There May Be Danger

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “A coin!”

  “Yes. A silver penny of Ceowulf, 874.”

  “What!”

  “Well, of course, Colin, it was just chance. Somebody must have dropped it there some time, but he wouldn’t know that. He probably thinks the tumulus is simply full of silver pennies. And as he sold this one for five pounds—”

  “Cheap at the price, if it was a good one. Who did he sell it to?”

  Kate explained, and added that the silver penny of Ceowulf was at present in London, but that Mr. Morrison had promised her a sight of it as soon as it returned. She remembered as she spoke that Colin had met the Morrisons, and asked him how he liked them. But Colin was still pre-occupied with the violation of Pentrewer Tump.

  “If it’s really this chap Lupton who’s doing the digging, I shall have something to say to him.”

  Kate laughed.

  “He’ll have something to say to you! He’s a descendant of the ancient Welsh bards, I believe. He’s got everything except a harp. Oh, by the way he told me he had a putty impression of that silver penny he’d show me some time, if I liked. So if you want an excuse to make his acquaintance—”

  “If I find him digging on the tumulus, I shan’t want any excuse,” said Colin severely. “I shall walk straight up and ask him what the blazes he’s doing. And then, if he’s really a bard, we shall have quite an Eistedfodd. And now,” he went on, sitting down and holding a hand to the now blazing fire, “what are you doing here, Kate? You were the last person I expected to see tumbling over pails of pig-food in this backyard! It’s grand to see you again. Are you staying near here? How’s the theatre? Is it evacuated to this part of the world? Or have you got a new job?”

  “I haven’t got a job at all,” said Kate, sitting down in the other armchair and sharing the blaze. “Unless trailing a forlorn hope is a job.”

  “It depends on how forlorn the hope is, I suppose. And on how important the issue is.”

  “A child’s life,” said Kate, and told him about Sidney Brentwood’s disappearance and her own determination to find out what had become of him. Colin listened with that agreeable attentiveness which she remembered as one of the things that had always endeared him to her. Colin had a nice, orderly, well-trained mind, and never interrupted the recital of facts with exclamations and surmises. When she had finished he said thoughtfully:

  “Well, Katy, I wouldn’t say the child’s life is at issue, exactly, would you? Either he’s already dead, in which case you’ll only find his body. Or he’s still alive, in which case you’ll only satisfy yourself and others of the fact. There’s no reason, from what you’ve said, to think his life’s threatened.”

  Kate was now not so sure that mental orderliness is an endearing trait.

  “No reason,” she admitted. “But—”

  “But what?” asked Colin.

  Kate replied with another question:

  “Colin, are there any chambered long-barrows on these hills?”

  Perhaps her dread showed in her face or sounded in her voice, for Colin replied in a reassuring tone:

  “Not one, Katy. I can assure you of that. Lots of little burial-mounds, like the one out here, but nothing elaborate at all. I know these hills well.”

  “Do you? What are you doing here, Colin?”

  “I told you—making measured drawings of the Llanhalo ruins.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “For a survey of border antiquities,” added Colin.

  It had not occurred to Kate that the Office of Works would be publishing surveys of antiquities during wartime.

  “The army’s doing without me for a month or two while I finish my job here.”

  “I see...”

  It sounded reasonable enough, but it was a little unlike Colin, and oddly disappointing, that he should allow the army to do without him while he finished such a job. The antiquities would still be there, when the war was over. Or, if they were not, the survey would be out-of-date!

  “There’s supposed to be the beginning of an underground passage at Llanhalo, did you know, Colin?”

  “Are you thinking your boy may be hidden there?”

  “Well—Gideon Atkins is a queer man,” said Kate slowly. “Nobody seems to know much about him. And he swears there isn’t a tunnel, and won’t let anybody look for themselves.”

  “Probably he’s right. Most underground passages only exist in the local imagination.”

  “If it doesn’t exist, he might prove it once for all by letting some responsible person see the cellar it’s supposed to lead out of. But he won’t. He won’t let even Mr. Morrison from the Veault satisfy his curiosity, and Mr. Morrison’s an antiquarian.”

  “Atkins may be afraid that if he gives an enthusiast like Morrison permission to explore whatever old vault opens out of his cellar, he might be pestered ever after to let people dig in it for subterranean passages.”

  “Well, if he’s such an old dog in the manger, he can’t be surprised if people explore that cellar of his without permission!”

  Colin stood up and swung aside the bracket chain from which the now jovially steaming kettle depended.

  “If by ‘people’ you mean yourself, Kate, I do hope you don’t intend another dead-of-night adventure. If I were you, I’d give up these secret nocturnal investigations. They’re not safe.”

  “Safe! Really, Colin, is this the sixteenth century?”

  “The twentieth century’s got dangers of its own.”

  “What, here? And anyway, how can I find Sidney without meeting whatever dangers he met? I want what happened to Sidney to happen to me.”

  Colin stirred the logs in the fire and a new flame sprang to roaring life.

  “What happened to Sidney was, that he disappeared,” he said quietly. “I don’t want that to happen to you, Katy. Why don’t you take the Davises into your confidence? They’re perfectly sound people, I believe, apart from this little matter of the shiny night. Ask them whether your Sidney was ever mixed up in one of their poaching expeditions, for instance. They may know something about him they haven’t seen fit to tell the police.”

  Kate agreed.

  “They will be surprised to find me here!”

  However, Mr. and Mrs. Davis, when towards the hour of four they returned, seemed disposed towards jocularity rather than surprise. It was certainly an unconventional hour for calling, and Kate did not attempt to explain her presence except by saying that she had been looking for Sidney.

  “He ben’t here, Missie,” said Mr. Davis, hanging up his cap and disclosing a surprisingly venerable-looking high bald crown with a fringe of grey hair. Apart from the two slinking dogs who followed them into the room, there was nothing about Mr. and Mrs. Davis to suggest their nocturnal occupation. Probably, thought Kate, they had left their tackle and booty in some outhouse, so as not to pain the susceptibilities of their law-abiding guest. Mrs. Davis busied herself with cups and saucers and plates, and soon the four of them were drinking tea, and Mr. and Mrs. Davis were eating cold bacon and potatoes. When Kate inquired whether Sidney had ever visited them again after the first occasion on which he had cycled over to see the tump, a look passed between husband and wife sitting at the table.

  “Well, no,” said Mrs. Davis briskly, “he never come again. But Mrs. Howells and us is not well acquainted, and I think she would not like him to be coming over here too often. Hastry people likes to keep theirselves to theirselves.” There was an indescribably ironic note in her clear high-pitched voice as she said this.

  “Only,” said Kate rather nervously, looking at Colin for encouragement. “I’ve found out that Sidney was interested in making nets. And I wondered—”

  “Nets! What would that be for, I wonder?” commented Mrs. Davis blandly, again with a glance at her husband that had, Kate thought, a warning in it.

  “Well—” Kate hesitated. Her eye caught Mr. Davis’s, and, disregarding his wife’s warning look, he allowed a sort of foxy grin to creep under his ragged moustache
and curve the long lines of his leathery cheeks. He spoke to his wife conciliatingly in Welsh, and she replied very spiritedly in the same language. An argument seemed to develop, of which, after a minute or two, Mr. Davis had the better. He turned to Kate, still smiling, and began:

  “Well, you see, Missie, since I expect as your friend has told you about us it were like this. The day as Sidney were here, were mending one of the nets I uses of a night-time, and Sidney—”

  But if there was talking to be done, Mrs. Davis, now that her desire for caution had been over-ruled, was evidently going to be the one to do it. She broke in:

  “Sidney was a very noticing, lively kind of boy! And he had been talking to my relation, Mr. Dai Lewis,” she gave her head a little jerk in the direction of the road, and Kate understood that her relation, Mr. Dai Lewis, was the proprietor of the caravans and tents at present pitched in the field opposite Gwyn Lupton’s. “And like a boy he wass wanting to know all about what the nets wass for, and if he could go with George and Mr. Dai Lewis one night. And to pacify him, George said he would have to show first he could make and mend his own nets. Because, of course, we wass not wanting children with us in such night work, dear me, no! And Sidney said at once he would learn to make a net. And nothing would please him but he must get a ball of silk for net-making off Mr. Lewis— exchanged a knife, he did, for a ball of silk. And off he went with it, telling us as he’ll be back to help us with his own net one night before long.”

  “I did not think as he would come, though,” said Mr. Davis, meditatively sucking his moustache, putting his cup and saucer neatly on his plate and feeling in his pocket for his pipe. “No, I did not think as he would come. Boys likes to think they will go out of a night-time, but when the time comes their beds claim them. Oh ah!”

  “Do you think, then, that Sidney may have been coming to you the night he disappeared?”

  “Oh ah, I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr. Davis, stuffing his little pipe with his large forefinger. “He wass asking me when we wass next going out, and I was telling him, most nights that is fine either me or Dai Lewis is out.”

  “Was it a fine night, the night he went?”

  “Oh ah, it was fine, but there wass no moon, if I remembers, and I was bad with my back, and we didn’t none of us go out that night, because Dai Lewis wass gone on into Breconshire. So Sidney would have been disappointed if he had come. Perhaps when he could not find us, he went off somewhere else, looking for something to do. It wass not a very good night to be out. Very dark it was, if I remembers.”

  “We did not say anything about it,” said Mrs. Davis, rather defensively, getting up and putting the cups together on the tray, “because it would have made a lot of trouble for us and not have done any good to Sidney. Besides, we does not know he wass coming to us! Poor boy! I would give a lot if George and my relation Mr. Lewis had never put such ideas into his head!”

  Her glasses flashed reproachfully at her husband, who replied philosophically, puffing at his pipe:

  “A boy like Sidney wass, will have his head full of ideas, anyways, I reckon, and if they doesn’t get put in one way, they will another.”

  A little silence fell. Mrs. Davis with a sigh picked up her tray and carried it out to the scullery.

  Colin asked, after a pause:

  “Did you know somebody was digging on the tump, Mr. Davis?”

  “Oh ah? Well, they are not likely to find anything, whatever.”

  “Whoever it is mustn’t be allowed to go on. Pentrewer Tump’s protected under the Ancient Monuments Act.”

  “Ah, I knows. We had a paper about it,” said Mr Davis, who was evidently less perturbed than Colin about the violation of Pentrewer Tump.

  “If it’s excavated without permission from the Office of Works, I’m afraid you’ll be held responsible, Mr. Davis,” said Colin.

  “Oh ah, I daresay,” said Mr. Davis with the utmost tranquillity, applying another match to his pipe. “It were all in the Government paper we had sent us, if I remembers.”

  But the Government was a long way away and occupied at the moment with other things than tumps. And Mr. Davis himself had more serious things to think about than the preservation of a rough grass-covered mound that was very little use even for grazing. So his easy-going tone conveyed.

  He got up, and stretched, and belched softly, and lifted the corner of the black-out curtain.

  “Her’s nearly light,” he observed. “Nearly light her is. And a fine day her’ll be, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Kate and Colin left Pentrewer and its inhabitants to a late sleep, and walked back down the track to where Kate had left her bicycle. Colin wheeled his bicycle with him, for he was going to Llanhalo, he said, to put in a little work before breakfast.

  “Do you mind if I come with you, Colin? I want to see Aminta.”

  This was slightly disingenuous, for Kate did not, except in the most general way, want to see Aminta. She wanted to see Gideon Atkins again. And she very much wanted to see the dairy at Llanhalo again, and if possible, in spite of Gideon Atkin’s hostility, the cellar that led out of it.

  She left Colin to his measurements in the Abbey ruins, and turned into the farmyard. It was now quickly growing daylight, and the farmhouse looked still and dark, but there was a thin pencil of light showing at the side of the black-out curtain at a ground-floor window.

  She went quietly to the dairy door and found it, as she had expected, open. There was no light inside, and as she entered Kate put on her torch for fear she might trip over a bucket or a churn in the cavernous darkness. There was the warm, sweet smell of new milk in the dairy from two tall frothing pails, and from somewhere in the farmhouse a faint scent of woodsmoke from a new-lit fire crept to this dark, cold place. Kate went quickly towards the door at the end of the short passage which Aminta had told her was the entrance to the cellar. The walls of the passage were of stone, rough-hewn in large blocks, and probably of great antiquity, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling reminded Kate of a church crypt. What a lot of things a farmer possesses! she reflected, running her torch over the barrels, the mole-traps, the coils of rope, the buckets, the brooms, the trestles, the oil-drums, all at present out of use and apparently surplus to other barrels, traps, buckets, brooms and trestles in use elsewhere! What a lot of props, what a complicated life! reflected Kate, thinking of her own life and greatly preferring it, forgetting for the moment that it had come to a full stop and a blank wall.

  The cellar door handle was a large iron ring, like ice to the touch. Kate’s heart beat fast as she put her hand on it, and she felt a little like Bluebeard’s wife at the door of the secret room. Only, Bluebeard’s wife had had a key, and Kate had not, but expected the door to resist when she turned the ring. To her great surprise, it did no such thing. The ring turned, and to a gentle pressure the door swung heavily away over two or three stone steps. What luck! But there was a light in the cellar. And where there was a light there was probably a human being. Quickly Kate made to draw the door silently shut again. But in her surprise at its opening, she had allowed the iron ring to slip out of her hand, and the weight of the door hanging over the steps carried it on slowly, swinging wide before her.

  Kate made a grab, but she could not reach the handle. Had she been able to do so, it would have been too late, for there was a woman standing below in the cellar staring up at her with an expression of the utmost astonishment. She was holding, Kate instantly observed, a large knife in one hand and in the other something horribly red, and raw, and bloody.

  Kate’s first impression was of the contrast between the dank, dark stone cellar, empty, unwhitewashed, with an earthen floor, and the starched shirt-blouse and spotless apron of the neat, fragile, elderly little figure that stood there. Her startled eyes focussed upon the knife and the other horrible bleeding thing in the little grey-haired woman’s hands.

  The next moment she saw that it was only a piece of raw lights or something of the ki
nd. There was a bunch of the stuff hanging up on a nail over a stone shelf. And three tabby cats were rubbing themselves against the woman’s stiff apron.

  “I—I’m sorry if I startled you,” said Kate. “I’m looking for Aminta. I thought, perhaps—”

  She had enough presence of mind to descend into the cellar as she spoke. She might not easily get such an opportunity again.

  “She’s still out milking, I think,” said the little elderly woman in a rather toneless, grating voice. She had coarse grey hair tightly drawn back from her florid-skinned, pink-nosed, plain little face, and her neck was so bent and stiff that she appeared almost hump-backed. She added: “I’m just getting some breakfast for my cats to keep them quiet. They try me so with their mewing.”

  Kate tried not to look too eagerly round her, nor to reply too absently as she looked. The cellar was a square stone place, vaulted like the dairy and two or three feet lower in level. The floor seemed to be of earth, and there was no window. Quickly scanning the walls, Kate could see no sign of a door, nor even of the outline where a door might have been bricked up a long while ago. But close to the floor, in the corner of the wall opposite the steps, was an iron grating about two-and-a-half feet square, with pitchy blackness the other side of it. Kate tried not to keep her eyes focussed too eagerly on this. If there were an ancient entrance to any secret passage in this cellar, that must surely be the place!

  “This must be tremendously old a cellar,” she observed, lingering and gazing.

  Miss Atkins, if it were she, gave a toneless little laugh.

  “Eh, it’s old enough, and cold enough, too. I’ve got a fire in th’kitchen, Miss—”

  “Mayhew. Are you Miss Atkins? I hope it isn’t very tiresome of me to come so early, but I thought I might catch Aminta before she started work.”

  “Eh, we start work here a lot earlier than this,” said Miss Atkins. “Miss Hughes’ll be in presently. Please to come to th’kitchen.”

  Kate had no excuse for lingering here, and followed Miss Atkins perforce up the steps. Miss Atkins took a large key from the pocket of her apron and locked the cellar door. Then she proceeded to cut the piece of lights she carried into three rough portions, and calling “Puss! Puss! Puss!” opened the door into the yard, and threw the gobbets up and out. The cats streaked out and up the steps after them, and the door was shut. Kate thought of Miss Brentwood’s three cats and their saucers of sardine-bits perched on table and piano. It took all sorts of cats to make a world! Kate followed Miss Atkins along a stone passage to a large kitchen where a glittering kitchen-range was roaring, and a candle in an enamel stick provided all the light there was. Miss Atkins blew out the candle she was carrying as soon as she entered the room. Economy was the order of the day at Llanhalo. Kate could have guessed that from the speckless, but somehow rather worn and bleak, aspect of the kitchen. Kate, whose idea of a kitchen until recently had been an apartment five-feet square, or a gas-cooker on the landing, or even a gas ring in a sitting-room, was becoming quite a connoisseur of kitchens. There was a nice old settle and a wicker basket-chair or two, and a very large table and an enormous deal dresser loaded with ugly plates. There was also, standing on a low wooden stool in front of the fire, a large red earthenware crock with a piece of white table-cloth draped over it. It roused Kate’s curiosity. It had such a ceremonial and secret air, enthroned there and jealously covered over like one of the properties of a magician which has been carried on to the stage and left to excite the audience’s speculation.