Kate was wondering that herself, with a sharper anxiety every moment, as they continued their way along the tunnel, which showed no sign so far of coming to an end. In spite of Gideon Atkins’s firm, and, Kate suspected, disingenuous denials, Llanhalo tunnel existed, a well-constructed passage made in the dark ages for who knew what sinister traffic between Llanhalo Abbey and Heaven-knows-where? But it was only too probable that somewhere along its considerable length a blockage of fallen earth had long ago closed it in, and that soon these twentieth century traffickers would come to a blank end. Then, they would have to return by the way they had come. Then, they would have to be prepared to meet whoever it was they had heard turning the handle of the cellar door.
“Ronnie,” asked Kate suddenly, “how do you like Mr Atkins? How do you get on with him?”
She did not know whether to be relieved or not when Ronnie replied in a rather surprised tone:
“All right. Miss. I reckon he’s a decent sort. He gave me a ride on his horse.”
“He said there wasn’t any tunnel here.”
Ronnie grinned.
“Then I reckon he never looked, Miss.” He added: “Miss, I think this tunnel comes out somewhere all right. Do you know why? Because I reckon if it was stopped up the air wouldn’t be like it is. I reckon we wouldn’t be able to breathe, Miss, if it didn’t come out somewhere.”
Kate wondered whether this piece of ratiocination were based on a science lesson or merely on a yarn about treasure seekers in a penny comic. It sounded reasonable, anyway. The air, though it struck chill as the tomb, was not stagnant.
There had been one or two curves in the tunnel, probably made to avoid cores of hard rock, and Kate was no longer conscious of direction. They had come quite a long way, the drip... drip... they had heard while they listened to the movements in the dairy, was louder now. Taking another curve round a great boulder of natural rock which had been left by the tunnel-makers as part of the tunnel wall, they came to a place where a trickle of water had worn shallow fissure in the rocky floor of the tunnel before it found its perennially trickling way through the masonry overhead. Kate lifted her lamp to look at the great drops, black as ink, that trembled on the edge of the crack, before falling drip, drip, into the shallow pool upon the floor that overflowed into the fissure and was carried off by the perennially trickling stream.
“This is where the tunnel will collapse one of these days,” murmured Kate, scanning the walls and ceiling. “Seems all right for the present, though.”
But Ronnie, who had his torch turned upon the floor, clutched at her arm.
“Miss! Miss!”
“I wish you wouldn’t hiss at me like that, Ronnie, can’t you call me Kate?” said Kate, a little irritably. But when she saw what he was pointing to, she forgot this hyper-criticism. A little way the other side of the shallow pool of water, on the dry earthy floor, faintly but unmistakably impressed, was a footmark. Further on, much fainter, was another one. Somebody had trodden in the pool of water, and his wet shoe, picking up the dry earth from the floor at the next step, had left its faint, shallow imprint there.
“Somebody’s been here,” said Kate, stating the obvious.
“A man. Going the same way as us.”
“Not necessarily. He might have come the other way, without treading in the water, and trod in the water when he went back. I wonder how long a footprint like that would last,” mused Kate. “Quite a long time, probably. There’s nothing to disturb it. No rain. No wind. Nobody to tread it over. Perhaps it’s been here for years.”
Ronnie looked very sceptical. And Kate herself did not know why she felt this disposition to minimise the importance of that footprint. The anxiety with which she had heard that soft turning of the cellar door-handle, and which had sent her scurrying with Ronnie down the passage, was fast becoming an acute sense of danger. She had not thought sufficiently before setting out so gaily, and with this child in tow, on this night’s adventure. She had imagined herself making leisurely investigations in Llanhalo cellar and then going home to work out a plan of action based on her discoveries. She had envisaged dearly enough the possibility that there was no tunnel at all, not even the beginning of one. She had never, she realised now, clearly enough envisaged the possibility that there was an easily negotiable tunnel. She had not considered at all the possibility that she would find herself followed down it by she knew not whom! That’s you all over, Kate, she said to herself bitterly: act first and then discover it’s too late to think, that’s you, you fool. What a piece of management!
She did not speak aloud, but she made a little uneasy, impatient noise, and Ronnie looked up at her, and she recalled herself, to the necessity of keeping a brave front. She was all the while listening for the approach of pursuing footsteps, but could hear nothing yet, only the drip, drip, of the water behind them now. She needed all her bravery when she perceived what looked like the blocked, blank end of the tunnel ahead of them: a blocked blank end of masonry, a rough stone wall of large irregular blocks roughly mortared together.
She bit her lip to suppress a cry of dismay; and the next moment hope sprang up the more strongly for that moment of blank distress. There was an aperture at the foot of the wall, which, always supposing that there was no blockage the other side, would, if they crawled upon their stomachs, amply let them through. Blocks of loose stone lay in the tunnel, as though they had fallen out from that aperture; or rather, been deliberately removed, for they were piled roughly aside against the wall of the passage. Kate thought in passing that some of the surfaces had a clean, new-quarried look as though they had not long been hammered and chiselled out of place, but she had not time now to reflect on the implications of this. Getting down on her stomach, she dragged herself through, torch in hand, into what appeared to be a small, rounded chamber, earthen-floored, vault-roofed—a simple circular chamber like the burial chamber to which the passage of a Stone-Age long-barrow may lead, except that it was larger and the stonework of comparatively modern date.
But such a comparison only flickered across Kate’s mind as she drew herself through. For there was somebody lying on the ground, covered in brown blankets, at the farther side of the little chamber, looking at her with a white, blank face on which not even surprise was pictured. All excursions into ancient history, and all reflections on the art of masonry, all sense of danger and urgency, even, vanished from Kate’s mind at the sight. She drew herself slowly to her feet, and looked down at a fair, thin, ghostlike boy, who stared back at her with eyes that looked blind and black, with lips expressionlessly parted and darkly caked. His chin and even the modelling of his forehead had a strange sharp look, and the whiteness of his cheeks made Ronnie’s normal pallor look like that of a different race, said never a word, and Kate said never a word. She realised, with a sort of amazement at herself and circumstance, firstly, that she had truly found Sidney Brentwood, and secondly, that, driven by the sense of danger to herself and Ronnie unpremeditatedly down this passage, she had for the last half-hour or so quite forgotten Sidney Brentwood.
But Ronnie had not forgotten, or he recovered more easily than Kate from his amazement. He stared a second, and then, with a face of exultation, fell on his knees on the other boy’s blankets.
“Hey, Sid!” He paused a second, disconcerted perhaps by the lack of response in his friend’s face and perhaps also by the sharp pallor and the cracked lips and the flat hair. Then, in the touching, half-earnest, half-playful tone in which children comfort one another, he went on:
“You know me, Sid! You know old Ron!”
It was not plain that Sidney Brentwood knew old Ron, nor that he knew anybody or anything. But he was alive, and that was all that mattered to Kate and Ronnie in that first amazed and exalted moment.
But very soon Kate realised that to have found him was one thing, to rescue him another. They were in danger themselves, she and Ronnie, and Sidney was in danger, too, and their respective dangers reacted upon one another to create an appalling danger. I
t was plain the boy was ill, feeble, semi-deaf and semi-blind with darkness and loneliness and privation. His life was in Kate’s hands now, as well as Ronnie’s and her own.
Gideon Atkins and his accomplice Major Everyman had spared Sidney Brentwood’s life: even professional criminals, let alone amateur traitors, would jib at committing murder, if it could be avoided. But if it were their only hope of escape from discovery and the law, they would not jib.
Kate stooped and put her ear to the aperture in the chamber wall through which they had just come. She could hear nothing as yet but the drip, drip of the water from the roof. The locked cellar door had served them well, but it was only a matter of time before pursuing footsteps came down the tunnel. Then what would Kate do, alone with these two frail kids?
Kate felt in all its force the deep dismay of the too-sanguine adventurer who sees for the first time that his adventure will not end at all in accordance with his glowing plans. It did not surprise her that the pale boy kept his lips expressionlessly parted and did not respond to her smile, for her smile felt as if fastened on her face. Oh God! said she to herself under that stiff, mechanical, pinned smile, oh God, what a fool I was not to bring Colin with me!
Chapter Nineteen
But work in the theatre induces above all things a habit of buoyancy and strong, quick reaction to ill-hap. While Ronnie knelt and uttered consolations to the unresponsive Sidney, Kate examined rapidly with her torch the place in which they were. There must, she thought, be some further exit from this place—unless, in the course of centuries it had been blocked in. So well-constructed and lengthy a tunnel could not have been contrived to lead only to this little chamber, but must surely have been a communication between two places of importance in their day.
The vaulted ceiling seemed to terminate in a kind of central chimney-like shaft, probably a ventilation shaft, and the cause of the comparatively good air they had breathed in the tunnel. But it was very narrow, not more than eighteen inches across, and even had they been able to reach to the centre of the ceiling) it would have been futile to think of escape that way. Kate next examined the walls, and found, to her relief and joy that there was another aperture in the wall, opposite to the one by which she and Ronnie had struggled in, dose to where Sidney was lying. Examining the wall more closely, she found that this aperture was at the base of what had once been a doorway, filled-in now with mortared stone. There was a timber lintel about five feet from the ground, and the narrow rectangular outline of the filled-in doorway could be traced in the masonry. And looking more carefully at the entrance through which she and Ronnie had come, she saw that it also was at the base of a blocked-in doorway. Two sizeable doors had once, in the heyday of the secret passage, led into this chamber, which had probably been a storeroom. Both doors at some time in the passing centuries, perhaps by agreement between the owners of the connected properties, had been built in. And recently, quite recently, Kate judged from the clean broken edges of the stone, both had been opened again sufficiently to allow an uncomfortable passage through. There was a chance, and it was worth taking, that the other half of the secret tunnel was negotiable and might lead to escape, if not to safety. She knelt by Sidney Brentwood and said softly and clearly:
“Sidney, we’ve come to take you back to Hastry now. We must be quick. Do you think you can come with us?”
The boy only stared at her. She thought of the smiling chubby face in the photograph she had seen in the Edgware Road She would not say the child was quite unrecognisable: the width across the eyes, the proportions of nose and upper lip, were unmistakeably the same. But there was no other resemblance to that photograph in the white-faced wraith with the earth-coloured circles below the eyes, so stupefied and shrinking. Kate had sometimes pictured herself meeting Sidney Brentwood for the first time, coming to his rescue: and always, so uncalculating in the sanguine spirit, she had pictured a lively, joyous, candid boy whose friendship and trust would spring to meet her overtures.
“You don’t know me yet, but you know Ronnie, don’t you?”
“Ronnie,” repeated the boy hoarsely and faintly, licking his cracked lips. Yes, evidently he knew and trusted Ronnie.
“Well, Ronnie and I have come to take you home.”
Sidney had his clothes on under the blankets that lay across him. A half-burnt-down candle in a brass stick stood near his bed, and a box of matches, and also a plate on which were several apples and a half-eaten, stale-looking loaf. There was a jug of dusty water, too. Sidney was not starved, then, and he could probably walk. But when Kate told him to get up and took him encouragingly by the arm to help him, he seemed unable to rise, he whimpered that his feet hurt, and Kate, pulling the blankets away, found that his ankles were hobbled together with strong wire.
She gave one energetic curse which she hoped would find its way on to the heads of Sidney’s mishandlers, and set herself to untwist one of the wire fetters, while Ronnie did his best with the other. It was a laborious job, and the impatient Kate had three broken finger-nails by the time she had loosened hers and was ready to finish Ronnie’s. Kate wondered for a moment that Sidney had not managed to undo that wire himself before he became too feeble to attempt it. Then she noticed faint dark marks like old bruises on his wrists. No doubt the necessary precautions had been taken.
“Come on, son!” said Kate anxiously, for if he could not walk at all, she and Ronnie should they be intercepted, would indeed by almost hopelessly handicapped. She had had a momentary thought of leaving Sidney here while she and Ronnie went to fetch help: but she had decided that the risk for Sidney was too great. She would not let him out of her sight now till there was a fair prospect of safety for him.
He made one or two feeble steps, and would have collapsed had it not been for Kate’s arm. And when Ronnie with his torch had crawled first into the aperture in the wall and had reported space for three, and Kate, subduing her galloping impatience and sense of danger, was urging Sidney to follow his friend, a sort of desperate, lost look came over the child’s white face, on which even this small exertion had brought out little points of sweat, and he turned back towards his bed.
“Come, Sidney, come!”
“My net— my net—” he stammered hoarsely, and groping in his bed found and dragged out a large square-meshed net of brown silk.
“Oh, must you bring that?”
Evidently, he must. Kate rolled it up and put it under her arm; and giving Sidney gentle and unhurried directions as if he were a child of three rather than thirteen, she persuaded him to crawl after Ronnie through the hole in the wall. She followed.
The passage they found themselves in much resembled in proportions and construction the one from which they had entered the central chamber. They walked along, slowly, Ronnie ahead, and Kate supporting Sidney with an arm around his waist. But before they had gone far it became evident they were not going to have so easy a passage at this end of the tunnel. The earthen floor became rough and covered with rubble and loose broken stones, against which Sidney perpetually stumbled. And it seemed to Kate, playing her torch anxiously ahead, that the ceiling sloped lower and lower towards that uneven floor. Before long, Kate found that she could not stand upright, but must walk crouching over the thick layer of loose stones, with the sensation of the whole earth suspended over her bent head. She longed after a while, more acutely than she remembered ever longing for anything, to stand upright. She could see nothing ahead of her but Ronnie slowly and cautiously making his way along, and for all she knew this narrow tunnel might bore on for miles—to Wigmore Castle, Aberystwyth or the Garden of Eden, as Aminta had said, and she more or less on all-fours all the time!
“Can’t you see anything yet, Ronnie?”
Ronnie did not answer for a moment. Kate, who had noticed that the tunnel ceiling seemed to be getting even lower, for Sidney at her side, as well as she, had to stoop now, was about to repeat the question more sharply and anxiously, when he replied in a low voice:
“Miss,
I believe the tunnel’s blocked.”
There was a sob of despair in his voice, and Kate acutely realised that she was not the only one of the party who felt the strain of the danger they were in. But the next moment the boy said hopefully:
“No, I reckon we can squeeze through all right!”
Kate, brought to a halt while Ronnie investigated what lay ahead of them, sat crouched against the wall beside Sidney Brentwood, She took his hand in hers, but he made no sign except a little sigh. Shining her torch down the way they had come. Kate realised that the reason this tunnel was narrowing was that it was filled with debris of stone and brick. It was not the ceiling that sloped down, but the rubble-covered floor that sloped up. The blockage ahead of them seemed to consist of a heap of stone and brick rubble and earth. Ronnie was already crawling across it, head-first, head-first, at full length; she could see the soles of his gum-boots disappearing between the blockage and the ceiling. A moment later his stooping, flushed face appeared at the opening.
“It’s all right here!” he breathed joyfully. “Miss, you can stand up here! There’s steps, too! I believe we can get out here!”
Kate’s heart leapt. But when she tried to persuade Sidney to follow where Ronnie had gone, he became limply obstinate and despairing, shaking his head to all her coaxing.
“No. No.”
The clammy skin of his puckered forehead was wrinkled like an elderly person’s. He looked as if he might faint, and Kate was in despair. She could not go through herself until Sidney was through, but to unburden herself she passed over the rubble to Ronnie the net she had been carrying under her arm.
“My net!” said Sidney faintly and despairingly.
He looked as if he were about to cry.
“Oh, Sidney, it’s all right. You put your hands up there to Ronnie and he’ll give you the net,” said Kate.
Sidney obeyed, and Ronnie, who had been anxiously adding his persuasions to Kate’s, took his friend’s hands firmly.
There May Be Danger Page 18
