Appleby's Answer by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

this letter was as good as her word – as indeed she ought to have been, since she was actually proposing to herself to be a good deal better. For a plan – let it be announced at once – had formed itself in Miss Pringle’s mind.
    There are several ways of beginning a reconnaissance in foreign territory of a rural sort. The most common is to discover a sudden need of stamps, and draw up at the village post-office. If the post-office is the everything-shop as well, so much the better. There will then be three or four female cottagers (as Miss Pringle would have called them) gossiping in the place; these will fall silent as you enter, and then draw aside out of what you may be fond enough to suppose a proper feeling of deference towards the gentry (even foreign gentry); in fact, there has been a sudden outpouring – as of a flood of adrenalin into the bloodstream – of suspicion and hostility of the most primitive sort. But you need not greatly worry about that. This is civilisation, after all. The village constable is bedding out lettuces in his garden next door, and (although it wouldn’t be his real inclination) he knows that his livelihood depends upon defending you at need. One of the women makes a gesture, indicating that you should jump the queue. They do in fact want to get rid of you, so that they can resume their talk. But you decline, and withdraw modestly into a corner of the constricted space, perhaps affecting to study some faded picture-postcards of local beauty-spots. So the women continue with their miscellaneous purchases, and within a minute they have forgotten about you and resumed their tittle-tattle. Whereupon you listen in. Persons seeking dream cottages, dilapidated and going for a song, but offering the largest scope for inspired modernisation, tend to have particular faith in this method of setting to work.
    Miss Pringle, however, was not in quest of a hovel, since she was very nicely accommodated in this particular in her own part of the country already. What she sought might be defined as a synoptic view of the social situation in Long Canings and round about. For this reason (but also, of course, because she was a stout churchwoman) she had chosen to present herself at matins in Long Canings church.
    For there was still a church in some sort of working order, attended to in such leisure as the pastoral care of the people of Gibber Porcorum afforded the rector of that more populous parish. Miss Pringle had made preliminary enquiries, and she had come over on a Sunday – a pleasantly sunny Sunday – upon which Long Canings was having its innings. As her little car chugged over the last stretch of downland and dropped down to the venerable Wilts and Berks canal, she realised that ‘Kandahar’, alias The Old Rectory, was not going to be hard to find. It dominated the suddenly contracted horizon like a cathedral or a gasometer, and the church in the shade of which it ought modestly to have reposed would in fact have gone into it two or three times over. Apart from a pub and a few scattered cottages of no very prosperous (or even picturesque) appearance, the two structures, moreover, seemed to constitute the totality of the village or hamlet of Long Canings. But this was presently revealed as not quite so. Beyond the church was a shrubbery, beyond the shrubbery was a lawn, and beyond the lawn and on a lower level was a large and rambling – although nowhere lofty – manor house put together over some centuries (one had to suppose) to the effect of a careless miscellany of architectural styles. Beyond all this again, and plainly appurtenant to the manor, was a pleasingly imposing park. Miss Pringle, who had a fondness (proper in a lady of good family) for all evidences of spacious and ordered living, felt that she would be much more at home in this squirearchal fastness than in the towering, arched, crocketed, and generally hideous redbrick residence of