Three-Cornered Halo by Christianna Brand Page B

knelt with outstretched arm, and prepared for the terror to come.
    * In the old days of humility before God, it had been the tradition for the Juanese Grand Dukes to serve as altar boys at Mass. With the steady maintainence of their hereditary immensity, however, and the consequent inconvenience of having them lumbering about, ill-disciplined, in the circumscribed space of the sanctuary before the altar, the duties whittled down to a single offering of incense immediately prior to the reading of the Gospel, before the Canon of the Mass. The thurible, a treasure preserved for this purpose alone, is a thing of remarkable beauty attributed to Cellini and the pious loot of El Pirata himself; handed down from generation to generation and exclusively in the charge of the current Arcivescovo, whose care the cathedral is.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    T HE vagaries of the British on (conducted) tour have been described elsewhere. ‘Gay ones, jolly ones, vulgar ones; refined ones looking down upon the jolly ones and hoping they wouldn’t shame them by whipping out funny hats.… Easy-going ones. Complaining ones. Experienced ones. Robust ones who drank Water out of taps and confounded the experienced ones by not going down with bouts of dysentery, anxious ones who refused all shell-fish, raw fruit and unbottled beverages and went down with dysentery before they had even started; neurotic ones, turning pale together at the sight of heaped dishes of death-dealing green figs and peaches, hearty ones calling loudly for lo nachurelle and assuring one another that a smattering of French would take one all over the world.… Pretty ones, plain ones, downright repellent ones.…’
    The Major’s grouppa, aboard the Bellomare’s privately hired vaporetto, formed a fairly representative collection. They stood about in chatty little groups, for all the world, cried Mr Cecil, like the Noyades, bound together in bundles and spinning down the Loire to Nantes: only they were chugging, with much steaming and hooting, across the five-mile wide stretch from San Juan to the satellite island of Tenebros. There was a ponderous lady novelist in search of a setting for yet another volume of childhood dark doings and subsequent in-growing remorse: all written in language so obscure as to force even the most literate to read only between the lines. There were the inevitable half dozen widows whose husbands had overworked themselves to a premature death, apparently for no reason than to enable their relicts to console their loss with expensive trips abroad. There was the gentleman who, having cheerfully invested two hundred pounds in this outing of pleasure, now made himself miserable night and day, lest he be cheated out of a penny’s worth (he had a curious walk, the feet straddled widely apart and was known to the group as Fuddyduddy); and there were two ladies suffering from stomach trouble who always did suffer from stomach trouble when they went abroad but who went abroad religiously, year after year, and proudly boasted the capitals they had been sick in; and a spinster aunt with her handsome niece whose chances of marriage she was, from some obscure reasons of jealousy, though devoted to the niece, resolutely destroying: Grim and Gruff they were named—Mr Cecil had met them on a previous Odyssey Tour. And there were the Bilsons.
    Mr and Mrs Bilson were known as the Back-Homes. He was a builder, back home in California, and they were on their first trip to the beautiful continent of Europe; but displeased to find so little poverty there, for it was well known that Europe was supported entirely by U.S. dollars and they could not approve the general air of well-being and bonhomie. The Major, ever anxious to oblige, was always on the lookout for a barefoot child for them but those they saw looked depressingly as if they went without shoes because they didn’t like shoes. Mrs Bilson was pledged to give a lecture to her Women’s