The Secret Vanguard (8 page)

Evans did not immediately reply. He had paused to listen and now he lay down and put his ear to the ground. ‘Nothing,’ he said softly, and rose. ‘Where is tomorrow, Sheila: east or west?’

‘East, I think. Every tomorrow comes from there.’

‘But the new world is in the west. There’s a sense in which tomorrow lies towards the sunset. Not that our friends would be likely to see it that way. German thought – and there’s a lot of it – tends to see the unexhausted world-views in the east.’

Sheila cautiously negotiated a steep turn in the path. ‘What an odd time for a lecture out of Spengler, Dick Evans.’

They laughed together – but awkwardly, as if this discovery of a common learning suggested all of the other that lay unknown to each. ‘Well,’ said Evans practically, ‘find the last lonely fountain and it’s only a short march either way.’ He laid a hand on her arm. ‘Smoke!’

The smell – faint, acrid, sudden – halted them like a traffic light. And in the same moment the mist parted as if at the stroke of a great sword, parted in two uncertain ranks which were presently split and split again, harried and broken and swept from the field by an invisible cavalry of the air. The transformation had the speed of good theatrical machinery; Sheila and Evans had barely dropped to cover when the last wisps curled within themselves and vanished, revealing in the distance a prospect of sullen and solitary grandeur and, hard in the foreground, a solid, silent house.

A sinister house. Instinctively Sheila crouched lower, digging her elbows into the drag and give of the heather where it twisted toughly near the root. The house was sinister not because thus encountered in the middle of a wild adventure; it was sinister in terms of those obscure memory-traces which are at work when one loves or hates at first sight. She tried to think this out. A large house with a square tower; the walls of the sort of rough-cast which in Scotland is called harl; the tower, however, rising to a system of battlements and overhanging turrets in grey stone. Her conscious mind struggled with the problem. There was often something subtly alien about houses which the wealthy put up for their recreation in this stern and barren country. And the house now before her was a bogus version of that again. It was like the man she had called Burge and later Dousterswivel – sinister because in the wrong place. For the house stood in the middle of nowhere, and with nothing but a faint track leading to it through the heather. And a house of this sort – the genuine slightly alien, English thing – would have plantations, a garden, some sort of drive. Or it would be smaller and stand near a river or stream. Searched, her memory told her so much.

This house was sinister because in the wrong place. And that – despite Dick Evans’ rational sense of the plumb craziness of the game – was why Dousterswivel had to be resisted, had to be resisted personally, immediately, head on. A foreign officer whose heels clicked ironically in the darkness of a Highland railway station, he was profoundly in the wrong place. The follies of governments, the obsoleteness of controlling minds, the responsibility which two hundred million people bore for letting such control be: all these things were but a difficult penumbra round an immediate situation which was mercifully simple and clear. The activity upon which she had stumbled on the Forth Bridge was something to smash if smash it she could. For it was a challenge to the very soil on which she lay. And she turned her head and whispered, ‘It’s them, Dick. I know it is.’

He nodded, as if taking her word for it; his glance was not on the house, but was going carefully over the whole terrain which the dispersing mist had revealed. Their route from the croft must have lost them considerable altitude and the mountains had dropped with them: these were now only a girdle of blue on the horizon, low and displacing little of a sky still clouded and grey. No sheep could be heard or seen; Sheila remembered that they had started neither grouse nor pheasant as they walked; not even a peewit called remotely over the great saucer of moor near the centre of which the house before them appeared to lie. Loneliness. And she recalled the man – a shepherd at all points, Dick had called him – who had trudged up through this solitude to their prison. These people – it was to put it mildly – were bracingly efficient. Dick, she saw, was frowning. For him perhaps the challenge lay in that: efficiency that had taken craziness as its bride.

His glance was moving steadily from where they lay towards the eastern horizon. Perhaps – she thought, disconcerted – his problem remained obstinately her own personal safety. If that was so she knew it would be impossible to move him. He was that sort of young man. She wished he would speak.

He completed his survey carefully, and with an appearance of qualified satisfaction. When he did speak it was to whisper: ‘It’s wonderful to be alive.’

She was startled. ‘I suppose it’s always that.’

He shook his head, absently and as if in the presence of an enigma. Then he spoke rapidly. ‘It’s a big house – looks as if it might be back of a lot. And we’ve got them by surprise and we’ve got a gun. With luck we might clean up the whole place.’ He put the gun on the heather beside Sheila. ‘But first I’m going to reconnoitre. We can’t risk our whole force – and your information – against an objective of unknown strength: you understand?’

‘Yes, Dick.’ Sheila was helplessly under orders.

‘And the first thing is to make sure they’re our friends. You see that pump? It shows they store their own gas – and that means they do their coming and going by car. I’m going to search the outhouses for the car that was at the station: I’d know it, and if it’s there we’ll
know
. Then I’m going to try and get an idea of who’s about. Have you got a watch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Give me twenty minutes from the time I disappear. If I’m not back by that, well – it will be just too bad.’ He smiled grimly into the heather.

‘But, Dick–’

‘And now the important part. The moment my time’s up you start moving
east
. I can’t figure out where we are and there just isn’t a landmark to make guessing worth while. But in the north of Scotland that policeman is more likely to be in the direction of the North Sea than of the Atlantic Ocean. See?’

‘I see.’

‘The mist has left us in none too good a spot. But there’s this bit of ridge we’re behind now: follow it and you’ll make that dark patch most part of a mile on.’ He pointed steadily. ‘That’s a long hollow, foreshortened: it’s dark because it
is
a hollow and the sun isn’t yet into it. At the end of that’ – he was looking at her dark suit – ‘put on the raincoat and walk slowly on in a zigzag. And stop a bit every dozen or twenty yards.’

‘Why ever–’

‘Because you’re being a sheep to any naked eye at the house. And binoculars you must just pray against. It won’t be for very far; in a short mile I think you’ll be able to manoeuvre the house out of sight and keep it so. Then go east till you’re ready to drop. Nothing short of a village will be quite safe; ten to one a croft or cottage would be, but this looks like headquarters and they may have their outposts here and there. Can you talk like a duchess?’

‘I could try.’

‘Don’t waste many words on policeman Dugal or Alec when you find him. Make him produce a telephone and get right through on long-distance to the bigwigs. Are your relations here important folk?’

‘Tolerably that.’

‘Then the sheriffs or chief constables or whatever they are will be the less inclined to think your most unlikely story phony. But that’s all just in case be. I feel we’re going to fix this ourselves, Sheila Grant.’

He was gone. A wriggle of slim khaki-clad hips; the glint of a long bare leg; heather, cautiously displaced, falling again over the sole of a large shoe: for a moment there were these things – and he was gone. It was less than an hour since she had seen him for the first time.

Sheila looked at her watch. It had stopped. She made a guess and set it at eight o’clock. The second hand began to jerk laboriously round the dial, as if time were a sticky element through which consciousness had to drag itself step by step. A minute passed. She decided that she must collectedly survey both the situation and the scene.

In a sense these were one. Like a child sunk in the part of a hunter or an Indian brave, she had to think and act sheerly in terms of a surrounding physical world; the swell of a hillock, the drift of a cloud, guesses at distance, at direction, at the intentions and dispositions of enemies lurking and unseen: these, abruptly, had become her life. She parted the heather and looked again at the house. Its east façade presented itself obliquely to where she lay; early sunlight glinted on windows which appeared for the most part curtained and closed. Of life there was no sign save in the single column of bluish smoke which rose slowly and as if heavy with sleep from offices at the back. An indication perhaps that the inhabitants were not numerous… She tried to trace the route which Dick Evans must be taking to the house. There was a ditch, and a broken dry dyke which looked as if it might have bounded a previous property less considerable than this – perhaps another croft. These gave something like cover as far as the outbuildings, but the house itself looked formidable indeed. With an effort she stayed her glance from going back to the watch on her wrist and looked instead at the depression in the heather where Dick had lain. Close by his rucksack she saw the pistol. He had left it behind.

Deliberately. For she knew that this acquaintance of a night didn’t make mistakes of that sort. He had left the gun and his leaving it was only part of something secret about him, a step in some ulterior intention of which she had been uneasily aware as he had slipped from her. She frowned and raising her head scanned the horizons. Folk would be up now; everywhere countryfolk would be up; somewhere surely a drift or smudge of smoke would give evidence of at least a hamlet – a clachan nestling in a fold of the moors.

There was nothing. She tried to form a rational estimate of the degree of loneliness, the possible acres or square miles of solitude, which the highlands of Scotland could contain. But she had been only so intermittently Scottish. And one forgot. That snow peak which they had glimpsed from the croft: it might have told much to a person properly informed. But one forgot all but the idea – the mere song of the place. Like Dick Evans’ speech: after a few years of Oxford and the pursuit of Caravaggio he had really forgotten, and the rhythms of his speech were English – with the ghost of American song blowing, perhaps conscientiously, though in the accent that had made her dream of the Statue of Liberty, the idiom that had pronounced her a grand girl. But this was irrelevant; the point was that
she
had forgotten more of Scotland than was safe.
Still the blood is strong, the heart is highland
…maybe, but it wasn’t enough. One wanted a topographical intelligence and a social sense which were unimpairedly highland, too.

She looked at her watch. Then she looked again at the house, fixedly. Nothing stirred and across the hundred yards that separated her from it no sound drifted. She looked at her watch again and then at the dry dyke, at the ditch, at the nearer heather. She shivered. Surely it was cold. She looked at her watch. The twenty minutes was up.

Sheila took the gun in her hand for examination. It was small – the sort of thing, she remembered, that lavishly curved and sparingly attired ladies opportunely produce from evening bags on the covers of sensational magazines. Sheila noted at what strange moments irrelevant things will drift into view; noted that the noting, too, was strange; realized that while her mind occupied itself with this rubbish her body, mysteriously impelled, was worming itself cautiously towards the house – the house from which Dick Evans had not returned.

She forced herself to a halt and again studied the gun. Experimentally, she poised it before her. Something gave at the root of her thumb. She examined this: it was a sort of press stud – like the button one used to push down before moving the gear lever into reverse. In fact a safety catch. Grasp the butt firmly then and the weapon was presumably ready to fire. She could go on.

The house was nearer. On the east wall the sun was brighter; patches of sunlight now were moving about the moor. She was herself in sunlight. She paused warily. On the heather before her a shadow moved.

It was a false alarm: a hawk. Low on her right the bird hovered, swooped, checked itself, soared, hung. Breathtaking. And then she remembered.

Where the westerly spur of the furthermost mountain

Hovers falcon-like…

She knew about that. And nobody else knew – nobody except Dick, and Dick was gone. And, almost, he had made her promise. Or by not speaking of a promise he had established it that they agreed. Should this reconnaissance fail it was her first duty to get away, to get herself and these cryptic verses to safety together. Whatever else had remained hidden in his mind this had been clear between them. Their motives had differed. But the pact was there and to be honoured. She looked again at the hawk; it hung splendid in the morning. Sheila put the pistol in her jacket pocket and turned her face towards the sun.

They had descended on the crest of a ridge which here, a stone’s throw from the house, swept boldly to the east, but which diminished as it did so to a low and discontinuous swell running across the shallow concave of the moor. The cover afforded was like that a field mouse might find behind a half-buried root; but with occasional gaps it stretched to the considerable depression which Dick had pointed to as lying still in shadow. Sheila wriggled her arms through the straps of the rucksack and set out on hands and knees.

On the higher ridge the surface had been sparse turf, bare earth, boulders, and heather in scattered clumps. But here the heather was luxuriant; it trammelled foot and knee and hand so that progress was laborious in an extreme. Sheila made fifty yards and rested. Deer-stalkers presumably behaved like this – or perhaps they did so only in ancient numbers of
Punch
: cockney deerstalkers, and dour gillies recognizing them as not at all the real thing… Sheila made a grab at her wandering mind and found that her head was swimming slightly. She had absorbed nothing but chloroform and milk and chocolate over an unknown length of time: perhaps that was it. Or perhaps it was Dick Evans and what had become of him. Suddenly, and as if the thing had been spoken into her ear where she lay, the immediateness of her own danger came to her. If Dick had been caught then they were hunting for her now. She got to her feet and, stooping low, went forward at a stumbling run.