Read Online There May Be Danger by Ianthe Jerrold - Free Book Online

her map.
    However, there was a man engaged in slashing at the hedge with a long-handled sharp-edged tool not unlike a Cromwellian halberd, and since Kate always preferred making verbal inquiries to reading a map, she pedalled on a few yards and stopped beside him.
    â€œPlease can you tell me if Llanhalo Abbey is far from here?”
    The man, who was a small, tubby, elderly man with a prevailing sandy-greyness of hue about him, paused in his onslaught on the brambles long enough to shake his head. In so doing he shook crooked his steel-rimmed spectacles, and had to waste another valuable second in adjusting them. While he did this with one hand, he made a motion with his pruning hook straight down the track to the ruined church on the bank below.
    â€œDown there?” asked Kate.
    The man nodded. Kate was surprised at his taciturnity, and as is usual with humanity when it comes across true economy in words, she proceeded to redress the balance by wasting a good many words herself.
    â€œMr. Atkin’s Farm, I mean—Llanhalo Abbey Farm?”
    The man nodded silently, and laying hold of a great snake of blackberry with his thickly gloved hand began to haul it relentlessly on to the road, which was already littered with thorny clippings enough to puncture a fleet of bicycles.
    â€œPerhaps you work there,” suggested Kate, “and if so, perhaps you can tell me whereabouts I’ll be likely to find Miss Hughes?”
    Jerking his long whip of bramble free, the man paused as if he were considering whether it were possible to answer this question without articulating. He looked at Kate thoughtfully from the sharp little grey eyes behind his still somewhat crooked spectacles. He had shaved more recently than Gwyn Lupton, but not very recently, and this chiefly accounted, Kate saw, for the greyish bloom that overlay the uniform brown of his roundish, heavy-chinned face. He transferred his pruning-hook from his right hand to his left, and lifted his ancient tweed hat with his right to scratch his head, as if he might thus become inspired with a method of answering Kate’s question in silence. It was no use. He had to open the tight-closed trap of his lips and let some precious words out.
    â€œIn byre yonder.”
    â€œStraight down this track?”
    â€œAye.”
    â€œIs Mr. Atkins about anywhere?” pursued Kate, for she did not intend to miss a chance of seeing this celebrity while she was on the spot.
    â€œAye.”
    â€œI suppose that’s the farmhouse, that square stone place beyond the chapel?”
    â€œAye.”
    â€œThank you so much. It’s a grand afternoon, isn’t it?”
    â€œAye.”
    â€œI suppose you know that half the bicycles that come along here will get their tyres punctured on these bits and pieces of yours?” said Kate, with amiable remonstrance, as she wheeled her machine aside on to the farm road.
    â€œAye.”
    A little piqued, Kate said: 
    â€œIt’s all the same to you if they do, I suppose, eh?”
    â€œAye.”
    â€œOh, do say something different!” cried Kate, half amused, half exasperated, and waited a second to see if he would. But he became a sphinx again, and she cycled cautiously down the rutty lane, smiling to herself, to look for the byre which contained Aminta.
    She felt extraordinarily pleased to be going to see old Aminta again. Before the war, Aminta had worked as secretary to a firm of photographers, an occupation which she had arranged to desert for the Women’s Land Army almost before the Women’s Land Army had come into being. Aminta was never happier than when in the company of dumb animals of one kind or another, the larger the better. And now, Kate imagined, nothing would ever lure her from her work among the cows—or nothing but the chance of a job in a circus, with elephants, or in a Zoo, with camels.
    The chapel Kate was approaching was a curious neglected building, and Kate