There May Be Danger

by Ianthe Jerrold

  About a quarter-of-a-mile up from Gwyn Lupton’s cottage, the track forked around a copse of young oaks and hazels that sloped up the spur. It was the left, and more open fork that Kate had to take. The wooded and widening spur was on her right. There were open, if steeply sloping, fields on the other side of the hedge to her left hand, and, a little way beyond the fork, standing up on the left bank, its gable-end towards the track, a small cottage with a huge yew tree, black as night itself, standing behind it.

  This must be Pentrewer Farm. It looked as blind and quiet as Gwyn Lupton’s cottage, and scarcely larger. Kate slipped over a gate in the hedge a few yards below the house, and approached up the field track towards the front. It seemed, with the moon full upon it, to be a simple box-like one-storey cottage with a stone roof beetling down over its tiny upper windows. A barn was built on to the cottage at the side farthest from the lane. It was certainly a farm of sorts, but Kate could well believe that poaching was a more profitable occupation than farming this rough land.

  She moved cautiously to the shelter of the hedge, for although Mr. and Mrs. Davis were both out in the fields, she could not be sure that the house was empty, and that an eye might not watch from a crack in the blinds at one of these dark windows that faced her approach, The back of the cottage, which would be out of the moonlight and sheltered by the yew tree whose thick fringed boughs drooped over the chimney, would make a better approach for investigation than the front. Kate made her way between the cottage and the hedge, past a great woodstack and a water-butt, into a small enclosure that seemed, as far as she could judge in the darkness here, to be a sort of kitchen-garden and backyard combined. The cobbled space between the cabbage-bed and the back of the cottage was nearly taken up with a dog-kennel—empty, Kate thanked heaven, at the moment—a tin-bath full of potatoes, and a wheelbarrow. In the shade of the yew tree it was very dark indeed. A galvanised iron rain-tub stood close to the back door, and she avoided stumbling against it by a hair’s-breadth so narrow that the mere thought of the noise which might have terrified the night caused a dampness to break out on her forehead.

  Very cautiously she put her hand on the door-latch. It lifted, and the door gave. She stood a moment, reflecting, hesitating, with her hand on the latch. Should she go in? There was not a sound to be heard. The chances were that the house was empty, and that she would be able to walk through all the rooms and return unchallenged.

  Standing there in that lonely and dark place, listening to me silence across which her own heartbeats struck like faint, far warnings, Kate realised for the first time how very light-heartedly, how unimaginatively, she had entered upon this search. She had seen herself trailing a lost boy across open country. She had not seen herself, as with a glimmer of common-sense she might have done, entering people’s houses at dead of night, investigating their cellars, braving not only their righteous wrath and the law, but those unseen forces of the dark with whom, ever since an over-imaginative childhood, she had never quite managed to come to terms.

  Before she went in, perhaps she had better track out the lie of the house and barn, so that if she had to beat a quick retreat she would know how best to do it. She softly let the latch fall, and, leaving the door ajar, crept up into the shadow of the yew tree. The yew tree stood on a little bank some fifteen feet or so behind the cottage, and the darkness under its boughs was intense. Leaning against the immense rough bole in the protecting darkness, Kate could see, out in the field beyond the gate, one or two stacks, paler than the hillside against which they stood. Farther out in the field, she could see against the sky an outline that was unmistakeable. In that crowded week in Dorset with Colin Kemp she had seen too many round-barrows not to know one when she saw one, even though it was by night, and only the top of the crouched shape was visible against the moonlit sky. There was the tumulus, Pentrewer Tump, large, flattened with the feet of the centuries, and with that regularity of outline which proclaims to the hastiest eye, even after the lapse of ages, the work of man’s artist hands.

  It was, so far as Kate could judge, a simple round-barrow. The field was fairly level here, and there seemed to be no ditch or vallum around the tumulus, which Kate guessed to be about twelve feet high. She wondered whether Colin Kemp had come across Pentrewer Tump in his recent wanderings through this district. She also wondered passingly what he thought he was doing, in this year of turmoil 1940, wandering solitary about the countryside, making drawings of abbey ruins. Colin had had a very affirmative, adventurous nature, the kind of nature that readily accepts a challenge: it was the thing Kate had liked about him—one of the things she had liked. She could not imagine him attempting to keep clear of any fight that his friends were involved in.

  Perhaps he was finishing off some big piece of work before giving up his beloved archaeology for the duration. But he had been away from England, among the Incas, when she had last heard from him: it would have to be a magnum opus indeed that would take in Welsh mediaeval abbeys as a pendant to the remains of the Inca civilisation! And Colin had never been much interested in mediaeval ruins, regarding them as things of yesterday. It was a puzzle, but Kate was not likely to solve it now, and anyway she had something else to do.

  Yet, not only because the dense outline of the tumulus standing up against the lighter indigo sky brought Colin back so clearly to her mind, but also perhaps because she had not yet nerved herself to break into the house, she remained standing there. She wondered how long Colin had been in England and had not let her know?

  The night was so still that she could have heard a spider moving in the shaley bark of the yew tree at her back. The black tassels of foliage hung, quite unmoving, against the sky. So that when she did hear a sound, it disproportionately startled her. It was the full, thudding sound of a spade being struck into earth.

  It seemed to come from the direction of the tumulus. Kate stepped cautiously away from the yew tree and advanced across the yard, remembering that it had been to see the tumulus that Sidney had first visited Pentrewer. She had a vague hope that he might, from whatever hiding-place he lay in, be re-visiting the tumulus at night, digging in it, perhaps, looking for another coin of Ceowulf. Unlikely in the extreme that he would find one, for Saxon coins were not indigenous to Stone Age barrows! Gwyn Lupton’s find must have been the merest chance, the picking-up of a coin dropped accidentally hundreds of years after the barrow was raised. But neither Gwyn Lupton nor Sidney would be likely to know that.

  Kate was almost at the yard gate which led into the field when, this time indubitably from the tumulus, there came a cough. She stiffened, and stood still. It had been a man’s cough, she thought, deep and rattling, though suppressed. Unwelcome fantasies—stories about revenants and haunted places, quasi-philosophical theories about time and vibrations, a fearsome short story she had read once about a mindless elemental whose habit it had been to cough around people’s house-doors in the dusk, rushed into her mind. She took herself in hand, reminding herself of all the sensible things she had said to Ronnie Turner. There was no need to start inventing Grand-Guignol one-acters in her head, just because a man was out at night taking up rabbit-snares or burying a dead sheep!

  Her self-admonitions braced Kate so much that she was about to open the yard gate and go and investigate, when the dark curve of the tumulus against the sky was broken. I he figure of a man rose quietly and stealthily on to the top of it. A tall, lank figure, but with a crouching, earthward stoop of the broad shoulders and head. He stood back to the moon, and Kate could not see his features. In spite of her self-admonitions, she did not want to. A tumulus was, after all, a grave. And this man carried something in his hands—a spade.

  The moonlight was full on Kate. Whoever this man was—for of course it was a man—she must not be discovered before she had carried out her plan of searching the house. She turned as quietly as possible, and made her way back to the yew tree, but she had no cover as she went over the miry yard, and the figure on the tumulus was facing her way, an
d she had small hopes of not being seen.

  When she arrived back at the cover of the tree, she looked round, and saw that the figure had disappeared. Had she frightened him into retreat? Or—had there really been no man there at all, but only an appearance, a picture of some long passed episode upon the moon-struck air?

  Kate had better not think about it, but do what she had come to do without delay. She was here to look for little Sidney Brentwood, who might be facing worse things than the remembered fragments of old, foolish stories, and the sight of a man digging in the moonlight. She went quietly to the back door, this time carefully avoiding the galvanised iron tub.

  She had left the door ajar, and a gentle push would open it. She had her torch ready to put on as soon as she entered the dark house. She gave the door a gentle push, but to her surprise it did not open, though the latch was certainly up. There seemed to be some obstruction inside—perhaps the doormat was lying crooked. Kate gave another, slightly stronger push, and this time the door opened so quickly and so wide that she was startled.

  The next moment she was paralysed to perceive that there was somebody standing there in the dark, on the threshold, holding the door open. Nothing was said. In the silence, Kate could hear breathing, her own and another’s, and the hammering of her own heart.

  Chapter Eleven

  On the slim chance that she was not visible, in the shadow of the house, to the person who stood there, Kate backed cautiously against the house-wall, intending to make her way as silently as possible round to the barn door.

  “Who is it?” asked a man’s voice sharply.

  Kate felt her way along the wall, and was just beginning to hope she was not going to be followed, when her foot made a scraping sound, and the figure emerged from the doorway.

  “Is that you, Mrs. Davis?”

  The tone and accent surprised Kate, even in her alarm. Her ears had become very much attuned to the border inflections in these two days: or why should a man’s voice in the dark, simply because it lacked those inflections sound like Colin Kemp’s? She did not reply. The man took a step towards her, and hastily turning she caught her shin against the bathtub full of potatoes.

  She saved herself from falling by putting out a hand and grazing it badly on the house wall. It was painful, but not so painful as her shin. Like most people who bark their shins, she became instantly at enmity with all mankind, and when, standing on one leg and clasping her agonised shin tightly in her hands, she found a torch being played over her, it seemed like the last insult to misfortune. Even the fact that the man holding the torch and now uttering exclamations of surprise and concern, actually was Colin Kemp, seemed only a god-sent opportunity for letting herself go.

  “Colin! Why the devil didn’t you say who you were? Look what you’ve done! Nearly broken my leg! You’ve no business to frighten people out of their wits like that!”

  Colin characteristically did not reply to her absurdity. He did not even laugh, though the next moment Kate had to do so, if grudgingly, for the echoes of her hot accusations struck comically on her ears.

  “I thought you were an elemental,” she grumbled, putting her foot to the ground. Her pain had abated.

  “A what?”

  “An elemental! There’s one on the tumulus. Did you know? Digging.”

  “Somebody digging on the tumulus?” echoed Colin, his professional zeal aroused. “Nobody’s got any business to be digging on the tumulus. It’s scheduled under the Ancient Monuments Act. How’s your shin, Kate? Better now?”

  “Awful. I’m lamed for life,” replied Kate briskly. “Colin, what are you doing here?”

  “Staying with Mr. and Mrs. Davis and making some drawings at Llanhalo Farm. What are you doing, Kate, in this back yard at this hour of the night?”

  “I didn’t know you were in England.”

  “I haven’t been—long,” said Colin, rather evasively, for him. “Well, Kate, hadn’t you better come in and rest your broken limb? Did you come to pay a midnight call on the Davises? They’re out, at the moment.”

  “I know they are.”

  Kate entered the dark house door, and Colin opened an inner door on to a small kitchen where an oil lamp shed a circle of light over a crimson chenille table-cloth, and a few embers glowed in the little oven grate. It was not such a cosy, nor such a well-polished kitchen as the one at Sunnybank, but comfortable enough, with two armchairs covered in American cloth drawn up close to the fireplace, and a fine oak dresser occupying almost the whole of one wall. Colin groped under a side table for some logs and thrust them endwise into the dying fire, and applied a very large pair of bellows.

  “Sit down, Katy. Don’t stand and suffer.”

  “I don’t think I want the Davises to find me here,” said Kate uneasily.

  “They won’t be back just yet.”

  “Do you know what they’re doing?”

  “Do you?” parried Colin cautiously.

  “Yes. I’ve just seen them at it.”

  “Well, it’s their delight on a shiny night in the season of the year,” said Colin. “Nothing to do with me. I’m only the lodger. I promised to have the fire going and the kettle boiling for a cup of tea at three o’clock, and there my responsibility ends. I’ll just fill the kettle, and then I think, Kate, if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to puff the fire while I slip out and see what this person you spoke of is doing on the tumulus. Was he really digging?”

  “He had a spade,” said Kate, sitting down and taking over the bellows. “But I think he saw me, so he may not be there now. I don’t suppose he was really an elemental, Colin. Just somebody digging out a badger or something.”

  “Nobody digs out a badger on the tumulus while I’m about,” said Colin firmly.

  He departed. Kate, puffing energetically at the weak fire, admitted to herself that she was delighted to see Colin again, and to see him looking exactly the same as ever, too. She did not know what she had expected—possibly an impressive beard, or a skin burnt to mahogany by South American suns, or anyway the remote and unfamiliar manner of one who has had strange experiences in foreign lands. But Colin’s chin was as smooth, his complexion as light brown and his manner as matter-of-fact as it had ever been. He had the same perky and intelligent looking sprout of hair sticking up out of the crown of his head, and Kate was almost sure he was wearing the same tweed jacket. Of course, there was no reason on earth why he should have informed Kate of his return to England. Probably in those two years he had come to agree with her about the incompatibility of earthworks and theatres. Still, he might have just looked her up. If she had found herself among the Incas, she would certainly have looked him up.

  The weak flame caught on a splinter and began to lap and curl, and Kate put the bellows down and stood up. She determined to search the house thoroughly before Colin returned, in case he had scruples about letting her do it.

  The little scullery, examined by torchlight, proved to contain no hiding-place and no way of egress except into the yard. In the passage, and the frozen little parlour into which it led, there was nothing to rouse any suspicion—-in fact, respectability was written so clearly in that little parlour, with its Victorian sideboard and marble clock, that its owners’ nocturnal occupation seemed almost too fantastic to believe in. Kate also searched the three bedrooms upstairs, and even looked up the wide chimneys, but there was nothing to suggest that anybody could be hidden there. On the upper landing she stood and called once or twice urgently and clearly. “Sidney! Sidney!” but only the ticking of a grandfather clock, and the roaring sound of the fire, now well alight, answered her.

  She returned to the kitchen and opened the deep cupboard alongside the fireplace. It contained a small quantity of tinned food and groceries on the shelves, a large wooden trough on legs which proved to be full of flour, a quantity of rabbit-wires, a ball of twine, and, on the floor, a pile of kindling wood. Pentrewer farmhouse seemed to contain nothing more criminal than a poacher’s paraphernalia.

/>   “I say, Kate,” said Colin, when he returned a moment later, “there has been somebody digging on the tumulus. Not a sign of a soul there now, but some silly ass has dug quite a hole on the side of it. It’s filled in with loose earth and roughly re-turfed—you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it. There’s no question of digging out a badger, or anything like that, either. Somebody’s been digging there quite methodically, looking for something—or burying something.”

  “Burying!” cried Kate involuntarily. She faltered: “How—how big is the hole?”

  “About two-feet square. Why?”

  “Only, there’s been a boy missing from Hastry for nearly a month, and—”

  Colin smiled faintly.

  “You could hardly bury a cat in this hole. I should think it’s more likely some silly ass has got the idea there are antiquities buried in the tumulus, and doesn’t realise that they’ll only be bones and bits of earthenware if he ever comes to them—which he never will the way he’s digging. It’s certainly not anybody who knows anything about excavating tumuli. The digging’s been done thoroughly, but childishly, more or less down from the top.”

  “Gwyn Lupton, perhaps,” murmured Kate. “He did say most firmly that he was not for ever delving in the ground after treasure. So perhaps he is.”

  “Who is Gwyn Lupton?”

  “Oh, Colin, you can’t have missed seeing Gwyn Lupton! Or rather, hearing him!”

  “I’ve only been here two days and spent most of the time up at Llanhalo. Why should this Gwyn Lupton delve in the ground for treasure?”

  “Well, you see, some weeks ago he found a coin on the tumulus.”