I talked about Sergeant Tarrington until Martha stopped crying and started giggling and blushing and telling me a long story about the first time he had ever kissed her. I made myself listen carefully to every word of it: anything was better than looking down the road and wondering what might be happening at the Beemer Mill. I baked a fresh currant cake for Lieutenant Featherstone. I set the chickens simmering in their broth on the hob. I started a batch of new bread for breakfast. I helped Debbie scrape the lint. I made sure that nothing was missing or out of place in the medicine chest. And all the while, in spite of everything I could do, I found myself listening for the sound of somebody coming down the road — listening so hard that the faintest rustle outside seemed louder than a voice in the same room with me. But at seven o'clock it was only my father riding in from New Jerusalem. At half past eight it was only the minister stopping by on his way home from a sick call near Stonybrook Ford.
It must have been almost nine when I finally heard again the slow clop of hoofs coming up the lane. I sprang to my feet and ran out to the porch, with all the household crowding behind me. In the distance, little points of light were flickering and moving through the South Meadow, and outlined against them I could just make out three shadowy figures approaching from the gate, one riding and the other two walking on either side of the horse. The one on the horse was drooping awkwardly in the saddle, and seemed to have his left arm tied up in some sort of scarf; but his voice as he called up the lane to us through the darkness had a ring in it which I had not heard for months.
"We won, and don't worry, nobody's really hurt," he said. "Charles and Tarrington here weren't even scratched; and the doctor says I've only cracked my collarbone — he'll be up to set it as soon as he's tended to Lyons and Dykinck. There ought to be a law passed to keep me from chasing Peaceable Sherwood across slippery rocks in my riding b — "
He broke off with a sharp gasp of pain as he came down from the horse, and I went dashing into the house again and up the stairs for hartshorn and bandages. By the time I got back, Dick was lying on the bed in his own room, Martha was weeping noisily again in Sergeant Tarrington's arms, my father was pouring out sherry for everybody, and Lieutenant Featherstone was perched on the window seat devouring an enormous slice of currant cake and answering questions between mouthfuls.
"It was a nice little stream, too, just the place for trout when Dick and his confounded rangers aren't roiling up the water with their great thundering feet," he was complaining as I came through the door. "There was nobody at the ruins yet when we rode up, and I could easily have had a cast or two into the old mill pond before they came; but Dick made us all climb the hill and lie close behind the trees and rocks to take them by surprise while they were busy with the General. They went to cover in the mill, of course, just as he thought they would — came stealing up through the bushes by twos and threes, all in their masks and cloaks, like brigands in a romance, while we sat watching and having bets which one was Peaceable Sherwood. There must have been seventy of them at least."
"Was he there? Did you see him?" my father interrupted.
"I didn't myself, not at the time, but Dick said he could tell without even thinking twice about it — something about the way he stood and leaned against the old mill-wheel while he was waiting for the rest to come up. They all hid in the ruins when they heard the General's party on the road, and then went boiling out like hornets the minute it came around the bend into the ford. The next thing I knew we were tearing down the hill after them, and everybody was fighting like mad in the middle of the water. You never heard such a commotion: the poor trout will never be the same again. It was mostly all fists and rocks and every man for himself, if you see what I mean — not very much firing on either side because it was so hard to aim without hitting your own men in the tangle. The outlaws were almost two to one, of course, but our first big charge down the hill had taken them off their feet, and they were beginning to lose their heads. Peaceable Sherwood might have rallied them if he'd had the chance, but old heroic Dick there had gone straight after him over the bank, and was hanging on like death itself when his boot slipped and they both came down with the most awful crash over the rocks. Then about fifteen of his own men went rushing up — they must think very highly of him — and contrived somehow to throw his body over a loose horse and make clean away with it in all the confusion. But they were just the mountain people — his own particular private guard, so to speak. We got every one of the others, I'm thankful to say. They started to surrender in droves as soon as they lost him."
"You mean Peaceable's dead?" I asked, hardly able to believe my ears.
"Oh, no — there wasn't enough of a fall. My guess is it only knocked him out," murmured Dick from the bed. "You can't kill that man, except maybe with a silver bullet, as old Sergeant Lee would say. But I think the situation's in hand now. Even if he gets away, he won't be able to do very much damage without his secret Tories to help and supply him. Now they're gone, the whole organization ought to be pretty well finished."
"What did you do with them?"
"They're on their way to Goshen now, in charge of about twenty rangers and General Washington, himself, no less," replied Lieutenant Featherstone airily. "He said he owed it to Dick, and I was to see him home to his bed the instant he was fit to move. We limped in with the rest of the wounded. Nobody else will be back till the Lord knows when."
"How many others were hurt?"
"None seriously. It all happened too fast and there wasn't enough firing. Lyons has a nasty flesh wound through one arm — some of those mountain men must have been carrying knives — and a big outlaw smashed Dykinck over the head with a sharp rock. The others came out of it with nothing more serious than cuts and bruises, which was something of a miracle, considering how heavily we were outnumbered. General Washington wanted to know where Colonel Van Spurter and his fifty men were." Lieutenant Featherstone smiled happily, as if savoring some pleasant memory. "He seemed very much annoyed with Colonel Van Spurter, and said that he was going to deal with him in the morning. I only hope I'm somewhere about when he hears the news. I wonder where he is now? And what's become of that confounded doctor? I thought I heard his sweet, gentle voice outside the door five minutes ago."
The door opened halfway with a jerk, and the doctor said over his shoulder: "Well, stop scratching then!" as he flounced into the room. He was a wizened, peppery little man who seemed to live in a state of continual irritation. He slammed the door with another exasperated jerk and darted at Dick like a dragonfly.
"Didn't I tell you not to go falling on that shoulder again the last time I patched you up?" he demanded peevishly. "What do you think your bones are made of, anyway — granite? And who's that other tom fool you've got out there in the hall? Worst case of poison ivy I ever saw. Must have spent hours crouching in a nest of it. Said he was watching for outlaws or something and didn't notice. Notice! As if anyone but a born idiot couldn't see it grows all over Bald Rock!"
Lieutenant Featherstone on the window seat behind me suddenly uttered a sort of strangled yelp, and Dick sat up in the bed so quickly that he jarred his broken collarbone and gasped.
"Yes, and it's going to hurt you even worse in a minute," snapped the doctor, untying the scarf around the injured shoulder. "Lieutenant Featherhead or whatever you call yourself, come here and hold that candle for me. Eleanor, what are you standing there for? I detest women breathing down the back of my neck. If you must make yourself useful, go away and mix up some slippery elm poultice for your afflicted friend in the hall. And tell him I said to stop scratching!"
I spent a most trying half hour with the disconsolate Colonel Van Spurter, and when I finally got him off to bed and came back downstairs, everything was over and Lieutenant Featherstone and the doctor were out by the hall fire planning a fishing trip and sharing one of the pumpkin pies Martha had made that afternoon. Fortunately, the other pumpkin pie had disappeared out at the back door with Martha and Sergeant
Tarrington some time before.
"Hell do now," said the doctor briefly, jerking his head at the closed door across the hall. "Give him some of that hot broth when you settle him for the night — it may help him drop off. Looks half starved to me, anyway. Don't you ever feed him?"
Dick was lying back against the pillows with his eyes shut, very white and exhausted, his left arm in a sling and the free one hanging limply down the side of the coverlet. He seemed only half conscious, and I slipped my own arm under his head to steady him as I fed him the broth. He managed to drink it, and when I put the empty cup down on the night table by the bed, he turned his head a little to look at me.
"Eleanor?" he said drowsily.
"Yes, Dick?"
"General Washington says he's withdrawing the special forces from the County."
"Yes, Dick."
"But he says he'd like me to stay on here for a while with about ten men to get Peaceable if I can, and make sure he doesn't try to start something else."
"Yes, Dick."
"Would you mind very much if I stayed on?"
"No, Dick."
"I don't want to be a nuisance to you."
"Of course not. Hadn't you better try to go to sleep now?"
There was a moment's silence, and I thought he might be dropping off at last. Then the dark head stirred restlessly on my arm again.
"Eleanor?"
"Yes, Dick."
"Do you remember the way we used to fight when we were children?"
"Yes, Dick."
"I scrubbed your face with mud once."
"So you did."
"For telling me what I was thinking."
"Yes, Dick."
"How did you always manage to get even the words right?"
"I don't know, Dick."
There was another silence, so long that this time I thought he must really have gone to sleep.
"Eleanor?"
"Yes, Dick."
"You haven't done that to me for a long while."
"No, Dick, I haven't."
"Could you still do it?"
"I might."
"Can you tell me what I'm thinking now?"
"I suppose so."
"Even the words?"
I drew the dark head over to my shoulder, and put my lips against his hair. "I love you with all my heart," I said to him. "Now will you please go to sleep?"
Eleanor Shipley broke off, cocking her head as if she were listening to something, and then suddenly rose from the big footstool by the armchair.
"I have to go," she said, smiling at me. "That will be Petunia coming down the hall with the mail now."
"But it doesn't matter — it really doesn't matter," I entreated her. "There won't be anything for me anyway."
"How do you know?" She smiled at me again, and then with one of her quick butterfly movements, she was across the room and out through the French window into the garden just as Petunia opened the door from the hall.
"Was that you talking, Miss Peggy?" she asked. "I didn't know where you'd got to since breakfast. This here letter come for you this morning in the mail."
The letter was addressed to me with a very thick pencil in large, uncertain capitals that staggered drunkenly all over the envelope. It looked as if it had been done by a small child who was just beginning school and had not yet grasped the principles of punctuation. The sheet inside was covered with more of the same writing.
"Am stuck fast here Mrs. Dykemann's," it began abruptly:
Betsy tried to jump fence probably her idea of a joke Betsy unhurt but cracked my collarbone also concussion they wouldn't let me have a pencil till today no further trace of ancestor yet but Mrs. Dykemann has dug up family relic most curious specimen of cipher supposed to have been used by Tory guerrillas during Revolution have made copy to show you if you will just come see me you'll never guess what it is will you please come see me?
PAT
I sat there on the floor by the open drawer of the Chippendale cabinet holding the letter while all the birds in the garden outside seemed with one accord to burst suddenly into song. It was quite a long while before I finally got to my feet and went over to the big secretary to work out my answer.
"Dear Pat," I wrote slowly:
I worry in lighthouses like cannonballs Can over methods; every association soothes some other opening, So never assert such positive outrageous Guess: see secret inner balance Look lions everywhere Here.
PEGGY
The Bean Pot
PEGGY!"
"Yes, Uncle Enos," I murmured dutifully but not enthusiastically. It was a warm afternoon, and I was very comfortably stretched out in the cool library after a long horseback ride over to New Jerusalem to call on Pat at Mrs. Dykemann's. Mrs. Dykemann, all of a flutter, had given us iced tea on the side porch, with thin watercress sandwiches and a superlative currant cake which she said had come down in her family from the time Eleanor Shipley gave the recipe to her great-great-great-grandmother. "Her name was Martha," Mrs. Dykemann had remarked, "and the recipe was a present from Miss Shipley when she went away to get married, after the Revolution."
"You never told me that, Mrs. Dykemann," Pat reproached her from the hammock. His arm was still in a sling, and Mrs. Dykemann was keeping a careful eye on him.
"The fact is, I'd forgotten it till this minute," she said apologetically. "I guess it was meeting Miss Grahame put me in mind of it again. Let me see, didn't Eleanor Shipley marry one of the Grahame boys? I know there was some sort of connection. I think Martha worked for her out at the Shipley Farm before she moved to Rest-and-be-thankful. Maybe you've heard about it?"
As I could not very well tell them exactly how I had heard about it, I merely smiled and shook my head and asked for another slice of the —
"Peggy!"
"Yes, Uncle Enos? I beg your pardon. I wasn't attending."
"I've been looking for you," said Uncle Enos peevishly. "Why aren't you ever around when I want you?" That, incidentally, was a fine remark, coming from him. "Where have you been all day?"
"I went for a ride."
"Oh?" said Uncle Enos, losing interest. The question had been intended simply as a reproof. "It's this article I'm writing on eighteenth-century drinking customs for the next issue of Antiques and Collectors," he explained, brushing away the whole subject of the ride with a wave of his hand. "I want you to run downstairs for me at once, and see just how many bottles those racks in the wine cellar can hold. I've mislaid my note of the exact number, and I never like going down those steep steps myself: it's bad for my rheumatism."
"Can't you send Petunia?" I asked lazily. I had ridden almost fourteen miles out and back since morning, and the wine cellar seemed a long way off.
"Petunia! I shouldn't trust Petunia to count six bottles of ginger ale; she's too flighty. You can take her with you to hold the light if you want to. It's dark down there."
The wine cellar at Rest-and-be-thankful was enormous, built in the days when sherry and claret and port and Madeira and brandy appeared every night on a gentleman's table as a matter of course. Uncle Enos himself never drank anything except a modest cup of hot cocoa at his desk before he went to bed, but he took a certain pride in keeping up all the family traditions, and so the sherry and claret and port and Madeira and brandy were still there in their long dusty racks, as if waiting forlornly for the jolly old butlers and the liveried menservants who never came any more. It was very dark indeed, and the stairs were even steeper than Uncle Enos had led me to suppose. Cobwebs touched our faces at every step, and unseen creatures ran before our feet with unpleasant scampering noises. It seemed a long time before I finished my count, and then I had to do it all over again, because Petunia was so frightened by the darkness and the rustlings that she kept putting me off by giving sudden squeaks of terror and wavering the light with her unsteady hand.
"Eighty-seven — eighty-eight — will you keep still, Petunia? Eighty-nine — if you drop that candle, we'll probably have to stay here al
l night — ninety — ninety-one. No, we are not going to run back to the stairs. I want to look around a little. It's an interesting place."
And since at the bottom of my heart I was actually feeling just as uncomfortable as she was, I took particular pains to saunter slowly and casually back to the door, looking idly about me and asking questions, as if I were mildly curious and not especially anxious to leave.
"What do you keep in there, Petunia?" I inquired, making myself pause almost at the cellar steps to point to a queer sort of door, lurking sullenly in a corner, half concealed by the angle of the stairs. It was made of iron grating, like the door of a prison cell, and was fastened on the outside, top and bottom, not only with two long rusty bolts but a clumsy large lock as well.
"I don't know, Miss Peggy!" protested Petunia, trying unobtrusively to work me on up the steps. "You won't find nothing in there. Mr. Enos says it ain't been open since the Revolution."
I went over to the door and tried to lift the upper bolt, which fell with a deep grinding moan. Petunia gave another squeak of terror, and almost dropped the candle again.
"Haunted!" she said in a sepulchral whisper. "Don't you go in there, Miss Peggy."
"Nonsense, Petunia. See! There's nothing in here but cobwebs and maybe a few — ouch!" I had stumbled and nearly fallen over a rounded object half buried in the dust on the floor. It appeared to be a jar of some sort, but had become so caked and encrusted over the years that it was almost unrecognizable. As I straightened up again I felt a touch on my shoulder, and peering around, saw that I had brushed against two ugly iron chains suspended from the wall. I could not understand why they had been hung there until I caught sight of an iron ring attached to one of them. They were shackles.
"Come on out of there, Miss Peggy, before something gets you," wailed Petunia unhelpfully, from the doorway.
The Sherwood Ring Page 8
