The Sherwood Ring (11 page)

Lieutenant Featherstone on the window seat behind me suddenly uttered a sort of strangled yelp, and Dick sat up in the bed so quickly that he jarred his broken collarbone and gasped.

"Yes, and it's going to hurt you even worse in a minute," snapped the doctor, untying the scarf around the injured shoulder. "Lieutenant Featherhead or whatever you call yourself, come here and hold that candle for me. Eleanor, what are you standing there for? I detest women breathing down the back of my neck. If you must make yourself useful, go away and mix up some slippery elm poultice for your afflicted friend in the hall. And tell him I said to stop scratching!"

I spent a most trying half hour with the disconsolate Colonel Van Spurter, and when I finally got him off to bed and came back downstairs, everything was over and Lieutenant Featherstone and the doctor were out by the hall fire planning a fishing trip and sharing one of the pumpkin pies Martha had made that afternoon. Fortunately, the other pumpkin pie had disappeared out at the back door with Martha and Sergeant Tarrington some time before.

"Hell do now," said the doctor briefly, jerking his head at the closed door across the hall. "Give him some of that hot broth when you settle him for the night — it may help him drop off. Looks half starved to me, anyway. Don't you ever feed him?"

Dick was lying back against the pillows with his eyes shut, very white and exhausted, his left arm in a sling and the free one hanging limply down the side of the coverlet. He seemed only half conscious, and I slipped my own arm under his head to steady him as I fed him the broth. He managed to drink it, and when I put the empty cup down on the night table by the bed, he turned his head a little to look at me.

"Eleanor?" he said drowsily.

"Yes, Dick?"

"General Washington says he's withdrawing the special forces from the County."

"Yes, Dick."

"But he says he'd like me to stay on here for a while with about ten men to get Peaceable if I can, and make sure he doesn't try to start something else."

"Yes, Dick."

"Would you mind very much if I stayed on?"

"No, Dick."

"I don't want to be a nuisance to you."

"Of course not. Hadn't you better try to go to sleep now?"

There was a moment's silence, and I thought he might be dropping off at last. Then the dark head stirred restlessly on my arm again.

"Eleanor?"

"Yes, Dick."

"Do you remember the way we used to fight when we were children?"

"Yes, Dick."

"I scrubbed your face with mud once."

"So you did."

"For telling me what I was thinking."

"Yes, Dick."

"How did you always manage to get even the words right?"

"I don't know, Dick."

There was another silence, so long that this time I thought he must really have gone to sleep.

"Eleanor?"

"Yes, Dick."

"You haven't done that to me for a long while."

"No, Dick, I haven't."

"Could you still do it?"

"I might."

"Can you tell me what I'm thinking now?"

"I suppose so."

"Even the words?"

I drew the dark head over to my shoulder, and put my lips against his hair. "I love you with all my heart," I said to him. "Now will you please go to sleep?"

Eleanor Shipley broke off, cocking her head as if she were listening to something, and then suddenly rose from the big footstool by the armchair.

"I have to go," she said, smiling at me. "That will be Petunia coming down the hall with the mail now."

"But it doesn't matter — it really doesn't matter," I entreated her. "There won't be anything for me anyway."

"How do you know?" She smiled at me again, and then with one of her quick butterfly movements, she was across the room and out through the French window into the garden just as Petunia opened the door from the hall.

"Was that you talking, Miss Peggy?" she asked. "I didn't know where you'd got to since breakfast. This here letter come for you this morning in the mail."

The letter was addressed to me with a very thick pencil in large, uncertain capitals that staggered drunkenly all over the envelope. It looked as if it had been done by a small child who was just beginning school and had not yet grasped the principles of punctuation. The sheet inside was covered with more of the same writing.

"Am stuck fast here Mrs. Dykemann's," it began abruptly:

Betsy tried to jump fence probably her idea of a joke Betsy unhurt but cracked my collarbone also concussion they wouldn't let me have a pencil till today no further trace of ancestor yet but Mrs. Dykemann has dug up family relic most curious specimen of cipher supposed to have been used by Tory guerrillas during Revolution have made copy to show you if you will just come see me you'll never guess what it is will you please come see me?

PAT

I sat there on the floor by the open drawer of the Chippendale cabinet holding the letter while all the birds in the garden outside seemed with one accord to burst suddenly into song. It was quite a long while before I finally got to my feet and went over to the big secretary to work out my answer.

"Dear Pat," I wrote slowly:

I worry in lighthouses like cannonballs Can over methods; every association soothes some other opening, So never assert such positive outrageous Guess: see secret inner balance Look lions everywhere Here.

PEGGY

PEGGY!"

"Yes, Uncle Enos," I murmured dutifully but not enthusiastically. It was a warm afternoon, and I was very comfortably stretched out in the cool library after a long horseback ride over to New Jerusalem to call on Pat at Mrs. Dykemann's. Mrs. Dykemann, all of a flutter, had given us iced tea on the side porch, with thin watercress sandwiches and a superlative currant cake which she said had come down in her family from the time Eleanor Shipley gave the recipe to her great-great-great-grandmother. "Her name was Martha," Mrs. Dykemann had remarked, "and the recipe was a present from Miss Shipley when she went away to get married, after the Revolution."

"You never told me that, Mrs. Dykemann," Pat reproached her from the hammock. His arm was still in a sling, and Mrs. Dykemann was keeping a careful eye on him.

"The fact is, I'd forgotten it till this minute," she said apologetically. "I guess it was meeting Miss Grahame put me in mind of it again. Let me see, didn't Eleanor Shipley marry one of the Grahame boys? I know there was some sort of connection. I think Martha worked for her out at the Shipley Farm before she moved to Rest-and-be-thankful. Maybe you've heard about it?"

As I could not very well tell them exactly how I had heard about it, I merely smiled and shook my head and asked for another slice of the —

"Peggy!"

"Yes, Uncle Enos? I beg your pardon. I wasn't attending."

"I've been looking for you," said Uncle Enos peevishly. "Why aren't you ever around when I want you?" That, incidentally, was a fine remark, coming from him. "Where have you been all day?"

"I went for a ride."

"Oh?" said Uncle Enos, losing interest. The question had been intended simply as a reproof. "It's this article I'm writing on eighteenth-century drinking customs for the next issue of
Antiques and Collectors,"
he explained, brushing away the whole subject of the ride with a wave of his hand. "I want you to run downstairs for me at once, and see just how many bottles those racks in the wine cellar can hold. I've mislaid my note of the exact number, and I never like going down those steep steps myself: it's bad for my rheumatism."

"Can't you send Petunia?" I asked lazily. I had ridden almost fourteen miles out and back since morning, and the wine cellar seemed a long way off.

"Petunia! I shouldn't trust Petunia to count six bottles of ginger ale; she's too flighty. You can take her with you to hold the light if you want to. It's dark down there."

The wine cellar at Rest-and-be-thankful was enormous, built in the days when sherry and claret and port and Madeira and brandy appeared every night on a gentleman's table as a matter of course. Uncle Enos himself never drank anything except a modest cup of hot cocoa at his desk before he went to bed, but he took a certain pride in keeping up all the family traditions, and so the sherry and claret and port and Madeira and brandy were still there in their long dusty racks, as if waiting forlornly for the jolly old butlers and the liveried menservants who never came any more. It was very dark indeed, and the stairs were even steeper than Uncle Enos had led me to suppose. Cobwebs touched our faces at every step, and unseen creatures ran before our feet with unpleasant scampering noises. It seemed a long time before I finished my count, and then I had to do it all over again, because Petunia was so frightened by the darkness and the rustlings that she kept putting me off by giving sudden squeaks of terror and wavering the light with her unsteady hand.

"Eighty-seven — eighty-eight —
will
you keep still, Petunia? Eighty-nine — if you drop that candle, we'll probably have to stay here all night — ninety — ninety-one. No, we are not going to run back to the stairs. I want to look around a little. It's an interesting place."

And since at the bottom of my heart I was actually feeling just as uncomfortable as she was, I took particular pains to saunter slowly and casually back to the door, looking idly about me and asking questions, as if I were mildly curious and not especially anxious to leave.

"What do you keep in there, Petunia?" I inquired, making myself pause almost at the cellar steps to point to a queer sort of door, lurking sullenly in a corner, half concealed by the angle of the stairs. It was made of iron grating, like the door of a prison cell, and was fastened on the outside, top and bottom, not only with two long rusty bolts but a clumsy large lock as well.

"I don't know, Miss Peggy!" protested Petunia, trying unobtrusively to work me on up the steps. "You won't find nothing in there. Mr. Enos says it ain't been open since the Revolution."

I went over to the door and tried to lift the upper bolt, which fell with a deep grinding moan. Petunia gave another squeak of terror, and almost dropped the candle again.

"Haunted!" she said in a sepulchral whisper. "Don't you go in there, Miss Peggy."

"Nonsense, Petunia. See! There's nothing in here but cobwebs and maybe a few — ouch!" I had stumbled and nearly fallen over a rounded object half buried in the dust on the floor. It appeared to be a jar of some sort, but had become so caked and encrusted over the years that it was almost unrecognizable. As I straightened up again I felt a touch on my shoulder, and peering around, saw that I had brushed against two ugly iron chains suspended from the wall. I could not understand why they had been hung there until I caught sight of an iron ring attached to one of them. They were shackles.

"Come on out of there, Miss Peggy, before something gets you," wailed Petunia unhelpfully, from the doorway.

"All right," I answered rather shakily. "I'm coming."

Uncle Enos was back in his study, a jeweler's glass at his eye, examining two antique wineglasses from the corner cabinet of the dining room. The first Richard Grahame was supposed to have brought them back with him from a voyage to Italy when he was a young man. They were lovely things, fragile as bubbles. One was pale sea-green flecked with gold, the other a blazing crimson that was almost scarlet. There was a plunging dolphin curved about the green stem, and a curling snake twisted around the crimson one, both blown with incredible delicacy out of the glass itself. The rest of the desk was covered with old books and papers and masses of untidy notes.

"Thank you, child," said Uncle Enos with unusual good humor, when I made my report. "I dislike going down to the cellar. What's that thing you've brought up with you? It looks like a small Colonial bean pot."

"I fell over it in that little room with the grated door and the chains on the wall."

"Oh, that one." Uncle Enos was already turning back to his desk. "Old prison," he informed me absent-mindedly, as he leafed through a pile of notes. "First Enos Grahame built it. Used it to scare off Indians. Country still pretty wild around here when he settled. Had a theory they'd never attack the place if they once got the idea it meant being caught and shut up. Never actually put anybody down there as far as I know."

"Then how do you suppose that the bean pot — "

But Uncle Enos was now thoroughly tired of rewarding me for my good behavior. He reached for a small leather¬bound book that lay among the litter of papers, and opened it rather as if it were a door through which he was trying to usher me out of the room. "Can't you see I'm busy?" he demanded testily. "Do run along and don't bother me, like a nice child."

I did not feel at all like a nice child as I retreated to the library, and flung myself passionately down in Dick's big armchair by the fireplace. I hated being a nice child. I did not want to be a nice child. I wanted to be a mean, nasty, horrible shrew and go yell in Uncle Enos's ear until he gave up and told me who had left the bean pot in the cellar.

"I overlooked it at the time," replied a matter-of- fact voice from the other side of the room. "Very slatternly of me, I confess, but my thoughts were in a state of some confusion. And of course, we had Captain Sherwood on our hands too, and as Richard said,
he
couldn't be trusted even when he was unconscious."

It was Barbara Grahame again. She had just closed the hall door behind her and was coming forward into the room. She still had on the same long crimson cloak that she wore the first time I met her; and I noticed with a slight feeling of surprise that in spite of the summer heat the hood was pulled up around her throat and knotted there over a little sprig of pine and red berries as if it were a cold day in the Christmas season.

"Tell me, Peggy," she said, with a sudden delightful smile that made her look like her brother, "did you find any beans in that pot?"