Dead Man Riding

by Gillian Linscott

  ‘Are we ready then?’

  ‘Here.’ Kit stepped out of the shadows, holding a bundle of spruce and holly twigs. ‘Might as well do it properly.’

  He held out the bundle for Alan to light, waited until it flared up then passed it over.

  ‘The bridal torch,’ he said.

  He and Alan stared at each other for a moment, the contours of their faces sharp in the light of the flames, then Alan made a lunge like a fencing movement and pushed the torch into the heart of the bonfire. The straw caught at once, then the dry branches and in moments the whole fire blazed up and ripped a hole in the dark sky that must have been visible for miles around. Down in the town people would see it from their back yards or doorsteps. The gossip about the will had probably got round by now and they would be sure it was the Old Man burning. Late walkers or shepherds would watch it from the hills on the Scottish side of the Solway, fishermen from the sea. Nearer at hand, Major Mawbray might be watching too, standing in his porch between his barley sugar brick pillars, and know it was a last defiance from his enemy. At least the Old Man hadn’t been cheated of that. We stood round it, not saying anything. Once Alan had got the fire lit he’d stepped back alongside Imogen. They were shoulder to shoulder, hands probably touching. From where I was standing the rest were just dark shapes, with faces coming into view every now and then as the flames shifted. I thought about Kit and the bridal torch. Had he chosen that way of admitting defeat over Imogen? Quite possibly. There was a love of drama in both Alan and Kit.

  The flames began to die down. Nathan’s chair glowed red for a while, then flared and crumbled. We started patrolling the dry grass, stamping out bits of glowing ash. The fire drew in on itself until it was an untidy ball of burnt branches with a glowing heart. We drew in on it as well in an informal circle, kicking bits of smouldering wood back into the centre. As it happened, there was nobody close to me when my toe tangled in something that wasn’t wood. I thought at first it must be a piece of tough bramble or bracken stem and knelt to pull it away before it could scorch my shoe but there was too much of it for that. My hands closed on something leathery, too straight-edged to be a plant stem. The burnt end broke and I was holding a length of it in my hand. Even then it took me a while to realise what it was. A leather thong. My heart jumped ‘Not that,’ even while my head was telling me there might easily be a leather thong on the bonfire, caught round some other piece of rubbish we’d burned. But a log at the heart of the fire gave a last little spurt of flame, just enough for me to see that the thing at my feet was a tangle of leather thongs and knots and string. My mind had hardly registered that before my foot was lacking it again and again, right into the heart of the fire. I felt my toes getting hot inside the shoe, heard Midge shouting to me to be careful. The tangle caught and hung on a red-black branch, flared and fell into glowing ashes. I’m sure none of the others noticed. Because of Midge’s shout they were looking at me, not the fire.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told them.

  The instinct not to talk about it came as suddenly as the one to kick. You couldn’t call either of them decisions because that implies thought and I hadn’t thought at all. I’d simply wanted the thongs and string not to be there and now they weren’t. With the excitement of the fire gone the feeling of loss came back. Not simply the loss of the Old Man but of something in ourselves. It felt quite cold now after the heat of the flames and a tawny owl was calling in the wood. Somebody suggested going back to the house for tea and food if we could find any. I don’t think many of us had eaten all day. We began to trail down the field in ones and twos, nobody talking. We’d closed the gate behind us and were on the track going down to the house when Midge said, ‘Where’s Nathan?’ We called for him, but there was no answer.

  ‘He’s probably still up there mourning for his chair,’ Kit said. ‘He’ll come in when he gets hungry.’

  But when we’d finished the ham and oatbread and Dulcie – calm as ever – had brewed a third pot of tea, there was still no sign of Nathan. We had a half-hearted discussion about whether we should go up and look for him, but as Alan said he was adult and quite capable of finding his own way home, we stopped worrying about him and went to our beds.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE THREE OF US WENT DOWN TO BREAKFAST together the next morning. It was quite early, around seven, and there was nobody in the kitchen but Dulcie. She was stirring something in a saucepan and said would we take some poddish. It turned out to be a kind of porridge but Imogen said she didn’t want any. Dulcie ladled poddish for Midge and me, poured tea and smiled her little smile as if nothing had happened and yet it must surely have been on her mind that she was a landed woman now. The roof we were sitting under and the table we were sitting at were hers as long as the lease lasted. The baby she was carrying would be born a wealthy child. But if she was thinking of that she gave no sign, her poise as perfect as ever. While we ate we could hear the men moving around and talking in the parlour next door. After a while, Alan and Kit came in and sat down at the table.

  ‘Where’s Nathan?’ Midge asked.

  Alan said quietly, ‘I’m afraid he’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ Midge dropped her spoon. ‘Gone where?’

  Alan looked uneasy. ‘I’m afraid he just didn’t come in last night.’

  ‘You mean he’s still out there somewhere? Why on earth aren’t you out looking for him?’ Midge, usually so quiet, was practically screaming.

  Kit said, ‘It’s not entirely accurate to say he didn’t come in last night. He must have come back while the rest of us were up by the fire because he’s taken his things with him – or most of them at any rate.’

  ‘His pack’s gone,’ Alan added, ‘and all of his clothes – not that he’d brought many. All he seems to have left here are some books he never read anyway and some tins of tobacco he must have forgotten he’d left on the mantelpiece.’

  Imogen had grabbed Midge’s hand under the table and was holding it tight.

  ‘But Nathan’s not the kind of man who goes off on his own,’ she said. ‘He likes being with people.’

  Midge just nodded. She was trying hard not to burst into tears. I asked if Nathan had said anything to anybody. Alan shrugged.

  ‘Not as far as we know.’

  ‘Where’s Meredith?’

  ‘Out looking for him, in case he just took it into his head to go for a night hike.’

  But we all knew that unnecessary hiking wasn’t like Nathan, and it was no surprise when Meredith came in ten minutes or so later, shaking his head.

  ‘I’ve been up as far as the woods and down to the crossroads. No sign of him.’

  ‘But where’s he gone?’ Imogen insisted.

  Alan said, ‘Home, I suppose, or back to Oxford. He’d probably just had enough.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t do that without telling…’ Imogen had obviously been going to say ‘Midge’ but made it more tactful ‘… without telling somebody.’

  Midge said, her voice harsh from keeping the tears back, ‘After it happened, he was trying to persuade all of us to go away with him.’

  Alan was clearly hurt by the desertion too, but determined not to show it.

  ‘It’s not as if he could do anything, after all. Perhaps we’ll get a polite note in a couple of days saying thank you for the hospitality.’

  ‘It’s simply not like him,’ Imogen said. ‘I’ve never known a man who’d do more for his friends than Nathan.’

  All she got was another shrug from Alan.

  * * *

  For the rest of the day Midge kept glancing up the track from the road, hoping to see Nathan walking down it and thinking that Imogen and I weren’t noticing. Towards the middle of the afternoon she decided she’d go up to the barn with a book and for once discouraged Imogen and me from coming with her. I went to look for Meredith and found him in the vegetable patch, weeding onions.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be working at the book?’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘M
ost people get along without philosophy but we all need onions.’ Then, more seriously, ‘Yes, I know I should be but I can’t concentrate.’

  ‘Nathan?’

  ‘Yes. It is very uncharacteristic.’

  ‘What does uncharacteristic mean, after all? Only something that we didn’t know about him so far.’

  He pulled up a groundsel plant. ‘That sounds bitter.’

  ‘It is bitter. He’s hurt Midge very badly.’

  I knelt down and for a while we weeded companionably. When we got to the end of a row I made up my mind to tell him.

  ‘Somebody put the knots on the fire last night.’

  He stared. I told him what had happened and what I’d done, not trying to give explanations or excuses.

  ‘Are you quite sure they were the same ones? After all, you only saw them for a moment in the firelight.’

  ‘I’m sure. Leather thongs like the ones in the tack room and that thick string that went under the horse’s belly.’

  ‘We dragged a lot of things up for that bonfire. I suppose they could have caught on something without the person being aware of it.’

  ‘Yes, but that would mean they’d been hidden somewhere for the past five days, wouldn’t it? I’ve been looking on and off and haven’t found them in any of the likely places.’

  ‘You realise they’re evidence – or would have been?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t justify it, but I think if I had it to do again, I’d make the same decision.’

  ‘That’s honest at any rate.’ From his expression, he was seeing me in a new light. I was sorry about that. ‘You must have had some reason.’

  ‘At the time, no. At least I didn’t think so. But I suppose I knew that if they’d been put on the fire deliberately, or hidden somewhere and put on accidentally, it had to be by somebody here.’

  The kitchen door opened. Dulcie came out, threw a handful of crumbs to the hens, gave us one of her slow smiles and went back inside. We stopped talking until the door closed behind her.

  ‘Where does this leave your hypothesis?’ he said.

  ‘Major Mawbray? It wrecks it, I admit that. He couldn’t have hidden the leather thongs and string in the first place and he certainly couldn’t have put them on the fire last night.’

  And yet, stubbornly, I didn’t want to give up my theory. I decided not to tell Meredith, for the meantime at least, about my tea with Major Mawbray and how he’d reacted to the news about Dulcie. I knew I’d given him more than enough to think about and quite probably wrecked my reputation in his eyes. I was comforted a little because he’d said I was honest – but he must have realised when he said it that what I was being honest about was dishonesty. He could even, if he wanted, go to the coroner and tell him Miss Bray had deliberately destroyed evidence. I didn’t think he’d do that – at least not without telling me first.

  * * *

  I left Meredith in the vegetable patch and went through to the stable yard to wash the dirt off my hands in the drinking trough. Imogen was sitting on the edge of it, staring down into the water. She watched as I dabbled my hands.

  ‘Weeding with Meredith,’ I explained.

  ‘Has he any more idea why Nathan’s gone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps Alan’s right after all. He’s simply deserted us. Poor Midge is devastated.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised she felt quite like that about him. I knew they got on well but…’

  ‘I don’t think she’d realised either. It’s funny how suddenly it can come to you. You think you know somebody as a friend, then…’

  ‘Like you and Alan?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swung her foot in its white stocking and tennis shoe worn for coolness and stared at it. ‘Alan and I have had an argument, Nell.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry. Aren’t lovers’ tiffs considered a normal part of the process?’

  ‘What’s normal? I feel so bad about it now, making things even worse for him, but we had to talk about it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About that awful will. He says he’s not going to accept the Old Man’s legacy.’

  ‘Five thousand pounds is a lot of money.’

  ‘I know. Enough to start a school.’

  That didn’t come as a complete surprise. We’d all of us discussed educational reform, especially as a way of levelling inequality between classes and sexes. Still, I’d never thought of either Imogen or Alan as teachers.

  ‘That’s what you think he should do with it?’

  ‘Yes. Not the usual sort of school. It’s something we’ve talked about and he’s discussed it with Meredith too. A new school for a new century with boys and girls being encouraged to ask questions, develop their minds, take nothing for granted. It would be quite small at first, but we’d write a book about what we were doing, perhaps train teachers to start other schools like it and…’

  ‘I suppose you could still do that in time, even if he turns down the Old Man’s money.’

  ‘Time, time, time.’ She flicked the surface of the water, ruffling it. ‘If he’s got no money he’ll have to be an ordinary teacher in some awful boys’ public school and all the ideas we have will get ground down to nothing or even if we believe in them still we shall get scared and conventional and not do anything because it might offend people. And in time we’ll be a housemaster and his wife and have lots of ordinary children and go to chapel and die without doing anything with our lives. That’s what time does.’

  Perhaps she wanted me to argue, but the sheer bleakness of the picture and the anger in her voice took my breath away. She went on talking, looking down into the water.

  ‘It’s when you’re young that you need to do things, when you still believe in them, but most people can’t because they haven’t got the money. Now it’s happened and Alan wants to throw it away.’

  ‘Has he told you why he doesn’t want to accept the money?’

  ‘Nothing that makes sense. There’s this business of not burning the body as his uncle wanted…’

  ‘But that was a codicil, not a condition of inheriting.’

  ‘I know. So then he said he’d feel the money was tainted.’

  ‘You mean because of young Mawbray, or the way the Old Man died, or Dulcie?’

  ‘I don’t know. Alan won’t talk about it. He just says it’s his decision. He wants us to get engaged but keep it secret for a while, go back to Oxford and be patient.’

  ‘And you don’t agree?’

  ‘It all seemed so clear a few days ago but so much has happened I don’t know any more, except that I still love him. But I know it would be wrong to refuse the money.’

  ‘I think I agree with you.’

  ‘Good, because I want you to help me persuade him.’

  ‘If he won’t listen to you, I’m sure he won’t listen to me.’

  ‘You seem to be getting on well with Meredith. No, don’t blush and look away from me. I saw your faces when you came in the other night. Will you talk to Meredith for me? If he tells Alan it’s his moral duty, he might listen to him more than me.’

  ‘I haven’t got that sort of influence with Meredith. Anyway, I’m not sure he’d say it was a moral duty.’

  ‘If money gives you power to do things, isn’t it right that good men should have it rather than bad?’

  ‘If good men can be guaranteed to stay good.’

  ‘Nell, don’t start a debate. Just help me.’ She leaned against me, heavy with the accumulated weariness of the past few days. I put an arm around her to stop her sliding off the edge of the trough and into the water. As far as their argument was concerned I was on her side, but my mind was full of another problem.

  ‘Imogen, that night – the night he died. Did you and Alan see or hear anything?’

  She went tense. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The horse was still in the top paddock at sunset and the tack’s kept in the room under our loft. Somebody had to do a lot of coming and going in the dark, whether it was the O
ld Man or somebody else. You and Alan were out there until about one o’clock so I wondered—’

  ‘Nell, what is this?’

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hear anything?’

  ‘No, no, no. And don’t go asking Alan. He’s had enough from the police without your interrogating him.’

  ‘Am I interrogating?’

  ‘Yes. For some reason you and Meredith have got it into your heads to play detectives and you’re trying to impress him. I think it’s unforgivable to experiment with people’s feelings like that.’

  She stood up, turned her back on me and walked away towards the house. There was enough truth in what she’d said to leave me feeling sick and shaken. Perhaps because of my wandering life, the friendships I’d made in college meant a lot to me and now it looked as if I’d trampled on one of the closest of them.

  * * *

  The atmosphere in our loft that night was tense, with Imogen not speaking to me and Midge subdued. I guessed from the sighs and rustling of the hay mattresses that we were all sleeping badly but there were none of the whispered conversations we’d had on other nights. Long after midnight it was still oppressively hot. At Midge’s suggestion we’d opened all the long windows over the stable yard before going to bed, but it didn’t seem to make much difference, so I was at least half-awake when the shouting started. It came at first from the other yard near the house, a man’s voice, shouting, ‘Stop. You there, stop.’ Then there was the sound of running feet, coming through the arch into the stable yard. All three of us were out of bed and at the open windows in the same instant. A figure came rushing out of the arch, on to the paving just below us. The moon was down and it was too dark to see more than a shape, except looking at it from above there was a glint of pale hair.

  ‘Stop.’ It was Kit’s voice shouting, echoing under the arch. The figure swerved, then ran diagonally across the yard making for the gateway that led towards the mares’ paddock. Kit came into view, white shirt showing clearly, still shouting but running clumsily because of his arm. The figure got to the gate, vaulted over it and disappeared. I didn’t see what happened next because the three of us were running down the stairs and out through the tack room. By the time we got into the yard only Kit was there by the gateway breathing heavily.