Spinsters in Jeopardy Read Online Free PDF

don’t suppose Miss Truebody will say anything or that anybody will pay much attention if she does. It’s just that I don’t want to brandish my job at the Chèvre d’Argent.” He turned and looked into her troubled face. “Never mind, my darling. We’ll buy false beards and hammers in Roqueville and let on we’re archaeologists. Or load ourselves down with your painting gear.” He paused fora moment. “That, by the way, is not a bad idea at all. Distinguished painter visits Côte d’Azur with obscure husband and child. We’ll keep it in reserve.”
    “But honestly, Rory. How’s this
débâcle
going to affect your job at the Chèvre d’Argent?”
    “In a way it’s useful entrée. The Sûreté suggested that I call there representing myself either to be an antiquarian captivated by the place itself — it’s an old Saracen stronghold — or else I was to be a seeker after esoteric knowledge and offer myself as a disciple. If both fail I could use my own judgment about being a heroin addict in search of fuel. Thanks to Miss Truebody, however, I shall turn up as a reluctant Good Samaritan. All the same,” Alleyn said, rubbing his nose, “I wish Dr. Claudel could have risked taking her on to St. Céleste or else waiting for the evening train back to St. Christophe. I don’t much like this party, and that’s a fact. This’li larn the Alleyn family to try combining business with pleasure, won’t it?”
    “Ah, well,” said Troy, looking compassionately at Miss Truebody, “we’re doing our blasted best and no fool can do more.”
    They were silent for some time. The driver sang to himself in a light tenor voice. The road climbed the Maritime Alps into early sunlight. They traversed a tilted landscape compounded of earth and heat, of opaque clay colours — ochres and pinks — splashed with magenta, tempered with olive-grey and severed horizontally at its base by the ultramarine blade of the Mediterranean. They turned inland. Villages emerged as logical growths out of rock and earth. A monastery safely folded among protective hills spoke of some tranquil adjustment of man’s spirit to the quiet rhythm of soil and sky.
    “It’s impossible,” Troy said, “to think that anything could go very much amiss in these hills.”
    A distant valley came into view. Far up it, a strange anachronism in that landscape, was a long modern building with glittering roofs and a great display of plate glass.
    “The factory,” the driver told them, “of the Compagnie Chimique des Alpes Maritimes.”
    Alleyn made a little affirmative sound as if he saw something that he had expected and for as long as it remained in sight he looked at the glittering building.
    They drove on in silence. Miss Truebody turned her head from side to side and Troy bent over her. “Hot,” she whispered, “such an oppressive climate. Oh, dear!”
    “One approaches the objective,” the driver announced, and changed gears. The road tipped downwards and turned the flank of a hill. They had crossed the headland and were high above the sea again. Immediately below them the railroad emerged from a tunnel. On their right was a cliff that mounted into a stone face pierced irregularly with windows. This in its turn broke against the skyline in fabulous turrets and parapets. Troy gave a sharp ejaculation. “Oh,
no
!” she said. “It’s not that! No, it’s too much!”
    “Well, darling,” Alleyn said, “I’m afraid that’s what it is.”
    “La Chèvre d’Argent,” said the driver, and turned up a steep and exceedingly narrow way that ended in a walled platform from which one looked down at the railway and beyond it sheer down again to the sea. “Here one stops. Monsieur,” said the driver. “That is the entrance.”
    He pointed to a dark passage between two masses of rock from which walls emerged as if by some process of evolution. He got out and opened the doors of the car. “It appears,” he said, “that Mademoiselle is unable to