Three-Cornered Halo by Christianna Brand Page A

it.… No trouble at all, a pleasure, a happiness: only, having put the Arcivescovo to some little exertion on her behalf, he must beg that the Senorita would keep the appointment, she would not let him down. …? Smiling and flourishing, he kissed hands all round, and with a last naughty glance from the sloe-black, gipsy eyes, drifted off again. “These people will go to any lengths,” said Cousin Hat, lost in wonder, gazing after him, “to get one to go into their shops and buy.”
    Meanwhile, mention of the censer had raised in the Major a thirst to dispense further knowledge. “H’rm, h’rm. If-I-could-have-y’r-attentions-one-moment.” He leapt agilely on to a small rock hummock that formed the centre of the picnicking group and stood there looking like a mountain goat crowned with the white linen hat. “Ought to have told you. ’Bout that thurrible. Gold, you know. Made by feller called Bellini.”
    â€œCellini,” said Miss Cockrill.
    Major Bull took a dekko at the book of the words and by Jove, there was a Bellini. “Yes, we all know that, Dick, but the thurible was made by Cellini. And you don’t pronounce it thurrible.”
    â€œTo say thurrible,” said Mr Cecil, “is turrible.” Of course to say thorrible, he added thoughtfully, would be even more horrible.…
    Miss Cockrill caught the infection. “And to say thorible——”
    â€œDeplorable!”
    â€œIn fact, to be endurable——”
    â€œYou have to say thurible.”
    The Major privately considered that if anything were deplorable it was that before embarking on the subject, he had not taken the precaution of another Quiet Talk with Hat. “Yes. H’rm. Very amusin’. Thing is, this thing was made by this feller Cellini, Bellini, whoever it was, for old Jewan himself.”
    â€œMy dear Dick!”
    â€œIt being well known,” said the Major hastily and for once correctly, “that old Jewan erected the cathedral to his own honour, years before he died.”
    â€œBut not two hundred years before. Cellini.…”
    â€œAll right, Hat. Well, there you are,” said the Major, puffing and blowing, “ ’s all I wanted to tell you. Interestin’ bit of history, what?” He climbed down from his eminence and was immediately set upon by the Back-Homes with the claims of the Forest Lawns cemetery to all thuribles made by Cellini and by Bellini too; and released only by the demands of the two suffering ladies to be shown the way without delay to the excusados. Mr Cecil had christened them D. and V.
    After the collatione, the siesta; even in September, the afternoon sun is fierce and nothing really begins before five o’clock. Picnic baskets ringed the family pitches in the arena, as the people made for the woody grove; soon everyone was asleep, sprawled unashamedly in the shade of oleander and olive, the children lying like litters of puppies, their heads pillowed comfortably on their mothers’ humped, rounded thighs. Up in the pavilion, a little miracle in itself of polished white marble, the only man-made thing (except for the painted gallows) on the island, El Exaltida lay, magnificent in sleep as in waking, the splendid head with its curling black hair on a pillow of embroidered silk, the great limbs relaxed on a cool marble couch covered with cloth of gold; a girl playing a zither very softly on the floor at his feet. Outside, Tabaqui, the grey secretary, was in a fever of activity, organising the pink champagne, sugared almonds, sweet chestnuts, green figs and innumerable gelati, any or none of which the Grand Duke might demand upon waking—nothing elaborate, mind, for the whole thing was a picnic and simplicity the keynote. “Suppose he asks for the dogs? Has anyone brought the dogs?” Nobody had brought the dogs but mercifully a small boy was spotted, curled up in sleep with a creature of