The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  It was the unfamiliar note of the torrent that gave him his first clue. It seemed to come from further afield, as though road and river were separated by an appreciable distance rather than yards. He said, ‘Wait, I’ll test it for depth,’ and got out, the flood reaching to his shins and the surface under his feet more yielding than it should have been.

  He edged forward in the beam of the lights but he had not gone far when he came up against a wild tangle of brushwood. He tried to scramble beyond it but, to his bewilderment, the ground on his left rose steeply so that it was almost as though he was clawing his way up a bank. Then, directly ahead, he saw the wink of the torch flashing its signal and a partial awareness of the situation came to him, expressing itself in a yelp of dismay. Sloshing back to the car he shouted, ‘There’s been a landslide! A bloody great landslide and they’re beyond it, signalling for help!’

  Margaret seemed stunned but Evie said, ‘We’ve got to get to them. We’ve got to get to them somehow!’

  ‘We can’t, not from here. Nobody could. We’ll have to reverse back and get help.’

  Margaret said with a groan, ‘Vanessa—she can’t help herself—her leg’s in plaster! Let me try …’ and she threw open the car door but Evie reached over and grabbed her by the shoulder. ‘If Simon can’t, you can’t. You’ll drown out there. If they’re signalling they’re still all right—they’re almost certainly upstairs.’

  Simon said, sharply, ‘Shut that bloody door and watch out for me—I’m going to back,’ but before he threw the car into reverse he answered the signal, three short flashes, three long, three short.

  They kept him on course over nearly a mile of reversing. The posts helped—about a foot of each was still showing—and Evie shouted directions from her side. It needed a tremendous effort of will not to accelerate but Simon took his time. Nothing would be gained by ditching the car or stalling the engine and having to walk. At last they reached the ford, crossed it and made a U-turn. Then, in forward gear, the car shot up the drive and skidded to a halt in the forecourt.

  From then on it was Paul who took command and they deferred to him, for he was on his home ground and a situation like this had always seen him at the hub of affairs, working without haste and certainly without any hint of confusion, bringing his intimate knowledge of the tract between the Bluff and the Whin to bear on problems of approach and method.

  He said, as soon as Simon had briefed him on the situation, ‘One thing’s clear, we can’t go at it direct until it’s light. We’ll have to do the best we can without more help—just the three of us, you, me and young John. The girls must stay here but one of them can go across to Home Farm and tell Rumble to contact Henry Pitts, Eveleigh and any men they can get together.’ And when Simon said, ‘Damn it, Gov’nor, there’s the ’phone,’ he said, gravely, ‘You can try it but I’ll lay you a thousand to one it’s dead. A slide like that would bring all the poles down. You won’t be able to raise Home Farm or Coombe Bay.’

  Simon marvelled at his steadiness, at the way he grasped the essentials of the task. Then he remembered that Paul had been a community leader here a very long time and that he had faced approximate situations not once but a dozen times over the years, the first of them the day Simon had been born when he had ridden through a gale to Four Winds and had been the first to find Arabella Codsall sliced to death with a hay knife and her crazy husband swinging from a beam.

  Watching him going about his preparations Simon swore to himself that he would never undervalue Paul again, that this was, and always had been, a job that few men he had ever known could perform with anything like the same despatch and efficiency. Evie, equipped with a bull’s-eye, set off on foot across the paddock to alert the Home Farm. There was no danger in that direction, he told her, for the farmhouse lay this side of the road and the ground fell away sharply to the south. All the same, she was to follow the paddock palings, even though it meant another half-mile.

  ‘You can lose your sense of direction in the meadow,’ he said, ‘and might run against something Rumble has left lying around.’ In the circumstances he spoke very quietly and decisively so that nobody questioned his decisions. He gave Margaret something to occupy her mind, sending her off to put hot-water bottles in the beds, light fires in the bedrooms and after that to prepare soup.

  ‘Make up the stove and hang blankets on the clothes-horse,’ he added. ‘They’ll want to be fed first and there’s nothing like drinking soup while wrapped in a warm blanket after a shock and a drenching.’ Simon expected him to comment on the cause of the landslide but he did not. He just went about things methodically, almost as though he had been planning it for days.

  Young John said, ‘We’ve got a torch apiece. We can cross the field and work our way down the lane. Shall I go on ahead? I can get there far quicker than either of you.’ But Paul said, quietly, ‘No, John, we’ll stay together, the three of us. And we won’t walk either. We’ll take the landrover and go by way of Hermitage Lane, branching off along that track under the woods. Then we’ll have transport handy when we find them and the benefit of headlights providing we’re lucky enough to get down the lane.’

  They were factors that Simon, with all his army training, might have overlooked—handy transport for the rescued, and light to work by. A few moments later they were off, John driving and the landrover carrying a coil of rope, rugs and a metal ladder that opened out to twenty rungs. They went down the drive and turned right instead of left, moving along under the park wall until it joined Hermitage Lane and climbing it to within about two hundred yards of Henry’s place.

  ‘Couldn’t we pick up Henry now?’ Simon asked, but Paul said no, it wasn’t worth the wasted time. Three could do nearly as much as four and Rumble would have others on the scene within the hour.

  There was no evidence of the slide up here under the woods and the track, although very muddy, was negotiable. In ten minutes they had struck the head of the narrow lane that ran up from the river road to the south-eastern corner of the woods and as John eased the vehicle round, Paul said, ‘Steady now, we don’t know where the slide began. My guess is it’s much lower down but there may be fissures as high as this. Let me get out and walk ahead.’

  He got out and Simon with him. Together they began to descend the slushy surface of the lane, pointing their torches beyond the creeping headlight beam of the landrover. In five minutes more they struck the first big change in a familiar landscape, a great mound of freshly turned earth, as though someone had ploughed a giant, diagonal furrow from east to west. Paul judged that they were now two-thirds of the way down and within eighty yards of the cottage but they couldn’t be sure, for their lights fell on what looked like a twenty-foot earthwork, and the rivulet on their immediate left had grown to a torrent that skirted the lower ridges of the new escarpment and then fell directly on to the flooded road. The water echoed flatly as it came down the sound telling Paul that it was cascading into appreciable depths. He stopped for a moment, directing his torch to the crest of the mound.

  ‘We’ll have to leave the landrover here,’ he said, ‘but keep the headlights on and don’t lose touch. We’ve got to go up and over, no matter how liquid it is. Bring the rope and leave the ladder against the bonnet.’

  They did as he bid, moving like a couple of privates under the eye of a general, and then, with Paul in the lead, they advanced into the soft soil and forced their way up the face of the giant slide.

  It was heavy going on the north side but they kept moving, sometimes sinking to their knees. Once over the summit the mud was even less solid and sometimes rose to their thighs, plucking at their gumboots and causing them to flounder and curse. They made progress, however, and half-way down they saw the tree and the cottage or what was left of the cottage.

  The tree was a sturdy elm, probably about seventy years old and because it had not stood in the direct path of the avalanche it had remained rooted in the ban
k, mud enclosing its bole to within a few feet of the lower branches. Approaching it and paying out the rope they sank to their waists, but Paul fought free of this porridge as soon as he grasped the lowest bough and was able to fasten the rope as an anchor for further descent. John said, fearfully, ‘There’s no sign of life down there, Gov’nor. The back part of the roof is smashed in and the rear walls are down,’ and he waited for his father to comment.

  ‘They’ll be at the front,’ Paul said and bracing himself against the rope cupped a hand and shouted, ‘Claire! We’re coming down!’

  They stood waist-deep in the mud and waited for a reply but none came. All they could hear was the frenzied roar of the Sorrel tumbling down to the sea and after thirty seconds or so Paul said, huskily, ‘Stay here, John, and bring the ladder if I shout for it.’

  ‘Let me go down first.’

  ‘Do as you’re told, boy,’ he said and John nodded, taking hold of the anchored rope and helping them pay it out as they slipped and slithered down the still-moving mass of mud to a lip of stones that marked the northern edge of the garden.

  It was just possible, down here, to stand on the remains of the thatch and the slices of cob that had been the walls of the kitchen and scullery. Moving from beam to beam and probing with their torches they called and called again, and when no answer came from below they gave the rope a twist round an angled beam-end and kicked their way through the rubble, Simon advancing with mounting desperation so that Paul, still calm, said, ‘Easy, boy. We won’t help by bringing the whole damned lot down on us.’

  A moment later they were in the chaos of the living-room and their torches centred on the spread of roots in the aperture. For the first time since he had returned home with the news of the landslide Simon sensed desolation in the man who was stumbling and probing among the mush of carpet and shattered furniture that had built up under the window. He said, with authority, ‘Stay here, Gov, and let me do the looking,’ and without waiting for Paul’s assent he crawled through the roots, pushing his torch ahead until its beam rested on the small figure lashed to the fork by strips of webbing. He called over his shoulder, ‘It’s Vanessa. She’s here, tied in a tree … it’s okay, Gov’nor, she’s fastened there.’ Then, despair lifting his voice an octave, ‘Claire. Where are you, Claire?’ as he edged out along the trunk and clawed at the fastenings holding the child in the ‘Y’ of the lower branches.

  Paul said, so quietly that Simon had to incline his head to hear him, ‘Is she alive? Can you tell?’ and when Simon said he could feel her pulse and began chafing her, he heard Paul scrambling back over the ruins of the scullery shouting to John to bring the ladder. Then he was back in the room again and when he saw her stir he suddenly became excited and leaped up shouting, ‘John! The ladder! Hurry! Come over the roof!’ Subsiding again, as though ashamed of his outburst, he said, ‘You say she was tied there? Out on that tree?’ and Simon, still chafing the child’s hands, mumbled, ‘There’s no-one else out there, Gov. I’m sorry … sorry …’ but could add nothing more.

  John came scrambling over the roof and they heard the thump of the ladder, neither of them pausing to wonder how the devil he had managed to drag the cumbersome thing this far but then, as Simon rose, cradling Vanessa in his arms, he saw Paul crawl into the aperture and cast the beam of his torch in a wide arc over the water. They had already eased Vanessa through the hole at the back and were beginning to ascend the first rungs of the ladder before he rejoined them, reaching forward to steady Simon’s shoulders. He said, ‘Tied there … Must have dragged her there … God knows, it’s a bloody miracle … I couldn’t have done it! Neither could you or anyone else, not with the place falling about her …’

  They said nothing, concentrating on the tricky task of inching the child across the ladder that John had placed as a bridge between the remains of the thatch and a perilously insecure mound of cob a few yards beyond. They managed it somehow and dragged themselves back along the rope as far as the elm, with Vanessa balanced on their shoulders and Paul abreast of them, lending his shoulder as a staff whenever either of them needed it. When they reached the landrover he gave another series of despairing shouts but the answer came from some way above them, where there was a confused flicker of lights at the top of the lane.

  Simon said, sharply, ‘Take Vanessa home, Gov’nor. There’s no sense in staying now help has arrived. I’ll pilot them down there and we’ve got the rope and ladder. Drive him back, John. And see what you can do to rouse Whinmouth. Drive there by the moor if necessary, or try and phone from somewhere en route. God knows, there might be dozens of casualties in that caravan park on the other side of the Coombe.’

  He stood beside the bonnet gesturing and watched his father’s authority ebb so that John was able to coax him into the landrover where he sat hunched and silent, the child across his knees. Then, as Rumble Patrick and one of Eveleigh’s men appeared out of the darkness, John revved and began to back up the lane, the tyres fighting for a grip on a wash of loose stones in the gateway. Rumble Patrick asked no questions. With Simon and Eveleigh’s man he dragged at the floundering tail-board until the vehicle was wrenched round and moved off up the lane to where two other cars were parked at the junction. Henry Pitts waddled out of one of them, swathed in an enormous greatcoat that John recognised as superannuated Home Guard issue. He said briefly, ‘Stay here and keep contact, Henry. We’ve got Vanessa but mother’s still missing,’ and then swung left and lurched off into the darkness.

  Henry Pitts stood there with his mouth agape, watching the tail-lights until they disappeared and then turning to look at the bobbing lights lower down where Simon, Rumble Patrick and Eveleigh’s man were scrambling over a wilderness of liquid mud.

  ‘Christ A’mighty,’ he said aloud, ‘to think it should ha’ come to this. Claire Craddock gone. Carried away by a tide o’ mud in her own bliddy vields.’

  Suddenly he felt very old and helpless so that he blundered back to the car, groped in the glove box for a flask and sucked down two great mouthfuls of whisky and water. He recorked the flask, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and sat glumly to await reinforcements. Sitting alone in the darkness he remembered another such night down in Tamer’s Cove, when the whole lot of them were engrossed in work of this kind. But that was in the splendour of their youth and nothing had seemed too difficult or depressing. It was, he reflected, almost exactly half-a-century ago. The wonder of it was that of all that team he and Squire Craddock were present for the encore.

  Chapter Five

  Counter Attack

  I

  They recovered her body the following afternoon. It was caught in a tangle of briars nearly a mile below the landslide, just short of the choked bridge where flotsam was piled twenty feet high and the Sorrel, in its furious search for the sea, had turned aside to flood half the houses and shops of Coombe Bay High Street, some of them to a depth of ten feet.

  She did not die alone that night. The Coombe Bay constable, shouting a warning to sleeping householders, was caught by a wall of water between two of the shops and washed as far as the quay where the torrent tore through Smut Potter’s café leaving a hole ten yards wide. Down here, in one of the few original quayside cottages, an elderly couple were drowned in their beds and in the new red, brick houses, where the block stood in the path of the diverted mainstream, five other people died, two of them children.

  It was astonishing, people said when they surveyed the two-mile path of the torrent that the death toll was not higher. Thirty houses had subsided when the tide rolled back the floodwater in the small hours and several caravans, mercifully empty, were swept from the eastern side of the Dell and carried in the path of the slide as far as the river bed.

  Nine dead, damage estimated at a hundred and seventy thousand pounds. It was enough to put the Valley on the front page of the nationals for the fourth time in fifty-one years and bring newspapermen and television teams flocking
in from London, Bristol and Plymouth to record the devastation and interview survivors. A short-lived, out-of-season boom followed the night of terror. Hotels and boarding houses reopened to accommodate the Press and a Paxtonbury disaster fund was opened for the families of victims and the hundred-odd homeless. People living as far away as Rome looked curiously at the ruin of an English village half-inundated in slime and temporarily isolated by the two arms of the Sorrel, the one following its original course when the bridge arches were cleared, the other, the wayward one, cutting through the new housing block, a huddle of cottages behind the High Street, and on into the bay via Smut Potter’s café and the old quayside.

  Simon, plodding about among the muck and debris after his school was closed, likened the desolate scene to some of the towns he had passed in pursuit of the Wehrmacht to the Seine, places like Caen and Le Havre, but the defilement of this end of the Valley worried him less than his father’s silence.

  When they told him she had been found he seemed neither surprised nor relieved but looked at them under his grey, shaggy brows and listened politely, as though to a report of a relatively trivial occurrence at one of the farms, a burned rick perhaps, or a Dutch barn unroofed by a gale. The Whinmouth doctor said it was the effect of shock, but Maureen, who knew him far better than his sons, understood that it was a more complex and deepseated reaction, involving not only Claire but the Valley as a whole, and that, in any case, he would be likely to see his human and material loss as one for all the time she had known him he had identified the Valley with his wife. His withdrawal, she thought, was caused by his attempt to come to terms with this quirk in his character and that whilst others would see it as a coincidence to him it was nothing of the sort. There was a kind of inevitability about it that, to an extent, buttressed him against grief, at least for the time being. She did not try to explain this to anyone because it was far too complicated. The only person capable of understanding it would be his daughter Mary, and she had her own grieving to do and her own pride to sustain her.