The Secret Vanguard (17 page)

They were outside the cottage and in darkness. And from somewhere came the hum of a petrol engine drawing rapidly nearer.

‘Miss Grant’ – Hetherton’s voice came, at once crisp and mild, out of the night – ‘they are about a mile away. We shall have time, if only your boat will start. I leave that to you. I have forgotten something.’

He turned back to the cottage and Sheila leapt into the motorboat. Awkward if she muffed the controls now. But she didn’t. Her hands moved confidently in the darkness. The boat wouldn’t start, all the same.

Somewhere in the life of this complicated and powerful thing there was a hitch. And no possibility of investigating. There was the roar of an engine – not hers – and behind the cottage twin beams of light sprang, curved, halted. Running men.

Out of the cottage, silhouetted again, came Hetherton, running – in his hands what looked like an outlandish spear. A gaff for salmon, perhaps. He was beside her – and confusedly behind him the running men. He shoved at the boat and in the same moment one of the men jumped and landed straddled on the bow. The gaff whisked through the air, the bow was clear, Sheila was two yards out. She saw Hetherton turn, thrust, topple backwards into water and darkness. And beneath her she felt the boat quiver, bucket, throb. The engine had started; it was racing in neutral; there was a wobble and something tumbled at her feet. Hetherton. She had turned the rising nose of the craft and was heading across the loch. She had the impression that there was no shooting this time.

The moon was up but obscured in light cloud. Beyond the shattering pulse of the engine the night could be sensed in widening circles of silence; the violence of what lay behind slipped into sudden unreality, like a nightmare so brief that one awakes from it without confusion. Sheila glanced down at Hetherton. He seemed to have taken off most of his clothes and to be wringing them out over the side. ‘You are not hurt?’ she asked.

‘Indeed, no. But two of those men are – badly, I fear. There was no time for nice calculation.’

‘Indeed, no.’ Sheila was momentarily light-hearted. ‘I’m glad you managed to scramble in.’

‘So am I. I think we may be able, after all, to put two and two together in an approximate but still useful way. Go straight up the loch, keeping farther in towards the right. We shall then be in shadow when the moon comes out. We want just enough light to distinguish the bank.’

The boat leapt ahead; only the stern was in water; beneath them was an extraordinary resilience of air. ‘We can’t be far from the head of the loch now,’ Sheila said. ‘Shall we–’ She paused, realizing that her voice was unnaturally loud. It was necessary to shout because of the engine, but now the engine wasn’t there. A choke, a splutter, a final leap of power, and the boat was hissing forward with an idle screw. The petrol had given out and presently they would drift to a halt.

‘The moon,’ Hetherton said.

Everything was very still, like an audience watching a diffused light grow on an empty stage. Space and dark water faintly lapping were around them, and beyond on either side the darker masses of hill and pine. But straight ahead and clear in moonlight was a mountain: a little system of mountains crowned by a pinnacle which hung poised in air, hung as if supported on wings which were two shoulders running obliquely east and west. And down to the loch, wedge-shaped as the tail of a hawk, ran a long slope of moor and scree.

It was the Wind-cuffer. There could be no doubt of that.

‘A Mr Rodney Orchard,’ Hetherton said. ‘There was an appeal for him in the six o’clock bulletin. Sudden illness somewhere, I suppose.’

The boat had drifted into a little bay wholly in shadow. They had tied up, and wrapped in rugs Sheila had slept, tired out. Now they were eating bread and sardines and taking alternate swigs of the bottle of sherry: Sheila felt her body shot and traversed by fine lines of invisible fire. Very lightly the loch lapped against the bank; high up in the pines a faint wind stirred.

‘My attention was held by the name: it was familiar without my being able to place it. How deplorably narrow-based one’s information tends to be today! We work hard enough at the everything-about-something, and leave the something-about-everything to take care of itself. But I think he is a man of science. And he is certainly the mysterious garden which both you and my friend Appleby have run across in rhyme. In other words, he is in some retired corner of the country immediately to the north of us, and we must suppose him to be in danger. I greatly hope that my recollection will presently aid me to some idea of the last lonely fountain… You say you were machine-gunned? Such an outrage is almost incredible.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Sheila fished in the little tin for the tail of a sardine. ‘Fair enough, in a way. It’s a big organization there at Troy, and it was it or me.’

Hetherton took a moment to interpret this colloquial expression. ‘It or us, now.’ He paused. ‘I am so glad you turned up.’

Sheila was munching sardines.

‘I have always wanted something like this.’ The cultured voice in the darkness was suddenly boyish. ‘But of course I have never had the enterprise to go and look for it. Surely a gift of fortune that it should come and look for me. But this is talk’ – there was the sound of the sherry bottle being set down and the voice took on a faint and pleasing irony – ‘which owes too much to the romantic influences of the night. Our business is to get forward.’

‘To the lonely fountain?’

‘I judge not. We must get our information to some centre where it will take more than a machine-gun to stifle it. And that means Fortmoil, some ten miles north. More or less on the line of the fountain, one may guess. It will be best, if you feel fit for it, to walk through what remains of the night. If the organization behind us is, as you say, large it may have the power of sending out a considerable screen of scouts.’

‘Can they get round us?’

‘The road to Fortmoil is from the north-east, so they have a big detour to make. And our path gives us the advantage of cover almost continuously: through these woods to the head of the loch, up the eastern slope of the Wind-cuffer and through a species of col, then more pine woods most of the way.’

‘We’d better start now.’

‘I agree. The woods come right down to the water’s edge and the ground is rough. But there is little undergrowth, and if the moonlight holds something of it will filter through the trees… The last sardine is yours.’

‘Is it?’ Hetherton, Sheila thought, was comfortingly precise for the dim sort of scholar he appeared to be; his precision had even overflowed his courtesy in this brisk allocation of the final fragment of their meal. ‘I certainly mustn’t have more sherry.’

‘It is hardly the moment
pede libero pulsanda tellus
. Rather
pedetemptim
must be the word.’ Hetherton chuckled happily at this Horatian allusion. ‘We had better not flash the torch. Mind the boathook. Please remark this rock.’ He handed Sheila to the bank.

It was a long trudge and scramble, with Hetherton doing most of the path finding. The small hours were cold and still; the moon set and their pace was slow. The false Alaster, Belamy Mannering, Castle Troy: increasingly Sheila found these hanging between her and the darkness. She tried to visualize what lay ahead: police, telephones, cars at Fortmoil; Orchard in his retreat with some net closing about him; even disaster to herself at the hands of a further lurking enemy. But always Castle Troy and Belamy Mannering and the false Alaster came back; she felt the passion and discipline that could achieve all that – its assurance and word-perfect ingenuity. Spies: the idea was outmoded. These were something more. They were the secret vanguard. But of what? And she said aloud: ‘Of what?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Sheila explained.

‘Yes, I see. In its degree, at least, it is something new. And secret vanguard describes it pretty well.’

‘It could lead to a sort of madness in the end. No neighbour one could
quite
certainly trust.’

They stumbled on in silence; Hetherton appeared to have meditated before replying. ‘No, Miss Grant.’ He paused. ‘No, Sheila; not quite like that. A tragic growth of suspicion, yes – tragic because so often it would be undeserved. But there’s plenty of trust in store.’ He chuckled. ‘Let us worry rather about petrol and bulk wheat.’

What they call a mature mind, thought Sheila – and felt comforted. She brought her mind back to immediate issues. ‘The last lonely fountain,’ she said; ‘have you got any nearer that?’

‘I fear not. My local knowledge is very fair, but nothing striking suggests itself. And that, I think, must be the point. Your stanza gives an exact line to it, which would hardly be necessary if it were something easily identifiable in itself. One of any number of little springs in the group of hills ahead of us. Back at Castle Troy, and with a map, one could pretty well fix a line on which it lies. And then, having the distance, one could track it down. And then one would know that a mile to east or west, in some little mountain hut perhaps, this Rodney Orchard is staying. Something like that.’

‘Yes.’ Dick Evans had got as far as this. And at the thought of Dick Evans Sheila’s heart suddenly sank. He had jumped into something he knew to be plumb crazy, and plumb craziness had swallowed him. Or had it? He had vanished in the direction of the enemy’s citadel – of what had proved to be their outlying citadel. That was all.

‘The dawn,’ Hetherton said.

They had left the loch behind them and were climbing a scantily wooded slope towards the lower folds of the Wind-cuffer. Hetherton’s notion of the dawn was, surprisingly, an outdoor man’s: what trembled about them was a matter less of visual than of tactual sensation – as if night, a palpable thing, were being thrust slowly past them to the east. Something stirred, too, in the nostril, the ear was oppressed by a silence more unflawed, darkness deepened momentarily as if at the sweep of an electric pencil. And then the world awoke about them, a cock crowed far to the north, in the sky there was a flush of pale light, a bar of gold. Of these adventures, Sheila thought, this is the last day.

They were in heather, vulnerable and exposed. But perhaps, as Hetherton had promised, they would get to wooded country again before it lightened. Sheila wondered about Fortmoil. She had never heard of it. What would its resources be against the enigmatic power about them?

An uncertain skyline hung in front: the brow of the slope up which they were climbing. Abruptly it sank and vanished; they were on the top and looking down on a glimmer of water over which visibility was slowly spreading. It was a little loch – a mere tarn – on the farther side of which vapours were gliding like the ghosts of forgotten reptiles and impossible birds. Again the cock crowed far away, and the sound as it died seemed to leave behind a ripple of rapidly rising and falling notes with which the cock had nothing to do. They were listening to something else. They were listening to the fuss and babble of a spring that fed the tarn from some hiding place amid invisible rocks.

‘Mr Hetherton, do you think–’

Sheila’s voice tailed off as she felt a hand on her arm. By the nearer bank, and at a dozen paces, was the appearance of two trees: a thorn, twisted like some scraggy saint in a Baroque martyrdom; an ill-defined stump which sustained itself on two spreading roots. But Sheila saw what Hetherton had just seen: the roots were sprawling limbs; the trunk was the torso of a man. With sunken and invisible head, he must be staring down into the depths of the tarn.

A stone rattled from beneath Sheila’s foot; the man swung around with a motion which suggested at once abstraction and apprehension. ‘Who’s there?’ An educated English voice.

Cautiously they went forward. The man stood up – he was tall and lean – and took a pace backward. ‘Early for fishing,’ he said. The gaff must have caught his eye.

‘We are not fishermen. We–’ Hetherton, as if somewhat at a loss for a more accurate description, broke off. ‘Can you tell us if we are heading for Fortmoil?’

‘Fortmoil? I suppose so. But it’s a good step.’ The stranger looked at them in evident perplexity. Then his eye swept over the enlarging and bleak horizons about them. ‘This,’ he said aggressively, ‘is becoming a damned populous countryside. You’ve put the devil of a lot clean out of my head, curse you.’ He turned to Sheila. ‘I say, I don’t at all mean to be rude. Have you had an accident or something? How about some coffee? I’ve a hovel of sorts about fifteen minutes off.’ He seemed to feel that his presence brooding by the tarn required some explanation. ‘Just taken a morning stroll to clear the head. Too much caffeine in the last few days. Nothing like caffeine, though, if you’re chasing something.’

Sudden certainty came to Sheila. ‘My name is Sheila Grant,’ she said. ‘And this is Mr Hetherton.’ She paused. ‘The archaeologist,’ she added at a venture.

‘Archaeology?’ said the stranger, looking vague. ‘Ah, yes. How do you do?’

There was a silence. ‘We should like coffee,’ Sheila said. ‘What is your name?’

‘
My
name?’ The stranger sounded startled. ‘Oh,
my
name’s Smith. Spelt with a
y
though.’

‘And an
e
?’

‘An
e
? I don’t think so. That is – certainly not.’

‘Mr Orchard’ – Hetherton stepped forward – ‘we have reason to believe you are in danger. That is why we are here.’

‘You’re here’ – the man who called himself Smyth spoke doggedly – ‘for coffee. Tinned, I’m afraid – but come along. I shall start imagining things if I stay by this confounded pond.’ And he strode away. They had no choice but to follow. Nobody spoke again for some time; the stride of the stranger answered his height and Sheila and Hetherton had all they could do to keep up.

‘There’s that shepherd.’ The man whom Sheila knew to be Orchard threw out an arm. ‘Why hasn’t the fellow got any sheep?’

They followed his gesture and saw, outlined against the morning sky, a solitary figure who appeared to be regarding them fixedly. ‘Is he,’ Sheila asked, ‘one of the people who make the countryside so populous?’