by Ellis Peters
‘For general use,’ she remarked critically, flexing the hand not employed with the glass, ‘they’ll serve years yet. But music is music. No making do with that. I was saying so to Bunty a while ago.’
‘They’ll be out of their minds,’ said George with conviction, ‘if they don’t co-opt you as consultant for life. Somebody else can pound the keys and operate the stops no reason why you shouldn’t do the office of guardian angel, is there?’
‘Oh, Evan will let me interfere,’ she agreed serenely. ‘We’ve known each other a long time, and anyhow, we’d both feel deprived if we couldn’t wrangle over everything as usual. I don’t expect any problems there. After all, we’ve both had our work cut out, trying to restrain Stephen from chucking out all the old chants that everybody knows, and curb his enthusiasm for all these modern gobbledegook Bible versions. Such abysmal doggerel! Where do these people learn their English?’
‘I know just what you mean,’ agreed George ruefully, thinking of the intoxicatingly lofty prose of Bible and prayer-book on which he had been reared. On the brink of his half-century he could still thrill to the noble cadences, when half the doctrine had been rendered suspect; and certainly no new, debased, cosy popular version was going to do anything but put him off totally.
‘Our host, by the way,’ remarked Miss de la Pole, ‘is quite astonishingly competent technically on almost any keyboard instrument you could offer him. He has such a superb piano in the next room that I suspect he’s going to demonstrate soon.’
‘So Bunty warned me,’ agreed George. ‘And she shares your opinion of his powers, if that’s anything.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure we’d agree about his proficiency,’ said Miss de la Pole, sipping her whisky, which looked, and probably was, neat. ‘What a pity he isn’t in the least degree musical,’ she added absently, smiled briefly and brilliantly at George, and sailed into the centre of the now lubricated mob towards an old acquaintance. Her formal black dress, high-necked and long-sleeved, was by no means mourning black, but high fashion, and the back view of her silver-steel hairdo had the sheen of a war-helm and the floating bravado of its crowning plume.
A light hand slapped down on George’s shoulder, and a young voice, nicely balanced between impudence and shyness, said in his ear: ‘The old place has come down in the world since our day, don’t you think? Sad to see it going down the nick like this!’
George turned to look at the boy addressing him with such elaborate social assurance, and met two large, guileless blue eyes that stared him out steadily, waiting with confidence to be recognised. It took half a minute to run him to earth. Eighteen or nineteen now, by the look of him, claiming acquaintance both with George and with this house. Thick brown hair, a nice athletic build, double-jointed movements, and all the engaging cheek in the world. And who else would walk in uninvited on Rainbow’s house-warming, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt with a respectable blazer, the latter probably borrowed?
‘Toby Malcolm!’ said George, delighted, and saw his own pleasure mirrored in the blue eyes. ‘Well, this is a surprise! How on earth did you manage to turn up here?’
‘I didn’t break and enter,’ said the youth buoyantly, ‘not this time. Not even gatecrash, really. We’re playing in Presteigne this week, so I blew over to see Sam and Jenny, and they brought me along with them.’
‘And you’re staying overnight? Not driving tonight? Then come and get a drink, and I’ll make this one do, and we’ll join your folks.’ And when Toby was duly charged, this time, as he again remarked without embarrassment, not with breaking and entering: ‘What do we drink to? Success to crime?’
‘From your point of view, or mine?’ retorted Toby. ‘No, that was all kid’s stuff. There are much more exciting things going on now. Come on, let’s find Sam, he’ll love seeing us together like this. Jenny still worries about me a bit, bless her, that’s why I always come over on the old bike when we’re anywhere within reach.’ And he plunged ahead, weaving through the babel like a quicksilver lizard, and George coasted in his wake to where Sam and Jenny Jarvis were ensconced in a safe corner.
They were not really Toby’s folks, of course, unless by right of capture. He had a perfectly sound father of his own, and wealthy into the bargain, a merchant who did a lot of trading to the Middle East, and was probably somewhere out there now with his third wife, Toby’s second and charming but far too young stepmother. But Sam Jarvis had taught him Latin and English and European literature in this house when it was a special school, and Toby its star delinquent, with the longest record of adventurous crime in the book, and possibly the least harmful. A brilliant cracksman at thirteen, partly out of boredom, partly out of sheer necessity to experiment with his own powers, he had never been known to lift anything more than derisory trifles in all his exploits, just to prove he had really been where he said he had been, and he had never hurt anyone, except, on occasions, himself. Sam Jarvis and his wife had chosen to remain in Middlehope when the school closed, with their one son and their prodigious library, and Sam made a living, nobody knew how good or bad, by writing textbooks and works on education. George had never needed much assurance that Toby would prove one of the world’s assets in the end. The very fact that he hared back here at every opportunity to reassure Jenny was reassurance enough for George, too.
‘Here he is!’ proclaimed Toby, clarion-voiced, homing in on his elders with huge satisfaction. ‘The gaffer who put me away! But for Mr Felse you’d never have had the pleasure of my acquaintance, think of that!’
They were as pleased as he had known they would be. Sam was a large, clumsy, shy man with a simple face and a complex mind, clean-shaven, rosy and benign. Jenny was small and svelte and dark, possessed of a natural style that did wonders for mail-order clothes. They were both as proud of Toby as of their own single offspring, and showed it a good deal more openly, since he was not really theirs.
‘And what have you done with Bossie tonight?’ asked George. Bossie was James Boswell Jarvis, the one shoot of this promising stem, and approaching thirteen years old. ‘Heaven knows you couldn’t wish a baby-sitter on him, not without risk to life and limb, but I’ll bet there’s some sort of Praetorian guard hovering. How do you get round it?’
‘What can you do with an egghead like Bossie?’ demanded Jenny, between resignation and complacency. ‘Sylvia Thomas comes in as his guest, and plays him game after game of chess until we get home. Mostly he wins, but sometimes he gives her a game out of chivalry. He’s a bit sweet on Sylvia.’ Sylvia Thomas was a farmer’s daughter, eighteen and very pretty.
‘He’d have to be,’ agreed Toby positively, ‘or he’d mow her down in half a dozen moves.’
‘And what are you doing, these days?’ George wanted to know. ‘Playing, you said, but you haven’t said what or who. And as far as I can gather, it’s something that keeps you on the move.’
‘Oh, sorry, I forgot you couldn’t very well know about it. Thespis, that’s us! We’re a travelling theatre. We’ve got three wagons that put together into a rather ramshackle auditorium, but mostly we like to play outdoors, little festivals, all that sort of thing, and improvise according to what ground we can get. There’s seven of us to do everything. I’m general dog’s-body on lights, staging, scenery, whatever comes along, and sometimes I play, too. Mostly I do the adaptations, to get by with so few of us. Schools, as well. It’s all grist. After all, that’s where I got the bug.’ And he beamed upon Sam with so much satisfaction that George felt himself partaking of his friend’s justification. ‘I write plays for us, too. Bursting with social criticism, as if you wouldn’t guess! But funny, too, I hope. Blame Sam – I’ve gone legit!’
And blessedly, that was the plain truth. There went one danger to society, rapturously transmuted into a danger to nothing more precious than the establishment, which is quite a different thing. And funny, too! Nineteen, not yet out of the bud. George moved on dutifully to his next encounter, much encouraged. The only adverse note was Toby’s last
remark, as he looked round the furious animation and expensive furnishing of the hall, and wrinkled his straight, fastidious nose, and knotted his mobile and mischievous mouth in a grimace of distaste at so artful a display of taste. ‘It does seem a pity,’ said Toby with detached regret. ‘We had some good times here. Nobody ever really minded us.’
George found himself brought up by a tide in the restless sea of the hall, close behind a pair of tweed-clad shoulders that topped his own by at least two inches, spare, wide and straight, carrying practically nothing but bone and sinew and leathery hide, and topped by a tall brown neck and bleached, straw-coloured head. The tweed jacket smelled of resin, fungus-bearing woodland, and late summer greenery. The head was reared and still, braced like a pointer on a spot across the hall, where Barbara Rainbow had just appeared, newly-primed glass in hand, and bare shoulders shaken free for the moment of all close attendance. In a crowded room she looked alone, however briefly, and it so happened that she was looking about her with the mane-tossing challenge of a lion – sex was irrelevant! – who has just shaken off the hunt.
From the anteroom behind her rose the first notes of a Chopin study. Rainbow was indeed demonstrating his abilities, and yes. Miss de la Pole had been right, the piano was splendid. Traffic in the hall thinned somewhat, as dutiful devotees flocked quietly towards the music. Barbara stretched and straightened and breathed deep, and looked about her with relaxed interest, assured of where her husband would be for the next quarter of an hour or so.
‘Hullo, William,’ said George into a sun-tanned, leathery ear. ‘I didn’t know you went in for parties.’
‘Hullo, George,’ responded Willie Swayne, with a brief but amiable smile, and returned his gaze at once to the sophisticated Romany across the room. ‘I don’t.’
‘Or got invited to them, these days,’ added George. Plenty of people had tried it in the past, but it didn’t take long to discover that William Swayne, known to the whole valley as Willie the Twig by reason of his solitary lordship of some ten square miles of new and old afforestation along the border, found nothing interesting in gatherings for social chit-chat, and preferred his deer and his setters to more garrulous company.
‘Oh, yes, everybody was invited this time, even me. “Forest warden” sounds pleasantly feudal, and who knows, he may want a haunch of venison some day.’ Part of Willie the Twig’s forest was plantation only a few years old, but part of it was very old indeed, and had supplied venison to kings of England ever since Edward III. ‘I just blew in out of curiosity, I’ve only met the fellow once. I thought I’d have a look round, and be civil, and then shove off to the “Gun Dog” for a pint.’ Judging by the distrait tone of his voice and the steady stare of his light, bright grey eyes this original plan was in process of being modified. And at that very moment Barbara Rainbow’s roving gaze had lighted upon him, and very thoughtfully halted there. George felt the slight, silent tensing of sinews, the almost imperceptible leaning forward, as when a pointer is about to surge out of his concentrated immobility into action.
‘I shouldn’t, if I were you,’ said George benignly.
‘On the contrary,’ said Willie the Twig, ‘being you, of course you wouldn’t, but if you were me you certainly would.’ And without further waste of time he strode across the room, swerving only sufficiently to clear such persons and objects as got in his way, and made straight for Barbara. Who, George observed before he drifted towards his next encounter, was neither surprised nor displeased, but stood and waited, reeling in on the dark and glittering thread of her glance the only fish that had so far engaged her interest, in all these hundred or so milling about her.
‘Hullo!’ said Barbara. ‘I’ve been noticing you for some time, and nobody’s told me who you are. I was wondering when you’d work your way round to me.’
‘I don’t work my way round,’ said Willie the Twig. ‘I go straight across. And my name’s Will Swayne. Warden of Middlehope Forest. I don’t know if you like forests?’
‘I never really met one,’ said Barbara. Her voice was low, deliberate and thoughtful. ‘On closer acquaintance I think I might get to like them very much.’
By the time the musical interlude ended, George had reached a little group gathered at an open window. Courteously silent until that moment, they fell into easy conversation after Rainbow had received his due acclaim. Two of them George knew well, Robert Macsen-Martel from Mottisham Abbey, down the valley, and his wife Dinah. Their half-ruinous property was in process of renovation under the guidance of the National Trust, and archaeological interest in the new acquisition was proving unexpectedly lively.
‘I don’t think you’ve met Charles Goddard,’ said Robert, attenuated and lank and fair. ‘He’s advising on the work, we’ve been uncovering some rather good tiled floors.’ He was a little deprecating about saying ‘we’ now that he had agreed to surrender the place, but obviously he must be ploughing everything that was left of his family patrimony into endowing it, or the Trust would never have been able to accept the burden, however desirable. Robert worked in an estate office selling small new houses, in one of which he and his wife lived, and there was nothing left of the centuries of Macsen-Martels and their outworn glory except the decency and integrity contained within this desiccated and aloof exterior. Unless, perhaps, Dinah’s dress, loose from the shoulders, had been chosen for more reasons than fashion? Dinah was petite, rounded and dark, born into the ranks of honest toil, and with both small feet planted firmly on the ground, and what those two apparently incompatible and wildly devoted people would produce between them gave room for interested speculation. What was more, Dinah had already detected, the brief glance at her waistline, and was staring George out in sparkling silence, challenging him to ask or comment. Probably Bunty had already got all the answers.
Charles Goddard was large, impressive and grey, the silver of early distinction rather than encroaching age. He had the slightly waxen and heavy smoothness of the legal profession.
‘And here’s John Stubbs, who’s taken over as man-on-the-spot. Someone has to live on the premises, and John’s brave enough to inhabit the lodge alone, ghosts or no ghosts, and look after the whole place.’
This one was younger, dark, solid and taciturn, even dour. Perhaps partly because, while he murmured his perfunctory greeting, his real attention was concentrated upon a distant corner of the room, where Barbara Rainbow and Willie the Twig were perceptibly getting on rather well together. And now George realised that both these young men he was confronting had already caught his attention once this evening. They were the two who had been drawn half across the hall in bemused pursuit of Rainbow’s spectacular wife, like helpless sparks in the tail of a comet.
‘– and Colin Barron, who’s been an enormous help to me over a number of things I never realised were valuable assets until he briefed me. I owe Colin’s acquaintance to our host, as a matter of fact, and I’m grateful. I know absolutely nothing about the antiques market,’ owned Robert. ‘It’s salutary to discover that what you’ve been writing off as junk can realise a lot of money elsewhere, and be hailed as treasure.’
This was the fair one, who belonged on sight to Rainbow’s world. He was tall, and built like an athlete, but his features were urban and shrewd, his clothes, while tactfully unobtrusive, of the city and the fashion.
‘I’ve been a friend and rival of Arthur’s for a long time,’ he ‘said with an amiable but knowing smile, ’and learned a lot from him. Enough to know that any hare he starts is well worth coursing. When a chap like Arthur moves up into these parts, it pays to take a look at the territory and see what drew him there. I haven’t caught up with the real attraction yet, I suspect, but I did discover Mottisham Abbey. In time to be useful to Mr Macsen-Martel, maybe, but you may be sure it didn’t do me any harm, either. I like to be candid about it.’
‘I’m afraid we’ve been talking shop, even on this occasion,’ said Robert apologetically. ‘My fault, I don’t seem able to think of anythin
g else at the moment. It really has become very interesting. Several schools and clubs have come into the act, and been doing splendid work, under Charles’s guidance. I never imagined there’d be so much enthusiasm. We’re being asked to allow party visits from so many bodies that we’re planning on beginning in a few weeks. Afternoons only, and while the work’s in progress they’ll have to be strictly guided tours, it would be too chaotic to have people straying everywhere among the plant and materials lying around there. You wouldn’t like to volunteer as a guide, would you, George? We’re open to offers!’
‘I doubt if I should be much of an asset,’ said George. ‘I could certainly improvise a stunning scenario for you, but the facts might cause less trouble. You seem to have recruited several competent candidates already. And there’s always Professor Joyce, if you can lure him away from his magnum opus.’
That was a joke strictly for local people, who were all well aware that Professor Emeritus Evan Joyce, happily retired at sixty-odd to a decrepit but spacious cottage up the valley with his books, was busily engaged in not writing his long-projected history of Goliard poets, and almost any distraction was enough to justify him in never getting it beyond the note stage.
‘I think he’d rather reserve his options at the moment,’ said Dinah, dimpling. ‘Haven’t you run into him tonight? He is here. Miss de la Pole has just told him she’s made up her mind to retire, and has broken the news to the vicar. We could lure him away from his Latin poets, all right, but we can’t compete with the organ and the choir, not a hope. He’s been waiting to get his hands on them for years.’