My lady of Cleeve

by Percy John Hartley

Rounding the rocks which screened the bay, we found ourselves in a second one, a complete replica of the first. And beyond us, headland upon headland, serrated against the darkening sky, stretched faint and shadowy into the far distance.

Our progress was slow, for the beach was composed of small, slate-coloured pebbles, flattened and rounded by the wash of endless surges, and into which our heavy military boots sank deep at every step. Here and there we were forced to skirt some mass of lichen-covered rocks; which, torn from the cliff side, lay scattered upon the shore at its base, their sharp, needle-like summits wreathed with tangled seaweed and their caves and hollows filled with the flotsam of the tides.

And now the fog rolled down upon us, at first in thin wreaths of vapour that floated in ghost-like silence like the first sentinels of an advancing army, but growing ever thicker and thicker as they approached landwards, until they wrapped us completely round in their damp embrace, blotting out everything from our vision save the wall of cliff upon our right, which loomed dark and menacing through the mist. The wind rose as suddenly to a gale, sending the fog wreaths eddying around us, and bringing with it a cold rain that at every successive gust beat in our faces, blinding and confusing us. A hundred times I cursed my folly and recalled the sergeant’s warning. He was at my elbow now, at times his figure appearing distorted and giant-like as the fog thinned somewhat; anon banishing altogether from my vision, swallowed up by the mist.

How long we struggled on thus, buffeted by the wind and rain, falling over the jutting rocks, I do not know; but it was in a lull in the gale, when the wind died down for a moment and the fog lifted, that I felt myself seized by the arm and plucked violently backward. It was none too soon. From out of the mist ahead appeared a green wall of water capped with foam. Down it thundered, breaking upon the pebbles at my feet, sending the salt spume flying above my head and swirling round my knees in a cataract of foam.

Even then, so sudden was the surprise, that the backwash was like to have swept me from my feet; but the sergeant’s grip tightened upon my arm and dragged me back to safety. And in a moment I realised what had happened. We had reached the end of the bay, into which the sea had already entered. I put my lips to the sergeant’s ear.

“Back to the cliff,” I shouted, “and climb, man! Climb, or——”

There was no need to finish the sentence. Not a man there but knew our danger. We began to retrace our steps. It had grown so dark now that it was only when the curtain of fog parted to a more violent gust than usual that I was enabled to distinguish the form of the trooper upon my right. The rain which we had experienced all day was as nothing to that which fell upon us now. It descended in sheets, drenching us to the skin and numbing us with its icy cold. For a while, indeed, a species of coma seized me. I thought of the cornets waiting in the roadway above, and wondered idly whether they would succeed in achieving the arrest of the man we had come so far to seek, and whether, by chance, upon the morrow they would find some relic of our party floating in the wash of the tide to tell the story of our fate, for I did not deceive myself. To climb the cliff even in the daylight would have been a hard enough feat; to do so at night, in the darkness and fog, was an impossibility. And though I was willing enough for the troopers’ sake to make the attempt—aye, and to encourage the effort—yet in my heart I knew that there could be but one ending.

It seemed hard, I remember thinking dully, that a man who had passed unscathed through the perils of many battlefields—hard for a man who had made a campaign with Montecuccoli, and whose arms had held the great Turenne as he fell from his horse, struck down by a cannon-ball upon the banks of the Rhine—to be drowned at the last in a little bay upon the lonely Devon coast. I was aroused from these reflections by the sound of an oath and a heavy fall, as the trooper upon my left stumbled over a black mass which loomed up suddenly in his path. He was on his feet again ere I could reach his side, and gave vent to such a ringing shout that it pierced above the gale and brought us all around him. That which he had fallen over, very providentially as it proved for us, was a boat anchored to the beach by a short length of rope fastened to a stone. With renewed hope we scattered again in search of the path which the inmates of the manor must have been in the habit of using when passing to and fro to this small craft. At length an idea struck me, and raising my hand to pass it carefully over the rocky wall above me at a little above the level of my shoulder, I came upon a ledge. By climbing upon the sergeant’s bent back, I was enabled to draw myself up to it at the cost of a few bruises, and to clamber upon its flat surface.

It was, as near as I could judge, some ten feet square, and in the far corner my hands came in contact with a flight of steps leading upwards, roughly hewn in the cliff side. Five minutes later the whole party of us stood upon a little platform, side by side. And then, drawing a long breath, I essayed to make the ascent.

There were eighteen steps in all, giving place to a path, a mere narrow ledge on the surface of the cliff, at no place more than four feet wide, and with a sheer drop upon the one side to the beach below. Along this we crept, at every fresh gust of wind flattening ourselves against the rocky wall upon the right and clinging to its jagged fissures. It was a weird experience, I vow, to be suspended thus ’twixt sea and sky; no sound save the whistling of the wind in the crannies of the cliff, the roar of the pitiless surges below us, or the harsh scream of a gull from the mist out at sea. Yet I have travelled this same path since by daylight, and I have often thought that the thickness of the fog upon that night was most fortunate for us, sparing us, as it did, the full knowledge of the yawning which lay at our side, the sight of which might well have turned the strongest head giddy. Even as it was, at a place where the ledge took a sharp turning, a sudden blast struck me with such violence that, taken off my guard, for a moment I was in danger of being torn from my foothold, and only by driving my nails into a crack of the rock until the fingers themselves were left all raw and bleeding was I enabled to withstand its boisterous pressure.