“To call my stockbroker.” I continued before they could ask for a definition, “You don’t get many strangers through here, do you?”
“Oh, many there are. Why, only at Midsummer’s, an autocar filled with English came here and stopped, and drank a glass at Maddie’s mam’s.”
“Just coming through don’t count,” I asserted loftily. “I mean comin’ in and eatin’ and drinkin’ here and stoppin’ for a time. Don’t get many of them, do you?”
I could see from their faces that they didn’t have any convenient group of strangers to offer me, and sighed internally. Tomorrow, perhaps. Meanwhile—“Well, I’m here, but we’re not stopping long. If you want to run home and tell your people, we’ll have a show for you to watch in an hour. Unless my Da’ finds the beer here too good,” I added. “I tell fortunes too. Run along now.”
The supper was good and plentiful, the take from the fiddling and cards poor. Before dawn the next morning we jingled off down the road.
The next village had telephone wires but few isolated buildings. Neither my small informant nor the pub inhabitants could be gently prodded into revealing any recent influx of strangers. We moved on after midday, not pausing to perform.
Our next choice started out promising. Telephone lines, several widely scattered buildings, and even a response to questions about strangers caused my pulse to quicken. However, by teatime the leads had petered out, and the strangers were two old English ladies who had come to live here six years before.
We had to backtrack to reach the road to the other villages, and as dusk closed in on us I was thoroughly sick of the hard, jolting seat and the imperturbable brown rump ahead of me. We lit the wagon’s side lamps and climbed down with a lantern to lead the horse. I spoke to Holmes in a low voice.
“Could the kidnappers be locals? I know it looks like outsiders, but what if it was just a couple of locals?”
“Who spotted an American senator and thought up a gas gun and letters in The Times on the spur of the moment?” he drawled sarcastically. “Use the wits God gave you, Mary Todd. Locals are almost certainly involved but are not alone.”
We crept wearily into village number four, where for the first time we were not greeted by a company of children. “Too late for the little ones, I suppose,” Holmes grunted, and looked at the small stone pub with loathing.
“What I would give for a decent claret,” he sighed, and went off to do his duty for his king.
I settled the horse, found and heated a tin of beans over the caravan’s tiny fire, and slumped at the minuscule wooden table with the Tarot deck, sourly reading my fortune: The cards gave me the Hanged Man, the enigmatic Fool, and the Tower with its air of utter disaster. Holmes was a long time in the pub, and I was beginning to consider moving over to my bunk, travel-stained clothing and all, when I heard his voice come suddenly loud into what passed for the village’s high street.
“—my fiddle, and I’ll play you a dancin’ tune, the merriest of tunes that ever you’ll hear.” I jerked upright, all thought of sleepiness snatched from me and the beans turning instantly to bricks in my stomach. The caravan’s door flew open and in came me old Da’, several sheets to the wind. He tripped as he negotiated the narrow steps, and fell forward into my lap.
“Ah, me own sweet girlie,” he continued loudly, struggling to right himself. “Have you seen what I done with the fiddle?” He reached past me to retrieve it from the shelf and whispered fiercely in my ear. “On your toes, Russell: a two-storey white house half a mile north, plane tree in front and another at the back. Hired in late June, five men living there, perhaps a sixth coming and going. Curse it!” he bellowed, “I told you to fix the bloody string,” and continued as he bent over the instrument, “I’ll make a distraction at the front of the house in fifty minutes. You make your way—carefully, mind you—around to the back and see what you can without getting too close. Black your skin and take your revolver, but use it only to save your life. Watch for a guard, or dogs. If you’re seen, that’s the end of it. Can you do it?”
“Yes, I think so, but—”
“Me sweet Mary,” he bawled drunkenly in my ear, “you’re all tired out, ain’t you? Off t’bed wi’ you naow, don’t wait up for me.”
“But Da’, some supper—”
“Nah, Mary, wouldn’t want to be spoiling all this lovely beer with food, would I? Off to dreamland now, Mary,” and he slammed heavily at the door. His fiddle skittered into life and, heart-pounding and hands fumbling, I made myself ready: trousers pulled on beneath my dark skirts, a length of brown silk rope around my waist, tiny binoculars, a pencil-sized torch. The gun. A smear of black from the dirty lamp-glass onto my face and hands. A final glance around before shutting down the lamps, and the rag doll caught my eye, slumped disconsolately on the shelf. On sudden impulse—for luck?—I pushed her into a pocket and slipped out silently into the shadows, away from the pub, to make my way down to the big square house that sat well off the road, the one with no neighbours.
I crept up the road with infinite care but met no one and was soon squatting down among some bushes across from the house, studying it through my binoculars. The rooms on the ground floor were lit behind thin but effective curtains, and other than the voices coming from, I thought, the corner room on the far side, there was no way of knowing what the house concealed. Upstairs the front was dark.
After ten minutes the only sign of life had been a tall man crossing the room in front of the lamp, and coming back again a minute later. There were no indications of outside watchmen or dogs, and I continued up the road, scuttled across at a crouch, and worked my way back to a ramshackle outhouse, which smelt of coal and paraffin. The house’s thin curtains allowed lamplight to escape so that the ground around the house was illuminated for night-adapted eyes; ten more minutes in that spot, and nothing moved, other than a fitful breeze.
I fell back from the outhouse and picked my painstaking way through an overgrown vegetable garden, over a fence in need of mending, behind a second outhouse (this one smelling faintly of petrol) and its attached chicken coop, under the branches of a small orchard where the plums rotted underfoot, and up to a third shed whose diminutive size and location would have declared its function even if its aroma had not. It also gave me a full view of the back of the house and its yard.
There was a light on in a room upstairs. From the arrangement of windows I decided there were probably two rooms on this side, with perhaps a small windowless lumber-room between them, and it was the room on the right, away from the tree, that was lit. To my distinct pleasure the house’s general decrepitude came to a climax in the curtains of this room, which were either torn or simply not adequately closed, because a shaft of yellow lamplight fell across the sill. If I could get high enough I might see into that room, and I very much wanted to know what lay inside.
I looked around. Somewhere there was sure to be a hill, but in the darkness all I could tell was that it did not tower up immediately behind the house. I looked speculatively at the building beside me. It might give enough height, and the slates looked strong enough to hold my weight. I glanced around for something to step up on, to lessen the scrabbling noises, remembered a discarded bucket among the weeds in the orchard, and went to retrieve it. The bottom had a hole in it, but the sides were sound, and upturned with a board across it the makeshift step enabled me to reach the privy’s ridge. I gained the tiny roof and had just begun to congratulate myself on the minimum of noise I had made when the back door was flung open and a very large man with a terrifying bright lamp in his hand was revealed on the steps.
Holmes’ training held. The mad urge to leap off and dash into the covering darkness washed through me, leaving little more than a set of absolutely rigid muscles and a desire to mould myself into the cracks of the roof slates, but before the man was halfway across the yard my mind had notified me that although he was coming towards me, he had nothing in his other hand, and nothing on his mind other than a visit to the r
oom beneath me. I clung there in an agony of trepidation lest the slates creak, mixed with an almost unconquerable urge to hilarity, but when he finally took himself back inside the house (Seven minutes had passed, an eternity!), the amusement faded and left me feeling queasy.
Two other things came to me, slowly. The room he came from had been the kitchen, and, much more important, there had been no reaction to his presence in the yard. Nor, I decided, had he expected there to be one. Therefore, no dog, no guard.
Probably.
The sky was lightening with the moonrise, and as I stood slowly upright I felt as exposed as an elephant on a cricket pitch, and all for naught: The angle was wrong. All my binoculars showed me was the top of the door frame on the other side of the room. I let myself silently off the building, carried the bucket and board back to their resting places, and stood looking at the window, thinking.
Without a guard, there was nothing to keep me from that tree behind the house. From its thick, leafy, concealing, and comparatively safe branches I should have a choice of viewpoints into that lighted room, and although the ground around it and the first dozen feet of trunk were exposed, it was certainly safer than stumbling about the gravel yard waiting for someone else to come outside and step on me.
However, I had first to rid myself of encumbrances. Just beyond the drive a low shape rose, which proved to be a poorly maintained privet hedge, vastly overgrown but easily breached. I deposited my boots and the several skirts behind it, tucked the doll into the back waistband of my trousers and thrust the other belongings into various pockets, and crept across the drive to the wall of the house. Just under eight minutes until Holmes appeared with his diversion, and I spent two of them with my ear against the kitchen window before I was satisfied that all the activity—a card game, by the sound of it—was in the opposite end of the house.
The tree’s first branches were too far overhead to jump for, and a straight climb would make too much noise. I unwound the rope from my waist (Always carry a length of rope; it’s the most useful thing in the world.) and tossed it at a branch that faced away from the house. On the second try it looped over, and I walked it up the trunk. The crackles and creaks this made sounded like shouts in the night, but when no reaction came I gathered the rope up onto the branch and monkeyed myself up the tree for a view through the curtain.
And the fates were with me, because she was there.
At first all I could see was a bed and rumpled bedclothes, and my heart sank, but when I worked my way out to the precarious end of the limb and looked again I saw against the pillow a small head with auburn brown hair gathered into a rough plait. Jessica Simpson’s hair, Jessica Simpson’s face.
Half of my task was fulfilled: We now knew she was here. The other half, vastly the more important, was to explore ways to get her out. Unfortunately, there was no nice thick branch leading directly to her window, a fact that even my constipated friend could not have overlooked in the choice of the prisoner’s room. However, the tree was much closer to the other room, the dark one. (There came a sudden and unexpected sound from the direction of the town—men’s voices raised in a song, a first inkling of the kind of diversion Holmes had in mind.) I clambered over to the dark side and saw that one of the branches did indeed nearly brush the house. Suggestive. But once to the house, I considered, what then? There was no convenient ledge connecting the two windows; the guttering was too far overhead; and I did not much care for the vision of Holmes dangling like a spider from a rope wrapped around the chimney pots. No, it would probably mean a surreptitious entrance through the dark room.
Five men, and the possibility of a sixth. Four were playing cards—four voices, I corrected myself, and one wild card for certain. Downstairs? Or in with the child? Or, in the dark room? It hardly mattered tonight, but tomorrow, when we returned—
It was then that the idea hit me, a mad flash of derring-do that I immediately squelched, shocked at myself. This isn’t a game, Russell, I told myself in disgust. Do what you were told, then go back to the caravan.
But the thought had lodged itself like a thorn, and I could not help picking at it while I squatted motionless and attentive in the tree, my eyes open and my mind worrying at this crazy thought, examining it, turning it around, pushing it away, finding it persistent and unwilling to be discarded.
What if I did not wait for Holmes to effect the rescue tomorrow?
Madness. To take a child’s life into my own absurdly inexperienced hands—I shook my head as if to discourage an irritating fly and settled myself more firmly into my post of observer. My assigned post. My vital and agreed-to post. The chorus of voices was growing, soaring in almost-audible song, outside the village now and starting up the road. In a minute now the men inside would hear…I shifted, to keep a closer eye on the lit room.
In a moment the niggling idea had returned, stronger, surer. How else could we do it, if not through the dark window with a distraction out in front? There was no point in a direct show of force; a hostage with a gun to her head is even more a hostage than when in a quiet room in bed. And how could Holmes hope to reach her but across these narrow branches? Holmes, approaching sixty and becoming just the least bit hesitant about risking his bones, would have to balance his greater weight and height on the same branch—and in the few days left us before the deadline (How terribly appropriate that word sounded.), while the five men inside were becoming increasingly wrought up, to say nothing of being on their guards for a second unusual happenstance such as the one that was fast approaching on the road.
Madness. Lunacy. I couldn’t possibly carry it off, couldn’t even carry her off, out the window, across the branch, down the tree and away, not if she fought me, which she would. Even a “self-contained, intelligent” child might well panic at being snatched from her bed by a strange woman with lampblack smeared on her face and carried off a second time into the night.
My mind veered wildly between obedient caution and reckless insanity, between a sensible preparation for future action and the hard knowledge that we might never have the chance to use it, between carrying out Holmes’ direct orders and seizing what even common sense told me might be the only chance offered us, and I wished to God that Holmes might miraculously appear beneath my feet and take the choice from me.
They were Christmas carols, I decided with the portion of my mind that was not paralysed with indecision. Somehow me Da’ had raised a drunken mob in this tiny place, had summoned thick voices in song, and was driving them down the lane with the goad of his mad fiddle—a magnificent Welsh chorus, singing Christmas carols, in English, in an infinitesimal Welsh village, on a warm August night. Suddenly nothing seemed impossible, and as if the thought had loosed the house from stasis there was movement within.
A shadow moved across the slice of yellow light before me. I hung precariously out and was rewarded by the sight of a man’s back. He was in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat, with a dark knitted cap that covered his head down to his wide shoulders, and he was standing at the open door next to the head of Jessica’s bed. He leant out into the hallway, paused (Was that a man’s voice, shouting something unintelligible above the growing tumult?), opened the door wider, and went through it.
Had it not been for the vision of the broad back going through the door, I should never have done it, never have moved towards the dark window. Even as I moved, even as I looped the silk rope over an overhead branch with muscles and mind freed so blessedly (insanely!) from indecision, a small part still offered to be sensible, made a bargain with the fates that were controlling this night that, if the window did not unlatch, I should withdraw in an instant.
A thump and a series of raucous guffaws reached my ears above the song, and I stepped with one foot from the branch to the window, balanced in a triangle of rope, branch, and sill, took out my pocket knife and (A-here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green…) fumbled open its thinnest blade, slid it up between the window frames, and in a brief eternity felt more tha
n heard the latch snick open. I waited, but there was no reaction from within, so I reached down (A-here we come a-wand’ring so fair to be seen…) and eased the lower window up with barely a squeak. I stepped down onto the bare floorboards, taut for attack, but none came; the room was empty, and I let go a deep and shaky breath and moved quickly across to (Love and joy come to you…) the door. The hallway and stairs were empty, voices raised downstairs both inside and out, the door to the corner room slightly ajar. I pulled the doll from the waistband of my trousers and stepped into the horribly bright hallway.
(And to you your Wassail, too, and God bless…)
“Jessica!” I whispered. “Don’t be frightened. There’s someone here to see you.” I held the doll in front of me, pushed the door open, and looked down into a very serious six-year-old face. Jessica pushed herself slowly up onto her elbows, studying my black-smeared but evidently unthreatening visage, and waited.
“Jessie, your mama and papa sent me to bring you home. We have to go right now, or those men will stop us.”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
Oh God, I thought, what now?
“Why not?”
Wordlessly she sat up and pulled the covers back from her foot, revealing a metal cuff and a chain fastened to the leg of the bed.
“I tried to get away, so they put this on me.”
The riot outside was coming to a climax, with a crash and the tinkle of breaking glass, followed by furious shouts and a rush of drunken laughter. In an instant they would remember, and we had to be away before then. I had to risk a noise.
“Just a minute, honey. Here, you take the doll.”
Her arms went tightly around the beloved object, and I knelt to examine the chain. It was new and strong, fastened at one end to her ankle cuff—which was padded, I was glad to see—by a sturdy padlock, and at the other end to the leg of the bed, held by a bolt the size of my little finger, which seemed to have been welded to its nut. The bed was a cheap one, but the wooden leg was a good three inches thick, glued and fitted into place. I could see only one option, given the time, and could only hope that I didn’t break every bone in my foot.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 14