Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End (2 page)

‘Oh, sure! But McLeish’s ae daughter turned the offer down! What did
she
want? What has
she
got out of it?’

‘Look round you,’ said Bunty. ‘Now I suppose we’d better circulate, hadn’t we?’

‘Left or right for you?’ asked George obligingly.

‘You know me, always inclined left. I’ll see you round the other side.’

The noble hall and the reception rooms on either side, one of which housed the bar, the other the buffet, were very tastefully arranged, and adorned with so many, but so cleverly disposed, pieces of furniture, pictures, ornaments, that George found himself wondering which of them were for sale, and trying to fit them out with prices. The whole house was a show-case. A dealer living in it might well get carried away, and find at night that he’d sold the bridal bed from under himself and his wife by mistake. There were fine displays of flowers, too. The work of the gardeners, of the exotic but effective Mrs Rainbow, or of some florist from Comerbourne?

George’s progress round this gallery was marked by a series of halts and exchanges with people he knew, some of them natives of this remote valley-head, others from down the valley at Mottisham, or beyond, in his own village of Comerford, or the county town itself. Everyone who was anyone had been drawn in. Not, of course. Sergeant Moon, the resident police-god of Middlehope, who was invincibly plebeian and had no obvious favours to grant, but who nevertheless would know everything that had gone on in this house by tomorrow morning. Not the innkeeper, or the few tradesmen, or the sheep-farmers. The absentees were as significant as those present.

‘I’ve made up my mind,’ pronounced Miss de la Pole with finality, and clinched it by telling young Stephen in front of about seven interested witnesses. ‘I’ve been putting it off for months, but now there’s no putting it off any longer. I shall have to resign, and he may as well take the word for the deed. Nobody knows better than I do that I’ve been fluffing half the notes for the past six weeks, and if the choir can tolerate it, I can’t. You can argue for so long with arthritis, but it’s going to have the last word in the end. Look at these finger joints!’

‘ They appear,’ said George mildly, ‘to be retaining a very fine grip on that whisky glass, if I may say so.’

‘You may! When I lose that knack, they’ll be practicing the anthem for my funeral. But the church’s music is another matter. I won’t be a drag on it any longer, I’m getting out now. After all, there’s Evan, years younger than I am, and just as good – better now I’m acknowledging I’m crippled.’

She looked unequivocally alert, competent and masterful, as she always had and always would, a tall, erect, slender old lady with the steely, delicate profile of a Renaissance Italian, say one of the pleasanter Malatestas of Rimini. From which obscure branch of the de la Pole family she drew her ancestry nobody quite knew, and she herself had never shown any disposition to enquire, but there was no mistaking the quality. Rainbow would have bought her without pedigree, so plainly was she the genuine article. She had been organist and choirmistress at St Eata’s church for thirty years, and to contemplate her departure was nothing short of revolutionary. But the thin hands that retained the significant beauty of tools well-used were certainly growing daily more deformed at the joints.

‘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.