“She wouldn’t know,” answered Ronnie earnestly. “Miss, it was the night when Sid went. Well, then, we ought to look for him at night, didn’t we? The night’s different from the day. Different things happen.”
“How do you know that, Ronnie?” asked Kate, charmed by this sudden burst of enthusiasm, and putting off the moment when she would have to damp it down again.
Ronnie hesitated, and evidently decided to trust her.
“I know, I’ve been out at night, Miss,” he said in a lowered tone, as if shelters might grow pedagogic ears, even in this din. “Searching for Sid. I went on my bike, lots of nights, when he was first gone. It’s different to the day. Nobody about. The hills look ever so different. I saw a badger and a hedgehog. And there’s noises... only when you get to where they are, you can’t hear anything.”
Kate suppressed a smile.
“You didn’t ever see anything else, Ronnie, though? I mean, it’s lovely to see badgers and hedgehogs, but they don’t tell us anything about Sidney. And the noises at night are generally only horses and things moving in the fields, or birds, you know.”
Ronnie came closer to her and said eamestly:
“One night I saw a man going up the track at Pentrewer.”
“But, Ronnie! Probably he lived there! I mean—”
“No, it was further up than where Mr. Davis lives. There’s nothing up there, I know, on’y an empty house. The track gets all narrow and is all trees after that.”
“But still—farmers are often out at night. He might have been going to see some animal or—” But Ronnie’s intense expression did not alter, and, influenced a little by it in spite of common-sense, Kate asked: “What kind of man? A gipsy?”
“No. More like a toff,” said Ronnie. “It wasn’t Mr. Davis, nor yet Mr. Lupton, nor anyone as I’d ever seen.”
“And what happened?”
Ronnie looked a little embarrassed.
“Well, Miss, I—I lost track of him. I kept the other side of the hedge, and went up alongside of him. On’y I came to another hedge across the field, and by the time I’d got through it and out in the lane, I couldn’t see him any more.”
“What did you do?”
Ronnie looked distinctly unhappy.
“Well, Miss. I—I went back. There’s an empty house up there that they says is haunted, and—and the valley gets awful narrow and crowded together up there, and it seemed so dark. And I heard funny noises—”
“Owls?”
“Yes, them, and rustling noises, too, Miss, and sort of clicking noises—”
“Pheasants, I expect.”
“So I come back.” He swallowed and admitted: “I got a bit frightened, see, all by meself, like. But I shouldn’t be frightened if I was with you, Miss. When shall we start?”
“Well, Ronnie, I think we’d better talk it over when we’ve got a bit more time,” said Kate rather evasively, though she was beginning to feel that Ronnie, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his youth, would make the best kind of partner in a forlorn enterprise, single-minded, candid, imaginative, and not too brave. “You live at the Cefn, you say, so I’ll know where to find you.”
Ronnie’s face fell a little. Procrastination was an only too well-known grown-up habit.
“When, Miss?”
Kate hesitated, and rashly promised, as she had not intended to:
“To-morrow, or the day after. Will you take me to the headmaster now?”
Ronnie looked a little surprised and more dubious, as if he had thought better of Kate than that she should be hobnobbing with headmasters.
“He won’t be much help, Miss. He thinks Sidney’s dead, too. I heard him say so to the copper.”
“Ronnie.”
“Yes, Miss?”
“Sidney may be dead, you know. We mustn’t absolutely refuse to face the possibility.”
“Oh, I know that, Miss. On’y—you can’t look for a person properly if you think he’s dead, Miss, can you?” said Ronnie. He added simply: “I don’t think he’s dead, because I don’t want him to be.”
With this deplorable piece of reasoning but excellent piece of practical philosophy, he led the way into the schoolhouse.
Mr. Pilgrim was, as Ronnie Turner had prophesied, not much help. His estimate of his boys’ characters and capacities was clear-cut and probably, so far as it went, correct, but a trifle rough-and-ready, as was but natural in a man under whose eyes the youth of the nation had been streaming in hordes for about forty years. Sidney Brentwood, of whom he spoke in a melancholy tone which Kate tried not to find exasperating, had been a boy of sound character: a little scatter-brained, perhaps: not clever, oh, no! just normal ability: a nice boy: a superior family: the father a fine type: no mother: motherless boys were liable to cause trouble. Ronnie Turner? Oh, Ronald was a sound boy, too. Good stuff there, good brains. Not so enterprising as Sidney, but perhaps more reliable. A more thoughtful type. Had been rather difficult and unlike himself since Sidney’s disappearance. Had played truant from school on two or three occasions. His billet wasn’t very satisfactory. An old maid, and Mr. Pilgrim doubted if she gave the boy enough to eat. He was intending to see the billeting-officer about it. The job of a schoolmaster in wartime, as Miss Mayhew would no doubt observe, comprised that of a nurse. As well, said Mr. Pilgrim resignedly, with a sigh, bidding Kate farewell, as that of an office-boy. And he sat down to fill in forms about milk.
Walking back to the shop, when the school-bell had gone and break in the playground had ended in a clattering and shoving and chattering back in the school-building, Kate thought over her conversation with Ronnie Turner. She liked Ronnie, and thought it would be not only pleasant but useful to see him again, for, of all the people she had met, he seemed to be the nearest link with the missing boy. But he was, after all, only about twelve years old, an age which possesses all the virtues except discretion. He had certainly, though, shown a modicum of that elderly quality in his hedge-side tracking of the gentleman at Pentrewer and his withdrawal from the trail when he realised his loneliness before the empty house. If he had followed the trail, he would probably have only found it led to a sick cow sheltered in some tumbledown barn, or, at the most exciting, to a collection of rabbit snares; but with a boy like Ronnie, no doubt the dark, the mysterious lulls, the reputation of a haunted house and the sight, in the lonely night-time, of a fellow-creature walking up the valley, combined with the mission on which he was engaged, would put all such commonplace activities out of mind. Sidney had gone off into the night, and disappeared. The night was different from the day.
It was a sound idea, reflected Kate. The night was different from the day, and different in just the way that Ronnie’s eyes and tone, rather than his halting words, had implied. It put different thoughts into one’s head. It made one accept ideas which, in the day, one would reject. The sight of dark, huddling hills and gaunt black tree shapes suggested ideas which would never come from looking at brackeny, heathery slopes and autumn-hued oaks and ashes in the sunlight. To follow Sidney at night was not such a childish notion as might appear. The influences which had fallen upon Sidney would fall upon one, and who knew what queer inspiration might emerge that the day kept hidden under its commonplaces?
“I’ll do it!” said Kate to herself. “I’ll cycle out to the hills to-night!” For Ronnie, as well as Mrs. Howells, had seemed convinced that Sidney had gone towards the hills, though he had not been able to explain why. No doubt many childish conversations and fancy-spun yarns and romantic surmises between the two boys during their stay in Hastry had contributed to Ronnie's conviction, and Kate felt inclined to build on that conviction even more strongly than on the clue of the green toffee-paper which had been mentioned by Mrs. Howells.
Kate studied her map earnestly that afternoon, for the moon would scarcely be bright enough to read by to-night, bright as it might be. She memorised the lie of the hill road and the farm-tracks that ran into it and the woods below it and the streams that crossed it from the high hills.
Alongside the words “Pentrewer Farm,” “Mound” was printed in archaic characters, and up the next fork of the road two small black dots no doubt represented Ronnie’s haunted, empty house and its outbuildings. Straining her eyes over the map and wishing she had brought a reading-glass, Kate saw that these dots were named: Hymns Bank.
Chapter Ten
It was a wonderful night, with the moon flooding the hill-slopes with a theatrical radiance. By its light Kate could almost have identified the few late flowers that still hung about the October ditches. Under the clumps of silver-topped, scraggy trees, deep darkness stood like a presence. A white drifting mist, floating a foot above ground, lay in the valley below the sloping fields to her left, and mist blotted the far hills.
There was no wind, but the night was cold, and Kate was glad of her leather jacket and the wool hood she had tied under her chin. When Sidney had gone, it had been nearly a month nearer to summer. He had not taken his overcoat nor sweater. You must be cold now, Sidney, wherever you are.
Ahead of her was the little stone bridge that crossed the stream at Pentrewer. The gipsies’ encampment in the moonlight gained in dignity what it lost in colour. The tents and two caravans looked as if they might have been there since primeval times, as if they housed, not the eccentric wanderers of a mechanical age, but the owners of the earth they slept on, the craftsmen-inheritors of the Stone Age, the metal-workers, the sword-makers of the new expanding world of iron.
But then, Kate thought, remembering talks with Colin, the landscape would not have looked like this. The valley would have been full of trees, only the hills bare, with scrub climbing their lower slopes. She would not have been able to stand here and look across a gentle, agricultural valley.
She had stopped on the bridge, and as she glanced down the valley she saw something which put the Iron Age and its forests quite out of her head. Below her was a small sloping pasture, and below that, separated from it by a light wire fence, was a larger field. Across this field she could plainly see a man moving.
He moved in a queer, crouched, and purposeful way, holding up his arm stiffly and strangely, across the field. Then an overgrown hedge that met the wire fence hid him from her view. But there was still, it seemed to Kate, a sort of movement in that field, a sort of dark disturbance, as though a wave were passing over the grass. But there was no wind. Kate strained her eyes, but the moon will never yield up her secrets, as the sun does, to the straining eye. The field was quiet now, so quiet that Kate might have thought she had dreamt that queer effect of movement flowing over it in the wake of the vanished man.
She hid her bicycle in the ditch, and got over a gate into the pasture below. A footpath ran from the gate diagonally across the field towards the tree behind which the man had disappeared, but Kate shirked the moonlight and kept close to the hedge on her right hand. Her footsteps made no noise on the soft ground but the brush of wet grasses around her ankles. A few sheep lying in the lee of the hedge got up and trotted off at her approach, and she stood still a moment, up close to the hedge, afraid that whoever it was in the field below might see that scared movement of the flock in the moonlight and take some warning from it.
Her woollen hood caught against the thorny twigs of a blackthorn tree and she stopped to disentangle herself. Re-tying her hood, she glanced down and saw something lying at the foot of the blackthorns in the dry hedge bank. A heap, a small dark mass, a piece of sacking.
She stooped, rather nervously, and lifted the sacking. Under it lay a hank of some dark soft material. Before she picked it up, she knew what it was. It was a hank of dark net, silk net, strong but supple, hanging heavy and limp on her hand.
Her thoughts sprang to Sidney, as if she might almost expect to hear him breathing beside her in the hedgerow, she held her own breath and peered into the dark spaces between the stems. Sidney had been learning to make nets when he had vanished at midnight. Now, at midnight, with a net in her hand, surely Kate must be at least upon his trail!
She stretched her fingers through the silk mesh. It was a mesh of about an inch-and-a-half, dark brown as far as she could tell in this light, made of a thread of supple but tough quality. Kate stood there a moment, weighing the net in her hand, trying to see the connection between this net lying at night at the foot of a blackthorn tree, and the disappearance of Sidney Brentwood into the dark. Suddenly she thought she heard a movement in the field below, and dropped the net back where she had found it, for no doubt it belonged to the crouched man she had seen from the road creeping across the lower field, and it might be that he would be keeping an eye upon his cache and see the moonlight on her face or on the metal zip of her leather jerkin, which now seemed to her to shine alarmingly.
She replaced the sacking, and as she stooped thought she heard a horse trotting up behind her. But it was her own heart. She crept along under the hedge to where a clump of brambles masked the beginning of the wire fence, and behind this clump she hid and looked through its spraying whips into the lower field. The lower field was of stubble, irregular and faintly glistening where the moonlight fell on the polished straws. It was a wide field, sloping away down to some trees and the harder dark outline of a barn. It seemed to be quite empty of tree or man, an autumnal homestead field which would be pale gold and peaceful in the sunshine, man’s labour over for the season and the hens wandering and picking their gleanings from the carried harvest. But in the night, the dark surrounding hedges looked menacing, as if they were peopled with waiting presences, and the empty field were to be their meeting-place.
Kate, peering out from her clump of brambles, strained her eyes across the wires of the fence that glittered theatrically here and there in the moonlight, to see again, if she could, that man’s shape that had crept so purposefully across the ground.
She could see nothing, but now she could hear something—a soft, slurred, continuous swishing sound, as if the night were saying hush! to itself. There was nothing in the field that she could see to account for this, there was not a shadow of movement there, and she had to take herself firmly in hand to suppress the onset of a sort of panic terror at the continuance of that unexplained sound.
She was about to emerge from her ambush to get a better view of the far reaches of the field when she drew back. The figure of a man passed within six feet of her. He had been close to her all the while. He was moving alongside the wire fence with the same slow, silent, crouching movement she had seen from the road. He was holding a staff taller than himself aslant in his hands. There was a second man some distance on the far side of him, also holding a staff slanting forward against his slanting, crouching body. As they passed beyond Kate’s clump of brambles, keeping their silent way parallel to the wire fence, Kate saw that they carried between their staves a sort of darkness that hid the glistening stubble, yet caught the moonlight here and there itself—a net. It was the lower edge of the net that had made that brushing sound against the stubble. The men themselves walked silently, as if shod with felt.
As she watched, her heart pounding with the shock of discovering them so near when she had been scanning the distance for them, she heard a sudden sharp whirr and a flurry. There was a quick movement from the two men as they cast down their staves, the net lay flat upon the ground, and the two men ran together to where a great flutter and commotion was going on below the net.
Poachers! Kate had seen the nearer of the two men plainly as he passed her. It was Davis Pentrewer. There was no mistaking the angle of the cap, the benignant downward curve of the profile, the melancholy moustache. What birds those were fluttering and squawking under the net and sending a flurry of feathers up into the air above the men’s heads, Kate was not countrywoman enough to guess, and it did not matter. Nor did it much matter who the second of the two men was—it sufficed that he was certainly not a boy, not Sidney.
Was this what Sidney had wanted his net for? It seemed probable, for he had visited the Davises and the gipsies at Pentrewer, and from what Ronnie Turner had
said, had become enamoured of their lawless lives. Perhaps it was on a poaching expedition that he had set forth on the night of his disappearance. But then—where was he? The worst that could have befallen him, had he joined the gipsies in some such activity as was now going on, would have been a night in the lock-up and a talking-to from a magistrate! Poaching was a lawless, but not a dangerous, pursuit. Was it possible that Rosaleen and Ronnie, who had both made the same romantic suggestion, were right, and that Sidney was in hiding with the gipsies?
As Kate thought this, a third figure emerged from the darkness of the hedge and crossed the field towards the two men who were now, Kate judged, busily wringing the necks of their covey. This third figure was a woman, carrying a large covered bag or basket over her arm. The light broke on her spectacles, and Kate saw that it was Mrs. Davis.
Kate lingered a moment behind her brambles, considering what she could best do now. She had acted on Ronnie’s inspiration, she had come out and followed Sidney into the night that had swallowed him, she had encountered a human activity that seemed at least connected with Sidney’s own activities: but there was little purpose in waiting here and following the Davis’s and their companion through what would no doubt be a long night’s work. Kate rose and crept back to the shelter of the hedge. If poaching was connected with Sidney’s disappearance, the kindly-seeming Davises might also be connected with that disappearance. The best thing Kate could do was to get back to the road, find her way to Pentrewer Farm and, if possible, search the house and buildings.
The track that ran up towards Pentrewer Farm was rutty with cartwheels, and narrowed, Kate judged, as it went on. Kate decided to leave her bicycle where it was, and go on foot.
The chattering little stream made the night more friendly than it had seemed in the field. Gwyn Lupton’s cottage blinked at her with blind eyes as she went by. She wondered whether it was Gwyn who was out in the fields helping the Davis’s with their nets, or whether he was sleeping the sleep of the innocent under that stone-tiled roof. There was not a sound except the drowsy cluck of a hen re-settling herself on her perch in the fowl-house. A little way beyond the cottage, the track crossed the stream, and a stepping-stone tilted under Kate’s foot, and she continued her journey wet over the ankle and wishing she had come out in her gum-boots.
There May Be Danger Page 9
