Strange Images of Death by Barbara Cleverly Read Free Book Online

an excuse and leave in a hurry.’
    ‘What? You’re trying to tell me there are usually fifty of you here?’ Joe asked lightly. ‘Glad you felt brave—or innocent—enough not to flee before the Law, Estelle!’
    He was teasing but he was sincere. The girl was charming and flattering. Too effusive for his comfort, perhaps. There was something in the warmth of her welcome that disturbed him. Un peu surexcitée ? Yes. She was talking too fast, too loudly and with too many hand gestures. He reminded himself soberly that he was rubbing shoulders with young people of an artistic temperament, not nodding over a book in the London Library. And Estelle was exceptionally pretty. Her long fair hair was outrageously unfashionable and would have raised eyebrows in London but it flowed over her bare shoulders in waves a Pre-Raphaelite painter of the last century—or any red-blooded man of this—would have swooned at the sight of. Joe realized he was staring and tore his gaze away. Light brown eyes were emphasized by straight brows, her nose was neat and her mouth rouged and generous. There was a highly strung, theatrical air about her and Joe decided she would have been convincing as one of the daughters of Boadicea in any village pageant. But instead of a Celtic cloak, she was wearing some kind of strapless sun dress in white linen, the better to indulge in the new craze of sun-bathing, Joe guessed, noting peeling red patches on the creamy flesh.
    ‘Here, let me help you to some daube de lapin aux herbes de Provence ,’ Estelle offered. ‘It will be good. We have the services of a wonderful local cook. A woman. From the village. Poor lady! I don’t think we’re much of a challenge for her skills. In fact, I’m pretty certain she’s had orders from on high to back-pedal on the menus. Keep it simple for the ignorant Anglo-Saxons. Stew one day, roast the next. At least we’ve never been offered boiled mutton and jam which is what they’re all convinced we eat all the time back home. Though, occasionally, the cook forgets herself and does something seriously dreamy with asparagus. In England, it would get her a job at the Savoy!’
    Estelle, he noticed, was saying appreciative things about the food but scarcely tasting her own portion, merely rearranging the pieces on her plate. Too eager to chatter and make an impression, he thought.
    ‘The staff would, indeed, appear to be impeccable. They are in the employ of …?’
    ‘The owner of the château. The Lord of Silmont … can’t remember all his titles. Count or Marquis? Something like that. We just call him “the lord”. His name’s Bertrand but no one would dream of using it. Even the seneschal calls him “sir” and he’s a blood relative.’
    ‘He has a seneschal, did you say?’
    ‘Yes. That’s his maître d’hôtel, you know. And I’m using the word “hôtel” in the original sense, of course—’
    Smart town house?’ interrupted Joe, piqued by the girl’s condescending tone. ‘And I shall think of the gentleman as “the steward”. How very feudal! Tell me—are they here among us, this medieval pair? Do point them out so that I may direct a courtly bow in the right quarter or tug a forelock.’
    She looked at him uncertainly. ‘You have a very nice forelock. But don’t tug it just yet. The lord isn’t here at the moment. That’s his place at the head of the table, the empty one, and no one ever sits there but him. He pops in occasionally, he says to practise his English with us, but as he speaks more elegant English than any one of us, I have to think he’s actually checking on progress with the canvases.’
    ‘Checking progress? What? Like some sort of overseer?’
    ‘Yes. Exactly that. Keeping us all up to the mark. If you were imagining yourself joining some carefree house party—forget it! In fact it’s a sort of assembly line. I can’t call it a treadmill exactly—that would be too, too ungracious for words—but our host is a bit