Rattle His Bones Read Free Page B

errandboys on bicycles, towered at least half a dozen omnibuses. Like honeybees, they swooped to taste the queues of nectar-people at the flower-stops.
    A Number 30 bumbled towards the corner where she stood, closely followed by a 96. She stepped back to make room for descending passengers.
    Ah, there was a 74. Daisy hurried to meet it. Alec had assured her his daughter, Belinda, was perfectly capable at the age of nine of getting herself and Derek from St. John’s Wood to Kensington, but she was still anxious. They did not have to change ’buses, true. But brought up in the country herself, with occasional visits to London a matter of train and cab, she recalled her confusion over where to get off when she first came to live in town.
    The 74 stopped. Three or four people stepped down, the
conductor assisting an elderly woman, who stood on the pavement struggling to open her black umbrella. Daisy suppressed an impulse to help, and addressed the conductor.
    â€œI’m meeting two children, two nine-year-olds. A little girl with ginger pigtails—”
    â€œAunt Daisy!” Derek thundered down the winding stair. “Aunt Daisy, is it true a gentleman goes first down the steps?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI told you so!” Belinda scampered down behind him.
    â€œAnd then he turns to help the lady down into the street,” said Daisy.
    â€œOh!” Already on the pavement, her nephew swung round, grabbed Bel’s hand, and tugged her off the platform.
    Belinda landed safely, protesting, “Not like that, silly!”
    â€œThat’s not quite it,” Daisy agreed, laughing. “We’ll practise later, but come along now. I’ve got an appointment with the Director of Geology. You had better both try to squeeze under my umbrella. Why on earth did you sit on top in this rain?”
    â€œYou can see better,” Belinda pointed out, and Derek added, “It’s more fun. Besides, it’s not raining very hard and it’s warm—after all, it’s summer—and I’m not very wet, but I shall be if we all try to share the umbrella ’cause I’ll get drips down my neck. You ladies can have it,” he said grandly. “And I’ll carry that for you, Aunt Daisy. What is it?”
    â€œA tripod for the camera. Be careful, won’t you? It’s Lucy’s.”
    The ’bus moved on down Fulham Road. The policeman on point duty held up the traffic with white gloves and whistle, and they crossed the street toward the Brompton Oratory. Belinda, the Londoner, pointed it out to the provincial Derek.
    â€œIt’s a sort of church,” she explained knowledgeably,
“RC, I think. And that great big building next door is the Victoria and Albert Museum. We went there from school—not the church, the museum. Didn’t you write about that one, too, Aunt Daisy?”
    â€œThat’s right,” Daisy assured her stepdaughter-to-be. “I’m doing a series of articles on London museums for an American magazine.”
    As they walked down Cromwell Road past the smoke-begrimed Italianate church and neo-Renaissance museum, she listened to the children’s chatter. Derek’s stay with the Fletchers seemed to be going well, in spite of Belinda’s grandmother’s antipathy towards the boy’s aunt.
    Old Mrs. Fletcher, in agreement with Daisy’s mother, the Dowager Lady Dalrymple, strongly disapproved of the daughter of a viscount marrying a middle-class Detective Chief Inspector. Daisy suspected that Alec had occasional qualms, fearing that she would regret stepping outside her own class.
    She herself had no doubts whatsoever. She was a working woman. Her father dead in the ’flu pandemic—like Belinda’s mother—and her brother killed in the trenches of Flanders, she had chosen not to sponge on the cousin who inherited the title and the Gloucestershire estate. As for living in the Dower House with