Dance to Your Daddy

12 Zapatos-Goody Two-Shoes

13 Basse Danse-Confrontation

14 Danse Champetre-Joy in the Morning

15 Country Dance-Parson's Farewell

16 Calushari Dance-Evil Spirits

17 Country Dance-Mage on a Cree

18 Hornpipe-The Boat Comes Home

CHAPTER ONE

GALLIARD-HEARTLESS HOUSE

'...unmannerly modest as a measure, full of state and ancientry.'

Measure for Measure.

(1)

Eiladh Beatrice Margaret Gavin, having put her fist in the minister's eye, submitted with placid fatalism to the ceremony of baptism. She was a happy baby and, since happiness has no history, she passes, for the purposes of the chronicler, into almost total obscurity.

'Well, that's that,' observed Laura, her mother, when the cortege had returned to the Stone House in the village of Wandles Parva, 'and now it's time I got back to work.'

'I may not need you yet,' said Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, who employed her as secretary and treated her as a favourite daughter. 'I am invited to pay a visit of indefinite length to a certain Romilly Lestrange, who claims to be a distant connection of mine by marriage. He lives, it seems, at a place called Galliard Hall.'

'Romilly? You haven't mentioned him before, have you?'

'For the sufficient reason that, until I received his letter, I was unaware of his existence.'

'Funny he should suddenly pop up out of a trap. I'd give him a two-eyed look, if I were you.'

'He has offered me a commission on top of the invitation. It appears that he has been extremely worried lately by the strange behaviour of his wife.'

'What does she do?-make spells and incantations?-dance naked on the greensward by the lee light of the moon?'

'He says that she has contracted a habit of drowning things.'

'Drowning things?'

'She began with a toy trumpet and followed this by consigning to the deep a transistor radio set and a dozen gramophone records.'

'Not a music lover, wouldn't you say?'

'I might leave it at that, if she had not continued by drowning, at intervals of nine months, a small cat, a pet monkey and a life-sized baby doll.'

'Well, there seems to be an obvious explanation. Either her husband won't give her a baby, or else she's had a miscarriage.'

'You mean she has aborted. Justice may miscarry; human beings do not.'

'Just as you say.'

'We must remember, however, that, in her journal, Marie Bashkirtseff informs us that on one occasion she felt impelled to throw the dining-room clock into the sea. I have the impression that, at the time, Marie was unmarried and, most probably, therefore, according to the fashion of the age, a virgin.'

'Oh, just an anti-mother complex, no doubt. I expect her action relieved her mind of all sorts of inhibitions and frustrations. Mrs Romilly has a different set of worries, that's all.'

'Worries-yes,' said Dame Beatrice thoughtfully.

'If this Romilly is a relative of yours,' said Laura, 'I think I had better write him our official letter before you go and see him. Relations always think they're entitled to get something for nothing.'

The so-called official letter was Laura's own invention and she was proud of it. It did nothing so crude as to give a scale of charges, or even to state, in unequivocal terms, that Dame Beatrice's services had to be paid for; nevertheless, people who received it, signed L. Catriona Gavin, Secretary, had no reason to be unaware that they were to expect a far from moderate bill. What was more, without reference to Dame Beatrice, Laura was always prepared to chase up any laggards. As she herself expressed it to her husband (although not to Dame Beatrice), 'There's always the State. If they're choosy, and want us, they've got to pay through the nose.'

'Oh,' said Laura's employer, on this occasion, 'there is no need for an official letter. I have accepted the invitation, and am off to Galliard Hall tomorrow afternoon.'

'Galliard Hall?' said Laura. 'Didn't somebody commit suicide there, or something, a few years back? The place was up for sale and the owner kept reducing the price, so I heard, because nobody would buy.'

'Because of the suicide?' asked Laura's husband, Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin.

'I suppose so. Besides, it's an enormous old barracks of a place. I can't think who'd buy it.'

'My relative has either bought it or rented it, it seems,' said Dame Beatrice. 'Romilly? Romilly? It sounds the kind of name by which a male Lestrange would very likely be called, but I cannot say that it strikes any other chord. However, a family tree has many branches.'