And then we came into sight of the shepherd and his wife. They had been tied together side by side, each in a sitting position, and a couple of heavy rocks had been propped behind them so that they were unable to move. Doubtless they had been there all night.
The moment we spotted them young Cannell was up and bounding over the rock-strewn ground towards them. If there had been any Keepers waiting in ambush he would have been an easy target. But there was no one, only the middle-aged couple tied up together there.
The Keepers had been artistic in their brutality. We learnt when we cut the gags from the couple’s mouths that nothing had been done to them themselves. Only the Keepers had made sure that they could not help seeing the utter destruction of everything that had gone to make up their lives.
‘But what are you going to do now?’ I asked the shepherd when he had finished telling us what had happened.
His dark-tanned lean face with its purposeful moustache looked up into mine.
‘It’s not what we’re to do,’ he said. ‘It’s what you’re to do.’
2
For me our walk back to the glen was simply one long sad trudge. I could think of nothing but the shepherd and his wife and of how, simply because they had offered us hospitality, this outrage had been committed on them. Apparently there had been no question of them concealing information about our present whereabouts: it had never even occurred to the Keepers that the shepherd might have retained some link between us. They had spotted our boat from their high watchpoint on Trigorrey; they had gone down to look for any signs of men on the shore and had seen some flotsam from the wreck, had immediately set off in hot pursuit and had succeeded in tracking us back to the shepherd’s house, and there they had punished him in their choicely savage way.
‘Tracks,’ Keig had said sharply. ‘We’ll have to take more trouble to hide all our tracks.’
But he, I discovered, had not been brooding during our return on what had happened. No sooner had we arrived than he called a council of war.
He told everybody about the shepherd in brief unemotional phrases, and then he said:
‘So we’ll need guns as soon as ever we can get them. This is what we’ll do.’
Then, sitting there on an awkwardly-shaped chunk of loose rock beside that dark, thin, secret stream, he outlined to us in detail the plan he must have been working out all during the hour and a half in which we had been trudging back to the glen.
We were going to raid a big country house some twelve miles away, down towards the foot of the mountains on the landward side of the range. And how did he know the place existed and would be worth raiding? Simple.
He shot a look at Donald.
‘Colonel Aleyn’s house,’ he said to him. ‘You showed me it on the map yesterday. You stayed there once.’
‘Good lord, yes,’ Donald said. ‘I was just chatting, but you’re quite right. Old Aleyn has Parties there for the shooting in the summer and autumn and spends the winter in England—or he used to. It’s certainly worth a try. I can lead you straight to the gun-room, I dare say.’
‘You mentioned a gun-room,’ Keig added.
He filled us in with further details—the route we would take, the steps that would be necessary to spy out the lie of the land, the best likely time to break in.
An air of excitement stirred among us. Only Jack Ascough, sitting clutching his knees not directly facing Keig, seemed unaffected. He gave Keig a sharp look in which there was no hint of recognition of the fact that only the day before he had owed him his life.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but aren’t we exposing our flank making a long patrol like that on the off-chance of finding a few B2 class weapons?’
‘Do you know of any weapons nearer?’ Keig asked sharply. ‘Of any, anywhere?’
‘No, no,’ Ascough conceded, brushing aside an academic point. ‘But all the same, weren’t we going to wait here till we got some reliable intelligence? I mean, I should have thought that was the way to go about it.’
The quick frown came and went on Keig’s forehead.
‘And how much do you think we’ll be told when people round about hear what the Keepers have just done?’ he asked. ‘Precious little, unless we show we can do something for them.’
Ascough stared at his knees in silence. No one else had any suggestions to make.
‘We’ll be off just as it gets dark,’ Keig said.
We caught our first sight of the house shortly after ten that night. A single square of light dim in the distance.
Keig and Donald conferred and quickly decided that Donald’s vague memories of his previous visit years before had not let him down. A light as far up from the ground as this could only be from a big house and one with an electric generator of its own too. Colonel Aleyn’s place was the only one such for miles around. We must be now, in fact, somewhere on his estate. His was the nearest to the mountains of the big properties which shared between them almost all the rich inland wolds. We were no longer in the area where tough independent men owned their own flocks of hardy sheep and lived their own lives. We were on the edge of the tenant-system lands, where large properties—Mr Mylchraine had once been merely the biggest of them—owned big estates and farmed them through law-abiding quiet tenants.
The solitary steady light told us more than this, too. It indicated surely that Colonel Aleyn was in fact away. The big house would be in the care of a few servants. Provided only that guns had been left in the gun-room, we were all right.
Keig made his dispositions. Detachments of two or three men went quietly off into the night with various tasks: to locate and cut the telephone wire—easy enough when the solitary line would be running through the open countryside on poles—to locate and keep watch on the nearest cottages, to get into the grounds of the house itself and see what could be seen.
By midnight it was all done. The telephone wire was disconnected, the house had been found to be well isolated, a convenient low roof at the back had been spotted with above it a narrow window, bathroom, lavatory or corridor perhaps. The single light was still lit and no others had been seen to come on. Doubtless the few servants in the place went to bed early when the master was away.
‘All the better if they sleep sound,’ Keig murmured.
And we set off.
The night was dark, but not too dark. There was a moon though it was at present hidden by cloud. By now my night vision was very good and when we entered the big garden of the house I could make out almost every detail—the dark clumps of shrub-filled flowerbeds, the broad winding stone-chip paths, to be avoided for their noisiness, and the white-painted greenhouses and solid granite outbuildings. I noted that I was feeling neither fear nor excitement. Indeed, my predominant emotion was hunger: we had had nothing to eat all day. But Keig had detailed three men under Fred Quiddie to make for the kitchens and see what they could find there.
We posted look-outs and Keig himself swarmed first over the low roof that had been chosen for us and up to the narrow window above. Even in the shadow I thought I could see that its glass was more opaque than that of other windows nearby: a lavatory was my guess.
There was a tiny, almost inaudible crack as Keig put the blade of his axe to the window-frame, and then he was pushing it up. A moment later he was inside and beckoning to the rest of us.
Eight of the group were to go in—Fred and his two helpers for the kitchen side, Donald and myself and Keig for the guns, and two others who were to get up to the main roof if they could and act as look-outs for us inside. One by one we clambered up, crept cautiously across to the opened window and climbed in.
I turned out to be right: we found ourselves in a lavatory, rather large, with heavy tiled walls to half its height and a majestic old cistern. Keig was standing just outside in a wide corridor which was dimly lit by the light we had seen coming from somewhere one floor above as well as by its uncurtained windows. He was glancing this way and that, one finger to his lips and his axe pointing dramat
ically at the floor. I looked down. Shiny polished boards with one small square rug in the distance either way—dangerously noisy.
But the house seemed wonderfully quiet. I could smell furniture polish in the air, a clean sharp odour.
We stood for a few moments in a group in the wide corridor while Donald whispered what he now recalled of the layout of the house to Fred Quiddie and the men who were going to make for the roof.
Then we all set off, gliding carefully along the extreme edge of the corridor in the direction of the main staircase. Most of the big panelled doors on either side were firmly closed, their round brass doorknobs just catching the dim light. I imagined large bedrooms behind them, the high wooden-ended beds stripped and the mattresses in narrow-striped blue-and-white ticking exposed. This Particular house I had never visited; but I had been to a dozen others of almost exactly the same sort in the days when my father had taken us to spend some summer months at the foot of the mountains. I had earlier said something about this to Keig, and no doubt this was why I had been picked to help find the gun-room.
One door in the wide passage was standing open. I glanced into the room behind it. It was a bathroom, and again I seemed to know it before I had properly seen it. There was a huge curly-sided bath standing on four squat iron legs with a tall hollow metal hood at the top end from inside which, after due adjustment of the massive controls, water would spray out at you from all sides, or would have done in the contrivance’s prime. There was a solid cork-topped bathroom stool. There was a wash-basin of almost sculptural dignity with a wide glass shelf above it on which a litter of half-discarded objects could just be made out. I saw a tooth-mug, a mop-headed shaving-brush, a tall bottle, a jar or two and an old-fashioned safety-razor.
By my side Keig suddenly darted off through the open door. For an instant I thought we had been spotted. But then I saw that Keig was making purposefully straight for the big wash-basin. His hand reached out to the shelf. He swung round and came out. I saw that he was pushing the safety razor into his pocket. One of his problems at least was solved.
At the stairs we split up, Fred and his team coming down with us to the ground floor, the other two going up. When we got to the foot of the stairs Donald, standing beside the heavy square carved newel-post, pointed to a baize-covered door tucked away at the back of the spacious entrance hall. The kitchen party made towards it and we three were left with the vital guns to find.
We followed a broad corridor running along one whole wing of the big house. There was carpet here, broad regularly-patterned stuff, and the walls were panelled to half their height. Here and there along them hung large oil-paintings, dim landscapes as far as I could make out in the faint light coming from a glass-panelled door at the far end of the passage.
At the last door on the right Donald stopped. He gently turned the brass knob and pushed. The door softly opened.
‘Ah.’
Donald’s exclamation was quiet, but I could hear the satisfaction in it. His memory had not let him down in these uncharted waters.
Keig and I followed him quickly into the room. It was long and narrow with a bare table running its whole length and a few leather armchairs placed rather aimlessly in what space there was left. But what attracted our attention to the exclusion of everything else was the far wall. On it there was a solid-looking rack, and in the rack there were no fewer than a dozen shotguns. Arms.
We hurried towards them. But we were in for a setback. The solid-looking rack was solid indeed. It had been designed doubtless with just such a visit as ours in mind, and designed to frustrate it. The guns were fastened in at trigger-level and also near their downward-pointing muzzles by heavy bars of some tough wood—mahogany, I think, reinforced with thick brass trimming. These two bars were securely fastened by locks built into the wood itself.
I looked at Keig’s axe nonetheless with hope.
Peering at the edge of the top bar, he sought for a crack to insert the tip of the axe-blade. But the two surfaces met as tightly as could be.
Try levering the whole thing from the wall,’ Donald whispered.
I felt a pang of envy at the originality of the suggestion, and while he and Keig tackled the top of the rack, I knelt and began examining the lower bar to see if I could hit on something similarly helpful.
I had no success, and Donald and Keig standing above me seemed to be doing equally badly. The wall behind the rack was of dressed stone, the universal island granite, and the rack itself was recessed into it.
‘Damn it,’ I heard Keig grunt. ‘If only it was safe to make a bit of noise . . .’
I levered myself up from my kneeling position and stepped back a pace to take a long view of the whole rack in the unfocused hope of hitting on some solution to the problem. I began to feel a nagging sense of valuable time slipping fruitlessly by. I do not know whether it was because of this, or because of some tiny sound I heard only half-consciously, but at that moment something prompted me to turn round and look back at the still open door of the long narrow room.
And there, clear to see in the diffused moonlight coming in through the windows, was an altogether astonishing figure.
It was a parlourmaid, a parlourmaid in full uniform, such as you hardly saw any more in those days in Britain and not much in Ireland. She wore a black dress, a small decorative white apron with a bib, a white cap jutting stiffly up with a line of black ribbon in it, and black stockings and shoes. She might almost have been carrying a heavy silver tray with a letter or some drinks on it. But she was not. She was just standing staring at us, taking in everything with her deep-set eyes in a stern forty-year-old face blazing with avidity.
For a moment I stood paralysed. And then I darted forward. She must be silenced.
But the long length of the room was against me. I caught the inside of my hip on the sharp corner of the table, ran along its length in a series of lopsided bounds in consequence, and charged with arms outspread at a doorway that was completely empty.
I do not know exactly what I had hoped to do: seize the dusty dignified-looking figure that had been there moments before and wrap it in an all-enveloping stifling embrace perhaps. But in any case I was much too late. And the maid had not, in fact, taken it into her head to scream. Probably she knew well that doing so would have been ineffective, that the other servants in the house were no match for us. She certainly looked the sort of woman who would not act in a panic, a stern-faced resolute doer of her duty, one who would as a matter of course get dressed before investigating night sounds.
Out in the wide corridor I felt at once a sweeping breath of colder air. The glass-panelled door three or four yards away was wide open.
I ran to it, Keig and Donald at my heels. Outside, in a small stone-paved yard we stood still for a moment and listened. The sound of running steps scrunching along one of the stone-chip paths of the garden came clearly to our ears. The steps were regular and going strongly, but their exact direction was hard to make out from inside the wall-enclosed yard with its several arches.
‘We won’t catch her: we’d better leave, and fast,’ I said without thinking.
‘No,’ Keig barked. ‘We won’t catch her, but we’ll get the guns.’
He swung heavily round and hurried back into the house.
Running back in after him, I was just in time to see him raise his long axe high above his head in front of the gun-rack. It swept down. There was an agonized crack of rending wood.
‘Marvellous,’ Donald said, hurrying forward.
It needed, in fact, a second and third swipe from the axe at the lower part of the rack before we could get at the guns, but no more than that. Within a minute of having come back into the house Donald and I were cradling in our arms almost enough weapons for all our small force.
‘Cartridges, quick,’ Keig said, darting glances all up and down the long dimly lit room.
Again I cursed myself for not having thought quicker. I had stood by while Keig and Donald had been attemptin
g to force the rack, and I could have been doing something useful. But worse was to come. It soon became apparent that there was nowhere in the long room where cartridges could be kept. There was no cupboard. The big table had no drawers in it. By all the rules cartridges should be here. But where were they?
‘There’ll be a pack of people down on us in a few minutes,’ Donald said bitterly.
‘Would cartridges be kept anywhere else?’ Keig asked.
Donald thought for a moment.
‘Old Aleyn had a study,’ he said. ‘Might be there.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I’m not sure. But we can look.’
We ran out into the corridor. The glass door still stood ajar. I closed it and turned the key in the lock. A few seconds’ delay might make a lot of difference to us.
Donald and Keig were hurrying along the corridor, no longer making any effort to keep quiet, flinging open doors, looking into rooms.
‘Blast it,’ Donald yelled. ‘But I was never in the damn study. Just saw Aleyn disappear in there once.’
We came back to the entrance hall without having found any sort of study, or anywhere that looked at all a reasonably likely place to keep cartridges. There had just been a drawing-room, all chairs shrouded in white dust-sheets and little pie-crust tables, a dining-room, very bare-looking with its high-backed chairs pushed against the walls, a broom cupboard, dusty-smelling and empty, and a smaller morning-room, dust-sheeted like the drawing-room.
Just as we had come to the hall Fred Quiddie and his food foraging party had pushed open the baize door behind the stairs. They at least had been lucky: their arms were full of loaves, baskets and bags.
‘Get away,’ Keig shouted. ‘Quick. Out at the back.’
They turned and disappeared. Donald ran across the hall and flung wide the first door he came to on the far side, at the same time flicking on the light.
Strong Man Page 15
