The Catherine Wheel

CHAPTER 10

They went trooping through a green baize door at the back of the hall, to find themselves in a confusing rabbit-warren of stone-floored passages. There was a smell of cooking, and of mould from old walls which held the damp. One passage ran straight ahead, not narrow like the one which had led from the front door, but wide enough for two men to walk abreast and carry a load between them. All the passages here had this convenience of width-and no difficulty in guessing why. The smell of food came from a half open door on the left, carried out and away by the heat of a noble fire.

But Jacob Taverner turned into a cross passage which went away to the right. Doors opened on either side of it, a stair came down on the right. The middle door on the left disclosed a cellar stair going down easily into the dark with wide shallow steps.

Fogarty Castell had a bright electric lamp. He stood at the bottom and lighted them down. Eighteen steps, and they were in a wide hall with doors opening on three sides of it. The floor was dry and dusty under foot, and the air warm. Fogarty went ahead with his lamp and stopped at a door which was locked on the outside. He turned the key-a heavy old thing like a church key-and took himself and his light into a long, narrow cellar with brick walls and a stone-paved floor. It was quite empty except for one or two small wooden boxes lying in the corner.

Jeremy had Jane by the arm. He thought, “What is he getting at?” and he kept her near the door.

Jacob took the lamp and went to the far end of the cellar. He said, “All right,” and Fogarty Castell did something in the corner where the boxes were. They couldn’t see what he did. Nobody could, because they were all looking at Jacob and the light. Castell might have bent down and straightened up again. Jeremy had the impression that that was what he had done, but he couldn’t be sure, and in the next moment he had something else to think about, because Jacob Taverner laughed and pushed hard against the brick wall at the end of the cellar. He pushed hard with both hands on the right side, and it gave and swung in. A long black gap showed all down that side. The whole end wall of the cellar moved-eight foot of it-the right-hand side going back, and the left swinging out until it stood endways on, with a four-foot passage on either side.

Jacob held up the lamp for everyone to see.

“Well, here’s the old back door of the Catherine-Wheel. Ingenious, isn’t it? The wall looks solid enough, but it’s only a door built into a wooden frame and pivoted on an iron bar. There’s a simple locking arrangement, and when it’s locked no one can get in from the shore. There were some rough characters in the smuggling game, and our forefathers took precautions against waking up some fine night with their throats cut. Well, there’s the road to the shore. The cliff’s about forty foot, and we’re ten foot under ground here, so there’s another thirty foot to go before you get down to shore level. But they didn’t bring the cargoes in off the shore. There’s a cave right under here, no size but very convenient. They used to run a boat in at high tide and land the stuff where the passage comes out. So you can cut off another eight or nine feet. That leaves a twenty-foot drop, and with the help of a few steps they’ve managed a passage with quite an easy gradient. Anyone want to come along and see? I don’t advise it for the ladies, because it’s all pretty foul from not being used, and they’ll be apt to spoil their dresses. I don’t suppose anyone’s been into it a dozen times since Jeremiah died.”

Mildred Taverner, standing very near the middle of the cellar, said in that high voice of hers,

“But I thought-”

Nobody had spoken whilst Jacob spoke. Everyone listened, and when he stopped speaking there was a hush. Mildred’s “But I thought-” came right into the middle of it. When she caught herself up, everyone was looking at her. She said, “Oh!” with a sort of gasp, and stood there.

Geoffrey Taverner said, “No, I don’t think the ladies ought to go.”

Jacob moved, passing between Geoffrey and Florence Duke. He said,

“Mildred was saying- What was it you were saying, my dear Mildred?” His tone sharpened on the question.

There was confusion in her manner and colour in her face- ugly, flat colour. She said in a hurry,

“Oh, nothing-nothing at all.”

“You said, ‘But I thought-’ What did you think?”

“I don’t know-I’m sure I don’t know why I said it-it must have been the excitement. It’s very exciting, isn’t it? And my dress won’t hurt. I should like to see where the passage comes out. These patterned silks are so useful-they don’t show marks.”

In the end they all went down except Marian Thorpe-Ennington.

“Not that I’m not interested, my dear man, because of course it’s too utterly thrilling, but as this is probably the last garment I shall ever be able to buy from Worth, I really should hate to get it spoilt with slime and seaweed and things. They never really come out-too devastating. And of course the very minute Freddy goes into bankruptcy nobody will give us any more credit-so unfair, I always think. Only I can’t stay here in the dark.”

“Fogarty’s got a torch-he’ll take you back. I’m afraid we must stick to the lamp.”

One underground passage is very much like another. Jane wouldn’t have stayed behind for the world, but she had never hated anything quite so much in all her life-the dark descent, the shadows cast by the electric lamp, the smell of the cave coming up on a salt breath, the smell of decaying seaweed that might easily have been something worse. There might have been murders in a place like this-a knife stuck suddenly between someone’s ribs, and dead men’s bones left lying in the dark. It was like all the worst nightmares she had ever had, the kind where something chases you in deep places where there isn’t any light. She held Jeremy’s arm in a painful grip. He felt her heart beat as she pressed against him. His whisper at her ear had a laughing sound.

“If you’ll stop mangling my arm, I can put it round you.”

It came round her, and she held on to his jacket instead. They were behind the others. He said, “Silly!” still in that laughing whisper, and kissed the back of her neck.

The smell which she kept telling herself was only seaweed got stronger. There was an oozy feeling under foot. The lamp stopped a little way ahead, and they were called forward one by one to look out over a lip of rock and see black water moving under the light a couple of feet below. The walls of the cave went away up out of sight. They glistened with moisture. The light glittered on the water. Jane felt as if at any moment the whole cliff might tilt and drown them. The glittering and the glistening and the oozy feeling under foot began to run together in her mind. Just for a minute she didn’t know where she was, or that it was only Jeremy’s arm that kept her on her feet.

When the giddy feeling passed they were going back up the slope. She said,

“I’m all right now. Oh, Jeremy, I do hate secret passages.”

“I rather gathered that. Sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, quite.”

He let her take her weight again. They came out into the cellar and up the cellar stairs to the warmth from the kitchen door and the wholesome smell of food. The door was still half open, as it had been when they went down. There was a fragrance of coffee. Jane said close to Jeremy’s ear,

“Let’s go and see Annie Castell.”

It was quite easy to fall back and let the others go on. They pushed the kitchen door and went in, to find themselves in a big room with a stone floor and a low ceiling crossed by heavy beams. The beams had big hooks in them here and there, and in the old days there would have been hams hanging up to cure. Now there were only strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs.

Annie Castell turned round from the range. She was a heavily built woman of middle height with a flat, pale face which reminded Jane of a scone, and flat, pale hair dragged back into a scanty knot behind. At first it was difficult to say whether it was fair, or grey, or somewhere betwixt and between. She looked at them out of small nondescript-coloured eyes which had no expression at all. The few sandy lashes did nothing to shade them, and the wide colourless eyebrows showed like smudges on the pale skin. If Jane had stopped to think she would have felt discouraged. But she was too full of a sense of escape. The warm room and the smell of coffee were too heartening. She said in her prettiest voice,

“We’re some of the cousins. This is Jeremy Taverner, and I am Jane Heron. We want to say thank you for the lovely dinner, Cousin Annie.”

She put out her hand as she spoke. Annie Castell looked at it, looked at her own, wiped it slowly upon the washed-out overall which enveloped her, and then just touched Jane’s fingers in a limp, hesitating way. She did not speak at all.

Jane persevered.

“It was a most beautiful dinner-wasn’t it, Jeremy?”

“I don’t know when I tasted anything better.”

Annie Castell made some kind of a movement, but whether it was intended to be a modest disclaimer, or a mere acknowledgement of compliments received, it would have been difficult to say. For a moment nobody said anything. Then a raw-boned elderly woman emerged from what was evidently the scullery. She had a battered-looking hat on her head, and she was buttoning up a man’s overcoat some sizes too large for her.

“I got through,” she said in a hoarse confidential tone. “And if you’re really not wanting me to do the silver-”

Annie Castell spoke for the first time. She had a country accent and a very flat, discouraged voice.

“No, Eily can do the silver. You’ve done the glass?”

“I didn’t know I had to.”

“Yes, please.”

The woman bridled.

“I’m sure I don’t know that I can. Mr. Bridling, he won’t half carry on if I’m late. But there, if I must I must, and no good having a set-to about it. I’ll tell him you kept me.”

“Thank you.”

Annie Castell turned back to Jeremy and Jane.

“The coffee has gone through,” she said in her flat monotone.

They were dismissed, and, as far as it was possible to tell, without acquiring any merit. As they shut the kitchen door behind them, Jeremy said,

“Effusive person our Cousin Annie.”

“Jeremy, do you suppose he beats her?”

“Who-Fogarty? I shouldn’t think so. Why?”

“She’s got that crushed look. People don’t look like that if they’re all right.”

Jeremy put his arm round her.

“Sometimes I like you quite a lot. But talking about looks, you’ve got a green smudge-you’d better slip upstairs and do something to the face.”

They separated at the foot of the stairs. As Jane turned into the passage which led to her room she heard a man’s voice. She didn’t get any words, only the voice. There was something about it that made her angry. She came up the four steps where the level of the passage rose, and heard Eily say, “I won’t!”

Just at this point she realized that the voices came from her own bedroom, and that one them belonged to Luke White who certainly had no business there. Eily, she supposed, would be turning down the beds, and if either of them thought of Jane Heron at all, they would expect her to be taking coffee in the lounge or whatever they called that big room downstairs. In the circumstances, she didn’t feel the least bit ashamed of standing still and listening.

Luke White said with an odious drawling sound in his voice,

“And what good do you think you’re doing by saying you won’t?”

Eily sounded breathless.

“I’m saying it because I’m meaning it.”

“And what good do you think you’re doing by meaning it? I’ll have you in the end. If you’d a grain of sense you’d know that and come willing.”

He must have reached out and caught hold of her, because there was a half-stifled “Let me go!”

“You’ll listen to me first! And you’ll give me a nice kiss, and then you can go-for this time.”

She said, “I’ll scream. You’ve no business here. I’ll tell Aunt Annie.”

“Annie Castell-that makes me laugh!And what do you think you’ll get out of telling Annie Castell?”

Her voice wavered.

“I’ll tell Uncle.”

“You won’t! If you want to start anything like that, there’s two can play at telling. Where had you got to this evening when I spoke up for you and told Castell Annie had sent you out on an errand? I lied for you and got you out of the mess you’d have been in if he’d known where you was. Along of John Higgins, wasn’t it? Keeping company like-sweethearting like-holding hands and kissing, or perhaps a bit more. For all he’s so pious, I bet you don’t sing hymns all the time you’re with him!”

“Luke-let me go!”

“In a minute, when I’ve said what I want to. Here it is. You go snivelling to Castell or you go running away to John Higgins, and I’ll cut his heart out. If you want to wake up some night and find your bed a-swimming in his blood, you run off and marry him, and that’s what you’ll wake up to some fine night. I’ll not swing for him either-you needn’t think it-I’d not give you that satisfaction. I’ll have an alibi that the two Houses of Parliament couldn’t break, not if they tried ever so. And I’ll have you too, whichever way it goes and whatever you do. You can choose whether you’ll come willing and now, or whether you’ll let it come to what I said and have John Higgins’ blood on you first. And now you’ll kiss me proper.”

Jane went back down the four steps, and made a noisy stumble on the bottom one. Just as she did so she heard Eily cry out. Hard on that Luke White cursed. Jane ran, and almost bumped into him as he came out of the bedroom looking dangerous and nursing a hand. When he saw her he stopped for a moment and said,

“Eily called me in to see to the catch of your window. It slipped and caught my finger.”

Jane watched him nearly to the end of the passage before she shut the door.

Eily stood by the chest of drawers which served as a dressing-table. She had a fixed sick look, her eyes staring, her face dead white. She was holding Jane’s nail-scissors. There was blood on the blades. She was wiping it off with her finger and staring at it.

Jane went close up to her and put an arm round her shoulders.

“I heard what he said. Why do you stand it?”

Eily went on wiping the blades with her finger.

“There’s nothing else I can do.”

“Of course there is! You ought to tell Mr. Castell and your aunt.”

A faint shudder went over Eily like a ripple going over water.

“You don’t understand.”

“You could walk out of here and marry John Higgins. He wants you to, doesn’t he?”

“I can’t be doing that.”

“Because of what Luke said? He was just trying it on. You could go to the police. There, that’s three things you could do. And you can put those scissors down-they give me the creeps. You stuck them into his hand, didn’t you?”

The dark blue eyes widened. There was another of those slow shudders. Jane said half impatiently,

“I shouldn’t worry-he was asking for it.”

She turned round to the glass, exclaimed at what it showed her, and began to get busy with cleansing tissue.

Eily put the scissors down and moved a step or two away. All the time Jane was doing her face she was aware of her, standing there with that fixed staring look.

When she was ready, Eily was still there. Jane began to feel that she needed shaking. A girl who was chambermaid at an inn which certainly contained some odd people ought to be a bit tougher than that. The Catherine-Wheel was no place for a sensitive plant-very few places were. If you had your living to earn you had to learn how to look after yourself, but it oughtn’t to have to come to stabbing, not even with nail-scissors. She said rather briskly,

“Come along, Eily-there’s no harm done.”

Eily looked down at the blood on her forefinger.

“It was only the little pair of scissors,” she said, “and no harm done at all.”

“Then what are you worrying about?”

She said, “Suppose I’d had a knife-”

This time the shudder was in her voice.