Kate could not help smiling at poor King Charles, that peripatetic monarch, under the patronage of whose shade so many inns, old manors and oak trees flourish!
“I have been working on the Veault for Mr. Hufton the builder, getting it ready for the London children that is coming there, so I knows what I am telling you about, young lady. There is some grand old panelled rooms there, if you likes panelled rooms, and most London ladies does, I has noticed. There is a spit, too, in the kitchen, and some of the ceilings has their beams and joists showing, and there is a front staircase that has carved newel-posts and a back staircase that is like a corkscrew,” said Gwyn Lupton, who was evidently a pretty good judge of the taste of lady fanciers of house property. He added: “And now there is four baths, no less, and lavatories galorum.”
“When will the children be coming, Mr. Lupton, have you heard?” asked Mrs. Howells, shaking the cloves out of a large tin on to the scales.
“Pretty soon, I expect, Mrs. Howells. The young lady from the Abbey Farm was at the Veault the day before yesterday to fix up with Mrs. Morrison about supplying the milk for the children.”
“That will be your Land Army friend, Miss Mayhew!”
“Oh, indeed, young lady, so the young lady from the Abbey Farm is a friend of yours?” said Gwyn Lupton with melodious interest. “Well, Llanhalo Abbey is an old ancient place, too, but there is not so much to see there as there is at the Veault, and what you see you has to pay sixpence for.” Mr. Lupton seemed firmly convinced that old houses were Kate’s chief interest in life. As a carpenter, reflected Kate, he probably had to listen to a good deal of feminine gush about oak beams and such objects. He pocketed the screw of cloves and picked two pennies out of his little black purse.
“Gideon Atkins isn’t popular, is he?” commented Kate, amused.
The bard, planking down his two pennies, flashed his remote and haughty glance at her.
“Good opinions cannot be bought with gold, it is true, but bad opinions is the reward of the miser,” he observed. “There is men in this world thinks so much of money they doesn’t know the value of anything, and Gideon Atkins is such a man. He is a man who would die to save a doctor’s bill, if it were not for the funeral expenses that would follow.”
Kate wondered whether Aminta, who was a detached and somewhat unobservant girl, was aware that her employer’s funeral formed one of the more frequent, and more cheerful, topics of local conversation. Gwyn Lupton’s haughty and poetic features wore quite a rapt expression.
“Well, Mrs. Howells, well, young lady, I must take my leave of you, for my wife is suffering great agonies, poor woman, and I must not be lingering on my way to her more than is reasonable. Do not forget, young lady, when you are at Llanhalo, seeing your friend, to go to the Veault and ask Mr. Morrison to show you Gwyn Lupton’s piece of money. Good-day to you, Mrs. Howells, I would not be worrying if I was you about Miss Gilliam’s tongue. There is other people has tongues besides Miss Gilliam, and could use them if they liked.”
And with this dark observation Gwyn Lupton departed, bumping out with his fist and sticking on the back of his head an ancient felt hat that he had been carrying flattened under his arm.
“If words could charm away the tooth-ache, Gwyn Lupton’s wife would not be sending for cloves!” observed Mrs. Howells with a smile.
“What did he mean by that last bit?” Kate inquired, taking a seat by the counter and studying the selection of cigarettes that shared a little glass case with some dummy packets of chocolate.
“Well, I dare say as being a carpenter and working a lot in people s houses, Gwyn Lupton gets to know things about the people he works for as they wouldn’t always like to have spread about,” explained Mrs. Howells.
Kate smiled. No doubt a village carpenter did possess grand opportunities for inspecting the skeletons in his neighbour’s cupboards before putting the doors right!
“That was what he meant, I expect. There isn’t many houses about here as Gwyn Lupton hasn’t done repairs in, one time and another. Well, I must be getting on with my polishing.”
“Can you remember, Mrs. Howells, Sidney ever saying anything about making a net?”
“A net!” echoed Mrs. Howells, pausing with the flap of the counter held up in her hand. “No, I don’t remember ever he said anything about such a thing. What kind of net?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve just been to the County Library. And I asked the woman there if she could remember anything Sidney Brentwood did or said when he went to the library to take that book out—you know, the one you showed me in his bedroom. And she said that he had asked her whether there was a book in the library about making nets.”
“Net!”
“Yes. Apparently he didn’t go into any details, and she didn’t ask for them. She just said that ‘Things for a Boy to Do’ would be the only book in the library that might have a chapter on net-making, and he at once took it out and went off with it.”
“Nets!” echoed Mr Howells again, letting her counter fall and shaking her head in a mystified manner. “No, I cannot recollect that Sidney ever said anything at all about nets. Would it be nets for rabbiting, I wonder, or—”
“I don’t know. It seems he just wanted to know how to make a net. It’s queer, isn’t it, Mrs. Howells? What could he have wanted a net for? What are nets used for?”
“Well, for snaring—they uses them sometimes rabbiting, and for keeping haystacks down. And for putting over fruit. But if Sidney had wanted to go rabbit-snaring he could have borrowed a net, there’s plenty about!”
“He may not have wanted a net, I suppose. He may have just wanted for some reason to know how to make one,” said Kate, though from what she had heard of Sidney Brentwood his interests were more likely to be practical than theoretical.
A little quiver passed over Mrs. Howells’ broad rosy face. “If that was all he wanted, Corney could have showed him how to do netting! But boys is funny, they will not say what is mostly in their hearts, they gives themselves and everyone else a lot of trouble sooner than speak out, they is like that, boys!”
Mrs. Howells departed to her polishing in the already brightly polished kitchen, and Kate sat a moment or two in the shop, reflecting on these last remarks. If Sidney had wanted to learn netting sufficiently to look for a book on the subject in the library, and yet had not mentioned his desire to Mr. and Mrs. Howells, it seemed probable that his net-making was connected with something that he wanted to keep a secret. Nets! thought Kate, bird-nets, fish-nets, butterfly-nets, camouflage-nets, nets for rabbiting, nets for snares—
There was an echo here of what Kate had been thinking as she toiled home on her bicycle. Snares were dangerous—for the snared creature. And sometimes a hunter was caught with his own snare, and the danger was his. Was there a connection between Sidney’s interest in nets and his departure? Had he already made his net secretly before he went? Kate picked up her oilskin coat and went upstairs to her bedroom. Taking up “Things for a Boy to Do,” she was about to turn to the index when she found it was unnecessary. The book fell open at page 105, Netting. The page had that peculiarly fingered and dingy appearance reading matter acquires when the young idea has been poring over it.
“For Netting,” read Kate, “a netting needle and a spool are needed—”
And, Kate supposed, quite a lot of string. If Sidney had been secretly practising net-making during the month before he went—perhaps during those fight evenings when Mrs. Howells had thought him touring the countryside on his bicycle—he must have acquired his materials from somewhere. No doubt it was possible to buy twine and netting needles at Llanfyn, which was the nearest market-town. But, if Sidney had bought his materials there, the police would surely have discovered it and questioned Mrs. Howells about the transaction?
Or Sidney might have got his materials privately, as a gift, or loan. But if so, why had the giver kept the matter so quiet that Mrs. Howells had not heard of it? Was the giver involved in whatever danger h
ad overtaken Sidney? Did he even know —too well, perhaps—what had happened to the boy?
Kate, standing there in the little bedroom with the boy’s book in her hands, became aware that she was casting her own nets a bit wide. They were catching at all kinds of distant, sinister possibilities which she was quite unable to draw in and examine. For the present, she had better attend to collecting facts, rather than to casting about for possibilities. She thought a bicycle-ride would clear her head, and went downstairs to raise the saddle of Mrs. Evan’s bicycle a couple of inches, and to tell Mrs. Howells that she was going over to Llanhalo and would not be back till evening.
Chapter Six
Kate’s cycle-ride took her downhill and up again on a road that skirted along the lower slopes of Rhosbach, on whose far upper slopes the distant sheep seemed to crawl like lice. Below her, to her left, when she could glimpse the landscape through the tall hedges and the woods that clung here and there around the base of the hills, lay wide, rolling tracts of farmland and handsome old magpie houses showing tantalisingly here and there behind the yew trees which protected them from the winds.
Occasionally a farmer’s battered motor car, or a flock of sheep with drover and collie, passed her on the road. And once a gipsy’s caravan went by, with two rough ponies tied on behind the vans, and a couple of half-grown boys walking alongside.
As they passed her, Kate thought of Sidney, and even turned her head, as if hoping to see, sitting in the back doorway of the lumbering vehicle, a fair-skinned, fair-haired boy. But the person who sat on the step nursing a baby and smoking a cigarette was an old wrinkled woman, anything but fair-skinned.
The afternoon was fine, with a tattered blue and white sky and a lovely shifting light upon gold-turning trees and gleaming, browning grasses. The road crossed the valley, and then went uphill once more, and then down and up again along the lower slopes of the spurred hills until she caught sight, on the bank below her, of a rather ruinous-looking small church or chapel, a square stone house and a great many barns huddled round it, and decided that she had better get off and take a look at her map.
However, there was a man engaged in slashing at the hedge with a long-handled sharp-edged tool not unlike a Cromwellian halberd, and since Kate always preferred making verbal inquiries to reading a map, she pedalled on a few yards and stopped beside him.
“Please can you tell me if Llanhalo Abbey is far from here?”
The man, who was a small, tubby, elderly man with a prevailing sandy-greyness of hue about him, paused in his onslaught on the brambles long enough to shake his head. In so doing he shook crooked his steel-rimmed spectacles, and had to waste another valuable second in adjusting them. While he did this with one hand, he made a motion with his pruning hook straight down the track to the ruined church on the bank below.
“Down there?” asked Kate.
The man nodded. Kate was surprised at his taciturnity, and as is usual with humanity when it comes across true economy in words, she proceeded to redress the balance by wasting a good many words herself.
“Mr. Atkin’s Farm, I mean—Llanhalo Abbey Farm?”
The man nodded silently, and laying hold of a great snake of blackberry with his thickly gloved hand began to haul it relentlessly on to the road, which was already littered with thorny clippings enough to puncture a fleet of bicycles.
“Perhaps you work there,” suggested Kate, “and if so, perhaps you can tell me whereabouts I’ll be likely to find Miss Hughes?”
Jerking his long whip of bramble free, the man paused as if he were considering whether it were possible to answer this question without articulating. He looked at Kate thoughtfully from the sharp little grey eyes behind his still somewhat crooked spectacles. He had shaved more recently than Gwyn Lupton, but not very recently, and this chiefly accounted, Kate saw, for the greyish bloom that overlay the uniform brown of his roundish, heavy-chinned face. He transferred his pruning-hook from his right hand to his left, and lifted his ancient tweed hat with his right to scratch his head, as if he might thus become inspired with a method of answering Kate’s question in silence. It was no use. He had to open the tight-closed trap of his lips and let some precious words out.
“In byre yonder.”
“Straight down this track?”
“Aye.”
“Is Mr. Atkins about anywhere?” pursued Kate, for she did not intend to miss a chance of seeing this celebrity while she was on the spot.
“Aye.”
“I suppose that’s the farmhouse, that square stone place beyond the chapel?”
“Aye.”
“Thank you so much. It’s a grand afternoon, isn’t it?”
“Aye.”
“I suppose you know that half the bicycles that come along here will get their tyres punctured on these bits and pieces of yours?” said Kate, with amiable remonstrance, as she wheeled her machine aside on to the farm road.
“Aye.”
A little piqued, Kate said:
“It’s all the same to you if they do, I suppose, eh?”
“Aye.”
“Oh, do say something different!” cried Kate, half amused, half exasperated, and waited a second to see if he would. But he became a sphinx again, and she cycled cautiously down the rutty lane, smiling to herself, to look for the byre which contained Aminta.
She felt extraordinarily pleased to be going to see old Aminta again. Before the war, Aminta had worked as secretary to a firm of photographers, an occupation which she had arranged to desert for the Women’s Land Army almost before the Women’s Land Army had come into being. Aminta was never happier than when in the company of dumb animals of one kind or another, the larger the better. And now, Kate imagined, nothing would ever lure her from her work among the cows—or nothing but the chance of a job in a circus, with elephants, or in a Zoo, with camels.
The chapel Kate was approaching was a curious neglected building, and Kate scarcely thought it could still be in use for religious services. A great pile of faggots stood just outside it, and a harrow was lying close up to the lee of its ancient wall. There was no glass in the fine traceries of the window at the gable-end, and the delicate stonework was weatherbeaten and damaged. Obviously, the walls were of great antiquity. But the roof, or most of it, was of corrugated iron, like any little non-conformist chapel newly put up to house a remote, poor congregation. The track ran round it, a very secular-looking approach, scratched up by hens and waddled across by ducks, and the farmyard pond lay near. A large square stone-built house of a strictly utilitarian Victorian type stood farther along the trackway behind a little orchard of scraggy apple trees. A perfect huddle of lean-to roofs and ancient lichen-covered barns and sheds sprawled around the house and cuddled intimately up against it, so that it preserved its smug square look of nineteenth century respectability with some difficulty, seeming to apologise, with raised stone eyebrows under its penthouse roof, for the odd company it kept.
Which of these manifold buildings was the byre which contained Aminta, Kate could not guess. She got off her bicycle. A wall-eyed collie came suspiciously up to her, his hackles rising. She propped her bicycle against the orchard fence, and was contemplating going up to the house’s very prim front door when there came to her ears, from a long low stone roofed building beyond a very muddy yard that lay behind the chapel, the peculiar low-toned musical sound which even a town-bred ear ran recognise as the sound of milk spurting into a pail.
Kate skirted the yard and looked in at the open door. She was rewarded by the sight of Aminta, sitting precariously on a three-legged stool, the top of her head buried in the soft part of a bony roan cow, making great play with the muscles of her brown forearms.
“Aminta!” cried Kate joyfully, and realised the next instant, from the cautious manner in which Aminta, who had started violently, recovered herself, moved her tipped bucket to a safe position and herself to an upright one before looking round, that she ought to have approached with more circumspection. The cow, how
ever, evidently a quiet lady, looked mildly round and went on eating hay.
“Hullo Kate!” said Aminta with pleasure, but without undue surprise for the actions of her fellow-creatures rarely surprised her. She added “Lucky Tulip’s a quiet cow, or she might have kicked half my milking over, being bounced at like that.”
“I’m sorry. I say, I am pleased to see you, Aminta! You do look grand and rugged, too. Like a piece of mountain scenery.”
Aminta, clapping Kate on the shoulder, replied genially:
“I thought somehow you’d come along.”
“You did? You must be psychic if you thought that, because I didn’t think it myself till the day before yesterday.”
“I thought my last letter’d fetch you. Have you joined up yet, or are you waiting to join up at the county headquarters?”
Kate looked at Aminta, marvelling not for the first time at the strange misconceptions which add zest to friendship.
“Your letter didn’t fetch me, darling. No.”
“Didn’t it?” said Aminta without offence. “Look, Kate, I’ve just got to finish Tulip, if you don’t mind waiting a moment. Whups, my beauty!”
Taking her stool in her left hand and her milk-pail in her right, Aminta inserted herself with great skill and precision between them and groped about under the cow, inquiring in a rather cow-muffled voice as she did so:
“What did you come for, then?”
But the spurting of milk drowned Kate’s attempt at a reply. In the year since Kate had last seen her, Aminta, who had always been pale and inclined to run to fat, had become comparatively slender, nut-brown in colour, and to judge from her forearms up which at the moment terrifying ripples of muscle were passing, as hard as iron. There was evidently a great deal to be said for the Land Army as a beautifying agent.
Kate stood in the doorway and looked across the yard at the picturesque collection of roofs which lay at the back of the farmhouse, and at the first building she had seen, which she now perceived was an ecclesiastical ruin patched up to serve as a barn. Behind it, a graceful melancholy shell of stone, holding nothing but sky in its empty windows, was, she supposed, one of the relics of antiquity to inspect which visitors paid Mr Gideon Atkins their sixpences. What looked like the remains of a cloister joined the two buildings. Kate thought that Mr. Gideon Atkins might really use some of his sixpences in clearing away the brambles which were doing their best to drag these ancient stones back into the earth from which they had come.
There May Be Danger Page 5