The Deer Leap Read online

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part I:

  GOOD NIGHT! WHICH PUT THE CANDLE OUT?

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part II:

  WHAT INN IS THIS

  WHERE FOR THE NIGHT

  PECULIAR TRAVELER COMES?

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part III:

  CHILDREN — SWINDLED FOR THE FIRST

  ALL SWINDLERS — BE — INFER —

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part IV:

  YOU — TOO — TAKE COBWEB ATTITUDES

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Part V:

  NOW IT IS NIGHT — IN NEST AND KENNEL —

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Part VI:

  AN AMETHYST REMEMBRANCE

  IS ALL I OWN

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  to the memory of my father

  Was it a pleasant Day to die —

  And did the Sunshine face His way —

  A Wounded Deer — leaps highest—

  I’ve heard the Hunter tell —

  ’Tis but the Ecstasy of death —

  And then the Brake is still!

  The Past is such a curious Creature

  To look her in the Face

  A Transport may reward us

  Or a Disgrace —

  Unarmed if any meet her

  I charge him fly

  Her rusty Ammunition

  Might yet reply.

  —Emily Dickinson

  PART 1

  Good Night!

  Which put the Candle out?

  One

  Una Quick had been searching for two days for her dog, Pepper.

  Whenever anyone in Ashdown Dean came into the post-office stores (of which Una had been purveyor of goods and stamps for forty-five years) she would ask the same questions over and over, thereby delaying the dispensing of letters, tinned goods, and half-loaves for as long as she could keep the benighted villager’s attention. Everyone in Ashdown knew Pepper’s habits in tedious detail.

  “Probably just run off or someone picked him up. And don’t forget that lab,” added Sebastian Grimsdale with his usual compassion. Over the two torturous days, Sebastian finely tuned this theme with references to dog- and catnapping, never forgetting to toss in references to the Rumford Laboratory, where, according to Mr. Grimsdale, they did all sorts of dreadful experiments. Having reduced Una Quick to tears, he would then tell her not to worry, and leave with his post and tinned tomato soup. This he would later reduce to something slightly thicker than water but considerably thinner than blood for the guests of Gun Lodge.

  Blood was, indeed, his milieu: Sebastian Grimsdale was Master of Foxhounds and Harriers and his own huntsman. The only persons he actually paid were his one maid-of-all-work, and his head keeper, Donaldson. Donaldson was a great stalker. Like most of them, from Scotland. But Grimsdale preferred Exmoor, the game being much larger. That was through now until spring, damnation. This put Grimsdale in an even more insufferable mood than was usual for him. He was cheered only by the thought of the meet in five days — though running a fox to ground was no comparison to the stag at bay. Well, in the meantime, he could take his shotgun out to the pond and see what flew by . . . .

  • • •

  With poor Una Quick clutching at her heart — she had a “heart,” as she described her condition — most of the Ashdown villagers offered far gentler and happier prognoses. “Pepper’ll be back, you’ll see, dear,” said her neighbor, Ida Dotrice. “You know the way they are. Just turn up at the door like always . . . .”

  Una was not sure the way they were after going missing for two days.

  Little Mrs. Ashley, whose baby sat with its moon-face half covered by a cloud of white blanket, consoled Una by telling her the tale of “those dogs and that cat that went for hundreds of miles, or something, and finally got home.” Mrs. Ashley panted slightly, as if she had just made the journey herself, while shoving marmite and bread into her carryall. She went on about these animals: “. . . all the way from Scotland or somewhere, I don’t remember. Didn’t you read it? Well, you ought, one was a Siamese, you know how smart they are . . . . How much do I owe? Oh, that much. Things get dearer every day. And what they charge for just dog food . . . . Oh, sorry, Miss Quick. You must get that book.” She could not remember its name. “Don’t you worry now. Ta.”

  Siamese cats trekking through Scotland did not console Una Quick at all. She grew paler with every chime of the steeple bell that reminded her that everyone would pass to his reward, including Pepper. The vicar, a tiny man who walked as if he had springs on his shoes, had not helped Una with references to all of us going to our reward.

  • • •

  On the third day, she found Pepper. The liver-spotted dog lay stiff as a board in the tiny shed behind her cottage where she kept her few gardening supplies, one of them weed killer. The door had been secured, she was positive, by a stick driven through the metal clasp.

  Una collapsed. Ida Dotrice, come to ask to use her telephone, found and revived her. Una was barely alive.

  It was the first time the post-office stores had been closed during the week, other than half-day, when Pepper’s funeral was held in the backyard of Arbor Cottage. Una, wearing black, was supported by Ida and her other neighbor, Mrs. Thring. The vicar had been persuaded to read over the small grave, and he did this, but somewhat springily.

  Paul Fleming, the local veterinarian and the assistant administrator of the Rumford Laboratory, had said, yes, it was undoubtedly the weed killer. Una asked him how Pepper had managed to work the stick out of the latch. But Una was known to be slightly absentminded. Paul Fleming had shrugged and said nothing.

  The Potter sisters — Muriel and Sissy — were well known in Ashdown Dean, largely because hardly anyone knew them at all. They were famous for keeping their shades drawn, their doors locked, and themselves behind them. Groceries were delivered by a local boy, and there was never any post. When they did appear, one was always dressed in black and one in mauve, as if in the first and second stages of Victorian mourning. It was considered an event when they had gone up the High Street to the Briarpatch tearoom to sample the proprietor’s famous pastries.

  After all of these years of shuttered living, the Potter sisters were seen leaving their house the day after Pepper had died, their cat wrapped in a blanket, and getting into their ancient Morris.

  Sissy drove hell for leather up the street and out of town, where Dr. Fleming’s office was situated.

  They returned without the cat and locked the door.

  Gerald Jenks, a surly man who kept a cycle shop on the edge of the v
illage, also kept a spitz as surly as Gerald himself. The dog was chained to a post outside the run-down shop like a guard dog. What there was to guard, no one knew. Only Gerald could have found anything of value in the tottering stacks of wheels and parts and pieces.

  The day after the Potter sisters’ cat had died from a heavy dose of aspirin, Jenks found the dog caught in a rusty bicycle chain, its efforts to escape apparently having strangled it.

  If it hadn’t seemed impossible, one would have thought the animal population of Ashdown Dean was methodically killing itself off. Or being killed.

  Una Quick lay in bed three days later, not having risen since the funeral. Stiff as adamantine, hands clasped over her bosom, a votive candle burning beside her.

  The vicar hadn’t wanted to read the service over Pepper, she was sure. Beneath him. Him. Fidgety old fool, he was. Some just didn’t understand how you got attached to an animal.

  Here in her tiny cottage in Aunt Nancy’s Lane — two up and two down — she’d nursed a crotchety mother for twenty years. And forty-five years keeping the post-office stores. Little enough thanks had she got from the villagers for that. Selling soup and sorting post. So what if she had her bit of fun with it. That taint of perfume on letters to Paul Fleming. Handsome, thought he was God’s gift.

  The candle guttered in a tiny gust of wind. She had held one at the funeral, and when that went out she had lit another and then another. Keeping watch. In that breeze she smelled a storm coming. Una thought of it waiting out there, like Death.

  When the steel band gripped her below the breast, she winced. The beat of her heart was uneven and ragged as her breath. Dr. Farnsworth had come and gone directly after the funeral to check on her again. Would he be annoyed if she called him on the Monday? Tonight? Instead of Tuesday?

  The band loosened and the constriction eased. No, she mustn’t fall prey to the habit of some patients. He had laughed, pleasantly enough, his arm round her shoulder, and told her to stop dwelling on her heart, as it only made matters worse. But it had almost killed her this time, what with Pepper’s passing away. Arsenic. It must have been horrible . . . .

  Across the room the telephone rang, and she wondered if she should make the effort. It persisted. She dug her feet into slippers and went to it.

  The voice was strange. Strangled, almost.

  The message was stranger.

  She wiped beads of perspiration from a brow cold as pearl.

  Two

  Ordinarily a person who could be rendered speechless by the public in general, Polly Praed was ready to strangle the woman in the public call box. At least she thought it was a woman; it was hard to tell in the rain pouring down the call box, drenching Polly’s yellow slicker, water flung like sea-spray against her eyes. A sudden beak of lightning turned the blood-red box a livid yellow, but the damned fool just nattered on.

  Had she not been in extremis, Polly Praed would no more have thought of pounding on the glass of the door than she would have considered giving a speech at the annual Booker Award ceremonies. Not that she’d ever get the chance. The trees that lined the High Street could have accepted the award better than Polly Praed. Ten minutes now. Ten minutes. She wanted to scream.

  Unfortunately, screaming was out, too. She had failed her est course in London. When commanded to fall on the floor and scream, she had sat like a rock.

  She had failed her Assertiveness Training course in Hertford, too.

  Any call from her editor threw her into paroxysms of fright; he would call to “check on her progress.” In his sly, friendly way.

  About the only people she could manage were a few of her friends in Littlebourne, and she was cursing herself for a fool for not staying there in the first place.

  The rain poured, the lightning clawed, and that odious man at Gun Lodge had had the nerve to tell her the Lodge telephone was for private use only and directed her up this hill to the call box.

  She felt like throwing herself against it, toppling the damned thing and the person inside who must be calling everyone in Ashdown Dean. Fortunately, it was a tiny village. Probably only another twenty calls to go.

  If her editor hadn’t phoned her to “check on progress,” she’d never have set off on this harebrained literary excursion in the first place. Canterbury first, then Rye, as if the imaginations of Chaucer and James might fall at her feet like cathedral stones or tiles off roofs. Then up to Chawton and Jane Austen. Not even Jane could make the wheels start turning.

  Had she stuck with Assertiveness Training, she would simply have told that Grimsdale person — demanded — that she must use his telephone. Then, of course, the storm hadn’t risen to gale force. So she had trekked up here.

  Raining cats and dogs.

  She wouldn’t have minded if it had rained down her own cat, Barney. That dreadful person said no animals allowed. Barney was used to the car, having made this literary pilgrimage with her. And she had gone sneaking out after dark to bundle him in.

  Only Barney wasn’t there.

  If she hadn’t got kicked out of est, she would have been able to go to police, rout out whoever was around. But she knew, instead, who to call and who would give her advice, since he had been so free with advice over the last two years whether she wanted it or not.

  Finally, in a furor, Polly put her hand in the metal pull and yanked the door open.

  “I’m sorry! It’s an emergency!”

  The woman responded quickly enough. She fell backward across Polly Praed’s feet. Her hand was still holding the receiver and the cord lay snakelike, half in, half out of the call box, as the lightning knifed again and showed a waxen face.

  • • •

  It was too much like her stories to be believed.

  Here she sat in the police station on a hard chair waiting for Constable Pasco to come back. Polly, having done a great deal of research in the course of writing her mystery novels, knew that rigor mortis had either passed off or not yet started in the body whose head had used her feet as its cushion. Having gingerly removed those feet, she had had no choice then but to step over the elderly woman and ring up the local police. The lonely public telephone in the rain had quickly become a carnival of whirling blue lights and villagers materializing out of Ashdown Dean’s cottages and narrow streets.

  For a good twenty minutes she had been sitting on this chair, waiting. Since Constable Pasco was the single local policeman, he had sent to some town five miles on another edge of the New Forest for reinforcements. Polly had been surrounded at the call box, questioned, plunked down here.

  And no one cared about Barney. She told herself not to worry. Barney had probably just crawled out the window. Barney wore a red neckerchief and would have got the gold medal in Assertiveness Training . . . .

  Literary inspiration. Good God.

  She was absolutely stuck for a plot and she had that contract staring her in the face, promising January delivery of a book that she hadn’t even started. And it was October twenty-second. All the way from Canterbury to Battle she’d contrived a plot around six people in a first-class train compartment making bets on which of them could tell the most interesting story before they got to their destination. She had been killing them off one by one as each had to leave for the toilet or somewhere. She didn’t know who was doing the killing or why . . . the Chaucer scholar, perhaps, who had thought it up.

  Battle had scratched that plot when she saw the Battle Rolls in the Abbey and wondered if a murder incorporating William the Conqueror might not be instructive. But think of all that research . . . .

  Then Rye. Henry James. Inside Lamb House she wondered how a mystery in which several people have achingly endless, convoluted conversations over tea and biscuits, all of them knowing there was that body in the solarium but, with their Jamesian sensibilities, making such oblique references that no one knew if anyone knew if he or she knew. Including the reader. Her fascination with the endless possibilities of this grew. It would break new ground in the mystery
world. A mystery within a mystery. A cobweb-covered windowpane. Her editor wouldn’t know what was going on, but would of course have to pretend he did, being a man of Jamesian sensibility himself.

  But her hopes were dashed when she picked up The Awkward Age and tried reading it over tea and cakes and realized that, although she couldn’t make head nor tail of it, Henry James probably knew what he was doing. Damn the man!

  Why hadn’t she stayed in Rye for dinner at the Mermaid, as she’d been tempted to do? Or spent that extra day in Canterbury? Or never left Littlebourne, where she would be just settling down in bed with somebody else’s mystery, hoping there might be something she could nick?

  Thus did Polly Praed, like a film running backward, retrace her movements over the last three days. After leaving Jane Austen’s imagination in Hampshire (where she now was), Polly had planned to motor along and make a casual stopover in Long Piddleton, Northamptonshire, though she didn’t see how one could merely be straying by the family seat of the Earls of Caverness. Well, he kept asking her to visit, didn’t he?

  Half an hour. No police. Constable Pasco had questioned her quite thoroughly and, she thought, with some suspicion. Why hadn’t she used the telephone at Gun Lodge? Because that Grimsdale person wouldn’t let her.

  Finally, he came in, and she found a sliver of steel in her spine, enough to say, “I’m allowed one call.”

  Feeling a fool for all of the times she’d heard that on American television programs, she blushed. Pasco, a tall, laconic policeman, merely plunked the telephone on the counter and told her to go ahead, miss.

  Pleased at least by the miss — Polly had left her “miss” days behind her like a string of pop beads — she picked up the receiver. If he was so plentiful with advice and succor, let him advise and succor his way out of this mess.

  In this way, Polly Praed decided to dump the whole thing on the former Lord Ardry, eighth Earl of Caverness, pretty much like she dumped her hastily written books on an unsuspecting public.