There May Be Danger (16 page)

He spoke with a heat of resentment and a determination to keep his cellar inviolate that roused in Kate an answering heat of curiosity and an equal determination to make her way, by force, cunning or blandishment, into that close-kept cellar. She tried blandishment straight away.

“Would you let
me
look at it, Mr. Atkins, just once?”

He stared at her with a partly puzzled, partly hostile look in his sharp little eyes.

“What in thunder's naeme do ye want to look at it for?” he inquired. “There's nobbut to see but an old rusted-in grating, with an old draen the other side, I tell ye.”

“But you say you haven't looked, so how do you know? Oh, Mr. Atkins, I'm awfully interested in—”

But Kate had made a false step, she saw at once, in casting an aspersion on her host's omniscience. Rising and putting down his cup with an indignant rattle, he said roughly:

“Eh, well, your interest mun be your master, my dear! I've no objection to you, and I've no objection to Miss Hughes having her friends here, wi'n reason! But I'll not have her friends, nor anybody else, poking their noses round i'my house! Next thing'd be, yon smart Percy from the Veault'd be here again, talking the hind leg off a cow about his interest in old houses, and such flim-flam! He's got an old house o' his own, let him pull that to pieces and leave mine aloane! I'm fed up wi' talk abut old houses and old ruins!” he went on, becoming more and more righteously wrathful at the sound of his own voice, and fixing Colin now, with an unloving eye. “I tell ye straight, mister, when I bought this plaece two years ago, it was my intention to pull down yon abbey, as they calls it, and build a fine new barn wi' the stoanes. There's a tidy lot o' stoane out there, and it was that decided me to buy th'plaece. But I hadn't been here six weeks when I was served wi' a damned paper from th' Government to say as I'd be liable to go to quod if I built a good barn out o' yon damned useless ruin, even though it's my own, bought and paid for! And I had to
buy
th' stoane to build the barn I wanted, and leave all that clobbering mess standing in my yard, just to please the damned Government!”

“I know,” said Colin, apologising on behalf of the Government. “It's hard lines on you, but—”

“But nowt! I can't stop ye from waesting your time out in th'yard but I'll stop ye from bringing your damn-headed nonsense inside my house! And if I ever find any of yer, or any of your smart-Percy friends nosing i'my cellar, I'll—I'll lock ye in, and ye'll be welcome to crawl out by any underground passage ye can squirm into!” said the wrathful Gideon, and departed heavily from his fireside. Even in his wrath, he carefully skirted the covered crock which still nursed its secret before the fire.

Aminta rose, stretched herself and remarked:

“Well, I must measure up the milk and take it over to the Veault.”

“Do you do an early delivery there every day?”

“Yes, generally. They'll be good customers later on, for all sorts of things.”

“And
such
an early delivery, too!”

“Oh, I don't know! It's getting on for half-past-six,” said the early-rising Aminta. “Rather late, for me. I'll see you again soon, I expect, Kate.” She added: “You would have it my respected employer was meek and mild, you know, Katy. I told you he wasn't, didn't I?”

And with some satisfaction at her own unusual perspicacity, she strolled off towards the dairy.

Kate was beginning to think that Mr. Atkins was anything but meek and mild. She was determined to find her way again into that cellar, and with leisure, this time, to draw her own conclusions about the rusted-in grating and what lay the other side of it. She needed a collaborator. But Aminta, who had not in a year had sufficient curiosity even to go and look at the grating which was reputed to conceal an age-old subterranean passage, was scarcely the right partner for the enterprise.

“Miss Atkins,” said Kate, reverting to the idea which had occurred to her ten minutes ago, “if you would really like an evacuee here, there's a boy in Hastry the school-master wants to find a new billet for. A nice boy, twelve years old—”

Miss Atkins was by nature inexpressive both in face and voice, but it seemed to Kate that her response to this suggestion was sincere. They decided that Kate should tackle the head-master, and that Miss Atkins should apply to the billeting officer, and that a little wire-pulling should soon remove Ronnie Turner from the barren land of the Cefn to the good pastures of Llanhalo.

“I'd like well enough to have a boy here. I could manage on the billet-money, and I like to see a boy eat,” said Miss Atkins simply. “I mun go and start on my bed-making now, but doan't you hurry away. You bide here a bit by th'fire, you and your friend.”

When the kindly little woman had gone rattling away with her dustpan and brushes, Kate said to Colin:

“I wonder why Mr. Atkins is so keen not to let anybody see the cellar.”

“Just what he said, I should imagine. He's an obstinate kind of chap whose home is his castle. And he's got a grievance about the ruins—a fairly legitimate grievance, from his point of view.”

But Kate, whose mind was obsessed with hiding-places and the lost child who might be hidden in them, saw Gideon Atkins in a more sinister, if flickering and uncertain, light.

“I wonder if there
is
a secret passage here?”

“I dare say there was, even if there isn't now. After all, this house is built on very ancient foundations.”

“And if there is a secret passage or the remains of one, what's in it?”

“Just the usual things, I expect. Earth, and worms, and bits of broken stone, and insects. Don't let your imagination trot away with you, Katy. I've excavated all sorts of sites, and I can assure you the usual things nearly always are in the usual places.”

‘‘A boy's a usual thing, one would think, but this boy Sidney isn't in the usual place.”

Colin said gently:

“I'm afraid he probably
is
in the usual place for little boys who've been missing a month, Kate.”

“Meaning heaven?”

Kate was not going to waste her energies quarrelling with Colin about this.

“I've been thinking, Colin, about what Mr. Davis said. It was a dark night when Sidney disappeared. A bad night to be out on, Mr. Davis said. Well, to-night was a lovely night to be out on—you could see for miles. I ought to have thought of that. If I want to do what he did, and have a chance of finding what he found, I ought to come out on the same sort of night. The dark's different from the day, and dark nights are quite different from moonlight ones. You lose your way, perhaps. You mistake things for other things. You get frightened.”

“Look here, Kate, if you want to experiment again, let me know beforehand.”

“Why? So that you can jump out on me from behind a hedge?”

“Just because I'd rather you did. I know you wouldn't let me come with you, or I'd suggest that. But I'd rather spend only one night wondering what you're up to, instead of half-a-dozen.”

“All right, if I can, I will,” agreed Kate, standing up. “But as you're not on the telephone, I may not be able to.”

“I'd better be getting back to my ruins, I suppose,” said Colin without much enthusiasm. “Miss Atkins's dough is rising nicely, isn't it? It's making quite a hump in the cloth.”

“Oh, is that
dough
? I've been wondering what it was all the time!”

Colin smiled.

“What did you think it was, Kate?”

“I don't know! It looked so mysterious sitting there all veiled, with everybody skirting round it.”

Colin lifted the cloth and revealed the whitish spongey mass.

“
Not
the Doom of Llanhalo, after all, you see! Just the usual thing in the usual place.”

Kate laughed, and went with him through the dairy to the yard. It was nearly light. The sky had that greenish tint of morning, and all the stars were gone.

“I think,” said Colin, “after all I'll go back to Pentrewer and get a bite for breakfast, as Atkins has kindly given me a season ticket.”

“Colin, surely if you're doing this job for the Office of Works you don't have to keep doling sixpences out to old Gideon?”

Stooping over his bicycle and pinching a rather flabby tyre, Colin answered:

“I didn't say I was doing this job for the Office of Works, did I? Dash. I must pump this tyre, or I'll have a puncture.”

Watching him, Kate felt a little puzzled and a little chilled. No, he had not definitely mentioned the Office of Works, but surely he had conveyed the idea that his work was sanctioned by interests greater than his own?

However, his manner somehow discouraged her from pursuing the subject further. And when he had blown his tyre hard, he changed the subject, or had forgotten it. They talked about London, and the theatre and Maiden Castle and the old days, most of the way back.

When she returned to Sunnybank, Kate found a letter from Sidney's great-aunt awaiting her. Drinking her third lot of tea since midnight and eating the hearty breakfast of bacon and fried potatoes that was more welcome than usual after the exertions, Kate read the underlined, effusive little missive:

Kate did not know whether to laugh or cry over this effusion. As she folded it up and put it in her pocket, however, a memory of the raffish leer with which the devoted Bobbie, sitting on the pavement of Tranchester Terrace, had received her admonition to go home, made her decide to laugh. If the loving, timid creature could have spoken, its farewell message to its mistress would, Kate felt sure, have shaken that lady's dream world to its foundations.

This was not the first time Kate had been up all night, and she had not expected to feel any reaction during the day. But either the open air or the fried potatoes proved too much for her, and she spent the first part of the morning sleeping on the settle in front of Mrs. Howell's kitchen fire, with the noises of pudding-mixing, the oven door being opened and shut, and the melodious tinkle of the shop-bell as a dim, pleasant accompaniment to her dreams.

At eleven, she roused herself and washed in ice-cold water at the sink, and went out into the sunny, blue and tawny November day to call upon Mr. Pilgrim at the school. Mr. Pilgrim, a man who did not readily allow the eccentric or the unexpected to disturb the findings of his practical common-sense, had firmly placed Kate, in spite of her disclaimers, as a relation, or at least an old acquaintance, of Sidney Brentwood; and therefore it seemed natural to him that she should be exercised over the comfort of Sidney Brentwood's ally Ronnie Turner. He readily accepted her assurance that there was a good billet waiting for Ronnie at Llanhalo, and promised straight away to make representations to the billeting-officer.

Kate decided, in case the billeting-officer required more positive evidence than Mr. Pilgrim was able to provide, that she would visit the Cefn and form her own conclusions, and that the dinner-hour would be the most profitable time for a visit.

The Cefn, approached by a track running almost vertically up Rhosbach, except where it swung aside here and there to avoid outcroppings of grey stone, was a cottage of the smallest, plainest, one-storey type, built of the stone from the hill it stood on and looking itself almost like an outcropping of limestone and slate.

Kate knocked on the door, and Miss Gilliam herself, looking oddly untidy without her pixie-hood, her thin, grey-streaked bobbed hair hanging raggedly to her shoulders, opened the door, not very wide, and said good-morning, not very cordially.

However, when Kate had expressed a desire to see Ronnie Turner before he went back to school, Miss Gilliam seemed unable to think of any plausible reason why she should refuse her and, rather unwillingly, let her in to the living-room upon which the front door opened, Ronnie was sitting at the table eating a lot of sodden boiled potatoes with a very little pale gravy.

Miss Gilliam, it seemed, had her own dinner after Ronnie had gone back to school. She liked, she said, to eat in peace. Judging from a savoury smell that came from the oven, Kate thought that she also liked, perhaps, to eat in secret, and not be reproached, however silently by Ronnie's boiled potatoes.

“They say as potatoes is very good for children!” remarked Miss Gilliam gratuitously and with an ingratiating air. “There iss vitamins in them!”

“Not when they're boiled to a mash.”

“Oh, very often we hass them baked in the skins. Doesn't we, Ronnie bach?”