Appleby's End by Michael Innes

better not venture far from the house until there is a thaw.”
    â€œVery good, marm.”
    â€œNo doubt it is Hannah Hoobin’s boy. Only last month he stole a turkey from the Murcotts. Everard, I told you it was a mistake to keep him out of gaol. First, the Murcott’s turkey – a remarkably fine one, Mrs Murcott says – and now this. Judith, why should you give that hysterical laugh?”
    â€œI’m only yawning – by way of preparing to go to bed.” Judith had got rather unsteadily to her feet. “Rainbird, Mr Appleby has been most kind to me. Do see that he has soap as well as towels, or towels as well as soap.”
    â€œVery good, Miss Judith.”
    â€œGood night, everybody. Aunt Clarissa, come along.”
    The two ladies of Dream Manor were gone; Robert saw them out of the long room; Mark’s eyes, Appleby noted, again never left his sister until the door closed behind her.
    Everard moved towards the fireplace. “As I say, I think we ought to be off too. Or shall we have a cigar? The New Millennium people send down a box every time we tick off a letter. Remarkably attentive they are – in little matters of that sort. Mark, be a good fellow and fetch them in.”
    Mark left the room with alacrity and appeared to be away rather a long time. Rainbird moved softly about clearing the table, or rather making such redispositions as he appeared to think requisite for breakfast. Every now and then he murmured “Heyhoe,” softly; but Appleby, after listening carefully, decided that this was a mere ejaculation, made without reference to the dead coachman. Presently Mark returned; he looked relieved – perhaps only because he had succeeded in finding the cigars. Everard opened the box with an air, disclosing the largest Romeo and Juliettas that a leisured smoker could wish to see. It looked as if at least an hour’s further confabulation with the Raven menfolk lay ahead. Appleby, forlorn in borrowed clothes, considered the prospect without enthusiasm. But at least it would give Rainbird ample time to add soap to the towels or towels to the soap. And now Everard remembered that Clarissa might find the cigar-smoke oppressive in the morning, and that it would be better to move to the library. So they all left the dining-room – a large apartment hung with innumerable oil paintings which the light was inadequate to distinguish – and passed across what was already familiar to Appleby as an excruciatingly draughty hall. Robert Raven padded as if through a zone in which skill in unarmed combat might at any moment be required; Luke’s lips moved in an inaudible threnody; Everard, who had put on a faded rose-pink jacket salvaged from some wine club of his youth, toddled ahead like a careworn cockatoo; and Mark contrived to stand aside and view the whole procession with his most louche grin.
    The hall of Dream Manor, as well as being draughty, was long, narrow, and sadly disproportioned as the result of the injudicious addition of a pretentious Regency staircase. But what made it really odd was the Mongolians. For each Mongolian had a glass case to himself, and these were disposed in a quincunx pattern all over the available floor space. There is something markedly disconcerting in a miniature Madam Tussaud’s deposited in a country gentleman’s hall, and where there has been loving concentration on the more inscrutable Oriental types this effect is accentuated. The Mongolians – they had been collected by Ranulph’s third brother, Adolphus, a person of some talent who had joined the Romish Communion and become a bishop in partibus , but who was later converted on his death-bed to the religious system of the Zend-Avesta – the Mongolians eminently possessed that creepy half-life which all waxworks share, and which analysis shows to proceed from our conviction that they are uneasily aware of their own mere waxiness. The Mongolians,