There May Be Danger (3 page)

“Going hiking, dear?” inquired her landlady, bringing her a nice cup of tea, and some stockings and a brassiere she had kindly washed out for her.

“Yes, Mrs. Mander, I'm going to wild Wales.”

“My sister-in-law's daughter, she's gone to Wales with 'er kiddies!” said Mrs. Mander. “You might see'er. It's wild where she is, all right. Gives 'er the willies properly. Not many bombs in Wales, that's one thing. There was a bomb on a farm, though, near where my sister-in-law's daughter's staying—killed nine sheep, it did. Bombing sheep, what next. Well, dear, I mustn't hinder you. If you
do
see Edna—I'll give you her address, in case—you tell her from me not to be a fool, and to stay where she is!”

Purchasing, packing, letter-writing and tidying up her room, left Kate no time to reflect in cold blood upon what she was doing. But in the small hours of the night, when even the most impulsive blood runs somewhat tepid, she awoke and contemplated her project without enthusiasm, and even began to wonder whether there was insanity in her family, and her mother and father had kept it from her.

She consoled herself by recalling other small-hour watches, before first-nights, when the most careful preparations would look like muddles, brilliant plays like hog-wash, and the rosy prospects of a run tinged all over with the grey hues of the bird. As usual, these vapours were dispelled by the sunrise.

They returned to her in some measure, however, when she found herself on the last stage of her long journey, in a little train-coach with its seats arranged sideways, like a tube-train, puffing slowly out on the single line from Llanfyn to Hastry. The day, which had started with sunshine, was closing in with a thin, driving rain. The wooded hills on either side of the long valley looked flattened against the grey sky. Kate looked at those grey, wet hills, and thought of Sidney Brentwood, unseen for three weeks, and her folly in supposing there was anything she could do to find him almost overcame her.

There were only two passengers in the coach beside herself, and both were sitting facing her. One was a small, round-faced woman in glasses, with a knitted wool cap on her head, who sat up in the corner nursing a shopping-basket on her knees, and looking at Kate and Kate's haversack whenever Kate was looking elsewhere. The other was a tall, large-featured, rather good-looking young woman in the brown uniform of a children's nurse, who sat with her elbow resting on the small suitcase on the seat beside her, looking in a rather melancholy fashion out of the window. Kate surmised that she was on her way to a new job in strange country, and that the sight of the wet, wild hills made her apprehensive for her comfort.

“Wild country, isn't it?” said Kate, happening to catch her pensive eye. Kate had scarcely spoken a word all day, except to an elderly evacuee who had not been able to decide whether her destination was Malvern Link or Great Malvern until it was too late to get out at either of them, and she had had to descend at Malvern Wells.

“I'll say it is,” replied the children's nurse feelingly. “I've never been in this part before.”

“Nor have I,” said Kate. They both glanced at the little woman in the corner, who had the look of a native. But she was looking straight in front of her, with an untouchable, wooden expression on her prim round face.

“Going to a new job?” inquired Kate.

“Yes. Place called the Vault. At least, I suppose that's how you pronounce it. It's spelt V-e-a-u-l-t.” 

Again they glanced at the little woman in the corner, but she did not enlighten them.

“Yes, isn't it? It's a nursery-school for evacuated babies, or going to be. I don't like nursery-school work much, it's all running about and no thanks for it, but private work's all over the place nowadays. And I suppose one ought to pull one's weight when there's a war on. And at any rate,” added the young nurse frankly, “I shall be away from the bombs. I'm not keen on bombs, are you?”

Kate was about to agree that bombs did not attract her, when the little woman in the corner suddenly spoke in one of the clearest, sharpest, most incisive voices Kate had ever heard, on the stage or off it.

“Indeed, and you have come to the wrong shop, then! There was a bomb over in a field to Aberwent last Tuesday fortnight.”

The young nurse, with some facial skill, expressed polite interest to the speaker and extreme amusement to Kate.

“And Aberwent is not so far from the Veault, not more than eight miles, whatever!” pursued the woman with the market basket. She pronounced it Vote.

“Oh dear, my blood fairly curdles, doesn't yours?” said the nurse to Kate, gathering her belongings together as the train began to slow down. “Well, I'm glad it isn't a vault I'm going to, anyway. Good Lord, it's raining horribly! If they haven't sent a car to meet me, I shall go straight back to London by the next train!”

Kate struggled into her oilskin coat and picked up the one large knapsack in which she had packed all her luggage, and the three of them descended and straggled out into the yard, where stood a shabby old horse and trap, and a very expensive-looking little black car with a pretty girl in the driver's seat. A man carrying a quantity of dead rabbits slung on sticks was standing and conversing with the elderly driver of the trap.

The pretty girl swung open the door of the car, the children's nurse got in, and they drove off. Kate felt envious. A chilly wind was blowing the rain aslant, it would soon be dark, and she did not know where she was going to sleep the night. The road curved away up-hill to the left, past the gaunt shoulder of a hill, and to the right ran along the valley beside the railway line. There was no village in sight.

“Can you tell me which is the way to Hastry village?” asked Kate of the little round-faced woman who was settling her basket on the seat of the trap preparatory to climbing in herself.

“Hastry village?” echoed the man with the rabbits, before the woman had time to answer the question. “It would depend what part of Hastry village you wass wanting!” 

Kate, who had not been so far west as the border before, had never heard such a melodious fall and rise of tone except on the stage, in the plays of Emlyn Williams. The man's bright brown eyes were fixed in a sort of foxy curiosity on her face, as also were the eyes of the middle-aged woman, and those of the elderly driver, who sat, collar turned up and cap well pulled down, with rain dripping off the reddened nose between his straggling grey brows and straggling grey moustache.

“It would depend, now, who you wass wanting in Hastry village,” said the man with the rabbits zestfully.

“Mrs. Howells.”

“Howells the farm, or Howells the post, would that be, I wonder?”

“Mrs. Cornelius Howells, Sunnybank—”

“Ah, that iss Howells the post! Well, now, Mr. Davis he iss going up by Sunnybank. He would let you ride in his tub, I shouldn't wonder!”

“Oh, ah!” said the driver of the vehicle affirmatively.

“Please to get in,” said the little woman, as the tub, which was a sort of governess-cart, moved forward slightly, and the horse shifted his hooves under her own advent. “Well, goodnight, Mr. Morgan.”

“Good-night, Mrs. Davis. Good-night, Mr. Davis. I shall be getting the rabbits from you on Monday?”

“Oh, ah!” agreed the man in the tub. “I will be bringing them down myself, early. There will be some good ones I shouldn't wonder.”

His leathery cheek curved in a grin, and a peculiar look of humorous, secret understanding crossed Mr. Morgan's foxy face. It still lingered as he turned to Kate, who wondered passingly what there was about rabbits to cause this sub-humorous understanding.

“Good-night, young lady! Mrs. Howells will be expecting you, I expect?”

The grating of wheels, clattering of hooves and squeaking of springs made a reply impossible, so Mr. Morgan had to go for the present with his curiosity unsatisfied.

“I'm afraid she isn't,” said Kate to the little woman, drawing her oilskin over her vulnerable knees. “I only decided to come yesterday. Is there anywhere in Hastry where I'll be able to get a room? An inn?”

“Mrs. Howells the post has a room empty, now the boy she had there is gone,” replied Mrs. Davis, studying Kate with sharp grey eyes behind her round steel-rimmed spectacles. “Perhaps you are a relation of the boy—Sidney Brentwood his name was?” 

“Not a relation. Just a—friend.”

“Oh, indeed!” cried Mrs. Davis, her voice sharper than ever, and even the taciturn Mr. Davis turned his head about one degree towards Kate as if to lend an ear to what was going on. The trap was climbing the long uphill road, and over the brow of the hill Kate could see farther hills standing high against the sky.

These were certainly not the rocky and hazardous mountains of Miss Brentwood's urban imaginings: but seen in this evening light, their tops in cloud, the grey rain driving round their feet, they looked formidable enough, unfriendly enough, secretive enough, to daunt even Kate.

“There has been a lot of search-parties on the hills,” said Mrs. Davis, noticing Kate's glance. “There was people from the villages making parties and helping the police, but nothing was found.

Mr. Davis, with an eye upon the hills, said something which the unfamiliar intonation of his quick speech made unintelligible to Kate. His wife turned to Kate and said half-apologetically:

“He is saying that the bracken-cutting has started, and perhaps something will be found now. The bracken is very high at this time of year.”

“Did you know Sidney Brentwood?” Kate might as well waste no time in her inquiries.

“Yes, indeed, he came to Pentrewer on his bicycle to see the tump where Gwyn Lupton found the old piece of money!”

This had the elements of drama in it, and Kate seized on it.

“An old piece of money?”

“Very old, indeed, perhaps from when the Romans was here, Gwyn Lupton says.”

“Where do you say it was found?”

“On the tump at Pentrewer, which is where we lives.”

Kate was not enlightened.

“The tump?”

“Yes, there is a tump on Pentrewer bank, not far from where we lives. There is a lot of them on the hills. A gentleman who came from the Government in London was saying they are places where people was buried in history times, more than two hundred years ago, I shouldn't wonder!”

“Oh, a tumulus! And Sidney Brentwood came to see it?”

“He heard about the piece of old money Gwyn Lupton found, and he came over wanting to dig for treasure. But we told him he must not do that, because we had a paper from London to say we must not interfere with the tump, although it is on our land. The Government wants it, because it is in history!” 

Kate made a mental note of the name, Pentrewer Tump. She knew a little about tumuli, for she had once been persuaded by an archaeologist friend, Colin Kemp, to spend a week assisting, in a very minor capacity, at the excavations at Maiden Castle. In Colin's company she had visited every place marked on the map in black-letter for miles around, and obediently got off her bicycle whenever a round-barrow came in sight, which happened more frequently than Kate would have believed possible. It had been an educative experience in more ways than one, for it had brought home to Kate what, before that week, she had been in danger of overlooking, the fact that earthworks and the theatre cannot live together. She had pointed this out to the young man, who had not at all agreed with her, but had been forced to submit to her conclusion, and had gone to South America to console himself among the remains of Incas. Kate still occasionally had letters from him, though she had not had one for a long time now, and still, more than occasionally, found herself thinking about him.

A new and gruesome thought struck her.

“I suppose,” she hesitated, “there aren't any chambered barrows in this part of the world? I mean,” she explained as Mrs. Davis looked at a loss, “big tumps, long-shaped, with entrances and stone passages inside where people can just crawl along?”

“I never heard of any tumps with passages! They are just round tumps, with grass over them, and some has trees growing on them. Some is flatter than others, and some has a ditch and a bank round the bottom of them. Perhaps that iss what you are thinking of?”

“No, but stone tunnels through them, that you can crawl into,” said Kate, who had been suddenly afflicted with a horrible vision of an adventurous small boy, miles away from human kind, on the wild stretches of the hills, finding the bramble-hidden entrance to a great long-barrow, crawling down the dank earthy passage, trapped by a falling stone. The stone might not have been touched by human hand since the builder's had first placed it there in days before Julius Caesar was born, and the centuries in which rabbits had burrowed and foxes dug their earths might have undermined that builder's work, to make the stone fall at the first renewal of a human touch. The child would shout, and cry, but not for long. And the larks would sing, and the wild honey bees hum over the blackberries and nobody, nobody would ever know.

Perhaps the tenor of Kate's dark imaginings showed in her face, for Mrs. Davis subdued her high decisive voice into a lower key when she answered: 

“No, there's no tunnels that I ever heard of. There iss a tunnel at Mr. Atkin's farm, they say, but there iss no tump there. There iss a lot of old ruins that visitors goes to see, and people say there was once an old tunnel in the cellar that ran under the hill towards an old castle that used to be there in history times, but nobody hass ever seen this tunnel that I know of. Mr. Atkins iss a queer man, he does not like visitors at Llanhalo.”

“Llanhalo!” cried Kate, in joyful surprise. “Not Llanhalo Abbey Farm?”

“Yess, that iss the place.”

“Oh, good! Is it far from Hastry? A Land-Army friend of mine works there!”

Mrs. Davis poked her husband sharply in the back.