Free Styx and Stones by Carola Dunn Page A

at the envelope and the shepherd’s pie turned to lead in his stomach. Another one of those bloody letters! Well, he bloody well wasn’t going to read this one. They all said the same, didn’t they?
    All right, so he’d done a bit of fiddling, a few jobs on the
side. What harm if he charged people a bit less for repairs and pocketed the lot now and then, when the boss was over in Hythe at the new garage? Wyndham was a bloody plutocrat, he’d never miss a few quid.
    But Mr. Wyndham wouldn’t look at things that way if someone told him. Might even call in the coppers. At the very least, it’d be back to the hop-fields for Sam.
    Which of the bloody fools he’d done a favour for was writing the letters? Or was the bugger stupid enough to boast about the deal he’d got, and someone else did the writing? If Sam found out who it was, he’d soon show him which side his bread was buttered!
    With a surly grunt, he stuffed the envelope in his pocket and stamped out. Revving the Wooler savagely, he raced off down the village street with the engine roaring.
    Â 
    Piers Catterick whistled tunelessly as his fingers flew over the keys. Words flowed, and the pile of manuscript beside the typewriter grew visibly.
    When things went badly, he thought he’d go mad, stuck in this bucolic paradise. When things went well, he knew he had been right to leave town. How could one produce novels of steamy rustic lust stuck in a bedsitter in Bloomsbury? At least, he never had any trouble getting up steam—the trick was to stay on the right side of the Lord Chamberlain; no use getting one’s books banned, like Lawrence’s Rainbow . But his exile was adding an authentic rural flavour to his writing which was bound to improve already respectable sales.
    What was it Lomax called those black and white birds? Magpies, that was it. And the rhyme: “ … Three for a girl, four for a boy …” He could weave that in somewhere, add a nice little touch of primitive superstition.
    Rum old boy, the brigadier. He had been rather shocked
when he found out the sort of books Piers wrote, but then some busybody tried to get him to turf out his literary tenant and he dug in his heels.
    Piers caught himself staring out of the window at the chimney-pots of the brigadier’s house, visible between the trees. Elms. Be precise.
    Turning back to the typewriter, he reread his last paragraph, and picked up a pencil. Rooks in the elms, not black birds in the trees. Vermin, Lomax said. Come to think of it, those distant bangs which had diverted Piers’s attention from his work could be the brigadier taking a gun to the rooks or some other pest. Before he came to live in the country, Piers had not realized the extent of the constant slaughter that went on even outside the hunting and shooting seasons. Hares, otters, badgers—all torn to pieces in the name of sport.
    A moue of distaste on his long, pale face, he unfolded his long, weedy body from his chair. He had lost his train of thought; time for lunch. Gathering up the pile of discarded manuscript pages to bung in the waste paper basket downstairs, he trotted down, remembering for once to bend his head to dodge the low beam.
    Several letters had fluttered through the letter-box an hour ago. With a feeling of conscious virtue for having let them lie unread so long while he wrote, Piers scooped them up from the doormat. A gratifying number of friends wrote regularly: long, self-consciously literary epistles with one eye on possible future publication. Edgbaston and Jill threatened to come down for a few days. Oh Lord, they were arriving in the morning! He couldn’t put them up; they’d have to stay at the Hop-Picker. There was something from his editor, and …
    â€œHell, not another of those confounded diatribes! Damnation,” he swore again as he gave himself a paper-cut tearing open the envelope.

    Yes, the same stuff again, “