I felt the sheets on his bed. They were cold. I pulled on my breeches, pushed my feet into shoes and put on my coat and hat, without troubling with the periwig. I left the chamber and went down to the first floor. Everything was quiet, but below me I heard a rattling and scraping that suggested the maid was lighting the kitchen fire.
Perhaps, I thought, Stephen had been hungry and had gone downstairs to see if he could beg a crust.
I followed the sounds to the kitchen. The maid, the one who had served us at dinner, started violently when she saw me.
‘Have you seen Stephen?’ I asked. When she looked blankly at me, I added impatiently, ‘The African boy.’
She shook her head.
‘He’s not in his bed. Where could he be?’
She found her voice at last. ‘I don’t know, master.’ Her eyes slid away from me, towards the back door. ‘It was unbolted when I came down. I thought it was my mistress. Sometimes she can’t sleep, and goes out early.’
I crossed the kitchen and opened the door. It led to a kitchen yard with a handful of chickens squabbling in a coop in one corner. I went outside. An arch led to the stables and the gateway to the road outside the house. Underneath the arch, there was a perfect print of a small, naked foot.
The maid had turned her back to me and gone back to riddling the ash from the fire. I swore under my breath. I went down past the stables and into the gardens. I called Stephen’s name but he did not reply. I walked round the end of the house and entered the orchard, which lay on the other side from the stables.
The dew lay silver and cold on the ground. Two hogs rooted for late windfalls under the trees. I glanced up at my window, which was a leaded casement squeezed under the roof, with the larger window of Lady Quincy’s chamber directly below it. I thought I could make out a trail of ragged, darker patches on the grass among the trees, following a wavering path towards the stream. Stephen’s footprints or my imagination?
I followed them. Almost at once I saw a shadowy shape huddled on the bank near the water. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I swore and ran towards it, my shoes slithering on the wet grass.
Thank God, I thought as I drew nearer. It’s not Stephen.
There was brown fur on the grass, not dark skin. I staggered to a halt over the body. The dog lay on its side with a dribble of white foam at its mouth. Its eyes were open.
Panting, I knelt beside it. It was a big animal of no particular breed. It wore a wide collar set with spikes. I touched its flank. It was cold. There was no sign of a wound.
There was no sign of Stephen either. But there were more footprints in the grass, and they led towards the misty waters of the Fen.
‘Poison,’ Mistress Warley said in a tone that brooked no argument as she prodded the corpse with her stick. ‘If Grimball were prone to fits, we should have known it.’
‘But where’s Stephen?’ I said.
‘The blackamoor? Ten to one he did this. Some witchcraft of his own. I hold you responsible, sir.’
I had found the old lady in the kitchen when I returned to the house. When I told her what had happened, she had glared at me as if it were my fault and sent the maid upstairs to rouse her grandson. Mr Warley had hurried down, still with his nightcap on and with a cloak flung over his bedgown, and we had walked into the orchard.
As we were trooping back to the house, Ann arrived with a message from her mistress. Lady Quincy sent her compliments to Mistress Warley and begged to inform her that she and her party would leave Hitcham St Martin this morning. The message made no mention of Frances.
‘We can’t leave until we’ve found Stephen,’ I said to Mistress Warley. ‘He must be somewhere.’
‘What’s happened?’ Ann asked, too surprised to be respectful.
‘The boy slipped out at night. I don’t know when. His bed was empty when I got up.’
The maid was staring at me. Usually she would have expected to sleep with her mistress, as she had done in Cambridge and Puckeridge on the way here. If she didn’t know for sure about my nocturnal visit to Lady Quincy, she certainly must suspect it.
Mr Warley turned slowly around, making a complete circle, as if in the hope of spotting Stephen sitting in a tree or strolling towards us. There was a frown on his thin, dark face.
‘A fit of madness? Moonstruck – there was a moon last night? Africans are not as we are, sir. The rational faculty is not as developed, and there’s some debate as to whether in fact they have souls as we do, or are closer to the horse or the dog in that respect. One thing is certain, they are in thrall to ungodly superstitions. My grandmother is right about that.’
‘Stephen’s not mad,’ I said. ‘He must have had a reason to go outside.’
‘He’s not here, sir,’ Warley said. ‘He can’t have left the house and gardens. That wall is nigh on ten feet high, and topped with spikes.’
The old woman ground her stick into the mud. ‘If the boy’s not on the earth, he must be on the water. Or in the water.’ She stared out at the Fen, grey and ghostly in the first light of the day. ‘Perhaps he’s drowned himself,’ she went on with an air that suggested that, taken all in all, this would be a happy outcome for everyone concerned. ‘After all, he’s unlikely to know that self-murder is a mortal sin.’
‘Then let’s look for him,’ I snapped. ‘You must have a boat of some sort.’
‘We rely on punts in this part of the country, sir,’ Warley said, adapting the didactic manner that seemed to come naturally to him. ‘Not the most elegant of conveyances, but appropriate to this setting, owing to their shallow drafts. Every Fenman has his punt.’
‘Is there one missing from here?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Mistress Warley said, pointing with her stick. ‘Our own is there – moored at the foot of the orchard.’
While we had been talking, the light had been growing stronger and the mist was beginning to lift. Beyond the Warleys’ punt was a stretch of open water fringed with islets, reeds and stunted saplings. A dark shape was moving among them, which a moment later resolved itself into a smaller punt with a man poling in its stern.
‘Someone eeling or fishing,’ Warley said.
‘Ragfield,’ said his grandmother crisply. ‘Cottage by the cattle pound. Lives with his mother.’ She frowned. ‘Something’s upset him. Call him over.’
We walked to the landing stage, with Ann trailing behind the two Warleys and me. Ragfield was punting as if his life depended on it, driving his pole into the muddy water with unmistakable urgency, splashing himself with water. He had seen us and was coming in our direction. The unwieldy craft was incapable of speed, and it wallowed from side to side.
‘What’s he doing?’ Warley said. ‘Has the fellow gone stark mad?’
‘He looks scared out of his wits,’ Mistress Warley said.
‘Mistress!’ Ragfield cried as he approached. ‘Master!’
He drove the punt into the bank with such force that he almost lost his balance. He scrambled on to the land. I seized the painter and made it fast. The punt was small and crowded with baskets. There was a powerful smell of fish.
‘Mistress, we need vicar!’ His accent was so hard and broad I could hardly distinguish what he was saying. ‘There’s a marsh imp out there, black as sin, and he cursed me when he saw me, and I’m damned as sure as hellfire if vicar don’t come quick.’
‘An imp?’ Mistress Warley demanded. ‘Do you mean a blackamoor?’
‘No, an imp, mistress, an imp, and I could hear him shrieking his spells at me.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘Prior’s Hump.’
‘It must be Stephen,’ I said. ‘Let me fetch him.’
‘But how did he get there?’ Mistress Warley said suddenly. ‘Someone must have taken him.’
‘The dog …?’ I said.
She glanced at me, and I saw she understood me perfectly. ‘We have a trespasser, it seems. First he came here, killed our dog somehow, and then he took the boy to Prior’s Hump.’ I r
aised my eyebrows, and she went on, ‘It’s a rocky outcrop.’ She pointed again. ‘About two hundred yards away over there, behind that big reedbed. It’s part of the Warley estate.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘The rogue could be still there. But why would he kidnap a boy like that? Unless the boy went of his own accord.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘I must go there at once.’
‘Ragfield will take us,’ Mistress Warley said.
I stared at her. ‘Us?’
‘I shall come too, sir. I don’t care for trespassers on my land.’
‘Madam, it’s hardly suitable that a gentlewoman of your —’
‘Suitable, sir? Who are you to tell me what’s suitable in my own garden?’
‘Perhaps Mr Warley should come in your place.’
She threw her grandson a glance that spoke volumes for her opinion of him. ‘I want to see for myself if we have poachers. We set our own traps there.’
I shrugged. ‘As you wish. You should fetch a thicker cloak though, madam, and I shall bring a pistol.’
Warley cleared his throat. ‘Very wise, sir, if I may say so. I would of course come with you, but as a man of the cloth I fear I should be more of a hindrance than a help.’
‘Ragfield? While you’re waiting, bail out that punt of ours. It’s larger than yours and a good deal cleaner.’
‘Must I go with you, mistress? The imp will—’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Mistress Warley snapped. ‘Whatever the imp can do to you, I can do worse, I promise you that.’
I beckoned Ann as I walked back to the house. ‘Tell your mistress what’s happened.’ The merest hint of a plan was beginning to form in my mind. Anything was worth trying. ‘Have her dress as soon as she can, and pack her things. Tell the postillion to saddle our horses.’
She stared up at me with wide eyes. Without my wig, the scarring on that side of my head was more obvious.
‘Make haste.’ I lowered my voice. ‘And wake Mistress Frances, too. Tell her ladyship that this may be her chance.’
The maid gave me a startled glance, but she didn’t argue or question me. I suspected she knew her lady’s business here already.
We went into the house by the back door. I went up to my room and found my cloak. The pistol was still in a holster that had been attached to my horse’s saddle. I took it out, checked the priming and stuck it in my belt.
On the landing below there were already sounds of hasty movement in Lady Quincy’s chamber. I went downstairs and into the yard. Mistress Warley was walking back to the place where the punts were moored. Her grandson was beside her, gesticulating, and I guessed he was trying to dissuade her from going. I hoped he wouldn’t succeed.
Ragfield was waiting by the Warleys’ punt. It was no more than a flat, open box: a crude rectangle of planks, with more planks below, coated with pitch both inside and out to repel the water. I helped Mistress Warley into it. She moved stiffly but calmly to the single seat, which was another plank placed across the craft about halfway down. She sat in the middle, her stick across her lap, in a way that made it impossible for me to sit beside her. I crouched in front of her in the bow.
‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ Warley said from the bank. ‘I’ll rouse the village. And I’ll make sure they light the fires downstairs. You’ll need breakfast, too, and a warm drink.’
He retreated towards the house. Ragfield began the laborious process of turning the punt about. I looked round. Mistress Warley was staring after her grandson.
‘Mr Warley is better off in his college,’ she said abruptly. ‘He’s a fish out of water here, though that’s an odd thing to say in a watery place as full of fish as anywhere in the kingdom.’
She turned away, drawing her cloak tightly around her. It was indeed very cold on the water. Ragfield was punting more efficiently than before. The mud, only a foot or two below the surface, sucked ceaselessly at the pole. Using it as a primitive rudder, he steered a course that took us round one end of the reedbed. I took up a paddle that lay in the bottom of the punt, and did my best to help.
The journey didn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes. Once we were past the reeds, Prior’s Hump lay before us. The island was about thirty yards long, too small to serve any agricultural purpose. At one end there was the hump that gave it its name. It was covered with scrubby trees, except at the lower part, where a tangle of bushes grew untidily in the mud.
‘Moor there,’ Mistress Warley said, using her stick yet again as an extension of her index finger.
I craned my head round as we approached. ‘Stephen’s there,’ I said, unable to keep the relief from my voice. ‘I can see him on the hump. He’s waving.’
Frowning, she peered in that direction, her head hunched forward on her shoulders. ‘Can you see the poacher?’
‘No, madam.’ I guessed that she was short-sighted. In a flash, I glimpsed a method of solving the problem of how to remove Frances from Hitcham St Martin. I launched into a lie. ‘No – I’m not sure … Yes, I believe I can – I think someone’s over there.’
‘On the other side of the hump? I knew it. That’s where our traps and nets are.’
The punt bumped against the stump of a tree on the edge of the island. I scrambled off the punt and made the painter fast. Stephen had seen us and was moving towards us.
Mistress Warley rose to her feet, steadied herself with her stick and moved cautiously towards me. ‘Take my hand.’ She climbed on to the bank and glanced back. ‘You too, Ragfield. Let me take your arm.’
‘But, mistress—’
‘That’s not an imp, you numbskull. That’s just a boy with a dark skin. Come here at once. If there’s a poacher on my land, I want him caught and brought before a magistrate.’
Ragfield obeyed. He was more afraid of the old woman than of poachers or the black imp of Prior’s Hump.
I shaded my eyes. ‘Yes, I’m sure there’s someone over there … There’s movement among the trees. The fellow’s punt must be on the other side of the island.’
‘Quickly then. We shall need your pistol.’
Stephen stumbled towards us. He was trembling with cold. I took off my cloak and draped it over his shoulders.
‘Get on the punt. Sit in it.’ I gave him a little push towards it and raised my voice. ‘To the side there, madam. Do you see him? If we hurry we can cut him off.’
I took her arm and guided her further away from the punt, leading her towards a path winding between tussocks of coarse grass among marshy puddles. Ragfield was on her other side.
I glanced back. Stephen was on board the punt. Mistress Warley forged ahead.
I released her arm, turned and ran as fast as I could back to the punt. She cried out behind me but I couldn’t make out her words. I tore the painter free, pushed the punt into the water and tried to leap aboard. I managed one leg in but the other trailed in the water. The mud sucked at my foot. With a mighty effort I hauled myself dripping into the bottom of the punt.
We were about six feet away from the bank, drifting slowly over the water. Mistress Warley had realized what was happening and was walking back as fast as she could, clinging to Ragfield. I seized the pole and pushed it into the water. The mud gripped it. I pushed hard. The punt shot away from me, and my body extended itself over the water, one hand still holding the pole.
Mistress Warley was shouting, and so was Ragfield. I felt a pair of hands gripping my free wrist, the one that was not attached to the pole.
For a moment the issue was in doubt. Then Stephen’s extra weight drew me back into the punt. I twisted the pole and pulled free from the mud.
Mistress Warley’s shouting continued. With Stephen paddling vigorously in the bow, I poled the punt slowly and uncertainly towards the reedbed and Hitcham St Martin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
‘THANK YOU FOR your hospitality, Mr Warley,’ Lady Quincy said. ‘And pray give my compliments to your grandmother when she returns.’
Lady Quincy rode out into the lane. The postillion followed. I lingered a moment. I heard shouting from the bottom of the garden. The stableboy and one of the peasants had gone to assist in the rescue.
‘I regret it had to be like this,’ I said. ‘I hope Mistress Warley comes to no harm from her adventure.’
‘So do I.’ Warley was looking desperately worried, as well he should. ‘She will miss Frances.’
‘I know. But she would be unwise to try to get the child back. She has no grounds for it. And you yourself, sir – you have seen the King’s letter. I’m sure you will discourage Mistress Warley from acting imprudently.’
I nodded to him and rode after the others. Warley was in awe of his grandmother, but time was on his side, and her power over him diminished as soon as he left the village. Besides, as I had hinted none too subtly, it was in his interests to restrain her: he was an ambitious man and, if he wanted preferment, he would be a fool to risk losing the King’s favour.
We didn’t linger in the Fens. We made good time to Cambridge, where we dined at the Rose and hired fresh horses from the livery stable. I enquired after Burbrough. He was fully conscious and in his right mind; but he remained in great pain; he had told his attendants that he had slipped on the bank and fallen into the mill race while on the way to see the miller.
In the afternoon we rode on to Puckeridge, where we put up again at the Falcon. Both children were exhausted, and Frances was weeping silently. I wondered if she had ever been away from Mistress Warley and Hitcham St Martin since she had gone to the Warleys as a baby.
While Lady Quincy and I were eating supper in her chamber, the news was brought up that her coach had arrived.
‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘At least we shall travel more comfortably tomorrow.’
We went to bed early. Nothing was said because there was nothing to say. She had been courteous to me – grateful, even – but I knew that there was no question of my going to her in the night. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to. She had never desired me for myself, only for what I could do for her. What had occurred at Hitcham St Martin had been in the nature of a transaction. Each party had rendered the other a service, and the invisible contract between us had been fulfilled.
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