Death and the Maiden Read Free Page B

Miss Carmody to be civil to Mr Tidson, although not to countenance or encourage his oddities.
    â€˜Why, Polly’s girl’s boy,’ replied Mr Tidson unhelpfully. ‘What’s the name, now?’
    â€˜Preece-Harvard,’ said Connie, through her teeth. ‘I ought to know!’
    â€˜Preece-Harvard is the name,’ agreed Miss Carmody, ‘and it is nothing to do with Polly, as you very well know. They live not very far from Winchester. We had better look them up while we are there.’
    â€˜Don’t ask me to go!’ said Connie.
    â€˜I must look up the address,’ said Mr Tidson.
    â€˜You will hardly have time to look the boy up, though,’ observed Crete, not without malice. ‘You will be too busy looking up your nymph.’
    Mr Tidson became silent, and looked out of the car window at College Wood, distant half a mile from the road.
    â€˜We should be passing Bradley Farm about now,’ said Connie, who had the map open on her knees. She was seated between her aunt and Crete Tidson on the back seat of the car. Mr Tidson was in front, beside Toogood.
    â€˜Bradley? Ah, that reminds me,’ said Miss Carmody. ‘My friend Mrs Bradley is also proposing to stay at the Domus with us. Miss Carroll took her place at Cartaret College, Connie, you remember, when she relinquished the post of Warden of Athelstan Hall.’
    â€˜Yes, I remember,’ said Connie. ‘That terrifying, black old lady who always wore dreadful colours and did indescribable knitting. We heard her lecture. I should hardly have thought you could call her a friend of yours, though. We only knew Miss Carroll very slightly, and although you spoke to Mrs Bradley—’
    â€˜ Black? ’ said Mr Tidson, turning his head.
    â€˜She has black hair and black eyes,’ Miss Carmody sharply replied. ‘There is nothing else black about her, of course. Connie is given to wilful and misleading exaggeration at times.’
    â€˜Exaggeration is always misleading,’ said Crete. Mr Tidson, who did not believe this, resumed his contemplation of the landscape, and the car swept smoothly past Dodsley Wood and a couple of tumuli , and then along a stretch of what hadonce been a Roman road, and so past Abbots Barton towards Winchester.
    â€˜And although you spoke to Mrs Bradley after her lecture on hereditary tendencies,’ said Connie, who disliked to be cut off in the middle of a sentence, ‘I don’t see that that could exactly make her a friend of yours, Aunt Prissie, and I don’t want to meet her again! I didn’t like her.’
    â€˜Put that rug back, dear,’ replied her aunt. ‘You won’t need that in the hotel. Well, here we are, Crete,’ she added, turning to the slightly more bearable of her parasitic guests. ‘I wonder how you will like it now we’re here?’
    â€˜Oh, I shall like it,’ said Crete. ‘Edris will have his nymph, you will have your friend the black woman, Connie will walk and go early, very early, to bed, and I shall enjoy myself alone. But how is this the hotel? We are not yet in Winchester.’

Chapter Two
    â€˜. . . which is to inform such Housekeepers as are not in the Higher Rank of Fortune, how to Eat, or Entertain Company, in the most elegant Manner, at a reasonable Expence.’
    Mrs S ARAH H ARRISON OF D EVONSHIRE ( The
House-Keeper’s Pocket Book and Complete
Family Cook, 1760 )
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    T HE Domus hotel was in a side-turning and free of the main road traffic. It was approached by way of a lane south-west of the broad arterial road from which A33 debouched before appearing, out of a maze of tributary meanderings, as the main Southampton Road beyond St Cross.
    The Domus had been in turn a monastery, an Elizabethan mansion devoted to the cause and hiding of Jesuit priests, an eighteenth-century town house, a nineteenth-century nunnery, and, lastly, a hotel, and it showed traces of all these