Free The Venetian Judgment by David Stone

believe it. Now I do.”

    “I’m happy for you. Maybe we can dilate on that theme inside,” he said, taking her arm and leading her back to his booth at the rear of the pub. The barman came over, perhaps just to get a second look at her “lorly garms,” and went away again to fetch her a pot of tea and a mug. When he had come back and gone again, Dalton reached into his pocket and took out the glass cutter.

    “I take it there’s some kind of trouble with these people?”

    Mandy flinched at the open display of the glass cutter, took it, and put it in her purse, snapping the latch with a certain dramatic emphasis.

    “Why not put a notice in The Guardian ? You hapless wretch.”

    “It’s a glass cutter, Mandy. Not a dagger dripping blood. Don’t be such a dramatist. I take it there’s a problem with the Glass Cutters?”

    Mandy sipped at the tea, made a face, and set it down.

    “Utter swill,” she said.

    “And such small portions?”

    “You know the Glass Cutters? What they do?”

    “I know the essentials.”

    “Dangerous work, theirs, would you say? Lots of wear and tear?”

    “The Glass Cutters? God no. Mind work, but not . . . why?”

    “Well, my lad,” she said, sipping at her tea, “you may want to revise that view, since they seem to be dying like . . .”

    “Flies?”

    “Such a cliché,” she said, making a face, “but there it is.”

    “But many of them are . . . getting on, aren’t they?”

    “Old age has its burdens, I agree,” she said, giving him a look over the rim of her cup, “but being tortured to death is not usually one of them. Not in England, at any rate, although I admit that the National Health does all it can.”

NEW YORK STATE

GARRISON, THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY

    Briony Keating’s “little place on the Hudson” reminded Jules Duhamel of Berchtesgaden, although Hitler, who had the Bavarian taste for vulgar excess, would never have built such a Lutheran home: it was a square, slightly stolid stone fortress done in the Federal style, with six bedrooms, maids’ quarters, a large book-lined study, an honest working kitchen. Its best feature was a long stone-walled, low-beamed living room that took up all of the home’s riverside view.

    This open, light-filled, masculine space was filled with old saddle-leather couches and armchairs grouped around a large cut-stone fireplace, with a wall of antique sash windows on either side. A collection of Civil War weapons took up most of one wall, and six rather good oil paintings of the Adirondacks took up another.

    The house overlooked the rolling Hudson River valley and the low blue mountains far to the west. It also had a small stone carriage house, built in the same Federal style, that had once been a stable. This was where Briony Keating kept her private office. He had not been shown this office. Yet.

    The home rested on a shelflike outcropping of land that had been extensively planted a long time ago, so the entire three-acre estate now stood in a grove of ancient oaks and wind-twisted jack pines. The house was set squarely down in the middle of a rolling park that led to a steep drop into the broad brown Hudson River, which swirled massively in a long, lazy bend below the edge. All of this was tinted pale amber by the patina of old money that seemed to lie upon it like the soft winter light that bathed it every afternoon.

    The house had been built by Briony’s great-great-grandfather, a West Point man, she explained, who served with John Buford’s cavalry, and had been severely wounded in the first day at Gettysburg. It seemed to be important to her, so he was careful to appear interested.

    Duhamel had no idea who John Buford was, and he was a little vague on the details of the American Civil War, although he suspected that Gettysburg was somewhere in Pennsylvania. But he had always been good at looking as if he were listening, and getting Briony to speak freely about her life was important to him.

    He