Died in the Wool Read Online Free PDF Page B

uncompromising landscape. ‘It’s a rum go,’ he said, and after a moment: ‘Have you thought carefully about this? Do you realize you’re starting something you may want to stop and—not be able to stop?’
    â€˜I’ve thought about it ad nauseam .’
    â€˜I think I ought to warn you. I’m a bit of state machinery. Any one can start me up but only the state can switch me off.’
    â€˜OK.’
    â€˜Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘you have been warned.’
    â€˜At least,’ said Fabian, ‘I’ll give you a good dinner.’
    â€˜Then you’re my host?’
    â€˜Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Arthur left Mount Moon to me and Flossie left her money to Douglas. You might say we were joint hosts,’ said Fabian.

    Mount Moon homestead was eighty years old and that is a great age for a house in the antipodes. It had been built by Arthur Rubrick’s grandfather, from wood transported over the Pass in bullock wagons. Starting as a four-roomed cottage, room after room had been added, at a rate about twice as slow as that achieved by the intrepid Mrs Rubrick of those days in adding child after child to her husband’s quiver. The house bore a dim family resemblance to the Somersetshire seat which Arthur’s grandfather had thankfully relinquished to a less adventurous brother. Victorian gables and the inevitable conservatory, together with lesser family portraits and surplus pieces of furniture traced unmistakably the family’s English origin. The garden had been laid out in a nostalgic mood, at considerable expense, and with a bland disregard for the climate of the plateau. Of the trees old Rubrick had planted, only lombardy poplars, pinus insignis and a few natives had flourished. The tennis lawn, carved out of the tussocky hillside, turned yellow and dusty during summer. The pleached walks of Somerset had been in part realized with hardy ramblers and, where these failed, with clipped hedges of poplar. The dining-room windows looked down upon a queer transformation of what had been originally an essentially English conception of a well-planned garden. But beyond this unconvincing piece of pastiche—what uncompromising vastness! The plateau swam away into an illimitable haze of purple, its boundaries mingled with clouds. Above the cloud, suspended, it seemed, in a tincture of rose, floated the great mountains.
    At dinner, that first night, Alleyn witnessed the pageant of nightfall on the plateau. He saw the horn of the Cloud Piercer shine gold and crimson long after the hollows of the lesser Alps, as though a dark wine poured into them, had filled with shadow. He felt the night air of the mountains enter the house and was glad to smell newly-lit wood in the open fireplaces.
    He considered once again the inmates of the house.
    Seen by candlelight round the dining-room table they seemed, with the exception of the housekeeper-chaperon, extremely young. Terence Lynne, an English girl who had been Florence Rubrick’s secretary, was perhaps the oldest, though her way of dressing her hair may have given him this impression. It swept, close-fitting as a cap, in two black wings from a central parting to a knot at the nape of her neck, giving her the look of a coryphée, an impression that was not contradicted by the extreme, the almost complacent neatness of her dress. This was black, with crisp lawn collar and cuffs. Not quite an evening dress, but he felt that, unlike the two young men, Miss Lynne changed punctiliously every night. Her hands were long and white and it was a shock to learn that since her employer’s death she had returned to Mount Moon as a kind of landgirl, or more accurately, as he was to learn later, a female gardener. Some hint of her former employment still hung about her. She had an air of responsibility and was, he thought, a trifle mousey.
    Ursula Harme was an enchanting girl, slim, copper-haired and extremely