“We all dived for cover,” Merle panted. “It was total chaos. We didn’t realize he was missing until Mrs. Graham did a head count of the children.”
“Where would he go?”
“I’m not sure—we thought he might have gone back into the school, but he wasn’t there, was he?” She looked at Danielle, who shook her head.
“The tide’s out,” Louis said. “He might have gone to the boathouse, Miss Alice, looking for you.”
“I’ll go and look for him.”
“No,” Merle said, catching my arm. “He’ll be somewhere safe, I’m sure. Probably in one of the houses in the village. If you go, we might miss something.” She glanced toward the house.
I didn’t know what to do. What if he wasn’t in the village? What if he’d wandered off in the confusion and got himself lost? I couldn’t bear the thought of him being alone and afraid.
“Just look after things for a few minutes, while I get the children settled.” Merle guided me up the steps to the house. “If he’s not back here by then, I’ll take over in the library.”
An hour later I was on the path down through the valley, straining my ears for any sound that might betray the whereabouts of a small, lost child. When I reached the church, I went up and down the graveyard, looking behind tombstones and up into the trees, in case Ned was hiding there. Then I went into the church itself. It was a rather forbidding place for a child to enter alone. I thought it very unlikely that he’d choose it for a refuge, but I searched the place anyway—even the little room behind the pulpit where the bell ropes hung.
When I came out into the sunshine, I stood for a moment, listening. A magpie was rattling away in one of the ancient yew trees. When it stopped, all I could hear was the whispering rush of the stream that trickled through the trees on its way to the cove. Then I thought I heard something else. Something human. Not words, something more like a cough or a burst of laughter. It sounded like an adult—not a small child. It was coming from beyond the church, somewhere in the tangle of shrubs and trees, away from the path. I ran across the graveyard, almost tripping over a toppled tombstone half-hidden in the grass. I scrambled over the wall, and as I landed in the pile of leaf mold on the other side, I heard a familiar voice, singing.
“Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream . . .”
Through the foliage I spotted Jack’s face in profile. On his back was what looked like a giant pine cone. My brain leapfrogged the message my eyes were sending. With a surge of joy, I realized that it was Ned, dressed as a hedgehog. Jack had one hand around two little ankles that stuck out from under the sacking hem of the costume. Ned was holding on to Jack’s head. I could see his fingers moving, rubbing Jack’s hair as if it were a biddable pony, not a person, carrying him. As I got closer, I saw Ned’s body quiver, as if he was sobbing silently. I could just see his nose and chin protruding from the hood of the costume. In the moment before he saw me coming, Jack reached up and felt for Ned’s face.
“Soon be home, little chap.” He cupped the child’s swaying head in his hand. “There’s nothing to be frightened of. I’ve got you now.”
The expression in Jack’s eyes was intense—gentle but ferocious—words that shouldn’t go together, but somehow did. I’d encountered something similar when I was in Africa, in the maternity ward at the mission hospital. I’d seen it in the faces of the women when they held their babies for the first time.
“Alice!” He’d seen me. In a flash he heaved the drowsy child off his shoulders and set him down on the ground. Ned blinked up at me from beneath a small forest of bristles. His eyes were red and swollen. Green caterpillars of snot oozed from his nostrils.
“Thank goodness you’re safe!” I bobbed down and wiped Ned’s nose. “Where did you find him?” I glanced up at Jack, who looked as if he were chewing on a wasp.
“In the summerhouse.” He jerked his head back over his left shoulder. Through the trees I could just see the moss-covered thatch of the little hut where he’d taken me for target practice before we went to Brittany.
“Oh, Ned! Why did you run away?”
“I s . . . seed a plane.” He drew the back of his hand across his eyes. “Louis says if it goes bang, I got to run.”
“I’d better get you back to the house.” The way Jack spoke to Ned was quite different from when he’d been carrying him on his shoulders. He sounded brisk and businesslike, as if the child were a stray animal that he’d rounded up. He gave the boy a little prod. I wondered why he didn’t pick him up. Ned could hardly put one foot in front of the other.