A Mansion and its Murder by Robert Barnard Page B

not a bridesmaid, but I was not excused attending the awful event. My mother, of course, did not go. She had resisted all pressures to make preparations for it, saying that she had many dresses bought for other weddings she had not attended, and she would wear one of those if she was well enough to put in an appearance at Church. In the event she stayed in bed, as everyone knew she would. By this stage in her life she never did anything to please anyone other than herself. I saw her aboutonce a month. I on the other hand was primped and prettified and eventually was taken in one of the family tumbrils to sit toward the back of the church with Miss Roxby, Aunt Clare and Uncle Alfred, and their three boys – those doubtful insurers of Fearing’s Bank and its future. They were boisterous boys but pleasant enough, and they loathed the flummery of the wedding as much as I did, though for different reasons.
    The church was St Michael’s at Great Orpenden. The family had no associations with the village, but it was the only church in the area large enough for the sort of grand wedding the family had planned (it was built in the fifteenth century to the glory of God and the woollen trade by one of the sleek profiteers of the time). Uncle Frank sat awaiting his blooming bride in the front pew, making no attempt to hide the fact that he would rather be anywhere else but here, doing anything else but this – a common enough feeling among bridegrooms, so it aroused little comment except some mild jocularities.
    The bride, when she arrived, looked beautiful I had to admit – like a winter landscape in the sun. She walked slowly up the aisle to the usual musical accompaniments, attended by my cousin Kate, Aunt Clare’s only female child, and variousCoverdale girls, each one a biscuit box picture in herself. Uncle Frank stood up, joined up with her as casually as if she were a lady he was meeting outside Swan and Edgar’s, and went through his part of the ceremony with studied casualness, as if it was no part of the agreement he had entered into to pretend to take such nonsense seriously. Mary, on the other hand, was clear and word-perfect, a tribute to the elocution teacher’s art. Eventually it was all over, and we got into the tumbrils again and returned to Blakemere for the festive baked meats.
    I had hoped to slip away from there, but Miss Roxby was under strict instructions that I was to do the honors of the house to all the other children. This was something I was used to, though I never enjoyed it. Since most of the children there, including the Coverdale biscuit boxes, had been to Blakemere before, I confined myself to finding out what they wanted to do and providing them with the wherewithal to do it. Blakemere was good in that respect – its hospitality was a well-oiled routine, and every age and taste was catered for. And of course the taste of young people for food was amply met on this occasion – grossly, wastefully, too richly catered for, so that the poor children ofthe village on whom it was off loaded the next day were gorging themselves on unaccustomed delicacies for weeks afterward, and making themselves very ill.
    ‘Why are children given plain nursery fare for three hundred and sixty days a year, and disgustingly rich food on birthdays and holidays?’ I asked Peter Coverdale as we watched the infant gentry stuffing themselves.
    ‘I always imagined nursery food at Blakemere would be rather grand,’ said Peter disparagingly. ‘Everything else is.’
    All bad times come to an end. Eventually the adult gorging was over, the bride and groom disappeared to various appointed bedrooms and re-emerged smartly dressed for going away, on the first leg of their journey to the south of France – a conventional choice, perhaps Uncle Frank’s way of suggesting that this was a conventional marriage: one of convenience, mercenary and unromantic. They mingled for a while with the guests, she immensely self-assured, he