Death of an Old Master Read Online Free

How much wealth could be quietly removed from the McCracken accounts in the banks of Wall Street into the coffers of William Alaric Piper!
    A couple of miles to the west a military inspection was under way in Chelsea.
    ‘Stand at ease!’ said the tall Sergeant Major figure with the brown curly hair and the blue eyes.
    ‘Attention!’ The troops banged their feet on the floor, eyes staring rigidly ahead, fists pressed tightly to their sides.
    ‘Shoulder arms!’ shouted the Sergeant Major. A couple of shortened broom handles made their way slowly up into the correct position.
    ‘By the left, quick march!’ The little platoon moved off smartly towards the window.
    ‘Squad, halt!’ said the Sergeant Major, nearly tripping over a chair.
    ‘About turn!’ The figures shuffled awkwardly round to face the way they had come.
    ‘By the left, quick march! Left, left, left, left right left.’ The parade was rapidly approaching the double doors of the drawing room. The Sergeant Major, whose mind had temporarily
wandered off somewhere else, recalled himself to his duty.
    ‘Squad, halt!’ He was only just in time. One more pace and the heads of the platoon would have crashed into the hard wood of the doors.
    ‘Squad, stand at ease!’ One of the figures refused to move.
    ‘You there, at the back, you miserable rapscallion, you! What did I just say? I said stand at ease! If you can’t obey orders in this battalion it’ll be bread and water for
thirty days! Stand at ease!’
    A foot banged into the floorboards. Two arms went behind the back. A face looked rather sad at the prospect of bread and water for thirty days.
    ‘Squad, dismiss!’
    Two small figures turned round and leapt into their father’s arms. Lord Francis Powerscourt held his two children, the six-year-old Thomas and the five-year-old Olivia, very tightly and
laughed.
    ‘You were nearly in trouble there,’ he said, ruffling Olivia’s hair. ‘Bread and water for thirty days. Don’t think you would have liked that, would you?’
    ‘Would you really have done that, Papa?’ asked the little girl, staring up into Powerscourt’s eyes.
    ‘You never know,’ said her father. ‘You never know what the Sergeant Major might have to do.’
    Lord Francis Powerscourt had served in the army in India as an intelligence officer of the Crown. Since then he had become one of the foremost investigators in Britain, called in to solve
murders and mysteries in England and abroad. A month before he had taken the children to visit his former Sergeant Major, recently installed in scarlet luxury as a Chelsea Pensioner. Sergeant Major
Collins had always seemed a most formidable figure on the parade ground to Powerscourt but he had been wonderful with Thomas and Olivia. He had shown them the great hall where the Duke of
Wellington’s body had lain in state before his funeral in 1852, the pensioners guarding the great warrior twenty-four hours a day. He had shown them his tiny room with the bed that folded
into the wall. The children had been enchanted and immediately wanted to know why they didn’t have a similar arrangement at home. He had sat them down on the lawns that stretched down to the
Thames and told them stories of strange Indian tribesmen with great beards, of campfires in the high mountains, of the terrible cold in the Crimea where he had lost a toe.
    ‘God bless them, sir,’ Sergeant Major Collins had said to Powerscourt as they left. ‘It makes you feel young just to be around them, so it does. I don’t have any
grandchildren of my own, you see, so it brightens an old man’s week.’
    ‘Think of them as honorary grandchildren of your own, Sergeant Major,’ Powerscourt had said. ‘Make no mistake, we shall come again.’
    ‘I suppose you’ll want to look at the pictures,’ James Hammond-Burke said rather sadly to Edmund de Courcy that same afternoon. The Hammond-Burkes lived in a
crumbling Elizabethan house called Truscott Park in