The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  ‘Hold your tongue, man!’ Ivor Bolderwood spoke with a decision unexpected in one whose eyes gleamed so vaguely from behind their expanses of glass. ‘Now, Gracie, why–’ But here the young man stopped, his glance having fallen for the first time upon another of the intruders. ‘Billy, weren’t you told to be off to the station long ago?’

  ‘And indeed I was, Mr Ivor.’ The man addressed took a step forward, acknowledging the presence of his employer as he did so by pulling at a forelock. ‘And I’m after driving back this moment with the terrible news of the great disaster to the train. And sorry I am that it’s without the poor young gentleman that I’ve returned here.’

  ‘A disaster to the train!’ The elder Mr Bolderwood paled. ‘You don’t mean the train on which my nephew and his tutor were–’

  ‘Indeed he does, sir.’ The woman called Gracie spoke again. ‘A great and terrible accident in the tunnel it has been, and the mangled bodies and severed limbs strewn far under the wide heaven, and the cries of those in their agony like to be heard from here to Sligo.’

  ‘But this is too ghastly to believe.’ Mr Bolderwood looked in consternation at his son, whose perturbation was equal to his own. ‘And is the poor boy–’

  ‘The poor boy, indeed!’ Denis was no longer to be restrained. ‘The fine lad that was to be coming amongst us, triumphant and brave, to be no more than one of a dark line of corpses crying shame upon the railways of Ireland!’

  ‘And the learned man that was with him to be less even than that, by far and far.’ Gracie had risen and raised imprecating hands against the heavens. ‘For no morsel of him have they pieced to morsel in all that dolorous field.’

  ‘Not with all the labour of all the doctors that be there now with all their fair and shining instruments,’ said Denis with conviction. ‘But thanks be to God we can do better for the boy. For with a stitch here, and maybe some hay or tow thrust in there, he can be laid neat and decent in his coffin and it shipped at no great expense to his sorrowing dad in London. And no trouble on the way except it may be a bit rummaged, reverently undertaken, in the Customs sheds of Dublin.’

  At this Mr Bolderwood produced a large coloured handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘Am I to understand,’ he cried, ‘that my nephew is dead?’

  Billy, who was chiefly addressed, made a motion with his head which contrived to be at once vigorous and completely ambiguous. ‘As soon,’ he began, ‘as ever the train got into the station–’

  ‘Got into the station?’ It was Ivor Bolderwood who exclaimed this time. ‘And how the deuce could the train get into the station when it had had a terrible accident in the tunnel?’

  ‘Indeed and why should it not?’ Billy was innocently surprised. ‘The great disaster was safely over, praise God, and what should the train do but arrive where it was intended?’

  ‘It’s enough to drive a man out of his senses!’ Mr Bolderwood’s voice rose in despair. ‘Haven’t you been telling us, you abominable rascal, of mangled bodies and severed limbs and dark lines of corpses and – and doctors and surgeons by the bevy. And now you–’

  ‘But indeed, your honour, there was an ambulance.’ Billy produced this with a good deal of triumph. ‘There’s five or six of them that was on the train to swear to it – although others will yet be denying of it, to be sure, since it was gone it seems almost as soon as come.’

  ‘There was an accident – but not so bad that the train couldn’t continue on its way.’ Mr Bolderwood had advanced and was grasping Billy sternly by the lapel of his coat. ‘And there was an ambulance – but it saw no reason to stay long. Now, what of all the rest of this outrageous nonsense? Was anyone killed? Was anyone injured?’

  ‘Or’ – and Ivor Bolderwood intervened sharply – ‘is anyone missing?’

  Billy threw up admiring hands – thereby dexterously freeing himself from his employer’s grasp. ‘There, now!’ he said. ‘It’s a great intelligence that your honour’s son has, and a great pride that he must be to his father. For there were three strangers at the back of the train, it seems, and they the most sorely wounded of all. Screaming in their agony, they were, and the blood all about them as deep as fish-pools, while the others, as it appeared in the end, were no more than shaken and bruised. And when all that great fear and panic was over it was seen that these three had vanished entirely, and with them the learned man that was your honour’s nephew’s tutor. And this same that I’m after telling you is but another proof that there was an ambulance there surely, for how else could the wounded men have vanished? And the tutor, Christ help him, must have been taken as at death’s door too.’

  ‘Then it comes to this.’ Ivor Bolderwood turned to address his father, who, wrathful and bewildered, still confronted Billy. ‘The accident resulted in three strangers and Mr Thewless being injured and taken away in an ambulance. That is bad enough, although not nearly so bad as all this excited chatter suggested. But where is the boy?’

  ‘Exactly so.’ The elder Mr Bolderwood was now trembling with mingled anxiety and irritation. ‘Where is Mr Humphrey, you blackguard? Why haven’t you brought him home? Do you realize how – how important this is?’

  ‘And that we are responsible,’ Ivor added, ‘to his father?’

  ‘There, now!’ said Denis indignantly. ‘And can’t you answer his honour with some mite or drop of reason, Billy Bone, instead of blathering, God help you, over every irrelevant thing?’

  ‘And causing the limbs to drop and the blood to flow,’ cried Gracie, ‘from untold Irish souls, when there was no mischief but to three poor creatures from the North, and maybe to the young lad’s tutor, which is a person of great learning, God be praised, but of small consideration either among Christian folk or gentry?’

  Under this general reprobation, Billy Bone shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. ‘Should I not be sparing his honour’s feelings,’ he demanded of the company at large, ‘and waiting some more seemly time for telling him that his nephew has gone off with a woman in Tannian’s car?’

  ‘Gone off with a woman? Stuff and nonsense!’ The elder Mr Bolderwood threw up his arms in despair. ‘Why should Mr Humphrey do a fantastic thing like that?’

  ‘And why should he do anything else?’ Billy was bewildered. ‘With the tutor that was set at guard over him laid low in an ambulance, and a fine woman in her perfumes and her pearls and her rich and rustling garments waiting for him in Tannian’s great car, and himself a young heretic without fear of priest or purgatory or the blessed St Patrick–’

  ‘Lunacy – utter lunacy!’ Mr Bolderwood’s manner wavered between incredulity and apprehensiveness. ‘Do you ask me to believe that a – a woman of this character should be waiting in the wilds of Killyboffin on the chance that a railway accident might incapacitate my nephew’s tutor?’

  Ivor Bolderwood had strolled to the window and was staring out at the wisp of smoke rising from the hidden trawler. Now he turned back and looked at his father soberly. ‘To me,’ he said, ‘the unlikely touch is Tannian’s car. One would expect the equipage of such an adventuress to match the perfumes and the pearls and the alluring limbs.’

  Mr Bolderwood looked at his son in some surprise. ‘But surely you can’t think–’

  ‘Well, the boy has vanished. And something odd does seem to have happened on the train. I begin to wonder if we quite reckoned with what we might be taking on.’ He glanced round the circle of his father’s retainers. ‘Paxton père,’ he said, ‘n’est-il pas très riche et très célèbre? Peut-être on trame l’enlèvement de l’enfant.’

  The element of play-acting commonly discernible in the elder Mr Bolderwood quite evaporated under this dire hint. He sat down heavily and without the intention of creating an effect. ‘You disturb me,’ he said. ‘You disturb me very much.’

  Ivor’s eyebrows had dipped beneath his glasses in a thoughtful scowl. ‘The tutor – this Mr Thewless – sounded extremely respectable. But, of course, there might have been a second adventuress waiting to nail h
im. She might have lurked in the tunnel. She might have been disguised as a beautiful nurse and laid on with the ambulance.’

  The elder Mr Bolderwood looked momentarily relieved. ‘You ought not to make these jokes,’ he said. ‘I am naturally worried; naturally very worried indeed.’

  ‘If, of course, this Mr Thewless who has travelled with the boy is the genuine Mr Thewless. We can’t really be sure… Ah – that may tell us something!’

  This exclamation was occasioned by the shrill ringing of a telephone bell in a far corner of the room. Ivor Bolderwood made for it, but not before he had ejected his father’s retainers with the gesture of one who drives sheep expertly through a gate. He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘…yes. This is Ivor Bolderwood speaking… No, he hasn’t turned up yet. As a matter of fact, we have become a little anxious. One of the servants says he has gone off with a lady… No, I didn’t say there had been something shady. I said that we are told he has gone off with a lady… Yes, we are certainly going to inquire at once. I hope that you yourself… Dear me… dear me! Yes, indeed. A most alarming experience… Good lord! Extremely careless… Certainly a stiff letter will be the thing. Can we send the car?… I see. Yes, we look forward to it… Yes, we will start a search now… You think it will be all right? I am so glad. It will allay my father’s anxieties… A prank? Quite possibly… Goodbye.’

  Ivor Bolderwood put back the receiver and turned to his father. His eyebrows had risen expressively over the rims of his glasses. ‘Thewless,’ he said. ‘Thewless, as you may have guessed. There really was some sort of accident in the tunnel. He was hit on the head.’

  ‘In the accident?’

  ‘It sounded to me more like after the accident. And then he was put into an ambulance – so there really was an ambulance – and driven away. Apparently it was a children’s ambulance. And when the people in charge of it discovered that he was not a child they more or less dropped him like a hot potato and disappeared.’

  ‘Well I’m damned!’ The elder Mr Bolderwood looked doubtfully at his son. ‘And was he terribly upset when he heard that Humphrey hasn’t turned up?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. He says it must be some boyish prank.’

  ‘Bless me! And does he think being carried off in an ambulance was a boyish prank too?’

  ‘He considers that it was careless – really unpardonably careless. He is going to write a letter about it to the local authorities?’

  ‘It is certainly a sort of thing that must be stopped.’ Cyril Bolderwood frowned. ‘But, my dear Ivor, this is most disturbing – positively sinister, indeed – whatever this fool of a tutor thinks of it. The lad may be in the hands of Lord knows what set of gangsters or professional kidnappers at this very moment. This Thewless must be a confoundedly casual chap.’

  ‘He didn’t give me quite that impression.’ And Ivor Bolderwood stared at the telephone as if that instrument might be capable of throwing light on the matter. ‘He struck me as a man who was almost irrationally determined to deny that the universe holds anything dangerous or surprising.’

  ‘An admirable temperament! I wish I could feel the same.’

  Ivor Bolderwood shook his head. ‘I didn’t feel it was a matter of his temperament. The learned tutor is in some rather abnormal state of mind. His ordinary way of taking things may be quite different.’

  ‘Well, it’s our way of taking things that is the question. What the devil are we to do?’

  ‘Make sure that the excellent Thewless isn’t right, and that the boy’s disappearance isn’t, in one way or another, a mare’s nest. After that – well, we must send a wire to Bernard Paxton and call in the police.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’

  ‘But do Irish rural policemen believe stories of kidnappers and beautiful decoys? I doubt it.’ And Ivor Bolderwood, disregarding his father’s evident perturbation, placidly chuckled. ‘It would be better – yes, decidedly better – to rescue the boy ourselves. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I think I’ll get the police station now.’ Cyril Bolderwood rose with sudden resolution and approached the telephone. ‘They may at least tell us something like the truth about the train… Whatever is that?’

  From somewhere beyond the precincts of Killyboffin Hall there had come a sound as of the ragged firing of small-arms. It drew nearer and presently disclosed itself as being in the nature of a death-rattle from some internal combustion engine.

  ‘Tannian’s car!’ exclaimed Ivor. ‘Perhaps it’s the adventuress come to do a deal with us.’ He strode to the window, threw it open, and leant out. There was a moment’s pause and then his laughter floated back into the room. ‘It’s the lady, sure enough. But she’s fifty, if she’s a day. And she’s brought the boy with her.’

  Cyril Bolderwood produced his handkerchief and once more mopped his brow. ‘Bewildering,’ he said, ‘really bewildering. One doesn’t at all know what to make of it. And – do you know? – there isn’t a single egg in the place.’

  13

  The various anxieties to which Mr Thewless had been subject since accepting the guardianship of Humphrey Paxton had indeed produced very much the effect divined by Ivor Bolderwood over the telephone. He was, he assured himself, a commonplace person who had undertaken commonplace employment. Law, order, and security surrounded him as they had always done, and the only disturbing factor in the situation was the lurid and infectious imagination of his pupil. The affair of the ambulance had certainly been a little out of the way; but this was all the more reason for his being on his guard against treating it as Humphrey would do – as a springboard to some alarming fantasy. Even to write that stiff letter of complaint might be to make too much of the incident. The Irish, after all, were known to be a somewhat erratic people, and the mistake that had been made, although perplexing and vexatious, was not serious. Much more disturbing was the fact that Humphrey, although uninjured in the affair in the tunnel, had made another of his foolish disappearances.

  And Mr Thewless (who had found little difficulty in hiring a car which was now carrying him comfortably towards Killyboffin Hall) remembered with mortification the absurd suspicions he had harboured upon the occasion of Humphrey’s vanishing on the Heysham train. Those suspicions had not even held any coherency among themselves. For instance, there had been that muddled idea that the boy travelling with him was an impostor – an idea upon which he might positively have acted (to the vast detriment of poor Humphrey’s nervous balance) but for that fortunate flash-back to the Velazquez in Sir Bernard Paxton’s library. But now the whole of that bad twenty-four hours was behind him; the life of a country-house in this remote region could scarcely be other than tranquil; and once Humphrey had turned up again a quiet and wholesome routine could be established. Unless, indeed, the house-party assembled by Sir Bernard’s cousins was of an order so large, brilliant or – abominable thought! – rackety as to make quiet and study difficult.

  But for the moment, at least, complete tranquillity was possible. Mr Thewless’ pipe and tobacco had come safely through his adventures; he employed himself with them comfortably now, while he surveyed a countryside which was quite unfamiliar to him. Ahead were occasional glimpses of an ocean the deep blue of which was beginning to take the glitter of the declining sun; and here and there, too, he had seen cliffs and headlands which hinted at a rugged and deeply indented coast. Behind and on either hand stretched gently undulating country, intensely green, divided by stone dykes into fields and paddocks that grew larger and more ill-defined as they climbed from the valleys towards the higher ground. Sparsely threaded on invisible tracks that ran diagonally up and down the hills were the low white cottages which were almost the sole sign of human occupation. Their doors, windows, and chimneys were so disposed as to make them strongly suggestive of sentient beings, crouched with wide eyes and pricked ears to mark the intruder. Twice the car had passed the burnt-out shell of a large mansion amid abandoned gardens, and Mr Thewless’ driver took it upon himself to explain th
at this state of affairs dated from the Troubles, and was the work of persons whom he, the driver, held in the strongest reprobation; whom he regarded, indeed, as possessing a reach of wickedness quite beyond even the common large tether of humanity. Mr Thewless, having a strong persuasion that his informant had himself been a handy man with a firebrand, supposed that this political attitude was not unconnected with the amount of the fare he should presently be expected to pay. Perhaps (speculated Mr Thewless, thoughtful for his employer’s pocket) the Bolderwoods would have some idea of what was reasonable. Two shillings would certainly be an adequate tip.

  At this moment the car swung sharply and the driver announced that they were on the drive to the big house. Mr Thewless would not have guessed it, but looking back at what appeared to be a cart-track he discerned that they had passed the ruins of a small lodge. These were unblackened by flame, and the mere product, it was to be conjectured, of the effluction of time. The car took another bend and the house was before them. Mr Thewless looked at it with some surprise. For here too time seemed to have been let play almost unimpeded. The mansion, although it was not actually ruinous – having recently received, indeed, a sort of token restoration in the form of much amateurishly applied white paint – was not such as Sir Bernard Paxton’s manner would have prepared one to expect. It contrived to suggest the idea of an immemorial and settled possession, of the confident tenure that comes only with generations; but at the same time there appeared to be whole wings and floors that were deserted, so that the life of the whole place conveyed the notion of a gentle peripheral decay. This effect was enhanced by a long balustraded terrace along the line of which were disposed sundry groups of statuary so drastically decayed as to display little more than a tangle of lower limbs, human and brute, from which an anatomist might possibly have reconstructed the various super-incumbent dramas now missing. Behind this somewhat mournful detritus of classical culture a woman was moving about in what appeared to be the motion of feeding hens.