There May Be Danger (12 page)

“I'll do it!” said Kate to herself. “I'll cycle out to the hills to-night!” For Ronnie, as well as Mrs. Howells, had seemed convinced that Sidney had gone towards the hills, though he had not been able to explain why. No doubt many childish conversations and fancy-spun yarns and romantic surmises between the two boys during their stay in Hastry had contributed to Ronnie's conviction, and Kate felt inclined to build on that conviction even more strongly than on the clue of the green toffee-paper which had been mentioned by Mrs. Howells.

Kate studied her map earnestly that afternoon, for the moon would scarcely be bright enough to read by to-night, bright as it might be. She memorised the lie of the hill road and the farm-tracks that ran into it and the woods below it and the streams that crossed it from the high hills. Alongside the words “Pentrewer Farm,” “Mound” was printed in archaic characters, and up the next fork of the road two small black dots no doubt represented Ronnie's haunted, empty house and its outbuildings. Straining her eyes over the map and wishing she had brought a reading-glass, Kate saw that these dots were named: Hymns Bank.

It was a wonderful night, with the moon flooding the hill-slopes with a theatrical radiance. By its light Kate could almost have identified the few late flowers that still hung about the October ditches. Under the clumps of silver-topped, scraggy trees, deep darkness stood like a presence. A white drifting mist, floating a foot above ground, lay in the valley below the sloping fields to her left, and mist blotted the far hills.

There was no wind, but the night was cold, and Kate was glad of her leather jacket and the wool hood she had tied under her chin. When Sidney had gone, it had been nearly a month nearer to summer. He had not taken his overcoat nor sweater. You must be cold now, Sidney, wherever you are.

Ahead of her was the little stone bridge that crossed the stream at Pentrewer. The gipsies' encampment in the moonlight gained in dignity what it lost in colour. The tents and two caravans looked as if they might have been there since primeval times, as if they housed, not the eccentric wanderers of a mechanical age, but the owners of the earth they slept on, the craftsmen-inheritors of the Stone Age, the metal-workers, the sword-makers of the new expanding world of iron.

But then, Kate thought, remembering talks with Colin, the landscape would not have looked like this. The valley would have been full of trees, only the hills bare, with scrub climbing their lower slopes. She would not have been able to stand here and look across a gentle, agricultural valley.

She had stopped on the bridge, and as she glanced down the valley she saw something which put the Iron Age and its forests quite out of her head. Below her was a small sloping pasture, and below that, separated from it by a light wire fence, was a larger field. Across this field she could plainly see a man moving.

He moved in a queer, crouched, and purposeful way, holding up his arm stiffly and strangely, across the field. Then an overgrown hedge that met the wire fence hid him from her view. But there was still, it seemed to Kate, a sort of movement in that field, a sort of dark disturbance, as though a wave were passing over the grass. But there was no wind. Kate strained her eyes, but the moon will never yield up her secrets, as the sun does, to the straining eye. The field was quiet now, so quiet that Kate might have thought she had dreamt that queer effect of movement flowing over it in the wake of the vanished man.

She hid her bicycle in the ditch, and got over a gate into the pasture below. A footpath ran from the gate diagonally across the field towards the tree behind which the man had disappeared, but Kate shirked the moonlight and kept close to the hedge on her right hand. Her footsteps made no noise on the soft ground but the brush of wet grasses around her ankles. A few sheep lying in the lee of the hedge got up and trotted off at her approach, and she stood still a moment, up close to the hedge, afraid that whoever it was in the field below might see that scared movement of the flock in the moonlight and take some warning from it.

Her woollen hood caught against the thorny twigs of a blackthorn tree and she stopped to disentangle herself. Re-tying her hood, she glanced down and saw something lying at the foot of the blackthorns in the dry hedge bank. A heap, a small dark mass, a piece of sacking.

She stooped, rather nervously, and lifted the sacking. Under it lay a hank of some dark soft material. Before she picked it up, she knew what it was. It was a hank of dark net, silk net, strong but supple, hanging heavy and limp on her hand.

Her thoughts sprang to Sidney, as if she might almost expect to hear him breathing beside her in the hedgerow, she held her own breath and peered into the dark spaces between the stems. Sidney had been learning to make nets when he had vanished at midnight. Now, at midnight, with a net in her hand, surely Kate must be at least upon his trail!

She stretched her fingers through the silk mesh. It was a mesh of about an inch-and-a-half, dark brown as far as she could tell in this light, made of a thread of supple but tough quality. Kate stood there a moment, weighing the net in her hand, trying to see the connection between this net lying at night at the foot of a blackthorn tree, and the disappearance of Sidney Brentwood into the dark. Suddenly she thought she heard a movement in the field below, and dropped the net back where she had found it, for no doubt it belonged to the crouched man she had seen from the road creeping across the lower field, and it might be that he would be keeping an eye upon his cache and see the moonlight on her face or on the metal zip of her leather jerkin, which now seemed to her to shine alarmingly.

She replaced the sacking, and as she stooped thought she heard a horse trotting up behind her. But it was her own heart. She crept along under the hedge to where a clump of brambles masked the beginning of the wire fence, and behind this clump she hid and looked through its spraying whips into the lower field. The lower field was of stubble, irregular and faintly glistening where the moonlight fell on the polished straws. It was a wide field, sloping away down to some trees and the harder dark outline of a barn. It seemed to be quite empty of tree or man, an autumnal homestead field which would be pale gold and peaceful in the sunshine, man's labour over for the season and the hens wandering and picking their gleanings from the carried harvest. But in the night, the dark surrounding hedges looked menacing, as if they were peopled with waiting presences, and the empty field were to be their meeting-place.

Kate, peering out from her clump of brambles, strained her eyes across the wires of the fence that glittered theatrically here and there in the moonlight, to see again, if she could, that man's shape that had crept so purposefully across the ground.

She could see nothing, but now she could hear something—a soft, slurred, continuous swishing sound, as if the night were saying hush! to itself. There was nothing in the field that she could see to account for this, there was not a shadow of movement there, and she had to take herself firmly in hand to suppress the onset of a sort of panic terror at the continuance of that unexplained sound.

She was about to emerge from her ambush to get a better view of the far reaches of the field when she drew back. The figure of a man passed within six feet of her. He had been close to her all the while. He was moving alongside the wire fence with the same slow, silent, crouching movement she had seen from the road. He was holding a staff taller than himself aslant in his hands. There was a second man some distance on the far side of him, also holding a staff slanting forward against his slanting, crouching body. As they passed beyond Kate's clump of brambles, keeping their silent way parallel to the wire fence, Kate saw that they carried between their staves a sort of darkness that hid the glistening stubble, yet caught the moonlight here and there itself—a net. It was the lower edge of the net that had made that brushing sound against the stubble. The men themselves walked silently, as if shod with felt.

As she watched, her heart pounding with the shock of discovering them so near when she had been scanning the distance for them, she heard a sudden sharp whirr and a flurry. There was a quick movement from the two men as they cast down their staves, the net lay flat upon the ground, and the two men ran together to where a great flutter and commotion was going on below the net.

Poachers! Kate had seen the nearer of the two men plainly as he passed her. It was Davis Pentrewer. There was no mistaking the angle of the cap, the benignant downward curve of the profile, the melancholy moustache. What birds those were fluttering and squawking under the net and sending a flurry of feathers up into the air above the men's heads, Kate was not countrywoman enough to guess, and it did not matter. Nor did it much matter who the second of the two men was—it sufficed that he was certainly not a boy, not Sidney.

Was this what Sidney had wanted his net for? It seemed probable, for he had visited the Davises and the gipsies at Pentrewer, and from what Ronnie Turner had said, had become enamoured of their lawless lives. Perhaps it was on a poaching expedition that he had set forth on the night of his disappearance. But then—where was he? The worst that could have befallen him, had he joined the gipsies in some such activity as was now going on, would have been a night in the lock-up and a talking-to from a magistrate! Poaching was a lawless, but not a dangerous, pursuit. Was it possible that Rosaleen and Ronnie, who had both made the same romantic suggestion, were right, and that Sidney was in hiding with the gipsies?

As Kate thought this, a third figure emerged from the darkness of the hedge and crossed the field towards the two men who were now, Kate judged, busily wringing the necks of their covey. This third figure was a woman, carrying a large covered bag or basket over her arm. The light broke on her spectacles, and Kate saw that it was Mrs. Davis.

Kate lingered a moment behind her brambles, considering what she could best do now. She had acted on Ronnie's inspiration, she had come out and followed Sidney into the night that had swallowed him, she had encountered a human activity that seemed at least connected with Sidney's own activities: but there was little purpose in waiting here and following the Davis's and their companion through what would no doubt be a long night's work. Kate rose and crept back to the shelter of the hedge. If poaching was connected with Sidney's disappearance, the kindly-seeming Davises might also be connected with that disappearance. The best thing Kate could do was to get back to the road, find her way to Pentrewer Farm and, if possible, search the house and buildings.

The track that ran up towards Pentrewer Farm was rutty with cartwheels, and narrowed, Kate judged, as it went on. Kate decided to leave her bicycle where it was, and go on foot.

The chattering little stream made the night more friendly than it had seemed in the field. Gwyn Lupton's cottage blinked at her with blind eyes as she went by. She wondered whether it was Gwyn who was out in the fields helping the Davis's with their nets, or whether he was sleeping the sleep of the innocent under that stone-tiled roof. There was not a sound except the drowsy cluck of a hen re-settling herself on her perch in the fowl-house. A little way beyond the cottage, the track crossed the stream, and a stepping-stone tilted under Kate's foot, and she continued her journey wet over the ankle and wishing she had come out in her gum-boots.

About a quarter-of-a-mile up from Gwyn Lupton's cottage, the track forked around a copse of young oaks and hazels that sloped up the spur. It was the left, and more open fork that Kate had to take. The wooded and widening spur was on her right. There were open, if steeply sloping, fields on the other side of the hedge to her left hand, and, a little way beyond the fork, standing up on the left bank, its gable-end towards the track, a small cottage with a huge yew tree, black as night itself, standing behind it.

This must be Pentrewer Farm. It looked as blind and quiet as Gwyn Lupton's cottage, and scarcely larger. Kate slipped over a gate in the hedge a few yards below the house, and approached up the field track towards the front. It seemed, with the moon full upon it, to be a simple box-like one-storey cottage with a stone roof beetling down over its tiny upper windows. A barn was built on to the cottage at the side farthest from the lane. It was certainly a farm of sorts, but Kate could well believe that poaching was a more profitable occupation than farming this rough land.

She moved cautiously to the shelter of the hedge, for although Mr. and Mrs. Davis were both out in the fields, she could not be sure that the house was empty, and that an eye might not watch from a crack in the blinds at one of these dark windows that faced her approach, The back of the cottage, which would be out of the moonlight and sheltered by the yew tree whose thick fringed boughs drooped over the chimney, would make a better approach for investigation than the front. Kate made her way between the cottage and the hedge, past a great woodstack and a water-butt, into a small enclosure that seemed, as far as she could judge in the darkness here, to be a sort of kitchen-garden and backyard combined. The cobbled space between the cabbage-bed and the back of the cottage was nearly taken up with a dog-kennel—empty, Kate thanked heaven, at the moment—a tin-bath full of potatoes, and a wheelbarrow. In the shade of the yew tree it was very dark indeed. A galvanised iron rain-tub stood close to the back door, and she avoided stumbling against it by a hair's-breadth so narrow that the mere thought of the noise which might have terrified the night caused a dampness to break out on her forehead.

Very cautiously she put her hand on the door-latch. It lifted, and the door gave. She stood a moment, reflecting, hesitating, with her hand on the latch. Should she go in? There was not a sound to be heard. The chances were that the house was empty, and that she would be able to walk through all the rooms and return unchallenged.

Standing there in that lonely and dark place, listening to me silence across which her own heartbeats struck like faint, far warnings, Kate realised for the first time how very light-heartedly, how unimaginatively, she had entered upon this search. She had seen herself trailing a lost boy across open country. She had not seen herself, as with a glimmer of common-sense she might have done, entering people's houses at dead of night, investigating their cellars, braving not only their righteous wrath and the law, but those unseen forces of the dark with whom, ever since an over-imaginative childhood, she had never quite managed to come to terms.