by Cave, Hugh
"Killed?"
"Shot—by accident—when he was visiting a brother in the capital one day. He was one of two innocent bystanders who got caught in a gunfight between the police and some of our nasties."
"For such a small island, St. Alban seems to have more than its share of violence," Alton Preble observed from the backseat. "And I don't suppose all of it makes the English papers, either."
"Isn't the whole world becoming more violent, Alton?" Edith Craig said.
"Touché! But we're not personally interested in the whole world."
"Anyway," Peter said, "I should warn you that the woman you've just met speaks better English than you can expect from some of the others. She finished grammar school and does the Bible reading in her church."
"She seems to have a problem," Edith said.
"One of her sons, Georgie, is with the missing scouts. The other, Gerald, has been behaving strangely for the past few days."
"Strangely? How do you mean?"
"Well, yesterday I put him to bushing out a stretch of track. When I went to check his work at three o'clock, he was sitting on the ground staring into space, talking to himself, and nothing at all had been done. I walked him home."
Miss Craig turned her head to do some staring of her own—at him. "You must feel quite close to these people. You spoke to that woman with true compassion."
Peter settled for a shrug and drove on to the little mountain village of Cedar Ridge, where Armadale received its mail. At this time of day the shops and post office veranda were all but deserted. To the man on the rear seat he said, "Just a mile or so more, Mr. Preble."
"Thank God," the barrister said.
Much rougher now, the road climbed between yards filled with coffee trees. The sun blazed on the zinc roofs of farmers' houses as though determined to set them ablaze. "This is called Grove Path," Peter said as they passed a dilapidated shop where a woman waved to him from behind the counter. "And this," as the car splashed through a shallow stream a few moments later, "is the Armadale boundary, Miss Craig. Everything from here on is yours."
He glanced at her as he said it, and saw her eyes dance with excitement as she leaned forward to peer through the windshield. Then as the car turned in through Armadale's open gate and she caught her first glimpse of the old Great House on its hillside half a mile ahead, her soft, full lips trembled apart to utter a cry of delight.
5
ARMADALE'S GREAT HOUSE HAD BEEN BUILT BY A Scottish pioneer in 1793, the year Captain William Bligh, surviving the Bounty mutiny, had arrived at another of England's West Indian colonies, Jamaica, with the first breadfruit trees from Tahiti.
Built into a steep hillside, the house had its kitchen and servants' quarters downstairs, the latter unused now because Peter's housekeeper went home at night, and all the other rooms on the level above. Its double front doors opened onto a long, high veranda reached by climbing a flight of steps.
When Peter showed Edith Craig the front bedroom made ready for her by his housekeeper, she voiced murmurs of pleasure. Apparently she was fond of old houses and old furniture, even of juniper floors so buckled with age that walking on them demanded a certain spirit of adventure. After admiring the huge four-poster, she went to one of the four windows, choosing one that afforded a view of terraced gardens and, farther down, a wooded slope descending steeply to the roofs of the village of Look Up. Many of Armadale's workers lived there.
"Not disappointed, Miss Craig?"
"Oh, no, Mr. Sheldon!"
Her fiancé was less impressed. His bedroom, hastily made ready while he waited in the drawing room, had much the same view, but only the bed interested him at the moment. Without removing even his shoes, he lowered himself onto it with a groan.
"What about dinner, Mr. Preble?" Peter asked.
A clock on the chest of drawers said 6:30. "What time is dinner, please?"
"Seven, usually. But if you'd rather—"
"No, no, don't alter the routine on my account. I'm not hungry."
"We can easily—"
"Just let me lie here." The barrister closed his eyes. "I suppose I'll recover eventually."
"Car sickness is no joke, Mr. Preble."
"Look in on me later, will you? See if I'm still breathing?"
"Of course."
So, Peter thought . . . he and Edith Craig were to dine alone.
"How, Mr. Sheldon, did you happen to come here? I've never really been told. All I know is that you're American."
All through the meal Peter had waited for the expected inquisition while the two of them exchanged small talk. Now, after pumpkin soup to melt a stranger's heart, and chicken that must have been marinated for hours in herbs and spices, and vegetables from Armadale's own gardens, and a sweet-potato pudding that was his housekeeper's specialty, they were sipping some of the plantation's own prizewinning coffee. And his job, he realized, might depend on how he answered Edith Craig's questions.
"I came here from Florida to visit friends who had a winter home on the north coast, Miss Craig. They introduced me to your father."
"When was this?"
"A little over five years ago. Your father had bought Armadale the year before and was trying to run it from the capital, with a local farmer as headman."
"Did you know about growing coffee?"
"I'd studied tropical agriculture in college. But I don't think that's why he offered me the job of running this place. It may have been a factor, but what sold him on me was my enthusiasm. I loved everything about Armadale the minute I laid eyes on it: this old house, the challenge, the possibilities, even the mountains. Only a Floridian would be that insane about mountains. We don't have any, you know. Not even an honest hill."
"So he offered you—what, really?"
"He asked me if I'd consider running the plantation for him. Replanting it. Restoring it. Building it back up to what it was when its coffee won world awards. He had bought it because he, too, fell in love with it, but he couldn't tackle such a project himself. He was managing a bank in town, as you know."
"And?"
"I applied for work papers and have been here ever since. Then last year, of course, he was recalled by his bank to London and I became solely responsible for what happened here."
"And then he died," she said quietly. "We hadn't a clue that his heart was bad, you know. It came like a bolt from the blue."
"He left you everything?"
She nodded.
"You're much younger than I expected, Miss Craig."
"Would you mind calling me Edith, Mr. Sheldon?"
"I'd like to. We all use first names here."
"And may I call you Peter?"
"Please."
"Yes, I suppose I am younger than you expected. Mother was quite a bit younger than Daddy, you see. She died of pneumonia when I was only twelve."
A movement in the doorway had caught Peter's eye. His housekeeper, Coraline Walker, stood there—a forty-year-old Look Up woman who from the beginning had treated him like a son. In a state of agitation now, she apparently was awaiting a chance to interrupt.
"Yes, Coraline?"
"Mr. Peter, you must turn on your radio! The searchers did find two of the boys-them! Someone is talking about it this very minute!" She must have been listening to her small radio in the kitchen.
Peter rose swiftly and hurried into the drawing room where a battery set of good quality stood on one of the many casual tables. As he switched it on, he noticed that the windows were turning dark and heard the first slow throbbing of the diesel power plant that supplied the house with light. Coraline must have pressed a remote-control button.
As the radio voice filled the room, the lamps began to glow. Slowly the power plant attained its running speed and the glow brightened. Edith Craig had followed him in from the dining room and now stood at his side, intently listening with him.
The man talking was apparently doing so over a telephone. ". . . and were found wandering in a dazed condition
near the small mountain village of Durham, in the parish of Chester. A farmer working in his field discovered them, and someone with a jeep brought them here to Port Anthony. They are now at the hospital here for observation. As I have said, they appear to be exhausted, hungry, and badly frightened."
"You were able to speak to them personally, Lieutenant?"
"For a few minutes."
"Could they tell you what happened? How they became lost?"
"Only that when all the scouts were together, approaching Blackrock Peak at dusk and looking for a place to bed down for the night, they seemed to become confused. 'Sort of crazy or light-headed, not knowing what they were supposed to be doing,' was the way Derek Crosdale put it. He said he didn't remember wandering away from the others but found himself alone hours later when he came to his senses. Day was just breaking. For another two or three hours he just wandered around, calling out and praying someone would hear him. When he finally got an answer, it was from Calvin Vernet, and after a while they were able to reach each other."
"Had Calvin, too, been wandering about in confusion all through the night?"
"Yes, he had. He didn't remember leaving the group but found himself alone when he recovered. He heard Derek calling and answered him. Then the two of them spent hours searching for the others but couldn't find them, so decided to try to reach the north coast by themselves. They got lost repeatedly but managed to keep going on wild fruits and berries."
"Is the search for the others now being concentrated in that area near Blackrock, Lieutenant?"
"You would know more about that than I would, with the search being directed from the capital. But yes, I'm sure the Blackrock area will be getting most of the attention now."
"Thank you, Lieutenant. That was Lieutenant Foster of the Port Anthony police, talking to us by telephone about the finding of two of the missing scouts. Radio St. Alban will keep you up to date on further developments in this baffling mystery as they are brought to our attention. We return you now to—"
Peter shut the radio off and turned to the woman beside him. "Miss Craig, I know I shouldn't be leaving you at this time, but—"
"But you promised to tell that woman if you heard anything, didn't you? And you must. Where does she live, Peter?"
"In Look Up." Noting the expression on her face, he added, "That's a village. We have some odd village names here."
"Is it far?"
"You were looking down on its roofs from the windows of your room."
"Let me go with you, then."
He was only mildly surprised. True, she had just completed a long and tiring journey from England, culminating in a two-hour climb from the airport over a road that had sent her barrister to bed. But she was no ordinary woman.
"I'd better let Mr. Preble know," he said, "and tell Coraline to stay here with him until we return."
"Yes, that might be wise."
He hurried along the hall to her fiancé's room but found the man asleep and saw no need to wake him. In the kitchen his housekeeper was listening to her radio, and he explained the situation to her.
She would stay, she said. No problem. "Bronzie Dakin have a radio," she added, "but perhaps her won't be using it just now with Gerald behaving so peculiar."
"Perhaps she won't."
"You go along, Mr. Peter. Her will be glad to know two of the boys-them was found, at least. It will give her some hope."
6
THE YARD WAS DARK WHEN HE LED EDITH CRAIG out the massive front door of the Great House and down the veranda steps. He had picked up a pair of flashlights and now handed her one. "It's possible to drive to Look Up," he explained, "but we'd have to go back to where we met Bronzie this afternoon, and the side road to the village is pretty bad. The shortcut the workers use is faster."
"I like to walk," she said.
She had to stay behind him as they went down through the terraced flower gardens. The path was not wide enough for them to walk side by side. It continued the same way down through the vegetable gardens, where their two flashlights transformed shoulder-high gungo pea bushes into distorted night creatures that seemed to crowd forward, threatening their intrusion. At the bottom a barbed-wire fence designed to keep out peasant livestock contained a small gate that was never locked. Then the road.
It had been a driving road once, he explained as they circled boulders and mounds of rubble in a cautious descent. "Used to run from Armadale to Look Up. I drove it once in the jeep to see if I could convince the parish it ought to be restored. They weren't having any."
"It does look used, though."
"The way we're using it, though most of those who do are barefoot. Trouble is, we have rains here that cause slides. You bulldoze a track like this, and after the next six-inch downpour you have to do it again. Anyway, here's the village."
He meant the start of the village. Though small, Look Up was one of those communities that seemed to sprawl along almost endlessly: a house here, another a hundred yards farther along, with coffee or banana walks in between. Now that night had fallen the yards were empty, though there would be people on the road for a while yet. Men, mostly, unsteadily making their way home from some shop where hard-earned wages, mostly from Armadale, would have been slapped on a soiled wooden counter for a drink of rum or a bottle of St. Alban beer. Edith and he met no one, however, before reaching their destination.
Slightly larger than some they had passed, the house stood alone behind a rail fence of bamboo poles he had allowed Bronzie Dakin to cut on the Armadale property in return for her loyal service. Its two front-room windows, lit from within by lamplight, had the baleful look of spectral eyes floating disembodied in darkness.
Saying "Here we are" to his companion, Peter stooped for a stone in the road and rapped on the gate with it. "Bronzie," he called, "are you at home?" She would be, of course. With a sick son to look after, she would not be out after dark. But one didn't barge uninvited into a peasant yard after dark, either. Many of these good people believed in ghosties, duppies, and other feared night prowlers.
The door opened, creating still another rectangle of lamplight, this one framing Bronzie's figure. "Who is it?" her voice demanded.
"Peter Sheldon, Bronzie, with a friend. We've news for you about the boys."
She rushed to the gate and clutched at him as he stepped through. "What news, Mr. Peter? Oh, dear God, tell me them all right!"
He put a hand on her shoulder. "Now, Bronzie, it's not too bad, and we've come to tell you all we know about it. Bronzie, this is Miss Craig, who owns Armadale now." He waited for the expected curtsy, then gently took her by the arm and steered her back to the house, with Edith trailing.
When they were inside and seated, he quietly repeated what Edith and he had heard over the radio, while Bronzie looked at him wide-eyed. In the light of the one oil lamp that was burning in the room, her handsome face with its wide-spaced eyes seemed to have been lifted from a bright copper coin.
"It happened near to Blackrock Peak?" she whispered when he had finished.
"Yes, Bronzie."
"Where the Devil's Pit is supposed to be?"
"Now, Bronzie, you don't believe that old mountain tale. You're too levelheaded."
"I only know my Georgie is missing!" she wailed. "And now something terrible is happening to Gerald, too. What is going on, squire?"
"There can't be any connection between Blackrock and Gerald," Peter said. "It makes no sense. May I see the boy, Bronzie?"
"Yes, yes, I want you to!" Clutching his arm, she pulled him across the plank floor into a bedroom.
A lamp burned in that room, too, though dimly, and by its glow Peter saw Gerald Dakin on a bed. It was a wide bed of the ornate, highly varnished kind favored by country people who could afford better furniture than that made by themselves or a village carpenter. Probably, since there was but one other bedroom, the lad normally shared it with his brother.
Wearing pajama bottoms but no top, the sixteen-year-old lay not in t
he bed but on it. His eyes, wide apart like his mother's, gazed up at Peter without blinking. Bronzie stepped forward to place a hand on his moist forehead.
"Gerald, you see who come to call on you? Is Mr. Peter. And Miss Craig, who own the Armadale property now. They come here to tell us that two of the boys your brother Georgie went off with has been found." She waited for a response and, getting none, said in the same patient voice, "You hear me, Gerald?"
Seemingly without understanding, he shifted his gaze from her to Peter, then to Edith. Bronzie repeated what she had said, and a frown formed on his face. "What them say happen?" he asked.
Peter answered the question, speaking slowly and distinctly. "They had some kind of trouble up near Blackrock Peak, Gerald. All of them became confused up there for some reason and didn't know what they were doing. The two who have been found, Crosdale and Vernet, wandered off separately, it seems, then discovered each other by accident and made their way together down to a village in the parish of Chester."
"Not Georgie?"
"No, not Georgie. But we have every reason now to hope he and the others will soon be found. Doesn't that make you feel better?"
"My head hurt me," Gerald mumbled.
"You mean you have a headache?"
"Not a headache. Worse."
Peter turned to the boy's mother. "Has he been complaining of headaches, Bronzie?"
"No, squire. All the time he say he feel cold and wet."
"What do you mean by wet, Gerald?"
"Me don't like this place!"
"But you're in your own room, in your own home. It isn't cold or wet here. Is it, Bronzie?"
"No, squire."
"Miss Craig," Peter said, "do you feel uncomfortable here?"
"Not at all," Edith responded quickly. "It's a very pleasant room, in fact."
"Me can't get to move," the boy moaned. "Something holding me. And it all green in here, so me frightened the whole time! Do, suh, let me out of here!" Suddenly tears trickled down his face and an outburst of whimpering caused his mouth to tremble.
