Death of a Ghost by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online

Valenciennes.
    The Bishop went up to her with outstretched hands. They were very old friends.
    â€˜My dear lady,’ he said, his famous voice rumbling like the organ in his own cathedral in his efforts to lower it a little. ‘My dear lady, what a triumph! What a triumph!’
    Mr Campion gazed round the room. It was evident that he would not be able to get near Belle for some time. He caught sight of Donna Beatrice, a startling vision in green and gold, talking psychomancy to a bewildered-looking old gentleman, whom he recognized as a scientist of world-wide distinction.
    In the background, unnoticed and forlorn, he espied the melancholy Mr Potter, whose eyes turned ever and again with shuddering agony to the dismal display of prints upon the curtain.
    He heard Linda catch her breath and he turned to see her gazing across the room. He followed her glance and caught sight of Tommy Dacre leaning by the table where the jewellery made by Donna Beatrice’s protégées, the Guild of Women Workers in Precious Metal, was displayed. He was standing with his back to the table, half sitting on the edge of it, in fact. He was carelessly dressed, but had taken the precaution of conforming to the costume permitted by popular superstition to the artist.
    By his side was a girl, a girl so striking, even startling, in her appearance that Campion recognized her immediately as the cause of the passionate resentment in the breast of the elemental young woman at his side. Rosa-Rosa looked less like an Italian than one would have thought possible. She had a curious angular figure whose remarkably well-developed muscles showed through her thin grey dress.
    Rosa-Rosa’s frizzy yellow hair was parted in the centre and hung obliquely round her head. Her face was beautiful, but fantastic. She had the dark mournful eyes and arched brows of a Florentine Madonna, but her nose was long and sharp and her lips thin and finely curled. Like all natural models she moved very little and then only to drop from one attitude into another, which she held with remarkable faithfulness.
    At the moment she was listening to Dacre, who was chatting to her in Italian, his head thrown back, his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his black hat crushed under one arm.
    She was leaning forward, her chin tilted slightly, her weight supported on one foot, her arms hanging at her sides. It was an arrested movement, perfect in its way and utterly unexpected and striking.
    She looked, Campion thought, less like a human animal than an example of decorative art.
    Linda walked across the room towards them and he followed her. Dacre’s smile vanished as he caught sight of the girl, but he did not look embarrassed, and as a layman Campion wondered afresh at the oddities of the artistic temperament.
    He was introduced to Rosa-Rosa, and as he spoke to her he understood some of Linda’s fury. Rosa-Rosa had another of the perfect model’s peculiarities; she was unbelievably stupid. She had been trained not to think, lest her roving fancy should destroy the expression she was holding. For the best part of her life, therefore, her mind remained a complete blank.
    â€˜I’ve brought Mr Campion to admire the exhibits,’ said Linda.
    Dacre slipped off the table and turned round lazily to survey its display.
    â€˜I’m minding them for Donna Beatrice,’ he said. ‘She wanted to toddle off and chat to her friends. I don’t know if she’s afraid someone’ll walk off with this junk – kleptomaniacs, and that sort of thing. Pretty terrible stuff, isn’t it?’
    They stood looking down at the handiwork of the industrious Guild of Women Metalworkers and the depression induced by the contemplation of the useless and the unlovely descended upon them.
    â€˜Modern design approached from the outside by the eighteen-ninety mentality can be rather terrible, can’t it?’ said Dacre, indicating a pair of table-napkin