A Feast Unknown

While I talked, the sun set behind the Atlantic to the left. England became a dark bulk with a few scattered lights, which were actually large towns. Then I swung out towards the middle of the sea, still only about ten feet above the moon-sparkling waters.

I thought of my ancestors and their country. When I first came there as lord of Grandrith Castle,

Catstarn Hall, and Cloamby Village, I had not known my family history. Or even the history of England.

Later, after much reading and travel, I understood much more. Yet I have never been entirely at ease on my estate or in England. I feel as if I were born of African earth and have no ancestors. The past was dissolved when I gave voice to my first cry on the seashore by the equatorial jungle.

32

My agent, stationed in the forest near the castle, responded to my call. Trish listened in.

I said, “Any news of Lady Grandrith yet?”

“Nothing, sir,” the man said. “All we still know is that she left London to come here. She should have been here hours ago and may be. There were lights in the castle for about an hour, sir, but I couldn’t get close enough to see who was using them. The drapes in the hall windows are closed tight, sir. I can’t see any activity there, but I get the impression that there’s much going on.”

“Have you heard from the other man?” I said, referring to his companion.

“No, sir. The situation is the same as when I last reported. He went to investigate the castle and the hall; he said he might knock on the door and pretend to be a lost traveler; I never heard from him again.”

“Have you found out anything about the two strangers who were buying such large supplies of food and liquor in Greystoke?” I said.

“Nothing, sir. They left before I heard about them so I couldn’t put a tail on them. If Noli’s men have moved in, as we suspect, then they may have been his.”

“Ask him if he’s heard anything from Doc or anything about him,” Trish said eagerly.

The agent said he had heard nothing, but then he’d been out of contact with the London men for about 6 hours.

“Have you been able to look in the garage or the barns?” I said.

“No, sir. They’re both still tightly locked and the windows are curtained. If there are an unusual number of cars in there, I can’t find out without trying to break in. And as you said ...”

“That’s right,” I said. “I don’t want to let them know that anybody’s on to their game.”

His voice had not sounded quite right, but there was much static, due to the storm approaching from

Ireland. I said, “We’ll be landing on the strip in approximately one hour. You be ready to cover us, because if Noli is in the hall or the castle, he and his men will come swarming out. We’ll run into the woods and then plan our strategy from there. Signals as arranged. Four blinks by me, six by you.”

“Right, sir. Four and six.”

I shut off the transceiver. The man had not quite sounded like my agent, but perhaps it was he, and he was taking this opportunity to warn me. The signals had been three blinks by me and five by him.

I told Trish what I suspected. She said, “If they’ve got him alive, they’ll get everything out of him. And they’ll kill him when they realize he’s tricked them.”

“They’ll kill him, anyway. And he’s probably already dead. They must have gotten everything from him. That voice was close to the real agent’s, but not quite close enough.”

I did not, of course, tell her that the man holding Catstarn Hall and Castle Grandrith might be

Caliban, although I doubted it. Noli had a head start on him. If Noli was there, then Caliban might be in as much danger as I. Noli would try to double-cross Caliban, and Caliban must know that. Perhaps Caliban was amused by this, and stimulated, since it made the odds greater against him.

I turned the radio back on. We were approaching a black wall, the storm from Ireland. The weather reports said that its front was now over Keswick and moving east. The rain was heavy with winds at 40

miles per hour. The plane bored into the blackness and began bucking. At the same time, I pulled her up, because I did not want to run into a vessel. At three thousand feet, I was picked up by the coastal radar, and the challenges started coming. I gave them a false identity, said I was an Irish flier blown off course.

The identity lasted about six minutes. On receiving information from Ireland, the station challenged me again and told me to land or I would be shot down. I did not know how they were going to manage that, since I doubted they would send a missile against a small plane and no military plane would find me while the storm was progressing.

However, I pretended engine trouble, made a last-minute appeal, and dived the plane. The lights enabled me to pick up the sea surface just in time; even so we must have been licked on the underfuselage by the waves. Surface vessels or no, I clung to a twenty foot ceiling and did not pull her up until I saw lights. This should be Whitehaven, and from here on I had to maintain at least a five-thousand-foot ceiling.

If the weather had been clear, I would have hedgehopped in. It was not, so there was nothing else to do. I could not help Clio—if she was not past helping already—if we smashed up against the Skiddaw or some other mountain.

“There’s a small airport at Penrith,” I said. “That’s about 5 miles from Grandrith. The port doesn’t have radar instruments to guide us in; we’ll have to make a visual landing.”

“And there’s no visibility except when the lightning flashes,” she said, peering through the rain at a massive upthrust revealed by a streak of whiteness. Thunder bellowed; the plane rocked.

She said, “Penrith. Is that name related to Grandrith?”

“No. Penrith is Celtic, one of the few Welsh place names in the Lake District. Grandrith, if you’ll remember, comes from the Norse Randgrith.”

She was trying to make small talk to cover up her nervousness. I went along with her to help her.

“Once we land,” I said, “we have to move fast. There’s no use in trying to convince the port authorities of a false identity. We’ll just get out and into the closest available car and leave. If somebody recognizes me, I’ll have to explain later.”

She checked our automatics, my .38, her .32, the breakdown .22, six hand grenades, and a small crossbow. I wore a knife in a sheath back of my neck. She was similarly armed. In addition, she had a twobarreled derringer.

She put screwdrivers, pliers, and a jumper cable in the pocket of my raincoat.

“We could parachute down,” Trish said. “The country is unpopulated back of your estate, you said.

There’d be no danger of the plane crashing into a house.”

“There are too many trees around there,” I said. “Moreover, Noli will be looking for us to do just that, you can bet. And if I were able to make a landing on the road near Cloamby in this rain, you can bet that

Noli would know it before we landed. He’s listening in to the radar reports on us. He must have shortwave equipment. He’d have a car down on the road with his thugs and be ready for us.”

“Then he’ll have men waiting at Penrith for us.”

“He won’t know I’m going there until the last minute, if I have anything to say about it. He’ll be able to send men then, but they’ll be too late then, I hope.”

“He may have figured out that that’s the only place you can land,” she said. “In which case, his men will be on the way now.”

“That’s possible. We’ll see.”

The radio reported that visibility was still zero but that the winds had dropped to 20 miles per hour.

The airports in the entire county were closed except for emergency landings.

The military might be thinking like Noli and also have men waiting at Penrith. I did not tell Trish that; she was nervous enough.