The House on the Strand

  I took both out of the case, and saw that there was a long, buff-colored envelope immediately beneath them, and typed upon it the words:

  "Otto Bodrugan. Writ and Inquisition, 10 October Edward III (1331)"

  The student must have been at work again. I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the envelope. It was a copy of a document giving the names of the various manors and lands owned by Otto Bodrugan at the time of his death. The manor of Bodrugan was among them, but he apparently paid rent for it to Joanna, "Relict of Henry de Campo Arnulphi" (which must be Champernoune). A further paragraph followed: "Henry his son, aged twenty-one years and more, was his next heir, who died three weeks after his said father, so that he had no seisin in the inheritance aforesaid, nor did he know of his father's death. William, son of the aforesaid Otto, and brother of the said Henry, aged twenty years on the morrow of the feast of St. Giles last, is his next heir."

  It was a strange sensation, sitting there on the bed, reading something I already knew. The monks had done their best, or perhaps their worst, for young Henry at the Priory, and he had never been told of his father's death.

  There was another long list of properties which Henry, if he had lived, would have inherited from Otto, and then a further note, taken from the Calendar of Fine Rolls.

  "10 October. Westminster. 1331. Order to the escheator on this side Trent to take into the King's hand the lands late of Otto de Bodrugan, deceased, tenant-in-chief."

  The student had scribbled PTO at the bottom of the page, and turning over I found a half-page attached, also taken from the Calendar of Fine Rolls, and dated 14 November 1331, from Windsor.

  "Order to the escheator on this side Trent to take into the King's hand the lands late of John de Carminowe, deceased, tenant-in-chief. The like to the same touching the lands of Henry son of Otto de Bodrugan."

  So Sir John must have caught the infection he had so greatly feared and died immediately, and Joanna had lost her choice of a second husband...

  I forgot the present, forgot the mix-up at the station, and sat there on the spare-room bed thinking about the other world, wondering what advice, if any, Roger had given to the disappointed Joanna Champernoune. The two Bodrugan deaths, with the successor her nephew and a minor, must have given her every hope of greater power over the Bodrugan lands, and just as the power was within her grasp she found the tables turned, and the Keeper of Restormel and Tremerton Castles gone as well. I felt almost sorry for her. And for Sir John, who, luckless fellow, had held his handkerchief to his mouth in vain. Who would take his place as keeper of castles, woods and parks in the county of Cornwall? Not his brother Oliver, I hoped, the bloody murderer...

  "What are you going to do?" Vita called up the stairs.

  Do? What could I do? Oliver had ridden off with his gang of thugs leaving Roger to take care of Isolda. I still did not know what had happened to Isolda...

  I heard Vita coming up the stairs, and instinctively I put the papers back in the envelope and stuffed them in my pocket, closing the suitcase. I must switch myself back to the present. This was not the moment to become confused.

  "I was just getting out Magnus's pajamas and dressing-gown," I said as she came into the room. "He'll be pretty well fagged out when he does turn up."

  "Why not run his bath for him as well?" she countered. "And lay a tray for early morning tea? I didn't notice you being so attentive a host to Bill and Diana."

  I ignored the sarcasm and went along to my dressing-room. The murmur of the television came from the library below. "Time those boys went to bed," I said, without conviction.

  "I promised them they could wait up for the Professor," said Vita, "but really I think you're right, there's not much point in their hanging about any longer. Don't you think you ought to drive down to Par? He might be in some pub getting blind to the world."

  "Magnus isn't the type to hang about in pubs."

  "Well then, he must have come across old friends and has been taking dinner off them instead of us."

  "Very unlikely. And damn rude not to telephone," I replied. We went together down the stairs and into the hall, and I added, "Anyway, he doesn't have any local friends, to my knowledge."

  Vita suddenly gave a little cry. "I know," she said, "he's met the Carminowes! They haven't got a telephone. That's what's happened. He must have run into them at Par, and they took him back to dine with them."

  I stared at her, my brain confused. What on earth was she talking about? And suddenly I knew. Suddenly the message from the guard came clear and full of meaning. "Owner of suitcase, Professor Lane, gave message to guard that he had changed his mind and decided to get out at Par, and walk from there. Told guard Mr. Young would understand."

  Magnus had taken the local connection from Bodmin Road to Par because it would travel more slowly through the Treesmill valley than the express. He knew, from my description, that he had only to look left and up, after passing above Treesmill Farm, to see the Gratten. Then, because it was still light when the train arrived at Par, he would have walked up the Tywardreath road and cut across the fields to inspect the site.

  "God!" I exclaimed. "What a fool I've been! It never entered my head. Of course that's it."

  "You mean he's gone to see the Carminowes?" said Vita. I suppose I was tired. I suppose I was excited. I suppose I was relieved. All three in one, and I could not bother to explain or think up some different lie. The most natural thing to say just tripped off my tongue.

  "Yes," I replied. I ran down the steps and across the front path to the car.

  "But you don't know where they live!" called Vita.

  I did not answer. I waved my hand and leaped into the car, and in a moment I was tearing up the drive and out on to the road.

  It was quite dark, with only a waning moon that did not help, but I took the shortcut up the lane skirting the village, meeting no one on the way, and parked in the lay-by near the house called Hill Crest. If Magnus found the car before I found him he would recognize it, and wait for me. It was hard going across the field to the Gratten, stumbling about among the banks and mounds, and I shouted for him, once I was well out of earshot of the house, but he did not answer. I covered the site thoroughly, but there was no sign of him. I walked along the lower path to the valley itself, and down to Treesmill Farm, but he was not there either. Then I walked up the road to the top of the hill and back to the car. It was as I had left it, empty. I drove down into the village, and walked round the churchyard. The hands on the clock-face said after half-past eleven; I had been searching for Magnus for over an hour.

  I went to the telephone-box near the hairdresser and dialed Kilmarth. Vita answered immediately. "Any luck?" she asked.

  My heart sank. I had hoped he might have arrived home. "No, not a trace of him."

  "What about the Carminowes? Did you find their house?"

  "No," I said, "no, I think we were on the wrong track there. It was stupid of me. Actually, I've no idea where they live."

  "Well, someone must know," she said. "Why don't you ask the police?"

  "No," I said, "it wouldn't do any good. Look, I'll drive down the village to the station and then come slowly home. There's nothing more I can do."

  But Par station appeared to be closed for the night, and though I circled Par itself twice there was no sign of Magnus.

  I began to pray, "Oh, God let me see him walking up Polmear hill!" I knew just how he would look, my headlights picking him up at the side of the road, the tall angular figure with a loping stride, and I would hoot loudly and he would stop, and I would say to him, "What the bloody hell..."

  He was not there, though. There was no one there. I turned down the Kilmarth drive, and walked slowly up the steps into the house. Vita was waiting for me by the porch. She looked distressed.

  "Something must have happened to him," she said. "I do think you ought to ring up the police."

  I brushed past her and went upstairs. "I'll unpack his things," I said. "He may have lef
t a note. I don't know..."

  I took his clothes out of the suitcase and hung them in the wardrobe, and put his shaving tackle in the bathroom. I kept telling myself that any moment I should hear a car coming down the drive, a taxi, and Magnus would jump out of it, laughing, and Vita would call up the stairs to me, "He's here, he's arrived!"

  There was no note. I felt in all the pockets. Nothing. Then I turned to the dressing-gown, which I had unpacked already. My hand closed upon something round in the left-hand pocket, and I drew it out. It was a small bottle, which I recognized at once. It bore a label: B. It was the bottle I had posted to him the week before, and it was empty.

  16

  I went along to my dressing-room, found my own suitcase, put the bottle in one of the pockets and the documents about Bodrugan as well, locked the case and joined Vita downstairs.

  "Did you find anything?" she asked.

  I shook my head. She followed me into the music-room and I poured myself a whiskey. "You'd better have one too," I said.

  "I don't feel like it," she answered. She sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. "I'm quite certain we ought to ring the police."

  "Because Magnus has taken it into his head to roam the countryside?" I queried. "Nonsense, he knows what he's doing. He must know every inch of the district for miles around."

  The clock in the dining-room struck midnight. If Magnus had left the train at Par, he had been walking for four and a half hours...

  "You go to bed," I said. "You look exhausted. I'll stay down here in case he comes. I can lie on the sofa if I feel like it. Then as soon as it's light, if I'm awake and he hasn't arrived, I'll go out in the car and have another search."

  It was true, she looked all-in: I was not trying to get rid of her. She stood up uncertainly, and wandered towards the door. Then she looked back at me, over her shoulder.

  "There's something odd about all this," she said slowly. "I have a feeling you know more than you say." I had no ready answer. "Well, try and get some sleep," she went on. "Something tells me you're going to need it."

  I heard the bedroom door shut, and stretched myself out on the sofa with my hands behind my head, trying to think. There were only two solutions. The first, as I had originally imagined, that Magnus had decided to find the Gratten site, and had either lost his way or ricked his ankle, and so decided to wait where he was until daylight; or the second... and the second was the one I feared. Magnus had gone on a trip. He had poured the contents of bottle B into some container that could be carried in a coat pocket, and had got out of the train at Par and walked--to the Gratten, to the church, anywhere in the district, and then swallowed the drug and waited... waited for it to take effect. Once this had happened he would not be responsible for his actions. If time took him into that other world that we both knew he would not necessarily witness what I had witnessed, the scene could be different, the point in time earlier or later, but the penalty for touching anyone, as he well knew, would be the same for both of us; nausea, vertigo, confusion. Magnus had not, as far as I knew, touched the drug for at least three or four months; he, the inventor, was not prepared and might not have the stamina to endure it as I, the guinea-pig, could.

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture him walking away from the station, up the hill and across the fields to the Gratten, and swallowing the drug, laughing to himself. "I've stolen a march on Dick!" Then the leap backwards in time, and the estuary below, the walls of the house about him, Roger close at hand--leading him where? To what strange encounter on the hills or beside the strand? To what month, what year? Would he see, as I had seen, the faltering ship, dismasted, enter the creek, the horsemen riding on the opposite hill? Would he see Bodrugan drowned? If so, his actions might not be the same as mine. Knowing his taste for the dramatic, he might have flung himself headlong into the river and struck out for that opposite shore--and there would have been no river, only the smothered valley, the scrub, the marsh, the trees. Magnus could be lying there now, in that impassable wasteland, shouting for help, and none to hear. There was nothing I could do. Nothing until daylight came.

  I did sleep, after a fashion, waking with a jerk from some distorted dream that instantly faded, to fall off again once more. A deeper sleep must have come with the first light, for I remember looking at my watch at half-past five and telling myself another twenty minutes would not hurt, and then when I opened my eyes again it was ten past seven.

  I made a cup of tea, then crept upstairs and washed and shaved. Vita was already awake. She did not even question me. She knew Magnus had not come.

  "I'm going to Par station," I said. "They'll know if he handed the ticket in. Then I'll try and trace his movements from there. Somebody must have seen him."

  "It would be so much simpler," she insisted, "if you went direct to the police."

  "I will go to them," I said, "if no one can tell me anything at the station."

  "If you don't," she called as I left the room, "I shall ring them up myself."

  I drew a blank at the station: a chap wandering about told me the booking office would not be open for half an hour. I filled in the time by walking up to the bridge that spanned the railway line and gave a view of the valley. Once this would have been wide estuary; Bodrugan's ship, dismasted by the gale, would have drifted past this very spot, driven by wind and tide, seeking shelter up the creek and finding death instead. Today, part reedy marsh, part scrub, it was still easy to trace the original course of the river from the winding valley itself. A man, sick or in some way hurt, might lie beneath those stubby, close-packed trees for days, for weeks, and no one know of it. Even the marsh ground on which the station stood, the wide, flat expanse between Par and neighboring St. Blazey, was still wasteland to a large extent; even here there were large tracks where no one wandered. Except, perhaps, a traveler in time whose mind trod a vessel's deck upon blue water while his body stumbled among scrub and ditch.

  I returned to the station and found the booking office open, and for the first time proof that Magnus had arrived. The clerk had not only taken his ticket but remembered the holder of it. Tall, he said, going gray, hatless, wearing a sports jacket and dark trousers, with a pleasant smile, and carrying a stick. No, the clerk had not seen which way he had gone after leaving the station.

  I got into the car and drove halfway up the hill, to where a footpath went off to the left. Magnus could have taken it, and I did the same, striking across country to the Gratten. It was warm and misty, foretelling a hot day. The farmer the land belonged to must have opened a gate somewhere since the preceding night, because cows wandered on the hillside now, among the gorsebushes and the mounds, following me in curiosity to the entrance of the overgrown quarry itself.

  I searched it thoroughly, every corner, every dip, but found nothing. I looked down into the valley below, across the intervening railway line, to the sweeping mass of trees and bushes covering the one-time river bed. They might have been woven tapestry, colored with silken threads in every shade of golden green. If Magnus was there, nothing would ever find him but tracker dogs.

  Then I knew I must do what I should have done earlier, what I should have done last night. I must go to the police. I must go, as any other man would go whose guest had failed to arrive over twelve hours earlier, though his ticket had been given up at the station at the correct time.

  I remembered there was a police station at Tywardreath, and I wound my weary way back again and drove straight there. I felt inadequate, guilty, like all persons who have been lucky enough never to have found themselves involved with the police, beyond minor traffic offenses, and my story, as I told it to the sergeant, sounded shamefaced, somehow, irresponsible.

  "I want to report a missing person," I said, and instantly had a vision of a poster with the haunted face of a criminal staring from it, and the words "WANTED" in enormous letters underneath. I pulled myself together, and told the exact story of all that had happened the preceding day.

  The sergeant was helpful
, sympathetic and extremely kind. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Professor Lane personally," he said, "but we know all about him, of course. You must have had a very anxious night."

  "Yes," I said.

  "There's been no report to us of any accident," he said, "but of course I will check with Liskeard and St. Austell. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Young?"

  I accepted the offer gratefully, while he got busy on the telephone. I had the sick feeling at the pit of my stomach that people get waiting outside a hospital ward during an emergency operation performed on someone they love. It was out of my hands. There was nothing I could do. Presently he came back.

  "There's been no report of any accident," he said. "They're alerting the patrol cars in the district, and the other police stations. I think the best thing you can do, sir, is to go back to Kilmarth and wait there until you hear from us. It could be that Professor Lane twisted an ankle and spent the night at one of the farms, but they're mostly on the telephone these days, and it's strange he shouldn't have rung you up to let you know. No previous history of loss of memory, I suppose?"

  "No," I told him, "never. And he was very fit when I dined with him in London a few weeks ago."

  "Well, don't worry too much, sir," he said, "there'll probably be some simple explanation at the end of it."

  I went back to the car, the sick feeling with me still, and drove down to the church. I could hear the organ--they must have been having choir practice. I went and sat on one of the graves near the wall above the orchard--Priory orchard once. Where I sat would have been the monks' dormitory, looking south over the Priory creek; and close at hand was the guest-chamber where young Henry Bodrugan had died of smallpox. In that other time he could be dying still. In that other time the monk, Jean, could be mixing some hell-brew that finished off the business, then sending word to Roger that he must carry the news to the mother and the aunt, Joanna Champernoune. Ill-tidings were all about me, in the other world and in my own. Roger, the monk, young Bodrugan, Magnus; we were all links in an interwoven chain, bound one to the other through the centuries.