Your Secret Friend (Timothy Herring) Read online

  “Somebody has had a fire in here,” she said. “A tramp, I suppose. I wonder how he got in? Well, have you made up your mind?”

  “There’s a lot to be done. I shall have to make that clear to my committee. Our treasurer, I must warn you, is a hard and miserly man. Another thing: when Phisbe undertakes a job the size of this one, we are apt to insist that the owners be prepared to show the place.”

  “Open it to the public, do you mean? Oh, but your cousin and I want to work here! It hadn’t occurred to us that there would be—well, strings tied to the thing.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t get Phisbe to lift a finger unless our conditions are met. It’s only fair to tell you that.”

  “In that case, perhaps we could employ our own architect and get a local builder to do the alterations. I can’t bear the idea of letting people in to tramp all over the house and quiz all our furniture and fittings, apart from the interruption to our work. We’re writing a book, you know.”

  “You wouldn’t need to throw the whole house open, of course. People usually keep some of the rooms to themselves. That’s reasonable enough, and Phisbe would agree to it, I’m certain.”

  “How much of it, then, would we need to show?”

  “The great hall and the solar, of course, and at least part of the undercroft.”

  “That means they would tramp up and down the newel staircases, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yes. If you had a complete restoration it would mean doing away with the modern ladder staircase the last tenants put in, and that would leave nothing but the two spirals. I’m afraid you’d have to show the undercroft because of the stone vaulting and the pillars. Another point: have you considered how extremely uncomfortable and inconvenient you’re going to find this place? How dark and chilly it’ll be, especially in the winter? How eerie—I don’t want to frighten you, but I must confess that to live in a place like this would give me the creeps.”

  “Oh, April and I have thought it all out and considered it from every point of view, and she is just as excited about it as I am.”

  “April’s geese are all swans, but only for a limited time, I’m afraid. I don’t know how well you know her, but, so far as the family are concerned, we take her young enthusiasms with a very big pinch of salt”

  “Yes, I know she’s apt to take up things—and people—and then drop them, but if she got tired of Little Monkshood and—and of me, I could afford to buy her out. As it is, I shall be putting up all the money at first. It seemed better than April getting a loan from the bank.”

  “You’re as keen as all that?”

  “Quite as keen as all that.”

  “I see.” He stood with his hands on his hips and studied the seated woman. When he had met her at his own house and had been forced to compare her with his pretty, extremely lively, and volatile cousin, he had thought her gawky, angular, and plain. Looking at her now, as she sat with her long legs stretched out, her narrow feet crossed, one fine hand negligently holding the book, the other hanging loosely down so that, from her seat in the low chair, her fingers almost brushed the stone floor, he realised that she could look graceful, that her sallow, thin, fine-boned face was sensitive and that her mouth held the promise of passion. Her remarkable eyes he had noted at his first meeting with her. Her hair—too closely cropped, he thought, to look as attractive as it might have done—was silkily smooth and formed a cap of darkness for the small and beautifully-shaped head, and this was set on a neck as slender as that of a child. He was reminded of a flower on a fragile stem, and was mildly surprised at himself for thinking in such sentimental terms.

  “Well,” she said, “what’s the verdict? Have we made fools of ourselves?”

  “Oh, no,” he answered. “Of course, there’s a lot to be done, but you’ve realised that. All the same”—his heart smote him as he looked at her and thought of the unpredictable irresponsible April—“if I may say so,

  ‘It hurts the heart to see you unafraid, Who to the bottomless future have betrayed The perilous perfection of your dust.’ ”

  To his consternation she stood up, white-faced and furious, all her diffidence gone.

  “Who—who on earth told you?” she cried. Timothy looked at her in amazement. He wondered what secret of hers he was supposed to have uncovered by his lightly-spoken quotation. She detected unerringly that he was innocent of any offence. The fire died out of her eyes. She controlled herself immediately and said, “If Gerald Gould is the order of the day, no doubt you remember how that particular poem ends. It’s strangely inconclusive:

  ‘Voices there are, and sudden silences . . .

  And endless thoughts, and no thought in the end

  But the wind in the trees.’

  “Oh, and talking of trees, that enormous old elm at the back of the house must come down. It overshadows the whole of that wing. Did you notice, when you were outside?”

  “That wing will have to come down, too,” said Timothy, secretly amused and rather impressed by the adroit way in which she had contrived to change the subject. “It doesn’t belong. It’s a vandalous, scandalous addition. But I agree about the tree. It might be in a dangerous state. It could shed a mighty branch at any moment. Elms are notoriously treacherous.”

  “Yes, they’re witches’ trees,” she said, lightly. She tucked her book into the leather brief-case which served her as a handbag and accompanied him on a tour of the building while he pointed out what he thought would have to be done if Phisbe agreed to undertake the alterations. Then he put her into his car and gave her tea at the mill-house and stood hat in hand as he watched her walk up the long drive which led to the school. She had resumed her disguise. She was again a gawky, plain, blue-stocking of a woman. The ivory tower was closed, its windows shuttered against a too-intrusive sun.

  He thought about her all the way home. She was an enigma, a contradiction in terms. The secret she had so nearly given away could only be a secret love-affair. That was implicit in her reaction to the quotation which he had made so light-heartedly and with such a curious result. He could not imagine her in love in the physical sense, although he realised, to his own astonishment, that a man could easily be deeply in love with her.

  “La Belle Dame Sans Merci?” he wondered. No, there was nothing sinister, either about herself or what he was beginning to see as her beauty. Undine? Etain of The Immortal Hour? There was storm in the air, anyway. He hoped fervently that it would prove a storm in a tea-cup. April would let her down, of course, but would that be all?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Coven

  “But you don’t really know how to do it, do you?” asked Stephanie.

  “Certainly I do,” Sandra replied, “but it’s no good unless you’re a believer, and the first belief is in reincarnation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means that you’ve been on earth before.”

  “But how do I know I have?”

  “You just have to believe it, that’s all.”

  “Are there any others in it besides just you and me?”

  “Of course there are. I’ve already spoken to Gillian and Caroline and I’m going to speak to Mavis.”

  “Have Gillian and Caroline joined?”

  “Yes. We had an initiation in that empty house. Gillian thinks she was the third witch in Macbeth. We lit a fire. It was simply marvellously creepy, even in daylight. Later on we shall go there at night.”

  “But the Macbeth witches weren’t real.”

  “Macbeth thought they were, and he ought to know. He’s historical, isn’t he?”

  “What about Caroline? Who was she?”

  “She wasn’t sure, but she thinks she was the witch-mother in that ballad Miss Cummings read to us.”

  “What, the one who wouldn’t let them have the baby?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And what about you?”

  “In a previous existence I was a witch of noble birth called Lady Alice. Also
I’m the seventh child of a seventh child, so I’m bound to have the Power.”

  “I thought you were an only child.”

  “There were six born before I came. With my magic spells I murdered them.”

  “Oh, don’t be horrid! And don’t talk such awful rubbish!”

  “Well, are you going to join?”

  “I’ll join if Mavis does.”

  “Well, anyway, you’ve taken the oath of secrecy, remember, whether you join or not, and there’s an awful curse on you if you break it. Do you want me to tell you what will happen to you if you break your oath?”

  “No, I don’t! Anyway, I suppose I’ll join. I think I was Medea.”

  “You couldn’t have been! She was much too important to be you. I think you were Meg Merriles.”

  “She was a gipsy.”

  “A witch, too. If not, how could she have kept alive on blackberries and pods of broom? And if she’d been a real gipsy, she would have sold her mats of rushes, not just given them away to the villagers. I don’t suppose they wanted them, anyway.”

  “Do you think they were magic spells, then?”

  “I know they were, but the villagers didn’t. Well, you really want to join, then?”

  “All right, but I want to be a real witch, and I’m sure Meg Merriles wasn’t.”

  “Well, who were you, then? Come on, if you think you know so much.”

  “Perhaps I was the Witch of Endor.”

  “Of course you weren’t! Besides, I don’t think we’d better take things out of the Bible—well, not yet, anyway. Do you think you were Old Mother Shipton?”

  “Was she a witch?”

  “Bound to be, with a name like that. All right, that’s settled, then. The coven meets in the churchyard tonight around the old yew tree, and in the dark of the moon.”

  “After lights-out? We’ll be expelled!”

  “Not while I have the Power.”

  “Suppose it rains!”

  “Oh, suppose you’re a pig’s grandmother! Now, repeat after me: Floreat St. Trinian! Floreat Hecate! Floreat Diana of the Ephesians!

  “You said we mustn’t use the Bible.”

  “All right, you can leave out ‘of the Ephesians,’ and then it will be all right.”

  The neophyte repeated the salutations and giggled.

  “It’s not funny,” said the head of the coven loftily. “Now I’m going off to find Mavis, and you jolly well remember that you’ve taken the oath of secrecy, and if you break it the vultures of Satan will tear out your liver, and Odin’s ravens will pick out your eyes.”

  “Don’t be beastly!”

  “Don’t you forget, then!” With this, the high priestess went off to gather in the last of her flock. Old-fashioned stories about boarding schools for girls are always right about one thing. Every boarding school has one rebel who is gifted with the qualities of leadership to the extent of organising a gang which, for a time, is capable of terrorising other children and of becoming a nuisance, and sometimes a problem, to members of the school staff.

  Such a child was Sandra Davidson. She was a thin, intense, red-headed little girl, aged between twelve and thirteen and, in the summer, so freckled that the freckles ran into one another and gave, at first sight, the impression that she had a brown skin which was beginning to peel. She had brought herself to the disapproving notice of the authorities at an early stage in her school career, but had been allowed to get away with a good deal until she fell foul of the junior history mistress, Timothy Herring’s cousin April. She did this by appearing in class one morning with her face completely covered in dark tan shoe polish.

  April, who, as Timothy had indicated, was both young and foolish, prided herself on her wit and relished the sycophantic giggles with which it was often received. On this particular occasion she greeted the form with her usual briskness, and looked them over with good-humoured contempt. Her eyes rested upon Sandra’s injudiciously decorated countenance. A crisis, she realised, was upon her.

  “Oh, Celia,” she said, addressing the form captain, “I see that we have a new arrival. Does Pocahontas speak English?” From those who disliked Sandra came the usual giggle of appreciation, and, encouraged by this, (for the form, as a whole, she found a difficult one), April rashly continued, “But what has happened to our little friend Cuckoo Egg? I don’t seem to see her among us.”

  The nickname, bestowed upon Sandra in a previous lesson as a retaliation for the latter’s tiresome behaviour, was, of course, unpardonable, and had April been older, wiser, kindlier, and more experienced, she would not have pushed her luck as far as she did. Sandra stood up.

  “I choose to cover up my freckles, (which I can’t help), to stop silly moos like you calling me damn silly names,” she said, and, as promptly as she had stood up, she sat down again. The form was enthralled, and looked hopefully at April.

  “Really, Sandra!” said April, white-faced.

  “And you’re a lousy teacher, anyway!” said Sandra, carried by the aghast yet avid expressions on the faces of her contemporaries to lengths towards which she had never intended to go. April, realising too late that she had unleashed forces beyond her control, banged the table and shouted,

  “How dare you, Sandra! Go out of the room at once and report yourself to Miss Salter.”

  “Don’t worry!” cried Sandra, now semi-hysterical. “I’m going to her to report you!”

  “Well, wash that muck off your face first!” retorted April weakly. She sat down. The observant form noted that her hands were shaking. “Open your books at page sixty-one,” she managed to say. “There will be a written test on the chapter.”

  An unnatural silence prevailed. April drew some papers towards her, but her eyes saw what was on them without her brain taking in a single word. Her father had threatened that if she did not keep her present job (the fifth she had taken since leaving the university two years previously) he did not intend to support her, and she was only too well aware that every junior mistress at Miss Pomfret-Brown’s school was strictly on probation. Miss Pomfret-Brown was in a position to pick and choose her staff. She paid extremely well, and expected full market value for the money. Included in this was obedience to the unwritten, unspoken, but inflexible law: Do nothing to antagonise the parents. They foot the bills.

  Sandra was brought back to the form room by Miss Salter, who, as deputy headmistress, was responsible for school discipline, to make a public apology. This she did with an ill grace and spent the rest of the lesson, to everyone’s discomfort and April’s apprehension, sobbing with fury. At the lesson break, April was summoned to the presence of the deputy head.

  “I imagine that Sandra has told me the truth, Miss Bounty, but I should be interested to have your account of what took place.”

  “Do I have to justify myself, Miss Salter? Is that what you mean?” April attempted bluster. It did not work.

  “There is no occasion to take that line, Miss Bounty. Surely you realise that witticisms made at the expense of sensitive children are both unkind and out of place?”

  “I only intended a joke.”

  “That is what I mean. Did you not anticipate the effect that a comment upon her personal appearance would have upon a child such as Sandra Davidson?”

  “Well, she came into class with shoe-polish on her face. It was done on purpose to annoy me and—and to undermine my authority.”

  “You seem to have been instrumental in doing that yourself, do you not? Your methods might work in a State School, although I very much doubt it, but they are entirely out of place here.”

  “The girl was extremely insolent, Miss Salter.”

  For which she has been made to apologise. Very well, Miss Bounty. That will do. I think we understand one another, do we not?”

  April went to the Staff Common Room and raged to Vere Pallis, the only member of staff who happened to have a free period.

  “Well,” said the latter, when the tirade was over and April was blinking away tears of fr
ustrated fury, “I don’t know what you expected. This is a good school in most ways and, of course, it’s got to keep up its reputation if it’s to continue to flourish. But how long do you suppose it would flourish if parents took their daughters away because the junior staff used them as stooges for their sense of fun?”

  “So you’re against me, too!” cried April, indignant but not surprised. “I did think, being Marchmont’s half-sister . . .”

  “Oh, no, you didn’t,” said the cold-eyed woman at the table, “and, if Alison had listened to my advice—”

  “Very kind of you to offer any! Considering all the circumstances—”

  “Really, Miss Bounty, you are hardly keeping to the point.”

  “No? Do you think I don’t realise how things are between Marchmont and Simon Bennison? Yes, and between you and Simon Bennison, too! I’m not surprised you don’t want her to buy a house where she can meet him as often as she pleases, without always having you snooping around! What’s more—”

  “Miss Bounty,” said Vere Pallis, turning upon the rash and reckless April those cold and frightening eyes which were so unlike those of her half-sister, “will you please stop showing off like a jealous, bad-mannered child of ten? I should be glad to get on with my marking. If you had a little more consideration for other people, including the children, you would not now be in this ridiculously hysterical condition.”

  A few hundred yards from the scene of this emotional disagreement, Sandra Davidson was holding court over close personal friends and loyal followers.

  “So I’m going to do something about it,” she said, at the end of a long exposition, “and you two and Gillian have got to help me. I’ll get Mavis to join, and then we shall need a postulant.”

  “A what?”

  “You know—a sort of tenderfoot—somebody who will be lower than us, so that we can boss her about and frighten her, and make her do the things we don’t want to do.”

  “Who could it be?”