Nightmare Farm

2: At The Hunters’ Arms

2: At The Hunters’ Arms

THE ROLLS-BENTLEY, smoke grey with black wings, drew up outside the town house of General Sir George Green, K.G.V.O., D.S.O., and the general’s son got out and, with one glance of pardonable pride in ownership at the quiet aristocrat of sports cars— he had bought it out of the somewhat illicit proceeds of his first case as Gees— rang the bell and got himself admitted to the house. In the library, his father gazed at him in a way that indicated a possible storm.

“Well, what do you want?” the general snapped out.

“Oh, lots, father,” the son answered, “but I didn’t come here looking for any of it. Just a simple inquiry, if you don’t mind.”

“Which is the business of confidential agencies, as you call that preposterous pretence at occupation of yours,” the general observed.

“But it hasn’t been altogether preposterous,” Gees— as his intimate acquaintances usually called him— protested gently. “Even you yourself handed me a bouquet over the Kestwell case—”

“I don’t like your slang expressions, Gordon!” the general interrupted. “That one case is all you appear to have done or ever intend to do— except for maintaining a very pretty secretary on premises which include your living accommodation—”

“My secretary, father, could give Caesar’s wife ten yards in the hundred and come out an easy winner,” Gees interrupted in turn.

“It’s not the first time you’ve made that imputation against her, and I’d call any man but you a liar for making it, and hit him if he were not too old. Now do we drop this wrangling while I ask what I came to ask—”

“Quite apart from the girl, you’ve started that infernal advertising again, I see,” the general broke in again. “That ludicrous and perfectly damnable mumps to murder sentence that makes me ashamed to own that you are my son. Consult Gees! Consult the devil!”

“A matter of taste,” Gees said blandly. “Which you consult, I mean. But unless you have any more observations to hurl at me—”

“What do you want here?” the general interrupted yet once more.

“Being on my way to Denlandham—” Gees began, only to meet another interruption, uttered in a tone of wrathful surprise.

“Denlandham? You— going to Denlandham?”

“I believe I said so. To make an investigation—”

“Why— what has Hunter been doing?” the general broke in again.

“I don’t know what anyone has been doing till I’ve got on to my investigation,” his son told him as patiently as ever. “But I wanted to ask you— did you see Hunter in your club, the day before yesterday?”

“I did. What has that got to do with your investigation?”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Speak to him? What do you take me to be, Gordon? Of course I didn’t speak to him! How dare you suggest such a thing?”

“But you were talking to somebody about me,” Gees accused, “and you said whatever it was loudly enough for Hunter to overhear it.”

“I— what?” The general looked like making some outburst, but checked himself. “I— yes, I remember, now. Palliser was inquiring about you, questioning whether you were keeping on with that agency in co-operation with the man named Gees. I didn’t undeceive him, and I said that either you or Gees was fool enough to keep on with anything, or something of that sort. Hunter may have heard me— I don’t care if he did. Your mumps to murder advertisement is enough to make me say anything. I loathe and detest it. Hate it! Resent it!”

“You’re terribly redundant with your verbs, father,” Gees said placidly, “and now you’ve told me what I wanted to know, I’ll not trouble you any longer, but head for Denlandham to make it by nightfall.”

“If Hunter is the culprit and you land him, I’ll forgive you everything except that advertisement, Gordon,” the general promised.

“There appears to be precious little else to forgive, father,” Gees pointed out. “Besides, I’m acting for Hunter, not against him.”

It stands to General Green’s credit that he restrained himself. He merely pointed at the library door and said, “Get out of this house!” in a small voice— but it was like the rustle of a zephyr travelling just ahead of a tornado. And, foreseeing that the tornado was imminent, Gees got out of the house and set his course for Denlandham.

The quiet of the marshes, with old-world Ludlow behind and Shrewsbury ahead, at the end of the serene day. Limpid green over the sunset and opal shades in the lower west. Green meadows, placid streams, and the foliage of the trees at its best, with the scent of hawthorn blossom burdening the air after Gees had turned off from the Shrewsbury road to take the winding, narrower way to Denlandham, placid as the day itself after his late tea in the old, half-timbered Ludlow inn.

It was, he reflected, the first time since childhood that he had felt even reasonably cheerful over coming to Shropshire, for his father had designed that he, Gees, should manage the family estate as soon as he was old enough, and had made him learn all the intricacies of management so thoroughly that he detested the idea as much as the general detested his slogan. But this business on which he was engaged promised to be interesting, and probably profitable as well, so that he was quite prepared to concede to anyone that the scenery through which he drove was lovely, and that Shropshire as a county was worth knowing. Moreover, with the rattle and smoke of London hardly out of his ears and nostrils as yet, and the very last word in mechanical perfection under his control, he was half-inclined to regard Angus Hunter’s twirling gurgler as did Eve Madeleine, whom he called Miss Brandon in speaking to her. Yet, he knew, Hunter had detailed his case quite practically and reasonably, as if he knew rather than believed in its truth.

And now, ruminating, Gees wished he had his father’s knowledge of the Hunter family. Grandfather Green’s brother had annexed Celia Hunter three-quarters of a century before, making the breach between the families which still showed no sign of closing— Hunter’s lying about a talk with the general in the club could not be taken as a sign— and, knowing of the breach, Gees had made no attempt to learn the full history of these Hunters. Angus of that name had confessed to a slave-trader and a murderer in the family, and Gees had a half-memory of a legend to the effect that, when the first of the family to come to notice had dispossessed the monks of Denlandham, he had been guilty of senseless cruelties. There had been a convent, too, and the nuns—

Not nearly so placid as he remembered the old tales, Gees looked about him and felt that the May landscape was not quite as beautiful as it had appeared when he first began this train of reflection. It had already occurred to him that Hunter’s letter, which he carried in his note-case, had no more cash value in the event of his success on this mission than had the paper that contained it, but, bad though the record of the family was, in spots, and from the view-point of a Shropshire Green, Angus would surely not be swine enough to repudiate that obligation. Or would he? The sum was little enough to him, but—

A jab at the brake pedal, for a small boy of four or five darted into the narrow road from a wayside cottage gateway, almost under the front wheels of the slowly and silently moving car, which came to a standstill while the urchin completed his journey across the road and gained the bank on the far side from the cottage gateway, where, thumb in mouth, he stood divided between pride in his achievement and a desire to howl loudly over the narrowness of his escape.

A woman came out from the cottage to the gate, and looked out at the child and the long car. She was about to speak, but Gees forestalled her: he did not know if she would begin on him or the child.

“Madam,” he asked, removing his hat and speaking most ingratiatingly, “could you tell me how far it is to Denlandham?”

“Denlum?” she amended for him. “Why, this is it.”

“All of it?” He looked past her at the cottage.

“Willie!” she called past him to the child, “coom heer, you little davvle! Runnin’ out inter the rud like that, you!”

But heedless of whether the child obeyed or no, Gees let in his clutch and moved on. Denlandham or Denlum was somewhere handy, evidently, and there must be a hostelry somewhere about. He found it about a quarter of a mile farther on, and would have hated to total up the bends and twists in that quarter-mile, for the road could give a worm points and a beating on turning. Then, set back from a sort of forecourt, which was shaded by a chestnut tree that would have set any toiling village blacksmith rejoicing, he saw THE HUNTERS’ ARMS declare itself by means of a swinging signboard, and turned off the road to discover that one Nicholas Churchill was licensed to retail... but then Gees got out to search for Nicholas or some accredited representative, for the rest of the sign was of no consequence. Here was an inn, and the first of the May twilight was at hand. Leaving the car, he entered what proved to be the public bar.

Behind the bar was a red-faced man with a perceptibly humped back and a nose that would not have failed by comparison with Cyrano de Bergerac’s facial centre. Two youngsters paused from competing at darts on the far side of the low-ceiled room at the entry of this stranger, and two rather elderly men of the hedger-and-ditcher type, seated on a long settle at right angles to the bar, gave him a glance and then ignored him. He addressed the hunchback.

“Are you Mr. Churchill?”

Mr. Churchill made a shrill noise of assent, a sort of “Yeahp!”

“Well, then, Mr. Churchill, could you put me up for the night?”

Again Mr. Churchill made his noise, and added something like

“Sir.”

“Thank you,” said Gees. “I’ll go and get my belongings.”

He returned to the car, took out his suitcase, and faced about to see a woman as tall as himself standing in the inn doorway.

“Coom along o’ me, mister,” she invited or commanded. “Ah’ll show thee tha room, an’ what’ll tha loike to eaat?”

“Oh, anything that’s handy,” he answered, as he followed her to the staircase beyond the doorway leading to the bar.

“Ah’ve a gradely ham on coot,” she announced, “an’ happen tha’d loike eggs wi’t. An’ a pot o’ tea.”

“Splendid,” he assented, and came, at the top of the stairs, to a tidy bedroom with— the thing he noticed first— an illuminated

“God Bless Our Home,” over the head of the bed. Facing it from the opposite wall, he saw next, was an oleograph “Soul’s Awakening”— but there was room under the bed for both, he decided.

“An’ theer’s a staable at the back wheer thee can put thy car,” she told him. “When’ll thee loike tha sooper?”

“Oh, in an hour, say,” he suggested. “I’ll put the car away and drop into the bar for a bit. Mr. Churchill can tell me when the meal is ready, if you let him know. You don’t belong to this part of the country, I gather, Mrs. Churchill?” He risked calling her that.

“Noa. We coom fra nigh Sheffield,” she informed him, and added in a lower voice after a brief pause— “Worse luck,” before leaving him to a wash and brush-up after his journey.

He looked out from the casement window and saw a squat church tower and the slated roof of what he decided was the vicarage or rectory not far from the church. There was a row of aged cottages a little way along the road from the inn, and behind these tokens that this was indeed Denlandham— perhaps a mile distant from the inn— glimpses of a big residence set on a slight rise of ground were visible among trees. That, Gees reflected, would be Denlandham House, Hunter’s residence, for it was unlikely that two such— for this part of the country— imposing mansions would exist in one village.

He found the stable and backed the Rolls-Bentley inside, after driving out a half-dozen hens which, he decided, must roost elsewhere for the night. Then he returned to the bar, leaned against it, and requested a pint of bitter, which Nicholas Churchill provided without even a comment on the weather. Apparently the landlord was not loquacious.

Sipping at the pint glass, Gees watched the dart players in an abstracted, dreamy way, and presently had his reward. For the two elders on the settle, considering him not interested in them, renewed the conversation his entrance had interrupted. They talked with long pauses between sentences, and without emphasis: it was as if the conversation were part of their evening ritual, and not very interesting to them.

“My beans begun to flower,” said one.

“There be a mortal lot o’ fly this year,” the other observed.

“Aye, Tom, yu’re right,” said the first one.

Tom looked into his pint glass, and decided to drink no more yet. One dart-player missed the board altogether, and danged it loudly.

“Squire back yit?” Tom inquired of his fellow.

“Yistiddy,” was the reply.

“I did hear Norris’s gal is hoam.”

“Yistiddy,” said the other again.

Tom shook his head over his glass, gravely. “Still mazed,” he said, and Gees took care to avoid any expression of interest or look at them.

“Aye,” said Tom’s friend, with equal gravity.

“Stoppin’ at Cosham’s till Michaelmas, they say,” Tom observed.

“They’m cousins,” said the other.

“Aye, but Cosham’ll want pay for their keep, till Michaelmas,” Tom averred. “He ’on’t keep three on ’em till then for nothin’.”

“I ’ouldn’t neether,” said Tom’s friend, after thinking it over.

“An’ noobery know what did happen to that gal.”

“Narves. Growed too fast, I reckon, an’ got narves.”

“Then yu don’t believe?” Tom glanced at Gees, and did not end it.

“That?” The other spoke with his first sign of interest in what he or Tom was saying. “Them tales’ll do to frighten children with.”

Tom thought it over, and drank some beer to aid his reflections.

“I lay yu ’ouldn’t go oop to Nightmare alone i’ the dark, Jacob Hood,” he said eventually, very deliberately and with conviction.

“If there was,” Jacob Hood remarked after another long silence, “it ain’t never touched nobody that I heerd. Them as believe about them things do tell yu might shove a hand right through ’em, an’ they can’t feel it. An’ if there is things like them, which I ’on’t believe, they’m no more’n wind an’ shadder, an’ couldn’t so much as hit anyone.”

“But I lay yu ’ouldn’t go oop to Nightmare alone i’ the dark,” Tom repeated, as if he were challenging Jacob to make the trip.

“I ain’t got no call to go,” Jacob said. “Time I done for the day, I bin on my feet aplenty ’ithout traipsin’ up to Nightmare or anywhere else. I gotter soak my corns to-night afore I go to bed.”

“I did hear tell once,” Tom observed, after thinking it over, “as the right bottom end o’ a bindweed root’d cure any corn, an’ I’d got a right bad ’un jest then. So I took a spade down the end o’ my garden, an’ dug at a bindweed. I got the hole a good seven foot deep, an’ the bindweed was still agoin’ down as thick as ever.”

“So yu didn’t try it?” Jacob inquired.

“I don’t believe bindweed got a bottom end to the root,” Tom averred with a spice of disgust at the habits of the plant. “I believe they go right down to the middle o’ the earth, or nearabouts. Seven foot down I dug, an’ was about wore out at it, an’ still that root was agoin’ down as strong as ever. Bill Thacker next door, he wanted to know if I was diggin’ a well when I put my head up outer the hole.”

“An’ what’d yu say?” Jacob asked.

“I said what I’d bin diggin’ for, an’ he larfed like anything. So I filled up the hole, an’ got some green stuff in a little bottle off a pedlar, an’ it eased that corn most wonderful.”

At that point, the landlord consulted a little square wicket in the back of the bar, and learned from it that Gees’ supper was ready. He let his guest through by a side door into a room in which the meal was set, and paused to look over the table and assure himself that all was in order. An incandescent paraffin lamp lighted the room brilliantly, and showed Gees a bookshelf containing works one would scarcely expect to find in such a place as this. Frazer’s GoldenBough, in the condensed one-volume edition, Eliphaz Levi’s two big tomes on magic, and Lytton’s Zanoni, were volumes that Gees observed and recognised.

“Nice little library you have there,” he remarked.

Nicholas emitted his squeaky assent, and moved the mustard pot.

“Do you mind if I look at some of them?” Gees inquired.

“As many as thee like and as long as thee like, sir,” Nicholas shrilled. “They bean’t to my taste. Th’ wife’s first husband, they belonged. I’d burn the dinged lot, if I had my way.”

Which, Gees thought but did not say, indicated the superiority of the grey mare in this establishment. He gave up his scrutiny of the bookshelf, and seated himself at the table.

“I suppose you found trade brisker in the Sheffield district than it is here, Mr. Churchill,” he remarked pleasantly.

“So that dinged wife o’ mine been chatterin’ again, have she?”

Nicholas inquired morosely. “I don’t belong to that part. I married her there, that was all. She belonged that way.”

“Nicholas?” The voice of Mrs. Churchill sounded to them.

“Bar!”

“Aye,” said her husband gloomily, “she’d die afore she’d do a hand’s turn in it. If thee want anything else, sir, there’s the bell.”

“I’d like to ask a few questions about the village and district,” Gees told him. “If you wouldn’t mind, after closing time?”

Churchill shook his head. “I don’t know ’em well, sir,” he said.

“Most o’ these folk are hard to know. But there’s Phil Bird, the sexton, he’s a sort of walkin’ directory for the place, an’ he’ll talk half an hour for a pint about the place an’ the folk in it.”

“Then I think somewhere about two quarts ought to do it,” Gees surmised. “How can I get hold of Phil Bird and start him warbling?”

“It’s nigh on his time for comin’ in,” Churchill answered.

“Well, would you tell him that a gentleman interested in the district would like a four-pint talk with him, and let me see him in here?”

“I don’t think she’d raise no objections to that, sir, if she’s let clear away first when thee’ve had thy supper.”

Gees took the cover off the dish before him and saw its contents.

“This is all I shall need, and then some,” he said. “If you’ll tell the lady that when I ring it will mean clearing the table, and then induce Bird to come in”— he slid a pound note along the tablecloth toward Churchill— “this will have nothing to do with what you charge for putting me up. It’s extra.”

“Thankye, sir.” Nicholas brightened considerably as he took the note. “He’s a queer character, Phil, an’ tha better not believe everything he got to say, but he’ll tell thee a lot that’s true as well.”

“I hope so,” Gees said fervently. “Thank you very much, Mr. Churchill.”