when Mr Carswall, overhearing their excited conversation on the subject, told them that according to the estate records the grotto had been constructed on Mr Cranmere's orders not fifteen years before.
During this period Sir George Ruispidge and his brother were frequent visitors. Usually, but not always, they rode or drove over together. They came on the slightest pretext – to inquire yet again after Edgar's ankle; to return a borrowed volume; to bring a newspaper newly arrived from London. The brothers' manner towards me did not encourage undue familiarity.
On one occasion they came down to the lake. Sir George stayed on the bank but Captain Ruispidge requested the loan of my skates and soon showed himself an able performer on the ice. He took my place beside the ladies, and I fancied he exerted himself to be agreeable, more so than mere courtesy required.
All this time, I continued to turn over in my mind the events of the last few weeks that might suggest that Henry Frant was still alive. The intelligence from Mrs Lee concerning a former understanding between him and Mrs Johnson had naturally aroused my suspicions. Mrs Johnson denied visiting London recently, but there was reason to believe that she might have done so on at least one occasion. Finally, I considered the man I had glimpsed at the window of Grange Cottage.
Puzzling and even suspicious as these circumstances were, could I deduce from them that Mrs Johnson was sheltering her former lover? The more I subjected the possibility to rational analysis, the less plausible it seemed. In the first place, a youthful attachment, however ardent, was no guarantee of a present one, as my own experience showed. In the second place, if Henry Frant were still alive, surely he would avoid Monkshill-park, where so many people who knew him intimately had gathered?
If Frant had contrived his own murder, it must have been with the intention of creating a new life for himself somewhere, under a new name. In order to do that with any security, it would be necessary for him to flee abroad. He was a man who had lived too much in the world to be safe from discovery anywhere in his native country.
One morning, when the boys were examining the ruins of the monks' grange, my eyes wandered to Mrs Johnson's cottage. The boys were absorbed in a game of make-believe so I sauntered across to the palings and through the gate. The house and garden seemed even more forlorn and unloved than on my last visit. The shutters were across the ground-floor windows. No smoke came from the chimneys. Mrs Johnson was still at Clearland- court, and even her servant had gone.
I walked round the house. At the back was a small stable and a row of outhouses. As I walked back through the yard, I noticed a footprint frozen in the patch of mud by the pump. Judging by the size, it was a man's.
I returned to the park. I knew there were a dozen perfectly innocent explanations for that footprint. Yet the sight of it was enough to feed that state of uncertainty that had become so uncomfortably familiar to me.
When I reached the ruins, the boys were no longer there. I walked up the slope, shouting for them. I had nearly reached the lake, approaching it from the east, when I heard an answering call from the edge of the wood between the water and Flaxern Parva. Mindful of the mantraps, I ran and slid across the ice to the west bank of the lake. I found the boys not among the trees but in a defile that cut into the flank of the ridge perhaps fifty yards from the lake.
The defile's mouth was angled away from the lake and faced north towards the dark mass of the woods. It was connected by a path to the track running round the shores of the lake. Both the path and the defile's entrance were partly obscured by a heap of stones, loose earth and several fallen trees, one of them a sweet chestnut of considerable size. The boys were digging like a pair of badgers into the pile of spoil around the uprooted trees. My anger evaporated.
'I do not think you will find the treasure there,' I observed mildly.
'Why not, sir?' Edgar said. 'One could hide anything here.'
'It is a most capital spot,' Charlie put in loyally.
'That may be so. But I don't think the monks would have done. The chestnut can't have been lying there for more than a month or two. Look, it still has some of its leaves.'
Edgar paused in his labours. He was as filthy as a gypsy. 'There's also that doorway, sir.' He pointed to a stone archway that closed off the far end of the defile. 'Does it not look older than the Crusades?'
'It most probably leads to an ice-house,' I said.
'Perhaps it does now,' he said. 'But who is to say what was there before?'
I scrambled over the debris towards it, with the boys frisking after me. The door within the archway was in two leaves, constructed of stout oak and strengthened with iron. Charlie took the handle and rattled it. The door hardly moved in its frame.
'Perhaps there's another entrance,' Charlie suggested.
'We'll go round the hill until we find it,' Edgar said. 'I'll race you.'
The boys cantered out of the defile and were soon out of my sight. I followed more slowly. As I rounded the spur of the ridge that concealed the mouth of the defile from the lake, I saw on the path below a man and a woman, arm in arm, walking slowly with their heads close together in the direction of the shell grotto and the obelisk. With a lurch of unhappiness, I recognised them as Captain Jack Ruispidge and Sophia Frant.
47
On Monday afternoon, Mr Noak arrived from Cheltenham in a hired chaise. Carswall made much of him – in truth, I believe he was becoming bored in the country and welcomed the stimulus of company; he was not a man who took easily to life in a retired situation.
With Mr Noak came Salutation Harmwell; and on the same day Mrs Kerridge appeared in a new gown. Perhaps, Miss Carswall murmured to me, the two circumstances were not entirely unconnected.
The following morning, Charlie came to me after breakfast, begging that the start of our morning lessons might be deferred.
'Mrs Kerridge has an errand at the ice-house, sir, and says Edgar and I may come as well. And you too, if you wish. I am sure the Romans and the Greeks had ice-houses, so it would be most instructive. May we, sir? It would not take above twenty minutes.'
I knew the expedition would take at least forty minutes, perhaps an hour, but the morning was fine and the prospect of a walk was tempting. So the three of us met Mrs Kerridge in the side hall. We found Harmwell in attendance, carrying the basket and a lantern.
'Mr Harmwell is most interested in the construction of icehouses and wishes to inspect ours,' Mrs Kerridge explained. 'And if he comes it will save me having to find a gardener. Besides, they speak so strangely in these parts I can scarce understand a word they say.'
Harmwell's presence solved a minor mystery: why Mrs Kerridge, a lady's maid who was fully aware of the dignity of her position, had volunteered to run an errand for the cook. The boys and I took the lead, while the other two followed more slowly, deep in conversation. We turned left at the obelisk and took the path leading to the western side of the lake. After the shell grotto we climbed the gentle slope to the defile in which the ice-house lay. The boys ran ahead and rattled the handle of the door.
'We must frighten the ghosts!' Edgar cried, and Charlie echoed him: 'Frighten the ghosts!'
Mrs Kerridge drew out a large key and inserted it in the door. Mr Harmwell crouched to light the lantern. The two leaves of the door opened outwards on squealing hinges. The boys tried to plunge into the darkness beyond like terriers down a rabbit hole. Mrs Kerridge put out an arm to bar them.
'Please, dear Mrs Kerridge, let us go first,' Charlie said. 'Edgar and I have a most particular reason for wanting it.'
'You will wait and do as you're bid,' I said. 'Or else you will go straight back to your lessons.'
Mrs Kerridge sniffed the air. 'It stinks like a charnel house.'
'It is indeed very bad,' Harmwell agreed. 'Though few ice-houses smell sweet at this time of year.'
'They say the drain is blocked.'
'So the melt-water cannot escape?' He glanced over his shoulder at the lie of the land. 'It drains down into the lake, I suppose, so the outlet may be frozen.'
'No, sir, they believe that the drain itself is blocked higher up.'
'Can they not clean it out?'
