“Then this house is no place to defend,” said James Alexander Musgrave, who had been relieved on duty by Elspat, and so had joined in the conference.
“But what about the police?” enquired Gillian, appearing from the garden, where she had been keeping watch with her sister Lesley. “Surely it’s their job now?”
“Well, it might be, if we could prove that we expected an attack,” Mrs. Bradley answered. “As it is, I think we should create an impression of hysteria by calling them in at this juncture. They would think we were nervous because of the murders at the tower.”
“I don’t see why we can’t prove Mr. Joshua did those,” said Gillian, eagerly. “After all, Lesley and I did see him slinking in.”
“There is nothing to show who did them, child. We are against a man who is a genius in his own way. He has no idea, though, that we are abreast of his plans. He is coming with at least three men. We muster three men and four women—enough to settle their hash, I should imagine. We can call the police in afterwards to deal with the survivors. Oh, that reminds me,” she added. “Hasn’t young Tom turned up?”
Tom, it appeared, had not. This was worrying, since, if he had carried out his instructions, he ought to have arrived at the house before Mrs. Bradley and George turned up in the car.
“He’ll have to be found,” said Mrs. Bradley. “James Musgrave, you and George will have to go. George knows the lad, and can describe him. Take the car to Lanark, and see what news they have there. He should have arrived by four o’clock this afternoon, if he did exactly as I told him when he got to London.”
“It will weaken the defence of the house,” James Musgrave pointed out.
“It will weaken our defences so much,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that I propose we leave the house and take to the tower. That we can defend against any assault. What do you say, my dear David?”
“I am against it,” David Ker answered. “We have in this house food for several people for at least a fortnight. There we would have nothing but what we could put into the trap. Even your car will not be available, if the men take it to Lanark this evening.”
“I don’t think the siege will last long,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We shall inform the police as soon as it begins, and by the time we have held off Mr. Joshua for an hour or two, the police should have arrived, and will take our assailants into their care.”
David, however, proved obstinate. Therefore, perceiving that he did not intend to vacate his house, Mrs. Bradley gave in for the moment, and went round the house with Elspat to examine the possibilities of defence.
“We’ll never keep them out if they mean to get in,” said Elspat with what, in anybody but a Borderer, would have been the deepest pessimism, but which, in her, was a kind of gaiety, to think that the task was going to be dangerous and difficult. It was with disapproval that she had witnessed the departure of James Musgrave and George, but when their quest was explained to her she agreed readily that the poor wee laddie must be found and brought to the house.
As there was now nothing else to be done but to set watchers at top-floor windows, and then wait for the rescue party to return, or for Mr. Joshua to make his attack, Mrs. Bradley, not having the first spell of duty, set herself to work out the probable movements of the enemy, and the form the attack on the house was likely to take. With the written result she decided to go again to David Ker and urge the immediate evacuation of the house.
“We are not in a good position here,” she stressed. “These men will be armed, and, judging by their conduct up to the present, will stop at nothing. I still want to leave this house and go to the tower. Once there, you and Elspat, with Michael and the two girls, can hold the fort with ease.”
“And you?”
“I want to find the deeds. I believe I was on the track of them before. I should have gone on searching then, if I had had the evidence of the will to guide me, but I did not know of the verses.”
“You canna be left alone. Have Michael go with you.”
“I don’t want Michael. I don’t think I like him very much.”
“Do you not? Perhaps you’re right. I’ll send him away until this business is over. Where is he now?”
“He should be on duty on the west side of the house, looking out of the attic window.”
“Aye, I’ll go and find him.”
He went away, and scarcely had he begun to mount the front staircase when there was a sound of clattering feet on the servants’ stairs, and Lesley came bursting along the kitchen passage and through the baize-covered door.
“Oh, Aunt Adela!” she said. “That Irishman—the groom! He’s gone!”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Gillian just went along to give him a piece of chewing-gum, as we’d got some, and were all on duty together, and found he wasn’t at his post.”
Upon this, Elspat, David, and Mrs. Bradley searched the house, whilst Gillian and Lesley each watched two sides of it instead of one.
Nothing was known of the groom until Lesley, gazing through field-glasses, suddenly gave a shout which brought David Ker to her window on the west of the house. He took the glasses she handed to him.
“Is that Michael?” she asked. In the distance, and heading away from the house, was a man on a zig-zagging motor cycle.
“It is,” said David Ker. “I shall kick him harder next time I see him,” he added.
“I suppose he is in the pay of Mr. Joshua,” Lesley remarked. “I bet that’s the way the caviar got into the house. It didn’t come by post at all.”
“No doubt about Michael now, I am afraid,” said Mrs. Bradley, joining them. “It makes a difference of two able-bodied men, as it were, to our defences. We have lost one, and the enemy has gained one. What do you think, David?”
“Nothing,” replied David Ker. “If it seems the best thing to abandon the house, why, we’ll do it. Just wait until I telephone the police.”
“If Michael’s had any sense he’s cut the wire,” said Lesley, the student of escapist literature.
“First round to Mr. Joshua,” said Mrs. Bradley, when David failed to get through to the police.
“Second round, you mean,” said Lesley. “What price us not spotting that a motor-bike had been left on the premises so that that beastly Michael could make his getaway? I never did like that man. I wish George and Musgrave were still here.”
So did Mrs. Bradley. She added that the motor cycle was probably the one which Geoffrey had ridden to the tower.
“It is a nuisance about the telephone,” she said. “We should have thought of that. After all, it is not only in fiction that a telephone wire is cut for criminal purposes.”
The exodus from the house now had to be planned without delay. Mrs. Bradley had a last word with David.
“Now, David,” she said, “you are our trump card, remember. As long as you are safely in our hands we win the game. If Mr. Joshua gets hold of you, we lose it.”
“I can’t owe my life to a pack of women,” said David Ker, ungratefully.
“Baby!” said Mrs. Bradley.
“Pack of women!” said Gillian, from her post in the south attic.
“Isn’t he the limit?” agreed Lesley.
“It doesna seem to occur to him,” said Elspat, joining in the fray with grim thoroughness, “that he owes his very existence to a woman.”
These Amazonian tactics on the part of the despised sex reacted strongly on David. He apologised.
“And now,” said Elspat, “we are a’ gaun tae dae as Mrs. Bradley says, and that’s to get oot o’ here the best way we can whiles thae limmers still dinna ken what we are after. So up wi’ you, David Ker,” she added urgently, “and get your bits o’ things, and let us a’ be gaun to the tower. She’s a sensible body, yon,” she added, in a loud hoarse whisper, drawing her employer away from Mrs. Bradley’s vicinity, “and kens what tae dae, gin you dinna.”
Completely swamped, David was led away.
“And now,” said Mrs. Brad
ley, “when you are ready, I want you two girls to go with him and Elspat, and I’ll stay and search for the deeds, which may be all the time in this house.”
“I’m staying with you,” said both the young girls, in a breath.
“I’d like to have you,” said Mrs. Bradley tactfully, “and, really, I suppose it would be far less dangerous for you if I did. But I’m afraid David will dig his toes in altogether if anybody else stays behind, and he is our first consideration. He is at once the first and last shot in our locker.”
The girls agreed about this, conferred together in loud tones from their respective windows, and then, after last looks through the shared binoculars, abandoned their posts and professed themselves ready to accompany David to the tower.
“One thing, David,” said Mrs. Bradley, when the party was ready to set out. “Where is the family residence? Where, for instance, did Great-Uncle Gregory live?”
“Why, in the tower, of course. I bought it from Gregory’s family before I leased it to old Uncle Joshua.”
“I see. All right. That’s all, child. Good-bye, everybody. It won’t be long before I see you again.”
She watched them out of the eastern attic window, and went occasionally to the other sentry-windows to look for the coming of Mr. Joshua and his adherents. The cut telephone line made any appeal for police protection impossible for some time. Mrs. Bradley found herself glad of this. Mr. Joshua, with his wholesale, Renaissance disregard of life, and his, so far, brilliantly trackless trail of murder, robbery, and bluff, was not only a foeman but a challenge.
It was chilly upstairs. She also saw no particular need to watch for the approach of the enemy. Her plans were made. If, by any chance, George and James Alexander should return to the house with young Tom, they could please themselves whether they remained with her or accompanied Tom to the tower. The boy must certainly be in a place of safety. Her own view was that Musgrave should take him to the tower. George, she preferred to believe, would elect to remain at her side.
The day began to darken. Mrs. Bradley made up the fire, drew the curtains, and foraged in the kitchen for food. She made China tea, and cut thin bread and butter. Then, setting this elegant English meal upon a tray, she brought it into the room where there was the fire, and set it down.
She enjoyed her solitary tea. When it was over she washed up, made a tour of the house to test door and window fastenings, and then chose a book and settled down to spend a pleasant and restful evening. She did, however, keep an ear open for the sound of the returning car, whose engine beat she thought she could recognise, and also for the sound of any other vehicle.
She had no lights on elsewhere in the house, and the curtains of the room in which she sat were so closely drawn that no chink of light could escape. In any case the night was not yet dark. The house might have been fully inhabited, or absolutely empty: there was nothing to show.
At nine o’clock, or just after, like the trump of doom in that it was unheralded by any preliminary warning, there came a loud knocking at the door.
• CHAPTER 14 •
“Then bespake him the King againe,
And these were the words said hee:
‘If we stand not stiffly in this battell strong,
We are worthy to be hang’d on a tree.’ ”
Young Tom’s adventures had been various. Once on the train he had fallen asleep in the corner of the carriage for the first two hours of the journey, and probably would not have wakened as soon as he did, even then, but that a dining-car attendant touched him on the shoulder, and informed him that breakfast was ready.
Breakfast lasted young Tom until the train reached the outskirts of London, and he returned to his compartment with only just enough time to collect his cap, which he had left there, and his waterproof, before the train drew in at the London terminus.
Tom had received implicit instructions from Mrs. Bradley about what to do when he reached London, but the only clear order, which remained in his head, was that he was to look out for a tall thin clergyman who was to offer him breakfast.
“As you will already have had breakfast on the train, Tom,” Mrs. Bradley had continued, “you will know that this is the sign.”
“Sign as that be the right man, like, and not one of t’other bloke’s blokes,” Tom had observed intelligently.
“That’s it,” said Mrs. Bradley. She had imagined that Tom would remember the bit about the clergyman and the breakfast, and probably nothing more, and so had telephoned the rest of the instructions to the Reverend Noel Wells, her friend, as well as having entrusted them to young Tom.
There was the tall clergyman, at any rate. Tom went up to him.
“Here I be,” he said. “Be you a-looking, like, for I?”
“Will you have breakfast?” the clergyman enquired. Relations having been established by this simple means. Tom then broke through the careful plans by beaming and accepting the offer. The clergyman was slightly alarmed by this, for his instructions had been to conduct the youth to Euston Station by taxi immediately he had established his identity, there to catch a train for Lanark, by way of Carlisle.
He took out his watch and made a rapid calculation.
“We’d better have it at once, then,” he said. They were served quickly at the station buffet, but had cut the time rather fine. The clergyman hailed a taxi. “Come along. Jump in,” he said.
At this point Fate, which entered little into the lives of either of them, decided to interfere in its usual unforeseen manner. The weather, which had been perfect when Tom left home, had turned wet. The rain was thin and light—sufficient to make the streets slippery.
At a corner the taxi-driver tried to jump the lights, decided, too late, to pull up, and skidded his cab into a lamp standard. Neither he nor the passengers were hurt, but the delay, which involved explanations with a policeman, and then the abandoning of the damaged taxi for another, which did not come along immediately, caused young Tom to miss the train.
“Oh, dear! I’m afraid that’s done it!” the clergyman said, inwardly cursing young Tom’s boyish appetite for breakfasts. “You’ll have to get the next one, that’s all.”
The next train, fortunately, was not so very much later. Tom’s ticket was purchased and he was seen off by Reverend Noel Wells, and the train, a slower one, making many more stops than the one he should have taken, steamed out of Euston at thirty-six minutes past twelve instead of at twenty-nine minutes past eleven, but this did not seem too bad, thought Tom, with the country boy’s placid indifference to time.
He had lunch on the train at half-past one, and made it last until a quarter to three, then he returned to his compartment and went to sleep. It must be recalled that his night’s rest had been very much disturbed, and that he was a boy who needed his sleep.
He woke to find a stranger in the carriage, a very deaf gentleman who was travelling, he informed Tom, to Keswick. Conversation proved too difficult to be long sustained, but one thing Tom grasped clearly. It was that the information given him at Euston by the Reverend Noel Wells, and gleaned after exhaustive enquiry of station officials by that gentleman, was incorrect. According to this information, Tom had caught a through train to Carlisle.
“You change,” said the deaf gentleman firmly, “at Leeds.” As he was under the impression that Tom’s destination was Redcar, he may or may not have been right. Tom, at any rate, implicitly believed him. Mrs. Bradley had forgotten, or, at any rate, had overlooked young Tom’s peculiar objection to clergymen when she had made her arrangements. It was a psychological error of some magnitude, for it had become second nature to young Tom to mistrust the voice of the Church when it was applied to the discussion of earthly things. One does not have a “preached-against” mother for nothing.
He had not been at all favourably impressed either, by the fact the Reverend Noel Wells, although sound on the subject of breakfasts, had proved to be deficient in second sight where skidding taxi-cabs were concerned.
&nbs
p; At Leeds, therefore, Tom alighted, and waved farewell to the deaf gentleman, who reached Keswick still happily convinced that he had assisted a fellow-traveller in making a cross-country journey.
Tom applied to a porter, and learned that the clergyman, after all, had been right, and that he should have stayed on the train. The only difference, in the end, was that whereas he had been scheduled to arrive in Lanark at some reasonable hour in the evening, he did not get out of the train there until twenty minutes past midnight. George and James Alexander Musgrave were still waiting grimly in the car. Another watcher, lounging in the shadows of the station with a motor cycle, once the property of Geoffrey Ker, propped up against the curb, was the groom Michael, who had been suborned by the same Geoffrey, and bribed since by the wicked Mr. Joshua, to lend any sort of hand that was desirable.
He had heard all about the missing country boy, whilst he was still, ostensibly, in David Ker’s service, and had ridden off to confer with his new employer. He had been given his commission, and, up to the time of young Tom’s arrival, had been cursing this commission as heartily as George and James Alexander were cursing theirs.
All things come to an end at last, however, and when the car moved off, with the two men and the boy aboard her, Michael started up his motor cycle and followed. Unfortunately for him, George, in the long vigil, had been aware of this hidden watcher, and although he could not manage to see the face of the man, he recognised the make of the motor cycle.
“Funny,” thought George; and set his sharp Cockney wits to work, not knowing what to make of this new factor, but convinced, in his own idiom, that it was n.b.g. “Lead him a dance,” thought George, blessing, not for the first time, the curiosity and pioneer spirit of the Americans who had insisted upon so thorough an exploration of the Scottish countryside when he had been their chauffeur.
The consequence was that from Lanark George led the groom over hill and dale, across the moors and over the mountains, until, striking Sanquhar, and wondering what was happening in his absence at the Big House (as James Musgrave was inclined to call it) and feeling confident that he had shaken off pursuit, he made for home, and arrived at the iron gates just before morning.
Hangman's Curfew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 21
