Murder in Abbot's Folly by Amy Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

this Jack the Ripper might look an attractive proposition.’
    â€˜How about lunch? Food might make you less critical.’
    She laughed. ‘Good idea.’
    There was a long queue at the main-course buffet table in the dinner tent. Georgia could see Jennifer Fettis keeping an overall eye on what was going on, but there was no sign of the Fettis party yet. Pity, they were missing something, Georgia thought. Interesting dishes bore tempting labels including pork frigasy, haricot mutton, rolled salmon, stewed cucumbers, salmagundi, hunting pudding and salmon pye. The queue was moving amazingly quickly, considering the mind-boggling choice. Several women were serving, but one was clearly in charge, a rough complexioned, determined-looking woman of about forty-five or fifty, whom she heard addressed as Barbara.
    â€˜Difficult to know what to try,’ Georgia remarked lightly to the woman behind her in the queue. In her sixties, a Regency high-waisted clinging dress should not have been first choice for her short and rather dumpy figure. Her face was a strong one, however, which suggested that clothes were of little importance to her life.
    â€˜Have the potted shrimps,’ she advised Georgia. ‘Jane Austen must have gobbled them up, because the Medway estuary area was famous for its pink and brown shrimps in her time. To coin a phrase, people came from far and wide.’
    â€˜That was before they had to cope with the M25,’ Georgia joked.
    â€˜I managed it today.’
    That seemed to end the conversation. Georgia decided on the pork frigasy, Luke chose the haricot mutton and then they attempted to get near the bar for a brave attempt to buy two drinks. Jane Austen’s orange wine was being so strongly pushed by the barman that she didn’t have the heart to choose anything else, while Luke went for Mr Knightley’s spruce beer. The barman was a young chap in his twenties, who – she worked out from the shouts across from the food counter – was called Craig and he was Barbara’s son. The family was doing a good job, Georgia decided, because once she and Luke had found themselves somewhere to sit outside on the grass, the food proved to be as delicious as it looked, and the wine too was worthy of Miss Austen’s name.
    Perhaps with the help of the wine, the afternoon seemed to pass quickly, even though the magic hour of four o’clock loomed large in her mind. Nevertheless, she found herself playing an elegant game of shuttlecock with Luke, Mark and Jill, while Elena and Peter looked after Rosa. The men had a distinct advantage, owing to their wearing trousers as opposed to long skirts, but Jill turned out to be a superb player (naturally) and she and Georgia won comfortably. For the first time, Georgia felt at ease with her stepdaughter-in-law, and her hopes grew of welding the four of them into a contented family group – five with Peter, and if the worst happened six with Elena. She pushed that thought away. She couldn’t cope with it yet.
    Luke then swept her off into the Sir Roger de Coverley, the only country dance that Georgia knew. She enjoyed stripping the willow – or threading the needle as the Dancing Master termed it – followed by a cotillion, and she realized the day was turning out much better than she could have hoped . . . save, she thought uneasily, for the fingerprints. She had a moment of fear that the nausea would return, but it didn’t, and she fixed her mind on what was going on around her. She noticed the woman who had been behind her in the food queue dancing nimbly with someone whose face, or rather costume, she recognized as the peasant who had bowed to her when they had first arrived.
    â€˜This is a very egalitarian cotillion,’ she joked to Luke. ‘Fancy letting peasants in.’
    Joke over, the uneasiness returned as Luke pointed out that it was getting near to four o’clock. She had caught