The Valley of the Fox

by Joseph Hone

  I thought I knew what she was thinking. ‘Would you live with me? Would you really want to?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, impatiently. ‘What else could be so obvious? It’s you, though. Do you want to?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, but more slowly.

  ‘You don’t seem so sure.’

  ‘Just it’s never been so easy, for me.’

  ‘Nor me. I told you. With anyone. But we could probably get on together. We’ve plenty in common.’ She smiled. ‘We don’t get on with other people after all. That could be the main thing!’

  She stopped smiling then. But there was something even better in her face – hope, and a wry, calm amusement: the reflection of a future between us, offered up and jointly accepted.

  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘But if you’re going to be running all over the world soon –’

  ‘Let me get Clare safely to Portugal.’

  ‘Safely?’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘But the boat could sink. Besides the old man may have set up a trap for you in Tewkesbury. He probably told the police here as soon as he got your letter.’

  ‘I’ll have to take that risk. But if I get to Portugal, and leave Clare, I’ll come back here and we can start afresh. I’ll tell the police all about it then. And later maybe we can get Clare back, and she can live with us.’

  Life sprang up before me then, another life, another chance with Alice and Clare. Perhaps I didn’t deserve it. But it was there all the same, waiting for me.

  Then we heard the car drawing up, crunching round the gravel in front of the house, and I felt threatened once more. ‘Don’t worry,’ Alice said. ‘It’s nothing. Just those Victorian people – the Society. They’re coming this morning to start fixing things up. This weekend it’s the hundredth anniversary of the house, you remember? The fête, the jousting tournament, the cricket match, the costume ball. Had you forgotten?’ She smiled now, that active smile of hers, where she suddenly became a decisive person, intent on life, with all the gifts for living. Indeed, I saw how our being together these past few months had so encouraged both our better qualities. She no longer acted without cause, a mad Ophelia in a Camelot outfit, spotlit among the greenery of the conservatory, or gave Indian war-whoops without answer down by the lake, or brought roses to a crumbling tomb. She had a live audience at last, a sounding-board with me – and her mimic vigour, her quick laughter, her idiosyncratic renovations about the house were no longer masks in front of some awful despair, but the true face of appropriate passions. As for me, where there had been an equal despair, she had given me a similar hope. All the same, I wasn’t living with Alice yet.

  ‘Well, I won’t be involved in this fête,’ I said.

  ‘Why not? The police aren’t going to bother to look here again.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’

  ‘You could just be a guest.’

  ‘Disguised, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Just like you’ve been before, as Harry Conrad and that antique-dealer in the hospital. This cricket match they’re playing – that’s your game, isn’t it? You told me how much you like to play it. Well, now you can. It’s all in nineteenth-century costume. The Society are arranging it. Or what about the jousting tournament? You could get dressed up for that. They wouldn’t recognise you got up in a lot of armour either, would they?’ Alice was suddenly very happy. She saw a future between us: a future of all sorts of fun and games, a future of disguises.

  ‘Me – in the jousting tournament –’ I said incredulously.

  ‘Yes. Why not? The riders are coming from all over: even some real knights –’

  ‘But I can barely ride a horse, Alice, let alone poke people with lances from one going full gallop.’

  ‘No?’ She seemed genuinely surprised, crestfallen, at my reply. And I saw then how much she wanted to believe in me, as a Sir Galahad or Launcelot reincarnate. She wasn’t cured of that sort of heroic delusion, I realised. Indeed, by my helping her achieve some sanity, I had encouraged her all the more to think of me as some shining knight errant, a worker of all sorts of miracles on her behalf.

  ‘Alice, you must be joking.’

  ‘Nothing venture, nothing win,’ she answered very seriously.

  *

  It was now Tuesday, the 20th of August, and there was more than a week to fill before I could think of leaving for Tewkesbury to get there after the 1st of September. The fête was due to last two days – starting the next Saturday afternoon, with stalls and sideshows in the immediate manor parkland, and the re-created nineteenth-century cricket match to be played further down in the grounds. On the Saturday evening a medieval Costume Ball had been arranged, with appropriate food to go with it – tickets at £40 a pair – to be held in the great Baronial Hall.

  Sunday was the day of the great jousting tournament, with visits for the public round Beechwood Manor and gardens as well. There was to be a Mrs Beeton cooking competition in the morning, held in the old kitchens, and a selection of other treats later on: a vintage bicycle race round the manor drives, an exhibition of Victorian farm equipment in the yard, excursions about the estate in a coach and four, dog-and-donkey-cart rides for the children, together with short aerial trips for the more intrepid in a tethered hot-air balloon which was to be chauffeured by a man dressed up as Passepartout from Around the World in Eighty Days. Since the proceeds were all to go to the Victorian Society they were arranging everything. It seemed a fine programme and many hundreds of people were expected. But there was no place in it all for Clare and me.

  I had other problems. For example, although Alice would be able to drive Clare and me to Tewkesbury easily enough, taking the small lanes over the wolds and perhaps travelling by night, I couldn’t leave for the river town before the Friday of the following week, to arrive there on the Saturday, which would be the 1st of September. I would have therefore to spend this corning busy weekend hidden in the Manor with Clare. And further, since the Pringles were due back from their holiday on the coming Saturday, Clare and I would have to spend the last week after that incarcerated up in the tower. It was not a happy prospect, especially since the weather, which had been quite cool and overcast for a week, had now turned brilliantly fine again, the start of an Indian summer.

  The days were noticeably shorter, but they were burnished Mediterranean days now, with a shimmer of blue heat in the air almost from sun-up, while by early afternoon the temperature was intense, the sun a slanting fire in an ever-cloudless sky. We searched for shade, Alice and I, about the house. But Clare became restless. She wanted to be out in the open, to swim; above all, to cool herself down by the lake in the hidden valley where she had been happy. But this she could not do – for apart from the African, whose sudden violent presence loomed from every bush now, Alice’s two men were still clearing the burnt trees away from the shoreline there.

  Nor could Clare play outside in the parkland or in the formal gardens down by the great Neptune fountain, for the volunteers from the Victorian Society were active everywhere in the grounds, preparing the fête. Thus we were confined for most of the day to the top landing or the tower and both places, so close to the sun, became unbearably hot.

  So it was that I had brought Clare down one afternoon to the wine cellar in the basement, where it was deliciously cool and safe – bringing a chair and some rugs and Clare’s toys with us, the ark and its animals, with a book for me to read by the light of the single bulb above the pyramids of old wine bottles.

  Yet when I got down there, I found I’d left the book behind, and more importantly that day’s newspaper, which I’d put aside somewhere with an account of that week’s test match in it. Clare seemed completely bound up with her animals on the rug next a bin of Gevrey-Chambertin. So I had left her, explaining what I was doing, and gone back upstairs, closing the cellar door. When I returned less than three minutes later the door was open and Clare had gone.

  She had either run herself, I thought, or the African had taken her: the A
frican, ghost-like again, who’d been haunting this dark, unused basement area, waiting for just such an opportunity. And though it was cool in the cellars I was suddenly drenched in sweat, mad at my stupidity in leaving Clare by herself. And worse, since Alice had gone far down into the parkland with one of the men from the Victorian Society, I would have to search for Clare alone.

  First I stalked from door to door along the shadows of the basement passage, a bottle in my hand ready to smash it in some dark face. But all the old, unused rooms here, with their creaking doors laced with cobwebs, were empty.

  I went upstairs. She could not have come into the big hall, or gone up by the main staircase, since I’d just been in that part of the house myself. She could only have left by the back door into the yard via the kitchens. Then I thought – the old laundry room, with its huge copper cauldron and the dangerous linen press: that was where she’d probably gone, where she’d once before played so happily in the grate and in the big tub itself.

  I rushed out to the yard and into the laundry. She wasn’t there. But she’d gone this way, I saw then, for on the cobblestones, next the gateway leading down towards our old valley by the lake, I found one of the wooden animals from her ark, a big tawny-maned lion.

  I went back to the house and fetched Alice’s Winchester from the gun-room. Clare must have gone down to the lake. But had she gone there of her own free will or had she been taken? I took no risks myself, pumping the stock, priming the gun as I ran out of the yard gateway. Luckily there was no one about on the eastern side of the house where the covered laurel pathway led down to the back drive and then on to the orchard, and beyond that to the ridge of beech trees and the hidden valley below.

  The sun cast fierce shadows through the bushes as I sprinted along beneath them. I crossed the back drive and then took a short cut through the orchard, stalking from tree to tree now, moving towards the hedge at the end which would bring me out near the top of the valley. Early Worcesters hung thickly on the branches and wasps hummed at my feet picking among some already rotten windfalls. But otherwise there was complete silence in the baking afternoon heat. I wasn’t far from the lake, yet the sound of the chainsaws and the axes, which had echoed up from the valley there for weeks past, was gone. The silence was unnerving. Then something moved beyond a row of apple trees – a gathering movement, as if from many feet, swathing steadily towards me through the dry grass. I raised the rifle.

  A flock of white geese, big birds, striding through the dappled shade of the orchard, came into sight. And suddenly their loud and outraged cackles, when they saw me, broke the silence. A few of them pursued me as I moved away from them as quickly as I could, down towards the hedge at the end of the orchard, where I could get over onto the pathway on the far side which led down to the bathing-place at the northern end of the lake. But when I got to this hedge, hiding beneath it, I heard another sound: footsteps, human footsteps this time, coming slowly towards me along the path on the other side. I raised the gun again, trying to peer through the briars, hoping to get a clear first shot if necessary. Through the hedge I saw Clare coming up the path, hand-in-hand with one of Alice’s workmen, a middle-aged man, burnt a deep bronze, wearing a singlet. Clare wasn’t happy.

  ‘Why can’t you swim?’ she asked petulantly, reversing the pronoun as usual, wanting to swim herself. Of course the man didn’t understand.

  ‘Oh, I can’t swim down there now, Miss. I’ve work to do, see? But I’ll get you back to your Mum up at the house, you don’t worry. See, you can’t be down there with us with all those trees and branches falling about the place. Not safe. But you’ll be all right now, you’ll see. You have your Mum with you up at the house, I expect, won’t you?’

  Clare didn’t reply. And there was nothing I could do. Clare’s existence here had been discovered. But perhaps the trusting gardener would think nothing of it – just a stray child belonging to one of the people from the Victorian Society. He would look for Alice now, who would take her over, having invented some suitable excuse for the girl’s presence. The man would make nothing of it. Why should he? There were a dozen people about the estate that afternoon. So I shadowed the two of them, keeping behind the hedge, back up the pathway to the Manor.

  They went into the yard first and it was there, hidden behind the gateway pillar, that I saw the small car parked right next the kitchen entrance. It hadn’t been in the yard ten minutes before. The boot was open so that whoever was taking something out from the back was invisible.

  Clare and the man walked over to the car. Then the boot slammed shut and I saw the gross figure of Mrs Pringle looming up with a load of parcels in her arms. At the same moment the gardener spoke.

  ‘Hello, Anna. Back sooner than expected. Not ’till the weekend, we thought.’

  Mrs Pringle came round to the front of the car. ‘Billy, hello. Yes, we came back early. Half the Spanish hotel went down with some tummy bug. Terrible. We were offered the chance of an earlier flight home. So we took it. How has Miss Troy been – safe and sound, or mad as a hatter? We were worried. We phoned several times, heard about those thugs down by the lake. But she’s been all right, has she?’

  The gardener nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. Mary and Alec have been keeping a firm eye on her, no problems. Apart from that mad lot down by the lake. Broke in through the fence they did, and then set the whole place alight. But we’ve strengthened the fence now. Miss Troy won’t get out of the place, leastways, that’s for sure.’

  Mrs Pringle looked at Clare then. ‘Who have you got there, Billy?’ she asked, peering over her packages.

  ‘Don’t know. Some kid. She came down to the lake just now. But it’s not safe. We’ve been cutting back the burnt wood. So I’ve brought her back up here. Don’t know who she belongs to.’

  ‘I’ll bring her to Miss Troy. She’ll know. Must have something to do with one of all these people come to fix this fête. But doesn’t the child know who she is herself? She looks old enough.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to. She talks kind of funny, too.’

  ‘Well, we’ll soon find out. Come here, child. What’s your name?’ Mrs Pringle, her great body towering over Clare, had the air of the Beadle in Oliver Twist. Clare didn’t answer her. So Mrs Pringle bent down and tried to wheedle Clare towards her, calling to her as though she was an animal.

  ‘Come with me, child,’ she said eventually, in sterner tones of her indeterminate London accent. She put her parcels on the roof of the car. Then she held out a very pudgy arm. She’d obviously been doing herself well in Spain before the tummy bugs set in. ‘Come on. Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘You don’t want to come,’ Clare said suddenly, staying where she was.

  ‘No. I don’t want to come, but you do, don’t you? Come on, we’ll go and find your Mummy or Miss Troy. She’ll know.’ Finally Mrs Pringle had to lead Clare away, in through the dark passageway towards the kitchen, like a child being taken into an institution.

  And again, there was absolutely nothing I could do. I could only hope that Alice, with all her quick inventions, would find some sudden inspiration here, when she saw Clare coming towards her with the dreadful Mrs Pringle.

  She did. Half an hour later Alice found me, on tenterhooks, up in the tower. From one of the turret windows I’d seen Mrs Pringle and Clare moving out into the parkland, and had seen them all return some time later, Alice walking easily, holding Clare’s hand, chatting to Mrs Pringle. Was it all over? Or just one more beginning?

  ‘It’s simple,’ Alice said when she had started to explain to me. ‘You’re Harry Conrad again. Remember? Our friend, Arthur’s lawyer friend from London, the man you were before, when Mrs Pringle found you locked in the wine cellar. And Clare is your daughter. Harry has a daughter anyway, just about Clare’s age. And you’re both staying with us – come down for the fête. What could be more natural?’

  Alice smiled. I sighed.

  ‘Now don’t start thinking up objections,’ she went on. ‘It’s done. I’ve ex
plained it all that way. And Mrs Pringle accepted every word of it. She doesn’t suspect a thing. Why should she? Just the opposite. She was pleased you were here again. You see, she thinks you’re my new man, my next husband. And she wants to think that, don’t you see? So that there’ll be a future for her down here: that I’m not going mad all on my own, talking to myself, before being dragged off in a straitjacket – which would mean the end of everything for Mrs Pringle here. Don’t you see? So she’s pleased.’

  ‘Yes. I see. We’re back to the theatricals.’

  ‘So all we’ve got to do now,’ Alice rushed on, ‘is to get you down to a spare bedroom again, have some suitcases out and some more of Arthur’s clothes. And Clare can come downstairs too, into the next bedroom. It’ll make everything easier. The two of us can stay here quite openly, until I take you to Tewkesbury next week. And you can join in the fête now – why not? You won’t have to stay cooped up in the tower anyway. It’s ideal.’ She emphasised the word sharply, brightly, happily. And when I didn’t reply she said, ‘Isn’t it?’ even more sharply, but less happily.

  ‘Yes,’ I said finally. ‘I’ll start getting my make-up on. And the costumes.’

  ‘Why, I hadn’t thought of that. You could play your cricket now –’

  ‘And the medieval costume ball,’ I interrupted. ‘That’s even better. That’ll suit me perfectly.’

  Alice wasn’t sure whether my irony was real or assumed. She came towards me, undecided. ‘There wasn’t anything else I could think of saying to Mrs Pringle,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why –’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. There wasn’t anything else. My fault for letting Clare out of my sight.’

  ‘Besides,’ Alice broke in, suddenly enthusiastic again, ‘What better than spending a weekend down from London with me?’

  ‘What better, indeed,’ I said, kissing her.