Read Ellis Peters - George Felse 13 - Rainbow's End for Free Online

snatching the right moment, above the desktop for the line opposite. Consequences also had its days, with appropriate variations. Sometimes Bossie, at one end, started a paper slip with the invented name of the dear departed, and each boy after him added one line of the epitaph to appear on his tombstone. But on this particular Sunday it was a similar game played with lines extracted from hymns. This was too difficult to be taken beyond the quatrain, and the fourth participant, if stuck, was allowed to invent his line without being tied to actual hymns. The system had just produced the following:
    ‘The voice says, Cry. What shall we cry?
    When heated in the chase,
    Behold, the bridegroom draweth nigh
    With his arm round amazing Grace.’
    Resulting giggles had to be suppressed, and the next player could start a new stanza, in this case generously enough with a simple line:
    ‘This is the first of days’
    to which Spuggy Price, always enterprising, added:
    ‘When our heads are bowed with woe’,
    and Toffee Bill contributed:
    ‘Let our choir new anthems raise’.
    The manuscript had now reached Bossie, just as the vicar concluded his sermon, as suddenly as ever, and announced the next hymn. Number 193, ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul’. Now this, thought Bossie contentedly, as the congregation squared up hopefully for ‘Aberystwyth’, is one he can’t spoil. Even if he chose ‘Hollingside’, instead, that would be only a shade less satisfying than the majestic Welsh harmonies. Only the rest of the choir rose apathetically. Bossie, for once, had missed practice, owing to the slight aftermath of a visit to the dentist, and the sound of a completely strange, complicated and extremely uncongenial tune rolling down from the organ-loft caused his jaw to drop, and his eyes to pop out like hat-pegs with indignation. He could even spoil this! Here on the edge of Wales, in a parish of fervent singers, who but Rainbow would have dared to ditch something as splendid as ‘Aberystwyth’ for this trendy drivel?
    Bossie grasped the pencil and wrote the final line of the quatrain so violently that he pushed holes in the paper:
    ‘Rainbow’s
got to go
!’ Underlined savagely, and with the added note below: ‘In the furnace-room after service. Council of war!’
     
    They sat on upturned boxes among the coke, and there wasn’t a dissentient voice among them.
    ‘Our choir’s been made to raise new anthems long enough,’ said Bossie grimly, setting his rounded but resolute jaw. ‘The others are just as fed-up as we are, and dislike him just as much, and if he stays here much longer somebody’s going to get desperate and dot him one, or set his house on fire, or something. Because he’s never going to fit in, he’s all wrong, and he’s
got to go
!’
    ‘You’re only saying what everybody’s been saying for weeks now,’ Ginger reminded him reasonably. He was a solid, sensible boy, large for his thirteen years, freckled and sandy, but placid of disposition instead of fiery. ‘They shut up if they think we’re listening, but you should have heard the basses letting fly the other night, after he produced this new tune. They didn’t know I was still there. But if they can’t think of any way of getting rid of him, what do you reckon we can do?’
    ‘He won’t go easily,’ said Toffee Bill gloomily. His mother’s shop had not benefited at all from the coming of the Rainbows, who had most of their exotic goods delivered from Comerbourne. Middlehope was good enough to exploit and patronise, but not to mix with; except, of course, its top layers, where layers had never played much part before. The pub didn’t benefit, either, drinks were sent up by the crate from dealers in Birmingham. ‘He’s got that house all poshed up, he won’t let go of it now, after all the money he’s spent , not unless he’s druv out. And I don’t know how you set about that.’
    ‘Grown-ups are too squeamish,’ said Bossie darkly.