Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Gladys Mitchell
Vintage Murder Mysteries
Title Page
Chapter One: Galliarde—Heartless House
Chapter Two: Ritual Dance—Lamb to the Slaughter
Chapter Three: Morris Dance—Beansetting
Chapter Four: Pieds-en-l’Air—Family Gathering
Chapter Five: Danse Macabre—The Wicked Uncle
Chapter Six: Sarabande—Dancing Ledge
Chapter Seven: Sword Dance—Kirkby Malzeard
Chapter Eight: Coranto—Felix Napoleon’s Fancy
Chapter Nine: Bolero—Mother and Son
Chapter Ten: St Vitus’ Dance—Three Wise Monkeys
Chapter Eleven: Oxdansen—Crowner’s Quest
Chapter Twelve: Zapatos—Goody Two-Shoes
Chapter Thirteen: Basse Dause—Confrontation
Chapter Fourteen: Danse Champêtre—Joy in the Monling
Chapter Fifteen: Country Dance—Parson’s Farewell
Chapter Sixteen: Calushari Dance—Evil Spirits
Chapter Seventeen: Country Dance—Mage on a Cree
Chapter Eighteen: Hornpipe—The Boat Comes Home
Copyright
About the Book
Rosamund Lestrange’s behaviour is decidedly strange – but is she an unhinged wife, or an innocent and sane girl at the centre of a conspiracy wrought by her guardian? Dame Beatrice Bradley is called to apply her psychiatric skills to the problem, but when the question of a rich inheritance arises and a body is found, her skills as a detective are more urgently required.
About the Author
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin called her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.
Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G.K Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.
ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL
Speedy Death
The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop
The Longer Bodies
The Saltmarsh Murders
Death and the Opera
The Devil at Saxon Wall
Dead Men’s Morris
Come Away, Death
St Peter’s Finger
Printer’s Error
Hangman’s Curfew
When Last I Died
Laurels Are Poison
The Worsted Viper
Sunset Over Soho
My Father Sleeps
The Rising of the Moon
Here Comes a Chopper
Death and the Maiden
Tom Brown’s Body
Groaning Spinney
The Devil’s Elbow
The Echoing Strangers
Merlin’s Furlong
Watson’s Choice
Faintley Speaking
Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose
The Twenty-Third Man
Spotted Hemlock
The Man Who Grew Tomatoes
Say It With Flowers
The Nodding Canaries
My Bones Will Keep
Adders on the Heath
Death of the Delft Blue
Pageant of a Murder
The Croaking Raven
Skeleton Island
Three Quick and Five Dead
Dance to Your Daddy
Gory Dew
Lament for Leto
A Hearse on May-Day
The Murder of Busy Lizzie
Winking at the Brim
A Javelin for Jonah
Convent on Styx
Late, Late in the Evening
Noonday and Night
Fault in the Structure
Wraiths and Changelings
Mingled With Venom
The Mudflats of the Dead
Nest of Vipers
Uncoffin’d Clay
The Whispering Knights
Lovers, Make Moan
The Death-Cap Dancers
The Death of a Burrowing Mole
Here Lies Gloria Mundy
Cold, Lone and Still
The Greenstone Griffins
The Crozier Pharaohs
No Winding-Sheet
VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERIES
With the sign of a human skull upon its back and a melancholy shriek emitted when disturbed, the Death’s Head Hawkmoth has for centuries been a bringer of doom and an omen of death – which is why we chose it as the emblem for our Vintage Murder Mysteries.
Some say that its appearance in King George III’s bedchamber pushed him into madness. Others believe that should its wings extinguish a candle by night, those nearby will be cursed with blindness. Indeed its very name, Acherontia atropos, delves into the most sinister realms of Greek mythology: Acheron, the River of Pain in the underworld, and Atropos, the Fate charged with severing the thread of life.
The perfect companion, then, for our Vintage Murder Mysteries sleuths, for whom sinister occurrences are never far away and murder is always just around the corner …
MORE VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERIES
EDMUND CRISPIN
Buried for Pleasure
The Case of the Gilded Fly
Holy Disorders
Love Lies Bleeding
The Moving Toyshop
Swan Song
A. A. MILNE
The Red House Mystery
GLADYS MITCHELL
Speedy Death
The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop
The Longer Bodies
The Saltmarsh Murders
Death and the Opera
The Devil at Saxon Wall
Dead Men’s Morris
Come Away, Death
St Peter’s Finger
Brazen Tongue
Hangman’s Curfew
When Last I Died
Laurels Are Poison
Here Comes a Chopper
Death and the Maiden
Tom Brown’s Body
Groaning Spinney
The Devil’s Elbow
The Echoing Strangers
Watson’s Choice
The Twenty-Third Man
Spotted Hemlock
My Bones Will Keep
Three Quick and Five Dead
Dance to Your Daddy
A Hearse on May-Day
Late, Late in the Evening
Fault in the Structure
Nest of Vipers
MARGERY ALLINGHAM
Mystery Mile
Police at the Funeral
Sweet Danger
Flowers for the Judge
The Case of the Late Pig
The Fashion in Shrouds
Traitor’s Purse
Coroner’s Pidgin
More Work for the Undertaker
The Tiger in the Smoke
The Beckoning Lady
Hide My Eyes
The China Governess
The Mind Readers
Cargo of Eagles
E. F. BENSON
The Blotting Book
The Luck of the Vails
NICHOL
AS BLAKE
A Question of Proof
Thou Shell of Death
There’s Trouble Brewing
The Beast Must Die
The Smiler With the Knife
Malice in Wonderland
The Case of the Abominable Snowman
Minute for Murder
Head of a Traveller
The Dreadful Hollow
The Whisper in the Gloom
End of Chapter
The Widow’s Cruise
The Sad Variety
The Morning After Death
GLADYS MITCHELL
Dance to your Daddy
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
CHAPTER ONE
Galliarde—Heartless House
‘… unmannerly modest as a measure, full of state and ancientry.’
Measure for Measure.
* * *
(1)
Eiladh Beatrice Margaret Gavin, having put her fist in the minister’s eye, submitted with placid fatalism to the ceremony of baptism. She was a happy baby and, since happiness has no history, she passes, for the purposes of the chronicler, into almost total obscurity.
‘Well, that’s that,’ observed Laura, her mother, when the cortège had returned to the Stone House in the village of Wandles Parva, ‘and now it’s time I got back to work.’
‘I may not need you yet,’ said Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, who employed her as secretary and treated her as a favourite daughter. ‘I am invited to pay a visit of indefinite length to a certain Romilly Lestrange, who claims to be a distant connection of mine by marriage. He lives, it seems, at a place called Galliard Hall.’
‘Romily? You haven’t mentioned him before, have you?’
‘For the sufficient reason that, until I received his letter, I was unaware of his existence.’
‘Funny he should suddenly pop up out of a trap. I’d give him a two-eyed look, if I were you.’
‘He has offered me a commission on top of the invitation. It appears that he has been extremely worried lately by the strange behaviour of his wife.’
‘What does she do? – make spells and incantations? – dance naked on the greensward by the lee light of the moon?’
‘He says that she has contracted a habit of drowning things.’
‘Drowning things?’
‘She began with a toy trumpet and followed this by consigning to the deep a transistor radio set and a dozen gramophone records.’
‘Not a music lover, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I might leave it at that, if she had not continued by drowning, at intervals of nine months, a small cat, a pet monkey and a life-sized baby doll.’
‘Well, there seems to be an obvious explanation. Either her husband won’t give her a baby, or else she’s had a miscarriage.’
‘You mean she has aborted. Justice may miscarry; human beings do not.’
‘Just as you say.’
‘We must remember, however, that, in her journal, Marie Bashkirtseff informs us that on one occasion she felt impelled to throw the dining-room clock into the sea. I have the impression that, at the time, Marie was unmarried and, most probably, therefore, according to the fashion of the age, a virgin.’
‘Oh, just an anti-mother complex, no doubt. I expect her action relieved her mind of all sorts of inhibitions and frustrations. Mrs Romilly has a different set of worries, that’s all.’
‘Worries – yes,’ said Dame Beatrice thoughtfully.
‘If this Romilly is a relative of yours,’ said Laura, ‘I think I had better write him our official letter before you go and see him. Relations always think they’re entitled to get something for nothing.’
The so-called official letter was Laura’s own invention and she was proud of it. It did nothing so crude as to give a scale of charges, or even to state, in unequivocal terms, that Dame Beatrice’s services had to be paid for; nevertheless, people who received it, signed L. Catriona Gavin, Secretary, had no reason to be unaware that they were to expect a far from moderate bill. What was more, without reference to Dame Beatrice, Laura was always prepared to chase up any laggards. As she herself expressed it to her husband (although not to Dame Beatrice), ‘There’s always the State. If they’re choosy, and want us, they’ve got to pay through the nose.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura’s employer, on this occasion, ‘there is no need for an official letter. I have accepted the invitation, and am off to Galliard Hall tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Galliard Hall?’ said Laura. ‘Didn’t somebody commit suicide there, or something, a few years back? The place was up for sale and the owner kept reducing the price, so I heard, because nobody would buy.’
‘Because of the suicide?’ asked Laura’s husband, Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin.
‘I suppose so. Besides, it’s an enormous old barracks of a place. I can’t think who’d buy it.’
‘My relative has either bought it or rented it, it seems,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Romilly? Romilly? It sounds the kind of name by which a male Lestrange would very likely be called, but I cannot say that it strikes any other chord. However, a family tree has many branches.’
‘What was all that about the girl who chucked the dining-room clock into the sea?’ asked Gavin.
‘Clocks, so I understand,’ said Laura’s son Hamish, who was holding his baby sister in hickory-tough young arms, ‘are thought, in morbid psychology, to symbolise the female cycle of …’
‘Not in front of the child,’ said his father, hastily. ‘Chuck the brat over here. They talk about bouncing babies. Let’s see if this one does.’
(2)
‘Well,’ said Laura, on the following afternoon, ‘if Mrs. Romilly asks you to go swimming with her, find some cast-iron excuse.’ They had finished lunch, the car had been ordered round to the front of the Stone House, and Dame Beatrice was about to set out for Galliard Hall.
‘It is scarcely the right time of year for sea-bathing, and, in any case, I am not as fond of strenuous personal aquatics as you are,’ she observed, ‘so you may spare yourself all anxiety on my behalf.’ She entered the car and waved her hand as it moved off down the drive; then she settled her small, spare elderly body comfortably against the upholstery, and as the car moved on to the New Forest road which linked Ringwood with Burley, she gazed out of the window at the passing scenery.
The vast stretches of Forest pasture on the common near her home gave way to woods and then to what seemed to be a limitless expanse of undulating country covered in brown bracken with a wayside edge of rough grass, broken by still and shining ponds and stretches of gorse and withered heather.
The road was a minor one until it merged, at Picket Post, with the highway between Ringwood and Romsey. The car swung off to the left, skirted most of the town and then, speeding up, made for Wimborne. Here a one-way street took a tour round the two-towered minster and then went left again at insignificant crossroads and over an ancient bridge.
Up a long and winding hill and through a long, dull village ran the road, then it dipped past a farm and alongside a tree-bowered estate until, at a major roundabout, it dropped sharply south-west to Wareham.
After Wareham, with its defensive earthworks, its Saxon church-on-the-wall, its prominent priory church of Lady St Mary, its river and its flooded, riverside meadows (for the time was late February, a few days away from March), the scenery changed. The road wound on towards the Purbecks and across the moors of Slepe, Middlebere and Creech. Corfe Castle, a stark, defiant shell, reared itself, frowning, on the mound which bridged the only gap in the range. The road skirted skittishly round it.
One stone-built village followed another, once Corfe was passed, and then, at last, there was nothing to be seen but the clean and lovely lines of the rounded hills. Suddenly, from a valley which dropped to sea-level on the south, a magnificent headland shouldered into the sky and a flat, wide, sea-lapped moorland stretched away into the distance.
The road soon divided a large, partly-timbered estate into two unequal parks, and on the lesser of these, backed and sheltered by the hills, lay, at the end of a sloping drive, an impressive, intimidating mansion.
‘I think we’re here, madam,’ said George. They had arrived at Galliard Hall.
The house belonged to the early years of the Stuart dynasty, having been built in about the year 1610. The front entrance faced north, and two gabled wings had Jacobean bay windows with the mullions and transomes of the period. It was clear that successive owners had done little to alter the original façade. It was equally obvious that this had begun to crumble, and the whole place, including the unweeded, untended drive and the cracked and broken steps which mounted in two flights to an ornate but battered front archway, gave an overall impression of poverty, neglect and decay.
George drew up in front of the terrace. At the top of the steps an elderly man, whom Dame Beatrice took to be her host, was waiting to receive her. Behind him, and a little to one side, were another elderly man wearing a green baize apron and, in the doorway itself, a couple of youthful maidservants.
The first elderly man seized Dame Beatrice by her thin shoulders and kissed her rapidly on both cheeks. The second elderly man went gingerly down the worn steps to help George with the luggage. The maidservants stood aside, curtsied, and followed their master and the visitor into the house. Dame Beatrice found herself in the great hall, a magnificent room with windows looking towards the drive, a heavy brass chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two carved figures, two-thirds life-size, standing at either end of the mantelpiece. There was a gilt-framed Corot on the chimney-breast between them. There were other pictures around the walls. Dame Beatrice thought she recognised a Lely and a Raeburn among them.
The floor was uncarpeted and was of black and white tiles, each a foot square. At some time the floor of the room above had been cut away and a balustered gallery substituted, giving the great hall height and light appropriate to its size. It was all extremely impressive and, after the dilapidated appearance of the exterior of the house, considerably surprising, for the interior seemed beautifully kept and maintained.