Audley waited for elaboration, but none came. With a man like this, a man of few words, every word had to work an eight-hour day.
'He came here when he was young?'
'Aye.'
'And not since—up until now?'
'Aye.' Pause. 'But he's not changed, though.'
dummy5
That confirmed the record. Charlie hadn't really got on with either his cousin or his uncle, whose political and social persuasions were very different from his. He was the
'What was he like—as a boy?'
Burton took another dozen paces and then halted. Half turning he waited for Audley to come alongside him. They stared at one another in silence.
'What you after, mister?' The question was as direct as the stare.
'Information.'
'To cause trouble?'
No lies, thought Audley. Burton would smell a lie as quickly as his bitch smelt a rabbit.
'No.'
Burton stiffened. 'No?'
'The trouble has already been caused. And I didn't cause it.
What I cause isn't called trouble.'
There was a rustle of leaves and the bitch appeared, summoned by the tension between them. She came to heel again precisely as she had done at their first meeting, and Burton reached down in exactly the same way to touch her head. It was as though there was a current passing between dummy5
them.
Audley reached forward, offering his right hand to the bitch again.
Lick or bite?
He felt the warm, wet tongue on his fingers.
'What was he like when he was a boy?' he repeated the question.
Burton nodded slowly. 'Same as now. A chancer.'
A chancer?
What was a chancer? Something more —or less—than an opportunist. A taker of risks, a twister—
'He never cared for nobody born, nor nothing made, nor nothing growed.' Burton paused. 'He never did, and he never will. Not till he's six foot under.'
The bitch shivered at the pronouncement of this anathema and Burton swung back on to the path, releasing her and striding away. All the words he had to give on Charlie Ratcliffe had been said.
The trees ended abruptly on the ruin of a corner bastion and the rampart curved away along the crest of the ridge above open country. Audley realised that they had been following the contour line all the way round the spur of land on which the house had been built—having seen it he could no longer think of it as a castle, despite its name. And here, on the dummy5
northern and more open side—this must be the Reverend Musgrave's 'pleasant open valley'—only the chimneys were visible.
And sure enough, there across the valley on the lower ridge above the Harwell beyond it, were the earth walls of the old castle, four or five hundred yards away. Obviously it had been built above the original village which the Black Death had wiped out; and built long before the days of gunpowder and cannon which made it a death-trap under any guns planted on this higher ridge. No wonder the Cavaliers had found this a hard Roundhead nut to crack! For, with the lie of the land to his advantage, old Sir Edmund had raised his glacis and rampart simply by moving the earth from the great ditch between them, leaving the ridge to do the rest of the work of shielding his manor.
Burton had stopped and was pointing along the rampart.
Audley took the guide-book from his pocket and opened the map. The walled kitchen garden was sited half way along the southern defence line, tucked behind 'The Great Bastion'.
Within it, right next to the bastion itself, was a small cross marked 'The Memorial' . . . well, here at least the Double R
Society wouldn't have to expend any of its funds on a pious monument to the real thing. He turned back to the text—
'... a second and final disaster. For, having given shelter to a party of Roundheads led by his kinsman Colonel Nathaniel Parrott, a trusted dummy5
lieutenant of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Edmund was more fiercely assaulted by the Royalists than ever before. By this time, however, he was reduced to casting his own ammunition with lead from the castle roof and making his own gunpowder with materials prudently laid in store; and it was while attending to the latter that he was killed in the explosion of a magazine behind the north wall.'
Oh, careless Sir Edmund! Once might be called bad luck, but twice—well, that lesson ought to have been better
