Free The Wrong Rite by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

Elen’s. I’ll just take her upstairs, she usually has her nap about now.”
    Sir Caradoc and Sir Emlyn volunteered in chorus, bass and baritone, to sit with her if Janet and Madoc wanted to go off somewhere. Janet was charmed.
    “Why don’t you do it together? She’d love having two handsome men all to herself. Wouldn’t you, Dorothy?”
    Sir Caradoc would drop off, too, Janet suspected. So would Sir Emlyn, like as not. And what if they did? Surely one or the other would wake up if the baby cried. Lady Rhys was indicating that she’d be downstairs in the drawing room fixing the flowers, or else in the dining hall scraping up candle wax. She’d come to the rescue should her services be required, as they very likely would.
    While they were settling the baby-sitting question, Madoc had been making Janet a lovely sandwich to take upstairs with her. She thanked him and excused herself.
    “Come up in half an hour or so, whenever you’re ready. I doubt whether Dorothy will take long to drop off, after the busy morning she’s had.”
    She’d had to raise her own voice to make herself heard over Bob’s, he was still on about the Beltane fires.
    “It is sympathetic magic, you know. Symbolically, the fire is meant to burn up the witches.”
    “That doesn’t sound madly sympathetic to me,” drawled Iseult. “Would somebody pass the mustard?”
    Presumably someone did. Janet couldn’t wait to find out, Dorothy was beginning to fuss.
    It was thoughtful of Betty to have put them in the red room, pleasant to be alone with her baby for a while, to sit in a low slipper chair by the window with the soft breeze coming in, to watch the sun turning the hills to golden green, to eat her good sandwich while Dorothy kneaded and sucked and made gentle grunting noises like a happy piglet. A neat illustration of supply and demand.
    She’d got the baby tucked into the cradle and herself decent by the time the proud grandfather and the delighted great-great-uncle tiptoed in like two policemen strayed from The Pirates of Penzance, and she was free to go. She gave them each a kiss, reminded them to yell for Lady Rhys if their charge should wake up, and left them to cope as they might.
    Her husband was, as she’d expected, still in the kitchen. Megan had appeared from somewhere and was washing pots for Betty, Madoc was trying to help and getting the shy girl all flustered. Janet chased him off to make another fuzz stick and offered to take over the pot-washing. However, that only flustered Megan further, they might as well go fluster Lisa instead.
    Madoc was quite willing, this was not a day to be sitting around the kitchen stove. He presented his fuzz stick to Betty, who tucked it up carefully in a corner of the dresser next to the Staffordshire cow, and they went.
    “How far is it to Lisa’s?” Janet asked. “I didn’t even get to meet her before, did I? I didn’t remember her at all.”
    “It’s not much more than half a mile. You won’t mind walking that far, will you? And no, we didn’t see Lisa last time. She was off somewhere. Looking at tortoises, probably. I told you about Tessie, didn’t I?”
    “Yes, you did. We’ll have to get some of her books for Dorothy when she’s old enough to read.”
    “I’m not so sure about that, love. Tessie’s a fairly uninhibited type, as tortoises go, we don’t want to give the kid notions. Jenny, do you think it’s going to be tough on her, having a cop for a father?”
    “I expect likely she’ll manage. Look at that sheep, smack in the middle of the road. It’s got blue paint on its neck. That’s not Uncle Caradoc’s mark, is it?”
    “No, his is a red splotch on the left hip.” Madoc remembered that all too well. “I don’t know whose this one would be. Somebody will cope with it, sooner or later.”
    On her previous visit, Janet had marveled over the way sheep were allowed to graze wherever they took the notion. She’d seen them in dooryards, churchyards, along