informal name, appellation)