Mrs malory and a time to.., p.1
Mrs. Malory and A Time To Die, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Praise for Hazel Holt’s Mrs. Malory Series
“Delightful.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Ah, what joy to read Hazel Holt. . . . The book delights at every page. . . . To be treasured.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“This is the kind of mystery to reach for after a day spent battling the hordes at the local mall.”
—The Washington Post
“A wonderful heroine—with just the perfect balance of humor, introspection, and vulnerability.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“A soothing, gentle treat. . . . The literate, enjoyable Mrs. Sheila Malory is back.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Holt’s descriptions and characterizations shine. . . . She invigorates both village and villagers with brisk liveliness.”—Romantic Times
“Finely textured. . . . Sink comfortably with the heroine into a burnished old pub or a cup of tea. . . . Full of elegant shadings of place and character and appealing local color. . . . Anglophiles will delight in the authentically British Mrs. Malory.”—Booklist
“A delectable treat for cozy lovers, British style.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A delight. . . . Warm, vivid descriptions.”
—Time Out (London)
“The fundamental British cozy . . . first class.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Interesting . . . enjoyable. . . . If you haven’t discovered Mrs. Malory, I highly recommend reading the rest of the series.”—Mystery News
Also by Hazel Holt
Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murder
Mrs. Malory and the Shortest Journey
Mrs. Malory: Detective in Residence
Mrs. Malory Wonders Why
Mrs. Malory: Death of a Dean
Mrs. Malory and the Only Good Lawyer
Mrs. Malory: Death Among Friends
Mrs. Malory and the Fatal Legacy
Mrs. Malory and the Lilies That Fester
Mrs. Malory and the Delay of Execution
Mrs. Malory and Death by Water
Mrs. Malory and Death in Practice
Mrs. Malory and the Silent Killer
Mrs. Malory and No Cure for Death
Mrs. Malory and a Death in the Family
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For my granddaughter Natalie
With love and thanks for her help
with all the horsey bits
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
Chapter One
“Keep his head up, Fiona! Straighten up, Jemma. You’re like a sack of potatoes! Poppy, don’t check him too soon. That’s good, Hannah. Keep him moving!”
I watched, with some affection, the tall woman taking a class of young riders in the ring.
“Jo really is fantastic,” I said to my friend Rosemary. “She must be seventy if she’s a day. She’s so full of energy; she never stops! How does she do it?”
“Oh, metabolism,” Rosemary said, “or whatever they call it. Some people have it and some people haven’t. I haven’t.”
“Oh, nor do I, but I do envy people who have. I mean, just looking at all this”—I gestured towards the stables, the fields with horses grazing and the ring set up with jumps in the field below—“makes me long to go for a ride again. After all, I’m younger than Jo, but I just know how much I’d ache and how nervous I’d be about injuring myself. Feeble, isn’t it?”
“Nonsense,” Rosemary replied robustly, “just sensible. Jo’s been riding every day of her life for the last goodness knows how many years. You haven’t. Anyway,” she continued with the candor of an old friend, “you’ve never been much of a one for taking exercise.”
The voice from below went on. “Martha, keep your hands down. Don’t pull at his mouth like that! Jemma, lower leg forwards!”
Clear and mellifluous, each word audible even at this distance, it was a splendid voice, as well it might be. Josephine Howard, as she was then, was used to making herself heard at the back of the upper circle without a microphone. We tend to forget that Jo was one of the leading actresses of her day. Looking at her now, with her brown, weather-beaten face and untidy, cropped gray hair, it’s difficult to trace the beauty that illuminated her Rosalind, her Viola and her enchanting Beatrice. Just occasionally a graceful movement or gesture brings back memories. And there’s the voice, of course.
“I wonder,” I said, “if she ever regrets giving it up—the stage, I mean.”
“She seems happy enough,” Rosemary said, “and she still adores him.”
At the height of her career Jo had abandoned the theater to marry Charlie Hamilton, and embraced with enthusiasm his world of horses. It wasn’t surprising, I suppose; his charm was legendary. In our cynical age, charm is something dubious, almost a pejorative term, but Charlie’s was the real thing. It still is. He’s one of the nicest people I know and the niceness has survived some pretty awful bad luck.
When he married Jo, he was a brilliant show jumper, Olympic standard. He bred his own horses and rode them magnificently. Until, that is, he had a bad fall and his leg never mended properly. He went on breeding horses, but the business didn’t prosper. He was let down badly by some financial backers, and it was Jo who finally called a halt. She persuaded him to come back to Taviscombe, where she’d been born and brought up, and set up the riding school with their remaining capital. Through determination and hard work she’d made it a success, and the quieter life seems to suit them.
Just then we saw Charlie crossing the stable yard. He’d finally and reluctantly taken to a walking stick, which he raised in greeting when he saw us. We waved back, and Rosemary said, “You can see why she does—adore him, I mean.”
We watched him fondly as he went into one of the horse boxes. He doesn’t ride anymore but still gives the occasional lesson and is always busy with the horses in one way or another.
“When you think,” Rosemary went on, “about the sort of life he’s had and ho
w unlucky he’s been, it’s amazing that he never seems bitter or resentful—always cheerful and in good spirits.”
“And Jo’s the same,” I agreed. “I suppose they’re content, and how many of us can say that?”
A small group of riders appeared in the distance.
“Oh, good,” Rosemary said, “that’s Delia’s ride coming back. I hoped they’d be back on time because I’ve got to collect Alex from his piano lesson at half past.”
Rosemary’s daughter, Jilly (my goddaughter), has a sprained ankle and can’t drive, so Rosemary has taken on the task of ferrying her grandchildren to and from the many social and leisure activities that the young seem to need to engage in nowadays.
“We were never driven about everywhere,” I said. “We went by bus or on our bikes.”
“Goodness, yes,” Rosemary said, laughing. “Do you remember that time we cycled to the Valley of Rocks and you got a puncture? It started to get dark and our parents were frantic—no phones anywhere, of course, and certainly no mobiles!”
“But it was practically the only time they did get frantic,” I said. “We had so much more freedom then. And, actually, Michael and your two got about quite a bit on their own.”
“I think,” Rosemary said thoughtfully, “that was just about the end of the age of innocence. Before all the dreadful tabloid stories and the horrors on television. And there was less traffic even then. I know Jilly gets really anxious when Alex insists on cycling to school.” She sighed. “Sad, but I don’t think we’ll ever get back to the way things were.”
The riders had now dismounted, and I saw Delia leading her horse back into the yard.
“Oh dear,” Rosemary said, “I hope she’s not going to hang around there. I do want to get back for Alex, and once she gets into those stables . . .”
But Delia emerged quite soon.
“Hello, Gran,” she said, taking off all the impediments that safety regulations seem to require (I know they’re sensible, but I’m always delighted to see the Queen out riding, wearing a head scarf).
Delia acknowledged my presence in the casual way the young do.
“Did you have a nice ride, darling?” Rosemary asked.
“Yes, I had Tsar. I love him; he’s very lively.”
“That gray one looks nice too,” Rosemary said. “He looks just like the old rocking horse I had when I was a child.”
Delia looked at her grandmother in horror. “Gran, how could you! Someone might have heard you—so embarrassing!”
She wrenched open the rear door of the car, flung her riding things inside and scrambled in after them, presumably in case any of her friends saw her with people who made such uncool remarks. Rosemary looked at me and pulled a face, and I smiled back.
However, in the car—presumably safe from the observation of her peers—Delia held forth at great length about the glories of the ride.
“We had a lovely lot of cantering. Tsar canters really well; he really likes to go. And we got as far as the Giant’s Chair this time. You know how last time it was too windy high up there and the horses were getting spooked. Tsar tried to bolt, but I pulled him round all right. Liz said I did really well. Gran, do you think Daddy will see about that loan pony we saw advertised? If you speak to him, I’m sure he will. Liz said there’s room for us to keep him at livery here. Oh yes, and Mummy said I could have another jumping lesson, so I booked in for next Friday, and Charlie said he’d be taking it! Isn’t that wicked!”
Not surprisingly, Charlie is something of a hero with the young who frequent the stables, and he’s wonderful with them. He and Jo have no children of their own but are always surrounded with a crowd of the young. Mostly girls, of course.
When Rosemary dropped me off at home on her way to pick up Alex (“He’s completely unmusical,” Rosemary says, “but Jilly thinks piano lessons are somehow good for him—I can’t imagine why!”), I let the animals out and, on an impulse, got out one of the old photograph albums that live in the chest in the hall. I turned over the pages and smiled at the pictures of my younger self, formally dressed in boots, breeches and hacking jacket with a shirt and tie, on Prudence, an elderly mare who once lost her head and bolted with me, trying to join the hunt when she heard the sound of the hounds in the distance. There were photographs of Michael in riding gear too, but boys seem to grow out of their horsey phase more quickly than girls, and he soon gave it up in favor of fishing and ferreting. I suppose it won’t be long, though, before Alice wants to ride too.
My thoughts were interrupted by the phone. Its ring seemed to have a particularly imperious tone and I wasn’t surprised to find that the caller was my friend Anthea. Brunswick Lodge is a large house, the center of most of the social activities of Taviscombe. It is staffed entirely by volunteers who, as is well-known, need a very firm hand to control them. Anthea is that firm hand.
“Where have you been?” she demanded, without any sort of preamble. “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon.”
“I went with Rosemary to fetch Delia from the riding stables,” I said, an apologetic note creeping involuntarily into my voice.
“Oh.” From Anthea’s tone I gathered she didn’t think it was much of an excuse. “Well, anyway, it’s about the bring and buy next Wednesday morning. Can you take over? Maureen says she’s got to go to visit her mother in hospital in Taunton, though why she can’t go in the afternoon, I don’t know.”
At times like this one doesn’t say no to Anthea, and I found myself agreeing to do far more than simply “take over”—providing cakes and scones, for example, and arranging for the trestle tables to be picked up from the Scouts’ Hall. I was just about to ring off when Anthea suddenly said, “Oh yes, and talking about the stables, you know Charlie Hamilton, don’t you?”
“Well, yes,” I said warily.
“I thought it might be a good idea to get him to give a talk about show jumping and all that sort of thing when we start our autumn season. It might bring in some of the younger people. We could do with some young blood. The over-sixties are all very well, but we have to look to the future.”
Since Anthea’s views on the young are usually condemnatory to put it mildly, this was quite a turnaround. Still, I was determined to not get involved.
“Not really a good idea,” I said. “I don’t think it would be tactful to ask him to talk about the old days.”
“Whyever not?” Anthea is not renowned for her tact.
“Oh, you know, the way everything fell apart for him, the memories must still be very painful.”
“What nonsense.” I sometimes wonder if Anthea has ruthlessly expunged from her memory anything that might give her the slightest feeling of disquiet. “Oh well,” she went on, “I’ll have a think about it and get back to you.”
As it turned out, Ron Murphy, who usually fetches the trestles for us, was away on holiday. (“What he wants to go to Egypt for, I don’t know,” his sister said when I rang. “I blame all these television programs about pyramids and pharaohs and nonsense like that. I wouldn’t cross the street to see one of those horrible mummy things—morbid, if you ask me!”) As a result I had to try to make other arrangements, without success, so I had to fall back on my last hope—Michael.
“I know you’re busy, darling,” I said, “but it’ll take you only half an hour and I’d be so grateful. There’ll be someone there to help you load them into the Land Rover.”
“I suppose I could manage Thursday evening,” Michael said, “but in return, I’ve a favor to ask you.”
“Of course. What is it?”
“Will you look after your granddaughter next Friday? Thea and I want to go to Taunton to see poor old Jonah. He’s just had his gallbladder out and is feeling a bit low, and frankly, I don’t think Alice and hospital visiting are a good mix.”
“Very wise. Of course you must go and see Jonah—he’s your best friend after all. Do give him my love. And I’d love to have Alice. If it’s a nice day, we could go to the beach.”
As it turned out we didn’t go to the beach because Rosemary rang me that morning in some agitation.
“Sheila, I hate to ask, but could you possibly collect Delia from her riding lesson this afternoon? Jilly’s out of action and Roger’s taking Alex to the cricket, and now I’ve just heard from Mother that she’s made an appointment to have her eyes tested. Mr. Mackenzie doesn’t usually see people in the afternoon, but she persuaded him! And she didn’t think to tell me until this morning. I can take Delia to the stables, but if you could collect her at three o’clock and take her back with you, I’ll fetch her as soon as I’ve sorted Mother out.”
