Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online Page B

times they saw elephants again, and several times deer, and the sky over them became the clear, pre-sunset sky of a summer day at home, shading down from deepest blue at the zenith to jade green at the rim of the world. The few feathers of cloud were coloured like roses, in variations of pink and gold.
    They turned back at last. Romesh was just bringing the boat about in a long, sweeping curve, the water hissing along its side, when they all heard a distant, muffled report, not at all loud, but borne across the mirror of lake as though it came from everywhere at once, or from nowhere.
    ‘What was that?’ Larry demanded. ‘I thought there was no shooting here. It isn’t a hunting reserve, it’s a wild life sanctuary.’
    ‘That is right, sahib,’ Romesh confirmed. ‘But sometimes wardens must shoot injured animal, or rogue animal.’
    ‘But it didn’t sound like a gun to me,’ Dominic said. ‘More like what you hear at a good distance when they’re blasting in a quarry. But I don’t suppose there such a thing for a hundred miles around here.’
    They listened, straining their ears, but the sound was not repeated. They had the broadest expanse of the lake to themselves, and the silvery hush of the hour was like a glass bell enclosing them.
    ‘Ah, we’re dreaming!’
    But they had not been dreaming. Looking ahead as they sped towards the narrows, they saw a tiny puff of iridescent cloud rise and assemble in the sky far before them, and there hang shimmering like gilded dust for some four or five minutes before it disintegrated. In a countryside almost without aerial pollution, even a shot in a quarry would have produced little more than that. And before the arms of forest rose on either side to shut them in, it was gone.
    The successive bends of lake became surfaces of steel mirror, reflecting pastel channels of sky, and shut in by black walls of forest. But wherever a wider bay opened the light took heart and returned. It was well after six o’clock when they came back to the place where they had seen the elephants cross, and instinctively looked again at the shore from which they had set out, where a few dead trees provided scratching posts in the shallows, and man-tall reeds grew, a paler patch in the dusk.
    ‘What’s that?’ Larry asked, pointing. ‘There in the reeds, look – something white… ’ Reddish elephants they had seen, but a white elephant would be too much to ask. Deer, perhaps? Anything pale would look white at this hour.
    They peered, and caught the gleam he had been the first to see. Too white for deer, and too motionless; something low in the water, half obscured by the vertical stems of the reeds. ‘Wait!’ said Dominic sharply. ‘Ease up, Romesh, there’s something queer there— Take us in towards it a bit.’
    Romesh slowed down, and obediently turned the boat’s nose into the bay. They drew nearer to the pale patch, and it took on shape, veiled as it was, the curve of a white hull, a tarter of canvas trailing overside into the water.
    ‘It’s a boat – but it’s foundered – it’s filling!—’ Dominic leaned over the side, and caught the quicksilver gleam of water inside the settling hull, and something else, pale wisps and bulges of cloth, awash among the bilge and hanging limply over the distant side. ‘Something’s happened— Closer, Romesh, get us alongside. My God, there’s someone in her!’
    They were all braced intently at his back as he kneeled on the seat and leaned far over to get a hand on the gunwale of the other boat. Patti’s voice said, in tones of stunned and frozen unbelief: ‘There can’t be! It’s only old rags – it’s an old boat, it must have been abandoned here long ago…’
    ‘Impossible, we couldn’t have missed seeing it.’
    The reeds rustled, brushing their hair and sleeves. Dominic got a hand on the rail and steadied them alongside; and now they could all see down into the unmistakable shell of Mahendralal Bakhle’s smart