MISS MIRANDA’S WALK

Betty Beaty

Rosamund was not at all happy about the prospect of having a film unit invading her beautiful home. She could imagine only too well the chaos that would ensue. But what she had not foreseen, was the upheaval it was to cause in her private life as well.

CHAPTER I

The first warning was the stranger's voice calling out for the way to Holywell Grange. At least, I presumed he was a stranger. I didn't recognise his voice above the throb of his car engine, and if you're a schoolmistress in a place like Derwent Langley there are few people's voices you don't know. Not that I troubled about it at the time. Our home, Holywell Grange, is a small Tudor manor house, and especially in the summer, my mother, my sister Tanya (when she's home) and I get used to the odd sightseer who's done the church, and the cobbled High Street, with the smugglers' passage beside the market cross, finishing their tour with a peep over our overgrown hedge, or through the rickety gates.

More important still, I was sitting in the garden of the White Hart inn, sipping their real fruit strawberry milk shake with our neighbour Robbie Fuller. And when I'm with Robbie, I don't think I'd notice if a space ship full of green men had asked for the best route back to Mars. It's not because I'm in love with Robbie—I know a hopeless cause when I see one. It's just that he is one of the most attractive people I've ever met. He has that natural effortless charm that exudes an immediate sense of well-being. One always associates Robbie with warm sunny days—gold is somehow his colour—gold hair, tawny eyes, and as Tanya irreverently says, gold fingers too! For everything Robbie touched prospered. That particular Saturday afternoon was sunny too. There was hardly any wind, and above the high briar hedge that screened the garden from the road I could see the heat from the stranger's car shimmer up into the still air like a finger drawn across calm water. Up until then, and even for hours afterwards, I thought it was one of those days when everything goes well. I'd been up with the lark and got all my class's exercise books corrected, then I'd baked a record batch of gingerbread, and cut three dozen bunches of flowers. For though the three of us love the house dearly, it's almost impossible to keep up on my mother's pension and my schoolteacher's salary, for as Tanya has a flat up in town we can't expect her to contribute. So like lots of other householders we help out with selling produce. Every first Saturday of the month my mother takes it along to the W.I. market stall.

That's where I'd just delivered her in the horse and trap when I saw Robbie coming out of the Post Office, and he'd taken hold of Lady Jane's bridle and said, "You look all cool and pink and white in that dress. How about giving a poor thirsty driver a lift to the inn?"

That's how I came to be there, listening to the quick pant of the stranger's car, and the landlord's shouted instructions, "Down the 'igh, sir. Then left, sir, at the crossroads, sir. Then down the slope towards the river. Then you'll see it, sir, where there's a little old curl like in the river. An 'orseshoe bend. Can't mistake it, sir."

I remember Robbie raising his curious fair brows and laughing. "Must be very impressive, by the sound of old Fred. How many sirs did you count?"

I laughed. "I didn't."

"I made it five or six. Who is it, do you suppose?"

"I haven't a clue. A tourist, I expect."

Then we heard a shouted thanks. The car accelerated. I caught a quick flash of white through the screen of green, and then Robbie got up and peered over the top of the high hedge. "An American car by the look of it, Rosamund. He drives like the clappers. And it kicks up a helluva lot of dust." Robbie made an exaggerated gesture of dusting down his well-cut jodhpurs and silk shirt. He re-tied his yellow stock before coming back to sit at our table. "Maybe a rich uncle that you knew not of ? Or a cousin seven times removed who's struck oil in where-is-it-Miss Vaughan, please-teacher?"

"Texas."

"Right you are. A cousin seven times removed from Texas."

I shook my head. "No such luck," I sighed. "If he's a rich American, he'll be collecting brass rubbings. Or he'll want to look for the old passage. Or he'll want a picture of his missus and himself in Miss Miranda's Walk."

"Now you're boasting, Rosamund. They've never heard of Miss Miranda," Robbie mimicked the landlord's voice. "In li'l ole Texas."

"You'd be surprised. They put a bit about her in the National Trust guide. Anyway your rich American's out of luck. Mother's going on to see her friend Mrs. Mellor after the W.I. There's no one at home."

"Is there anybody there, said the traveller," Robbie quoted softly, "knocking on the moonlit door."

For no reason that I can think of, I shivered, as if a sudden wind had blown in over the Downs. But the afternoon was still hot and windless. No cloud had momentarily blotted out the sun. Hardly a leaf stirred on the rhododendrons, and the surface of the hotel's lily pond remained unruffled. There was not even enough breeze to disperse the white car's exhaust fumes. I could smell them faintly in the air as they mixed incongruously with the roses and the cut grass and the sharp tang of the distant sea.

Then Robbie laughed, and asked me for heaven's sake was I feeling cold? He ran his fingers playfully over my bare arm, and I shivered again, but this time with an almost apprehensive delight.

Though I promised him I wasn't in the least cold— whoever heard of anyone being cold on a sunny day in May?—he insisted on moving the little wrought-iron table directly into the sun. Although he's not more than twenty-six, and he seems to be comfortably off, and never had to worry about anything himself, Robbie is the most amazingly thoughtful person.

"Besides," he said, picking up the chairs one on either arm, "I can see you better that way."

He set them down by the table in the centre of the lawn. Then he sat down and tipped his chair backwards, folding his arms across his chest, and resting one foot nonchalantly on the crosspiece of the table. From under their light lashes his golden eyes surveyed me teasingly.

"You're looking as pretty as ever, Rosamund. That pink dress suits you. And yet, and yet..." he held his fair head on one side, "aren't those dark shadows under those lovely grey eyes? Isn't Rosamund's skin slightly wan? It's not to be wondered at, mind you. Coping with how many noisy brats is it...?"

"Thirty," I said. "And they're not brats."

"Have it your own way. Thirty-whatever-they-are." He smiled sweetly at me. "How you cope I shall never know."

He continued to stare up into my face, his eyes so full of an almost exaggerated concern that for a moment I thought "He really does care." My heart gave a sudden lurch, and so that he wouldn't read my eyes, I looked down at the table top, making patterns with my glass as bashfully as any schoolgirl.

"I tell you what," Robbie snapped his fingers together as if he'd just had a sudden inspiration. "I was only saying the other day—it's high time I got the cabin cruiser going for the summer again. I'll tell Jackson to get cracking on it. Then I'll take you out for the day, Rosamund. We'll go down river to the sea."

For a moment I said nothing simply because I couldn't really think of what to say. I'm not one of those fortunate people who have the right answer just like that, or who can fill a blank in with something polite and friendly and meaningless. Tanya is always telling me that I'd be useless in her line of business. Because a beautician has to say the right thing at the right time, which to quote Tanya is "But fast."

The reason was that an invitation from Robbie Fuller produced in me a curious mixed reaction. I suppose the crux of it was because I like him so much. Therefore I didn't want to get involved with him, when he was perhaps inviting me out of kindness or just filling in time between more eligible girls.

Although Robbie's parents had bought High Acres when Mr. Fuller retired from the city some four years ago, none of us saw Robbie for a couple of years after that. Apparently he was working as an engineer out in Malaysia, and he only came home when tragically his parents were killed in a car crash. Poor Mr. Fuller had not been much of a farmer, and the lovely rich Downland fields of High Acres had gone to ruin.

Robbie had installed a new manager, Mr. Jackson, to help him, while Mrs. Jackson did the house and the cooking, and Robbie himself had worked like a slave. Now the whole place prospered. The Fuller herd of pedigree shorthorns were quite famous. Robbie could afford to ride and ski, and keep his own boat.

I was still at teacher training college when Robbie came out of his work shell, and it was only six months ago that I first officially met him, when my mother gave an informal barbecue for my twenty-first party. Though Tanya (really it's Titania, ours being a Shakespeare-struck family—but Tanya suits her better somehow) knew him quite well. "And I promise you," she said, "be careful. He doesn't improve on acquaintance."

In the time he was here his name had been linked with quite a few girls, but I think that too was only village gossip. And though rumour had it there'd been some unhappy love affair, something told me he was the sort of man who could walk through life heart-whole and fancy-free.

Then noticing my hesitation, Robbie said casually, "Bring Tanya along if she's free."

I smiled. I said I would ask her, but as he knew, Tanya hardly ever was free.

"Yes, well, it was just a thought. Not to worry." Robbie laughed engagingly. "I prefer my pretty girls singly."

I laughed back, feeling myself drawn effortlessly into Robbie's powerful aura of well-being. A peaceful, companionable silence enfolded us.

Screened somewhere in the willow, a blackbird sang, and high in the bland blue above our heads two gulls wheeled like white weightless paper. A harvester driven probably by one of Robbie's men hummed distantly from the Downland fields. Dragonfly darted and hovered in incandescent green flashes over the lily pond. Bees hummed in the herbaceous border.

The air was full of flower scent, country sounds, and bird song. All was perfect. I didn't even notice that the exhaust fumes from the white car had drifted away. Because a long time ago I had forgotten all about the stranger.

CHAPTER II

I remembered him again when I arrived back at Holywell. The old brick entrance pillars have crumbled over the centuries, so that the wrought-iron gates, themselves rickety with age, are out of true. Everyone in Derwent Langley knows you have to wedge the left-hand gate with a block of wood to make them latch shut, but today the gates hung ajar and there were big fat tyre marks all the way up the soft shingle of the drive. I remember guiding Lady Jane in their tracks like someone treading in footprints on sea-wet sand, past the overgrown azalea beds, between the two sentinel macrocarpa trees, till rounding the curve of the drive, first the clump of three ancient oaks, then the house itself came into view.

Or rather I should say floats into view. For built in solid Tudor style though it is, the elevations of rosy mellow brick seem to have an almost ethereal lightness. A lightness accentuated by the yellow-green water meadows, the river, and the position in which it stands.

Set in shallow mid-Sussex just far enough back from the South Downs to lose little sunlight in their shade, but near enough to be sheltered by their shoulders from the strong south-west winds, Holywell Grange lies snug in a horseshoe bend of the meandering river Derwent. It is the first up the estuary from the sea and has been in my father's family for centuries, and though she has been a widow for the last twenty years, wild horses, or more formidable still, bank managers presenting overdrafts, couldn't drag my mother away from it. I have the same almost fierce affection for it, but that afternoon I wondered what the stranger thought of it all, seeing my home not through my own indulgent eyes, but his.

Did he miss the beautiful mullion windows, the lovely Tudor portico, the terrace, and see only the sagging roof, the chipped entrance steps, the chimneys that leaned southward like the Tower of Pisa? Did he turn to his wife and say, "This place, my dear, needs a fortune spending on it." As in our secret hearts my mother and Tanya and I know, but don't say. Just as we know that one of these days a big repair job will have to be done, and that will be the end of it.

Then Lady Jane trotted smartly right in front of the portico, obliterating the last of the tyre marks. Still high in the south-west, the sun caught the windows, making the ancient glass glow like beaten gold, drawing out the scent of the white geraniums in their stone tubs, striking a thousand silver sparks from the river bend. I drew my usual sigh of pleasure at coming home. I had a dozen small jobs that I had to do before my mother arrived home on the bus at six. Besides, if I was going out with Robbie next week, I might try to finish the flowered summer dress I'd just cut out, or if we were going down river as far as the sea, it might be better to wear my best linen slacks and finish knitting the sweater.

With nothing more important than such small decisions on my mind, I let Lady Jane have her head past the front of the house and then sharp left through the arch to the flagged stable yard. Her shoes clipped ringingly over the flagstones, sending our pair of fantails whirring up against the square of blue sky in mock-startled flight. Then she came to a practised halt by the old-fashioned trough. I stepped down, unharnessed her, and pushed the light trap into the old shed. Then I went back and sat on the corner of the trough, rubbing Lady Jane's nose while she drank her fill, watching the fantails descend again to the yard, walking hopefully in their quaint busy way to see if I'd left the lid of the feed bin open.

It was then that I noticed a white rectangle chalked out at the far end of the stable yard. I was still staring at it, puzzled, when the little carillon of tiny brass bells set in the wall above my head shook and clamoured as someone at the front door pulled the iron handle of the front door bell.

* * *

Though I'd heard no car in the drive, I knew who it was. I even knew exactly what he looked like. He was short and stout and he was both persuasive and insistent. I shouldn't have wondered if he'd wandered right round here while we were out, and marked out that chalked rectangle as a suitable place (though not the spot I'd have chosen) for the photo he had in mind. Not that I objected to that, but I have that English failing of believing one's home is one's castle, and I don't like people poking around when one's out.

So I didn't hurry. I tethered Lady Jane and hung her hay net on the hook in front of the stable, and before I'd had time to wipe my hands, the bell rang again. This time there was no mistaking the impatience. I could hear the high metallic sound slicing through the soft silence of the house like a knife through a honeycomb while the little back door carillon, which is set off by the same mechanism, almost capsized itself like little brass boats against the sky.

"All right," I called. "I'm coming!" Though no one could have heard through our big house with its thick walls. "Probably," I said to myself, "wondering, like those people last week, if we do cream teas. Or it's that anglers' society again, wanting to fish our bit of Derwent. Or a geography student doing a thesis on rivers that have bores."

My footsteps echoed across the flagstones of the scullery, then the kitchen, through the green baize door that separates the domestic quarters from the house proper, and then less sharply but more creakingly over the ancient polished oak timbers of the hall.

Whoever was there must have heard me coming, for they didn't ring again. Yet in some odd way I could feel their impatience as I struggled with the ancient lock hoop of the heavy door. I should explain that since our resources are so small for this house my mother and I, and Tanya when she's home, live almost exclusively in the kitchen, and our friends always come through the arch and yard to the door at the back. So the front entrance is only used by strangers and those are infrequent, so opening the door takes time. But eventually I got the rusty ratchets of the mechanism into line. I pulled the great door open. And there he was.

* * *

First I remember thinking was that he was quite different from what I imagined. He was the stranger at the inn all right, for there was the big white car parked on the other side of the drive. But he was tall and slim, and though the sun was behind him, and his face was in shadow, I could see he was very dark and quite young. The next thing I noticed was that for all his easy posture, somehow he matched his impatient ringing of the bell. For there was all about him a contained aggressive energy. An energy and an impatience too, that was carefully controlled under a relaxed exterior. But there all the same.

He was casually dressed in light-coloured linen trousers, navy linen shirt, and moccasins. Yet just as his surface manner seemed to belie his inner forcefulness, so these informal clothes conveyed an impression of throwaway elegance. His bare arms and face and neck were so deeply tanned that I wondered if he might not be English, but his voice when he said "Good afternoon" was as English as Derwent Langley's apple orchards. And it was certainly the voice I'd heard over the hedge at the White Hart.

While I returned his greeting, and for seconds afterwards we seemed to stand there studying one another. I don't know whether the expression was natural to him, or whether he didn't care greatly for what he saw, but his thick black brows were drawn together in a slight frown. He had very dark eyes too, of a curious shade of gem-hard blue. In fact not only his expression but the whole bone structure of his face conveyed an inflexible determination.

Then, finishing his inspection of me, from my sun-bleached wavy hair (rag-bag hair, Tanya calls it) to the tips of my sandalled feet, the stranger said, "I presume this is Holywell Grange."

"Yes, it is."

"Good." He raised one eyebrow. "For a moment I thought I must have come to the wrong place."

"Were you...

"I've already been here a couple of times today," he said, and to my own irritation I heard myself say apologetically, "Yes. I'm sorry. I had to go out."

"That's all right." He actually gave me a frugal forgiving smile of considerable charm. He had very white even teeth and the effect on his face was quite miraculous. The tough lines seemed to melt, the hard eyes crinkled up. "You weren't to know I was coming today."

"No."

"But this is the sort of day to see a place like this."

"Yes, I suppose it is."

So he was a tourist. Later in time I was to wish most fervently that he was exactly that, but at the time for some reason I was vaguely disappointed. I watched him back a couple of paces, the better to see the portico, and then I said, "The only trouble is that it's not open to the public."

"I should hope not indeed. That wouldn't do at all." He tossed me a vague surplus-to-requirements smile. "I wouldn't look at a place that was."

"You're welcome," I said coldly, "to see the outside, of course."

"I've seen it already, thank you. Back and front. And I like it. Now it's the inside I want to see." And when he saw that this arrogance had produced a quick flush to my face, he added with what he fondly hoped would no doubt soften my mood, "Besides, I am not the public. I'm Nicholas Pemberton."

At that point I felt my second pang of disappointment in him. If there is one sort of person I dislike it is the self-important variety. Then I noticed the stranger looked at me expectantly. After a second's pause he said softly,

"You don't know me?"

"To the best of my knowledge I've never met you in my life."

"All right," he shrugged his shoulders. "There's no need to sound so indignant." His voice was mildly amused.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but there it is. There's nothing of interest to see in the house. And anyway, my mother doesn't like..."

"So you're Miss Vaughan?" It wasn't so much a question as a statement. "You're Rosamund, in fact."

"Yes."

And though anyone in the village—Fred at the White Hart for instance, or Mrs. Peabody at the Post Office, could have told him that it was Tanya, the elder, the glamorous one who had the flat in London, yet his knowledge seemed to arm him against me.

"I didn't realise at first. You don't look like a school-marm." He made it sound a very unpleasant thing both to look like and not to look like.

"Really."

"Though perhaps," he smiled teasingly, "you sound a little like one." He paused, swinging himself back on his heels, tucking his thumbs into the waistband of his trousers, while he surveyed me at leisure. "So you're the one this place couldn't function without?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"Now don't be modest. Your mother says that."

"My mother?"

I felt rather relieved. Now I began, or I thought I began, to understand. Mr. Pemberton was the friend of a friend, or he knew a distant member of the family. The kind of person to whom you say oh, if you're on holiday in Sussex look up Mrs. Vaughan. I haven't seen her for donkey's years, and they have an interesting old place they'd like to show you around. In fact Mother and I had had such summer visitors before.

"Oh, that's why you said you weren't the public. I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Pemberton. I thought you were a tourist." This time my face was flushed in embarrassment. "I didn't know you knew my mother."

"But I don't."

"Well then, you know a friend of hers. Or a relation. I do apologise..."

But the stranger was enjoying himself. "I know you a little, that's all. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to making your mother's acquaintance."

"But she is expecting you?"

I felt so confused by this time, wondering who on earth he was and why my mother hadn't mentioned him, that I actually contemplated just asking him outright who exactly he was and what on earth he was doing here. And the sheer rudeness of that made me remember the rest of my manners. I stood back, and opened the door wide.

"She's not exactly expecting me, Miss Vaughan. Let's say she knew I was coming to see her. But she didn't know the precise date."

"Then perhaps you'd come in and wait for her. Tanya will be picking her up round about six." I waved a hand in belated hospitality. "If I'm permitted."

Half in self-justification, half in apology, I said,

"I'm sorry, Mr. Pemberton, but this is the first I've heard about your visit."

He made no comment on that. I doubt if he even heard me. He was staring down at the entrance steps. Almost as if now that he was invited inside he couldn't wait to take over, he said in a matter-of-fact, master-to-servant voice:

"Someone will break their ankle on these, Miss Vaughan. They'll have to be fixed for a start."

He shrugged his shoulders as if after all I couldn't be expected to understand, and then he gave a quick backwards glance at the terrace rose beds, the lawn, and beyond the water meadow, the glittering horseshoe bend of the river, before turning to come inside. I shall always remember that moment, just as he stepped into the house. For then the sun, aslant in the south-west sky, threw his long dark shadow ahead of him, over the threshold, and on to the sunlit boards of the hall. And suddenly I didn't want to close the door behind him, because I knew that from then on things would never be the same again.

CHAPTER III

My sister Tanya always says that I'm over-imaginative, but I'm sure that houses, especially old, much-lived-in houses, have different atmospheres for different people. And from the start I'm certain that the house resented him. It wasn't just the change from bright sunlight to the cool interior. It was something more. I had never till then noticed the silence of the hall. Beyond the thick walls and door, high summer with its country sounds and bird song was shut out. Within, no timbers creaked, not even a tap dripped. The only sound was our own breathing.

But if the house didn't resent him, I did.

"Ah, yes," he said. "Not bad. Not bad at all." He stood with his arms folded, surveying every detail, not in the polite indulgent way a guest might do, but as if he was memorising every detail, each crack, each warped window frame, each worm-eaten timber. "Now let's see..." He was thinking aloud, not bothering to address his remarks to me. "I’m six feet two ... if I stretch my arm, that's another couple of feet at least... mmm, not bad, I suppose."

"It's very good indeed. For the period, quite exceptional."

"Really? You of course being a schoolmarm would know. Historically I'm sure it's all you say, but for my purpose ..." He frowned.

"Just what is your purpose, Mr. Pemberton?"

But he had very convenient hearing, this stranger. I might never have spoken. He walked over to the window on the left of the door, and measured the depth of the sill with a quick expert hand. "Does it get much light in the morning?" he threw at me over his shoulder.

"Hardly. It faces west."

"Pity. Still, it's quite effective. So's the staircase ... wide...." He narrowed his eyes. "Couple up, couple down.

Yes. It could hardly be better."

After a few seconds' further contemplation, he started to walk toe to toe across the hall, and in a conversational voice, as if I were his willing ally in all he did, "One, two, three, four, five ... though I'd say my feet were bigger than twelve inches, wouldn't you, Miss Vaughan?"

"Much bigger." Then a new and disturbing idea suddenly blossomed in my mind. "Tell me, Mr. Pemberton," I asked breathlessly, "you're not by any chance an estate agent, are you?"

"Good heavens, no. Do I look like an estate agent?"

"I don't know. I've no idea what an estate agent is supposed to look like."

"Well, I'll tell you. They're very fearful-looking gentlemen, with long noses to smell out dry rot. Like you have here. And big eyes to spy out decaying beams." He stood on tiptoe, prodded the oak with his forefinger and a thimbleful of wood dust sifted across the sunlight down to the floor.

"But you're acting like one."

"Nonsense." He stared up now at the small minstrels' gallery, with its exquisitely carved balustrade and shallow alcoves of decorative plaster containing the oil paintings of some of our ancestors. "That looks a bit rocky to me. Wouldn't stand enough weight, I'd say. Besides, Miss Vaughan, an estate agent would have all sorts of gubbins to measure with. Slide rules, spirit levels, and what have you."

"So you're not actually an estate agent, but are you by any chance imagining this house is for sale?" The very words "for sale" made my voice tremble. But the stranger didn't notice. He actually laughed outright—a short burst of such unfeigned amusement which at any other time I might have thought attractive. Then he made one of those private jokey remarks to himself, which the solitary hearer is never expected to understand.

"You know at one time I thought that, too. When the price was mentioned I thought, She means me to buy it, lock stock and hold-up gunbarrel."

"Price?" I said. "Price of what?"

But once again he ignored me. Not deliberately perhaps because he was still absorbed. Then he shrugged his shoulders, and looked around. Unsmiling this time, he said, "No, Miss Vaughan, let me put your mind at rest. The thought of buying all this would never occur to me. Not even in my wildest dream. Or to be more accurate, shouldn't I say," he paused, "nightmare?"

"Then," I placed myself squarely in front of him, "before you go any further, I must ask you to explain what your purpose is."

"Explain what my purpose is." He repeated my words like Mr. Backhouse, our head teacher, does, with the questions of particularly inept pupils. "Oh, come now, Miss Vaughan, I don't think it would be proper for me to answer that. My purpose, after all, is with your mother."

"But I've let you in."

"Yes, of course you have. And if that's what's worrying you," he turned round, "I can always wait for her on the doorstep."

"No," I said, smiling reluctantly in response to his. "Of course not."

"Well then," he said, "let's call it a day, shall we? You agree to swallow your curiosity till your mother returns. And I'll promise not to do anything to get you worried. In fact I'll go so far as to say what I have in mind will help you keep the house. Now, how's that?" He smiled down at me this time like a kindly uncle towards a fractious child.

I don't know why I should have been so won over, but I was. I took the hand that he held out to me. It had a pleasant, firm, dependable grip. And when he said, "Is it a bargain, then?" I echoed the last word.

"A bargain it is," I said.

Then I led the way through the arch at the end of the hall and to the left, and showed him into the drawing room. "Sit down," I said. "The chairs are rather rickety, but they're quite comfortable." And I hurried along to the kitchen to make up for my rather rude reception by giving him a tray of tea.

* * *

When I carried it through into the sitting room, Mr. Pemberton was standing by the open french windows. Our sitting room is one of the loveliest parts of the house. It runs almost the entire length of it, so that cm the west there are windows which give a view of the drive, and on the south-east you can see the long fertile valley flooded with golden light, and the swell of the South Downs darkening sombrely as the sun slides into late afternoon. This is the garden side too, and the french doors set in the middle of the window open on to a circular flight of steps which lead to the lily pond and Miss Miranda's Walk.

"I was just admiring your lovely garden," Mr. Pemberton said. "Who does all this?"

"We all give a hand." I set the tray down on the deep windowsill and poured him a cup. He took it from me without moving from the window. I watched his eyes as he stood there admiring the pretty little complexities of our old-fashioned garden—the green cushions of London Pride with their straight flower stems and pink fairy hats, the crazy-paved paths, their cracks filled in with emerald moss, the pond, covered now from bank to bank with water lilies. But he was not just drinking in the beauty, of that I was certain.

"Takes you back a couple of centuries. Perfect! Absolutely perfect!"

I listened to the droplets of the fountain in the centre of the lily pond as they whispered and creaked on the lilies' polished leathery pads. Sometimes the sunlight split those droplets as they fell, made a quick rainbow, which vanished almost immediately. And my anxiety stirred like that and was gone as quickly again.

Instead, I took pleasure in his pleasure, seeing his careful unhurried gaze travel down the garden, and hover over the little stump of stone with the flat plate-shaped top and the scarcely decipherable inscription. Time and Derwent Langley weather had worn some of the letters away altogether, but the date—1609—still remained.

It is what Tanya and I called the sundial-that-isn't-a-sundial. For though it looks very like one, it is in the wrong position to tell the hours, and apart from the inscription at one corner, its round face has none of the figures of a dial.

I expected Mr. Pemberton to ask me what it was, and I had my little piece ready—how no one really knew what it was, but it had stood there as long as anyone could remember. It seemed to serve no useful purpose now, and though there was some sort of rusty mechanism at the base of the plate-shaped top, it had long since jammed or been broken. But his eyes slowly travelled further.

"Tell me, Miss Vaughan," he sipped his tea and nodded towards the far end of the garden, "what on earth is that place over there? It looks like a covered pathway. But it could be a loggia."

"Oh, that," I smiled, for this was one of my favourite subjects. "That leads all the way down to the river. It's called Miss Miranda's Walk."

"Ah, yes. Your mother did mention it." He thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and produced a leather notebook, and from a slot at the back brought out a thin packet of letters. There was no mistaking my mother's large and stylised handwriting. Nor was there any mistaking the photograph of Holywell on the other side, which I'd taken myself last summer. "In her second letter. That's right. There's a ghost story about it, isn't there?"

I said there was, and Mr. Pemberton made some remark about hoping the ghost wasn't around now, and I said no, she only appeared when, for some reason, the house was menaced. He then made one of those sarcastic little jokes to which he appeared prone, to the effect that the house was menaced right now—by woodworm and dry rot. And I almost asked him if he was the representative of one of those dry rot firms who do your house up in exchange for allowing them to use your house in their advertisements. But a truce was a truce, so I just, albeit feebly, smiled.

"Tell me more about Miss Miranda, then. I know you're dying to."

"Well, there's not much to tell. She was very beautiful, for one thing. There's a portrait of her in the minstrels' gallery—but not by anyone famous, unfortunately. She's not been seen for a very long time. She was supposed to appear when the Roundheads surrounded the place. And once when there was a bad fire. They say she came in the winter flood of 1609, when the Derwent burst its banks, and when the Great Bore sweeps up. But that only comes every once in an age."

"I see. She comes for hell and high water." Mr. Pemberton helped himself to another cup of tea. "Who was she, anyway?"

"A daughter of the house. Some ancestress of mine, I think. Her father had squandered her money, and he wanted her to marry a rich neighbour."

Mr. Pemberton ducked his tongue and sipped his tea. He didn't interrupt.

"But she ... Miss Miranda ... was in love with someone else ... a young fisherman. People said he was a smuggler on the side."

"People in italics have a knack of being right."

"Yes, well, Mr. Pemberton, they were about him. Anyway, smuggler or not, the family didn't approve."

"Quite right."

"And so they met in secret. He used to come down river from the coast, and tie up at the mooring. She'd signal him with a lantern if it was dangerous. Then they'd meet in the covered walk. Sometimes if he couldn't come up here, he'd send a message by a travelling tinker and she'd ride over the Downs to meet him. Then for weeks he didn't come. There was no message. So in the dead of night she saddled up and rode off to the coast. There they told her he'd been killed, shot by militiamen. And riding back Miss Miranda's horse fell in one of the chalk holes, and she broke her neck."

"Well, that's a grim story, if I may say so. What happened to her poor penniless father? I take it he didn't get a rich son-in-law? Or did he have another pretty daughter?"

"No. There was a young brother, that's all."

"But Father didn't die in a debtor's gaol, if they had them then?"

"Indeed no. Miss Miranda had left a will saying she wanted to be buried in the Walk, and when they dug it up, they found all the smuggler's loot."

Mr. Pemberton gave a disbelieving snort. "What's much more likely is that the whole family were engaged in smuggling, and they made up the story to explain a lot of stuff that shouldn't be found in any self-respecting landowner's back garden."

I said, "Well, maybe. Most families appear to have had a hand in it, then."

"And you, my dear schoolmarm, probably have smugglers' blood in your veins."

He touched my hand and smiled at me, and I smiled back at him. Then he was oblivious of me again, lost in whatever had brought him here. "Either way, though," he said enthusiastically, "it somehow adds authenticity to the story...."

And then I didn't listen any more. I didn't even look at him. I covered my eyes with my hands, the better to think. Now I knew. It was as if all along I'd been picking up tiny clues, jigsaw fragments. And that last unintentional remark of his was the final piece, the vital key.

"Pemberton," I said softly, under my breath. "Nicholas Pemberton." I actually saw the name in letters on the darkened retina of my eyes, as if my eyes were a wide cinema screen. For that was where I had seen the name before. In big credits at the beginning of a film. My eyes flew open. In a loud voice I said, "The Fly in the Amber. That was the film. You're Nicholas Pemberton. The Nicholas Pemberton, the film director. But what are you doing down here, Mr. Pemberton? ..."

And even before I'd got the question properly out, I answered myself. "Oh, I know now. I remember reading it in the paper. You're making a new film from some period novel ... The Moon Riders, isn't it?" My voice faded. I felt as if the floor was shaking under my feet. "You're looking for a setting, is that it?"

"Yes."

"An old house?"

"In fact I've found one."

"This?"

"Yes."

"You mean you want this house. Our house?"

"That is roughly the idea. "

"You intend to move a film company actually in here?"

He nodded.

"Take complete possession?"

"Yes."

I drew a long deep breath. It was as if my lungs were an old rusty pump handle and only a little breath could come up from deep down in the ground.

"Mr. Pemberton, you must see it's quite out of the question. We live here. This house is our home. We couldn't possibly do with a film unit here. Really, I can tell you here and now. You're wasting your time. My mother will say exactly the same." I picked up the tray in what was meant to be a gesture of dismissal, but the cups rattled so much that I put it down again.

And then I saw that Mr. Pemberton had brought out his horrid leather notebook again, and my mother's bundle of letters which somehow I'd forgotten all about. And this time he brought out another very official-looking document, and he spread it out in front of him.

"I'm afraid," he said softly, "that it's you, Miss Vaughan, who is wasting her time. Your mother has already given permission for us to use the house. Provided only that it proves satisfactory."

I said nothing, for the simple reason that I had neither anything to say nor breath to say it in. And even if I had, no words could have done justice to my feelings. Now it felt as if the floor gaped under my feet, as if the whole house was slowly subsiding. I was so shocked that when I heard the faint sound in the drive, I wouldn't have been surprised to see the ghostly Miss Miranda galloping her warning at top speed, and for ghostly lights to blossom even in the sunshine.

But the sound deepened to the note of a car engine. The only light was the sunshine glinting on the windscreen of Tanya's red Mini. Still in a disbelieving gaze, I followed Mr. Pemberton to the west window, the better to see my mother and Tanya alight from the car. He put the leather notebook on the table and leaned his hand against the stone mullions of the window.

Without meaning in any way to pry, but rather in the fascinated way that one stares at something which has brought bad news, I glanced down at the notebook. It had fallen open, not this time at Mother's letters, or the official-looking document, but at a photograph—that of a lovely redheaded girl.

A moment ago I would have sworn that nothing could have increased the apprehension which mingled with my anger. But the sight of the photograph did just that. Not because she was perhaps the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, but because in some curious way she bore such an uncanny resemblance to the painting in the minstrels' gallery of Miss Miranda herself.

CHAPTER IV

By nightfall the battle for Holywell Grange was over. Because the battle had never really begun. I had been disarmed, all my arguments discounted by that expression on my mother's face. It was a curious mixture of her tender maternal look, and triumph slightly tinged with disappointment. It was the expression of a parent about to hand over a marvellous present, only to find that the inquisitive offspring has already peeped into the parcel.

"The awful thing was, Mother expected us both to be delighted." I was perched on the edge of Tanya's bed while she sat at her dressing table, trying out some new La Pompadour preparation. Outside, beyond the undrawn curtains, the night was warm and sweet-scented, heavy with thunder to come.

"Well, I was, my love. Absolutely thrilled!" Tanya dabbed the end of her perfectly shaped nose with some stick foundation, and then held her head on one side to assess the effect. "It was a brilliant idea. And to think she kept it all to herself! I can just see her tearing out the advert and writing up. And never breathing a word. Who says women can't keep secrets?"

"She always was a great schemer for us, wasn't she?" I said softly.

"I'll say! And an avid reader of personal columns. And catalogues."

"It's rather like the time she got us Lady Jane. That was a personal column ad too. We didn't know anything about it till Lady Jane was delivered, d'you remember?"

"Will I ever forget? 'Free to good home,'" Tanya quoted, " 'spirited grey mare. Ride or drive. Needs some handling.' And we didn't even know how to begin. Well, we handled her. Or rather you did." Tanya's lovely greeny blue eyes met mine in the mirror. They sparkled mischievously. "Let's hope you can handle the film unit equally well."

"I think they'll be rather a different proposition."

"They?" Tanya asked innocently. "Or he?"

But I didn't rise to the bait. I asked her if she remembered the time Mother had ordered huge walkie-talkie dolls for our Christmas, the ones that were supposed to be so cheap because they were fire-damaged stock.

"Heavens, yes. And I'd been hoping for a lipstick and a manicure set, and you were wanting a snaffle bridle or something horsy."

I laughed for the first time since Air. Pemberton's arrival.

"Mind you," Tanya went on, "I could have told her that a home-bird like you would have set up a squawk. About the film unit, I mean."

"Well, I didn't, did I? I kept quite quiet."

"Yes. But all the same I could tell by the expression on Mr. Pemberton's face that you'd had your say before we arrived."

"Possibly I did. But then it was a bit of a shock. The whole idea takes a lot of getting used to."

"All the better." This time Tanya waved a brush dipped in a brilliant copper-coloured mascara. "You need to get out of the rut. To see a bit of life, my love. Think of all the interesting people you'll meet—film stars, extras, camera teams, technicians, press men."

"I've already met one of them," I said dryly. To not mad keen to meet the rest."

Tanya raised her brows, and then laughed. "Yes, I gathered it wasn't exactly love at first sight."

I said that was what was known as the understatement of the year, and Tanya said, "I should have thought a man who handles temperamental stars could make mincemeat out of a country schoolteacher."

We both laughed, and I said, "Well, I suppose in a way he did. I felt as if I'd been through a wringer, if that's what you mean." And then to tease her back, I said, "Anyway, he was different altogether to you and Mother. He seemed to like the look of you all right."

But her quickly indrawn breath made me look closely at her reflection in the mirror. I suppose it seemed strange that I should feel protective towards her. After all, she is eighteen months older than I am, and on the surface, much more sophisticated.

But Tanya has that vivid apparently gem-hard attractiveness that doesn't always make for happiness. She has a model's figure, tall and very thin, and an oval face with high cheekbones and good features. Her skin is a creamy white, and she wears her thick dark brown hair in a french pleat.

Of course, Tanya would say the whole effect is greatly enhanced by Madame Pompadour's beauty preparations, whose representative she is. Yet without the heavy makeup, the manicures, and hair rinses, she is just as attractive, but to me infinitely more vulnerable. For in some way, that eye-catching appearance attracts the wrong sort of man.

Now in the mirror I saw her curiously shaped eyes narrow. The hand upraised with the mascara brush halted in mid-air. I thought I saw a faint colour creep under her skin. Then she lowered her eyes and muttered something about having spilled the mascara. While she mopped up the non-existent drops, she obviously thought something out and came to some decision, for she swung round on the dressing-table stool and faced me.

"Do you really think he did?" she asked softly. "Like the look of me?"

"I'm quite sure he did."

"I," she said softly, "liked the look of him."

"So I noticed."

"Well, after all, someone had to be nice to him. Mother was all flustered. And I saw straight away that you hadn't exactly rolled out the red carpet. But"—she sighed as she watched my reflection in the mirror—"looking back, I think perhaps he, Mr. Pemberton I mean, was quite the most attractive man I've ever met." And for the life of me I couldn't tell whether she was teasing me or not. For Tanya can most devastatingly alternate utter seriousness with joking, frankness with deadly secrecy. Though I think I know Tanya as well as anybody else, I can never be quite sure what she feels.

Though I think I have always felt at the back of my mind, that when for a change she falls in love with a man instead of men falling in love with her, somehow it might well be the wrong one. But I think I had only a sixth sense to go on that Nicholas Pemberton was the wrong man.

Partly to test her feelings, and partly because the likeness still fascinated me, I told her about the photograph Mr. Pemberton carried.

"Oh, I know who that will be," she said. "That rings a bell. That must be Sylvia Sylvester. I read all about her in the Film Monthly. You know, the one we get at the salon for all the latest hair trends. This film is her big chance. They did a special interview on her. It's very touching really. Or you would find it so. Nicholas Pemberton discovered this fairly unknown actress, fell in love with her, and is going to make her a star. Mind you, I believe she's quite a girl. She's got a temper to match the red hair. I saw it in some other magazine. Since she was discovered, they call her The Temperament."

"In that case, they should be very well matched, Nicholas Pemberton and her."

"Always supposing that it comes to anything," Tanya said very softly, very thoughtfully.

"Tanya, what d'you mean?" And when all she did was smile, "Tanya, you wouldn't!"

"Why ever not? All's fair in love."

"If it is love. Even sometimes, not then."

"Now you're being very schoolmistressy. After all, it was you that gave me the idea."

"I did not!"

"Yes, you did. You said he obviously liked me."

"That's very different from..." I began. And then I said indignantly, "Oh, for goodness' sake, Tanya! What's got into you? Are you just teasing again? You can't be serious! You can have any man you choose. Why set your cap at someone who's engaged? And someone like Nicholas Pemberton. There are loads of men around here, decent types..."

I broke off in mid-sentence. Suddenly I remembered Robbie. In the midst of all the upheaval of this afternoon and evening, I had forgotten all about his invitation. Now it stood out in the confusion like a veritable lighthouse beam.

"And that reminds me, I saw Robbie Fuller this morning. He wants to take us both out in his boat on Saturday. Tanya, do try to come."

But whatever the invitation did to me, it only served to infuriate Tanya. She stood up. In fact, she actually stamped her foot. "Do you honestly mean to compare Nicholas Pemberton to Robbie Fuller? And do you have the nerve to say to me that Robbie is the decent type? You have absolutely no idea. No, thank you!" She tossed her head. "I wouldn't set foot on his rotten boat. And if you take my advice, you won't either."

And then I was angry too.

"Now you're just being beastly," I said.

We both stood facing each other, faces flushed, eyes sparkling. Tanya had shaken her head so vehemently that a wisp of her beautifully groomed hair had come loose. It hung over her pale face. She suddenly looked very young, a child in fact again. My mood melted. I said gently, "I'm sorry, Tanya, I didn't mean to get you worked up." I touched her arm and she smiled back at me.

Then I walked to the window, and leaned my arms on the ledge, staring out, gaining peace from the garden and the countryside beyond.

Though my anger had vanished, I still felt a curious almost physical ache inside. The film unit had not yet arrived, but already Tanya and I were tangled up in it. And we, who seldom even argued, had just been on the brink of a quarrel.

The moon had risen clear of the shoulder of the Downs. I watched it spangle the tiny ripples of the river bend, and flood the valley and the garden with its pale light. I could pick out each detail, every path, every shrub.

Only Miss Miranda's Walk baffled its radiance and lay secret as our future, under its impregnable shroud of matted ivy leaves.

CHAPTER V

That following Saturday must have been the first time for years that our old mooring jetty was used. Robbie brought Sea Nymph down river just before noon, and tied her up at one of the old posts.

Mother and I were at the back of the house, in the scullery, making an inventory of all the household items that would have to be put up in the attic to store when the film unit moved in, so we didn't see Robbie arrive. But we did hear him sound the little ship's bell, so we downed tools and strolled through the garden and Miss Miranda's Walk to meet him.

Though it had rained most of the week, it was a fine clear morning and the sun was drawing forth the smell of the earth and of fresh growing things. Cobwebs jewelled with dew festooned the box hedges. Strolling down Miss Miranda's Walk was like moving through a tunnel of translucent green light, and the air was as cold as a watercress stream. Even in our summer shoes, our footsteps echoed over the worn flagstones, the same flagstones that had been there when Miss Miranda herself had flitted at night down to the river to meet her shady lover. How different it was, I remember thinking, for me, in day and by sunlight! And I though Robbie Fuller isn't in love with me, he's a much more satisfactory companion than poor Miranda's smuggler.

I've never been sure just how much Mother likes Robbie. It's very difficult to judge because Mother is one of those people who literally likes everybody. This may partly account for the fact that everyone likes her, and for the way unpleasant people like Mr. Pemberton change character and eat out of her hand.

But even with Mother there are degrees of liking people, and I'm sometimes curious to know whether those benign grey eyes of hers regard Robbie with a high, medium, or low degree of liking. When I mentioned earlier this week that I'd be off sailing with him, she had seemed pleased enough, although she herself hates the water. My father was in the Navy and he was killed at sea when I was less than a year old, so it's understandable, really.

"Tell Robbie to watch the weather, darling," she had said. "These storms blow up so quickly, you know."

She repeated this to Robbie and me as he leapt nimbly on to the jetty to help me aboard.

"Don't worry, Mrs. Vaughan," he said. "I'm an experienced sailor. And the forecast's very good."

"But the locals never like too bright a June morning. Especially when the Downs are standing so clear."

Robbie laughed. "The locals never like anything, Mrs. Vaughan, as well you know!" He is a very good mimic, and he took off the rich Sussex burr. "They don't 'old with none of them lil' ole gadgets for telling the weather an' all. Wireless an' such like. They can do it all proper wi' a lil' ole finger an' a drop o' spit like."

Mother laughed and reminded him that we were locals, too, and enough of his nonsense. And Robbie promised he would take every care, not because the Downs were moving in like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, but because he had precious cargo aboard. To emphasise his point, he slipped his arm for a moment round my shoulders and gave me a brief, almost brotherly hug.

I thought then that Mother in fact must like him very much, because she asked him to stay for supper when we got back and not to be late. Seven-thirty-ish we usually eat.

Then Robbie untied Sea Nymph, pushed clear of the landing stage, and started up the engine. Her screw kicked up a froth of white and sent small ripples slapping against the landing stage and the banks. The sleek lines of the little vessel vibrated under its power as Robbie turned the wheel and guided her into mid-stream.

Until we had rounded the horseshoe bend of the river, Mother stood, a slim girlish figure for all her white hair blowing in the wind, and waved.

My heart warmed to Robbie when he said, "You know, I adore your mother. I only wish I had one like her!"

I said yes, Tanya and I were very lucky.

I suppose it was natural then that he should say, "Talking of Tanya, I presume she couldn't or wouldn't make it? The trip today?"

"She didn't come down this week-end at all. She said she had some special demonstration to give. ’I’m terribly sorry."

"Well, don't be. I'm not." Robbie smiled as if he meant it, and that was all that was said.

The air was very still, and the river full, its surface smooth as silk. It's a glorious trip to the estuary because not one single habitation stands at the water's edge between Holywell Grange and the sea.

Just along here, the banks widen, and are lined with reeds and marsh grass. The steady putter of our motor filled the quiet, sending a reed-warbler chattering up into the sky, and echoing under the old stone bridge near Castle Langley.

From far away in its fold in the Downs, the village church chimed the half-hour.

"Isn't it marvellous?" Robbie said, taking a hand off the wheel and touching mine. "Everything is so uncluttered and peaceful! Everything is just the same as it's always been for centuries! That's what I like about this place."

It seemed somehow the cue to tell him about Mr. Pemberton and the film unit. So I said, "You're wrong, Robbie. Things aren't just the same as they've been for centuries. Or at least, if they are, they're not going to be for much longer."

"Don't tell me you're going to do a Tanya on us, and go off to find life in the big city?"

"No, I'm staying right here. It's life that's coming to find me. Or rather us."

"Rosamund ... whatever do you mean?"

"Just this..."

And I began the story of how Mother had read the advertisement that Nicholas Pemberton had put in the personal column for a period house, preferably with atmosphere. A house which might be a suitable background for shooting a script of The Moon Riders, the best-selling period novel about highwaymen. And how Mr. Pemberton ...

"By Mr. Pemberton," Robbie interrupted me, "I presume you mean Nicholas Pemberton, the director chap?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. But how did you know?"

"Oh, I've been around." Robbie smiled, took one hand off the wheel and tilted my chin playfully. "I've lived in the big world too, don't forget!"

I said yes, but somehow I always thought of him as being Sussex bred and born. And I remember thinking just then that oddly enough, although he was our neighbour, I really knew very little about Robbie.

Then Robbie said, "Well, go on! Don't suddenly come to a full stop! Nicholas Pemberton chose Holywell Grange, I presume, and has offered a tidy sum for the use thereof. Is that it in the proverbial nutshell?"

I smiled. 'It is, indeed!"

"But you're not going to accept?"

I didn't look directly at Robbie. I let my hand trail over the side, feeling the current catch at my fingers like tentacles. For one brief second I longed to tell Robbie how much I disliked the scheme, however necessary it might be. How Tanya and I had really known nothing about it, and how I feared that Mother would, in the end, be taken advantage of by this tough go-ahead character who had worked himself up in an industry famous for its ruthlessness. But the well-known Vaughan family loyalty would never allow me to breathe a word. After a while, I lifted my eyes to Robbie's face. He was looking down at me, his brows drawn together in a curious intent stare.

As lightly as I could, I said, "No, Robbie, we're not going to accept. We have accepted."

His face, which had just begun to clear, darkened again. An unnatural angry flush crept up under his skin. I remember thinking that I had no idea that the countryside, and Holywell Grange in particular, meant so much to him. Then he said softly, "I just don't believe it. I just can't believe it."

I folded my hands in my lap. "It's quite true."

"But you must be mad! Have you thought of what it will mean? The whole village will be inundated with them. They'll simply take over. Can you imagine it? The place won't be the same again I"

They were so much my own thoughts put into words that I said nothing. I just stared down at my hands, feeling the sun warm on my back.

"And Holywell Grange!" he exclaimed. "Once the peace of a place like that has gone, you never get it back! There'll be lorries all over the garden, churning up the lawns! Ramps made up the steps! Walls torn down! Doors made bigger! When you move back in you won't recognise your own home."

"We're not moving out," I said.

"You're not what?"

"Moving out. We're staying at Holywell. Mr. Pemberton promised Mother he'd make us a flat on the first floor. Two or three of the upstairs rooms that he doesn't want."

Now it was Robbie's turn to say nothing. He seemed to hold his breath for minutes on end, and then to let it out in a sudden explosion of righteous indignation.

"Mr. Pemberton has promised, has he?" Robbie said, using almost exactly the same words I had used to Tanya only a week ago. "How very kind of him! He's going to allow you a few rooms he doesn't want, in your own home I"

Suddenly I wanted to cry. The misery of agreeing with every word that Robbie said, and yet not really being able to say so, made my voice when I spoke both cold and terse.

"Well, it is our own home, as you say, Robbie. And we have to do with it what we feel best."

I stood up, I suppose on some sort of gesture of making that the final word on the whole subject. But the wheel-house deck of Sea Nymph is small, and we were in the shallow waves of the estuary. Our faces were very close together.

Swiftly, and almost totally without tenderness, Robbie bent and kissed my mouth. Then he said in a cold and level voice like my own, "On the contrary, Rosamund, it is not only your own concern. It's your neighbours' concern, too. The whole village's, for that matter."

He put his hand under my chin and tilted my face. Quite softly and studying the effect of his words carefully as he spoke, he said, "Come off it, Rosamund! I can't really believe you'd approve. Not of that sort of hare-brained scheme. Tanya, perhaps. It's right up her street. But not you!"

I don't know if he saw the tears come into my eyes. But if he did, I counteracted them by saying stubbornly, "Well, I do. I approve. We've given our promise ... Mother's signed the agreement. And that's that!"

I saw Robbie's full lips tighten. He stared at me baffled, as if I were a vandal. A cold silence like a drench of spray lapped over us. The day's outing, only an hour or so old, disintegrated.

I felt my heart thudding with disappointment. And once more the thought hammered in my mind. My first real date with Robbie, and we were quarrelling. And as with Tanya, it was the film unit that had caused it.

Again.

CHAPTER VI

I suppose if it had been anyone else but Robbie, the disagreement would have spoiled the whole day. But nothing can really sour the sweetness of Robbie's temperament. I don't know how long the cold estranged silence continued. What I do know is that it was sufficiently long for Robbie to lose his concentration on Sea Nymph.

For suddenly a wave, not an estuary wave this time, but a real sea roller, caught us beam on. The wheel spun, and we were drenched, this time in a real cold salty spray.

Robbie let out a quick shout, which being Robbie, toppled as suddenly into laughter. "Heavens! I didn't see we'd passed the harbour bar." He caught hold of the wheel, and turned Sea Nymph neatly back, nosing into the green waves. And as suddenly he flung out his free arm and caught me to him.

When he kissed me this time, it was very gently and both our faces were as wet and salty as if we'd been crying. It gave that kiss, to me anyway, a special significance of real reconciliation.

"There!" said Robbie at last. "I'm sorry. It is nothing to do with me. It is your concern. Or rather your mother's. But I love Holywell Grange too. I... oh, well, never mind what I was going to say about that. Let's just forget all about it. Let's enjoy ourselves. Mrs. Jackson's packed a very special picnic. She's got a soft spot for you. First of all, I'm going to turn up coast a bit and find a little inlet I know where we can anchor."

He kissed the top of my head, and then used both his hands to turn Sea Nymph's wheel hard to port. We bumped about a bit as we chugged across the waves at the foot of the chalk cliffs.

"Mind you," Robbie said, concentrating on the sea and not, apparently, on my face, "you can deny it as much as you want. But I know you hate the scheme as much as I do. More, in fact. But you being you are just too nice to say so."

Though he wasn't looking at me, he seemed to see me open my mouth to protest, because he held up his hand, and said, "No! Positively no! I won't let you deny it! I'm having the last word on the subject today. And that is that! If you say one word I'll let the wheel go and come and kiss you. And those cliffs are mighty near!"

So I just had to let it go at that. And at that, there was some queer comfort in it, as I think Robbie had meant there to be. He didn't speak again for a while. He just hummed under his breath, while smooth green hillocks of water on one side and white cliffs on the other fled past us. Seagulls flew out of crevices in the rock and soared high into the blue. The air was still, and on the other side of the horizon, high white cumulus build-ups had grown like matching white cliffs.

Then, ahead of us, the cliffs became lower and seemed to back away. "Actually," Robbie said, pointing to it, "that's caused by a cliff fall. But it makes a sheltered bay. And it's got shallow water to anchor in."

He throttled back Sea Nymph's engine to a soft lazy putter. Then he showed me where the anchor was stowed, and I helped him slide it over the side. When he cut off the engine, we seemed enfolded in a small cell of quiet.

On either side of us, the white cliffs acted like the shelter of a huge armchair. And within the sheltering arms, the smooth green rollers diminished to lakeshore size. They flopped lazily against the shingle of the sun-drenched beach, with soft hissing sighs, rocking us gently up and down as they came and went. Although it was Saturday, the inlet was deserted.

"It's virtually impossible to get down to it from the landward side. And not many people know about it, anyway," Robbie explained.

We toyed with the idea of wading ashore, but we finally settled for picnicking on board. Robbie pulled down a red-and white-striped deck awning, and I lay under that while he produced Mrs. Jackson's provisions.

I had never had a meal at High Acres, but I'd heard in the village that Robbie's housekeeper was an excellent cook. And certainly that day she had excelled herself. There were shrimp patties and asparagus rolls, chicken in aspic, stuffed tomatoes, and a tossed salad, crisp from the ship's tiny refrigerator.

With these she had packed sticks of morning-baked bread, and their own freshly churned butter. And all this was followed with fluted strawberry tartlets, topped off with whipped cream.

"It's as well we're not expected to swim after all that," I said, pouring the coffee. "I don't think I've ever had such a lovely picnic."

"Well, there'll be lots more, I promise you. We'll need these outings all the more, you and me, when the film unit comes. We birds of a feather," he grinned, "must fly away together."

And that was all he mentioned about the film unit again that day. Without having to put it into words, we had come to an agreement. The less said about the film unit the better.

So we lazed on deck, chatting about safe subjects like my class at school, and what the headmaster had said to the Ministry Inspector, and how I hoped that Tim Brocklebank (whose father is the village blacksmith) would get to a Technical School, and how Lady Jayne was a bit nappy these days because she wasn't getting enough exercise. And then we talked about Robbie's shorthorns and the funny remarks Mr. Jackson made. ...

Then Robbie stood up and said, "Damn, the sun's gone in! We can't sit and sunbathe without the sun." He helped me to my feet and scanned the sea. A small smile played around his lips. "I know," he said. "It's just the weather! A slight swell, but no white horses. Let's take Sea Nymph out into deeper water. And you can watch me put her through her paces."

I said I was game, and while he hoisted and stowed the anchor I went down into the tiny cabin and washed the plates and cups and put them away.

Down there you could feel more rocking from the tiny inlet waves. Or maybe it was just that they'd increased in strength with the rising of the tide. I heard Robbie start up Sea Nymph. Before I climbed the three steps back on to deck again we were turning out to sea, to where now the white cumulus towers filled the sky like a medieval citadel.

Once out of the shelter of the cliffs, Sea Nymph bucked like a young filly. Then Robbie had her slicing through the tide, taking each smooth green roller with just an economical dip and rise. Then he accelerated and the great bow wave rose up on either side of us like white wings.

White wings we really seemed to have, skimming over rather than through the water, blinded with wind and sea, and the thud of each wave regular and steady as a heartbeat. After ten minutes of that Robbie put his mouth to my ear and shouted, "We could be over in France in another hour. Are you game?"

In some odd way, I knew it was a little test. Despite the wind and the spray, I was aware that he was watching me.

It was as if, after the business of the film unit, he was giving me another chance to be his sort of girl. All the same, I shook my head and I waved my hand to get him to slow her up.

"Sorry," I said breathlessly, as the engine note lowered and our sea waves subsided, "but I did say we wouldn't be all that late. Mother worries a bit."

"Well, you're a big girl now. You can look after yourself."

"Oh, it's not that, Robbie. She knows I can. She never stops me doing anything. I simply don't like her to be worried. Especially," I added, "as the weather isn't so good."

I said that last sentence before I actually looked around. When I did, I frowned. The sky now was heavily overcast, and those white towers had turned a formidable grey, and flattened themselves into what every Downs dweller knows are the anvil heads of thunderclouds. All around us the now grey rollers had risen in strength, and that ominous sneaky wind that precedes a storm was blowing off the land behind us and whipping a thin spume off their rising tops.

At least, I thought of it as the land behind us, but when I turned, the coast had gone, blotted out by distance and diminishing visibility.

Luckily, Robbie is no fool. I saw him look around as well, and although no frown wrinkled his brow, I noticed a new alertness in his expression.

"Mmm, yes—well, maybe you're right at that!" He gave me one of his broad sweet smiles. "As usual. Five minutes more and I'll turn her around. It's high tide now or thereabouts. It'll turn any minute, then we'll be into tide again, and it'll be that much more fun."

It seemed churlish to grudge him five more minutes, though I kept glancing all the time, first at my watch, which moved so slowly, and then up and behind and in front, at the clouds which gathered so fast.

Now the thump of the waves seemed not like a heartbeat, but a series of heavy body blows. I'm not a nervous person, but I have the countrywoman's healthy respect for wind and weather, and I couldn't help remembering that Robbie was town born and bred, and only a recent sailor. Finally, breathless himself, Robbie said, "All right, let's call it a day." He laughed, as he throttled back the engine. "Or night, should I say?" He squinted up at the black clouds and shrugged.

Now that the engine note was no longer blotting out every other sound, I heard the sea echo with the none-too-distant rumble of thunder. And from the furthest anvil cloud came a quick blue flicker of lightning.

The first heavy splash of rain fell almost immediately, isolated large drops that herald the beginning of a thunder downpour. Then I didn't notice it for a moment because Sea Nymph was away on my side, as Robbie wrenched her round towards home.

He'd been right about one thing, and that was the tide. It had turned all right. The swell was rising and a heavy ebb tide flowing. I could feel it shoving us back as Robbie gave Sea Nymph all the power he dare.

"Don't worry," Robbie said, as the real rain now came down, rattling on the deck and dimpling the troughs of the grey-green waves. "It's just a harvest storm."

"It isn't harvest time."

"Then it's a lambing storm."

"That's ages ago." I had to shout above a crack of thunder. But Robbie just laughed.

"This is one that got left behind."

Then a huge flash of lightning seemed to split the sky ahead of us. Vivid corkscrews of white light touched the sea and our faces, illuminating the waves in their eerie radiance. I felt my own face tense with fright, and I glanced at Robbie. I must admit that the thing I feared then, above anything else, was that I'd see Robbie himself, the townsman, suddenly confronted with the elements, baffled, and therefore afraid.

But nothing seemed to alter Robbie's expression. That slight smile was still there. His face was covered in sea spray and rain, and he lifted one hand just briefly off the wheel to wipe his eyes clear. Feeling me watching him, he said, still in that good-tempered voice of his, "Rosamund, be a dear. There are oilskins stowed under the for'ard bunk. Get them, will you, darling?"

It says rather little for my courage that it was only afterwards I remembered he'd called me darling. And then it seemed more important to find the oilskins in the darkness of the lurching cabin than to register the endearment. I got them as quickly as I could, because down there it was stuffy and sickly.

I'd just got my foot on the first step of the ladder up when the engine note went soft. And for one glorious moment I thought miraculously we'd made the estuary already. I bounded up the next two, and heard Robbie swearing softly under his breath.

"Put that oilskin on, darling! Here, give me the other. Do it fast as you can, sweetie, then take the wheel. Here! No, hold it very steady! You have to wrestle a bit, old thing. Yes, that's it! While I tinker with the engine. She's done her best. But there's a spot of wet got in."

I suppose it was the jolly conversational tone of his voice that made me momentarily blind to danger—an engine failing miles off land in heavy weather, in a little pleasure boat with no radio, and an ebb tide shoving us out to sea and thunder all around. That and the fact that the wheel and I seemed to fight all the way. I hadn't time to don the sou'wester, and the rain drenched my hair, gumming most of it to my face while the wicked wind whipped loose ends like a wet towel against my cheeks. Any energy I had left over I kept for peering ahead for those blessed white cliffs, looming out of the rain mist ahead.

Then the soft faltering engine note gave a short, sharp bark, faltered once more, and then gained strength. Finally it settled on a firm steady note.

"That's the girl," Robbie shouted. "For a moment she had me worried." This time I think it was sweat he wiped from his face. "Here, let me have that now!" He took the wheel from me. "I'm going to give her all she's got. I've got to risk her conking out. Because if we don't make the estuary before nightfall, we may not find it. And I haven't the gas to look indefinitely."

He wrinkled up his face as he said this, in a humorous deprecating way. He might have been talking about booking for the theatre or which way we should go for an afternoon drive. Then he put his arm round my shoulders and gave me a quick squeeze.

About half an hour later, only the night seemed to have advanced. Not us. We were still surrounded by dark grey running waves. I looked at Robbie's face, and meeting my eyes, he said, "You ought to go in the cabin. You're soaked."

But I shook my head. "I'd rather stay up here."

"Just the two of us." He smiled wryly. Then he said, "Don't worry. I'll get you home, I promise you."

And then, after that, I stopped worrying.

It was just about nine-thirty and dusk when I saw a blob of light seemingly floating on the tip of an oncoming wave. Then Robbie saw it too. He let out a yell and hugged me to him.

"Home!" He laughed. "Ten more minutes and we'll be in the lee of the cliffs. You feel the shelter then, my love! Not that our troubles'll be over." He laughed triumphantly. "But we'll live!"

Ahead the squalling rain mist seemed suddenly to solidify. Up loomed the chalk cliffs, with their white froth of breakers. And to port were the little vee of lights on either side of the estuary, and the smooth waters of the river. Even then we had to fight hard to get in against the tide and the swollen outpouring of the Derwent. I remember hearing the church clock of Seahaven, which is high on the headland, chiming as we at last hit the calm of inland water. And it again says little for my courage that my first thought was that we were safe, and how lovely to hear the country sound of chimes instead of the howl of the sea and the crack of thunder. Then I counted the chimes. Eleven. And my relief turned to dismay.

"It's all right," Robbie said. "I'll get you home in another hour."

"Midnight!"

"Sorry, can't make it earlier. The Derwent has a strong current at the best of times. Now it's swollen. And the engine's taken a beating."

I suppose I must have looked horrified, because from then on Robbie kept tinkering with the engine trying to get more out of her. The thunder had died away, and the night air was cold. I leaned over the rail, clutching the oilskins round me against the wind. Suddenly I was glad of this hour to calm down. I watched the black waters running by, knowing that a different person, perhaps two different persons, watched them from the two who had set out in sunlight.

A new dimension had been added to my idea of Robbie. I saw him now as someone foolish perhaps, but devil-may-care courageous, and infinitely lovable. Then suddenly he came behind me, cupped my wet face in his hands, and I wanted him to say only three words.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. But those weren't them. "I was a fool;' he went on. "Thanks for being so decent and for taking it -so well. I can't think of many girls who'd have been so cool. You're an absolute pipper." He dropped his hands and took hold of the wheel with one, and the other he kept round my shoulders.

"You weren't so bad yourself."

"Oh, I don't matter. Or do I?"

"You do."

"Bless you! D'you really mean that? Anyway, I'd have got you home. You know that. Because..." He had to put both hands on the wheel now to turn us round the river bend of Derwent Langley itself. We were in the home stretch. The next curve was the horseshoe bend. Now Sea Nymph seemed to fly against the current.

"Because...?" I prompted.

"Because I ‑" His soft whisper was cut off, drowned by a loud megaphone hail. A huge giant voice echoed like the very manifestation of the thunder across the river and round the bend.

""Sea Nymph ahoy ... ahoy ... is that Sea Nymph?"

Robbie dropped the wheel and put both hands to his lips. "Ye-es!"

Again the monster voice boomed. "And about time!"

Then we rounded the horseshoe bend, and there was our little landing stage dancing with lights. And silhouetted against the lights was a tall figure holding a megaphone to his lips, while other lesser figures stood in the garden. I remember thinking it was like a caricatured version of the arrival of Miss Miranda's lover.

"Where in heaven's name have you been?"

And then I recognised the voice.

"Who are you yelling at?" Robbie shouted back.

"You!"

I heard Robbie's angry mutter as he guided Sea Nymph in and tied her up.

We jumped ashore and Mr. Pemberton and Robbie came face to face.

"I suppose you realise that everyone thought you were adrift at sea? Or drowned?" Mr. Pemberton said. "Mrs. Vaughan has been extremely worried. We had a report that you'd been seen heading out, after the storm cone was hoisted."

"Now just a moment, who do you think you are ..."

The quarrel was just starting when a figure detached itself from the shadows of the garden. I saw her face in the dancing lantern light. The face in the photograph.

Her voice when she spoke was as lovely as her face, and I really can't think of any higher praise than that.

"Nicholas darling," she said, coming forward and laying a hand on his arm, "they've both had a bad fright. Don't start in on them now! Mrs. Vaughan was sensible, and put the coffee on as soon as she heard the engine. Let us be sensible too. All's well now. Let's go inside. We can talk then."

I noticed that though her words appeared to be addressed to her fiancé, Nicholas Pemberton, her beautiful smile included Robbie.

"I'm Sylvia Sylvester," she said with the simplicity of the famous. She held out her hand. "And you must be the charming neighbour Mrs. Vaughan was telling me about. I am so glad Nicholas and I dropped in. I was longing to have a look at this quaint little place Nicholas had found for our film. That's why he drove me over. I simply couldn't wait."

I didn't listen to the rest of what she said. I was watching Robbie's face. I wondered if he knew that he still had hold of her hand. And I remember thinking Robbie must be very glad that whatever he'd nearly told me on board had been left unsaid.

Then Sylvia Sylvester slipped a small but strangely powerful hand through each man's arm. Even in her high heels her red-gold head was just level with Mr. Pemberton's shoulder. Like a man in a dream Robbie inclined his head to hear her soft chatter. I think he had truly forgotten about me. And as for the other two, apart from my nuisance value, I'm sure they didn't know I existed.

So in silence and at a respectful distance, I followed in the path of the red-haired bewitcher who looked so like the girl in the painting, and her two attentive men, through the garden and alone up Miss Miranda's Walk to the now almost public place that had once been my home.

CHAPTER VII

The following fortnight three things happened. The advance guard of the film unit moved in. Nicholas Pemberton unbent sufficiently to ask me a favour. And last but not least, he called a press and public relations conference.

It was Friday afternoon when the advance guard arrived, and the first period after lunch, so I was taking the nine-year-olds for Nature Study. We were doing the life cycle of the frog, and I had got as far as sketching the frog-spawn on the blackboard. We'd had the usual joke about it being exactly like the school sago pud, only more so, from Tim Brocklebank, the blacksmith's son, and Lennie Sharp had promised to bring a jam-jar full of tadpoles next week, when the road that runs right in front of our school echoed to the trundle of heavy vehicles.

Now as any schoolteacher knows, Friday afternoon when the summer week-end beckons is always a period of minimum concentration anyway, and teaching Nature to these Downland children is like lecturing Mrs. Beeton on how to coddle an egg. So any diversion makes them prick up their alert little ears and forget the lesson on hand.

At the sound of the engines, Tim Brocklebank was halfway out of his chair and exclaiming hopefully that it was the Royal Artillery on manoeuvres, and did we know that his uncle drove the biggest vehicle in the British Army.

"Sit down, Tim," I said. "Yes, we did know. He came to see you once in it. The road outside hasn't been the same since."

But it was Janice Peabody who really halted Tim.

" 'Tisn't the Army," she said with scorn. "Who wants to see the Army? It's the fillums. Miss Vaughan's fillums." And having silenced Tim, she turned to me, her pink hair ribbon quivering with the pleasure of the limelight. "Me mum," she said, "put a call through to your mum, just afore dinner. I got in just as our mum was unplugging your mum."

I should add that besides being our postmistress, Mrs. Peabody also works the local telephone exchange. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage to life at Derwent Langley. It's helpful to know if you make a call that the person at the other end is visiting her sister, or at the dentist's, or nursing a heavy cold and doesn't want to be disturbed. Calls to the hairdresser can be saved by knowing that Mrs. Mellor who phoned up just before you was told that they were booked right up to the week-end. But it would be nice sometimes to have a less personal interest taken in one's doings, and not to feel that on a slack day in the Post Office one's call was being constantly vetted for clarity.

"There!" Janice Peabody said, rising out of her chair in triumph. "There's the first. There's gonna be three, miss. Two are gonna go in the south side. And that big 'un, that's got all the gear on. An' that'll stand out in the drive, because it's too big to go anywhere else."

All my class were, by this time, on their feet watching the small motorcade of two fifteen-hundredweight lorries and one huge pantechnicon trundle down Gypsy Lane, which is really a continuation of the High Street, and turn, with great scrunching of gears and protesting of tyres, left at the T-junction at the end.

"Course," Janice said, determined not to return to the frog-spawn, "you wouldn't know, miss. You not going home for your din an' that."

"Oh, yes. Thank you, Janice. We knew they were expected by the week-end, and that they'll be staying for eight weeks. We didn't know the exact time of arrival. But these things take a lot of organisation. Now, children, this jellied mass of frog-spawn is not unlike a whole village in embryo."

"Mum says it'll be like a whole new village, up there. At your place, miss."

"They'll take over us too, Dad says, miss." This from Charlie Dann whose father Fred keeps the White Hart. "Not that he minds. They've booked up every room right up to September. We're going to have the film stars staying with us. The big boss chap, the one in the white Lancini, he's making us what he calls his H.Q. And he told Dad that if we put in a special bathroom for his lady, Dad could send the bill to him."

"His lady," Janice said dreamily. "She's loverly. A proper dream, me mum says. She came into the shop to get some postcards last Saturday, and me mum got her autograph for me."

"Yes, well," I said firmly. "Now all this is very interesting. Just the same, children, we can't allow the coming of the film unit to upset our education." Mentally I added to myself, even if it upsets everything else.

But neither the film unit nor Janice Peabody were done with me for the day. Janice kept silent, however, staring at me with that glazed look of someone whose mental processes are engaged elsewhere, till I'd got as far as my sketch of the tadpole growing his front legs. Then she said,

"You're wrong, Charlie, she's not his lady. Not his proper lady. She's his leading lady. That's different."

"'Tisn't!"

"Yes, it is."

"No, it's not. Because she's both. My dad says so. He saw it in the paper. And she's got a diamond the size of an oak-apple on her finger."

"That doesn't mean nothing."

"A double negative, Janice, please."

"My mum knows different. It isn't the man, the one in the white car. It's Mr. Fuller. Our Mr. Fuller, from High Acres. Me mum said wouldn't it be lovely if he did marry her. An' we had a film star down here properly to live?"

"Janice, be quiet! Kindly pay attention. Do not repeat idle gossip."

The tone of my voice kept her (and everyone else for that matter) quiet till the end of the lesson. But I could see that Janice, whose mental efforts are notorious among the staff for being slow and ponderous, was thinking some irritating problem through to the end. The colour in her rather pinched face came and went.

Finally, when I had the fully developed frog sitting on a lily pad catching his own flies for himself, and Tim Brocklebank who was this week's room monitor had cleaned the blackboard, Janice put up her hand.

"Can I say something now, please, miss?"

"Yes, all right, Janice."

"It wasn't idle gossip, miss, at all. Charlie 'as got it all wrong. If she ... the film lady is engaged to the producer man, why does Mr. Fuller phone 'er up every night? Right up to London? Personal call, miss?"

And with her honour vindicated, Janice got up, bade me good afternoon, and trooped out after the others, for the next hour in the gym.

* * *

"Ah, Miss Vaughan, just the person I want to see!"

I was a trifle late for school on Wednesday morning. Everything at home was at sixes and sevens. We hadn't yet moved upstairs, but we were already half packed. So I'd been speeding up the slight gradient on my bike, head down, shoulders hunched over the handlebars, when I'd met the big white car at the Gypsy Lane T-junction.

Luckily, I didn't do anything so undignified as actually come off my bike, but I did have the odd anxious second as I wobbled into the grass verge, and the brakes of the white car squealed. I thought, but I can't be sure, that I heard a sharp, angry shout from the driver, but as he drew his car to a halt, Mr. Pemberton's face seemed composed and untroubled.

It was a warm morning, and Mr. Pemberton had the roof down, so conversation was easy. Too easy.

Oblivious, it seemed, that he was not at all just the person I wanted to see, and equally oblivious that the last two times, indeed the only two times that we'd met before, our social exchanges had hardly been cordial, Mr. Pemberton leaned nonchalantly on the door of the car, prepared to talk.

"Tell me," he said in that deceptively quiet voice, "do you always cycle like that?"

"Not always, no."

"Good. It strikes me as being remarkably dangerous. Not to mention a bad example to the children."

"Look," I said furiously, "you were on the wrong side of the road yourself."

"Oh, no, I wasn't. I'm quite prepared to go back and look at tyre-marks. However, don't let's waste time."

"Exactly what I was going to say, Mr. Pemberton." I looked at my wrist watch. "I am, in fact, in a great hurry."

"I gathered that from your cycling." He gave that small economical smile.

"Mr. Pemberton," I said, "whatever is or is not my speed is not your concern." I drew a deep breath. "The last time I saw you, you lectured me and my—er—friend about sailing. Now it's ..."

"Oh, the sailing. Yes, I'm glad you reminded me. That was rather different." Mr. Pemberton frowned. "That wasn't altogether your fault. A bad show. But not just yours. However, neither your cycling nor your sailing was what I wanted to see you about. I was on my way to Holywell to see what my men were doing with your flat conversion."

"They're doing quite well, thank you," I said stiffly.

"And I hoped to—er ‑" he smiled, "run into you, because I wanted to ask you a favour."

Now this, I was beginning to learn, was exactly like Mr. Pemberton. Most people, most ordinary people, if they wanted to ask you a favour, would butter you up a little first.' But not so Mr. Pemberton. He simply asked you a favour, period. It was, in fact, a favour he was doing you by asking it. And far from buttering you up first, he reckoned it was just as well to do the opposite, to get in a few trenchant criticisms while he was about it.

Rather breathlessly, but nevertheless with spirit, I said, "You pick your moments, Mr. Pemberton."

And I thought I saw a queer humorous gleam light up those hard blue eyes. But perhaps I was mistaken, because he ignored my remark, and went on briskly.

"The favour," he said, "is the loan of your horse, the grey mare. Lady Jane, isn't she called?"

"She is, Mr. Pemberton. But I didn't know you rode."

"I don't."

"Then ‑?"

"Don't worry," he said. "It isn't for me. It's for the male lead."

Now numerous rumours had gone round the village as to who the leading man was going to be, and I must say I was as interested as the next person. These days everyone seemed to be vying with each other as to who had the first bit of information about the unit.

"And who is the lucky man to be?"

"Actually," he said, this time registering my mild sarcasm, "it is I who am lucky, to get Mm. Unless of course you mean in playing opposite Sylvia Sylvester." A strange look passed over Mr. Pemberton's lean face, half amused, half tender, or as near as I imagine that face could ever get to tenderness. Then he roused himself from his brief daydream and said, "He's not done many films so far, but he's very good. His name is Gary Hennessy."

"I have heard of him, I think. Isn't he an American?"

"That's right. From Cape Cod. He's like you, country born and bred." Once more that faint flicker of a sarcastic smile, devastating as lightning, played round Mr. Pemberton's lips. "You two should get on well. And boy, can he act!"

I said in what even to me sounded a stiff schoolmistressy manner, "What concerns me most at the moment is, can he ride?"

"Ride? As a matter of fact I never thought to ask him. But it won't be difficult to him. If he can't it'll be simple enough to learn."

"Well, there's more to it than that."

"Anyway, I only want the loan of her once, till the horses I've ordered arrive."

"All the same, I hope he's got some idea."

"Lady Jane's quiet enough, isn't she?"

"She's all right with me."

"Well then?" Mr. Pemberton didn't actually say, Judging by your cycling and your sailing, but somehow he managed to look it. Instead he said lightly, "I'm sure if a girl can cope with her, a strapping lad like Gary Hennessy will have no difficulty."

I didn't answer that. Instead I looked at my watch again, and seeing it was ten minutes to nine, and assembly would be starting in ten minutes and I wouldn't have time after all to put out the corrected exercise books, I put one foot on the pedal and asked coldly, "And when would you like Mr. Hennessy to borrow her?"

"I want him to ride her for the press conference. You've heard about it? No? Well, never mind, you will be doing. The office is dealing with it now. I'm calling it for Saturday week. Gary won't be arriving till then. He'll be staying with us at the White Hart. So could we have Lady Jane Saturday morning?"

"Certainly," I said. "I'll hack her over."

"Don't do that, I'll send someone to fetch her."

"Lady Jane wouldn't come. She wouldn't leave her stable with a stranger."

"Then I'll get them to drive you back."

"No, thank you," I said, "I prefer to walk." I mounted my bike. My goodbye was lost in the roar of his exhaust. I knew I'd been discourteous and I was therefore cross both with myself and with him. The odd thing was (and this fact only struck me halfway through first period geography), the real reason I'd refused the lift back so rudely was because he hadn't offered to drive me himself.

CHAPTER VIII

"So what's new," Tanya asked, "besides tonight's conference, us moving into the flat, and the Hennessy arrival?"

"Goodness me," I laughed, "what more do you want? You come dashing down from London and you find more going on here than the big city. And you still want more!"

Tanya helped herself to a potato crisp and crunched it noisily. We were in the big kitchen, preparing what my mother calls a few finger eatables, for the press and public relations conference at seven. Tanya had just driven down from London, hot and dishevelled as she put it, and thirsty for news. Actually she looked cool and bandbox-fresh, but she was curious.

"Well, why not? And whose idea was it in the first place."

"Mother's," I said, and rapped the hand that stretched out for an asparagus roll.

"Well, who supported her?"

"You did," I said. "I don't think I’ve forgiven you yet."

"Come off it! You're having a whale of a time. You must admit that's a swish flat Pemberton's merry men have rigged you out."

"Yes," I said. "Not bad. And you've seen what Pemberton's merry lorries have done to the drive."

"Not to worry. Mother says he's promised to make everything good."

I said, Yes, in a disbelieving tone of voice, and quite logically Tanya asked, "Well, why all this help you're giving if you're still as and as all that?"

"Mother. You know she's enjoying every minute. She said, quite rightly, of course, that we're the hostesses, as well as the go-betweens, and it's up to us to share in the get-together. Mr. Pemberton did offer to get a catering firm to do it. But as there'll only be thirty or forty coming, Mother felt we could manage."

I arranged the last fragment of parsley on the lobster canapés, and added, "Of course, Mr. Pemberton sent help around—men to move in chairs, and men to collect the extra crockery, and glasses from the village hall. He has his little band of slaves, has Mr. Pemberton."

"Really," Tanya murmured meaningfully. "And what slave was it that rode Lady Jane down to the White Hart? And walked, mind you, walked back."

"Oh, that V'

"Yes, that."

"Well, I can assure you I didn't do it for Mr. Pemberton. It's Gary Hennessy that's borrowing her."

"Did you see him?"

I shook my head. "It was early. He hadn't arrived. I put Lady Jane in the loose box at the back, and I told Charlie —you know Charlie Dann who's in my class at school, to give her a bucket of water around ten."

"Did you catch a glimpse of The Temperament?"

"No. She wouldn't be up. I hear Mr. Pemberton's had a special luxury bathroom installed there for her. And talking of The Temperament, I know I shouldn't repeat gossip, but just to you..."

And then I told her the rumour first told me by Janice Peabody which had gained ground this last fortnight about Robbie and Sylvia Sylvester. I finished up by saying that I didn't really think there was anything in it. But it did seem odd that I'd not seen anything of Robbie for nearly three weeks.

Tanya said nothing for a while. She subsided into the rocking chair by the kitchen range, and swung herself backwards and forwards, her eyes narrowed in the way she does when she's thinking.

"Of course," she said finally, in a cold, neutral voice, "I'm not the one you should really discuss him with."

"Why ever not? I certainly wouldn't discuss Robbie with anyone else."

"Because I've never really liked Robbie. Therefore I'm biased. Against."

"I can't think why, Tanya. Robbie's the nicest man I know."

"That's because you don't know many men. And you don't know Robbie at all."

"Well, I know him now better than you do."

"Do you?" Tanya gave a short sharp laugh. She seemed about to say something. Then she bit her lip, staring down at the tips of her fashionable shoes. After a while she shrugged her shoulders and said in an altered casual tone of voice, "Yes, of course you do. I hardly know Robbie Fuller at all. Just the same, I'm still the wrong person to discuss him with. I've got what's called a vested interest, don't forget." She laughed. "If Robbie was silly enough to fall for The Temperament, and she was silly enough to fall for him, then Q.E.D. That, my love, would leave the Pemberton field clear for me."

I said that oddly enough I'd never really thought about that. Which was perfectly true, because I was still only half convinced of my sister's interest in Mr. Pemberton. With Tanya it's very difficult to know when she's joking and when she's deadly serious.

But I must say I got more convinced of her interest as the afternoon wore on. It was one small thing in particular that I remembered.

Efficient, it seemed, in everything he did, and able to order around even rebel elements like myself, Nicholas Pemberton had left with us a list of guests and a seating plan of how they were to be arranged at the press conference. And Tanya, who is a surprisingly neat and scholarly writer, volunteered to help me write out the name cards.

"I understand from Mother that he's got it all worked out," I said, extracting the seating plan, the list of guests, and the blank cards. "Central table for those that are talking, the rest, the villagers, the bigwigs, and the press arranged in a semi-circle around, so that they can fire their questions."

I unfolded the plan and spread it out on the scrubbed board of the kitchen table. Tanya rested one hand on my shoulder and we both leaned forward and pored over it.

"The arrangement's sensible enough," Tanya said. Mr. Pemberton had, in fact, arranged everything with remarkable discretion. I suspect that Mother or maybe Mr. Dann or Mrs. Peabody had been giving him some advice. The village policeman who for years has been courting Mrs. Peabody was seated next to her. And in the centre front were what Tanya and I refer to as the village headmen— that is, the Rector, my headmaster Mr. Backhouse, and the Chairman of the Parish Council, Captain Coggin. Next to them was Robbie (though a mile away on the Uplands, our nearest neighbour), the local doctor, the district nurse, the shopkeepers, the blacksmith, the postman, the vet, and Mr. Dann.

Naturally Mr. Pemberton had pride of place in the centre of the talking table, and naturally Sylvia Sylvester, his leading lady, sat on his left. But there was an alteration to the seating on his right.

"Look," Tanya said, "the Big Boss actually changed his mind. Oh, who," she quoted gaily, "shall stand on my right hand and keep the bridge with me?"

"Oh, that," I laughed. "No, he didn't really change his mind. I remember, Mother did mention it. As a courtesy, he wanted her to sit there. But she said she was much too shy to sit on what was a top table. So she told him she'd much rather be in the circle with her friend from the W.I., Mrs. Mellor." I pointed. "Look, there's where she is. And that's why he put me there instead."

"Me," Tanya said.

"Me," I repeated.

"Me," Tanya said. "As the elder. He's put me."

"Sorry, Tanya." I was still smiling. "He didn't know you were coming. Look carefully. That says 'Miss R. Vaughan'."

Equally firmly, but not smiling, Tanya said, "That's not an R. That's a fancy T. 'Miss T. Vaughan'."

I was just about to say, "A flight of fancy, you mean," when I saw the tight determined expression round her mouth.

Of course I know now that it's always a mistake. It's no good pretending either to oneself or to anybody else. But at the time it seemed a small enough thing to do for Tanya. So I bent over the table again, and screwed up my eyes, and then I said, keeping my fingers firmly crossed behind my back, that now I came to look closely, Mr. Pemberton was a very ornate writer, and yes, I suppose that could conceivably be a letter T.

That meant there was no seat for me. But I didn't mind. I preferred the anonymity of what in my own mind I referred to as the Villagers' Side. Besides, the onlooker sees most of the game, they say. And that evening I saw several things.

For the meeting, as Nicholas Pemberton meant it to be, was a turning point in his relations with the village. And what had seemed to me like an invisible touchline—those few feet of floor which separated the top table from the semi-circle of villagers' chairs—melted like snow.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it's kind of so many of you to have come along this evening...." Nicholas Pemberton had begun talking as soon as he had handed Miss Sylvester and my sister to their respective chairs. I must confess that it saddened me a little to see Tanya among what I, and a good many others, still regarded as Them—the other side. But there were other things that disturbed me even more. And Nicholas Pemberton is a persuasive speaker. "I've heard a lot about you Downlanders. And I know that, like me, you want straight speaking and plain facts...."

He has an easy throwaway manner which I've read somewhere is usually the result of long practice. He also has the facility of dominating an audience. He explained that they were just a location unit here for about eight weeks and that the rest of the film had been shot at Elstree. I won't say that you could have heard a pin drop while he was speaking. Far from it. His whole speech was punctuated by considerable noise—murmurs of hear-hear, chuckles at his jokes, and the rustling of Sunday-best dresses and the creaking and shuffling of wedding-cum-funeral shoes, as the villagers craned their necks to get a better view of the stars.

Gary Hennessy of course wasn't there, because he was going to appear at the end of question time in costume on our Lady Jane, partly as a gimmick and partly so that the press photographers and the unit's own publicity men could take photographs.

But Sylvia Sylvester was looking both beautiful and radiantly happy. Even while Mr. Pemberton was talking, I could hear cameras clicking. Several times she altered her pose so as to be taken at the best advantage. And I could see Mrs. Mellor, Mother's best friend, identifiable in the crush purely by her cherry-decorated hat (which Mother says she wore at my christening) bobbing up and down with film-struck excitement.

Of course we weren't all won over. Far from it. There would, I knew, always be a hard core of resistance. And I would be at its toughest centre. For at that meeting I was feeling particularly nostalgic.

These last few weeks everything had come about so quickly that I could hardly grasp what was happening. Now, looking around our ravaged drawing room, with the smell of mothballs competing with the expensive alien hothouse blooms with which Mr. Pemberton had caused the whole place to be decorated, the full impact seemed to hit me.

None of our original furniture remained. The curtains had been taken down and folded away. Our threadbare rugs had gone, and the floor was bare except for weird hieroglyphics scrawled in chalk. Odd-looking pieces of lighting and machinery lurked in the corners. I could see the unbleached rectangles on the plaster of our walls, where our pictures had hung, and the photographs of my father taken as a young man, fishing off the terrace steps, when a quarter of a century ago Derwent had burst its banks. There was another blank space over the fireplace—instead of the centuries-old speckly mirror, which Tanya used to pretend had magic qualities and that in it on Midsummer Night you could see the face of the man you would marry.

There still remained beneath it the old Tudor fireplace, where ages ago we'd hung our Christmas stockings, and roasted chestnuts on Bonfire Night. But this, pending some minor repairs, we now temporarily boarded over, on Mr. Pemberton's instructions.

As everything these days was. Not boarded up, I mean, but on Mr. Pemberton's instructions. He signed an order, pulled a string, or waved a wand, and imperceptibly at first, but inexorably our way of life changed.

Now he appeared to have come to the end of his speech, and still confident, still in command, he was asking for questions.

Up jumped Captain Coggin, the Chairman of the Parish Council, and asked if Mr. Pemberton didn't think in a matter as serious as this that the Parish Council ought to have been consulted.

"No, sir. This is a purely private arrangement. On private ground. Next question, please."

Captain Coggin sat down.

The village policeman ponderously got to his feet and asked if Mr. Pemberton anticipated that with all these people an' all coming here it would lead to an increase in the village crime rate.

Mr. Pemberton replied, amid laughter, that of course he didn't know exactly what the crime rate was at present for Derwent Langley—though he had heard the sole prosecution last year was of someone who hadn't a rear light on their donkey cart. However his, Mr. Pemberton's, lot were an orderly bunch, and anyone not behaving themselves would have to answer to him personally.

Then some of the shopkeepers asked if there would be an increase in trade—"that was more to the point than crime, eh?" and received a gratifying affirmative. Someone else enquired if the trout in the Derwent would be affected and Mr. Pemberton made some crack about it all depending if there were film fans or not, but other than that, nothing the film unit did would distract them from the anglers.

Isolated, it seemed, in my antagonism, I watched the meeting going in Mr. Pemberton's favour. Then from the front, almost as if in response to my telepathic entreaty, up shot Robbie.

He is a popular figure in the village, and when he got to his feet, one or two of the villagers clapped. Robbie took his time. He stuck his hands in his pockets and turned around to the audience and grinned.

I watched carefully, I saw Nicholas Pemberton's eyes narrow. For a moment I thought I saw a look of bitter antagonism cross his face. But if I did, it was gone as quickly as it came.

"Yes, Mr. Fuller?" His voice had an added terseness. As if he knew, as I knew, that Robbie was going to play to the gallery, to say something impertinent to break, as it were, Mr. Pemberton's sway over the meeting.

The Robbie looked towards Miss Sylvester. Whether she made some signal to him or not I don't know. For abruptly Robbie seemed to change his mind. The smile faded. He made some craven enquiry about wondering whether it was possible for the villagers to get jobs as extras, and if so how you went about it.

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Fuller. The Casting Director will be posting up a notice shortly."

Nicholas Pemberton himself looked puzzled, as if he couldn't make out what game Robbie was playing. But all I know as I watched Sylvia Sylvester's secret smile, and my sister's frankly contemptuous frown, was that Robbie had gone over to the other side.

* * *

I suppose most people might consider this old-fashioned, but whenever I feel in need of solace as I did that night, I gain great peace from the garden. Automatically, my eyes strayed out to where in the cool and calm of the evening the garden lay quiet amid the long shadows. And I closed my ears to the questions and answers, the laughter and hear-hears.

Low over the pond a few swallows, nesting in the eaves, swooped and dived after the flies. The roses were in full bloom, the strong Sussex oaks in high summer leaf. I remember thinking that by the time the swallows had gone, the rose petals fallen, and the beech leaves turned brown, the unit would have gone. And everything would be the same again. But even as I thought it, I knew that from then on nothing could ever be the same again.

And so it was out of my despondency that I came to see him. At first it didn't quite register, in the way that reality doesn't immediately penetrate a daydream. I saw the figure moving, without it at first touching me in any way.

Then abruptly I came aware and alert. Not up the drive, but across the spinney that skirts the wood, came Lady Jane, at full gallop (being nappy, in horsemen's words), and taking the short cut home to the stable, while around her neck, grasping in fact her long mane, stirrupless and reinless, clung her unfortunate rider.

I rose from my chair. Mr. Pemberton, in answer to a question, was explaining some technicality about the electricity generator and he appeared to hold the audience as spellbound as in any film. I don't think anyone heard the rattle of hooves up Miss Miranda's Walk, because they were all too busy applauding and rustling the 'Information Sheets' which gave a précis of the film and the shooting programme. If anyone saw me slip out, they would assume I'd gone to make the coffee. But I don't think they did. Everyone seemed to be vying with each other as to who could ask the next most intelligent question.

Once outside the room I ran across the hall, down the passage, and through the kitchen and scullery. I wish I could have run a bit faster, or that I'd seen him a bit sooner, because then I might have been able to catch Lady Jane's bridle before he fell.

Instead, to my horror, I got there just in time to see him hit the stable-yard cobbles, and the curly handsome Regency wig, already askew, go flying through the air and come to rest on the red-tiled roof of the feed shed.

"Lady Jane, you wicked girl!" I exploded, catching her bridle then and bringing her to a halt. I gave her a sharp slap on her hindquarters and led her up the ramp and through the stable door. I shut it firmly after me, and for a second leaned my back against it, getting my courage up, to go over to Mr. Hennessy.

Then with considerable trepidation, I bent over him.

"Are you hurt?" I asked nervously—partly because up until then I had tended to regard film actors as a race apart, partly because the man really had taken an awful tumble. "I'm terribly sorry. Lady Jane doesn't usually behave like that. Usually she's so good. Maybe all the upheaval has upset her. But I do apologise. I hope you aren't hurt ‑"

My voice trailed away. He was half lying, half reclining where he'd fallen. The gorgeous apricot satin costume was covered in stable-yard dust. So were the white hose. One buckled shoe was still on his foot, but the other lay a couple of yards away. His handsome face was scratched and streaked with green, no doubt from his pelt through Miss Miranda's Walk. His eyes were closed, and his brows drawn slightly upwards as if frozen in permanent surprise.

But none of these made my voice falter. What frightened me was that his whole body was shaking, as if under some violent emotion, or with the effect of some profound shock.

I knelt down beside him, and shyly put my hand on his shoulder. I had just begun to talk soothingly. "Stay where you are, Mr. Hennessy. Don't try to move or anything. You may have broken a bone ... now the doctor's inside at the meeting ... he's a nice old chap. I'll go and get him, but I'll be right back."

Then suddenly a hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. First one merry brown eye opened, and then another. Abruptly, I realised what the shaking was. Mr. Hennessy threw back his head, convulsed with laughter.

Then abruptly he sat up.

"My, oh, my," he said. "What an entrance! Could you beat that, honey? I ask you?" Then he reached up a hand to straighten his wig, and looked around, startled. "Say, I've been robbed! That mean old horse has run off with my mane."

His joke pleased him so much that he went off into more laughter, in which, because it had such a spontaneous infectious quality, I joined in.

"It's on the feed-shed roof," I said, pointing.

"Land's sakes!" he said. "This place really is bewitched. Now what we gonna do? This is not the entrance our boss is going to like."

I watched Mr. Hennessy leap nimbly to his feet, retrieve the missing shoe, and begin to dust himself down.

"Come into the kitchen," I said. "You can tidy up in no time. I'll give Lady Jane a talking to. Then you can walk her round through the arch to the front, and no one will be any wiser."

Mr. Hennessy murmured something about me being a real honey, even if I did own that dratted animal, as he assumed I did. But first things first, and that was the missing wig.

The retrieving of it proved considerably more difficult than I would have supposed. The stables and the sheds for some unknown reason are all built on a ramp, making their roofs nearly as high as the first floor of the house. Mr. Hennessy tried climbing on a water butt, and hooking it down with a yard broom, but without success.

Finally I stood on his shoulders and just managed to pull it down by one of its chestnut ringlets. Mr. Hennessy let out a great whoop of triumph and slid me neatly over his head and into his arms.

I don't know why Robbie came through to the yard at that particular moment. What I do know is the picture he must have seen. Me, held tightly in Gary Hennessy's arms, both balanced precariously on top of the water butt, both smiling, both friends.

And by the look on Robbie's face, I knew the conclusion he had drawn.

CHAPTER IX

"Just who are you setting your cap at?" I asked Tanya six days later. She had recently taken to coming home every week-end. She said it was because London was unbearable in midsummer and the salon closed all day Saturday in June, and anyway her current London boy-friend was on holiday in America.

But I knew differently. The film unit, with its strange illusory way of life, attracted my sister like a moth round a flame.

And now it was Gary Hennessy that she admired.

"Well, you must admit he made a splendid entrance. I thought we were going to have a pop-star screaming session in the audience. They absolutely adored him. And I give you full marks. You did a good job. He looked as soigne as any Regency buck."

"He did, didn't he?" I smiled.

"And," Tanya went on, "he walked Lady Jane as if he'd been born in the saddle. No one would have known."

"Except Robbie. Robbie saw him lifting me down. Robbie would think..."

"Robbie doesn't think, period. Anyway, he doesn't count."

"Not to you, perhaps. But he does to me."

"Then more fool you! Though I really can't believe it. With all these dishy men around—Nicholas Pemberton, Gary Hennessy, that rather nice extra with the brown crew-cut hair, not to mention the camera man with the roving eye, and the art director . . . "

"Then don't believe it," I said, throwing her the dish towel, and pointing meaningly at the pile of tea dishes I was putting on the draining board. We had had tea early because we had been invited to the first day's shooting, an honour which Mother and Tanya had hailed with delight and I with a still hostile interest.

Reluctantly, Tanya slid off the stool and picked up the cloth. She gazed at her perfect crimson nails wistfully and began half-heartedly to dry a plate or two.

"Anyway," she said, "if you want a bit of advice from me, just let him think—Robbie, I mean. For if by any chance he did imagine you were keen on Gary Hennessy, or anyone else for that matter, he wouldn't be less keen on you."

"Of course he would," I said. "And that cup isn't washed yet."

"No, he wouldn't. He'd be more interested in you."

"How d'you know?"

"Because I know men."

I cleared my throat meaningly, and she laughed.

"I know men like you know children."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. And they have a certain amount in common."

I washed up the last dish, emptied out the water, and dried round the bowl.

"They may be unpredictable," Tanya went on, "but their unpredictableness has a certain predictability, if you know what I mean?"

I shook my head. "Frankly, no." And then the telephone began to ring, and still laughing, I said, "All right, Miss Clever, tell me who that is?"

"Certainly." Tanya made herself comfortable on the stool again and brought out a nail file. Without looking up, she said, "It's Robbie, of course. For you. Like I said. Because he thinks you might be interested in someone else. He's anxious to keep his tabs on you himself."

I smiled ruefully.

"Don't raise my hopes!" Then I walked out into the tiny hall and picked up the receiver. But when I heard the voice and what it said, I could hardly accept Robbie's invitation, for surprise that Tanya should have been so absolutely right.

Nicholas Pemberton came over to meet us while a swarm of technicians moved about the set. He looked very cool and collected in an open-necked shirt and blue jeans, very much the man in easy command. His eyes were bright with enthusiasm. His face, for all his responsibility today, somehow younger-looking.

"I'm afraid," he said, "this may seem rather a tedious process to you. At the moment," he pointed, "the camera over there is just getting angled up for the establishing shot, and working out what's called the frame. We only shoot a few minutes at a time, and we do it over and over again until it's just right. That, I'm afraid, for the onlooker, doesn't make for good viewing. You don't get any scene in its entirety. We consider we're lucky if we get five minutes' film in the can at the end of the day."

Tanya made some remark about a director having to be a monument of patience, and Nicholas Pemberton laughed ruefully and said alas, he was not renowned for that virtue. Then he went on to say that in terms of our jobs, it was rather like Tanya going over and over mascaraing a customer's single eyelash, and me repeating a single word twenty times over in a lesson.

"Oh," Tanya laughed mischievously, "she's been known to do that! Haven't you, Rosamund? You see, Nicholas, unlike you, she is renowned for her patience."

"Really?" Nicholas Pemberton raised one saturnine eyebrow. "Now you do surprise me. I would never have supposed it."

To show that last remark was all in fun ... well, mostly in fun ... well, partly in fun ... he gave one of his brief, rather attractive laughs, and lightly holding Tanya and me by the arm guided us over to where a row of green deck-type armchairs were arranged in a row, in one of which Mother was already in possession.

"It's such fun, Nicholas," Mother said, "simply sitting here and watching everyone. I've no idea what they're all up to. All that electric cable must be dangerous, surely? No? Well, you're the expert. I only hope you don't use too much current, and we have a village power failure on our hands. Captain Coggin would be after us in no time."

Mr. Pemberton explained to her that they had their own mobile generator for location work. Anyway, today, most of the scene was going to be shot in sunlight. Curiously enough, this particular scene was meant to be in the evening. But the camera lenses would either have what was called a "matte" on them, or else light and sharpness of colour would be filtered out with gauzes, or by smearing the lens with vaseline.

"Now I've put you here partly so that I can explain it to you as we go along." He pointed to a rather superior type chair which had the word Director written in bold black letters on it, "and partly because it's the best view, by the camera dolly." Then he smiled this time at Tanya. "Though I hope you won't distract the crew too much from the job in hand!"

He didn't include me in the remark, for one thing, because no one has ever had any difficulty in keeping their minds on the job in hand when I'm around, except perhaps Janice Peabody. And for another, it seemed I was not held in the same favour by Mr. Pemberton as Tanya and Mother obviously were.

Even as he arranged our little party in their seats, he made this clear. For Tanya was put next to the director's chair. Then Mother, Finally me.

Not that Tanya was able to avail herself of the proximity. Because as soon as we were settled in, Mr. Pemberton was on his feet, beckoning the camera teams in, testing shots with what looked like a large jeweller's lens, altering the angles of the machines themselves, placing the microphone, which he explained quickly to us had to be near enough to pick up voices and yet not be visible in the picture, adjusting the small arcs on the floor, which in the unit are known as 'pups'.

"By the way," I leaned behind Mother's chair and asked Tanya, while Nicholas Pemberton was busy with what was apparently called a "sound boom", "since when have we been on Christian-name terms?"

"Since when have who?"

"Us and Nicholas Pemberton."

"We and Nicholas Pemberton, tut-tut, child—who is the teacher of English? Oh, I don't know." She shrugged. "Since the beginning. I really can't remember. Why? Do you object?"

"Not particularly."

"Actually," Tanya said, smiling mischievously, "he ... Nicholas said he preferred my real name, Titania. He said it conveyed a quality of enchantment. Which was all very suitable."

"Really?"

"He thought Rosamund was very suitable for you, too."

I was trying to recall, what attribute of Rosamund was the particularly undesirable one that he had in mind, when it appeared that the set was all ready. The stand-in was being dismissed. The stars were being called for. Onlookers were being silenced, and in all her undoubted beauty, Sylvia Sylvester had appeared.

Mr. Pemberton was standing at a distance then. But I could very clearly see the expression on his face. And I remember thinking that Tanya would require all the fairy magic of her namesake if she really ever dreamed of competing with a love like that.

* * *

I had further evidence to support that theory before the day's shooting was over. Once the players were in position, in this case, just Sylvia Sylvester and an elderly character-part actor, dressed as a butler, Mr. Pemberton came back and stood beside us.

"Any minute now," he said, "we'll begin. I must ask you to keep absolutely quiet during the actual take. After that, you can talk quite freely till the next one. Now I'll just explain that we use two cameras, one a picture camera and one a sound camera, and roll two films all the time. We'll be taking a tracking shot of Miss Sylvester. The camera dolly will follow her on rails wheeled by that chap over there. He's called the grips. As soon as the clapper boy appears, not another word, please! Because the smacking of that is to synchronise soundtrack and film. Oh, and if you get bored and want to leave, don't forget .... do it between takes."

But there was never any question of any of us getting bored. Like three good children we watched Nicholas Pemberton check the position of the actor and actress, and quibble over a ruffle out of place in Miss Sylvester's costume. We saw him crook his finger, and forward came Miss Tripp the wardrobe mistress with a pad of pins and needles on her wrist, fluttering and clucking in agitation like a black minorca. After that the butler's whiskers were not quite to Nicholas Pemberton's pleasing, and the make-up supervisor was duly torn off a strip.

"I must say," Tanya leaned across and whispered, "much as I admire the man, I wouldn't like to work for him." And Mother shook her head reprovingly and reminded us that it was rude to whisper, not to mention making personal comments and about our host at that.

Finally by the time Derwent Langley church was striking seven, Mr. Pemberton appeared satisfied. After one last careful look around at everyone and everything, he shouted, "O.K. Roll'em!"

This was apparently an order to the picture and the sound cameras, for number one camera team leapt into life, and a man with earphones on, standing beside a large console-type machine, shouted back "Running!"

Then a ginger-haired lad came forward in front of the camera, the clapper boy, I assumed, and held up what looked like a small blackboard, divided into one large and two small sections. On it was chalked the name of the film, The Moon Riders, directed by Nicholas Pemberton and in smaller sections below, "Scene 17, Take 1."

Attached to the top of this blackboard was an arm, rather like half a pair of scissors. And this the clapper boy raised and then snapped shut again.

As if to make sure that we understood that this was the moment Mr. Pemberton had meant, Mother put her finger to her lips, first at Tanya and then at me. And we both nodded obediently back.

"Action!" called Mr. Pemberton, and like two puppets jerked into movement, Miss Sylvester and the butler began their parts. She started to walk down the terrace steps, and behind her the butler said, "Madam, I implore..." when Nicholas Pemberton shouted "Cut!"

By the time eight o'clock had chimed, Mr. Pemberton had permitted the butler to complete the single sentence, "Madam, I implore you, pray have a care!" and to stretch out a trembling hand. While Miss Sylvester, in a mixture of anger and distress, gathered up her skirts and fled a few paces down the path.

By eight-thirty the clapper boy was now holding up a board which said exactly the same in the top two segments but 'Take 12' in the third.

I could tell by the set of her head as she waited up between takes for slight adjustments to be made to one camera, and the sound mixer, that Sylvia was not in the best of tempers. And when her dresser fussed round trying to adjust her wig, she gave her a little push aside, and stood with her arms folded, glaring crossly at Mr. Pemberton.

By nine o'clock the sun had sunk behind the typical Downland build-ups of evening cloud. It sent its last rich gold shafts across the meadows, casting long shadows in front of the trees.

"We'd better have the pups. And an arc," Mr. Pemberton said. "All right, make a special effort this time. She's not your long-lost daughter, Thistlethwaite. No need to look quite so watery-eyed. And, Sylvia, a bit more feeling from you."

He ignored her rebellious look, and called, "O.K. Action!"

In fact when it happened, I thought that that was exactly what she was doing; putting a bit more action in it, and putting it in to perfection. I assumed, too, that this was how the scene was meant to continue.

By now of course we all knew what the butler said off by heart, while this time with perhaps more anger than I would have thought necessary, Miss Sylvester once again ran down the garden. The tracking cameras following her went on whirring. Half a minute, a full minute, a minute and a half. I could feel everyone holding their breath. Was this going to be the successful take after all? Very slightly, Nicholas Pemberton was smiling. I saw the scene director put up his thumb.

Sylvia Sylvester had reached the top of Miss Miranda's Walk, while the camera, on its dolly, did a tracking shot.

Suddenly she stopped dead in her tracks. Simultaneously, her hand flew to her mouth, as if trying unsuccessfully to stifle her scream. Then out it came, echoing eerily across the water meadows and the river, dying away to a strangled sob, a terrified whimper. Simultaneously Nicholas Pemberton called "Cut!"

And I was just thinking to myself that I had to hand it to her, she was in fact a brilliant actress, when I saw Mr. Pemberton quickly covering the few yards that separated him from the actress.

"Kill those pups!" he said over his shoulder impatiently to the electricians who were still operating the baby arc lights, and had them fixed on the now weeping star.

"I saw it, I tell you! I'm not imagining it! I saw it with my own eyes! Down that tunnel. A ghostly light, and a man bending over it!"

It was quite a tender scene, much more tender in fact than the one they'd been shooting. But they both seemed oblivious of being watched. After a few minutes, Miss Sylvester permitted her dresser to dry her eyes. She allowed Mr. Pemberton to detach himself from her side long enough to satisfy himself and her that there was no one down Miss Miranda's Walk—no ghostly figures, no dancing light.

"It was sunlight on the water. Nothing else, I promise. Now," he said briskly, "come along. You're going to do that scene again."

"Darling, I can't! Really! I've had quite enough for one day."

I saw Mr. Pemberton's jaw set. Very gently, but still more firmly, he said, "Sorry, Sylvia, but you must! Otherwise you'll get stuck at this part for evermore. It's like getting up on a horse again when you've fallen. Isn't that so, Rosamund?"

Feeling rather pious, obligingly I said it was, and I heard Miss Sylvester murmur something that I fear was uncomplimentary under her breath.

Then reluctantly she allowed her make-up to be repaired, her wig to be combed, forward came the ginger-haired clapper boy, and we went through it all again.

Only this time Mr. Pemberton stationed himself by the camera dolly so that as soon as she was finished, she could fling herself in his arms. And this time he managed to call out "Cut" before anything not in the script was recorded on that soundtrack.

Just as well, I think, for as she flung herself at him, Sylvia Sylvester smiled tremulously up into his face and said:

"Darling, I did it, didn't I? But only for you. Only because I love you."

CHAPTER X

My date with Robbie was for Wednesday evening. He and Mr. Jackson were going off in the afternoon to put one of his bulls in the Sussex Agricultural Show, and he would be back in time to pick me up at seven. If it was fine, we were going to ride up on the Downs, and Robbie had undertaken to bring one of Mrs. Jackson's inimitable picnics.

The morning, as I hoped, dawned not too bright. A light sea mist rolled in, without interruption, to us from the sea. Dew spangled the cobwebs on the hedges as I cycled up the rise to Gypsy Lane, and though not yet sunny, the air was soft with the promise of a fine day to come.

School went well, too. For at that point, though the film unit had begun its malign influence, I had not actually perceived it. More important still perhaps, neither had Mr. Backhouse. In fact he complimented me on my class's singing, and on the display of chalk drawings which I put up in the classroom at the end of every month.

The fact that twenty-four out of my thirty children had chosen to draw either a camera on a dolly or a film set, or the portrait of a star, did not unduly disturb us, because we both recognise that one of the marvels of childhood is the clarity and excitement with which they see all things new. And, as Mr. Backhouse said, it made a change from the Brighton Belle, the Horticultural Show and the Gymkhana, a horse being shod at Mr. Brocklebank's, the blacksmith's, or "Mother Baking Bread".

So, all in all, I was on top of the world, as I cycled back home, turning in at the end of Gypsy Lane, and freewheeling all the way down to our gates. Of course, now it was always a little chilling to turn in and up the drive. Because, strive as I think I really do to turn a blind eye to it all, home is no longer home.

Most of the activity is at the side of the house where apparently Mr. Pemberton has a favourite "frame". It takes in a very beautiful buttress, the terrace, and part of the old-fashioned garden beyond.

Besides the original two lorries and the pantechnicon which came that first day, we now have several gantries, a van, a staff bus, innumerable cars, and two of the most luxurious caravans surely ever built, which are used as dressing-rooms by the stars.

So as I cycle up the drive and past the front of the house and under the arch, I usually avert my eyes from a scene that looks to me like a miniature fairground. For as well as the vehicles, there's usually a set being rigged, a bit of stage-coach, half an inn, even a gibbet, not to mention always coils and coils of electric cables.

But that afternoon there were sounds to be heard as well as sights to be seen. Not from the set itself, because by now we were quite used to the noise of scenic effects being carted here and there, and the sound of hammers and sawing, but from inside the house, from the drawing room itself.

There is a peculiar hard ringing sound that is unmistakably that of a chisel being used to chip old stone or ancient brick. And that was the sound I heard, together with the rattling sifting noise of rubble falling. Those sounds seemed to tear at my whole being. Anyone who has had love for, and security from, the home of their childhood will know what I mean.

It wasn't just the spoiling of a beautiful place, though that came into it, but a bruising somehow of a whole childhood and growing up.

Despite the fact that, without invitation, this place was now out of bounds to us, I walked unhesitatingly up what were, after all, our own front steps. Without knocking I twisted the ancient handle of what I told myself was, after all, our own front door. Equally without hesitating, without looking to right or left, at the equipment and notices that cluttered the place, I walked across what was, after all, our own time-honoured hall.

I had been right about the sounds. They did indeed come from the drawing room. I walked towards the arch, which was now swathed in dust sheets, picking my way across coils of cable, stubbing my toes against bits of electrical gear and scenery. And I suppose I was too busy concentrating on where my feet were going to see any notice.

All I saw was that the drawing room door was shut. And I remember thinking "as well it might be", no doubt to minimise the sound of the whole house being torn down beneath our feet. And then I turned the handle and flung the door open.

I don't really know if it was I who gasped or them. Probably all of us. Because an outraged gasp seemed to ricochet round the room. I couldn't for the life of me think what reason they had to protest. But there was every reason in the world for me.

For I entered in what seemed to me to be the most extraordinary scene of pure vandalism. There was no other word for it. A scene that Nicholas Pemberton himself was watching, nay admiring. And the object of that vandalism was the beautiful fireplace—the one of special historic interest. The one above which used to hang Tanya's magic mirror, the one with the inglenook big enough to seat a whole family, the one that had been boarded up on Mr. Pemberton's instructions for minor repairs.

Now the scene that met my eyes was that of two workmen, dressed most extraordinarily from head to foot in what looked like black frogmen's outfits (minus the flippers) wielding against the ancient stonework, not just chisels, as I had feared, but axes.

Regardless of the people grouped around, I said in a furious voice:

"Mr. Pemberton! How could you? You know you promised you would take the greatest care of anything of historic value. That fireplace is irreplaceable. In the contract it says..." '

I don't know what else I or the contract said. All I know is that suddenly my voice trailed. I saw Mr. Pemberton come striding towards me, with a look on his face such as I never want to see again on anyone's face. And simultaneously I became aware of a camera and that strange machine with the man in headphones sitting at it, that he'd told us was a sound mixer, and that the light was from an arc and not the sun, and of the cameraman with the roving eye shaking his finger at me in what looked like a mixture of disapproval and the sort of awed admiration my class have for a child that cheeks the headmaster.

I suddenly felt as if my brain had gone numb on me and it had just fastened on one word that I'd heard shortly after I'd come in. That word that now burned into my consciousness with its full meaning.

"Cut!"

And then Mr. Pemberton had taken hold of my wrist, no my elbow—no, both my elbows, and he was literally lifting me out of the room. As if he had neither time (as of course with a scene being shot he hadn't) nor patience (which with me he never appeared to have) he simply bundled me out of the room, and setting me down in the hall, said furiously, "Can't you read?"

In his rage he rapped on the back of the door with his knuckles, on the panel of which a printed notice was pinned. "Shooting in Progress. Keep Out."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't notice it."

"Then you ought to have done."

I said with what dignity I could muster, "I really am sorry, Mr. Pemberton. I wouldn't have dreamed of barging in like that, if I'd known. Give me credit for that at least. It was just that I thought you were tearing the place apart."

More furiously than ever, he said, "Then give me credit, too, for not being a vandal."

"I'm sorry."

"And have a bit of trust as well. In me." Then he made a strange remark. "After all, you seem to have enough to spare." Then without more ado he turned round and stalked back in, and shut the door. I was left with the blank face of the door and the cardboard sign dancing mockingly in my face with the energy with which the door had been closed. And then I heard Mr. Pemberton say to his people in the drawing room:

"All right, as we were. Not much harm done. Though," and here he seemed to smile dryly, "sometimes I think that famous remark about actors and actresses really applies to all women."

* * *

"As a matter of interest," I said to Robbie, "do you happen to know what the famous remark is about actors and actresses?"

We had dismounted at the top of the high shoulder above Holywell and now we rested both our horses and ourselves.

"What's this," Robbie grinned, "a conundrum?"

"No, not really."

"General knowledge test, then?"

"Something of the sort. It's just some well-known remark that was supposed to be made about actors and actresses in general."

"Oh, that. Yes, I know. You mean the one about the only difference between them and children is that you're not allowed to smack them?" He gave me a quick penetrating look. "Why? What's up? Why have you gone so red? It was said about actors and actresses, not pretty girl schoolteachers."

I did not enlighten Robbie. I sat there for a few minutes saying nothing, while I turned over in my mind all kinds of answers that I could and ought to have given Mr. Pemberton. Then what I hope is my innate sense of justice tried to reassert itself, and I told myself I probably deserved it.

Determinedly, I turned my thoughts to the present. In the calm of the evening, the air up here was cool and sweet, but below us in the valley, the sun still drew up shimmers of heat from the road and the new-cut stubble fields. Around the horseshoe bend, the river glinted in the sunlight, and the house itself, shorn by distance of all its ugly film impedimenta, stood serene and seemingly unchanged —the last house before the Derwent met the sea.

We had thrown our horses' reins over their heads, and now they cropped at the short turf. The air was sweet with the scent of harebells and gorse and ladies' slipper, and the faint smell of river water and the distant tang of the sea.

I was sitting on a little hillock, with the ground falling away beneath my booted feet. Robbie, eyes narrowed, was, I thought, admiring the scene below. Along the main road that skirts the village, midget cars belted along, no bigger than May bugs. I saw a couple of tiny indistinguishable figures walking along our drive, and a car that might have been Mr. Pemberton's white one, or a grey, bleached by distance.

Then Robbie put his hand in the pocket of his jodhpurs and brought out a small pair of binoculars. Carefully, with these, he followed the scene below us. Then suddenly, "Mmm, yes," he said as if talking to himself, "I thought I saw the sun catch something." He frowned. "Tell me, Rosamund," he said, putting down the glasses, "since this is the day for asking riddles ... who would be looking up here at us through binoculars?"

I took the glasses from him. He put his hand on my shoulder, his face close to mine. "Just by the corner of the house. Between the house and the caravans."

With some difficulty I focused, but at that distance I could just make out a blurred figure, disappearing now behind what looked like the makings of a set.

* * *

Mr. Pemberton's unfortunate remark, and Robbie's real or imagined spy down there at Holywell, at first tended to cast a shadow over our date. A shadow which Mrs. Jackson's excellent picnic of asparagus rolls and scones split with home-made jam and whipped cream did little to dispel.

From time to time I could feel Robbie's eyes on me, thoughtfully and assessingly. Twice as though in silent apology for some unknown offence, he covered my hand with his, and once he did actually start to say, "Look, Rosamund, there's something I’ve got to say to you...."

He went very red, and muttered something that I couldn't catch under his breath. Then he shook his head.

"Yes?" I said, when minutes went by and he still didn't finish. "What is it that you must say?"

"Oh, nothing very much. No, what am I saying? It is very much. But I can't tell you now. I'll tell you later."

It actually entered my head that perhaps he was going to propose and then I, too, blushed and became embarrassed. Because suddenly I didn't think I wanted him to. And yet I couldn't understand why not. And if not, how did one prevent him so doing?

"I'll tell you before the evening's out," Robbie said. “I’ve made up my mind to tell you sooner or later. I promise." And then he lapsed into this moody silence again.

A silence in which one would have thought every approaching sound would have been very clear. But it must have been that very pregnant kind of silence that cuts you off from the rest of the world, because the horses heard before we did. They both threw up their heads and whinnied, and from lower on the Downland track another horse answered.

Then came the muffled slow thud of a horse ridden at walking pace, and minutes after that, a loud halloo echoed over the Downs. "Hi, there!" There was no mistaking the rich slow American voice as Gary Hennessy came trundling up on an ancient iron-grey mare, one of a string that the film unit had hired.

"Say, imagine running into you two!" It struck me that we were visible for miles around, but no doubt Mr. Hennessy had been too intent on practising his riding to notice. "I hope I'm not intruding or anything," and without waiting for Robbie to repeat my assurance that he wasn't, rather clumsily, Mr. Hennessy dismounted.

"I just figured I'd better get a bit more riding practice in before the next shooting," he said, accepting Robbie's brusque invitation to join in the rest of the picnic. "I guess not even my closest buddy would call me the Boy Wonder."

And then, as if determined to hold Robbie in conversation, "They tell me you're something of an expert rider, Robbie?"

Flattered, Robbie murmured, "Not bad, I suppose."

"Isn't that what they call the famous British understatement?"

Not displeased, Robbie shrugged.

"I guess you wouldn't care to give me a few tips? Seeing we're all nicely tucked away up here, far from the madding film crowd?"

Grudgingly, Robbie considered it. Then he suddenly flung his cigarette away, and stood up. "Oh, all right. Just for a few minutes, then."

The few minutes must have lasted an hour and a half. They lasted for as long, in fact, as there was any light to see by. Mr. Hennessy had the position of his feet corrected, was shown how to hold the reins, how to rise at the trot, and on what foot to start the canter.

I don't know whether Robbie enjoyed it or not. I think perhaps he did. He was flattered by the film star's humble admiration of his riding, his perfect acceptance of everything Robbie told him to do.

Finally, when the valley was full of purple shadows, Gary Hennessy said, albeit reluctantly, "Well, folks, I guess we better call it a day."

Ruefully, Robbie shrugged and grinned. He helped me to saddle up Lady Jane. Then we began the long ride down to the valley, with whatever Robbie had been going to say remaining once more unsaid.

There was still of course the ride back to Holywell when presumably Robbie and I would be alone together. But no, even here Mr. Hennessy had other ideas. There was a tape he badly wanted to pick up from the Holywell sound room. Mr. Fuller didn't have to escort Miss Rosamund all that way. Regardless of the fact that he was probably coming between me and the only proposal of marriage I would ever receive, he insisted on accompanying me the whole way back home.

And when finally and very formally, I said "Good night" and thanked this strange American, so oblivious was he of how things might have been between Robbie and me that he actually smiled contentedly and said in that slow voice of his, "That's all right, ma'am. Don't feel yourself obligated to me. I've always reckoned one good turn deserves another."

CHAPTER XI

Afterwards Tanya said that Midsummer Night was the time when the campaign against the film unit began. But I don't think so. In its own way it began before that. Midsummer Night was just one of those times when feeling in country places runs high. And a comparatively small thing can send it this way or that.

In Derwent Langley, it is celebrated by what's known as St. John's fire—a torchlight procession culminating with a bonfire lit in a field above the village, halfway up our high shoulder of the Downs. The whole population turns out to a man, and every child from Derwent Langley primary school is there. And joining hands, they dance round the flames.

I'm told that in bygone times they roasted ah ox, or sucking pigs. But ever since I can remember we've singed farmhouse pork sausages held on long skewers, and baked potatoes in the hot ashes, and then split them and filled them with cottage cheese and spring onions.

This year Midsummer Night fell on a Saturday, and so Tanya was able to come. And this year of course the film unit were there in force. Their publicity man was hovering round the fire taking press photographs, as the unit mingled with the villagers. And as a token of goodwill, Nicholas Pemberton had a caterer around with trays of patties and cakes and buns.

Miss Sylvester posed for a photograph, handing a toffee apple to Tim Brocklebank's little sister, while Nicholas Pemberton stood by smiling.

"Do you suppose those two really will get married?" Tanya asked me suddenly, as we stood in the shadows at the bonfire's edge.

"I imagine so. Why? Are you still interested? In him, I mean?"

Tanya shrugged. "Oh, that" She frowned. "You always take me so literally. No, I'm not really interested, if you must know. He's a bit too bossy for my liking. Mind you, he's exactly what she needs. He's just right for her."

"I suppose you're right," I murmured, watching the children joining hands and dancing. The flames threw their pointed shadows on the glowing grass behind them, making them look like a band of black imps. Big glowing sparks soared like fireworks against the dark sky. And then, without thinking, I said in a constrained voice, "I only hope that she's just right for him."

At least I think I said it aloud, but if she heard, Tanya gave no sign. Exactly as if I hadn't spoken, she went on, "Remember how well he managed her at that first day's shooting? Marvellous, wasn't it?"

I said it was, and this being Midsummer Night when all the village seems slightly spooky and all the villagers slightly fey, I said to Tanya what I would never have dreamed of saying in the broad light of any other day. "Do you suppose she really did see something in Miss Miranda's Walk?"

Tanya shook her head. "No, I'm quite sure she didn't. I don't even believe she thought she did. I've read somewhere that actresses like to get frightened or angry over something, just to get themselves worked up for a scene. But if she did think she saw a ghost, it was a trick of the light, like Nicholas said."

"I suppose so. Do you remember how we always used to imagine we saw lights and figures?"

"Do I remember?" Tanya laughed, and helped herself to a handful of crisps from the laden table behind us. "Especially in the autumn when the river was full and misty."

And from that we reminisced about all the other silly things we used to imagine as children, and suddenly Tanya said, "And don't forget, it's Midsummer Night. Remember how we used to look in the mirror?"

At that point I made some mild not very funny joke about Miss Sylvester looking in it tonight, if she only knew its supposed properties. And after that I didn't think any more about it. I went over then to have a word with Mr. Backhouse's wife and family, and then one of my children was feeling sick and I had to go and find her mother.

I caught a glimpse of Robbie, but he was busy with a group of his young farmer friends, so he did no more than wave. And I brought some coffee and cakes over to Mother and Mrs. Mellor.

Then, at eleven-thirty, Tanya said she for one was feeling sleepy. Mrs. Mellor was going to drive Mother home, so we need not wait. Tanya put her hands to her cheeks and said her skin was scorched with the fire, and if she was to smell any more hot sausages and burned fat and toffee apples, she would be feeling like my pupil. So together we strolled down towards home.

There is to me always something very mysterious and exciting about the figures seen round a bonfire, as you walk away from it into the dark countryside. The smell of scorched earth and burning wood mingled now with the sweeter ones of grass crushed underfoot, and the night woodland and flower scents of the darkened countryside.

I suppose that all this induced in Tanya the romantic mood to suggest, and in me to accept, her silly idea. The clock on Derwent Langley church tower was just chiming a quarter to twelve as we walked up the drive. The valley caught its clear high notes, and the hills echoed them back. The river lay clear in starlight, with just a half curve glowing pink in the light of the fire on the hill above. The garden was full of shadows—of trees and shrubs and tall flowers, and the stubby shadow of the sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial. The house itself was dark and mysterious.

"Listen, Rosamund, it's not midnight yet. Let's do it again. Let's go and look in the mirror!"

I remember turning to stare at my sister—not so much because of the apparently light-hearted suggestion, but because of the curious urgency that underlined it.

"Tanya," I said, "I'm surprised at you, I really am. At your age! And anyway, I don't know where the wretched thing is. They've taken it down, remember."

"Yes, I remember. But I also know where they've put it. It's simply standing against the wall in the publicity room. Come on! Just for a joke!"

I opened my mouth at first to say no, and then to murmur well, just so long as it was a joke, but it sounded so stuffy that I left it unsaid. After all, people still read teacups, and throw pennies into fountains, and catch the bride's bouquet, and put wedding cake under their pillows, so I suppose it was a harmless enough thing to do!

"All right," I said, "but if Nicholas Pemberton catches us, I'll never speak to you again."

Tanya promised that if he did she would take all the blame, and together we went in through the back entrance. Down here, with items of equipment, and sections of scenery and without our homely bits and pieces, the house suddenly did feel spooky. The boards creaked as we made our way down the back corridor and to the second door on the right.

Cautiously we turned the handle and went in. Exactly as Tanya had said, we made out the shape of the huge speckly mirror, propped against the wall, facing the uncurtained window, through which came a feeble starlight.

"Well," I said, "there it is. But a fat lot of good that does us. We can't see in it. Shall I switch on the light?"

"No, of course not. It's all got to be shadowy."

Tanya got down on her knees, and laughing now at herself looked in. "Some wretch has stuck some papers or something on it," she said. "What a nerve! Apart from that, all I can see is a shadowy me and your legs."

I bent down beside her and put my hands on her shoulders. "Come on," I said. "The game's over! It's struck twelve, I'm sure." And then just as I spoke, the window and the room seemed filled with a curious pink and incandescent light.

The mirror caught its glowing colours, and showed us our two crouched forms and our startled faces. Then I had straightened up and run to the window.

"What on earth was that?"

But Tanya didn't answer.

I stood on tiptoe trying to pinpoint the conflagration. It came from halfway up the Downs, where Farmer Whitehouse had his first harvest of hay. I could see a spinney of birch trees outlined against the glow. And crackling sparks soar and die in the darkness.

"Heavens," I said to Tanya, "it's a fire. Someone must have thrown a lighted torch. They've set the Whitehouse stack alight."

And when she didn't answer then, I walked back. Tanya was still looking in the mirror, where now in the light of the fire several faces were clearly visible.

They were the faces in a whole row of press release photographs that the publicity manager had taken during the original get-together, and stuck as people are wont to do in the frame of the mirror.

As well as Miss Sylvester, there was Nicholas Pemberton and Gary Hennessy, the location manager, and a whole string of locals, Fred Dann and the blacksmith, Captain Coggin, and Robbie.

I remember saying, "Well, you've got plenty to choose from," and Tanya answering, "So have you!"

Then the bell of the fire alarm sounded. And almost simultaneously Derwent Langley church clock struck midnight.

* * *

"I felt so sorry for her," Mother said, "that I hope I didn't do the wrong thing...."

We were sitting out in the garden in the cool of the evening. It was beginning of the second week in July, so I had a pile of examination papers in front of me. And Mother, oddly enough, was darning a pair of socks.

I must say that at her words my heart sank a little, simply because Mother is the most spontaneous and generous of people, and when she's sorry for anyone she is liable to do anything. But I had quite enough on my mind as it was, with what promised to be some very mediocre papers in front of me, and these exams being rather important for my ten-year-olds.

"You see, ever since the fire, people haven't been very kind."

"Kind? Who to?"

"To whom, shouldn't it be, dear? To the film unit, of course. They blame them."

"Well, someone did see a couple of them kicking around a lighted brand."

"I know. But Nicholas compensated Farmer Whitehouse. And he helped at the fire, and it was out in no time."

"Yes. But country folk have a thing about fire. You know that. They're always careful. They're saying that this Midsummer Night festival's being going on for centuries without anything going wrong. Till now"

"That's it, dear. That's what I mean. Some hooligans have chalked 'Film Unit Go Home' all over the W.I. Hall wall. And Captain Coggin was quite military with me in Petronella's."

"I'm sure he didn't mean it," I assured her. "It's just his manner. He's a crusty old misogynist. He's not used to talking to females."

"All the same," Mother had gone quite pink, "there seems to be quite a group against them."

I said nothing. As I continued my marking of the papers in front of me, my sympathy with the faction she talked about grew. In our simple geography paper, Charlie Dann had put Hollywood as the capital of the U.S.A., and the principal export of Texas as cowboy films.

Every day that the film company were working you could see a knot of schoolchildren hanging around. There had been quite a spate of one-day sore throats, sick headaches, earaches, and backaches, all of which mysteriously cleared up without seeing the doctor, and all of which were assisted by a walk near the river at the time that shooting was in progress.

I know for a fact that a number of my children, as soon as they got home from school, popped their tea-time bread and butter and buns in a paper bag and spent the rest of the evening peering through the hedge at the unit. I need hardly say they did not pack their homework in paper bags and take it along. The nearest they got to putting pencil to paper was to bring their autograph books with them.

I was about to hold up for Mother's inspection a particularly grubby arithmetic sheet belonging to Tim Brocklebank, which had as many inky fingermarks as a Scotland Yard identification print, when I saw that she was wearing her bemused, faraway look.

"I've never seen anyone quite so frightened of an animal," she murmured, her gentle grey eyes clouded with .sympathy.

"Who, Mother?" I asked. "And what animal?"

"Why, Sylvia, of course." She stared at me, surprised. "That's who I was trying to tell you about. Sylvia Sylvester. She was the one I was so sorry for when they were shooting more of the film this afternoon."

"And the animal, I take it, was her horse?"

"Yes, dear."

"Well, I don't imagine the horse enjoyed it greatly either," I said with an acerbity that caused my mother to give me a look of shocked alarm.

"No, dear, naturally, her fear communicated itself to the animal. And they had quite a time."

"I'll bet," I said, totally without sympathy.

"Sylvia was in tears."

When my mother appeared to expect something more from me than my murmured tut-tut, I asked, "What about her stand-in?"

"Oh, she wasn't very good either, though she did make the horse go. She couldn't gallop, poor thing. Not in a convincing way at all."

I said bad luck, and what on earth was Mr. Pemberton going to do about it? Mother gave a small triumphant smile. "Well, dear, it was then I had my brilliant idea."

I glanced up from my pile of examination papers, my heart sinking even further, and said "Mother! Not another of your brilliant ideas, please."

Mother went pink and nodded. "That's why I said I hope I didn't do the wrong thing, dear. But there was the poor girl in tears ... she's a very simple child at heart really, and she's desperately keen that this picture should make her famous, and her stand-in was useless, and of course, dear, I know, we all know, that you're absolutely brilliant on..."

"Mother!" I shrieked. "You didn't!"

"Didn't what, darling?" Mother murmured, purely for form's sake.

"You know what I mean."

"Yes, dear, I do. And I'm afraid I did. In fact I thought it might be rather fun—for you, as well. Tanya's always saying you don't get enough fun. And it's only for a couple of minutes. And you are about the same size and shape as she is, and in a wig and costume, Mr. Pemberton said you'd hardly know the difference."

"Mother, you didn't actually promise them?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, dear, I did. Sylvia was terribly grateful. Sweet, really. She's very frightened of any physical hurt, you know...."

"What about Mr. Pemberton?"

"Nicholas? Well, he was less enthusiastic. But he didn't seem to mind. It was all a question of when you could do it...."

"I should jolly well think Nicholas Pemberton doesn't mind!" I said. "And as to when I do it, if I do it...."

Then I was suddenly aware that Mother was no longer looking at me, but staring past me towards the box hedge, and smiling. And I heard a voice say, "Who's taking my name in vain?" and when I turned, Mr. Pemberton was vaulting neatly over the hedge, and coming across the garden towards us.

"Good evening, Mrs. Vaughan ... Rosamund," he smiled lazily down at the pair of us. "Do I understand you've been putting her in the picture, Mrs. Vaughan?"

"I don't know if it was meant to be a pun," I said, "but it is one."

"So she has?"

"Yes."

"And what do you think?"

As if suddenly embarrassed at her handiwork, Mother got up and looked at her watch and said, "Goodness, it's getting on for nine! I really must get those rock buns mixed for the W.I. tomorrow. But please don't let me hurry you away, Nicholas. I expect there are a few details you'd like to run over with Rosamund."

And with that, she fluttered away into the house, and Nicholas Pemberton and I were left alone.

* * *

Looking back on it afterwards, I just can't imagine how we came to quarrel about it. There was absolutely no reason except for one dark and never-to-be-mentioned one.

For in my heart of hearts, I was really quite excited and flattered. It would be the kind of thing you told your children and grandchildren about when you took them to see the famous actress, the wife of the famous director, how years and years ago you acted as her stand-in, and rode her horse at full gallop and in unwieldy seventeenth-century ladies' riding costume. Of course, they might ask you how long the scene took and then you would have to tell them it was only one minute. But all the same, it would be the nearest I would ever get to fame. And, as Mother said, it would be fun.

Besides, Nicholas was very sweet about it. Or he was to begin with. He started off by saying that Sylvia was delighted and desperately relieved about the idea. But as far as he was concerned he didn't want to hold me to it. The scene was important, of course, but if the worst came to the worst, they would simply cut the scene out altogether.

"Don't you want me to do it, then?"

"Of course I do. But it may be more difficult than you think. You'll have to ride side-saddle. And that won't give you much control of the horse."

"I'll manage," I said, and smiled. I can remember feeling a particularly warm glow inside me, though why I didn't know. I suspect that it was because it seemed to me that Nicholas Pemberton really cared a little about my safety. Though why I should mind whether he cared or not remained obscure.

I remained in that warm glow for several minutes while he explained what I would have to do, and I reassured him about both my willingness and my competence.

"Yes, well," he said in a business-like manner, "that's all right, then. The next point is when? I'd like it done straight away. Is it possible for you to get some time off from school? The set's all ready. And I prefer not to go on to anything else."

I suppose it was the coming out of the warm glow that made me angry. Like waking up from a dream to cold reality. Nicholas Pemberton didn't care a rap about me or anyone else except his film and Sylvia Sylvester. My time, the children's education was of no consequence whatever. And I suppose I gave an impatient little movement and the exam papers went sliding off my knee. And suddenly their disappointing results, and Nicholas Pemberton's request, and the film unit, and my own inexplicable change of mood disclosed themselves as inextricably tied up.

"I'm sorry," I said, "it's quite impossible. We're trying to work very hard at present. And the children are very behindhand."

He was busy gathering up the spilled papers for me, and I don't think he was aware of my change of mood.

"Oh, come," he said, good-humouredly, "all schoolteachers are the same. They all think their pupils are behindhand. Mine did me."

"I'm sure he or she was absolutely wrong," I said tardy. "Nevertheless I happen to be right. Enough damage has been done to their education already."

"By whom, Rosamund?"

"By your film unit."

"Oh come, now! Aren't you exaggerating a bit?"

"If you really think that, look at these exam papers. Ten-year-olds' efforts. Look at this, Mr. Pemberton!" I held up Charlie Dann's scrawled and crossed out essay. "I set them 'A Day by the River'. I thought as country children they would be able to really spread themselves. Listen to this, Air. Pemberton! One day by the river we seed a big lorry —spelled with a U, Mr. Pemberton—draw up and out got a man with a funny machine—machine spelled MASH double E E N, Mr. Pemberton—and asked us way to Miss's place."

Mi. Pemberton gave me a superior man-of-the-world smile.

"And if you think I've picked out a bad one, look at those you've got in your hand. Any one—I don't mind."

I wanted nothing so much as to wipe that superior smile off his face.

"All right," he laughed. "Here's a fine effort, I must say. Janice Peabody." He began to read aloud. "One day my brother and me went down to the river to see what the film company was doing." Air. Pemberton raised his quizzical blue eyes to me and said, "Yes, I see what you mean about spelling and grammar." Then he continued. "And we watched the stars being made up, and when the film was over, we followed the leading lady down to the river and we saw Mr. Fuller kiss her."

The words were out before Air. Pemberton realised what he was reading. The words seemed to drop like stones before their meaning was clear, to us. He stopped when he realised, his face frozen in what I can only describe as horror. For a moment I sat, and he stood there, incapable it seemed of saying a word. Then he simply flung the paper on the table, murmured, I think strangely enough, "I apologise." Then he turned on his heel and strode away.

While I sat there, a prey to misery and guilt, wishing I could recall that superior smile, which it seemed I had wiped away for ever.

CHAPTER XII

I was afterwards very glad that Tanya wasn't at home when I acted as stand-in for Miss Sylvester. This took place the following Wednesday afternoon, partly because Wednesday is my early finishing day—I have a free period from three to four, so I can be home by three-fifteen. And partly because Mr. Pemberton said there was a good weather forecast.

It may sound strange that a good weather forecast should be needed for shooting a scene that was supposed to be enacted in twilight, but apparently (so Mr. Pemberton explained to Mother) they like to shoot in full sunlight with a "matte" over the camera lens because this gives the outlines a certain added clarity. So Wednesday at four in full sunlight it was to be.

I arrived home, naturally in somewhat of a state of apprehension. I am by no means as prosaic and sensible as Tanya would have me believe and the idea of acting as stand-in to a film actress was a big event to me.

Inevitably, Derwent Langley being what it was, word had got around. I'd had to have three fittings for my wig and costume, and Miss Tripp, the wardrobe supervisor, lodges in the village. So, for once, I was the recipient of several admiring glances from my class, and I received the final accolade when at the end of arithmetic four of my pupils lined up and asked me for my autograph.

I said briskly that they would certainly all be getting my autograph, without queuing up for it, at the end of their yearly reports, which damped their ardour a little. But I signed their books with a flourish and hoped they didn't notice that my hand was trembling a little.

Naturally, of course, Janice Peabody had the last word. "Me mum heard Miss Tripp tell the director on the phone that you and her ... Miss Sylvester . . look the very spit an' image of one another. Not so pretty, of course . . . but in the dark you look as like as two peas in a pod."

And of course that was precisely why it happened.

I don't flatter myself that I look in the slightest like Sylvia Sylvester. But Miss Tripp, that tiny white-haired, birdy-eyed wardrobe supervisor, is a real genius at her job.

"You're a half inch taller and bigger all round than Madame." I don't know whether it is customary to call the leading lady Madame, but Miss Tripp always did.

She led me down through the long prefabricated hut they'd rigged up as the wardrobe department on the east side of the house. It's a fascinating place with a central store which is like an Aladdin's cave filled with racks and racks of glamorous dresses and suits on hangers, and shelves stacked with hat boxes, and buckled shoes. Dangling from the wooden struts of the ceiling are huge circular wire frames for petticoats, ruffles, frame and pad shoulders, masks, and even spare legs and ears. The place smells of fabric and moth repellent and the gum arabic they use for stiffening, while all the way down one side are rows of dummies like a guard of honour with name tags on.

Miss Tripp had led me down to one labelled Miss Rosamund Vaughan already decked out in the gorgeous bottle green velvet jacket and the pink frothy dress of the film. Her faceless head was crowned in the auburn-haired wig and the big-brimmed hat, with the matching green bow. Without me inside, the effect was very glamorous. And even on me it still looked very good.

Because the film was to be shot on long-range cameras, I didn't have to wear a very heavy make-up. But what makeup I had made me look astonishingly, almost eerily like Sylvia Sylvester. If Tanya had been there I might have laughed, and said that I felt so like her, any minute now, I'd be throwing a temperament. But there was only Miss Tripp, anxiously tweaking a tiny ruffle here, altering a hair there, standing back with her bright eyes triumphant.

"Perfect!" she said. "Isn't it? I'd defy even Mr. Pemberton to tell you apart."

I remember laughing, "Oh, I don't know. I think he more than anyone else could do that."

Miss Tripp gave me a knowing wink and said she did declare I was a remarkably perceptive young woman.

Had I had the time or the interest I would have told her that all of Derwent Langley must qualify for that praise, seeing everyone knew about Mr. Pemberton's special interest in Miss Sylvester. But I had neither the time nor the desire to gossip. Mr. Pemberton had told me to be on the set at four sharp. And what Mr. Pemberton said went.

The door at the far end of the wardrobe department leads on to the camera ramp and then the set. And as I opened it and stepped out, it was almost like walking through a mirror. For coming up the step was my double. Madame herself, rigged out exactly like me, every curl, every fold, every ruffle, the same.

Because I was nervous and shy, I said rather foolishly, "Snap!"

But Miss Sylvester eyed me coldly. "The director is waiting for you," she said sharply, and swept past me inside.

* * *

The props man who was holding the head of the chestnut mare assured me I was bang on time, but that the boss usually liked people five minutes early. Miss Sylvester had just been shot in close-up getting on the horse, and not a very good job she had made of it either.

"Heads are bound to fall if she's upset," the props man said lugubriously. "Mark my words, heads will roll!"

And it being my afternoon for making inept remarks, I said, "Just so long as it's not mine."

As I mounted the chestnut, I had a glimpse of Mr. Pemberton in his usual rig-out of linen shirt and jeans, waving the camera crew back to the right distance. I caught a glimpse of Mother excitedly talking to Mrs. Mellor, who had been invited up for the occasion all rigged out in my christening hat, and the tall figure of a man that could have been Robbie.

Because the film was a period piece, I had to ride sidesaddle, and with the voluminous skirt, this was no easy way. Sensibly, the wire had been left out of the hem, otherwise the chestnut would have been more irritated than she was. When you've more or less grown up with horses, you can get the feel of their mood almost straight away. And I knew from the moment I got up on her that the chestnut was rattled.

While I waited for Mr. Pemberton to come over and give me my orders again, I ran my hand over the warm silky neck and whispered in her ear. But I could still feel the nerves tremble and the fine muscles tense.

Of course maybe she felt my nervousness too. Not of the ride, because even in all that costume nonsense I know I can ride. But suddenly I was in awe of this alien set-up— the sound and sight cameras trained on me like machine-guns, the knots of technicians and extras watching, the continuity girl at her makeshift desk, all the various people watching and checking.

It was hot, too, in the sunlight. I felt my hands sticky and my throat dry. The chestnut was feeling uncomfortable too. She kept tossing her head and I didn't know if it was because the flies were bothering her or because she was restless. Then the continuity girl pointed out that the gauntlet of one of my gloves had become folded back, with patting the chestnut, I suppose, and when it was adjusted, Mr. Pemberton called out sharply as if I were a schoolgirl, "And now keep still!"

Three minutes later, he came over and stood beside me, all very businesslike with the shooting script under his arm. "All right? Quite comfortable? Horse all right? Not nervous?" without giving me the slightest time to answer any of these questions.

Then he said, "Good show!" as if I had. "Now all you have to do is to walk the horse over to where you see that chap with the white flag. When you get to him, trot her till you get to the chap with the red flag. Put her into a full gallop. Then hold the gallop till you get to the chap with the green flag. And then that's that. Nothing to it, is there? Two minutes, and it'll be all over."

Of course Mr. Pemberton never knew how absolutely accurate he was. Two minutes—and it was all over. The course that was laid out brought me in front of the cameras at a twenty-foot range only for something like forty seconds. Then I was to disappear behind the trees beside Miss Miranda's Walk.

"All right," Mr. Pemberton called. "Quiet, everyone, please!"

I heard the click as the clapper boy held up the take number. Then Mr. Pemberton called, "Action, Miss Vaughan!"

The prop man gave the chestnut a light friendly slap, and I gently pulled the rein and pressed my crossed feet into her side. Just at the white flag exactly, I tightened the rein and sat forward for the trot.

Our green trees and the overgrown borders swept past the corners of my eyes in an orderly procession. The light wind of speed flicked the hard tight ringlets of my wig against my cheek.

I heard Mr. Pemberton shout some order to the camera teams and the soft whirr of their machines above the rhythmic thud of the chestnut's hooves. Now the chestnut and I had got the feel of one another. I felt relaxed and competent, rising just the right amount for a side-saddle trot, taking a pride in setting her into the gallop on the right foot at exactly the right point beside the red flag.

I felt the ringlets of my wig stream out behind me. The lace fichu round my neck whipped round and trailed. The chestnut was moving beautifully, her hooves thundering, and drowning all sounds, except someone, the "grips" I think it was, saying, "Jolly good!" And then the green flag whipped past me, and Mr. Pemberton shouted "Cut!"

It was all over. The scene was in the can. I felt a sudden dizzy triumph. I slackened the rein, preparatory to lessening her speed, and took one hand off the reins to pat Her neck. Off guard and vain, I listened to the clapping of the technicians. And then it happened.

Passing the heavy green leaves of Miss Miranda's Walk, out of sight of the set, nothing at all in fact in sight, suddenly the chestnut shied.

I shall never know why. As far as I know there was absolutely nothing there. Not a leaf stirred in the still air. And yet she shied with such inexplicable suddenness and such terrified force that I shot over her head.

And then the costume I wore completed my undoing. Instead of being able to fall softly and roll away, my huge skirt caught in the stirrup iron. And because of that or because the horse had seen something truly fearful that I couldn't see, she didn't stop as Lady Jane would have done. She went galloping off, with me bumping over the rough ground, till the skirt tore, and the frightened horse and I were free of one another.

I don't know how long I lay there, looking up at the bare blue sky. Everything seemed to have retreated to a long way away from me, like a scene viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Sounds had dwindled too, the way they do when you almost faint.

I suppose the horse must have galloped in by the set, because I dimly heard voices raised in alarm. And then I heard someone running, and the shadow of someone bending over me blotted out the sun. I think I must have half fainted, or maybe the banging around on the ground had befuddled my brain, because for some reason I thought it was Robbie, partly because as he bent over me, I was sure, or I thought I was sure, that he called me darling.

And then my brain seemed to clear and it wasn't Robbie at all, but Mr. Pemberton. Then I must have dreamed the next part, or else the shock must momentarily have made Mr. Pemberton act as if I was really Sylvia Sylvester.

For it seemed to me that he put his arms round my shoulders and asked very tenderly if I was hurt. And when I shook my head he knelt beside me and kissed me first on my forehead and then on my lips, and though I knew it was only a dream, it was briefly like one of those dreams of childhood—so sweet and so splendid that you hope it will go on for ever, and that you need never wake up.

* * *

I would say that the fault could be evenly divided between Mr. Pemberton and the cub reporter from the local paper. It seemed as if the shock of the incident had affected the former, almost as much as it had done me.

For after that brief real or dreamed-up kiss, Mr. Pemberton had insisted on carrying me into the shade of the garden, and put me down gently on Mother's chaise-longue. It was almost as if for the space of the few seconds that it took for the damage to be done, he really did believe it was his valuable star (whose incapacity would cost him thousands of pounds) who had been injured, instead of the village schoolteacher, who after next week, with term ending, would scarcely be missed.

Mr. Pemberton had insisted that Mother immediately telephone Dr. Shawcross, and though I protested that apart from a bump on the head and a graze on my shin, I was as fit as could be, Mother chose to obey him rather than listen to me. However, the doctor's wife answered the phone and said her husband was out at a confinement and she didn't know when he would be back. So Mr. Pemberton himself had washed and dressed the graze, then removed the auburn wig rather brutally, I thought, snipped a lump of hair off the back of my head so that he could get at the beastly bump underneath.

"At least, it was jolly good padding," I remember smiling at him. But he didn't smile back. For it was then that he seemed to come out of his bemused state. The becoming auburn wig removed, my forehead streaked with Mr. Pemberton's mixture of Dettol and water, I seemed to do a Cinderella in the broad light of day. I was back again, if not to my rags and hearthbroom, at least to my rag-bag hair and teacher's ruler.

"Yes," he'd said stiffly, getting to his feet. "All the same I want the doc to give you a look-over. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I feel all this is my fault."

And that was really how it came to be exaggerated out of all measure. That was when the cub reporter took over.

Summer in Derwent Langley is not rich in local news. Usually the headlines of our local newspaper consist of such items as "Television Announcer opens local show” or "Banning of High Street parking a disgrace, say Traders".

So it was hardly surprising that the young reporter from the Courier, who'd taken to coming up every other day on the chance of a bit of hot news, should turn the small episode into a Courier exclusive scoop.

Local Schoolteacher injured on Film Set was the headline in big black type. Underneath was a blown-up, quite indistinguishable, picture of me and my class taken two months ago, for the annual school photograph. And beneath that was a highly spiced-up account which contained such flights of fancy as: "The quiet of the film set was brutally rent asunder by the thunder of runaway hooves and a cry of anguish."

The poor bewildered chestnut was described, when caught, as foaming at the mouth and rolling her wild eyes, and the narrative ended by suggesting that she might have been scared by yet another appearance of the famous ghost of Miss Miranda's Walk.

I suppose the cub reporter, a countryman himself, knew that horses are supposed to be able to see ghosts when they're not visible to mere mortals, and this provided a nice chillsome ending to his highly imaginative story. Nevertheless the story called forth other stories.

When the Courier came out the following week, it carried a vast number of letters to the editor, all under the same heading, The Film Unit. Some were frankly of the mystical type. One, from a retired history professor, recalled the times in the past when Miss Miranda's ghost had been seen, and the disasters which had inevitably followed. Another was from an angler, who reported hearing bumps and lights in Miss Miranda's Walk from just down river.

But the rest were from people who used the account to emphasise the inconvenience that the village was being put to—crowded buses, busy telephone lines, litter in the High Street, noise, and once again Captain Coggin stopped my mother in the village and had a few sharp words with her, this time as she was about to have a quiet cup of tea at Petronella's.

I must say that I waited with some interest to see what Mr. Pemberton's reaction would be. Would he in turn compose an irate letter to the Courier? Would he have a few words with Captain Coggin or try to explain the unit to the village?

But no, he did none of these. Clever as always, Mr. Pemberton simply announced that the following Thursday the film unit would be At Home to the village and hold a fancy dress ball.

The whole population was invited. Anyone who hadn't their own fancy dress could help themselves from a whole room full of extras' costumes. Everything would be free.

* * *

I was just walking past the film unit caravans when Miss Sylvester called my name. As it was the last day of term, I was staggering under the usual load that a teacher has to bring home on that gala (for the children) day. I had a large roll of chalk drawings (a gift from some of the class) under one arm, next term's syllabus under the other, and¹ in one hand Tim Brocklebank's tank of now well-developed frogs (to be released tomorrow into our lily pond), and in ,the other, the class Japanese garden, brought home for watering.

I had, during the course of the last week, heard that Sylvia Sylvester was by no means pleased with my performance as her stand-in's stand-in. Janice Peabody had stoutly declared on more than one occasion that no one believed I had fallen off o' purpose, and that the leading lady had no right to say a nasty thing like that.

So I was somewhat surprised to see Sylvia standing there on the steps of her caravan smiling at me in what was an unmistakably friendly manner. "Why, Rosamund," she said in a voice of absolute sweetness, "I'm so glad to see you. I've been meaning to phone you or write to you or something. You must have thought me frightfully rude."

"I? No, of course not. Why should I?"

"Because I never thanked you for standing in for me, in the gallop scene."

"Oh, that's all right. There was nothing to thank me for really." I smiled. "I didn't exactly distinguish myself, you know." I shifted my burden and Miss Sylvester murmured, "Oh, dear, you are laden, aren't you. Can I help?" With difficulty she repressed a shudder at the sight of the tank full of frogs and added, "Well, perhaps not. Why don't you just dump all that down for a moment, and come and sit on the verandah here with me?"

I was nothing loath. The afternoon was warm and the idea of sitting down was welcome. The flat was empty because Mother was over at Mrs. Mellor's nursing her through an attack of summer 'flu. And term being over, there were no more exam papers or exercise books to correct.

Miss Sylvester waved me towards a small deck chair and seated herself in the opposite one. Then she shook a handbell imperiously, and out came her dresser with a tray of iced lemonade and long glasses with sugar-frosted rims.

"Now what were we saying?" Miss Sylvester said as she poured us each a glass and handed me mine.

"I had just reminded you that I didn't exactly distinguish myself, when I stood in for you."

"Oh, but, darling, you did. You were marvellous I Truly! I've seen the rushes. They're first-class!"

I sipped the delicious drink and murmured that I was relieved to hear it.

"And even the falling off, though I wouldn't have had it happen for the world, might have been done on purpose."

"But it wasn't," I said indignantly.

"No, of course not. What I mean is that it demonstrated that it wasn't as easy as it seemed, that I was quite right to refuse to do it. That even what Nicholas calls a real leather and straw horsewoman like you couldn't do it—not perfectly, I mean. Without any mishap, that is."

I didn't reply to that. I was by no means pleased at Mr. Pemberton's description of me. Leather and straw indeed! I stared into my lemonade. Once my initial irritation with him was over, I pondered on how even in a nice village like Derwent Langley, people can make rumours out of nothing, the idea that Miss Sylvester was displeased with my performance being a very good example.

"Though I must say," Sylvia went on, "I was simply horrified when you were hurt. I blamed myself, you know. Oh, yes, I did. That's why he insisted you see the doctor. Nick, I mean. He knew I'd never get any peace till you did, and darling, I hope you liked the flowers. He did get you roses, didn't he? Red roses? Nicholas?"

She suddenly sat forward and eyed me with wide exaggerated intent. "Darling! I can tell by your face that he didn't! The wretch! The absolute wretch!" She frowned and stamped her small slippered foot. "Men are the end, aren't they? Utterly, absolutely unreliable! You must have thought me the most selfish, thoughtless person alive!'

The very fact that once upon a time I had thought something of the sort made my face flush with guilt. Now as I looked into her innocent china-blue eyes, I wondered how I could have been so hasty to judge, and so uncharitable in that judgement.

"Well, all I can say," Miss Sylvester went on indignantly, "is that I'm glad I planned my little surprise myself. Without any help from him, or anyone!"

"Your surprise?" I asked, as I was obviously expected to.

"Yes, darling. My surprise for you."

I hope I didn't look as embarrassed as I felt. I'm not used to the extravagant, impulsive ways of the film world and I didn't really know what reply was expected of me.

However, Miss Sylvester appeared to expect none. Off she went apparently at a tangent on a totally different subject.

"Now you are coming to the ball tomorrow, aren't you?"

I said that I would—at least for a while. Mother would still be with Mrs. Mellor and Tanya up in London, but I would certainly come.

"Good. Nicholas would be hideously annoyed if none of the Vaughan family turned up. He'd take it as a slight. But you mustn't just come for a while. You must come at the beginning and stay till the end. And what are you going to wear?"

"I've not had time to think. School's just broken up. I suppose like everyone else, I'll rummage in the costume bin that Mr. Pemberton's providing."

Before I'd finished speaking, Miss Sylvester began to smile at me fondly. Then in a charming childish gesture she clapped her hands together. "Oh, no, you won't, Rosamund dear. Not after your kindness to me."

She jumped to her feet and walked up and down the small balcony like a delightful excited child. "This is my surprise. This is what I planned. Aren't I clever? I knew you wouldn't have bothered to get yourself a costume, so I’ve got the most marvellous one and its all to be for you."

Once more she rang her bell, and like rubbing the magic lamp immediately in came her impassive-faced dresser.

"Those boxes," Sylvia said imperiously. "You know the ones, Gabby, and hurry"

The glass door shut behind the dresser again. Miss Sylvester hummed under her breath. Then she broke off suddenly and said, "Don't look so embarrassed, Rosamund, please." She spread her arms wide in a theatrical gesture. "I love giving my friends nice surprises. It's so marvellous to be able to."

She laughed gaily, and I remember thinking with a queer catch in my throat that somehow now I could understand why Mr. Pemberton loved her so much. And I think it was that sudden, sombre enlightenment which made the expression of my face freeze, rather than any embarrassment.

"Besides," Sylvia Sylvester went on, "the costume was made originally for me, for the ball scene, but I don't really think the colour suits me. But it'll be charming on you. Ah, there you are, Gabby! What a perfect age you took to get them. Yes, well, there is rather a pile, I suppose."

Miss Sylvester's dresser was struggling under a pyramid of what looked like three dress- and two hat-boxes. "Now it's all in there, Rosamund dear. Everything for the costume. Mask, wig, slippers, jewels. Gabby, ring up and have one of the men carry them up to Miss Vaughan's flat. No, don't thank me, Rosamund, please. It's the least I could do." Smiling happily, Miss Sylvester watched her dresser depart to do her bidding. Then she leaned against the wrought-iron balcony and tilted her head sideways at me. Though she was as old as I, maybe a few years older, she seemed suddenly a sweet and naive child.

"You're not insulted or anything, are you, Rosamund? You will wear it, won't you?"

"But of course."

Miss Sylvester threw back her head and laughed prettily. "It will make the ball. Not a word to anyone. Promise? It's going to be simply priceless fun. With both of us there, people won't know which of us is which."

* * *

But there weren't both of us there.

Or if Sylvia was, I couldn't see her, and neither apparently could anyone else. Because the masked man in footman's rig at the entrance to the drawing room whispered, "Good evening, Miss Sylvester," and his opposite number, I swear, winked as he handed me the white card with the word "Day" printed on it.

I should explain that because this was Open House, the film unit wanted everyone to mingle from the word go. So for the first dance, girls were given a white card and men a red one, each with half of a well-known pair printed on. The idea was that you had to find your other half and then have the first dance together. That was why we'd all been asked to arrive promptly at nine-thirty for the very beginning.

But as I made my way in with the rest of the guests— pierrots in pointed hats, witches carrying broomsticks, ballerinas, space men, Guy Fawkes, and red devils, and of course lots of people in eighteenth-century costume, it was clear that Miss Sylvester had not obeyed her fiancé’s instructions.

For all around me I could feel excited whispers, "There she is" ... "No, it's not" ... "It is! I saw her picture in a dress just like that..." and the crowd seemed to draw back shyly to let me go through.

I must confess to feeling a conflict of emotions. I suppose that in the heart of every one of us who isn't a raving beauty there lurks a fragment of the Cinderella. Exactly as Miss Sylvester said, it really was priceless fun to go to the ball just for a little while, be mistaken for the star of the film. It was harmless enough, I told myself. The star herself had dreamed it up. She was a simple soul really, just as Mother said. And impulsively and generously she wanted some of her glamour to rub off on me.

Well, it did. I know I looked as pretty as I have ever looked. I can't think why she didn't think the colour of the costume suited her, because it was of a most lovely pale lemon satin, with gathered quilted panniers and an underskirt of white scattered with tiny seed pearls. There was a mesh of the same seed pearls to go over the auburn wig, and even the white velvet mask was embroidered with them. Miss Sylvester had included a pair of chandelier ear-rings which seemed like twin waterfalls of pearls and an intricately woven pearl necklace.

All the same, excitement and a sense of fun did not predominate. I felt guilty, too. And though I told myself I was being stuffy and schoolmistressy, my own strictures against deception to my pupils came back to haunt me. In fact, I'd wakened in the night, with a single sentence of Miss Sylvester's rattling in my mind, "Now not a word to anyone, promise?" and I had a vision of myself standing in front of my class saying, "A good thing to remember is that what you can't tell anyone is usually something of which you're secretly ashamed."

And then suddenly I stopped feeling either excitement or guilt or anything, because abruptly the knot of people around me melted and I was standing at the edge of what was the dancing space. And right in the centre of it was Nicholas Pemberton. Perhaps because he was the host, he wasn't wearing a mask, and he was only vaguely in costume. He'd wound a red spotted bandana round his dark hair and another round his throat, and he had a film props cutlass thrust into a leather belt at his waist. These combined with his dark swashbuckling good looks to convey a curiously vivid impression of a pirate, as he stood there beating time with his foot to the music from the violins up in the minstrels' gallery in the hall.

A pirate whose stare now chilled me as much as any real live one could have done. I saw him smile and raise his brows questioningly, and immediately I turned and burrowed my way through the throng. A man dressed as a cowboy caught my arm as I passed and asked if I was his other half, was I the thread to his needle? And I smiled and shook my head. The room was full of voices and people pushing here and there, standing on tip-toe and calling above the heads of the crowd. Velvet stage prop curtains had been hung at the windows and a small stage had been rigged up behind banked-up flowers for the band.

Someone had had the clever idea of hanging huge blown-up stills from the film on the walls, while stage prop chandeliers hung from the ceilings, and half a velvet-lined stagecoach stood by the french doors. So that in some odd way they had successfully mixed past and present, reality and make-believe.

I remember noticing this, and thinking wryly at the same time ... exactly as I had not, while I clutched my white card in my hand and searched for the safe harbour of the anonymous Mr. Night.

Next to me, a milkmaid asked what I supposed was the other half of curds?

"Whey?" I answered, and she said, "Oh, thank you, Miss Sylvester!"

A masked Arab rushed around shouting, "I'm a bucket, where's my spade?" and a stout lady with Left pinned on to her costume was asking plaintively if anyone had seen her Mr. Right.

Of course everything was utter confusion, which was exactly as Mr. Pemberton must have intended. Because everyone was talking to everyone else, regardless of whether they knew them or not, and when partners did eventually find each other they embraced like long-lost explorers, reunited.

And then just as I thought that they must have forgotten to hand out a card with Night on it, I felt my wrist gripped, not at all gently, and myself pulled abruptly backwards.

A voice, neither tender nor lover-like, bade me tersely to "Cut it out. Now no nonsense tonight. No playing hard to get. I told you specifically we should lead off the dance."

Now we had reached the edge of the dancing space. He actually used the excuse of putting his arm round me to give me an admonitory shake. "Behave yourself! I'm not in the mood for any nonsense."

And with that, the band struck up and Nicholas Pemberton and I led off the ball.

CHAPTER XIII

With Nicholas Pemberton's hand holding me firmly in the small of my back, I was swept into the centre of the floor. It was a quickstep, which he danced with the same effortless, throwaway competence with which he seemed to do everything else. And for one complete circuit of the room we were in splendid isolation.

I had a marvellous view of the whole colourful scene— the truly excellent decorations, the imitation grottoes filled with lights and ferns and flowers, the band rigged out as eighteenth-century musicians, the guests all grouped around in brilliant costume and variegated masks. But I was in no state to feel anything except embarrassment, and though I hated to admit it even to myself, apprehension. It was already beginning to dawn on me that Miss Sylvester's generous gesture was neither so innocent nor so spontaneous as it first appeared. And it had dawned on me weeks ago that Nicholas Pemberton was not the sort of man to be trifled with.

So through the slits of my pearl and velvet mask, all I really noticed was the inscrutable face above me, as I tried to read something from the set of his jaw and the expression of his lips. I heard things, though, even above the fast smooth rhythm of the band, and the equally loud beating of my heart, I heard the whispers.

"That's her, yes...."

"Isn't she lovely...."

"Don't they make a proper pair?"

"When? I dunno! Soon, they say."

Mr. Pemberton heard them, too. For suddenly his stern expression softened, he pushed me gently away from him, the better to see what was visible of my face and said lightly, "The price of fame, my love."

He gave me, or rather what he assumed to be Miss Sylvester, a glance of such unabashed fondness that I almost choked. All I could do was to nod and smile, in what I hoped was a rueful manner.

"What's the matter, darling? Have you lost your tongue?"

"No," I said, feeling that the least said would be the soonest mended.

"No?" Mr. Pemberton echoed, eyeing me at once quizzically and indulgently. "No? No what?"

"No, thank you."

Mr. Pemberton gave one of his short, oddly endearing laughs. "Darling," he said, "I'm not your little schoolteacher stand-in, trying to teach you your manners. Are you angry with me? Is it because I spoke to you sharply just then?"

"No."

"No. Just no again? You're getting like the Russians at U.N.O.," Mr. Pemberton said with mock severity. "No what, darling?"

The emphasis on the last word gave me the clue. Though tears of what I think were indignation had risen behind my velvet mask, I managed to croak out, "No, darling."

"Better. But not quite right. Not for us!"

I tried to guess at their secret endearments, "No, my love," I said more huskily still.

And then the hand on the small of my back tightened. Mr. Pemberton let out a little sigh of pleasure. I remember thinking that for all his insufferable rudeness to little schoolmarms, she was lucky to be loved like that, by a man like this.

"That's more like it, my sweet." Gently, teasingly, he pushed aside one of my waterfall ear-rings and kissed my ear.

"Mmm," he murmured, "I like the perfume you're wearing. Is that the stuff I gave you? The bottle I brought you back from Paris?"

I whispered that it was. And then he drew my head close to him, so that it rested against his chest. So close in fact that I could hear the beating of his heart.

And then I did a very dangerous thing. Like someone falling asleep in the snow, I let it rest there, and I pretended that I really was in love with him and he with me. And I abandoned myself to the pleasure and pain of the rest of the dance.

Like that, relaxed and dreaming, we danced as if indeed we were in love. For a few short minutes, my antagonism to him and to the film unit melted. Our lovely room had never seemed so lovely.

Then the music stopped with triumphant rolls on the drums, that exploded my make-believe world. Nicholas Pemberton lifted my gloved hand and kissed it.

"Now, darling, I think we both ought to circulate. You might have a dance with old Captain Coggin." He still held on to the tips of my fingers, gazing down at me fondly. "But don't," he laughed, "dance with too many good-looking men. You know I'm jealous."

I remember wondering how he managed to turn a blind eye in that case to Sylvia's flirtations and I remember coming to the conclusion that love after all is blind. Hadn't I every reason to be glad of it tonight?

"Oh, and by the way ‑"

He had yet one further instruction for his fiancée as he handed her to a chair by one of the grottoes, and a mysterious one at that. "I'd avoid all Chinamen if I were you." He winked as he said it, as if this were something else which Sylvia was bound to understand.

* * *

I had every intention from then on of avoiding not only Chinamen but every living male, and for that matter female, in the entire room. I assumed that avoiding the Chinamen was either another secret lovers' code or yet another manifestation of Nicholas Pemberton's jealousy.

Whatever it was, I had only one resolve and that was to get out of the room, take off the costume, and avoid any more intolerable situations. The very second Nicholas Pemberton had his back turned, I was out of my chair, and making for the door.

But my way was barred. A tall masked Red Indian who I think was the production manager said, "You're a slippery customer, Sylvia. Come on now. No bilking on my rhumba."

After that I was courteously confronted by an elderly gentleman who insisted on doing a military two-step when everyone else was doing the twist, and who, despite his mask and admiral's costume, was undoubtedly Captain Coggin. That number turned into a Paul Jones, and once more my exit was cut off. A lady in a sari on one side, and a masked "Lively One" on the other gripped my hands and swept me into the circle. When the music stopped there opposite me was a man so tall and stout that he had to be Tim Brocklebank's father rigged out as a Yeoman of the Guard.

The lights went down then, because it was an old-fashioned waltz, and the only illumination was from a rainbow-coloured spotlight. And because from the village there were a lot of older people present, even those that hadn't joined in the Paul Jones now came on to the floor. The already crowded dancing area was full to bursting. I had visions of the old beams giving way and us all being deposited in the dank and unused cellars.

Mr. Brocklebank, though he is a marvellous blacksmith, is not so good at steering. For all that we did move, simply because between us we seemed to carve a path of devastation through the crowds.

Cries of "Oh, my foot!" or an anguished indrawn breath were frequent. We bumped, trod, and were trodden on, elbowed and were elbowed, cannoned from one crushed couple to another. So that when my hand was briefly held I noticed it no more than an elbow in my ribs or a foot against my ankle bone.

Then I became aware that now my hand held something. Something that crackled like paper under my gloved fingers. Something that hadn't been there before. I glanced around at the packed mass. Their faces under their masks were indistinguishable, their expressions unreadable.

Certainly no one was smiling or gesturing as if to attract my attention. Over on the far side of the room, the spotlight played. Faces were caught in its brief radiance, swallowed into the twilight mass again.

"Well," Mr. Brocklebank said, mopping his brow, "that was very enjoyable, mum, I’m sure!"

And I was aware that the music had stopped and the lights had come on.

* * *

Even as I unfolded the note, I had an absolute certainty that whoever had thrust it into my hand was now carefully watching. I remember glancing around, wondering behind which mask a pair of eyes rested on me.

The message was printed in block letters and it was brief. It said ... Please come to the tech store when next dance starts. Urgent. The note was neither signed nor was it addressed to anyone. I neither knew if it was Sylvia Sylvester writing to me or a friend of Sylvia's to her or someone unknown to Sylvia Sylvester. I stood there, with my hands clenched round the note, feeling a curious panic take hold of me. It was as if the party had suddenly dissolved into something alien and menacing, and as if it were a matter of life or death whether I should go.

And then, as abruptly, my mood reversed. Common sense reasserted itself. It might be a joke, it might be someone who'd rumbled my disguise or a film fan seeking an autograph, or most likely of all it was Miss Sylvester herself.

At the very worst, it could be Mr. Pemberton seeking a kiss from Miss Sylvester or a thorough apology from me.

When the next dance was announced, by the leader of the band, I drew a deep breath. I waited till the floor was fairly full of dancers and then I made my way across the room.

The tech store I knew was where mechanical replacement props were kept. It's a room at the back of the house that in the old days was the gun-room. It still has the old racks round the walls, and I suppose that partly because of those and the fact that it has a door leading outside near the set, it was chosen by the location manager for a tech store.

To reach it from the ballroom you have to go through the hall and down the corridor to the kitchen quarters and then turn left, and it's on the right.

There was no one in the hall and I went through and the kitchen corridor was empty, but lit. Because they're short of space, all kinds of boxes were piled neatly the length of both corridors, and outside the door to the technical store were carriage wheels, and brass-decorated imitation harness.

I must confess that before I turned the handle of the door I paused. To the forefront of my mind I brought all kinds of sentences, lest my worst fears were realised, and inside I found Mr. Pemberton himself ready to confront me.

I did in fact actually knock gently on the door, in case whoever was inside would call out, "Come in" and I would have some clue to their identity, and better still, to their mood. But my knock received no answer. So I turned the handle, and gingerly put my head round the door. The room so far as I could see was empty.

I took a couple of paces inside, and said rather stupidly, "Here I am." No one answered. I don't know if this was the usual practice in the tech store, but the shutters were closed and the electric light switched on.

It was very quiet too, because the music and the laughter from the party didn't penetrate. Everything was neatly arranged. Strange-looking spares hung in the old gun-racks, shelves were full of what looked like camera parts, and in one corner stood a newly constructed gibbet. I shivered as I walked up and down, listening for footsteps outside, deciding one minute that this unpunctuality proved it was Miss Sylvester who'd changed her mind, the next sure that Miss Sylvester was being made the victim of some silly party game, then deciding that perhaps this was something she knew about all the time and had forgotten to tell me, like with Mr. Pemberton leading off at the dance.

The more I strained my ears to hear, the more I imagined noises. But there was nothing but the call of an owl from the woods outside, the scuffle of mice behind the panelling. The room itself was almost oppressively still. I felt suffocated with the smell of wood and preserving liquid and sawdust.

Then just as I was deciding I would wait no longer, I heard footsteps outside in the corridor. They were a man's slippered footsteps, I was sure—very soft at first, growing firmer, pausing outside the door.

I turned to face it, my heart for some reason racing. Then the person on the other side knocked as I had done.

I cleared my throat and in a thick voice said, "Come in."

With infinite slowness the handle turned. My eyes watched it, fascinated. The door opened a crack and then suddenly, fully.

There, framed in it, like some horrible painting, was the figure of a Chinaman.

His face was entirely covered by a yellow mask and his bead in shiny black hair which ended in a pigtail. He stood for a moment, his hands tucked mandarin-wise in the wide sleeves of his satin tunic.

For my part I seemed rigid to the floor, unable to move, unable to take my eyes away from the apparition, unable though I opened my mouth to say anything. Vaguely, I can remember a draught of cold air somewhere behind me. But it didn't really penetrate my immediate consciousness.

Then suddenly two things happened. With a terrifying suddenness that made me scream, someone grabbed me from behind, jerked my wrists roughly behind me, and then fastened a hand over my mouth. Simultaneously, as if working in perfect silent co-ordination, the Chinaman reached out a hand to the switch beside the door and put out the light.

It was like suddenly being plunged into a nightmare. Here I was in the darkness, with an unknown assailant gagging my mouth and gripping my wrists, while somewhere in this room lurked the silent Chinaman.

"Don't struggle!" a voice hissed in my ear. But I took no notice. I was a mixture of fright, bewilderment, and fury. These things simply didn't happen these days. It was as if we'd all slipped through a crack in time back to the era of the film, back to highwaymen and kidnapping and violence.

Once or twice I kicked out behind me, and the hard jewelled heels found some sort of target, because the man grunted and tightened his hold on my wrists.

Then I felt a rope ... no, something smoother than a rope, maybe a nylon cord or a leather, being bound round them. Again I lashed out with my heels, but this time he must have been standing to one side of me, for my feet kicked empty air and the man laughed briefly. I tried wriggling my head from side to side to free my mouth from the heavy hand, and partly succeeding, I dug my teeth in deep, and the man yelped.

From somewhere in front of me in the darkness, the Chinaman whispered, "I said she was a cat." Then he must have switched on his torch, for I saw the dancing circle of white light come towards me. Then in a sudden swift movement my feet were grabbed and bounds The hand across my mouth lifted just long enough for me to gasp "What on earth ..." And then a gag went over it.

"Right?" the voice behind me asked.

"Right," the Chinaman answered.

Already totally disorientated in the dark room, I suddenly found myself swung between the two men. I heard their feet moving across the room, and the handle of the outer door turn.

Up till then I was too bewildered to think. The only emotion or thought I seemed capable of was to decide if I was really awake, if this was really and truly happening, and happening to me. And then a dawning but nevertheless burning sense of outrage.

Now as once more the door opened, bringing with it the cool night air and the scent of the garden and the river smell in, along too came a chill sense of fear. Abruptly I realised that I was leaving the comparative safety of the house for the darkness outside with heaven knew what men, and what purpose they had in mind. My heart began to hammer against my ribs and I could scarcely breathe, not only for the gag but for a suffocating apprehension.

They were carrying me feet first, and briefly as the door swung fully open, I had a glimpse of the Chinaman's head and shoulders, outlined against the now star-filled sky. They were broad shoulders, even under the satin tunic. I tried to judge how tall he might be. Five foot ten, eleven ... over six feet? But no, I couldn't be sure. The costume, the darkness, the fact that he was stooping all served to bewilder me.

But at least reason was reasserting itself. Now my mind began to work clearly, and as it worked, the apprehension died down.

"Three steps here! Watch out!" the Chinaman whispered to the other man. And immediately my mind stored up the words. He was familiar with the place, maybe on the film unit staff.

I felt the man behind bend over me as we reached the flagstones at the bottom. I think he had a nylon stocking over his head because his features were all blurred and flattened, and very terrifying. I don't think he was in costume, and I remembered that, too. One at the dance and one not.

"Left," the Chinaman whispered. He must have been wearing rubber-soled sneakers like Mr. Pemberton usually wore because his shoes didn't ring out over the flagstones. I just heard the rattle of the odd loose stone and once the man behind me stumbled, and the Chinaman said irritably, "Shhh!"

"Left."

Left again. That meant we were turning into the flower garden. Now my eyes were getting used to the starlight. I focused them on the Chinaman's back, trying to find something familiar in the carriage of his head, but I was foxed by the ridiculous black plait swinging as he walked.

I leaned my head back as far as I could. I caught just the outline of the man behind. He was taller than the Chinaman and I think he was dark. He was wearing jeans, and what looked like a dark sweater. Feeling my struggles to see him, impatiently the hands under my armpits tightened. He jerked me closer against him, so that I could only turn, not bend back my head.

Against my cheek, I could just feel the stuff of his sweater. It was rough wool, the chunky sort of sweater most of the film people wore. But then so did most men at some time or other. I gave up for the moment. I let my eyes rest on the outlines of the shrubs and the tall clumps of lupins.

An overhanging wisp of honeysuckle brushed my face. I smelled the lavender hedge and the old wall covered in jasmine and the clump of night-scented stock. I could hear the soft whispering of the little fountain and behind that and very far away, the faint sound of music from the house. I thought I heard from within the ballroom laughter and the sound of dancing feet, but as distant and incapable of help to me, as high up in the sky, an aircraft light, carving a brief passage through the pathway of the stars.

Then we were past the lily pond, still going down the garden. Then my heart stood still. Panic and superstition overwhelmed me. We turned sharp left again. The Chinaman bent his head under the roof of ivy. I smelled the river and the graveyard smell of old wet flagstones and damp mossy earth, as the chill of Miss Miranda's ghost-haunted Walk came out to meet me.

* * *

Wet cobwebs trailed across my face. Natural, ordinary cobwebs that formed on summer nights between moist mats of leaves, I told myself. But they made my skin prickle with fear.

Light summer mist would be rising from the river, and now it drifted in delicate wreaths up the funnel of Miss Miranda's Walk, forming itself into weird shapes that reflected back the light of the Chinaman's torch with a queer glowing radiance. Through the funnel effect of the shrubs and creepers, the soft footsteps of the men echoed weirdly. For the few seconds in the Walk I was glad. At least it gave them a human solid quality. Then we were at the end of it. The starlit sky and the faintly gleaming bend of the river appeared. I heard the light slap of water against the landing jetty. And then everything blacked out for me. Suddenly the man behind freed one hand and I felt a blindfold slipped over my eyes.

I knew then what was going to happen. I felt a curious disbelief, as if a situation like this could not be happening, at least not to me.

Then I heard their feet on the landing jetty, the creak of the loose and rotten boards. I smelled the river and something else—fuel oil. I was right. They were taking me on board some river craft.

"Easy does it!" The big man behind swung my whole body deftly into his arms. I felt the vibration as someone jumped on to the craft, heard soft feet moving. Then— "O.K. You put one foot over, then pass her."

Heard in that context, the jetty, the river, the craft, enlightenment dawned. I recognised the voice—or I thought I did.

If the voice I thought I recognised, the craft itself I was almost sure I did.

Passed like a bundle of laundry on to the deck, I counted the paces I was carried. Five across the deck. Then—yes, as it ought to be, the companionway. Flinging me over his shoulder in a fireman's hold, the Chinaman began the descent. I knew that if it was Sea Nymph there would be a polished banister made of twisted brass, and I reached out my joined hands to try to touch it with my fingers.

But my captor had eyes in the back of his head. With a smart slap and a sharp twist of his shoulder he jerked me away. I lost count of the steps down and I couldn't be sure whether there'd been six or seven.

I could be fairly sure, however, that we then went forward and that the cabin he then dumped me in was in the same position as Sea Nymph's. But then most small boats' cabins are there, too.

I heard him moving around close to me and a faint slamming noise as if he was making sure a porthole was closed. Then he gave me a light push, and I subsided on to a bunk, and in a hoarse unrecognisable whisper, he said, "If you promise to behave, I'll be down later and untie your wrists."

Then the cabin door shut, and a key turned and I heard his footsteps up the companionway. A few minutes after that, the engine started. I heard my captor say "Give her a push" to the man on the jetty—I felt a gentle sideways movement as we slipped away.

Whatever the boat, and whoever was sailing her, they were keeping the engine throttled back. Barely a murmur, if any sound at all, would betray our departure to the party guests.

I tried to decide whether we were going upstream or down. It felt as if light waves smacked against the prow, but unable to remember what the time of high water was I couldn't decide if we moved upwards against the current, or coastwards against the incoming tide.

For a while I tried banging my feet against the bulkhead, and then I tried to explore the cabin by bunny-hopping on my tied feet. But in the dark, and with no hands to feel my way, all I did was to bump myself. Then in the curious fatigue of failure I must have fallen asleep, for I was dreaming that I was on Sea Nymph, though I wasn't tied up any more, and that Robbie knew all the time it was me that he'd kidnapped, and that he'd done it because he was in love with me.

Suddenly the dream turned into a nightmare, and I was struggling and shouting at Robbie to let me go, because I wasn't in love with him. I was in love with someone else.

Then I woke with a start. There was someone with me in the cabin. The door was open—I felt the cold air. I could just see the light was on, through my blindfold, or a torch shining full on my face. Then I felt a hand wrench off that blindfold and the mask.

And there was Robbie all right. He had his hands on his hips, staring down at me. If I had any lingering idea that my dream was true and Robbie was in love with me, it was dispelled for ever by the agonised expression on his face, and the agonised gasp, "Rosamund! Oh, no! Not you!"

CHAPTER XIV

"Why on earth did you do such a stupid thing?"

That night, I did the questioning, and ruefully, penitently, Robbie answered. But the real questions were the ones I should have asked myself. And the silliest thing of all was what I did.

Coming up here to High Acres. Though at the time, with the night suddenly moist and chilly, and me with my teeth chattering, half with fright and half with anger, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world.

"Why?" Robbie echoed, pouring me a steaming hot cup of coffee, end squatting down on the kitchen hearthrug beside my chair. "Why do I always do stupid things?" He pulled down the corners of his mouth.

"But I'm awfully sorry, Rosamund. You know that. I wouldn't have frightened you for the world. I just can't tell you how sorry I am. I had a fit when I saw a lock of your hair peeping out from under the wig."

"I should just think you did," I said. "Though I'm getting over it now." I curled my fingers gratefully round the cup, for despite our walk up the hillside from High Acres jetty, I was still cold. "But you haven't answered my question. Why, why did you want to kidnap Sylvia Sylvester in the first place?"

When he didn't reply, I asked another question which was as much to test my own feelings as to ascertain his— like chewing on a tooth you've just had filled, or walking on an injured foot.

"Are you in love with her?" I waited for the quick flare of pain inside me. None came. Even before he answered, there was just... nothing.

"Heavens, no," Robbie said. "What did you imagine? That I was going to keep her locked up here till she said yes?"

"Something like that."

Robbie shook his head. "No fear! She's the last person I'd be in love with."

If it seemed strange that Robbie and I should be sitting here in the empty kitchen at High Acres, dispassionately discussing whether or not he was in love with Miss Sylvester, it certainly didn't strike me as such at the time.

"Well then," I said briskly, "if you're not in love..."

"Oh, I didn't say that. I said I wasn't in love with her."

I said nothing for a moment, considering this carefully. Then I asked, "Does that mean you are in love with someone?"

"Yes."

"May I ask who?"

"No, you may not."

"Is it someone I know?"

"You're not allowed to ask that either."

I sighed. "What am I allowed to do?"

He patted me in an elder-brotherly way on the shoulder, and said, "You're allowed to be a good little girl and listen."

I folded my hands. I suppose it says a good deal for my own self-knowledge that the one thing I didn't expect to hear was that the person he was in love with was me. Somewhere along the line, by some look, some gesture, or some moment of truth, I'd learned perhaps the most difficult lesson any girl can learn. Though how I'd come by that knowledge was then not clear to me.

"I expect," Robbie began, "that like everyone else in Derwent Langley you've heard the rumour that I was once in love with a girl."

"A girl, Robbie? I've heard you've been in love with lots of girls."

"Then you heard wrong. Once is enough, and once is for keeps. There's only ever been one girl."

He stared down at his hands. He seemed to have a great deal of difficulty in saying the next sentence. I waited. The house seemed very silent. Not even an owl hooted, though somewhere up the Downland road a distant car engine hummed. "But she wasn't in love with me." He got it out at last.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Did you ask her?"

"Many times."

After a while I asked gently, "Is that why you've always pretended to fall for every other girl?"

"Perhaps."

Then he lapsed into a moody silence and I had to gently prompt him. "But what exactly has the girl you were in love with to do with kidnapping Sylvia Sylvester?"

"I don't really know. It all seems so absolutely crass now." Robbie ran his hand through his fair hair in a rueful self-abnegatory gesture. "But a few weeks ago it didn't. Some of us got together after the Agricultural Show—a few of my buddies and me. Now it seems just real coffee-bar heroics, but then it looked like a good idea. Somehow or other we'd kidnap Sylvia and hold the film unit to ransom. A bit like a varsity rag, but with a modicum of serious intent too. I imagined myself cutting a dash. I'd get the film unit moving, if no one else could."

"To impress your girl."

"Not my girl. The girl. Yes, I suppose so. You're really too perceptive for your own good, Rosamund."

"Well, I know feelings have been running pretty high, against the unit, I mean. I suppose a lot of people might have hailed you as a local hero."

"A very minor St. George and the Dragon. And there not being many dragons hereabouts to slay."

I smiled, "I think Mr. Pemberton can be somewhat of one, when he has a mind to."

"You can say that again!"

"And I suppose the fancy dress ball was your big chance."

"An absolute gift."

I said nothing, as I sipped my drink, and watched Robbie's handsome moody face. The fancy dress ball seemed very far away.

Robbie's kitchen was warm and comfortable—an expensive tasteful mixture of old-fashioned homeliness and modern mechanisation. The hot fuel in the Aga creaked and sifted gently, like someone getting themself into a more comfortable position. The lights gleamed on the highly polished copper jelly-moulds and warming pans and kettles, and on the white tops of the mechanical dishwashers and coffee grinders and mixers and freezers that were Mrs. Jackson's delight. I wondered who the unknown girl might be who so steadfastly refused to come and be mistress of High Acres.

Someone from the past, perhaps. Someone he'd met up at the university, someone he knew before the family moved down here. Or maybe the girl he was supposed to be in love with at Arundel. Or the pretty blonde he'd been photographed with a couple of years ago at the Hunt Ball.

After a while I pointed out what seemed to me to be a very great flaw in his kidnapping plan.

"You surely never imagined, Robbie, that Mr. Pemberton is the sort of man that anyone could hold to ransom?"

Robbie shook his head with disarming vigour. "Now I come to think of it, no. Positively not."

"So all in all it was probably very lucky that Sylvia Sylvester decided to give me this dress."

Robbie looked at me at first in bewilderment and then astonishment. "Now," he demanded, "who's being silly? Who's being naive? You don't imagine she did it in all innocence, do you?"

"Of course I do."

"Well, you're wrong."

"Why am I?"

"I just know you are. I know Sylvia. She does nothing for nothing."

"Oh come!" I began, but he interrupted.

"She found out. That's obvious."

"But how?"

"Everything gets found out sooner or later in Derwent Langley."

"But why didn't she just tell Mr. Pemberton? Or me? Or you, for that matter?"

"Because this way suited her purpose better."

"How? And anyway, what is her purpose?"

"I don't know, to both those. I only wish I did. Something devious, that I'll bet!"

He frowned thoughtfully into the distance. I listened to the sound of a car turning in through Robbie's gates. I looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.

"Goodness!" I exclaimed. "The party will be nearly over. That must be the Jacksons coming back."

Robbie put his hand on my arm. "Before I take you home," he said softly, "there's one thing I've got to say to you. You've been jolly decent. I can't think of anyone else who would have been as nice. She," his fair skin coloured slightly, "the girl I'm in love with, would have hit the roof. Would have?—what am I saying? Will. If ever she finds out she'll never speak to me again. I don't suppose she'd have approved if it succeeded. But this messy failure!" He lifted his arms and dropped them to his sides in a curious touching gesture of defeat.

I put my hand on his. "But, Robbie, does she have to? Find out, I mean. No one will have missed me. If they have, they'll think I came here of my own accord. In fact, I'll tell them that. For so in a way I did."

"Dear Rosamund," Robbie said. He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me lightly on the forehead, and then very gently and coolly on my lips.

If ever in future years I am asked to define a proof of not being in love, I will say "A kiss." That sort of kiss. For more than anger, more than indifference, that gentle brotherly kiss proved that I had never been in love with Robbie, just as certainly as he had never been in love with me.

But by a most terrible irony, that kiss proved the exact opposite to two other people.

For suddenly a car door slammed, feet hurried across the gravel. The kitchen door was flung open and framed in the doorway were not Mr. and Mrs. Jackson home after a pleasant evening at the Ball, but Nicholas Pemberton wearing a face like thunder. And just behind, bobbing up and down in her eagerness to see what was going on, catching Mr. Pemberton by the arm, was Sylvia Sylvester.

Furiously Nicholas Pemberton said, "Fuller!" And then, though I would not have thought it possible, his mouth tightened. I became aware that Robbie still held my face cupped in his hands and that my surprised and parted lips disclosed that I had just been kissed.

Without another word, Mr. Pemberton turned on his heel, and as she skipped joyfully behind him, I heard Miss Sylvester say, "There, Nick! What did I tell you? They've been there all evening! What was all the fuss and mystery about? Everyone knows she's madly in love with him!"

* * *

"Oh, yes, miss!" Mrs. Peabody replied as I bought a new book of stamps and ordered my next term's supply of Savings Certificates some two weeks later. "It's fine enough, to be sure. But you mark my words, miss. That be the sort of sun that breeds weather!"

I was inclined to agree with her. Breeding weather in our part of the world means brewing up a storm. Certainly the air was heavy and moist, because of these last weeks' constant rain, and around the sun, which Mrs. Peabody so rightly suspected, was an aura of thin hazy cloud, which made me wish I'd taken my mother's advice and brought along a mackintosh.

"It's not been a good summer at all, really," Mrs. Peabody went on. "Too much rain too soon for the farmers. But then some farmers really haven't as much need to worry as others, have they?" And how had I enjoyed being in London last week with my sister?

"Very much, thank you."

"And did you go up there for something special like?"

I shook my head. "Just shopping."

"Yes, miss, that's what I meant. We wondered if you might be shopping for something special?"

"No, nothing very exciting. Well," I corrected myself, "quite exciting. I got a new autumn suit. Is that what you meant?"

But Mrs. Peabody did not. She shook her head vigorously as she counted my change. "Well," she said, and sighed, "I don't suppose you'll be doing this much longer, miss."

"Doing what, Mrs. Peabody?"

"Coming in here to order Savings Certificates from me and such-like."

So far was I from taking her meaning that I was about to ask if there was going to be some new Post Office arrangement for Derwent Langley, when I noticed her expression.

I have always remarked that for all her fifty years, Mrs. Peabody has a skin as delicate and eyes as bright as any schoolgirl's. Now these eyes were sparkling with an unmistakably romantic expression and her already rosy cheeks were glowing with excitement.

"Don't tell me you're leaving us to get married, Mrs. Peabody!" I exclaimed, remembering the village policeman. But she shook her head in something very like exasperation.

"Not me, miss—you."

"Me!" I am quite sure that the surprise in my face and in the tone of my voice was sufficient to waver what appeared to be a very strongly held theory. All the same she said firmly, "Yes, miss, you."

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

I saw her eyes stray sideways to the square panel of plugs and sockets and wires of her little telephone exchange. "I heard ..." then she corrected herself. "I heard tell in the village," she said, "I heard tell several times. Ever so many people know about it. In fact, we're going to get up a collection to give you a nice present. When you announce it, of course."

"Of course," I repeated. Then slowly, "May I ask who to?" I even forgot my grammar.

But Mrs. Peabody did not notice any error. She slapped her hands against her aproned sides and threw back her head and laughed out loud.

When she wiped her brimming eyes with the back of her hand, she said of course that was one of the things they all liked about me. Not just the parents, but the little 'uns too, they appreciated it. My sense of humour. Oh, if you'd got one o' them you couldn't go far wrong. And I had to mark her words again, because you needed a sense o' humour in marriage, more than anything else.

She had a sense of humour, and the late Mr. Peabody had had a sense of humour, and, she cleared her throat delicately at this point, Constable Barber, he had quite a nice little sense of humour, though there were folks that didn't reckon so.

I thought she would never put me out of my misery till abruptly she said, "Ah, yes—well, I mustn't carry on all day. I just wanted to tell you that we all think Mr. Fuller is a very lucky man. And we thought it was ever so romantic the way he took you away from the dance to propose...." Who told her that? ... Why now, it was that nice Miss Sylvester! She'd promised to give something for the wedding present, and so had Mr. Pemberton. And though she for one liked the film unit, it was nice they were going to finish soon, and then I could have a lovely wedding at my own dear home ....

At this point, Mrs. Peabody's eyes had misted over. She took out her handkerchief and dabbed at them. And she seemed to think it quite excusable, even positively right, that my own should be misty too, and that I should leave the shop without another word.

* * *

But both Mrs. Peabody's weather-breeding sun, and her erroneous information about my engagement, were totally eclipsed by a much more powerful piece of news that spread around the village like wildfire.

The film unit was moving out. Mr. Pemberton had given an exclusive interview to the cub reporter on the Courier, to the effect that all but one of the location shots were now "in the can". And this they hoped to shoot by the coming Saturday.

"So," Tanya said, arriving home late that Friday, "tomorrow, I hear, may be moving out day. I popped in at Mrs. Peabody's and she was full of the news. Among other things." I thought she gave me a sudden keen assessing look. But I couldn't be sure.

And then Mother called from the kitchen where she was making some of her special lobster puffs, "Yes, darling. It's really splendid! I hear they're all terribly thrilled with the rushes."

Tanya and I exchanged glances. Mother had become very au fait these days with the film words and expressions.

"And Nicholas has promised to bring the stars up for coffee as soon as it's over. I'm so glad that in the end things weren't too bad with the village either. The Fancy Dress Ball really worked well. I wondered," she appeared in the doorway, her face very pink from the cooking, "I wondered if it might be a nice gesture to ask Captain Coggin along as well. As Chairman of the Parish Council? What do you think?"

Once more Tanya and I exchanged tender smiling glances. We both said it was an excellent idea. The only thing being he was such a crusty old misogynist, would he come? And Mother, unsmiling, agreed that he was a very odious man and simply no way with women at all, but manners were manners.

"Of course," she went on, "I shall be very sorry to see them go. The film unit, I mean. They've been such a colourful sight. I shall quite miss looking out and seeing all the activity."

"Rosamund won't, will you, poppet?"

I said nothing, simply because I couldn't. For just as I could never quite believe that they were coming, so I could not quite accept now that they were leaving. In a wry and melancholy way, I took satisfaction in the fact that I had been so absolutely right—and so utterly wrong.

As I had forecast, things would never be the same again. They had left their mark, destroyed the peace. Not upon the house, as I had said they would, but upon me.

"Rosamund," Tanya went on, "can't wait for Holywell to have its face-lift, and for us all to get back to normal."

And Mother tactfully murmured something about that really applying to all of us, though we mustn't count our chickens till they were hatched. There was still another scene to get in the can, and she, Mother, didn't suppose they'd really get away before Monday, and supper was getting cold while we chattered like this.

And there the matter rested, at least till the supper dishes were cleared away, and Tanya noticed that despite Mrs. Peabody's gloomy prognostications, it was a fine calm night outside with not a breath of wind, and nothing would do but that she and I must stroll in the garden.

I was not loath to accompany her, though I knew before I set out exactly what would be discussed. For there was within me that evening a terrible melancholy, a kind of foretaste of a loneliness to come that only a stroll in our own quiet garden could in any way ease.

There is something very soothing in a moonlit garden, with the gay colours blurred and blanched and outlines softened, and the air rich with the scents drawn from the night-flowering plants. Above all, the quiet with only the high cry of a bat, the steady running of the swollen river and the delicate whispering of the fountain over the water-lily pads.

Without speaking, Tanya and I strolled out through the stable yard, paused a moment to stroke Lady Jane's muzzle, and then we walked along the paved path and into the old-fashioned garden.

As if by mutual agreement, we didn't speak until we reached the old sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial just by the fountain. Then in a voice that seemed unnecessarily harsh and loud, Tanya said, "What's all this I hear about you marrying Robbie Fuller?"

* * *

I took a long time to answer her question, because I had a great deal of careful thinking to do, and a very difficult decision to make. Yet when I did reply, it seemed as if I had hardly heard what she said. I said, "Do you know, Tanya, I think Mother and Captain Coggin are rather fond of one another."

Tanya exploded, "What on earth has that to do with what I asked you? Don't hedge!"

"It has a lot to do with it," I said.

"Oh, yes," Tanya answered in an altered strained voice. "Yes, sorry, I apologise, I see what you mean. You don't want to leave Mother on her own when you marry. Yes, maybe you're right."

"Why do you think I'm right?" I asked inexorably.

Tanya laughed without much mirth. "Well, you know as well as I do, Mother always has that certain look on her face when she mentions his name. Despite the fact that she, charitable soul, hasn't a good word to say for him. They're always at loggerheads."

"The Vaughans," I murmured, "are proud in love."

"Exactly!"

"They'll never let a man know they love him."

"Never," Tanya said vehemently.

"Even when they know he loves them."

"Even then," Tanya echoed.

A melancholy silence fell between us. When Tanya spoke again her words sounded as though her lips were frozen. "That was why Robbie took you away from the party. To propose to you, I suppose? Just as Mrs. Peabody said."

"No," I said, coming to my decision, and breaking my promise for the first and I hope the very last time in my life. "He kidnapped me from the dance, because he thought I was Sylvia."

" What?" And then in an even more melancholy voice, "Don't tell me he's going to marry her!"

"No. He did it as a prank. At least half a prank, and half as an attempt to hold the film unit to ransom...."

I didn't get the rest of it out, because Tanya had exploded in wrath. The words, feckless, no-good, selfish, spoiled, no sense of responsibility, streamed out like a fountain. If proof I had wanted, there it was. I said in a smug voice, "Robbie said you would hit the roof if you found out."

"I? What on earth have I got to do with it?"

"Well," I said, "he didn't mention you by name, but he said the girl he was in love with."

She was too surprised to deny it. Though she did try saying that she wasn't in love with him, not with a man that did silly things like that.

"That's all right," I said. "You've called him all those names before. You've called him everything except a crusty old misogynist. The Vaughans, remember, are proud in love."

For a moment I thought that I had accomplished what I had set out to do. I thought that she was going to melt, admit she was in love with him.

"I'd always wondered," I said, "who the mysterious girl was that Robbie was in love with. Oh, I know he tried to flirt with lots of girls, even me, but it was never the real thing. And I always wondered why you made yourself so attractive to everyone else but him. You're both too proud to admit you love each other. Love," I said softly, "should be humble as well as proud."

But suddenly all I seemed to have succeeded in doing was to make her angry.

"Love," she said loudly, banging her fists down on the face of the little sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial. "What on earth do you know about being in love?"

And I was just about to gather my courage to tell her that indeed I did know a great deal about being in love.

That in fact I knew about the worst of all its forms, that where the man you loved was in love ... nay, engaged to marry somebody else, when I became aware that Tanya was no longer looking at me.

She was staring down at the three-cornered piece of metal on the face of the sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial. Released by her angry blow, it had moved forward into its proper groove in the centre of the queer engraved face.

And like that it caught the clear light from the almost full moon. I remember thinking, only mildly interested, that it wasn't a sundial, but a moon-dial, though how did one tell the hours of the day from something so inconstant as the moon's face? And then I looked more closely at where that clear knife-edged shadow fell.

As authoritatively as any teacher's pointer, indicating a piece of information on the blackboard, the fingertip of that sharp shadow touched precisely the centre of the inscription.

Blurred by time, weathered by wind and rain, many of the letters had dwindled into nothing, but the rough shapes of the words were there.

I touched them with my fingertips like someone blind, while the always fairly clear first line ran through my head. Nothing very remarkable.

The sort of old folksy warning you often find on small ancient monuments to stop them being removed or desecrated.

"Now woe betide..."

I'd always imagined that it would continue some sort of curse or misfortune on whoever took the sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial away.

But now I recognised other words and odd letters in the second line. And my mind completed the rhythmic rhyming jingle.

"Now woe betide,

When Derwent fludde to sky doth ride."

It still didn't make much sense to me. And anyway, just then I wasn't very interested. All the same I made a mental note to read up what I could about this sort of moon sorcery, which of course in this day and age was merely amusing.

Yet for all that, I shivered. And Tanya said impatiently, "Yes, come along. It's getting cold. We've been here nattering about things that can't happen for long enough."

She was of course referring to her love affair with Robbie. And as we walked inside her words made me think for some sad, strange reason of Mr. Pemberton.

Only the moon shadow remained in the garden, and one thing I swear—neither Tanya nor I thought of that.

CHAPTER XV

On the surface at least, everything was more cheerful in the clear light of day. It could, I think, have been difficult not to have been cheerful that Saturday, with the last scene in the can, and the film unit jubilant. That last scene, as is apparently quite usual in the film world, would be the actual opening scene of the film proper, and it was a trick shot taken as though through the eyes of a horseman high up on the Downs, showing first our chimneys and then us, low-lying in the mist rolling up-river from the sea.

All that day there had been great comings and goings, with Nicholas Pemberton and the stars and some of the other actors and actresses and the production manager and the art director all going off to the cinema in Castle Langley to see the last of the "rushes".

Tanya and I had watched them return. Miss Sylvester had embraced everyone, including of course Nicholas Pemberton, and even her poor bullied dresser, Gabby.

Gary Hennessy was in such a jubilant mood himself that just after tea-time, for a dare no less, he had climbed on to our roof, and then at great risk, scrabbled up our flagpost chimney, and fastened the flag of Sussex that he used in the film securely there, to where no flag had flown since I could remember.

In short, the end of term at Derwent Langley primary school had nothing to compare with this. And even the sudden storm which broke round about six did nothing to damp their spirits.

"Not, ma'am, that we're happy to be going," Gary Hennessy explained to my mother, as he nibbled one of her lobster puffs. "Though for land's sakes," he added, comically squinting out at the drenching rain, and the flickers of lightning, "you have the good old British climate. Only more so. It's just that we're happy to have completed a really successful film."

We were all cosily upstairs in the sitting room of our flat—Nicholas Pemberton, the stars, Captain Coggin, and we three. Down below the quick bursting of the storm was causing a lot of good-humoured pandemonium as technicians got the equipment stowed on the pantechnicons and extras and dressers ran for the liberty bus into the village.

"I second that," Sylvia said prettily. "We've quite enjoyed being in your spooky old place. Heavens! Does it often thunder like this? I hate thunder! But all the same, it's marvellous that the rushes are so good. Was that really the Film Festival organiser you got down to see the rushes, Nick? And did he truly say, Nick darling, that you've got a real star there?" She put her hand through his arm and with a pretty, possessive gesture dragged him away from the rest of us.

I must say that of all the unit, Nicholas Pemberton looked the least jubilant. But that, as I heard Mother explain to Captain Coggin, was because he still had a great deal of work to do on the film itself. Back at Elstree, cutting and editing would now begin, and it was understandable that he should appear somewhat pale and drawn.

Not that we were able to have much in the way of conversation. Our little pocket of the Downs is well known for storms. It is something to do with the formation of the hills and the funnelling effect of the estuary. Once it is overhead, it's as if the storm itself is trapped in the bowl of the valley and that it can't escape.

"Never mind," Mother said, as a particularly loud crack of thunder rumbled round the hills and down the valley, reverberating through the very ground under our feet. "We shall all just have to shout. Fill Sylvia's cup, Rosamund, while I switch on the lamp. Dear me, how the nights draw in!"

But it wasn't the night only that was drawing in. Lightning flickered from the anvil heads of those black thunderclouds and they it was that had moved in, till they seemed to fill the sky from pole to pole.

Though country born and bred, Fm too used to storms to fear them, yet I have the country-dweller's respect for them. Natural forces like wind and tide are there for man to reckon with. And therefore I had some sympathy with Sylvia's artistic terror of deafening sound and menacing light.

Like Mother, I tried to cheer her as I poured her coffee. "They say round here that the loudest bang is soonest over," I smiled.

"And I don't suppose it will last long," Tanya came to my aid. "I expect it will go out with the ebb tide."

"Ebb tide, my foot!" Captain Coggin was not the one to sympathise with feminine vapours. "Never heard such nonsense in all my born days! Why is it countrywomen never know anything about natural phenomena? Bless my soul," he took out an old-fashioned watch from his pocket, and looked at it. Maybe it was just that the presence of Mr. Pemberton made me specially sensitive or maybe it was the electricity in the air, or the memory of that queer shadow on the sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial, but it seemed that he took a long time to read the time, and then that he made some mental calculation, and having made it that his whole face changed.

In what seemed to be an altered, brisker, what Mother would call a military tone of voice, he said, "The tide turned hours ago. High tide's at midnight. Just three hours to go."

And then to my absolute astonishment, he put down his cup with a rattle. "And now if you'll take my advice, Mrs. Vaughan, I think your guests should be on their way. This storm isn't going to abate. It's going to get worse till high tide is past." He marched over to the window. "The drive's already half flooded. You'll be lucky if the water isn't up to your engine." He glanced first at Nicholas and then at Gary. "It's a good thing all the others have gone."

Miss Sylvester stood up and began casting around tearfully for her handbag. She seemed suddenly undecided what to do, torn between fear of going out into the storm and an equal fear of staying.

For myself, I didn't really think it was anything more than Captain Coggin's well-known penchant for interfering in matters not entirely his own, until Nicholas Pemberton said softly, "Well, sir, yours is an older car than ours. We'll see you on your way first. Make sure you can make it."

And Captain Coggin replied, "Me, dear boy? No, certainly not! Never could stand driving in a storm. Reminds me too much of the old shell-fire. Besides, my old car's a cussed old mule. Just won't start if there's a drop of rain."

Nicholas Pemberton had just said, "Come to think of it, sir, my car's exactly the same," and Sylvia Sylvester had begun to cry in earnest, when there was a flash of lightning that filled the room.

It was almost as if one of the huge film unit arc lights had been switched on with such power and fierceness that it had fused the whole generator. For the noise that accompanied it seemed to explode in our ears as the lightning exploded in our eyes. The whole house rocked to the echo of it. And as the thunderclap rumbled and bounced towards the sea, I listened for the sound of falling masonry.

"Were we hit?"

"Did that strike us?"

"By Jove, that was close!"

My first reaction was surprise that no damage appeared to have been done. Certainly there was no sound of chimney pots falling or slates and bricks rattling down. There was no sound except the rattling of the rain, the rushing and gurgling sound of the river, and Lady Jane's frightened whinny. Almost disbelievingly, I rushed with the others to the window.

Though the heavy overcast sky produced an ominous twilight outside, the scene was lit by the constant flicker of lightning. And there we saw what that last big flash had struck. The tallest of the ancient trio of Sussex oaks near the beginning of the horseshoe bend, and the three of them, ripped out in a clump, had fallen forward into the river bend.

Behind this temporary impediment, the narrow waters fumed and fretted. And then swiftly, as we watched, an arm of the river reached sideways, over the low-lying path at the bottom of the garden. Past the end of Miss Miranda's Walk, the river divided itself around us, and then looped back together again.

It was all so swift and silent that I could hardly believe it had happened. The river had done what it had always wanted to do. It had followed that tempting low-lying pathway closing the narrow prongs of the horseshoe bend. And it was only then that it dawned on me that, as suddenly as that, it had made us an island.

* * *

Strangely enough, it wasn't the view from the window that made Sylvia Sylvester have hysterics, but the lamp going out. It went off with the suddenness which we in the country are well used to. Given a bad thunderstorm, our overhead cables usually fail us. But that night, even to us, Mother and Tanya and me, it emphasised our terrible isolation.

"Never mind," Mother said briskly, rising as always to the occasion. "We always keep a supply of candles ready for just this sort of thing. And there's an oil lamp in the kitchen. Perhaps you would be good enough to pump it up, Captain." Though I couldn't see her face, I knew by the tone of her voice that she was smiling determinedly. "We shall all be very cosy in here, I promise you."

But Sylvia Sylvester refused to be comforted. She began to alternate that high harsh laughter which contains no amusement in it with tears and lamentations.

"I knew it all along!" she sobbed, watching Mother place the candelabrum on the table. "I said all along, now didn't I, Nicholas? I said there was something spooky about this place."

"Nonsense," Mother said, and patted her on the shoulder. "It's a most friendly house."

In the light of the candles, Sylvia's face was all white and pointed almost like a paper mask, her eyes coal black, her mouth open and yet somehow unmoving. And out through this open mouth gushed an endless torrent of words, as unstoppable it seemed as the river outside.

"I always knew something was going to happen. I felt it in my bones. The place just isn't safe either. Everyone knows that. It's going to fall down! That's what's going to happen!"

I must confess that her words, with the thunder and the river surrounding us, and I knowing full well the state of the timbers and the foundations, gave me a terrible frightened feeling inside, but I really think that the laughter when it came was every bit as bad, if not worse.

Funny, it was, she said, real cruel fun, that just when she'd finished a film like this, that everyone, and she was right about that, wasn't she, Nicholas, including that funny chap down from the Film Festival Committee, that when they all said it was going to make film history, and put her right up there with Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, that this would happen. It was enough to make a cat laugh. What was it they called it, Nick, the script-writer fellow, kitchen sink irony... well, you could say that again.

On her happiest, loveliest day, it was just as if the house hated her and was taking its revenge. Honestly, it made her laugh! She threw back her head. The candlelight glinted on her lovely red-gold hair, and sent her pointed shadow on to the far wall.

Fear is very catching. Suddenly she looked again so terribly like that portrait of Miss Miranda that my heart seemed to shrink inside me and my arms goose-pimple with an inexplicable fear. Ghosts and hauntings and inexplicable happenings are all right in broad daylight and by warm and crowded firesides, but in an ancient crumbling house, with the river in spate and the storm at its height, with timbers creaking and doors rattling, fear lurks and breeds in every shadowed corner.

"Oh, for land's sakes, Sylvie," Gary Hennessy said, "give it a rest! This is just the good old British summer. You ought to know that!"

But I don't think she heard him. A crack of thunder broke through her hysterical laughter, and as it died away, she began to sob again.

Of course she'd known it all along. They'd told her, warned her in the village. Everyone there knew the place was haunted. Well, for that matter, she'd seen the ghost herself, hadn't she? Nick hadn't believed her, then, had he? But then lately Nick hadn't believed anything she did say. Oh, he'd told her often enough that she was a fibber. Well, all right, she did sometimes stretch the truth a bit, but then so did everybody. And anyway this wasn't one of those times.

And they said in the village that when Miss Miranda's ghost appeared the house was doomed. Doomed, did we hear that? Or did he think that the ghost was all a trick?

To scare her? Because if he did, she knew who was responsible. Someone not so far away who was in love ....

At this point, Nicholas Pemberton smacked her. Very hard.

I would like to be able to say that he smacked her more in sorrow than in anger. But alarmed, unhappy, worried as I was, I could still recognise that the reverse was, in fact, true. That slap was well aimed, angry, and entirely successful.

For the first time, Sylvia's face ceased to be a mask. Even in the candlelight, the planes of her face melted. Her mouth twisted into astonished fury, her eyes blazed, her brows wrinkled. An angry colour crept into her pallid cheeks.

She wept like a child. She called him a beast and a bully. She wondered how she had ever really been able to work right through the film with him. But after a little while she allowed him to put up her feet, and with Mother sitting beside her, she drifted off into an exhausted sleep. It was as if she'd handed over all responsibility for herself to him, given herself trustingly into his charge. And I remember thinking that this too was part of being in love.

* * *

As soon as she was asleep, Nicholas took Tanya and me by the arm and walked us into the kitchen. Over his shoulder, he jerked his head for the other two men to follow.

For ever afterwards, I think when I smell paraffin and warm wax, I shall see the tiny kitchen with the five of us crowded in counsel inside. Outside the wind had risen. It moaned softly round the corners of the house and howled in the big wide throat of the chimneys. It sent handfuls of rain rattling against the window panes and shook the old frames in their sashes.

Under our feet, the structure shifted and vibrated to the boom of the thunder. And either the noise or the wind or our own worried breathing sent the candles flickering and smoking, casting our weird shadows on the table and walls.

Quite unselfconsciously, and apparently by mutual consent, Nicholas had taken command. Quite unselfconsciously, the rest of us, even Captain Coggin, deferred to him.

Without any preamble, as soon as the door was shut behind us, Nicholas addressed himself to him. "You've got something on your mind, sir. I realised that out there. What is it?"

Naturally, being Captain Coggin, he took his time in answering, and Gary Hennessy broke in with, "Now see here, Nick. I've got something on my mind too. I don't like it one bit. No, sir! Nor would any seaman, I'm telling you. There's something real mean about this crazy storm! And there's a great white moon out there back of all that cloud!"

"Yes," I said, remembering the little sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial and its ominous moon shadow, the memory chilling what courage I had like a cold hand clutching my heart. "The locals never like a storm at the full of the moon."

"And there's a sky full of water to come down yet," Gary Hennessy whispered hoarsely, mindful of the hysterical Sylvia in the room beyond. "The river's full to busting right now, and..."

"Is that what you had on your mind, sir?" Nicholas asked, impatiently waving Gary to be silent.

"Not quite. Something on those lines, but not just that. There's more to it than that, by Jove!" The captain pursed his lips and frowned. "It's the full of the moon, and the vernal tides. Tides come into it as well you know. Holywell's a bit too near the coast for my liking. Gets nearer every year, you know. Erosion. That sort of thing. Always said that. But you can't expect women to listen. Not scientific, you know."

"What have the vernal tides to do with it?" Nicholas Pemberton prompted him, bringing him back to the point.

"Everything. Well, not quite everything. But quite a deal. Yes, indeed. There've been weeks of heavy rain, don't you know. Yes, of course you do. Now this dratted downpour, not to mention the storm. I don't like the way the elements are joining up. It's like an army. You can take an attack on your front and your flank, pick 'em off battalion by battalion. But not on all fronts. That's when you've got to beware!"

"Beware of what, sir?"

"Of history repeating itself. Often does, you know." He waited till the noise of another clap of thunder died away. As I listened I watched the men's faces. I felt the palms of my hands go clammy, my mouth dry up with apprehension. I suddenly felt exactly as Sylvia Sylvester had done. As if I'd known all along that something like this was going to happen. And the only thing that had been in doubt was exactly when.

For then I remembered all the signs and portents that had given warning. That curious feeling I'd had right at the very beginning when Nicholas had first set foot into Holywell Grange that from then on things would never be the same again. Sylvia Sylvester's certainty that she had seen some apparition in Miss Miranda's Walk. The angler who wrote to the Courier and said he'd seen lights and heard sounds in the dead of night. That cryptic moon shadow warning on the face of the sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial... what was it again? ...

"Now woe betide,

When Derwent fludde to sky doth ride."

Even Sylvia Sylvester's resemblance to the face of the long-dead Miss Miranda, as if perhaps time had looped back, and history was indeed repeating itself. And she and her betrothed were to play out once again another chapter in this house's tragedy of love.

And though all these might be dismissed as nebulous, superstitious, spooky stories, suitable only for frightening women, now to give them credence were the scientific facts which were bringing if not apprehension, at least an awareness of imminent danger to the faces of these men.

"History?" Nicholas Pemberton prompted, as the Captain hesitated, glancing shrewdly first at Tanya and then at me to see, I think, if we were of a tougher fibre than Miss Sylvester.

He apparently decided that we were, for he said briskly, "Yes ... well, I won't mince my words. You may or may not know, but history is my hobby. And being Chairman of the Parish Council, I've studied the parish records very thoroughly. Of course it may not happen again. The last really bad time was three hundred and fifty-seven years ago. They've had it since, but never as bad as that."

"Three hundred and fifty-seven years ago," I murmured. "That's the date then of the little sundial-that-isn't-a-sundial."

"Possibly," Captain Coggin said, impatient of my feminine interruption.

And then I said aloud, "When Derwent fludde to sky doth ride. I wondered what that meant. Now I know. Of course, it would look like that—the Derwent Bore."

Captain Coggin said with great asperity that he hadn't in the least idea what I was talking about. But I had guessed right. The Bore.

He then embarked on a brief terse description of this wall of water, a phenomenon of certain river estuaries brought about by the build-up of sea and river water, and the funnel effect of the river bed.

"Of course, it may not occur. We must hope that it won't. But the moon, the tide, and the season are right."

"Or wrong," Nicholas said grimly.

"And the wind and the flood," Gary Hennessy said again in his throaty whisper. "Land's sakes, they're not going to exactly help!"

"Exactly! But even so, if it comes, it may only be as it was twenty-five years ago, when it simply flooded the ground floor rooms."

"And if it isn't?"

Captain Coggin shrugged.

"Tell me," Tanya asked. "What happened that last time? Three hundred and fifty-seven years ago?"

"As far as I could see from the records, the household all went up to the village. They're much higher up. You're the lowest-lying house in the area. I have often remarked to your gracious mother ..."

"But Holywell wasn't surrounded by water then, sir, was it? As we sure are now. We. couldn't get to the village now for love nor money."

"Exactly!"

"The house, though," I asked. "What happened to the house itself?"

"It was extremely badly damaged. The bore covered the roof, I understand. I'm told you can still see where some of the parts were replaced. But it stood. Oh yes, even then it stood."

"And it'll stand now," I said, with a stoutness I was very far from feeling.

But no one was listening to me. Without another word, Nicholas Pemberton had gone into the hall, and I heard the ratcheting sound as he dialled on the telephone.

"Well, folks," Gary said, and smiled, "that's something they didn't have all that time ago. The good old Edison Bell telephone! Am I thankful for that! In no time flat, some guy with a boat... that friend of yours, girls, from up- river ... will maybe get down here and pick us all up. Land's sakes," he laughed, "this'll be a real good publicity story in the end! The folks back home'll love it! Taken off by boat at the end of a film. Out of the ordinary? Oh, no—regular occurrence in li'l ole Sussex!"

But even as he laughed, I think I knew what he knew. For the ratcheting sound went on. Inside the kitchen, we all became very quiet. When Gary finished no one else spoke. There seemed nothing to say. Nothing that in the face of the disaster which threatened us that would not appear banal and unimportant. I watched the flicker of the candles in the draught, the march of goblin shadows that they sent across ceiling and wall, the way their black smoke trailed behind them, like miniature spume, and I listened to the low reassuring hissing hum of the little oil lamp.

Between the hammer of wind and thunder, there were no sounds except the creaking of the house timbers, that continuous ratcheting of the telephone dial, and far away, once, twice, Lady Jane's uneasy fretful whinny.

Then Nicholas Pemberton reappeared. He closed the door carefully behind him, before saying in a studiedly calm untroubled voice, "Only to be expected, of course. With the cables down, probably the telephone wires have fallen as well. One of the penalties of living in the country." He paused before adding in a neutral matter-of-fact tone, "There appears to be no way of getting help from the outside world."

CHAPTER XVI

But of course there was one way. And it was because of that reason, and at that point, that I stopped looking at Nicholas Pemberton. I was afraid that if he caught my eye he might guess what was in my mind. Why I should fear that, I don't know, except that I know people you love often have the power to read your thoughts, and I didn't want my secret guessed and therefore thwarted.

My secret was born with much the same blinding suddenness as the flash which had struck down the oaks. But I suppose that in reality it was a conjunction of Gary's remark about not having the phone in those old days, and me thinking of Miss Miranda riding off to find her lover. Then Lady Jane had whinnied. Nicholas had come in and said there was no way of reaching the outside world. And there it was. The only possible solution.

"I won't be a moment," I said, my hand on the door, "but I can hear Lady Jane. She's frightened of storms." It wasn't strictly true. She was frightened of the actual noise of thunder. But the wind and equalling rain excited her. "I just want to make sure she's all right."

No one seemed to notice that I'd gone. Or rather, they registered the fact, but their minds were on other things. As I closed the door behind me, the men were talking of the possibility of knocking up a raft together, and trying to think what could be used as a rocket to send up a distress flare.

It was dark outside on the staircase, dark and queer-smelling as the dank ominous smell of the river seemed to permeate even the thick, once stout, walls. The panelling felt slippery to the touch. The staircase creaked and groaned. Windows rattled like imperious demands for entry. The house shook and creaked and trembled like a centuries-old sailing ship riding out a storm. Lightning, less vicious now, showed through the large staircase window, the hurrying uncaring grey wastes of water, not a stone's throw away.

I shivered with fear as much as with cold. For several seconds I stood on the bottom step, a prey to all the frights and fancies of mingled superstition and pure science. Cravenly I wished that they had all guessed what was in my mind, and by sheer physical force they had all stopped me.

I don't know how long I stood there in a cowardly tremble. Quite a few minutes, I imagine. Then I became aware of the grandfather clock in the hall, ticking ceaselessly and inexorably away, bringing the danger time of the high tide nearer and nearer. It was almost as if the clock ticks themselves were drops of water coming in and in.

Determinedly, I turned the corner of the stairs, feeling my way down the familiar corridor, stubbing my toes over some unfamiliar box of film equipment, till I found the warm touch of the green baize door and opened it.

I knew the number of steps across the flagstones off by heart, but the stones themselves felt cold and damp that night, and they too seemed to smell of the river like the flagstones in Miss Miranda's Walk. And once, putting my foot down rather heavily, I trod in a pool of rain water driven in by the force of the wind under the heavy oak door.

Then I was through into the butler's pantry and the small utility room which gave access to the stable.

We've never had electric wiring put through to the stable itself, so there's always a heavy duty torch hanging on a peg, just by the door. I felt with my finger till I found it, hoping, as I unhooked it, that the battery was all right.

With a sigh of relief I saw a steady beam of light play on the stable door. As I lifted the latch, from the other side of the door Lady Jane snickered softly.

As soon as I pushed it open, she thrust her pale nose into my hand. It felt silky and warm, alive and tremendously reassuring.

"Now, listen," I whispered softly as I unhooked the bridle and slipped it over her head. "You've got to do your stuff."

Though I'm not one of these people who endow animals with human expressions, I'm sure that her face registered surprise as I thrust the bit between her teeth. But she let it slide in without clenching.

Inside the stable, the noise of the storm was clearer and more urgent, and beyond its walls I thought I could hear the rushing of the river from its new and menacing bed.

"I know it's not the night for a ride," I gabbled. "But this is urgent." She blew through her nostrils as I fastened the cheek strap. I felt the warm breath on my forearm and I gathered a curious naive encouragement from her apparent co-operation.

"I haven't even any sugar," I said, as she tried to nose in my pockets. "But Robbie'll give you a whole packet, I promise." I was going to say, if we get there, but instead, I said, "When we get there." Then I walked to the far end of the stable and took the saddle down from the saddle horse.

Lady Jane stamped in protest as I slung it quickly on her back, turning her head round, surprised. I thought she shivered as I fastened the girths, and her ears were pricked to the sounds outside.

"There," I straightened up and ran my hand through my hair. "Bit of a rushed job. But we'll have to make the best of it." I took hold of her reins and immediately she walked forward with me. No holding back, no protest. We might have been setting off on our ordinary exercise. Then I threw the reins over her head while I struggled with the old rusty bolts of the door from the stable that led out down the ramp to the yard.

"Now," as I struggled I talked to Lady Jane as much to get things straight in my own mind, as to reassure her, "a swim first, Lady Jane. Now we both know you can do that. You've swum the river before, remember. Then up, and over the Downs to High Acres. Are you game, Lady Jane?"

I like to think she snickered in assent as I finally got the door opened. But it wasn't that sort of noise. Besides, her whole body shivered as the storm-racked night was disclosed to us.

The whole sky, the whole world for that matter seemed to have dissolved into hurrying grey water. The stable yard was filled with dark tarnished pools. The wind flung great drenching gusts of rain over us, rain that stung the cheeks, and rattled the water butts and window panes. While worst of all, the flickering eerie lightning disclosed the foaming frothing river just ahead of us.

"Come on, Lady Jane," I said, urging her the one, two, three paces over the stable threshold and into the yard. I saw her start as a flicker of lightning seemed to split the sky overhead.

"O.K. Wait a second!"

I hadn't said that. I jumped as Lady Jane had done at the lightning flash. A man's voice had said it. A man's voice from behind me. A man's hand was on my shoulder, and a man's hand snatched the reins from me.

"Where do you think you're off to?" the familiar man's voice asked me tersely.

"To High Acres, of course. To Robbie's."

Nicholas Pemberton didn't ask me why to Robbie's. But as if he had, I went on urgently, "Don't you see, it's our only chance."

"On the contrary, I do see." But he still didn't give me back the reins.

"Lady Jane can swim. She knows the way. She can find a safe way, where I couldn't. I'd only have to give her her head. Throw her the reins and she'd find a path."

"That's what I thought. Now you get back inside." With a roughness that only the urgency of the moment excused, he pushed me towards the door. And a desperation, whose cause I feared to admit, made me resist him so stubbornly.

"I'm not going back in. I've told you what I'm going to do."

"No," he said softly, "what I'm going to do."

"You!" I shouted the single word at him above the sound of the storm. "Of course you can't go! You can't ride! You don't know the horse." The wind snatched my words away from my mouth and shoved my breath back in my throat I was half shouting, half sobbing. The rain had already drenched my hair so that it was glued to my forehead, and trickles ran down my cheeks like tears.

But oblivious apparently of what I felt, Nicholas Pemberton unfastened the buckles of the leathers and pulled down the stirrups to his own height. And when I tried to stop him he freed one hand and fended me off.

Finally as he made to mount, I snatched at the reins. And with an exclamation of real exasperation, he turned swiftly round, picked me up and bundled me inside the stable door. Then to my horror he pulled the heavy unwieldy door shut after him.

When I managed to heave it back open again, he was up on Lady Jane, a tall dark figure sitting easily in the saddle and her reins held lightly in his hands. With a cry of real anguish, I watched him press his heels into her sides. "Why?" I shrieked. "Why won't you let me go? I'd have had a chance. You haven't got a hope."

And even as I hurled the questions at him, I didn't expect any answer. But surprisingly, he bent down and said softly, as if he had all the time in the world, "Because I'm a man. I couldn't let a girl go."

And then, abruptly, his mood apparently changed. He almost shouted at me as he thrust Lady Jane forward. And the treacherous wind distorted his words. Because the message that came back to me before he plunged into the grey uncaring torrent, was as deceiving as the cry of the Lorelei.

"Because," it said, "because, damn you, I love you."

Then began the longest two hours of my whole life. Exhausted as if I had crawled from the river itself, I crept upstairs to where, as solemn as I, the others were waiting. Silently I joined the little knot by the window, staring out into the darkness, waiting for the light from a lightning flash.

Once we all thought we saw Lady Jane's white head and neck above the rushing water. But I couldn't see any rider, and though they all said they could, I could tell by their faces that no one was sure.

And once I swear I heard Lady Jane whinny, and carried across by the wind the sound of hoofbeats on some solid road. Then as I stared I thought I saw, too, a soft light playing in the spume around Miss Miranda's Walk, and wondered if I'd seen and heard the ghostly lights and hoofbeats that signalled the house's doom.

Perhaps worse than that, the thought of Miss Miranda's story came back to haunt me, and the terrible end to her ride out over the Downs. And without bothering to check diem, the tears rolled down my cheeks as silently as the rain down the window panes.

"He had to go," Tanya said. "You know that. He couldn't possibly have let you go. He's a real man, not like Robbie. He'd never have looked himself in the face again."

"It's so silly," I wept. "I'd have had ten times the chance. I might have got through. He's just throwing his life away."

Tanya put her fingers to my lips and motioned to the sleeping Sylvia.

In a miserable whisper I went on. "But I'm light, and I can ride in any weather."

"I know, sweetie, but don't distress yourself."

"And Lady Jane would respond to me. She'd do anything for me."

"Maybe," Tanya said gravely, cryptically, "she would for him, too." And in some odd way the thought gave me comfort.

But not for long. The minutes ticked by. I tried not to look at my watch. I'd already worked out how long it should take. Fifteen minutes to ford the river. Fifteen for the marshy fiats. Half an hour for a quick gallop over the crest of the Down and the mile drop on the other side to High Acres. Half an hour if Robbie was home to launch the boat, and bring it down here.

"He probably won't be," Tanya said.

"Won't be what?" I asked, unaware that I had been calculating aloud.

"At home. Robbie."

"How d'you know?"

She shrugged. "He'll probably be at some party. Kidnapping some girl or other."

But she said it without conviction. A kind of half cynical, half desperate attempt at her own antiseptic wit. Then moodily she walked up and down, glancing at the dark muffled grey beyond the window, listening to the sound of wind and water.

"If he is in," she said suddenly, an entirely different expression in her voice and face, "isn't it going to be very tricky bringing Sea Nymph down here?"

She addressed her remark to the room at large. Nobody answered, though Captain Coggin half nodded. And in real anxiety now, she went on, "With the river in spate like this. Heavens, he might get carried out to sea himself. We should have thought of that. Here we are," she went on with quite monstrous injustice, "thinking only about ourselves." She went over to the window.

"If I might interrupt you," Captain Coggin said, "young Fuller is a very able young man."

"Of course," Tanya said sharply. "I know that. Even so, in this sort of torrent..."

"If anyone can get through," Captain Coggin said gently, "he will."

But it was Tanya's turn to refuse to be comforted. "That's the trouble with Robbie, he's too daring."

"Well, that's a fault to be commended." He smiled, I thought, a little sadly.

In direct contradiction to all she had ever said before, Tanya went on, "At times like this he puts everyone else before himself."

I could see that some piece of worldly wisdom was hovering on Captain Coggin's lips, but whatever it was, he left it unsaid. On the pretext of getting up to knock out his pipe, he took a long look through the window. In a brisk matter-of-fact voice he said to Gary, "The water's rising fast now. I think something is going to happen"—he cleared his throat—"within the coming hour."

Over our heads he exchanged a look with Gary Hennessy. I think the look said that he can't have got there, and if he has it's going to be too late anyway, though to me the second part didn't seem half so important as the first.

I got up and joined Tanya by the window.

The thunderstorm was dying away, going out, like the locals say, with the last of the ebb ride. And the moon was high, a washed yellow disc racing through the broken webs of trailing cloud. Intermittently, as though diary of illuminating the whole scene, it shone off the wastes of hurrying water, on the river encircling us like two huge snakes, dosing in nearer and nearer.

And something else. Some other strange phenomenon. Some creation of wind or tide that lifted little white-capped crests that didn't flow swiftly towards the sea, but tossed up and down like tiny things caught in a battle between two giant opposing forces.

Then abruptly Miss Sylvester sat up. "What's that?"

"Just thunder."

But I think even as I said it I guessed that it wasn't. I guessed by the expression on Captain Coggin's face, briefly, cruelly illuminated in the yellow light of the match, as with studied nonchalance he lit his pipe. I guessed it by the way he glanced at Gary, and the sad protective glance he turned towards my mother.

I guessed it by the sound itself, a low rumble certainly like distant thunder, but not breaking into peals and dying away, just continuing steady, gaining imperceptibly, like a faraway express train coming up the valley. A sound which at first hopefully and foolishly I thought might be the distant putter of Sea Nymph's little engine.

"Don't tell me the storm's still on," Sylvia said fretfully, her eyes tearful again, staring almost accusingly at me.

"It's dying away. But the river's flooding. Your fiancé has gone to High Acres to get help."

"My fiancé?" Like many people, fear seemed to make her irritable.

"Nicholas."

"He's not my fiancé," she said. "And that's not thunder either." She jumped to her feet, gazing around her wildly at Captain Coggin, Gary Hennessy, Mother, Tanya, and me, as if trying to read her fate in the expressions of our faces.

I think it says a great deal for the strength of a love that I, alas, had discovered too late, and not enough of thoughtfulness for others, that even in that moment of her terror and of our joint apprehension and danger, I actually contemplated asking her to elucidate. Was she in love with Nicholas? Had she ever been engaged to him? And why had she so suddenly changed?

But I was saved by Captain Coggin. "Can you estimate," he said to Gary, "how far away it is?"

And I remembered Gary telling me how he was a sailor back in Cape Cod, and how he knew a lot about wind and weather. And I remembered too the inscription on the sundial-that-wasn't-a-sundial, and the full moon rising at full strength drawing the swollen waters up to the sky.

"Kinda difficult." His hands gripped the back of a chair, his head held on one side, listening. " 'Bout three miles, maybe four."

"And travelling at?"

Gary shrugged. "Who can say? Eight miles an hour? Ten?"

And I knew, as I suppose I'd known all along, that three hundred and fifty-seven years had come full circle. And moon and tide and wind and water were right. And the Bore, that great wall of water, was slowly sweeping up-river towards us.

Now my head was filled with new calculations. Say four miles away and travelling at eight miles an hour. It was just a matter of simple arithmetic, the kind even Janice Peabody would have been able to do. The night had turned to a giant blackboard, on which my fearful mind had to chalk the fatal calculations. Eight miles an hour meant six and a half minutes a mile. If it was four miles away then that meant another thirty minutes to go.

But what if, Miss Vaughan, the water was travelling at ten miles an hour, and only three miles away? Eighteen minutes to go.

And for how long had I been calculating? Already the water might have moved another half mile. Maybe a mile, with the acceleration of the funnel effect between the hills.

Suddenly this slow march towards us reminded me of that Edgar Allan Poe story—I believe they made that into a film, too—The Pit and the Pendulum, when the walls of the cell were slowly closing in on the victim and the knife-edged pendulum swung to and fro, nearer and nearer.

Like that noise outside was getting. Steadily stronger and louder. An invisible express train rushing up the trackless valley. I cursed that shoulder of the Downs, that curve that cut off the lower reaches of the river from our view, wishing we could at least see the monster that was going to overwhelm us. And then I blessed it, glad that we couldn't.

I saw Captain Coggin look at his watch. "How long?" I asked in a low voice so that the others couldn't hear.

"About fifteen minutes, by the sound of it."

By the sound of it. Certainly the sound had acquired a certain rasping razor sharpness. A sound that increased faster, much faster than the Bore's steady roar. A sound that failed once and picked up again, and then died altogether. A sound that might or might not have been, like the thunder of ghostly hooves an hour or two ago.

Then I heard it again. Harsh and high, borne on a gust of wind, and snatched away again. I didn't dare speak. I knew it must be imagination.

"Was that something?"

Captain Coggin tapped his ears as if they were faulty machines. But like the rider on the horse, was it there or not? No one could be sure.

The next time if no one else was sure, I was. So was Miss Sylvester. She was on her feet. So was Mother, so next to her was the Captain, and with Gary and Tanya and me, they all rushed over to the window.

Out of the darkness came two blurred and muzzy lights, one red, one green, tossing and corkscrewing in the currents. The engine noise was strong and I could see a white lantern light, bobbing around on the deck. Then a voice through a loudspeaker shouted, and Captain Coggin opened the window.

"We're coming round to the front and we'll throw a rope through the door. Get down there as fast as you can. Don't wait to pick up anything. Do you hear? Wait for nothing. Just come!'"

It all seemed to happen, almost before I could realise that it was happening. I couldn't feel anything except a thankfulness that Nicholas was safe, and I couldn't think of anything except that somehow we had to hurry.

And numb from suspense, as we all tried our best to hurry, it was like one of those childish nightmares where you know the danger closing in on you, but you can't move. Your feet are stuck to the ground, your hands numb and clumsy. While we could hear the roar clearly now through the open window, as steadily and chokingly as the roaring you have in your ears when you dive too deeply and you can't get to the surface fast enough for air. The noise like you must hear when the Wall overwhelms you and you're being drowned.

But somehow by the flickering light of the candle, our little procession got downstairs and the men secured a rope round the loop lock of the ancient door.

I suppose that it was at that moment that the immeasurable relief at Nicholas's safety gave way to realisation.

The realisation that what months ago I had so much feared was now going to happen. We were leaving Holywell Grange for ever. And far worse than I had feared, we were leaving it, not to the mercy of strangers or film-makers or anyone else, but to its certain destruction.

And then we were all splashing through the shallow water on the terrace steps, and Robbie had manoeuvred Sea Nymph alongside the portico, while Gary and Captain Coggin stood up to their waists in water helping us aboard. First Mother, then Miss Sylvester and Tanya. Then it was Nicholas's hand holding up mine.

And somehow, sad and terrible though it was, it mattered less. For though I was leaving the house of my birth and my childhood and my growing up, I was leaving it as every girl should, with her hand in his, to go to the man she loves.

* * *

"Explanations and everything else will wait." It was Robbie's voice that said that. A new crisp authoritative voice to which Tanya meekly responded. "Give her a good shove, Captain Coggin, and then we'll haul you up!"

"After all," Nicholas met my eyes and smiled gently at me, "if a man can't be boss on his own ship, where can he be?"

"In his home, of course," Robbie called over his shoulder. "You see that you are."

And despite the danger the two of them grinned. I could see that this last hour or so together had somehow begun a friendship. But there was not time to ask how or why. "We'll get her turned round now, Nick," Robbie shouted, "but fast!"

He put his wet hands to his mouth and tasted them, and yelled, "That water's salt!"

I must confess that despite the danger, despite Nicholas beside me, that last sight of Holy well seemed to drag the heart out of me.

"Don't look," Nicholas said, putting his hand over my eyes.

"But I must." I had to watch her standing there proudly still, with the water right up to her foundations, her tall chimneys dark and regal against the eerie sky. I watched as a thin finger of moonlight rent the overcast sky and showed her clearly to me for what must be the very last time. The light struck a ghostly illumination from her mullioned windows as if from within, brave lights still shone out from every room. Even in that pale light I could see her brick glow a dusky red, and I could see all the exquisite tesselations of the ancient chimneys, with Gary Hennessy's flag still fluttering there.

And then Robbie had got the engine at full throttle and he was turning Sea Nymph out into the middle of the flood, away from the hidden dangers of submerged walls and shrubs and trees. And like that we had a view past the horseshoe end and that obstructing shoulder of the Downs. And like that I saw it.

I think it was the most truly terrifying phenomenon that I have ever seen. Spotlighted in the moonlight, a huge high wall of water, grey like the river, grey like the sky, and reaching up seemingly from the swollen hurrying surface of the one to the torn hem of the other.

"When Derwent fludde to sky doth ride....""

Solid as a cliff, higher than a house, it moved slowly and inexorably forward, the dull throaty roar swelling, its crest foaming and smoking white in the fitful moonlight.

Now sadness changed to fear. And only Nicholas's presence beside me stopped that fear changing into panic. Uneasily Sea Nymph struggled forward. Now it was she, it seemed, that was caught in the nightmare, every fibre of her being urging her forward while she seemed glued fast to the same place in the river. But of course hers wasn't the dream or the nightmare, hers was the reality. For flat out though her engine was the strong current was now reinforced with the strong undertow towards that wall of water gaining on us every second.

On either side I kept looking at the familiar landmarks that remained, wondering if by the time I looked again, I could measure against than the distance we had gained.

And once, twice, I glanced fearfully over my shoulder. But after that I didn't look any more. I remembered the verse of The Ancient Mariner which my class had learned last year. Tim Brocklebank had recited it with great gusto.

"Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head,

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread "

The Bore was gaining. Now it seemed that the whole river and sky and distant sea behind us was one huge conch shell tight to our ears. The water all around us, drawn into its influence, was choppy as the sea. Dangerous bits of flotsam were sucked past us, stumps of wood, leafy branches, what looked like an old metal cattle feeder.

Once a wave came right over us, in a sheet of crystal glass that broke into a million icy stinging fragments over the wheelhouse, and Robbie had to wrench Sea Nymph right round to stop her burrowing into the water.

Captain Coggin, standing just behind us, shouted, "We'll never make High Acres landing."

Robbie looked quickly over his shoulder. I could see* his eyes measuring that cliff of sea behind us. " 'Fraid not."

"What are you going to do?"

"Aim for the nearest high ground."

"You mean beach Sea Nymph?"

"Yep. Beach her and run for it."

"Only thing possible."

It struck me that Robbie perhaps had some of the same feeling for this little boat as I had for Holywell, yet not the slightest vestige of it showed in his face.

"I suggest you put in at Whiteside's gully. It'll only be half flooded, and you can make her fast for long enough to one of the trees."

I heard Robbie say after a while, "Mmm, I suppose that is the nearest. Take us all our time, though." And my own heart sank. I knew that he couldn't unload just anywhere because of the difficulty of having enough water under the boat to keep us afloat, and yet be near enough to terra firma for us all to get out. But Whitehouse's gully!

The waters had risen so much that somehow the whole landscape looked unfamiliar. And all along the edge of the flood tops of trees, oak and beech and walnut, were like huge round vegetables floating in the water.

"Can't you get more speed out of her?" Captain Coggin asked.

"She's flat out."

The storm had died down now, and the rain had stopped falling. The moon shone down with a deceptive radiance that made everything look phosphorescent, ominous somehow as if we were already at the bottom of the sea. At the bottom of the sea with that great roaring drowning noise swelling in our ears.

The Sea Nymph's engine faltered. Twice her stern was tossed up and down, and her propeller raced round and round in thin air. Then for twenty terrible seconds the blades were caught in the foliage of a tree, and more time was lost as Nicholas pushed her free of the stuff with a boathook.

Then we were moving forward again. I saw the looming side of what was Farmer Whiteside's downland barley field, with the gully haven we were making for. Captain Coggin looked at his watch. "Twelve-sixteen," he shouted. "Look! The tide's turned!"

And I saw the flood water now moving swiftly up the Derwent, with us, but also with the Bore.

"It'll move faster now. The Bore? Eh?"

"Yes."

And now we were at the critical point, near enough, if Robbie wasn't careful, for Sea Nymph to ground, and then for us to sit waiting there like Holywell Grange for the few minutes before the Bore came to overwhelm us.

Once I heard the bottom grate, and Nicholas and Gary and Captain Coggin thrust with all their strength against the tops of a couple of trees. Once she wobbled ominously from side to side, and Robbie pumped the throttles frenziedly till the uneven speed managed to slither her off the mud.

"All right, everybody on deck! Land ahoy!"

I don't know to this day how he managed to do it. Seamanship, sheer devil-may-care audacity, a desperate desire to safeguard Tanya, whatever it was that night he slew his dragon for her, or at least he saved her from the roaring monster.

Nicholas was over the side first, while Robbie held Sea Nymph as close in to the water's edge as he dared. Wading chest-deep in the swirling water, Nicholas secured a rope to the bole of an oak and drew her in till she grated on the bottom.

Then he was lifting Mother, Sylvia, Tanya, and me, and we were hopping and splashing to dry land.

"Don't hang around," Robbie yelled as we stood waiting for them at the water's edge. "Run up the path, high as you can! We're coming!"

One after the other the men splashed and waded through the water, and then I heard them pounding up the path behind us.

"Come on, faster. Run!" I felt the breath sore in my chest. Captain Coggin and Gary were helping Mother up the path between them. Without any jealousy I watched Nicholas pulling Sylvia Sylvester after them, while I brought up the rear with Tanya and Robbie.

"All right," Robbie shouted. "Let's rest. We're safe enough here."

Thankfully we all flopped down on the sodden ground. The earth smelled almost unbearably sweet, of gorse and ladies' slipper and harebells and that curious smell of the uplands after heavy rain. It reminded me of the garden smells of Holywell and the cold watery scent of Miss Miranda's Walk.

Then I heard Mother let out a muffled sob, and I saw Captain Coggin's hand tighten on her arm.

"There she goes!" Gary Hennessy said in his studiedly laconic voice. Across the wet turf I felt Nicholas's hand reach for mine.

Like some huge white ghost the wall of water had rounded the horseshoe bend. Maybe it was my imagination or maybe as Captain Coggin said it was a trick of the echoes, but its roar seemed to increase in strength as it did so. And back from the flooded garden, back from the flooded tops of Miss Miranda's Walk, back from the house itself an answering defiant shout seemed to answer back.

And then it was all over.

The house was there one minute, and gone the next The great white wall of water swept in over it. Not even the chimneys showed up above the foaming, smoking mass.

I heard the great roar, the scrunch of bricks and stones. I could even feel the spray on my face as the great cliff of water swept and thundered seemingly just below our feet. I shut my eyes and listened for the sound of falling masonry.

But the sound, like the water, was all-engulfing. Though I heard the sharp crunch as Sea Nymph was picked up and flung against the side of the gully, and the breaking, splintering sound as if someone had carelessly squeezed a matchbox in their hands.

Then I felt rather than heard Nicholas gasp. I opened my eyes. The Bore had swept on up river, out of sight. I heard its diminishing roar as it rounded the next curve past High Acres. Then I looked down again for the pile of rubble that must be Holywell.

But I couldn't find it. No pile of rubble stood like a cairn in the middle of the river to mark where Holywell had been. But Holywell Grange herself. I counted her proud chimneys. I looked at her roof, her centuries-old walls. Enhanced by yet another baptism of fire she stood wet but intact, glistening in the moonlight, ready for another five hundred years.

* * *

There was hot coffee waiting for us back at High Acres, and Mrs. Jackson handing round sandwiches and already deferring to Tanya about which rooms she should make ready for her influx of guests. But the men themselves didn't stay. They had all piled into Robbie's Land-Rover to see if anyone else needed help in the village or the valley.

Luckily, as Captain Coggin pointed out, no one was quite so foolhardy as the Vaughans in building their house so low, therefore it was unlikely that anyone else would be affected by the Bore before it spent itself up river. But there might be people in the village flooded out, or anxious for the safety of the occupants of Holywell.

Of course none of us could stop talking about the marvellous escape that the house itself had just had. "Quite in keeping with the time the Roundheads surrounded the place and got flooded out," Captain Coggin had said. "I expect it will go down in Holywell history, and that the happier saga of Lady Jane will become quite as famous as that of poor Miss Miranda."

"Two separate sides of the coin of love," Nicholas had said just before he left with Robbie. And with that I had had to remain content.

Tanya and Mrs. Jackson had bustled us all to bed, though not, I think, for many of us to sleep. Too many things had happened for us to do much except rest fitfully but thankfully.

For my part I remember lying awake listening to the river far below us here at High Acres. And I remember towards dawn hearing a wind, from the east it sounded, a drying wind, rattling round the windows. After that, I suppose, I must have drifted off to sleep, because I seemed to dream that all this had never happened, and that everything was back at the beginning, exactly as it had always been again.

I remembered that dream with remarkable clarity shortly after breakfast. Excelling themselves, it seemed, the men had been up early and given Mrs. Jackson a hand with the cooking. After grilled bacon and eggs and Mrs. Jackson's Sussex flatcakes, Nicholas insisted that he drive me back to Holywell.

"Robbie says we can take the Land-Rover," he said, "so that we can ford the bit of river that remains."

"Robbie's very obliging," I smiled.

"Well, Robbie is as anxious to have us out of the way as I am to have you on my own."

"Oh," I said, because there seemed nothing else to say. And after a while I ventured to ask, "Why?"

"I'll tell you that when I get you to Holywell."

"Is there some particular reason?"

"Yes indeed."

And it was then that I remembered the dream because he said, "I want to tell you, when we get back to the beginning again. Back to where it all began."

And with that I had to remain quiet while we swept down through the sodden hillside landscape to the flooded road below. A pale gold September sun, still full of warmth and light, had risen and all about us the ground steamed, drying out almost under our eyes. The air was full of misty mellow light, and the sweet fertile smells of coming autumn.

The gullies were still streaming in the High Street, and the meadows covered in burnished flood lakes. The turning at the end of Gypsy Lane was half under water, and the village looked deserted, because everyone must be indoors, mopping up where roofs had leaked and rain been driven in.

As we bumped and splashed our way down the river road, I said, "Well, if that can wait till we reach Holywell, I can think of something that can't."

Nicholas took one hand off the wheel and covered mine. "What?"

"Whether or not you are ... or were ... engaged to Sylvia Sylvester?"

Nicholas let out his short, infinitively attractive laugh. "Good heavens, woman," he said in mock indignation, "do I look the sort of person that would be here with you when I was engaged to Sylvia? Or anyone else, for that matter?"

I was about to laugh and say yes. But already I knew, for all his humour, Nicholas was not the sort of man to have his love made light of. And so, when I shook my head, he said, "Well then?"

"All the same, she did say you were."

"Don't I know it!"

"Why did she ... do you suppose?"

He said gently and sadly, because Nicholas is a very kind person, "Poor Sylvia! There were a number of reasons. First, she thought it was jolly good publicity ‑"

"It got plenty," I said drily. "Why else?"

"Well ‑" He manoeuvred the Land-Rover round a huge puddle. A great bow wave of yellow-brown water was flung up on either side of us. "She had a pretty tough struggle to begin with. Her main idea was always to look after Number One. And she never believes that anyone does something for nothing. She's set her heart on making her name in this film."

"Will she?"

"Yes, I think so. But the thought I'd put more into it if ... well," he smiled shyly, "we were engaged or in love or what-have-you."

"Sometimes you gave a very good imitation of It."

"Did I now? Like you did with Robbie, eh?"

He took his eyes off the bumpy road to glance down at me, wrinkling his brows in amused and mock reproach.

I felt my cheeks burn. To divert attention, I went on, "And imagine ... I thought you were upset about Robbie kissing Sylvia when you read that awful essay. You remember ... Janice Peabody's?"

"Will I ever forget it?" He laughed. "And all the time I was worrying about you being miserable over Robbie."

I said no more. We had just come to the edge of the river flood. The morning sun and the night's brisk wind had lowered what had been yesterday's torrent to no more than a few feet of flood water.

"Hold tight!" Nicholas commanded.

I gripped the metal handles on the Land-Rover. Nicholas slammed the vehicle into low gear. The next moment we were splashing through. Dirty water flew up on either side of us in huge grey wings. It spattered over the windscreen. The Land-Rover bumped from side to side like Sea Nymph had done last night. And then we were graunching and sliding between the bare stumps that had been our old gateposts, past torn-up trees, up the drenched drive, and round the corner.

And there once more was Holywell Grange.

I had thought that last night's miraculous escape had given me all the surprises I could have about Holywell. But the sight that now met my eyes surprised me more—and yet should have surprised me not at all.

For where I had expected to see the house wreckage-strewn and deserted, I saw the whole place alive with people. Every man, woman, and certainly every child of Derwent Langley was there, while one gigantic Operation Clear-up appeared to be going on.

I saw Mr. Brocklebank, the blacksmith, picking up what looked like half Miss Sylvester's car in his hands, while Tim, following in his father's footsteps, was lifting down one of our front gates, which the Bore had apparently tossed into the branches of a surviving willow.

Fred and Charlie Dann from the White Hart, together with Constable Barber, were sweeping oceans of water out through the broken french windows on to the terrace. Mr. Backhouse had somehow got himself a ladder and was perched precariously examining the damage to the roof. And my entire stage-struck class, led by none other than Janice Peabody, were industriously salvaging not only bits of film equipment, but pieces of furniture that had been swept right out on to the paths and garden.

It was left to Mr. Barber, the policeman, in his semiofficial capacity, to explain. "We knowed you wouldn't want a homecoming with all this wreck and rubbish around."

But it was odd that he didn't address his remarks to me, but to Nicholas.

And then Nicholas was handing me out of the Land- Rover, and pulling me up what remained of the wet and broken steps. Perhaps because even in love, he is a film director, he insisted that the closing shot should be as at the beginning, with me standing in the doorway.

He even said, "I presume this is Holywell Grange?"

Though he barely gave me time to answer that it was, for he went on with a shyness and humility that touched my heart, "I don't suppose you knew that even then I was in love with you?"

He put his hand on the old weathered doorway. I think in his mind and mine, too, the house was somehow like his love—strong, protective, ready to withstand whatever the years might bring. For as if following my thoughts, he added, both gently and proudly, "And come hell or high water, nothing can change that."

"I knew," I said slowly. "Not that you were in love with me, but that you were somehow going to change my life."

"One does," he said almost dogmatically. "One always knows."

"Then," I smiled, teasing him out of my huge happiness, "why didn't you know it was me? At the fancy dress party?"

He put his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me in surprise. "But I did. As soon as you were in my arms. I knew straight away."

"Then you were teasing me?"

"A little."

"But did you know about Sylvia's plan? Or Robbie's?"

"Of course I didn't! I thought it was some joke of yours. But I recognised Robbie as the Chinaman, and I just had a hunch he was up to something."

"And that was why you came up to High Acres. Only to think you'd interrupted a proposal."

"Which reminds me," he said briskly, "I've a bone to pick with you. Why were you kissing Robbie when you're going to marry me?"

But once again he didn't give me time to reply that it was just a brotherly kiss. For he had taken me in his arms, and was kissing me himself in a way that was the opposite of brotherly. I remembered then so clearly that night in the High Acres kitchen. How right I was to think that a kiss can tell. I closed my eyes in perfect bliss. And when I opened them again, the sun had climbed clear of our shoulder of the Downs.

And presently it was shining through the leafless tangle of Miss Miranda's Walk, spattering a shimmer of pale sun-drops on the ancient flagstones. So that where there had been ghosts and shadows, now there was nothing but a fragile lacy network—like a bride's veil filled with sunlight.