Strange Recompense (15 page)

She poured herself a second cup of coffee with growing confidence and agreed to sound the local shopkeepers while he went to pay his call on the vicar.

As soon as she saw him again she knew that he had been disappointed. Anyone who knew Noel Melford realized that the tightness about his mouth was determination in the face of setback, and she had worked with him for years.

“Well,” she said slowly, “no luck?”

“Absolutely none. The vicar was on holiday and I saw his locum, a charming fellow who said he would do what he could for me but didn’t think he would be half so useful as the man on the spot.”

Sara said: “Bad luck!” but was secretly glad, although she had not done much better herself.

“I went the rounds and bought myself enough toothpaste to last me a lifetime!” she laughed, “but the name Anna just didn’t ring a bell anywhere in the village, and these people generally know the locals for miles around.”

“I’ve made up my mind to try Alnwick this afternoon,” Noel said, his disappointment sticking in his throat like all bitterness. “I thought I was going to get somewhere down here. In fact, I could have sworn it!”

Sara put a warm, friendly hand over his where it lay on the table.

“Must you go on with this, Noel?” she asked gently. “You’re wearing yourself out. I know how galling it is to have to admit defeat, but really you’ve done everything in your power to solve this problem. Why not turn the whole thing over to the proper quarter when you go back, and have done with it?”

“You mean, of course, the police?” He was looking at her as though he hardly saw her. “That is the last thing I shall do,” he said stubbornly. Don’t ask me about it again, Sara.”

She flushed scarlet.

“Very well! If you wish to go on being made a fool of I shall certainly not interfere again, but I shall still try to help, if it is only to prove to you how wrong you are about this girl!”

It was a speech so completely typical of Sara that Noel did not even consider it odd. He smiled at her strange offer and went on with his meal, smoking two cigarettes in rapid succession when he had finished, sure sign that he was thrashing out some major problem in his mind.

“Excuse me, sir,” the hall porter said at his elbow as he stubbed the second end into the ash-tray. “You’re wanted on the telephone. A long-distance call, sir. Would you take it in the office?”

Noel rose at once, pushing back his chair, and Sara met his eyes inquiringly.

“Sounds as if it might be Glynmareth,” he satisfied her. “I phoned Ruth last night to ask about Anna.”

Anna! Always Anna, Sara thought savagely. He
was
in love with the girl! Any fool could see that now!

Tense and angry, she waited his return, and saw immediately that something had upset his plans. He was frowning and there was a slight flush on his tanned cheeks as he strode back to their table.

“It was Ruth,” he said. “There’s been an urgent call for me from Bristol.”

“Noel, your appointment!” The color ran up into her pale cheeks, and ambition deepened the lustre in her wideset eyes. “It means that you’ve got it! They would never send for you like that otherwise.”

He smiled faintly.

“You have more confidence in my ability than
I
have, Sara!”

“You’re far too modest, my dear!”

“Perhaps I am conscious of my own limitations.”

“Noel,
”
she demanded sharply, “you’re not contemplating turning this Bristol offer down, are you?
”

He shook his head.

“I would be several kinds of fool to do that, but I haven’t got the job yet.”

“This can mean nothing else.” She swept his objections aside with her usual imperiousness. “It’s yours for the taking.”

“I’m not so sure. It could mean that the Board just wanted to take another look at me!”

“I’ve told you you’re being far too modest!” She rose to her feet, smiling down at him. “I really think this calls for a celebration, you know!
”

“Sorry, Sara,” he apologized, “but there just won’t be time. I’ve got to be in Bristol by tomorrow evening.”

She bit her lip in exasperation, but the thought of his new appointment was compensation of a kind. If he accepted the post, if he moved to Bristol to this job he had always coveted, he would be forced to leave Anna behind!

That she would also be left behind in Glynmareth did not affect Sara in the same way. There were such things as transfers, and she was not without her own personal ambition, although she would have been ready to sacrifice her career at Noel’s bidding any day.

“I won’t be able to wait to hear the result!” she declared truthfully. “We will miss you at Glynmareth, of course—terribly. It’s certainly a plum of a job, Noel. You’ve been very lucky.”

He smiled crookedly at the left-handed compliment but did not say anything, and half an hour later, having paid his bill and packed his one small suitcase, he was waving Sara farewell and driving swiftly off down the narrow main street.

With his back to the sea and that winding road before him he seemed to be leaving hope and a high endeavour behind, yet he was not so foolish as to turn down the substance for the shadow. He
could come back to Northumberland after the business in Bristol was settled.

It was over three months since he had sent in his application for the appointment and he had almost given up thinking about it, presuming that the position was already filled; then the summons of last week had come out of the blue and he had gone to Bristol as one of a short list of eight doctors and been interviewed by a row of elderly gentlemen with varying qualifications, and told that he would hear from them “in due course.”

This further interview surprised him, but he was far too ambitious to think of turning it down, even in the present circumstances. He decided that he could write to Alnwick for the information he sought, although the personal contact would have been more satisfying.

There was, of course, Sara! He thought about Sara for a long time on his way south, considering her good qualities and her strange idiosyncrasies which, manlike, he could still smile at and call harmless. Sara would rout out anything there was to find, and she would probably look upon it as a sort of crusade now that he had been forced to come away with his own task unfinished.

Sara’s idea of a crusade was hardly the same as Noel’s, however. It was a grim search, a desperate seeking for the power to destroy, and she lost no time in setting about her plan.

It was quite by accident that she made her first contact. The weather, which had been fine for weeks, suddenly began to show signs of deteriorating. A dull grey haze lay over the sea, creeping in from the east, and the blue gradually faded from the sky. There was no definite cloud formation; just the universal greyness and a heaviness of approaching storm in the atmosphere which she should have accepted as a warning.

She was too keen on her objective, however, too wrapped up in her own purpose to notice the vagaries of an English summer, and early the following morning she set forth on foot along the coast, travelling northwards and slightly inland with a packed lunch in her green canvass satchel and her mackintosh strapped across it as a precaution. Her shoes were sensible but light, and she had scorned a hat.

She set out in comparatively warm sunshine at ten o’clock and walked until one, and by that time the first sign of rain had drawn a hazy finger along the sky. She wondered if she should turn back along the coast or walk on, trying to find a main road, in the hope of getting a bus back to Alnmouth, and finally decided on the former. About a mile back she had passed a farm house, and ahead of her there seemed to be nothing but a wild stretch of open country.

The first splashes of rain fell on the dusty road before her as she came in sight of the gaunt old house standing high up against the skyline, and she hurried towards it as the only means of protection she could see for miles.

The farm, when she reached it, wet through and curiously aggrieved at the failure of her light mackintosh to keep out the deluge, was a square, unpretentious place built of native stone, grey against a grey landscape, with low outbuildings on either side of it and a Dutch barn sheltering it at the rear. It looked austere and cold with its closely-curtained windows, as if its inhabitants had no desire for contact with the outside world, and she was somewhat surprised when a young girl opened the door to her.

“
We saw you coming up the path,” the girl said in a sullen tone which did not exactly suggest a ready hospitality. “You’ll be wanting to shelter from the storm?”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Sara said.

Reluctantly, it seemed, the door was opened a few inches farther and the rain spattered in on a stone-flagged passageway scrubbed scrupulously clean and laid with home-woven rugs.

Sara passed the morose-looking custodian of the door to find herself confronted by several closely shut inner doors, all looking about as uninviting as the outside of the house itself.

“I brought a mac,” she said, “but I was right up on the moor when the storm broke and I had no idea how fierce your northern rain can be! A light raincoat is apparently of very little use in these circumstances.”

The girl eyed her bright scarlet coat with silent contempt while she closed and bolted the door. She said nothing, and Sara had time to notice that she might have been attractive in a dark, northern way but for her glum expression and the look of resentment in her eyes, before her guide flung open another door and motioned her into a room which looked and smelled as if it had not been used for months.

Strangely enough, it was a most attractive room and might even have been termed comfortable but for that deserted, unused look it had acquired. The green carpet was shabby but good, and the three-piece suite was of green velvet muted almost to grey, which seemed to prove that the room had known the joy of sunshine streaming in through its narrow windows at one time and had not always been shrouded in the gloom of the heavy curtains hanging there now.

The lack of flowers about the place was strange, too, since the garden surrounded by its grey stone wall was full of flowers, riotous but unattended bloom which she had noticed even in the rain. Perhaps someone had died recently, Sara thought. The whole place had t
h
e air of death about it.

The girl left her without a word, returning in a few minutes with a burly Northumberland farmer whose hard eyes looked Sara over from head to foot before he spoke.

“Caught in the storm, eh?” he asked, adding with a surprising change of tone when he saw her plight: “By gox, but you’re wet, hinney! Best come in an’ dry yourse
lf
at the kitchen fire, where it’s warm, an’ my lass will get ye something to drink.”

“I’d be grateful for a cup of tea,” Sara admitted, ignoring the girl’s dark scowl. “There’s nothing like being soaked through for making you feel cold!”

“Ye look fair chilled tae the marrow,” the farmer commented. “Run on wi’ ye, Jess,” he added to his daughter, “an’ bring a sup
o’
milk. Maybe there’s a bowlful o’ soup left in the pot, too.”

“You mustn’t trouble, really,” Sara protested, although the hot soup would have been welcome. “I’m quite sure you’ve had your lunch by this time and I have some sandwiches with me to eat. If I might just have the warm milk, that wi
ll
do, and perhaps the rain will have cleared away by the time I’ve finished.”

“You could get a lift back from the egg van.”

It was the first time the girl had spoken since they had come back into the room and the low, cultured tone was strangely out of keeping with her slightly untidy clothes and the darkly scowling brows. Sara looked at her again as she followed her into a low-raftered kitchen, scrupulously clean as the passage outside and warm with the smell of newly-baked bread. She was a strange creature, this Jess, curiously like the old man in looks, dark and sturdy, with a full bosom and' broad hips, a typical product of the moors, and somewhere beneath it all slumbered a fierce antagonism. She looked out upon the world with resentment, as if it had done her a grievous wrong. Like a hunted animal, Sara thought, wounded and resentful, an
d
waiting its opportunity to strike back.

“Your job will be looking after the hens, I suppose?” she asked conversationally.

“Everything about this place is my job now,” the girl told her sullenly, “I do everything in the house.”

She went through to the stone-flagged dairy, banging the door behind her, and Sara took off her wet mackintosh to hang it over a chair away from the fire.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” the farmer said, looking after his daughter. “She gets into these black moods at times and there’s no getting her out o’ them save just to bide your time.”

“Doesn’t she like the work on a farm?” Sara asked idly.

“She likes the outside work, but the inside was never her job—not till recently.” His own brows had drawn together in a swift scowl. “Somebody else did it, but things have changed since then, and I can’t get a woman to stay in t
h
is place for love nor money. It’s ower far from the bus routes an’ the pictures, I warren!”

“It is isolated,” Sara agreed, “but I expect it has its compensations. It is really beautiful countryside, and I should imagine that one could see the sea from here on a clear day.”

“Ay! Up on Clifton Bank ye can see the whole of the coast from Coquet to the Fames! And behind ye there’s the Cheviot an’ a’ the hills o’ the Borders!”