The Coldstone

by Patricia Wentworth

  She reached the top, felt for the wall—and heard her name: “Susan—” It made her pringle all over. She hadn’t made a sound.

  “Susan—”

  Susan pushed open the door of old Mrs. Bowyer’s room and went in.

  “What is it, Gran?”

  “Where ha’ you been?” The voice came out of the dark very composedly.

  Susan didn’t know what to say. Gran was the limit. She laughed, because that was easiest, and Mrs. Bowyer said,

  “It’s no laughing matter.”

  “Gran dear, I went out for a breath of air. It’s so hot.”

  “You needn’t trouble to tell me lies, my dear.”

  “Gran!”

  There was the splutter of a match. Mrs. Bowyer sprang into view in a white frilled nightcap, leaning over on her elbow to light a candle in an old candlestick that was rather like a shovel with a piece of metal to grip the candle. When the wick had caught, she pulled herself bolt upright against the head of the bed and looked at Susan. Her eiderdown covered with red turkey twill was drawn up to her waist. She wore a flannelette nightdress trimmed with crochet of her own making. Her eyes rested with sarcasm upon Susan’s uncovered neck and the diaphanous black of her dress with its long floating sleeves.

  Susan burst out laughing.

  “It’s a fair cop!” she said. “But you’re not going to ask me a lot of questions, are you?”

  “You’ve been meeting a lad.”

  “I didn’t want to, Gran—honest injun. He came and whistled under my window, and I thought of Mrs. Smithers putting out her head to listen, or Miss Agatha, or Miss Arabel, or their awfully proper cook. So I just went out to tell him he must go away. You see, Gran darling, it really was most frightfully compromising for you. I don’t know what Mrs. Smithers would say if she thought young men came serenading you.”

  “Come here, Susan!” said Mrs. Bowyer.

  Susan came reluctantly. She sat down on the red eiderdown, and Gran’s black eyes bored through and through her.

  “Was it Anthony Colstone?”

  “Good gracious, no! What a frightfully amusing idea, Gran! I wish it had been!”

  “Wishes come home to roost,” said old Susan Bowyer. She picked up a fold of the thin black dress. “What d’you call this stuff, eh?”

  “Georgette, Gran.” Her cheeks grew hot. “I dragged it out of my box because it was black, and I should have hated to frighten Mrs. Smithers or the cook by being all white and ghostly.”

  “You’ve a good tongue, my girl. Who ha’ you been meeting?”

  “I can’t tell you.” Susan put her hand down on the old fingers and stroked them. “You needn’t worry—I can look after myself.”

  “I never knew a maid that couldn’t—until ’twas too late. Are you in love with him?”

  “Of course I’m not.”

  “Is he in love with you?”

  “He’s a nuisance,” said Susan, frowning. Then she jumped up. “I do want to go to sleep so badly.”

  She bent forward and blew out the candle.

  “Good-night, Gran.”

  Mrs. Bowyer’s voice followed her on to the landing:

  “If I don’t ask no questions, I won’t be told no lies. Is that your meaning?”

  Susan’s laughter came back to her, and the sound of the closing door.

  Mrs. Bowyer lay down flat on her one pillow and straightened the sheet. She liked to wake tidy in the morning. She thought about Susan, and the core of her heart was warm. She thought about an earlier, softer Susan, pretty, gentle, sweet—Susie, so pretty-spoken—William’s darling. He never spoilt the others, but he spoilt Susie. She could see William now, ever so big and strong with his little maid on his shoulder, ducking his head to come in at the door, and Mr. Philip behind him laughing—“I say, you might let me carry her for a bit!”

  She fell into a dream of her own courting. William, too shy to speak, snatching a kiss in the dusk. And then it wasn’t her and William, but Susie with her floating curls crying bitterly at her mother’s knee: “Oh, Mother, I love him true—I love him true!” And again, Philip, on the threshold, looking at them.

  Young Susan lay awake in the dark, three pillows heaped behind her and only a sheet for covering. It had been in her mind that she would fall asleep at once. But she lay awake. It was just as if she had come up against a smooth, blank wall. There was a door in it somewhere, but she couldn’t find it, though she kept feeling for it with groping hands.

  In the end, the wall melted and let her through, and she saw Garry, with a face like a demon, hurling a great stone down upon her from the top of a high black mountain. The stone broke into three pieces and fell into the sea, and three rushing fountains sprang up from where the fragments had fallen. Only they were not fountains of water, but fountains of fire.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bernard West arrived next day. Anthony dug out the aged Daimler and drove into Wrane to meet him. It was four years since he had seen West. He found him the same, but yet not the same. Small, lean, dark, opinionated, intolerant, he was everything that West had been, only there was more of it. In the four years he had intensified to such a degree that another four at the same rate would land him in caricature.

  By the time they had covered the seven miles back to Ford St. Mary, Anthony began to wonder how they were going to get on. He had been a good deal peeved because West was only sparing him a couple of days on his way to join a walking tour, but already two days seemed to be rather a long time.

  West talked a great deal. He always had talked a lot; but in those days one said “Shut up!” and hove things at him. He had developed a scholastic eye and a manner of competent authority. One could no longer throw things at him, and he remained unresponsive to the politer ways of saying “Shut up!”

  Anthony walked him up to see the Coldstone Ring, and he had plenty to say about it. It wasn’t his subject, but he could quote Karnak, and Stonehenge, and Avebury—dolmens—sun and serpent worship—and the Bronze Age.

  He immediately propounded a theory that there had been an inner and an outer circle of stones, and that the prostrate stone had not fallen, but was a true altar stone, occupying the central position and lying east and west, so that the officiating priest might face the rising sun as he stood to sacrifice. All this from a cursory and casual glance at two upright stones and one lying flat in a bare stony space ringed about with high, ripe meadow grass. Then, still talking, off again down the hill, turning every now and then to admonish Anthony with lifted hand as if he addressed a class.

  “If we postulate a double ring, the missing stones have to be accounted for, and I expect to find them here there and everywhere in this village of yours. Your own gates—have you thought of that?—are, in all probability, cut from one of these monoliths. But of course your local archæological society may have some information—not that these local people are to be relied upon, but still they might be able to furnish some data.”

  Anthony got a word in edgeways.

  “Sir Jervis wouldn’t let them see the Ring.”

  “What?” West had the air of having been contradicted by a small boy.

  “He wouldn’t let anyone see it. You saw the hedge. I had to break my way through.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Can’t tell you—a kink I should say.”

  “Oh, but that’s all nonsense. You must change all that. Get into touch with experts. I wouldn’t trust local people to do any excavating, but the whole thing ought to be thoroughly and carefully investigated. Ah now! Here! What did I say? What did I tell you? That gate of yours—look at the pillars! The stone is undoubtedly the same. Vandals! We shall probably find bits of these archaic stones built into half the houses of the village. This doesn’t look like a stone country, but of course anyone who wanted stone for a gatepost, or a well-head, or a doorstep simply went and looted from the Coldstone Ring. By the way, what’s the origin of the name?”

  “I don’t know.”

&nb
sp; “Your family name obviously derives from it.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Suppose so? Of course it does! Have you asked about the origin of the name? Someone ought to be able to give you some information. Have you tried the parson? Parsons are very often a mine of information on this sort of subject. Have you tried your local man?”

  “We haven’t got a resident parson. We go shares with two other villages, and the present man is a retired Indian chaplain who has only been here a few months—at least so the Miss Colstones say.”

  Mr. West pounced on the Miss Colstones.

  “Ah! And what do they say about the Ring?”

  “Nothing,” said Anthony. Somehow it gave him great pleasure to say “Nothing” like that to West. He grinned, and West frowned portentously.

  “Nothing? Have you asked them?”

  “They don’t talk about the Ring. No one in Ford St. Mary talks about it—it’s a great taboo.”

  “Since when? There wasn’t any taboo when they set these gates and built this wall. That garden opposite too—look at those flagstones. Look at them—look at them! And the doorstep! The house is Elizabethan. There wasn’t any taboo in those days, whatever there may be now.” He darted across the street and hung over Mrs. Bowyer’s gate, discoursing upon the stones that paved her garden.

  He proceeded to discover fresh evidences of vandalism in the Smithers’ well-head, and in the wall of the churchyard. At least a dozen of the oldest tombstones he declared to be portions of the Stones from the Coldstone Ring.

  After a tour of the village he returned full of energy to the Ring itself. This time each Stone was minutely examined. He made copious notes as he talked. Then, at the prostrate Stone, he stiffened, knelt down, and began in great excitement to trace the worn markings which Anthony had already discovered.

  “What’s this? What’s this?”

  Anthony cheered up a little. He had begun to feel rather like one of those small tags which adorn the tail of a proud, erratic kite, and have perforce to follow its soarings and plungings. He found it a boring rôle. Now he cheered up a little. These marks, at any rate, he had discovered for himself. He said so:

  “Oh, those triangles? I found them the other day. I suppose they are triangles?”

  Mr. West threw a scornful glance over his shoulder.

  “Triangles? It’s a pentagram. That’s very interesting—that’s very interesting indeed. I don’t remember any other instance—I don’t believe there’s any other instance.”

  “Well,” said Anthony, “anyone might have put it there, any old time. And—er—isn’t a pentagram a thing with five points? This has six.”

  West was on his knees beside the Stone. He turned now and looked up with an arrested expression.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes—put on afterwards—perhaps as a charm—to ward off evil. I can’t see six points. I believe I’m right in saying that the pentagram, or pentacle, was freely used in mediæval magic. Magic’s not my subject, but I seem to remember that.”

  They went on to the standing Stones, but there were no more marks. West talked about the pentacle, about Solomon’s temple, about freemasonry, about mediæval magic, about Friar Bacon, and about Michael Scott. Anthony wondered how much he really knew about any of them, and he thanked his stars for the walking tour that was going to absorb West the day after to-morrow—only the day after to-morrow was the deuce of a long way off. By the time it came, he never wanted to see West again. The fellow was possessed of a perfect demon of energy. He wanted to interview everyone in the village on the subject of the Stones. He cross-examined Lane and Mrs. Hutchins; and the gardeners, and the maid-servants and the boot-boy; and a cowman whom he caught in a field; and the postman, who came from Wrane and said he didn’t know nothing about any of it; and the sexton, who grunted, spat on his hands, and went on digging; and three village boys, two of whom were inarticulate, and the third impudent.

  No one told him about old Mrs. Bowyer, so he did not interview her. The people he did interview displayed that dense ignorance with which the peasant in every country in the world knows how to shield the knowledge which he does not intend to impart. No one knew anything about the Coldstone Ring. The Stones were “great old stones.” They had always been there. They hadn’t been to see them themselves. Sir Jervis didn’t hold with people going into his fields—and, to all the flood of voluble suggestion made by Mr. West: “You don’t say so!” or “Like enough you’re right, sir.”

  Anthony did his best to keep him out of the Miss Colstone’s way. He had a perfectly clear vision of West with a note-book in the white panelled room—West sitting on the edge of a gimcrack gilt chair, rattling off questions at Miss Agatha and Miss Arabel like a human maxim, whilst he himself perspired in the background. As far as the village was concerned, he hoped to live West down; but he felt it would be hard to live him down with the Miss Colstones.

  It is fatal to try and keep people apart; anxiously placed obstacles seem merely to defeat their own ends. To Bernard West, earnestly copying the inscriptions on some of the older tombstones in the little churchyard, there appeared from the church, where she had been arranging flowers, Miss Arabel; and, as it so chanced, Miss Arabel was feeling faint, and accepted with gratitude the arm and the escort of Anthony’s friend. She could do no less than ask him in, and as Miss Agatha was busy in the garden, they had what Mr. West considered a very pleasant conversation in the white panelled drawing-room, with the portrait of the Lady Arabella Stuart looking down on them with her unsmiling dignity. Miss Arabel no longer felt indisposed.

  Bernard West found Anthony a little cold on the subject of his Cousin Arabel’s charms. He did not want to talk about his cousins at all. He only hoped to goodness that West had kept his mania for asking questions within decent bounds. After a chance meeting with Miss Arabel he abandoned this hope. At the mention of West’s name the little lady changed colour, fluttered, and began to talk about the weather. The man was really a most infernal nuisance.

  He turned from Wrane station and drove away with this thought in his mind. He had seen West off with decently suppressed joy, and he was wondering why he had ever thought Stonegate lonely. It wasn’t going to be lonely; it was going to be peaceful. He felt exactly as if he were going home for the holidays after a strenuous term.

  He was passing through the outskirts of Wrane and thinking vaguely what hideous outskirts they were, when his eye was caught by a little lady who was about to enter one of the houses. He slowed down, and recognized Miss Arabel, her air of exquisite finish rather startlingly out of keeping with her surroundings. The street was narrow and mean. The dull little houses were all exactly alike; they had yellow brick walls and grey slate roofs, and their windows were entirely obscured by Nottingham lace.

  As Anthony approached, the door in front of which Miss Arabel was standing opened and let her in. He drove on, and had just a glimpse of a young woman in nurse’s dress—just an impression of fluffy hair, butcher’s blue, and white starched linen. Then the door shut, and he made haste out of Wrane.

  Miss Arabel sat on the edge of a horsehair sofa and talked to the fluffy-haired young woman, whose name was Mabel Collins, but whom she addressed as “Nurse.” She talked to her for about ten minutes about what a fine August it was, and how nice it was for the farmers to have it so warm and dry, but didn’t Nurse find it just a little oppressive in a town like Wrane?

  “What’s she want?” said Miss Collins to herself. “You bet your life she didn’t come out here seven miles—and they’re as mean as misers—just to talk about the weather.” Aloud, she agreed with Miss Arabel in a tone of deferential sweetness.

  Miss Arabel passed from the weather and began to talk about her father’s illness—“As if I wasn’t fed to the teeth with the whole thing,” Miss Collins commented inaudibly. “Oh, get on, you old fool! If you’ve come here to say anything, for goodness sake say it and get out!”

  Miss Arabel sat a little more upright. Her feet, in th
eir very small shoes, were pressed down hard upon the bright green Brussels carpet. All the while that she talked about “poor Papa” she saw, not the dreadful little room with the bright walnut furniture, but the room at Stonegate where Papa sat propped against pillows looking across the footrail of the bed at the field where two tall grey stones stood amongst the high grass.

  She said how good Nurse Collins had been, and how grateful they felt, and how much she hoped Nurse had not found her next case as trying. And all the while she saw that room, and Papa looking past her, and talking, talking, talking in a low mutter that sometimes made words and sometimes lapsed into mere sound. Her little black-gloved hands held one another very tightly as she said,

  “I would have come to see you before, because there was something that I wanted to ask you about. You know, you went off in such a hurry.”

  “Baby cases won’t wait,” said Miss Collins in a brisk, decided voice.

  Miss Arabel fluttered a little. This girl—she seemed so young—it didn’t seem quite nice. She returned to “dear Papa” with the sound of his muttering voice in her ears. She must ask—she must find out.

  “What did you want to know, Miss Colstone?” said Miss Collins. “And for the Lord’s sake hurry up!” she added to herself.

  Miss Arabel hesitated, opened her little button mouth, half closed it again, and said suddenly,

  “My father talked a good deal—”

  “Yes, he did.” (“And so do you, you silly old maid.”)

  Miss Arabel proceeded with difficulty:

  “On the afternoon—the last afternoon—the afternoon before he died, the—the Monday—”

  “Yes, Miss Colstone?”

  “You may remember that I sat with him whilst you went to your tea.”

  Miss Collins nodded. What a rigmarole!

  Miss Arabel found it very hard to go on, because she could hear Papa’s muttering voice so plainly—just a smudge of sound, and then her own name, “Arabel.” And then things, frightening things, forbidden things, that were not to be talked about, by Papa’s own especial order. And yet here was Papa talking about them in that low terrifying mutter. It made her heart beat so hard that she missed the next words. And all of a sudden he was looking at her and saying the things that he had said fifty years ago. It was only for a minute. If it had lasted more than a minute, she was sure she would have fainted. But half way through a sentence he stopped; his hand lifted from the sheet and fell again; his voice changed. “Well—well—it’s a long time ago—you can have them now—I kept them—” And then, whilst she leaned forward terrified, his eyes closed and he leaned back against his pillows, and an awful endless silence closed down upon the room. Neither of them moved until Nurse came back.