his cousin’s small-holding in the Teme valley, in case Annet had turned up there. He’d come home only on Monday night. Nobody had checked his statements, why should they? Not even his wife. Nobody knew that he wasn’t really Annet’s father, nobody except Mrs Beck and Tom Kenyon.
Was it too far-fetched? It would be an appalling tragedy, but it could happen. There was an even worse thought peering at him relentlessly from the back of his mind: that Beck had told her the truth himself, because he could not feel towards her as his daughter, knowing she was not, and his sick conscience would not let him rest until he had made confession. He was a stickler for truth and duty in his ineffective way, he might even have meant it for the best.
And she – how could you ever be sure about Annet? She might have reacted with warmth and indignation and tenderness, from which the slippery path to love is not so far. And granted that as a possibility, into what a desperate and piteous situation they had trapped each other. Flight, robbery, murder might well come to look like legitimate ways out of it, if no other offered.
He wished now that he had told George, he even made strenuous resolutions to tell him as soon as he came; but in his heart he knew that he never would. He could not repeat what he had heard from an overwrought and drunken man; he had no right to break that lamentable confidence.
As often as he reached the end of this reappraisal, and turned to look at the whole idea with a more critical eye, he was convinced that he was mad, that it was impossible, that he had a warped mind; but as soon as he began a feverish examination of the details, in the hope of throwing it out altogether, he knew that it could happen, that such things had happened, that there was no immunity from the abnormal even in a world of careful normality, and no place to hide from love if it came for you. Look at his own case! Had he ever wanted to love her? Does anybody ever want to walk into the fire?
Half past six by his watch. The small, luminous pinpoints of the figures were the only brightness in this calm, immemorial, secret dark. He stirred, finding his limbs cramped by the gathering chill, and slid down from his perch into the grass. George would surely be here soon. And almost inevitably the two boys, though told to go home after their tea, would use their own obstinate judgement, and come back to share what was left of his vigil. More than likely even Jane, having packed her coach-load off to Comerbourne in charge of a couple of prefects, would return to see how he had fared. It couldn’t be long now.
He would be sorry, almost, to have his solitude shared by the living. For all the innumerable generations of the dead, dwindling far into time past, before the Romans came mining for lead, before the Iron Age fort on Cleave was dug, before the chipped flints of Middlehope were made, he had no need of speech in order to communicate, no need to exert himself in explanations or response. He was at one with them without effort of any kind, without rites, without ritual.
Regina was surely right. There were not, there never had been, any witches on the Hallowmount. They would have been inappropriate, derisory, redundant, alien, false. Incantations were for outsiders.
He thought, I’m going queer from being alone, getting fanciful; there’s a twentieth century somewhere around, and we’re in trouble in the middle of it, and no way out that I can see.
And it was then that the small sound that had been hammering for some minutes at his senses, unnoticed, achieved actual presence, and made itself known to him.
Time came back with it, and stress, and the inescapable memory of Annet, mute in the heart of her pathetic dream of happiness, with wreckage all round her. He moved out of the enclosing ring of the rocks, to hear more clearly.
Busy, regular, persistent, the hum of an engine climbing steadily, not on the Fairford side of the hill, but down there in the highest reaches of Middlehope. From the western flanks of the Hallowmount the sound would be cut off completely; here on the crest he heard it plainly. And when he moved out to the edge of the slope, looking down over the shallow bowl of the valley head, he saw the small glow-worm of a headlight weaving its way up by the sheep-path from Abbot’s Bale. Light and sound drew steadily nearer, crossing the boggy patches with assurance, mounting into the dry pasture where the path vanished like a smoke-trail on a pale sky. Close beneath the Altar, in the throat of Middlehope, the motor-cycle halted, and in a moment the engine stopped.
Like a cloud of birds disturbed, the silence wheeled, circled, and settled again. The tiny light went out. A small, dark figure detached itself from its mount, and began to climb the slope.
CHAPTER X
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He drew back hurriedly into the circle of rocks about the Altar, the beat of his heart suddenly violent against his ribs, the tatters of time past shuddering away from him. The grating of stones under his own feet sounded like an avalanche to him. He felt with stretched toes for the silent patches of short turf, groped his way round bony elbows of rock into a deep niche of darkness, braced his feet firmly in grass, and took hold on the harsh faces of spar with cautious fingers. With his head drawn back into cover, his cheek against the stone, he could watch the faint, lambent spaces of sky between the outcrops, overhanging the descent into Middlehope. If he failed to see where the intruder emerged, he would surely hear him come.
A motor-bike, and a solitary rider climbing purposefully towards this unlikely place in the night! They had not been so far out in their guesses, they had not wasted their day. And here was he alone, not empowered or equipped to do more than observe and identify. Above all identify. That he must do, at whatever cost. Because this could not be coincidence, it could not be innocent. The man climbing the hill was Jacob Worrell’s murderer.
How many minutes to mount from the last faint smear of the path above the brook? The head of the valley was shallow and bare, it could not take long. He waited with breath held, but the thudding of blood in his own ears deafened him to more distant sounds, or else there was no rising current of air to lift to this place sounds from too close below. Minutes dripped by like the slow drops of sweat trickling between his shoulder-blades, and still nothing. He began to think the newcomer must have swung away from the Altar to traverse towards the trees.
Then he caught the sudden rattle of a stone rolling under a foot, and the grunt of a sharply-drawn breath, both startlingly close. He shrank and froze in his cranny, cheek turned painfully against the rock, eyes on the paler levels where sky and earth met.
A head and shoulders, stooped into the effort of climbing, and all but shapeless in consequence, heaved from the dead black of the earth and hunched into the dim blue-black of sky. In lunging strides the shadow lengthened, came over the rim panting with exertion, and straightened and stretched with a sigh of relief as it stepped on to level ground. Against the sky he was a long silhouette, against the rocks, as he came forward, he was shapeless
