Off With His Head. Ngaio Marsh

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       CHAPTER 3

       Preparation

      All through the following week snow and frost kept up their antiphonal ceremony. The two Mardians were mentioned in the press and on the air as being the coldest spots in England.

      Up at the castle, Dame Alice gave some hot-tempered orders to what remained nowadays of her staff: a cook, a house-parlourmaid, a cleaning woman, a truculent gardener and his boy. All of them except the boy were extremely old. Preparations were to be put in hand for the first Wednesday evening following the 21st December. A sort of hot cider punch must be brewed in the boiler-house. Cakes of a traditional kind must be baked. The snow must be cleared away in the courtyard and stakes planted to which torches would subsequently be tied. A bonfire must be built. Her servants made a show of listening to Dame Alice and then set about these preparations in their own fashion. Miss Mardian sighed and may have thought all the disturbance a bit of a bore but took it, as did everybody else in the village, as a complete matter of course. ‘Sword Wednesday,’ as the date of the Five Sons was sometimes called, made very little more stir than Harvest Festival in the two Mardians.

      Mrs Bünz and Camilla Campion stayed on at the Green Man. Camilla was seen to speak in a friendly fashion to Mrs Bünz, towards whom Trixie also maintained an agreeable manner. The landlord, an easy man, was understood to be glad enough of her custom, and to be charging her a pretty tidy sum for it. It was learned that her car had broken down and the roads were too bad for it to be towed to Simon Begg’s garage, an establishment that advertised itself as ‘Simmy-Dick’s Service Station.’ It was situated at Yowford, a mile beyond East Mardian, and was believed to be doing not too well. It was common knowledge that Simon Begg wanted to convert Copse Forge into a garage and that the Guiser wouldn’t hear of it.

      Evening practices continued in the barn. In the bedrooms of the pub the thumping boots, jingling bells and tripping insistences of the fiddle could be clearly heard. Mrs Bünz had developed a strong vein of cunning. She would linger in the bar-parlour, sip her cider and write her voluminous diary. The thumps and the scraps of fiddling would tantalize her almost beyond endurance. She would wait for at least ten minutes and then stifle a yawn, excuse herself and ostensibly go upstairs to bed. She had, however, discovered a back stairs by which, a few minutes later, she would secretly descend, a perfect mountain of handweaving, and let herself out by a side door into a yard. From here a terribly slippery brick path led directly to the near end of the barn which the landlord used as a store-room.

      Mrs Bünz’s spying window was partly sheltered by overhanging thatch. She had managed to clean it a little. Here, shuddering with cold and excitement, she stood, night after night, making voluminous notes with frozen fingers.

      From this exercise she derived only modified rapture. Peering through the glass which was continually misted over by her breath, she looked through the store-room and its inner doorway into the barn proper. Her view of the dancing was thus maddeningly limited. The Andersen brothers would appear in flashes. Now they would be out of her range, now momentarily within it. Sometimes the Guiser, or Dr Otterly or the Hobby Horse would stand in the doorway and obstruct her view. It was extremely frustrating.

      She gradually discovered that there was more than one dance. There was a Morris, for which the men wore bells that jangled most provocatively, and there was also sword-dancing, which was part of a mime or play. And there was one passage of this dance-play which was always to be seen. This was when the Guiser in his rôle of Fool or Old Man, put his head in the knot of swords. The Five Sons were grouped about him, the Betty and the Hobby Horse were close behind. At this juncture, it was clear that the Old Man spoke. There was some fragment of dialogue, miraculously presenved, perhaps, from heaven knew what ancient source. Mrs Bünz saw his lips move, always at the same point and always, she was certain, to the same effect. Really, she would have given anything in her power to hear what he said.

      She learnt quite a lot about the dance-play. She found that, after the Guiser had acted out his mock-decapitation, the Sons danced again and the Betty and Hobby Horse improvised. Sometimes the Hobby Horse would come prancing and shuffling into the store-room quite close to her. It was strange to see the iron beak-like mouth snap and bite the air on the other side of the window. Sometimes the Betty would come in, and the great barrel-like dress would brush up clouds of dust from the store-room floor. But always the Sons danced again and, at a fixed point, the Guiser rose up as if resurrected. It was on this ‘Act’, evidently, that the whole thing ended.

      After the practice they would all return to the pub. Once, Mrs Bünz denied herself the pleasures of her peepshow in order to linger as unobtrusively as possible in the bar-parlour. She hoped that, pleasantly flushed with exercise, the dancers would talk of their craft. But this ruse was a dead failure. The men at first did indeed talk, loudly and freely at the far end of the Public, but they all spoke together and Mrs Bünz found the Andersens’ dialect exceedingly difficult. She thought that Trixie must have indicated her presence because they were all suddenly quiet. Then Trixie, always pleasant, came through and asked her if she wanted anything further that evening in such a definite sort of way that somehow even Mrs Bünz felt impelled to get up and go.

      Then Mrs Bünz had what she hoped at the time might be a stroke of luck.

      One evening at half past five she came into the bar parlour in order to complete a little piece she was writing for an American publication on ‘The Hermaphrodite in European Folklore.’ She found Simon Begg already there, lost in gloomy contemplation of a small notebook and the racing page of an evening paper.

      She had entered into negotiations with Begg about repairing her car. She had also, of course, had her secret glimpses of him in the character of ‘Crack’. She greeted him with her particularly Teutonic air of camaraderie. ‘So!’ she said, ‘you are early this evening, Wing Commander.’

      He made a sort of token movement, shifting a little in his chair and eyeing Trixie. Mrs Bünz ordered cider. ‘The snow,’ she said cosily, ‘continues, does it not?’

      ‘That’s right,’ he said, and then seemed to pull himself together. ‘Too bad we still can’t get round to fixing that little bus of yours, Mrs – er – er – Bünz, but there you are! Unless we get a tow –’

      ‘There is no hurry. I shall not attempt the return journey before the weather improves. My baby does not enjoy the snow.’

      ‘You’d be better off, if you don’t mind my saying so, with something that packs a bit more punch.’

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      He repeated his remark in less idiomatic English. The merits of a more powerful car were discussed: it seemed that Begg had a car of the very sort he had indicated which he was to sell for an old lady who had scarcely used it. Mrs Bünz was by no means poor. Perhaps she weighed up the cost of changing cars with the potential result in terms of inside information on ritual dancing. In any case, she encouraged Begg, who became nimble in sales talk.

      ‘It is true,’ Mrs Bünz meditated presently, ‘that if I had a more robust motor car I could travel with greater security. Perhaps, for example, I should be able to ascend in frost with ease СКАЧАТЬ