Ten Lords A-Leaping is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Douglas Whiteway
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LCC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LCC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benison, C. C.
Ten Lords a-leaping: a mystery/C. C. Benison.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-34447-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-440-33985-4
1. Vicars, Parochial—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.B37783T46 2013
813′.54—dc23 2013010373
www.bantamdell.com
246897531
Jacket design: Marietta Anastassatos
Jacket illustration: Ben Perini
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Cast of Characters
Family Tree
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Cast of Characters
Inhabitants of Eggescombe Park
Hector Strickland, tenth Earl of Fairhaven
Georgina, Countess of Fairhaven
His wife
Maximilian
Their son
Marguerite, Dowager Countess of Fairhaven
Roberto Sica
Her lodger
Michael “Mick” Gaunt
Butler-valet
Ellen Gaunt
Cook-housekeeper
Visitors to Eggescombe Park
The Reverend Tom Christmas
Vicar of St. Nicholas Church, Thornford Regis
Miranda Christmas
His daughter
Madrun Prowse
His housekeeper
James Allan, Viscount Kirkbride
Jane, Viscountess Kirkbride
His wife
Oliver fforde-Beckett, seventh Marquess of Morborne
Lady Lucinda fforde-Beckett
His half sister
Dominic fforde-Beckett
Their cousin
Derek Bliss
Detective Inspector, Totnes CID
Colin Blessing
Detective Sergeant, Totnes CID
To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.
The Vicarage
Thornford Regis TC9 6QX
6 AUGUST
Dear Mum,
Short note this morning as it’s the big day! Mr. Christmas has to be up and out to Plymouth airfield early so he and the others from the village can learn how to properly jump from an airplane without doing themselves an injury. He has looked a bit green about the gills the last few days, I must say. I was fetching a loaf at Pattimore’s yesterday morning before I dropped your letter at the post office and I thought Roger looked a bit off, too, and I said so. He came over all huffy claiming it’s the weight he’s lost so he can fit into one of those leotards jumpsuits they have to wear. Ha! I thought, but didn’t say anything. I don’t think his mother is best pleased her son is going to throw his 16 stone into thin air with only a scrap of silk to boy bouy buoy him up. Enid was very quiet, and I could sense she was working herself up to one of her little “turns.” I said to Karla when I got to the wicket at the post office, £10 and a quarter of choc limes if Roger doesn’t pull out at the last minute. But Karla wouldn’t take the bet. As you know, she’s set herself against the Leaping Lords fund-raiser for the new church roof, thinks it’s not proper, although I’m not sure now whether she means it’s not proper for St. Nicholas’s or the church council or Mr. C. or the peerage—or her! Perhaps she means everyone. Anyway, I’ve come around to Mr. C.’s point of view, as it should raise a very good sum quickly and let work start sooner than later on the roof, before water starts to drip on someone’s poor head at Sunday service. I haven’t told Karla I’ve shifted my views, though, as she is apt to get her back up. I don’t blame her at any rate for not wanting to jump from an airplane. Neither do I, as I’ve said, and told Mr. C. before he even asked! He has been very good at chivvying folk in the village to join in, though, getting everyone on the PCC (except Karla!) to sign up and get pledges and getting dozens more in the village, too, although some of the attraction I think is the treat of a day at Eggescombe Park where there’s to be a summer fair, too, and the chance to meet the peerage—once they’ve landed safely on the ground, of course. Ten lords have signed up at last count, Mum, a good job on the part of Lord Kirkbride. I am looking forwards to the day! I’ve never been to Eggescombe Hall, though it is not far. Have you? I can’t remember if you’ve ever said. Of course, I’ve seen pictures, and they did film one of Agatha Christie’s books there not long ago, The Seven Dials Mystery, I think. Eggescombe Hall stood in for “Chimneys.” Anyway, I’m driving Miranda to Eggescombe in Mr. Christmas’s car later this morning after he and the others take the coach they’ve hired to the airfield. And then he and Miranda will take the car later this afternoon or evening and start their journey to Kent for their holiday. They’re stopping overnight in Exeter with Miranda’s Aunt Julia—did I mention before? I wonder if we shall ever see her at the vicarage again? But I expect not—after everything that happened last year when poor Sybella Parry was found dead in that big Japanese drum. Anyway, I mustn’t dwell on past afflictions. The Met Office says the “barbecue summer” is to continue through the weekend (with chance of late-evening showers in the southwest). The Met is often wrong, of course, but I have my fingers crossed, as I expect all who shall be parachuting do, as leaping into dark clouds might be rather alarming. The sun’s shining right now on the lovely blooms I have in your old golddish goldfish bowl on the window ledge. Of course, it will be grand to have some time away from Thornford R myself and it was so thoughtful of Ellen to invite me to stay a few days with her and her husband at Eggescombe. I’m staying with them at the Gatehouse rather than at the Hall, it turns out. Which is just as well, as I would feel odd bumping into Lord or Lady Fairhaven coming out the loo or the like. It was good of Lord Fairhaven to let their housekeeper have an old friend (me!) to stay, though it may be a bit of a busman’s, Mum, as Ellen told me on the phone yesterday their best daily can’t
help at the weekend as she has had a family tragedy. I won’t mind, I don’t think. It will be like being “in service” as great-Grannie was up at the Big House in Thornford before the Great War—only with a dishwasher and a microwave and the other mod cons, of course. It will be good to see Ellen again, too. Hard to imagine it’s thirty years—more!—since we were at cookery school together in London. I was never quite sure why we stopped writing, so I’m looking forward to a catch-up! Well, must go, Mum. I’ll have to see that Miranda is properly packed for the trip and try to get a decent breakfast into Mr. C. He might be a bit squiffy this morning. I popped into the pub last night where all our “skydivers” were gathered having a bit of a knees up and there was much fortifying with Dutch courage, I must say! There’s going to be a few thick heads on the coach this morning. I shouldn’t care to jump from an airplane with a dicky tummy, but there’s always a price to be paid, isn’t there! Cats are well as is Bumble, who will be minded while I’m away by one of the Swan children from the pub, though they haven’t sorted themselves out as to whom who. Love to Aunt Gwen. Glorious day!
Much love,
Madrun
P.S. I can’t believe that mobility scooter I ordered for you last month hasn’t arrived yet! Aunt Gwen was telling me on the phone yesterday. I’ll have to leave it be for the days I’m at Eggescombe, but when I return I shall let ScootersPlus have a piece of my mind!
CHAPTER ONE
“The things I do for the Church of England,” Tom murmured, thinking he might as well have shouted it aloud. One could barely hear a thing anyway what with the fearsome roar. He could hear his heart crashing in his chest, though. It sounded like a big bass drum, accompanied by a simmering tintinnabulation along the fibres of his nerves, and he rather wished he could exercise some control over it—but he couldn’t. The messy, squashy, beaty thing was coursing inexorably to a horrible bursting point. He would surely die before it was his turn. He would leave his daughter fatherless. It was too cruel. Miranda was already motherless.
His eyes raced around the fuselage with its great girdling ribs. The belly of Jonah’s whale would have seemed like this, if the beast were aluminium and tore through the air at alarming speed. As a calming strategy, as the queue shuffled towards the beast’s open jaws—to doom, surely—he focused his attention on the back of Mark’s head, which was squashed into a leather helmet reminiscent of a Roaring Twenties aviator farce. Mark Tucker, faithful husband, young father, brilliant accountant, budding novelist, the best church council treasurer a priest could have. What if something unthinkable happens? How will I ever bear Violet’s reproach? Those fearsome pinprick eyes of hers.
But Violet was young. She could marry again. Mark would have set her up nicely with insurance. Her rich in-laws doted on her. She was not without education. She could find work, keep herself occupied. Oh, it would be dreadful at first. Too, too dreadful. The grief, the pain. He knew these things. But time heals. It does. She would carry on. You do, don’t you. Well, don’t you?
What have I done?
This is all my doing, Tom thought. I’m the one who pressed for this. But it seemed the right thing at the time. Anything to avoid years’ worth of bring-and-buys and carboot sales and karaoke nights to raise funds for church repairs. Something that would bring the cash in a flash. It’s always such a bore lying awake at night worrying more about stones than souls. And it would be enormously satisfying to rid St. Nicholas’s churchyard of that ghastly plywood thermometer. It insulted him every time he walked up the pea shingle path to the church, with its sad little red plastic capillary and its unaccountably inelegant hand lettering. He had fought members of his church council against having such a thing set up by the north porch, and had lost. If funds raised from today’s event proved insufficient, well … The village had among its citizens a lovable kleptomaniac. Perhaps it had a likable arsonist.
The queue shuffled forwards. Tom stared past Mark’s shoulder towards the gaping portal. Strong light, undifferentiated and cold, seemed to pour towards him and sear his startled eyes. Might this be what our moment of death is like? One of his parishioners in Bristol had described it thus, urgently, wonderingly, in a state of euphoria as she faded in and out of consciousness on her deathbed. The light, Father, the light! she’d rasped, her fingernails digging into his palm. I can see Our Lord, oh! And, look, is that Ivor Novello?
Mark bent forwards slightly, and what greeted Tom’s eyes, try as he did to look away, was neither beckoning Jesus nor disoriented matinee idol, but tidy tiny patches of warm greens and golds knitted together like a fancy patchwork coat. How delightful! Heaven might look exactly like Devon. And look, off in the distance, the patterns of colour merged into a crease of soft grey brushed by a transcendent haze. Wasn’t that …? My God, it was! The Channel! How high in the air were they?
And then there was a terrible shout and Mark vanished. Tom shuffled forwards, to the head of the queue, into the full ring of light, and said a silent prayer. Now it was his turn. Blood roared in his ears; his heart swelled in his chest.
Some little time passed—really, very little time (plunging through the ether did rather tend to play havoc with time)—when it dawned on Tom that all might not be kosher. Not frighteningly, horrifyingly not kosher. More worryingly, troublingly not kosher.
He had done everything as he ought to have done, as instructed by their skydiving teacher at the airfield. When the jumpmaster next to the door of the airplane roared at him the “go” command, the fear that had punctuated his waking thoughts for the last week, the fear that had grown through their four hours of on-ground instruction, the fear that had gripped him in the fuselage of this airplane, had hurtled to a crescendo. His heart leapt into his throat like a flapping fish and in a blinding moment of panic he’d seized the frame of the door like grim death. But the jumpmaster gently tapped his shoulder. It felt like an angel’s grace, and his fright ebbed. He vaulted into the sky, somersaulted, gaped with wonder at the dome of hard blue and wispy white, and—he astonished himself entirely—felt a mighty whoop exit his throat as the adrenaline terror coursing along his veins turned to joy and he embraced the wildness of the moment. Air rushed past his popping ears—a new roar—as he executed his opening stance—legs up high behind, back arched, back up—while he tumbled. He was upside down in the sky! And then, in a second, he was facing the horizon, gasping as the line between earth and sky seemed to rise higher and higher and higher. Yet oddly, he felt suspended, held in place only by the whipping wind that pressed against his body.
The free fall was over in a seeming instant. Novices, he and the other villagers weren’t as high in the sky as the Leaping Lords would soon be. Tom pushed down on his rip cord, felt a sudden tug along his body, and heard the distinctive whump! of rushing air suddenly trapped. It was exultation. His whole body lifted into the sky as air filled the cells of his canopy. The feverish rush of noise and wind stopped. The thrumming in his veins settled into a giddy groove as a kind of peace flowed through, above, and around him. All was silent but for the hum of the vanishing airplane, above, and the popcorn pops of other opening chutes. Thin clouds hovered over the Channel, he noted as he pulled at his steering toggles, but over this patch of Devon the sky was clear, allowing an unimpeded view of the collage of fields, ripe with golden grain this early August, of the dark green coombes riven by streams glittering in the sunlight like tinsel thread, and of the snug groupings of houses, their slate roofs turned to flashing planes of silver. Below him, too, like flowers flung from a balcony, fluttered the bright canopies of the other skydivers from the village who had risen—bless them all—to this sponsored fund-raising challenge: eager Mark, for instance, who had needed no persuading; tentative Roger Pattimore, who had strained to lose a stone to come below the maximum allowable weight; undaunted Jeanne Neels, who wouldn’t let being born with one hand stop her; octogenarian Michael Woolnough, untroubled by his advanced age—all of them members of his parochial church council, the entirety of which, bu
t for one, signed on for the adventure, along with forty more from Thornford Regis.
Tom tugged his right strap, sending him in a gentle twirl. Puzzled, though not concerned, he wondered a little that no one—in the air or on the ground—had tried to communicate with him on his squawk box, the radio nestled above his chest strap. Jumper Number Nine, you should be preparing to land, or the like. Most likely he was doing so splendidly, no one felt obliged to correct him. Really, once you’d got past the stomach-churning bit of leaping from an airplane at thirty-five hundred feet, it was all a bit of a lark. He was starting to feel assuredly old-hand at it as he floated downwards, the earth and all its charms sharpening in delineation. He could clearly make out now the dark E-shape that was Eggescombe Hall and the pale circle of its forecourt with two roads leading from it like shoots on a sprouting bean gently winding and disappearing into a thicket of greenery. And there, to the east of the Hall, on a little hillock, was the famous Eggescombe Labyrinth, intricate and meticulous as if a sky god had pressed his signet ring into the soil.
Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) Page 1