The Vatican Rip Read Online Free

with that dazzling winter brilliance you get living near the cold North Sea. To the east the sea-marshes glistened, trees standing in spectacular white silhouette against the blue. Even the thought of schooling didn’t put me down. I’d wangled my unlearned way through childhood. A day or two more would be peanuts. And maybe they included dinner.
    I got a lift into town on a horse-drawn wagon, since there had again been snow during the night and all the modern mechanical wonder-gadgets were frozen under drifts. At such times East Anglia’s one useful vehicle is Jacko’s cart. He is a smelly, cheerful old devil, much addicted to light opera, who runs a ramshackle removal van in summer and Terence in winter. Terence is his gigantic shire horse, ancient as a church and about twice as big, and he pulls this wooden farmyard cart which Jacko, a born comedian, rigs up with nailed planks he calls passenger seats.
    ‘Is it true you’re going to school, Lovejoy?’ Jacko called as I climbed up. He was falling about at the notion.
    ‘Shut it, Jacko.’ I hate the way word gets round our village.
    But he choked with laughter all the way down to the brook and across the water-splash where the town road begins. I had to grin weakly and put up with him because he lets me on for nothing. It was a lot kinder than it sounds – I still owe him for six journeys from last winter when the black ice had blocked us in for three days.
    Jacko put us all down at the Albert tavern, from where we could walk up the slushy hill into town. I ploshed my way out to the Pinnacle Peak Language Academy, my chirpiness dwindling with every wet step.
    The lowering sky to the south-west was leaden, promising yet more snow. The wind was rising, the air dank and chill. I was hungry as hell, perishing cold and imprisoned in a trap of utter misery by that lunatic Arcellano. My antiques trade would vanish. My life was a wreck.
    So I went to school – and met Maria.
    From then on things went downhill.
     
    The so-called Academy was heaving. I’d never seen so many shapes and sizes and ages. Somehow a motley mob of people had battled their way to this emporium of learning and were noisily finding acquaintances among the press. There were kids, geriatrics, housewives, workmen, and elegant ladies obviously bolting from boredom. The Pinnacle Peak’s idea of welcome was a handshake in the form of grievous bodily harm from a bluff language instructor called Hardy (‘everybody calls me Jingo’), a sermon full of veiled threats from a geriatric grammarian headmistress, Miss McKim, and a gentle reproof from old Fotheringay. He was heartbroken because I’d never done classics at Balliol. I sympathized, because so was I.
    Jingo Hardy enrolled me in a dusty side room. I nearly fainted at the fees printed on the form. One week’s worth would have kept me six months.
    He boomed a laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Lovejoy. Yours have been paid. Ten weeks of special instruction.’
    He told me to wait in the hall so I sat on one of the radiator pipes and watched Jingo Hardy, in the thick of things, inform a small disorderly bunch that they were intellectuals about to tackle Russian literature. With poisonous cheerfulness he bullied them off into a side room, leaving only a moderately-sized horde milling blindly to and fro.
    What with the warmth and the comfort I must have nodded off or something because the next thing I knew I was being criticized and prodded with a shoe, which proved I was awake again. The hallway was empty. This woman’s voice was saying sharply, ‘And what do you think
you
are doing?’
    ‘Waiting.’
    I blinked up at her. She was one of the loveliest women I had ever seen. Dark, slender, bright and stylish with a warm tweed-and-cardigan look. Pearl stud earrings. I fell for her. She toed me again. The crowd had vanished. A faint hum arose from the rooms all about, school now in session.
    ‘You’re a tramp, aren’t you?’
    ‘Not yet.’ I said. The irony