Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

Chapter 18 The Dead Spaces of the Earth

Tuesday, 1 November 1808

I awoke this morning with the idea of a boat in my dreams: a dory, easily manned by a single oarsman, that had borne me swiftly across Southampton Water Sunday evening, then turned back in the direction of the monks’ passage. Orlando must have left it hidden among the rocks of the shingle that night while he sat his patient vigil in the tunnel. Orlando had vanished. But what of his vessel?

Lord Harold might declare that his valet should fend for himself — he might devote his hours to composing letters of statecraft and policy, intended for the eyes of a duke — but I could not be so sanguine. I owed Orlando a debt of obligation, for having saved Martha Lloyd a most troublesome journey; and I did not like to think of him in danger and alone, as he had been so much of his difficult life.

I breakfasted early, then wrapping myself up well against a sharp wind off the water, I went in search of Mr. Hawkins.

“Strange talk there do be about the folk at Netley,” said the Bosun’s Mate darkly. “Old Ned Bastable swears as he saw balls o’ light hovering over t’a Abbey two nights since, and the cottagers of Hound will tell you, after a tankard of ale, that the mistress can fly through West Woods, and speak with animals in a strange tongue.”

“Young Flora has been spreading wild tales,” I observed.

“Mrs. Challoner turned Flora away,” Jeb Hawkins returned. “Said as she failed to give satisfaction. But Flora will tell any who listen that the lady is right strange. Says she looks through a body in a way that gives a Christian chills; and that there’s doings at the Lodge as will end in blood, one o’ these days. Is that why you and his lordship are forever going to Netley?

Keeping a weather eye on the place?”

“Mrs. Challoner is not a witch, Mr. Hawkins,” I said firmly. “It may be that she is nothing more than what she claims: a widow lately removed from the conflict in the Peninsula, and entirely without acquaintance in this part of the world. It is also possible that matters are otherwise. But you would do well to say nothing to anyone in Hound.”

The old seaman eyed me unsmilingly; he would determine his own course as ever he had done. He threw his back into the oars, and said, with seeming irrelevance, “I like the cut o’ his lordship’s jib. If he’s watching that woman, I reckon there’s cause. Are we bound for the passage? Or the landing near the Lodge?”

“The shingle,” I answered, “below the tunnel mouth.”

He lifted a hoary brow, but said no more; and the remainder of our voyage passed in silence.

The sun was weak this November morning — the Feast of All Saints. A chill breeze slapped the waves into white-curled chargers, and the Bosun’s Mate fought hard against a stiff current. I clutched at the edges of my black pelisse with mittened hands and thought of Lord Harold. Was he in Whitehall already, consulting at the Admiralty? Or had he sought his counsel in the gentlemen’s haunts of Pall Mall — in the card room at Brooks’s Club? Grouse season was at an end, but partridges were in full hue and cry: the majority of the Whig Great were still likely to be fixed in their country estates and shooting boxes. Parliament should not open until just before Christmas, when the foxes were breeding and all sport was at an end. He might find that his acquaintance — the men he most wished to secure — were thin on the ground in London at this season. He might, in sum, be delayed beyond his power—

The dory scraped across the shallows; Mr. Hawkins, without a word, jumped into the frigid sea and hauled the boat up onto the shingle. He assisted me carefully to land, and stood waiting for direction. I cast about me; to all appearances, the place was barren of life. A grouping of boulders — cast by Nature, or dragged into position by monks five centuries dead — screened the tunnel mouth from the notice of the inquisitive. I made first for these, peering behind them to ascertain that no small vessel lay upended there. Then I paced in the opposite direction, peering diligently through the waving grasses at the shingle’s edge, until the strand itself petered out to nothing. I turned back, to find Jeb Hawkins calmly lighting his pipe.

“Where’s his lordship this morning?” he asked.

“He has posted to Town.”

Mr. Hawkins glanced speculatively at the sky.

“Might you tell me what you’re looking for?”

“Lord Harold’s man, Orlan — Mr. Smythe — has disappeared. He and his dory were last seen in this place, and I thought that if I could find the boat—”

“Boats drift with the tide,” the Bosun’s Mate observed. “A boat might fetch up anywhere.”

“That is true,” I replied dispiritedly. In this chill and empty place, the idea of searching at random for the valet seemed ludicrous in the extreme.

Mr. Hawkins gestured with his pipe stem. “Could he’uv gone up into that there passage?”

A chill flickered at my spine. Naturally he could have gone into the passage; it was his express purpose in coming here, to spy upon the party we suspected of treason. But Mr. Hawkins knew nothing of that, and I did not like to adventure into the passage alone.

“Will you help me to open the hatch?” I asked faintly.

He knocked the bowl of his pipe against his boot, and let the ashes drift onto the sand.

“Gather yer skirts,” he told me, “and I’ll give ye a hoist.”

Mr. Hawkins, being a wise seaman, kept a bundle of tapers in his boat. Though the daylight was now broad, the tunnel was darkest pitch; and so he fetched me several of the paper twists, and lit the first with his own flint.

Then he lit another, and said: “Shall you lead the way, miss? Or shall I?”

I was too relieved at the notion of company, for the demurrals of pride. “If you do not dislike it—”

He merely grunted, and stepped forward with bent back. I gratefully followed.

The tunnel floor was much scuffed, as though an army had passed through; and I found this surprising, for Orlando was a stealthy creature and a careful one. Mr. Hawkins, never having seen the interior of the passage, could not be expected to comment. The way steadily ascended, and darkness filled in the gap behind; it was as though the tunnel mouth was closed to us, and no return should ever be possible. But I said nothing of this desperate fancy to my companion. He should have hawked and spit his disdain at my feet.

“There’s a branching in the way just ahead,” he muttered. Even Mr. Hawkins had enough respect for the dead spaces of the earth to speak soft and low.

“Left, or right?”

He swung round as he said this, and the light of his taper moved in a golden arc beyond his head. In that instant, I saw — I knew not what: a figure tall, motionless, watchful as Death. The tunnel wall was at its back, and pressed against it thus, the spectre might have avoided detection. But now I had espied it: and before I could so much as cry aloud, the figure hurtled past the Bosun’s Mate, its right hand making a vicious strike for the taper. The fragile thing spun out of Mr. Hawkins’s grasp and sputtered on the tunnel floor. In the swift current of air occasioned by the figure’s flight, my own flame flickered and went out. I felt his movement — the breeze of hurried passage — and heard the panic tearing at his lungs. As the figure darted past me, I clutched at the air — and closed on the stuff of a cloak.

Brutal hands gripped my shoulders and thrust me hard against the tunnel wall. I cried out as my head struck the stones; light exploded before my eyes, and I slid downwards to rest on the tunnel floor.

“Oi!” Jeb Hawkins shouted in rage towards the passage mouth. “Oi! You there!” He broke into pursuit, his stumbling gait that of an old, bent man in a darkened place; but in a moment, I was alone. Gingerly, I felt with my fingers at the back of my skull. No blood — no broken skin — just a slight lump, to pair with the one I had earned on horseback. I pushed myself upright, and found that a slight dizziness passed quickly away. With care, I might make my way towards the tunnel mouth.

But what should await me there? The menacing figure, and brave Mr. Hawkins insensible at his feet?

Ought I to turn, instead, to the trapdoor set into the Abbey floor, and the freedom of the ruins above?

But what if the cloaked man — mon seigneur — had just quitted the place, and his conspirators remained?

Stiff with uncertainty, I could move neither forward nor back. And then a voice shouted from the passage mouth. “Miss Austen?”

“Jeb!” I cried. “Are you unharmed?”

“Naught to do with me — but the skiff’s gone! The damned blackguard scarpered in ’er!”

The outrage in Mr. Hawkins’s words must have been comical, had our situation been less unhappy. I descended to the shingle. “Do you mean to say that your boat has been stolen?”

The Bosun’s Mate did not reply; he was employed in cursing with a fluency that attested to fortyodd years in His Majesty’s service. My ears burned with every ejaculation, though I am sure my brother Frank should have heard them unmoved.

I waited until his fury was spent, and then said briskly, “We must walk along the shingle until we reach the landing area below Netley Lodge, and take the path that leads past the ruins. It is three miles from the Abbey to Southampton — a trifling walk. I have often achieved it.”

The old seaman stared. “Do you not know that I’ve the gout in my leg? I can never walk all of three mile!”

It was true that our dealings with one another were generally afloat; I had formed no notion of his general spryness.

“Shall I go in search of aid?” I enquired. “Your friend, perhaps — Ned Bastable — who lives in

Hound? Might he possess a cart... or... a conveyance of some kind?”

By way of answer, Mr. Hawkins lifted his bosun’s whistle from the chain where it rested around his neck, and commenced to blow.

“There’s vessels enough on the Water,” he gasped between exertions, “to carry us safe home. It’s not marooning what troubles me, miss! It’s the loss of my boat! Mark my words — someone’ll have to pay!”

He said this with such awful purpose that I understood, of a sudden, that my meagre purse should presently be petitioned to supply the want of Jeb Hawkins’s livelihood; and I wished all the more devoutly that I had heeded Lord Harold’s advice, and left Orlando to fend for himself. Perhaps the valet had simply tired of labouring in his lordship’s service, and had seized his chance to take swift passage elsewhere in the world—

“Ahoy there!” Jeb Hawkins cried, and waved his arms frantically. The whistle dropped to his chest.

“It’s the Portsmouth hoy, miss — travels each day up the Water, bearing folk from one town to the other. Ahoy there! On the water! We’ve need of aid!”

As I watched, the smart sailing vessel far out in the middle of the Solent seemed to hesitate, and then — as I joined Mr. Hawkins in waving my arms — slowly came about and turned towards us.

“The draught’s too great to permit it to come in close,” Mr. Hawkins told me regretfully. “You’ll have to kilt yer skirts, miss, about yer knees.”

I gathered the black cloth in my hands without argument, and consigned my poor boots to the deep. The shock of cold was as nothing to the tug of the current, and for an instant, I was terrified of being borne under, and of drowning in three feet of water from the weight of my clothes. But Mr. Hawkins reached a steadying hand to my elbow, and urged me forward. I bit my lip to avoid crying out, and kept my gaze trained on the hoy as it steadily approached. A sailor, red-faced and bearded, leaned forward from the bow.

“Ye blow a fair whistle,” he said. “That’s a navy man’s tune.”

“Aye, and I’ve the right to play it,” Mr. Hawkins returned testily. “I’m Jeb Hawkins, as once tanned yer backside on the Queen Anne, Davy Thomas — and how you can forget it—”

“Jeb Hawkins!” the sailor cried, and held out his hand. “How came you to be run aground?”

“My skiff was stolen, and the lady here incommoded.”

The cold seawater surging about my knees was so frigid at that moment, my teeth were clattering in my head, and I could barely acknowledge the sailor’s look of appraisal.

“Stolen?” he repeated. “And you marooned an’ all?”

“Davy Thomas!” shouted the captain from the cockpit, “stop yer palaverin’ and say what’s to-do!”

“A lady and the Bosun’s Mate as have had their boat stolen, Cap’n, sir,” Thomas replied with alacrity.

“They be marooned!”

“A lady?” enquired a third — and far more cultured voice. “Then for God’s sake, man — swing her aboard!”

I raised my eyes to the centre of the vessel, where a quartet of passengers was seated. A young woman with round blue eyes that stared at me in horrified astonishment, a nursemaid in a dowdy cap, a child of less than two — and a man in the dress uniform of the Royal Navy.

“Fly? ” I cried in astonishment — and dropped my skirts in the water.