There May Be Danger Read Online Free PDF Page B

she must do when she found herself alone, and when she was warm and dry again, must be to look at her Ordnance Survey map.
    With cold wet fingers she knocked at the door, which was round the side of the cottage. Steps sounded on stone in a moment, and the door was opened by a fat middle-aged woman in an apron, with red cheeks, slightly tousled hair, rolled-up sleeves and the floury hands that tell of kitchen, stove and food. A door was open behind her, and from it came the smell of baking, and that most welcome of all sounds to the cold traveller, the swish and hiss of flames rushing up round logs in the grate. To Kate at that moment the thought of a kitchen was like the thought of Paradise. Her sense of adventure was ebbing low. She asked for nothing of the gods but to be allowed to go into a kitchen, and listen to that noise, and smell that smell.
    A moment later she was waving farewell to her friends the Davises and following Mrs. Cornelius Howells into a kitchen, low-raftered, lamp-lit, close-curtained, with fantastic flames rushing up around great cleft logs thrust endwise in the grate, and a huge iron kettle swinging on a chimney crane. An enamel teapot stood on the hob, and a meal was laid on the square table. There was a gleam of oak furniture and a glitter of black-lead and polished brass. There was an old high-backed settle with a red cushion on it drawn up close to that fire. A side of bacon hung on the wall, and a ham swung from the ceiling. It was a cottage kitchen of the kind that the stage often tries, and always fails, to reproduce; the kitchen of the weary traveller’s dreams.

Chapter Four
    A couple of hours later, Kate was sitting on that curved-backed settle in front of the fire, hot-faced and replete with a large meal of fried green bacon, potatoes, bread-and-butter, strong tea and hot cake, and fortified in her resolve to find Sidney Brentwood by the simple approbation with which Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Howells accepted her intention.
    â€œWe was real upset to think of Sidney’s relations coming here, and yet when they didn’t come, we was more upset,” said Mrs. Cornelius, who, in contrast to Mrs. Davis of Pentrewer, had a very gentle voice, soft and deliberate, yet full of colour, with the clear consonants and rising inflections that Kate had noticed in the Davises. She was a stout, black-haired woman of about fifty, with large rosy cheeks and a pleasant untidiness of person, in contrast with the glittering orderliness of her kitchen. Her husband, who sat upright in a wooden chair opposite Kate, was a little man, grey-bearded and wrinkled, with a shrewd eye and a clipped, jovial tone of voice that Kate found rather difficult to follow. He had come in, in his oilskin cape, shortly after Kate’s arrival, from some remote outpost of the G.P.O. which he visited daily to sell stamps and receive letters and, incidentally news. Kate was just getting used to the almost shockingly human look of a hatless postman, when, having finished his tea, Mr. Howells retired into the bakehouse and came out in an old tweed jacket, with only the red pipings up the seams of his trousers to remind Kate that she was talking to a Government official.
    â€œWell, you see, his father’s in the Merchant Navy, and the great-aunt he lives with is a very old lady,” said Kate.
    Mr. and Mrs. Howells exchanged a stolid, and yet, Kate, felt, subtly ironical glance.
    â€œWe had a letter from Miss Brentwood saying she couldn’t leave her cats,” stated Mrs. Howells simply, folding up the cloth and putting it away in a drawer. “We was surprised about that, Cornelius and me.”
    â€œHer’s an old maid, I reckon,” said Cornelius tolerantly, “and they be mostly cankerish... So Davis Pentrewer drove you out from the station! He be a rough kind of man, I reckon!”
    The tone, as well as the words, was disparaging, and Kate perceived that the Post Office looked down upon