The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (7 page)

“And why should Caesar be a tyrant, then?

Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf!”

He swung round on Ian. “Did I do wrong to shut them off my land?”

“
Well
—” Ian was temporizing when there came an outburst of explosions from Lostmid, hidden in the valley, and a dozen rockets soared into the sky beyond the windows.

“That means someone’s taken the Furry Ball,” said Hudson, coming in with the decanter of sherry. “Been long enough about it, seemingly.”

Sir Murdoch
’s expression changed completely. One stride took him to the French window. He opened it and went streaking across the park. Ian bolted after him.

“
Stop! Sir Murdoch, stop!
”

Sir Murdoch turned an almost unrecognizable face and hissed, “‘Wake not a sleeping wolf!’” He kept on his way, with Ian stubbornly in pursuit. They came out by the crossroads and, looking down to Lostmid, saw that it was a circus of wandering lights, clustering, darting this way and that.

“They’
ve lost him,
” Ian muttered. “No, there he goes!”

One of the lights broke off at a tangent and moved away down the valley, then turned and came straight for them diagonally across the hillside.

“I’ll have to go and warn him off,” Ian thought. “Can’t let him run straight into trouble.” He ran downhill towards the approaching light. Sir Murdoch stole back into the shade of the spinney. Nothing of him was visible but two golden, glowing eye points.

It was at this moment that Clarissa, having established her red-herring diversion by sending a boy with a torch across the hillside, ran swiftly and silently up the steep road towards the signpost. She wore trousers and a dark sweater and was clutching the Furry Ball in her hand.

Sir Murdoch heard the pit-pat of approaching footsteps, waited for his moment, and sprang.

It was the thick fisherman’s-knit jersey with its roll collar that saved her. They rolled over and over, girl and wolf entangled, and then she caught him a blow on the jaw with the heavy applewood ball, dropped it, scrambled free, and was away. She did not dare look back. She had a remarkable turn of speed, but the wolf was overtaking her. She hurled herself into the telephone box and let the door clang to behind her.

The wolf arrived a second later; she heard the impact as the grey, sinewy body struck the door, saw the gleam of teeth through the glass. Methodically, though with shaking hands, she turned to dial.

Meanwhile Ian had met the red-herring boy just as his triumphant pursuers caught up with him.

“You mustn’t go that way,” Ian gasped. “
Sir Murdoch
’s waiting up there and he’s out for blood.”

“Give over that thurr ball,” yelled the Lostmidians.

“’Tisn’t on me,” the boy yelled back, regardless of the fact that he was being pulled limb from limb. “Caught ye properly, me fine fules. ’Tis Miss Clarissa’s got it, and she’m gone backaway.”

“
What?
”

Ian waited for no more. He left them to their battle, in which some Polgrue reinforcements were now joining, and bounded back up the murderous ascent to where he had left Sir Murdoch.

The scene at the telephone box was brilliantly lit by the overhead light. Clarissa had finished her call and was watching with detached interest as the infuriated wolf threw himself repeatedly against the door.

It is not easy to address your employer in such circumstances.

Ian chose a low, controlled, but vibrant tone.

“Down, Sir Murdoch,” he said. “Down, sir! Heel!”

Sir Murdoch turned on him a look of golden, thunderous wrath. He was really a fine spectacle, with his eyes flashing, and great ruff raised in rage. He must have weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. Ian thought he might be a timber wolf, but was not certain. He pulled the ampoule from his pocket, charged the syringe, and made a cautious approach. Instantly Sir Murdoch flew at him. With a feint like a bullfighter’s, Ian dodged round the call box.

“Ol
é
,” Clarissa shouted approvingly, opening the door a crack. Sir Murdoch instantly turned and battered it again.

“‘Avaunt, thou damn
é
d
door-keeper!’
” shouted Ian. The result was electrifying. The wolf dropped to the ground as if stunned. Ian seized advantage of the moment to give him his injection, and immediately the wolf shape vanished, dropping off Sir Murdoch like a label off a wet bottle. He gasped, shivered, and shut his eyes.

“Where am I?” he said presently, opening them again. Ian took his arm, gently led him away from the door, and made him sit on a grassy bank.

“You’ll feel better in a minute or two, sir,” he said, and, since Shakespeare seemed so efficacious, added, “‘The cure whereof, my lord,/’Tis time must do.’” Sir Murdoch weakly nodded.

Clarissa came out of her refuge. “Are you all right now, Sir Murdoch?” she asked kindly. “Shall I sing you a song?”

“All right, thank you, my dear,” he murmured. “What are you doing here?” And he added to himself, “I really must not fly into these rages. I feel quite dizzy.”

Ian stepped aside and picked up something that glinted on the ground.

“What’s that?” asked Sir Murdoch with awakening interest. “It reminds me— May I see it?”

“Oh, it’
s my medallion,
” said Clarissa at the same moment. “It must have come off. . . .” Her voice trailed away. They both watched Sir Murdoch. Deep, fearful shudders were running through him.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, turning his cavernous eyes on Clarissa. His fingers were rigid, clenched on the tiny silver St. Francis.

“It was my mother’s,” she said faintly. For the first time she seemed frightened.

“Was her name Louisa?” She nodded. “Then, your father—?”

“Here comes my father now,” said Clarissa with relief. The gnarled figure of the doctor was approaching them through the spinney. Sir Murdoch turned on him like a javelin.

“‘O thou foul thief!’” he hissed. “
My lost Louisa!
‘Stol’n from me and corrupted/By spells and medicines.’”

“
Oh, come, come, come,
” said the doctor equably, never slowing his approach, though he kept a wary eye on Sir Murdoch. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. She came to me.
I
was quite looking forward to bachelorhood.”

“‘For the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor,’” murmured Ian calmingly.

“And I’ll tell ye this, Sir Murdoch,” Dr. Defoe went on, tucking his arm through that of Sir Murdoch like an old friend, “you were well rid of her.” He started strolling at a gentle but purposeful pace back towards the Hall, and the baronet went with him doubtfully.

“Why is that?” Already Sir Murdoch sounded half convinced, quiescent.

“Firstly, my dear sir, Temper. Out of this world! Secondly, Macaroni Cheese. Every night until one begged for mercy. Thirdly, Unpunctuality. Fourthly, long, horrifying Dreams, which she insisted on telling at breakfast . . .”

Pursuing this soothing, therapeutic vein, the doctor’s voice moved farther away, and the two men were lost in the shadows.

“So that’s all right,” said Clarissa on a deep breath of relief. “Why, Ian!”

Pent-up agitation was too much for him. He had grabbed her in his arms like a drowning man. “I was sick with fright for you,” he muttered, into her hair, her ear, the back of her neck. “I was afraid—oh well, never mind.”

“
Never mind,
” she agreed. “Are we going to get married?”

“Of course.”

“I ought to find my Furry Ball,” she said presently. “They seem to be having a pitched battle down below; there’s a good chance of getting it over the boundary while everyone’s busy.”

“
But Sir Murdoch
—”

“Father will look after him.”

She moved a few steps away and soon found the ball. “Come on; through the wood is quickest. We have to put it on the Polgrue churchyard wall.”

No one accosted them as they ran through the wood. Fireworks and shouting in the valley suggested that Lostmid and Polgrue had sunk their differences in happy saturnalia.

“Full surgery tomorrow,” remarked Clarissa, tucking the Furry Ball into its niche. “Won’t someone be surprised to see this.”

When Ian and Clarissa strolled up to the terrace, they found Sir Murdoch and the doctor amiably drinking port. Sir Murdoch looked like a man who had had a festering grief removed from his mind.

“
Well,
” the doctor said cheerfully, “we’ve cleared up some misunderstandings.”

But Sir Murdoch had stood up and gone to meet Clarissa.

“‘
As I am a man/,
’” he said gravely, “‘I do think this lady/To be my child.’”

The two pairs of golden eyes met and acknowledged each other.

“That’ll be the end of his little trouble, I shouldn’
t wonder,
” murmured the doctor. “Specially if she’ll live at the Hall and keep an eye on him.”

“But she’s going to marry me.”

“All the better, my dear boy. All the better. And glad I shall be to get rid of her, bless her heart.”

Ian looked doubtfully across the terrace at his future father-in-law, but he recalled that wolves are among the most devoted fathers of the animal kingdom. Sir Murdoch was stroking Clarissa’s hair with an expression of complete peace and happiness.

Then a thought struck Ian. “If
he’s
her father—”

But Dr. Defoe was yawning. “I’m off to bed. Busy day tomorrow.” He vanished among the dark trees.

So they were married and lived happily at the Hall. Clarissa’s slightest wish was law. She was cherished equally by both father and husband, and if they went out of their way not to cross her in any particular, this was due quite as much to the love they bore her as to their knowledge that they had dangerous material on their hands.

Hope

It was on a clear, frosty November evening, not many years ago, that Dr. Jane Smith, having occasion to visit a patient in the part of London known as Rumbury Town, was suddenly overtaken by the impulse to call on an old teacher of hers, a Miss Lestrange, who had a bedsitting-room on the edge of that district, where she earned a meager living by giving lessons on the harp.

Rumbury Town is a curious region of London. Not far from the big stations, adjacent to Islington, beyond, or anyway defying the jurisdiction of smokeless-fuel legislation, it lies enfolded generally in an industrial dusk of its own. The factories of Rumbury Town are not large, and their products are eccentric—artificial grass for butchers’ windows, metal bedwinches, false teeth for sheep, slimmers’ biscuits made from wood-pulp, catnip mice, plastic Christmas-tree decorations—these are a random sample of its exports. But the small gaunt chimneys, leaning from the factories at various precarious angles, belch black smoke as vigorously as any modern electric power station, and so do those of the houses, like rows of organ-stops, along the ill-lit, dour little terraced streets that lead up in the direction of Rumbury Waste, the ragged strip of tree-grown land fringing Rumbury Town on its eastern edge.

Rumbury Waste is a savage place enough, on no account to be visited after dark, but many a police officer would agree that the centre of Rumbury Town itself is far more of a hostile wilderness, far more dangerous. Here lies an area of mixed factories, business premises, and wholesale markets, interspersed with a few lanes of private dwellings and some dingy little shopping precincts; seamed by narrow alleys and shortcuts; a real maze where, it is said, only those born in Rumbury Town or who have spent at least forty years within earshot of the bells of St Griswold’s, Rumbury, can ever hope to find their way.

So cold and clear was this particular evening, however, that even the smoke from the Rumbury chimneys had dwindled to a slaty wisp against the sky’s duck-egg green; so little wind was there that in the derelict corners of factory lots where goldenrod and willowherb cloaked piles of rubble, the withered leaves and feathery seeds drifted straight and unswerving to the ground.

Engines and presses in the factories had ceased their clanging and thudding; workers had gone home; in the centre of Rumbury Town the only sound to be heard was the distant, muted roar of London; and a nearer surge of pop music, sizzle of fish frying, and shouts of children from the few inhabited streets. Dr. Smith parked her car in one of these, locked it carefully, and went in search of her friend, Miss January Lestrange.

Rumbury Town seemed a curious environment for a spinster who taught the harp. And Miss Lestrange was a real spinster of the old-fashioned kind; she walked very slowly, with small, precise steps; she wore tight, pointed button boots, very shiny, which ended halfway up her calf, and long serge skirts, trimmed with rows of braid, which hung down over the boots; it was pure chance that Miss Lestrange’s style of dressing was now once more the height of fashion, and a circumstance that she would certainly not have noticed; had she done so she might have been mildly irritated. Her grey hair was smoothly drawn back into a bun, and she wore pince-nez; all the children of Rumbury Town wondered how she managed to make them balance on her nose. Miss Lestrange kept herself to herself and never troubled her neighbors; many of them, if they had thought about it, would not have been surprised to be told that she was a thin, grey old ghost, occasionally to be seen gliding out on her small shopping errands. And the children, though they were not exactly frightened of her, never chalked on her door, or threw ice-lolly sticks after her, or sang rude rhymes about her, as they did about most other adults in the neighbourhood. Miss Lestrange, however, was no ghost, and although she had lived within sound of St Griswold’s bells for forty years, was not a born citizen of the district; she still did not venture into the twilit heart of Rumbury Town.

“Why
do
you live here?” Dr. Smith asked, when she had knocked on the faded blue door with its postcard,
j. lestrange, harp tuition
, and had been admitted, passing a small frantic-looking boy on his way out with a music-case under his arm.

“It amazes me the way some of them keep on coming,” murmured Miss Lestrange, zipping its case over the harp, which was as tall, gaunt, and worn-looking as she herself. “I’ve told them and told them that you don’t get a first-rate harpist once in a generation, but they all think they have the seed of it in them.”

“What about that boy? Is he any good?”

Miss Lestrange shrugged.

“He’s the same as the rest. I don’t hold out false hopes and sweet promises. I send him away at the end of the lessons utterly despondent, limp as rhubarb, but by next time he’s always plucked up heart again and thinks he’ll be a second David. Well, Jane, it is nice to see you. What brings you here?”

“Suppose I said that I wanted some more lessons?” Dr. Smith asked with a small, grim smile.

“I should tell you what I told your parents. It would be a waste of their money, my time, and yours, to teach you for another five minutes.”

“And they at least believed you. So I went away and trained for a doctor.”

“And have turned into a good one, from what I hear.” Miss Lestrange nodded at her ex-pupil affectionately. “I hope you will stay and take your evening meal with me and tell me about your work.”

But her glance strayed a little doubtfully to the screened corner of the room where she cooked over a methylated-spirit lamp; she had been about to brew herself a nourishing or at least vitamin-rich soup, made from hot water, parsley, grown in her window-box, and salt.

“No, no, I came to invite you out. I have to pay one call on a patient not far from here, and then I thought we’d go to the Chinese restaurant at the corner of Inkermann Street. Put on your coat and let’s be off.”

Miss Lestrange was always businesslike.

“Well, that would certainly be a more enjoyable meal than the one I could have offered you,” she said, put on her coat, and a black hat which had the shape though not the festive air of a vol-au-vent, and ushered out her visitor, locking the door behind them.

The little grimy street was silent and watchful. Half a dozen children stared, to see Miss Lestrange setting out at such an unwonted time of day, in such an unwonted manner, in a car, with a friend.

Dr. Smith reverted to her first, unanswered question.

“Why
do
you live here?”

“The rents are very low,” Miss Lestrange said mildly. “Five pounds a year for my room.”

“But in a better part of town you might get more pupils—bright ones . . .”

“The world is not that full of gifted harpists,” Miss Lestrange said drily. “And this neighbourhood suits me.”

“You have friends here?”

“Once I did. One friend. We have not seen each other for some time. But as one grows older,” Miss Lestrange said calmly, “one requires fewer friends.”

Reflecting that it would be difficult to have fewer friends than one, Dr. Smith brought her car to a halt by a large, grim tenement with a dozen arched entrances. The road that passed it was an old, wide, cobbled one, and on the opposite side began the cluttered, dusky jumble of piled-up factory, warehouse, shed, storehouse, office, factory and lumber-yard that like a great human badger-warren covered the heart of Rumbury Town.

“My patient lives just through here; I shan’t be long.”

“Who is your patient?” inquired Miss Lestrange, as the doctor turned to lift her black case from the rear seat of the car.

“Well, as a matter of fact he’s quite well-known—the writer Tom Rampisham. Why, like you, he chooses to live in this godforsaken spot I don’t know, but here he’s lived for goodness knows how many years. He has a ground-floor flat in that gloomy block.”

“Tom Rampisham,” Miss Lestrange said musingly. “It is some time since he did one of his broadcasts. What’s his trouble?”

“Heart. Well, I probably shan’t be more than a few minutes. But here’s a spare car-key in case you want to stroll about.”

It looked an unpromising area for a stroll. But when Dr. Smith’s few minutes lengthened to ten, and then to fifteen, Miss Lestrange, who seemed restless and disinclined to sit still, even after a long day’s work, got out of the car, locked it, and stood irresolutely on the pavement.

For a moment she stared at the large, forbidding block into which the doctor had vanished. Then, with decision, she turned her back on it and struck off briskly across the road. Almost immediately opposite the car was a little opening in the cliff-like façade of warehouses, one of those narrow lanes which the denizens of Rumbury Town call
hackets
, which led inwards, with many angles and windings and sudden changes of direction, towards the heart of the maze.

Along this alley Miss Lestrange rapidly walked. It seemed as if she walked
from
rather than
to
anything in particular; her head was bent, her eyes fixed on the greasy cobbles, she ignored the entrances with their mysterious signs: Wishaw, Flock Sprayers; Saloop, Ear Piercing Specialists; Ample Tops; The Cake Candle Co.; Madame Simkins, Feathers; Sugg, Ganister Maker and Refractory Materials Manufacturer; Toppling Seashell Merchants; Shawl, String, and Sheepskin Co.; Willow Specialists and Wood Wool Packers. One and all, she passed them without a glance, even the Shawl, String, and Sheepskin office, which was in fact the source of her new harp-strings when the old ones had snapped under the inexpert fingers of the youth of Rumbury Town.

Miss Lestrange walked fast, talking to herself, as elderly people do who lead solitary lives.

“If he were ill he might ask for me,” she muttered, going past Gay Injectors and Ejectors without sparing a thought to wonder what obscure goods or services their name denoted. “He once said he might; I remember his saying that if he were taken ill he might get in touch with me; it’s queer that I can hardly remember what we quarreled about, and yet I can remember that.”

The alley took a turn, widened, and led her into a melancholy little area of street market: crockery stalls, cheap clothing stalls, vegetable stalls, second-hand book and junk stalls. The traders were just closing up for the night, piling their unsold wares—of which there seemed to be a great many—back into cartons; the way was impeded by boxes of rubbish, and slippery with squashed vegetables, but Miss Lestrange stepped briskly round and over these obstacles without appearing to notice them.

“What did we quarrel about, all that long time ago?” she mused, neatly by-passing a pram loaded with dusty tins of furniture polish and stepping over a crate labeled
supershine wholesale: we promise dazzling results
. “It was something to do with his poetry, wasn’t it?”

The lane narrowed again and she went on between overhanging cliffs of blackened brick, frowning a little, over her pince-nez, as she tried to summon up a young, lively, impatient face. What had he looked like, exactly? At one time she had known his face by heart—better than her own, for Miss Lestrange had never been one to spend much time gazing at herself in mirrors. Noticeable cheekbones, a lock of hair that always fell forward; that was all she could remember.

We Promise Dazzling Results.

“
I don
’t
know
anything about poetry, Tom. How can I say if it’s good or bad?”

“You’ve got an
opinion
, haven’t you, girl? You can say what you
think
?”

“You don’t really want me to say what I think. You just want me to praise them.”

“Damn it, that’s not true, January. January!” he said bitterly. “There never was a more appropriate bit of classification. If ever anybody was ice-cold, frozen hard, ungenerous, utterly unwilling to give an inch, it’s you!”

“That’s not true!” she had wanted to cry. “It’s just that I can’t praise what I don’t understand, I won’t make pretty speeches just to encourage. How can I tell about your poetry? How can I say if I don’t know? It wouldn’t be right.”

But he had already stuffed the disputed poems into an old black satchel and gone striding off; that was the last time she had seen him.

She passed a café with an inscription in what looked like white grease on its window-glass: Sausages, potatoes, onions, peas; frying now, always frying. Why not try our fry?

A staggeringly strong, hot waft of sausage and onion came from the open door; inside were boys with tiny heads, tiny eyes, and huge feet in black boots; as she hurried by, Miss Lestrange felt their eyes investigating her and then deciding that she was not worth the trouble. The hot smell of food made her feel sick and reminded her that she was trembling with hunger; for her lunch at midday she had eaten half a hard-boiled egg, for her breakfast a cup of milkless tea.

“I suppose I shall have to put my fees up,” she thought, frowning again.

A shrill whistle, with something familiar about it, disturbed her chain of thought, and she glanced ahead. It was the tune, not the whistle, that was familiar: in a moment she identified it as a tune she had written herself, an easy tune for beginners on the harp; she had called it
Snowdrops
.

And, rollerskating heedlessly in her direction, whistling it shrilly, but in tune, came the boy to whom she had just finished giving a lesson earlier that evening when Dr. Smith arrived.

Their surprise at meeting was equal. He had almost run into her; he skidded to a jerky stop, braking himself with a hand on the alley wall.

“Miss Lestrange! Coo, you’re a long way from home, aren’t you? You lost your way?”

“Good evening, David. No, I have not lost my way,” Miss Lestrange replied briskly. “I am simply taking a walk.” What is there surprising in that? her tone expressed.

David looked startled; then he gave her a teasing, disbelieving grin, which made his crooked eyebrows shoot off round the corners of his face. She had never noticed this trick before; but then of course in his lessons he never did grin; he was always sweatingly anxious and subdued.

“
I
don
’t believe you’re just out for a walk; I think you’re after that there buried treasure!”

“Buried treasure? What buried treasure, pray?”

“Why, the treasure they say’s buried somewhere under the middle o’ Rumbury Town. That’s what
you’re
after. But you won’t find it! They say the old Devil’s keeping an eye on it for himself. If I were you, Miss Lestrange, I’d turn back before you do get lost!”