The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [55]
“Getting the lie of the land?” I asked.
“If you were kidnapping a child, Russell, how would you get her away?”
I chewed my lip for a few minutes and contemplated the bracken-covered hillsides.
“Personally, I should use an automobile, but no one seems to have heard one that night, and it’s a goodly hike to anywhere with three and a half stone of child on one’s back, even for a strong man.” I stud-ied the hill and saw the trails that wandered over and around it. “Of course. The horses. No one would notice one more set of prints with all these here. They came in on horseback, didn’t they?”
“It’s a sad state of affairs when, being confronted by a hillside, the modern girl thinks of an automobile. That was slow, Mary Todd. Over-looking the obvious. Theological training is proving as destructive to the reasoning abilities as I had feared.”
I cringed away and whined at him.
“Aw, Da’, it waren’t me fault. I war lookin’ a’t’evidence.”
“Harden your t more,” he corrected absently. “So, which way?”
“Not towards the road; there’d be too much chance of being seen.”
“Down the valley then, or over the hill?” he considered aloud.
“A pity we weren’t here a week ago; there might have been some-thing to see.”
“If wishes were horses...”
“Detectives would ride,” I finished. “I should go further away from the nearest village, I think, along the hill or over it.”
“We have an hour before the guard is back. Let us see what there is to find. I’ll go up the hill; you take the base of it.”
We zigzagged along and up the hill in increasingly wide arcs out from the tent. Half an hour went by with nothing but aching backs and stiff necks to show for our scrutiny. Forty-five minutes, and I began to listen nervously for the Welsh equivalent of “Oy, what’s this then?” from the campsite behind us. The two of us reached the furthest points in our arcs and turned back toward the middle. Something caught my eye—but it was nothing, just a gleam of bare stone where a hoof had scraped a rock. I went on, then turned back for a second look. Would an unshod hoof actually scrape into stone? On the whole I thought not.
“Hol—Uh, Da’!” I called. His head came up, and he started across the hillside at a long-legged trot, the spade bouncing on his shoulder. When he came up he was barely winded. I pointed and he dropped down with his glass to look more closely.
“Well done indeed. That excuses your lapse earlier,” he said mag-nanimously. “Let us see how far this might take us.” We continued in the direction we had come, walking slowly on either side of the clear path cut by generations of hoofs. An hour later we passed the limits of the police search.
Holmes and I spotted the white patch at the same moment. It was a small handkerchief, nearly trampled into the mud. Holmes worked it out of the soil and held it outspread. In one corner was an embroidered J.
“Was this an accident?” I wondered aloud. “Could she have been awake enough to drop it deliberately? Might a six-year-old do that? I shouldn’t have thought so.”
We continued, and in a few minutes my doubts were stilled, for to one side of the path a narrow strip of blue ribbon hung limply from a patch of bracken. I held it up triumphantly.
“That’s my girl, Jessie. Your hair ribbon.”
We walked on, but there were no further signs. Eventually the path split, one going up and over the hill, the other dropping down towards some trees. We stood looking at the two offerings expectantly, but no ribbons or signals caught our eyes.
“I’ll take the uphill again.”
“Wait. Down near those trees, is the ground scuffed up?” We went down, and there, in a little hollow, were indeed signs of some flurry of activity. Holmes walked around it carefully, and then bent down quickly, reaching for something invisible to me twenty feet away. He continued his scrutiny, picked up another object, and finally allowed me to approach.
“She jumped off the horse,” he said, running his fingertips back and forth an inch above the