Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18)
Page 20
“I do know my knots,” Georgina informed her, with some pride. “I was a Girl Guide—family tradition, you know—but yes, I see what you mean. You can’t really tie people up so well in sheets as you could if you had proper rope, and of course there’s no rope anywhere in here. They’ve taken care of that.” She forced a laugh. “We can’t have our hostage climbing out of windows and sliding down ropes, now can we? And the beastly sheets are nylon or polyester or something. You can’t tear them into strips—and don’t think I haven’t tried—but then, there are heavy shutters across the windows, so it wouldn’t have been much use even if I’d managed it.”
A fleeting vision of Douglas Fairbanks flashed before Miss Seeton’s inward eye, followed by a much more vivid impression of the blonde Georgina as Rapunzel: but neither sight was reassuring. Short curls, she knew, might well lengthen into gracefully-waving locks, but that would take far too long, even if—
Miss Seeton shook herself. The strain of her (or rather of Georgina’s) situation was obviously affecting her common sense. How foolish even to imagine escaping down a rope of someone’s hair, whether from the turret of a castle or from the bedroom—perhaps bathroom—window of a house. Far more foolish, indeed, than ...
“Guy Forks,” murmured Miss Seeton. She sighed. It seemed that—regrettable though such a step must appear to all right-thinking persons—there was no alternative for her but to obey the royal command ...
“That’s wonderful, Miss Seeton.” Georgina, thinking it wise to ignore the cryptic reference to Guy Fawkes as she’d previously ignored the repeated motif of Miss Seeton’s hat, chose to hear just as much of Miss Seeton’s current murmuring as best suited her purpose. “You agree? I knew you would!” And the young princess threw her arms about the older woman in a heartfelt embrace. “The minute we hear the car arrive,” she went on, “we’ll take our places. You stand by the door—try to look helpless, won’t you?—and I’ll be over here, looking miserable, but really ready to kick the tray beast just as soon as you’ve hat-pinned the other.”
With another sigh, Miss Seeton signalled her willingness to adopt this—unpleasant, but necessary—tactic. If only one could be sure it would succeed ...
Georgina dismissed Miss Seeton’s doubts with a wave of her hand. Her sparkling eyes hinted at further refinements to the plan. “Let’s turn the tables on them—give them a taste of their own horrid medicine! Just before you pink the one by the door, Miss Seeton, switch off the light. And they won’t be expecting it any more than I—we—did, which will give us a bigger advantage. After all, people our size need to wangle every advantage they possibly can ...”
A sentiment with which Miss Seeton could not, in the circumstance, honestly disagree.
The Night Watch Men were at the other end of the village. Just one solitary passer-by was in The Street to witness the sudden extinction of the Lilikot lights, to hear the great outcry which arose immediately afterwards ...
But by next morning almost all of Plummergen was speculating on the affair.
chapter
~ 21 ~
MISS SEETON, FORCING herself—in the circumstances, forcing was no exaggeration—to remember that a gentlewoman should, on every occasion, strive to maintain her composure, closed her eyes, and made an attempt at her most beneficial deep breathing exercises.
It was not easy.
It was, in fact, almost impossible. Such an undignified way to move from one place to another. And so very ... Miss Seeton smothered a cough ... dusty. Or rather, to be moved. Not active, but passive. Except that neither she nor Her—nor Georgy (as far as she’d been able to tell, with so much ... excitement, one must in all honesty term it) ... neither of them had been especially passive in their action, or rather their reaction, to the reprisals which their captors had wrought upon them after the hat-pin-kick-and-tray assault (as she’d feared from the start that it might) had—softly, she sighed—failed. The superiority of numbers ... no, because there had been two of them, and two of them. But superiority, one must admit, of size. Miss Seeton sighed again, with caution. And weight. She coughed, quietly. And then perhaps—she felt a guilty flush creep up her cheeks—her heart, and as a consequence her energy and effort, had never been entirely in the enterprise from the very first. Which was understandable, since she found violence of any kind more than distasteful, but which (she reproached herself) must also be regarded as disobedience to a Royal command—in respect of which, if Emily Dorothea Seeton, admittedly a gentlewoman but without pretensions to noble birth, felt so very undignified in the current situation, how much more undignified for Her Royal Highness, Georgina Elizabeth Mary Alexandra Edwina Victoria, Princess of the Realm? Always assuming—and here Miss Seeton’s heart gave a horrified thump—that—
She suppressed the awful thought with a sigh of relief as the car—or was it a van? (In the hurried darkness, they’d had no proper chance to find out)—juddered over a bump in the road, and a muffled squeak of indignation advised Miss Seeton that Her Royal Highness was, like Miss Seeton herself, in full possession of her faculties. And in a position reassuringly near to Miss Seeton.
And in—again like Miss Seeton—a sack.
Much cheered by this information, Miss Seeton breathed too deeply the wrong way, and inhaled fibres from woven jute. She spluttered, and coughed out loud.
Georgina at once called, “Are you all right. Miss Seeton?” And herself began to cough.
Above the stereo soprano clamour of their dust-induced fusillade, Georgina and Miss Seeton could just make out the frantic muttering of male voices somewhere close by: in the confusion of the hessian dark, it was hard to tell exactly where, but it was not—Miss Seeton was startled by a sudden sideways thud, and was even more startled to hear Georgina say something extremely unregal—not within kicking range.
“Please remain calm, Your Royal Highness,” said a voice Miss Seeton recognised as belonging to Mr. Rookwood. “You’ll do yourself no good with these heroics—-and there’s no need for them, in any case. We mean you no harm.”
“You’ve a funny way of showing it,” said Georgina, once her coughing fit had subsided.
“Idiosyncratic,” said Mr. Rookwood, in tones of the deepest deference. “If, that is, I may venture to correct Your Royal Highness. Eccentric, if you prefer—but never funny. We regard this whole business in a very serious light, Ma’am—deadly serious, indeed.”
“Deadly?” Georgina wasn’t going to show this kidnapper that she was in the least scared. “You use words like that, and then try to tell me you don’t plan to harm me?”
“I do,” said Mr. Rookwood, above the sound of changing gears, “and we don’t. You’ll have to take my word for it, I know—but it happens to be true. Please believe me, Ma’am. We have no intention of harming a hair of your head.”
The car lurched, turning off the smooth asphalt road along what felt like a rough track. The engine laboured in bottom gear, the wheels rumbled and bounced; stones clanged upwards against the vehicle’s metal underside. Mr. Rookwood, unable to compete, perforce fell silent.
Miss Seeton, rolled sideways by the sudden turn, was too busy wondering at the identity of the objects—one hard and thin and spiky, one more square and yielding—bearing her company inside the sack to wonder why Mr. Rookwood had been so very careful to assure Georgina, and only Georgina, that the kidnappers meant her no harm ...
But Miss Seeton, through all her myriad adventures, had never been able to accept that anyone, anywhere, could ever wish harm to herself. Should harm occur, she would always feel that it must have been a mistake: and—though on many occasions it had been far from a mistake—her luck, so far, had held. The harm had never been lasting ...
But was her luck, for the first time, about to run out?
* * *
Delphick said, “We still haven’t a clue where she’s gone. We’ve no real idea whether she’s with the princess—or even, indeed, whether she’s been taken by the same people who took Georgina. If taken
, of course, she has been,” he added, trying as ever to keep an open mind.
“Young Georgina,” growled Brinton, “there’s no doubt, she has. As for MissEss, you’ve shown me those sketches, and I’ve got to say I agree with your original translation—though I can’t see there’s any doubt of a connection even without translating the things. Miss Seeton isn’t one to be out on the tiles all night, never mind not leaving a message for Martha Bloomer—and if that doesn’t mean something’s happened to her, I don’t know what does. If you’re asking me to go along with the hunch you’re not quite sure you want to put into words, I’ll come right out and agree she’s been snatched because she knows—if that’s a term anyone can use about Miss Seeton—something in that crazy way of hers, and the snatchers—though don’t ask me how—know she knows it. I’ll bet my pension she’s with HRH—find one, you find ’em both. And you don’t need to be an Oracle to predict that when we get ’em back, MissEss’ll be waving her brolly same as usual, tut-tutting and wondering why on earth we’ve all been so worried ...”
Delphick said, “You’re trying to reassure me, Chris, and I appreciate the attempt—but reassurance is hardly enough, is it? We need facts, and as yet we’ve really none to go on. We need inspira—oh.” His tone changed. “What was that you just said?”
“I said MissEss is bound to turn up safe and sound as usual, waving her brolly in the air and—”
“No, before that—let me think. You said she’d been snatched because she knew something, but you didn’t know how the snatchers knew she knew anything worth snatching her for ... Chris, you could just be on to something here. Miss Seeton’s identity as the setter-off of the radiation alarm has been kept out of the papers, hasn’t it? The British ones, at least.”
Brinton grunted. Although over the years he’d come, grudgingly, to accept that Thrudd Banner of World Wide Press and the Daily Negative’s Amelita Forby could be relied on to play as fair as could be expected of any scoop-hunting newshound—and though the pair had more or less persuaded their Fleet Street colleagues to mention Miss Seeton’s name as seldom as possible when chronicling her adventures ... he just didn’t—couldn’t—feel quite as happy about such a very informal arrangement as the Oracle evidently did. And Banner’s influence on the World Wide crowd was mostly limited to the home market: Miss Seeton still hit the headlines in the foreign press ...
“I know, Chris, I know, but I refuse to posit a sinister foreign abductor unless I absolutely must. Everyone inside that power station—everyone with access to Georgina, at any rate—was Security cleared. The nearest anyone came to having what might be called exotic connections is the head of the cleaning staff, whose husband is Welsh. And there has, I would remind you most emphatically, been not the slightest hint that the kidnapping of Her Royal Highness was carried out by Plaid Cymru.”
“It’s a long way to Wales,” Brinton conceded. And even if the Principality had been just around the corner instead of a good couple of hundred miles away, he couldn’t honestly hold the Welsh National Party responsible for the abductions of a princess and an elderly spinster: considering they were political animals—and Brinton’s view of politicians was as jaundiced as any—Plaid Cymru, he thought, had far too much sense for that.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Delphick was inspired. “Which means that if the kidnappers are sure Miss Seeton’s a threat to them, they must be local. The grapevine in these parts is more efficient than MIS at its very best—which, Chris, means we must take another close look at Miss Seeton’s sketches, for clues with a purely local emphasis. If,” said the Oracle thoughtfully, “we can only work it all out, that is.”
“I don’t know,” said Brinton grimly, “about working it out—but it’s running out, all right, if you ask me. Time, I mean. Do you realise it’s Guy Fawkes Night tomorrow? And if they’re planning anything—anything spectacular, on top of snatching young Georgina, then fifty-to-one tomorrow’s the day they’ll let everyone know about it, if you ask me.”
But Delphick did not ask him. Instinct had already told him that the superintendent spoke nothing but the truth.
The Night Watch Men were organised according to a highly sophisticated rota drawn up by Martin Jessyp, paper-shuffler extraordinary to the village of Plummergen. While to Sir George Colveden were due the honours of the original idea, it was Martin Jessyp who had thrashed out the finer points of a schedule which never, except around the hours of dusk and dawn, saw fewer than six men patrolling the area at any one time. These men—nearly all of them hardy sons of the soil—were as fit and muscular a band as any in Kent. Even those who were not farm workers had been selected for their ability to toss an opponent into a ditch with as little effort as their agricultural colleagues could toss a bale of hay to the top of a stack.
In the afternoon and evening of the fourth of November, most of Plummergen had turned out to assist in building the bonfire for which various logs, broken pieces of furniture, and bundles of straw had been stored, according to Nigel’s suggestion, in various outhouses around the village. There is a considerable art in the construction of a bonfire. You may pile it as high and as wide as you please, but it must have a strong foundation and a supportive spine—or rather ribcage, since it is the inside which is the least strong part. As the fire burns, so it will collapse from the outside to the in, by this means sparing onlookers the risk of injury, or worse.
Everyone entered into the spirit of the occasion with as much enthusiasm as Plummergen regularly applies to any cooperative endeavour. Jack Crabbe directed traffic into the playing-field in a one-way stream, while his father ensured that departing vehicles did not collide with those bringing further bootloads of burnables to add to the collection. After school, before it grew too dark, Mr. Jessyp and Miss Maynard formed their pupils—each bearing a bundle of twigs or a small branch brought from home—into a neat queue, and sternly warned those who giggled to excess that they must behave themselves. Nigel Colveden and Daniel Eggleden—the latter, skilled in the science of the smithy, putting to good use his specialised knowledge of combustion—supervised the stacking of the heavier items, the placing of the lighter ones.
Sir George, bowing sadly to the commands of his wife, watched as his favourite armchair—its spring and horsehair stuffing gone finally to that great upholsterer’s in the sky—was hoisted by brawny arms to the very top of the celebratory edifice, and Guy Fawkes, his monstrous sacking body stuffed with equal amounts of fireworks and straw, was settled in state on his throne, crowned with Miss Seeton’s hat above the lopsided mask. Nobody had thought to remove the battered felt until too late, and the sight made people uneasy, though nobody quite knew why; and Mrs. Flax did not help their mood by hovering in the background, dredging up folk-memories of Napoleon, against fear of whose invasion the Royal Military Canal—not a quarter of a mile from the recreation ground—was dug, and beacons were prepared to be lit at a moment’s notice.
“And never mind warnings for Boney,” said Mrs. Flax, enjoying herself hugely as the more susceptible within earshot shuddered at her awful tones. “Nor fires for Guy Fawkes, neither—ah, further back we go, and further yet. Roasted in sulphur—steeped in gulfs of liquid fire—there’s wend-fire, and bale-fire, the flames of Samhain and the Beltane revels, the—”
“Excuse me,” broke in Nigel, who’d had quite enough of the Wise Woman’s posturing. “If you wouldn’t mind moving out of the way, Mrs. Flax, we can let this carload through. The ground’s all churned up everywhere else. Thank you,” as—grumbling, but not daring to speak out against one she couldn’t help but regard as the squire’s son—Mrs. Flax stepped aside.
It was not thought necessary to post a guard on the bonfire during daylight hours. Not only do two rows of council houses overlook the recreation ground, but the residence of Constable Potter and his family stands almost opposite the entrance. Even if Potter himself were out in his car on one or other of his various patrols, Mabel Potter and (after school hours) young Amelia—not to
mention tabby Tibs, a cat credited by many with powers every bit as awful as those of Mrs. Flax—would be sure, for the sake of village honour, to remain vigilant as long as the sun was above the horizon.
But the sun sets, in England in early November, no later than half-past four; and people went home to their suppers, conscious of a job well done. Now it was up to the Village Watch ...
“Been one or two cars slowing down to take a look, Jack tells me,” said Sir George to Mr. Jessyp, as they checked the final arrangements for the night’s vigil. “Cars he didn’t recognise, that is. Wouldn’t have mentioned them if he had, of course. No need. Could be perfectly harmless, mind you: idle curiosity—lost their way ...”
“It could,” echoed Mr. Jessyp. The echo did not ring with much conviction.
“Maybe even a few tips for their own fire,” said Sir George, duty bound to give people the benefit of the doubt. A magistrate should at all times remember that people were innocent until proved guilty. “Left it a little late, though, I’d’ve said. Unless ...”
“Unless,” supplied Mr. Jessyp quickly—and concisely. Nothing more needed to be said. The schoolmaster and the baronet looked at each other in an understanding silence.
“Murreystone,” said Sir George at last, with a nod. “It’s possible. Potter told me this morning they hadn’t begun to build just yet.” Murreystone was one of several villages on PC Potter’s motorised beat, and his choosing to live in Plummergen was yet another source of annoyance to the rivals across the marsh.