‘Yes,’ said Barnaby. ‘I rather think it is.’
Amy was in her room working on Rompers. She had been up there since five o’clock and so far had not been troubled either by a tinkling bell or any vocal demands.
At the moment she was worrying about her prose style, which was beginning to sound rather too cosily familiar. But was it, wondered Amy, chewing the tip of her Biro, worth constantly searching out fresh adjectives? Wouldn’t readers feel more at home with tried and true combinations? And this was not, she argued, simply an excuse for authorial laziness, for surely there were certain pairings so felicitous that even the most gifted scribe could hardly be expected to improve upon them.
A quick glance at the dawn sky from any bedroom window showed rosy fingers at their very best. Black hair, in certain lights, definitely took on the glossy hue of a raven’s wing. And where was the besotted eye that did not shine exactly like a star when alighting on the object of its affection?
Amy was slightly comforted in the knowledge that this waning of writerly confidence was not entirely unknown even among the most successful. Max Jennings had described how he always started a new book convinced that this time the relationship was going to be one of unalloyed bliss and that they would be walking off into the sunset hand in hand with never a harsh work spoken. But it never happened. Long before the end of Chapter One they’d be back in the thick of it, screaming, swearing and throwing plates.
Amy sighed, gathered her thoughts and applied herself once more. The scene on which she was working was a dramatic one. Araminta had escaped from Black Rufus by leaping from his droshky (suitably clad in a Donna Karan jump suit) into a drift of newly fallen snow. Emerging, she had been reluctantly compelled to abandon her mock-ermine Versace throw with genuine amber toggles and rhinestone hood and was now fleeing across a frozen lake pursued by bloodhounds. Amy chewed her pen some more. Decided bloodhounds were a bit tame and substituted wolves.
She had no problem empathising with her perilously placed heroine, for she herself was shivering in a sub-zero temperature. She got up and placed her mittened hand on the rusting radiator. Rather pointlessly, for it had been stone cold all day and, sure enough, remained so.
Amy jumped up and down a bit, the thick ridged soles of her fur boots bouncing on the threadbare rug. She blew on her fingertips and rubbed her cheeks hard, but the friction only made them sore. She decided, bearing in mind Honoria’s promise that the heating would definitely be looked into, to go down to the library and have a word with her sister-in-law.
Amy made her way along the landing, her passage marked by dark, heavily varnished portraits of grandly robed Lyddiards going back to the sixteenth century. Her own particular aversion was a hawk-faced judge who looked as if he not only derived great pleasure from passing the death sentence but for two pins would roll up his sleeves and carry it out.
Honoria was at her desk severely engrossed in matters dexter and sinister. She looked aloof and far removed from worldly things. Though the one-bar electric fire was on, the big, high-ceilinged room felt almost as cold as the one upstairs. Amy hovered in the doorway but without attracting any response.
‘I say . . .’
‘Blood and bone.’ Honoria was mumbling to herself. ‘That’s what counts. Blood counts. Bone counts.’
‘Honoria?’
Honoria looked up. Her eyes burned into Amy’s yet appeared not to see her.
‘It’s terribly cold. Could I—’
‘Go away. Can’t you see I’m busy?’
Amy went away. This was plainly not the time to ask if Honoria had ordered the coke. Or if she would be prepared to down tools and bend the Neanderthal boiler to her will. As she crossed the ancient flagstones in the hall Amy stopped to pull out a couple of weeds that had seeded themselves between the cracks. The garden it seemed was trying to enter the house and, in this weather, who could blame it? She tried the cellar door, but it wouldn’t open.
Amy frowned and tried again, sure that the door was simply stuck, for she had never known it to be locked. However after two more good pushes there seemed little doubt about it. Amy hesitated and wondered if she might not just make herself a nice hot-water bottle and sit with it on her lap. But then soon she would have to come down and start preparing dinner and she could hardly carry it round the chilly kitchen.
Honoria having made it plain she did not wish to be disturbed, Amy set off to find the bunch of internal house keys herself. Sometimes they hung on an iron nail in the lumber room, sometimes they were in the drawer of the kitchen table, occasionally Honoria put them down and completely forgot where. Once Amy had found them in a flower pot in the greenhouse.