Miss Silver watched him without speaking for a time. At last she said,
‘Well, Captain Cunningham? Do you wish me to go on? It is for you to say.’
Henry lifted his head and looked at her. He never knew quite how he came to a decision, or what impelled this decision. He said,
‘I want you to go on.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Marion Grey went back to work after five days of Hilary’s nursing. It was about this time that Jacques Dupré wrote to his sister in Provence:
I saw Marion in the street today. It breaks one’s heart – she looks like a shadow carved in stone…
But then Jacques was a poet, and he had loved her vainly for years – one of those endless, hopeless loves.
Hilary urged a longer rest, but was silent when Marion said,
‘Don’t stop me, Hilary. If I stop I shall die. And if I die, Geoff won’t have anyone.’
It was this speech more than anything else which took Hilary down to Ledlington again just a week after her last fruitless visit. She wasn’t going to be caught in the dark this time, se she took the 9.30, and found her way out of the station yard and into Market Street with a good fat slice of the morning still before her, to say nothing of the afternoon – only she hoped she would have found Mrs. Mercer long before it came to that. She had duly pawned Aunt Arabella’s ring, and was comfortably conscious of being a capitalist with four pounds ten and sixpence in her purse. She had brought it all with her, because you never know, and bicycle shops have a way of asking for a deposit before they will hire a machine to a stranger. Even a deposit does not always incline them to what they regard as a chancy transaction.
Hilary tried three bicycle shops before she encountered a very pleasant and impressionable young man who not only produced a bicycle but gave her floods of information about all the cottages between Ledlington and Ledstow. He had a most surprising crop of fair hair which stood up a sheer four inches from his freckled forehead, and he was one of the most friendly creatures Hilary had ever met. He hadn’t heard of any strangers taking any cottages -‘But then you never know, miss – I’ll just pump that back tyre up a bit. It might be Mr. Greenhow’s cottage, best part of a mile and a half along the Ledstow road and turn to the left down the the lane – there isn’t more than one thereabouts. I did hear he’d gone to stay with his married daughter in London, but Fred Barker told me he’d come back again. Or it might be the new house Mr. Carter was building for his daughter, only she never got married at all and it was up to be let. I don’t know that you’d hardly call it a cottage, but you might try there. And there’s the Miss Soameses. They always let in the summer, but you wouldn’t hardly call it summer now, and they’re a good half-mile off the main road.’
‘I shouldn’t think that would be it.’
The young man stopped pumping and stood up.
‘There’s Humpy Dick’s place,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Nasty old tumble-down shack though. I shouldn’t think anyone ’ud take it, though you never can tell – can you?’
It didn’t sound attractive, but Hilary wasn’t looking for attractions. A broken-down woman might very well be hidden away in a broken-down shack.
She said, ‘How do I get to it?’ and was rewarded with another flood of information.
‘Third bridge you come to there’s a lane going off to the right – well, ’tisn’t hardly a lane, but you might call it one. Well, you don’t take any notice of that, you go straight on, and then there’s a bit of a wood, and then there’s a pond, but you don’t go as far as the pond. There’s a footpath all along by the side of the wood, and you keep right on till you come to Humpy Dick’s. Only I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone there, because it’s stood empty ever since Humpy fell over the quarry in the dark last January and his brother fetched him away. I did hear a London gentleman had bought it – some kind of an artist – but he wouldn’t hardly move in this time of year, I shouldn’t think. Anyhow, it was empty a fortnight ago, because I was up that way myself and seen it.’ He went on telling her about cottages, until she received a comforting impression that the Ledstow road had fallen a prey to ribbon building, and that cottages fairly jostled one another over the whole seven miles.
She thanked the young man, left a deposit of two pounds, and tore herself away. She would much rather have continued to listen to his friendly discourse than go the round of the house-agents and then start looking for Mrs. Mercer.
The house-agents were a complete wash-out. They were neither chatty nor helpful. The name, of Mercer evoked no response. They knew nothing of any cottage being taken. The Miss Soames never left in winter. Mr. Greenhow’s cottage had not been in their hands. Mr. Carter was going to live in his new house himself. The late Mr. Humphrey Richard’s cottage had been sold about a month ago. They were not at liberty to give any information about the purchaser. Thus three agents with admirable discretion. But at the fourth a very young clerk told Hilary that the place had been bought for a song by a Mr. Williams, a gentleman from London, who wanted it for a weekend cottage in summer.
By this time Hilary was hungry, and today she wasn’t lunching on a bun and a glass of milk. You didn’t pawn Aunt Arabella’s ruby ring every day of the week, and when you did you didn’t lunch on buns -you splashed, and had a two-course lunch, and cream in your coffee.
It was about half past one when she rode out of Ledlington past rows of little new houses, some finished and lived in, some only half-grown, and some just marked out, mere sketches on the ground. Hilary rode past them on the hired bicycle, bumping a little where the road had been cut up, and thinking that the shock-headed young man had been too zealous with his pumping. However, hired bicycles had a tendency to leak, so perhaps it was all for the best.
Once clear of the houses, she had an expanse of perfectly flat green fields on either side under the lowering grey arch of the sky. The morning had been fine, and the weather forecast one of those which thoughtfully provides for every contingency. Hilary, having picked out the pleasant words ‘bright intervals’, hadn’t really bothered about the rest of it, but as she looked at that low grey sky, lost fragments emerged uneasily from the corners of her mind. There was something about ‘colder’, and it was certainly turning colder. That didn’t matter, but there was also a piece about ‘rapid deterioration later’, and she had a gloomy feeling that the word fog came into it somewhere. She ought to have read it more carefully, but the honest truth was that she hadn’t wanted to. She had wanted to get on with this business and get it over, and really, in November, if you allowed yourself to be put off by what the weather forecast said, you might just as well throw in your hand and hibernate. All the same she did hope there wasn’t going to be a fog.
The fog came on at about four o’clock. Hilary had been to fifteen cottages and six small houses. They all said that they didn’t let, though some of them varied the answer by admitting that they wouldn’t mind taking in a quiet lady or gentleman in the summer. One of them went so far as to say that she was used to actresses and didn’t mind their ways. They all seemed to regard Hilary as desirous of forcing herself upon them at an unsuitable time of year when people expected to be left to themselves after the labours of the holiday season. She must have overshot the footpath to Humpy Dick’s cottage, because though there were several patches of woodland she never identified the young man’s pond. This was not very surprising, as he had quite forgotten to tell her that it had dried out in the drought of 1933 and had never had any water in it since. She arrived at Ledstow feeling that she never wanted to hear of a cottage again.