And she matched her actions to her words by getting to her feet.
“Come on, Trout,” she said. “Let’s sit somewhere else. Something here stinks.”
They walked with stiff necks, like a pair of Old Testament princesses, to the shade of another tree, where they sat down again with their backs to me.
“Argh,” said a voice behind me. “Ignore those chumps.”
It was Gremly, the gnomish girl I had seen at the Ouija séance in Jumbo’s room.
She squatted beside me, plucked a blade of grass, and began to chew on it reflectively.
“I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You’re okay.”
“Thank you,” I told her, because I didn’t know what else to say.
We sat in silence for a long moment, not looking at each other, and then Gremly spoke: “I can tell you’re a person who enjoys her pheasant sandwiches.”
The world stopped. My heart stopped.
Pheasant sandwiches! The very words Winston Churchill had spoken to me five months ago on the railway platform at Buckshaw Halt. The exact words my mother, Harriet, had mouthed toward the camera in the ancient ciné film I had found in the attic at Buckshaw.
Pheasant sandwiches: the secret words that identified the speaker as a member of the Nide.
“The phrase was chosen carefully,” Aunt Felicity had told me. “Innocuous to the casual observer, but a clear warning of danger to an initiate.”
Gremly had spoken it very matter-of-factly—almost too casually. Was she giving me a warning, or was she simply making herself known?
I tried not to appear panic-stricken as I looked round at the small groups of girls seated here and there in the grass. Had anyone noticed?
No one seemed to be paying us the slightest attention.
“I know I do,” she prattled on, as if nothing had happened. “Quite a welcome break from your usual cucumber and soggy lettuce. Still, peanut butter and banana is my own favorite. Rather exotic so far north, don’t you think?”
Could this possibly be the same creature who had crouched, mumbling over her words, at the Ouija session? If so, she was an absolute wizard of camouflage, and I was filled with admiration.
“Yes,” I said with a smile, “pheasant is pleasant,” and then we both tittered. Just two little girls picnicking in the sunshine, relishing all the millions of words that remained unspoken between us.
Again came the shriek of Miss Moate’s infuriating whistle.
THWEE! THWEE! THWEE!
“Girls! Girls! Girls!”
Did the blasted woman do everything in threes? My mind boggled at the thought.
“Form a column—off you go. No straggling.”
Her extended finger was pointing us toward the cluster of wooden huts that lay slightly to the south.
“Dah-dit-dah-dit,” Gremly said, making the high-pitched sound of a ship-to-shore telegraph with her mouth. “Dit-dah-dit … dit-dah … dit-dah-dah-dit.”
Even though I couldn’t decipher the code, I understood the meaning by the tone of her voice and the rebellious look on her face.
Miss Moate shot us a sour glare, but said nothing.
At the huts, there was trouble with the keys, and the bus driver had to be sent for to open the door. As we stood waiting in the sun, Gremly raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly and I couldn’t help but grin. There are times when eyebrows speak louder than words. I knew as well as she did that either one of us could have had it open in a quarter of a trice blindfolded with both arms in plaster casts.
Two of the older and larger girls lifted Miss Moate’s wheelchair across the threshold in a bizarre reenactment of the honeymoon rituals I had seen in the cinema. This time, however, there was no waiting bottle of champagne and no discreet fade-out: The inside of the hut contained not much more than half a dozen rickety trestle tables with folding chairs, a potbellied iron stove with a twisted pipe, and a bird’s nest that had fallen out of the rafters.
The place smelled of ancient dust, of plaster, and of rising damp.
A strange uneasiness shimmered in the air.
For some peculiar reason I felt as Jack must have felt when, having climbed the beanstalk, he was forced to hide out, barely breathing, in the giant’s kitchen cupboard. I know it sounds strange, but that’s as close as I can come to describing the tense atmosphere of the place: as if something unseen were coiled … waiting.
Miss Moate opened several drawers of a painted counter and dragged out an enormous octopus of tangled cables, telegraph keys, and headsets, which she distributed as if they were the riches of King Solomon.
“Dit-dit-dit-DAH!” Gremly said triumphantly. “Didn’t I tell you?”
I knew perfectly well that she was forming the letter V for Victory, the same pattern of four notes that Beethoven had used for the opening of his Fifth Symphony.
Without warning, a tidal wave of homesickness broke over me. My mind was suddenly aswim with images of Father, Feely, Daffy, and me (aged six) sitting among the hanging ferns in the study at Buckshaw, listening to those opening chords of doom on the wireless. I should have known that, as Daffy would say, they did not bode well.
But it was now too late for tears. I could never remember, in my entire life, feeling so alone. I thought I was going to vomit, and this time it would be the real thing.
I pretended to wipe a speck of rogue grit from my eye. I sat, shaken, at the table, unable to speak, and the taste of ashes in my mouth.
“In twos,” Miss Moate said, and I grabbed at Gremly’s hand before anyone else could do so.
We sat across from each other at a trestle table upon which someone with a penknife had carved “KILROY WAS HERE” and other things which I will not take the trouble to repeat. Jumbo handed out pencils and papers from a canvas knapsack that looked as if it had seen service during the Trojan War.
“I’ll send, you receive,” Gremly told me. “I’ve done it before. It will be easier this way.” She handed me a card upon which were printed the letters of the alphabet and the numerals from one to zero: A.— B—…
C—.—.
And so forth.
I clapped the headphones over my ears, plugged them into a chipped enamel terminal box, and Gremly gave the key a couple of presses: Dit-dit-dah-dit.
I looked it up on the card and found that it was an F.
Dit-dah-dit-dit. L.
Dit-dah. A.
She was tapping out my name. This was easy.
I already knew what was coming next: the familiar dit-dit-dit-DAH … V.
I smiled to let her know I was getting the hang of it, and picked up a pencil. Gremly gave her head an almost imperceptible shake.
Dah-dit … dah-dah-dah, she sent.
No. I was not to write it down.
I pressed the cold cups of the headset to my ears. No one else could hear the dots and dashes. At least I hoped they couldn’t. But with six girls tapping away at the same time, it seemed impossible that anyone in the room would be able to pick out the sounds of a single key.
T—R—U—S—T … N—O … O—N—E, Gremly tapped out.
I read it at first as “Trust noon,” but quickly realized my error.
She must have seen my puzzlement.
“No one,” she sent again. “Keep away from—”
“Well?” Miss Moate said suddenly, slapping the surface of our table for attention. “How are you getting on?”
I nearly sprang out of my skin. Neither of us had heard her coming.
I tore off the headset.
“Gremly’s just telegraphed my name, F—L—A—V—I—A,” I said. “What jolly good fun!”
For an instant I considered bursting into Gilbert and Sullivan:
“Three little maids who, all unwary
Come from a ladies’ seminary
Freed from its genius tutelary
Three little maids from school …”