The Case of the Missing Brontë [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1INTERRUPTED JOURNEY"Can we stop and send a few postcards?' said Jan, as we drove through Hutton-le-Dales. T just love these small Yorkshire villages.''Heaven on a postcard, hell to live in,' I muttered."Oh, you're just grumpy,' said Jan.And I suppose I was. Jan, Daniel, our son, and I had been spending an early summer holiday with what remains of my family in Northumberland. Seeing my sister again was all right, but she was so taken up with her baby that we might have been day trippers passing through for all the notice she took of us. For the rest there was my Aunt Sybilla, increasingly uncertain on her pins, who had taken to wearing monstrous turbans in the Edith Sitwell style except that where Dame Edith carried hers off, Sybilla in hers looked as if she had been extinguished by some enormous candle-snuffer. Then there was my hygienic cousin Mordred, who has taken over the running of the house as a showplace, and is now the complete aesthete's tour-guide, full of out-of-the-way information and one-up jokes. And my Aunt Kate, much occupied with the fortunes of some ultra-rightist paramilitary splinter group of the National Front, whose slogan is 'Keep England Anglo-Saxon.' No, it wasn't much of a summer holiday. Broadmoor would have been more restful. I probably was grumpy.I was even grumpier after we had stopped for twenty minutes for Jan to write postcards and Daniel to eat something fluorescent on a stick, because we no sooner got started again than, two minutes outside Hutton-le-