Carson’s Conspiracy by Michael Innes

Author:Michael Innes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Carson’s Conspiracy
ISBN: 9780755120888
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

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10

The first person Appleby noticed on the lawn was Mary Watling. He didn’t know her – or, indeed, any of the family at Upton Grange – very well. But he knew that she had become an art-student, and that for a time she had prosecuted the activity in America. As she was merely a girl, and had thus not violated the military traditions of the Watlings in general, she had no doubt been allowed to follow her own inclinations in the matter. With what success she was busying herself as an artist, now, Appleby had never heard. But the fact would explain her taking up with the Lelys, who lived not far away.

‘We’ve come to bag some tea,’ Humphry Lely said cheerfully, as Appleby shook hands with the visitors. ‘And we picked up Mary on the way. Mary was just walking for pleasure, and was getting tired of it. Kate and I’ – Kate was Mrs Lely – ‘were out on business.’

‘Sketching en plein air?’ Appleby asked.

‘Something much more rewarding than that.’

‘Simply drinking in inspiration,’ the clerical Dr Folliott suggested humorously, ‘from the meadows, groves, and streams.

‘Nothing of the kind. Pocketing the cash. And literally the cash. Fifty-pound notes. Think of that.’

‘All in Humphry’s bulging pockets now,’ Mrs Lely said. ‘Shall I, or will our little ones, ever see any of them again? I doubt it. Judith, I’m delighted to notice muffins. There’s sense in muffins en plein air. And they sustain. May I unobtrusively secret a couple of them for the twins?’

‘Whenever I hear,’ Dr Folliott said, ‘of unexpected brief affluence befalling a parishioner, I turn the conversation to the Mission Field. Or – more hopefully, it may be – to the state of our church’s roof. To be dripped on during a sermon is a double affliction which everybody understands.’

Appleby reflected that Herbert Folliott, equally with Hoobin, was a perusing man. He spent most of his time, that was to say, with his nose happily in print. But whereas Hoobin’s texts bore at least some distant relationship to the Queen’s English, those favoured by Folliott were in Hebrew. Folliott was the odd sort of country clergyman who happens to be a theologian as well. All the more credit to him, surely, that on some afternoons he attended polite tea drinkings with their harmless chatter such as was now going on, and on others dodged in and out of cottages, helped old women to hang out their washing and children to recite with some approximation to accuracy even the more advanced of their multiplication tables.

‘I hope,’ Judith was saying to the vicar, ‘that the bazaar went well?’ This was simply Judith doing her stuff – as she always did. Equally with her husband, she no doubt judged it odd that institutions for public worship and the administering of sacraments should have to fund themselves out of cake and candy stalls. But she said the right things, which Appleby himself often culpably neglected to do.

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