Free The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes

‘I’m not.’
    ‘–and so it’s less simple for me than for you.’
    He was suddenly indignant. ‘Look here, that flag-waggy line of talk–’ He stopped and looked down the path. It wound into mist and its end was utterly unknown. He frowned and stretched his arms – stretched them as if there lay some puzzle in his being able to do so. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Come along.’
    They descended cautiously together.

 
     
9:   Sheila in Search of Scotland
    ‘It’s a long way,’ said Sheila. ‘Seven sad leagues, I mean. Twenty-one miles. I don’t see that to anything so far away as that, the spur and the heart of the bay can be a very accurate pointer.’
    ‘Don’t you?’ Evans was peering intently ahead. His voice, Sheila thought, was faintly mocking.
    ‘But perhaps if they were both in the distance–’
    ‘You’ve got it.’ He nodded quickly. ‘The leagues are from where you stand. The bay is some way off and the spur of the mountain is much farther. Given that and a little careful mapwork, you could arrive at a fairly small area as containing the last lonely fountain. What do you make of it?’
    ‘Not the sort of thing that spouts in a garden. Just a spring, I imagine; the highest spring to which you can trace some stream. What about “tomorrow”? “ A mile towards tomorrow the dead garden lay .”’
    Evans did not immediately reply. He had paused to listen and now he lay down and put his ear to the ground. ‘Nothing,’ he said softly, and rose. ‘Where is tomorrow, Sheila: east or west?’
    ‘East, I think. Every tomorrow comes from there.’
    ‘But the new world is in the west. There’s a sense in which tomorrow lies towards the sunset. Not that our friends would be likely to see it that way. German thought – and there’s a lot of it – tends to see the unexhausted world-views in the east.’
    Sheila cautiously negotiated a steep turn in the path. ‘What an odd time for a lecture out of Spengler, Dick Evans.’
    They laughed together – but awkwardly, as if this discovery of a common learning suggested all of the other that lay unknown to each. ‘Well,’ said Evans practically, ‘find the last lonely fountain and it’s only a short march either way.’ He laid a hand on her arm. ‘Smoke!’
    The smell – faint, acrid, sudden – halted them like a traffic light. And in the same moment the mist parted as if at the stroke of a great sword, parted in two uncertain ranks which were presently split and split again, harried and broken and swept from the field by an invisible cavalry of the air. The transformation had the speed of good theatrical machinery; Sheila and Evans had barely dropped to cover when the last wisps curled within themselves and vanished, revealing in the distance a prospect of sullen and solitary grandeur and, hard in the foreground, a solid, silent house.
    A sinister house. Instinctively Sheila crouched lower, digging her elbows into the drag and give of the heather where it twisted toughly near the root. The house was sinister not because thus encountered in the middle of a wild adventure; it was sinister in terms of those obscure memory-traces which are at work when one loves or hates at first sight. She tried to think this out. A large house with a square tower; the walls of the sort of rough-cast which in Scotland is called harl; the tower, however, rising to a system of battlements and overhanging turrets in grey stone. Her conscious mind struggled with the problem. There was often something subtly alien about houses which the wealthy put up for their recreation in this stern and barren country. And the house now before her was a bogus version of that again. It was like the man she had called Burge and later Dousterswivel – sinister because in the wrong place. For the house stood in the middle of nowhere, and with nothing but a faint track leading to it through the heather. And a house of this sort – the genuine slightly alien, English thing –