Smuggler's Moon Page 10

  “Sorry! Truly, I am sorry!”

  “Such twaddle! If you were that regretful, you would come up with phrases that would comfort me more.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not my place to think them up. Men are supposed to have such phrases always upon their tongues.” Such notions came from her constant reading of romances. ”Why don’t you?” she demanded.

  “Because I do not read the same books as you do,” said I proudly.

  “No, I suppose you don’t. Well, the least you can do is throw your arms about me and comfort me with a few gentle pats upon the back. I’ve been weeping, you know.”

  Kicking the door shut, I stepped close and took a good look at her face. Ah yes, her eyes were red and a bit puffy; her nose was sniffly; and her voice had, as previously noted, grown husky.

  “So you have,” said I. ”But why?”

  “Why? The heroine always weeps when she is imprisoned.”

  ”You weren’t imprisoned,” said I. ”Someone simply turned the key in the lock by mistake—probably that little maid who was so well-mannered.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, never mind. But here now, this is all the consolation you’ll get from me.”

  So saying, I wrapped my arms awkwardly about her and delivered a few perfunctory pats. As I did so, I happened to look over her shoulder at the carpet upon which we stood. Its dark pattern was interrupted by crisscrossing marks of white. I had stared at them curiously for a bit until I realized that the marks were, in fact, footprints, and the white was the same chalk white which covered the soles and heels of the dead man’s shoes in the wood. Releasing Clarissa, I turned her round and pointed down at the carpet.

  “Are those your footprints?”

  “Yes, they are. I’m afraid I’ve made a mess here. It’s chalk, you know.”

  “Indeed I do know. Mr. Sarton, the magistrate here, pointed that out to us when we viewed the remains of the victim. Chalk was all over the shoes of the poor man. Yet the odd thing was that there was no place thereabouts that he could have picked up the chalk on the soles of his shoes, and so he came to the conclusion that the body had been moved.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” cried Clarissa.

  “No, I thought it was quite reasonable, and so did Sir John.”

  “Yet it is only so if you did view the body in another place from that where I found him.”

  “You found him? You mean where you and Will Fowler found him, don’t you?”

  “No, I found him first, and then I took Mr. Fowler to see.”

  “Just a moment,” said I, ”perhaps, Clarissa, you had best tell me the story from the beginning.”

  ”But where shall I start?”

  “As I said, at the beginning.” I fear that the exasperation I felt at her higgledy-piggledy lack of all sense of logic was made much too plain by my tone of voice. Yet I recovered sufficiently to suggest that she might start at the point where I left her and her guide, Will Fowler, and headed for the library.

  “Oh, well enough, well enough,” said she, ”now let me see. When you went off to the library, Mr. Fowler took me to a room that is kept as a kind of picture gallery. Oh, you should have stayed with us, Jeremy. Some of the paintings were quite wonderful, especially those of an artist named George Stubbs—all sorts of animals. A zebra! Can you imagine? He painted the most wonderful picture of a zebra. Can he have gone to Africa to do that?”

  “Really, Clarissa, I have no idea. Do get on with your story, won’t you?”

  She sighed. ”Well, all right. Oh, but whilst we were there in this gallery room, Mr. Fowler began to tell about the ghost. You remember? Sir Simon talked about him at dinner? Well, Mr. Fowler’s version was much more complete. For one thing, the spirit which haunts this house is that of the first Baronet of Mongeham, Sir Roger Grenville, who received his title over a hundred years ago! There was something familiar about the features of the face in the portrait.”

  “Please, Clarissa, get on with it.”

  Well, obviously her way of telling a story is not my own. If there is a byway or a digression in sight, then she will take it, no matter where it leads. And indeed, in spite of my urging that she get on with her tale, she supplied all manner of extraneous detail on the arrogant cook, Jacques Dufour, and his most impressive kitchen belowstairs; then, too, she gave me Will Fowler’s account of Sir Simon’s courtship of the present Lady Grenville, which was presented down to every last particular. And so on.

  Since I am sure, reader, that you would prefer that I dispense with all such minutiae, I now offer you my version of the discovery of the body purged and abridged of all but what is relevant to this narrative. Let it begin with Will Fowler’s offer to show her about the grounds upon which the house was situated.

  Having given her a good look at the kitchen, he showed her out the rear door of the house and into the garden. (This did surprise me, for I did suppose that in order to reach the place where the murdered man had been found, they would have exited by the front door.) In any case, Mr. Fowler did show her about the garden, proving himself knowledgeable regarding the varieties of flowers and other plants which were laid out in the space in chaotic profusion. They walked the garden path which led out past some outbuildings and ultimately into the thick woods which surrounded the house on three sides. She asked Mr. Fowler where the path led, and he said that there was an old, deserted chalk mine higher up the hill and nothing more. Just then Mr. Fowler was hailed from the house by the cook, Jacques, who demanded that he return to settle a disagreement with one of the porters. Reluctantly, he made to go, but Clarissa asked if she might not stay on there in the garden, and he, thinking it would take but a short while to settle the matter, granted her wish and suggested that should she grow weary of the garden and wish to rest, she might sit upon the bench near the brook, ”a favorite place of Lady Grenville’s.”

  As it happened, Mr. Fowler was detained longer than expected. Clarissa grew bored with inspecting flowers; and not one to rest content sitting in one place, she chose rather to follow the path which led out of the garden and up the hill. The out-buildings which she passed were quite unlike the stables which lay off to the far side of the house: they were intended for human occupancy and were evidently indeed occupied; she heard rough, male voices issuing from one and moved swiftly and quietly past it that she might not be detected.

  Once beyond, she turned and looked back at the house, half hoping that she might see Mr. Fowler below, beckoning her to him. Yet, not seeing him, there seemed naught to do but plunge onward up the path and into the woods. Glancing down, she happened to notice a peculiarity in the pathway: it was heavily dusted with white, and there were many footprints. It was not so below in the garden—of that she was certain. But then she recalled that Mr. Fowler had said there was a chalk mine up on the hill, but he had described it as a ”deserted” chalk mine. Evidently he was wrong about that. Apparently the men who lived in those buildings worked in the chalk mines. But surely Mr. Fowler would have known about that, wouldn’t he? After all, he seemed to act as a sort of majordomo in the Grenville household. She was puzzled, but fueled now by curiosity, she picked up her pace and made her way swiftly up the path.

  She saw the entrance to the mine plain enough, though not until she was a scant ten yards away, so dark was it in that part of the wood. But having come so close, she noted that the chalk dust was specially thick in that space, and that there were all manner of prints to be seen in it—and not just bootprints. For, contrary to what Will Fowler had implied, the path did not end at the entrance to the mine; it led beyond and farther up the hill. But just before the entrance, it intersected a wagon track which led off to the right—that is, in the direction of the stables. There at the crossing, hoofprints and wagon tracks cut back and forth in the chalk dust. There could be no doubt that there had been a good deal of sustained activity in that wide space. It would seem that, far from being deserted, the mi
ne was working briskly once again.

  She was moved to explore the mine in order to confirm this. On the other hand, she was curious as to what lay above the mine and where the path she had followed truly led. And would it not be good to know where the wagon track terminated? Perhaps at the stable, where she had supposed; but perhaps, too, somewhere beyond it at some secret intersection with the main road. Yes, secret—all of this was most curious and most secret.

  As Clarissa stood before the mine entrance, casting her eyes this way and that, trying to decide what her next move might be, her glance did fix upon something in the underbrush, something that looked, as near as she could tell, like a human hand. She was drawn to it immediately. Hastening to the spot, kneeling, though not touching the hand, she looked closely beyond it and saw, thank God, that it was attached to a whole body, one hidden among the plants and bushes that provided a kind of carpet beneath this mighty forest of oak and pine. She pushed the bushes aside and flattened the plants, and then she had a proper look at him. He was dead, of course. She expected that. A man does not climb in amongst the vegetation to take himself a nap. No, this was not the place for it. The young man’s wound did give her pause, however. Looking down upon the cut in his throat, she saw that he had lost much blood. The lower part of his neck was quite drenched with it, though it had caked and darkened and looked more like dirt than blood. She shivered at the sight, quite in spite of herself. (It may have been that the nature of the wound brought back the memory of a time when a knife was held against her own throat, by that villain, Jackie Carver, and a threat was made to inflict just such damage, as you, reader, may recall from an earlier narrative.)

  She had seen enough to know that there was no point in remaining there. Half-crawling to avoid the lowest branches of the pine trees, she left the body and turned back down the path toward the house. Just then, from far below, she heard Mr. Fowler’s voice calling her name. She ran to meet him and told him what she had found. Quite shocked she was at the effect her news had upon him. He was not angered at her, as she thought he might be; he seemed, rather, to be quite terrified at what she had told him. Instructing her to wait for him on that bench by the brook, he hastened up the path without so much as a look back at her. Yet he surprised her by stopping at the outbuildings, banging on the doors, and rousting four men from them. Together they ascended the path and disappeared round a bend.

  Though she waited long, this time she did not stray from that bench in the garden. She kept place for what seemed a century yet must have been near an hour. When Mr. Fowler returned, he came alone. She reflected that perhaps the four who had gone up with him had remained to bury their comrade—somehow she was sure that the dead man at the chalk mine was one of them. He advised her to go to her room upstairs, for he was off to inform Sir Simon of this terrible crime, and then he must fetch the magistrate from town. All this made perfect sense to her, and so she left him at the back door and went to the room, where he had sent her. She was so overcome by what had happened that when she lay down upon the bed to rest, she fell asleep. When she awakened, she found that she had been locked inside. No matter how loudly she called, and no matter how fiercely she rattled the door, there was no response.

  “Was that when you began to weep?” I had asked her then.

  “You’d weep, too,” said she, ”if you were locked up for three or four hours.”

  “It is not in my nature to weep,” said I, which was both a lie and a rather priggish thing to say.

  “Well, that is just one of the many ways in which we differ.”

  “It was all probably done in error, anyway. The little maid who cleaned the carpet before your door seemed most mannerly, but she may simply have been careless and turned the key by mistake.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that none of this is out of the ordinary? A murdered man? His body moved from where it was discovered? The finder punished by imprisonment?”

  Clarissa did have a way of putting things in the most dramatic way possible—”punished by imprisonment,” indeed!

  “Well … no, of course not. It’s all most extraordinary.” I paused to give the matter some thought. Yet after turning the matter this way and that in my mind, I could but pose a question: ”Why should they have moved the body? I rode next to Will Fowler on the trip from Deal, and I daresay he was most surprised when he was informed that the body which had been in one place was now in quite another. Why should they have moved it?”

  “Well, it seems clear to me,” said she. ”Since I found the corpus practically at the entrance to the chalk mine, Sir Simon wished to keep visitors away from it. If they were to see it, they might well wonder what went on in there and might start asking questions.”

  “Yes,” said I, ”Sir Simon denied to Mr. Sarton that there was anyplace in all his property where the dead man could, while alive, have managed to cover himself, his clothes, and his shoes so thoroughly with chalk dust.”

  “He denied it? Well, there’s your proof right there on the floor.” She gestured to the chalk-covered carpet upon which we were standing.

  “I should like to get up there and see for myself just what is in that old chalk mine.”

  “So would I,” said she. ”It must be something more valuable than chalk, something worth guarding.”

  “Guarding? What do you mean?”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? The fellow was simply bristling with arms of every sort. The poor man was obviously guarding something. He was a sentinel, a guard. He had a pistol tucked in his belt, as well as a dagger, and a great long musket by his side.”

  “You mean there beneath the bushes and the trees? I wonder whoever killed him didn’t take them as a prize of war.”

  “Whoever killed him must have had a lot to carry away,” said she.

  “By the bye, you said nothing of pistols and muskets when you told me all this the first time.”

  “I didn’t? Just an oversight, I assure you.”

  “Be sure you include it when you tell your tale to Sir John.”

  As it happened, that did not take place until a good deal later. Fearing that Clarissa might suffer a relapse and begin behaving oddly once again, I made my excuses to her and slipped out of her room as swiftly as decently possible. I took a moment to listen at the door to the room shared by Sir John and me, and I satisfied myself from the sound of his snoring that he slept soundly still. Then did I make my way quietly downstairs to the library where, for over an hour, I read uninterruptedly in A Sentimental Journey. Perhaps my interest in the book flagged, or perhaps I thought it time to go back upstairs and listen at the door to our room once more. In any case, I left the library and ascended to the first floor where, to my surprise, I found Will Fowler in the corridor between our two rooms. He was moving briskly in my direction.

  “Ah, there you are,” said he, having obviously recovered his assurance. ”I’ve been looking for you. I tapped upon your door and, getting no answer, I stuck my head into your room and saw Sir John sleeping. I hope I didn’t disturb him.”

  He seemed to be talking with greater animation than was necessary, and a bit more rapidly, as well. I wondered what errand had brought him up to this part of the house.

  ”What will you, Will?” I was not punning upon his name, reader. It simply came out so.

  He cleared his throat and spoke forth in his grand manner: ”I wish to inform you and all of your party that much as Sir Simon would like to have your company upon this evening, he has been detained in Sandwich by certain affairs of business. He cannot dine with you at seven, but he trusts that Jacques will do as well for you tonight as he has ever done in the past. Will you be good enough to pass this on to Sir John and to the young miss, as well?”

  “You may consider it done,” said I to him.

  Then did he add in a somewhat nervous manner: ”And do please pass on to her my hope that she is well recovered from her shocking experience of this morning. Has she talked of it?”

  “I shall tell her,
right enough,” said I, ”but she is a brave girl and made of stronger stuff than you might suppose.”

  Then, thanking me, he took his leave and made for the stairs. I watched him go, wondering what it was made him uneasy. He seemed a decent sort of man. Dissimulation did not come naturally to him.

  I listened at our door, and hearing none of the sounds of sleep, entered the room. Sir John, still in bed, did rise up beneath the mound of covers, his hair tousled and his jaw set pugnaciously. He called my name.

  “Yes sir, it is I, Jeremy.”

  “You’re the second who has come in the last few minutes. And neither of you had the decency to knock upon the door first. I feigned sleep to find out what he might do—nothing, so far as I could tell. Yet he stayed an unconscionably long time. He seemed to be looking for something, though what it might have been I cannot suppose.”

  “Nor can I,” I declared.

  As I helped him dress, I informed him that Will Fowler had been the intruder, that I had encountered him in the hall, and told of the announcement he had made regarding dinner. I also let him know a bit about Clarissa, yet I did not attempt to tell her story. I did mention, though, that for some reason, someone seemed to have locked her in her room.

  “Locked her in?” exclaimed Sir John.

  “Yes sir.”

  “All this seems to be much too mysterious and threatening. I’d thought we might enjoy some pleasant country air out here in Mongeham. Yet now we have a body turning up then moving about—not on his own, I’m sure. Clarissa is locked in her room, and somebody comes snooping about in ours. No, I don’t like this a bit.” He paused, then asked, ”Is it still light out?”

  “Yes, but not for much longer.”

  “As soon as you have me looking fairly presentable, go across to Clarissa’s room and see if she would like to take a stroll with us and tell us her tale. I’d like to loosen up this hip a little. We should be able to work that in before dinner.”

  And that was how it was done. Perhaps intimidated by Sir John’s official manner, she restrained herself from digressing quite so often as was her usual. What had taken her half an hour to tell me, she told him in half the time. A good thing, too, for we were back in the house and seated at table by seven.