Death’s Jest-Book. Reginald HillЧитать онлайн книгу.
854db47b-788c-58f5-b491-5235f78d6876">
REGINALD HILL
DEATH’S JEST-BOOK
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by HarperCollins
Copyright © Reginald Hill 2008
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007313204
Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007396351
Version: 2015-06-22
For Julia
who never hassles
thanks
The woodcut illustrations which prefigure each of the novel’s thirteen sections are taken from Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death
For death is more ‘a jest’ than Life, you see Contempt grows quick from familiarity. I owe this wisdom to Anatomy.
T. L. BEDDOES Lines to B.W. Proctor
… fat men can’t write sonnets
T. L. BEDDOES The Bride’s Tragedy l.ii.
Contents
Imagined Scenes
from
AMONG OTHER THINGS:
The Quest for Thomas Lovell Beddoes
by Sam Johnson MA, PhD (first draft)
Clifton, Glos. June 1808
‘That’s it, man. Hold her head, hold her head. For God’s sake, you behind, get your shoulder into it. Come, girl. Come, girl.’
The shouter of these instructions, a burly man of about fifty years with a close-cropped head and a face made to command, stands halfway up a broad sweeping staircase. A few stairs below him a rustic, his naturally ruddy complexion even more deeply incarnadined by exertion, is leaning backwards like the anchor in a tug-o’-war, pulling with all his strength on a rope whose lower end is tied round the neck of a large brown cow.
Behind the beast a nervous-looking footman is making encouraging fluttering gestures with his hands. From the marble-floored hallway below a housekeeper