The Golden Fleece Read Online Free PDF Page A

promised to deliver the authentic Golden Fleece,” Dr. Hu reminded him. “No—just joking. She’s just a little weird, as I say. Don’t let her put you off. It’s Jayjay you have to impress—and you haven’t put a foot wrong so far, Golden Boy.”
     
    “Weird how?” Adrian wanted to know, for safety’s sake.
     
    “She’ll look at you in a funny way—and then, if she doesn’t like what she sees, won’t look at you again. She doesn’t like trivia, or dressing things up—won’t have knick-knacks on the mantelpieces, apparently, or paintings on the walls. It’s Bleak House up there, as I said. All plain wood paneling—brown by the acre, not a splash of color; more like a monastery than a house. You’ll find it even duller than I did, I dare say. Must be other eccentricities, but those are the ones you’ll notice. Don’t worry about it. I’d say, turn a blind eye, but that’s not really your thing, is it?” He smiled.
     
    Adrian ignored the gibe. “What about Mr. Jarndyke’s art collection?” he asked.
     
    “He doesn’t have an art collection,” Hu informed him. “Maybe he wanted one—she probably did—but if so, they shelved the project. Artistic disagreements, at a guess—real ones, not euphemistic ones. Angie paints, so rumor has it— actually has a barn of sorts for her own private space, that no one but her ever goes into, where she does whatever witchy stuff she does, but there are none of her paintings on the walls of the Hall if she does fancy herself as a painter. Not downstairs, at any rate. Maybe they’re too pornographic to be allowed out of the bedroom.”
     
    Adrian was puzzled, seeing a mystery in the evolving pattern. Chester Hu didn’t seem to think that there was anything to what he’d said but a report of arbitrary eccentricity, but Adrian wasn’t at all sure, now that he could put what Jason Jarndyke had said to him into a different informational context. Angelica Jarndyke had “dragged” her husband to see the Rothko chapel, but wouldn’t tolerate paintings on the walls of their home...not in the spaces that visitors saw, at any rate. She was “rumored” to be a painter herself, but the likes of Chester Hu had never seen any of her work. No one was allowed in her “barn,” but Jason Jarndyke had “a treat” for him after Sunday dinner—or maybe not. Something that might interest him, at any rate.
     
    Perhaps, Adrian thought, Professor Clark’s Medea joke hadn’t simply been a matter of mythological free association after all. And perhaps Jason Jarndyke’s third condition hadn’t simply been a random shot aimed to shake his exaggerated complacency and make him blink.
     
    Adrian was almost tempted to ring Professor Clark to ask him for a little more insight into the legend of the Golden Fleece, because he remembered something in that connection, very vaguely, about dragon’s teeth. He didn’t. He didn’t even bother to interrogate a search engine. This was the twenty-first century, after all, and the only magic abroad in the world was that of genetic reverse engineering. A genius of that sort need have no fear of “real” witchcraft.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Jason Jarndyke’s “Old Manse” was neither old, nor a manse. Not literally, at any rate. It had been completed less than ten years before, having been seven years in the construction, to a design that Jarndyke had imposed on his reluctant architects by sheer will-power and bribery. Unkind people had called it a Folly, but unkind people always said that, and even if it had been a Folly, that didn’t mean to say that it was unesthetic. Adrian knew that they could be grandeur in a Folly, and magnificence, even when there was an abundance of mere folly.
     
    In fact, he rather liked the look of the house on top of the moor, although architecture wasn’t really “his thing,” as Chester Hu would have put it, and fake Portland Stone from northern France definitely wasn’t his color. He preferred