"Are you coming, then?"
He turned from the window and saw Abby Cable in what looked like proper gear for an Eskimo. He could barely see her face; he could feel the glare, though, like ice struck by light. "What? Coming where? Have you built an igloo?"
There was a silence. Her face was muffled in scarves, shawls, and something feathered on the edges that moved with her breath. But he felt the penetrating stare. "To find the sheep. You said you wanted to."
He had? When he didn't jump from his seat, she said, "Good-bye, then."
Adults lie. That was in the tone, pure and simple, something she was used to.
"I don't know what to wear for this adventure."
Silence. The Eskimo turned. "A coat would help." She left the doorway to which Melrose rushed. "Can't you wait for three minutes?"
She opened the door to the great snow-swamped outside. The dog Stranger sat there with snow on his coat. "Okay," she said, flatly.
As he strived with his Wellingtons he could hear the clock ticking.
22
He felt ridiculous tramping along with a crook in his hand.
"You need it," she had said. "That stick-thing won't do you any good."
It wasn't, he had said, a "stick-thing." It was a nineteenth-century cosher. Finding out it was a weapon had stirred Abby's interest. She'd hefted it, inspected it, asked if police had used it to kill people, and seemed disappointed that that hadn't been the cosher's primary use. But her attention ripened again when he added that it was, of course, possible to strike a mortal blow. Why? he asked her.
The question went unanswered as they'd set off in some northerly direction to the rear of Weavers Hall.
"I don't see why we can't keep to a well-worn path," Melrose noted irritably as they'd been stolidly walking for twenty minutes. What he suspected was the last of civilization had been left back on the Oakworth Road where a red telephone kiosk stood quietly alone. He saw two paths crisscrossing like long dents in the fresh snow. The snow wasn't deep; it was merely forbidding, given this landscape.
Her sigh at the hopelessness of taking along this person untutored in the ways of sheep was rather exaggerated and punctuated with a swipe of the cosher, which she had appropriated, and with which she dealt mortal blows (swish!). "Sheep don't use paths. I expect you don't know nothing about sheep."
Must she begin every comment regarding the possimnty of some small fund of knowledge on his part into a total lack of faith that he had any? I-expect-you-don't this and I-expect-you-don'tthat?
"I certainly do. I know that under the outside coat is an inner one that keeps them warm." Melrose wished he had an inside layer, as he worked the hand holding the crook to keep the circulation going. His fingers felt like ice-packed twigs.
But she trampled on his small bit of sheep-knowledge, saying, "People think they're stupid. They're not. Come up against some stroppy old ewe and you'll see." It was almost a challenge as she pointed the cosher in the direction of a large, black-faced sheep some distance away.
"Is that so?"
Abby did not answer rhetorical questions; clearly she felt there was no reason to replay her statements. He got it; he didn't get it; it made no odds to her. Melrose imagined that whatever information he did manage to get from her would come out dry as cold toast, unlaced with jam. She was certainly not one to embroider like Ethel.
"You never know where Mr. Nelligan's sheep are. They wander off."
"Who's this Mr. Nelligan, anyway?"
In answer, Abby turned and pointed with the cosher in the direction of a hillside that could have been a mile off but was probably closer. In this landscape, judging distances was an art in itself. "That caravan over there."
Melrose shaded his eyes, looking toward the distant hillside where he thought he saw a small structure, smoke curling from its roof. "A caravan with a smokestack?"
"He cut a hole in the roof."
He didn't bother questioning this. "Then why isn't Nelligan out here saving his own sheep?"
"He drinks poteen. Once he had over a hundred sheep got down in a gully. Stranger rounded them up." She shook her head, clearly implying that if it weren't for her dog they'd all be down in a gully.
They plowed on, heading for a broken wall "yonder." It occurred to him that he didn't even know what this egregious errand was for. He stopped. "Where are we going?"
"Wherever Stranger goes," she said, looking up at him. Beneath the circle of the hood her eyes shone out, a dark and fathomless blue.
"We're following the dog?" No reply. "My own dog follows me." This was not technically true: Mindy's residence by the fireplace was seldom interrupted by anything so banal as a "walk." Well, Mindy was old. And so, he felt, was he. Another ten minutes of it and he would grow a beard of hoarfrost. He wrinkled his nose; his nostrils seemed to be glued together from the cold dry air.
The landscape was like the negative of the landscape he had seen last night, standing with Ellen (and where was Ellen?) outside of the Hall. A dead white moon against a black sky, the silvery reservoir beneath. This sky was sickly pale, the clouds low and leaden and the blackened moor beneath the covering of snow, bracken, and heather so dark and withered the ground looked singed, as if they had come upon a moon crater. Melrose was fond of the natural setting of his own house, its woods and lanes; the grand view, the scenic vista. Sometimes, sitting in his comfortable chair before the fire watching Mindy vegetate, he had felt he should jump up, get his binoculars, and rush out and watch birds. A country gentleman of good breeding and lavish means should certainly be more involved with his natural surroundings. Melrose compromised and kept his binoculars on the floor, occasionally picking them up when something flew by the drawing-room window.
"Where are we?" he asked again, his eye searching this waste of snow for some marker, some directional sign. A while back they had crossed a beck (precariously, he thought) whose waters, replenished by yesterday's melting snow, curled over choked roots and around stones.
"Nowhere particular," said Abby.
He stopped, jamming the crook in the snow, and said, "You really mean you don't know, correct?"
She regarded him coolly. "You're not lost."
The dog ran, spewing up snow, toward an old drystone wall.
He felt lost. "I should have brought an ordnance map." He watched her tramp on ahead of him, toward the wall and the dog, brandishing the cosher. For her it was probably a jolly old adventure, some kind of game. It occurred to him he still didn't know precisely what their goal was. "Wait up, for heaven's sakes. What is the object of this communion with the moors?"
"I expect you wouldn't like it if you were in a tomb, buried alive." The blue eyes were looking stormy.
It sounded like one of the Braine woman's inscrutable comments on Hadrian's troops.
She clicked her tongue, and Stranger started a patrol of the wall. Wind had caused the snow to drift, and the dog was nosing slowly along, sniffing. "Here, poke with the crook."
"I take it we're looking for sheep. Good grief, if any were trapped in there they'd be dead."
"No they wouldn't," she said matter-of-factly. "I expect you don't know their breath makes airholes-"
"Oh, be quiet." But he did as he was bid and tried to hold on to his temper. He'd never get anything out of her if he drove her deeper into silence. The crook met with no resistance; what, he wondered, were they to do with these entombed sheep, should they find any? Stranger had reached the end of the wall and turned, panting.
"That's all right, then," she said. "There's another wall yonder."
"So you do know where we are."
"More or less." Slogging along, she held the cosher above her head like a bayonet. There was another wall up there.
Stranger ran alongside of it, raced back, sat down, and at the clicking of her tongue darted through what was apparently a hole in the wall.
They approached it. "Well, we can't get through there, obviously."
"It's a cripple hole," she
said, disregarding his statement. Carefully she lay Melrose's stick near the hole, got down and crept through on her hands and knees.
The last he saw of her was a mittened hand coming back to claim the cosher and whisk it through the hole. Then there was silence.
He looked at the size of the cripple hole, remembered how big the black-faced sheep was, and imagined he could get through it, if he manuevered on his back or his stomach. He called: "I'm much too big for this cripple hole thing."
No response. His voice was borne away by the wind; he heard its distant echo, or thought he did. No sound came from the other side of the wall, not even the bark of the dog. He cupped his hands and let out with a "hallo, hallo." He whistled as if the dog would come at his bidding. Who was he fooling? That dog wouldn't pay attention to Attila the Hun.
He knelt and peered through the cripple hole. No tracks led away from it, of girl or dog. Blast it all, where was she? Except for wind soughing through the stand of evergreens over there to the east, the silence was engulfing, and the clouds appeared lower, the sky chalkier, the curlews circling in ever-narrower patterns, as if they meant to settle soon, like vultures. Oh, for heaven's sakes, it was merely an illusion created by the godforsaken moor.
"I'm heading back!" he shouted irritably as he planted his crook more firmly in the snow. Why should he continue on this senseless venture? He'd got precious little information for his trouble, all of those monosyllabic answers. That bit about the dog Stranger constituted, for Abby Cable, a parliamentary address. Must have been two, three sentences. "Well, good-bye!"
There was no response although he thought she was probably just the other side of the wall, doodling in the snow, drawing rough pictures with his walking stick.
Still. One never knew whom one might meet. He thought of the black-cloaked figure striding across the moor. Furthermore (he rationalized, as he tossed the crook through the hole and lay down on his back, arms outstretched to gain purchase on the stone), they were probably not too far from the Citrine estate.
God. He flattened out, heaved his way through the cripple hole, to which the sheep smell and sheep's wool clung. Then he rose and shook off the snow.
They were directly on the other side of the wall, Stranger working one end, Abby the other. Melrose walked beside the snowdrift to the place where she was poking with the cosher.
"Use your crook," she said.
"You heard me calling. Why didn't you answer?" Irritably, he poked the crook into the drift.
"You said you were going." She shrugged and looked at him, eyes narrowed as if against something heavenly bright or hellishly unsightly. "You're still here, aren't you?"
He resisted the temptation to raise the crook. To hear her talk, one would think she were clairvoyant. What she expected to happen, would.
"I'd sooner talk to the dog. Did you get him as a pup?"
"No."
He sighed, watching Stranger snuffling at the drift of snow. "Well, how'dyou get him?"
"He came by," was her no-frills answer.
The dog was pawing away, sending up fans of snow.
"I should think a border collie smart enough to round up a hundred sheep down in a gully would be missed."
Abby appeared to be giving this some thought. In her flat-as-a-pancake voice she said, "Maybe nobody cared." Then as the dog kept shoveling away, she added, "He's found one."
The highlight of the morning for Melrose was to be pulling and yanking a sheep from what must have been its snow tunnel. The ewe didn't seem the worse for wear as Stranger herded it out of the snow.
"Now, what do we do?"
"We don't do nothing. It does for itself." She turned and tramped up the moor, headed, probably, for the wall in the distance.
Since he was getting nowhere putting questions to her he hoped would elicit answers that might deepen into some conversational foray about her life, about Mrs. Healey, about anything, he decided to be direct, even if the subject was grisly. He supposed the little wall Abby Cable had built between herself and the world was as resistant to grisliness as it was to snowbound animals.
"That's a terrible thing that happened at the Old Silent Inn, isn't it? It must have upset you quite a bit." If it did there was no sign of it. Her small face held to its contour of stony silence just as those distant outcroppings of millstone grit held to the horizon. "Since she's a friend of yours and your aunt's." He tossed that in because he wondered, indeed, if the two women had been friendly.
"I don't think so."
"Don't think what so?"
"She's a friend of Aunt Ann's." She made that little clicking noise with her tongue, and Stranger, who had gone so far he showed only as a dot in snow, turned and ran back.
"Oh? I thought Mrs. Healey came to visit your aunt."
"She came to visit me."
The sheer force of her anger hit him like the wind, one of those winds that "wuthers," that rakes the snow and slants the trees. "Billy and Toby and me, we were best friends."
Then she turned and tried to run but could do no more than lope along, shrouded in her heavy garments.
"A dead lamb," she said, when he'd caught up with her. She stood looking at the small thing, its legs tucked up. For some time she stared down and, then, in her usual businesslike manner, covered it up with snow.
"Look, don't you think we've had enough of death and blight for one morning?"
But she'd already followed the dog down the wall into a wind that had stiffened enough to bend the stand of pines off to the east. What an execrable place; what execrable weather. If Cathy Earnshaw had wanted to be flung out of heaven to get back here, it must be a cold heaven indeed. Melrose looked upward and thought with longing of the public house not far from here, surely. Shading his eye with his hand, he turned from the high moor and looked downward. Was that some pub on the road where cars, tiny in the distance, were parked like beetles? If they weren't always stopping for entombed sheep and pathetic dead lambs they could make it down there in another twenty minutes. Warmth! Light! Hospitality! Yes, the picture he conjured up was the very shape and color of good fellowship: the rubicund, accommodating publican; the hearty regulars round the bar; the dark brew, polished pine, glinting brass, rosy glow of mullioned windows…
Where was she, for God's sakes? The wind sent up coils of snow with a snakelike hiss. He saw her and the dog Stranger way off at the end of the wall and was a little surprised at the relief he felt. He called. No answer.
In the habit by now of following her instructions, he walked toward the two, aimlessly poking the damned crook into banked-up snow, wishing almost he could jab some sheep where it really hurt, thinking Aha! when it finally met with resistance. He hunkered down, rather proud of himself, and started shoveling the snow off with hands that he was sure were frostbitten beyond saving. He uncovered a patch of dirty pink snow and black sleeve. He rose very quickly.
The sleeve was frozen stiff, the fingers of the hand jutting out curled as if the hand had tried to gain purchase on something. Life, perhaps. He stood there blinking, staring down at the frozen hand much as Abby had looked at the pathetic body of the lamb.
Hardly aware of what he was doing, he looked for the motorcycle, as if he might find it, black and shining, leaning against the drystone wall.
He hadn't seen Ellen; no one had seen Ellen since she had vanished last night down the drive against the backdrop of dark sky and silver reservoir…
It was an image that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life. Furiously, he swept away snow from the arm and the face.
Ann Denholme's eyes were open, the sockets partly filled with snow. The face looked heavenward, the dark hair he could see gray with frost, and spiky, looking almost like hair that had whitened overnight from some dreadful shock. Her coat was stiff as ice, but when he lifted her arm slightly, the cold wrist was limp.
Melrose looked off to his right, saw that Abby and Stranger were slowly making their way along the other part of the wall, and started c
overing the body.
The snow was mucked about, but he thought or hoped the wind would hide both his handiwork and the blood scent. He could hardly have the poor child (for now he so thought of her) discovering the body of her aunt.
As they neared him, Stranger's head lowered to the bank, sniffing, sniffing. Melrose pretended to slip and fell down across the body. Perhaps his own scent would cover hers.
Stranger, he was sure, could smell death.
But although the dog seemed interested in pawing about the place where Melrose sat, Melrose gave him a few rough pats and tried to turn him away. Stranger was not about to be turned.
Abby tilted her head and then shook it slowly, giving the Clumsy One a look of utter disgust, whether at his falling over or at his idiot attempt to make her dog respond to ordinary commands, he couldn't say. Abby looked at Stranger, made some tiny sound in her mouth, and the dog froze in position.
Both of them stood there within two feet of Ann Denholme's snowy grave, locked in place like players in that old childhood game of Statues.
How in the devil was he going to get them out of here? Not only that, but get either to the inn or the telephone kiosk back there on the Oakworth Road? He wondered if this was the way she looked at that lazy shepherd, Mr. Nelligan.
Melrose got to his feet and played for time by arranging his overcoat and shoving his (gangrened, he was sure) fingers through his stiffened hair. All the while he was rehearsing and rejecting various ruses. Finally he said, "This is too much for me; we must return to the Hall." How pompous he sounded.
Not that it made any difference. Abby stood with her crook in one hand and his cosher in the other, both plunged into the snow like crutches. The damned dog was going to hypnotize him with that eye of his. Melrose felt slightly light-headed.
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