Chapter 20
“All right,” said Alec, coming to a halt at the edge of the dank, dark wood, “show us the way through and set us on the right path up the hill, then come back to your friends at the farm.”
Brock Wood was very different from Cooper’s Wood. The beeches stood tall and straight, well spaced, with little undergrowth. Instead of narrow, twisting paths which came to deadends, the difficulty lay in distinguishing a path from the general openness.
Daisy took Alec’s hand and they led the troops under the trees. To hide her uncertainty, Daisy enquired meekly, “How are you going to find Phillip?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering,” Tommy said, coming up on Alec’s other side. “If he doesn’t know we’ve arrived, we not only lose a man to help carry out your plan, Fletcher, he’ll very likely wreck it.”
“It’s a problem,” Alec admitted. “We can’t go hunting for him without the risk of alerting the kidnappers.”
“He’ll be hiding in the hawthorns,” said Daisy. “It’s the only place he can watch from without being seen. You’ll never find him without me.”
“You’re not coming, Daisy,” Alec said firmly and patiently. “With your facility with words, I’m sure you can describe his position well enough for us to follow.”
“If you manage to stick to the direct path up the hill. There are countless sheep paths to lead you astray, so that you come out at a different point on the circle. Ah, here we are,” she said with relief.
Just ahead their path was crossed by a shallow ditch and low bank, perhaps once part of the fortification on the hill above.
They climbed over, turned right, and followed the bank, barely visible in the gloom.
Alec and Tommy discussed tactics, with Binkie listening in and the four servants following.
They came to a stile in a post and rail fence. Daisy climbed over. Alec followed, then stopped on the top step.
The fence marked the end of the wood. Beyond it rose the bare hillside, its truncated summit standing out against a darkening sky.
“We can find our way without you, love,” said Alec. “Tell me where to find Petrie and you go on back to the farm.”
Glancing back, past the pale faces of the men to the murk beneath the trees, Daisy remembered her lonely trek from the witch’s cottage to Fairacres. She shivered. “Don’t make me go through the woods alone.”
“Make you?” The tender laugh in his voice caused a quite different sort of shiver to run down Daisy’s spine.
“When have I ever succeeded in making you do anything? All right, come with us, but please, I beg of you, stay close to me until we storm them, and then stay behind. If you insist on going in with us, you’ll get in the way and divert our attention to protecting you. ”
“I’ll keep out of the way,” Daisy promised.
“Good girl.” Alec turned to face his troops.
Raising his voice to be heard above the patter of rain on leaves, the sough of tossing branches, he said, “I take it you all know by now what we’re here for.
The idea is to rescue Miss Arbuckle while at least one of her captors has gone to fetch the ransom, improving the odds on our side. ”
“Already in our favour,” Tommy put in.
“As far as we know. What we don’t know is whether someone has already left, and whether they have a look-out watching the track on the far side of the hill. I’m hoping to learn that from Mr. Petrie, who’s up there somewhere.”
“If so be there’s a guard to be took out, sir,” said Carlin, “’e’ll not find a better man nor I at creeping up on poachers.”
“Thank you, Carlin, I’ll remember that. I’ll give you all further instructions when we see what Mr. Petrie has to say. For now, we follow Miss Dalrymple up the hill. If you must speak, keep your voice down. Let’s go.”
Outside the shelter of the trees, the blustering wind swooped upon them, flinging random salvoes of rain. Daisy grabbed her hat. As she tugged it down further over her ears, a mighty gust sent her tottering. She clutched Alec’s arm.
Hanging on to him, she slogged up the hill at his side. Wetter and wetter, chillier and chillier, she tried to remember why she had insisted on coming.
The path, never more than a stripe of sparser grass across the close-cropped turf, was hard to make out in the dusk.
For the most part it led straight up the slope, with here and there a zigzag around a stunted hawthorn.
Daisy began to wonder whether her memory of the thorn thicket within the fort was accurate, and whether she was right to assume Phillip would have taken shelter there.
She pictured the interior of the circle as viewed from the gateway, where they had always entered.
The hut was somewhat to the right of the centre, she thought, with the hawthorns visible beyond it to its right.
According to the lay-out she and Lucy had pieced together, that meant the thicket would be to her right when they reached the track at the top.
“Which way?” said Alec.
“To the right. Oh, you mean now?” Rounding a tree, they had come to a fork. The right-hand branch led away around the hillside, the left-hand upward. “No, left here.”
They trudged between two more hawthorns and faced a bare slope to the top. Alec stopped.
“If they’re watching in this direction, they can’t miss us.” He looked back. “Pearson, do you see any alternative approach?”
Tommy came up beside him. Hand sheltering his eyes from the rain, he scanned the surroundings.
“No,” he said baldly, “but at least it’s no Vimy Ridge.
I presume they’re not waiting with artillery and machine-guns.
In any case, I rather doubt they have a sentry out in this foul weather, not being disciplined troops. ”
“Let’s hope not.” Alec glanced at his wrist-watch. “We can’t wait for it to get any darker. In spite of this gloom, the sun’s only just setting and the half-light may linger for another hour. We’ll have to risk it.”
There was no way to tell whether they were observed as they moved out into the open. For all they knew, a look-out could be rushing to the hut. By the time they reached the top, perhaps the kidnappers would be hustling Gloria down the track on the far side of the hill.
Might they even mistake the amateur rescue-party for police and kill her?
Daisy forced her weary legs to move faster. She strained her ears: surely Phillip would attempt to save Gloria if they tried to move her, and surely he’d shout as he attacked—before they knocked the poor, gallant chump out again.
The only sounds were the wind and the rain, and the distant, sleepy bleating of sheep settling for the night.
At last they reached the level track circling the base of the mound. Daisy walked round to the right. “It must be about here,” she said doubtfully. “I can’t be quite sure.”
She eyed the steep bank without enthusiasm, without the least desire to climb. However, after her insistence on coming, it would be too frightfully shabby to back down now. Moving forward, she reached for a handhold.
Alec instantly pulled her back. “You’re not going up, Daisy.”
Equally instantly, perversely, she was determined to do it. She racked her brains for reasons why she was the best choice.
“The first thing Phillip sees will be a silhouette. If it’s a man, he may think it’s one of the villains and raise an outcry.”
“Someone can wear your hat.”
As he spoke, Daisy pulled away from his grasp and started up the bank. After a couple of feet, she promptly slid down again.
“Blast, it’s fearfully slippery in the rain. You’ll have to give me a boost. And as I’m the lightest, I’m the one to do it.”
The others had gathered round by then. “I am not hefty, look you,” said Owen. “It’s glad I’d be to go, sir.”
“Phillip might refuse to budge for Owen,” Daisy pointed out, silently berating herself for persisting in the face of any number of excellent excuses. “I can talk him into joining the rest of us.”
“Daisy’s right,” Tommy said reluctantly. “Petrie won’t be happy to be asked to abandon his vigil at the crucial moment. He’d quite likely disregard a servant.”
Alec conceded. “All right, but Daisy, if you get up there and see anyone but Petrie, you slide straight back down. Or if you don’t see him right away. Don’t hunt around for him. Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Bincombe, you’re tallest and strongest. See if you can get her to the top.”
It was a fearfully undignified scramble, in the course of which Daisy managed to kick the uncomplaining Binkie in the face.
At the last, one of her feet in each of his hands, he gave her a great heave.
She shot upwards and only just stopped herself slithering head-first down the reverse slope.
The electric torch in her mac pocket thumped her hip painfully.
Gasping for breath, she lay on the ridge, peering down into the bowl. Not a soul in sight, though soft lamplight glowed between the chinks in the stone walls of the shepherd’s hut. The wind seemed to have died, and she heard a murmur of voices but failed to make out any words.
The hawthorn-patch was still a bit further to her right.
Alec could not have meant she was not to look for Phillip in the thicket just because she had miscalculated its position.
She wriggled along the top of the bank, silently cursing the torch, till she was able to peer down among the tangled, spiky branches.
She couldn’t see Phillip, but there was only one hole in the thick growth large enough for the passage of a large body, a few feet ahead of her.
Daisy squirmed forward, cupped her hands around her mouth, and hissed, “Phillip!”
A rustle and a squeak might have been a frightened rabbit. Daisy hoped it was Phillip—being stabbed by a thorn? A moment later, the soles of a pair of boots came into view. They vanished; there was more rustling; and Phillip’s fair head appeared.
“Daisy!” He mouthed the word, or spoke in a whisper too low to be heard over rain pelting on leaves. Her name was followed by what looked like, “Confound it, what the deuce are you doing here?”