Sweet Danger (9 page)

Mr Campion appeared to have been forgotten, and he sat in a little recess in a corner of the hall and looked through the open doorway at the quivering leaves and dancing water without. The old house seemed very quiet after the hullabaloo. It was really amazingly attractive. Like all very old houses it had a certain drowsy elegance that was very soothing and comforting in a madly gyrating world.

He allowed his thoughts to wander idly. He noticed the delicate Gothic carving of the stone fireplace, sniffed appreciatively at the mingled odours of wallflower and baking cookie, and wondered how the rabid busybodies who leap upon ancient monuments and tear them stone from stone that they may grace the dank loneliness of museums could have overlooked such a perfect unspoiled gem.

He was disturbed in his reflections by the reappearance of Amanda dancing down the staircase in her ‘working clothes'. At first sight she appeared to have put back her age ten years or so. Her slender figure was covered by an old brown jersey and skirt which had shrunk with much washing until they clung to her like a skin. The only concession to vanity was a yellow-and-red bandanna handkerchief knotted loosely round her neck.

‘Hullo,' she said. ‘Where are the others?'

Mr Campion explained. Amanda looked crestfallen.

‘Has that floor gone at last? Scatty and I wondered if we
couldn't re-board it with faggot poles. They wouldn't be comfortable to tread on, but they'd be safe. I'm very sorry. Is he badly hurt?'

‘I don't think so. He seemed to be enjoying it,' said Campion truthfully. ‘Your sister was looking after him. She's taken him to the doctor now.'

Amanda was silent. A shadow had passed over her face.

‘I didn't think I'd go myself,' Mr Campion continued. ‘It was rather like joining the crowd round an accident, I felt. By the way, I hope your doctor is not too rustic. Not the cobbler in his spare time, or anything like that?'

She shook her head. ‘Oh no. Old Galley's all right, really.'

She stood fidgeting in the middle of the hall, looking absurdly young.

Something prompted Mr Campion to take a shot in the dark.

‘I must get back to Lugg,' he said. ‘That's my man. He's getting very temperamental. He went for a walk on the heath last night and came back with a ridiculous story about finding a corpse on the heath.'

He stopped abruptly. The girl was looking at him with a mixture of alarm and defiance in her eyes.

‘Don't you think it would be nice,' she said in a tone which warned him not to continue as clearly as if she had said the words, ‘Don't you think it would be nice if we went to see the mill?'

‘Splendid idea,' said Mr Campion affably.

His tone and expression were friendly, but his pale eyes behind his spectacles were keen and searching, and it had not escaped him that Amanda's cheeks were very white and her lips were trembling.

‘
EASE HER A
bit! Ease her! Now hang on or she'll go in the river.'

Amanda, breathless and crimson with exertion, clung to the archaic steering arm of the old brougham.

Mr Campion, who was pushing the cumbersome vehicle up the dangerous slope to the coach-house of the mill, did as he was told.

‘If only Scatty was a proper chauffeur,' Amanda observed, as they tucked this great-great-grandmother of electric transport into an old striped-canvas shroud, ‘If only Scatty was a proper chauffeur he could do all this shoving.'

‘That's right,' said Mr Campion brightly. ‘Or if he was a horse.'

Amanda regarded him coldly. ‘You admitted the car looked very well outside the house,' she said with dignity. ‘You're probably one of those people like Hal who don't believe in appearances. But I do. Appearances matter an awful lot.'

‘Oh, rather,' said Mr Campion. ‘I knew a man once who carried it to excess, though. His name was Gosling, you see, so he always dressed in grey and yellow, and occasionally wore a great false beak. People remembered his name, of course. But his wife didn't like it. Of course, he had perfectly ordinary children – not eggs – and that was a blow to him. And finally he moved into a wooden house with just slats in front instead of windows, and you opened the front door with a pulley on the roof. It had a natty little letter box on
the front gate with “The Coop” painted on it. Soon after, his wife left him and the Borough Council stepped in. But I see you don't believe me.'

‘Oh, but I do,' said Amanda. ‘I was his wife. Come and see the mill.'

The shadows of the leaves made dancing grey patterns on the white walls, the water was very clear, and the air was warm and sunny, as they came across the yard and turned into the cool, slightly musty-smelling building.

‘There isn't much to see up here,' said Amanda, ‘except my dynamo, which is rather fun. That's our principal possession. Then there's Mary's loom. She makes homespun scarves and things. They go to a shop in London. She doesn't get much for them, but they're very pretty. That's all there is except the oak, and that's Hal's.'

‘The oak?' enquired Mr Campion.

She nodded. ‘It's right up in the mill tower. It isn't much to see, but it's the only Pontisbright heirloom we've got. It isn't really an heirloom at all, because I suppose we stole it. But nobody wanted it except us.'

She paused, and stood leaning against one of the pillars which supported the crazy floor of the apartment above. An old sack-shoot trap stood open, and through it was a vivid picture of green meadows, overblown trees, and a little winding stream which flowed gently on to the crimson and yellow of a distant osier bed.

She made such a fantastic figure in her tight brown jersey and red-and-yellow kerchief that Campion, regarding her owlisly behind his spectacles, wondered if the whole adventure were quite real.

He sat down on a pile of sacks, and the girl's next remark was in keeping with his mood.

‘Of course,' she said, ‘Hal's the proper Earl of Pontisbright. That makes it all the more fun, don't you think?'

Mr Campion blinked. ‘It all depends what you mean by fun,' he said cautiously.

‘Oh, well – the missing earl and all that sort of thing. You know; the wicked great-grandmother, the babe in the snow, and justice gone astray. It's so nice when it's true. Shall I tell you about it?'

It was evident to him that the query was superfluous. Amanda, always informative, was in a chatty mood.

‘Well,' she said before he could assent, ‘the last proper Earl of Pontisbright – that is, the last man who lived at the Hall – had two sons; a young one called Giles and an older one called Hal. Well, Giles went off to America and was never heard of again until Aunt Hatt turned up. She's his granddaughter. But the elder son stayed on with his father and mother, who was an absolute terror called Josephine, until he was about twenty-five, when he fell in love with an absolutely beautiful girl called Mary Fitton, and they got engaged.

‘Mary Fitton lived over at Sweethearting with her father, who was just a knight.'

She paused. ‘You don't look very intelligent,' she said. ‘Are you taking it all in?'

‘Every word,' said Mr Campion truthfully. ‘Aunt Hatt's grandfather's eldest brother was engaged to Mary Fitton, whose father was just a knight. I suppose he had trouble with his parents? A battle of snobs in high life, as it were.'

‘Oh, no. Only with great-great-grandmother Josephine,' said Amanda quickly. ‘His father was rather keen on the marriage, and, anyway, they did get properly engaged. And then, of course, the Crimea happened, and one day Hal rode over to tell Mary that he'd got to go off to the war next morning. And so he said could they get married at once? And she said Yes. And so they went to the clergyman and persuaded him to do them. And it wasn't very legal, but he did. Then Hal and his father both went to the war and got killed, and the Countess Josephine had the nerve to say that Hal and Mary hadn't been married at all, and so the little Hal wouldn't be the heir when he arrived. And she bribed
or frightened the parson, who must have been an awful fool, anyhow, into saying there hadn't been any marriage, and so the title lapsed, and the Countess Josephine sold up everything and had the house pulled down. Still clear?' she demanded, somewhat breathlessly.

‘Yes,' said the valiant Mr Campion. ‘Can I tell you the story of my life after this?'

Amanda ignored him and went on: ‘Mary Fitton got into trouble from her relations, but the little Hal, although he was poor, was an awfully fierce sort of person, and clearly a Pontisbright. He went off to London and made some money and got married, and his son was called Hal, too, and that was my father. He came down here and bought the mill and fought the claim, really because he had promised his father he would for the first Mary Fitton's sake. But it was very awkward, and he had no documents, and so he lost. Then he got killed in the war, and his money was lost in the war, too, all except a hundred a year, which we've got. But you see how it all happened, don't you? I mean, the Countess Josephine business, and why Hal is the proper rightful earl. You believe it, don't you?' she went on anxiously.

Mr Campion's pale eyes smiled from behind his enormous spectacles as he looked from the girl in the shadow to the green and lovely scene without. After all, he reflected, if the electric brougham were true, why not the story of the rightful earl?

‘Of course it's true,' said Amanda, breaking into his thoughts. ‘That's why we stole the oak. Would you like to see it? These steps aren't very safe, so you'll have to take care.'

She led him across the uneven floor to a very tottery open staircase, which led up to the apartment above.

‘There isn't time to show you all this now,' she said, pointing vaguely to the big dusty barn in which they stood. ‘The oak's in the tower. It took six men to get it there, besides me.'

The tower of the mill proved to be a small wooden room,
built on above the main structure, and as they climbed into it the air smelt hot and stuffy, and there was an ominous scampering in one corner.

‘Rats,' the girl remarked cheerfully. ‘There's dozens of them about. Ratting's rather fun. Well, here you are. Here's the oak.'

She displayed a huge cross-section of an oak bole, about four inches thick, which leant up against the wall under the window.

‘We stole it; or at any rate we took it,' she said proudly.

‘Very determined of you,' murmured Mr Campion affably. ‘Where was it?'

‘On the tree, of course,' she said. ‘If you're interested I'll tell you about it, but if you're not I'll save it for some other time.' As usual she hurried on without waiting for a reply. ‘First of all, the oak tree that this belonged to was supposed to have been planted by the first Pontisbright that ever was, hundreds of years ago, and it stood up in the park by the Hall. It was famous all over the county. And then a long while ago, probably about seventeen hundred, a part of it blew off. So they cut the rest down quite short, until it was about as high as a table from the ground, and they fixed a brass sundial over it. When the Countess Josephine sold the house she sold the sundial, too, and it was unscrewed and taken away. Well, we found the tree – or rather, Father and Mary did, when Mary was quite young – and we stole this slice off it. It was a tremendous business to cut, I believe. I wasn't old enough to know much about it then, but anyway here it is.'

Mr Campion's pale face was perfectly blank. ‘Very nice, too,' he said. ‘But what for?'

‘The inscription, of course,' said the girl. ‘It was on the wood under the sundial, rather badly carved and a bit mossy when we found it. But that's gone now. I scrubbed it. If you could help me push it back a bit – it's frightfully heavy, so be careful – I could show you what I meant.'

Mr Campion was fast learning that association with Amanda always entailed strenuous physical exertion. He took off his coat, and between them they lowered the great disc gently to the floor. The underside of the wood, which now lay revealed, had roughly gouged signs upon its blackened surface. Cracks had defaced the letters in some places, but the tremendous depth of the carving and the size of the ciphers had helped to preserve their character.

There appeared to be eight lines of lettering, each character being a good three inches high.

Mr Campion said nothing, and the girl dropped upon her knees and with a somewhat grubby forefinger traced the words as she read, while the young man, bending over her, followed her finger, an expression of complete stupidity on his pleasant, vacuous face.

‘Rather jolly, isn't it?'

Mr Campion looked more vague than ever. ‘I say,' he began diffidently, ‘this would probably be of great use to old Wright in his book. I'd like to take a copy of it for my album, too. There's one thing I don't follow: if the tree was blown down about seventeen hundred, and the sundial was put on the stump then, how did this carving come to be on the wood itself?'

‘Oh, we worked that out,' said Amanda. ‘It's quite simple, really. You see, we imagine this inscription was meant to be a secret affair, and we think the man who wrote it was the father-in-law of the Countess Josephine. He was always writing bits of verse. Mother had some of his letters, and he
often broke out into doggerel in those. You see,' she went on earnestly, striving to make herself clear, ‘we think this writing was not done before the sundial was put on, but after. Someone unscrewed it, did the carving and then put the sundial back. We worked this out from the condition the letters were in when we found it.'