by Jack Mann
“There appears to be precious little else to forgive, father,” Gees pointed out. “Besides, I’m acting for Hunter, not against him.”
It stands to General Green’s credit that he restrained himself. He merely pointed at the library door and said, “Get out of this house!” in a small voice—but it was like the rustle of a zephyr travelling just ahead of a tornado. And, foreseeing that the tornado was imminent, Gees got out of the house and set his course for Denlandham.
The quiet of the marshes, with old-world Ludlow behind and Shrewsbury ahead, at the end of the serene day. Limpid green over the sunset and opal shades in the lower west. Green meadows, placid streams, and the foliage of the trees at its best, with the scent of hawthorn blossom burdening the air after Gees had turned off from the Shrewsbury road to take the winding, narrower way to Denlandham, placid as the day itself after his late tea in the old, half-timbered Ludlow inn.
It was, he reflected, the first time since childhood that he had felt even reasonably cheerful over coming to Shropshire, for his father had designed that he, Gees, should manage the family estate as soon as he was old enough, and had made him learn all the intricacies of management so thoroughly that he detested the idea as much as the general detested his slogan. But this business on which he was engaged promised to be interesting, and probably profitable as well, so that he was quite prepared to concede to anyone that the scenery through which he drove was lovely, and that Shropshire as a county was worth knowing. Moreover, with the rattle and smoke of London hardly out of his ears and nostrils as yet, and the very last word in mechanical perfection under his control, he was half-inclined to regard Angus Hunter’s twirling gurgler as did Eve Madeleine, whom he called Miss Brandon in speaking to her. Yet, he knew, Hunter had detailed his case quite practically and reasonably, as if he knew rather than believed in its truth.
And now, ruminating, Gees wished he had his father’s knowledge of the Hunter family. Grandfather Green’s brother had annexed Celia Hunter three-quarters of a century before, making the breach between the families which still showed no sign of closing—Hunter’s lying about a talk with the general in the club could not be taken as a sign—and, knowing of the breach, Gees had made no attempt to learn the full history of these Hunters. Angus of that name had confessed to a slave-trader and a murderer in the family, and Gees had a half-memory of a legend to the effect that, when the first of the family to come to notice had dispossessed the monks of Denlandham, he had been guilty of senseless cruelties. There had been a convent, too, and the nuns—
Not nearly so placid as he remembered the old tales, Gees looked about him and felt that the May landscape was not quite as beautiful as it had appeared when he first began this train of reflection. It had already occurred to him that Hunter’s letter, which he carried in his note-case, had no more cash value in the event of his success on this mission than had the paper that contained it, but, bad though the record of the family was, in spots, and from the view-point of a Shropshire Green, Angus would surely not be swine enough to repudiate that obligation. Or would he? The sum was little enough to him, but—
A jab at the brake pedal, for a small boy of four or five darted into the narrow road from a wayside cottage gateway, almost under the front wheels of the slowly and silently moving car, which came to a standstill while the urchin completed his journey across the road and gained the bank on the far side from the cottage gateway, where, thumb in mouth, he stood divided between pride in his achievement and a desire to howl loudly over the narrowness of his escape.
A woman came out from the cottage to the gate, and looked out at the child and the long car. She was about to speak, but Gees forestalled her: he did not know if she would begin on him or the child.
“Madam,” he asked, removing his hat and speaking most ingratiatingly, “could you tell me how far it is to Denlandham?”
“Denlum?” she amended for him. “Why, this is it.”
“All of it?” He looked past her at the cottage.
“Willie!” she called past him to the child, “coom heer, you little davvle! Runnin’ out inter the rud like that, you!”
But heedless of whether the child obeyed or no, Gees let in his clutch and moved on. Denlandham or Denlum was somewhere handy, evidently, and there must be a hostelry somewhere about. He found it about a quarter of a mile farther on, and would have hated to total up the bends and twists in that quarter-mile, for the road could give a worm points and a beating on turning. Then, set back from a sort of forecourt, which was shaded by a chestnut tree that would have set any toiling village blacksmith rejoicing, he saw THE HUNTERS’ ARMS declare itself by means of a swinging signboard, and turned off the road to discover that one Nicholas Churchill was licensed to retail ... but then Gees got out to search for Nicholas or some accredited representative, for the rest of the sign was of no consequence. Here was an inn, and the first of the May twilight was at hand. Leaving the car, he entered what proved to be the public bar.
Behind the bar was a red-faced man with a perceptibly humped back and a nose that would not have failed by comparison with Cyrano de Bergerac’s facial centre. Two youngsters paused from competing at darts on the far side of the low-ceiled room at the entry of this stranger, and two rather elderly men of the hedger-and-ditcher type, seated on a long settle at right angles to the bar, gave him a glance and then ignored him. He addressed the hunchback.
“Are you Mr. Churchill?”
Mr. Churchill made a shrill noise of assent, a sort of “Yeahp!”
“Well, then, Mr. Churchill, could you put me up for the night?”
Again Mr. Churchill made his noise, and added something like
“Sir.”
“Thank you,” said Gees. “I’ll go and get my belongings.”
He returned to the car, took out his suitcase, and faced about to see a woman as tall as himself standing in the inn doorway.
“Coom along o’ me, mister,” she invited or commanded. “Ah’ll show thee tha room, an’ what’ll tha loike to eaat?”
“Oh, anything that’s handy,” he answered, as he followed her to the staircase beyond the doorway leading to the bar.
“Ah’ve a gradely ham on coot,” she announced, “an’ happen tha’d loike eggs wi’t. An’ a pot o’ tea.”
“Splendid,” he assented, and came, at the top of the stairs, to a tidy bedroom with—the thing he noticed first—an illuminated
“God Bless Our Home,” over the head of the bed. Facing it from the opposite wall, he saw next, was an oleograph “Soul’s Awakening”—but there was room under the bed for both, he decided.
“An’ theer’s a staable at the back wheer thee can put thy car,” she told him. “When’ll thee loike tha sooper?”
“Oh, in an hour, say,” he suggested. “I’ll put the car away and drop into the bar for a bit. Mr. Churchill can tell me when the meal is ready, if you let him know. You don’t belong to this part of the country, I gather, Mrs. Churchill?” He risked calling her that.
“Noa. We coom fra nigh Sheffield,” she informed him, and added in a lower voice after a brief pause—“Worse luck,” before leaving him to a wash and brush-up after his journey.
He looked out from the casement window and saw a squat church tower and the slated roof of what he decided was the vicarage or rectory not far from the church. There was a row of aged cottages a little way along the road from the inn, and behind these tokens that this was indeed Denlandham—perhaps a mile distant from the inn—glimpses of a big residence set on a slight rise of ground were visible among trees. That, Gees reflected, would be Denlandham House, Hunter’s residence, for it was unlikely that two such—for this part of the country—imposing mansions would exist in one village.
He found the stable and backed the Rolls-Bentley inside, after driving out a half-dozen hens which, he decided, must roost elsewhere for the night. Then he returned to the bar, leaned against it, and requested a pint of bitter, which Nicholas Churchill provided wit
hout even a comment on the weather. Apparently the landlord was not loquacious.
Sipping at the pint glass, Gees watched the dart players in an abstracted, dreamy way, and presently had his reward. For the two elders on the settle, considering him not interested in them, renewed the conversation his entrance had interrupted. They talked with long pauses between sentences, and without emphasis: it was as if the conversation were part of their evening ritual, and not very interesting to them.
“My beans begun to flower,” said one.
“There be a mortal lot o’ fly this year,” the other observed.
“Aye, Tom, yu’re right,” said the first one.
Tom looked into his pint glass, and decided to drink no more yet. One dart-player missed the board altogether, and danged it loudly.
“Squire back yit?” Tom inquired of his fellow.
“Yistiddy,” was the reply.
“I did hear Norris’s gal is hoam.”
“Yistiddy,” said the other again.
Tom shook his head over his glass, gravely. “Still mazed,” he said, and Gees took care to avoid any expression of interest or look at them.
“Aye,” said Tom’s friend, with equal gravity.
“Stoppin’ at Cosham’s till Michaelmas, they say,” Tom observed.
“They’m cousins,” said the other.
“Aye, but Cosham’ll want pay for their keep, till Michaelmas,”
Tom averred. “He ’on’t keep three on ’em till then for nothin’.”
“I ’ouldn’t neether,” said Tom’s friend, after thinking it over.
“An’ noobery know what did happen to that gal.”
“Narves. Growed too fast, I reckon, an’ got narves.”
“Then yu don’t believe?” Tom glanced at Gees, and did not end it.
“That?” The other spoke with his first sign of interest in what he or Tom was saying. “Them tales’ll do to frighten children with.”
Tom thought it over, and drank some beer to aid his reflections.
“I lay yu ’ouldn’t go oop to Nightmare alone i’ the dark, Jacob Hood,” he said eventually, very deliberately and with conviction.
“If there was,” Jacob Hood remarked after another long silence, “it ain’t never touched nobody that I heerd. Them as believe about them things do tell yu might shove a hand right through ’em, an’ they can’t feel it. An’ if there is things like them, which I ’on’t believe, they’m no more’n wind an’ shadder, an’ couldn’t so much as hit anyone.”
“But I lay yu ’ouldn’t go oop to Nightmare alone i’ the dark,”
Tom repeated, as if he were challenging Jacob to make the trip.
“I ain’t got no call to go,” Jacob said. “Time I done for the day, I bin on my feet aplenty ’ithout traipsin’ up to Nightmare or anywhere else. I gotter soak my corns to-night afore I go to bed.”
“I did hear tell once,” Tom observed, after thinking it over, “as the right bottom end o’ a bindweed root’d cure any corn, an’ I’d got a right bad ’un jest then. So I took a spade down the end o’ my garden, an’ dug at a bindweed. I got the hole a good seven foot deep, an’ the bindweed was still agoin’ down as thick as ever.”
“So yu didn’t try it?” Jacob inquired.
“I don’t believe bindweed got a bottom end to the root,” Tom averred with a spice of disgust at the habits of the plant. “I believe they go right down to the middle o’ the earth, or nearabouts. Seven foot down I dug, an’ was about wore out at it, an’ still that root was agoin’ down as strong as ever. Bill Thacker next door, he wanted to know if I was diggin’ a well when I put my head up outer the hole.”
“An’ what’d yu say?” Jacob asked.
“I said what I’d bin diggin’ for, an’ he larfed like anything. So I filled up the hole, an’ got some green stuff in a little bottle off a pedlar, an’ it eased that corn most wonderful.”
At that point, the landlord consulted a little square wicket in the back of the bar, and learned from it that Gees’ supper was ready. He let his guest through by a side door into a room in which the meal was set, and paused to look over the table and assure himself that all was in order. An incandescent paraffin lamp lighted the room brilliantly, and showed Gees a bookshelf containing works one would scarcely expect to find in such a place as this. Frazer’s GoldenBough, in the condensed one-volume edition, Eliphaz Levi’s two big tomes on magic, and Lytton’s Zanoni, were volumes that Gees observed and recognised.
“Nice little library you have there,” he remarked.
Nicholas emitted his squeaky assent, and moved the mustard pot.
“Do you mind if I look at some of them?” Gees inquired.
“As many as thee like and as long as thee like, sir,” Nicholas shrilled. “They bean’t to my taste. Th’ wife’s first husband, they belonged. I’d burn the dinged lot, if I had my way.”
Which, Gees thought but did not say, indicated the superiority of the grey mare in this establishment. He gave up his scrutiny of the bookshelf, and seated himself at the table.
“I suppose you found trade brisker in the Sheffield district than it is here, Mr. Churchill,” he remarked pleasantly.
“So that dinged wife o’ mine been chatterin’ again, have she?”
Nicholas inquired morosely. “I don’t belong to that part. I married her there, that was all. She belonged that way.”
“Nicholas?” The voice of Mrs. Churchill sounded to them.
“Bar!”
“Aye,” said her husband gloomily, “she’d die afore she’d do a hand’s turn in it. If thee want anything else, sir, there’s the bell.”
“I’d like to ask a few questions about the village and district,”
Gees told him. “If you wouldn’t mind, after closing time?”
Churchill shook his head. “I don’t know ’em well, sir,” he said.
“Most o’ these folk are hard to know. But there’s Phil Bird, the sexton, he’s a sort of walkin’ directory for the place, an’ he’ll talk half an hour for a pint about the place an’ the folk in it.”
“Then I think somewhere about two quarts ought to do it,” Gees surmised. “How can I get hold of Phil Bird and start him warbling?”
“It’s nigh on his time for comin’ in,” Churchill answered.
“Well, would you tell him that a gentleman interested in the district would like a four-pint talk with him, and let me see him in here?”
“I don’t think she’d raise no objections to that, sir, if she’s let clear away first when thee’ve had thy supper.”
Gees took the cover off the dish before him and saw its contents.
“This is all I shall need, and then some,” he said. “If you’ll tell the lady that when I ring it will mean clearing the table, and then induce Bird to come in”—he slid a pound note along the tablecloth toward Churchill—“this will have nothing to do with what you charge for putting me up. It’s extra.”
“Thankye, sir.” Nicholas brightened considerably as he took the note. “He’s a queer character, Phil, an’ tha better not believe everything he got to say, but he’ll tell thee a lot that’s true as well.”
“I hope so,” Gees said fervently. “Thank you very much, Mr. Churchill.”
CHAPTER 3
PHIL BIRD
A THIN, SMALLISH MAN, with a shiny bald top to his head, deep-set eyes which appeared to hold a laugh—at the persistent irony of life, perhaps—and his whole face, even to the full of his cheeks, crossed at all angles by innumerable lines, he stood just within the door of the room as Nicholas Churchill closed it on himself, and took in Gees standing by the table, the two pint glasses and big jug which Nicholas had provided, and, as reinforcement, the wicker-covered, two gallon jar on the floor. He wore an old-fashioned and rather rusty suit of broadcloth, and above it his face showed the colour of good old oak that has not been too deeply stained—and even the bald top of his head was as much brown as
pink. When he opened his mouth to speak, he revealed a set of teeth too perfect to be natural at his age—Gees estimated him at not much less than seventy, and perhaps more.
