A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,20

to read a road map, if you ask me. Are we at the right place? It doesn't look as if a soul's waited up for us."

"I shouldn't be surprised. I told them we'd arrive at nine and now it's..." he peered at his watch in the weak interior light of the car, "good God, it's half past eleven." She heard the laughter in his voice. "Are you for it, my love? Shall we spend our wedding night in the car?"

"Teenagers grappling hotly in the backseat, do you mean?" She tossed her long hair back with a shake of her head. "Hmm, it is a thought. But I'm afraid in that case you should have hired something larger than an Escort. No, Simon, there's nothing for it, I'm afraid, but banging on the doors and rousing someone. But

you shall make all our excuses." She stepped out into the chilly night air, taking a moment to study the building before her.

It was a pre-Elizabethan structure by initial design, but one which had undergone a number of Jacobean changes that added to its air of rakish whimsicality. Mullioned windows winked in the moonlight that filtered through the wispy fog which had settled on the moors and was now drifting down into the dales. Walls were covered with Virginia creeper, its leaves burning the old stone to rich russet. Chimneys germinated upon the roof in a helter-skelter pattern of capricious warts against the night sky. There was a contumacy about the building that denied the very existence of the twentieth century, and this quality spread to the grounds that surrounded it.

Here enormous English oaks stretched out their branches over lawns where statuary, encircled by flowers, interrupted the flow of the land. Pathways meandered into the woods beyond the house with a beckoning, siren charm. In the absolute stillness, the play of water from a fountain nearby and the cry of a lamb from a distant farm were the only auditory concomitants to the whisper of the breeze that soughed through the night. They might have been Richard and Anne, home to Middleham at last.

Deborah turned back to the car. Her husband had opened his door and was watching her, waiting in his usual patient fashion for her photographer's reaction to the beauty of the place.

"It's wonderful," she said. "Thank you, my love."

He lifted his braced left leg from the car, dropped it with a thump onto the drive, and extended his hand. With a practised movement, Deborah helped him to his feet. "I feel as if we've been going round in circles for hours," St. James remarked, stretching.

"That's because we have," she teased. "Just two hours from the station, Deborah. A wonderful drive.'"

He laughed softly. "Well, it was, love. Admit it."

"Absolutely. The third time I saw Rievaulx Abbey, I was positively enchanted." She glanced at the forbidding oak door before them. "Shall we try it then?"

They crunched across the gravel drive to the dark recess into which the door was set. A pitted wooden bench was tipped drunkenly against the wall next to it, and two enormous urns stood on either side. With the perversity of plants, one urn held a burgeoning beauty of flowers while the other was home to a withering colony of geraniums whose dried leaves fluttered raspingly to the ground as Deborah and her husband passed.

St. James applied some considerable strength to the large brass fixture that hung in the centre of the door. Silence greeted its fading echoes. "There's a bell as well," Deborah noticed.

"Have a go with that."

The ringing far back in the deepest reaches of the house immediately roused what sounded like an entire pack of hounds into furious howling. "Well, that's certainly done it," St.

James laughed.

"Dammit, Casper! Jason! S'only the bell, you devils!" Pitched very much like a man's but with the unmistakable cadence of a country woman born and bred, a raucous voice shouted brisk reprovals behind the door.

"Down with you! Out! Get back t'the kitchen." A pause, followed by some desperate scuffling. "No, blast you! Out in the back! Why, you blackguard fiends! Give me my slips!

Damn your eyes!" With that, a bolt shrieked back from the inside of the door, which was pulled briskly open. A barefooted woman hopped back and forth on the icy stones of the entry, her frizzy grey hair flying about her shoulders in bursts of electricity. "Mr. Allcourt-St. James," she said without preamble. "Come in with you both. Damn!" She removed the woollen shawl she had thrown about