The Cuckoo Tree (19 page)

"And if so be as you're chatting with old Lord Forecastle," Dido said, "could you ask him to send a decent doctor down here? That Subito's too scared of Mother Lubbage to be any more use than a pastry pickaxe."

Yan said he would see to it.

That seemed to take care of everything. "I'll be getting back then," Dido said, and slipped into the alley, looking vigilantly all around her. After a cautious interval, Yan followed her.

Dido carried bowls of porridge down to Cris and Tobit. They were awake, and seemed quite content with each other's company, but still could not, or need not, talk together. They had gone back to their old occupation of staring at one another's faces.

Dido, finding their silence rather fidgeting, asked Tobit how he had come to be in the well, and he told her the whole tale.

"So it
was
old Mystery—and he's your cousin from furrin parts. No wonder he likes to come a-sneaking around Tegleaze after cockshut, measuring the flowerbeds and sizing up the pigsties," Dido said thoughtfully. "But what a murks)' set-out to push you down the well. Anyway I bet he's in a proper taking now—a-looking for you right, left,
and rat's ramble. And you say the luck-piece fell down the well too?"

"I should think it must have. And so far as I care, it can stay there—Grandmother was only waiting for me to come of age so she could get hold of it and sell it for gambling money, my cousin wants it to sell to the Margrave of Bad Somewhere to pay for a Hanoverian plot—and it's never done
me
any good."

Dido was inclined to agree.

"Anyhow it can bide there for the time—nobody but us knows it's there, reckon it's safe enough." She chuckled. "I'll lay old Mystery's tearing out his hair in handfuls wondering where it's got to—he probably reckoned
you
made off with it."

"Well, so I did," said Tobit proudly.

Dido had observed a change in him since his adventure. It was hard to put into words, but be seemed more sensible, less given to play-acting and senseless dares.

She explained the plan in regard to Uncle Ned and the carrier's cart and the trip to London. Tobit's eyes certainly brightened at the thought of perhaps being able to see the coronation after all, but he was not so wildly excited as Dido had thought he would be; while Cris seemed very little interested in the prospect.

"The cart don't pass here till dusk, so you'll have to stay down here for the day. You'd better play cat's cradle or summat—you can't just sit
staring
all day."

Neither Tobit nor Cris knew how to play cat's cradle; Dido pulled a length of string out of her pocket and
instructed them, looping it over Tobit's hands, crossing it, and showing Cris how to take hold of the crisscrosses, pull them under and out, and so make a new framework. In no time they had got the hang of it and were completely absorbed.

Dido dumped a log on the fire and went upstairs, feeling rather lonely.

I wish I
was
a-going up to London with them and the Wineberry Men, and not staying here in this spooky little town, she thought enviously. And don't I just hope the Fust Lord of the Admiralty sends back some decent doctor as can put the poor old Cap'n to rights.

It was another driply foggy day; twilight came early, long before the arrival of Uncle Ned. During the afternoon Dido helped Uncle Jarge and his son Ted pack Tobit and Cris into sacks, with handfuls of wool and all the smugglers' socks Miss Sarah had knitted to stuff out the crannies so that they looked like a load of grain or seed. Then Uncle Ted arrived in his ancient covered wagon drawn by a spavined gray mare who went along so slowly that her driver never bothered to stop her, but simply loaded and unloaded as she wandered along. The canvas cover was pulled aside, the two sacks were placed on the cart. Dido did not dare call good-bye, as two or three other people were hoisting goods on at the same time, so she gave each sack a friendly pat under pretext of settling them in place, and jumped down on to the cobbles again.

"Eh, dear," she thought. "I do hope Cap'n Hughes's Dispatch will really be all right."

She had given it to Tobit, with strict instructions to hand it over to Yan Wineberry as soon as they were alone together.

"Jub on, mare," said Uncle Ned, the mare plodded slowly on up the bill, and Dido went off to Wm. Pelmett, Chymist, to get some more treacle, since Captain Hughes had finished the first gallon. The apothecary's shop was open for an hour on Sunday evenings, for the sale of treacle and cough jujubes, because so many people made themselves hoarse singing hymns in church.

"I can see you've a sweet tooth, missie," said Mr. Pelmett, handing her the treacle with a gluey smile.

Dido gave him a scowl in return.

As she was carrying the heavy jar up the High Street she caught a glimpse, in the distance, of a lanky, familiar figure, just turning left in the direction of the church.

"I'll not lose him twice!" Dido vowed. Thrusting the jar of treacle into the arms of a startled small boy, she told him to carry it to The Fighting Cocks Inn and ask Miss Sarah for a spoonful.

"Say I said you was to have one!" And she made off at top speed in pursuit of the retreating figure. As he had not seen her and did not realize she was after him, she was able to dodge swiftly around the block and so meet him face to face in front of the church.

"Hello, Pa dear!" she greeted him affably. "Ain't you a-going to speak to me? Your own little Dido? How's Ma? And Penny-lope?"

Mr. Twite—for it was undoubtedly Dido's father—
would have turned and run once again, but his daughter had him firmly by the jacket buttons.

"Now, Pa! Don't you try and scarper! Jigger it, some dads would be
pleased
to see their child as had been twice round the world and given up for drownded. Come and sit down on a tombstone and tell us the family news."

"Why, there's none that I know of, my chickadee. Indeed, for the last year or so I have been a happy man, free from family afflictions." But seeing there was no help for it, he allowed her to lead him to a dry tombstone behind a hollybush in the churchyard, where they could talk unobserved. "Your dear lamented mother was lost to us when Battersea Castle blew up—so was your aunt Tinty and your cousins—your sister eloped with a very ineligible young fellow who traveled in buttonhooks—and
I
am under the painful necessity of supplying hoboy music for a strolling puppet troupe, since the Bow Street runners conceived a wholly unjustified suspicion that I was in some way connected with the Battersea Castle explosion."

"Swelp me," said Dido. "The whole family's gone, then?" She was not particularly cast down, since her mother had never been at all fond of her. "But what about Simon? And our house in Rose Alley?"

"Sold, sold, alas—or so I understand, not having been able to inquire personally—to pay some few trifling debts. So I have not even a home to offer you. As to Simon—the young boy who used to lodge with us?—I really cannot say." Mr. Twite sighed. He pulled a hoboy from the front of his waistcoat and played a few melancholy notes on it, then,
becoming enthusiastic, launched out into a spirited jig.

"Ah," said Dido, "I suspicioned it was you playing, soon as I heard the hoboy tuning up for old Mystery's Mannikin show. So you're Mystery's mate, are you? How long've you been with him, Pa?"

"Why, but a few weeks, child. I was introduced to him by a most respectable gentleman, a Colonel FitzPickwick. I understand Mr. Mystery has only recently come from one of our delightful colonies."

"And is already up to his whiskers in a plot to pinch Tegleaze Manor and put Bonnie Prince Georgie on the throne, helped by those old witches and that dicey pair o' footmen; Pa, Pa," said Dido sorrowfully, "why
will
you let yourself get imbrangled with such a jammy-fingered set o' coves? It's sure to lead to trouble."

"Not if we succeed, my dove; it'll be all garnets and gravy then, and Sir Desmond Twite, conductor at Sadlers Wells, and a house in Cheyne Walk."

"But you won't succeed, Pa."

"Oh? And why not, my sprite?" Mr. Twite gave her a sharp look.

Dido was tempted to tell him that the Tegleaze luck-piece, which was to have paid for the conspiracy, had been dropped in a well, but she resisted the urge. She said,

"Stealing may be respectable in your circles, Pa, but attempted murder ain't going to be so easy to laugh off."

"Humph," muttered Mr. Twite. "I wondered, when I came back and found the well stone had been pushed aside, if your little meddling hands had been at work. I
had the devil of a job to get it back. So the boy
did
escape, did he?"

"Some trustable chaps as I know of are on their way to London this minute to lay an information about the whole affair before the Lord Chief Justice," Dido went on, impressively. "So if I was you, Pa, I'd mizzle while the mizzling's good."

"Oh, ho!" said Mr. Twite gaily, not a bit impressed. "But suppose I told
you,
my dear little chickadee, that some trustworthy chaps I know are perfectly informed about
your
trustworthy chaps and plan to get their information off them and destroy it before they reach London. Hey, dee, marathon me, what a set of simple souls those Jacobites be!" he hummed.

Dido gaped at him, utterly taken aback by this news.

"Yes, yes," Mr. Twite went on agreeably, "our friend Mystery—ah, there's a clever spark for you—got an equally clever old lady called Mrs. Lubbage to find out through some timid-hearted relative of one of those gallant Wineberry Men all about their so-called secret route to London. Unknown to the Preventive Men, maybe, but not to us; a concealed canal, I understand, all the way from the Arun River to the Thames, along which the barge of contraband plies its worthy way. With
one
extra crew member on board, ho ho, snug between the lavender water and the Lapsang Souchong and the spirits of licorice! So this famous Dispatch will vanish before it ever reaches London; and by Thursday, you know, it won't matter if
twenty
Lord Chief Justices know about the affair, it will be too late; too
late, too late, too late, to retaliate," he sang joyously.

"Sir Christopher Wren
Let fall his goosefeather pen
But, he said, whatever else falls
It won't be St. Paul's.

Ah me, ah me, even the best of us are sometimes faulty in our judgments, are we not?"

"Sir Christopher Wren?" said Dido slowly. "The Wren's Nest?"

Mr. Twite suddenly stopped short in his caroling.

"You didn't know that, then, my duckling? Well, as it's too late now to prevent it, I'll strike a bargain with you. I will unfold to you the whole Wren's Nest project—ah, and what a startlingly sublime and sweepingly satisfactory scheme it is—in return for one small piece of information which doubtless you have at your clever little fingertips. What has become of that volatile pair, the youthful Tegleaze heir and his bewitching twin, like as one pin to another pin? Oh where and oh where can they be, with their noses turned up and their toes turned out, afloat on the bonnie blue sea? Or words to that effect," he added, suddenly darting another sharp look at his daughter.

But Dido was hardly heeding him.

"I couldn't say where they are, Pa, I'm sure," she truthfully replied.

"Oh, well, in that case, no cash, no crumpet."

"That's right," Dido said inattentively. "I must go, Pa,
my Cap'll be wanting a dose of treacle."

"Indeed, indeed, the gallant Dispatch bearer. Poor fellow, what a misfortune that his coach should overturn, and he on his way to town with tidings of such urgent import."

"So long, Pa." As impatient to leave him as she had been to question him, Dido gave her father a hasty nod and almost ran in the direction of The Fighting Cocks. Had she looked back she would have seen him staring thoughtfully after her. But she did not look back.

Dido was panting and breathless when she arrived back at The Fighting Cocks Inn.

"Gracious, dearie, what's amiss?" inquired Miss Sarah, placidly stirring a caldron of soup with a spoon in one hand while she rotated five sizzling chickens on a spit with the other.

"Miss Sarah, I've got to get arter those Wineberry chaps at once! There's a spy among 'em that's going to pinch the Cap's Dispatch!"

"Eh, dear, there's a fanteague. Who could that be, I wonder?" Miss Sarah, still unruffled, basted her chickens, took a china mug down off the mantelshelf, and counted out five gold guineas from it. "Well, that Dapple horse is still there eating his head off in our stable, they've never sent for him from the Dolphin, so you'd best take him. Here's a bit o' cash—it never comes amiss."

"The Cap'n—" Dido began.

"Bless your heart, don't you worrit about him, dearie, I'll see to him as careful as if he was my Hannibal that was
struck by lightning in a rowboat full of corkscrews, fifteen year last Michaelmas. Terrible fierce thunderstorms we had in those parts when I was a girl. Ah, it's a hard profession being a Gentleman."

Dido ran up to have a last look at the Captain, who seemed to be having pleasant dreams, lapped in his brandied lily leaves.

"Wrap up warm against the sea fret now," warned Miss Sarah when she came down. "Do you know where to go?"

"To the White Hart Inn?"

"That's it, but don't you cross the river. There's an old narrow bridge they call Stopham Bridge;
you
stop on this side, and follow the river upstream. Then you'll come to where the secret canal begins—"

"How be as it's so secret, ma'am?"

"Well, you see, dearie, it's a long way from any highroad, running through the farmers' fields. O' course the farmers knows about it, but they don't reckon to mention it, not when they finds a keg of Bergamo Water or two-three corkscrews in the hay barn now and again. And the canal's all grown over with maybushes, right the whole way up, so you'd hardly notice it was there. Ah, dear, in May month it surely is a pretty way to go to London, a-gliding along under the maybushes and a-listening to the nightingales sing—many's the time I've done it with my Hannibal in bygone days. Well, when you find the canal, 'tis easy enough; all you've to do is follow along till you come up with the barge, the
Gentlemen's Relish
she's called;
she doesn't go faster than mule pace, it shouldn't take you that long to catch up with her. If you meet anybody, just you say Yan, Tan, Tethera, Methera, and they'll know you're on Gentlemen's business and not hinder you."