Ring of Terror Read online

  ‘That may have been all right in those days,’ said the Rector sadly. ‘But not today. Not in England. The classes are set and fixed. You can’t argue them away. Remember what the hymn says, “God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate”.’

  Hezekiah brought them down to earth.

  ‘You realise, boy,’ he said, ‘that if Sir George takes against us, I could lose my job. And we could be turned out of house. It belongs to him, not me.’

  This hit Luke between the eyes. He was almost too upset to speak. He said, ‘You don’t think—could he really—’

  ‘I don’t say he would. I only say he could.’

  ‘Then of course I’ll apologise. I’ll go right round today.’ In spite of his consternation he managed to grin. He said, ‘I shall have to think out pretty carefully how I’m going to say it. After all, it was Oliver who was breaking the law. And he attacked me. Not me him.’

  ‘Watch your grammar,’ said the Rector. ‘The subject of the verb “to attack” should be the nominative pronoun. You should have said, “Not I.’”

  This made them all laugh, which was, no doubt, the Rector’s intention.

  The heavy, nail-studded door at the back of Bellingham Court opened on to a flight of steps which led down to a passage flanked by doors on each side, a subterranean area of cold stores, wine cellars and game larders. In his childhood, Luke had feared it. He had thought of it as a cemetery.

  This was partly the fault of his grandfather. The old man had been versed in the mythology of death. In his own childhood, he could remember how heavy stones were laid on newly dug graves to prevent their occupants emerging and he had entertained the little boy – sometimes frightened, but resolute not to show it – with stories of vampires and ghosts and of men who turned into wolves as the light began to fade. So it was that when Luke had to carry messages to Mrs Parham, he had hurried down that particular passage, fearing to hear the pheasants and partridges coming back to life and fluttering their wings to escape from the hooks on which they hung.

  Now, he was too old for such fancies, but none the less, he wasted no time in making for the far end of the passage and climbing the steps which led up to the kitchen quarters, a more temperate zone. Here lived and worked the platoon of maids who served the house, under the joint generalship of Parkes the butler and Mrs Parham the housekeeper.

  Luke had once calculated that if you added the outside staff, the gardeners and grooms and stable boys, you could easily reach a total of thirty people. It seemed a great number to be looking after Sir George, who was a widower, and his two sons; but when he had mentioned this to his father, Hezekiah had not been impressed. ‘It might seem strange to you,’ he had said, ‘but think of it this way. Sir George is giving employment, from his own pocket, mark you, to thirty men and women. It stands to his credit, not to his discredit.’

  In truth, it was a style of living that was already becoming uncommon. In Sir George’s case, the money needed to keep it up did not come from the farms on the estate. As Sir George pointed out to his cronies, the miserable rents which the farms paid scarcely met the repairs which, as landlord, he was bound to carry out.

  The real money came from Sir George’s share in the silk- and cotton-spinning industry brought over by Huguenot refugees from France two centuries before. One of Sir George’s ancestors, when leasing them the site near Lavenham for the factories they wanted to build, had stipulated that, instead of a rent, they should allow him a share of the profits. This had proved to be a very lucrative investment.

  Mrs Parham welcomed Luke warmly and he rewarded her with a smile which, had he known it, was already beginning to flutter the hearts of the local girls.

  She said, ‘What good wind blows you here? Don’t tell me you’ve come to see an old woman, because I shan’t believe you.’

  ‘Then you’d be wrong, Mrs P,’ said Luke. ‘Because I did come to see you. Though it’s true I had a second reason.’

  ‘I knew it. Something you want out of me. In the old days it would have been my home-made fudge. But I guess you’re too old for sweets now.’

  ‘Never too old for your home-bake. But the thing I really wanted was a piece of information.’

  ‘Indeed. About what, might I ask?’

  ‘About Sir George. I need to know how his gout is.’

  ‘At the moment, thank the Lord, it isn’t troubling him.’

  ‘And he’s at home?’

  ‘When I saw him about half an hour ago he was in his study, writing letters.’

  ‘Then I’d better go straight up.’

  ‘Before his gout comes back, is that it?’

  Luke knew that she was longing to be told what it was all about; and although in the past he had confided many of his secrets to her as a surrogate mother, his own being dead, he felt that in this case he had to keep his counsel.

  He departed, up a second flight of steps, emerging through a baize-lined door into the front hall of the house. Here he paused to collect himself.

  He had crossed Sir George’s path many times, at shoots and on other outdoor occasions and had observed him in church, trying not to go to sleep as the Rector plunged more and more deeply into Hebrew history and philosophy, but he had never contemplated a face-to-face encounter. How was he going to manage it? Should he stump in, say, ‘I’m sorry for what happened yesterday,’ and stump out again?

  By now the simplest words seemed to be sticking in his throat and his hands were clammy. It was determination which took him along the passage and pride which knocked at the study door.

  Sir George looked up from his writing and said, ‘Come in, boy. Shut the door. What can I do for you?’

  ‘There’s something I wanted to say, sir.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you sat down?’

  ‘No, sir. I’d rather stand. The fact is—well, my father and Reverend Millbanke both thought I should come along and apologise—’

  ‘I’m not interested in what other people thought. What I’d like to know is what you thought.’

  ‘I thought the same. It was silly of me. I should have realised that Oliver – that your son – would have told you what he meant to do and got your permission.’

  ‘My son told me nothing. He knew he could go anywhere he liked on my property and he only told me this morning about his rabbiting. He should not have used illegal snares, but that was for me to tell him, not you.’

  ‘No, sir. I realise that now.’ Luke drew a deep breath. ‘If it would make up for it, I’d be glad to set some of our dead-fall traps where he set his. And I’d let him have any rabbits they caught.’

  ‘Handsome,’ said Sir George. ‘But not necessary.’

  Gaining confidence from the comparative friendliness with which this was said, Luke added, ‘I was fearing you might be planning to visit my sins on Father.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that you might dismiss him.’

  ‘You can put that idea right out of your head. What? Get rid of the best head keeper I’ve ever had and at the beginning of the shooting season? That would, indeed, be cutting off my nose to spite my face.’

  Sir George paused for a moment, then added, ‘In fact you may well be wondering why I should be bothering my head about a boys’ quarrel. But there’s more behind it than you think.’ He got up and walked across to the window. ‘There’s a dangerous spirit abroad in the land. An evil spirit. It comes creeping up like one of our fen fogs. One moment the sky’s clear. The next you can hardly see your nose on your own face.’

  As he spoke he was looking out across the expanse of lawn to the line of wind-stripped beech trees which guarded the far end. Luke realised that he was really talking to himself.

  ‘God alone knows what propagates this evil, or why people encourage it. Radical politicians, do you think, trying to make a name for themselves in the House? Agitators stirring up trouble, so that they might find pickings in the chaos they create? You can see the symptoms of it everywhere.
Workers starting to combine against their employers. Tenants against their landlords. Everyone who fancies that he has too little of this world’s goods trying to snatch something from those who have more than he has. And one sign of it is very clear. The growing and open disrespect of the lower classes for the class above them. Every time an example of it occurs, whether in big things or in small things, the upper class must stamp on it. If they fail to do so, they are acting as traitors to their caste.’ Sir George swung back on Luke. ‘So now you know why I was upset.’ He gave a short grunting laugh. ‘Really, you’re apologising to the wrong person. It’s Oliver you should be addressing yourself to. I don’t mean for stopping him from using illegal snares. Maybe you were within your rights there, though it might have been done more respectfully. What was unfair was taking him unawares when he wasn’t expecting it and tripping him up.’

  Luke said, ‘If that’s what he told you, he was lying.’

  There was a long silence. The boy would have given anything he possessed to take the words back. If he had been only a few years older he would have realised that up to that point he was winning. He had only to keep his mouth shut to consolidate his gains. Now he had thrown everything into the discard.

  He waited for the storm to break, but there was no storm.

  What happened was almost worse. Addressing him coldly and impersonally, as though he was delivering a judgement from the Bench, Sir George said, ‘One thing is clear to me. You are totally unfitted to be a clergyman of the established Church, in any shape or form or any place. Should you try to pursue your intention of so doing I should regard it as my duty to use all means in my power to prevent you from getting further.’

  Having said this he sat down to continue with his writing and Luke went out of the room, closing the door quietly. He was leaving behind him something that had been part of his life for the last three years.

  As he shut the study door, the door next to it opened and a young man came out. Luke knew him by sight, though he had rarely met him. It was Sir George’s elder son, Julian. Unlike Oliver he did not accompany his father on his sporting forays and never seemed to put in an appearance at church. Also he was much away from home. Until recently at Eton and now at Cambridge.

  When the village discussed him they called him either ‘odd’ or ‘modern’. The terms, which were not really intended as insults, were almost synonymous and arose partly from Julian’s appearance, but more from his occasional visits to the village pub. Here it was his custom to order drinks all round and having thus ensured himself a captive audience, to lecture it on current political topics.

  He now grabbed Luke by the arm and said, ‘Come inside. I want to talk to you,’ and dragged him into his room.

  Luke offered no resistance. He was not frightened of Julian, assessing him as a less formidable opponent than his younger brother.

  Also the room, which he had never been in before, was intriguing. The pictures on the wall would have supported the village verdict, being daubs of colour, apparently applied at random to the canvas. One of them Luke saw was entitled Womanhood Observed, but turned out, disappointingly, to be a composition of blue and crimson triangles and circles.

  And there were books: shelves full of them, piles on the window ledge and a heap of what was evidently Julian’s current reading on the table by the small sofa. Luke was more interested in books than in pictures. A careful course of English literature, as prescribed by the Rector, had recently embraced both poetry and philosophy. As he was being hustled past the pile on the table he had only time to look at the top one. He recognised the name of the author, Bernard Shaw, whom he knew to be an exciting and much criticised playwright, though this one could hardly be a dramatic work, being entitled The Common Sense of Municipal Trading.

  ‘We can’t talk standing up,’ said Julian. ‘Come and sit down over here.’

  He dragged him to an armchair and sat down beside him. The chair was a large one, but not really broad enough to accommodate two people and Luke found himself pressed against Julian who increased his discomfort by putting one arm round his shoulders.

  ‘I thought I must tell you this. There’s not much goes on in Dad’s study that can’t be heard in here. So I got the full force of his standard lecture on the trahison des clercs. Not that I needed to listen too hard. I knew it by heart.’

  ‘What did you call it?’

  ‘Trahison des clercs. That’s a French expression. There’s no exact equivalent for it in English. It means that if you belong to a certain class you should stand up for it and defend it if it’s attacked.’

  ‘That seems sensible.’

  ‘It’s all right if you don’t imagine, as Dad seems to do, that it applies only to your class. Perhaps I shouldn’t talk about my father like this, but you’re a sensible kid, I know.’ He gave Luke’s shoulders a squeeze. ‘He’s really just a silly old buffer. As old-fashioned as the Tower of London and as difficult to shift. What he refuses to accept is that the lower classes have every right to their own sort of solidarity. The right to combine for war against their superiors. Why shouldn’t a group of tenant farmers gang up to force their landlords to lower the exorbitant rents he’s charging? Why shouldn’t workmen combine to secure a rise in their wages and strike if they don’t get it?’

  ‘Reasonable,’ said Luke. Julian’s body was pressed so tightly against his that he could feel the warmth of it coming through.

  ‘But he’s quite right when he says that it’s not only the big things. Little things matter, too. Like workmen not remembering to call the boss “sir” and tenants failing to take off their caps when the landlord passes them. And you not knuckling under when you realised that it was Oliver – I offer no excuse for his conduct – who was setting illegal snares. You can realise now why he was forced to tell lies about Oliver being treacherously attacked by you. What he couldn’t get away from was the fact that Oliver finished up on the ground. You must have cheated to put him there. Otherwise you were a better man than he was, which was unthinkable.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Luke. ‘All the same, I shouldn’t have said what I did. Your father’s gone out of his way to help me in the past. I should have thought about that and held my tongue.’

  ‘I disagree. Most emphatically I disagree. It’s always right for the under-class to speak out against the over-class. I’m only sorry that in this particular case it worked so much to your detriment. You’re such a nice kid. Everyone in the place likes you. I know that. If only there was something I could do to help. Anything at all.’

  Julian had shifted his position slightly and his face was very close to Luke, who could see the sweat starting up on his forehead and a tiny dribble at the corner of his mouth.

  He wants to kiss me, thought Luke. Am I going to let him? To stop him, I should have to hit him. And if I hurt him, that will make more trouble.

  The problem was solved for him by Sir George, who chose that moment to give tongue from the next room.

  ‘I don’t know who you’re talking to,’ he bellowed, ‘but just stop gossiping and come here. I’ve something I want to tell you.’

  The alacrity with which Julian responded rather contradicted the disparaging way in which he had been talking about his father. He jumped up and trotted to the door. Luke extracted himself from the sofa and followed him. When they were out in the passage he muttered a quick, ‘Goodbye. I’ll be thinking about what you said,’ and was through the green baize door before Julian had got into his father’s room.

  He realised that what he needed most was time. Time by himself; time to think things out before he talked to his father and the Rector, both of whom would probably be waiting for him at home. Above all, time to plan. In spite of his haste to get clear he realised that it would be a mistake to slide out without saying goodbye to Mrs Parham, though he was sorely puzzled about what he could say to her. Another problem, in a day of problems. When he got there, the housekeeper’s room was empty.

  He caug
ht sight of one of the maids coming out of the kitchen and said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘I’m Debbie.’

  ‘Well, Debbie, would you be kind enough to give Mrs Parham a message from me. Tell her I looked in, but her room was empty. I’ll try to see her later.’

  ‘Do anything for you,’ said the girl, with a slanting look out of her dark eyes. ‘And pleased to do it, I’m sure.’

  Luke looked after her as she scuttled back into the kitchen. Evidently she liked him. Fine. He liked people to like him. Just so long – he grinned as he thought of Julian, squeezing down beside him on the sofa – just so long as they didn’t start liking him too much.

  He found his father and the Rector waiting for him and gave them as truthful a report as he could manage.

  ‘Until that moment,’ he said, ‘everything seemed to be going pretty well. He’d no hard feelings against you, Dad. In fact, he described you as the best head keeper he’d ever had.’

  ‘I can see from your face,’ said the Rector, ‘that that’s where things went wrong. What happened?’

  ‘What happened was I lost my head. He accused me of cheating, of catching his son unawares and tripping him up. Heavens above! If he could have seen it. Oliver announced that he was going to teach me a lesson and came rushing at me, his arms going like a windmill. I did what I’d been taught, stretched my arms straight out so that he couldn’t reach me and when we clinched, rolled him over.’

  ‘Good,’ said his father, the light of old battles in his eyes. ‘Good.’

  ‘Good that you defended yourself,’ said the Rector. ‘Bad that you accused Sir George of lying. For all you knew he was only repeating what Oliver had told him.’

  ‘That’s just it. I didn’t accuse him of lying. What I said was, if that’s what Oliver told him, he was lying.’