Red Hart Magic (12 page)

HUE AND CRY

Chris was afraid that Aunt Elizabeth would keep going on about what had happened. But though she looked at him now and then, a faint frown between her eyes, she said nothing before Nan. So minute by minute Chris relaxed a little. He was still very sure that he had not a single chance of being believed tomorrow, but he had tonight. Though he did go to his room early. Nan had been watching him, too. He tried to shove her out of mind. There was nobody he could depend upon, not even himself.

Unless—

He did not know what very small hope sent him to the drawer, made him bring out the inn. He wished he really could go back in time. Even if it were to the time when the Excisemen and smugglers were fighting. Just at this moment that seemed better than what faced him now.

Slowly he set the Red Hart down on the bedside table. It rested on the letter from Dad, which he had not even opened. He looked down at that—what was the use? There could be nothing in that envelope worth the reading. Reluctantly he got into bed.

Someone was shouting so loudly the noise rang in his ears. And he was no longer in bed. There was cold, with snow, and bushes around where he crouched. Part of the battle with the smugglers? But he had been at the inn then—

He saw a flare of fire shooting up. The inn was afire!

Chris pushed forward. The flames drove away the night shadows. No, that was not the inn he saw across a scrap of field. It was a big barn, and what blazed beside it was a haystack. Men were milling around throwing buckets of water on the flames and then falling back as the fire, as if to spite them, only leaped up higher. There were other noises, and some men were coming out of the barn leading cows. One had a big horse with its head muffled up in a coat.

He got to his feet. Were the smugglers doing this? Why?

“Chris Fitton!”

His name hissed out of the shadows made him half turn. There was another boy standing so that the flickering of the fire showed him a little but not enough for Chris to see his face.

“Who are you?” Suddenly it was very important that he know that.

His only answer was a laugh as the boy slipped back into the shadows. However, it seemed as if some door in his head had opened.

He was Chris Fitton right enough, and his father was landlord of the Red Hart. As to what he was doing here—he knew that, too, now. He had been waiting for Sampson Dykes. And if his father knew about his being with Dykes! Chris drew a deep breath. Right now he should be back in bed at the inn, and the sooner he was there, the better.

Shuffling through the brush, he hurried toward the dim woods path. That was the Manor farm he had seen afire. In this weather they could not get enough water out of the pond to wet it down. To judge by the shouting, half the village was already there.

Chris hesitated. If they kept that up, his father and the ostler Jack and the stableboys would be coming. He might make the wrong choice going back. But he still padded toward the innyard. Yes, he had been right in his guess; there was the flare of a lantern, men tumbling out of the stable quarters. Chris just managed to join them.

“The Manor farm,” someone was yelling. “It's afire!”

He saw his father move swiftly out the door. “Buckets, lads,” he called as he came. “And bring horse blankets. We can wet them with snow and beat out the flames—”

Chris snatched up a strong-smelling blanket from within the stable, joining with the force Ira Fitton led back along the woods trail.

They plunged into the fight around the fire, but it was too late to save the barn. Rather they had to fight for the rest of the outbuildings and even the house.

“Set it was!” A man with a smoke-blackened face, who spoke with Henry Nevison's voice, declared hoarsely. “Wickedness it was. Set by some murderin’ rogue as would burn us all in our beds!”

The flames were dying. They had at last won the battle. Chris tried not to breathe in the thick smoke.

“It's a mercy, Master, as how we got the horses out. They were so frightened.”

“The poor beasts.” Nevison commented. “I tell you it was set. And him who had the doing of it, do I lay my two hands on him, he'll wish he'd never been born. Not that it'll do him any good!”

Ira Fitton, nearly as smoke-blackened as the farmer, spoke first. “What makes you think it was set, Henry?”

“How else could it be? The lads know as how there is to be no lanterns ever in there. Plain, I made it to them. And a haystack, it don't burst into fire by itself in the middle of winter! You know well, Ira, there be those who have a spite against the Squire. He has been hard on men since he sits as Justice. But no man but a devil would turn spite back on poor dumb beasts. If Mick here hadn't got him a bellyache as kept him awake"—the farmer nodded to one of the grimy figures behind him—"we'd have lost all the beasts into the bargain. Murder, I calls it, even if they say as how they is only dumb animals. And how I'm to shelter them,” he added, “in this cruel weather now—”

“Bring them to the inn. There's room and enough. We don't get many travelers in winter, Henry.”

“What's to do here?”

The man who rode into the crowd, his horse, alarmed by the stink of the burned hay, fighting his control, was older than Chris's father. He had a narrow, long-nosed face with a tight, ill-tempered mouth slashing across it. Squire Mallory. Instinctively Chris drew into the shadows. Master Nevison was sure that the fire had been set, and it was true that the Squire had a dark hate for poachers. He'd sent Sampson's
older brother off to be like a slave in Australia for taking a couple of hares when his family was nigh to starving ‘cause the Squire had turned them out of their cottage and given it to some gamekeeper he brought from the north.

Had Sampson fired the hay? Chris denied that thought as soon as it came to life in his mind. Sam hated them as hurt animals. He would never have let the farm creatures be caught in any fire. There were other men and boys, too, that had it in for Squire Mallory, that hated him enough to burn up his home farm. Take Jem Catsby, for instance, though Jem had gone away two days ago, saying as how he had nothing here, so he might as well go up to London and see what kind of a fortune he could make. Father had said he was a fool; you found worse in London than you did right here.

Henry Nevison was repeating his accusation and that mean mouth Squire wore twisted a little more. “This is a hanging matter!” he snapped. “And we'll see that someone swings for it.”

Chris shivered. Squire meant exactly what he said. He would see as how someone swung for what happened tonight. The boy moved back farther into the shadows. No use letting Squire sight him, not since last week when he had turned white with rage when he caught Miss Nan talking to Chris and asking about the fox pup the boy had raised. To Squire, Chris was not much better than dirt, and no one as his daughter should speak to. Chris had seen even Miss Nan was afraid when Squire sent her home.

“You, Fitton!” Squire pushed his horse near the innkeeper.

“What are you and those hangdogs you hire doing here?” He swung his riding crop back and forth in one hand as if he itched to use it, and not on a horse either.

“We came to help.” Father was calm. He stared Squire back as straight as Squire eyed him. Squire did not like the fact that the inn was free of his owning, that it belonged to the Fittons and he could not say what they must do.

“And now,” Father continued, “since our services are no longer needed, we'll go.”

Chris saw the shamed look on Henry Nevison's face. But the farmer dared not speak up; it was as much as his living was worth, seeing as how he was Squire's man.

It was very quiet as Ira Fitton and his people turned their backs on the rest. They did not take the woods trail either, but plodded along the road, mindful not to set foot off that in Squire's seeing.

Jack's voice came out of the dark. “That one will make mischief, Master.”

“If he can. Now listen, all of you.” There was a stern note in Ira Fitton's voice. “It may be right, as Henry Nevison has said, that the fire was set. But in times when such things are believed, men are apt to seize on the first person and accuse him—guilty or not. You will keep your tongues between your teeth on this matter, and you'll also keep off Mallory land. We'll give him no chance to point a finger in our direction.”

“That's well said, Master. The Squire, he takes it unkindly that he ain't master at the Red Hart as he is in the village.

He'd like as not point that finger just as you said,” Jack agreed; and there was a mutter from the stableboys and the tapman in a chorus of approval.

“So you will give him no chance,” Ira Fitton returned. “And you'll do no talking with any in the village. I'll not see any innocent man swing if I can help it, so say nothing because if you do any guessing aloud, it may put someone's neck into danger—guilty or not.”

Now he reached out a hand to close firmly about Chris's upper arm in a grip the boy could not throw off even if he tried. There was more his father would say, he guessed uncomfortably, but not before these others. It must have to do with Sam—He stumped through the snow, that grip never releasing him, wondering what he could answer if his father had lighted upon the truth and knew of his slipping out to follow Sam. There was nothing he could offer in defense; he had been warned enough about trespassing on Mallory land and had seen in his meeting with Miss Nan what could come of it. His father had accepted his explanation of that, but he would take very unkindly to any knowledge that Chris had accompanied a suspected poacher.

The men went to bed again in the loft over the stable, but Chris under his father's urging came, not into the friendliness of the kitchen, but beyond into the small room where Ira Fitton kept accounts and dealt out justice to those of his own household. The boy heard the click of a flint and then blinked at the blaze of a candle.

Ira Fitton sat down in his big armchair. His hair was
dusted with gray along those sideburns which reached near to the angle of his jaw. And near his right eye was the pucker of scar gained at Waterloo. There was none of the good humor he usually showed in his dealings with Chris shining in his gray eyes now.

“You were out tonight"—he did not make that a question but a statement.

There was no lying to Sergeant Major Fitton, Retired. Chris had never tried. “Yes.”

“Where did you go and why?”

“I went to the bushes by the farm hedge.” But Chris could not add why he had gone. Father had no use for Sampson. He had said publicly that the whole Dykes family were rogues and the parish would be the better with them out of it.

Ira Fitton broke the silence between them. “It was Sampson, wasn't it? You went with him?”

Chris shook his head. “I didn't see him. He never came.”

Sampson could not have set the fire; Chris would swear to that. And if no one knew that he was out that night—

His father leaned forward a little in the chair. “You little fool!” he exploded. “It needs only one man to have seen you sneaking around and tell the Squire—He'd have you sent to jail in Rye before you took a deep breath. And there'll be plenty to curry favor with him by swearing that you're the one. Do you understand me?”

Chris was too shaken to shape any words. He nodded.

“We had better hope that you weren't seen,” his father continued.

Suddenly Chris remembered that shadow who had called his name. “Maybe,” he croaked, “there was someone.”

“Who?” His father shot that at him as he might have shot one of the big pistols he had brought back from the war.

“I don't know.” Hurriedly he told of that figure.

His father slapped his open hand down on the table with a noise that made Chris blink. “There's trouble right before us. I've got to think. As for you—get you up to your room and stay there until I send for you.”

Chris scuttled out, fear nosing at his heels as closely as a hound might do.

Nan stood at the window, the thickest and warmest of her shawls about her shoulders. But she was shivering more with excitement than with cold as she watched that distant flare of flames which now died away. Had the farm all burned up?

She had been wakened by a heavy pounding on the door. Liz, who had been in the truckle bed near her, had gone slip-slopping off in her loose slippers, to return with the tidings that it was Dolph Nevison come up with the news that there was a fire at the home farm and there was a need for men to fight it. Nan had pulled out of the big bed and gone to the window to see.

Later her father had pounded by on his horse, heading down the farm lane. The men must have gone the shorter way across the fields. Her father had only been a black shape in the night, but she could imagine his fury.

Only too well did Nan know how much the Mallorys were disliked. Her father might set himself up as Squire, but
everyone knew that he had bought the Manor and the lands at a forced sale, because the last owner had broken his neck out hunting and left a widow and two children without a guinea to their purse. And if he had bought his way in here, that did not mean that the villagers, the farmers, the few gentry families hereabouts, accepted him.

She let the curtain fall back into place. Liz had lighted one candle and left it on the chest when she had gone off again into the kitchen to lend a hand in getting hot drinks ready for the men when they returned. Nan longed to slip down there, too, to hear what had really happened. Fear of her father kept her where she was.

He would not have her gossiping with the servants, as he said. She cringed now at the memory of the whipping he had given her after she had gone to see the fox cub that boy at the inn had tamed. Father hated the inn people because he could not rule
them.
Master Fitton held the inn from his father and his grandfather before him. It was one of the tales of the neighborhood which she had heard from Liz.

It all had to do with the smugglers who used to be so important here before their leader Havers was killed—right down in the courtyard of the inn. There had been a Lieutenant Fitton, a wounded officer of the Excisemen, whom Havers had come there to hunt. But the innkeeper was a woman, and she would not give up the wounded man. There had been a regular battle between the smugglers and some dragoons the Exciseman's son had brought in. Afterward the Lieutenant had been judged unfit for duty because of his
wound, and he had married the innkeeper and stayed on. So the inn was not part of the village as her own father wished, but remained the Fittons's.