The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “It’s about time‌—”

  “She wouldn’t go‌—”

  Janey held up her hands. She looked from Clare to the Gaffer, loving them both, wondering how things could have deteriorated to the point that they should all be at one another’s throats.

  “Why don’t we make a pot of tea, Gramps,” she said, “and then we can see what Clare wanted to talk to us about.”

  It felt decidedly odd to Janey to be acting as a mediator‌—especially between the Gaffer and Clare. Her grandfather was so good-natured that he was everybody’s mate, and Clare was normally so even-tempered that Janey felt she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d seen her friend angry. But mediating helped keep at bay the bleak feeling that was inside her and she wanted to hear what Clare had to say‌—hoping, she had to admit to herself, that Clare would somehow be able to defend Felix’s behavior, however unlikely that seemed.

  It took a while, but when Janey and the Gaffer had heard her out, the three of them sitting in the kitchen with a pot of tea, Clare’s story did exactly that. At the first mention of Lena, the Gaffer interrupted to explain who the woman was‌—that she’d come around earlier, sniffing after Dunthorn’s secrets.

  “I never knew,” she said. “And neither did Felix.”

  Before the Gaffer could take the conversation off on a tangent, she went on with her story, refusing to be interrupted again until she was done. Then she let them speak.

  “But I saw him and that American woman,” the Gaffer said. “The two of them together on that bike, looking for all the world like a pair of lovers.”

  “And how else was he supposed to get her back to her hotel?”

  “Did he never think of an ambulance?”

  “And did you ever give him a chance to explain?” Clare shot back. “He’d only just met her. Would you rather he’d left her there by the side of the road?”

  Janey found herself nodding, then realized how spiteful she was being. Besides, if what Clare was saying was true, then Felix couldn’t have known who this Lena was in the first place.

  “That’s well and fine,” the Gaffer said, “but it still all rests on our taking Felix at his word.”

  “And did he ever lie to you before?” Clare demanded.

  Janey shook her head. But the Gaffer nodded.

  “There was that letter,” he said. “Janey never sent it. I believe her.”

  “Of course she didn’t send it,” Clare replied. “I did.”

  Janey’s eyes went wide. “You?”

  Clare nodded. “Someone had to get the two of you back together again.”

  “So‌—so Felix had nothing to do with‌—with any of it. . . ?”

  Janey felt about an inch tall. She turned to the Gaffer, the anguish plain in her eyes. The Gaffer looked as mortified as she felt.

  “Of course he didn’t! For God’s sake, how could you even think Felix would be involved in anything that would hurt you?”

  He wouldn’t, Janey realized. And if she’d given it even a half moment’s thought, instead of going off half cocked the way she had, she would have seen that.

  Oh, Felix. Talk about betraying a trust. . . .

  “I’m awful,” Janey said. “I’m an awful, horrible person. How‌—how could I have treated him like that?”

  “We both did,” the Gaffer said bleakly.

  “Well, it’s partly my fault,” Clare said. “I shouldn’t have sent that letter. It just seemed like such a good idea at the time. . . .”

  “It was a very good idea,” Janey said.

  Because seeing Felix again had made the world seem better. She’d been a little confused about her feelings at first, but that was only natural. Once she’d had a chance to think things through, she’d realized just how much she’d missed him. Yet now . . .

  “Is he‌—is he at your place?” she asked.

  Clare shook her head. “I lent him a cane that he was going to drop off with that Lena woman‌—I wonder if she even did sprain her ankle‌—and then he was going to hitch to London to get a job.”

  “How long ago did he leave?” the Gaffer asked.

  Clare looked at the clock. “It took me a half hour to get here, and we’ve been talking for almost two hours. . . . I’m not sure. Say three hours all told?”

  “What hotel was she staying at?”

  “Felix never said.”

  “He’ll be gone now,” Janey said. Tears were welling up in her eyes again. “Bloody hell! Why couldn’t I have listened to him?”

  “You didn’t know,” the Gaffer began, reaching over the table to pat her arm.

  She refused to be comforted.

  “That’s right,” she said. “But I should have.”

  She rose from the table.

  “Where are you going?” the Gaffer asked.

  “To look for him‌—what do you think?”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Janey shook her head. “This is something I have to do myself, Gramps.” She turned to her friend. “Thanks, Clare. I mean that.”

  “If I hadn’t sent that‌—”

  “I’m glad you did,” Janey said fiercely. “Now I have to see if I can’t salvage something from what you started for me.”

  She went next door to get a jacket and her car keys and came back to find Clare and the Gaffer outside. Clare was just buttoning up her nor’wester. She was wearing a matching yellow hat against the light drizzle that had started up. The whole outfit made her look like one of the lifeboat Coastguards.

  “Do you want a ride?” Janey asked her.

  Clare shook her head. “You just go on and find Felix. I’ll be fine.”

  “Clare, my gold,” the Gaffer said. “I don’t know how to say I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve all got things to be sorry about tonight,” she told him. “Go on, Janey. I’ll talk to you both tomorrow.”

  Janey waited a few heartbeats. Clare gave her a small smile, then started off for home. The Gaffer waved Janey to her car.

  “Bring him back,” he said.

  Janey nodded. “I will, Gramps.”

  5.

  Chapel Place, the small square on which the Gaffer’s house stood, took its name from the old Methodist Chapel on its northeast corner. The chapel had a small yard, separated from the square by a low stone wall, the base of which was slightly raised from the street, for the village still climbed the hill towards Paul, here, where Duck Street became Mousehole Lane.

  Sitting behind the wall, hidden from view and apparently listening to a Walkman, was Michael Bett. He wore a low-brimmed hat that hid his features and what appeared to be a pair of sunglasses but were, in fact, specially treated infrared lenses that served the double duty of both disguising him further from a chance glance and allowing him better night vision. He was bundled against the night’s damp chill with a heavy sweater under his lined raincoat, thick denim trousers, and rubber shoes with a thick sheepskin insulation.

  Removing the earplugs from his ears, he waited to hear the Gaffer’s door close and for Clare’s footsteps to fade. Not until the sound of Janey’s three-wheeled Reliant Robin had died away as well, did he finally sit up.

  When he’d hired the private eye Sam Dennison, part of Dennison’s surveillance had included the installation of a state-of-the-art microphone/transmitter remote eavesdropping system. Four miniature wireless transmitter microphones had been placed in the Gaffer’s house‌—one each in the kitchen, living room, and main bedroom upstairs, the fourth in Janey’s rooms. At Bett’s request, Dennison had left the microphones in place when he’d completed his surveillance.

  The microphones had a transmission range of fifteen hundred feet‌—far more than Bett required in his present position, though he would have appreciated a greater range so that he could have remained in the comfort of his B and B, instead of crouching here in the drizzle. But then, he thought, he wouldn’t be in such a perfect position to take immediate action, now would he?


  Storing the receiver in the inner pocket of his coat, he hopped over the wall to the street below and made his way to the red box of a telephone booth he’d noted near the post office when he’d explored the village earlier. Fishing coins from his pocket, he put through a call. Lena answered on the second ring.

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you have a beautiful telephone voice?” he asked her.

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, it’s an odd thing, but I was listening in on a conversation that the Littles were having earlier with their good friend Clare Mabley, and what do you think I found out?”

  “I’m not in the mood for games, Bett.”

  “Neither am I. I told you to stay in your hotel room this afternoon.”

  There was a momentary pause that Bett didn’t fill. Let her think about it, he decided.

  “I can explain,” she began.

  “Don’t bother. Surprisingly enough, you didn’t screw up.” He filled her in on what he felt she needed to know about what he had recently learned, then finished up with, “He’s going to be showing up at your room any minute now.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Do I detect a certain reluctance in your voice, dear Lena?”

  “No. I . . .”

  She was just regretting the trouble she’d brought into Gavin’s life, Bett realized with surprise. Now there was one for the books. The Ice Queen was worrying about somebody else for a change. That was just what he didn’t need now‌—to have the Ice Queen turn into a soft-hearted cow. Bad enough she was so stupid.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he told her in a voice that would brook no further discussion. “He’s going to show up at the hotel and you’re going to keep him there, in your room, and you’re not going to let him leave.”

  “But‌—”

  “I don’t care how you do it, just make sure that you don’t screw it up. You see,” he added, “if I find him wandering around the streets tonight, the next time he shows up in public will be when the tide washes his body in. Am I making myself clear?”

  “What are you planning?”

  “I’ve got some business with another of Janey Little’s friends. Like you, she’s been sticking her nose into what doesn’t concern her. Unlike you, she’s not going to get a second chance.”

  There was another moment of stiff silence as Lena digested that.

  “Daddy said this was supposed to be a low-key operation,” she finally said.

  Bett laughed into the receiver. A low-key operation. Christ, she had the terminology down pat, but she didn’t have the first clue as to what she was really talking about.

  “This isn’t some spy novel,” he told her.

  “But Daddy‌—”

  “I’m in charge here. Just do it.” He hung up before she could whine any more.

  She was seriously getting on his nerves.

  Opening the door to the telephone booth, he stepped out into the drizzle and took a few steadying breaths, hands opening and closing at his sides. It had been a long time since he’d taken someone apart to see how they worked, and the more he listened to her whiny voice, the more he wondered just how long she’d last under the knife.

  She’d squeal. She’d beg and plead. She’d‌—

  Forget it, he told himself.

  He couldn’t touch her. Not without Madden’s okay. Just as he couldn’t touch the Littles‌—at least not until they’d coughed up what the Order was looking for.

  Fine. He could handle that. But no one had said anything about the Littles’ friends.

  Take the Mabley woman.

  Yes, thank you. I do believe I will.

  She was an interfering whore who couldn’t be allowed to go around making everything hunky-dory anymore. He wasn’t going to have the time to do her right, but he’d still get a little satisfaction out of throwing her off a cliff. He didn’t like meddlers. And he didn’t like cripples.

  According to the file Dennison had compiled on her, she’d taken a fall once when she was a kid. Those cliffs out past her house were dangerous places for a crip. It’d be a real shame if she took another fall.

  Poor Clare Mabley.

  And poor Janey Little, losing a friend like that, hard on the heels of screwing up things with Gavin who‌—if Lena knew what was good for her‌—would soon be found in a compromising position with the “enemy.”

  Janey was going to need a friend. She was going to need comforting. And he knew just the man for her‌—Mike Betcher, ace reporter for Rolling Stone.

  Bett felt calmer now, enough so that he cracked a smile as he set off to find the Mabley woman before she hobbled her way back to the supposed safety of her home.

  He’d do her inside, if he had to.

  It’d just make things that much easier if he could save himself the trouble of having to break in.

  Lonely streets. Dark streets. Anything could happen on them. Even in a quiet little village like this.

  6.

  The Gaffer returned inside and shut the door behind him. He looked slowly about the room, feeling a constriction that he’d never experienced before in its cozy limits.

  Came from doing the wrong thing, he thought. Clare had been correct in that much. They’d never given Felix a chance to explain himself at all. They’d treated him unfairly, as though he’d proved himself unworthy of their trust long before today’s incident, and the Gaffer knew that he himself was the most to blame for that.

  He wondered if Felix would forgive them. Wondered if they would be allowed the chance to find out. He could be anywhere, and the Gaffer didn’t hold much hope that Janey would simply run across him. That smacked too much of chance, and chance, of late, had proved to be working against them.

  His gaze settled on the copy of The Little Country that Janey had brought downstairs with her, but then left on the sofa when they had all gone into the kitchen to have their talk with Clare.

  Whether Felix was innocent or not‌—and the Gaffer was inclined now to give Felix the benefit of the doubt‌—he still couldn’t shake the feeling that Billy’s book was at the center of the web in which all the events of the past few days had become entangled.

  He picked up the book and took it to his chair by the hearth. He didn’t have to open it to remember the story‌—for all that he hadn’t dipped into its pages since that time, years ago, when he’d first read it. A time when, he recalled, another series of baffling events had made their presence felt in the Little household. It hadn’t just been the vultures, out scavenging for anything that had belonged to Billy. There’d been other occurrences, less easily explained, but evident all the same.

  Music heard, when it had no visible source.

  Movement sensed from the corner of one’s eye, but nothing being there when one turned to look.

  An uncommon restlessness in himself and his young wife, Adeline, that was even less easily explained.

  And their son Paul‌—starting and crying with night-fears late at night, when normally he slept through the dark hours and had no fear of the shadows under his bed, or in his closet.

  All gone when the book was safely hidden once more.

  “What did you do, my robin?” he asked the ghost of his old friend whom he could sense hovering near. “What did you hide in this book?”

  Nothing that the Gaffer could see.

  True, it was odd that it should have been published in an edition of only one, but that explained little. And the story‌—while told in Billy’s remarkable prose‌—was no more remarkable than that of either of his previous books, though the Gaffer had liked it the best of the three.

  He had particularly appreciated one of the lead characters who was the captain of a fishing lugger called The Talisman, back before the end of the pilchard industry. He became the best friend of the book’s heroine, an emperent young orphan who had disguised herself as a boy and worked on The Talisman until she was found out. And wasn’t there a row about that, for having a woman on board ship was
bad luck, as any fisherman knew‌—nearly as bad as having a dog, or worse, a rabbit or a hare. The fishermen wouldn’t even use the common names of animals while at sea, calling them two-deckers instead.

  Billy had set their story in an imaginary town, but it had been easily recognizable to the Gaffer as a combination of Penzance, Newlyn, and Mousehole‌—the three rolled up together into one fanciful harbour town. There was a bit of the familiar Dunthorn magic in the book as well: the Smalls, whose miniature craft was found in the harbour one morning at low tide, and the hidden music that could grant any one wish, could one but remember its odd phrasing and repeat it. Both were details that Billy had used in his previous two books.

  That had surprised the Gaffer some, for Billy hadn’t been one to repeat himself, but the story itself had been a new one, and a good one. A story that the Gaffer had felt spoke directly to him when he was reading it, and became more so as he grew older and he could find parallels between his own life and that of The Talisman’s captain in the book.

  Still, none of that explained why it should be of such interest to this Lena woman and her friends. Nor why they’d been searching for it for so long, for the Gaffer was convinced that this new interest was merely a renewed interest, though why he thought so, he couldn’t have explained.

  Thirty-five years it had been, now, since the crows had first come ’round looking for it.

  He flipped through its pages, trying to fathom what it was about the book that made it more than merely a literary curiosity, but still nothing came to mind.

  He paused for a moment, head cocked and listening, thinking he had heard something. Janey returning perhaps, or . . . he didn’t know what. It was gone now.

  Just the wind, he thought. Or a scatter of earnest rain, in among the drizzle.

  He glanced at the clock to find that Janey had only been gone twenty minutes. He was tired, but knew he couldn’t sleep until she returned‌—with Felix, or without him. He had to know.

  Opening the book again, he decided to reread it while he waited. He smiled at the opening lines and was soon caught up in the familiar story, humming an old, half-familiar tune under his breath as he read.