“Stop!” piped Miss Seeton, waving her umbrella almost as if she were hailing a taxi. The pony tossed its head and whinnied. In the moonlight one could see the whites of its rolling eyes. “Stop!” But Miss Seeton’s genteel command was lost above the barks, and the sounds of battle from the seven men left behind. “Stop!”
Her ankle protested, but she ignored its protests. Into the very path of the runaway trap scuttled Miss Seeton, with her umbrella in her hand. She had remembered something she once read about a barking dog and a Japanese sunshade. She waited until the pony was almost upon her and then, with a flourish, opened the umbrella right under its nose. With a startled whicker, the pony showed its teeth, and stopped dead in its tracks.
“Thank goodness,” said Miss Seeton breathlessly, taking a few faltering steps towards the poor creature’s head and trying to furl her umbrella at the same time. Tucking it under her arm, she grabbed blindly at the strange confusion of leather straps and clinking metal which dangled from the pony’s neck. Which part of the harness—bridle? reins?—did exactly what, Miss Seeton had no idea. Of course, one was aware that it was by such means the driver could control the animal, but the idea that anyone else should attempt to control it . . .
For one thing, it looked far larger, close to, than one had somehow expected. And Miss Seeton hadn’t realised just how very menacing a pony’s teeth could look, when it curled its lips and, well, one might almost say it snarled . . .
Miss Seeton, in her time, had controlled an entire class of schoolchildren, and had won several battles of wits with Amelia Potter’s infamous tabby, Tibs. A solitary pony pulling a cart ought surely to be an easier proposition—one had always understood that one tugged on the reins, whichever these might be, and, well, instructed the pony to obey one’s wishes.
Except that Miss Seeton had wished it to do nothing more than stop. Which it had. But now, evidently realising that the person who had stopped it had no real notion of what to do next, it was beginning to give the distinct impression that it didn’t intend to remain stopped for long. It threw back its head once more and neighed. An answering bark came from the neighbourhood of the fighting men . . .
Miss Seeton recalled that one patted horses to soothe them. Tentatively, she patted the pony’s neck. It was snatched away from her inexpert hand in irritation—and the reins with it. Miss Seeton heard, above the sounds of the still-fighting men, the sound of a stamped hoof, and the creaking jingle of harness. If it should start to run away again . . .
“I think, my dear,” she panted, as she fumbled for the dangling leather once more, “that if you could possibly help me by, er, catching hold of . . . if you could prevent him from . . . I really am unable to hold . . .”
The poor girl made no response to this disjointed plea, either by word or by deed. Rigid with shock, supposed Miss Seeton. Which was hardly surpri—“Stop!” The pony began to move off. Miss Seeton pulled frantically on every piece of leatherwork she could find: the pony ignored her. It was moving away—it was moving past—one could hardly seize it by the tail, poor creature, even for the sake of—
“Oh. But surely—Oh, I see. Good gracious—no wonder . . .” As the body of the trap lumbered past, and Miss Seeton panted alongside its creaking weight, she had looked desperately up to admonish the young woman and bid her play her part. Sometimes, when one was in a state of shock, a brisk slap about the face—not that one could easily reach her face, being so much higher, but . . .
But the deceptive moonlight was deceptive no more. Miss Seeton saw, as the trap rolled past, not a young woman—not exactly—a young woman, certainly, but not flesh and blood.
It was the statue of the goddess Hiberna.
chapter
~24~
NO SOONER HAD this shocking realisation dawned on her than Miss Seeton realised several other things, all at once.
The seven men were still fighting.
The pony was still moving.
The trap would soon be out of reach . . .
Miss Seeton threw one swift glance back towards the surging, struggling, mass of angry men, and knew she stood no chance of interrupting the fight while everyone was so preoccupied with hitting everyone else. So preoccupied that they hadn’t noticed how the pony was pulling the trap away—with the statue, which, no matter how high the youthful spirits, she felt sure could not have been, well, lawfully removed from the temple. Because it had been there for over three hundred years. It belonged there. And now it wasn’t there anymore . . .
Miss Seeton’s sense of the rightness of things made her forget all about her ricked ankle and her aching knee. With a reproachful click of the tongue, she turned away from the fight and began to trot after the trap, slightly faster than the pony, saving her breath for the chase rather than waste it in what she knew would be useless exhortations to the animal to stop. She doubted whether it would. It sensed, she felt sure, that she had no proper idea of how to control it; like a child set unexpectedly free from the discipline of school, it was what one might call running riot. Or preparing to do so . . .
It was not easy for Miss Seeton to swing herself up into the back of the trap. She tossed her umbrella and handbag over the low side to leave her hands free, then made a grab as she continued to run—but failed to hold firm, and fell back. She braced herself for another attempt. She did not dare approach from the side: the wheels seemed as tall as she was, turning in their iron rims, creaking, heavy . . .
She made it. Gasping, she scrambled on hands and knees—she rather feared that her stockings must be laddered, but fortunately there had been no splinters as she fell on the wooden floor—past the statue and towards the front of the trap, where she knew the reins should be.
But where, to her dismay, they weren’t. Of course. She must have pulled them off the . . . the driving seat when she first caught hold of the pony’s head. No wonder it had been so, well, irritable—as irritable as, she recognised, the men she was rapidly leaving in her wake were. They seemed to have stopped fighting, and were calling after her.
“I can’t stop,” Miss Seeton called back to them, trying to make herself heard above the thump of hooves on grass and the rattling jingle of harness. “Oh, dear.” And she found herself sitting down once more with a bump.
The men shouted again. Some of them began to run. “I can’t,” cried Miss Seeton, trying to make them understand. The shouts continued. The pony began to—trot, rather than walk? Gallop, rather than trot? It was moving faster than before, anyway. And she still couldn’t stop it, no matter how much she was asked to do so.
The hubbub seemed to have aroused the house. In rooms all over the upper floors of Belton Abbey, lights came on. Miss Seeton found herself being carried willy-nilly towards the busy, watching windows: towards, past, and then beyond. Hurry as they might, the men behind her showed no signs of catching up with her; shout with amazement as they might, the people in the windows could not deter the pony from its onward flight.
Miss Seeton looked back nervously at the sight of Lord Edgar—then who was it, if not he and his friends, who had removed the statue from the temple?—trying to make sense of what was happening below, leaning—no, hanging—from the window, calling after her . . .
Miss Seeton gasped, and fell backwards. Useless to try to keep her balance; her dancing hands made abstract patterns in the air. The air which was moving past her faster than ever, as the pony, maddened now by the shouts of those who pursued it in the other trap, took the bit, literally, between its teeth. And bolted.
“Not much farther now, sir,” said Bob Ranger cheerfully. He had slowed to read the name on a signpost, and would have played a high-spirited tootle on the horn had his superior not fixed him with a steely sideways look.
“Not much farther? We have made suspiciously excellent time, Detective Sergeant Ranger. I trust that there was no exceeding the speed limit during my innocent slumbers?”
Bob grinned. “All strictly legal, sir, but you said the roads would be clea
r at night—and they were. We’ll have to camp out in the car until the landlord, or whoever wakes up first tomorrow, wakes up.”
Delphick peered at the luminous numbers on his watch. “You mean today, Bob. Yesterday, you looked forward to seeing Anne tomorrow: and today is tomorrow, as it were. Great heavens, I’m starting to sound like MissEss. Put it down to proximity, although . . .” And he yawned. “No doubt, being half-asleep as I am, I am picking up psychic vibrations from her dreams . . .”
“Stop!” cried a tumult of voices to the rear; but the pony galloped on. Miss Seeton was bumped, and bruised, and helpless. One had never ridden in so much as a governess-cart, suitable though such a conveyance might have b—
“Oh, no!” Now they were tearing down that long, curving drive in the direction of—surely not—but one remembered, only too well—the main road. Would the gravel, the uneven surface, drag against the wheels? Such did not appear to be the case. Miss Seeton shuddered. Suppose—if those pursuing her did not manage to catch up before the pony passed through the gates—a car were to come in the opposite direction? It must—she must—be stopped. The alternative was too awful to contemplate.
Miss Seeton groped for her umbrella, looking back as she did so. The second trap had taken a short cut across the grass, deceived by the moonlight into believing it to be a flat, smooth surface: it bounced and juddered and moved more slowly than she. They would never catch her up in time.
Miss Seeton, that keen cinema-goer, remembered the scene in Stagecoach where John Wayne is seen leaping from horse to horse to seize the dropped reins and restore control. Only, of course, it hadn’t been John Wayne, but a stuntman. Miss Seeton shuddered again. The practice of yoga, while making one undeniably fit and agile, hardly prepared one for such daunting feats.
It did, on the other hand, impart a certain degree of mental agility. Better late, reflected Miss Seeton as the pony swept through the gates of Belton Abbey and turned up the main road, than never. The moon shone clear and bright, and she could see that the—traces?—the reins had somehow, as the pony skidded and turned, been caught—snagged—had been stopped in their slithering and sliding—had been held comparatively still, so that if one possessed a steady eye, a hand and wrist made skilful by many years spent wielding a paintbrush—and something like a stick, with a curved end to it—something like an umbrella . . .
“Talking of psychic manifestations, sir,” said Bob, slowing the car to take a sharp bend, “perhaps we should keep an eye open for the tragic maidservant as we pass the Abbey turning—I know the temple mound’s a bit far from the road, but, well, I’ve never seen a ghost. And if she’s likely to come popping out in her draperies in front of the car . . .”
“There are other ghosts in these parts, older ghosts by far,” said Delphick, drowsily. “The little dark people who fled west when the Romans came . . .”
“Boadicea,” supplied Bob promptly. Delphick woke up at once. His sergeant was a dear chap, but . . .
“Boadicea, or Boudicca, was of the Iceni, a tribe of the east. She never came this far west—she began her revolt by burning Colchester and London. Camulodunum”—he yawned again—“and Londinium.”
“Knives on her chariot wheels,” said Bob, remembering history lessons at school.
“Also St. Albans,” Delphick informed him, frowning at this perpetuation of what was generally accepted now as nothing but propaganda. “Otherwise Verula—what the hell!”
“Hey!” cried Bob, slamming on the brakes. “What—who—I don’t believe in . . .”
But there, in front of his eyes—and, it seemed from the force of his exclamation, his superior’s—the ghost of a warrior queen, in her battle chariot, came thundering down the road towards them, with another chariot appearing in hot pursuit around the bend. Another chariot that was gaining, as the first chariot slowed—that was drawing almost level—and then, as the driver apparently for the first time noticed the stalled car blocking the road, performing an erratic manoeuvre that was half overtaking, half evasion . . .
Or trying to perform. But failing. And ending up in the ditch . . .
Delphick and Bob, unclasping their safety belts as one and leaping from their seats to see what assistance they could render, were prepared for the bad language, and the groans, and the startled whinnies of the pony as it trampled in the mud, its traces broken. They were prepared for blood—and bruises—and broken limbs . . .
But they were most definitely not prepared to hear, from the driver’s seat of the cart which had caused all the problems in the first place, a voice they both knew well.
“Why, good evening, Chief Superintendent Delphick,” said Miss Seeton. “And dear Bob, too. How very fortunate that it should be you. I was thinking, you see, that it would be so useful if I could find a policeman . . .”
It was in Belchester police station, twelve miles away, that Delphick and Bob began to make sense of what had happened. They were not alone in their intense desire for enlightenment: Lord Edgar Bremeridge, his father’s steward, and Miss Emily Seeton all knew part of the puzzle, but nobody could unravel the whole without the help of the others.
Lord Edgar, a quick-thinking, fast-moving, and extremely fit young man, had come pelting down the drive with one of the duke’s shotguns in his hand, ready to repel intruders as necessary. He was followed at a surprisingly (for his age) close distance by Faulkbourne, brandishing one of the pikes from the armoury. The rest of the ducal household, following haphazardly in their wake with an assortment of weapons, were deflected from their immediate purpose by the sight of three staggering forms near the temple knoll.
The forms staggered all the more after the confrontation with the first footman, under-footman, upper housemaid (the under-housemaid being incapacitated by a wisdom tooth), and cook. These loyal domestics rapidly deduced that his lordship and Mr. Faulkbourne must, in their haste, have missed the trespassers; it was their clear duty to remedy the oversight; and they accordingly fell upon the hapless three, who were already battered and bruised from their encounter with the four large men in the pony and trap.
The rolling pin wielded by the cook had been the final inducement. The three men surrendered; and it was while they were being escorted in triumph back to the house that the party encountered Delphick, Lord Edgar, and assorted allies coming back up the drive with four more men under guard. (Jasper, trained for poaching, had headed silently home at his master’s whistled command, there to await his return.) The four took one look at the three, and things seemed about to get out of hand; but Lord Edgar’s quick wits again came into their own. His lordship understood at once that the malefactors could not be dealt with in Belton. The village police house had been designed for the odd poacher, tramp, or drunk: there was nothing so formal as one cell, let alone seven. Belchester it must be: but the transporting of so ill-assorted a group would cause problems, unless the chief superintendent agreed to co-opt Lord Edgar and Faulkbourne as what might be called emergency volunteers. With the loan of the ducal Land Rover . . .
“Not quite how I expected our journey from Town to end,” remarked Delphick, as he sat with his auxiliaries drinking a welcome cup of coffee. “An altogether stimulating finish, thanks to you, Miss Seeton.”
“Chief Superintendent, I assure you—”
He ignored her pinkened cheeks and fluttering hands. “I repeat, stimulating—and rewarding, undoubtedly. For, with your help, Miss Seeton, and that of his lordship, and Faulkbourne, of course, not to mention those unable to be present for, er, various reasons—we can be confident that we have collared a vital cohort of the Croesus Gang . . .”
chapter
~25~
“GOOD GRACIOUS,” SAID Miss Seeton faintly. Delphick smiled, regarding her with amused affection. Goodness knows how she always managed to come up trumps—but she did . . .
“The Croesus Gang?” repeated Lord Edgar Bremeridge, with a frown. “I had one of the local coppers—crime prevention or some such—call on me the other day,
nattering about the Croesus Gang, and security at the Abbey. But he certainly never gave me to understand that the risk of being robbed by Croesus was particularly great. If I’d known . . .” He broke off to sigh, and shake a rueful head. “Oh, well . . .”
“At the time, I don’t suppose he realised the risk was particularly great.” Delphick thought it better not to let his lordship suspect that the crime prevention officer’s visit had been more in the nature of an attempt to advise on the Raffles robbery, about which the police had then known, officially, nothing. He glanced towards Faulkbourne, who appeared slightly uncomfortable at Lord Edgar’s words, and gave him a reassuring smile as he continued:
“If your lordship had only seen fit to report the loss of the Belton snuffbox collection, we might not have been taken so much by surprise when the news was broken later by the tabloid press. As it was, however, the papers had a field day—and every detail of the Bremeridge history was broadcast to the general public. Most members of which, of course, read it with no more than ordinary interest, maybe decided to visit the Abbey on a day trip, nothing more—but Croesus, as I shall continue for the present to call him, was a rather more avid reader than most. He read about the Temple of Hiberna—and decided at once that the statue must be his. Accordingly, he—”
“Why?” broke in Lord Edgar, echoed by Faulkbourne, whose expression was unreadable. “What on earth possessed the man to pinch Armless Arabella? He must be mad.”
“Very probably. The consensus of expert opinion”—here Delphick shot a quick look at Miss Seeton, and smiled—“is that he’s not only mad, but that his madness takes the form of an excessive interest in all things cold: what we might call cryomania, perhaps, or hypolepsy. No doubt the trick cyclists have a proper term for his condition, which is not only chronic, but severe. It is also irrational, in that the intrinsic value of the items he desires is of no importance. They may be priceless—or without price. All that matters is that they catch his fancy—”
Miss Seeton by Moonlight (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 12) Page 19
