Miss Seeton by Moonlight (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 12)

by Crane,Hamilton

  An hour and twenty minutes later, having spent rather longer than they’d intended paying court to Orlando, the stately marmalade cat whose closer acquaintance they had been permitted to make on their second night at the hotel, Anne and Miss Seeton were bowling through the countryside in Anne’s little car, with the windows down and a breeze on their faces, filling the air with the heavy scent of summer. Anne drove steadily, but not fast, around the narrow lanes, and above the engine’s purr the clamour of birdsong, the lowing of cattle, and the bleating of sheep could be easily heard. Miss Seeton looked about her with delight, revelling in each sight and sound and odour. So different from her dear Kentish landscape, but still so lovable, so English . . .

  She sighed with happiness. Anne said at once: “Are you tired, Aunt Em, or bored? Do you want to stop at the next place we come to for a cup of tea or something?”

  “Oh, please don’t think that,” cried Miss Seeton, afraid that she had somehow given dear Anne entirely the wrong impression. “There’s no need at all to go to any such trouble on my account, truly. I am having a lovely time, and am not tired in the least. I was simply admiring the beauties of the scenery, and . . .”

  Anne saw her hands dancing on her lap. She recognised the signs. “And you’d like to sketch the view? Why didn’t you say so sooner? We can’t stop just yet—there’d be no room for anyone to pass safely—but with luck there’ll be a lay-by before too long. I’ll park the car off the road, and you can set up your easel, if you like, and enjoy yourself while I stretch my legs. How would that be?”

  Ignoring Miss Seeton’s protests that really, she hadn’t intended dear Anne to go to any bother on her account, Anne pulled into the lay-by which appeared a providential three minutes later, just past a minor crossroads, beside a giant beech. The car rolled into the welcome leafy shade, and Anne switched off the engine. “I’ll get your things out of the boot,” she said, and had darted round to the back of the car before Miss Seeton could say another word.

  While Miss Seeton leaned her sketching block on the top of a five-barred gate and gazed at the scenery, Anne, true to her word, sauntered off to indulge in a little exploring. Miss Seeton would be perfectly happy for half an hour, at least; if she grew tired, or hungry, she could sit in the car and nibble chocolate biscuits. Anne told herself she probably would, and it was therefore up to her to replenish the stock by finding, if such a thing existed in the immediate neighbourhood, a village, with its concomitant shop—or, as it might be (a guilty giggle came bubbling up) shops. One of which might sell secondhand bargains . . .

  If she hadn’t lived for so long in Plummergen before her marriage, Anne might have expected a signpost at the crossroads, giving distances to the nearest signs of human habitation: but she’d grown wise in the years since her father’s retirement, on health grounds, from his position as one of London’s leading neurologists. The Knights had arrived in Kent to have several cherished beliefs destroyed within a surprisingly short time. One had been that in the middle of the countryside, travellers might reasonably be supposed to want to know in what direction they were travelling. It had quickly become clear that anyone displaying such selfish needs would never be indulged by the locals. They knew where they were coming from, or going to, and how far that might be: why pander to the fancy notions of furriners, or encourage strangers to wander where they would? Dr. Knight diagnosed fifty percent of this reaction as due to rustic paranoia; and fifty percent to the fact that it wasn’t yet thirty-five years since all the signposts had been removed for fear of invasion in 1940. It always took time to sort such matters out afterwards—and even when anyone made the effort to sort them, it was chancy to rely too much on the distances given. His prescribed formula was based on a multiplication by three and subsequent division by two, but he would add the rider that there were times when you had to apply the formula back-to-front, multiplying by two and dividing by three, because they didn’t want you to feel complacent about having cracked it—and you could never tell when it might be one of those times . . .

  So, even though she wouldn’t have trusted one too much had she seen one, Anne saw no signpost. She saw, however, a five-barred gate, and climbed carefully up the hinged side to balance on the upper rail. She gazed in all directions: no village, or at least not for several miles. Oh, well, it was a nice day for a stroll, anyway. She went on for about a mile, and came to a stile, with a footpath sign pointing to Little Belton, supposedly three miles across the fields: too far, even if she believed it. She sat happily on the bottom step for a while, delighting in the warm summer near-silence, hoping Miss Seeton was finding it all half as much fun. She was drifting off into a daydream when she heard, approaching in the distance, the rattle of wheels accompanied by a wooden, creaking sound.

  The pony and trap came trotting down the road towards her, harness jingling, hooves clip-clopping. The hooves belonged to a sturdy little chestnut with a shaggy mane, whose reins were held by a man every bit as brown and shock-headed as his pony; equally shock-headed was the large grey dog which sat beside the man, who, as he drew near Anne, with a fine flourish of his whip pulled the trap to a halt, and leaned across to smile a gap-toothed, leathery smile as he chanted:

  “Enn yole dahn—rags, bols, bones?” Anne blinked at the traditional cry, uttered in a strange yodel, obviously intended to carry. Was it likely that anyone in the middle of nowhere, as she was, would have a ready supply of scrap iron or empty bottles to sell? The weather-beaten man saw her surprise, and chuckled richly.

  “Oh, pay no heed to me. I do nothing more than keep in practice for what people expect, that’s all.” His normal voice was a husky rumble, but perfectly articulate. “Today is a fine day for sharing laughter, is it not?”

  “It certainly is.” Anne returned his smile. “A lovely day all round, as far as I’m concerned, and I hope it’s the same for you. Your trap looks pretty full—have you had much luck so far?”

  “I don’t complain.” He flourished his whip once more, and the pony tossed its head. “Easy now, Bucephalus. Quiet you, Jasper,” as the great lurcher at his side pricked up its ears. “Someone in the village back there has been minded to renovate a house, casting out the radiators for night storage heaters, and more besides. Not that I hold overmuch with electricity, mark you, but there’s no accounting for taste—though it would never suit the likes of them to live as me and mine, to cook over an outdoor fire and light the caravan with tallow dips. But there’s the only real life, the freedom of the road.” He glanced at her, and contrived to look wise. “Nothing and nowhere to tie you down, nobody telling you what to do—the sky for a roof in summer—the sun and the stars and the wind on the heath . . .”

  “Life is very sweet,” agreed Anne, with a straight face. After a startled moment, he laughed. Beneath the shaggy fringe his black eyes danced in his weathered face, and his white teeth flashed; even the dog Jasper twitched a knowing ear in sympathy with his master’s mirth.

  “You’re a clever, well-read young lady, and if my woman was with me she’d tell you a good fortune, I know. But our camp’s ten miles from here, and she busy cooking, and caring for the babes while we earn an honest penny, my brothers and me. Yet you’re a long way from home too, aren’t you?” The whip indicated the loneliness about them. “Lost, stolen, or strayed? Would the offer of a lift tempt you?”

  “That’s awfully kind—but it depends on where you were going. I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way—”

  “You talk like a fool,” he broke in, and flourished the whip with a crack. Bucephalus danced in his traces, and the dog Jasper uttered a sharp bark. “Steady, my friends. What was I saying a moment since about the freedom to go where I please? Step up now on the cart with me, and I’ll carry you where you will—I’m in no rush to reach one place above another, so long as I’m home by nightfall and my cart filled with that which others don’t want. Yet on a day like this, I’ll put other people’s wishes above other people’s rubbish, and if you’re wish
ful to be carried home . . .”

  “My car’s about a mile down that road,” said Anne, pointing, “in a lay-by. I left my aunt there admiring the scenery, while I went for a walk, and—”

  “And you’ll come back to her in style, in my cart. Not on Shanks’s Pony, but pulled by the pony of Tawno Petulengro—if you will believe me,” he added, showing his teeth in a grin. “Such a well-read young lady as you . . .”

  And Anne’s laughter mingled with his as she scrambled up beside the man who called himself Tawno Petulengro, and Bucephalus the chestnut pony trotted down the road towards the lay-by where Miss Seeton was sketching.

  chapter

  ~18~

  WHEN MISS SEETON, perched on the trunk of a fallen tree, saw the totter’s cart setting Anne down at the lay-by, she shut her sketchbook hurriedly and tucked it under her arm before crossing the field back to the car. By the time she reached the lay-by, Anne was alone.

  She was standing by the closed boot of the car with a strange expression on her face. Miss Seeton said: “Have I kept you waiting, my dear? I’m so sorry, but I was enjoying the view—the sunlight on the beech leaves, so fresh and summery—and one cannot walk quickly across farmland, even when there is an adequate footpath.”

  “Waiting? Oh, no, I’m the one who’s kept you waiting, and I hope you weren’t too bored. But I was having rather a . . . an interesting little adventure, you see.” Anne’s gaze drifted down the road after the vanished pony and trap, then back to the boot of the car. She sighed, and shook her head. “Only now I can’t help wondering . . .”

  It wasn’t like Anne to be indecisive. Miss Seeton’s own thought processes were sometimes so incoherent that only she knew what she meant, but it always surprised her when anyone else displayed similar tendencies. She regarded Anne with an anxious eye. Going for a walk as the morning advanced—surely it couldn’t be sunstroke? How would they make their way back to the hotel if dear Anne was unable to drive the car? “A pony and trap, I suppose,” she murmured, and Anne’s rueful chuckle made her jump.

  “The pony’s name is Bucephalus, and the driver called himself Tawno Petulengro, though I doubt if that’s really his name. It’s obvious that he’s read George Borrow—you know, The Romany Rye—and worked up his patter into a pretty good line—he’s certainly a persuasive salesman,” as she gazed at the boot once more. “When I spotted it on the cart it seemed just the thing, but now . . .”

  Miss Seeton quirked an eyebrow at her, and waited. Anne chuckled again. “I may as well show you—but you must promise not to laugh, Aunt Em. It seemed such a bargain at the time, and I was thinking of you anyway, which is why . . .”

  She opened the boot, and Miss Seeton peered inside. Her eye was caught by something dark, patterned with flowers and gleaming. “Good gracious,” she said, stretching out an exploratory hand. “That looks not unlike . . .”

  “An umbrella stand, yes. Heaven knows why I bought it! Maybe thinking about you made me more receptive to the idea, when I realised how long I’d been gone and wondered if you minded, though you of all people don’t need a papier-mâché umbrella stand. And nor do we! Bob put up a row of hooks for coats and macs, and neither of us has an umbrella, except the cheap collapsible sort. And this could hardly do duty as a coat stand, could it? But even if it’s meant to be for umbrellas, I’ll have to find something else I can use it for, or Bob will never let me forget it. I’m only thankful it isn’t made out of an elephant’s foot. He had such a gift of the gab, I think he could have talked me into buying something even that hideous.”

  “Good gracious,” repeated Miss Seeton faintly. “You say it was a bargain, of course, so I suppose—”

  “What’s a bargain? Something you know you need before you find it, at a price you can afford when you do. Well, I won’t say it was expensive, because it wasn’t, but I really can’t see that we need it. We’ll have to tell Bob it’s a . . . an unusual vase, for long-stemmed flowers, and I want to try my hand at arrangements or something. Unless,” she said doubtfully, “you think it might come in useful for you . . .”

  Miss Seeton regretted that she thought it would not, for all her umbrellas, as dear Anne knew, were clipped in a row in their rack on the wall, taking up as little room as possible in the hall of Sweetbriars. She really couldn’t see that she had either the need, or the space, to put it, but if Anne thought Bob would be cross—

  “Oh, no, he won’t mind at all—I’m the one who’s going to mind, and then only all the teasing. But, well, we’re on holiday, aren’t we? So why not a little extravagance, once in a while?” And she firmly closed the boot on her impulse buy, and changed the subject by asking to see what Miss Seeton had been sketching during her absence.

  There were several quick studies intended, as Miss Seeton explained, for a larger, composite picture once she was home again; not that she really felt she could do justice to the beauties of the area, but she hoped it might at least serve as a reminder, once their little holiday was over. So much more personal, she always thought, than a camera . . .

  Anne had reached the final sketch. “Oh,” she said, and looked at Miss Seeton: who seemed unaware that it was in any way remarkable. But to Anne, who knew her so well, it was. Miss Seeton’s artistic style was generally earnest, plebeian, and painstaking: personal (if she insisted), but the camera she despised could do as well, every time. Yet there were other times, with altogether another style: the style of the swift, almost instinctive line drawings, which had always, to Anne’s knowledge, meant that they deserved more than ordinary attention.

  “Oh,” said Anne, and studied the sketch with care, while Miss Seeton watched a squirrel which, because the two of them stood so still, had scampered up the trunk of the beech and was running along a branch above her head. “Oh . . .”

  There was the pony, pulling the trap, sturdy and shaggy and very like Bucephalus. But Anne couldn’t be sure whether the driver bore any resemblance to Tawno Petulengro; there was no dog by his side, no whip in his hand, and his face was unclear, though every line of his body portrayed secrecy and haste. It was his companions who had startled her, however. Two men, or so it appeared, were beside him on the seat; but the third passenger was in the body of the trap, and had the distinct form of a woman: a woman scantily clad, indeed almost nude, for modesty’s sake draped with folds of unspecified material in only a few strategic places . . .

  Anne was a nurse, so nudity didn’t embarrass her: Miss Seeton had attended life classes as an art student, and very little could embarrass her. But surely this sketch wasn’t suggesting that she regarded Anne as a bare-faced liar, a brazen hussy or an adulteress—she’d only been married five minutes, for heaven’s sake—even if the man might well not be Tawno Petulengro (or whatever his real name was) because, by the time Miss Seeton had come within sight of the road, he’d already disappeared, and it was therefore no surprise that she couldn’t show his face. As for the other two in the picture, they looked even less like the Romany than the driver of the trap did. Besides—Anne peered more closely at the background to the sketch—those weren’t, as she’d at first thought, pine trees in the distance, or strange-roofed houses, but soaring, ice-covered mountains. Of which there were remarkably few in the Belton Abbey neighbourhood, never mind what time of year it might be.

  “Good gracious, how very strange,” remarked Miss Seeton, looking over Anne’s shoulder at her own sketch. “It does rather remind me—How foolish, at the height of summer . . .” Her voice fell, and Anne caught only a few words. “I do wonder why . . . him . . .”

  “Him, who, Aunt Em?” Anne spoke calmly; she knew what importance the police, especially Delphick, placed in Miss Seeton’s instinctive sketches, but she also knew that these same sketches were about the only things which embarrassed the little spinster. Art, she maintained—unless one had the good fortune to be a genius—should reflect only what one saw; and it seemed to disturb her every time she saw, and in her sketches showed that she saw, anything in a way
nobody else seemed to do, looking right through any illusion to the reality behind. It was for these sketches that Scotland Yard paid her the retainer, but it was on the matter of these sketches that Miss Seeton, in her everyday dealings so painfully honest, preferred to ignore the truth.

  “Oh, dear,” said Miss Seeton, and murmured foolish a few times more. “In such hot weather, to be thinking—that is, of course, unless that is the reason for . . . the heat, you see. Perhaps we could call it wishful thinking, although I cannot suppose I would ever attire myself in such a fashion, no matter how high it rose—the temperature, that is. Not him, but hymn. From Greenland’s icy mountains,” sang Miss Seeton, in a cracked but only slightly flat quaver. “To India’s coral strand—though an Indian summer is far hotter than an English one, which means that I must have been in rather a muddled state when I drew this, especially as I do not believe there are any rag-and-bone men in Greenland—or horses, either, and as for India, there are cows, of course, and they are sacred, which must remind one of the hymn, even if it makes little sense to have either a horse or a cow pulling a trap . . .”

  And she seemed so worried by what she obviously thought of as an indication of mental fragility that Anne spent some time reassuring her of her undoubted sanity before coaxing her back into the car, and driving off in the direction of the nearest village likely to possess a teashop. Anne was a great believer in the restorative powers of tannin, and said so, very firmly, as they spotted a likely hanging sign and began to wonder where to park the car. Not doctor’s orders, said Anne with a laugh, but nurse’s—