Eventually Crawford pushed his plate away, refilled his glass, and then squinted belligerently at his companions. “I lost the ring,” he said. The sea breeze blew his brown hair back from his forehead, letting the sun catch the gray hairs at his temples in the moments when he wasn’t shaded by the waving branches or the seagulls sailing noisily back and forth over the shore slope.
Appleton blinked at him. “The ring,” he echoed blankly.
“The goddamn wedding ring, the one Jack’s supposed to hand to me tonight—I lost it last night, when we were larking about in the back yard of that inn.”
Jack Boyd shook his head. “Christ, I’m sorry, Mike, that was my fault, going crazy the way I did—I got no business drinking so much. I’ll buy you a new one some how—”
“No, I’m to blame,” interrupted Appleton with a smile which, though rueful, was his first genuine one of the day. “I was soberer than you two, but I got scared of the dark and ran out on you—hell, Michael, I even saw you take the ring out of the pocket of your coat, after you’d draped the coat over the barmaid who was getting chilled, and I knew it was risky, but I was in such a sweat to get back inside that I didn’t want to bring it up. I insist you let me pay for it.”
Crawford stood up and drank off the last of his ale. Even now his face had not lost quite all of the deep-bitten tan acquired in shipboard life, and when he smiled he looked vaguely foreign, like some kind of American or Australian. “No no, I’m the one that lost it—and anyway I’ve already bought a replacement from the landlord back there. It cost me half my travelling money, but I think it’ll do.” He held out a ring on the palm of his hand for them to look at.
Appleton had at last regained his usual manner. “Well, yes,” he said judiciously, “these southern rustics will probably never have seen real gold … or any kind of metal, conceivably. Yes, you ought to be all right with that. What’s the name of the place again? Undercut-by-the-Sea?”
Crawford opened his mouth to remind him that it was called Bexhill-on-Sea, but, now that at least a tenuous sort of cheer had been restored, he didn’t want to seem stuffy. “Something like that,” he said dryly as they wrapped up the leftovers and started back toward where the hired driver waited by the carriage.
The roads were open now, with the sea generally visible to their left as the carriage rocked along past the stone jetties of Brighton and Hove—Boyd made deprecatory remarks about the little boats whose ivory sails stippled the blue water—and even when they turned to follow the Lewes road inland across the South Downs, the green fields stretched broadly away to the hills on either side, and the walls between the fields were low.
The only jarring moment came when they were passing the north face of Windover Hill, and Crawford awoke from an uneasy doze and saw the giant figure of a man carved crudely into the chalk of the distant hillside; Crawford instantly scrambled up into a crouch on the seat and grabbed the door as if he intended to vault out of the carriage and simply run back toward the sea, but Boyd caught him and pushed him back down into the seat.
He stared fearfully at the figure, and his companions shifted around to see what had so upset him.
“For Christ’s sake, Mike,” said Boyd nervously, “it’s only an old Saxon hill-figure, like there’s dozens of throughout these parts. The Wilmington Long Man, that lad’s called. It’s just a—”
Crawford, still not completely awake, interrupted him—“Why is it watching us?” he whispered, staring across the miles of farmland at the pale outline on the hill.
“You were having a dream,” said Appleton a little shrilly. “What do you drink for if it gives you dreams like this?” He dug a flask out of his coat pocket, took a deep swallow, and then leaned forward and ordered the driver to go faster.
Late in the afternoon they passed the first outlying stone-and-thatch cottages of Bexhill-on-Sea; a few miles farther and they were among the shaded lanes of the town, driving past rows of neat seventeenth-century houses, all built of the local honey-colored limestone. Flowers brightened the boundaries of the yards and lanes, and the house at whose gate they stopped was hardly visible from the road because of the hundreds of red and yellow roses that bobbed on vines woven around the posts of the front fence.
As Crawford climbed down from the carriage to the grass, a boy who had been crouched beside the gate leaped to his feet and sprinted across the lawn and into the house. A few moments later the abrupt, mournful wail of a bagpipe startled birds out of the trees overhead, and Appleton, who had followed Crawford out of the carriage and was now trying to pull the wrinkles out of his coat, winced when he heard it.
“Blood sacrifice?” he asked politely. “Planning some sort of druid rite, are you?”
“No,” said Crawford defensively, “uh, it’s going to be a traditional Scottish ceremony, I understand. Wrong end of the island, of course, but …”
“Christ,” put in Boyd anxiously, “they’re not going to make us eat those stuffed sheep stomachs, are they? What do they call it? Havoc?”
“Haggis. No, the food’ll be conventional, but … oh, they’ll have whitened Julia’s eyebrows with antimony, and I sent ahead ajar of henna so the bridesmaids could stain her feet with it after they wash them—”
He was reaching toward the back of the carriage for his portmanteau when he froze.
“Hey, Mike,” said Boyd, leaning down from the carriage to grab Crawford’s shoulder, “are you getting sick? You’re suddenly pale as a low sky.”
Crawford shivered, but then continued his interrupted reach to the boot; with trembling fingers he began unbuckling the leather straps. “N-no, I’m fine,” he said. “I just … remembered something.”
Mention of the washing of feet had brought back a hitherto lost memory of last night—he had washed his feet, and taken off his muddy trousers too, after fleeing back to his room from the statue; and he hadn’t cleaned up because of any particular fastidiousness, it seemed to him now, but out of an irrational fear of Sussex dirt. So he must have gone outside one more time … at least. He searched his memory now for any recollection of it, but could come up with nothing.
Could he have been searching for the ring again? The question frightened him as soon as he posed it to himself, for it implied the conceivability of some other reason. He forced himself to concentrate on unstrapping his luggage.
People were coming out of the house now. Crawford recognized the minister who had had him and Julia to tea at the local rectory a fortnight ago; and the man behind him was Julia’s father; and the lady in the blue velvet stole—whose shuffling, undersea-creature gait was the result, he decided, of a reluctance to look down at the stepping stones for fear of disarranging her tall rose-studded coiffure—must have been Julia’s aunt, though previously Crawford had only seen her in a housedress, with her hair pulled up in a tight bun.
And the scowling girl hanging behind, he thought warily, must be Julia’s twin sister Josephine. She’s got Julia’s coloring, I suppose, but she’s far too thin—and why does she hunch her shoulders so? Maybe this is the defensive “mechanical” pose Julia told me she assumes in stressful situations—if so it’s even less attractive, and far less funny, than Julia described it.