Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

The dory scraped across the shallows; Mr. Hawkins, without a word, jumped into the frigid sea and hauled the boat up onto the shingle. He assisted me carefully to land, and stood waiting for direction. I cast about me; to all appearances, the place was barren of life. A grouping of boulders — cast by Nature, or dragged into position by monks five centuries dead — screened the tunnel mouth from the notice of the inquisitive. I made first for these, peering behind them to ascertain that no small vessel lay upended there. Then I paced in the opposite direction, peering diligently through the waving grasses at the shingle’s edge, until the strand itself petered out to nothing. I turned back, to find Jeb Hawkins calmly lighting his pipe.

“Where’s his lordship this morning?” he asked.

“He has posted to Town.”

Mr. Hawkins glanced speculatively at the sky.

“Might you tell me what you’re looking for?”

“Lord Harold’s man, Orlan — Mr. Smythe — has disappeared. He and his dory were last seen in this place, and I thought that if I could find the boat—”

“Boats drift with the tide,” the Bosun’s Mate observed. “A boat might fetch up anywhere.”

“That is true,” I replied dispiritedly. In this chill and empty place, the idea of searching at random for the valet seemed ludicrous in the extreme.

Mr. Hawkins gestured with his pipe stem. “Could he’uv gone up into that there passage?”

A chill flickered at my spine. Naturally he could have gone into the passage; it was his express purpose in coming here, to spy upon the party we suspected of treason. But Mr. Hawkins knew nothing of that, and I did not like to adventure into the passage alone.

“Will you help me to open the hatch?” I asked faintly.

He knocked the bowl of his pipe against his boot, and let the ashes drift onto the sand.

“Gather yer skirts,” he told me, “and I’ll give ye a hoist.”

Mr. Hawkins, being a wise seaman, kept a bundle of tapers in his boat. Though the daylight was now broad, the tunnel was darkest pitch; and so he fetched me several of the paper twists, and lit the first with his own flint.

Then he lit another, and said: “Shall you lead the way, miss? Or shall I?”

I was too relieved at the notion of company, for the demurrals of pride. “If you do not dislike it—”

He merely grunted, and stepped forward with bent back. I gratefully followed.

The tunnel floor was much scuffed, as though an army had passed through; and I found this surprising, for Orlando was a stealthy creature and a careful one. Mr. Hawkins, never having seen the interior of the passage, could not be expected to comment. The way steadily ascended, and darkness filled in the gap behind; it was as though the tunnel mouth was closed to us, and no return should ever be possible. But I said nothing of this desperate fancy to my companion. He should have hawked and spit his disdain at my feet.

“There’s a branching in the way just ahead,” he muttered. Even Mr. Hawkins had enough respect for the dead spaces of the earth to speak soft and low.

“Left, or right?”

He swung round as he said this, and the light of his taper moved in a golden arc beyond his head. In that instant, I saw — I knew not what: a figure tall, motionless, watchful as Death. The tunnel wall was at its back, and pressed against it thus, the spectre might have avoided detection. But now I had espied it: and before I could so much as cry aloud, the figure hurtled past the Bosun’s Mate, its right hand making a vicious strike for the taper. The fragile thing spun out of Mr. Hawkins’s grasp and sputtered on the tunnel floor. In the swift current of air occasioned by the figure’s flight, my own flame flickered and went out. I felt his movement — the breeze of hurried passage — and heard the panic tearing at his lungs. As the figure darted past me, I clutched at the air — and closed on the stuff of a cloak.

Brutal hands gripped my shoulders and thrust me hard against the tunnel wall. I cried out as my head struck the stones; light exploded before my eyes, and I slid downwards to rest on the tunnel floor.

“Oi!” Jeb Hawkins shouted in rage towards the passage mouth. “Oi! You there!” He broke into pursuit, his stumbling gait that of an old, bent man in a darkened place; but in a moment, I was alone. Gingerly, I felt with my fingers at the back of my skull. No blood — no broken skin — just a slight lump, to pair with the one I had earned on horseback. I pushed myself upright, and found that a slight dizziness passed quickly away. With care, I might make my way towards the tunnel mouth.

But what should await me there? The menacing figure, and brave Mr. Hawkins insensible at his feet?

Ought I to turn, instead, to the trapdoor set into the Abbey floor, and the freedom of the ruins above?

But what if the cloaked man — mon seigneur — had just quitted the place, and his conspirators remained?

Stiff with uncertainty, I could move neither forward nor back. And then a voice shouted from the passage mouth. “Miss Austen?”

“Jeb!” I cried. “Are you unharmed?”

“Naught to do with me — but the skiff’s gone! The damned blackguard scarpered in ’er!”

The outrage in Mr. Hawkins’s words must have been comical, had our situation been less unhappy. I descended to the shingle. “Do you mean to say that your boat has been stolen?”

The Bosun’s Mate did not reply; he was employed in cursing with a fluency that attested to fortyodd years in His Majesty’s service. My ears burned with every ejaculation, though I am sure my brother Frank should have heard them unmoved.

I waited until his fury was spent, and then said briskly, “We must walk along the shingle until we reach the landing area below Netley Lodge, and take the path that leads past the ruins. It is three miles from the Abbey to Southampton — a trifling walk. I have often achieved it.”

The old seaman stared. “Do you not know that I’ve the gout in my leg? I can never walk all of three mile!”

It was true that our dealings with one another were generally afloat; I had formed no notion of his general spryness.

“Shall I go in search of aid?” I enquired. “Your friend, perhaps — Ned Bastable — who lives in

Hound? Might he possess a cart... or... a conveyance of some kind?”

By way of answer, Mr. Hawkins lifted his bosun’s whistle from the chain where it rested around his neck, and commenced to blow.

“There’s vessels enough on the Water,” he gasped between exertions, “to carry us safe home. It’s not marooning what troubles me, miss! It’s the loss of my boat! Mark my words — someone’ll have to pay!”

He said this with such awful purpose that I understood, of a sudden, that my meagre purse should presently be petitioned to supply the want of Jeb Hawkins’s livelihood; and I wished all the more devoutly that I had heeded Lord Harold’s advice, and left Orlando to fend for himself. Perhaps the valet had simply tired of labouring in his lordship’s service, and had seized his chance to take swift passage elsewhere in the world—

“Ahoy there!” Jeb Hawkins cried, and waved his arms frantically. The whistle dropped to his chest.

“It’s the Portsmouth hoy, miss — travels each day up the Water, bearing folk from one town to the other. Ahoy there! On the water! We’ve need of aid!”

As I watched, the smart sailing vessel far out in the middle of the Solent seemed to hesitate, and then — as I joined Mr. Hawkins in waving my arms — slowly came about and turned towards us.

“The draught’s too great to permit it to come in close,” Mr. Hawkins told me regretfully. “You’ll have to kilt yer skirts, miss, about yer knees.”