by Sarban
Charles stepped back and looked at the doctor. His face, which had gone pale when he first saw the tarpaulin tent, was now red from his stooping.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
The doctor rubbed his chin.
‘It’s likely enough that that appliance was the girl’s—what was her name? I read old Waite’s report to refresh my memory last week, but I’ve forgotten again. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I should think she tucked it away here when she left.’
‘But the other thing?’ Charles said. ‘What in God’s name is that?’
The doctor stared down at it. ‘Poor old Waite,’ he said. ‘Pity he’s gone. He’d have recognised that, I should think. I wouldn’t care to express a definite opinion without examining it more carefully, but my guess is that it’s one of those mummified monkeys he mentioned the girl had hanging in her room.’
‘Is it?’ said Charles, puzzled. ‘What did she leave it for I wonder?’
‘Oh, well . . . ‘ said the doctor, suggesting by his tone the uselessness of speculation on that. ‘Some sort of private symbol, perhaps, like leaving the appliance in the place where she was cured. I believe she did recover the use of her leg before she went, didn’t she?’
‘A kind of thanks-offering to the gods, or whatever god she believed in, you mean,’ I suggested.
‘Maybe. Something like that,’ he said.
‘I don’t know whether Inspector Waite said so in his report, but Mrs Pottinger seems to have understood from him that the police searched this house pretty thoroughly before the Guyatts left,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t they have found these things if the girl had taken some boards up and hidden them here. Surely the police spot things like that?’
The doctor chuckled. ‘Of course old Waite saw them. And without searching. They were there, in the room, under his nose when he was talking to the girl. She hid them after they’d gone over the house. He was looking for something quite different from that. Well . . .’ he turned to the sergeant. ‘Nothing much I can do about this, sergeant. You’d better not try moving that thing yourself. The damp’s got at it. It’ll all go to pieces if you touch it. You’ll have to get the experts on the job.’
The constable and the foreman began to put the little tent back.
Doctor Manton smiled at Charles.
‘Not quite what you were expecting, eh? We’ll get the pathologist to have a look at it, if we get any bits of it out intact, but you can tell your wife from me that that thing’s not, and never was, what she thought might be buried here.’
I heard from Charles later that Manton had told him that by the time they got the thing to the police laboratory it was no more than a small parcel of dust. What the pathologist made of it he did not know.
Nor do I know to this day whether Charles, or Doctor Manton or anyone else but myself had really guessed what Constance expected them to find at Number Fourteen.
The Sacrifice
‘IF THAT’S THE way you feel about it, perhaps you’d rather go your own way and let me go mine?’
For almost a minute Frances Prinne stared at him without speaking. The words were the climax of half a morning’s absurd, muddled, desolating argument: an argument, beginning as her arguments with Eric Fields always did, in a trivial dispute over some entirely unimportant point of fact or opinion, and mounting, as it seemed to her, in thickening clouds of sullen smoke spreading and expanding until it begrimed every facet of their relationship and choked the love that might, in spite of all their differences, have grown green and mantling about them.
Swiftly, and still half-frightened by her own hard perception of the reality, she applied his words not to the present matter of the walking-tour they were beginning together, but to their engagement. The tour was a symbol and an experiment. If a simple difference about a map-reading and a route could lead to these two hours of dreary, repetitive recriminations and irresolvable misunderstandings what earthly hope was there of a marriage with Eric succeeding? If one of her friends had recounted such a beginning of a holiday with their fiancé to Frances, Frances would have said with all the ruthless commonsense we apply to other people’s problems: ‘Call the whole thing off!’ But because it was herself and Eric, she had sat for two hours at the little café table seeing, hearing all hope of understanding broken into little pieces and yet not able to screw her courage to the point of admitting that it was shattered past mending.
Now the hostility in his voice, by angering her, impelled her to take the final step towards a clean break. All experience of the last loveless months and long candid reflections in private had shown this most clearly to be an act of honesty and plain commonsense. Moral cowardice, she understood, can be the cruelest of injustices to another person, and it is more often cowardice than kindness that makes us hesitate to hurt the other person. Like clumsy quacks that can neither cure nor leave the hurt alone, we prolong with unskilled fumblings and windy false hopes an agony that craves only a swift end.
Even now, if Eric had spoken the words with a trace of sadness or genuine question in his voice, she would have hesitated and lost the moment of courage. It was the brutality that decided her: the bullying note, and, above all, the sneering assumption that, if challenged, she would surrender. She would not reply until her anger had passed. There could be no question of their parting in a fit of temper, without meaning it, of her flinging out and marching a mile on her own to come scurrying back to reconciliation when her petulance, as he saw it, had exhausted itself. While she looked at him and gained command of her feelings she saw, among many inescapable facts, the unbridgeable difference of character and background between them: that he could believe that she would be afraid of being left alone. His look, his words, the tone of his challenge, all assumed triumph: he had no doubt that she was dependent on him, on his company, his direction and capability, for her holiday. In all these last twelve months he had failed to penetrate the least way into her character or acquire the smallest comprehension of the things that interested and inspired her. She had told him of many a long expedition she had made quite happily alone, in other vacations and even earlier in her school holidays. She supposed now that he could never have paid any real attention to anything she had said. Surely, otherwise—if he had learned to know her even a little—he would have understood that she did not need his company. . . .
She pushed back her chair, bent down and knotted the cord at the mouth of her rucksack and buckled the flap over it. She did not need his company, and now would say what she had long known: she did not want it. She had wanted the company of the man she had once thought he was.
‘On the whole I think I would rather,’ she said quietly and got up from the table. ‘I mean, for good.’
His face reddened. There was such bewildered anger and pain of wounded pride in his look that she felt a pang of pity for him, but then he forced a grin and tried, clumsily, to pretend he had not understood. He half succeeded in controlling his voice and said, with a false heartiness that grated upon her:
‘Hey, what’s your hurry? The bus doesn’t go till half past. Have another coffee.’
Frances swung her rucksack onto her shoulder.
‘I’m not going on that bus. I’m going to walk to Wendasbury and after that I shall go where my fancy takes me.’
She had reached the door of the café before he stopped her. He tried to bluster:
‘I want some explanation! What do you mean? Does this mean you’re chucking me? What do you call this?’
‘I mean, we’ve had our last quarrel, Eric,’ she said.
She had meant to speak reasonably and kindly, for she herself felt an immense relief now that the break was made. But he was aware of nothing but the blow to his own pride. Her reasonable tone infuriated him. He could no longer even half control his temper.
‘All right!’ he said. ‘Go your own damn silly way! You might have told me that’s how you felt about it all before you got out here and spent the money on the fares, but never mind: I’ve be
en made a fool of, that’s all. A good job I haven’t wasted more time and money. . . .’
Frances did not hear more. Her own anger had flared up again, and with nothing kind towards him in her heart or coolly reasonable in her head she marched down the High Street, over the railway crossing, and out along the main road to the fork where the lane branched off and climbed steeply uphill towards Wendasbury.
***
Four days later Frances sat on a fence on a hill looking down at the pleasant little Georgian town of Ambourne, which she had left half an hour before. She could enjoy the satisfying tones of the old red brick in the broad setting of summer pastures and gardens full-heartedly, with no mingling of regret and with no distracting discontent nagging at her. Four days of her own company had done more than convince her that she had been right to break with Eric: they had brought her a lightness of spirit that she had despaired of ever knowing again. Eric had oppressed her. That was the simple truth. She marvelled now that it had taken her so long to break away. It was London that had daunted her before, she supposed: there, in Streatham, with her own family, with Eric’s mother and father and brothers and sisters all treating her as though she were already Eric’s wife—though there was only what Mrs Fields called an ‘understanding’ between them. She had been bound by all those little personal strands as fast as Gulliver by the threads of the Lilliputians. That was why the final break had come there in Midford, far away from London: in the unknown country place she had felt free of the tyranny of familiar acquaintances and things: she had felt her own independence undoubtedly grow strong again and, on the eve of a fortnight’s holiday in open country places, her longing for complete freedom had surged up with such force as to burst all bonds.
She jumped down from the fence, gave a last look at the town and blew out a great, loud breath of relief. The June sky was cloudless; the woods, the fields and verges of the roads were at the height of their green summer glory, spreading unbelievable and inexhaustible riches all around her. She had no plan—Eric was the planner—but her examination at the Royal Academy School was behind her, victory over her own self-subjection was behind her: she felt triumphant and free, and she meant for two weeks at least to put on no other chain, but only to saunter where the land looked loveliest, to stop where she wanted, or where lodging was to be had, and to sketch and paint country things and scenes as the spirit moved her. Two weeks? She stopped and laughed with the joy of finding a new freedom that victory had brought her. Three weeks had been the length of Eric’s holiday from his job on the railway. Now, there was no reason why she should not wander as long as her money would last. Very blithely she walked on between banks of tall verdure.
Eric had planned the original tour so that they could sleep each night at a Youth Hostel. Frances did not want to be tied to hostels. She was quite prepared to sleep on fine nights in an old barn, or a copse, or under a haystack. That had been one of the skirmishes leading to the last battle with Eric.
Alone, she revelled in space and peace. Three nights running she had beech-leaves below the star-lit sky for a roof and bracken for her bed. The fourth day it rained and she paid six and sixpence for bed and breakfast at a cottage on the outskirts of Ambourne. The next day, with the sun rapidly drying the bright drops from the hedges and high roadside weeds again, Frances had struck off without a notion where she was to spend that night but cheerfully trusting in England’s kindness to wayfarers who demanded little.
The lane she followed would lead her, she thought, into the heart of the ancient royal chase of Hernemere. It is a tract of country still thinly inhabited. Though disafforested since the beginning of the last century and with most of its once wild, wide glades enclosed and its original oak woods much shrunk in area, it can still present to someone viewing it from the top of one of its numerous sudden eminences, the appearance of a wilderness, silent and utterly untouched by husbandry, much as it would have done to the rangers who kept King John’s deer there. And though many acres of tall trees have fallen since that time, Time, in an English way, has made amends by broadening hedgerows until they have become thickets and planting in them oaks and beeches and ashes so plentifully that they make the grass fields between the woods seem but a thinner sort of woodland. The villages that have grown up since the chase ceased to be a royal preserve squat privately in deep bottoms where flint and brick or timber and yellow thatch is so closely screened by the trees that you are not aware of them until the very last bend of the steeply-descending lane brings you to the little bridge or ford about which the cottages cluster. In summer the weight of foliage that presses down upon those marshy, lush little valleys is overpowering; the sappy, green exuberance of the earth, producing such rank jungles of undergrowth, is almost tropical. There are winding bottoms which for three or four months of the year are as impenetrable as a Malayan Jungle. They were the fastnesses once of the wild boar, and outlaws could sleep easily there, walled by alder, thorn and willows, by briars and profuse annual herbage, safer from importunity than any high lord in his castle. Deer-poachers and smugglers knew those deep places in earlier days and still, in present times, a woodsman finds a roebuck there.
In the later afternoon Frances came down a sunk lane, so narrow that it scarcely seemed possible that any wheeled vehicle could have travelled it, into the hamlet of Chevrelbourne. Seven or eight flint cottages, a stone-built inn and a tiny church sprinkled haphazard on gently sloping ground between a hanging beech wood and a stream where formerly a Plantagenet hunting lodge stood. A narrow wooden footbridge with a single hand-rail crossed the stream beside the ford. Frances stood there, resting her rucksack on the rail and taking in the place.
The road beyond the ford seemed to cease at a little green vaguely bordered by hedges where bramble and honeysuckle, bryony and nightshade had smothered the quickset heart. Over these a cottage or two just managed to show their weathered, diamond-patterned thatch from among green waves of orchard trees that rolled up to their eaves. Somewhere, between the dense gardens and behind the broad screen of horsechestnuts through which she could just see the tower of the church, Frances supposed the lane must run on, to climb the further side of the valley, through the beech woods. There was a way into Chevrelbourne, but way out there seemed to be none. The unmetalled lane, having brought the traveller by many a curious wind and turn from the signpost two miles away to the ford and the green, seemed quietly to resign its office there and melt away into the lovely verdant disorder of the hamlet’s bowers. To Frances it said with a justifiable complacency: ‘I have led you to what you were seeking. You have no further need of me.’
Frances found the inn beyond the chestnut trees, not far from the church. The Talbot is a long, low building of pleasing proportions, not thatched like the rest of the village but roofed with small tiles which the weather and lichen-growth of two centuries have brought almost to the same hue as the walls. The house is a free one, its front is disfigured by no claimant brewers advertisement; only the Talbot hound himself, painted black and very angular, glares down with red eyes from a swinging wooden sign.
Even before she had found the inviting old inn Frances had decided that she must stay in Chevrelbourne. Such a combination of warm, drowsy peace with fecund weather and variety of natural beauty must be rare even in Hernemere Chase. She could be happy and busy in this hamlet for all the rest of her holiday: her object was not to walk for the sake of walking, but to find by walking a lovely place to enjoy. It would have been a crime merely to admire Chevrelbourne for half an hour and then pass on.
It was so quiet. She had not seen a soul in the hamlet. Only, in front of the inn stood a small baker’s van with a grey pony in the shafts. She looked around her once more, deliberately, conscious, as in a life-class, of using observation as an art—as the basic skill that must be learned and exercised before the art of interpretation can begin. Standing there steadily taking in colours and forms, slowly seeing significant patterns within the apparent denial of order and symmetry on nat
ure’s part and man’s, she was already analysing and interpreting the strong attraction she felt towards the spot from her first sight of it. Its beauty had excited her as she stood on the footbridge; but it was more than the itch to get to work, more than the excitement of attempting to record her comprehension of the place in paint: there was some stimulus here in Chevrelbourne that she could not easily isolate and define. She wanted to do more than look at it, than observe and express her observations: she wanted to explore, to find what was hidden in the place. That was it! She murmured the words: ‘find it’ as if she were echoing a whispered command uttered to her from out of the depths of the summer leaves. And she knew that it was not an ‘interpretation’, not a subjective meaning, that she wanted to find in that woodland loveliness, but an objective thing, something as independent of her speculating mind as she of the quiet little cottages and crowding trees. She was excited by that intuitive conviction that there was something more in Chevrelbourne than the beauty her eye could comprehend, and the queer strength with which the conviction had established itself disturbed and awed her a little. There could be no question now of not staying there; she must have time, two or three days—a week—at least, to explore the valley carefully, to find out what it was that spoke to her, voicelessly, with such disturbing power.