“I have not heard from Sidney’s father yet, but he always was a bad correspondent, and I expect I shall see him before I hear from him. Poor Dick, I am really dreading his arrival, though of course, nobody could blame me for what has happened... I am sure you will excuse only a short note when I tell you I am in great trouble! Bobbie is lost! In fact, he has not been home since the morning you called, when you so kindly tried to catch him for me! I don’t know whether the raids upset his nerves, or what, I am always most careful not to allow my pets to go out anywhere but in their own back garden, but Bobbie has been trying for some time to get into the street, though I never thought that he would get lost like this. I am really heartbroken, as I am afraid he has met with an accident, or caught cat-flu! There is such a lot of it about! I have advertised for him and offered a reward, but I am beginning to feel that my poor pet must have gone to heaven, as he was so devoted to me and such a loving, timid, creature, I know he would come home if it were in his power. I am sure if you have any news of poor little Sidney, you will let me know at once, by telegram if possible, so that I shall have something to tell his poor father when he arrives.”
Kate did not know whether to laugh or cry over this effusion. As she folded it up and put it in her pocket, however, a memory of the raffish leer with which the devoted Bobbie, sitting on the pavement of Tranchester Terrace, had received her admonition to go home, made her decide to laugh. If the loving, timid creature could have spoken, its farewell message to its mistress would, Kate felt sure, have shaken that lady’s dream world to its foundations.
This was not the first time Kate had been up all night, and she had not expected to feel any reaction during the day. But either the open air or the fried potatoes proved too much for her, and she spent the first part of the morning sleeping on the settle in front of Mrs. Howell’s kitchen fire, with the noises of pudding-mixing, the oven door being opened and shut, and the melodious tinkle of the shop-bell as a dim, pleasant accompaniment to her dreams.
At eleven, she roused herself and washed in ice-cold water at the sink, and went out into the sunny, blue and tawny November day to call upon Mr. Pilgrim at the school. Mr. Pilgrim, a man who did not readily allow the eccentric or the unexpected to disturb the findings of his practical common-sense, had firmly placed Kate, in spite of her disclaimers, as a relation, or at least an old acquaintance, of Sidney Brentwood; and therefore it seemed natural to him that she should be exercised over the comfort of Sidney Brentwood’s ally Ronnie Turner. He readily accepted her assurance that there was a good billet waiting for Ronnie at Llanhalo, and promised straight away to make representations to the billeting-officer.
Kate decided, in case the billeting-officer required more positive evidence than Mr. Pilgrim was able to provide, that she would visit the Cefn and form her own conclusions, and that the dinner-hour would be the most profitable time for a visit.
The Cefn, approached by a track running almost vertically up Rhosbach, except where it swung aside here and there to avoid outcroppings of grey stone, was a cottage of the smallest, plainest, one-storey type, built of the stone from the hill it stood on and looking itself almost like an outcropping of limestone and slate.
Kate knocked on the door, and Miss Gilliam herself, looking oddly untidy without her pixie-hood, her thin, grey-streaked bobbed hair hanging raggedly to her shoulders, opened the door, not very wide, and said good-morning, not very cordially.
However, when Kate had expressed a desire to see Ronnie Turner before he went back to school, Miss Gilliam seemed unable to think of any plausible reason why she should refuse her and, rather unwillingly, let her in to the living-room upon which the front door opened, Ronnie was sitting at the table eating a lot of sodden boiled potatoes with a very little pale gravy.
Miss Gilliam, it seemed, had her own dinner after Ronnie had gone back to school. She liked, she said, to eat in peace. Judging from a savoury smell that came from the oven, Kate thought that she also liked, perhaps, to eat in secret, and not be reproached, however silently by Ronnie’s boiled potatoes.
“They say as potatoes is very good for children!” remarked Miss Gilliam gratuitously and with an ingratiating air. “There iss vitamins in them!”
“Not when they’re boiled to a mash.”
“Oh, very often we hass them baked in the skins. Doesn’t we, Ronnie bach?”
“Yep,” replied Ronnie indifferently. He had put his knife and fork down, less, Kate thought, as a protest against the watery mess on his plate than in excitement at seeing her. He had flushed, and his eyes shone expectantly. He was transformed, in the extraordinary lightning-like way of children, from a pale and torpid little boy ploughing his way through his dinner into a creature of fire and light.
“Children iss mostly very fond of potatoes,” said Miss Gilliam, cutting the slice of white bread that was evidently to be Ronnie’s afters.
Kate had not come here to talk about potatoes, but Miss Gilliam’s uneasy defensiveness irritated her.
“I don’t think they’re enough in themselves for a kid’s dinner.”
“Oh no, indeed, I should think not!” cried Miss Gilliam in high-pitched and insincere agreement. Keeping a minatory eye on her evacuee, she added: “Ronnie hass plenty other things to his dinner, doesn’t you Ronnie? Good gravy from the joint, greens when I has time to clean them, rabbit-stew, tinned salmon, apple-pies! Doesn’t you, Ronnie?”
Ronnie, evidently a polite as well as a truthful child, looked a little surprised and said nothing. Miss Gilliam’s hand, grasping a table-knife, hovered above a bowl of pallid dripping which was standing on the table.
“You’d like a nice piece of bread-and-dripping now, wouldn’t you?” she asked winningly. “Or—” she hesitated, glancing first at Kate and then at a corner-cupboard, and screwed herself to the sacrificial point, “Or would you like jam to-day? Nice apricot jam?”
“Jam, please,” said Ronnie, looking very surprised indeed. Jam was evidently a rarity.
Miss Gilliam unlocked the corner-cupboard door with a key out of her pocket, and whisked out a pound pot of shop jam with a very gaudy label, and shut the cupboard as quickly as if there were rabbits in it who might jump out But Kate had had a glimpse, not of rabbits, but of shelves laden with pound pots of grocer’s jam. She looked thoughtfully at Miss Gilliam, remembering the trouble there had been in Mrs. Howells’s shop over the sultanas, and Mrs. Howells’s remarks about Miss Gilliam’s nose for scarce confectionery. There were plenty of other cupboards in this kitchen—one on each side of the fireplace and others under the dresser. Kate wondered if they were all equally handsomely stocked.
“Ah,” said Miss Gilliam, spreading apricot jam very thinly and lingeringly on the slice of bread in her palm, “it iss not easy to satisfy a boy’s appetite with nine shillings a week, but we must not complain when there iss a war!”
Kate took the opening and observed that she believed Ronnie was soon to change his billet. Ronnie looked as if he could hardly believe his ears. So did Miss Gilliam, but the delight in the child’s face was quite absent from hers. She paused, with the slice of bread and jam in her hand, and a look of thunderous wrath gathered on her brows.
“Oh, indeed, and who hass been complaining?”
“I don’t know that anybody has.”
“I will go and see the billeting-officer this afternoon I will go, and see him? Does they think that with nine shillings a week we can feed people on chickens and ducks and plum cake?” demanded Miss Gilliam shrilly, energetically scraping off most of the jam she had spread on Ronnie’s slice of bread before thrusting it into his hands. “Well, if there iss people that can afford to keep other people’s children for nothing, let them do it! I am sure I am glad if Ronnie goes! I have had nothing but work and worry with Ronnie, and all for nine shillings a week, too! I hope he will be moved this very day, and not come back here expecting jam and eggs and cake, and his washing done for him, and all for nine shillings a week! Indeed, I have been out of pocket
, I can tell you! I can tell you I would not have taken the boy at all, except that I was sorry for him, and I am sure I did never expect such ingratitude!” cried Miss Gilliam, more in anger than in sorrow, turning her batteries on Ronnie now.
That philosophical child, however, rose with the remains of his slice in his hand, and remarking:
“It’s ten to two, Miss,” picked up a satchel from the table, retied a shoelace, slung his gasmask over his shoulder and looked expectantly at Kate.
They departed, leaving Miss Gilliam still vociferously arguing with her own conscience. As they walked down the hill, Kate told the excited Ronnie of the possibility that he might be removed to Llanhalo Abbey, and that there he might be able to help her in her search for Sidney. Ronnie walked beside her as if on air, skipping every now and then and kicking a small stone joyfully down the slope in front of him.
A couple of days later, when Miss Atkins’s and Mr. Pilgrim’s appeals had had their effect and the transfer had been sanctioned, Kate enlarged further on the subject as she and Ronnie once again strolled down from the Cefn. Ronnie was carrying a little suitcase tied together with string, a gasmask, a pair of football boots, an overcoat and a satchel, and Kate was bumping Ronnie’s bicycle down the steep and rocky path.
“When you have an opportunity, find out, if you can, what that grating’s like. Whether it’s really rusted in and can’t be moved, or whether it’s loose in a frame. The cellar’s usually locked, but Miss Atkins keeps cat’s-meat there, and I don’t suppose she’ll mind you going in. Only remember Mr. Atkins doesn’t like talk about underground passages, and keep quiet about it in front of him.”
“O.K., Miss!” said Ronnie, with so much zest and gladness that Kate was constrained to say firmly:
“But, Ronnie, don’t on any account try to loosen the grating or take it out, will you? It wouldn’t be safe. And it might spoil all our plans. Leave all that till I come.”
“O.K.”
“I think you’ll like it at Llanhalo. Miss Atkins is nice. And my friend Aminta’s there. If you’re in a hole and want to talk to anybody talk to her. You’ve been having rather a thin time of it at the Cefn, haven’t you?”
Ronnie made his indifferent, humorous underlip grimace:
“A bit lonely, it was, Miss.”
“Did Miss Gilliam always give you a dinner of potatoes and bread?”
“Pretty near always, Miss,” said Ronnie cheerfully. He added, in fairness: “I had rabbit, sometimes.”
Chapter Fourteen
The following night Kate set out on a second expedition in Sidney’s wake. This time she went earlier, before the waning moon was up, leaving Sunnybank before darkness through which a little chilly wind blew from the north. Mrs. Howells had done her best to dissuade her from going to-night, for two or three bombers had throbbed through the dark early in the evening, with that low, purposeful, threatening throb of aeroplanes in open country, far from balloon barrages and ack-ack guns, and Mrs. Howells was not as inured as Kate to the presence of enemy aircraft.
“The waterworks is only four miles away, the other side of Rhosbach,” said Mrs. Howells uneasily. “There has been plenty bombs dropped not so far off, too. I wishes you would not go. There was bombers over the night Sidney went.”
“But they didn’t drop any bombs.”
“Not near here they didn’t, but they dropped some the other side of the hills. And you never knows with them Nazis. They’re sly.”
“They’ll have to be awfully sly to hit me. Awfully extravagant, too. I’m not worth a bomb to them.”
But Mrs. Howells’s rustic superstitions were not in favour of joking about disaster. She sighed.
“I can see as it’s no use me talking, so I’ll hold my tongue. You’re more used to being bombed than we are, I expect.” She added, with a faint unwilling smile: “People does get used to things, whatever! First time we had the planes over here, Corney and me went in the cupboard under the stairs, but we never thinks of it now.”
Kate could just see the outline of the hill above her on her right against the higher-toned sky, but it was some time before she was sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to distinguish between the different tones of road and hedge, and she had to cycle slowly in the little sphere of light cast by her darkened bicycle-lamp, for fear of running over the grass verge or into a telegraph-pole. Nobody passed her, and in the chill of the night even the animals in the fields were quiet. Down in the valley to Kate’s left an occasional small spot of light beamed out, from a pedestrian’s torch or a bad black-out.
Kate pedalled slowly on. Her thoughts, like the night, were uneventful, and a sort of feeling of frustration began to creep over her. Perhaps it had been, after all, rather foolish of her to suppose that by following in Sidney Brentwood’s tracks through the darkness she might meet with whatever inspiration or danger he had met with. There was a time-lag of four weeks; and Kate Mayhew was a different person, differently susceptible, from Sidney Brentwood. If Sidney Brentwood’s mind on his going out had been as dull, as empty, as Kate Mayhew’s, he would have met with neither danger nor inspiration: he would have gone home to bed. A dark night like this was neither dangerous nor inspiring; it was empty, it was dull, it was silent, it gave rise to no fancies, as the moonlight did.
Thinking thus and mechanically pedalling on, Kate came around the spur where the road swung a little away from the hills down to Pentrewer Bridge. The cold wind had made her nose drip, and at the bend she got off her bicycle to fish in her pocket for a handkerchief. As she stood there, blowing her nose, her bicycle propped against her, a light, a point of yellow light, flashed out and quickly off again, then on again, then off again, ahead in the complete blackness of the hill.
Had Kate been moving, she might have thought the trees were obscuring and revealing to her as she went some careless cottage black-out. But she was standing still.
Queer, thought Kate, standing and straining her eyes into the distant dark. She mounted her bicycle, and rode a little way down the road. The light disappeared. She returned to where she had been standing, and watched again. Once more flick, flick went the little yellow point of light in the black distance, with a deliberate, precise effect, as if some infant troll among the hills were playing with a light-switch. Signalling came at once to Kate s mind, as it must have come to any mind, however untutored in radiography, at such a time in history as this. Kate knew nothing about the morse code, but it seemed to her that sometimes the light stayed on for longer, sometimes for shorter, flicks. Signalling—but to whom?
When the eyes are being strained to the utmost, the ears perhaps perform their function indifferently. As the question entered Kate’s head, she heard very plainly and all of a sudden what she might well have heard before, the distant, menacing thrum... thrum... thrum ... of an unfriendly aeroplane somewhere in the sky. Good God! thought Kate, with an intensity of feeling that had been quite off her spiritual horizon five minutes ago, I believe somebody’s signalling to that damned Jerry! She looked around the dark sky in which, had there been a hundred planes, she could not have seen one. She felt an impulse to rush on her bicycle towards the place where that light was, and put it out. But where was the place? There was no building nearer than Pentrewer, so far as Kate knew. Could it be from Pentrewer that that intermittent light was coming? Flick—flick. Flick—flick. And thrum... thrum... went the engine overhead, closer and closer, with a rhythmic greed that seemed to eat the air.
There was nothing for it but to cycle on down the road towards Pentrewer. Kate jumped on her bicycle and was off. When she moved on, trees, or the lie of the land, blocked her view, and the light was no longer visible.
In a very different mood from that of a few minutes ago, Kate cycled on as fast as she could go, keeping her eyes now on the perilous dark road, now on the distance quite unpointed by any speck of light, and feeling as if her bicycle were racing the huge engine that seemed to fill the empty night with its menacing throb, so that it was diff
icult to believe that it was not flying almost within crashing distance of the hill. Long before she had arrived at Pentrewer it had passed, grown remote and faint, and faded out of hearing.
At Pentrewer Bridge, Kate dismounted. The darkness and the silence were now unbroken, except for the sound of the little stream and the faint noise of the wind in the trees. She put her bicycle in the ditch as before, and advancing cautiously to the hedge, shone her torch into the gipsies’ field. The gipsies’ encampment was still there, dark and silent, everyone asleep. Gipsies could not light campfires and sit round them, nowadays, in the night-time.
It had been growing colder during the past two days, and there was a thin crackle of ice on the water that filled the ruts of the rough track. As Kate approached up the track to Pentrewer Farm, of which she could just distinguish the outline of roof and chimneys up on the bank, she thought of Colin. She had not, as she had half-promised, given him warning of this expedition. She had not decided on it until to-day, but that had not been the only reason. A sort of reticence surrounded her friend Colin, and bred an equal reticence on her. She had freely and fully explained to him what she was doing in Radnorshire, but he had not responded with an equal confidence about his doings, but played her off with amiable prevarications. As for the nonsense he had talked about the dangers of solitary nocturnal expeditions she might have been listening to some great-aunt, not to Colin, and it had never been Kate’s habit to defer, except politely, to the opinions of her great-aunts on such matters.
Pentrewer Farm, like the cottage below, was dark and silent as the grave. And the grave, the tumulus, whose shoulder Kate thought she could just see rounded against the open darkness of the sky, was silent, too. No light in any of the windows here.
There May Be Danger Page 13
