Heavy as Lead by Gladys Mitchell

Author:Gladys Mitchell [Mitchell, Gladys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Public Meeting

Timothy locked his bedroom door that night and slept soundly. A modicum of reasoning had assured him that, far from having guessed that he had wanted to make love to her, Jane Stretton was in some sort of trouble which she wanted to confide to him, but that, at the last minute, she could not bring herself to the point of revealing what it was.

Mrs. Prynne appeared at breakfast, impassive, ugly, and dignified, and waited upon him and her employer with her habitual taciturnity. After the post-breakfast cigarette, Timothy walked over to the church. The ladders, which had been removed early on Sunday morning, were in position again, but there was nobody about. Timothy mounted the nearest ladder and began another detailed inspection of the roof.

He was not a qualified surveyor. Phisbe’s specialist would come later, if the report on the church justified the Society’s taking direct action. He knew enough about timber construction, however, to realise that, as he had suspected, and as his cursory inspection from the top of the tower with Godfrey Frimley and his more detailed work on the long ladders had confirmed, the church possessed a fine example of a thirteenth-century arch-braced roof, not quite as he had deduced it, but near enough to make no difference to its splendid craftsmanship.

The spaces between the common rafters had been boarded in, and these boards, naturally enough the weakest part of the structure, would need repairs and replacements, but the wall-plates and purlins were sturdy enough, and so were the principal rafters which carried the gables. From the shape of the barrel ceiling visible from the inside of the church, the arch-braces could be deduced, and, for extra strengthening against the thrust of the purlins, there were collar beams placed crosswise from one side of the roof to the other. Wall-plates joined the arch-braces, and the latter also rested on wall-posts.

He spent a long while, and had climbed the available long ladders not once, but several times, when Sir Ganymede’s voice from below hailed him.

“Come on down! I’m out of drinks. You’ll have to take me to the pub, and you may as well give me lunch while we’re there.”

As giving Sir Ganymede lunch at the pub, with drinks thrown in, appeared by this time to have become an old Spanish custom, Timothy descended to the churchyard.

“Right. I’ve finished, except for jotting down another note or two and making a few sketches,” he said. “Be with you at my car in half an hour. Would Mrs. Prynne care to join us?”

“Prynne? Oh, dear me, no. A most strait-laced woman. Wouldn’t dream of appearing in a pub, even to have her lunch. I often wonder she doesn’t join these Dissenting fellers, you know.”

Timothy, with a vivid recollection of a rapt Mrs. Prynne on her knees before the devil, wondered whether the “Dissenting fellers” would welcome her in their midst. He went up to his room, made his last notes and sketches, washed and changed, and went out to the drive to place himself at the squire’s service.

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