Read Dolly and the Starry Bird-Dorothy Dunnett-Johnson Johnson 05 for Free Online

to the Shittites.”
    One of the blossoms at his feet raised her fair face. “Hittites, Uncle Maurice,” she said.
    “In my book,” said Maurice gently, “it was Shittite. Tell Innes, Ruth, that if he cares to bring the creature to me, I shall rename it. In a vat. With some sulphuric acid.”
    “I once painted a mouse,” said Johnson Johnson.
    “What?” said Maurice sharply.
    “Green,” said Johnson. “It looked very pretty.”
    We left soon after that.
    From the loggia behind the French windows you could see the top of the hill and even the mosque shape of the observatory black against the night sky, with the segment of denser blackness where the cupola was rolled back for the telescope. We left that way because it was quicker, and we looked up at the dome because we were together, and Jacko was alone, and hadn’t got either Di or her photographs.
    That was how we came to see that tonight there was no segment of dark but a golden triangle. Tonight the cupola was pouring out watts like a lighthouse.
    I bumped into Innes as we raced for the steps. He took one glance where I pointed and joined us. No one spoke. Even Charles, the outsider, knew enough to recognize what was the matter.
    At night the full lights in the cupola never go on. They would spoil the plate, and ruin your night sight. Sometimes, when you lose sight of the wire and begin to see streets and people and cars in the lens, you can relieve your eyestrain in the dim light of the console. But you can’t, of course, abandon the telescope. The motor might stick: the telescope might fail to follow the arc of your subject; atmospheric changes might make your star become fuzzed or the light become jumpy and splintered, so that you have to center it back on the cross wire.
    On a clear night like this, with exposures going on all the time, the cupola light is never on. Except in an emergency.
    We got to the Dome and I found the front door, which is always locked, had been forced open. Charles swung around the emergency generator and dashed for the stairs to the cupola. I stood in the hall shouting “Jacko!” while Innes closed the door and dragged a chair over to jam it. We heard Charles reach the second floor and then the ring of his feet on the steep iron steps to the telescope. Then a door on the middle floor opened, and a moment later a man came out of the darkroom.
    He looked down and I looked up, and I recognized him. It was the second of the two men from the Villa Borghese.
    I shrieked. I heard Charles’s answering cry from the dome. Then suddenly all the lights vanished.
    It was Innes who surprised us that evening. As Charles’s steps came thundering down from the top and the steps of the intruder, even louder, came down the lower staircase toward us, Innes shoved a chair into my hand and said, “Stand there. We’ll get him between us.”
    We did, too. The footsteps came flying toward us: I could smell him, that polite gentleman with collar and tie and neat haircut, who had asked me in the Villa Borghese where I was lunching. Then Innes moved. There was a thud, and a gasp, and I brought my chair down with a crash just as the intruder came blundering between us.
    I had grasped his jacket when he tore himself free and turning, ran back upstairs again. There was another crash, and a series of thwacks and harsh grunting. He had run into Charles’s fists this time. Somewhere behind me was a fire extinguisher. I felt for it and ripped it off its hook. Then I said, “You guard the doorway” to Innes, and, running, made for the fight on the staircase.
    It had moved upward before I could reach it. From the sound of it, they were fighting in and out of the darkroom and then through the workshop and into the storeroom. I thought of all the tools in the workshop and called Charles’s name in the darkness. He shouted back something which sounded reassuring. Then he said more clearly, “Ruth? I’ve trapped him. Tell Innes to stay by the door. Try and