Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

overhead. Self-made and made in a big way, Alfred Armiger; many a lesser mortal had been bowled over in that head-down charge to success. Some of the casualties were here to-night; more than one of the looks that followed his triumphal progress through his Tudor halls would have killed if it could.
    “He’s in high fettle,” said a voice in George’s ear. “Always is when he’s been walking on other people’s faces.” Barney Wilson of the architect’s department slid into the settle beside him, and spread lean elbows on the table; a long, saturnine young man with a disillusioned eye. “Don’t take too much notice of me,” he said with a wry smile, catching George’s curious glance, “I’m prejudiced. I once had hopes of taking this place over myself, pulling down the rubbishy part of it and making the rest over into a house for my family. I still grudge it to him. What does he need with another hotel? He has more than he can keep count of already.”
    “Biggish job for a private man, restoring this place, the state it was in,” suggested George, eyeing him thoughtfully.
    “Biggish, yes, but I could have done the necessary minimum and moved Nell and the kids in, and taken my own time over the rest. And the way sales trends are running these days, a place this size and in that sort of state was the only kind of place I had a chance of getting. Everybody wants a modern, easy-to-run semi or bungalow, they fetch fantastic prices everywhere, but these bigger properties are going for next to nothing. You can’t run ’em without servants, or so everyone supposes, and they cost the earth to maintain. But the maintenance would have just been my job to me, and Nell was raised on a Welsh farm, she knows all about managing a lot of house-room with a minimum of effort. Oh, we thought we were in. I’d even started drawing plans for my conversion, believe it or not, I was that confident. What a hope! The minute I clapped eyes on his man at the auction I knew we’d had it. If it hadn’t been for him we could have got the place for the reserve, nobody else wanted it.” He gazed glumly into his beer and sighed. “But no, he had to snatch it from under our noses and turn it into this monstrosity. You can expect anything of a man who’d turn The Joyful Woman into The Jolly Barmaid!”
    “Is that what it used to be called?” asked George, surprised and impressed. “I never heard that.”
    “I’m well up in the history of this house, believe me. I read it up from the archives when I thought we were going to live in it. It was a pub, for centuries before it was used as a private house, and that was the sign—The Joyful Woman. Lovely, isn’t it? Goes right back to about 1600. And before that it was a private house again, and before that, until the Dissolution, it was a grange of Charnock Priory. But now it’s The Jolly Barmaid, and that’s that.”
    “Business is business, I suppose,” said George sententiously.
    “Business be damned! He’s willing to run this place at a loss rather than let his son have any part of it, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”
    “Was his son going to have some part of it?”
    “He was coming in with me. We put together all we could raise between us to bid for it. We were going to convert the barn into a studio for him and Jean, and Nell and I and the kids were going to have the house. You know the barn? It’s right across the yard there, beyond where he’s laid out the carpark. It’s stone, built to last for ever. It would have made an ideal studio flat. But somehow his loving father got to know about it, and he thought a few thousands well spent to spite his son.”
    The Armiger family quarrel was no news to George, or indeed to any native of the Comerbourne district. It was natural enough that Armiger, self-made, ambitious and bursting with energy as he was, should intend his only son to follow him in the business, and marry another beer heiress who would nearly double