A Death of Distinction Read Online Free

contents had followed, put on the market to pay off death duties and to allow the incumbent heir to continue to live the jet-set life he felt was his due. The sale completed, he had departed smartly to make a large hole in the proceeds, leaving behind only a few marble nymphs and some urns in various niches and interstices of the building, plus several time-obscured and unremarkable oil paintings in the hall to add gravitas to what was then to be a local detention centre. What had now come to be the Conyhall Young Offenders’ Institution.
    Several acres of land still remained behind the main house, with a small lake providing a home for a few ducks, and within the perimeter fence, separated from the housing estates by a belt of trees, was an area of kitchen garden to help support the prison, plus soccer and basketball pitches. The original house was now the administration section, and alongside was a motley collection of purpose-built accommodation blocks, kitchens, workshops, etc. Lying beyond the wire was the Elizabethan Home Farm, which had escaped the restoration of the big house and was now the governor’s private home.
    Before the others were down to breakfast, on the morning after the celebrations at the Town Hall, Dorothea Lilburne was out in her garden, on her knees in the beech coppice, dividing snowdrops.
    The swelling buds of the ash trees were black against the light, pearly sky, early daffodils danced, crocuses spreading purple, gold and white across the grass. It was a perfect morning, though still bitterly cold for mid-March, and she was glad of her padded body warmer. Snowdrops, she thought, lifting the bulbs tenderly, were probably her favourite flower. Fair Maids of February ... She had twelve different kinds, double, single, some pink-flushed, scented, or tipped with yellow. So pretty they’d looked, a few weeks before, carpeting the ground beneath the trees with the meek, drooping white chalices hiding their delicate green stamens, but they were in danger of becoming overcrowded. There wasn’t much nourishment between the gnarled, twisted, surface roots of the beeches, and they were vying for what there was of it with the naturalized daffodils and fritillarias.
    â€˜Wouldn’t move ‘em if I was you, missis.’
    Tom Barnett stood sardonically regarding her efforts. With his shambling figure, his spade over his shoulder, ill-shaven, with a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and mud-caked gumboots, he looked like some oversized and disagreeable old Nibelung. ‘Snowdrops is like you and me – older we get, less change we like.’
    â€˜Oh, rubbish!’ Dorothea answered coldly. ‘If you catch them after they’ve flowered, before the leaves or bulbs have the chance to dry off, they’ll transplant well enough.’
    â€˜Oh ar. Have to see, then, won’t we?’ Parting his lips in a knowing grin, he clomped off to dig the vegetable plot, which was the only sort of gardening he thought worthwhile, and the only reason he was employed – for that, and to trim the hedges and cut the lawns. And even there, a conflict of interest arose between her own preference for gently curving borders and his conviction that they should be ruler-straight.
    Dorothea rammed her handfork into the hard earth. Tom Barnett was a miserable old grump who didn’t know the first thing about flower gardening. Which didn’t stop him having a lot to say about it. She hadn’t yet forgiven him for digging up what he swore had been a moribund shrub which nothing could save, when she’d been away once, and planting a row of onions in its place. She still mourned the little Judas tree, grown from seed, not dead, merely a reluctant specimen she’d coaxed along for years.
    And how dare he put her in the same age bracket as he was?
    You get back to your cabbages and leave me to my flowers, she thought huffily, nettled because he might well prove to be right: