“This is a fine play,” he said at last, turning to walk slowly back. “You realize, don’t you, that Barrie will suspect Pow of having pinched the leeks back again?”
“Does it matter much? He can’t say anything, any more than Geordie can, once they’re in the lodge garden.”
“‘Wha fin’s, keeps’, in fact?”
“Yes. And ‘wha losses, greets.’” Kate said gaily. “It’s all too simple.”
“So simple that I expect we’ll find Pow there himself on the same errand,” said Robin Anstruther.
Kate shook her head. “I don’t think so. Quiet dignity is his line—but you said ‘we’! You’re going to help me?”
“Someone’s got to keep an eye on you,” he said. “Yes, I’ll help, but we mustn’t be caught. I’m a J.P. and it would be a pretty thing if the police found me raiding a garden at dead of night.”
“You are a pet,” said Kate.
“I look like a pet, don’t I?” he growled. And his air was so singularly unpet-like, his frown so savage, that Kate began to shake with laughter.
“Now look here,” he said. “I’ll leave the car at Aunt Jean’s gate. I have to dine with some men at the ‘bell’ anyhow—and I’ll come back about midnight or a little after. You’ll have to get out of the house quietly and meet me in the road—”
“This is lovely. I feel like a conspirator,” said Kate.
“What an exciting place Haystoun is. I’ve never had so many adventures before.”
“I hadn’t noticed any excitement until you came,” he told her dryly. “And I expect you and adventures, as you call them, rush madly at each other like two bits of quicksilver. Don’t stir us up too much, or you may get a shock some day.”
“I’ll risk that,” Kate said, and went indoors to spend an evening which seemed interminable to her strung-up senses. Never had a meal been so dull—minced collops with little strips of toast arranged in a star pattern on top, cornflour shape and stewed plums—or so long-drawn out. Yet, when they rose from table, and Kate helped Mrs. Anstruther in her stiff painful progress across the hall to the sitting-room, only half an hour had been spent over it. Eight o’clock. For two hours Kate must sit and pretend to read, or watch Mrs. Anstruther play a complicated game of patience called ‘The Fascinator,’ which involved the use of two packs and never seemed to come out. As the grandfather clock on the upper landing wheezed ten, the grenadier brought a glass of hot water to her mistress, who sipped it slowly; at half-past ten Mrs. Anstruther went upstairs to bed, leaving Kate and the grenadier to go round the house, bolting windows and locking doors. On this particular evening Hannah, who usually entrusted the fastening of the front-door to Kate, chose to do it herself, and in consequence Kate, stealing downstairs just at midnight, found that not only had she to turn a key which squeaked protestingly unless very tenderly handled, but to shoot two bolts and undo a clanking chain. This was so eating that she quite forgot the slight tremors which had troubled her earlier in the evening, and passed out of the house on a warm wave of annoyance, only to find that her fellow conspirator was nowhere in sight.
It was a soft dark night, moonless, with clouds sweeping slowly across the sky, hiding the stars to reveal them again. A light breeze carried in its wake all the scents from the gardens bordering the road. The clock on the Town Hall chimed in a cracked voice: “Ting-tong! Ting-tong!” which meant half-past twelve, and Kate, all the pleasant angry heat oozing out at her toes, shivered. Deeds of the sort she contemplated ought to be done quickly, as Macbeth knew, and not deferred until conscience and a belated sense of law and order had time to raise their small chill murmurs of disapproval.
“I wish Robin would come,” she thought nervously, and heard a quick light step on the road. He was with her, he had taken her cold hand in his warm one, he was saying in his half-teasing voice: “You’ll never make a conspirator, standing there shaking in your shoes and jumping at a shadow.”
“I wasn’t,” protested Kate. The whole venture took on a new colour, a new glow of enterprise, the stars winked encouragingly before a fresh band of cloud could veil them.
Time, which had crept so slowly, now took wings. Almost before Kate had realized that they had started on her poaching expedition, they were climbing the Barries’ garden wall. A smothered yelp and a scrambling noise brought her heart to her mouth.
“What on earth—” she whispered.
A stout Aberdeen terrier landed beside them with a heavy thud and shook himself.
“My God, it’s Wat!” muttered Robin. “The old devil must have followed me all the way from Pennymuir and hidden in the car. It’s a favourite trick of his. Never mind, he’ll keep us warned if anyone passes along the Loaning.”
Kate felt privately that the gang now numbered one too many, but she kept this opinion to herself, and in the difficulty of locating the bell-jar without leaving incriminating footprints all over the soft earth she soon forgot Wat.
“Here it is,” she whispered at last, as she almost fell over it.
“All right. I’ll hoick out the leeks if you’ll keep watch.”
The bell-jar was carefully removed, and in the faint glimmer of the September night the thick white stalks of the prize leeks shone palely. They were strangely hard to move.
“Did you bring a trowel or anything?” asked Robin Anstruther, straightening himself.
“No. How could I? They can’t be very firmly in, after all. It isn’t as if they’d grown there.”
He grunted. “Isn’t it? Well, all I can say is that they feel as well-rooted as trees. I can’t shift them.”
“I’ll help.” Kate went down on her knees beside him, and together they tried again. “Do be careful! If you hurt them they won’t be any good to Geordie!” she hissed in his ear.
“Damn Geordie and his leeks, too. And don’t make noises like a snake at me. I’m nervous.”
“We’ll have to shovel away the earth with our hands,” said Kate decidedly, though still in an undertone. Her partner in crime groaned.
“Come on!” She was quite ruthless by now, and started digging like a terrier about the roots of the leeks.
“I don’t believe you really need to throw all that mud in my eye. I got a mouthful just now,” complained Robin.
“A mouthful in your eye? Keep it shut, then,” panted Kate, scraping furiously.
“I’ve found a potato,” he announced after a few seconds’ silence.
“I wish I could find a leek’s roots! Pouf! What a smell of onions—”
“Did you expect ’em to smell like lilies-of-the-valley? Careful, now, they’re coming!”
Two pairs of dirty hands met round the smooth coldness of the yielding leeks, and just as by a combined effort, they pulled them, undamaged, triumphantly out of the ground, bedlam broke loose.
A cat, mincing along the roof of a small shed against the garden wall, intent on courtship, raised its face to the skies, and uttered a long musical cry, tremulous with passionate love. At the same moment the dog Wat, hearing the voice of an hereditary foe, opened a mouth like a crocodile’s and roared a savage bass reply to what he took to be a challenge. Someone threw open a window in the cottage and flashed a light over the garden. To Kate and Robin Anstruther, cowering behind the dahlias, it appeared as powerful as any searchlight. Voices were heard, angry voices which sounded as though their owners had been roused from well-earned sleep.
“Is there a’ body i’ the gairden, Jone?”
“Wife, I’m no’ a hoolet. I canna see in the dairk.”
“Wha belangs tae yon dog? It’s frichtenin’ the pussy.”
“Never heed the cat. It can mind itsel’. Awa’ back tae yer bed, there’s naebody ootbye.”
“Jone Barrie, are ye no’ gaun doun tae see? Think shame o’ yersel’, man!”
“I tell ye, wumman, there’s naebody there.”
While the argument was in progress, Robin touched Kate’s arm. “Come on,” he whispered. “We can get through between the
peas, but we’ll have to crawl.”
Obediently Kate followed him on hands and knees, wincing as her hair caught on the spruce branches on which the peas, now withered, had been trained. It was extraordinarily damp, and she wondered what sort of a trail they were leaving behind them.
Robin Anstruther apparently shared her thoughts, for he stopped in his painful travelling, and putting his face close to hers, muttered with a smothered laugh: “It must look as it a tank had been let loose in here!”
“Have you got the leeks?” asked Kate in an undertone hoarse with anxiety.
“Yes. Can’t you smell ’em? But you’ll have to take them now. I want to get hold of that infernal dog of mine.”
A moist oniony bundle was thrust into her unready arms, and he had slipped away so quietly that she did not know he had gone until, putting out her hand to touch the rough tweed of his sleeve, she felt nothing. Clasping the leeks to her bosom, Kate made her way as fast as she dared towards the wall, no longer on her knees, but crouching low and moving like a lapwing leading someone away from its nest. She guessed that the garden was no place for her now that she was in possession of stolen goods; if Robin by ill luck was caught, she supposed that he could put up some sort of a story of having climbed over the Barries’s wall to find his dog.
Nothing so desperate happened, and before Kate bad dropped carefully into the Loaning, the voices had ceased, the cottage window had been shut with a rattling bang, and peace reigned again. A sudden sharp shower of rain made her shiver, and she wished that Robin, whatever he might be doing, would hurry. It seemed a very long time until he and Wat landed on the road beside her.
“Sorry, but I had to clear up a bit,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be so easy to trace now. Give me the leeks. I suppose the next thing is to plant them in Pow’s patch?”
“I suppose so,” Kate said blankly, for this necessary part of the plan had completely escaped her mind.
He laughed. “I knew you’d forgotten. Never mind, our luck ought to hold now.”
In fact, the rest of the proceeding passed off so uneventfully that there seemed no adventure left about it, and Kate was frankly yawning when she and Robin arrived back at the gate of The Anchorage.
“You’ve been wonderful,” she said to him. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“It was good fun while it lasted,” he said. “but I am glad it’s over, and no one has seen us.”
This last statement was too optimistic, for though no one had seen them to connect them with a robbery, they had been noted and recognized with bulging-eyed delight by Mrs. Milligan’s peroxide-blonde Mima, who, herself absent without leave, was sneaking home from a dance at one of the farms outside Haystoun. It was a pity, Mima considered, that, in the circumstances, she could not pass on this titbit to Miss Milligan without betraying her own unlawful outing, or her means of entry, which involved the pantry window. Still, she was not debarred from telling her intimates, and to them she could freely retail the story of having seen “yon Miss Heron” with Mrs. Anstruther’s nephew, walking up the road as cool as you please, in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
“It is too naughty of Andrew not to have arrived. I fully expected him in time for tea,’ said Lucy, who looked distractingly pretty standing behind a small table laden with the old Worcester cups and saucers, the heavy Georgian silver of teapot and hot-water jug.
She spoke to the party at large, in a light, almost careless manner, but Kate thought she noticed an edge to her voice, a trace of nervous irritation in the fluttering movements of her small white hands. Granny’s soothing murmur was drowned by Cousin Charlotte.
“What did you expect?” said the old lady sharply. “If a man can avoid a tea-party he’ll do it. I don’t blame him.” And she swept the men in the room with an eagle glance that made them feel mere worms.
“But Andrew didn’t know—” began Lucy, and bit her lip.
“I thought not. You never told him, eh? What a pleasant surprise he’ll get,” said Cousin Charlotte, with a cackle of malicious laughter. Everyone looked miserably uncomfortable until Greystiel Heron, in the courtly eighteenth century manner which he could assume so well when he liked, engaged her attention, and conversation broke out again.
There were twelve people gathered for tea in the old billiard-room at Soonhope, where their absentee host’s photograph smiled gaily down on them as if he shared a secret joke with each. Kate sitting in a corner by herself, looked about interestedly, from Lucy, capably pouring out smoky China tea, to the youngest of her three children, Henry, who was carrying a plate of feather-light hot scones round the room in an absent-minded fashion, quite forgetting to hand them to anyone, but devouring an astonishing number himself. The other two young Lockharts were standing together, Anne’s lovely head of dark auburn curls very close to Adam’s red head. They were amazingly like their father, and had all his former gaiety and charm, while Anne, fortunately for her, had also inherited her mother’s dainty hands and slender narrow feet. Henry was the plainest, a lanky boy with a big nose, but Kate rather fancied that he was the most interesting of the three. Apart from appearances, she had had no opportunity to judge, for they had only arrived that morning, a few hours before the rest of the family gathering. Grey and Robin Anstruther, who, except for his aunt, was the only person present not related to Andrew Lockhart, were deep in shooting and fishing. Kate could hear her brother’s “lost a beauty a twelve-pounder at least by the look of him, and clean-run,” as she turned her head to see her father still bending over Cousin Charlotte all courteous interest, while every line of his elegant figure in its disgraceful old tweeds said to those who knew him best, ‘damned old harridan.’ Mrs. Anstruther and Granny were unravelling genealogical tables, while Mrs. Heron strove to make conversation with Lucy, whose distrait look and mechanical smiles showed that her thoughts were probably with her delaying husband. Finally Kate saw her mother glance at her despairingly, and left her corner to go to the rescue.
Robin Anstruther smiled at her as she passed him, a friendly smile which made her feel warm and happy inside, and then she was standing at the table saying to Lucy: “Such a lovely tea, Lucy. And a very good idea to have it in here. This room’s so big that people have space to move about without bumping into each other all the time.”
“I thought it would be easier for Mrs. Anstruther if she didn’t have to climb the stairs,” said Lucy, and while Kate was rejoicing at the real consideration shown in these words, spoilt the whole effect by adding: “Besides, I hate crumbs all over the drawing-room carpet. It marks so.”
Mrs. Heron, with well-concealed relief, had removed herself to join her husband, now wearying of Cousin Charlotte, and Kate was left looking ruefully at Lucy’s grateful down bent head as she filled the cups which her sons had just brought to her.
“I say, Kate,” said Henry, whisking round so that a billow of tea slopped over the brim of the cup he held. “Kate, did you—”
“Be careful, Henry, you’re spilling the tea,” said his mother. “And don’t you think ‘Cousin Kate’ would be more polite?”
“Oh, please—” began Kate, feeling at least Cousin Charlotte’s age. But Henry had already gone calmly on.
“That’s quite out of date, Mother. Even if she were an aunt of mine I’d probably still call her Kate. I say, Kate, did you really lock someone into that cupboard in the hall because you thought it was a burglar? Robin said you did.”
“Really, Henry, what nonsense you talk. Why should Kate do such a stupid thing? And I will not have you calling people so much older than yourself by their Christian names,” said Lucy with asperity.
Henry gave her a patient look. “It wouldn’t have been silly if it had been a burglar, Mother. And he likes it,” he explained. “He told me so. Besides, life’s too short for all these titles. Look at all the people in this room that I’d have to call Cousin if I began.” He gesticulated again with the cup, and this time the tea d
escended in a scalding flood on to his grey flannel legs, causing him to dance in agony. “Gosh, my only decent bags! And I’m burnt!”
“Go and change them at once. They’ll have to go to the cleaners now,” said Lucy.
“Don’t you care about me being burnt? If an area equal to one-third of the human body is burnt,” said Henry with gusto, “the patient usually succumbs. It’s true. I read it in Anne’s First-Aid book. I shall probably die.”
Kate laughed heartlessly, took the now empty cup from him and said: “Yours can’t be worse than a burn of the first degree, Henry. Off you go and change, and then see for yourself just how bad it is. I’ll take that cup for you when it’s refilled.”
What a boy,” sighed Lucy, filling the cup once more; but Kate could tell that Henry was the adored of her rather cold heart.
“He’s great fun,” she said, and went to deliver the tea its rightful owner.
“Kate,” said Robin Anstruther close beside her, “will you come out into the hall with me? I can’t get a word with you in this crowd.”
“All right. In a minute,” Kate promised, annoyed to that her heart was thumping absurdly.
As they left the billiard-room, they could hear Lucy saying to Anne: “I can’t think why your father isn’t here yet. It is too bad of him.”
Robin gave Kate a quick ironical look. “Poor Drew!” he murmured. “Not a good start, is it? I wonder where he is.”
Andrew, who could easily have been at Soonhope early in the afternoon, had dawdled deliberately on the way, holding his car back over stretches of good road, stopping frequently to look at the countryside. As a boy his favourite hour for arriving had been just before dinner, and he wanted to recapture, if he could, the joy of coming back to Soonhope in the clear evening light, when the sun, nearing the west, left the sky a cold pure green behind black banks of trees.
Reaching the top of Soutra he drew in to the side of the road and shut off his engine while he gazed, dazzled, at the brilliant stretch of richly coloured land running away northward to meet the Forth, which was a strip of molten gold. Once again he marvelled at the pigheadedness of people who seemed to shut their eyes and label Scotland a grey country. In weather like this it had all the changeful glories of a fire-opal, variations of colour which he had never seen in England. . . . ‘And never will,’ he thought, feasting his eyes on the bright blue of the sky, flecked with gold-tipped clouds, on the rolling miles of heather, on fields of ruddy wheat, ripe for the cutting, on emerald pasture, richer green of roots, heavy dark woods, and a line of white where waves were breaking on a distant sandy beach. Edinburgh lay half-hidden in a veil of blue smoke from her chimneys, with Arthur’s Seat brooding over the old town. He had a glimpse of a tenuous spider’s web which was the Forth Bridge, he picked out the islands in the Firth, black dots in that golden stream. Then he turned to look towards Haystoun, and found he could wait no longer to get there. It was queer, but this delight of homecoming was a pure happiness which nothing could spoil, not his long estrangement from Lucy, not even his parting with Elizabeth. Starting up the car again, he drove slowly down into the broad valley, taking all the by-roads he remembered so well, noting the burns where he had fished for trout, the narrow bridge over Alewater where he had seen a kingfisher for the first time in his life. He almost felt again the sudden stab of painful delight which he had known at sight of that blue-green flash, vivid as a flame against a background of dim grey willows. . . . And then quick as the kingfisher’s flight, there came a verse of Housman’s which robbed him of his quiet happiness. Try as he might to forget them, the words sang through his head in time to the throbbing engine.
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