Read Online The Lily Hand and Other Stories by Ellis Peters - Free Book Online Page A

without the mild expression.
    First time we marched up the street to play by the war memorial in the new uniforms we’d been saving up for, I thought he’d blow up. And Lije cocks up the bell of his double-B towards the window, special, and gives him a sour one, deliberate, as he goes by. Nora told him off for it afterwards. Told me off, too, for not stopping him, as if anybody could stop that old devil doing anything, once he took it into his head. If anybody knew that, it was Nora. But it was always me that was supposed to look after Lije, steer him off his monkey-tricks during the Sunday night open-air concerts, keep him sober when we went off to play in contests. That was what I was in the band for, according to Nora.
    We started winning a few little local events that summer, and the barman from the Black Horse told us Eb’s missus was having a hell of a life with him. Only comfort the poor woman had was that she couldn’t hear one word in ten he yelled at her. Then we decided to enter for the county championship in August, and the way we’d been improving I thought we had a good chance of winning it. It got around to him, of course. If he’d been sure we’d go along and make an exhibition of ourselves he’d have done everything in his power to help us – that was the only way he could ever have felt reconciled to having to loose his grip on anything he’d once been running. But he’d heard us play, he knew we were doing all right.
    Middle of the next practice he sent his missus down with a note. He was very sorry, but would we mind shifting all our stuff out of the clubroom by the end of the week, because he’d got an offer to rent the place to the auction bloke from the market as a storeroom, and as he hadn’t got any regular bookings for it as a clubroom, except ours, which didn’t bring him in anything, we would see he couldn’t afford to turn down the offer. He was sure we should find another room without any trouble. He was sure! He’d lived in the town all his life, he knew there wasn’t a decent room to be booked in the whole place. The old hands argued, and the kids exploded, but there was nothing we could do about it, out we had to go, instruments and all. We stacked them in our back parlour for the time being, and lost a whole week’s practice while I ran round the town trying to find a place for us to meet.
    We ended up in Alf Parkinson’s derelict garage, up on the pit mounds. It was summer, and it didn’t matter so much that all the windows were out, and some of the end boards coming loose into the bargain; but it was a long walk out of town for the lads who lived up the other side, and we had to carry the instruments back and forth because there was no proper lock on the door up there. Still, it was a private place, and a roof over us when it rained. We’d have played in the mortuary, by that time, sooner than let Eb Langley beat us.
    â€˜You watch,’ said Nora ‘this won’t be the end of it. If the old buzzard’s feeling as mean as that, he’ll stick at nothing to bring us to heel.’ She said ‘us’ because of her old man and me; if anybody was taking us on, he was taking on Nora, too. ‘I wonder,’ she said, gnawing her lip, ‘what the next move’ll be!’
    We didn’t have to wonder long, because a week or so later he wrote me a letter to say that he was forced, owing to temporary difficulties, to dispose of some of his surplus effects, and as it seemed unlikely that he’d ever be able to take an active part in the band’s activities again, he wanted to realize on the instruments which were his property. We were welcome to take them over, of course, if we could do so at once, because he’d had a lot of expenses with his illness, and business being so bad, and all, and if we decided against buying he was obliged to part with the things in next week’s