through 'nightmarishly twisting streets' to the Accademia. Here he was in another crush of carnival-revellers.
Melrose looked up from the page, glad that Agatha had taken herself off in search of cakes and cucumbers. He could not understand how such drivel (pardon me, dear Polly) could touch something in himself. His eye traveled the length of his drawing room, dim and shadowy in the last of the sun, as if it were that Venetian canal that bore Polly's hero along with the copper-haired woman who was going to end up killing the doge in self-defense and marrying Aubrey.
Well, he was so bored he read the last few pages so that he could give Polly the advantage of some varnished lie about her prowess as a mystery writer. She was, really, considerably better than this lot of codswollop demonstrated.
At least it hadn't yet been published (and Polly probably knew why). Unable to stand it any longer, Melrose flipped the manuscript closed and stuffed it back down between cushion and chair arm, wishing old Aubrey's 'sinking feeling' would drop him right in the Grand Canal.
Unfortunately, as Melrose reached for his sherry he was aware of a hollowness in his stomach as the face of the Signora Orsina Luna with her coppery, wind-tangled hair was suddenly replaced by the face of Vivian Rivington with her coppery, shoulder-length bob.
… a sinking feeling was the only way he could describe it.
Surely such tarnished prose could not call forth something akin to empathy for old Aubrey as he stood poised on the edge of some hectic-
Oh, for God's sakes, he was beginning to sound like old Aubrey. Or old Polly. Melrose belted back his sherry and slid down in his chair. With both hands he massaged his hair until it stood up in spikes and licks, hoping to work some sense into himself. That was the trouble with all of this maudlin sentiment; it began to suck you in.
His hand tightened on the leather chair arm as he thought of Aubrey's own hand grasping the metal rail of the vaporetto as he stared into the hazel eyes of the signora… No, it was Vivian's that were hazel.
And then the images of Vivian started flowing past him as if she too had been painted on the pages of a book: Vivian in her twin-set in the Jack and Hammer today; Vivian looking serene and silky in Stratford-upon-Avon; Vivian in a tatty old bathrobe in that country house in Durham; Vivian over tea, over drinks, over dinner-
His eyes widening as if he'd come upon a houseful of ghosts, Melrose wondered if he had made some dreadful miscalculation…
'Why on earth are you pulling that long face, Melrose?' asked Agatha, who had thumped back into the room carrying her dish of rum balls. 'You'd think you lost your last- what's
The racket made by the brass door knocker was violent enough to make the chandelier shudder.
'I don't see why these dreadful children can't stick to the village if they must go about playing pranks, nor why you can't have Ruthven stand down there at the driveway entrance and simply turn them away-'
'Generally, we set out steel-jaw traps,' said Melrose, as he heard some commotion and raised voices out in the entrance room and then the deliberate rap, rap, rap of heels across the marble.
Vivian appeared in the doorway.
'It's Miss Rivington, sir,' Ruthven said with whatever formality he could muster, but as he followed in her wake like a hound brought to heel, the announcement was superfluous.
Melrose got up quickly, bestowing upon his visitor an absolutely wonderful smile. For once in his life, he believed not in coincidence, but in Destiny. 'Vivian!'
Vivian Rivington stood there in a wet raincoat, her hair a mess of rainsoaked tangles, holding out a large pasteboard cut-out.
'Just what in the hell is
7
'Wherever you see smokestacks, you know it's shut down,' was the cabdriver's brief and bleak commentary on the West Riding mills, once a center of the wool trade. The taxi had dropped him at a car-hire place, and after the sooty valley of Bradford, the monotonous rows of slate rooftops and chimneys marching up and down hills like stairsteps, coming so suddenly upon the open expanse of the moors should have been a grateful escape. Perhaps it was the season; perhaps it was his mood. But Jury saw little to relieve that mood in the endlessness of the moors, the distant hills brown with old bracken and heather, gray with snow and granite.
The Citrine house sat within its own wood of oak, boxwood trees, and tangled vines on the border of Keighley or Oakworth Moor. It was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The sound of Jury's car lifted pheasant from the dead and nearly knee-high bracken as he drove up the narrow road to the house. He had passed a small stone cottage, perhaps once a caretaker's, but unoccupied now, given the build-up of filmy dirt on its windows. It did not seem the sort of grounds one would bother to 'keep up,' at any rate. The undergrowth, the dead branches, the moss and vines would simply take over again.
It was a fitting-enough landscape for such a medieval house, fifteenth, sixteenth century probably. Soot- blackened stone, vaulted porch, ranges of timber windows over archways, a turret at one end and a tower at the other. It was very large and looked very cold. Jury wouldn't have wanted to pay Citrine's heating bills. He wondered if it had been in the family forever; he knew the Citrine money had come from the woolen mills. Well, it was hardly Charles Citrine's fault that synthetics had come along.
The room into which Jury was led by a woman servant was not a great improvement over the stark medievalism of the facade. It had once been, he imagined, the 'great hall,' and still retained most of the size and much of the ambience of one. Its vaulted ceiling lent it a strangely cryptlike appearance. Near one end of the room was the large fireplace with a tile surround and copper hood, certainly not the original central hearth. Beyond this was a long entry screen, heavily curtained to cut off drafts and leading, probably, to buttery or dining room and kitchen. The walls were exposed stone sectioned off by wooden beams. Would he find the stone wept moisture if he touched it?
The furniture was heavy, dark Jacobean. Two baroque and elaborately carved chairs with high backs sat before the fireplace at opposite ends of a long claw-footed refectory table. There were other pieces, a sofa and several easy chairs. On the flagstone floor, oriental carpets were strewn, but their intricate and faded colors did little to add to any overall warmth and life. There were brass and pewter bowls set about full of flowers: mums and Christmas roses. They were sifting their petals onto the surfaces that held them, though, as if they, too, were giving over to the room's wintry look. That relieved this feudalism, but not greatly.
One thing that did relieve it, though, was an oriel chamber in the right wall, upraised and large enough to contain twin grand pianos. The high-climbing lancet windows that arched about this stagelike little room were beautiful.
There was music on one of the pianos. The cover of the keys was down over the other.
Unattended, the fire had burnt low. Why was the room not warmer, in tone if not in temperature? Against the other wall were floor-to-ceiling bookcases in recessed alcoves, and books usually made a room look tenanted, he thought. But these bookshelves seemed to have no arrangement, the books and magazines stacked or merely tossed there without any particular notice, like afterthoughts. Between the shelves was a window seat beneath a high window whose leaded panes should catch the morning sun. He walked over to it and found the view baleful, for it overlooked the downward slope of the moorland hill and the derelict farm, its longhouse, its barns studding the land like empty shells. The only life Jury saw was the black-faced sheep, raising their heads from the bracken.
