The Catherine Wheel by Patricia Wentworth

others go on. They pushed the kitchen door and went in, to find themselves in a big room with a stone floor and a low ceiling crossed by heavy beams. The beams had big hooks in them here and there, and in the old days there would have been hams hanging up to cure. Now there were only strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs.
    Annie Castell turned round from the range. She was a heavily built woman of middle height with a flat, pale face which reminded Jane of a scone, and flat, pale hair dragged back into a scanty knot behind. At first it was difficult to say whether it was fair, or grey, or somewhere betwixt and between. She looked at them out of small nondescript-coloured eyes which had no expression at all. The few sandy lashes did nothing to shade them, and the wide colourless eyebrows showed like smudges on the pale skin. If Jane had stopped to think she would have felt discouraged. But she was too full of a sense of escape. The warm room and the smell of coffee were too heartening. She said in her prettiest voice,
    “We’re some of the cousins. This is Jeremy Taverner, and I am Jane Heron. We want to say thank you for the lovely dinner, Cousin Annie.”
    She put out her hand as she spoke. Annie Castell looked at it, looked at her own, wiped it slowly upon the washed-out overall which enveloped her, and then just touched Jane’s fingers in a limp, hesitating way. She did not speak at all.
    Jane persevered.
    “It was a most beautiful dinner—wasn’t it, Jeremy?”
    “I don’t know when I tasted anything better.”
    Annie Castell made some kind of a movement, but whether it was intended to be a modest disclaimer, or a mere acknowledgement of compliments received, it would have been difficult to say. For a moment nobody said anything. Then a raw-boned elderly woman emerged from what was evidently the scullery. She had a battered-looking hat on her head, and she was buttoning up a man’s overcoat some sizes too large for her.
    “I got through,” she said in a hoarse confidential tone. “And if you’re really not wanting me to do the silver—”
    Annie Castell spoke for the first time. She had a country accent and a very flat, discouraged voice.
    “No, Eily can do the silver. You’ve done the glass?”
    “I didn’t know I had to.”
    “Yes, please.”
    The woman bridled.
    “I’m sure I don’t know that I can. Mr. Bridling, he won’t half carry on if I’m late. But there, if I must I must, and no good having a set-to about it. I’ll tell him you kept me.”
    “Thank you.”
    Annie Castell turned back to Jeremy and Jane.
    “The coffee has gone through,” she said in her flat monotone.
    They were dismissed, and, as far as it was possible to tell, without acquiring any merit. As they shut the kitchen door behind them, Jeremy said,
    “Effusive person our Cousin Annie.”
    “Jeremy, do you suppose he beats her?”
    “Who—Fogarty? I shouldn’t think so. Why?”
    “She’s got that crushed look. People don’t look like that if they’re all right.”
    Jeremy put his arm round her.
    “Sometimes I like you quite a lot. But talking about looks, you’ve got a green smudge—you’d better slip upstairs and do something to the face.”
    They separated at the foot of the stairs. As Jane turned into the passage which led to her room she heard a man’s voice. She didn’t get any words, only the voice. There was something about it that made her angry. She came up the four steps where the level of the passage rose, and heard Eily say, “I won’t!”
    Just at this point she realized that the voices came from her own bedroom, and that one them belonged to Luke White who certainly had no business there. Eily, she supposed, would be turning down the beds, and if either of them thought of Jane Heron at all, they would expect her to be taking coffee in the lounge or whatever they called that big room downstairs. In the circumstances, she didn’t feel the least bit ashamed of standing still and