Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

little to inherit, and threatened to be progressively less, and ultimately nothing at all, barring a monstrous minus of debts, if his father lived much longer. Hugh was different. Hugh was carefree, did what he liked and asked afterwards, mixed with whatever company he pleased and never asked at all, got his face dirty and his nails broken playing around with motors when he should have been accumulating O and A levels, and didn’t give a damn for his Norman blood or his aristocratic status. In fact, he was so like his delightful, unpredictable, eighteenth-century anachronism of a father that there was no mistaking the implications. They represented, between them, a late burst of demoniac energy in a line practically burned out. You had only to look at the mother— seven years older than her husband, and his first cousin; they always interbred—and the elder brother to see what had happened to the race, long since bled into debility, overtaken and left standing by history. Tenacious stock, time had shown that, but exhausted at last. Somebody had to break out, marry fresh blood, get fresh heirs and plunge into fresh activities. The ghost of the name would take some laying, but Hugh already stood clear of it, neutral as a clinical observer from outer space. After all, the crude reality was that the name meant nothing now; the doctor and the hotel-keeper ranked higher in importance than the attenuated representatives of past glory, and the vigorous incomers from the towns far higher. Hugh was the one who took the realities as they came, and did not feel his powers and possibilities in any way limited.
    For Dave all these considerations were very relevant indeed, because Hugh had worked himself into a partnership nearly four years ago, and the tacit understanding between him and Dinah had been growing and proliferating ever since. It wasn’t even a question of waiting for a concrete proposal; people like Dinah and Hugh didn’t function in that way, they simply grew together without words, and some day, still without words and without question, got married. If Dave knew his sister and his partner, that day was creeping up on them fast.
    As far as Dave could see, it wasn’t going to have much to do with him, when it came to the point. Dinah was ten years his junior, and he had had to be father and mother to her, as well as brother, but she was twenty-four years old now, and a remarkably self-sufficient young woman, who ran the house, did the firm’s books and occasionally relieved Jenny Pelsall in the office, with apparent ease. She had all the equipment she needed, a heart, a head, a chin and a backbone. She was a pocket edition, like her brother, but good stuff lies in little compass. He wasn’t worried about Dinah, she’d find her own way, and if she chose Hugh, she wouldn’t be choosing him just for a blinding smile and a light hand on a gear-lever.
    He’d got her as far as consenting to go and spend this particular evening with his people at the Abbey; the first formal encounter, this would be, but no amount of Norman blood—or blood of the princes of Powis, either, for that matter—could intimidate Dinah. And, as Hugh said, what the hell, we’re not tied to the place, we don’t have to stick around here if we don’t want to. Admittedly it’s a bit of an ordeal, Robert’s pretty dreary, to say the least of it, and the old girl’s virtually petrified in her devotion to her sacred line. But don’t let it throw you, we don’t have to see much of them when we’re married. And Dinah had said thoughtfully that she supposed they had to get it over sooner or later. Just so long, she had said, as you bring me home before I blow my top. We may not have to live in the same village afterwards, but we do have to live in the same world. And he had promised gaily, all the more readily because bringing Dinah home gave him the best excuse possible for not sleeping overnight at the Abbey. He retained his room there to please