The Fox in the Forest Read Online Free PDF

Its ivy-clad elevations bespoke a permanence, a faith in solid money and sensible investments. The grounds were large enough and mature enough to have full-grown copper beeches at their boundary. In spring, the magnolias held their purple-flushed cups confidently aloft and huge Pink Pearl rhododendrons made fifty-foot-high pyramids of opulent bloom on the closely mown front lawn. In summer, the spacious lawns at the rear called out for cucumber sandwiches and afternoon tea.
    In these dead days of winter, there was little colour evident in the long borders, but the huge Victorian conservatory, in decline for many years, had recently been restored to its pristine glory. Hyacinths filled the place with heavy, exotic perfume, and the bowls of paper-white narcissi would be out for Christmas Day. The temperature was kept at sixty degrees, comfortably above the level at which the last vicar who had lived here had been able to keep the house itself.
    The Old Vicarage had long since ceased to be owned by the Church of England.
    Peter Barton did not hesitate between the high wrought-iron gates because of envy. He had no regret for times past, no desire to live here with the comfortable social position of his predecessor a hundred years earlier. When he confronted the sparse audience for his Sunday sermons, he had an occasional nostalgia for the teeming pews of Victorian England, but he knew how he would have been appalled by the poverty and exploitation of that era. His grandfather had been an early Labour Party man, and he was proud of that, though there were some environments where he bit his lip and concealed it.
    The Old Vicarage, ironically enough, was one of them. But the people here meant well enough, he told himself resolutely as he marched up the long drive. He was seen before he arrived at the broad mahogany door. The maid, Mary Cox, was one of his parishioners. She smiled a shy welcome and ushered him into the drawing-room. Colonel Harry Davidson, JP, was holding forth at length on the penalties appropriate to young offenders, but he broke off to greet his vicar affably enough. “Come and sit down, Peter. We’re just rustling up some t-tea.” He had a slight speech impediment which caught him out when a t came at the beginning of a word; it went oddly with his general air of control.
    Davidson was a Gloucestershire man, but he had been away from the county for over twenty years in the service of his country. Woodford had been glad he had chosen the Old Vicarage when he retired a few years ago, and not only because money and employment were always welcome in a village where both were in short supply. Harry Davidson had managed to distinguish himself in the Falklands, leading a landing party in the crucial action at San Carlos in 1982. He said modestly that he would have retired as a major had he not been in that place at that time, but Woodford was glad of a whiff of military glory.
    His army pension would never have stretched to the Old Vicarage, but Colonel Harry had made a good, late marriage when he came back from the Falklands. Rachel was from a relatively minor Swiss banking family, but she brought with her considerable riches. She was striking rather than pretty, but she had the equable personality and intelligence which her husband was shrewd enough to recognize as more valuable to him in the setting he now dominated.
    Two-thirty was a strange time for tea, but she had long since reconciled herself to the English habit of offering it at any hour as an assurance of welcome. So she now pushed a plate of scones towards the young vicar, who she thought looked drawn and strained. “Sit down and get warm, Peter, for goodness’ sake! You look as though you need it.” Her Swiss accent was scarcely detectable now.
    He was more glad of the hot tea and the newly baked scones than he knew. Perhaps it was the feeling of being cosseted that his human weakness really appreciated. “I was hoping the four of us might form part