From London Far (30 page)

‘Wandering?
When does Miss Isabella wander?’

‘At night and when the Foxes are working, Miss Halliwell. The creaking of them disturbs her, I think, so that she can’t sleep, poor dear. And then she takes a lantern, maybe, and wanders the castle in the dark, which is no safe thing to do. Even to the cliff’s edge she’ll go, and be staring down at the anchorage. It’s then mostly she hears the long ships – and sees them too, she says; dark shapes with here and there a glimmering light.’

‘Do you think she really sees them?’

Mrs Cameron looked surprised. ‘And what for no? Even Tammas can hear Black Malcolm singing in his dungeon. And why shouldn’t Miss Isabella, that is for ever peering through the years, see the dark ships of Magnus or Olaf?’

‘I suppose there’s no reason why she shouldn’t.’ Jean rose. ‘I think I’ll go outside for a little fresh air before going to bed.’

Mrs Cameron raised a delaying hand.
‘The Root and the Stem finally demand notice. The root is designed, not only to support the plant by fixing it in the soil–’

Jean slipped to the door.

‘–
but also to fulfil the functions of a channel for the conveyance of nourishment
.’

The night air was chill. The moon was up.

‘It is therefore furnished with pores–’

Jean closed the door behind her. The sky had blown clear and there were stars. Venus was setting in the west.

The base-court was two broad panels of moonlight bisected by a dark bar of shadow cast from the keep. The only sounds were of a pig scuffling in straw and small waves very faintly breaking far below.

An outcrop of stone… Jean could see that in the farther corner of the court one of the massive inner walls seemed to rise up from a raised foundation of living rock. There must lie what Miss Isabella had called the Seaway – that deep fissure through which Magnus Barelegs had come long ago, and Captain Maxwell’s bleating cargo that very morning. And there was a grille. The hereditary Captain, anxious for her castle’s strength, had ordered that it be closed. But had Tammas obeyed? Jean thought it unlikely. Cautiously, and traversing the great shadow of the keep as one who fears an ambush, Jean crossed the court.

The aperture yawned before her. All that evening she had carried an electric torch in her bag – in Minnie Martin’s bag. She shone it now. An irregular, steeply sloping passage with sheer sides – some work of Nature, perhaps, enlarged by human hands – wound into darkness, chill and smelling indifferently of sea and sheep. Jean slipped past the open grille – a massive barricade enough – and plunged down the cleft, her torch waving before her. Bats flapped. The smooth stone beneath her feet was slippery with the droppings of sheep. Behind her now the opening through which she had come was no more than a dimly moonlit patch upon the darkness. She moved on, only to halt abruptly at a heavy grating sound that echoed dully down the walls. She turned. The opening which seconds before had been a single splash of faint radiance was now a criss-cross of dark lines. Someone had closed the grille.

She had switched off her torch and now she stood very still pressed against the unyielding rock, her heart pounding. For a moment a massive shadow further obscured the distant light. There was the sound of footsteps, progressing surely in the dark. And then a man laughed – a strange man.

It was Miss Dorcas’ world, but turned to nightmare. Jean forced her limbs to move and pressed on down the pitchy passage. The man laughed again. It was the laugh of one who follows a secure quarry. She gritted her teeth. At the other end was at least the landing-stage, the anchorage, the sea. If she could only make that she might conceivably have a chance to swim for it. She stumbled and fell heavily, bruising her knees, so that involuntarily she cried out with pain. The man laughed once more. Jean felt cold as ice, impossible to say whether with fear or rage. She turned – or was by the curve of the passage bumped round – a corner. Before her was the faintest possible radiance – an effect only perceptible because of the utter darkness from which she had come. The anchorage lay before her, a deep well unplumbed by moonlight or favouring stars. Only two dull red lights glowed near the surface of the water. She took a few more steps forward and was in open air.

Low-pitched voices murmured in the night. One light was moving. And across the centre of the anchorage lay a long, low shape, with immediately above it another dark mass suspended in air. Jean, poised to dive, hesitated while taking another glance at this obscurely significant thing. And as she did so a hand fell upon her shoulder from behind and the laugh sounded anew.
‘Guten Abend
,’ said a low ironical voice.
‘Wie geht es Ihnen, gnädige Frau
?’

Jean turned. ‘Who are you?’ she asked steadily. ‘And how did you come to be in the castle?’

The man kept his hand on her shoulder, spoke again in German, checked himself. ‘We usually send someone to the head of that passage, to see that all is quiet in the ruins. Tonight I went myself – and it was not.’ He paused. ‘You are fortunate.’

‘Am I?’ Jean had detected something oddly sombre in the stranger’s voice. But this did not obscure the fact that he had laughed when she fell. ‘At least I haven’t been driven daft, like poor Higbed.’

‘Higbed?’ The stranger was at a loss. ‘I know nothing of him – nor of you either. But plainly you have been more inquisitive than is discreet. You were bound to be caught. And your good fortune consists in having been caught by us and not by them. They are common criminals, you know – no more. They would simply have dropped you into the sea.’

‘What nonsense!’ Jean, who thought it politic to scout this indubitable truth, tried to catch a glimpse of her captor’s face. ‘And you?’

‘At first we were their employers. They were mere cogs in a system by which we got as much foreign currency as we could. But now that it is all over they have turned the tables on us. We are a mere ferry-service – and perhaps we might be called pirates, too.’

‘Well, you know, you were always that, after all.’

The stranger dropped his hand to his side. ‘We are broken soldiers, surplus war material – what you will.’ His arm shot out again, but this time only to point to the dark low streak on the surface of the anchorage. ‘She sank a British cruiser. And now she carries away the treasures of Europe to satisfy the vanity of–’

‘I know all about that.’ Jean found the noble melancholy of this German ex-sailor not particularly appealing. ‘But surely you can’t keep so complicated a thing as a U-boat in commission all on the quiet – as those other people do their furniture vans?’

‘Obviously not.’ The man standing in the darkness laughed again. ‘She becomes more absurdly unseaworthy every week. Quite soon now she will submerge for the last time. The moment will come to surface,
gnädige Frau
, and surface she will not. I wonder what, on that occasion, will be on board? A crate of Russian ikons, perhaps, and the better part of some great private collection from Poland or Belgium. That will be sad! And I, since I am her commander, shall be on board too. Sad, again. And you–’

‘I?’ said Jean. ‘But didn’t you say I was fortunate?’

‘Why, yes. Your watery grave will now not be a solitary one, after all. But here is the boat.’

A tiny dinghy with muffled oars had glided up to the landing-stage, and for the first time Jean fully realized that she was about to say goodbye to Moila. The prospect of indefinite voyaging in an unseaworthy submarine was not pleasing, and less pleasing still was the thought that it must be in the hands of men very little under even the remnants of decent discipline. They were defeated enemies engaged in what might be called a blind-alley profession of the queerest sort. It was rather like being pitched into Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
, which she remembered as about a super-submarine manned by outlaws. ‘I suppose’, she said, ‘that you are Captain Nemo?’

The effect of this question was startling. Even in the darkness the man beside her could be seen to give a perceptible jump. ‘I am Captain von Schwiebus,’ he said, and hesitated. Then his voice broke out harshly: ‘Who gave you that? From whom did you have that sign?’

Jean’s head swam. Could this conceivably be the password business again? Captain Nemo was the first nickname with which anyone of mildly literary inclinations would think to dub the piratical von Schwiebus; could it be that such a person had rashly embodied it in some system of signs and tokens? If so, Richard Meredith’s original role had now devolved upon her, and there was opening before her the first possibility of some obscure deception. Jean moved deliberately towards the dinghy. ‘Captain von Schwiebus,’ she said mockingly, ‘how funny you are. More absurd, even, than they suggested to me.’

Von Schwiebus savagely kicked what might have been either the dinghy or the man rowing it.
‘Bitte
,’ he said roughly,
‘nehmen Sie Platz
.’ But his voice was uncertain – and to the uncertainty Jean hastened to add by stepping in with alacrity. Her shaken captor followed and dressed the boat.
‘They
?’ he said. ‘Who are
they
?’

Jean laughed. She did her best to make the sound as disturbing in its kind as had been von Schwiebus’ own laugh in the Seaway. ‘What is wrong with many Germans’, she said, ‘is nothing particularly Germanic. It is simply reading too much Byron. Why is so mediocre a poet celebrated all over central Europe? And you, my dear Captain, devoured him. The fluency of your English attests it. And I was told how you delighted in the outcast hero role.’

Von Schwiebus breathed heavily. This, then, was mockery that went home.

‘But it inclines you to suppose that every man’s hand must be against you. Why did you behave in that ridiculous way in the fissure – shutting the grille and trying the effect of Satanic laughter? Didn’t it at all occur to you that I might be not a spy but – well, one of the common criminals, as you pleasantly put it?’

Von Schwiebus swore at the man who was rowing. And Jean was aware that although he was nonplussed by this line at which she had dived something else was on his mind as well. He was looking at a wrist-watch. ‘Be pleased to explain yourself,’ he said abruptly.

‘Dear me, no. All this is much too amusing. But I assure you that matters will explain themselves in time.’

‘As time will be abundant,’ said Captain von Schwiebus, ‘that may well be so.’

Jean’s heart misgave her. The retired hero was not so easy to rattle. And there is something particularly discouraging in the prospect of playing for time during an interminable voyage beneath the North Atlantic in an obsolete submarine. Still, things had seemed pretty hopeless before now. And for time, therefore, she would continue to play. ‘I suppose’, she asked carelessly, ‘that you have met our excellent Mr Neff? He has been buying stuff from Marsden’s people, I am sorry to say. But perhaps he will take the Horton
Venus
. Are you freighting it this trip, by the way?’

‘No, I’m not.’ By this knowing talk von Schwiebus looked like being quite impressed. ‘The quality this trip is poor. Indeed, it includes an Italian.’

‘A live Italian?’

‘I understand so. But as he has failed to turn up on time, he may well be dead.’ Von Schwiebus paused. ‘Perhaps’, he said suddenly, ‘you know his name?’

‘Yes – perhaps I do.’ Jean was not much struck by the success of her endeavour to put an enigmatic quality into this. But while she was still casting about for something more forceful the dinghy – it appeared to be a mere wood-and-canvas affair – bumped gently into the side of the submarine. She looked up and saw that the dark mass which had impended over it was gone. One more Flying Fox, in fact, had continued its bogus journey to Inchfarr.

There was a moment of confusion, the grip of strong hands, and she was standing on a narrow cat-walk amid a group of silent men. They were peering intently into the east, and one of them was glancing at a wrist-watch as von Schwiebus had done. She realized that the submarine was in a hurry to get away – perhaps because of some factor in the tides, perhaps because Captain Maxwell’s Sunderland laddies were still in the air and safety demanded gaining deep water soon. A man with a shaded torch and a sheaf of papers had come up to von Schwiebus and in his low rapid German Jean caught references to the Italian and to the fountain. This latter was altogether mysterious – but perhaps, she thought, they had been alternating Byron with Mr Charles Morgan’s mysterious love story. And now von Schwiebus said something about herself, the men parted before her, and she saw that she was being invited or required to descend an iron ladder that ran perpendicularly down through a hatch. The submarine was already low on the water, so this would mean that she was sinking below the surface of these chill, faintly lapping waves. There was something peculiarly unnerving about the necessity – much as there must be about a first parachute jump, she thought – and she stopped to give one last look at the upper air. At the level on which she stood all was absolute darkness and this continued until, seemingly immensely high above her head, the great black curtain became a ragged semicircular silhouette against a moonlit sky. That jagged line marked the ruined ramparts of Castle Moila. And Jean turned to the hatch indifferently. For it was as if she was already miles beneath the sea.

A low exclamation halted her. The waiting men had swung again to the east. She stood, unnoticed, and followed the line of their gaze. A small dark shape had appeared above the battlements; it grew larger and dropped lower, obscuring now one and now another star. Within seconds it had disappeared into the impenetrable darkness encircling them. Something began to vibrate directly overhead. The shape appeared again, startling close and low. It slowed down, and as it did so there was an intermittent creaking – such a sound as might be made by many oars swinging in the rowlocks of a long dark ship…

Jean wondered how the Foxes could be so accurately stopped directly above the waiting submarine – and wondered too how they could be unloaded while hovering still in air. The men were hurrying forward and only von Schwiebus remained beside her, his eye fixed on his watch. There was the sound of laboured movement forward, a dull clang of steel, stifled exclamations. Jean glanced at von Schwiebus. He was frowning into the darkness and appeared to have forgotten her. Perhaps it really did go against the grain with him to be casting this loot –