don’t belong in these parts.’
‘They make that very plain.’
‘A foreigner. In the English countryside we are all foreigners unless we have been here for ten generations.’ It occurred to her that he was in every sense a foreigner. His English was beautifully modulated, but there was something alien about him. ‘But that scene,’ he went on, ‘appeared unusually violent.’
‘It seems I’m regarded as a witch.’
His regard seemed to burn more and more deeply into her. She was sure her cheeks were flushed, perhaps smeared with dirt from trying to cope with clothes and cases dropped on the earth, and that her hair must have been blown and dragged this way and that.
Lingering softly on each word, he said: ‘It is difficult to blame them.’
* * * *
From the bumpy road Hexney gave the impression of a small fortified town rather than a mere village. The place had grown up around a makeshift castle with a bailey but no keep, overlooking bare expanses of fen plagued by Saxon outlaws and keeping the Norman defenders’ feet dry. It was still ringed by a medieval wall, punctured now by gaps through which lanes and a back road had been driven. The widest opening was straddled by a Norman gateway with two drum towers too substantial for the dumpy little hill. From a distance the church tower was a pinnacled landmark. The closer one approached, the farther out of true the tower seemed because of its bulging stair turret.
The trap clopped and grated its way up the last steep slope and in through the gateway.
Bronwen had already surveyed every inch of what lay within. The wall was merely a shell, protecting a village green that had been mutilated to make way for a cobbled marketplace. On one side The Griffin bore witness to a more prosperous past. Through its imposing frontage a beamed entrance led to a stable yard, and the depth of the main building promised more accommodation than would be needed today. Railways had robbed the posting houses of their splendour, and such new roads as came into being were many miles away, making wide circuits to the Wash and the east coast. The inn was not so much derelict as shrunken; like the whole village, huddled in on itself.
The trap stopped. The driver jumped down and stood to one side as Dr. Caspian helped Bronwen down. Then he cleared his throat.
‘You won’t be forgetting, miss...?’
Bronwen opened her reticule and settled her day’s account. Caspian nodded peremptorily at the luggage and left the man to deal with it as he escorted Bronwen into the inn.
Through an open door drifted the smell of polish and scrubbed tiles, and the clinging sourness of ale. A fire burned in the grate in the hall. Beside it was an alcove filled by a large bureau, its drawers and pigeonholes raggedly stuffed with papers. The landlord, hearing wheels rattle over the cobbles, had already stationed himself by it with one proprietorial hand on the open flap.
‘My name is Caspian. Dr. Alexander Caspian. I telegraphed for a room to be reserved.’
‘That’s right, Doctor. Quite in order, sir.’
‘And I’d be obliged if you’d provide this young lady with accommodation. She will let you know in due course how long she intends to stay.’
‘Well, now. I don’t rightly know about that, sir. We wasn’t expecting....’
‘You’re not telling me your establishment is full?’
‘No, Doctor. But after what’s happened, after what I’ve been hearing only this last thirty minutes or so, I’m none too sure how my regulars would take it....’
His excuses petered out as he caught the full hot blast of Dr. Caspian’s gaze.
Bronwen stole a glance at her protector. The bone structure of that saturnine face, the smooth darkness of the skin, gave it a positively Slav cast. Deep furrows on each side of his nose emphasized the flare of the nostrils. When he spoke, the throb of his tone and the accompanying insistence of his eyes, as ebon as a mountain tarn, seemed almost to mesmerize his audience.
Audience...? She groped for the thought, and it was gone.
‘Whatever you have heard, mine host, can assuredly be no more than contemptible tittle-tattle. In a profession such as yours, hearing what you must hear in your own bar day after day, I imagine you know how little substance there is in outpourings of that nature.’
‘It’s not me, sir. Not at all. My regulars....’
‘Your regulars will desert you only when by some stroke of fate their thirst deserts them.’
Bronwen said quietly: ‘Dr. Caspian, having so newly arrived upon the scene, I think you cannot know the full story.’
‘And do not need to at this moment. When I do hear it, I am confident I shall prefer your version to any other.’
The landlord rested his weight on the flap of the bureau, which creaked a protest. Abruptly he forced a smile. It was meant to be ingratiating, but the muscles of his face tugged downwards as if against his will.
‘Right you are, sir. Don’t see why we shonldn’t fit the young lady in.’
Caspian nodded, having taken it for granted that he would get his way. But Bronwen sensed another strange element in the landlord’s swift surrender—a kind of nudge, given to the man by some force he himself didn’t understand, something elusive which seemed about to come into focus but then retreated.
She rubbed her hand across her eyes. Perhaps she would have done better to let herself be bundled unceremoniously on to that train.
‘If you’ll come this way, miss, I’ll show you to your room and get Mrs. Fortrey to see you’ve got all you need.’
The room had a low ceiling with blackened, sagging timbers, and a latticed window overlooking the square. The carpet was worn thin along one edge, and the coverlet on the bed was badly faded; but it was clean and unpretentious, and Bronwen welcomed it as a temporary refuge. A young man brought up her cases, the large camera and her portable dark-tent, stacking them along one wall. He was followed by Mrs. Fortrey, who eyed this paraphernalia dubiously.
‘A towel for you, miss. And I’ll get the girl to fill the washstand jug when she comes in from the scullery.’
‘Thank you.’ Bronwen wanted only to be left alone, to sink into the armchair by the window and recover her scattered and mangled wits.
‘There won’t be any...well, you won’t be splashing acids and things? On our carpets, I mean, miss.’
Bronwen tersely reassured her. She had no intention of throwing acid about. But perhaps, instead of sitting down, she ought to open up her boxes and see what, if anything, had been damaged as the distraught crossing-keeper threw them out of doors and over the fence.
Mrs. Fortrey went to the door, expressing one last disquiet. ‘You’ve got no maid with you, then, miss?’
‘She took herself off. A most unreliable girl. She’ll have no reference from me, that I can promise.’
Mrs. Fortrey raised an eyebrow, evidently sympathizing with the girl rather than her deserted mistress, and
