visitors to the Stone House, although neither Dame Beatrice nor Laura had ever been invited to brave the Pharaoh hounds at Crozier Lodge. This was largely because the sisters had not regarded their hospitality as coming up to Stone House standards. Laura guessed that this was the reason, but there was nothing she could do about it.
‘It stands to reason,’ said Bryony, when the matter had came up for discussion once again recently, ‘that, living in that lovely old house and having maids and a French chef, Dame Beatrice would think that our accommodation and cookery were derived from the backwoods and ourselves smelling strongly of dog.’
‘They keep dogs themselves,’ Morpeth had pointed out.
‘Only two.’
‘I don’t see anything wrong with our house.’
‘Not for us, perhaps, but those two are used to better things, and, anyway, our cookery would not be up to their standard. Again, we spend so much time with the hounds that there is little left to spend in entertaining visitors.’
‘We’ve got Susan now. With her help with the hounds, it seems strange and uncouth not to return hospitality.’
‘I am sure Dame Beatrice will like it better the way things are. We do not have to go to the Stone House every time we are invited. In any case, there is a limit to the number of times we can leave Susan to cope with seven dogs. We don’t want to lose her, do we?’
‘I don’t believe she would leave us. She asked to come here. Where else would she go to find something she really wanted to do? There are no other kennels near here where seven beautiful dogs are kept.’
‘Seven? You can hardly count Sekhmet. Anyway, as for Susan, it would be awful if she elected to leave us. We must see to it that she has no reason to do so. She knows the hounds and they know her, and that is what really matters.’
‘I should like to know Laura Gavin better,’ said Morpeth.
‘Let us hope she feels the same about you, but I doubt it. She has Dame Beatrice, a husband, a son and a daughter. Why should she want more? Come along. It’s feeding time.’
All the hounds in residence at Crozier Lodge were named after the gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt. There were six of them. The dogs were called Osiris, Horus, Amon and Anubis. The two bitches were Isis and Nephthys. Then there was Sekhmet, the liver-coloured Labrador whom the tender-hearted Morpeth had bought from a pet shop in Axehead, the nearest town and the place where the sisters did some of their shopping.
The male hounds took little or no interest in Sekhmet. It was as though they were as conscious of class distinctions as are many human beings. They never rounded on her or ganged up against her, but this was partly because she was never allowed to run with them. The other two bitches tolerated her, for all three were allowed a run in the grounds together, but her heart was set upon fraternising with the dogs and her nose was always against the heavy, high, wire-netting fence which surrounded the spacious stable yard in which the dogs exercised themselves when they were not being taken for their daily run on the moor.
‘I believe she thinks she
‘Poor cow,’ said Bryony. ‘Don’t you remember how we always wished we were boys when we were young? If we had been, father would have sent us to college and we would have made a place for ourselves in the world.’
‘We shall do that with the Pharaoh hounds,’ said Morpeth.
The stables had been converted into cubicles, so that each of the six Pharaohs had his or her own domain. Each of the three handlers had her own couple to take on to the moor for exercise. Bryony took Osiris and Horus, Morpeth had Amon and Anubis, and Susan was responsible for Isis and Nephthys. If anybody had enough energy, Sekhmet was taken for a run. Otherwise the three women took it in turn to throw sticks and a ball for her in the garden. She was not housed in the stables, but had a large kennel constructed out of an ancient garden shed which was in the grounds when Dr Rant bought the property.
As for Crozier Lodge itself, it had always been too large for the family’s requirements, even while Dr Rant and his wife were alive, but his young partner had ‘lived in’ and occupied two of the rooms. Now that the sisters owned the house it was more or less of a white elephant to them, even though a bedroom was always available for Susan if she were ever to elect to stay overnight to assist with a whelping or to cope with any other emergency.
Known locally merely as the Lodge, the house had eight bedrooms, two bathrooms, drawing-room, dining-room, a former library which had been converted into two consulting-rooms, a morning-room which the two doctors had used as a waiting-room for patients who attended morning and evening surgery, and a large kitchen, a scullery and a butler’s pantry. Where the money came from to purchase such a property formed a topic for discussion in the village, for Dr Rant was not loved and had moved to Abbots Crozier from the Midlands, so that he was received (and distrusted) as a foreigner. There was even some dark speculation as to why he had ever left the Midlands and a theory was bruited abroad that he had diddled an elderly patient out of her money and had fled to escape some embarrassing enquiries.
Apart from the garden shed which Sekhmet occupied, and the stables which were now devoted to the six Pharaoh hounds, there was one other outbuilding on the estate. The ground floor of this was used as a garage, but there was an outside stair to a room in which Dr Rant had stored junk and to which the sisters, after their father’s death, had added his effects. The garage was kept locked when the car was inside, but there was no lock on the door of the room above, although it was at the top of an outside stair. In Bryony’s opinion, there was nothing in it worth stealing, and if a tramp chose to doss down in it, well, it was a long way from the house.
Dr Rant’s unpopularity had been added to by the deaths of two patients through what the village regarded as gross carelessness if nothing worse. One of the deaths had been followed by an inquest, for Dr Rant had refused to sign a death certificate when certain rumours had come to his notice.
To add to the discontent, any medicines which might be required had to be obtained from the chemist in Abbots Bay, for there was no chemist’s shop at that time in Abbots Crozier. The villagers resented the long trudge downhill and up again by the zigzag cliff path and still more the expenditure on the cliff railway by those who were too infirm to do the stiff climbs back.
As one old man recollected, Dr Rant’s predecessor had done his own dispensing. When you went to the surgery you expected to come away with a large bottle of pink medicine guaranteed to cure all the ills that the flesh is heir to. Dr Rant, therefore, started off on the wrong foot by requiring patients to present an indecipherable prescription to a sea-board chemist whom they believed could not read it any better than they could.
