Rainbow’s End
Ellis Peters
Felse Family 13
A 3S digital back-up edition 2.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|
Also by Ellis Peters and published by Macdonald
A NICE DERANGEMENT OF EPITAPHS
BLACK IS THE COLOUR OF MY TRUE LOVE’S HEART
THE KNOCKER ON DEATH’S DOOR
THE HEAVEN TREE trilogy
(Ellis Peters writing as Edith Pargeter)
THE HEAVEN TREE THE GREEN BRANCH THE SCARLET SEED
CHAPTER ONE
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The gate-posts, until recently shorn of their crests and leaning drunkenly out of true, now stood up regally on either side of the drive, crowned with a pair of baronial lions, gripping in their paws escutcheons certainly not native either to the building, which was in fact a rather monstrous eighteenth-century vicarage, built by a wealthy pluralist in the days when such remote parishes carried a stipend fit for a prince, or the present owner, who was a come-lately antique dealer from Birmingham, the first landlord since 1800 to be able to duplicate the founder’s extravagant fancies. No doubt the lions had been acquired in the course of business, but they looked sufficiently imposing, looming whitely in the early September dusk between dark-rose brick, and backed by clipped, cavern-dark cypresses. And hadn’t the gate-posts themselves been upped by a couple of feet, to tower so high above George Felse’s Volkswagen as he drove in? It was a fair preparation for what was to come.
The drive was newly-surfaced, the grass on either side shorn like a second-year lamb. Nicely-spaced cypresses accompanied the traveller, with the occasional life-size nymph or satyr, possibly marble, probably lead, posed against their darkness in antique pallor. Posed, as George noted, very tastefully, every dimension studied as meticulously as if this remote upper end of Middlehope, the rim of the world between England and Wales in these parts, had been the serene preserve of Stourhead, in Wiltshire, the final perfection of the landscape garden in these islands. Every tree placed with care, every vista calculated with the precision of a master-photographer, every view not so much an accident of nature as a dramatic composition. Between the trees sudden blazons of flowers shone in noble golds and burnished bronzes, like flares lit in the cradling dark.
‘How long did you say he’d been installed here?’ asked Bunty dubiously, hunching her right shoulder against her husband’s left, like a loyal colleague in a battle-line closing ranks.
‘Three months. Oh, I’ve no doubt most of these garden-gods were lying around here, it was that sort of set-up once before. Either flat on their faces or breast-deep in grass and shrubs. It wouldn’t take so long to get them set up again. And from all accounts he’s got the money to indulge his fancy. They’ll be glad of the jobs, they’re hanging on by their teeth here, the older ones. The kids head on out, more’s the pity. He could be a blessing if he employs local labour.’
‘He knows his stuff,’ admitted Bunty, gazing wide-eyed at the Psyches and Graces flickering by. Bunty knew hers, though her field was music rather than landscaping, and could appreciate authority when it showed. So why wasn’t she happy? Three months isn’t very long, and the extreme head of a valley climbing over frontier hills from England into Wales is hypersensitive territory, critical and aloof, resentful of mere mechanical aids like expertise.
‘In several fields, apparently,’ said George drily. ‘And does his homework, too.’ For one of the newcomer’s interests was also music, and he had arrived already primed with the knowledge that Bernarda Elliot, once a promising mezzo-soprano with a bright future before her, was one and the same with Bunty Felse, long since dwindled into a wife, and to the newly-promoted head of the Midshire C.I.D. of all people. The sole reason they had been invited to this house-warming, according to Bunty, was because she had let herself be conned into acting as secretary to the Comerbourne Musical Association, and their host showed every sign of planning a takeover bid for that earnest body, and was recruiting support at every opportunity.
‘I know I got myself into this,’ admitted Bunty frankly.
‘But you could easily have got out of it if you’d wanted to. I wonder why you didn’t?’
‘Curiosity, mainly. It pays to take a close look at every major development in these parts.’ He didn’t go into details, there was no need. The remorseless waves of urbanisation had rippled outwards from the lowlands into the ramparts of Middlehope, and reached as far as Mottisham, which was the halfway mark, but Abbot’s Bale and the scattered hill-farms round it remained a fortress of tribal solidarity. Lucky valley, still viable for a limited population, owing to sheep-farming and small personal craft industries, beautiful enough and just near enough to more populated centres to attract those commuters most grimly determined on peace and rural society, while remote enough to discourage the merely rich and pretentious. By no means a closed community, it had assimilated a number of retiring, and retired, artists and academics, and tolerated a few suburban hangers-on, who, given the atmosphere, would either adapt, or lose heart and sell out to more congenial arrivals. Middlehope was expert in providing the atmosphere, though it condemned no one on sight. At any given moment there might be three or four newcomers on probation, of whom one or two would survive to become initiates. Not always the most obviously inoffensive candidates, either.
‘Is he really good?’ asked George curiously.
‘Musically? Yes, very. I don’t think he’d waste time on anything at which he couldn’t excel.’
‘Or stop short of a take-over in anything at which he can excel?’
‘It’s early days yet to judge.’ They were just turning a curve in the drive, so screened with bushes that the view beyond should spring upon them with instant effect; and there, foursquare and arrogant and large in the afterglow, was the house itself, once the Old Rectory, now Abbot’s Bale House, a great sweep of russet gravel before it, already stippled with the sharp colours of cars, and backed by a rise of two terraces, sporting new terracotta vases along their balustrades. ‘It has got a lord of the manor look about it, hasn’t it?’ said Bunty dubiously. ‘He must have unloaded quite a lot of money to get all this done in the time. He’s rather committed himself, hasn’t he, with a stake like that ploughed into the property?’
‘Investment. He expects a set-up like this to sell antiques for him more effectively than any town shop, and it probably will.’
They were approaching the open space under the terraces, where the old, blocked-up portal glared darkly from the centre of the heavily-pillared undercroft. ‘You remember what this place used to be, five years or so ago?’ asked George, as he slid the Volkswagen neatly into line beside Willie Swayne’s ancient Land-Rover. ‘A special school for delinquents with abnormally high IQs. One of those gallant experiments we used to float on waves of good intentions, forgetting how much they were going to cost. It couldn’t hope to last long, but it went the length of ten years before the county finally gave in and acknowledged it couldn’t be kept going. One or two of my brightest first-offenders landed up here. There were enough idealists to provide the kind of advanced education to keep them interested and out of mischief. More or less, anyhow! Some of them did the place credit in the end. The bright get so abysmally bored when there’s nothing tough enough to stretch them.’