‘Anything more?’ said Matthew Binns, savagely.
‘No, nothing more. The kindness of the Good Folk on your supper.’
She never knew what had made her say that. She saw him go through the gate and up his path, a little unsteadily. Then she turned and ran.
Chapter 9: ‘Dame’s Folly’
WHEN SHE GOT home, after a hurried pause to hide the wax heart among the roots of the tamarisk hedge (nothing on earth would have induced her to bring it into the house), Snowball had arrived before her, and the place was in a turmoil and her father and the farmhands were again making ready to set out on the search for her.
She told the story she had ready, but it was not well received. ‘This,’ said her father, ‘is getting to be too much of a habit with you, my girl. If you cannot be trusted to come home at the proper time, you had best not go out alone until you can!’
That was what Damaris had been afraid of. She gathered herself together and stood up to him squarely. ‘I know that last time I forgot the hour, Father, but this is different. You told me yourself that you must—must take responsibility for any animal that belongs to you, or—or that you have power over. Would you have liked me just to come home leaving Snowball lost in the woods?’
‘Snowball was no more lost than you are!’ said her exasperated father. ‘He came home as straight as a bullet!’
‘He wasn’t heading for home when I last saw him, Father, he was making towards the Big House—but in the end when I had quite lost him, I thought it would be best to come home and ask Caleb to go and look for him; and then when I got home he had arrived before me and if he frightened everybody, Father, I am truly sorry, but you do see—’
‘Yes, I do see.’ John Crocker cut into the spate of words and somehow, having once started, she had seemed unable to stop. ‘Well, now that you are home, perhaps we can have supper. But first, upstairs with you and see your Aunt; you have brought on one of her headaches as well as setting the whole farm by the ears. I hope you are proud of yourself!’
At bed-time, with Aunt Selina still having her headache, Damaris knelt by her bed to say her prayers with all her clothes still on. To undress would only have meant getting dressed again later. So, though she did not wish Aunt Selina one of her headaches, she could not be really sorry that if she was going to have one, it should be tonight that she had it.
She took longer about her prayers than usual, and prayed much more deeply and earnestly, because the wax heart with the five blackthorn spines on it stuck in the back of her mind like the taste of something horrible clinging round the back of one’s throat. She had been mixed up with something that might very likely make God angry with her. But she was quite clear in her mind that whatever wickedness she had done, she would have done far worse to have left Tom Wildgoose to risk being hanged as a French spy. She explained this humbly but firmly to God, thinking it out and getting it straight within herself as she went along. Finally she asked forgiveness for whatever He might feel needed forgiving. Then she got up and sat on her bed and waited.
She was sure that she did not have to worry about keeping awake; she had never felt so far from sleep in all her life. She had not been able to eat much of her supper, and now she felt both hungry and a little sick, and shivery with that odd shiveriness that had nothing to do with being cold.
She almost did fall asleep once or twice, all the same, but each time jerked awake again; then she would get up and walk round the room on her stockinged feet before going back to sit on her bed again.
She watched the candle on her bedside table, which normally Aunt Selina would have taken away, burn low into its socket and start to jump and gutter, sending tall fantastic shadows leaping up the walls, until she had to blow it out and sit in the dark. She heard her father coming to bed in the room across the corridor, and the sounds of the old house settling down, and very faint and far off the Church clock striking 9–10–11–. She felt, as time crawled by, as though she had got trapped somehow in a night that was never going to be over and let her out into the morning.
At last the distant clock struck twelve, and something inside her tightened at the sound. Time to be moving. If she was too early at the meeting place she could wait there instead of here.
She took down her cloak from its hook behind the door, and put it on, tying the neck-strings with a small determined tug, and carrying her shoes in her hand, slipped out into the corridor, inching her door to behind her. Faint starlight on the old polished boards showed her the head of the stairs, and she crept down, taking care to miss out the third step from the bottom which always creaked when you trod on it. She felt for the clutter of sticks and cudgels and a shepherd’s crook that stood in the corner by the house doorway, and found a stout ashen thumb-stick of her father’s which he seldom used and with luck would not miss for a while, and got it out with infinite care not to bring the rest clattering down after it, and headed for the great flagged kitchen and the door into the dairy yard. The bar was up as usual at night, but that was easily lifted and laid aside, and she crept out, pulling the door to quietly behind her.
True, the yard dog, came out of his kennel by the stable archway, yawning his pleasure, to greet her, ‘She-sh!’ Damaris whispered, rubbing his warm rough neck, ‘it’s only me; I’ll be back soon. Go sleep now.’ And as True returned to his warm straw, she ran barefoot through the wicket gate into the lane and round to the front of the house, and felt among the roots of the tamarisk hedge for the little bundle she had left there. Her hand flinched from the feel of it, and it was all she could do to pick it up again; but she managed it, and stowed it in the pocket of her apron so as to have enough hands to spare for her shoes and the thumb-stick.
Then she set off in the direction of the village.
At a safe distance from the house she sat in the hedge and put on her shoes, then she went on again. She had never been abroad in the middle of the night before, and the familiar country seemed strange under the stars, and the sound of the sea much nearer than usual. Once a barn owl on the hunting trail floated across her path ghostwise on pale furred wings and a few moments later she heard the tiny shriek of a woodmouse. The night-time woods were up and hunting. Once she heard the uncanny scream of a vixen a long way off, but that was not hunting, that was Lady calling her mate, and somewhere further off still, a dog-fox barked twice in reply. But apart from stumbling into a ditch that was not there in the daytime, she met with no adventures or mishaps until she arrived at last, over beyond the village, at the little, neglected Folly, and stood looking across the home paddock to the Big House beyond its screening ilex trees.
She was ahead of time, she thought, and sat down on the step, leaning against one of the pillars. (The Folly had been built like a tiny Roman temple by an earlier Mrs Farrington who had once been to Italy and was, like Aunt Selina, of a romantic disposition.) Damaris pulled her cloak round her, and settled herself to wait.
In a while she became aware that something was happening over beyond the ilex trees. Lights were coming and going in the direction of the stable yard, and she caught a distant flurry of voices and the shrill squealing of an angry horse; and for a moment she thought there was a red flicker behind the roofs. But that was gone before she could be sure she hadn’t imagined it. What, oh what was happening over there? Had something gone dreadfully wrong? The church clock struck one, the lights and the small tumult were fading out. Whatever had happened, it was over.
The minutes crawled by; still nothing; would Tom never come?
And then suddenly he was there; a black shadow travelling at a desperate kind of running hobble, pitching down in the black shadow of the crazy little temple, and lying there drawing in great shuddering gulps of air.
Damaris let him get his breath back a little before she spoke; then she whispered, ‘It’s all right, it’s only me. We’ll stay here till you have your breath properly back, but then I think we ought to go.’
He broke off between one snatched breath and the
next, and there was a moment of startled silence. ‘Good God! Is it you, Damaris?’
‘Yes. Oh Tom, what has been happening back there?’
‘I’m not too sure. Some cursed high-mettled horse had a fit of the vapours, I think, and—tried to kick his stall down, and a lantern—got overturned. Someone let me out—maybe they thought the stable might go up—and drew the line at roasting even French spies. There was a side door open and—somebody pushed me through and said something about making for the building at the far corner of the paddock—’ He broke off and sat up on the step. ‘Damaris, what are you doing here?’
‘Genty couldn’t come. She had to go to a sick baby, so I came to meet you and take you to her cottage.’
‘Then you—you know about all this?’
‘Yes—but I think we should go now.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Tom Wildgoose. ‘But I don’t think I’m going to be a very good traveller, not without my staff.’
‘We’ll get it tomorrow,’ Damaris told him. ‘Till then—it’s not far to Genty’s cottage, and I’ve brought you Father’s thumb-stick—here it is.’
He gave a croak of laughter. ‘What a girl you are! Think of everything!’ He fumbled for it in the dark as she held it out to him, and got up, steadying himself against the nearest pillar. ‘Ah, that’s better . . . Now, which way?’
It took them some time to skirt the village, for Tom was slow and clumsy on his wounded knee, even with the thumb-stick, and Damaris moving ahead to keep him out of ditches and find the weak places in hedgerows for him; and all the while she was terrified that the noise they made would set the village dogs barking.
But they got safely to Genty’s cottage at last. It was dark and humped like a large sleeping hedgehog in its little woodshore clearing, but the door was on the latch, and Damaris found the tinder-box on the table and lit the candle beside it. The light sprang up long and ragged, and all the bundles of herbs and roots and dried things hanging from the ceiling and the jars and baskets and nameless masses lining the walls sent up leaping shadows in answer, shadows that might hide almost anything or grow long-fingered hands and take on shapes of their own at any moment. Damaris turned to the window and pulled the rough wooden shutter across, shutting out the crowding trees together with any curious eyes that might come peering in. When she looked round again, the candle-flame had steadied into the proper laurel leaf shape, blue at the heart and saffron fringed, that candle flames should be, and the shadows had shrunk back into their proper shapes and their proper places, and the room had taken on a look of kindness and shelter. The loaf and the jug stood ready on the table, Grizelda sat on the gay rag rug before the banked-down fire, her eyes shining like green-gold lamps. And Tom Wildgoose was leaning on the thumb-stick and looking dazedly about him.
Damaris saw that he was so tired that she was going to have to take charge and tell him exactly what to do. She pulled the chair round to the table. ‘Now sit down and eat that bread, and here’s milk. And then get some sleep in front of the fire. Remember to blow out the candle when you have done eating. Genty will be back, but I don’t know when. Wait till she comes.’
He let himself down into the chair like an old man.
Damaris had taken the little wax effigy from her pocket, and was reaching up to stow it behind a crock on the chimney-piece. When she turned round, he was lying forward with his arm on the table and his head on his arm. Like enough he would sleep like that all night and never touch the bread or milk. Well, the food was there if he wanted it.
‘I have to go now, Tom Wildgoose,’ she whispered. She blew out the candle herself, and leaving the cottage dark save for the faint glow of the banked fire, set off for home.
She was beginning to feel that the woods were criss-crossed with the tracks of all these comings and goings like the wildling tracks in the grass on frosty mornings. And the way seemed very long. But she came at last, her shoes once again in her hand, up the lane beside Carthagena and across the yard to the side door. She had a bad moment, imagining that her father or somebody else might have chanced to come down and found the door unfastened and put up the bar again. But when she raised the latch it swung open easily enough, and she slipped through into the warm familiarity of home, leaving the strangeness of the night behind her. She crept upstairs, mindful of the third step from the bottom, past the door of the chamber where Aunt Selina was snoring gently, and back in the safety of her own small room, just managed to pull off her cloak and gown, leaving them both lying on the floor, and fall into bed before sleep engulfed her.
Chapter 10: Her Majesty’s Customs
SURPRISINGLY, DAMARIS DID not oversleep next morning. After only three or four hours’ sleep, she woke up gummy-eyed and still leaden with tiredness, but at the usual time, as though something in her had remembered, even while she slept, that the events of the past days were not yet over, and she must be stirring again before anything else could happen while she was not there.
Aunt Selina was still stretched upon her bed, moaning faintly with her bottle of Hungary Water in her hand, when Damaris having brushed the worse of last night’s mud off her skirts, looked in on her. No lessons today.
She ran downstairs and out of the house. She longed to be away instantly to the Wise Woman’s cottage. But her sense told her that if she was missing at breakfast time, after what had happened the evening before, her father really would begin to suspect that something very odd was going forward, and then he would certainly put his foot down and refuse to let her go out alone. It might even end in a beating, which she would not so much mind, for he could never bring himself to lay it on properly, and in being locked in her room, which would be a disaster. So she stuck her head into the stable to see that all was well with Snowball, and found the pony comfortable and contented in his stall, alone save for her father’s Swallow, for Caleb and Dick with the farm horses were already about the day’s work. Waiting only to give both of them a bit of carrot, she darted off to pay a call on the lambing fold and see what newcomers there were since yesterday.
The barn fold was full of woolly backs and up-raised heads, the air bubbling with the shrill cries of the new lambs and the deep fond bleating of their mothers. Sim Bundy was busy at the far end of the fold, and so, unexpectedly, was Peter. He grinned when he saw her, and came wading towards her through the sea of bobbing fleeces, taking care to make no sudden movement to startle the sheep.
‘I came to see if the wall-eyed ewe had dropped her lamb in the night,’ he said, moving aside the gate-hurdle and coming out to join her. ‘Sim was afraid she might have trouble, but she’s well enough, and she’s dropped a fine little ewe lamb.’
‘You sound like a shepherd yourself,’ Damaris told him. But she saw in his face that something was wrong, and drew him round the corner of the barn. ‘What is it?’
‘Tom’s gone,’ he said, ‘I looked in on my way here, and he’s not at Tumbledown, and he hasn’t taken his jacket with him and his staff’s lying before the doorway. And there’s some crazy story all over the village that Mr Farrington had a French spy locked up in the stables, and Lucifer went wild in the night and kicked his stall to pieces and overset a lantern. And the spy got out in all the garboil and disappeared—’
‘I know,’ Damaris checked his quick anxious flow of words. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later. But he’s all right; he’s at Genty’s cottage.’
He glared at her, ‘What in Heaven’s name’s been happening? What have you been up to?’
‘I said I’ll tell you later. Now you’d best come in and have breakfast: if you’ve been here helping Sim with the ewes it will look more natural that way. Come on.’ And she caught him by the hand and began dragging him back towards the house.
Half-an-hour later, with a good breakfast of bread and cheese and cold bacon inside them, they got up from the scrubbed kitchen table, and Damaris collected her cloak which she had flung across the back of a chair. Her father, pulling on his boots by the hearth
while Hannah scrubbed pots and pans, cocked an eye at her. ‘The fact that your Aunt Selina has one of her headaches need not mean that your education comes to a stop for the day, Dimmy. Is there naught that you can study by yourself? Couldn’t you work on that fine ladylike sampler? Couldn’t you at least help Hannah with the cooking or Madge in the dairy?’
Hannah let out a snort.
And Damaris protested hurriedly, ‘Oh Father, Snowball needs exercise so badly! I think it was because I have not ridden him enough lately that he bolted yesterday.’
John Crocker pulled on the other boot, and looked at her consideringly, beginning to breathe loudly through his nose. Then he relented. ‘Very well. But see that you don’t have us taking search parties out after you, this time.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’ Damaris stood on tiptoe and flung her arms round his neck, then darted out of the door. ‘Come and help me saddle up,’ she called to Peter as she passed him.
In the stable, with no human ears to hear them, she told him in a breathless rush all that had happened since he left Joyous Gard the day before. He whistled at the bit about the wax heart, and was inclined to be resentful at having missed it all, glaring at her across Snowball’s back. ‘I do say I think it a bit hard! I’ve taken my share of the dull jobs like keeping him fed all this while, and when something really exciting blows up, you have it all to yourself!’
‘I didn’t want it all to myself,’ Damaris protested, beginning to lead Snowball out of his stall. ‘Some of it was too exciting. But I couldn’t come for you—you couldn’t have come; not with your Great Aunt just arrived, not without people asking questions.’
‘No, that’s true—Oh well, it can’t be helped.’
He gave her a heave into the saddle, and they clattered out of the yard, Peter with a hand on Snowball’s rump.
At the edge of the woods they parted, Damaris riding on towards Genty’s cottage, while Peter plunged off into the trees to collect Tom’s jacket and blackthorn staff and bring them on.