A Station In Life (18 page)

“Well, Mrs Smith, I must
return to the station with my borrowed nag or my Horse Superintendent will
complain that I hinder him about his business,” I declared.  “Thank you for the
muffin, I have tasted none better.  None better!”

Having gusted
unnecessarily, probably because I was frustrated by my inability to help and
aware that I might soon be looking for cheap accommodation myself, I found my
hat and donned it with a sharp tap.  My jocularity received a perfunctory
smile, and feeling uneasy that my counsel had left Mrs Smith no better off I
prepared to leave.  It would have been nice to tarry awhile and impart a few
stories of my own.  Cheerful ones.  But there was insufficient time.

While arranging my
riding tack I made the decision that I would return to the station and restore
Mr Maynard’s mare to the company stables then deal only with the day’s more
pressing paperwork so that I would have time to walk to Upwater for a spot of
fishing before the arrival of the midday Giddiford train.  This would afford me
time to think.

“Diggory will report for
duty this afternoon,” Mrs Smith assured me resolutely.  “He is very like his
father and cannot be without occupation.”

At this moment I
detected again that fragrance which I had once thought my only clue to Mrs
Smith’s identity.  Indeed, I believe she had applied the mischievous perfume to
herself secretly while gone from the room.  And since she had been nowhere but
the kitchen I cast my eye about to see if I could spot it.  Sure enough, I
espied upon a shelf a miniature phial labelled ‘Essence Of Mirbane’.  At first
I thought it a herb for cooking, but then I read the words ‘perfume for
discerning ladies’ and made a mental note of its name.

Mrs Smith beckoned me
through the back door to the garden, and as I removed my hat briefly for the
stoop she insisted upon picking me some mint, for she would not hear of me
leaving empty-handed.  Clutching a copious bunch of green leaves I brushed past
a rambling rose tied to the brick nogging, its thorny coils intent upon
clinging to me, checked my uniform for snags and waved Diggory goodbye.  No
further conversation was possible now, for my presence in the garden had upset
the geese and a spoilt child’s tantrum could not have matched the noise.  I
mounted Campion, tipped my hat, and rode away from the clamour.

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Chapter Seventeen — Fisticuffs

Jack Wheeler lent me his
rod to go fishing at Upwater, and to please him I thanked him profusely.  He
always enjoyed demonstrative appreciation for his good deeds, and had I been
gullible I might also have taken his angling advice.  A scurrilous grin slid
across his face as I struggled through the door laden with tackle, my mind
dreamy with anticipation.

“If I were you, Mr Jay,
I shouldn’t bother,” he confounded me.  “You’ll catch nothing tasty to fill
your dish today.  Not ’til you’ve faced up to unfinished business.  You’ve
’eard the saying...”

I parried him quickly.

“There are many sayings,
Jack, most of them discontinued now that mankind has embraced science.”

Undeterred, the clerk
tootled his proverb.

“All good fortune passes
by the twerp who shuns the devil’s eye.”

I shook my head at this
improbable proverb, wondering if drunken pixies were to blame for my Booking
clerk’s existence.

“It’s a warning to us
all, Mr Jay,” he advised me tetchily.  “Trouble and strife blights the life of
the man who runs to ground.”

“I am not running to
ground, Jack, I am going fishing,” I insisted with the water meadows and their
slippery bounty large upon my mind.

Sensing my scepticism of
his old sayings, Jack repeated the rhyming couplet with increased passion then
hovered before me with bated breath as if I should act immediately or be
damned.

“Well?” I jumped.  “To
what do you refer?  I do not have all day and I am aware of nothing outstanding. 
All the books are cast up and there is no traffic due.”

Jack twitched and began
a chant, intoning it with growing urgency.

“Farmer Smethwick, sir. 
Oil thief Smethwick.  Infested Smethwick.  Demented Smethwick.  I reckon your
confrontation with ’im is overdue.”

I frowned meanly at the
clerk and propped his fishing rod against my desk to establish that my plans
for dealing with the pugnacious pig breeder were well formulated and required
no accelerating.  Indeed I intended to challenge the quarrelsome farmer later
in the day.  However, before I could apprise Jack of this he hurried away,
presumably to fetch the troublemaker, the draught caused by his lightning
departure dispersing the papers upon my desk.  Tutting with exasperation I
redeployed my paperweights and sank into my chair to think.  Quite clearly,
Jack’s intention was to liven up a dull day at my expense.

A short while later,
Smethwick surprisingly having responded to being summoned in such a manner, and
so quickly, cast his shadow across my desk and darkened an invoice for washing
soda.  I looked up, smiled, and greeted him evenly.  Jack, misshapen by a
hollow grin, remained outside my office to observe events through a side
window.

“I come, my Lord,” Smethwick
mocked, then prostrated himself.

I thought it prudent to
ignore the jest, for the farmer was clearly no cooler in temper than he had
been upon his previous visit.  He straightened himself and leered at me
menacingly, his half closed eyes now miserably familiar.  This time, when he
stepped back and began to sway, I knew his swagger to be caused by ill health
rather than liquor.

“I believe you have some
badly brewed lamp oil,” I opened.  “Perhaps you would care to explain how you
came by it.”

Smethwick submitted no
reply so I tried intimidating him.  I shook my head gravely and stared at him
sternly for as long as I dared, then made notes about him on a sheet of company
letter-paper.  This also failed so I threatened him with arrest.  Still nothing.

The reason for the
fellow’s obmutescence, although I did not know it at the time, was that he had
indeed stolen the spiked lamp oil but not from the South Exmoor railway. 
Unbeknown to either of us there was an intermediate thief.  Incredibly,
therefore, the oil had been stolen twice!  Consequently, from Smethwick’s point
of view, my involvement in the sparkling lamp oil affair was as perplexing as
the pyrotechnic scintillations of his handlamp the previous night.

“The oil to which I
refer is stolen property,” I told him squarely.  “Railway property.”

At this the baffled
farmer found his voice and began protesting his innocence, doing so with such
vehemence that I decided upon a passive response to avoid further provocation,
for my keenest interest lay only in closing the matter and going fishing.  Yet
still the cur inflamed himself to such anger that eventually he reached across
my desk and seized my lapel.  A pot of ink toppled and a black puddle spread
through my paperwork, deleting hours of arithmetical calculations.

Amused by this,
Smethwick did not apologise, nor did he release his grip of my lapel until the
last of my tabulations had homogenised, whereupon the perverse smirk upon his
face embellished itself with a twinkle of sheer delight.

“There!” he said,
emphasising the ease with which hard labour can be undone, perhaps sharing with
me a taste of his own miserable life.

I called out to my
Booking clerk and observed a nose, at first pressed against my window,
disappear in the direction of my door.  Now, with a witness hurrying our way, I
expected Smethwick to release my lapel.  However, when it became clear that to
render assistance was not Wheeler’s purpose, he maintained his grip.

”Just a minute, Jack…” I
stammered as the clerk strode past my door without stopping.

“I thought so, served by
cowards,” Smethwick laughed and stepped around my desk.

The sickly fragrance of
writing ink did not mix well with the fetor of a perspiring pig breeder, and
not being of the strongest stomach, when he pulled me eye-to-eye against his
matted beard, I blacked out.

When I regained
consciousness I was told that Smethwick had punched me before leaving, and I
was presented with a vanity mirror to view the evidence.  I pushed this aside,
for I did not require a looking glass to feel the pain, nor to deduce that there
had been no rush to my assistance after the incident.  With little more than
some preliminary medical attention, administered by Mr Phillips, I had been
left slumped in my chair with a dead gaze for at least ten minutes.

Dismissing my heartless scrutators
I applied a swab of iodine to my swollen eye and stared at the ceiling to keep
it in place.  While engaged in this painful but highly recommended form of
medication my door creaked open, as if pushed by a draught, and Jack Wheeler
entered furtively.  Offering me a tin of live bait, maggots he had scooped from
a lineside morkin, he advanced with unconvincing nonchalance and claimed that
he knew nothing of the assault.

“I am a stationmaster,
not a turnip,” I rebutted him.

Removing the swab I
became aware that Jack was pleased by my fluster, for it added to the rattling
good yarn he would now tell down at The Shunter.  I pushed the revolting
maggots aside and told him to flush them under the station tap.  The clerk
ignored my instruction and squinted strangely, examining my eye from a
convenient distance.

“Jingo, you’ll ’ave a
prize black’n there, Mr Jay!” he gurgled with token sympathy, afterwards asking
a question to which he well knew the answer.  “You got ’im tooth for tooth, I
’ope?”

An ‘eye for an eye’ would
have been the better analogy.

“A stationmaster does
not strike a valued patron no matter how provocative he may be,” I answered
Wheeler boldly.  “Now perhaps the venomous Mr Smethwick will find he is able to
forget the matter of his tuppeny-ha’penny pigs.”

Mr Wheeler twitched with
surprise and I stared at him sternly.

“Ay, that’s right, Jack,”
I waggled my finger.  “This bruise has nothing to do with your blasted lamp oil
so your self congratulations are misplaced.  That scoundrel Smethwick assaulted
me to settle a score, plain as a pikestaff.”

Since no one else had
thought to do it, I set about mopping up the spilt ink, although by now much of
it had dried.

“You can tell your
cronies at the public,” I continued, “that Smethwick punched the stationmaster
for making him walk his infected pigs to market, not because you arranged a
confrontation over a drop of measly lamp oil.”

I took to my feet,
became dizzy, and sat down.  It did not occur to Wheeler to assist me.

“Take it from me, Mr
Wheeler,” I said, “Smethwick is a thoroughly nasty piece of work.  The kind to
bear a grudge.”

Jack frowned deeply.

“Everyone knows that,”
he replied.

My angry animations set
the iodine stinging again so I waved the clerk away.  Again, he ignored me.

“So ’e didn’t own up to taking
the oil then?” he quizzed me snappily, indifferent to my suffering.

“What do you think?” I
retorted.  “Frankly, I doubt we shall ever get to the bottom of the business. 
As far as I am concerned, the case of the disappearing lamp oil has itself disappeared. 
It is best forgotten.”

I stood up a second time,
librated again, and sat down again.  The show over, Jack left.

With all my calculations
to rework I could allow myself only two hours fishing at Upwater, and groggily took
Jack’s advice to cast my hook upstream of the cress-beds.  The clerk had
assured me that the biggest bites were to be had at the mouth of the flourmill
leat and I felt too sickly to make my own reconnaissance.

Needless to say I caught
no fish here, but I did find the lazy splash of an overshot wheel most
relaxing, and relaxation was the chief reason for my sojourn.  With a spritely
dipper for company I watched a shoal of fry hovering in the crystal slipstream,
and observed in the quivering backwaters a rash of lustrous whirligig beetles
circling relentlessly over an inverted image of Bessam forest.  All this teased
my tangled mind into drowsy enchantment and my eye stopped aching.

The mesmeric spell of
the river was broken suddenly by a frenetic swirl of martins chattering and
swooping to pick off the gnats that swarmed to the lambent watercourses of the
area.  After a few minutes observing the aerial antics of these birds, waiting
for the bite that was never to come, I turned my attention to the sky, a cloudless
blue void, to see if I could spot a skylark.  Its melodious twittering was
ceaseless enough for a troupe of songsters, yet its telltale speck I could not
see.

Later my thoughts turned
to Mrs Smith, whose plight I came to ponder in great depth.  There had to be
something I could do to assist, but nothing seemed appropriate for such a proud
person.  One thing I knew, she was sensitive about receiving charity.

I was still pondering
the widow’s circumstances, scratching my head in the manner of a dunce, when my
attention was drawn to the mill pond, for in that quarter the fish had begun to
plop somewhat lively.  At sight of this I put in hand the catching of my
supper.

Having set up my line
again, and having found a large stone with which to stun my catch, I waited for
my first tug.  I did not have to wait long, and I departed Upwater with not
only three trout gaping ruefully from my landing net but a good idea how I
might help Mrs Smith.  Anonymously.  Arriving back at the station I summoned
Jack Wheeler and Humphrey Milsom to my office immediately.

“As you two fine fellows
know,” I addressed them, flattering Humphrey and surprising Jack, “there is a
considerable amount of coal lying at the foot of Widdlecombe bank.  It is in a
very inaccessible location but you can be sure the resourceful folk of Ondle
valley will soon enough find a way to reach it.  Therefore I need a decoy, for
we are going to pinch the coal ourselves.” Eyebrows lifted.  “Furthermore,
gentlemen, I have a scheme by which this may be done.  However, if you are to
be part of my plan I must insist upon complete secrecy.”

“If e means to boost our
winter coal ration, Mr Jay, then I be game even if I has to flee the country
first,” said Humphrey, harmonising with Jack’s sly nod.

“Good,” I gusted.  “Then
to begin with I want you to start a rumour.  I need you to spread word that
something dreadful is abroad and mutilating sheep.  Say that passengers on
trains have observed an uncanny black creature roaming the countryside.  Say
that you have seen it yourselves, an abominable predator with razor sharp
fangs.”  I waggled a finger of caution.  “Do not be overly creative, lest you
contradict yourselves.  Simply say that the creature is big enough to eat
someone and has been seen leaping from trees making an uncanny wail, mostly in
the Widdlecombe area.”

“Don’t worry, Mr Jay,
it’ll be the most terrifying monster ever to stalk the valley,” Jack purred
keenly, as if there had been others.  “I’ll say it’s got bloodshot eyes and
gurgles, and falls down on you in broad daylight.”

I thumped my desk to
sober the clerk.

“You are supposed to
conjure up a frightening beast, Jack, not a drunkard.  Indeed you must
tantalise your audience with artful brevity.  Make vague references to voodoo
and people losing their sanity.  Above all, confide in no one.”

“It be a clever idea, Mr
Jay,” Humphrey applauded me.  “When everyone’s doors be bolted we salvage the
lion’s share for ourselves.  E mustn’t forget, though, Widdlecombe bank be a
devilish place.”