The Coldstone (6 page)

Susan shrugged her shoulders.

“If you're looking for your great-grandfather's treasure, you're just wasting your time, for I don't believe it ever had any existence, except in his dreams.”

Garry came quite close to her.

“Then why wouldn't Sir Jervis let anyone go near the Coldstone Ring?”

“I don't know.”

“I do then. It's because the treasure's buried there.”

“Garry, how ridiculous! It's not that at all. There's some old superstition. Gran knows about it.”

“Village gossip! You're not going to tell me Sir Jervis would believe it? It suited him well enough because it covered up what he'd been doing.”

“But good gracious, Garry, if he
had
buried the treasure, why should he leave it there?”

“My great-grandfather was alive till ten years ago. I say Sir Jervis didn't dare dig the stuff up until his ‘dear O'Connell' was dead, but by that time he was too old. He couldn't do it himself, and he hadn't got anyone he could trust. And if he couldn't have it himself, he didn't want anyone else to have it, so he tried to get his heir to promise not to shift the Stones.”

“The Stones?” said Susan. A little cold shiver went over her.

“The treasure's there,” said Garry with cold finality.

Susan shivered again. She hated the whole thing—the Stones, the treasure, the old mad O'Connell—and Garry. No, she couldn't quite hate Garry. But she wished most desperately that she was in bed and asleep. As a first step towards getting there, she smothered a yawn and said,

“Is that all?”

And in a moment Garry was off into one of his rages. It was like something blowing up, and it always frightened her, deep down under her self-control. If there had been any light, she would have seen his face quite, quite colourless, lips drawn back from the pointed, irregular teeth, eyes frightfully black, a ring of white showing all round the iris. Gran had been right when she said “Keep clear of the black.” But she didn't know Garry. Susan did; and she was frightened for herself, and for him, and for Anthony Colstone.

“All?” said Garry. His voice was quite soft. He began to pour out a medley of frightful words very slowly and deliberately. It wouldn't have been nearly so frightening if he had shouted. He never shouted when he was angry; he said blood curdling things softly, slowly, deliberately, with pauses between the words as if he were dwelling on them.

Just when Susan felt as if she were really going to scream, he stopped.

“No, it isn't all,” he said in his usual voice—“not quite. Sir Jervis had a nurse when he was ill—and Sir Jervis talked.”

Susan stood quite still. All this seemed very unbelievable. Thin sort of stuff to be keeping one out of one's bed at midnight. She was so tired that she didn't care how much treasure was buried in the Coldstone Ring, or anywhere else. Garry's rages were very depleting. She wanted to get away and shut herself up in her safe dark room and go to sleep. She didn't believe a single word about old Major O'Connell and the treasure. She wondered whether Garry really believed it either. It didn't seem possible to believe a story like that.

“I ran across the nurse in Wrane.” There was a note of triumph in Garry's tone. “Sir Jervis talked—and she told me what he said.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘It's safe. No one will ever find it.' He was talking in his sleep, you know, the night before he died. Then he woke with a start, and said ‘Did I say anything?' And the nurse told him what he'd said, and he said, ‘So it is—quite safe. And nobody will find it, because nobody knows it's there.' And presently he went to sleep again, and when he was asleep he talked some more.”

There was silence—warm, drowsy silence.

“Is that all?”

“It's all I'm going to tell you,” said Garry.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“All right,” said Susan. Then she said, “Goodnight, Garry,” and ran past him down the hill.

She heard him swear under his breath, and she heard him follow. She wondered if she could run faster than he could, and a little breath of excitement just touched her and went past. She took hold of herself and stood quite still, and he came up with a rush and caught her round the waist.

“You're not going like that!”

“I was.”

“You can't now.” His arm tightened.

“I shall have more luck than I deserve if I can get back without being seen. By the bye, where are you getting back to?”

“Wrane. I've got a motor bike. There's no hurry. Kiss me, Susan.”

Susan heaved a weary sigh.

“My good Garry, I don't want to be made love to—I want to go to sleep.”

Garry held her closer.

“Susan!”

“I'm dead sleepy.”

“Bored with me, I suppose.”

“Frightfully bored with you.”

“If I thought you meant that—”

“I do mean it.”

“I'd—”

“Well, my dear?”

The movement with which he let go of her was so violent that she nearly lost her balance. She said,

“Really, Garry!”

“Sometimes I think I could kill you,” said Garry.

“Think again!” said Susan. Then she laughed. “You're being most frightfully silly. Goodnight.”

This time she did not make the mistake of running. She walked away briskly and lightly, and after a moment's pause she heard him go running back up the hill. She came into the warm hush of the village street and looked up at the blank windows again. Not a glimmer, not a sound. Old houses, dreaming old, confused dreams of all the things that had ever happened in them. Old drowsy houses, slipping back into the past out of which they had come.

She lifted the latch of the garden gate, skirted the lavender bush, slipped into the dark living-room, and slid the bolt. She couldn't see anything at all, it was so dark. “Black as the inside of an oven,” Gran would say.

She felt her way to the stairs and went slowly, slowly up, each step solid under her foot without a creak, and the heavy rail smooth as glass under her hand. Hundreds of years of polish had made it as smooth as that—just the slipping of hands going up and down for three hundred years.

She reached the top, felt for the wall—and heard her name: “Susan—” It made her pringle all over. She hadn't made a sound.

“Susan—”

Susan pushed open the door of old Mrs. Bowyer's room and went in.

“What is it, Gran?”

“Where ha' you been?” The voice came out of the dark very composedly.

Susan didn't know what to say. Gran was the limit. She laughed, because that was easiest, and Mrs. Bowyer said,

“It's no laughing matter.”

“Gran dear, I went out for a breath of air. It's so hot.”

“You needn't trouble to tell me lies, my dear.”

“
Gran!
”

There was the splutter of a match. Mrs. Bowyer sprang into view in a white frilled nightcap, leaning over on her elbow to light a candle in an old candlestick that was rather like a shovel with a piece of metal to grip the candle. When the wick had caught, she pulled herself bolt upright against the head of the bed and looked at Susan. Her eiderdown covered with red turkey twill was drawn up to her waist. She wore a flannelette nightdress trimmed with crochet of her own making. Her eyes rested with sarcasm upon Susan's uncovered neck and the diaphanous black of her dress with its long floating sleeves.

Susan burst out laughing.

“It's a fair cop!” she said. “But you're not going to ask me a lot of questions, are you?”

“You've been meeting a lad.”

“I didn't want to, Gran—
honest injun.
He came and whistled under my window, and I thought of Mrs. Smithers putting out her head to listen, or Miss Agatha, or Miss Arabel, or their awfully proper cook. So I just went out to tell him he must go away. You see, Gran darling, it really was most frightfully compromising for you. I don't know what Mrs. Smithers would say if she thought young men came serenading you.”

“Come here, Susan!” said Mrs. Bowyer.

Susan came reluctantly. She sat down on the red eiderdown, and Gran's black eyes bored through and through her.

“Was it Anthony Colstone?”

“Good gracious, no! What a frightfully amusing idea, Gran! I wish it had been!”

“Wishes come home to roost,” said old Susan Bowyer. She picked up a fold of the thin black dress. “What d'you call this stuff, eh?”

“
Georgette,
Gran.” Her cheeks grew hot. “I dragged it out of my box because it was black, and I should have hated to frighten Mrs. Smithers or the cook by being all white and ghostly.”

“You've a good tongue, my girl. Who ha' you been meeting?”

“I can't tell you.” Susan put her hand down on the old fingers and stroked them. “You needn't worry—I can look after myself.”

“I never knew a maid that couldn't—until 'twas too late. Are you in love with him?”

“Of course I'm not.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“He's a nuisance,” said Susan, frowning. Then she jumped up. “I do want to go to sleep so badly.”

She bent forward and blew out the candle.

“Good-night, Gran.”

Mrs. Bowyer's voice followed her on to the landing:

“If I don't ask no questions, I won't be told no lies. Is that your meaning?”

Susan's laughter came back to her, and the sound of the closing door.

Mrs. Bowyer lay down flat on her one pillow and straightened the sheet. She liked to wake tidy in the morning. She thought about Susan, and the core of her heart was warm. She thought about an earlier, softer Susan, pretty, gentle, sweet—Susie, so pretty-spoken—William's darling. He never spoilt the others, but he spoilt Susie. She could see William now, ever so big and strong with his little maid on his shoulder, ducking his head to come in at the door, and Mr. Philip behind him laughing—“I say, you might let me carry her for a bit!”

She fell into a dream of her own courting. William, too shy to speak, snatching a kiss in the dusk. And then it wasn't her and William, but Susie with her floating curls crying bitterly at her mother's knee: “Oh, Mother, I love him true—I love him true!” And again, Philip, on the threshold, looking at them.

Young Susan lay awake in the dark, three pillows heaped behind her and only a sheet for covering. It had been in her mind that she would fall asleep at once. But she lay awake. It was just as if she had come up against a smooth, blank wall. There was a door in it somewhere, but she couldn't find it, though she kept feeling for it with groping hands.

In the end, the wall melted and let her through, and she saw Garry, with a face like a demon, hurling a great stone down upon her from the top of a high black mountain. The stone broke into three pieces and fell into the sea, and three rushing fountains sprang up from where the fragments had fallen. Only they were not fountains of water, but fountains of fire.

CHAPTER NINE

Bernard West arrived next day. Anthony dug out the aged Daimler and drove into Wrane to meet him. It was four years since he had seen West. He found him the same, but yet not the same. Small, lean, dark, opinionated, intolerant, he was everything that West had been, only there was more of it. In the four years he had intensified to such a degree that another four at the same rate would land him in caricature.

By the time they had covered the seven miles back to Ford St. Mary, Anthony began to wonder how they were going to get on. He had been a good deal peeved because West was only sparing him a couple of days on his way to join a walking tour, but already two days seemed to be rather a long time.

West talked a great deal. He always had talked a lot; but in those days one said “Shut up!” and hove things at him. He had developed a scholastic eye and a manner of competent authority. One could no longer throw things at him, and he remained unresponsive to the politer ways of saying “Shut up!”

Anthony walked him up to see the Coldstone Ring, and he had plenty to say about it. It wasn't his subject, but he could quote Karnak, and Stonehenge, and Avebury—dolmens—sun and serpent worship—and the Bronze Age.

He immediately propounded a theory that there had been an inner and an outer circle of stones, and that the prostrate stone had not fallen, but was a true altar stone, occupying the central position and lying east and west, so that the officiating priest might face the rising sun as he stood to sacrifice. All this from a cursory and casual glance at two upright stones and one lying flat in a bare stony space ringed about with high, ripe meadow grass. Then, still talking, off again down the hill, turning every now and then to admonish Anthony with lifted hand as if he addressed a class.

“If we postulate a double ring, the missing stones have to be accounted for, and I expect to find them here there and everywhere in this village of yours. Your own gates—have you thought of that?—are, in all probability, cut from one of these monoliths. But of course your local archæological society may have some information—not that these local people are to be relied upon, but still they might be able to furnish some data.”

Anthony got a word in edgeways.

“Sir Jervis wouldn't let them see the Ring.”

“
What?
” West had the air of having been contradicted by a small boy.

“He wouldn't let anyone see it. You saw the hedge. I had to break my way through.”

“Why on earth?”

“Can't tell you—a kink I should say.”

“Oh, but that's all nonsense. You must change all that. Get into touch with experts. I wouldn't trust local people to do any excavating, but the whole thing ought to be thoroughly and carefully investigated. Ah now! Here! What did I say? What did I tell you? That gate of yours—look at the pillars! The stone is undoubtedly the same. Vandals! We shall probably find bits of these archaic stones built into half the houses of the village. This doesn't look like a stone country, but of course anyone who wanted stone for a gatepost, or a well-head, or a doorstep simply went and looted from the Coldstone Ring. By the way, what's the origin of the name?”