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The Wonderful Garden or The Three Cs
CHAPTER V
THE MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
Now, the fern-seed was only warranted to show the invisible, not to make the unhearable heard. If there should be no sound when that raised hand tapped at the window, then the children would know that the fern-seed was doing what it was warranted to do by the Latin book. If, on the other hand, the hand tapped and made, in tapping, the usual noise produced by a common tapper, then one of two things might be true. Either the fern-seed was stronger than the Latin book bargained for, and was able to make people hear the unhearable even if they did not cover their ears with the charm that had covered their eyes, or else the fern-seed spell was all nonsense and the face outside the window was a real person’s face and the hand was a real person’s hand, and the tap that was coming on the window was a really-tap that would sound hard and rattly on the glass of the window, as taps sound when fingers of bone and flesh make them.
All the children felt quite sure that they were not at all sure whether they wanted the face to be the face of a real person, or whether they wished it to be the Invisible made visible by fern-seed. But when the hand tapped at the window and a sound came to the children within – a sound quite distinct, and just the noise you or I might make if we tapped at a window and didn’t want every one in the house to hear us – the children, though startled, no longer felt any doubt as to what they wished that face to be.
‘It’s only a real person,’ whispered Charles, and sighed deeply.
‘It’s only a boy,’ said Caroline. ‘What does he want?’
‘It’s that Rupert chap we saw in the train,’ said Charlotte.
Every one breathed much more freely, and they all smiled and nodded towards the window; and the face nodded back, but it did not smile.
‘He must have run away,’ said Charles, ‘like I told him to.’
‘It wasn’t you; it was me,’ said Charlotte promptly.
‘I like this much better than its being invisible people,’ said Charles, changing the subject a little. ‘This is something like an adventure.’
‘We shouldn’t have had it without coming down for the fern-seed,’ Caroline reminded him. And again they all nodded and smiled. The face outside moved its lips. It was saying something, but they could not hear what it said.
‘It is that Rupert boy,’ Caroline insisted; ‘and he’s run away to us. What larks!’
And again she nodded, and so did Charles. But Charlotte said, ‘Don’t let’s go on nodding like Chinese pagodas. Of course, it wants to come in.’ And at once the others saw that this was the case.
‘He can’t get in here,’ Charlotte said; and, indeed, to have moved that table on which the fern-filled bell-glass stood surrounded by unhappy-looking little ferns in little dry pots, with bits of old tumbler arched protectively over them, would have been dangerous, and probably noisy. And, unless they removed the ferny difficulties, it was quite plain that the window could not be opened.
‘The morning-room is next door – Mrs. Wilmington called it that,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s a French window. She said so. It opens all right. I know how the fastenings go.’
‘Why “French”?’ asked Charlotte, eager for information even at that exciting moment, while Caroline was trying to explain to the face by signs that if it would just go along till it came to a French window it would find some one ready to let it in. ‘Why “French”?’
‘Because it’s like a door,’ said Charles, joining in the sign-message. ‘Everything in France is the opposite of here. They say “we” for “yes,” and “two” is “you,” and “four” is an “oven.” Silly, I call it.’
‘Hush!’ whispered Caroline. ‘Tread softly, and don’t tumble over the wolf-skins.’
Candle-bearing, the little procession passed along to the morning-room. The face had understood the signs. At any rate, there it was, framed in glass panes; and when the French window, which was, indeed, just like a door, was opened, there was the face, as well as the hands, arms, legs, body, and feet, of Rupert, the platform boy, or somebody exactly like him.
‘Come in,’ said Caroline, holding the door open. And Charlotte added, ‘Fear nothing! We will baffle your pursuers. We are yours to the death.’
He came in, a drooping dusty figure, and the French window, which had permitted itself to be opened with the most gentle and noiseless submission, now, in closing, uttered what was little less than a tactless squawk.
‘Fly!’ whispered Caroline, swiftly turning the handle that fastened it. ‘But your boots will betray us.’
Flight was the only thing, you see, and they had to risk the boots. Yet Rupert in his flight was noiseless as the others, who were all bath-slippered, and therefore shod with – if you were only reasonably careful and looked where you were going – the shoes of silence.
When the whole party was safe in Charles’s room, with the door shut, they blew out the candles and stood holding each other and their breaths as they listened in the dark for what they fully expected to hear – the opening click of Mrs. Wilmington’s lock, the opening creak of Mrs. Wilmington’s door, the approaching rustle of Mrs. Wilmington’s gown, the mincing amazement of Mrs. Wilmington’s voice.
But all was still – still as the inside of a palm-house, which, as no doubt you know, is very much quieter than most of the few quiet places in this noisy world.
The four fugitives let their breaths go cautiously, and again held them. And still the silence wrapped them round, thick and unbroken as the darkness in which they stood.
‘It’s all right,’ whispered Caroline at last. ‘Light up.’
Fortunately, each silver candlestick had its box of safety-matches in a silver holder fastened to its handle by a silver chain. This does happen in really well-managed houses. The candles were lighted.
‘We are saved,’ said Charlotte dramatically.
‘You came up like a mouse,’ said Caroline to Rupert, – ‘a quiet mouse.’
It was then seen that Rupert’s boots were not on his feet, but in his hand, very muddy, and tied together by frayed boot-laces.
‘I took them off,’ he explained, ‘when I got into your park. My feet hurt so, and the grass was so soft and jolly. Oh, I am so tired – and hungry!’ His voice broke a little, and if he had not been a boy I think he would have cried.
‘Get on to the bed,’ said Charlotte, with eager friendliness, ‘and lie down. You be a wounded warrior and we’ll be an Arab oasis that you’ve come to. That’s the tent of the sheikh,’ she added, as Charles gave the weary Rupert a ‘leg up’ and landed him among the billows of the vast feather-bed. ‘Repose there, weary but honoured stranger. Though but humble Arabs, we are hospitable to strangers. We will go and slay a desert deer for you.’
‘There are lots of biscuits in the sideboard in the dining-room,’ said Caroline. ‘I’ll stay with the wounded – or else you can stay and I’ll go with whichever doesn’t.’
Though it was the middle of the night no one even thought of being sleepy. Perhaps it was the excitement of this most real adventure, or perhaps the seeds of the fern have an awakening effect. At any rate, the three C.’s were as ready to begin a new game as though it had been ten o’clock in the morning of the first day of the holidays, instead of half-past twelve of a night that wasn’t any night in particular except the Eve of St. John.
Charlotte and Charles set off, important and tip-toeing, on a biscuit-hunt, and Caroline, like a good little nurse, fetched a basin and sponge and washed the face of the stranger, taking no notice of his objections that he was not a baby, and earnestly hoping that in her long dressing-gown she looked at least a little like an Arab maiden ministering to a Feringhee warrior.
‘Now I’m going to wash your weary feet, if you will stick them out over the side of the bed,’ she said. ‘They always do in Saracen countries; and if you think it’s like a baby I’ll call it dressing your wounds.’
She brought a chair and a basin of water very carefully, and a big sponge, and then she peeled off Rupert’s stockings and bathed his tired, swollen feet with great care and gentleness. And if a little of the water did go on the bed – well, you can’t think of everything all in a minute, and she did put a towel under his legs afterwards.
‘That’s jolly,’ said the wounded knight, more graciously.
‘You are terribly wounded,’ said Caroline comfortingly. ‘You must have been fighting dragons or walking over red-hot ploughshares, or perhaps it was a pilgrimage with peas in your shoes. We play pilgrims sometimes, with cockles in our hats and pilgrims’ staffs – only we always pretend the peas. I think it’s quite fair to pretend the shoes, don’t you?’
When the others came back from their hunting, with a good ‘bag’ (it was a tin, really) of biscuits, the Saracen maiden greeted them with —
‘Hist! The stranger sleeps. Let’s pretend he’s fainted, and we’ll rouse him with a skin of wine. Get some water in the tooth-mug. And where are the biscuits?’
‘We might as well have turbans,’ said Charlotte, hastily twining a bath-towel round her head. ‘All really Arab maidens are turbaned Turks.’
‘Let’s make it more tent-like before we wake him,’ Charles suggested, drawing the curtains round two sides of the four-poster; ‘and we might put the candles out of sight and pretend they’re Arabian knights’ lanterns.’
‘Or put them in a line on the chest, and let them be the sun rising over the sands of the desert,’ said Charlotte, putting the three candlesticks in a row.
When all was arranged, the three towel-turbaned children climbed into the tent and looked at the wounded knight, who lay asleep, looking very tired indeed, his feet still wrapped in the towel and his head half fallen off the pillow.
‘Let him sleep a little longer,’ said Caroline, ‘ere we rouse him to eat of the flesh of the deer which my brothers have brought to the wigwam for the benefit of the poor pale-face.’
‘We’re not Indians, silly,’ said Charlotte. ‘We’re Arabs, and I could do with a bit of the flesh of the deer myself, if you come to that.’
‘So could I,’ said Charles, his turban over one eye. ‘It’s jolly not being asleep. They say you get sleepy and cross if they let you sit up – but look at us.’
‘Yes, look at us,’ the others agreed, and ate the best mixed biscuits in a contented silence, broken only by the sound of crunching.
The familiar sensation of biscuit in the mouth seemed somehow to calm the excitement of the three C.’s.
The adventures of the night, which had seemed, as they happened, not so very wonderful, now began to appear more surprising, and at the same time more real. And the silence which biscuit-eating demands (unless you are prepared to behave really badly and talk with your mouth full and have the crumbs all over the place) was favourable to reflection – a friend to thought.
‘Do you know,’ said Caroline at last – ‘pass the mug, please – do you know, I don’t at all know what we’re going to do with him.’
‘I was just thinking that,’ said Charlotte.
‘So was I,’ said Charles.
‘But I’ve been thinking – ’
‘So have I,’ said the other two together.
‘What?’ asked Caroline, stopping short.
‘What you have,’ said Charlotte, and Charles repeated her words.
‘Then I needn’t tell you what I thought,’ said Caroline briefly.
I think they were all getting, perhaps, a little sleepy – or the effect of the fern-seed was wearing off.
‘Oh, don’t be crabby,’ Charlotte said. ‘We only meant we didn’t see what on earth we could do with him. I suppose he must sleep with Charles. There’s lots of room.’ She leaned back on a pillowy bunch of featherbed and closed her eyes.
‘No, you don’t,’ said Caroline firmly, pulling her sister up again into a sitting position by a limp arm. ‘I could go to sleep myself if it comes to that. Take your turban off. It’ll cool your sleepiness.’
‘I said’ – Charlotte spoke very slowly and distinctly, as people do when they are so sleepy they aren’t quite sure whether they can speak at all – ‘I said, “Let him sleep with Charles.”’
‘Oh yes!’ said Caroline. ‘And be found in the morning when they call us, and taken alive and delivered back to the Murdstone man. No, we must hide him, and wake him before they call us. I can always wake up if I bang my head the right number of times on the pillow before I go to sleep.’
Charlotte was nodding happily.
‘Get up!’ said Caroline, exasperated. ‘Get up! Get down! Get off the bed and stand on your feet. Now, then, Charles!’
But Charles was deeply slumbering, with his mouth very much more open than it ought to have been.
‘That’s it!’ said Caroline, as Charlotte responded to her pull. ‘That’s it. It’s just you and me! Women always have to do the work of the world! Aunt Emmeline said so once. She said it’s not “Men must work and women must weep”; it’s “Men must talk and women must work.” Come on and give me a hand.’
‘All right. I’m awake now,’ said Charlotte cheerfully. ‘I’ve been biting my tongue all that awful time you’ve been talking. What’s the idea?’
‘We’ll make him an upper berth, like in ships,’ Caroline explained, ‘and then we’ll wake him up and water him and biscuit him and explain things, and get Charles into bed and all traces concealed. It’ll be just you and me that did it. That’s glory, you know.’
‘Oh, do stop talking,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ll do anything you like, only stop talking.’
There was a great mahogany wardrobe in the room, with a mahogany hanging-cupboard at each side, and between the mahogany cupboards a space with mahogany drawers below and mahogany shelves above. And the shelves were like shallow drawers or deep trays, and you could pull them in and out. There was nothing on the shelves but clean white paper, and on each shelf a little bag made of white muslin and filled with dried lavender, which smelt very sweet through the fine mesh of the muslin.
The girls took out two of the trays and hid them under the bed. This left as much space above the lowest tray and the highest as they leave you on a steamer between the upper and lower berths. The girls made up a shake-down bed with blankets and pillows, and when all was ready they woke the boys gently and firmly by a damp sponge on the forehead and a hand over the mouth in case the sleeper should wake up yelling.
But both boys woke quietly. Charles had just enough wakefulness to submit to being got out of his overcoat and slippers and bundled into bed, but Rupert was thoroughly awake – ate biscuit, drank water, and understood exactly where and how he was to spend what was left of the night, as well as why he was to spend it there and thus.
He got into the wardrobe by means of a chair. The girls took away the chair and almost shut the doors of the wardrobe.
‘We’ll have a grand council to-morrow,’ said Charlotte. ‘Don’t be anxious. Just remember we’re yours to the death, like I told you on the platform.’
‘It was me said that,’ said Charles, almost in his sleep.
‘And don’t move out of here, whatever you do,’ said Caroline. ‘I shall come quite early, and we’ll hide you somewhere. I expect I shall think of something in my sleep. I often do. Good night.’
‘Good night,’ said Rupert, in the wardrobe. ‘I say! You are bricks – and you won’t let them catch me?’
‘Of course not,’ said the three C.’s confidently. (Charles said it quite in his sleep.)
Five minutes later the others were sleeping as soundly as Charles, and out Tonbridge way the Murdstone man and his groom and his gardener and the local Police were still looking for Rupert with anxious feelings, with lanterns that flickered yellow in the pale grey of dawn.
CHAPTER VI
HUNTED
I don’t know exactly how it happened. Perhaps Caroline was too sleepy to bump her head seven times on the pillow before she went to sleep. Or perhaps that excellent spell cannot always be relied upon to work. At any rate, none of the children woke till Jane came to draw up the blinds and let the half-past seven sunshine into their rooms.
Then Caroline woke quite thoroughly, looked at her little watch, and leaped out of bed.
‘What’s the hurry, Miss?’ asked Jane, as Caroline stood, a little unsteadily, in the middle of the room, rubbing her eyes and yawning. ‘It hasn’t but just gone the half-hour.’
‘I was dreaming,’ said Caroline; and when Jane was gone she shook Charlotte and said, ‘I say! Did anything happen last night?’
‘No,’ said Charlotte, behaving like a dormouse.
Caroline caught up her dressing-gown and crept along to Charles’s room. He was sitting up in bed, looking wildly at the wardrobe. Its doors were open, and there was nothing on the shelves (which were all in their proper places) except clean paper and little bags of lavender that smelt sweet through their white muslin veils.
‘Whatever’s happened?’ asked Caroline, fearing the worst.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Charles, rather crossly. ‘Only I had a silly dream, and when I woke up I thought it was true, and of course it wasn’t.’
‘I thought it was a dream, too, when I first woke. And Charlotte says nothing happened last night. What did you dream?’
He told her a little.
‘But I dreamed all that, too,’ said Caroline anxiously. ‘About the fern-seed and Rupert, and our playing Arab Saracens and hunting the biscuits. We couldn’t both dream the same thing. Where did you put the biscuits in your dream – what was left of them?’
‘You put them on the dressing-table.’
‘Well, they aren’t there now,’ said she.
‘Then it was a dream,’ said he; ‘and we both dreamed it.’
The two looked at each other blankly.
‘I dreamed I dressed his wounds – sponged his feet, I mean,’ she added, after a pause full of doubt. ‘The mud was thick – if it wasn’t a dream it’ll be in the basin.’
But Jane knew her duty too well for there to be anything in the basin except a bright brass can of hot water with a clean towel laid neatly across it.
‘Well, the fern-seed did something, anyhow, if it only made us both dream like that,’ said Caroline. But Charles wanted to know how she knew they hadn’t dreamed the fern-seed as well.
‘Oh, you get dressed,’ said his sister shortly, and went to her own dressing.
Charlotte, when really roused, owned that she remembered Rupert’s coming. But, if he had come, he had gone and left no trace. And it is rare for boys to do that.
The children agreed that it must have been a dream, after the eating of the fern-seed, for all of them, for some reason that I can’t understand, agreed that the fern-seed eating, at any rate, was real.
Breakfast seemed less interesting than usual, and when, after the meal, Mrs. Wilmington minced a request to them to go out for the morning, ‘the same as you were requisted to do yisterday,’ they went with slow footsteps and boots strangely weighty.
‘Let’s get out of sight of the house,’ said Charlotte heavily.
They went away beyond the shrubbery, to the wood where there were oak-trees and hazels and dog-wood and silver birches and here and there a black yew, with open bracken-feathered glades between. Here they found a little glade between a honeysuckle and a sweet chestnut and a hazel thicket, flattened the bracken, and sat down amid the sweet scent of it.
‘To hold a council about the wonderful dream we’ve all of us had,’ said Caroline slowly.
But the council, if it could be called one, was brief and languid.
‘I’d rather think first,’ said Caroline. And the others said so would they.
‘I could think better with my head on your lap, Caro,’ Charles said.
And Charlotte murmured, ‘Bunch the fern up closer under my back, Caro.’
And when the sun came over the top of the sweet chestnut it fell upon a warm and comfortable heap of children asleep.
You really can’t stay up all night, or even dream that you stay up, and then hold important councils next day just as though nothing had happened.
When the children awoke, because the sun had crept up over the sweet chestnut and was shining straight into their eyes, everything looked different and much more interesting.
‘I tell you what,’ said Charlotte. ‘Let’s do fern-seed again.’
‘It’s only on the eve of – ’ Charles began, but Charlotte interrupted.
‘The seed goes on when once you’ve planted it – chewed it, I mean. I’m certain it does. If we don’t see anything, we may dream something more.’
‘There wouldn’t be time for a really thick dream before dinner,’ Charles objected.
‘Never mind! Let’s try. If we are late for dinner we’d tell the truth and say that we fell asleep in the woods. There’s such heaps of fern here it would be simply silly not to try.’
There was something in this. Fern-seed was chewed once more. Bracken, I have heard really well-educated people say, is not a fern at all, but it seemed a fern to them. And it certainly did its best to act up to what was expected of it. For when the three removed the little green damp pads from their eyes and blinked at the green leaves, there in the thick of them was Rupert, looking at them between the hazel thicket and the honeysuckle – a real live Rupert, and no dream-nonsense about him.
‘Was it a dream last night?’ they all asked him, in an eager chorus. ‘When you came to the window?’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ he said flatly. ‘Only I was so afraid of being nabbed. So I got out early and put the shelves back and the pillows on the bed, and I took the biscuits; I thought you wouldn’t mind – ’
‘Not a bit. Rather not’ – chorus of polite hospitality.
‘And I got out of your dressing-room window and down the ivy; it was quite easy. And I cut across the grass and in under those fancy sort of fir-trees, the ones that drag their branches – you know – in the avenue. And I saw you come out, but the place was all thick with gardeners and people. So I waited till their dinner-bell rang, and then I crept out here, and I was just going to say “Hi!” when you stuck that green stuff on your eyes. It looks nasty. What did you do it for?’
They told him.
‘That’s rummy,’ he said, sitting among them quite at his ease, with one hand in his pocket. ‘Because I knew fern-seed made you invisible – it says so in Shakespeare, you know, – and I ate a bit coming along, just on the chance it might be some good – so that no one should see me, you know – and nobody did till you did. So,’ he went on more slowly, ‘perhaps I was really invisible until you put the fern-seed on your eyes.’
‘What a perfectly splendid idea!’ cried Charlotte. ‘Because that makes it all true. We were most awfully sick when we thought it had only just made us dream. I say! Do, now, do tell us how you ran away and why – and what you’re going to do, and everything.’
‘I thought,’ Rupert answered carelessly, ‘of running away to sea. But it’s a long way to the coast. I would much rather stop here with you. Couldn’t you hide me in a log-hut or something, like a runaway slave? Just till they stopped looking for me. And I could write to my father in India and ask him to let me stay here instead of with old Mug’s brother. Couldn’t you hide me till the answer came?’
‘We could try,’ said Charles, a little doubtfully.
But Charlotte said, ‘Of course we can – we will! Only, why are you so different? You seem miles older than you were when we saw you on the platform.’
‘You’d look miles older if you’d locked your master in his study and then done a bunk – and been running and hiding for half a day and a night,’ said Rupert, a little crossly.
‘But what did he do to you?’ they asked.
‘Well, you saw what he was like in the train.’
‘But you seemed so frightened of him. I wonder you dared to run away.’
‘That wasn’t funk – in the train. That was just suppressed fury,’ Rupert explained tranquilly. ‘I was wondering where I should run to if I had to run. And then I did have to run – like Billy-o! And when I saw the name on a sign-post I remembered what you’d said about “true to the death” – and I kept behind the hedges, because I wasn’t sure about the fern-seed being any good, and I got up a tree and I saw you go by, and when you came back with the parson I just followed on quietly till I got to outside your house. I hoped you’d come out, but you didn’t. And I hid under one of those fancy firs, and then, I suppose, I went to sleep, and when I woke up there was a light in a window, and I went towards it, stupid, like a bird. You know how sparrows come out of the ivy if you show a light?’
They didn’t.
‘Well, they do. And then I saw you monkeying about. I was glad, I tell you. And I tapped on the window, and – you know the rest,’ he ended, like a hero in a book.
‘But what did the Murdstone man do to you?’ Charlotte insisted on knowing.
‘He was playing up for a row from the very first,’ said Rupert; ‘and when we got to his beastly house that night’ – Rupert lowered his voice and spoke in a tone of deep disgust and bitterness – ‘he gave me bread and milk to eat. Bread and milk – with a teaspoon! And when I said I’d rather not, he said I must learn to eat what was set before me. And he talked about discipline and showed me a cane. He said he was glad there were no other little boys there – little boys! – because he could devote himself entirely to breaking me in.’
‘Beast!’ said Charlotte.
‘He thought I was a muff of a white rabbit,’ said Rupert; ‘but he knows the difference now.’
I hope you will not think base scorn of Charles and Caroline when I own that they were both feeling a little uncomfortable in the presence of this young desperado. Fern-seed is all very well, and so is the idea of running away from school, but that any master should really be so piglike as to make running away necessary – this came too near to the really terrible for them to feel quite easy about it.
‘He must be like the Spanish Inquisition,’ said Charlotte indignantly. ‘Why isn’t he put in prison now there are proper laws?’
But Charles and Caroline still felt that it was less likely that the Murdstone man should be so hateful than that Rupert should be drawing long-bows to excuse his running away. If he had been timid and miserable they would have believed him more. As it was, he was easy when he wasn’t defiant.
You know that feeling – when you are not quite sure of some one you want to be kind to – when you can’t be quite certain that if you believe what they say you won’t be being unjust to somebody else. It is a hateful feeling. There is nothing more miserable than not being able to trust some one you want to trust. You know, perhaps, what that sensation is? Rupert, at any rate, must have known it, and must have known that the others were feeling it, for he suddenly pulled his hand out from his pocket.
‘Look here, then,’ he said. ‘But – no, I don’t blame you. I know it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to be true. Yes. He did it. The first night. About the bread and milk. Came and did it after I was in bed. With a ruler.’
‘It’ was a blue bruise and a slight red graze across the back of the hand that, till now, had been hidden.
‘I believed you – without that,’ said Charlotte, with hot cheeks. ‘I know there are people like that. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’
‘We do believe you,’ said Caroline earnestly. ‘Who said we didn’t?’
And Charles said, ‘Of course we do – what nonsense! We’ll bring you a paper and pencil and an envelope, and you can write to your father. And we will conceal you.’
‘Right O!’ said Rupert. ‘Hush!’
They hushed, and, Rupert pointing through the blue gap between the oak and the honeysuckle, their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. A figure was coming up the drive – a figure in blue.
‘Go and see what it is,’ whispered Rupert, ‘but don’t let on.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Charlotte, jumping up.
‘But what’ll you say if they ask you what you’ve come in for?’ Charles asked.
‘I shall say I’ve come in to fetch you a pocket-handkerchief,’ said Charlotte witheringly, ‘because you wanted one so badly. You always do.’
She went.
‘Look here,’ said Caroline, once more thrilling to the part of the protecting Saracen maiden. ‘Suppose they’re after you? Let’s cover you up with leaves and bracken, so that your tweediness won’t show through the trees if they look – and bracken over your head. Creep through the bracken; don’t crush it more than you can help.’
Rupert was entirely hidden when Charlotte returned, very much out of breath, from an unexpected part of the wood.
‘I came round,’ she whispered, ‘to put them off the scent.’
‘Who?’ asked Rupert, under the leaves.
‘The Police,’ said Charlotte, with calm frankness and a full sense of the tremendous news she was bringing. ‘They’re inquiring after you. They’ve traced you to Hadlow.’
‘What did they say at the house?’
‘They said they hadn’t seen you, but the Police might search the grounds.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I wasn’t asked,’ said Charlotte demurely. ‘But I’ll tell you what I did say. You lie mouse-still, Rupert; it’s all right. I’m glad you’re buried, though.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said,’ Charlotte answered, glowing with the pride of a successful strategist – ‘I said we’d help them to search! Come on, the three C.’s. Round the back way! We’ll help them to search for their runaway boy – so we will! And when they’ve gone we’ll bring you something to eat – something really nice – not just biscuits. Don’t you worry. The three C.’s are yours to the death.’
