Chapter Three

WE ARRIVED AT THE LOCAL STATION IN THE early evening, tired from a long day’s travelling, skin prickly from railway upholstery and clothes smelling of engine smoke. The train went on its way down to the coalmines and the coast and left us standing on the platform while Nathan and an old porter organised our pile of luggage. There seemed a lot of it for seven people intent on living simply. As well as the knapsacks and cases of books I counted at least three food hampers and a small crate of bottled ale. The porter heaved three cases and a hamper on to his trolley and looked towards the empty station yard.

‘Where to, sir?’

Nathan looked at Alan. Alan looked worried.

‘There isn’t a cart or anything to meet us?’

‘Where from, sir?’

‘Studholme Hall. Mr Beston’s place.’

The porter’s face was weather-beaten and as wrinkled as a hippo’s hide. It wasn’t the kind of face that changed expression easily but I had a feeling he didn’t like what he’d heard.

‘No sir.’

‘Is there anywhere we can get a cab?’

‘Cab’s away to Carlisle. Thank you sir.’

He accepted a tip and strolled away. Alan called to him to wait, but he didn’t seem to hear.

‘We can’t stay here all night,’ Imogen said.

Meredith looked amused. ‘We could if we really had to, but there may be alternatives.’

I guessed that he was deliberately holding back. As the oldest one of us he might have taken the lead, but it was his pupil’s party. At the moment Alan looked far from happy about that, but he took the hint.

‘Kit and I’ll walk up to the town. There’ll probably be a pub with a fly or something to hire.’

He and Kit went off at a good pace. The remaining five of us finished off the strawberries and lemonade and then Nathan got his pipe going, always a considerable performance. He smoked a particular kind of tobacco mix that a shop in Oxford compounded to his recipe. It smelt of old rope and overripe apples and he’d brought a dozen tins with him. Once the pipe was fuming away to his liking he produced a length of string from his bulging pocket and did tricks to entertain us – knotting his own wrists together until it looked as if they’d take hours to undo, then releasing the whole cat’s cradle with one tug of his teeth, pipe still in mouth. Only Midge managed to work up much interest and while he was showing her how the trick was done Alan and Kit came back. Alan looked angry and, I thought, a little scared.

‘We can’t get one.’

Kit said, ‘There’s a fly in the pub yard but they won’t hire it to us. They say there’s something wrong with the axle. Alan offered them a sovereign if somebody would just drive us a few miles to his uncle’s place, but they weren’t interested.’

From Alan’s expression, he wished Kit hadn’t told us that.

Imogen asked, ‘So what do we do now?’

It was about seven o’clock by then, three hours or so of daylight left. I think we were all waiting for Meredith to make a suggestion but he just stood there, politely interested.

‘We could walk,’ I said.

I’d brought a map with me and had been looking at it while we were waiting. Studholme Hall was marked, no more than five or six miles away by country lanes. Five or six miles uphill as it happened, but it was no good depressing them even more. Midge asked what we should do about all the luggage.

‘We’ll have to leave most of it here and have it collected tomorrow. We can put the things we shall need for overnight in the rucksacks.’

It took some time for us all to root out our hiking boots and get essential things packed into the three rucksacks we had among the seven of us. All the time the sun was sliding down the sky and our chances of getting under a roof before it was dark were going with it. That didn’t worry me or Midge – who’d led a tomboy life with her brothers – but I could see Imogen was unhappy. There was a point in the repacking when one of the men’s shaving kits and her nightdress and washbag were lying jumbled together on the platform and she gave me a look of pure panic. Then Nathan found a flat wagon at the end of the platform and we loaded all the rest of our luggage on to it and pushed and pulled it under a lean-to shelter by the ticket office, with a note in block capitals saying it was to await collection. By that time a group of boys around nine or ten years old had gathered by the railings separating the platform from the station yard and were watching us, not offering to help. I said to Meredith, who happened to be next to me on the cart handle, ‘Those boys worry me.’

‘Why?’

‘When a boy passes up a chance to earn a shilling, there’s something odd going on.’

At last we were organised with Kit, Nathan and myself carrying the rucksacks. Alan had tried to take mine from me, but I wouldn’t let him. The road from the station passed between terraces of workers’ cottages on the outskirts of the small town. There were strings of faded red, white and blue flags looped across the street and a poster in the corner shop window announced ‘Mafeking Relieved’ with a portrait of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell. It had happened six or seven weeks before, and if we’d had more energy the signs of celebration might have sparked off a discussion. In our group, all of us had our doubts about the Boer War but with most of the country in a patriotic frenzy you had to be careful about how and where you voiced your opinions. I had a cousin serving with the cavalry in South Africa and hated to think of him risking his life in what seemed to me a piece of imperial bullying. By the look of it, this part of the country was solidly behind Queen, Government and Empire. Some of the families along the street probably had sons in the army. It seemed a sociable place if you lived there. People were out on their front steps, chatting to each other and enjoying the evening. The boys who’d been watching us back at the station had fallen in behind us, still at a distance. It was natural that we’d attract attention but odd that none of the people on the doorsteps answered when we said good evening to them. One man even turned away and went inside.

‘Don’t seem to care for strangers round here,’ Nathan said.

Just after we passed the last house in the terrace the stones started flying. They came from the boys following us and the first flew over our heads and landed at Alan’s feet. Then two or three more, one of them thudding against Kit’s rucksack. He whirled round and ran back along the street towards the boys, Alan and Nathan following. The boys yelled out something in shrill voices, both scared and defiant, and disappeared behind the houses. Suddenly all the front doors had shut and there was nobody watching, just rows of closed windows glowing orange in the low sun.

Imogen called to the men, ‘Come back. Come back, it’s no good.’

They came unwillingly, furious.

‘The little…’

‘Their parents didn’t even try to stop them.’

We walked on. I was glad when we’d left the town behind us and were on the uphill road. It was a deep lane with ferns and red campion growing up the banks, thick hazel hedges at the top so it was already deep dusk.

Alan and I led the way at first but after a while I let him have the map and dropped back with the other two women because I was worried that Midge might still be having trouble with her ankle. She was stoic as usual and insisted it wasn’t bothering her. Imogen had gone silent and was walking in the plodding automatic way of somebody who can’t imagine the journey ever ending. The first of the bats were flying across the lane before she said anything.

‘Those boys, Nell, did you hear what they were shouting when they ran off?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘It sounded like “murderers”. Could it have been? What did they mean?’

‘They were just boys. Don’t worry about it.’

*   *   *

I tried to take my own advice and stop worrying because walking in the country on a fine night like this was what I’d pined for when shut up indoors. The clouds had cleared and a warm breeze was blowing, with wafts of hay and wild flowers coming off the fields and the sound of little streams. Above all there was the sense of the high hills not far away with a different smell about them that was difficult to define but somehow harder and older than the fields, perhaps the smell of the bare rock itself that you don’t get in the soft south. Although I couldn’t see them I knew that the Uldale Fells were to the east of us and the foothills of Skiddaw a little way to the south. We had the landscape almost to ourselves except sometimes we’d pass a track with the dark shape of a house at the end of it, the glow of candlelight or lamplight in a window and a dog barking. Once we saw a man checking a cattle trough at the side of a field with his back to us. Usually I’d have called out good evening but this time I said nothing. The others walked past in silence too. I think the experience with the boys had made us all unsure of our welcome. If he was aware of us, he must have found us a strange intrusion. It was too late in the day and too far north of the popular Lake District tourist areas for a rambling party. Besides, we didn’t look like one. Our clothes weren’t right and there was no spring in our steps, no sense of being pleased with ourselves.

We tried to keep together but got strung out. Alan and Kit walked in front. I could see Alan was torn between his responsibility as leader of the party and concern for Imogen because he kept looking back at her. For most of the time, Michael Meredith walked on his own a little way behind them, moving with a good easy stride and looking as if he, at any rate, might be enjoying it. Then there were the three of us, plus Nathan who was carrying the heaviest rucksack and kept up a continuous flow of jokes and silly remarks that were obviously intended to keep our spirits up and worked after a fashion, more because of his good-heartedness than the quality of the jokes.

By the time we’d gone five miles or so it was too dark for the leaders to read the map, so they had to keep stopping at crossroads and striking matches. Although we knew we must be getting near Studholme Hall it was difficult to navigate with rutted farm tracks all looking alike, and of course nobody had brought a compass. Alan got argumentative and led us half a mile in the wrong direction before admitting he’d made a mistake. By then we were all tired, hungry and ready to snap at each other. As we trailed back the way we’d come, tripping over ruts and being snagged by briars, a voice said close to my ear, ‘I congratulate you all. Nobody’s said it yet.’ Meredith’s voice, low and amused. I was about to ask, ‘Said what?’ then realised it was like a serve in tennis and I was supposed to return it, not let it fall.

‘The most pointless of remarks, but sometimes the hardest to resist.’

‘Yes. Once voiced, it would end our philosophic party before it got properly started.’

Matches flared again up ahead and Alan shouted that this time it was definitely right, his voice full of relief. We hurried to him and he struck more matches to show a sign on a five-barred gate. The sign was done in amateur poker-work on a piece of plank. It read ‘Studholme Hall’ and underneath, in larger letters, ‘Keep Out’. The gate was closed across the top of a drive between unkempt hedges. The smell of crushed pineapple weed was rising around us and even by match light you could see that grass and weeds were growing thickly in the gateway. Alan stooped and fumbled with the catch of the gate. When he pushed it open there was a sudden carillon of bells, tuned to different notes like Alpine cowbells. At any other time the effect might have been welcoming but, with our nerves already stretched, it made everybody jump back. We filed through the gate and Nathan pushed it shut, setting the bells jangling again. Below us, quite a long way down the steeply sloping track you could make out the dark rectangle of a house against the slope of a wooded hill with lamplight in one of the upstairs windows. We started walking down the track, Meredith still alongside me.

‘It’s something to see a light,’ I said. ‘I was beginning to think Alan’s uncle had forgotten about us and gone away.’

There was a new-looking post-and-rail fence on our right, a tall hedge on the left. Alan and Kit were striding ahead.

‘I agree his hospitality’s been unobtrusive so far.’

‘But then, different people have different ideas of hospitality.’

At that point the night exploded. There was a flash, a blast of noise then a second blast. After that silence for the space of a heartbeat apart from a sound like rain pattering on the hedge. Then a voice shouting, ‘Go away. I warned you. Go away.’

Alan and Kit had disappeared. Ahead of us on the track where their shapes had been there was only night sky. A sound came from Imogen behind me, part gasp, part sob. Then Alan’s voice, unsteadily from ground level, ‘Uncle? Uncle James, what’s happening?’

‘Alan?’ The voice down the track was doubtful at first, then horrified. ‘Alan, I haven’t gone and killed you now, have I?’

‘Not quite, Uncle, but you had a bloody good try.’

Kit laughed, high and shakily, also from near ground level. Meredith said to me entirely calmly, as if there’d been no break in our conversation, ‘It isn’t granted to many of us to be proved right so quickly, Miss Bray. Beston’s uncle clearly has a refreshingly original view of hospitality.’

Below us, Alan was getting to his feet. A figure came out of the dark, wrapped itself round him then released him.

‘Alan, my dear boy. I’m very sorry. I took you for some other people.’

It was an elderly voice, but powerful and unexpectedly attractive, with the deep, rounded quality of an old-fashioned actor. There was something actorly too in the man’s power of recovery. The horror when he thought he’d killed his great nephew had been obvious but now he sounded as if the thing had been some boisterous joke. Kit was on his feet by now, but there was something odd and awkward about his silhouette. Then the Old Man’s voice, uncertain again.

‘Who are you? Have I hit you?’

‘I bleed sir, but not killed.’ Kit was an actor too and had got his composure back, but he was holding his left arm stiffly away from his body.

Alan yelped, ‘Kit, he hasn’t gone and shot you has he?’

‘Only winged, I’m sure. Could we go inside and have a look at the damage?’

‘Yes, come in. All of you, come in.’

The Old Man hurried Kit and Alan down the path towards the house and the rest of us followed.