Slight Mourning by Catherine Aird Page A

they?” said Ursula. “Coffee?”
    â€œThanks. Hullo, Cynthia. I didn’t know you were here too.” Marjorie flung herself down in one of the wickerwork garden chairs. Its semi-godetic construction took the strain better than many a drawing-room chair would have done. Even so, it winced visibly at the extra weight before it realigned itself—with creaks—to take the new stresses. “I must say, it’s nice to sit down again. My poor knee’s been sore all day.”
    â€œI’m not surprised. Look at what it has to carry about,” said Cynthia with friendly candour.
    â€œDaniel wouldn’t like me thin,” she said, bending forward to rub the offending member. “That’s better. I think I’ll have to have some more of that famous balm of yours, Cynthia.”
    â€œWith pleasure.” She grinned. “Though you were supposed to be the dispenser.”
    â€œNot any more. I’ve forgotten all I knew. Besides, I don’t know what you put in it …”
    â€œThat’s a trade secret.”
    â€œWell,” admitted Marjorie a little grudgingly, “it certainly helped last time.”
    â€œYou and your potions, Cynthia,” chided Ursula Renville. “A couple of hundred years ago and you’d have been burned as a witch.”
    â€œA couple of hundred years ago,” remarked Marjorie Marchmont pertinently, “if you were, someone might have wondered if you’d put your curse on the Fent family.”
    Cynthia looked up. “In what way?”
    â€œWell,” she said, “they’ve still got the same old trouble again up at the Park, haven’t they? The trouble that they’ve always had.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” Ursula asked her cautiously. Marjorie’s thought-processes were deceptively simple, and needed taking one at a time.
    â€œGetting rid of the entail. They’re right back where they started, aren’t they? Now that Bill’s gone …”
    â€œI suppose they are.” Cynthia Paterson sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “They could always hunt out Hector Fent’s sons if he had any …”
    â€œHe’ll have had sons, all right,” declared Marjorie robustly, “but whether he ever married their mothers is a different matter.”
    â€œHe certainly had a twinkle in his eye,” said Ursula unexpectedly. “I used to think he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen.”
    â€œHe may still be alive,” said Cynthia. “We don’t know that he’s dead. He wouldn’t have been all that old, you knew, even now. About our age, Ursula. Older than you, Marjorie.”
    â€œAh,” said Mrs. Renville, “but he will have lived.”
    â€œUrsula, really!” Cynthia regarded her friend in astonishment.
    â€œWell, Constance Parva isn’t really living, is it, Cynthia?” She set her coffee cup down on the rustic wooden table. “I don’t mean that I’m not content or anything like that, and I’m very fond of Richard, but it’s hardly life with a capital ‘L’, is it?”
    Marjorie Marchmont hooted with laughter. “Ursula, you are a dark horse. Here you are, cherishing dreams of a tall dark handsome man in the Australian outback and all the while we thought wild horses wouldn’t drag you away from the village and Richard.”
    â€œStill waters run deep,” she said demurely. “More coffee, anyone?”
    â€œOf course,” said Cynthia Paterson, her mind still on the question of the Fent entail, “should Quentin and Hector or Hector’s sons if he had any and has died himself since—should they get together the outcome might be just the same as when Bill and Quentin did their talking.”
    â€œAnd from all that I heard,” said Marjorie expressively, “that was no go.”
    Detective Inspector Sloan—after talking to Mr. Puckle on the