Apart from Martin Threadgold’s housekeeper, this turned out to consist of Lydia and Roland Jolliffe, the St Clairs, Paulina Graygoss and, somewhat surprisingly, Lionel Broderer. Of William Morgan and the younger members of both families there was no sign. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. No one seemed to find my sudden appearance remarkable. (I think they had come to regard me rather like the Devil in a morality play, always popping up when least wanted or expected.) Judith St Clair gave me a resigned look and said, in an even more resigned voice, ‘Master Threadgold is dead.’ She finally managed to hush the little housekeeper’s noisy sobbing with a curt word or two, which she palliated with an arm about the woman’s shoulders. ‘My dear Mistress Pettigrew, you have had a shock, but you must pull yourself together. Many people die in their sleep, you know. It’s not uncommon, and your master was not a young man.’ Which was true, as far as it went, but there is old and then there is old; and if Martin Threadgold had been much past his middle fifties, I would have owned myself greatly mistaken.
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