The Coldstone

by Patricia Wentworth

  “You’ve got the key safe?”

  Anthony nodded.

  “In my inside pocket. That’s what I really came up for to-day.”

  “You said you came up to find me.”

  “I had to have a decent excuse. I did the key first anyway. I don’t suppose they’d have sent it for days. I wonder if—the others—have got theirs yet.”

  Susan shivered again, and Anthony took his left hand off the wheel and put it on her shoulder.

  “Cold?”

  “Oh no—boiling.”

  “You shivered.”

  He heard her laugh and felt her press against him.

  “I only want to get on. I want to be sure we get there first.”

  His astonishment was plain.

  “You think—”

  “I know,” said Susan. This time the shudder was in her voice. Garry never gave up. He always went on until he got what he wanted. She spoke in breathless haste. “Can’t you go faster?”

  “Why? What’s the hurry? We can’t do anything to-night, anyhow.”

  He was aware of an abrupt movement.

  “Not? Oh, but we must! You don’t mean to say—”

  “We shan’t get down till after eleven.”

  “But that’s just our very best time.”

  “You mean to look for the secret place tonight?”

  “Yes—yes! They’ll try and get in first—they will—I know they will.”

  She heard him laugh, a dry, short laugh.

  “It would be a lot easier for me if I knew a little more about it all.”

  “Yes—but—I—can’t. But we’ve got to be quick. Don’t you see it’s quite easy to do things to-night? Nobody will know we’re back—nobody will know anything.”

  Anthony considered this in silence. He couldn’t get in without rousing the house, unless … And then there was the car. Of course he could run it into the field at the corner. It would be quite safe there.

  Susan was speaking again, softly, eagerly:

  “You could come in with me, and we could go through the passage.”

  “I thought we agreed that you weren’t going to come through the passage any more.”

  “Anthony! You don’t imagine you’re going down into that cellar to find things all by yourself?”

  He abandoned the idea.

  “Well, how are you going to get in, anyway?”

  “Gran gave me the front door key. I told her I might be late, and she promised to go off to bed.”

  After a pause Anthony said, “You oughtn’t to.”

  “I’m going to.”

  After another pause, “I could back the car through the gate into that field just before you come to the corner.”

  Susan hugged herself.

  “Yes, you could!”

  Her spirits began to soar. Garry wasn’t following them. He wouldn’t follow them. He’d just give up. He’d be bound to give up once they’d got the book. There wasn’t anything he could do, really.

  All at once she felt as if someone had dropped a little burning piece of ice down the back of her neck. She made such a quick movement towards Anthony that the car swerved right across the road.

  “I say, don’t do that! What’s the matter?”

  “I’m frightened,” said Susan.

  “What on earth have you got to be frightened about?”

  “I don’t know.” (She saw Garry’s eyes.)

  “Darling—don’t! I can’t unfrighten you and drive the car.”

  “Sing!” said Susan. “Sing something nice and loud, so that I can stop hearing myself think.”

  Anthony risked another swerve by putting his arm round her and giving her a shake; after which he kissed her and began to sing at the top of his voice:

  “‘Adam and Eve could never believe

  That Peter the miller was dead.

  Shut up in the tower for stealing of flour,

  And never could get a reprieve.

  They bored a hole in Oliver’s nose,

  And put therein a string

  And drew him round about the town

  For murdering Charles our King.’

  Does that make you feel better?”

  “’M—” said Susan. “You’ve got a nice loud voice.” Then, in the middle of his burst of laughter, “Anthony, what do you suppose we shall find?”

  “Dunno. We shall know when we find it. Suppose it’s a spoof. You know, if it isn’t, I don’t see how your grandfather Philip, who was a younger son, ever got away with the book. I mean if there had been anything in it, somebody would have found out about it long ago, or anyhow the book would have been considered a valuable heirloom.”

  Susan broke in eagerly:

  “I asked Gran about that, and she knew Philip had the book, but she said his father didn’t care for any of the old things, and Sir Jervis didn’t care either when he was a young man, and they let Philip have the book because of his name being Philip too. And I asked her if she thought there was a message in it, or anything of that sort, and she said the Bowyers always said there was, but they didn’t speak about it, and the Colstones didn’t believe it, and whether it was a Colstone or a Bowyer, they were all for leaving well alone and not doing anything to stir up things that shouldn’t be stirred up. So that’s how Philip got the book.”

  They came down the hill into Ford St. Mary, and backed the car into the corner field nearly half an hour after it had struck eleven on the grandfather clock in the library at Stonegate.

  As the car left the road, the man who had been standing at the corner looking up the hill turned and ran down the road towards the village. He made no sound as he ran.

  The village street was as black as the inside of a chimney. You could just see where roof left off and sky began; and you couldn’t see that unless your eyes had been long enough in the dark to catch the very faintest break in it. Every house was asleep, and every window except one was fastened and unlit. In just one window there was a little faint candlelight, enough to show that the casement stood ajar. The blind was down. The light showed where its edge fell short of the sill.

  The man who had run from the corner stopped dead in the middle of the street. Someone moved towards him; a hand fell on his shoulder. He said, in a toneless whisper,

  “They’ve just come. They’ve put the car in the field at the corner.”

  The hand on his shoulder was lifted. There was a whispered answer.

  The man who had run went forward. When he was a yard away no one could have seen him. His footsteps went on a little way and then stopped.

  The other man went back into the darkness from which he had emerged. One or two minutes passed very slowly. Then there came to his straining ears a very faint sound. It became less faint as it came nearer. Two people, walking however softly, make enough noise to reach anyone who is listening for just that very thing. Garry O’Connell stood and listened; and if his mind had been less fiercely concentrated on the present moment of time, he might have been taken back eight years and remembered other nights, when he had stood in some Irish lane or behind the loose piled stones of an Irish dyke waiting, in a night as dark as this but soft with rain, for the moment that would give him an enemy’s life. He had taken life, and that not once or twice, with the extraordinary callousness of that time, but he had never waited for any of the men whom he had killed with the cold, fierce bitter hatred which possessed him to-night.

  Susan and Anthony came down the street without a light to guide them. They walked in the middle of the road, and went softly, having no desire to present Mrs. Smithers with a thrill.

  Susan put her mouth to Anthony’s ear and breathed, in a faint little whisper that tickled him,

  “I can’t see anything, but I can smell Gran’s Virginia stock. We’re here. Let me feel for the gate.”

  Anthony kept his arm round her, and they went through together and up the paved walk to Mrs. Bowyer’s front door.

  When it had closed behind them, Garry O’Connell too
k a step forward and lifted his eyes to where the square of Susan’s window stared, unseen and unseeing, into the black dark. Garry stared back at it. There was a black darkness within him. His thoughts moved in it, and the dark was troubled, but not broken. If it broke, it would break in flame. He watched the window steadily. If a light went up behind that curtained square, if it were only the glimmer of a match, he would see it. If there were no light—if they were there, murmuring to each other in the darkness, shut in from all the world, it came to him that he would know that too. He waited. There was no light. There was no sound. The room behind the unseen casement was empty. It was a dead room. Susan wasn’t in it.

  Garry’s frightful concentration relaxed. If they were not in Susan’s room, he could think again. When he thought, he knew where they were—they had gone through the passage into Stonegate. And if they had done that, it meant—Garry knew very well what it meant. He whistled, just under his breath, the first line of “Robin Adair,” and then walked across the street and some paces along it until he came to a garden gate. He opened the gate and went through it, and on until he was standing immediately under the one lighted window in Ford St. Mary. Standing there, he took a pebble from his pocket and tossed it up against the glass. The window, which was ajar, was pushed open.

  Garry O’Connell once again whistled: “What’s this dull town to me, Robin Adair?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Susan and Anthony went down the cellar steps with the library lamp to light them. The lamp was Susan’s idea.

  “I will not look for hidden treasure with an electric torch! It’s an anachronism.”

  Anthony held the lamp high and went first.

  “I don’t see why a Victorian anachronism is any better really than a neo-Georgian one.”

  “It doesn’t keep spotting off and on, and it doesn’t just make little holes in the dark and leave most of you soaked in inky blackness. Electric torches make me feel exactly like Guy Fawkes blowing up the Houses of Parliament.”

  “Who’s being an anachronism now?” said Anthony.

  But when they came to the heavy door that shut off the old cellars, he was glad enough of the lamp. The key that he had had made turned stiffly in the disused lock; he had to take two hands to it. Susan, behind him, uttered an exclamation. The lamp which he had set down at his side shed a still, yellow light upon the door, all scored black oak and rusty iron bands. It shone on the old lock, and the new key, and on Anthony’s straining hands.

  Susan uttered her exclamation, leaned between Anthony and the lamp, and touched the lock with the tip of her finger. She brought it away wet. The lamplight showed a dark smear.

  “Anthony—did you put oil in the lock?”

  “No.” He looked up with a startled jerk of the head.

  “Who did?” said Susan breathlessly. “Do you think—one of the servants?”

  “Not by my orders.” When he jerked his head up, a monstrous shadow jerked on the cellar roof.

  Susan had a frightful feeling of recoil from what lay behind the door, and at the same moment it swung open and the lamplight went a little way into the darkness that lay beyond, and there stayed. An indescribable smell of mould and old used air began to flow out towards them like stagnant water.

  Anthony picked up the lamp and stepped over the threshold. A dark passage with a very low roof was all that they could see, but half a dozen paces along it brought them to an open doorway on the left. It gave on an empty space. A similar opening on the right showed more emptiness. And then the floor began to slope downwards. They came to a door that blocked their path, running right across the narrow passage. It was held by a rusty staple and a broken chain.

  Anthony held the lamp lower. Simultaneously he and Susan saw the bright marks on the broken iron—bright deep scratches where a tool had slipped and scored through the rust to the sound heart of the metal. He lifted the staple and pushed open the door. Three steps led down into a small vaulted room. Ceiling, floor, and walls were of stone. The air was very close, and the lamp flickered.

  Susan bent as she passed down the steps. From the lowest tread she picked up a small wooden match with a bright green head.

  “Anthony—” she said, and then stopped.

  “H’m—” said Anthony; his brows drew together. But all of a sudden he laughed. “That’s an anachronism if you like!” He looked at Susan with a hard, straight look. “I think they got their key first after all,” he said.

  Then, as he swung round with the lamp in his hand, Susan cried out and pointed with her left hand. On the wall at the farther end of the room, at about the height of her shoulder, there was cut upon the stone the figure of the interlaced triangles which she had seen at the head of the newspaper cutting in Garry’s room—the sign of the Shield of David.

  “Look!” she whispered. The finger with which she was pointing trembled a little. Her voice quivered with excitement as she spoke Philip Colstone’s words:

  “Goe soe low as thou canst. There is a stone that turneth harde by the wall. Presse where is the shield, and with thy foote presse hard upon the second shield. These two shields I cut, for alle men feare Merlyn’s sign.”

  Her voice failed. She caught his arm, and shook the lamplight into a wild pattern of leaping light and dancing shade.”

  “Anthony—”

  “Where’s the second shield? Take care of the lamp!”

  There was some broken rubble scattered here and there on the floor of the chamber. He set the lamp down and began to shift the débris with his hands, feeling over each patch of stone as he cleared it. He stopped a yard from the wall on a level with the first sign.

  “Got it! Got it in one! Bring the lamp!”

  He was dusting away a little white powder and some small pellets of chalky stuff. Some of it had lodged where the point of the second shield showed faintly about a yard from the wall.

  “That’s it!” He scrambled up. “Stand clear with that lamp! You’d better go right over by the door—I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.”

  Standing close to the wall, he pushed with all his might against it just where the two triangles crossed. At the same time he thrust hard with his foot at the second shield. There was a creaking, groaning sound. The stone under his foot moved so suddenly that he came near to losing his balance; only the thrust of his hand on the wall saved him. He drew back his foot and jumped, to the sound of a soft cry from Susan.

  He put his arm round her, and they stood looking at the flagstone which had given under his foot with a forward tilt. And before their eyes it was moving now—moving slowly, tilting more and more, until its raised side almost hid a square black cavity.

  After a moment Anthony went forward and looked over the edge.

  “That’s the place,” he said in rather an odd voice. “It’s a beastly black hole. I wonder what he hid there. Bit of a practical joker our ancestor Philip.”

  Susan said, “I hate it.”

  “Would you like to go back?”

  “No, of course I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, wait here anyhow. Give me the lamp.”

  “What? Wait here—with ghosts and bogles positively oozing out of the walls?”

  She heard his unwilling laugh.

  “Sherlock would have loved to meet a ghost. But you can keep the lamp—I’ve got a torch.”

  “Oh! I simply won’t be left! Anthony—Anthony!” She spoke to a pair of hands gripping the sides of the opening, and the top of a brown head that hung below them.

  Then the hands let go and the head disappeared. She could see nothing but a square black hole. There was a thudding sound, and then Anthony’s voice:

  “I’m all right. It’s only a seven-foot drop, but I slipped, like a mug. Come on—it’s quite dry. Wait a moment—give me the lamp first.”

  Susan stooped to pick it up. Still stooping, she bent over the hole, and saw Anthony’s hands come up to take the lamp. She uttered a sharp exclamation and very nearly dropped it.
>
  “What’s the matter?” His voice came out of the darkness with a note of alarm in it.

  She moved the lamp until the light shone on his upturned face and full on his outstretched hands. She said with a gasp,

  “Your hands!”

  “What’s the matter with them?”

  “They’re black—they’re coal-black—you look like a sweep.” She began to laugh, and the lamp shook.

  “Give me that lamp,” said Anthony. And, then just as he was going to take it, he saw his own hands and laughed too, an odd excited laugh.

  Susan saw the lamp go down into the hole. She heard Anthony laughing, and looking down, she saw that the light was filling a space about seven feet square—a black space, all black. She did not wait to see anything more.

  “I’m coming down. Give me a hand,” she called, and came down with a rush, fetching up in Anthony’s arms.

  He was still laughing.

  “Coal-black’s the word!” he said. “It’s coal all right, and we shall both be like sweeps before we’re through.”

  “Coal?” she said. Then, slowly, “That’s not what Philip Colstone meant.”

  “It’s coal all right. And it’s what J.E.W. found. He came to Stonegate, and he reported coal under the estate. Sir Jervis said he’d be hanged if he’d have the place ruined. He tore up the report, sent West packing, and then, I suspect, Master J.E.W. tried to do the dirty on him and got together enough financial backing to make a bid for the place, and a pretty high one too. Only the old man wouldn’t play—and by gum, I respect him. Coal was coal in those days, and he might have simply raked in the cash, instead of which he destroyed the report and went on refusing fancy prices.

  Susan shook him by the sleeve.

  “Anthony, stop! My head’s going round. What has all this to do with Philip Colstone?”

  Anthony said, “I don’t know.”

  She shook him again.

  “Darling Watson, you’re mixing up two stories—you really are—and I’m not sure whether you’re in one of them and I’m in another, which makes it frightfully muddling. We began by being in the ‘Adventure of The Shepheard’s Kalendar and the Matters Philip Colstone brought from the Indies,’ and now all of a sudden you’ve switched off into the ‘Adventure of the Hidden Coal and the Deceitful J.E.W.’ And I like my story best—it’s much, much, much more romantic. And I want most desperately to know what Philip Colstone brought from the Indies.”