She looked up, and met the wary stiffness of Rosaleen’s smile. And at the same moment she knew that she had a second advantage over Rosaleen, the most ancient, the most primitive, advantage of all. She dropped her hand from Sidney’s arm as if she were relinquishing him to Rosaleen, and, stepping back a pace or two, clenched her right fist and with all her weight behind it drove on to Rosaleen’s chin.
Pugilism had formed no part of Kate’s stage-training, she knew nothing of the science but what she had seen in films, and the success of her blow positively took her own breath away. Rosaleen went over like a ninepin, leaving Kate open-mouthed with an odd reprehensible exhilaration, modified by the fear that she had cracked Rosaleen’s skull for her. There had been a horrible thud as she went down, and she showed no lightning-like disposition to get up again.
Well, after all, Kate did not want her up again! Kate picked up Sidney and heaved him over her shoulder. He was lighter than she might have expected, but not so light as she had hoped, or else her strength was not quite what she thought. Saying to Ronnie:
“Put your torch out, and come on!” she staggered out into the courtyard. It was moonlight now, not bright, the stars were small and there were thin clouds about the sky. But the outlines of the barns and out-buildings, and the wall that ran around the courtyard, stood out so clearly that Kate could but pray that no one was looking from a window. Thank Heaven she had thought of taking off her shoes, cold and uneven as the cobbles were! Silence was the thing. Silence, so that no one knew where to follow, since they could not have speed.
Kate was prudent enough not to yield to the temptation to cut across the courtyard, but went round it, keeping in the shadow of the outbuildings. She was scarcely through the gate, however, when she heard angry voices in the house, and dots of swinging light from somebody’s torch ran like will-o’-the-wisps about the barn walls. Rosaleen had been found, and pursuit was not far off.
If Kate had felt vaguely that there was danger in Llanhalo tunnel, she knew now quite definitely that there was danger, terrible danger, at the Veault. All the hazards of this night seemed to come to a climax here, as she stood panting, Sidney still in her arms, in the lee of the stables, out of sight of the back door, shadow over her, but moonlight all around, with Ronnie at her shoulder looking up at her with the wary and rather grim expression of a lieutenant who is beginning to believe that circumstances are after all going to be too much for his sanguine leader. His little chin quivered once. Oh God thought Kate, what now?
A sort of paralysis came upon her. If we go into the stables we’ll be just caught in a trap. If we make a dash for it, we’ll have the damned moonlight all over us. She balanced in a horrible, nerveless equilibrium.
It was Ronnie who broke the spell for her. As a man’s voice sounded from the back door:
“They’ve gone this way, you bet! ” he startled Kate by breaking away from their little group and climbing back up by the wheel on to the wagon which Aminta had left there yesterday.
“Quick, quick, in here!” he muttered, shoving aside armfuls of bracken, burrowing a hole in it.
It was a faint hope. Kate half-lifted, half-helped Sidney into the wagon, but she shook her head when Ronnie held out a tense hand to pull her up too.
“No!” she whispered. “I shall try and get help!”
“Oh no!”
“Yes, it’s safer so. Lie down, I’ll cover you up. Keep Sidney quiet. And, Ronnie, whatever happens—whatever happens—don’t make a sound or move. I trust you not to.”
With the two children buried deep in the bracken, the cart stood, half in moonlight, half in shadow, with supine shafts that rested on the ground. Oh, if Kate could but hitch those shafts to a hundred-horse-power engine, a Pegasus, a flight of magic geese, and drive it miraculously away! She had said that she would try to get help. But, of course, she could not leave the Veault while the children were hidden there! It was to draw the enemy’s fire that she had decided to remain in the open: so, she would not be staking everything upon one chance.
Yet it was hard, when footsteps and torch-light came across the courtyard towards that cart, to tear herself from it, to leave it undefended and slip around the corner of the stable. She felt that the once-friendly-seeming bracken had turned traitor now and cried aloud to be searched; she felt that no one, looking for fugitives, could fail to look in that obvious, self-advertising place.
Yet the two who came through the courtyard gate ignored it. Kate, listening with stopped breath around the angle of the building, recognised the voices as those of Mr. and Mrs. Morrison. It was by pitch and tone she recognised them, for the accent was strangely harsh and coarsened version of their gentle American drawl.
“Well, they can’t have gone far without shoes, that one thing! And with a sick kid, and only five minutes start—”
“Jesus, Ellida, quit handing out the sunny stuff! They can git far enough to finish you and me and all of us if we don’t stop them! I’ll go up the field-path, in case they’ve scooted back to Llanhalo. You search the barns.”
“What’ll I do with them if I find them, Doug?”
“Hold ’em up and holler to me to come.”
“And then what?” asked the woman, with a strange nervous dread in her voice.
“Leave that to me and Joe. I ain’t taking risks this time to please you, Ellida! I guess this time your soft heart’ll just have to gush in vain!”
“And suppose,” said the woman tremulously, “the girl left a message to say where she was going?”
“Then we’ll be for the high-jump anyway, I guess, and all the blitzed kids in London won’t be able to make us look like respectable philanthropists.”
“Doug, couldn’t we just keep them here, like we did the boy, till the day after to-morrow?”
“Nice little helper this girl’d be, wouldn’t she? Not on your life, Ellida! She’s got to have her mouth stopped for good, and stopped now, and the kids must go with her!”
“Doug, it’s dangerous! I—”
“Sure, it’s dangerous. It’s been dangerous, it is dangerous, and it’s going to be a whole lot more dangerous,” said the twanging level male voice, moving closer to where Kate stood. Kate could see the circle of his torchlight now playing upon the yard gate and the field gate.
If by chance Morrison turned his torch her way as he went towards the field gate, he could not fail to see her. No doubt he, as well as Rosaleen, had a weapon in his hand. It was Kate’s first intention to keep quite still, pressed against the wall of the stable, until he had gone up the field. But then it seemed to her almost certain that the man would play his torch in every direction as he went by, and that by remaining still she was simply waiting for him to see her. Too late, she decided to move.
Too late, because her movement in the semi-darkness attracted an attention that might have missed her had she remained where she was. She heard Morrison’s footsteps come suddenly to a halt. The beam of his torch reached her; by its light she saw a burdock with its thistly flowers and one or two plants of white bitter-sweet in the rough grass near his feet, very clearly, like a botanical plate in an old book. Her cautious movement along the wall became a careless flight. As she reached the corner of the stable building and rounded it out of the light of that torch, she heard Morrison cry:
“Back to the yard, Ellida. Here’s the girl!”
Skirting the stable wall, Kate found herself back again, by a lower gate, in the cobbled courtyard. Morrison was not far behind her, and she was dimly aware of Mrs. Morrison coming down from the barns towards the yard. She was cornered. She dared not rush out through the courtyard again into the open. Mr. and Mrs. Morrison no doubt had firearms, and it was too much to hope that they would be compunctious or inexpert in using them. The back door of the house stood open, and Kate’s immediate craving was for cover. She fled in.
The kitchen facing Kate was dark, but the hall a little way up the passage still glowed with the candles Kate had lit. Kate made for the hall, f
or the light drew her: the light in which, if she could be seen, she could also see. The hall door was open, and there was nobody there. But as Kate hovered, making sure of this, on the threshold, she heard a crack! and the little spitting noise of a bullet burying itself in wood somewhere.
Kate had wanted light, but not to make herself a target, and as much as she had welcomed light she now desired the dark a ding-place. She flew on her stockinged feet for the stairs, pinching out the candles as she went. She did not know where she was going-just, away from that pistol. She had flown for the stairs instinctively. But half-way up she paused, since no one was following her, and listened. She could hear Morrison at the back door saying:
“What happened?”
Kate stole softly down the stairs again into the hall. She must not yield to the impulse to run upstairs and let herself be cornered in some unfamiliar room. Alongside the door, in the corner of the room, was a panelled oak chest. Picking up the two-branched candlestick from the table, Kate softly got up on this. Like most pieces of Sheffield plate, the candlestick was heavily weighted with lead at the base, and it was Kate’s intention, when Morrison entered the room in pursuit of her, to use it as a club. A simple stratagem, but the only one Kate could think of.
“What happened?”
“Where’s the kids?” riposted Rosaleen in a tone as sharp and hard as his.
“I heard a shot!”
“I missed her. She made a dash for the hall.”
“You’re too hot on your gun, Rosa. Next time, wait for orders!”
“All right, all right, I didn’t shoot to kill! If I had, I wouldn’t a missed.”
“Where is she?”
“Went upstairs. We’ve got her cornered. Where are the kids?”
“They won’t get far.”
“If they do, we’re sunk.”
“Ellie and I can corner the girl, I guess. You take the car, Rosa, and go and fetch Joe. Go up the field way to the road. You may get a sight of the kids on the way. If you do, make sure of them. But don’t stop looking for them, we’ll do that directly. Go straight for Joe, and drive straight back here. Soon’s we’ve fixed the girl, we’ll make a search for the blasted kids. They wont’ve gone far. One of them’s sick.”
Rosaleen objected:
“Make sure of the girl and the kids first, and fetch Joe after, I say!”
“And if it happens we can’t make sure of the kids? We got to get away somehow, haven’t we? We’re in a jam and we may have to break out of it. Do as I say! Get Joe! Jesus, it’ll be daylight soon! Be serious, Rosa, can’t you?”
“If you’d listened to me being serious a month ago, this wouldn’t have happened! You risked the whole show, after all our work, for the sake of Ellida’s mother-complex! God! Couldn’t I just wring your fat motherly neck, Ellida?”
“Cut it out, Rosa!” said Mr. Morrison in a violently vibrating voice. “Go and fetch Joe!”
“You’re boss here, but you can take it from me you’re acting like a fool,” said Rosaleen, and went out. One pursuer the less, and not the least formidable of the three. Where, wondered Kate, was Nurse Maud? She had an odd persuasion that Nurse Maud, were she here, would be the most formidable and relentless enemy of them all.
“I’ll go up the back stairs,” said Mr. Morrison. “You up the front ones, Ellida. You got your gun? Don’t shoot unless you have to—we got to find out where the kids are. Don’t let her get away, though.”
Ellida moaned suddenly, and Kate had the impression she was shivering.
“I knew when the day was put off something awful’d happen! It’s been put off and put off, and now I believe it’s too late! The whole plan’s gone wrong from top to bottom, if you ask me, and—”
“Oh, quit moaning, get on after the girl! Use your torch. She’s got no gun. She can’t hurt you.”
Morrison’s voice receded through the kitchen. Can’t she, thought Kate. She hoped, she thought, she could. She gripped her candlestick, and waited. Now was her chance, probably her one chance. If she could eliminate Mrs. Morrison, there would, for a while at least, be only one enemy to cope with, a formidable enemy, and armed, but not, surely, entirely beyond Kate’s skill to elude. Kate held her breath, as torchlight and footsteps came up the passage. All the strength in her body seemed to be in her right arm, gripping the awkward but satisfyingly heavy two-branched candlestick by the central stem.
But it is practice that makes perfect, even in violence. The unpractised arm swinging a candelabra, though it may feel as strong as Samson’s will find itself subject to any sentiment or whim that may jump to the surface of the unpractised mind. When Mrs. Morrison, that elderly, commonplace, ill-conditioned woman, all of a sag without her corsets, her grey hair in a net that made an odd hard line above her coarsely-wrinkled forehead, her lips crimped together in a cruel enough line, but with a look of tragic care as well as the wariness of a hunted animal in her narrowed eyes, appeared in the doorway, a pistol gripped in her fat right hand and a torch in her left shining a beam into the ingle-nook and under the table and up the stairs, first Kate’s heart faltered, and then her hand. Violence must be whole-hearted; half-hearted violence is of no avail. Kate could not feel afraid of this woman; and the amateur in clubbing, to use a club wholeheartedly, needs to feel urgently afraid.
Sidney’s net lay on the chest beside her. She had felt it with her hand as she scrambled up. As Mrs. Morrison advanced a step further into the room, something in the opposite wall seemed to attract her attention, for she stooped and peered forward, and her huge shadow bobbed up over the ceiling like that of a nurse visiting a night-nursery, candle in hand. Kate swooped softly like a bird to the soft net, and picking it up by the corners, spread it out. The little careful noise she made in purring down the candlestick startled the woman, who turned sharply. As she turned, Kate flung the net down over her. She gave a shuddering cry, and pushed out with her arms, dropped both pistol and torch to claw with her fingers at the hampering silk. Her fingers caught in the meshes. Kate, leaping to the ground, drew the net tight around her towards the back. The torch on the floor brilliantly illuminated the dropped pistol, the crack between two flags and the yellow wood-dust covering the floor under an old lowboy.
Kate’s chief concern was to prevent the woman from calling for help. She clapped a hand over her mouth, clasping her tightly with an arm hooked round her neck, and so forced a sort of temporary grunting, struggling silence on her. But Kate had only two hands, and while one was thus engaged, the other could not fasten the net securely round her victim. And it was only a matter of time before Douglas Morrison, whom Kate could now remotely hear going up the attic stairs, would complete his search. Kate could at least, perhaps, with a struggle, secure the dropped automatic.
She tugged and stooped, and her left hand was straining down towards it, when she became suddenly aware of a third person close to them. Another hand was stretching down for that pistol. The shock of this gave an extra spurt to Kate’s strength, so that she succeeded, sobbing, in snatching the weapon up from the ground, prepared, if this were Morrison, to sell her liberty dear. But the other person made no attempt either to forestall her or to wrest the weapon away from her. His hand, instead, picked up the torch and set it on the lowboy. He was taking off his scarf. It was Colin.
“Oh, Colin!” uttered Kate faintly, and for a second, far from feeling overjoyed, she felt as faint and weak as Sidney Brentwood himself, with relief. She was saved. She would relinquish her hold on Ellida Morrison. She would relinquish everything. Colin would see to everything. She would sit down; preferably, on the floor.
“Hold on, Kate!” muttered Colin urgently. He was tying his scarf around Mrs. Morrison’s mouth. Thank Heaven, Kate need not clasp her round the neck and intimately smell her hair and talcum powder any longer!
“Oh, Colin! Oh, Colin!”
“All right, Katy! Now we’ll put her behind the wall. That’ll keep her quiet for a bit.”
“You know about it?”
/>
“How do you think I got here?”
“Oh, Colin, was it you I was running away from down that tunnel? Oh, if only I’d known!”
“Where’s Morrison?”
“Upstairs! He’ll be down in a minute, though.”
A space of fifteen inches or so is wider than it looks, and even a portly human body is smaller. Kate held the timber, while Colin assisted the groaning Ellida through. She went quite meekly. Perhaps the tunnel seemed to offer to her at least a dim prospect of at least temporary escape.
“Now you and I, Kate, quick!”
Kate stared at Colin.
“What, through there? No!”
“But, of course! You’ve no idea of the danger here!”
“I can’t go off and leave the kids!”
“What kids? ’
“Ronnie and Sidney. I found him! I found him! I told you I would! They’re out in the yard, hidden in a bracken-cart.”
“My God, Kate, what did you think you were going to do here, single-handed, with two kids?”
“I didn’t know I was coming here! I was looking for Sidney! Never mind that now! What shall we do?”
“Where are the others?”
“Rosaleen went to get the car out and fetch somebody called Joe. I don’t know where Maud is.”
“Could we stop Rosaleen?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard the car, but then I’ve been listening to other things.”
“Can you keep out of Morrison’s way, if I go and see?”
“I should think so. He can’t see me without a light, and if he puts his on I can see him first. Thank God there are two staircases in this house!”
“Take this,” said Colin, handing her Mrs. Morrison’s automatic. It was a small but wicked-looking thing. Kate had never before held a loaded pistol in her hand. She looked at it with aversion and distrust.
“What about you?”
But Colin gave a faint, grim smile.
There May Be Danger Page 20