Ring of Terror (2 page)

‘Correct.’

‘And you’re my father’s sucking clergyman. The one he’s paying for to get into the Church. The rector’s been teaching you to talk like a gentleman. Even if he can’t teach you to behave like one.’

‘He’s been teaching me more than that. Latin and Greek. We’re just starting on Hebrew.’

‘You can stop all that. As from now, you’ll get no more help from him or us.’

‘Isn’t that for your father to say?’

‘I can tell you what he’ll say. He’ll say that he was dragging you up, by your collar, from the ditch. Now he’ll let go of you, so you can sink back into the mud where you belong. Latin and Greek! What you need to be taught isn’t Latin and Greek. It’s respect for your betters.’

When Luke said nothing, some of Oliver’s anger seemed to drain out of him. He said, ‘Look here, you reset those traps and we’ll forget all about it. Right?’

‘Like I told you. They’re not traps. They’re instruments of torture.’

‘Then you set the comfort of six rabbits above your career?’

‘Put like that, it sounds silly. But yes, I suppose I do.’ He picked up the traps. ‘Have to take these with me. Be needed as evidence.’ He swung round on his heel and left Oliver staring after him.

When Luke got home it was after midnight, but his father was waiting up for him. He said, ‘I caught a boy who was setting snares and I pulled them up. Here they are.’

‘And you got his name?’

‘Yes, I got his name.’

‘Good. We’ll tell constable in the morning and he’ll have him up in front of the Bench.’

‘Who do you think will be sitting on the Bench?’

‘Sir George, like as not. And what are you grinning about?’

Luke explained what he was grinning about. His father, trying to keep the shock out of his voice, said, ‘You’re a bloody fool. You won’t find it no joke, that I can tell you for sure. Sir George ain’t the man to take a slap in the face and say thank you for it.’

‘Maybe his son won’t tell him. I had to put him on his back. He’ll not be proud about that.’

‘He’ll surely tell him,’ said his father. He sat for a time in silence while the clock on the shelf above the fire ticked away the minutes. For the first time that night, as he saw the distress on his father’s face, Luke was sorry for what he had done. Finally his father said, ‘I’ll have a word with Reverend Millbanke. Leah can drop a note at the Rectory on her way to school. Sir George thinks a lot of Rector. Maybe he’ll be able to work something out for us.’

The Reverend Francis Millbanke arrived after breakfast. He had a mop of grey hair and the pinkness and smoothness of his face belied his sixty years. A scholar of Sidney Sussex College, he had been offered preferment more than once, but had refused it on the grounds that since he was perfectly happy at Bellingham any change could only be for the worse. His popularity was great. It did not stem from his sermons, which were way above the heads of his congregation, but from his desire and ability to get on with everyone from the highest to the lowest.

He said, ‘All I could gather from your note, Hezekiah, was that you were worried. Sherlock Holmes would have had no trouble in deducing that from your writing, which was more nearly illegible than usual.’

Hezekiah grinned. He said, ‘Certainly I was kerflummoxed and I expect it showed. Any event, I’m no great hand at writing.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘You’d better have it from the boy.’

Reverend Millbanke’s face grew steadily more serious as the recital continued. Finally he said, ‘There’s only one thing for it. You’ll have to go along and apologise to Sir George. He’s really quite a reasonable man.’

‘That’s not what his people tell me,’ said Luke. ‘Mrs Parham says there are days when he does nothing but grunt and growl and no one can get any sense out of him at all.’

‘That’s when the demon gout has got him by the big toe. It would make Saint Peter and Saint Paul bad tempered. Incidentally’—a faraway look came into the Rector’s eyes—’have you ever thought that the real reason his disciples were so ready to follow our Lord and rough it with Him was that they were young men? If they’d been twenty years older they’d have thought twice about it and stayed with their lobster pots.’

Luke said, ‘I always thought that the reason they followed our Lord was because He was such a remarkable teacher.’

The Rector came out of his abstraction. ‘Don’t change the subject, boy. This is an emergency and must be treated as such. I’m sure you realise that if Sir George indicates that he doesn’t wish me to continue as your tutor I should be obliged to fall in with his wishes.’

‘Of course.’

‘And even if you were to continue educating yourself – I could probably let you have the necessary books – when it came to the point and you succeeded in passing the entrance exam at theological college you could hardly expect your father to find the fees.’

Hezekiah shook his head sadly.

‘And even supposing you managed to scramble your way through college without Sir George’s help, what would be your chance of going any further? Sir George is patron of a number of livings and it had been his intention to nominate you to one of them. You could hardly expect him to do that now. And if he raised his voice against you, no one would have you.’

Luke said, ‘When Oliver was thinking what he could say in order to hurt and insult me, he called me his father’s sucking clergyman. I’m not sure that he wasn’t right. Considered as a clergyman I am, in every sense, his creature.’

‘Then you’ll see him?’

‘I’ll have a word with Mrs Parham first. If she says he isn’t in one of his bad moods, I’ll have a try at apologising.’

‘Yes, certainly talk to Mrs Parham first. She knows Sir George as well as anyone. And she wouldn’t have put up with him for thirty years if he was the sort of ogre he’s made out to be.’

‘There’s just one thing that puzzles me. The faults were all on the other side. So what am I going to apologise for?’

The Rector thought for nearly a full minute before he spoke. Then he said, ‘I’ll tell you what you’re apologising for. When you thought you were dealing with a poacher, what you did was right. When you found it was Sir George’s son, it was wrong.’ He raised a hand to prevent Luke from interrupting him. ‘If you’re going to be a clergyman – a parish priest – one of the things you’ll have to remember is to keep a sense of proportion. Not to try weighing up absolutes of right and wrong. In this case you were putting three years’ work at risk for three minutes of ill- judged self-justification. You may not know this, but Sir George and I looked on you as a boy of exceptional promise. I can remember being impressed – oh, many years ago – when you were at the village school and I came to teach you all Divinity. A sad waste of time for the most part. But your comments and your questions were far above anything your fellows could produce. That was when our plans for you were made. They must not be thrown away for a single night’s misunderstanding.’

One part of Luke’s mind was ready to accept what the Rector said. Another part was in revolt against it. He said, ‘I understand that some men are placed above others and the ones below must respect the ones above. But that doesn’t seem to me to be what Christianity teaches us. Christ was quite prepared to challenge the classes above him. I mean, all the scribes and the pharisees and that lot. He was always ready to argue with them. He even took a whip to them when he cleared the Temple.’

‘That may have been all right in those days,’ said the Rector sadly. ‘But not today. Not in England. The classes are set and fixed. You can’t argue them away. Remember what the hymn says, “God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate”.’

Hezekiah brought them down to earth.

‘You realise, boy,’ he said, ‘that if Sir George takes against us, I could lose my job.
And
we could be turned out of house. It belongs to him, not me.’

This hit Luke between the eyes. He was almost too upset to speak. He said, ‘You don’t think—could he really—’

‘I don’t say he would. I only say he could.’

‘Then of course I’ll apologise. I’ll go right round today.’ In spite of his consternation he managed to grin. He said, ‘I shall have to think out pretty carefully how I’m going to say it. After all, it was Oliver who was breaking the law. And he attacked me. Not me him.’

‘Watch your grammar,’ said the Rector. ‘The subject of the verb “to attack” should be the nominative pronoun. You should have said, “Not I.’”

This made them all laugh, which was, no doubt, the Rector’s intention.

The heavy, nail-studded door at the back of Bellingham Court opened on to a flight of steps which led down to a passage flanked by doors on each side, a subterranean area of cold stores, wine cellars and game larders. In his childhood, Luke had feared it. He had thought of it as a cemetery.

This was partly the fault of his grandfather. The old man had been versed in the mythology of death. In his own childhood, he could remember how heavy stones were laid on newly dug graves to prevent their occupants emerging and he had entertained the little boy – sometimes frightened, but resolute not to show it – with stories of vampires and ghosts and of men who turned into wolves as the light began to fade. So it was that when Luke had to carry messages to Mrs Parham, he had hurried down that particular passage, fearing to hear the pheasants and partridges coming back to life and fluttering their wings to escape from the hooks on which they hung.

Now, he was too old for such fancies, but none the less, he wasted no time in making for the far end of the passage and climbing the steps which led up to the kitchen quarters, a more temperate zone. Here lived and worked the platoon of maids who served the house, under the joint generalship of Parkes the butler and Mrs Parham the housekeeper.

Luke had once calculated that if you added the outside staff, the gardeners and grooms and stable boys, you could easily reach a total of thirty people. It seemed a great number to be looking after Sir George, who was a widower, and his two sons; but when he had mentioned this to his father, Hezekiah had not been impressed. ‘It might seem strange to you,’ he had said, ‘but think of it this way. Sir George is giving employment, from his own pocket, mark you, to thirty men and women. It stands to his credit, not to his discredit.’

In truth, it was a style of living that was already becoming uncommon. In Sir George’s case, the money needed to keep it up did not come from the farms on the estate. As Sir George pointed out to his cronies, the miserable rents which the farms paid scarcely met the repairs which, as landlord, he was bound to carry out.

The real money came from Sir George’s share in the silk- and cotton-spinning industry brought over by Huguenot refugees from France two centuries before. One of Sir George’s ancestors, when leasing them the site near Lavenham for the factories they wanted to build, had stipulated that, instead of a rent, they should allow him a share of the profits. This had proved to be a very lucrative investment.

Mrs Parham welcomed Luke warmly and he rewarded her with a smile which, had he known it, was already beginning to flutter the hearts of the local girls.

She said, ‘What good wind blows you here? Don’t tell me you’ve come to see an old woman, because I shan’t believe you.’

‘Then you’d be wrong, Mrs P,’ said Luke. ‘Because I did come to see you. Though it’s true I had a second reason.’

‘I knew it. Something you want out of me. In the old days it would have been my home-made fudge. But I guess you’re too old for sweets now.’

‘Never too old for your home-bake. But the thing I really wanted was a piece of information.’

‘Indeed. About what, might I ask?’

‘About Sir George. I need to know how his gout is.’

‘At the moment, thank the Lord, it isn’t troubling him.’

‘And he’s at home?’

‘When I saw him about half an hour ago he was in his study, writing letters.’

‘Then I’d better go straight up.’

‘Before his gout comes back, is that it?’

Luke knew that she was longing to be told what it was all about; and although in the past he had confided many of his secrets to her as a surrogate mother, his own being dead, he felt that in this case he had to keep his counsel.

He departed, up a second flight of steps, emerging through a baize-lined door into the front hall of the house. Here he paused to collect himself.

He had crossed Sir George’s path many times, at shoots and on other outdoor occasions and had observed him in church, trying not to go to sleep as the Rector plunged more and more deeply into Hebrew history and philosophy, but he had never contemplated a face-to-face encounter. How was he going to manage it? Should he stump in, say, ‘I’m sorry for what happened yesterday,’ and stump out again?

By now the simplest words seemed to be sticking in his throat and his hands were clammy. It was determination which took him along the passage and pride which knocked at the study door.

Sir George looked up from his writing and said, ‘Come in, boy. Shut the door. What can I do for you?’

‘There’s something I wanted to say, sir.’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you sat down?’

‘No, sir. I’d rather stand. The fact is—well, my father and Reverend Millbanke both thought I should come along and apologise—’

‘I’m not interested in what other people thought. What I’d like to know is what
you
thought.’

‘I thought the same. It was silly of me. I should have realised that Oliver – that your son – would have told you what he meant to do and got your permission.’

‘My son told me nothing. He knew he could go anywhere he liked on my property and he only told me this morning about his rabbiting. He should not have used illegal snares, but that was for me to tell him, not you.’

‘No, sir. I realise that now.’ Luke drew a deep breath. ‘If it would make up for it, I’d be glad to set some of our dead-fall traps where he set his. And I’d let him have any rabbits they caught.’

‘Handsome,’ said Sir George. ‘But not necessary.’

Gaining confidence from the comparative friendliness with which this was said, Luke added, ‘I was fearing you might be planning to visit my sins on Father.’