Fete Fatale Read Online Free Page A

‘I hope she won you over?’
    â€˜Ah—you ladies! Always trying to win us over!’ said Colonel Weston, in as feeble an attempt at gallantry as ever I heard. Mrs Culpepper shot him a glance of friendly contempt.
    â€˜Which means, I suppose, that you’re intending to do damn-all about it?’
    â€˜I let Mary talk the thing through,’ said Marcus, in his slow, comfortable way, which was his method of defusing a situation. It worked better, I always thought, with the animals of Hexton than with the human beings. ‘I hope that she feels better about it now. I expect she was taking things a little too much to heart, after the death of her mother.’
    â€˜Poppycock,’ said Franchita Culpepper.
    â€˜You seem to forget,’ said Elspeth Mipchin (née MacIntyre) in her prim, still faintly Edinburgh tones, ‘that there are matters of principle at stake.’
    â€˜Do you think so?’ asked Marcus, puffing a veil of smoke around his face, perhaps to hide his expression. ‘Surely we buried all that High Church-Low Church rivalry long ago, didn’t we? I hope so, because it did us a great deal of harm. We’re all Anglicans together now, eh, Colonel?’
    â€˜Eh? Oh yes, yes. All Christians too, what?’
    There was a brief silence, as we sipped and considered this.
    â€˜I never did go much for this ecumenical spirit,’ Franchita Culpepper said, at last. ‘It always savoured of mushiness, you know. Everyone who went on about it always sounded so wet. The good old “Onward, Christian soldiers” spirit has always meant fightingother Christians, hasn’t it? Give me a good fight any day of the week, rather than a warmed-up basin of ecumenicalism.’
    â€˜Blurring around the edges,’ pronounced Mrs Mipchin, ‘is positively dangerous, when there are matters of faith involved.’
    â€˜And are you hoping,’ asked Franchita with heavy irony, ‘that Mary is just going to let the subject drop?’
    â€˜I certainly hope that when she’s thought things over a bit, and when she can get out of the house more, take up her old interests, she’ll see that this isn’t worth making such a fuss about,’ said Marcus.
    Franchita Culpepper’s comment was a whoop of laughter.
    â€˜Hope springs eternal,’ she said.
    â€˜What I cannot understand,’ said Elspeth Mipchin, fixing the Colonel with firing-squad eyes, ‘is why the position here was not made clear to the Bishop in the early stages.’
    â€˜Oh, Frank did his best,’ loyally put in Nancy Weston, a fleshy lady with social pretensions, who made unwise attempts at a fluffy prettiness. ‘After all, the Bishop is his CO, in a manner of speaking, so there are limits to what he could do. The Bishop’s the one that in the last resort is going to lay it on the line . . . ’ She spoilt this spasm of marital solidarity by adding: ‘Anyway, I never knew Frank convince anyone of anything.’
    Colonel Weston held his peace. He had early on in his retirement to Hexton found out that if he spoke he put his foot in it, and I had rarely heard him say an unnecessary word in company. As a matter of fact, I knew through Marcus that what Colonel Weston had said to the Bishop was: ‘Whatever you do, don’t upset the women.’ If the Bishop had consciously gone against this, it was no doubt for reasons of his own, and with the thought that it was up to the Colonel and the other lay dignitaries to fight their own battles with the women. Little did he know that they had long ago raised the white flag.
    â€˜And so,’ summed up Franchita, ‘due to the spinelessness of our menfolk—’ she shoved forward her glass hand—‘refill me, Howard—we are to be landed with a celibate vicar. My God!’
    â€˜I never knew,’ I said, to lighten the atmosphere, ‘that sexual prowess was a criterion