The Sherwood Ring

by Elizabeth Marie Pope

Uncle Enos's hands went out in a strange groping gesture, as if he thought I was going to put something into them. "Where are they?" he muttered. "I want... I can't. . . Didn't — you — find them?"

  "No, not yet, but I will," I answered reassuringly. "I promise you that I will. Truly I will, if you'll just lie quietly and rest a little while."

  One of the groping hands caught my wrist and closed hard around it.

  "You promise?" Uncle Enos whispered.

  "I promise," I repeated gently. "Just tell me what it is that you want, dear."

  "I . . . want.. ." but the voice was becoming only an incoherent murmur and I could no longer understand what he was saying. I caught the name "Peggy," and then the words "own" and "paneling" and "book," and then another name that sounded like "Earle," and then — very rapidly and urgently — something about "history" and "papers" and "Earle" again.

  "Christopher Seven, who is it that he's talking about?" I demanded.

  "I don't know, Miss Peggy," said Christopher Seven helplessly.

  Uncle Enos's hand fell away from my wrist and began to move restlessly about once more, trying to find and close over something that was not there.

  "Where . . . I . . . must . . . can't . . . any longer," he muttered; and then, in a high, sharp, distinct voice: "Peggy!"

  "Yes, dear?"

  "Thorne," said Uncle Enos. "Thorne."

  "What's that you after now, Mr. Enos?" quavered Christopher Seven.

  "Peggy," repeated Uncle Enos. "Thorne."

  I bent down over the bed.

  "Uncle Enos, is it Pat Thorne you want?" I asked as clearly as I could.

  Uncle Enos's eyes opened for an instant and looked up into mine, then they closed again and the hands resumed their feverish wandering over the coverlet. But he seemed to be lying a little more quietly. The desperate jumble of words stopped, and his head turned over on the pillow with a long gasping sigh.

  "You stay with him till the doctor gets here," I called over my shoulder to Christopher Seven as I swung around and made for the door as fast as my feet would carry me. "Tell him I've gone to fetch whatever it is if he starts talking again! I'll be back just as soon as I can." And then I was dashing down the stairs and through the hall and out the side porch into the garden.

  There was only one telephone at Rest-and-be-thankful — and that was far away across the orchard at the gardener's cottage in Mrs. Macintosh's back pantry, where Uncle Enos was officially supposed to be unaware of its existence. Fortunately, Mrs. Macintosh was a kindhearted woman and had simply set a painted china piggy bank on the pantry shelf along with the memorandum pad and the telephone book, as a gentle reminder to all of us that we were expected to drop in a contribution to the monthly bill.

  "No, I don't care, Miss Peggy," she had said the first time I had met her, "though I must say it's a blessing that your dear grandmother managed to get the bathrooms put in at the big house before your Uncle Enos could come along with any more of his quirks and his notions. Yes, you go right ahead and use the phone whenever you like. I don't care a bit. It gives me a chance to see a little company."

  She might have added, "—and hear all the gossip," for her ears were as sharp as her heart was kind, and poor Petunia had almost given up trying to have a quiet word of an evening with the new janitor who worked at the Methodist Church. The emergency calls and crises and excitement of a serious illness in the family were exactly the sort of thing Mrs. Macintosh liked best, and she was throbbing at the kitchen door that afternoon before I could even turn in to the path.

  "Miss Peggy, oh dear, what's the matter?" she cried as she caught sight of my face. "Why, you must have run all the way from the house! Is he worse?"

  "No, but would you mind if I used the telephone? I have to call somebody at New Jerusalem," I panted, fumbling through the directory for Mrs. Dykemann's number and praying frantically that Pat would not be out somewhere in Betsy or over at Goshen for a day in the library. I could have cried with relief when I heard the receiver click and then the voice saying at the other end of the line: "Hullo? I'm sorry; Mrs. Dykemann's not in."

  "No, not Mrs. Dykemann, you," I gasped. "Pat, it's Peggy. Can you come over to Rest-and-be-thankful? Yes, that was what I said. Now? Right away? Uncle Enos wants to see you."

  "Good heavens! Has he gone out of his mind?"

  "Something like that, and — oh, please will you hurry? I'm afraid it's most awfully urgent."

  "Hang on, I'm coming," replied Pat briefly, and I heard the receiver go down again.

  "Now, you'll just sit right down here at this table and have a good hot cup of tea and a cookie," announced Mrs. Macintosh, bustling about sympathetically somewhere behind me. "I always say there's nothing like a good hot cup of tea when you're feeling a little low. That's the young man who's boarding over at Susan Dykemann's, isn't it?"

  "I've got to go up to the gate and meet him, Mrs. Macintosh; thank you anyway."

  "He can't possibly be there for another half hour at the very least, not in that Ford of Ted Lowry's," said Mrs. Macintosh cajolingly. "I baked the cookies myself this morning. Just you try one, they're nice and fresh. Did you meet him somewhere abroad? Susan Dykemann doesn't know what to make of him. She says his socks are worn out till you can hardly see them for the holes, but all his hair brushes are real solid silver."

  I finally escaped by taking two of the fresh-baked cookies with me and promising faithfully that I would eat them while I waited for Pat by the gate. It was a heavenly summer day, high and warm and blue, and all the trees in the orchard were already crowded thick with little green apples. I stood leaning on the fence and counted the knotholes on one of the posts mechanically over and over again, trying desperately not to cry. I had never in all my life felt quite so cold or miserable or sick.

  Then Betsy suddenly charged out of the woods at the edge of the hill, her convertible top pulled grimly over the windshield like a jockey's cap and her wheels sending up showers of pebbles as she tore down the slope and collapsed with a triumphant puff in the long grass at the side of the road. Pat came out of the seat and across the gate in what appeared to be a single swift movement, and caught me as I ran stumbling to meet him.

  "My poor lamb, what on earth is the matter?" he demanded, with his arm around me.

  I had kept control of myself fairly well up to that point, but the words and the touch made me go completely to pieces. I put my head down on his shoulder without even knowing I had done it, and clung to him weeping helplessly while I tried incoherently to tell him everything between my sobs. Pat listened with a little frown of concentration, one hand smoothing my arm absent-mindedly and his eyes looking over my head at the house in the distance.

  "And you're certain I'm the one he wants to see?" he asked, adding in a bracing manner that I had better fish around in the left-hand pocket of his coat for a handkerchief and see if I couldn't stop crying for a bit.

  I took the handkerchief, which had apparently been used to dry Betsy's tears too sometime already that day, and mopped my face gratefully with a clean corner. "He said your name over and over again, and then when I asked him he seemed to understand and get a little quieter," I answered shakily. "There's somebody else called Earle that he wants besides, but I don't know who he is. Christopher Seven says he never heard of him."

  "That's all right, it isn't important. Don't worry about it any more — Not that handkerchief, you idiot! I've been using it to wipe down the windscreen. This one!"

  "But Pat, you don't understand! It must be important. The way he kept talking — "

  "It's all right, I tell you. He was probably only trying to say something else about me."

  "But your name isn't Earle, or anything like it! And it was 'Earle' he was saying, I'm perfectly sure of that."

  "Of course my name isn't Earle!" snapped Pat, looking rather embarrassed and completely exasperated. "It isn't even Thorne, either, if it comes to that. The family name is something quite different. Thorne's only the title."
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br />   I pulled myself out of his arm and took a step backwards, staring up dumbfounded into his face.

  "Pat, are you an earl?" I demanded incredulously.

  "Oh heaven give me patience!" moaned Pat. "You've been reading old books again. What do you expect an earl to look like? Want to see me ride up to the gate on my coal-black hunter followed by my pack of hounds and my personal string of faithful retainers? You little know modern England! There hasn't been a whole loaf of bread at Thorne since about the time of the Boer War, and even the death-duty and income-tax people are beginning to get tired of nosing about the place for crumbs. We'll probably have to spend the rest of our lives in some deplorable flat on a dusty street behind a red brick university where I teach history for a pittance; and it will be a serious question whether it's more important to buy Meg her new umbrella or get the blazer for Johnny, because we'll never be able to afford them both at once; and some time if you'd like to see the family estate we'll pack a picnic hamper and go down on the cheap excursion train for the day along with the other tourists; and oh yes, you'd better learn how to make bread sauce, because they tell me it makes the Sunday chicken stretch a little further — and now do you understand what it's really going to be like when we're married?"

  "When we're . . . what?"

  "Married," said Pat, casually. "Don't look so taken aback! Surely it can't really be news to you? I've had it in my mind ever since I saw you standing there in the road with your shoes all over mud."

  "B-but — "

  "And don't bother trying to argue with me about it. You can have as long as you like to accustom yourself to the idea, but you may as well get it through your head now that nothing you can do will make the slightest difference in the end. The members of my family have always been as stubborn as mules, and notoriously good at getting what they wanted. We even have a motto about it on our coat of arms: quod desidero obtineo, which, roughly translated, means — "

  My whole universe suddenly seemed to splinter and crack and go whirling chaotically in bits around my head like the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

  "Pat! Wait a minute! No, please listen to me! What did you say your family name was? Not the Thorne part — the other?"

  "Sherwood," said Pat, looking rather bewildered. "What's the matter? Did you expect it to be something like Montmorency or Plantagenet? Peggy Plantagenet would be a horrible name."

  "And your ancestor you were telling me about — you know, the eighteenth-century Thorne who was with the British Army in New York — was he called Sherwood too? Peaceable Drummond Sherwood?"

  "That was the one. He didn't come into the title and so on till after the war. I believe he was originally a nephew or something of the sort."

  "And he was the man with the diary and the letters and all the other stuff you couldn't find any trace of?"

  "Yes."

  "And the diary — was it written in a brown leather book with his coat of arms on the cover?"

  Pat frowned suddenly. "Yes; I remember now — there were about nine or ten of them altogether. But how on earth did you — ?"

  I drew a deep breath. Great fragments of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place and fit together at last.

  "Pat, I'm afraid I know what's become of your things. Uncle Enos must have them."

  "What?"

  "I'm not sure about the rest, but he had one of the diary books in his study last month. I saw it accidentally when I was trying to pick up his notes for him after the big thunderstorm. I expect he's got all the others put away somewhere too."

  "But that just isn't possible! Where in the world could your Uncle Enos have —" Pat broke off abruptly, his face clearing. "Of course! It must have been at that weekend in the country with Cousin Mildred after the old gentleman died. The one Mrs. Cunningham was talking about at the party." He leaned back against the gate and began to laugh helplessly. "Oh, naughty Uncle Enos! Do you suppose he carried them off down a ladder and smuggled them aboard the lugger in the middle of the night?"

  "But I thought you said your Cousin Mildred told you that she'd never heard of them, and she'd hung a picture of Salisbury Cathedral over the place where the miniature used to be, and I don't see any reason why she should do that unless she — she —" My voice faltered and went to pieces. I could not think of any tactful way to finish the sentence.

  "That's right," said Pat approvingly. "A courteous reticence in speaking about your husband's family is the key to a successful married life. But if you would like to ask: is my Cousin Mildred the sort of person who would sell those papers without consulting me and then try to carry the matter off with a high hand afterwards? the answer is: yes, I'm afraid so. In fact, I ought to have thought of it myself. She's an old lady, you see, and she's lived at the place all her life, and I suppose she's just gotten into the way of thinking about everything in it as more or less belonging to her. I don't mean she would have made off with the pearls or anything else she really regarded as valuable family property. But a box of dirty old papers that had been lying around the library for years on end without anyone paying the slightest attention to them? It wouldn't strike her as being the same sort of thing at all. And then when I charged in asking questions and pulling the house apart trying to find where they were — of course, she flew into a panic. You can't blame her."

  "But Uncle Enos! He must have known."

  "Not necessarily at the time he bought them. I fancy she wrote to him after her balloon got off the string. And then he flew into a panic too."

  "But he couldn't have! Why should he?"

  "I know the answer to that one." Pat's mouth twisted wryly, and for an instant there was a curious, self-questioning look in his eyes. "It's the good old occupational disease I always think of as the Scholar's Clutch. Don't you realize the Sherwood Papers are probably going to be the biggest historical discovery in their own field for a generation at least? I tell you that he could no more have given them up once he had his hands on them than — well, than I might have been able to if I'd been in his place. You think about it a minute. There he was, with his pen practically dipped in the ink to start rewriting the whole history of Orange County and New York and the War of Independence — and then he suddenly finds out that he doesn't have any valid claim to the material, and it all really belongs to some young whippersnapper with no reputation as a scholar who might make a complete botch of the job!"

  "That isn't any excuse."

  "No, I suppose not. There can't be very much wrong with him, though. He could perfectly well have blackmailed me into holding my tongue by threatening to take the whole business into court and raise a scandal about poor Cousin Mildred. That doesn't seem even to have occurred to him. All he's tried to do is get rid of the problem by ignoring it in a grand manner."

  " 'Run along and don't bother me!' " I said, laughing in spite of myself.

  "Something like that. I rather think he must have done it on the spur of the moment to begin with, and then found that he'd landed himself in a completely impossible situation. He couldn't very well admit what had happened, and he couldn't publish the papers without everybody finding out, and as a good historian it must have broken his heart to keep them a secret, and he never knew when you or Mrs. Cunningham or somebody else might get on his track, and there I was at New Jerusalem like an innocent child playing hide-and-go-seek in the cellar where he'd hidden the body — and all in all, he's probably had a fine, merry time of it for the last month or so. I don't wonder he cracked up."

  "And I didn't think there was anything he could possibly have on his conscience! Pat, it must be those papers he wants. He was trying to go downstairs to 'get' something this afternoon. And even after we put him back to bed, he went on groping about over the sheet and making me promise I'd 'find them.' Of course, and that's why he kept repeating your name the way he did. He was going to give them back to you."

  "I said there couldn't be very much wrong with him. What do we do now? Go tell him that the game is up,
but never mind, we're not playing for keeps?"

  But when we got back to the house and halfway up the stairs, the doctor came out of the bedroom with his coat off, and told us to go away for another hour at least, and for heaven's sake to find those papers Uncle Enos seemed to have on his mind if we really wanted to make ourselves useful.

  "Well, that ought not to take much doing, anyway," I remarked as I led the way down again. "They must be in the study some place. He wouldn't leave them anywhere else."

  It seemed strange to be going through the study door again with Pat behind me, exactly as I had that first afternoon, and I could not help glancing across the room at the spot where Uncle Enos had stood with his arm stretched out while he ordered him to leave the house. Pat took no notice. He went straight across to the nearest bookcase and began examining the contents systematically one shelf at a time, pulling out a volume now and then to look at it more closely. I sat down on the floor by the big desk and tried the drawer where I had seen Uncle Enos lock away the diary on the afternoon of the thunderstorm. But the drawer was open now, and there was nothing in it except an untidy heap of catalogues from rare-book dealers, and some discarded notes for the article on the drinking customs of the eighteenth century.

  The search took a long time. There were four bookcases in the room, tall ones set back at intervals between the panels of the wall, with brass-handled drawers to hold papers, built in under them. Uncle Enos had a bad habit of thrusting odd books away behind the regular rows, and Pat had to grope around at the back of all the shelves and then empty them out to make certain whenever his hand struck anything. The drawers underneath were a housekeeper's nightmare of manuscripts, off-prints, more discarded notes and catalogues, unframed engravings, manila folders full of correspondence, bundles of old bills tied up with tape, family records, files, bibliography cards, and historical documents of every sort and kind. Nowhere in the confusion was there any trace of the Sherwood Papers. At the end of an hour all we had found was the letter from Cousin Mildred, on eight sheets of airmail stationery in a very agitated hand, beginning: "Dear Mr. Grahame, I write in great distress to say that I am obliged to tell you — "