Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh Read Free Book Online Page A

Maggie.
    She held out her hand. Blondie, answering the gesture rather than the words, ran across and crouched beside her chair.
    Rangi said: “It’s true, she can’t help it. It affects some people like that.”
    Peregrine looked up from his notes. “What’s up?” he asked and then, seeing Blondie, said, “Oh. Oh, I see. Never mind, Blondie. We can’t see the lightning, can we, and the whole thing’ll be over soon. Brace up, there’s a good girl.”
    “Yes. Okay.”
    She straightened up. Maggie patted her shoulder. Her hand checked and then closed. She looked at the other players, made a long face, and briefly quivered her free hand at them.
    “Are you cold, Blondie?” she asked.
    “I don’t think so. No. I’m all right. Thank you. Ah!” She gave a little cry.
    There was another roll of thunder; not so close, less precipitate.
    “It’s moving away,” said Maggie.
    It died out in an indeterminate series of three or four thuds and bumps. Then, without warning, the sky opened and the rain crashed down.
    “ ‘Overture and Beginners, please,’ ” Dougal quoted and got his laugh.
    By the time, about an hour later, when Peregrine finished his notes and recapped the faulty passages, the rain stopped almost as abruptly as it had begun, and the actors left the theatre on a calm night with stars shining, brilliant, above the rain-washed air. London glittered. A sense of urgency and excitement was abroad and when Peregrine whistled the opening phrase of a Brandenburg concerto it might have been a whole orchestra giving it out.
    “Come back to my flat for an hour, Maggie,” said Dougal. “It’s too lovely a night to go home on.”
    “No, thank you, Dougal. I’m tired and hungry and I’ve ordered a car and here it is. Good-night.”
    Peregrine saw them all go their ways. Still whistling, he walked toward the car park and only then noticed that a little derelict shed on the waterfront lay in a ramshackle heap of rubble.
    “I hadn’t realized it’s been demolished,” he thought.
    Next morning a workman operating a scoop-lift pointed to a black scar on one of the stones.
    “See that?” he said cheerfully to Peregrine. “That’s the mark of the devil’s thumb, that is. You don’t often see it. Not nowadays, you don’t.”
    “The devil’s thumb?”
    “That’s right, Squire. Lightning.”
     
    Simon Morten had taken the part of Macduff by storm. His dark good looks and dashing, easy mockery of the Porter on his first entrance with Lennox, his assertion of his hereditary right to wake his King, his cheerful run up the stairs, whistling as he went into the bloodied chamber while Lennox warmed himself at the fire and talked cosily about the wild intemperance of the night, all gave him an easy ascendancy.
    Macbeth listened, but not to him.
    The door opens. Macduff stumbles, incoherent, ashen-faced, the former man wiped out as if by the sweep of the murderer’s hand. The stirred-up havoc, the alarum bell, the place alive, suddenly, with the horror of assassination. The courtyard is filled with men roused from their sleep, nightgowns hastily pulled on, wild and disheveled. The bell jangling madly.
    The scene ends with the flight of the King’s sons. In a short, final scene Macduff, already suspicious, decides not to attend Macbeth’s coronation at Scone but to retire to his own headquarters at Fife. It is here that he will make his fatal decision to turn south to England, where he will learn of the murder of his wife and children. From then on he will be a man with a single object: to return to Scotland, find Macbeth, and kill him.
    When Banquo has been murdered, Macduff moves forward and the end is now inevitable.
    Morten had become enamored of the fight, which he continued to rehearse with Dougal. At Gaston’s suggestion they both began to exercise vigorously, apart from the actual combat, and became expert in the handling of their weapons: twirling and slashing with alarming dexterity. The steel