Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords by Ellis Peters

convoluted blue heights of the Western Ghats, out of which they had come, and which, under a variety of local names and shapes, accompany the southbound road almost to the Cape. And in the afternoon they passed through Sattur, and remembered Mahendralal Bakhle, whose disputed lands lay somewhere in the neighbourhood. From Koilpatti they soon turned right, at Dominic’s somewhat hesitant direction, into a minor road, white as flour, climbing gently between paddy fields greener than emeralds, and tall palmyra palms, with the half-veiled blue complexities of the hills endlessly changing shape before them. And by the first downward swoop of evening they reached Malaikuppam.
    It lay on a gentle slope, facing south-east, and the rice here had become a different strain, a hill-rice, the upland crop almost golden in colour, and in one field being cut. Groves of trees framed the village as they approached it. There was a pond on one side, and two boys were splashing along its edges, minding the water-buffaloes that wallowed in its coolness with their blue-black hides gleaming and their patient, placid faces as near expressing happiness as they would ever be. In one place they saw tobacco growing, its huge leaves shading from pale green to yellow, its stems five feet tall. It did not look rich country, but neither did it appear depressed or poverty-stricken; and yet life in rural India is commonly lived on a knife-edge of debt and destitution, and they all knew it.
    There were women just gathered at their evening chore of drawing water from a big, stone-rimmed well on the dusty village square. One of the girls stood aloft on the four-foot-high rim, outlined against a sky turning to orange and gold, and the others handed up their brass pots to her to fill. Poised with thin brown toes gripping the stone, she dipped and raised the brimming pots, her anklets and bangles gleaming, and all her gestures were pure and graceful and economical, a lesson in movement. Larry halted the Land-Rover, and all the dark female faces turned to stare at them in candid curiosity, and laugh aloud in frank appreciation of their oddness and incongruity. It was a disconcerting experience which all the foreigners among them had suffered several times before. But when Lakshman leaned out and asked for guidance in fluent Tamil, the nearest woman approached willingly and cheerfully, and pointed them the way. Higher than the village. A little way uphill, and they would see the gates.
    They saw the wall first, lofty and white, capped with crude red tiles, and it went on almost as far as they could see. Then they came to the gates, wrought iron gates that stood wide on a short, dusty drive and a broad central court, round which the various buildings of the household were grouped somewhat haphazardly, many of them having been added at different times. Everything was low, one-storeyed and white, and shaded with overhanging eaves; and the first buildings they passed were clearly the dwellings of farm-servants and household retainers, of whom there seemed to be a great many. Then there were buildings that appeared to be barns and store-rooms, all space around the broad open area of trodden earth that gave place, a little higher, to a paved court. The end of the vista was filled in by a wide terrace, with steps leading up to it, and crowned by a long, low, single-storey house, white-walled and red-tiled, a little like a ranch-house but for the strong batter of the walls and the shaping of the roofs. Over the tiles the ornamental bushes and fruit trees of a garden peered, and beyond was a grove of forest trees looking over the boundary wall.
    ‘Riches without ostentation,’ Patti said critically. ‘I sort of knew it would be like this. At least it doesn’t look English. Have you ever been in the Nilgiris, and seen all those dreadfully unsuitable houses that look like something left over from Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and are all called “Waverley” or