“Yes,” he said, very firmly. “He’s a sensible kid, I don’t believe he’d let anyone creep up on him, and I don’t believe he’d do anything daft himself.” Which from eighteen to fifteen, when Tamsin came to think of it, was pretty generous, but he sounded as if he really meant it. “He’ll be found intact,” said Dominic strenuously, “and with any luck, we shall be the ones to find him. So hang on, and let’s have a look round the next corner.”
They had looked round a good many by then, with their hearts in their mouths at every turning, but so far there’d been no slight, tumbled body under the cliffs, and nothing washing about in the edge of the retreating waves but casual weed.
“Yes,” she said docilely. And after a moment, very quietly at his shoulder: “You’re a nice boy, Dominic Felse, I like you.”
“Good! I like you, too, I like you a lot. There, you see, nothing!” He couldn’t help reflecting, as soon as it was out, that nothing was a pretty poor return for all their hunting, and a pretty lame reassurance for Paddy’s mother. But it was all they had, and it was better than the wrong thing, at any rate.
The sea sighed away from them, down the more steeply tilted shingle. They stood close under the overhang of the cliff, on a washed and empty shore, and right above their heads must be the necklace of the lofty path that circled the Dragon’s Head, and the scattered hollows of gorse where Simon had found the bicycle. The waters had left the arched entrance of the cave now, it stood tamed and dark above a faint glimmer of salt puddles penned among the boulders.
They halted for only a second, contemplating it together.
“He wouldn’t,” said Tamsin, “would he?”
“Not without a reason, but he may have had a reason, how do we know?”
“But he knows the tides, he wouldn’t let himself get caught.”
“Something may have happened that didn’t leave him any choice. Anyhow, we’re not leaving anything out.”
“Careful, then,” she cautioned, drawing him to the right, to the landward side of the thin channel of water that lay prisoned among the pebbles in the cavern’s mouth. “This side’s the smoothest going. And look out, there are holes.”
Dominic fell into one at that moment, cold salt water gripped him to the knees, and the chilling shock surprised a muted yell out of him. Deep in the blackness beyond the beam of the torch, echo took the shout and volleyed it back to him redoubled.
“Dom!” Tamsin caught at his arm. “Did you hear that?”
Floundering out of the crevices on slippery oblique rock, he supposed that she was as startled by the force and complexity of the echo as he had been, and merely went on scrambling noisily up to safer ground. “Hear it? I started it. It wasn’t that good an imitation—”
“No—listen!” She shook him impatiently, and he froze into obedient silence, straining his ears.
Nothing at first, not a sound; then they were aware of the ceaseless, soft, universal sound of the dripping of sea water from every jutting point of the stone ceiling above them and the contorted walls around, and the soft, busy flowing of a dozen rivulets draining down between the pebbles into the central channel behind them. The place was full of the sounds of water, but empty of the sounds of men.
“But it wasn’t all echo. I’m sure!”
Almost fearfully, Dominic called upward into the invisible spaces of the cave: “Paddy?”
The call came eddying back to him from a dozen projections he could not see, repeated in a dozen hopeful, fearful inflections, ricocheting away into silence. Then a last faint and distant sound, out of turn, out of key, started a weak reverberation away on their right.
“There! Hear that? There is someone!”
But Dominic was already scrambling wildly up the rattling scree of sand and gravel and shell, the pencil of wavering light wincing away from rocks and water-drips before him, clawing his way up towards the drier reaches of the cave. He stretched out a hand to her and dragged her after him. Stumbling, slipping, panting, they climbed inland; and somewhere ahead of them, distant and faint but drawing nearer, unmistakable sounds of someone else’s stumbling, slipping, panting progress came down to meet them.
Into the beam of the torch blundered Paddy Rossall, wiping his dirty face hastily with an even dirtier hand; pallid, wet, and shivering with cold, but alive, intact and alone.
“You don’t mind,” said Phil, turning in at the drive of Treverra Place, “if we call in here? I don’t know that it will do any good, but I just thought, while we’re so near—She might remember something he said, anything that will give us the faintest clue. I know we’ve asked the same questions already, but it’s worth one more try. Oh, George, my poor little boy! I wish I hadn’t said no to him. I wish I’d let him go with Tim and Simon—at least he’d have been safe with them.”
It was the most she had said in all the hours they had hunted together. As long as there’d been more places to search, more possible people to contact, Phil had been a silent, ferocious force of nature sweeping all before her. Only now, when they had almost exhausted the possibilities, was the edge of desperation audible in her voice, and the shadow of breakdown a perceptible cloud over her face.
Miss Rachel was sitting over the fire in her sitting-room, huddled like a broody bird, with her solitary dinner untouched on a little table beside her. She stiffened her old spine and snapped the imperious lights on again in her eyes when Phil stalked in with George at her elbow, but she knew her back was against the wall.
“Aunt Rachel, didn’t he say anything about where he was going? There must have been something. You did see him yourself, didn’t you? Well, what did he say? I know we’re snatching at crumbs. Damn it, crumbs is all we’ve got.”
“Yes, I talked to him, certainly.” Miss Rachel looked smaller than usual, but fiercer. Attack is the best defence. “What passed between Paddy and me can’t possibly have anything to do with any danger to him. But it may—I say may—account for his naughtiness in staying away like this. If you ask me, that’s all it is, and you are just playing into his hands. I was justified in being cross with him. He was exceedingly impertinent and very disobedient, and it was high time someone took steps to bring him to a more chastened frame of mind.”
Quivering and aghast, Phil demanded: “But what—for God’s sake, Aunt Rachel, what did you do to him?”
She couldn’t stall any longer, it would only make it worse when it did come out. And besides, she was lonely and frightened and she wanted Paddy back, impertinent or not, disobedient or not, she just wanted him. So somebody had to find him for her.
“It’s too much to hope that you’ll approve, of course, but I was concerned only for you and Tim, and for the child’s own well-being. I told him what he should have been told as soon as he was old enough to understand—that he has to thank you and Tim for taking him in and giving him a good home and the love of good parents, when his own father wanted to get rid of him. I told him he was adopted, and that he should consider how much he owed to you, and try to behave better to you in future, not take everything for granted as he does. That’s what I told him, and you’ll have reason to thank me for it yet”
Stricken, Phil stood clinging to the back of a chair as to the rocking remnants of her world. “Aunt Rachel! You couldn’t! You couldn’t be so cruel!”
“Cruel, nonsense! It was high time he was told, you’d have had to do it in the end. I don’t believe it’s done him one jot of harm, either, so—”