The House of Arden, E. Nesbit [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

how he knew. “They all say so,” was all that could be got out of him, and “They told me to come tell you, my lord, and what’s us to do?”

We live so safely now; we have nothing to be afraid of. When we have wars they are not in our own country. The police look after burglars, and even thunder is attended to by lightning-rods. It is not easy for us to understand the frantic terror of those times, when, from day to day, every man, woman, and child trembled in its shoes for fear lest “the French should come”⁠—the French, led by Boney. Boney, to us, is Napoleon Bonaparte, a little person in a cocked hat out of the history books. To those who lived in England when he was a man alive, he was “the Terror that walked by night,” making children afraid to go to bed, and causing strong men to sleep in their boots, with sword and pistol by the bed-head, within easy reach of the newly awakened hand.

Edred and Elfrida began to understand a little, when they saw how the foretelling of the wise woman, strengthened by the rumours that began to run about like rats in every house in the village, stirred the people to the wildest activity.

Lord Arden was so busy giving orders, and my lady so busy talking his orders over with the maidservants, that the children were left free to use their eyes and ears. And they went down into the village and saw many strange things. They saw men at the grindstone sharpening old swords, and others who had no swords putting a fine edge on billhooks, hatchets, scythes, and kitchen choppers. They saw other men boarding up their windows and digging holes in their gardens and burying their money and their teaspoons in the holes. No one knew how the rumour had begun, but everyone believed it now.

They went in and out of the cottages as they chose. Everyone seemed to know them and to be pleased, in an absent sort of way, to see them, but nobody had time to talk to them, so they soon lost the fear they had had at first of being found out to be not the people they were being taken for. They found the women busy brushing and mending old scarlet coats and tight white trousers, and all along the dip of the cliff men were posted, with spyglasses, looking out to sea. Other men toiled up the slope with great bundles of brown brushwood and dried furze on their backs, and those bundles were piled high, ready to be lighted the moment it should be certain that the French were coming.

Elfrida wished more than ever that she knew more about the later chapters of the history book. Did Boney land in England on the 17th of June, 1807? She could not remember. There was something, she knew, in the book about a French invasion, but she could not remember what it was an invasion of, nor when it took place. So she and Edred knew as little as anyone else what really was going to happen. The Mouldiwarp, in the hurried interview she had had with it before dinner, had promised to come if she called it, “With poetry, of course,” it added, as it curled up in the corner of the drawer, and this comforted her a good deal when, going up to get her bonnet, she found the bottom drawer empty. So, though she was as interested as Edred in all that was going on, it was only with half her mind. The other half was busy trying to make up a piece of poetry, so that any emergency which might suddenly arise would not find her powerless because poetry-less.

So for once Edred was more observant than she, and when he noticed that the men built a bonfire not at all on the spot which Lord Arden had pointed out as most convenient, he wondered why.

And presently, seeing a man going by that very spot, he asked him why. To his surprise, the man at once poked him in the ribs with a very hard finger, and said⁠—

“Ah, you’re a little wag, you are! But you’re a little gentleman, too, and so’s the little lady, bless her. You never gave us away to the Preventives⁠—for all you found out.”

“Of course,” said Elfrida cautiously, “we should never give anyone away.”

“Want to come along down now?” the man asked. He was a brown-faced, sturdy, sailor-looking man, with a short pigtail sticking out from the back of his head like the china handle of a Japanese teapot.

“Oh, yes,” said Elfrida, and Edred did not say “Oh, no.”

“Then just you wait till I’m out of sight, and then come down the way you see me go. Go long same as if you was after butterflies or the like⁠—a bit this way and a bit that⁠—see?” said the man. And they obeyed.

Alas! too few children in those uninteresting times of ours have ever been in a smuggler’s cave. To Edred and to Elfrida it was as great a novelty as it would be to you or to me.

When they came up with the brown man he was crouching in the middle of a patch of furze.

“Jump they outside bushes,” he said. And they jumped, and wound their way among the furze-bushes by little narrow rabbit-paths till they stood by his side.

Then he lifted a great heap of furze and bramble that looked as if it had lived and died exactly where it was. And there was a hole⁠—with steps going down.

It was dark below, but Elfrida did not hesitate to do as she was told and to go forward. And if Edred hesitated it was only for a minute.

The children went down some half a dozen steps. Then the brown man came into the hole too, and drew the furze after him. And he lighted a lantern; there was a tallow