‘Well, I won’t be involved in this fête,’ I said.
‘Why not? The police aren’t going to bother to look here again.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘You could just be a guest.’
‘Disguised, you mean?’
‘Yes. Exactly. Just like you’ve been before, as Harry Conrad and that antique-dealer in the hospital. This cricket match they’re playing — that’s your game, isn’t it? You told me how much you like to play it. Well, now you can. It’s all in nineteenth-century costume. The Society are arranging it. Or what about the jousting tournament? You could get dressed up for that. They wouldn’t recognise you got up in a lot of armour either, would they?’ Alice was suddenly very happy. She saw a future between us: a future of all sorts of fun and games, a future of disguises.
‘Me — in the jousting tournament —’ I said incredulously.
‘Yes. Why not? The riders are coming from all over: even some real knights —’
‘But I can barely ride a horse, Alice, let alone poke people with lances from one going full gallop.’
‘No?’ She seemed genuinely surprised, crestfallen, at my reply. And I saw then how much she wanted to believe in me, as a Sir Galahad or Launcelot reincarnate. She wasn’t cured of that sort of heroic delusion, I realised. Indeed, by my helping her achieve some sanity, I had encouraged her all the more to think of me as some shining knight errant, a worker of all sorts of miracles on her behalf.
‘Alice, you must be joking.’
‘Nothing venture, nothing win,’ she answered very seriously.
It was now Tuesday, the 20th of August, and there was more than a week to fill before I could think of leaving for Tewkesbury to get there after the 1st of September. The fête was due to last two days — starting the next Saturday afternoon, with stalls and sideshows in the immediate manor parkland, and the re-created nineteenth-century cricket match to be played further down in the grounds. On the Saturday evening a medieval Costume Ball had been arranged, with appropriate food to go with it — tickets at £40 a pair — to be held in the great Baronial Hall.
Sunday was the day of the great jousting tournament, with visits for the public round Beechwood Manor and gardens as well. There was to be a Mrs Beeton cooking competition in the morning, held in the old kitchens, and a selection of other treats later on: a vintage bicycle race round the manor drives, an exhibition of Victorian farm equipment in the yard, excursions about the estate in a coach and four, dog-and-donkey-cart rides for the children, together with short aerial trips for the more intrepid in a tethered hot-air balloon which was to be chauffeured by a man dressed up as Passepartout from Around the World in Eighty Days. Since the proceeds were all to go to the Victorian Society they were arranging everything. It seemed a fine programme and many hundreds of people were expected. But there was no place in it all for Clare and me.
I had other problems. For example, although Alice would be able to drive Clare and me to Tewkesbury easily enough, taking the small lanes over the wolds and perhaps travelling by night, I couldn’t leave for the river town before the Friday of the following week, to arrive there on the Saturday, which would be the 1st of September. I would have therefore to spend this corning busy weekend hidden in the Manor with Clare. And further, since the Pringles were due back from their holiday on the coming Saturday, Clare and I would have to spend the last week after that incarcerated up in the tower. It was not a happy prospect, especially since the weather, which had been quite cool and overcast for a week, had now turned brilliantly fine again, the start of an Indian summer.
The days were noticeably shorter, but they were burnished Mediterranean days now, with a shimmer of blue heat in the air almost from sun-up, while by early afternoon the temperature was intense, the sun a slanting fire in an ever-cloudless sky. We searched for shade, Alice and I, about the house. But Clare became restless. She wanted to be out in the open, to swim; above all, to cool herself down by the lake in the hidden valley where she had been happy. But this she could not do — for apart from the African, whose sudden violent presence loomed from every bush now, Alice’s two men were still clearing the burnt trees away from the shoreline there.
Nor could Clare play outside in the parkland or in the formal gardens down by the great Neptune fountain, for the volunteers from the Victorian Society were active everywhere in the grounds, preparing the fête. Thus we were confined for most of the day to the top landing or the tower and both places, so close to the sun, became unbearably hot.
So it was that I had brought Clare down one afternoon to the wine cellar in the basement, where it was deliciously cool and safe — bringing a chair and some rugs and Clare’s toys with us, the ark and its animals, with a book for me to read by the light of the single bulb above the pyramids of old wine bottles.
Yet when I got down there, I found I’d left the book behind, and more importantly that day’s newspaper, which I’d put aside somewhere with an account of that week’s test match in it. Clare seemed completely bound up with her animals on the rug next a bin of Gevrey-Chambertin. So I had left her, explaining what I was doing, and gone back upstairs, closing the cellar door. When I returned less than three minutes later the door was open and Clare had gone.
She had either run herself, I thought, or the African had taken her: the African, ghost-like again, who’d been haunting this dark, unused basement area, waiting for just such an opportunity. And though it was cool in the cellars I was suddenly drenched in sweat, mad at my stupidity in leaving Clare by herself. And worse, since Alice had gone far down into the parkland with one of the men from the Victorian Society, I would have to search for Clare alone.
First I stalked from door to door along the shadows of the basement passage, a bottle in my hand ready to smash it in some dark face. But all the old, unused rooms here, with their creaking doors laced with cobwebs, were empty.
I went upstairs. She could not have come into the big hall, or gone up by the main staircase, since I’d just been in that part of the house myself. She could only have left by the back door into the yard via the kitchens. Then I thought — the old laundry room, with its huge copper cauldron and the dangerous linen press: that was where she’d probably gone, where she’d once before played so happily in the grate and in the big tub itself.
I rushed out to the yard and into the laundry. She wasn’t there. But she’d gone this way, I saw then, for on the cobblestones, next the gateway leading down towards our old valley by the lake, I found one of the wooden animals from her ark, a big tawny-maned lion.
I went back to the house and fetched Alice’s Winchester from the gun-room. Clare must have gone down to the lake. But had she gone there of her own free will or had she been taken? I took no risks myself, pumping the stock, priming the gun as I ran out of the yard gateway. Luckily there was no one about on the eastern side of the house where the covered laurel pathway led down to the back drive and then on to the orchard, and beyond that to the ridge of beech trees and the hidden valley below.
The sun cast fierce shadows through the bushes as I sprinted along beneath them. I crossed the back drive and then took a short cut through the orchard, stalking from tree to tree now, moving towards the hedge at the end which would bring me out near the top of the valley. Early Worcesters hung thickly on the branches and wasps hummed at my feet picking among some already rotten windfalls. But otherwise there was complete silence in the baking afternoon heat. I wasn’t far from the lake, yet the sound of the chainsaws and the axes, which had echoed up from the valley there for weeks past, was gone. The silence was unnerving. Then something moved beyond a row of apple trees — a gathering movement, as if from many feet, swathing steadily towards me through the dry grass. I raised the rifle.