The Lantern Moon (8 page)

‘Come on,' said William, seizing his hat, ‘let's get out of here before someone comes to see why the hens are in such foul temper.'

It was a long, hard trudge all that second day on the dyke. They tried hard not to be discouraged by the steep hills but just plodded on. One rocky ridge and peak followed the other. It was wild, lonely country with hardly a sign of life but for the flocks of black-faced mountain sheep and bleating newborn lambs. By early afternoon, they had descended into a wide river valley and saw the distant roofs and steeples of a town they thought must be Hay-on-Wye but were too nervous to go near. Besides, to the south loomed more mountains, blacker and higher than any they had seen in two days' walking, and they knew that their route lay in that direction.

Their path began to rise steeply, and even when they felt they must have reached the very top, the dyke would zig-zag
around a corner and point them ever higher. Sam's breathing was bad. He had to stop more and more often to cough and splutter, bringing up gobbets of black soot-stained catarrh. Once, far off, they saw a team of drovers and a herd of cattle coming in their direction but before they had got much nearer they had suddenly veered off on the English side between two mountain peaks. Now and then, flurries of snowflakes swirled around them. It was becoming impossible to follow their course. In the half-light and with the earth all around them covered with a sprinkling of snow, William could not make out the distinctive shape of Offa's Dyke. Whole sections of it seemed to have disappeared altogether. The weather was closing in and seemed set to get much worse before it got better.

They began to make their way down the mountain side to take shelter in a small stand of trees. William, walking in front, suddenly stopped and put his hand to his ear. Somewhere nearby there was a distant knocking sound, the rhythmic sound of metal on stone like someone hammering. All three froze where they stood like wild animals who have scented danger, every nerve in their body primed to run. In the stillness, their eyes scanned the hills a few hundred yards above them. It was Sam who first spotted the solitary blackcoated figure beyond the trees. He had his back to them and seemed to be standing hammering at the rock cliff. After a while, he stopped and closely examined whatever it was he held in his hand. Abruptly the strange figure turned, raised
his arms to the heavens and began to sing at the top of his voice although the words were carried off by the wind.

‘What on earth is he doing?' asked Annie.

‘Who knows?' replied William, ‘but we'd best keep out of his way. He's a clergyman.'

They crept further into the shadow of the trees. Deep in the centre of the wood, it was very still and a good deal warmer. It was almost as good as coming indoors after the chill of the wind and snow on the higher ground.

‘I need to stop,' said Sam, suddenly dropping down to sit on the exposed roots of a tree. ‘I'm hungry and my feet are done in.'

‘Mine too,' said Annie, pushing a finger down at the back of her tough leather boots to rub her heel. ‘I've got a new blister.'

William looked at them both in exasperation. He was stronger than they were and would have preferred to press on but he knew the weather and the landscape were against them all, even if the little ones had not been so worn out. They would have to find shelter and rest up until the weather cleared.

‘Wait there,' he said. ‘Don't move.' He pressed his finger against his lips, warning them not to call out after him, and walked off down through the trees. About twenty minutes later he was back.

‘There's a ruined abbey down in the valley,' he said. ‘We'll stop there tonight.'

Sam and Annie followed him out of the little wood, and
down into the valley towards the ruins of an old monastery. Its roof had fallen in almost entirely and its nave and sidechapels were overgrown with nettles, brambles and all variety of weeds, some of them waist-high. Free-standing stone pillars that once had supported the weight of the roof soared sixty feet up to the heavy snow-laden skies. Crumbling staircases led nowhere. Sam ran wildly through the arched doorways, climbed up on the sills of graceful vaulted windows and peered into the long deserted dovecote where, centuries earlier, monks had reared pigeons for their winter pies.

Annie stood still under the gaunt grey ruins, convinced that there were eyes watching her, people ready to pounce the moment she let down her guard. There was a doorway opposite her. Its door had long since disappeared but the frame had been blocked up with piles of fallen masonry. As she watched, the twitching snout of a fox appeared at a gap at the bottom of the rubble. She stood stock still, the stillest thing for miles around. The fox nudged aside a stone, sniffed the air, came out from under cover, then, too late, spotted her. Their eyes met for a moment and then it was off, running like a demon out of the ruins and across the meadow to the hill beyond.

Annie knelt down and peered into the hole where the fox had emerged. There was another room behind and, dimly visible behind a round column, she could see a flight of stairs leading down underground.

‘William,' she called. ‘Come and see.'

With bare hands so cold they were almost too numb to feel the pain, all three cleared a hole big enough to crawl through into the room behind. The steps led down to the crypt, a low, dark basement whose walls felt damp and clammy to the touch, but the floor was dry and at least its roof provided shelter from the wind and sleet. They bedded down for their third night on the run, carrying down armfuls of bracken to lay on the floor, but it was hardly more comfortable than the night in the stable. The crypt was draughty and Annie, unable to sleep, lay petrified, listening to the patter of small feet criss-crossing the floor and the eerie screams of owls as they glided under the abandoned stone archways. She felt hungry, homeless and friendless and secretly wished they had never set out on this adventure. She could hear William tossing about and knew he was awake and thinking too. Sam's breathing was deep and even as a baby's.

‘We can't go on like this, William,' she said. ‘It's worse than being a wild animal. Perhaps we should give ourselves up.'

‘No! They have you down for a thief, Annie; don't you understand? You wouldn't be put in the workhouse. They could hang you like they were going to hang father. And Bessell would whip Sam within an inch of his life if he laid hands on him again.'

‘I told you. I'm going to sea,' said Sam quietly in the darkness. ‘I shan't ever give myself up.'

‘I'm afraid, William,' said Annie.

‘I'm just hungry,' said Sam. ‘I can't think of anything but my empty belly.'

‘Tomorrow I shall get us something to eat,' William said. He thought of the two gold sovereigns tucked away at the bottom of his coat pocket but once again let the moment pass without telling Annie and Sam his guilty secret.

‘More gravy, Mr Lewis?'

‘Thank you, Dai, I don't mind if I do.'

The Reverend Charles Lewis raised his knife and fork clear of his plate so that the innkeeper's young servant could pour more gravy over his Welsh mutton and potato pie. In the dining-room of the Bear and Ragged Staff in Hay, he could always count on a good dinner after a cold and exhausting ride down the mountains.

The Reverend Lewis was the curate of several small and impoverished parishes, not that he spent very much time attending to his duties in any of them. His passion was geology. It was the coming thing, he told anyone who would listen to him, for he could see that the crust of the earth held remarkable secrets, not just coal and gold and diamonds that could be mined, but fossils that made him question the whole of God's creation. Only that afternoon, he had come
across an exposed rockface on which he could clearly make out the fossilised remains of hundreds of little fishes, bivalves and molluscs. This cold mountainy land had once lain beneath the sea. He had spent hours making exquisitely detailed drawings of feathery fins, and delicate lacy edged scallops, set in stone more than five million years ago. Now as he ate his dinner, he kept glancing down at his notebook and wishing he had someone to talk to.

At the corner table, between the window overlooking the street and the door into the kitchen, Oliver Waring, the eldest son of the workhouse master at Ludlow, huffily observed the preferential treatment the clergyman was getting. He scraped his chair back and smartly banged the salt cellar on the table to attract the waiter's attention.

The Reverend Lewis glanced over at him and politely nodded his head. He was a very thin man with a small bald head and a long delicate neck sticking up out of its collar, so that he looked a bit like an inquisitive, short sighted and good-natured tortoise.

‘A feast worth waiting for, I assure you,' he said to the young man, waving a forkful of food at him. ‘You cannot fault Mrs Knill's mutton pie.'

‘That is why there is none left, no doubt. I am to be served the boiled beef.'

The clergyman ignored the young man's surly tone. ‘An excellent choice, the beef is always excellent. Are you staying in the inn tonight?'

Mr Waring agreed that he was and looked impatiently towards the kitchen door.

‘Then perhaps you would like to share my table and have a glass of claret with me while you are waiting,' suggested the clergyman, expansively pointing at his bottle of wine and beckoning the other man to come and sit down beside him.

‘That is very decent of you indeed,' said Mr Waring, softening up at the prospect of a drink he would not have to pay for himself. ‘I would be delighted to join you.'

The Reverend Lewis poured out two brimming glasses of claret. He coyly slipped his notebook in the other man's direction, laying it open at a faultless illustration of a section of the fossil beds he had been examining that afternoon. Mr Waring swallowed half his wine and replaced his glass on the open page, leaving a deep purple scar. The clergyman looked at his companion's chapped hands, his blunt nails which were none too clean, his fraying collar and greasy jacket. He was disappointed not to have a more educated companion to share his wine with.

‘Are you travelling through?' he asked.

Mr Waring lowered his voice and looked around the empty dining-room.

‘To tell you the truth, I have come from Ludlow, on a mission to hunt down some runaways. Bad'uns.'

‘Convicts?' The Reverend Lewis took a large pinch of snuff from his snuff-box, laid it out carefully on the side of his hand above his thumb and noisily sniffed it up each
nostril in turn. ‘What or whom are they running away from?'

‘It's two children I am after, a sister and brother by the name of Spears. The girl escaped house arrest after stealing silver plate from Lord Powis' house. And to make matters worse, her brother, trying to draw off the crowds who were after her, drew a knife upon a servant of Lucien Bonaparte's and made off with two sovereigns belonging to a hatter in the town. They must be caught before they do more mischief.' The young man sat back, pleased that he had managed to mention both a Bonaparte and a lord of the realm in one breath.

‘By God, man, they sound like an evil pair. I would not have thought children capable of such deception.'

‘Indeed they are,' Waring lowered his voice. ‘It's their blood you see. Their father is already in Botany Bay – need I say more?' He threw his head back and drained the second half of his glass. ‘Have you seen any children travelling alone?'

‘Not that pair, I am glad to say. I did see some children up in the woods this afternoon, close by the ruined priory at Llanthony, but there were three of them. I took them for the children of a sheep farmer, doubtless looking for a lost ewe. You would not credit how the hills are littered with lambing ewes this spring.'

‘Three children, you say? Not two? Could you describe them to me?'

‘Why, sir, they were children,' the Rev. Lewis pursed his
lips. He would have found it easier to describe a fossil, an orchid, even a butterfly. He did not tend to look much at children. ‘There were three,' he repeated, poking his head out further from his collar so that even the unimaginative Mr Waring found himself in mind of a tortoise, ‘two boys and a girl: an older boy, a girl half a head shorter, a smaller lad. More than that I cannot tell for I was at some distance from them and the light was fading. I only remarked on them because the two fellows were wearing top hats; an odd apparel, I thought, for country boys.'

Oliver Waring rubbed his hands together and stood up.

‘Those will be the very children I am after. I am much obliged to you, sir. The boy, William, was apprenticed to a hatter in the town.'

‘Come, come,' said Mr Lewis, reasonably, ‘that is hardly cause to abandon your supper. Doesn't every man and boy wear a tall hat? If the possession of a hat was your only evidence, I fear you would be chasing after half the population of the country.'

‘You say the little boy also wore a tall hat?'

‘He did, a hat half as big as himself so that he looked like one of those children that sweeps have to put up chimneys.'

‘Sam Price, as I live and breathe!' Oliver Waring sucked his teeth. ‘So that is the third member of the party.'

‘Another Ludlow runaway?' The Rev. Mr Lewis raised an eyebrow.

‘Aye, one whose master spent all of Tuesday in the town
stocks for drunkenness and disorderliness. The boy would have had time enough and the opportunity to make a run for it.' He looked impatiently at his watch as if he had already spent too much time talking and shouted for coffee.

‘If they are the children you are seeking,' the clergyman said sadly, closing his wine-stained notebook, ‘they will have taken shelter for the night and in the darkness you will miss all trace of them. Wait till first light. I shouldn't think they could hide for ever in the Black Mountains.'