There May Be Danger (7 page)

The afternoon was fine, with a tattered blue and white sky and a lovely shifting light upon gold-turning trees and gleaming, browning grasses. The road crossed the valley, and then went uphill once more, and then down and up again along the lower slopes of the spurred hills until she caught sight, on the bank below her, of a rather ruinous-looking small church or chapel, a square stone house and a great many barns huddled round it, and decided that she had better get off and take a look at her map.

However, there was a man engaged in slashing at the hedge with a long-handled sharp-edged tool not unlike a Cromwellian halberd, and since Kate always preferred making verbal inquiries to reading a map, she pedalled on a few yards and stopped beside him.

“Please can you tell me if Llanhalo Abbey is far from here?”

The man, who was a small, tubby, elderly man with a prevailing sandy-greyness of hue about him, paused in his onslaught on the brambles long enough to shake his head. In so doing he shook crooked his steel-rimmed spectacles, and had to waste another valuable second in adjusting them. While he did this with one hand, he made a motion with his pruning hook straight down the track to the ruined church on the bank below.

“Down there?” asked Kate.

The man nodded. Kate was surprised at his taciturnity, and as is usual with humanity when it comes across true economy in words, she proceeded to redress the balance by wasting a good many words herself.

“Mr. Atkin's Farm, I mean—Llanhalo Abbey Farm?”

The man nodded silently, and laying hold of a great snake of blackberry with his thickly gloved hand began to haul it relentlessly on to the road, which was already littered with thorny clippings enough to puncture a fleet of bicycles.

“Perhaps you work there,” suggested Kate, “and if so, perhaps you can tell me whereabouts I'll be likely to find Miss Hughes?”

Jerking his long whip of bramble free, the man paused as if he were considering whether it were possible to answer this question without articulating. He looked at Kate thoughtfully from the sharp little grey eyes behind his still somewhat crooked spectacles. He had shaved more recently than Gwyn Lupton, but not very recently, and this chiefly accounted, Kate saw, for the greyish bloom that overlay the uniform brown of his roundish, heavy-chinned face. He transferred his pruning-hook from his right hand to his left, and lifted his ancient tweed hat with his right to scratch his head, as if he might thus become inspired with a method of answering Kate's question in silence. It was no use. He had to open the tight-closed trap of his lips and let some precious words out.

“In byre yonder.”

“Straight down this track?”

“Aye.”

“Is Mr. Atkins about anywhere?” pursued Kate, for she did not intend to miss a chance of seeing this celebrity while she was on the spot.

“Aye.”

“I suppose that's the farmhouse, that square stone place beyond the chapel?”

“Aye.”

“Thank you so much. It's a grand afternoon, isn't it?”

“Aye.”

“I suppose you know that half the bicycles that come along here will get their tyres punctured on these bits and pieces of yours?” said Kate, with amiable remonstrance, as she wheeled her machine aside on to the farm road.

“Aye.”

A little piqued, Kate said: 

“It's all the same to you if they do, I suppose, eh?”

“Aye.”

“Oh, do say something different!” cried Kate, half amused, half exasperated, and waited a second to see if he would. But he became a sphinx again, and she cycled cautiously down the rutty lane, smiling to herself, to look for the byre which contained Aminta.

She felt extraordinarily pleased to be going to see old Aminta again. Before the war, Aminta had worked as secretary to a firm of photographers, an occupation which she had arranged to desert for the Women's Land Army almost before the Women's Land Army had come into being. Aminta was never happier than when in the company of dumb animals of one kind or another, the larger the better. And now, Kate imagined, nothing would ever lure her from her work among the cows—or nothing but the chance of a job in a circus, with elephants, or in a Zoo, with camels.

The chapel Kate was approaching was a curious neglected building, and Kate scarcely thought it could still be in use for religious services. A great pile of faggots stood just outside it, and a harrow was lying close up to the lee of its ancient wall. There was no glass in the fine traceries of the window at the gable-end, and the delicate stonework was weatherbeaten and damaged. Obviously, the walls were of great antiquity. But the roof, or most of it, was of corrugated iron, like any little non-conformist chapel newly put up to house a remote, poor congregation. The track ran round it, a very secular-looking approach, scratched up by hens and waddled across by ducks, and the farmyard pond lay near. A large square stone-built house of a strictly utilitarian Victorian type stood farther along the trackway behind a little orchard of scraggy apple trees. A perfect huddle of lean-to roofs and ancient lichen-covered barns and sheds sprawled around the house and cuddled intimately up against it, so that it preserved its smug square look of nineteenth century respectability with some difficulty, seeming to apologise, with raised stone eyebrows under its penthouse roof, for the odd company it kept.

Which of these manifold buildings was the byre which contained Aminta, Kate could not guess. She got off her bicycle. A wall-eyed collie came suspiciously up to her, his hackles rising. She propped her bicycle against the orchard fence, and was contemplating going up to the house's very prim front door when there came to her ears, from a long low stone roofed building beyond a very muddy yard that lay behind the chapel, the peculiar low-toned musical sound which even a town-bred ear ran recognise as the sound of milk spurting into a pail. 

Kate skirted the yard and looked in at the open door. She was rewarded by the sight of Aminta, sitting precariously on a three-legged stool, the top of her head buried in the soft part of a bony roan cow, making great play with the muscles of her brown forearms.

“Aminta!” cried Kate joyfully, and realised the next instant, from the cautious manner in which Aminta, who had started violently, recovered herself, moved her tipped bucket to a safe position and herself to an upright one before looking round, that she ought to have approached with more circumspection. The cow, however, evidently a quiet lady, looked mildly round and went on eating hay.

“Hullo Kate!” said Aminta with pleasure, but without undue surprise for the actions of her fellow-creatures rarely surprised her. She added “Lucky Tulip's a quiet cow, or she might have kicked half my milking over, being bounced at like that.”

“I'm sorry. I say, I
am
pleased to see you, Aminta! You do look grand and rugged, too. Like a piece of mountain scenery.”

Aminta, clapping Kate on the shoulder, replied genially:

“I thought somehow you'd come along.”

“You did? You must be psychic if you thought that, because I didn't think it myself till the day before yesterday.”

“I thought my last letter'd fetch you. Have you joined up yet, or are you waiting to join up at the county headquarters?”

Kate looked at Aminta, marvelling not for the first time at the strange misconceptions which add zest to friendship.

“Your letter didn't fetch me, darling. No.”

“Didn't it?” said Aminta without offence. “Look, Kate, I've just got to finish Tulip, if you don't mind waiting a moment. Whups, my beauty!”

Taking her stool in her left hand and her milk-pail in her right, Aminta inserted herself with great skill and precision between them and groped about under the cow, inquiring in a rather cow-muffled voice as she did so:

“What
did
you come for, then?”

But the spurting of milk drowned Kate's attempt at a reply. In the year since Kate had last seen her, Aminta, who had always been pale and inclined to run to fat, had become comparatively slender, nut-brown in colour, and to judge from her forearms up which at the moment terrifying ripples of muscle were passing, as hard as iron. There was evidently a great deal to be said for the Land Army as a beautifying agent.

Kate stood in the doorway and looked across the yard at the picturesque collection of roofs which lay at the back of the farmhouse, and at the first building she had seen, which she now perceived was an ecclesiastical ruin patched up to serve as a barn. Behind it, a graceful melancholy shell of stone, holding nothing but sky in its empty windows, was, she supposed, one of the relics of antiquity to inspect which visitors paid Mr Gideon Atkins their sixpences. What looked like the remains of a cloister joined the two buildings. Kate thought that Mr. Gideon Atkins might really use some of his sixpences in clearing away the brambles which were doing their best to drag these ancient stones back into the earth from which they had come.

Aminta stopped making soothing noises to her cow and rose to her feet.

“That's the lot, I think,” she said, putting the frothing pail down on the cobbles and removing the ancient man's cap she had been wearing. “Tulip's a nuisance just at present. She's got twins and she tries to save up milk for them.”

Hooking her two buckets on to an iron hoop, she stepped into the middle of it, lifted it, and with this simple safeguard against splashed milk, led the way across the yard to the dairy.

The house itself might have a prim Victorian look, but the cavernous dairy, when they entered it out of the sunlight of the yard, reminded Kate of a mediaeval dungeon. They had to descend a few steps into it, for its stone-flagged floor was below ground-level, and the vaulted, rather low stone ceiling, gave the impression of a place quite sunk below the earth, although the walls were whitewashed to reflect what light there was. The scrubbed wide shelves that ran around the stone walls, carrying flat bowls of milk, dishes with remnants of cooked food, cheeses and other such harmless and even attractive objects, looked out of place.

Aminta put down her milk-pails with a sound like the clanking of prisoners' chains.

“I always thought,” said Kate, looking around her, “that a dairy was a light, sunny place where pink-cheeked maidens, mostly called Chloe or Amaryllis, sang songs about their swains while they swung the churns.”

“You try singing a song while you swing the churn, my child! And if the dairy was sunny, everything would go off in the hot weather. Still, I admit most of the dairies I've been into are a bit more cheerful than this,” said Aminta, taking a strainer and a couple of milk-cans down from nails on the wall.

At the darker side of the room, the vaulted ceiling broke in a low stone archway, with a short barrel-roofed passage beyond, which ended in a heavily-nailed door. A variety of things, including oil-drums, old brooms, mole-traps, wooden trestles, beer-barrels, and what might have been the original butt of Malmsey that drowned the Duke of Clarence, stood in this doorway. 

“Where does the door at the end of that passage lead to?” asked Kate.

Aminta glanced up.

“To a cellar.”

Kate's interest, already roused by these ancient quarters and the menacing and dungeon-like aspect of the old door, sharpened.

“What, the one where there's a secret passage?”

Aminta laughed.

“Who's been pulling your leg about a secret passage?”

“The Davises of Pentrewer, who drove me up from the station, said there was supposed to be—”

“Yes, there
is
supposed to be the beginning of some tunnel or other, miles long, that pops up goodness knows where— Wigmore Castle or Aberystwyth or the Garden of Eden—you know the kind of thing! Most old houses with cellars are supposed to have secret passages, aren't they?” said Aminta, busy over her milk-strainer.

“You mean there isn't the vestige of such a thing here?”

“I don't know, I'm sure,” said Aminta indifferently. “Old Gid says there isn't, and he should know. I've never been in the cellar.”

Such incuriousness seemed to Kate excessive, even for Aminta.

“You've been a whole year in a house that's supposed to have a secret passage leading out of the cellar, and you've never even looked in the cellar to see if there's a trap door or anything?”

“Well, I'm generally rather busy doing other things. And as a matter of fact, the cellar door's always kept locked, so I wouldn't be able to look around there, even if I wanted to.”

“Kept locked! Why?”

“Oh, well, sightseers used to come sometimes and want to look round it. It's part of the old foundations of the Abbey, you see. And Gid hates sightseers, and small blame to him. It's bad enough to have them crawling round the yard in the summer, without letting them into the house. And when the Morrisons first came to the Veault, Mr. Morrison annoyed old Gid rather by coming and enthusing about this imaginary secret passage and wanting permission to search for it—he's an American, awfully nice, but rather enthusiastic—and Gid got very cross about it. And one day he found Mr. Morrison in the cellar looking round, and suspected him of having designs on some old rusted-in grating that Gid says leads to an old drain, if it leads to anything at all. And there was a great row, and Gid's kept the door locked ever since. He threatened to have the cellar filled in, but he hasn't done it yet, and I should think he'd had too much sense to waste money on such a thing. But gosh he was cross! Old Gid's home is his castle, and nobody's allowed to forget it!”

“Sounds a bit of a dog-in-the-manger to me.”

“Oh, I don't know, Katy! A historic ruin is a trial to its owner, you know. Anybody that wants to come and gape at old stones seems to think it's your duty to leave off work and show them round. Mr. Atkins makes them pay sixpence each to come in the yard and walk round the refectory and cloister ruins, and won't have them in the house at any price. That keeps them off a bit,” said Aminta, with satisfaction.