The Marquis wanted to blame Charles for giving him the impression of a roué and a lecher rather than a hard-headed sharp-thinking criminal intent on stealing what he desired, whatever cost was involved in doing so.
Only a villain who was utterly despicable and perhaps more than slightly mad would have been ready to kill a young boy so that he could enjoy the benefits of his title.
The Marquis thought that until this moment he had in fact only half-believed Mimosa’s story of her cousin’s perfidy.
Norton Field must have planned it all very carefully and it struck the Marquis like a blow that it could not have happened without the help of some informer inside Heron Hall.
This meant that Norton Field must have bribed one of his own servants and his fingers tightened on the reins as he thought with fury that he had always trusted his own staff implicitly and found it hard to believe that any one of them would let him down.
At the same time he had been abroad for a long period and many of the old servants had retired and had been replaced by those who were perhaps not so loyal nor so proud of being employed in a big house in the way their predecessors had been.
It was all too easy, the Marquis thought, for somebody like Norton Field to bribe a young footman or even one of the scullions, not only with money but by standing him drinks in the local inn and flattering him by his attention.
Whatever the answer, he had learnt very soon after Mimosa had left home where she had gone.
When she and Jimmy did not return, he must have realised that before the Marquis had time to organise their defence, he must strike quickly.
“Surprise is one of the best weapons of war,” the Duke of Wellington had said once.
The Marquis knew now that it was a weapon that Norton Field had used very successfully.
All the time he was riding and thinking, he was watching Hunter a little way ahead of them.
Sometimes the dog stopped and, when he did so, the Marquis pulled in his horse and was exceedingly afraid that if Hunter lost the scent they would have no idea of where to go next.
He tried to think if he was in Norton Field’s shoes where he would take Mimosa and Jimmy.
Neither of them wore clothes, except for their night attire, and unless Norton Field intended to kill them, bury them in some secluded spot or drown them in a pond or stream, their appearance would preclude him from taking them to where they could be seen by any outsider.
Afraid that, because he had abducted them in such a manner, it was his intention to kill them, the Marquis’s only consolation was Charles’s argument that this was a most unlikely thing to happen.
This, of course, was because Norton Field could not run the risk in his position as heir presumptive of being suspected of murder.
The Marquis was growing more and more apprehensive as Hunter moved along the rough dirt track, which appeared to lead nowhere until ahead of him he saw that there was a wood.
It was then that Charles, who had not spoken since they had left Heron Hall, asked,
“Do you think the dog knows what he is doing, Drogo?”
“We have no other clue,” the Marquis replied sharply.
Then, as he looked ahead, he said,
“I have just realised that this is my boundary.”
Charles looked at him in surprise.
“Your boundary?” he asked. “Then who does the wood belong to?”
“The Earl of Petersfield!”
The two men looked at each other and the Marquis said,
“It makes some sort of sense. If he is hiding Mimosa and Jimmy on their own ground, he will be familiar with it and their estate is certainly not as well looked after as mine.”
Now they were drawing nearer to the wood and the Marquis added,
“Now I think of it, I remember one of my keepers complaining to me of the quantity of vermin in the Earl’s woods. They are a menace to our own birds because, since the old Earl has been ill, there has been no shooting and the gamekeepers have been dismissed.”
“What you are saying,” Charles said, watching Hunter running ahead of them, “is that there must be dozens of isolated places on the Earl of Petersfield’s estate where Norton Field could hide two young people and it would be very hard to find them.”
“Very hard indeed!” the Marquis said in a serious voice. Now the dirt track that Hunter had been following over the fields entered the wood and ahead of them the Marquis saw that there was a rough ride.
The ground was bumpy and covered with fallen twigs and branches of trees and he could see that the wood was in a disgraceful state.
Dead trees fallen into the undergrowth had been left to rot there and those that were growing were far too close together for them to develop as they should.
There was also, as his gamekeeper had told him, an inordinate number of jays and magpies that fluttered away as they appeared and seemed almost to resent their intrusion.
“The place is certainly neglected!” Charles pointed out unnecessarily.
The Marquis did not reply.
He thought that perhaps it would be a mistake to talk in case Norton Field or his men were lurking in the wood and would be alerted to their presence.
At the same time he was certain that with several hours’ start, Norton Field, or whoever had kidnapped Mimosa and Jimmy, would surely no longer be in the vicinity of their crime if they had killed the two young people.
Nor would they be hanging about if they had imprisoned them in some cave or perhaps in a woodcutter’s hut.
He had thought when he was a boy that the many woodcutters’ huts that were to be found in the woods around Heron Hall made excellent hiding places and on several occasions he had hidden in one of them to avoid his Tutors.
Then he had heard with satisfaction them calling to him while they had no idea that he was actually quite near them.
He glanced at the trees on either side as they still followed Hunter, but, as they were all close together with no clearing, there was no sign of the hut he was seeking.
It would be made of trunks of trees split down the middle, and fixed so close to each other that the hut when completed was rainproof and comparatively warm in the winter months.
Then unexpectedly Hunter stopped ahead of them.
Now he seemed lost, moving from first one side of the ride and then to the other and the Marquis’s heart sank.
He was well aware that this wood was very large and spread over a great number of acres.
It could take them days to search it thoroughly and, although if he really believed this was where Mimosa and Jimmy were hidden, he would go back to Heron Hall and bring every available man to assist him in his search, but he was not optimistic of being quickly successful.
Hunter was casting round in circles and the Marquis dismounted, handing as he did so his horse’s bridle to Charles.
“If Hunter has lost the scent, what are we going to do?” Charles asked, but the Marquis did not reply.
He only moved to where Hunter, breathless from the speed he had been running at, was sniffing the ground and still moving from side to side of the ride.
The Marquis looked down on the ground and now he could see the faint marks of wheels on the grass and they appeared to have come to a stop.
What puzzled him, as it obviously was puzzling Hunter, was that there appeared to be no turning off from the ride itself.
On one side there were trees growing very close together, while on the other a mass of undergrowth and fallen branches created a barrier that seemed for the moment impassable.
Then the Marquis noticed something significant.
Some of the branches that lay at the side of the ride had only recently been cut from a tree.
He pulled them to one side and immediately Hunter began to scratch his way through the small aperture he had made.
The Marquis turned his head.
“Come and help me, Charles! You can leave the horses. I don’t think that they will stray far.”
Charles dismounted and knotted the reins of each horse at the neck.
They immediately put down their heads and began to crop the grass and Charles felt that there would be no difficulty about catching them again.
He then joined the Marquis, helping him to move the branches of the trees while Hunter pushed his way ahead of them.
Then suddenly they saw it.
It was so covered in branches that they were right against it before they realised that it was there.
It was a strange, old-fashioned, square horsebox wedged between two trees.
The Marquis looked at Charles without speaking and then feeling as if he was turning over the last card in the pack, he shouted out,
“Is anyone there?”
For a moment there was only silence.
Then there were two voices crying at once,
“Help! Help us! Please – let us – out of here!”
The voices were rather faint as if those inside were afraid to make too much noise.
Then, as the Marquis replied,
“It’s all right, we are here to save you!” he heard Jimmy’s shrill little voice crying out in excitement.
He also thought, although he was not certain, that as he and Charles raised the bar on the door, he heard Mimosa saying,
“Thank You, God – thank You!”
*
It took the Marquis and Charles only a few seconds to lift the bar and open the doors of the horsebox.
But before they could pull them fully open, Hunter sprang in, yelping with pleasure and jumping up at Mimosa and, as she put her arms round him, the tears were running down her cheeks.
It was Jimmy who moved first and jumped into Charles’s arms who was nearest to him.
“You have come! You have come!” he cried. “We were so afraid that no one would ever find us.”
“We have indeed found you!” Charles replied. “But you have to thank Hunter, for he was the only one clever enough to know where you had gone.”
“It has been very frightening!” Jimmy said, putting his arms round Charles’s neck.
“I am sure it was,” Charles answered, “and we will take you back to Heron Hall as quickly as possible. I am sure you must be hungry!”
“Very hungry!” Jimmy agreed. “I could eat a dozen sausages!”
It took Mimosa a little while to ward off Hunter’s attentions before she could move towards the Marquis.
He waited for her and only as she met his eyes did she seem to realise how little she was wearing and that her thin nightgown was very revealing.
The tears were still on her cheeks, but she gave him a brave little smile before she bent down and picked up the blanket she had been carried off in and put it over her shoulders.
As she did so, the Marquis held out his arms and lifted her out of the horsebox.
He realised that her feet were bare and suggested,
“As it is not possible for you to walk, I will carry you.”
Mimosa was looking up at him and her eyes with her eyelashes wet from her tears were very expressive, as she said,
“You came! I prayed to God that by some – miracle you would find us – but I could not – think how you would be able to – do so.”
“You forgot Hunter,” the Marquis said. “He must take all the credit. If he had not led us here, we would not have had the slightest idea what that fiend had done with you.”
“How could it have happened at – Heron Hall?”
“That is what I have been asking myself,” the Marquis said angrily, “and it is something that will never happen again. That I promise you!”
“I think,” Mimosa said in a very small voice, “that Cousin Norton intended us to – starve to death – so that it would be impossible for anyone to lay the blame on him – for having murdered us.”
“I am sure that is what he intended,” the Marquis agreed. “But we have managed to stop such a terrible crime from happening, so don’t think about it until you are safely back at Heron Hall and have had something to eat.”
“I-I might have – known that you would – save us,” Mimosa said in a shaky little voice.
As the Marquis did not answer, she thought perhaps that he had not heard her.
Charles had already caught the horses and Jimmy was sitting in the front of his saddle.
The Marquis lifted Mimosa onto his horse and mounted behind her, putting his left arm round her to hold her close against him.
It was then for the first time, because the relief of escaping from the horsebox was so intense, she felt a little faint and, closing her eyes, she put her head against the Marquis’s shoulder.
As if he knew what she was feeling, he said very quietly,
“It is all right, it is all over now, and it’s going to be long time before he realises that you have been rescued.”
“When they go back later,” Mimosa said in a frightened little voice, “they will – know it was you – who found us.”
It ran through the Marquis’s mind that, if there was, as he suspected, somebody at Heron Hall who was in league with Norton Field, he would be informed of his prisoners’ escape without having to return to look in the horsebox.
The idea made him very angry, but there was nothing he could do at the moment and he could therefore only ride carefully so as not to shake Mimosa any more than was unavoidable on the way to Heron Hall.
As they were riding back, Jimmy was chatting away to Charles telling him exactly what had happened since he had been awakened by feeling a hand over his mouth.
He described how terrifying it had been when he and Mimosa had discovered that there was no way they could get out of the horsebox.
Mimosa did not feel like talking.
She only sat limply in the Marquis’s arms and, as they rode on, he had the feeling that she was so deeply grateful that she and her brother were not to die that she was thanking God in the depths of her heart.
He glanced down at her and thought that she looked very young and vulnerable and, as he did so, she opened her eyes, gazed up him and said,
“H-how can I ever – thank you for – s-saving Jimmy?”
The way she spoke was so intense that the Marquis deliberately replied lightly,
“I told you, you must thank Hunter.” There was a little pause and then Mimosa whispered,
“How can we – possibly live – knowing that this may h-happen again and again until Cousin Norton is – successful?”
It was a question the Marquis had been asking himself and he knew that for the moment he had no answer to it.
Chapter Five
“It is obvious that we must have an early night after such an over-dramatic day,” the Marquis said dryly.
As he spoke, he noticed Jimmy’s eyelids were dropping and that Mimosa looked very tired.
There was so much to talk about, so much to relate to each other, that there had been no chance of resting after they had returned to Heron Hall.
By the time Jimmy and Mimosa had eaten a large breakfast, bathed and dressed, it was almost time for luncheon and after that they went on talking and planning.
“What are we going to do now?” Charles asked pertinently. “So far the enemy has won on points, even if we have managed to prevent him from gaining a victory.”
He thought as he spoke how easy it would have been for Norton Field to have destroyed Jimmy and Mimosa as he had planned to do, had not it been for Hunter who had tracked down his Mistress.
They had reasoned out amongst themselves exactly how Norton Field had planned what had been a very clever operation.
“Nobody goes into that wood of Grandpapa’s,” Mimosa said, “for the simple reason that the trees have never done well and, after Grandpapa gave up shooting, we lost all our gamekeepers.”
“I know that to my cost,” the Marquis said ruefully. “My keepers complain bitterly about the enormous amount of vermin it harbours.”
“The wood is so very big,” Mimosa sig
hed, “and there is a gravel pit on one side of it which was used, I believe, in Roman times. When it rains it fills with water and is dangerous to animals, so the farmers keep well away.”
It was obvious as she spoke that there was no attraction for anyone to visit the wood, and it was astute of Norton Field to have thought of leaving them there and concealing their presence so that if by chance there was a casual passer-by, he would not notice the horsebox.
“What I don’t understand,” Charles remarked, “is why the men who kidnapped them took off their gags and ropes except for those round their wrists.”
“I too thought that was rather strange,” Mimosa agreed.
“He obviously guessed,” the Marquis replied, “that they would be able to release their wrists. Then when their corpses were found there would be nothing to indicate that there had been any criminal intent to murder them.”
Charles looked at him in astonishment.
“How can you say that?” he asked. “They were locked in!”
“The bar on the door could have been lifted at any time after they were dead. Their nightclothes would doubtless have crumbled away. ”
The Marquis pondered as if he was working it out before he went on,
“If they were found in a year or so when Norton Field was applying to be acknowledged as the fifth Earl owing to Jimmy’s disappearance, it would be difficult to find any motive for Mimosa and Jimmy to be hidden in the wood unless they went there themselves and in some extraordinary manner were unable to get away.”
“I can see what you are saying,” Charles said, “and it has some sort of reasoning about it.”
“It has merely convinced me, if I was not convinced already, that Field has an astute brain which is twisted, diabolical and undoubtedly mad,” the Marquis said harshly. “At the same time I agree with you that he is clever.”
“Then what – can we – do?” Mimosa asked fearfully.
“That is what I am going to think out very carefully,” the Marquis replied. “We are all tired and we shall be able to approach the problem more objectively tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.”
They went upstairs together, because the Marquis had said that he wanted to supervise all the arrangements, particularly as to where Jimmy would be sleeping.
Haunted Page 7
