Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart Read Free

country gentlemen with time on their hands and a mild musical curiosity, eager girls peering through their curtains of limp long hair.
    “They’re just taking parties round on a tour of the house,” said Arundale, opening the door for his passenger. “Leave your luggage, I’ll bring it in when I’ve run the car round to the yard. You just trot in and join them. Formalities later.”
    She reached in again for her guitar, all the same, and straightened up to look at the lighted windows above them. The party passing had halted for a moment, all their faces turned up to some painting hung very high on the inner wall. Only their guide faced the windows as she went through her recital; a very young girl, surely no more than fifteen or sixteen, slight and pale, with wings of mouse-brown hair framing a serious and secretive face, a face full of doubts and hesitations and flashes of uneasy animation, as early-April as the weather outside, and her own difficult season. Something in the fine, irresolute features, the set of the eyes and carriage of the head, made the newcomer turn and look again at Arundale; and she was not mistaken, the likeness was there, allowing for the years and the toughening and the entrenchment, though maybe he’d never possessed the possibilities of passion which the girl in the gallery certainly had, and didn’t know yet what to do with.
    “That must be your daughter, surely?”
    His face stiffened very slightly, though he gazed back at her with polite composure. “My niece. Unfortunately my wife… We have no children.” He snapped off the sentence briskly, like a thread at the end of a seam. A sore subject, she was sorry she’d embarked on it, however innocently. She was just wondering how to ride the punch, and whether his voice was always so constrained when he spoke of his wife, when he turned his head to look along the necklace of lighted windows, as willing to evade complications as she, and said in a very different tone: “Ah, there is my wife now, with the next party.”
    She had thought him without passion, but evidently he had one. This was quite another voice, warm and proud and soft, heavy with unguarded affection. No, his wife’s childlessness was only a shared sorrow, not at all a count against her, or a shadow between them. The girl looked up, following his devoted, secret smile, and saw a woman caught for a moment under the full brilliance of one of the chandeliers. She was slender and fair and elegant in a plain dark dress, with pale hair piled on her head, and a swimming, wavering walk that seemed to balance the silvery coils like a conscious burden. Her eyes were dark and large, her colouring richly fair, her face bright and animated almost to the point of discomfort. She talked and gestured and passed, and the medley of students and guests passed after her, consolingly ordinary, unhaunted and content.
    The girl stood fixed, watching her go without a smile, and for some moments without a word. When the pageant had passed she stirred, and moistened her lips.
    “She’s beautiful,” she said at last, with deliberation.
    This time she had said the right thing. She felt the evening filled with the glow of his pleasure.
    “Some excellent judges have thought so,” he admitted, a little pompously, more than a little proprietorially.
    “I have a feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before,” said the girl in a cool, distant voice.
    “It’s quite possible. You’re a ballad-singer. Audrey has some close friends in folk-music circles.”
    The girl with the guitar-case suppressed a faint and private smile. “Yes… yes, I’m sure she has,” she said gently, and turned from him and ran up the stone steps towards the great doorway.
     
    Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends, was an implacable hater of all humbug, and a merciless judge of all those who seemed to her tainted with its unmistakable sweet, self-conscious odour. At rising nineteen she could afford to be, her