Read Online To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey - Free Book Online

always pictured Lucifer as a magnificent, burning figure six-and-a-half feet tall. Not at all like Searle. What in Searle had suggested Lucifer to Ratoff's accusing mind?
    Lucifer. A fallen glory. A beauty turned evil.
    He saw in his mind a picture of the Searle who walked round the farm with him; his hatless blond hair blown into untidy ends by the wind, his hands pushed deep into very English flannels. Lucifer. He nearly laughed aloud.
    But there was, of course, a strangeness in Searle's good looks. A—what was it?—an unplaceable quality. Something not quite of the world of men.
    Perhaps that was what had suggested fallen angels to Serge's fertile mind.
    Anyhow, Searle seemed a good chap, and they were going to do a book together; and Searle knew that he was engaged to marry Liz, so that he would not——
    He did not finish the thought, even to himself. Nor did it occur to him to wonder how a beauty that made one think of fallen angels was likely to affect a young woman engaged to a B.B.C. commentator.
    He drove home at a better speed than normally, put away the car, took Liz's favourite sweets out of their place in the glove compartment, and went in to present them and be kissed for his forethought. He was also the bearer of the good news that Cormac Ross liked the idea of the book and was prepared to pay them well for it. He could hardly wait to reach the drawing-room.
    The baronial hall was very silent and cold as he crossed it, and it smelled, in spite of anachronistic baize doors, of sprouts and stewed rhubarb. In the drawing-room, which as usual was warm and gay, there was no one but Lavinia, who was sitting with her feet on the fender and her lap covered with that day's issue of the highbrow weeklies.
    'It's a strange thing,' said Lavinia, taking her nose out of the Watchman , 'how immoral it is to make money out of writing.'
    'Hullo, Aunt Vin. Where are the others?'
    'This rag used to worship Silas Weekley until he went and made himself a fortune. Em is upstairs, I think. The others aren't back yet.'
    'Back? Back from where?'
    'I don't know. They went out in that dreadful little car of Bill Maddox's after lunch.'
    'After lunch .'
    '"The slick repetition of a technique as lacking in subtlety as a poster." Don't they make you sick! Yes, I didn't need Liz this afternoon, so they went out. It has been a glorious day, hasn't it?'
    'But it is only ten minutes till dinner time!'
    'Yes. Looks as though they're going to be late,' said Lavinia, her eyes pursuing the slaughter of Silas.
    So Liz hadn't heard the broadcast! He had been talking to her and she hadn't even been listening. He was dumbfounded. The fact that the old lady in Leeds, and the child in the hospital in Bridgwater, and the lighthouse-keeper in Scotland hadn't been listening either made no difference. Liz always listened. It was her business to listen. He was Walter, her fiancé, and if he spoke to the world it was right that she should listen. And now she had gone out gaily with Leslie Searle and left him talking into thin air. She had gone out gadding without a thought, on a Friday, on his broadcast afternoon, gone out God knew where, with Searle, with a fellow she had known only seven days, and they stayed out to the very last minute. She wasn't even there to have chocolates given her when he had gone out of his way to get them for her. It was monstrous.
    Then the vicar arrived. No one had remembered that he was coming to dinner. He was that kind of man. And Walter had to spend another fifteen minutes with earthworms when he had already had more than enough of them. The vicar had listened to his broadcast and was enchanted by it; he could talk of nothing else.
    Mrs Garrowby came in, greeted the vicar with commendable presence of mind, and went away to arrange for a supplement of tinned peas to the entrée and a pastry covering for the stewed rhubarb.
    By the time that the missing pair were twenty minutes late and Mrs Garrowby had decided not to wait for