There May Be Danger

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “Til shine you out,” replied he courteously but firmly, and stood aside to let her pass, shining the torch upon broken boards so that she could pick her way.

  There seemed nothing for it but for Kate to skirt the damaged floor and descend. Mr. Lewis followed, keeping his circle of torchlight shining ahead of Kate down the stairs. Its shifty, stagey light fell on stairs deeply ingrained with the grey dust of ages, on the matchboarded walls puffed and splitting with damp, on the door at the bottom hanging on long iron hinges.

  As the circle of light fell over the door, Kate almost stopped dead on the fourth step from the bottom, almost gave a cry. Stuck to the blistering, thickly painted boards of the rough door, about a foot from the top, was a small square of bright green tinfoil, such as is used for wrapping toffees.

  Then Sidney had been here!

  “What’s the matter?” asked her escort from behind her, as after that involuntary jerk she went on down into the room, following the shifty circle of light closely with her eyes for other signs. Sidney had been here! Kate was not in the mood to weigh any other possibilities. Sidney had left that green square of tinfoil as a warning and a sign. Green for safety: but not this time!

  “I thought I saw a mouse,” said Kate calmly, holding out her hand for her torch.

  Dai Lewis switched it off, and for a moment Kate’s primitive fears threatened to return upon her. But, of course, to open a door in the black-out, one must switch off one’s torch! Kate heard the wind in the trees, and, she thought, once again, far off, that stubborn steady thrum of planes forging through the dark.

  “Good-bye, Missie. Don’t put on your torch. There’s planes about, I hears them.”

  Kate thought this was rather cool advice from one who had been guilty of blazing lights out of windows with enemy planes abroad.

  “And don’t you forget that black-out!” as she took her torch from him in the darkness.

  He laughed. It still seemed to Kate that his laugh, even more than his voice, was vaguely familiar to her. No doubt she had seen and heard Dai Lewis in Hastry village shop or elsewhere. A stage training develops an ear for voices, but not always a methodical memory for placing them.

  “Aye. I’ll hang up my jacket!” he replied, as Kate felt her way down the garden path and out of the rickety gate.

  The plane was coming closer, and Kate, who dared not use her torch, made slow and floundering progress. When it had passed overhead, she heard the unmistakeable, sickening, earth-heavy crash of an exploding bomb. A pause, then another, farther off. Impossible for an ear attuned to town bombing to determine how far away those bombs had fallen. Not so far as they sounded, Kate guessed, for the plane that dropped them had been more or less overhead only a few seconds ago.

  No more bombs fell, and for the present no more planes were to be heard. As she returned down the difficult path, Kate’s thoughts returned to Sidney Brentwood. If Sidney had stuck that piece of tinfoil on the door on purpose, as a despairing sign to friends who might follow on his trail, it must be that he had been constrained, unable to escape, unable to send any other message. Coming downstairs at Hymns Bank—perhaps being dragged downstairs—he had managed to stick that piece of green toffee tinfoil upon the door, knowing that Mrs. Howells, anyway, should news of it ever reach her ears, would connect it with him. But who had constrained him? Not Dai Lewis, for Dai Lewis and his tribe had been in Breconshire at the time that Sidney disappeared. Besides, even if Sidney had found Dai Lewis at Hymns Bank, why should Dai Lewis have done more than send him off with a flea in his ear? There was nothing dangerously criminal about using an empty house as headquarters for poaching in the woods, and Sidney knew all about the gipsies’ poaching exploits.

  But that Sidney Brentwood had been at Hymns Bank that night, Kate felt sure. Her night’s search had led her one step in the right direction. It was from Hymns Bank, not from Hastry, that she must track Sidney now.

  Who owned Hymns Bank, she wondered? It should not be difficult to find out. It lay at least two miles from Llanhalo Abbey and Gideon Atkins was scarcely the man to be encumbered with such derelict and unprofitable property: otherwise Kate might have played with the notion that it was his. Her thoughts continually reverted to that fabled subterranean passage, and to Gideon Atkins’ wrathful denial of its existence. She had to check a tendency to exaggerate Gideon Atkins’ unamiable denials into sinister and monstrous signposts to secret guilt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When, about two o’clock, Kate arrived back in Hastry, she found both Mr. and Mrs. Howells up—she feared, on her account, although they assured her they had got up entirely for their own satisfaction. However, they were both so relieved to find that neither of the bombs they had heard had landed anywhere near her, that she remained unconvinced that their vigil had not been on her account.

  “Berminster waterworks, that’s what they be after,” said Mr. Howells, looking less than ever like a postman, with his thatch of grey hair standing on end and his collarless shirt open around his sleep-dishevelled beard. “Every time I hears a bomb, I thinks of my sister’s brother-in-law, Jeff Dew, listening up at the control-station to hear if this’un or that’un’s going to send him to glory, and I has to laugh. Because he’s right as rain, they fellows never hits what them’s aiming at, my God, no.”

  It appeared from Rumour, who arrived in the village before the dawn and hung around on the doorsteps waiting for the taking down of the black-out, that Mr. Howells’ laughter was justified. Five, ten, twenty sheep—the number varied—were a dead loss, and there were two craters on Mr. Jenkins’s, Mr. Jones’s, Mr. Richard Hillier’s, Mr. Meredith’s land—Rumour was impartial in distributing the glory—big enough to put a house in, pretty near. But the Berminster waterworks and Jeff Dew remained unscathed.

  Colin, when Kate told him of her night’s expedition, did not express concern so loudly as Mrs. Howells had done. In fact, he said nothing for a moment. But he looked serious, and Kate could feel the air, already cold enough for sitting out in, grow cooler still with his silent disapproval. They were sitting on Pentrewer Tump, where Colin had been showing Kate the patch of recent digging cunningly covered over with fresh turves and replanted foxglove stems. The day was bright, with a snap in the air, and Mr. Davis, like any respectable farmer, was making a bracken-stack in his yard.

  “Mrs. Howells was afraid a bomb had dropped on me.”

  “Well, it might have done,” said Colin, and Kate could not deny it. He added amiably, having evidently decided either that warnings were wasted on Kate or that she had the right to disregard them if she chose: “where did you go? Did you find anything?”

  “I went to Hymns Bank. And I found a light, and a piece of green tinfoil. The light hadn’t anything to do with Sidney, but the tinfoil had.”

  Kate had expected Colin’s curiosity to be aroused by that piece of tinfoil, and looked expectantly at him. But it was the light that seemed to interest him.

  “You saw a light, Kate?” he asked quite sharply. “What sort of light? Where? A light in the black-out, do you mean?”

  Kate told him the story of her night’s adventures. She expected Great-Aunt Colin to draw the moral, as he would have been justified in doing, of the dangers that lie in wait, even in the twentieth century, for unaccompanied females who make nocturnal journeyings about the countryside. But he did not do so. In fact, Kate was a little disappointed to find how little her terrors seemed to interest him. He examined her, with a closeness that made her feel she was in the witness-box, on the subject of the light she had seen.

  “I’m afraid my education in the morse code’s been neglected, Colin. All I know is, there are such things as light-signals, and so when I heard that old bomber, I feared the worst. But if the light came from Hymns Bank, as it probably did, I was wrong. It was Dai Lewis signalling to his ferrets, as I’ve told you.”

  “I don’t believe looking for ferrets with a torch would give the effect of signalling through a window,” said Colin slo
wly. “Though of course we can’t be sure without experimenting.”

  Kate laughed.

  “Well, we can’t experiment without getting locked up! So I vote we take Mr. Dai Lewis’s word for it. He seemed perfectly candid. Except—”

  Colin looked at her sharply.

  “Except what?”

  “Well—Except that he wouldn’t let me see him properly. He wouldn’t give me my torch till I was out in the black-out with a bomber overhead and couldn’t put it on. And all the time he had it, he held it directed at the floor. That was one thing. And the other was—”

  “Well?”

  “Something about the way he spoke,” said Kate slowly. “Such a queer intonation. Not at all like the local accent.”

  “He may not be a local man.”

  “He’s a cousin of Mrs. Davis.”

  “But he may have been brought up in another part of the country, and got a different accent, all the same.”

  “Oh, I know. But that wasn’t it. It was—That I seemed to recognise something queer about his accent. I’ve heard the same kind of accent before, not here, somewhere quite different, I don’t know where. Also, I thought I recognised his voice, but that isn’t so puzzling, because very likely I have heard it, in the post office or somewhere.”

  Colin agreed:

  “And as for his accent, no doubt you heard that at the same time! To me, the fact that he avoided being clearly seen is much more odd.”

  “Yes, but not so very odd, when you think what queer fish gipsies are. It worried me at first, but when he said who he was, it didn’t worry me any more. And, of course, Colin, a gipsy would be the last kind of person in the world to be signalling to the enemy, though he might be the first person to be careless about the black-out. I don’t see, either, how Dai Lewis could have had any connection with Sidney’s disappearance, because he was in Breconshire the night Sidney disappeared, Mr. Davis said so.”

  “Then, if you think Sidney stuck that piece of tinfoil on the door to show that he was a prisoner at Hymns Bank, it follows that somebody else, not Dai Lewis, was keeping him a prisoner there?”

  “Yes—I suppose so.”

  “Then somebody else—not Dai Lewis—was using Hymns Bank for some secret purpose?”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “It would be very queer if two people, quite unconnected with one another, were using the same empty house for two different kinds of villainy, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose it would.”

  “And queerer still if they didn’t know of one another’s existence.”

  “Yes,” admitted Kate, feeling a little like a witness whom a clever barrister has driven into an uncomfortable corner. “But the only other thing one can think is, that Dai Lewis was signalling to the enemy, and that he is responsible for Sidney’s disappearance. And I don’t see how one can think that, if he’d wandered off into Breconshire before Sidney disappeared.”

  Colin murmured:

  “‘Here awa’, there awa’, wandering Wullie.”

  Kate sat up suddenly.

  “Say that again!”

  Colin looked at her in some surprise.

  “‘Here awa’, there awa’, wandering Wullie,” he repeated, rather sheepishly. “Why?”

  “Say some more.”

  “The rest of it isn’t at all appropriate.”

  “Never mind that! Say some more!”

  “But why—oh, all right! ‘Loud blew the cauld winter winds at oor parting, It was nae the blast brought the tear in my e’e! Now welcome—’”

  Colin, who, though not a Scotsman, was a Burns addict, was beginning to enjoy himself, but Kate had heard enough. She sprang to her feet.

  “I know now what it was that worried me about Dai Lewis’s accent!”

  Scotch?”

  Kate gave a little excited laugh. She had not time at the moment to tell Colin what she thought of his attempt at a Scots accent.

  “Scotch! No! Phoney! Colin, you know—or perhaps you don’t—how sometimes on the stage an actor who’s doing a dialect part drops out of the dialect he’s supposed to be using for a moment? Unless you really know a dialect well, it’s a most difficult thing to keep it true! He’ll seem to be getting along all right in his Irish, or American, or whatever it is, a bit hollow, perhaps, but you feel it’ll pass muster with anybody but a real Irishman or a real American. And then suddenly for a few words he gets the intonation quite wrong, and you hear his ordinary accent quite plainly. He hears it, too, and snaps out of it at once, but the illusion goes for a second. Well, that was Dai Lewis last night. His local accent wobbled about. When he said ‘That’s right,’ he might really almost have been a north country comedian. And every now and then he might have been a coster.”

  “Gipsies get about the world,” murmured Colin, looking at her thoughtfully.

  “I know, but not into repertory companies!”

  Colin also got slowly to his feet.

  “Did this man say he was Dai Lewis, Kate?”

  “He didn’t contradict me when I asked him if he was.”

  “What made you ask him?”

  Oh—because when I asked him where he lived, he said he lived ‘nowhere partickerler.’ And of course, the ferrets.”

  “Did you see the ferrets?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I didn’t. Nor hear them, nor smell them.”

  “And did Dai Lewis say he was in Breconshire the night Sidney went?”

  Kate reflected: “No, I don’t think he did. He just said he wasn’t at Hymns Bank.”

  “In fact, he didn’t really say anything to suggest that he was Dai Lewis, at all?”

  “No, I don’t think he did, Colin! I just concluded he was, and he didn’t deny it.”

  The bracken wagon, empty, came lumbering out of the yard, with Mr. Davis at the horse’s head. He had a companion with him now, Gwyn Lupton, his greenish hat at the back of his head, a pitchfork in his hand, his voice raised in a dignified monologue above the creaking of the axles.

  Kate hailed the two, and ran down the side of the tumulus as Mr. Davis whoaed his horse to a standstill.

  “Mr. Davis!” she cried impulsively. “Can you tell me—what is your cousin Mr. Dai Lewis like to look at?”

  Mr. Davis looked a trifle surprised at this bald question and the eagerness with which it was uttered. He slowly took off his cap as if about to scratch his head, slowly decided not to scratch his head and put his cap slowly back again. Then he said slowly:

  “Oh, ah, Missie! He be a tidy sort of a man to look at, I reckon. He do weigh well.”

  “What height?”

  “Ah, a lot taller than I be, Missie. A lot taller’n you be, too, though you be a tall un for a female. Six foot pretty near, Dai Lewis be, I reckon. Oh ah. Pretty near six foot.”

  The man Kate had seen in Hymns Bank had certainly not been anywhere near six feet, but about her own height, which was five feet eight. However, before she could ask for further details Gwyn Lupton observed:

  “Young lady, Dai Lewis and me is of a height, though we is not of the same girth, no, indeed, for he is more like an oak tree, and I am more like a spindle now that I am advanced in years, though when we was young it was the other way about. The years adds flesh to some men and wears the flesh off others, it is according to the constitution. Dai Lewis is a fine man to look at, a fine handsome man, and if you do not know him by anything else, you will know him by the limp he has, which he has had ever since he broke his leg getting off a tram in Llanfyn sixteen years agone. Sixteen years agone it was, I remembers, for I broke my leg the autumn following, falling off a stack where I was pitching bracken, as I might be doing this morning. But I had not the weight on me Dai Lewis had, and did not fall so fast, and so I mended proper and does not limp at all. For them that weighs well does not mend well, Missie, and a heavy belly is a deceiving thing.”

  Kate was now certain that the man she had seen in Hymns Bank was not Dai Lewis. But they were all doomed, she fea
red, to hear a good deal more about the handsome Mr. Dai Lewis and about his inferiority, in spite of appearances, to Mr. Gwyn Lupton, unless she could find some means of stemming the flow of Mr. Lupton’s sonorous discourse. He stood there, holding his pitchfork like Britannia’s trident, his other hand on his hip, a look of rapt inspiration on his dark, distinguished face, with an eye upon Kate whose stern spell she positively feared to break.

  Colin, however, held Mr. Lupton, whom he had reason to suspect of secret digging on Pentrewer Tump, in less awe, and, somewhat to Kate’s relief, stemmed the flood for her.

  “I’m told, Mr. Lupton, you took a mould of that coin you found on the tumulus, and I’ve been wondering whether you’d be so kind as to show it to me?”

  “Yes, indeed, I will show it you with pleasure, if you will step along to my house,” said Mr. Lupton graciously, transferring his hawklike glance from Kate to Colin. “A very old ancient piece of money it is, older than the days before the Romans was here, I did believe, but Mr. Morrison at the Veault said that it was from after those days, but none the worse for that. Five pounds he gave me for it. It may have been worth more?” said Gwyn Lupton interrogatively. “Well, Mr. Morrison is a very pleasant gentleman, an antiquary gentleman he is,” he resumed, as Colin non-committally shook his head, “and I wass glad to let him have the piece of money for five pounds, since he wished it. It cost me nothing. I was taking up a snare upon the tump—and I had set my snares on the tump not only to get rabbits for myself, but also because the tump is a valuable ancient thing that the Government is interested in,” said Mr. Lupton virtuously, “and it iss a pity if the rabbits should make their burrows in it and disturb the bones of the kings that is decaying there—I was taking up my snare, look, and I put my hand to the ground, and in my hand I found the piece of money.”

  He laid down his pitchfork and demonstrated in a very lively and graceful manner the casual stooping of the rabbiter, the delighted wonder of the treasure-finder.

  “I wass not looking for treasure, I wass not thinking of treasure. It is when we is not looking that we finds treasure. When we is looking for treasure, it hides away from us,” said he improvingly.