Читать книгу The Devil's Footsteps - John Burke - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

The crossing gates were still open to the road, but a distant feather of smoke showed that a train was on its slow way from Withersey. Visible for miles, it puffed along the embankment above fields and dykes and washlands, for an age seeming to draw no nearer. Bronwen Powys, one arm about her camera so that it did not thump too heavily against the rail of the hired trap, felt like urging haste on the driver. But he knew the roads and the railway and their relative speeds. Allowing for the train’s short wait at Hexney Halt, there was plenty of time before Mrs. Dunstall came out to swing the gates across the road.

It had been a rewarding day. Excellent light, fine definition. Bronwen smiled at the inappropriateness of totting up a score on such matters. Yet it had undoubtedly been a worthwhile bag: those almshouses in the shadow of abbey ruins, two windmills, and the quite unlooked-for gem of an intricately pargeted cottage. Tomorrow she must tidy up loose ends in Hexney itself, try another study of the church tower and the gateway, and complete another chapter in her self-appointed task.

She shaded her eyes to see how well the scene before her compared with the picture she had taken last week. For a fleeting moment she seemed to see Tommy Dunstall in the foreground, just as she had captured him on her plate. It was a good picture. She must make a print for his mother.

She was about to lower her hand when she noticed something different about the cottage ahead. An assortment of objects had been stacked up outside, like a winter store of wood and peat propped against the wall, since she set out this morning.

They were her own belongings: her trunk, the developing tent, and clothes piled up in a heap.

There was a distant whistle. Smoke from the train streamed away over the levels, at one point wreathing into the swirling plume from a pumping station’s blackened chimney.

As the trap slowed between the crossing gates, the door of the cottage opened and Bronwen’s maid came out. She was dressed for travelling, her bonnet firmly in place, and carried a bag which she set beside the others. Mrs. Dunstall, close behind, might almost have been bundling her out of doors.

‘Oh, Miss Bronwen, there’s glad I am you’ve got here in time.’

‘What on earth is happening?’

Mrs. Dunstall’s face was blotched by tears. Two men, one with dried duckweed caking his trouser legs and sleeves, stood behind her in the shadow of the doorway.

Bronwen got down and reached into the trap for her camera.

‘Don’t bring that any closer,’ cried Mrs. Dunstall.

‘I don’t understand. What are all my things doing here, thrown out like this?’

‘You’d best be on your way, miss,’ said one of the men flatly.

‘Mrs. Dunstall—’

‘They brought him back. Not an hour ago.’

‘Him?’

‘My Tommy.’

‘Miss Bronwen, I’ve been packing so we could be on our way, it’s all been so dreadful.’

‘My Tommy. He was taken.’ Mrs. Dunstall’s reddened eyes glared terror at the camera. ‘In Peddar’s Lode.’

‘Oh, Mrs. Dunstall, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe it. I....’

Bronwen was leaning awkwardly, the weight of the tripod on her shoulder, as she turned away from the trap, instinctively putting out a hand to Mrs. Dunstall. The widow let out a screeching sob, warding her off with a wild swing of the arm. ‘That thing!’ She struck the tripod so that it slid from Bronwen’s shoulder. One leg jarred on the flagged path to the door, stuck for a moment in a crack, and then tipped over. There was a crunch as the wood splintered.

‘Mrs. Dunstall, you can’t believe—’

‘I’ll not be doing with that in my house. Not after...after.... Should never have had you in the first place, you and that thing of yours. The train’ll be here any minute. Be you on it.’

‘I’m so sorry. Please, if there’s anything I can do—’

‘You can be on that train, that’s what you can do.’

The engine and two coaches drew in to the platform with a sigh of escaping steam. Hexney’s one porter and ticket collector stepped forward to open the door of the first-class compartment, a small saloon with four armchairs and a high-backed sofa.

A tall man about thirty years of age, with a silver-topped cane and a cloak lined in red silk, descended and set a large valise on the platform. He had lean features and a swarthy complexion, with darker streaks like bruises under his deep-set eyes, and a jutting imperial beard. When his head jerked to indicate that the porter should pick up his luggage and lead the way out of the station, his manner was that of one accustomed to summoning such service out of thin air.

But the porter had momentarily turned away, signalling to Mrs. Dunstall that she should now open the gates. The fireman leaned out from the footplate to add a similar exhortation.

‘I’m not opening the gates,’ said Mrs. Dunstall, ‘till she takes herself and all that mischief of hers on to that train.’

‘You can’t expect me to toss everything anyhow into a carriage.’ Bronwen was pleading rather than indignant, for she could see that Tommy’s mother was near to breaking point. Then she realized that her maid was already climbing aboard the train. ‘Eiluned, what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Do come along, Miss Bronwen. Not safe to stay here a minute longer, is it.’

‘Get down at once.’

The girl gulped, but pushed her case ahead of her into the compartment. ‘There’s sorry I am, miss, but I can’t, not another minute indeed.’ She groped for the door to pull it shut behind her.

The porter was leaning over the fence.

‘Evil eye? Oh, now, Mrs. D., that’s no concern of the railway company. We want those gates open, and sharp.’

Instead of obeying, Mrs. Dunstall began to gather up Bronwen’s possessions and, sobbing, tipped them over the picket fence on to the road. The porter came through the garden and personally opened the gates. When the train was safely through, carrying away Eiluned but not her mistress, he closed them again, climbed back on the platform, and picked up the newcomer’s case.

‘This way, sir.’

The driver of the trap sat with the reins loose across his knee, watching with morbid interest the drama between his last fare and the crossing-keeper. His attention was claimed by the rattle of a cane across two spokes of his nearside wheel.

‘This will convey me to the Hexney inn?’

The voice was powerful but controlled, with a cadence that suggested singing. Looking the new arrival up and down, the driver assessed the value of his clothes and general appearance and the probable tip. ‘If you could hold on just a jiffy, sir, till this young lady settles what she owes.’

The man glanced at Bronwen, struggling to save her effects from further damage. ‘It would seem highly probable that the lady will require your services further. I suggest we offer what assistance we may in conveying her, also, to Hexney.’

‘Oh, now, sir, I’m not so sure about that. Not with all this fuss. Best let me get you to the inn, and then we’ll see—‘

‘I can already see. The lady is in distress. If she wishes our help, she must have it.’

Bronwen held out her arms in a last imploring gesture to Mrs. Dunstall, then let them fall to her sides. The two men who had been shuffling awkwardly in the background now plucked up courage to leave, sidling past Bronwen with their faces averted and trudging away towards Hexney. Mrs. Dunstall went indoors. Curtains had been drawn across all the little windows.

The stranger said: ‘You’ll need time to collect your thoughts as well as your impedimenta, madam. I shall be privileged if you will accompany us to the village.’ It was said with sonorous determination, as much for the driver’s benefit as for hers.

She prickled with instinctive, inexplicable antagonism. The man was too sure of himself and, in spite of his politeness, too threatening. She did not understand the threat; but did not approve of the way the driver, abandoning any further attempt at argument, sprang down as nimbly as a performing dog and began to collect up her belongings; she was also conscious of a further confusion to add to the distress she was already in—a blurred vision of that red-lined cloak spread wide like the wings of a swooping bat. It was ludicrous, yet briefly, overpoweringly vivid.

He was saying: ‘If I may help you up, Miss...?’

‘Powys,’ she said stiffly. ‘Bronwen Powys.’

There was really nothing for it. The cottage had become tragically hostile, there was no shelter on the vast expanse of fen, there would not be another train until after dark, and that would deposit her for the night in an unfamiliar city; and in any case she did not see why she should be forced to decamp before her work was complete. Perhaps tomorrow, or just before leaving, she could venture to offer Mrs. Dunstall condolences and soothe her fevered imaginings. Meanwhile she had no alternative but to seek accommodation in the village.

The man’s fingers were strong and supple under her elbow as he assisted her into the trap.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Caspian,’ he said. ‘Dr. Alexander Caspian.’

‘Yes,’ she said. Then she was puzzled by her own immediate response. The name had come as no surprise, though she could swear she had never heard it before.

He was quick to catch her reaction. ‘You know of me?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘For a moment I thought....’ His eyes mocked her. For some arrogant reason he suspected her of being familiar with his name.

Why should she be?

They settled on the narrow seats at opposite sides of the higgledy-piggledy heap of luggage and Dr. Caspian frankly and appreciatively studied Bronwen’s face.

She had to say something. ‘It was most kind of you to come to my assistance.’

‘You don’t belong in these parts.’

‘They make that very plain.’

‘A foreigner. In the English countryside we are all foreigners unless we have been here for ten generations.’ It occurred to her that he was in every sense a foreigner. His English was beautifully modulated, but there was something alien about him. ‘But that scene,’ he went on, ‘appeared unusually violent.’

‘It seems I’m regarded as a witch.’

His regard seemed to burn more and more deeply into her. She was sure her cheeks were flushed, perhaps smeared with dirt from trying to cope with clothes and cases dropped on the earth, and that her hair must have been blown and dragged this way and that.

Lingering softly on each word, he said: ‘It is difficult to blame them.’

* * * *

From the bumpy road Hexney gave the impression of a small fortified town rather than a mere village. The place had grown up around a makeshift castle with a bailey but no keep, overlooking bare expanses of fen plagued by Saxon outlaws and keeping the Norman defenders’ feet dry. It was still ringed by a medieval wall, punctured now by gaps through which lanes and a back road had been driven. The widest opening was straddled by a Norman gateway with two drum towers too substantial for the dumpy little hill. From a distance the church tower was a pinnacled landmark. The closer one approached, the farther out of true the tower seemed because of its bulging stair turret.

The trap clopped and grated its way up the last steep slope and in through the gateway.

Bronwen had already surveyed every inch of what lay within. The wall was merely a shell, protecting a village green that had been mutilated to make way for a cobbled marketplace. On one side The Griffin bore witness to a more prosperous past. Through its imposing frontage a beamed entrance led to a stable yard, and the depth of the main building promised more accommodation than would be needed today. Railways had robbed the posting houses of their splendour, and such new roads as came into being were many miles away, making wide circuits to the Wash and the east coast. The inn was not so much derelict as shrunken; like the whole village, huddled in on itself.

The trap stopped. The driver jumped down and stood to one side as Dr. Caspian helped Bronwen down. Then he cleared his throat.

‘You won’t be forgetting, miss...?’

Bronwen opened her reticule and settled her day’s account. Caspian nodded peremptorily at the luggage and left the man to deal with it as he escorted Bronwen into the inn.

Through an open door drifted the smell of polish and scrubbed tiles, and the clinging sourness of ale. A fire burned in the grate in the hall. Beside it was an alcove filled by a large bureau, its drawers and pigeonholes raggedly stuffed with papers. The landlord, hearing wheels rattle over the cobbles, had already stationed himself by it with one proprietorial hand on the open flap.

‘My name is Caspian. Dr. Alexander Caspian. I telegraphed for a room to be reserved.’

‘That’s right, Doctor. Quite in order, sir.’

‘And I’d be obliged if you’d provide this young lady with accommodation. She will let you know in due course how long she intends to stay.’

‘Well, now. I don’t rightly know about that, sir. We wasn’t expecting....’

‘You’re not telling me your establishment is full?’

‘No, Doctor. But after what’s happened, after what I’ve been hearing only this last thirty minutes or so, I’m none too sure how my regulars would take it....’

His excuses petered out as he caught the full hot blast of Dr. Caspian’s gaze.

Bronwen stole a glance at her protector. The bone structure of that saturnine face, the smooth darkness of the skin, gave it a positively Slav cast. Deep furrows on each side of his nose emphasized the flare of the nostrils. When he spoke, the throb of his tone and the accompanying insistence of his eyes, as ebon as a mountain tarn, seemed almost to mesmerize his audience.

Audience...? She groped for the thought, and it was gone.

‘Whatever you have heard, mine host, can assuredly be no more than contemptible tittle-tattle. In a profession such as yours, hearing what you must hear in your own bar day after day, I imagine you know how little substance there is in outpourings of that nature.’

‘It’s not me, sir. Not at all. My regulars....’

‘Your regulars will desert you only when by some stroke of fate their thirst deserts them.’

Bronwen said quietly: ‘Dr. Caspian, having so newly arrived upon the scene, I think you cannot know the full story.’

‘And do not need to at this moment. When I do hear it, I am confident I shall prefer your version to any other.’

The landlord rested his weight on the flap of the bureau, which creaked a protest. Abruptly he forced a smile. It was meant to be ingratiating, but the muscles of his face tugged downwards as if against his will.

‘Right you are, sir. Don’t see why we shonldn’t fit the young lady in.’

Caspian nodded, having taken it for granted that he would get his way. But Bronwen sensed another strange element in the landlord’s swift surrender—a kind of nudge, given to the man by some force he himself didn’t understand, something elusive which seemed about to come into focus but then retreated.

She rubbed her hand across her eyes. Perhaps she would have done better to let herself be bundled unceremoniously on to that train.

‘If you’ll come this way, miss, I’ll show you to your room and get Mrs. Fortrey to see you’ve got all you need.’

The room had a low ceiling with blackened, sagging timbers, and a latticed window overlooking the square. The carpet was worn thin along one edge, and the coverlet on the bed was badly faded; but it was clean and unpretentious, and Bronwen welcomed it as a temporary refuge. A young man brought up her cases, the large camera and her portable dark-tent, stacking them along one wall. He was followed by Mrs. Fortrey, who eyed this paraphernalia dubiously.

‘A towel for you, miss. And I’ll get the girl to fill the washstand jug when she comes in from the scullery.’

‘Thank you.’ Bronwen wanted only to be left alone, to sink into the armchair by the window and recover her scattered and mangled wits.

‘There won’t be any...well, you won’t be splashing acids and things? On our carpets, I mean, miss.’

Bronwen tersely reassured her. She had no intention of throwing acid about. But perhaps, instead of sitting down, she ought to open up her boxes and see what, if anything, had been damaged as the distraught crossing-keeper threw them out of doors and over the fence.

Mrs. Fortrey went to the door, expressing one last disquiet. ‘You’ve got no maid with you, then, miss?’

‘She took herself off. A most unreliable girl. She’ll have no reference from me, that I can promise.’

Mrs. Fortrey raised an eyebrow, evidently sympathizing with the girl rather than her deserted mistress, and left.

Bronwen carefully opened out the folds of cloth around the dark-tent box. Nothing appeared to be leaking. She raised the lid to find one bottle dislodged from its compartment but mercifully undamaged. She had less luck in her plate storage box. Two glass plates of the Church had been cracked diagonally. The scenes would certainly have to be taken again. And here she would stay until they and several others were perfected, ignorant savages or no ignorant savages.

She turned her attention to the camera tripod. The injured leg was the result of the iron ferrule driving up into the wood. Any weight on it would widen the crack.

When water had been brought and she had washed and tidied herself, Bronwen went downstairs. There was nobody about, but she did not trouble to ring the handbell on the bureau. After so many explorations of the village she remembered her way round well enough.

It took only a few minutes to find the carpenter’s shop in West Lane. The sagging fence and the gate yawing on its hinges were no great advertisement for the craftsmanship of the occupant; but from the shed came the pleasing tang of newly sawn wood, and through the gaps in the planking she saw the gleam of yellow deal.

An elderly man within was completing work on a coffin.

When Bronwen pulled the door back he looked up and froze, then began to tap the end of his screwdriver on the lid.

‘I wonder if you could repair a camera tripod for me? One of the legs has split.’

‘That has?’ A shrug, a shake of the head. ‘Got my hands full right now.’

‘I don’t believe it would take long. Even if you could manage only a temporary repair, to keep me going while I’m here, it would be a help.’

He lowered his gaze and contemplated the coffin. ‘I’m likely to be asked for another one. Got to get this finished, and then there’s the talk of me having to do another one this next couple of days.’ His head went on one side, sly and accusing.

‘If it isn’t repaired,’ Bronwen persisted, ‘my work here will take me a lot longer.’

That seemed to strike home. ‘Well, I’d have to see it first.’

‘I’ll bring it round. I do assure you, it’s a fairly simple job.’

‘That do depend.’

‘If I go back and fetch it now—’

‘Leave it till tomorrow art’noon, then.’ He beat out a slow tattoo on the woodwork.

She left before he could change his mind. The light on the church, as she crossed the square, was just right for a picture. Now was as good a time as any to attempt a replacement of those cracked plates and at the same time to check that the camera itself was undamaged. She paced round the edge of the green in search of the best vantage point, and a solid base for the camera.

Of course. The lower platform of the pillory. The camera would need only the slightest tilting to take in the whole church tower, and the rising lens devised by her father would prevent vertical distortion. Bronwen went back into The Griffin and fetched the bulky box and cloth of her portable darkroom. When she had propped it against the pillory she went back again for the camera, glancing twice from her window to make sure that nobody was meddling with the equipment on the green.

In the hall as she came down this time, Dr. Caspian was talking to the barmaid, a plump girl with milky complexion and lips gone slightly sour—lips which now pouted and promised, under the spell of the slim, tall man and his extravagant presence.

‘Them footsteps, sir? Well, they do wholly puzzle every one of us. But we reckon it’s best to say nothing and let ’em go away.’

‘You can tell me exactly where I may observe this manifestation, Leah?’

He spoke her name as if he had been speaking it intimately for years. She swayed enticingly towards him and giggled. ‘Fancy someone coming all this way from London just because of old Josh Serpell’s maunderings!’ She edged herself closer to Caspian and, at the door, took his arm and leaned her left breast against him. ‘Your best way, sir’—her face was turned up to his—‘is turn left outside here...if you could wait till later...wanted me to show you the way....’

Bronwen swept past them and across the cobbles and grass to the pillory.

She balanced the camera carefully and established that she could achieve quite an agreeable composition. Satisfied on this score, she set up the equipment box on its stand, shook out the folds of lightproof cloth, and slid aside the flap of the red-tinted window. Wriggling under the cloth until it was draped over her head and shoulders and down to her hips, she prepared the collodion coating for a plate, and then transferred the plate-holder to the camera. Again she ducked under a cloth, and groped forward to adjust the focus.

Upside down, hanging beside the church tower like a bat hanging by its feet, Dr. Caspian swam into view with one hand on his cane, the other raised to doff his hat. Bromven was about to shout and wave him aside. But the plate was ready. Dr. Caspian’s exaggerated pose before the tower was as good a test piece as any, and she wanted to waste no more time. She pressed the bulb.

As she took the exposed plate quickly back to the tent, Caspian observed: ‘A somewhat outmoded technique, surely? I understood the day of the wet plate was past.’

‘Dry plates do not produce results of the same quality. Useful when one is moving about, but not for serious studies. My father refused ever to work with them.’

‘Ah. I am told Charles Lutwidge Dodgson recently gave up photography altogether for similar reasons.’

‘Besides,’ said Bronwen, plunging back into her dark-tent, ‘one can check one’s results in a matter of minutes.’

Most important if you could not be sure of returning to a site to rectify mistakes. And once she had left this surly place, she doubted if she would wish ever to return.

Carefully she poured on the solution of acetic and pyrogallic acid, and slid the plate into its hypo bath. Now, as on so many occasions since his death, she could almost believe that her father was still at her shoulder fussing, squeezing in under the cloth, or grunting a ‘Hm, hm’ outside, and a ‘You’ll lose it if you don’t look lively’, or at most a ‘Well, I’ve seen worse, mm, yes.’

The picture clarified. She was glad her father was not there to see the final result. The tower was as she would have wished it, Dr. Caspian emerged strong and clear, just as he himself would have commanded it. But between him and the tower, a peculiar shadow swirled and thickened, darkening into a cap above the darkness of his head. It was vexing. And more than that. Even in the negative form, where white was black and black was white, she was disturbed by the grimace of that faceless shape behind Caspian’s shoulder—something warped and violent, some hint of predatory lips and menacing talons.

‘You let some light in,’ her father would have chided her. ‘Isn’t that it, mm? Or someone crossed the green and you didn’t even notice.’

* * * *

Meredith Powys had been a Caernarvon architect who discovered early in the experimental days of photography the advantages of showing prints of existing buildings to his clients when explaining his own plans. He also, for his own satisfaction, amassed a collection of pictures of his native Wales, and in due course ventured across the borders. Unlike so many of his contemporaries he was horrified by the demolition which went on in the name of industrial progress: several years before alert preservationists created the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London, he was hard at work recording threatened buildings for posterity. If a row of old cottages or some corner of an abandoned castle was marked down for destruction to make room for a new railway or a new factory, it became the custom to call in Meredith Powys so that at least a two-dimensional memory of its existence might be preserved.

Mrs. Powys presented him with seven daughters. Two died in infancy, one went to America and was never heard of again, three married—two living still in Wales, one in London. Bronwen was the youngest. Sixteen when her mother died, she had looked after her father’s depleted household and helped him with his work. Most of his time in later years was devoted to photography, and most of that time was spent away from home: the grey stone house in Caemarvon was too hollow and too haunted. He sought the past, travelling, making notes, obsessively taking pictures of churches and abbeys, of great houses and straggling hamlets. Bronwen went with him. She sorted out his notes, kept his files and records, catalogued the accumulation of plates, and coaxed him homewards again when their load grew too bulky and it was necessary to devote some weeks to slotting glass negatives into their appropriate places in the library at Caemarvon.

For some time before his death it had been tacitly accepted as inevitable that Bronwen should continue his work. Once there had been talk of her becoming a teacher until such time as she married, but nothing had come of it. ‘Time you left me to it, girl,’ her father had said on a number of occasions. ‘Time you thought of yourself.’ Or, ‘Don’t have to be hanging round me all your life, now, Bron.’ But he would have been devastated if she had taken him at his word; and what pleased him most and mellowed his last painful months was her assurance that his collection would continue to grow even when he was no longer there.

The echoing hollowness of the slate and granite house was even more desolating after he, too, had left. His executors, the local solicitor and a second cousin from Llanberis, assumed Bronwen would sell it. Instead, she extended the library into a second room, and converted two of the ground floor rooms into a commercial photographic studio. It was a somewhat daring venture for a young unmarried woman with no male guardian on the premises but her family had been known and respected for so long, and she was so affectionately established in local minds as ‘Meredith Powys’s ginger one’, that allowances were made for her. Wedding groups and a certain amount of fashionable portraiture for the gentry brought in a fair income to supplement what her father had bequeathed her; but she did not neglect that other inheritance, her task of expanding topographical and architectural records as her father would have wished. Several weeks each year were set aside for exploration and accumulation. Usually they were uneventful weeks. She would find some inexpensive place to stay, take her pictures, make the relevant notes, and depart. It was rare to encounter trouble such as she had unwittingly run into at Hexney.

Nor were her troubles, apparently, over. The camera must have suffered some damage. How else could that strange blur have insinuated itself by Dr. Caspian’s head, writhing down out of the sky? Back in her room, Bronwen tilted the plate to and fro between her palms. It was not that Caspian himself had moved: his outline was perfectly sharp.

It was too late to make a positive print in this fading light. She would have to wait until tomorrow.

* * * *

From her window she saw Dr. Caspian emerge from a side lane into the village square. He was sunk in thought, his head down, his cane tapping a steady rhythm across the cobbles. She was able to look directly down upon the top of his high-crowned hat as he entered the inn.

He was already seated in the dining room, a decanter on the table before him, when she went down to eat. As she entered the room he stood up.

‘Good evening, Miss Powys. Will you take wine with me?’

She hesitated.

‘The landlord’s cellar contains no great treasures, but I have unearthed a more than tolerable claret which must have crept in without his noticing it.’

A place had been laid at another table, closer to the fireplace; but it did seem rather absurd that the two of them should conventionally keep their distance in this large, unpopulated room.

‘That’s most kind of you.’ She sat down.

‘I trust the results of your labours were satisfactory?’

‘Not altogether. Something went wrong.’

He went to the other table to fetch a second glass and, returning with it, poured glowing red wine and set it before her. ‘I have a suspicion I was at fault. I made some foolish gesture when I should have remained rigid.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. There must have been some trick of the light. It produced a very strange shape at your shoulder, Dr. Caspian.’

He raised his glass to her. His eyes gleamed as deep and dark as the wine. ‘Don’t tell me you have been concocting spirit photographs? You really must let me into your technical secrets. They could prove most useful in my own profession.’

‘I’m still ignorant of what that is.’

Instead of taking her up on this he said: ‘If you could spare me half an hour of your time, I believe you might be of some service to me here, tomorrow.’

‘After bungling one picture of you—’

‘I wasn’t thinking of my own image. What I need are some photographs of the footprints.’

Mrs. Fortrey, fussing up to the table, stopped short. Then in a strained tone she said: ‘I laid a table for you over there, miss. Thought you’d find it more cosy.’

‘I have invited Miss Powys to dine with me,’ said Caspian, ‘and she has graciously accepted.’

Mrs. Fortrey looked at neither of them but at a spot in mid-air somewhere above their heads. ‘Very good, sir. I’ll reset a place here. Will soup and lamb cutlets suit both of you?’

As there was no implication of any alternative being available, Caspian and Bronwen agreed that soup and lamb cutlets would suit admirably. It was not until Mrs. Fortrey had left the room that Bronwen took up the subject again.

‘The footprints?’ she prompted.

‘Yes. The footprints. You know of them, of course.’

‘I’ve heard some conflicting stories. Or, rather, fragments of stories.’

‘You’ve been to inspect them yourself?’

‘‘Naturally I went to see what the rumours were about.’

‘How many times?’

‘Just once.’

‘Then you have not verified whether or not they are advancing?’

She regretted having been drawn into discussion of this subject, and resented his inquisitorial manner. ‘It’s not the most direct route into the village,’ she said lamely. ‘And I have been occupied in other parts this week—Thomey, and Croyland.’

He nodded. His scepticism was all too apparent. Again she bustled. She had no intention of revealing to him the unease those marks had aroused in her, or her reluctance to go near them again. They were none of her business; and her feelings and conduct were none of his.

Really, she ought not to have sat so readily at his table. When he invited her it had not occurred to him that she would refuse. How much more might he take for granted?

Two dishes of rich vegetable soup, each a meal in itself, were set before them. As Mrs. Fortrey moved off, obviously eavesdropping for as long as she could manage it, Caspian set out with calculated loudness to question Bronwen about her work and about modern cameras and printing methods. She found herself expatiating on the aesthetic superiority of calotype over the admittedly more manageable emulsion plates now commercially manufactured, on albumen and carbon prints, and on possible substitutes for fragile glass negatives. He drew her out—truly he was mesmeric when he chose—on the niceties of naturalistic photography, tinted portraits, cartes-de-visite, and stereoscopy; and listened with flattering attentiveness to her own preferences in equipment and processing.

He was particularly interested in techniques of double exposure, but when she thought to use this as an opportunity for turning the conversation towards his own occupation, she discovered how late it was. The meal had been ended for some time, and she caught herself about to yawn, her eyes stinging with tiredness and the upsets of the day. Caspian had suavely directed the conversation along her own line of interests, and revealed nothing of himself.

As they were about to leave the dining room he said: ‘I may count on you, then, tomorrow morning? What time would best suit you for taking photographs of the footprints?’

‘Dr. Caspian, you have given me no hint of your reasons for interest in this matter. I’ve told you a great deal about my own work. So far I know nothing of yours.’

‘I’m a magician.’

‘Seriously, I mean.’

‘Most seriously I mean,’ he said, ‘that I am a magician.’