There May Be Danger (15 page)

“Do you mind if I come with you, Colin? I want to see Aminta.”

This was slightly disingenuous, for Kate did not, except in the most general way, want to see Aminta. She wanted to see Gideon Atkins again. And she very much wanted to see the dairy at Llanhalo again, and if possible, in spite of Gideon Atkin's hostility, the cellar that led out of it.

She left Colin to his measurements in the Abbey ruins, and turned into the farmyard. It was now quickly growing daylight, and the farmhouse looked still and dark, but there was a thin pencil of light showing at the side of the black-out curtain at a ground-floor window.

She went quietly to the dairy door and found it, as she had expected, open. There was no light inside, and as she entered Kate put on her torch for fear she might trip over a bucket or a churn in the cavernous darkness. There was the warm, sweet smell of new milk in the dairy from two tall frothing pails, and from somewhere in the farmhouse a faint scent of woodsmoke from a new-lit fire crept to this dark, cold place. Kate went quickly towards the door at the end of the short passage which Aminta had told her was the entrance to the cellar. The walls of the passage were of stone, rough-hewn in large blocks, and probably of great antiquity, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling reminded Kate of a church crypt. What a lot of
things
a farmer possesses! she reflected, running her torch over the barrels, the mole-traps, the coils of rope, the buckets, the brooms, the trestles, the oil-drums, all at present out of use and apparently surplus to other barrels, traps, buckets, brooms and trestles in use elsewhere! What a lot of props, what a complicated life! reflected Kate, thinking of her own life and greatly preferring it, forgetting for the moment that it had come to a full stop and a blank wall.

The cellar door handle was a large iron ring, like ice to the touch. Kate's heart beat fast as she put her hand on it, and she felt a little like Bluebeard's wife at the door of the secret room. Only, Bluebeard's wife had had a key, and Kate had not, but expected the door to resist when she turned the ring. To her great surprise, it did no such thing. The ring turned, and to a gentle pressure the door swung heavily away over two or three stone steps. What luck! But there was a light in the cellar. And where there was a light there was probably a human being. Quickly Kate made to draw the door silently shut again. But in her surprise at its opening, she had allowed the iron ring to slip out of her hand, and the weight of the door hanging over the steps carried it on slowly, swinging wide before her.

Kate made a grab, but she could not reach the handle. Had she been able to do so, it would have been too late, for there was a woman standing below in the cellar staring up at her with an expression of the utmost astonishment. She was holding, Kate instantly observed, a large knife in one hand and in the other something horribly red, and raw, and bloody.

Kate's first impression was of the contrast between the dank, dark stone cellar, empty, unwhitewashed, with an earthen floor, and the starched shirt-blouse and spotless apron of the neat, fragile, elderly little figure that stood there. Her startled eyes focussed upon the knife and the other horrible bleeding thing in the little grey-haired woman's hands.

The next moment she saw that it was only a piece of raw lights or something of the kind. There was a bunch of the stuff hanging up on a nail over a stone shelf. And three tabby cats were rubbing themselves against the woman's stiff apron.

“I—I'm sorry if I startled you,” said Kate. “I'm looking for Aminta. I thought, perhaps—”

She had enough presence of mind to descend into the cellar as she spoke. She might not easily get such an opportunity again.

“She's still out milking, I think,” said the little elderly woman in a rather toneless, grating voice. She had coarse grey hair tightly drawn back from her florid-skinned, pink-nosed, plain little face, and her neck was so bent and stiff that she appeared almost hump-backed. She added: “I'm just getting some breakfast for my cats to keep them quiet. They try me so with their mewing.”

Kate tried not to look too eagerly round her, nor to reply too absently as she looked. The cellar was a square stone place, vaulted like the dairy and two or three feet lower in level. The floor seemed to be of earth, and there was no window. Quickly scanning the walls, Kate could see no sign of a door, nor even of the outline where a door might have been bricked up a long while ago. But close to the floor, in the corner of the wall opposite the steps, was an iron grating about two-and-a-half feet square, with pitchy blackness the other side of it. Kate tried not to keep her eyes focussed too eagerly on this. If there were an ancient entrance to any secret passage in this cellar, that must surely be the place!

“This must be tremendously old a cellar,” she observed, lingering and gazing.

Miss Atkins, if it were she, gave a toneless little laugh.

“Eh, it's old enough, and cold enough, too. I've got a fire in th'kitchen, Miss—”

“Mayhew. Are you Miss Atkins? I hope it isn't very tiresome of me to come so early, but I thought I might catch Aminta before she started work.”

“Eh, we start work here a lot earlier than this,” said Miss Atkins. “Miss Hughes'll be in presently. Please to come to th'kitchen.”

Kate had no excuse for lingering here, and followed Miss Atkins perforce up the steps. Miss Atkins took a large key from the pocket of her apron and locked the cellar door. Then she proceeded to cut the piece of lights she carried into three rough portions, and calling “Puss! Puss! Puss!” opened the door into the yard, and threw the gobbets up and out. The cats streaked out and up the steps after them, and the door was shut. Kate thought of Miss Brentwood's three cats and their saucers of sardine-bits perched on table and piano. It took all sorts of cats to make a world! Kate followed Miss Atkins along a stone passage to a large kitchen where a glittering kitchen-range was roaring, and a candle in an enamel stick provided all the light there was. Miss Atkins blew out the candle she was carrying as soon as she entered the room. Economy was the order of the day at Llanhalo. Kate could have guessed that from the speckless, but somehow rather worn and bleak, aspect of the kitchen. Kate, whose idea of a kitchen until recently had been an apartment five-feet square, or a gas-cooker on the landing, or even a gas ring in a sitting-room, was becoming quite a connoisseur of kitchens. There was a nice old settle and a wicker basket-chair or two, and a very large table and an enormous deal dresser loaded with ugly plates. There was also, standing on a low wooden stool in front of the fire, a large red earthenware crock with a piece of white table-cloth draped over it. It roused Kate's curiosity. It had such a ceremonial and secret air, enthroned there and jealously covered over like one of the properties of a magician which has been carried on to the stage and left to excite the audience's speculation.

Like the magician, Miss Atkins made no comment on this object, but offered Kate a seat on the settle, and began to take some cups and saucers off the huge scrubbed dresser. Miss Atkins was Chloe or Amaryllis of the dairy, grown old without her swain. Her long white apron and her neat shirt-blouse seemed positively to crackle with cleanliness as she moved about, and her crumpled face was as pink as if it had been scrubbed with a scrubbing-brush, like the silvery shelf of the dresser behind her. She was the first shy person Kate had met in this countryside. The remarks they made to one another expired one by one on the well-whitened flags until, glancing at the clock and approaching the range with the teapot, carefully skirting the sacred object under the cloth, Miss Atkins shot a glance sideways at Kate under her bristly grey eyebrows, and said in her low grating voice:

“You're the lady who's come to look for the little boy that's missing, aren't you? Miss Hughes told me.”

Before Kate could speak she went on, tipping the black-leaded kettle towards the teapot:

“Eh, there's those that have children and doan't value them, and there's those that knoaws how to value them and hasn't got them.”

“Did you know Sidney Brentwood, Miss Atkins?”

“Nay, it isn't often a leaves th'house, and th'master doan't often have people here,” said Miss Atkins, stirring the tea in the pot three times round and putting on the lid. She spoke gravely and hesitatingly in her low toneless voice, as though words were too precious to be poured out like boiling water. “But I heard about the boy, He was a good boy, they tell me. A nice-looking boy, too, big for his age.”

Her voice was as inexpressive as ever, but her meek pose as she stood with her hands crossed in front of her, with her stooped stiff neck, looking at the fire, expressed all that there was of a sort of wistful resignation.

“I wonder you don't have one or two evacuees here, Miss Atkins, if you're fond of children. They'd be company for you.”

“I did put down to have one,” said Miss Atkins, “but I didn't get one. I reckon they thowt as we're a bit far away here. I'd like it well enough.”

“If you had a boy with a bicycle, it would be all right. It's not so far as all that,” said Kate. She was thinking of Ronnie Turner. An idea began to germinate in her mind. “Would Mr. Atkins mind having a boy here, if it turned out there were one wanting a billet?”

“Eh, he'd be willing enough, if it was a quiet boy,” said the little woman, putting her teapot under a cosy on the tray. “I could keep a boy easy on the billeting-money. The master'd have nowt to say against it.”

Any further discussion at the moment was stopped by the appearance of the master, followed by Aminta. When he saw Kate sitting by the fire he inquired with dry amiability: “That bike o' yourn punctured yet?” He seated himself in the basket chair opposite.

“No. I carried it all the way down your awful lane, you see.”

“That's a lie,” said Mr. Atkins genially, rubbing his large mauve hands together and holding them to the blaze. “I saw ye through th' byre door, biking up alongside his lordship the stone-picker out yonder. Happen he'd like a cup o' tea, too?”

“Happen he would,” replied Kate, “if the rations'll run to it.

“Maisie can water the pot down, can't you Maisie. Miss Hughes, lass, go and tell th'young man out yonder there's a cup o'tea for him in her alongside his young laedy.”

“I'll go,” offered Miss Atkins eagerly yet hesitatingly, as Aminta rose from her seat on the settle beside Kate. “You don't want to go out there again, Miss Hughes, you want a rest, I know! You sit you down, love, by th'fire I lit for you.”

“No, really, I'll go,” said Aminta, and went. She had spoken pleasantly but indifferently. Something in the look on Miss Atkins's face as she glanced after Aminta's sauntering figure, something baffled and sad, touched Kate, and also reminded her of Aminta's mild complaint that Miss Atkins mothered her more than she cared for. If Miss Atkins, poor lonely creature, nourished maternal yearnings, it was hard luck on her that Aminta, of all the girls in the W.L.A., should have been deposited at her welcoming hearth!

“Lit the fire for
her
, did ye?” commented the brotherly Gideon. “I thowt as ye'd lit it to do the cooking, but I were wrong, maybe. Pour out the tea, woman, pour out the tea! There's work to do about the plaece! Happen you've coom over to lend a hand wi' it?” he added to Kate.

“No, I didn't,” replied Kate, taking her cup of tea. “I came to see Aminta.”

“Eh, well, ye're a bit laete, lass. We're working people here, and milking's at five,” said Mr. Atkins, helping himself to a large quantity of sugar. When Aminta and Colin entered, he inquired at once with a kind of attacking geniality whether Colin had counted his old stones and found them all in place? Colin replied gravely that he believed there was a small piece of mortar missing from above the west doorway.

“The whole damned thing'd be missing, if I had my way,” said Mr. Atkins, taking a long draught of tea and lingering over his moustache.

“I know,” replied Colin pleasantly. “That's why I'm making a scale drawing of it. By the way—” he fished in his trouser pocket—“here's to-day's gate-money before I forget it.”

He handed a sixpenny bit to Mr. Atkins, who took it with a nod and laid it on the mantelpiece.

“I think I ought to have a season-ticket, really,” observed Colin. “Or anyway a workman's ticket, if I come before breakfast.”

“Eh, ye can go hoame to your breakfast, lad, wi'out stumping up again,” said Mr. Atkins, who perhaps disliked Colin's occupation more than he disliked Colin. “Ye can spend all day among them stones, and sleep on 'em, too, for owt I care. There's no accounting for the taeste of you educated chaps.”

The redoubtable Gideon seemed in a mood this morning to be tolerant even of archaeologists. Kate decided to put his tolerance to the test.

“Mr. Atkins, if it's really true that you've got a romantic underground passage here, why don't you throw that open to the public, too?”

An indescribably wooden look came over Mr. Atkins's round bristly face.

“Why doan't I? Well, I doan't because nobody in theer senses'd pay good money to see what's oanly an old drain, young laedy.”

“Are you sure it's only a drain, though? Have you looked?”

“I've looked as far as any man in his senses'd want to look. I haven't knocked th'wall down, nor yet taeken the floor up.”

“Have you moved the grating?”

Mr. Atkins, pausing with his saucer halfway to his lips, gave her a quick, hostile look.

“What do
you
knoaw about th'grating?”

“Eh, Gideon, I was down cellar getting food for th'cats when the young laedy came in by th'dairy,” said Miss Atkins placably.

“Oh, were ye?” grunted her brother, as if he would have found fault, if he could, with this innocent occupation. “Well then, young laedy, I
haven't
moved th'grating, and I doan't intend to! And I'll tell ye why I don't intend to. There's three reasons. One, there's only an old draen, or maybe a ventilation shaft, t'other side o' th'grating. Two, th'grating's rusted and fixed in so firm it'd taeke dynamite to shift it. And three, I'm not going to give the run o' my house to all and sundry to come gaeping about in it. And that's flat. It's bad enough to put up wi' them gaeping about th'yards and buildings. But a man's house is still his own, I reckon, even in these days!”