That's all right, sir," Dawson muttered. The address is not exactly in London."
"I didn't suppose it was, or the old — she wouldn't have told me so."
"Care of Mr. and Mrs. Ives, Ranham Old Park, Ranham, Hertfordshire."
Serene satisfaction animated Martin when he wrote it down, and put it in his pocket. He was still sitting by the telephone in the hall when Lady Brayle herself came downstairs past the dying light from the tall arched window.
Martin, startled, did not get up. She did not look at him; was not conscious of him. On her face was an expression he failed to read. She marched on her flat heels, shoulders swinging a little, to the front door; and departed without a word to anybody.
Then there had been dinner in the high square room at the back of Fleet House, candle-flames on polished wood making a shimmer against daylight through garden trees. H.M. and Masters had somewhat hastily departed after the interview on the roof, saying they were going to see the local police at Brayle. Ricky insisted on Martin's bringing his bag across from the inn. Then the long sitting in the back garden — Dr. Laurier arriving in his own car from just outside Brayle, Ricky rushing into the house to see how his mother was — until the position of the quarter-moon above rustling darkness told them it was time to…
Yes; he had got that address!
Sitting back relaxed, the cigarette-end glowing red against the darkness of Pentecost, Martin felt cool in temperature as well as mind; and he smiled. Tomorrow morning, very early, he would see what train-connections he could make for Ranham in Hertfordshire.
"With luck," he said aloud, "I might get there at breakfast-time.''
The sound of his own voice startled him. By the Lord, he was jumpier than he'd thought! Not a whisper of noise had come from beyond the iron door. Stannard must be sitting in the rocking chair, perhaps wheezing a little as he read Chekhov, near the closed gallows-trap. Martin reached down for the Stevenson; and then flung his head round.
Something was moving and rustling among the paper bales.
Steady, now!
He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his foot. Reaching down for the lamp, he directed it towards the aisle between bales and wall. Whoever it was, the person carried a light Out into the open emerged Ruth Callice: her face anxious, her finger at her lip.
"What the devil are you…?"
"Sh!" Ruth tiptoed over. "I know I'm breaking my promise. But I had to talk to you alone."
This was the Ruth he had known on Thursday night, and for so long: the dark-brown eyes softened and upturned, the hps half parted, that sense of "niceness" which so many persons found impossible to describe. Her sweater-and-slacks costume, Martin observed for the first time, became her very well. She looked at the iron door.
"Can Stan hear us?"
"I don't think so, unless you shout. The door of the — that place is thick oak, and he's got it closed. Where are the others?"
"They went home. I knew / was perfectly at home, if I had a lamp and that thread guide-line." Ruth's smooth forehead slightly wrinkled; a smile curved up the corner of her lip. "Sit down," she invited, "and move over. Have you a cigarette?"
Martin put down the light in its old position with Ruth's lamp beside it, and lit cigarettes for both of them. With his eyes becoming accustomed to near-darkness, he could see that the paper-mountains had been built up on the side of windows. He was acutely conscious of something else: Ruth's physical nearness.
"I suppose,'' Ruth said softly, when the cigarette had several times pulsed and darkened, "you thought I behaved very badly today?"
He had forgotten all about it "No, not in the least" "Well, I did."
"Never mind your behaviour. Why didn’t you ever tell me you knew Jenny? You knew I'd been searching for three years
"Pardon me," Ruth corrected. "I learned it just under a year ago. You got horribly drunk and told me all about it"
"Yes. That's true. I remember. Even so!—"
"Oh, I wish I could make you understand!" The cigarette glowed and darkened nervously. Ruth half turned; In near-darknss he could see the sincerity, the deep earnestness, in the gleam of her eyes. "I had to know whether it was right for both of you, and that wasn't easy. I had to decide what was best"
"You had to decide what was best for us?"
"Yes."
"Forgive me, Ruth. But can you, or I, or anybody else in this bloody Socialist world, say what's best for his neighbour?"
"I knew you wouldn't understand. You see, I'm very fond of Jenny, and I—am rather fond of you. Jenny's had a queer upbringing. Her father and mother, the Earl and Countess, never got on well. Her mother's dead. Her father lives abroad: in Sweden, I think."
"Yes. So Jenny told me."
"She's been brought up by this stately grandmother…" "And you think the old she-dog can stop Jenny from loving me?"
"Oh, she'll love you." Ruth laughed. "She'll love you so desperately that in a year or two you'll be bored to death. Also, Jenny's terribly jealous. And she has almost no sense of humour."
Ruth dropped her cigarette on the floor and trod on it Martin watched her. "How many times have you been in love, Ruth? Did you ever find a sense of humour much of a help?"
Ruth ignored this. She seemed about to add something else about Jenny or Jenny's family, but checked herself.
"And take you, for instance!" she went on, with soft and tender satire. "Do you remember what you said on Thursday night?"
Now the ability of a woman to remember some trivial remark, made possibly decades before, is a weapon which cannot be met
"You said if you ever found Jenny again, and she was engaged, you'd use any trick, however underhand, to get her back again. And what, as it happened, did you actually do?
"Darling, your fair-play-and-no-advantages attitude was ridiculous. If Ricky Fleet hadn't been up to his ears with Susan Harwood, there'd have been trouble. You insisted on keeping your word about the vigil here, though I was a cat and tried to make Jenny even more jealous, than she is.
"Look at your best, or rather your most popular, work! Look at your fencing! Look at Stevenson! You're an old-fashioned romanticist that's what you are, only temperamental and a bit crazy."
Ruth said all this in a low voice, speaking more quickly as she went on. Martin dropped his own cigarette and crushed it out
"What you say," he retorted, "may be true. If it is, if s no very deep damnation. Your friend Stannard…" "Oh, Martin!"
"Why do you say, 'oh, Martin' like that?"
(Yet all the time he was becoming more heavily, acutely aware of Ruth's physical presence.)
"Poor Jack Stannard is only showing off, that's all. He despises younger men, and wants to show them up as ignorant louts. And he's rather tremendous, you know. And that grave bearing of his, shaking hands just as though I were made of fragile china, is so touching that sometimes I—" She paused. "Do you know why he arranged this whole expedition?"
Martin hesitated. "Well! I suppose because he thought you were, you know, more interested in me than you were." ' "So you've guessed that," Ruth mocked softly.
(They were both breathing with a little more quickened beat)
"I'd have known it, of course, if there hadn't been a kind of spell on my brain. In any case, since it happens to be wrong…
"Who says it's wrong?" asked Ruth coolly, and turned round. "Suppose you kiss me."
Now here, it may be submitted, what is any man to do under such circumstances? Besides, human nature is human nature: to put the matter politely. Furthermore, ordinary social behaviour… Anyway, he did not treat her like fragile china.
Suddenly Ruth struggled and pushed herself away.
This doesn't mean anything," she said. After waiting a while, she repeated in a calmer tone: This doesn't mean any’ thing."
The thought of Jenny, even in Martin's present state of mind, partly sobered him. "I know!" He got his breath back.
"I wouldn't have an affair with you," s
aid Ruth, "and I certainly wouldn't marry you, for anything on earth."
"I know that! — But, for the sake of academic clearness, why not?"
"Because you have your way of life; you're an idiot; and you wouldn't change it one little bit I have my way of life; I'm practical; and I wouldn't change it one little bit. It would be horrible."
"Jenny—" he stopped. There's Stannard, you know."
"Do you think you're joking?"
"No!"
"Because I might just conceivably might be able to care a good deal for him, if only," said Ruth with intensity, "if only he were more of an idiot!"
"For God's sake," exclaimed the other, taken aback by what seemed to him the deep seriousness and complete illogicality of this remark, "isn't that the deadly charge you've been levelling at me?"
"Oh, you don’t understand." Ruth was almost crying. "I shouldn't have come here. You shouldn't have let me talk to you. It's your fault"
She reached across, took up her own lamp, and stood up. She moved softly away from him, turning round only at the aisle. Her dark-brown eyes were soft again. Her lips made a movement of lightness. -
"I shall get over this very shortly," she told him. "In the meantime, I warn you by your own code that I'm rather jealous of Jenny. Against that, I am trying to do the decent thing and what's right What I really came here to tell you.."
"Yes?"
"I can tell you, because it hasn't directly to do with Jen herself. Years ago," said Ruth, "a child was found murdered and mutilated at a place called Priory Hill, not very far from here." Then she was gone.
The old brick prison might have echoed with ghostly occupants shaking their cell-doors. Was Hessler, who also murdered and mutilated, listening with his ear to the little grille of the iron door? Across and beyond the paper bales Martin could see the tops of high windows, with vertical bars; but the lighter sky beyond made darkness here more dense.
Ruth… he must forget that subject, Martin told himself. Suppose Jenny had seen them? No harm in it, only natural; but hard to explain. Lord, suppose Ruth told Jenny? I’m rather jealous of Jenny." Stop! Mentally he closed the lid of the incident with a bang.
Still not a whisper, not a chink of light, from beyond the iron door. Under the rules of the test, the man inside was permitted to get up and walk about Could anything have happened to Stannard?
Martin would have shouted to Stannard, except for the practical certainty that it would bring the barrister to the iron door, sardonically to inquire whether his friend outside needed help.
Yes, Ruth — carefully did right to respect Stannard. Aside from anything else, the Great Defender was- as clever as Satan. Another memory stirred in Martin's head: a festal occasion at his club, viewed through a gauze of whisky, in which a certain eminent judge had spoken with great indiscretion. He spoke of Stannard, who had been briefed for the defence in the Cosens murder case.
"Gentlemen," His Lordship had declared, his speech being rendered here as free from alcoholic slur, "gentlemen, counsel for the defence produced an unexpected alibi. It was not only, gentlemen, that we couldn't prove the flaw in it; we couldn't even see the flaw in it. And that thus-and-so Cosens, as guilty as Judas, walked out a free man."
Well, there was no question of all…
Great Scott, no wonder Stannard hadn't become restless! Martin, blinking hard at the luminous dial of his watch, saw that the time was only half-past twelve. It should have been two o'clock, at least But he held the watch to his ear, and it was ticking.
Swung round once too often in the emotional bowl, exhausted, Martin sat down heavily on the paper-bale. His head felt very heavy. The light of the lamp began to grow yellow (somebody using it too long before?), and he hastily replaced the battery with a spare one.
With heavy movements he groped along the wall, found a nail there, shifted along the bale, and hung the lamp sideways so that its beam should shine past his shoulder. He groped down again for the Stevenson he had found in the library at Fleet House.
Begin with the first story, yes. Title-page, table of contents, foreword, so! Begin with the fine scene of the snowflakes sifting over mediaeval Paris. Begin…
The type blurred before his eyes. He had a hazy consciousness that the book was there, the light was there, and he was there; but not for long. His head and shoulders lolled back against the wall Martin Drake, with the lines of tiredness drawn slantwise under his eyes, was asleep.
What woke him he did not know at the time, or for nearly twenty-four hours afterwards.
But it was a noise. It made him start up, nerves twitching; it made him jump to his feet, miry-eyed, and peer round until he realized where he was. His first impression, possibly created by a dream, was that the alarm-bell on the roof was ringing.
"If you hear the alarm-bell in the night," someone had said, "it will mean we are in serious trouble."
But a bell would have gone on ringing. Besides, a deeper memory suggested, this had been something like a crash: not very loud, yet loud enough to jolt thin sleep. Martin's head remained mazy. By concentration on his wrist-watch, he saw the hour was two o'clock. Then Stannard flashed through his mind. Yanking the lamp off the wall, he hurried to the iron door and played the beam inside.
"Stannard!" he yelled.
The oak door to the execution shed was still closed. So was the other one. "Stannard! Are you all right?"
To his relief he heard the "Yes! Quite!" of the other's unmistakable tones, muffled by the oak door.' But in the voice was a curious wild inflection which in his relief he did not stop to analyze.
He groped for the key in his pocket, but hesitated. He would not offer Stannard the insult of asking whether he wanted to be let out
What vaguely puzzled Martin, as he returned to his seat was the fact that he had been able to sleep in the place of bogles. But this wasn't the place of bogles. Wasn't there some legend about iron, cold iron, keeping them off?
It was within the rules, both stated and implied, to sleep if you could. You could drowse in the rocking-chair, or even on the ruddy gallows-trap. Martin hung the lamp on the wall again, his hand heavy.
When he leaned back against the wall, he felt no sense of crick in the neck or stiffness in the back. His senses were padded. Once more, from here, he bellowed out at Stannard; and very, faintly Stannard's voice told him to mind his own damned business.
‘Right you are, Mr. Great Defender.
Sleep coiled insidiously, sleep soothed with shadow narcotics.
Though it might have been unusual under such circumstances, Martin afterwards remembered his dreams as being cozy and pleasant. He became somehow entangled with the love-scene between Blanche and Denis in The Sire de Mallétroit’s Door; and the old Sire de Mallétroit, who was going to hang somebody in the morning, bore a baffling, dissolving resemblance to Lady Brayle. The old Sire de Mallétroit…
Look out! Thud!
This time what woke him was toppling off the bale, his hands and arms in semi-consciousness saving him as he struck the floor. It was an ugly feeling, that sense of a helpless fall. But he was awake, chilly and sharply wide-awake, when he crawled up from the dirt-sting of the floor.
The corridor swam in a dim grey twilight which seemed as dingy as the prison. Outside the tall barred windows he could detect a white mist, wisps of it, past grime-speckled panes. Once more he consulted his watch. Two minues to four o'clock.
A great exultation sang in him, though he felt as if he had slept in a barrel. It was nearly all over. Give it dead to the time — exactly to the ant-busy travelling of the watch's secondhand — and then unlock the door.
The beam of the lamp still shone straight across, against murky daylight Stevenson, unread, had sprawled open on the floor. If there could be degrees of silence, Pentecost Prison seemed more utterly silent now than at any time during the night. And Stannard?
Martin let the full two minutes tick round. Then, drawing the large key out of his pocket, he went over to the iron door.
/>
"Stannard!" he shouted.
Chapter 11
Shading his eyes, Martin peered through the grille. Grey traces, very faint, showed a vertical glimmer along the edge of the execution shed door, which stood about an inch
open. Obviously, as in the case of the condemned cell, that room must have some kind of window. "Stannard!" he called, with the same formula. "Are you all right?’
"I'm here. I'm—" The voice seemed to answer somewhat hollowly, and from a distance away, though the oak door stood a little open. Odd, perhaps. Who cared?
"The time's up," Martin shouted back, "and I'm unlocking this door."
He did so, after which he pushed the iron door partly open with a squeak and squeal of hinges. There was a ringing clatter as he threw the key inside on the floor.
"Thanks' he added, "for an entertaining evening. You're free, and I'm free too."
The thought of Stannard's company, on the way back, almost revolted him. In his exuberance he felt like talking to empty air instead, so that he could use rich words unheard. Putting Stevenson in his pocket, and picking up the lamp, he took long strides to get away from there.
Faintly, once, he thought he heard Stannard calling something after him. But the light-found the white-string guideline with ease; amazing he hadn't noticed it before! Nevertheless, in his daylight mood, it was of a pattern with all the other incidents of last night.
Every action, every speech, had seemed quite natural at the time; even inevitable. Yet now, when the images unreeled before him — those evil forces (imagined?) in the condemned ceil, a fencing-match in which he had nearly been murdered by the sedate Dr. Laurier, a blood-stained dagger, an alarm-bell With its rope in the cell, an amorous passage with Ruth Callice — it became a phantasmagoria which struck him with wonder. The little talk with Ruth seemed to him inconsequential, as though it had never happened; even amusing. He would tell Jenny about it -
In less than two minutes, at rustling quick-step through what was now only a dreary storage-building, he reached the main gate. All phantasmagoria, like that skeleton in the clock. Briefly he wondered what Sir Henry Merrivale might have been doing with the skeleton in the clock.
The Skeleton in the Clock shm-18 Page 12
