“It’s paths,” Jen announced at last. “Or roads. And an important spot between them, marked with a cross. Perhaps the highwayman buried something special, that he had found or stolen. The two roads meet here at the bottom of the map; it is a map, of course. There’s a line drawn across, where they meet. They make a sort of long V, with the important spot between them.” She looked at the elder girls doubtfully.
“That sounds all right,” Janice agreed. “Go on, detective! You were the one to read my maps, by guessing the steps properly. Do you remember? You set us off on the right track. What about these scribbles?”
“I can’t read them,” Jen said hopelessly. “Where can we find two roads coming together like a V? That’s not the way roads usually behave! And what’s the spot between them? You don’t expect to find a cross marked on the grass, I suppose?”
Try as they would, the girls could find no clue to the map. “We need Joy,” Joan said. “It might suggest something to her. She knows every inch of the countryside.”
“We can’t wait till she comes home!” Jen cried. “Jandy Mac may have gone back to her Alec, and I may be in Yorkshire. I jolly well hope I shall have gone,” she added, her face clouding at the memory of her mother’s news.
“Could we send it to Joy and ask what she thinks?” Janice began.
“We might send a copy, and in the meantime we could go on thinking about it,” Joan suggested.
“I’ll copy it. There isn’t much of it,” Jen said. “I’ll do one exactly like this, and we’ll keep the—what do you call it, Joan?”
“The original.” Joan supplied the word. “Right, Jenny-Wren! You make a careful copy, and I’ll write a letter telling Joy how we found it. I can’t tell her all about Jane and her book, but I’ll say a little. Lavinia, you run along home and copy out your letter to your father. It’s exactly right, but we can’t send that pencil scribble, you know. Copy it in ink. I’ll find you some good notepaper.”
“I’ll put at the end, ‘Miss Joan give me the paper,’ or he won’t understand.”
“Yes, that’s sensible. But say ‘gave me’, Vinny; be careful. Bring the letter to-morrow morning; it can go inside mine. I’ve written to him too. Now, everybody, get to work! I must start on my letter to Joy, for it will need to be a long one.”
“And what is little Jandy to do?” Janice demanded.
“Write to Alec!” There was a united shout from Joan and Jen.
Janice grinned. “I could answer this morning’s letter. I love talking to Alec. See you later, then!”
With a board on her knee, Jen worked carefully at her drawing. Joan, writing at the table, glanced at her occasionally, relieved to see her so much more like herself, and, in spite of the news about her father, so enthralled by this new interest.
Jen looked up suddenly. “Joan-Queen!”
“Yes, Jenny-Wren? Have you discovered something?”
“I don’t believe both these long lines are roads. They’re different.”
Joan came to bend over her. “What do you think they are? You’ve done the copy very carefully.”
“This one isn’t straight. It wanders about just a little. Perhaps it’s a river.”
“That’s an interesting idea.” Joan sat beside her and looked at Vinny’s map closely. “I see what you mean: it’s a wavy line, and the other is straight. A road and a river meeting at a point: it’s quite a different place to look for! Your idea may be important. But where have we a river that meets a road?”
“We haven’t even many rivers. We’ve plenty of roads. I think my idea makes things worse,” Jen said dejectedly.
“It gives Joy something more to think about,” Joan pointed out. “Any hints we can give will help her. Has anything else occurred to you?”
“That shaded square place might be a house or a barn. It’s on the road-line, not the river one.”
“That’s a good thing! The road’s more likely to have a house beside it than the river—if it is a river.”
“If!” Jen groaned. “It’s a puzzle, all right. The road seems to go right through the house—if it is a house! It’s all across the road.”
Joan laughed. “Don’t sound so despairing! You’ve found out quite a lot, just by concentrating on the map while you copied it. I’ll give you another point! If your wavy line is really a river—if it is!—then that thing at the bottom, where the road and river meet, may be a bridge.”
“A stroke through the river-line, where the road crosses it!” Jen cried. “Oh, how clever! I’m sure it’s a bridge!”
“You write down all these ideas for Joy, while I tell her about the book. I haven’t nearly finished yet.” And Joan brought a writing-pad. “Anything we can suggest will be useful to her. I wish we knew what that cross stands for!”
“It’s where he buried something.”
“I think so too—something that would bring Jane luck. But what are we to look for? Suppose we find the road and the river and the bridge, and perhaps a house, we’d like to go on and find the buried treasure. But what are we to look for? We couldn’t dig up yards of field or road!”
“There might be a bush, or a pile of stones, or a post,” Jen pleaded.
“I’m afraid they’d have vanished. It must be a hundred years since Jane wrote her book. If we find all the rest of the map, we’ll see if there’s anything to guide us. But don’t get too keen, Jen! If we do find this place, we couldn’t just go and dig! It would be somebody’s land, you know.”
“But they’d let us search for buried treasure, wouldn’t they?” Jen asked in dismay.
“It would depend whose land it was. Matthew Edwards, at Bell’s Farm, certainly wouldn’t have us digging in his fields.”
“I know he’s an old pig. And why it should be called Bell’s Farm I can’t imagine!”
“We’ve all wondered about that. But no one can tell us.”
“But wouldn’t the highwayman bury his secret in one of his own fields?”
“I don’t know, Jenny-Wren. And I’m not at all sure that Mr. Jaikes would want us digging up his fields or his farmyard. He has nothing to do with Old Miles, the highwayman.”
“If we find the place, I shall go and ask whoever it belongs to, to let us have a try.”
“Then I hope, for your sake, it won’t be Mr. Edwards. You’d better write and tell Joy all these thoughts. I must finish my letter.” And Joan went back to her work.
CHAPTER XIX
UNCLE BONNY’S SECRET
Lavinia came early next morning, a neatly copied letter in her hand.
“Good for you, Vinny! That’s very nicely done,” Joan said. “We’ll post it at once, with my letter to your father, and a letter to Joy about your map.”
Lavinia, glowing with pride and importance, stood rubbing one foot on the other leg in an embarrassed way. “Mrs. Jaikes says as how she hopes my dad will have me. And Uncle Bonny says so too. I come through the Abbey, Miss Joan, and I tells him about the letters. You said as how I could go that way.”
“I did,” Joan agreed. “So Mr. Browning thinks you should go to Canada, does he?”
Lavinia’s foot rubbed up and down harder than ever.
“She’ll spoil her stockings,” Jen said suddenly. “If you must do that, you should have bare legs, Vinny.”
“Mrs. Jaikes won’t let me, Miss Jen. She says ’tain’t proper for a big girl. My Uncle Bonny”—and the cause of Vinny’s shyness was revealed in a sudden rush of words—“he says as how he’d like to go too.”
“What?” Joan and Jen cried together.
“What’s that?” Jandy’s head appeared at her window, just above them; they had received Lavinia on the terrace. “Old Boniface wants to go to Canada?”
Jen’s eyes met Joan’s, their message plain to read. “You’d get rid of him out of the Abbey,” they said.
“Lavinia, what do you mean?” Joan demanded. “Your Uncle Bonny couldn’t want to go to Canada?”
“But he do, Miss Joan. His gir
l’s married out there, and there’s little ’uns what he’s never seen. He’d like to go to her more’n anything in the world. But he knows as how it’s too far for him, at his time of life.”
“Vinny,” Joan said sternly, thrusting aside the entrancing suggestion in Jen’s excited face, “why do you put ‘as how’ into every sentence?”
Lavinia stared at her blankly. “I d’n know no other way to say it, Miss Joan.”
“Well, listen! You said, ‘He knows as how it’s too far for him.’ If you said, ‘He knows it’s too far,’ that would be quite enough and it would be good English. What’s the use of your ‘as how’?”
Lavinia reddened. “I allus says it that way.”
“Then it’s time you stopped. You only complicate—I mean, mess up!—your sentences. Leave out ‘as how’ every time you want to say it. You’ll find things are quite clear without it. It doesn’t help at all.”
“I’ll try, Miss Joan. I suppose as how Uncle Bonny—I mean”—hastily—“I suppose Uncle Bonny couldn’ go to Canady with me? It’s sorter lonely to go all that way alone.”
“You wouldn’t exactly go alone,” Joan comforted her. “If your father can’t come to fetch you—or perhaps one of your brothers—we would take you to the ship, and there would be somebody called a stewardess who would take care of you. Your father would meet you. You wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
“It’d be nice to have Uncle Bonny there.”
“Vinny could take care of Uncle Bonny,” said Janice from above, sitting on her window-sill to listen.
Lavinia glanced up, her face alight. “We’d take care o’ one another. I wish Uncle Bonny could go!”
“She resisted ‘as how’ nobly that time,” Jen said. “I’m sure it was tempting. Vinny, you look very nice this morning! If you go to Canada, I shall give you yards of ribbon, and you must always do your hair properly. Never leave it in a mess again!”
Lavinia’s face glowed. “Nobody never told me I looked nice till you did, Miss Jen.”
“Nobody ever told me,” Jen corrected her. “I think girls should be told when they look nice.”
“Some of them don’t need it,” Janice remarked. “But it won’t hurt Lavinia.”
“Jandy, do come down! Stop being a voice from above,” Joan commanded.
“Could my Uncle Bonny go with me, Miss Joan?” Vinny pleaded. “He wants to see his girl and her little ’uns.”
“I’ll have a talk with Uncle Bonny. We thought he wanted to stay in the Abbey.”
“There was one thing he wanted more than the Abbey,” Jen reminded her. “He was mysterious about it. Don’t you remember? This is it, Joan.”
“We’ll talk to Boniface,” Joan promised. “You go home now, Vinny, and help Mrs. Jaikes with her babies. We’ll see that your letter goes safely; we’ll post it at once. Then you must have patience while we’re waiting for the answer.”
“It’ll be a dreadful long time, I’m feared,” Lavinia said wistfully.
“Three or four weeks, perhaps. The letter has to find your family after it has crossed the sea, and then your father has to write back to us. But we shall hear some day,” Joan said cheerfully.
“Now, Jenny-Wren!” She turned to Jen when Lavinia had gone. “How far can you walk? It’s time you had some exercise. Wouldn’t you like to post the Canadian letter yourself?”
“Yes, rather! I can go as far as the village, I’m sure.”
“If she faints by the way, we’ll ask for Mr. Clarke’s bumpy little car to bring her home,” Janice suggested.
“I’d rather walk,” the invalid asserted. “That little rat-trap would shake me all to bits. But you and Joan could carry me.”
“Don’t you think it!” Janice retorted. “You’re a hefty young woman. You’ll walk home, my dear!”
“We’ll go through the Abbey,” Joan said, as they set out. “It’s time Jen saw the devastated meadow and the remains of our tree.”
“I’d forgotten.” Jen looked sober. “Is it very awful?”
“It isn’t beautiful. But the gate-house is lovely now. You must think of that.”
“I shall think of Ambrose sitting under the tree with Minette and the birds, when it was still very small.”
They saw nothing of Boniface as they went through the Abbey. “Out visiting friends in the village,” Joan said. “We may meet him somewhere.”
Jen stood and looked at the meadow, with the blank space where the big tree should have hung over the gate-house, her face grave. She sighed at last. “I suppose it couldn’t be helped. The stump looks awful! Couldn’t it be cut right down to the ground? Then the long grass would hide it.”
“We’ll think about that. Don’t you like this side of the gate-house, with those lovely buttresses?”
“Yes,” Jen admitted. “It looks awfully fine, but I’d rather have had our tree.”
“You’ve found stories about the tree,” Janice suggested.
Jen sighed again. “We must keep the tree and its stories inside us, that’s all—in our minds, you know. It’s rather like what Ambrose said when he heard Jehane was dead—‘I have her in my heart, and she is mine forever’—isn’t it?”
“A happy thought, Jenny-Wren! Thanks to the stories in your book, the tree will be ours, in our hearts, for ever,” Joan said heartily. “Oh, here comes Boniface! Then we’ll ask him about going to Canada.”
The old man came in by the gate. Joan, sitting on the tree-stump, called to him as she drew Jen down beside her.
Jen hesitated. “Ought we to sit on it?”
“Of course, silly! Sit here by me and rest, before we go on.”
Jen sat silently beside her, looking sober.
“There’s room for three, Jandy Mac. Three girls on one seat!” Joan said cheerfully, determined to have no sentimental grieving for the lost tree. “Mr. Browning, Lavinia says you want to go to Canada, to see your daughter and her children. Would you really have the pluck to face the journey?”
The old man stood playing with the hat he held in his hands. “’Deed, Miss Joan, I knows it’s too much to think of it, at my time o’ life. But my girl, she’s over there, and I haven’t seen her these ten years and more. Two big lasses and a lad she had when she went away, and now the lasses be married and have little ’uns what I’ve never seen.”
“Great-grandchildren!” Joan exclaimed. “You must be proud!”
“Vinny didn’t tell us your grandchildren were married,” Jen cried. “Oh, Boniface, you ought to see them before——” She stopped in dismay.
“Before ’tis too late, little missy. Aye, but it be a long ways to go. I’d feared to face it.”
“It would be quite easy,” Joan assured him, and repeated the plan she had proposed to Lavinia. “We’d take you to the ship and put you on board, and you’d have nothing to do but just wait till you reached Montreal, and your daughter would meet you there and look after you. What about the fare? Would your son help you to find the money?”
“He’d help. I don’t know as he’d do it all. But my girl’s man has done well. Maybe he’d send something,” Boniface began, a great hope dawning in his eyes. “Oh, Miss Joan, if I could see my Annie again!”
“I don’t see the slightest reason why you shouldn’t see her and live with her,” Joan said, her tone briskly encouraging. “I’ve no idea what it would cost, but I know how to find out. I’ll write to people in London, and I’ll tell you what they say. You’d only want single fare; you and Lavinia would stay with your families, once you found them. Ask your son if he’d be willing to help, Boniface.”
“You wouldn’t go alone,” Janice added. “Young Vinny would be company for you. Perhaps one person could meet you both and help you to find your way to your families. But they’d have to arrange that on their side of the Atlantic.”
“You’d look after Lavinia, wouldn’t you, Boniface?” Jen asked eagerly. “It would be wonderful for you both.”
“I aren’t fit to take care o
f a little lass,” Boniface began. “And it do mean a terrible lot of writing letters and making plans. I’d like to go above all things, but I do think it be too much for me.”
“But that’s where we would help,” Joan assured him. “We could write the business letters, if you wrote to your daughter and your son. You’d have to leave the Abbey, Boniface. I thought you wanted to stay here?”
The old man’s face clouded. “I do love the Abbey. But there’s my lass and her girls and the new babbies out there, Miss Joan.”
“And they matter most. I’m sure you’re right,” Joan said heartily. “If you stayed here, you’d always be wishing you could go to them.”
“Yes, Miss Joan. Could I really go, thinks you? It’s a terrible long way.”
“But it’s a very easy journey—just sitting on a ship! Of course you could go.”
“I was feared everybody would laugh and say old ’uns like me should stop to home. But you hasn’t laughed. I’ll away and writ them letters. Maybe I’ll believe it when I hears from Annie that she’s wanting me to come.” And Boniface stumped through the Abbey, an incredulous look of hope in his eyes.
“He doesn’t believe it yet,” Jen observed. “He thinks it’s a dream. I was afraid he’d back out when he said it was a terrible long way. Then you’d have had him in the Abbey for ever, and it would be my fault, because I said he ought to stay here.”
“If he goes, you won’t have your aged and infirm person in the Abbey,” Janice pointed out.
“But the Abbey will have helped the aged to find something better still,” Jen retorted.
“He’ll go,” Joan said. “His daughter will want him, and we’ll encourage him, and I’m sure he’ll face up to it. It will be a great relief to Lavinia.”
“Of course, I really meant that Vinny would take care of Boniface,” Jen explained, as they set out for the village. “But I didn’t think it would be tactful to put it that way. I’m quite sure she will. She’ll buck him up no end.”
“They’ll help one another. It’s a splendid plan. We’ll help them both all we can,” Joan promised.
Schoolgirl Jen at the Abbey Page 11