‘Would it help if we knew how he got them to print that stuff?’
‘I’ll have a word with the company. About that and other matters.’
Lucy looked at Edward, who held her gaze. She said, ‘I’d never have taken you for a …’
‘Careful.’
‘… tradesman as well as an expert on Gray.’
‘Tradesmen come in all sizes and shapes. What time is lunch?’
As they were on their way out, the landlord nodded politely to Edward and said to Lucy, ‘How’s my old friend Boris?’
‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you, Mr Littlejohn.’
‘Have you taken him on a proper excursion yet?’
‘I thought next week, perhaps.’
‘He’d enjoy it,’ said the landlord, who with his neat suit and generally scrubbed appearance looked like the citified person he was not. Laying a polished horseshoe on the counter, he said, ‘Anyway, here’s a present for him.’
‘Oh, he’ll absolutely love that. I’ll nail it on his stable door.’
II
Revision, especially of the Metaphysicals, and bad weather combined to put off the day on which Lucy ceremonially nailed the horseshoe to Boris’s stable door. But when that day came it was so clear and bright and the forecast so promising that she planned a proper excursion for him and her on the morrow.
She was up at six and, with her old tweed coat over her nightdress, fetched the horse to his stable facing the kitchen and put chaff and corn in the manger for him. A heavy dew sparkled on the grass, the sky was a slightly veiled but cloudless blue, and there was the kind of hush everywhere that she had noticed before at the start of a fine hot day. She got more or less ready before cooking herself a substantial breakfast of fried egg, bacon and tomatoes, no more than sensible before a day’s riding. By this time the paper had arrived and she glanced at it as she ate.
Her eye was caught by a short item saying that the supposed additional stanzas of Gray’s Elegy, the discovery of which was recently reported, had been shown to be a modern forgery. The finder’s request for continued anonymity was being respected. This information revived Lucy’s almost-lapsed interest in the matter, and even brought her a mental picture of Colonel Orion Procope being completely indifferent to the news, but she dismissed it and him from her mind in the course of making sandwiches with fresh Cheddar, chopped onion and plenty of sweet pickle. This done, she prepared a thermos of tea, leaving enough tea over to take up to her parents’ bedroom with some arrowroot biscuits she privately considered dead boring.
The grandfather clock in the hall struck eight; time for grooming and saddling up. Lucy’s saddle, a birthday gift, was of army pattern, which meant among other things that it had plenty of hooks on which to hang a haversack with her provisions, a nosebag with Boris’s stuff, her black fisherman’s sweater and a blanket of his. She was ready, and of course he knew it at once and made for the outdoors. A minute later she was walking him down towards the road, quite a striking figure in her twill jodhpurs and man’s shirt, hair drawn back under a dark-green scarf, with the upright posture Edward had noticed.
As the sunshine grew stronger, the two of them were making good time, mostly over grassland or greenwood floor, so good that Lucy began to think she would fulfil her hope of reaching the coast before turnabout time and showing Boris the sea, perhaps taking him for a gallop along the sands if the tide was right, for a paddle if not. She had been talking on and off to him since they started, and when she mentioned these possibilities he turned his ears back to listen, but on being asked how he felt about them he simply took no further interest.
From earlier outings with Virginia, Lucy was confident that somewhere along their line of march she would find a good place for a rest, and sure enough not long after one o’clock they came to a shady spot with a patch of turf next to the road and a culvert over a stream, only a little one but enough to water Boris and wash the dust off his feet. Then, having loosened his girth, she put on his nosebag and he munched contentedly, swishing his tail against flies. She ate sandwiches, drank half her tea and read a chapter of her paperback copy of Dr Zhivago. Before they moved on she got into the saddle and let him crop grass for a few minutes.
Lucy was expecting to come in sight of the sea quite soon when she realized she was heading more or less directly for the village near which Colonel Procope lived. A glance at the map she carried in her haversack showed her that by the shortest route she was about two hours’ easy riding-time from it. That route, however, involved a longish stretch of road and, although Boris never complained, she knew he preferred to avoid road travel where possible, so a few minutes later she turned aside on a more roundabout approach. Only then did it occur to her to wonder how long it was since it had first entered her head to seek out the colonel and what she hoped to achieve by doing so. She found no answer to either question, and soon put them aside in favour of taking in the look of sunlit greenery and wild flowers and the lulling pleasure of having a healthy, strong, good-natured horse under her. But she still moved along a curving path that led to Procope’s village.
When at length she reached it she found little to see: a few smartened-up cottages, some boring modern houses, a church decorated in the usual flint, but also a post office, and that was obviously her first port of call. With the sound of rock music in her ears, she tied Boris to a convenient rail and went inside among picture postcards and toffee bars as well as stamps and telegram forms.
Instead of a fat old woman with glasses and a pencil stuck in her hair, Lucy found a fresh-faced one little older than herself, in dark slacks and a tee-shirt bearing the name and device of a brand of American cigarette. No less unexpectedly, this person reduced the music to almost nothing without being asked, and smiled a welcome.
‘Colonel Procope?’ she said at once when the name was mentioned. ‘Straight down the hill over there, lane at the bottom on the left, a bit under a mile along on the left. Say twenty minutes’ walk. I suppose it’d be quicker on horseback. That is your horse out there, is it?’
‘Thank you. Yes.’
‘Work at a riding stable, do you?’
‘No. No, he’s my very own horse. I keep him at home and look after him there myself.’
‘That’s nice,’ said the young woman vaguely. She looked out of the window and then over her shoulder before glancing at Lucy and away again. ‘You, er, excuse me asking, but would you be a great friend of his worship the colonel?’
‘Certainly not. My parents see him occasionally but only as a neighbour.’
Lucy thought this description sounded pretty hollow, but it evidently reassured the other girl, who said with another smile, ‘I thought you weren’t, well, his type, kind of thing. Er, he’s not exactly popular round here at the moment.’
‘What’s he been up to?’
‘Not that he’s ever been very highly thought of in these parts, but just the other day, see, he went too far. One of the village lads, young Tommy, well, he’s only a boy, really, not too bright if you know what I mean, anyway, Tommy was playing round the colonel’s place, just like a kid, you know, he wouldn’t be doing any harm, and his nibs flies into a tremendous rage, shouts at him, says he’ll give him a thrashing if he doesn’t make himself scarce that minute. Then laughed and said he was only joking.’
Lucy thought for a minute. ‘Did Tommy tell you all this?’
‘His mother had to like drag it out of him.’
‘Rough luck on poor little Tommy. Did he say anything else?’
‘No. Oh, there was one bit, he said there was something funny about the shed in the colonel’s garden.’
‘M’m. What sort of something funny? I suppose he didn’t say.’
‘Not really. Something about a hole. His mother said he sounded frightened.’
The girl behind the counter herself spoke with sudden reluctance, as if she repented a little of having been so informati
ve. Lucy took her cue, bought a couple of chocolate biscuits and departed.
Twenty minutes later the biscuits were inside Boris and he was standing in the shade and out of view while Lucy, also out of view, sat looking down on Colonel Procope’s domain. This consisted of a small stone-dressed cottage of no particular consequence, a couple of wooden outbuildings and a fragment of land with a spinney at one end and an open gateway on to the road or lane. This was a rough-and-ready affair that on one hand became no more than a track and on the other led to a bridge across a considerable stream. On the far side of the little valley, a more serious road led westward towards Ipswich, Cambridge and other important places.
Nobody was to be seen moving around or near the cottage, not even through the modest but serviceable pair of field glasses that Lucy habitually carried in her haversack and had hitherto shown her nothing more dramatic than the odd pair of nesting waterfowl. It was more than likely that there was nobody in the cottage either. The sense of adventure that had uplifted her since she had reached the village began to subside, leaving her with a half-memory of more childish would-be exploits, adventures of the mind founded on reading and day-dreaming. She was on the point of calling off her fruitless vigil, remounting Boris and making for home – it was too late now for any trip to the coast – when a large dark-blue car she had glimpsed across the valley came into her view again making for the cottage. In due time it slowed up, drove through the gateway, stopped, and set down a figure she recognized without her field glasses as the eccentric colonel. Lucy had calculated that one or other of the outbuildings must be a garage, but if so Procope made no immediate use of it; instead, he went and unlocked the door of a small shed. Seen through her glasses now, he looked carefully about him before going inside. Though Lucy had no fear of being seen as long as she kept still, she found this intensive survey disturbing in some way. It took a full half-minute to complete, at the end of which time he did enter the shed and no doubt locked the door after him. There was no sign of the younger man who had acted as chauffeur in the past, nor of anybody else.
Lucy waited without result. She was again about to leave when she saw the door of the shed open and Procope emerge. After locking up once more, he gave a somewhat abbreviated repeat of his all-round scrutiny, then moved to the front of his cottage, which was out of her view, and presumably went in at the front door. When another ten minutes had passed without incident, she left her observation post, went to reassure Boris, who stood placidly tethered to a handy tree, and walked down the grassy slope towards Procope’s abode, expecting any moment a challenging shout at best. None came. Still nothing happened when she reached the shed and peered in through a small window.
The interior was dark, and her own reflection kept hampering her attempts to see inside, but quite soon she found a vantage point that gave her a limited view. It was not so limited that she failed to make out part of a shallow trench dug in the earth floor of the shed at one end. So that was the hole young Tommy had seen: a trench. But what was a trench doing in a shed? Was it a trench?
Lucy’s heart had begun to beat fast. Trying not to think, only to act, she hurried back to Boris and rode in a sort of semicircle along the slope, down and back till she was approaching along the lane from the village. At Procope’s gate she dismounted, having done just enough thinking to run up an elementary story about finding herself in the district with time to spare and paying a call on the off chance that he would be at home.
The front door of the cottage had an old-fashioned bell pull that set up a tuneless jangling somewhere inside. Nothing happened for so long that Lucy had almost made to ring again when the door was flung open to reveal Colonel Procope.
The declining sun clearly illuminated a look of eager welcome on his face which very soon gave place to puzzlement, consternation, anger if not more. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’
She had her back to the light; she was far from his mind; her hair was hidden; he had never done more than glance at her. These points occurred to her later; for the moment she was aware only that he had not recognized her. It seemed to her suddenly important to remain unrecognized. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, trying to look as well as sound rustic and gawky, ‘but I wondered if my horse could have a drink of water.’
‘Certainly not! Get out!’ He was shouting and glaring, his fierce eyes doubly strange under the brown thatch of hair. ‘If you don’t, if you’re not gone by the time I finish talking’ – his voice rose to something like a scream and a fleck of saliva hit her cheek – ‘I promise you I’ll set my dogs on you and I won’t be calling them off!’
There was no need on Lucy’s part for any mimicry of someone badly disconcerted and frightened. She was back in the saddle, and had cantered a hundred yards towards the village, before she had time to reflect that any available dogs of the sort implied would assuredly have made a tremendous noise at the first sound of an unexpected visitor. Later still it occurred to her that no horse needed to be taken in search of water with a whole river a bare hundred yards away, but that was not going to matter now.
She arrived back at the post office in time to get some change and was soon on the telephone to Edward’s college, to the porter there who advised her to ring the old mill house, then to Edward himself who listened to her account of events without asking any questions, except where he would find her on his arrival in something under the hour. Lucy went to the saloon bar of the designated pub on the far side of the village green, which was nice enough but not as nice as Mr Littlejohn’s, and very slowly drank a half-pint of shandy (heavy on the lemonade).
Bit by bit her excitement ebbed away and with it all pretence of certainty, all her former sense of having happened to catch Colonel Procope on the point of committing some fearful atrocity. He had responded with surely disproportionate anger to a stranger’s innocent intrusion, for such it had been to his knowledge, and had perhaps shown something of the same earlier to young Tommy. There were a dozen possible explanations for that. He was secretive about his shed, inside which he had dug a trench, and that trench might to a fevered fancy like her own – she admitted it now to herself – have been a grave. And it might have been an unknown number of other things besides. He, the colonel, had fabricated eight lines in the general style of a two-hundred-year-old poem to send a message to a friend who quite likely had been a spy. What had Edward called the basis for that notion? Surmise, perhaps leaving a ruder word unspoken. What he would call her more recent notions Lucy dreaded to think.
Her heart sank further when at last he arrived. She knew immediately from the way he looked round the bar, spotted her, came over, greeted her with a touch of solicitude, that he had not taken her tale seriously. He had turned up for merely avuncular reasons, to give her moral support and to calm her down. His manner was studiedly non-committal when she acted on his request to go over things again.
‘So according to you,’ said Edward after listening to her, ‘you surprised the colonel just as his friend Green, having received and acted on his message, was about to walk in, be killed and be buried in the garden shed. Well now, why would the colonel want to kill his old mate after so elaborately persuading him to come all this way?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, adding stoutly, ‘but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a reason.’
‘True, as far as it goes. How, do you think, would the colonel have known so exactly when Green was due after his long and difficult journey? And how might he have induced Green to call on him?’
‘He’s on the telephone.’
‘True again. If Green was indeed going to appear, he might do so at almost any hour of any day out of, let’s say a hundred.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you happened to come along and poke your nose in at the precise time he was expected.’
Lucy said forcefully, ‘That’s right, perhaps I did, and it’s no argument against the manifestat
ion of an unlikely coincidence to notice that such a manifestation, though perfectly possible, is unlikely.’
‘True a third time. I think. Now I’m going to have a large glass of whisky. What about you? Would you like something of the sort yourself?’
‘No, thank you.’ She was slightly astonished. ‘What, what for?’
‘To strengthen you against a coming ordeal, or what may very well turn out to be one. We’re off back to the colonel’s place to see what we can catch him at.’
‘Oh, are we? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait till dark?’
‘He’ll be on his guard then, and I want to see the ground in the light. The sooner we’re there the better.’
When Edward had returned from the counter with his whisky, she said, ‘Have you told, you know, your friends in the company about any of this?’
He hesitated briefly. ‘No.’
‘Because you don’t want to look ridiculous. As ridiculous as you think my story is.’
Dropping all lightness from his manner, and focusing his attention on her in a way he had never done before, he took her hands in a loose but strong grip. ‘I think it only just conceivable that your story has any substance in it at all. And that’s how you feel yourself, isn’t it? But I’d be a fool if I didn’t follow it up. And I’d be worse than a fool if I didn’t do something to repay the trust you showed in me when you asked me to help you.’
She was not sure she understood all the meaning behind his words, but she caught his tone immediately and responded to it. ‘I’m ready whenever you say.’
He gave a wide grin with his eyes fixed on hers, another new expression, and squeezed her hands for a moment. ‘Good. Now where’s that horse of yours?’
‘I suppose you mean Boris. He’s on the green outside here, or he was when I last looked.’
‘Yes, I thought I saw him,’ he said without much conviction, half got up, remembered his whisky and drained it. ‘Right. Order of march. You lead on Boris. I follow in my trusty shooting-brake, which I should like to pull up and put somewhere out of the way a couple of hundred yards short of the objective. Is that possible?’
Complete Stories Page 43