The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (24 page)

'Walk round the village some warm evening and see how many windows that will open are open,' he said. 'Cottage people dislike fresh air.'

Still, to think about what she would do if she had control was surely the most fruitless way of spending time and energy. She set about making the most of her unusual freedom.

In the afternoon she went for a walk through Layer Wood and was pleased to catch a glimpse of her two golden pheasants. They had been so tame by the time they arrived at Clevely that it had seemed safe to turn them loose in the grounds; there, for some weeks, they had remained, stalking on their delicate feet through the flowerbeds and over the lawns, and coming up, with friendly condescension, to take food from Linda's hand as they had learned to do on the ship. Then, at the beginning of October they had disappeared. There had been one or two light frosts, so it was not unreasonable, perhaps, for Richard to say lightly, 'I expect they died. After all, they're tropical birds; they could hardly be expected to weather an English winter.' He went on to say that he was himself feeling the cold severely and to ask whether this poor apology for a fire was really the best the house could provide.

Linda mourned the pheasants until someone from the village told Jim Jarvey, the lodgekeeper, who carried the news to the house, that 'a masterous gaudy old bird' had been seen in Layer Wood.

'They won't be there long,' said Richard. 'Yes, of course we could warn everybody not to shoot them, but what about poachers? My preserves are pretty sharply looked to, but Layer isn't all mine, and everybody isn't so strict. I'm afraid you've seen the last of them.'

However, they were there this afternoon and Linda called to them and flattered herself that they did hesitate for a moment before taking wing. Perhaps it was as well, she thought, that, since they had gone back to the wild they should have abandoned their former lameness completely. Safer so.

It was dusk when she reached home and full dark by the time she had taken off her outdoor clothes and settled down by the fire in the small sitting-room, with a tea-tray on a table beside her. The whole long peaceful evening stretched before her; and she was luxuriating in the thought when a servant came and asked when would it please her to see the bailiff--now, or later on ?

'I'll see him now,' Linda said, and laid aside her book. When the man entered she greeted him with a tentative smile, and saw with dismay that she had been right in thinking that he would resent these interviews. He returned her greeting civilly enough, bringing one big brown hand up to the lock of straw-coloured hair which fell over his brow, but his expression, which was surly, did not lighten.

'Sir Richard said, my lady, that you wished me to come and report to you every day.'

That was, of course, exactly how Richard would put it, making it seem as though the idea were hers. And she could not--in the circumstances--contradict. Also, she thought, with just a flash of spirit, suppose she had said so; would it have been so extraordinary? While Richard was away she was in charge and had a perfect right to demand that the bailiff report twice a day if she wished. But this bout of self-assertion lasted only a second; the rightness of her position was undermined by her knowledge that Richard had arranged these interviews as a form of penance for them both. Richard's malice poisoned everything.

'Well, you see,' she said placatingly, 'I shall be sending letters to my husband regularly, and what you tell me will give me something to write about. Please sit down.'

He was not placated, and too late she realised that to mention the matter of letter-writing was a tactless mistake; it sounded like a spy reporting.

'Thank you, no, my lady. I'm in my working clothes. That was one thing I wanted to ask you. Do you wish me to come when we knock off work, or later on, when I'm cleaned? I've taken the worst off my boots, but I'm still a bit doubtful whether they're fit to be in the same room with a lady.'

'That depends entirely upon which you prefer. To come back would mean more walking, wouldn't it?' She seemed to remember hearing Richard say that Hadstock, offered the choice between lodging at the smithy and a cottage in Berry Lane, had chosen the latter.

'I always make a round after supper,' Hadstock said.

'In that case then, if you prefer it, look in later on. But now please sit down. Do you drink tea? I know many men despise it.'

'I like it, but I won't have any now, thank you all the same. I shall be making my own later on.'

'Do you live alone?'

'I live alone.'

'In Berry Lane, isn't it?'

'Yes, my lady."

The brief, unyielding replies might, she thought, be put down to awe of her--but she had heard from Richard some verbatim accounts of things Hadstock had said to him during their differences; and his manner might also be the result of shyness in the presence of a female. Yet nothing in his posture or expression indicated shyness; he sat at ease, not fidgeting, and looked straight at her with a cool, unabashed look. His eyes were greyish-blue, light against the weather-beaten skin, and numerous little lines radiated from their outer corners. He was defying her to put the interview on an easier footing, and with a sigh Linda abandoned the attempt and asked the question which she had been deferring. What was there to tell about the day's work? As though he had memorised a distasteful lesson, he reeled off the day's doings. Because of her ignorance hardly any of the things he mentioned evoked any mental image in her mind, and when he had finished all she could think to say was:

'You seem to have been very busy.'

'I am glad that you are satisfied, my lady.' he said, and rose to his feet. 'Have you any orders to give me about tomorrow?'

'Orders?'

'Sir Richard said I was to report to you each evening and take my orders from you, my lady.'

'I think he meant only the event of his having sent some special orders from London, Hadstock. He knows that I know nothing about farming. And I am sure that he knows also that you know exactly what to do.'

'Then I'll wish you good night, my lady.'

'Good night, Hadstock.'

Except that the succeeding interviews took place later in the evening, that Linda never repeated her gesture of offering refreshment and that Hadstock had changed out of his working clothes, that first meeting between them set the pattern.

Then, when Richard had been gone a little more than a fortnight, something happened.

At mid-morning on a bleak, windy day Farrow, the builder in charge, was shown into Linda's room. He seemed to be in a state of excitement.

'We've come on something we hadn't reckoned for, my lady,' he said. 'There's a hole and something beyond it just where the new foundations are being dug. Job Rams-den stood there digging and then he disappeared. He ain't hurt. But to find a hole just where the foundations was to go'll put out all our plans. I thought you should know.'

'I'll come and look at it,' Linda said. 'Wrap up warm, my lady. It's raw out.' The trench which was being dug for the new front wall of the house ran across the space where, forty years earlier, Richard's mother had planned her 'purple' garden, the fashionable craze of the year after her marriage. Linda picked her way through the uprooted and dying lilacs and wistaria and perennials which had gone on yielding their purple blooms unheeded year after year. At a point where the new trench was nearing its limit its neat, narrow line gave way to a rounded depression with a hole in its centre. Close to it a dazed-looking man was wiping soil from his eyes and spitting.

'It's probably an old well,' Linda said to Farrow, as they neared the spot.

'Begging your pardon, no, my lady. There's stairs, and Job said something about an arch. More like a cellar.'

They stood by the hole. The reason for the collapse was plain to see in the ragged edges of ancient rotted timbers which projected from the soil. Down into the hole ran the flight of shallow stairs, smothered with earth and stones and fragments of sponge-like wood.

"Tain't no cellar, ma'am--m'lady, I mean,' said the man who had fallen. 'So far as I could see in the gloom, it looked more like a church arch, all carved like.'

'Ah,' said Farrow, 'some of them old monks' doings. They was all about here, back in the old times when they started the sheep up at Flocky.'

Linda stooped and took up a branch of one of the murdered lilac trees--the buds which should have been next year's leaves and flowers were already there, with their promise--and with it scratched away the soil and stones from the uppermost stair. White and smooth, the marble which the Roman galleys had brought to this barbarian, marbleless colony gleamed up at her. Of the Romans, of the galleys, she knew nothing; but she recognised marble. No cellar entry, this.

'Get a lantern,' she said. Then, turning to Job, she asked: 'Are you really unhurt?'

'A bit shook up, m'lady. Thought I was a gonner for a minute, I did, earth opening under me feet that way. Then I hit the stairs and went down on me...like youngsters go downstairs, m'lady. And then what with the arch and a great space beyond, all dark. Aye, that shook me up.'

'And yelled, he did, as though Old Scrat had got hold of him I' Farrow said. But he spoke absently. Job's accident and the hole and the stairs and the arch and whatever lax beyond were of no moment to him; he was working out what the find meant in terms of constructional difficulty.

The man who had gone for the lantern arrived, panting.

Farrow took it. 'Best let me go first, my lady. Something else might give way.'

He descended the stairs, his boots crunching on the soil and stones and fragments of wood. He disappeared under the flat canopy where the unbroken timbers still supported the three-feet depth of root-threaded soil and those above waited and listened. After an interval they heard his feet on the hidden lower stairs, and then he came into view again. He looked awed and did not speak until Linda asked impatiently, 'Well, what is it?'

'A church, I reckon; but sich a one as I never see...all pillars, my lady, and statchers, and the floor all coloured.' He blinked and seemed to shake himself. "Thass safe enough. I know what happened; they shored over the entrance, whoever they was--and they knew their job, I'll say that for them. But where the timbers ended they sopped up the damp, like, and when Job stood just on their ends they give way. Further in them pillars take the weight anyway. Thass safe enough, but I ain't sure...' He looked at Linda dubiously. Cursory as his inspection had been in the dim lanternlight, some of the 'statchers' had shocked him. But of course the 'gentry' had different notions. His sister, who before her marriage had been parlourmaid at Nettleton New House, had told him about some of the things they regarded as ornamental-- negresses without a stitch to their name, holding candles; little china boys naked as frogs, supporting fruit dishes. 'What aren't you sure about, Farrow?' Linda asked. 'How this is going to work out with the building,' Farrow said, almost truthfully, for part of his mind was grappling with that problem.

'Oh yes, of course. And I shall have to write to Sir Richard...but now I must see it.'

That evening she was in the middle of writing to Richard when Hadstock arrived to act his part in the daily ritual. Laying down her pen, she said, 'Oh, Hadstock, have you heard the news?'

'About the church found underground? Yes, my lady. I have heard.'

'I am just writing to Sir Richard about it; and I find that I have forgotten--or rather that I did not notice-- many details. I wonder, Hadstock, would you, instead of saying all those same things over again, come with me while I take another look?'

'But of course. Certainly, my lady.' And behind those simple words were a statement and a question. You give orders, I take them. Why ask me?

'I went down this morning with Farrow,' Linda said, answering the question. 'He hurried me round. There are some statues which, I am sure, he found embarrassing. But I have lived in India...and I assure you that these are, by comparison, most respectable.'

She checked herself. What on earth had provoked her to speak so confidentially to Hadstock, who might, for all she knew, share Farrow's views and prejudices? She started again.

'I could have asked Walters, or one of the Jarveys, or Daniel to come with me--but, to tell you the truth, all the servants seem a little...scared of it. They seem to think that anything so old and underground must be...sinister.'

And why should Hadstock think otherwise? He was a servant too.

With the first real feeling he had ever allowed any word of his to reveal, Hadstock said: 'I should regard it as a favour to be allowed to look round, my lady. As a matter of fact I intended to ask your permission to do so before I went home tonight. I have my lantern.'

'We'll go then,' she said.

As they walked towards the place, with the lanternlight casting a yellow circle about their feet, she said with cautious primness: 'You mentioned an underground church. It isn't quite that. The statues are more of a...classical nature.'

'Or possibly pre-Reformation English,' Hadstock said, as though speaking to himself.

'Would they use marble so much then?' Linda asked. 'This place is all marble--or at least I think so.'

'Indeed, my lady?' Holding the lantern in one hand, Hadstock with the other rolled back the piece of sailcloth with which Farrow had covered the hole. Then he descended five or six stairs and turned, offering Linda his hand.

'With only one lantern,' he said, as though to excuse this familiarity, 'one of us must walk in the dark, so I'll light my own steps and guide you down.'

'I meant to count this morning. I will now,' Linda said. There were twenty-four stairs. Between them and the arched entrance was a square of tessellated pavement, thinly covered with soil and debris brought down by Job when he fell. Then there was the arch and, within, the pillared space, three times as long as it was wide, and lined with figures which Linda had modestly described as 'classical'.

Hadstock seemed not to share Farrow's embarrassment; holding the lantern high, he studied each one and moved on. Neither he nor Linda spoke. In fact within a few moments of entering the place she would have found speech difficult, for she was forced to press her teeth together to prevent them chattering. There was a deathly chill in the place; a chill of which she had not been aware on her earlier visit, when, in contrast with the atmosphere above ground, the subterranean space had seemed warm.