Death of a Burrowing Mole

‘And Veryan is a married man.’

‘Not any more. Oh, dear, my head-in-the-sand old ostrich, you are behind the times! They divorced each other ages ago. It was kept very quiet, but it happened.’

‘One sees their names as attending the same conferences. They are listed as Professor and Mrs Veryan.’

‘What of it? She goes as a delegate in her own right, the same as she always did. It only means that she hasn’t married again, that’s all. Is the Holdy estate a large one?’

‘I should think so, but probably not of very much value. There would not be rich grazing or prosperous large farms around here. The size of the estates in this part of the country was achieved because the local nobility and gentry intermarried and added one estate to another and, of course, in England the property is not divided up when the father dies. The younger sons often come off very badly.’

‘But this – what was his name?’

‘Sandgate. No, he is not a younger son. He is the owner’s cousin.’

‘Why didn’t you like him?’

‘Perhaps because his name is reminiscent (to him) of mine. He suggested that we ought to get on well together. Somehow I felt there was something behind the remark.’

‘ “As I came through Sandgate I heard a lassie sing”,’ said Lilian, turning to go up to change for dinner.

As she came from the bathroom into the bedroom, Edward said, ‘Even if I have to stand at my flanking-towers with a shotgun, Malpas is not going to touch them. His wretched dig could do irreparable damage and I won’t put up with that.’

‘Stop worrying yourself, and don’t envisage situations which will probably never arise. Do you think the Horse and Cart will improve on last night’s offering of stewed steak and dumplings, followed by rice pudding and very sour plums? I suppose in the depths of winter they serve cold chicken and salad, followed by an ice-cream sundae. This is a loathsome little inn.’

‘We could always move to the Barbican.’

‘And have you and Malpas throwing crusty rolls at one another? Anyway, I’ve made Malpas and Nicholas feed those two boys and get them an occasional bath. Nicholas is your best bet, you know. If anybody can restrain Malpas, he can.’

‘If the worst looks like coming to the worst…’ began Edward, but Lilian did not allow him to finish.

‘I will tell Nicholas that Malpas takes more than a fatherly interest in Susannah,’ she said, her plump, smooth face creasing suddenly into a smile, ‘then he will murder Malpas and all will be well.’

‘You shouldn’t make jokes about murder.’

‘Oh, oh! Who talked of guarding our walls with a shotgun?’

‘Malpas adopts an irritatingly superior attitude in comparing his work with mine. When he has satisfied himself with his Bronze Age burials, the ground will all be smoothed over again, as though nothing had ever happened to it, but my restoration of the castle defences will last a thousand years. Doesn’t that mean something?’

‘Nothing means anything to a fanatic except his own fanaticism.’

‘Perhaps that applies to me as well as to him, and he may learn that to his cost!’

6

Humpty Dumpty

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Dear Godmother,’ (wrote Bonamy), ‘Tom and I are now the shadows of our former selves. We have moved blocks of stone which would have made Samson blench, swept up and dumped mountains of lung-corroding debris, all this at Saltergate’s behest, and for Veryan we have delved, toiled and sweated to make a vast ring round most of the outer bailey.

‘Now, however, we have decided to go on strike. The idea was mooted by the two girls, Fiona and Priscilla. They waylaid us after the morning’s work and told us that they were fed to the teeth with slave labour and proposed to take next weekend off. We are all for this flouting of authority and have backed the project. We shall cruise about in my car – the girls have hired Tom’s – and take the tent and the sleeping-bags and hey! for the open road.

‘We, all four of us, have put our point of view to our taskmasters and found it unopposed. As a matter of fact there has been what we think is a major row between Veryan and the Saltergates. There have been comings and goings between the castle and the house where the owner lives, but we gather that nothing has been settled. The owner himself is away and nobody else will take the responsibility of making a decision.

‘Anyway, what it comes to is that the two girls and ourselves are off the lead for the whole of next weekend. Our elders (if I can call the lovely Susannah an Elder – she was rather up against such in Holy Writ if I recollect the story correctly and, as a graduate and as Tynant’s piecie-missie she far outranks us), our elders, I think, won’t be sorry to see the back of us for a day or two in the hope that, if the work on the site is held up for a bit, things may begin to sort themselves out. There is certainly a lot of fur, feathers and bad blood about at present. Very uncomfortable and unpleasant for live-and-let-live blokes like ourselves.

‘What the girls propose to do I have no idea. They definitely won’t be coming with us, although a certain amount of fraternisation has taken place owing to a strong, mutual reaction against all the hard, tedious work we have been doing. In the early mornings Tom and I have also searched for our well and so put more work on ourselves. So far, we think we have located three wells.

‘However, we have discovered that the job of clearing them is impossible without expert help. We asked Saltergate about this, although we did not tell him our reason for asking. He said that it would need some sort of thing like the apparatus for boring for oil, he thought, and simply wasn’t worthwhile. Locating the wells was