by Robin Paige
Aunt Georgie bustled down the path, giving instructions. “Kate, please put that basket under the seat. Patrick, I hope you haven’t forgotten the rugs.” She looked around, a bit abstracted. “Where did I put my shawl? Patrick, did you remember the lemonade?” To Kate, she said, “I simply cannot believe the price of lemons these days, Kate. They are so dear!” Then, “Patrick! Where is my knitting? If the rest of you go running off to explore, I shall want something to amuse me.”
But at last they were off, behind a pony who seemed to know that this was a holiday jaunt, and not a bit of workaday travel. They went up the rising road, Patrick with the reins loose in his fingers, letting the pony have its head up the rutted lane through the curving chalkland, pulling them along beside a low flint wall daubed with the muted colors of moss and lichen. In the distance, flocks of sheep shone white, like constellations of stars on the flanks of the hills. Off to the left, stubble lay silver in the sun, with a few fiery poppies still blazing among the com stooks, and behind them Kate could see the Brighton race course, and the old windmill standing at arms on the top of Beacon Hill.
Then they were on the open downs, driving across the short, springy grass that was trimmed and kept so beautifully by the sheep. Kate could smell the wild thyme and marjoram crushed by the pony’s hoofs, and hear the sharp killy-killy-killy of a kestrel and the bright tumbling notes of skylarks, and catch an occasional glimpse of chalkhill blue butterflies clustering around a late thistle. She sighed happily. The downs were clean and innocent and so beautiful that she could almost forget the sordid adventure that lay behind them in Rottingdean.
“There it is,” Patrick said after a while, pointing to a large flint barn with tiled roof. It was built on a prominence that gave it a commanding view of the downs and the sea beyond. “That’s Height Barn. If you look out from the loft, you can see all the way to the valley of the River ’Ouse, and back to Brighton. On a moonlit night, you can count the ships far out in the Channel by counting their lights.”
“Is that where we’re to picnic?” Kate asked.
“In Wedding Hollow, behind the barn,” Josie piped up. “There’s a dew-pond there, and fairies. It’s my favorite place in all the world.”
“It looks like someone else is enjoying the area too,” Aunt Georgie said with interest. “Look. There’s a man taking pictures, there by the stone wall.”
“It’s a beautiful vantage point,” Kate said. “Perhaps I’ll ask Charles to bring one of his cameras and shoot it. The photographs would be a perfect souvenir to take home with us.” She put her hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “Perhaps you’ll come with us, Patrick, and show us the best place from which to shoot.”
But Patrick didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the man with the camera, who stood on the hill beside the grassy lane. Then he seemed to shake himself, and turned. “That’s the best place,” he said. “Where that man is.”
“But we don’t want to go to the barn,” Josie insisted. “Drive us to the Hollow, Patrick. I want to look for fairies!” She sobered. “But we must be careful when we look for fairies, my father says, for the fairies might be looking for us, although they don’t like to be called fairies but People of the Hills, who can do real magic, not just wave silly little wands around in the air. And they might carry us off.”
There might well be fairies, Kate thought as she climbed out of the wagon in Wedding Hollow and gazed around, for the place had the look of enchantment. There was a small, clear pond, surrounded by a thicket of gorse and blackberry and wild roses. Patrick, who seemed subdued, took Josie off to explore. Aunt Georgie and Kate spread the rugs and put out sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and potted meats and little cakes, and after a while the children came back and they all sat down and ate. Afterward, Patrick packed the food into the baskets and Aunt Georgie settled down with Josie in the curve of her arm to read one of the stories from The Jungle Books. Kate lay down in the dry grass and meadowsweet beside them, the sun warm on her face, listening drowsily until she fell asleep.
It was nearly an hour later when she awakened. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of gray clouds and a wind was stirring in the tops of the beech trees. Aunt Georgie and Josie sat up, too, rubbing their eyes.
“My goodness,” Aunt Georgie exclaimed, “I believe I’ve been asleep.”
“I’m cold,” Josie said, rubbing her arms. “Where’s the sun?”
“It’s gone under a cloud,” Aunt Georgie said. “The glass was falling this morning, so perhaps we will have a bit of rain.” She got to her feet and shook the dry grass out of her skirts. “Kate, why don’t you find Patrick, and we’ll start home.”
“Of course,” Kate said, and went off to look in the beech grove, and then in the blackberry thicket, and finally at the empty barn on the hill, shouting the boy’s name all the white. But there was no answer to Kate’s calls, nor to Aunt Georgie’s peremptory summons, nor to Josie’s piping wails. After an hour’s searching and shouting, they had to acknowledge the truth.
Patrick had disappeared, and Josie could not be persuaded that the People of the Hills had not carried him off.
29
All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON The Conduct of Life (1860)
After Charles’s interview with Harry Tudwell, he and Kipling drove into Brighton to talk to the chief constable. On the way, Charles stopped at Black Rock and, leaving Kipling to wait in the motorcar, went into the cottage for a brief talk with the widow Radford. She was waiting with all her belongings piled about her for her brother to come and take her and the children to Brighton, where they planned to bury her husband. She did not weep. Worse, she regarded Charles with a long, bitter look and replied to his questions with a torrent of scathing words, as hot and fierce as a fountain of molten rock.
Feeling depressed and hollow, Charles climbed back into the Panhard. Kipling looked at him searchingly, as if to ask him how the conversation had gone, then thought better of it and, pulling his motoring goggles over his eyes, sat back in the seat.
They drove for a while in silence. It was a pretty day, but a low band of gray clouds to the south, over the Channel, presaged a change in weather. At Kemp Town, they met the Rottingdean omnibus on its return trip from Brighton, and pulled over to the grassy verge to keep from spooking the horses. Charles stopped the car.
In the sudden silence, Kipling said, “You’re thinking that you’ve solved Radford’s murder, then?”
Charles pulled up his goggles and rubbed his eyes. Goggles or no, the fine grit from the roads seemed to filter through every crevice. “Judging from the evidence in Smith’s cottage and from what Mrs. Radford told me just now, it seems pretty clear that Captain Smith killed him. Radford apparently let Smith know that he planned to inform the officials about the smuggling operation at Rottingdean. Mrs. Radford claims that he wanted to persuade Smith to abandon his evil ways.” Charles sighed. “He might just as easily have wanted to blackmail Smith for a share of the ill-gotten gains. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know which it was.”
“Give him the benefit of the doubt,” Kipling said.
“Yes, I suppose,” Charles replied. “However it was, we have the weapon—Radford’s knife, which Kate found among the cutlery in Smith’s cottage. Smith must have run him through back to front, and then hauled him out for burial in the Channel.”
Kipling nodded. “So, Radford was killed by Smith. But who killed Smith?”
“Someone with access to the guns we found in the tunnel last night,” Charles said. “I am willing to wager, however, that it was neither Trunky Thomas nor Harry Tudwell. I’ve spoken to both, and while they have plenty to hide, I don’t think they’re concealing murder.”
Kipling looked grim. “Plenty to hide, indeed. To my way of thinking, those guns and explosives are tantamount to murder, all by themselves. In the hands of anarchists—” He shook his head angrily. “And to think that Rottingdean has gotten itself involved with
gunrunning! It’s a bloody disgrace, that’s what it is! The village will never recover from the dishonor.”
Charles gave him a questioning look. “So you’re convinced that’s what’s going on?”
“What else can it be?” Kipling demanded. “You said yourself that the bit of smuggling they’ve done or are likely to do scarcely warrants the cost of those underground works. And in today’s market, smuggling makes no economic sense—not on a large scale, in any event.”
“I’ve got to agree with you there,” Charles said. “And the guns are critical—there’s no getting around that. But still—” He frowned.
“Still what?” Kipling asked. “You’re thinking there’s something else?”
“It’s the map overlaps,” Charles said. “They don’t fit a smuggling venture—nor a gunrunning operation, either. That’s the one piece of the puzzle that makes no sense to me at all.”
“Well,” Kipling said darkly, “all I can say is that we had better find a way to keep this out of the papers. Life in Rottingdean won’t be worth a shilling if the story gets out. The village will sink under the shame of it.”
“I agree to that, too,” Charles said. The omnibus safely past, he drove back onto the road and they finished the journey into Brighton in silence, stopping for lunch at an inn on the east side of the town.
Their visit took longer than expected because Sir Robert had been called out to a robbery at the home of a prominent citizen, and they had to wait over an hour for his return. While they waited, Kipling read the Times and Charles reviewed the notes he had scribbled in his notebook over the past two days, making sure he had all the details straight in his mind. It was those map overlays that puzzled him so, as he had told Kipling, and the telegraph equipment. Everything else, he could fit comfortably into one or another scenario. But those two pieces were out of place, unless—
Kipling rattled the newspaper furiously. “Another blasted German warship commissioned at Kiel!” he exclaimed, “and according to the Times, the Germans are looking to the Philippine Islands for new coaling stations to serve their fleet.” He shook his head darkly. “Mark my words, Sheridan. This is serious business. We’ll find ourselves at war with them one of these days—no matter that the Kaiser is the grandson of the Queen.”
But Charles was scarcely listening. He sat very still, beginning to get a glimmering of a possibility—a fantastic-seeming possibility, a very faint glimmer, a will-o’-the-wisp luring him down a dark road, overhung with truly frightening shadows. Like a riddle, with another riddle as its key. But however fantastic this explanation might seem, there was surely something to it. He studied his notes once again, seeing no flaw in his hypothesis and shivering as he thought about the eventuality. Well, tonight’s venture, however it turned out, would surely yield more information. It had to. If his theory was correct, the stakes were unimaginably high, and the game was much larger than anyone had thought.
Upon his return, Sir Robert was appropriately apologetic for the delay. They began their conference by going over all of the points Charles had been arranging in his mind, one by one, from the murders of George Radford and Captain Smith to the smuggling operation that was planned for that night.
“According to the boy, the smugglers are to signal from the old house on the cliff just to the west of the village,” Charles said. “We shall simply observe what transpires and—”
Sir Robert shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sheridan,” he said gruffly. “I fear there’s to be more to it than that.” He pushed a yellow telegram across the desktop.
With a sinking feeling, Charles picked it up. “OBSERVE MY HAT STOP,” he read out loud. “APPREHEND KILLER FORTHWITH STOP ARREST WHOLE DAMNED VILLAGE IF YOU HAVE TO STOP WALES.” He looked at Sir Robert questioningly. “You told HRH?”
Sir Robert winced. “I had to, didn’t I? He left explicit orders to be kept informed.”
Kipling was gloomy. “To be sure. But if you bring your men down the coast en masse, it’s bound to get into the newspapers. You know what a fuss they’ll make of it. Underneath, the story is desperately tawdry, but on the surface it reads like a romantic fiction—smuggling, secret tunnels, hidden guns, all the trappings of a cheap adventure novel.” He shook his head. “Things are bad enough now, but after this, the day-trippers and souvenir-seekers will swarm all over the village. They’ll make a circus of the place. No sane person will want to live there ever again.”
“Worst of all,” Charles said, “a company of law enforcement officers will drive the killer or killers underground and erase any hope of discovering who’s behind those guns.” He leaned forward. “Maybe we can effect a compromise between your orders and the requirements of the situation.”
“If we can, I’m willing to work something out,” Sir Robert said. “What do you have in mind?”
Charles described the plan he had been considering. They spent the next half-hour fine-tuning their strategy. By the time they shook hands and he and Kipling took their leave, Charles was reasonably satisfied with what they had agreed to.
The question now was whether it would work as they hoped, or whether something they could not foresee would destroy their carefully laid plans.
30
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
—GEORGE HERBERT Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“I don’t want to be calm,” Aunt Georgie cried. “I want the boy found, do you hear me?” She thumped her hand on the constable’s desk. “Turn out the men of the village! I want an immediate search.”
Constable Woodhouse sighed heavily. “But Lady Burne-Jones,” he said, “I am trying to tell ye that th’ boy will be found, no doubt about it. ‘E’ll turn up, in ’is own good time. Boys do that, y‘know. They pop off, I mean. On their own business. ’E’s gone fishin‘, most like.” He gave her what was obviously meant to be a reassuring smile. “It’s near on teatime, milady. If th’ young imp ain’t back tomorrow mornin’, come an’ tell me, an’ I’ll ‘ave a look for ’im myself.”
Kate made another attempt. “I believe,” she said, “that what Lady Burne-Jones is saying is that the boy did not pop off on his own business. He did not go fishing, because he had no fishing equipment. We do not believe he has been injured, for we thoroughly searched the area. We think he has been ...” She swallowed. The idea was almost too terrible to contemplate.
The stout constable raised both eyebrows. “Been wot?” he asked.
“Kidnapped,” Kate said.
“Kidnapped!” the constable echoed, his bulbous eyes opening wide with a took of utter disbelief.
“Yes, kidnapped,” Aunt Georgie snapped. “Would you like us to spell the word for you, sir?”
“That’ll not be necess‘ry.” The constable could scarcely suppress his smile. “Ye’ll pardon me, yer ladyships, but ’oo would want to kidnap a worthless boy?”
Kate bit her lip. When she had seen the photographer standing near the barn, she had thought nothing of it. Why should she? The South Downs were crowded with photographers and painters seeking to capture the wild, sweeping beauty of earth and sky and sea, and falling all over one another in the general melee. There was nothing about this particular photographer that should have caught her attention.
So it wasn’t until Patrick had vanished and she had begun the fruitless search for him that she remembered the man in the gray bowler, packing his camera equipment hurriedly, as if he wanted to make his escape. She remembered, too, that Patrick had stiffened as if he recognized the man, and that all through the picnic lunch, the boy had been nearly silent. And then, with a sudden start, she remembered something else, as well: talking with another photographer, similarly dressed in tweed knickerbockers and gray bowler, on the Quarter Deck above the beach on the morning that George Radford’s body was pulled out of the ocean. That man had spoken with an accent—French or Belgian, perhaps—and had said something about the natives being driven by the powers of darkness to jump off the cliff, as if suggesting that the victim had kille
d himself. An intuition told her that the photographer on the Quarter Deck and the photographer near the barn were the same man. But why in heaven’s name would he want to kidnap Patrick? How was this foreign photographer—if that’s what he was—connected to the unhappy events in Rottingdean? And if he had the boy, what did he intend to do with him? Oh, if she hadn’t fallen asleep! If she’d kept a closer eye on the boy, if she’d taken her responsibility more seriously, none of this might have happened!
But Constable Woodhouse suffered none of Kate’s distress or guilt. “It’s clear as day, milady,” he declared cheerfully. “Since there’s nobody‘ud want the foolish boy, there’s nobody’ud take ‘im. Th’ lad’s got hisself lost, is all. ’E’ll come draggin’ back to th’ village when ‘e’s ’ungry an’ cold. Go ‘ome an’ ’ave yer tea an’ don’t fret.”
But somebody did want the boy, and somebody had taken him, for some appalling purpose or another. Kate was as sure of that as she was of her own name, and the certainty made her sick with apprehension. Patrick knew too much about the village’s profitable smuggling operation. Patrick knew what was going on in the tunnels, and what was planned for this very evening. He had seen the man who rowed George Radford’s body out to sea and had overheard Harry Tudwell talking with one of the investors about—
“Well!” Aunt Georgie exclaimed indignantly, rising from the chair in front of the constable’s desk. “I can see that we are going to gain no cooperation from the law, which is either too indolent or too inept to be of any real use.” She pulled at Kate’s sleeve. “Come, Lady Sheridan. We will organize our own search. When the boy is found, it will be no thanks to the law!” And with a last withering look at the constable, she swept out the door.
But as Kate and Aunt Georgie quickly discovered, it was impossible to organize a search. For one thing, the men to whom they spoke appeared to share the constable’s view: that Patrick had simply gone off in pursuit of his own affairs and would return when he was ready. For another, there seemed to be an air of barely suppressed anticipation in the village, as if everyone were waiting for something important to happen and had no interest in anything else. Kate thought she knew what they were waiting for and wished desperately that she knew whether it and Patrick’s disappearance were connected.