Over Sea, Under Stone

  “But it points back at the place we started,” Barney said. “Because he didn’t use it as his first clue. His first clue was ’Look and see what’s between you and the setting sun.’ The shadow was just our way of proving it.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to be a shadow made by the setting sun this time.”

  “That’s where my blodge comes in,” Jane said.

  Barney said sleepily: “Perhaps it’s the rising sun. Only it can’t be, it isn’t in the right place.”

  “No,” Simon said. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just a blodge.”

  Jane spluttered with impatience and glared at him. “Oh . . . why does it have to be the sun at all?”

  Great-Uncle Merry was still sitting silent and statuesque on the edge of the bed. He said again lovingly to himself: “The signs that wax and wane but do not die. . . .”

  Simon gazed at him blankly.

  “Don’t you see?” Jane almost howled at him. “It isn’t the sun—it’s the moon!”

  Simon’s face began to change like the sky on a windy day, different expressions chasing one another across it. He looked from Jane, to the map, to Great-Uncle Merry. “Gumerry,” he said accusingly, “I believe you knew all the time. Is she right?”

  Great-Uncle Merry stood up. The bed creaked as he rose, and his height seemed to fill the room; the light, swinging from the ceiling behind his head, cast his face into shadow and brought back once more to all three of them the old sense of mystery. His great dark figure, with a mist of light faintly silver round his head, left them silent and awed.

  “This is your quest,” he said. “You must find the way every time yourselves. I am the guardian, no more. I can take no part and give you no help, beyond guarding you all the way.” He turned slightly so that the light shone on his face and then his voice was ordinary again. “I imagine you’ll need some guarding on this next stage, too. You know what it is now, don’t you?”

  Simon said slowly: “We have to find which way the shadow of the standing stone points at night. Under the moon.”

  Barney said, matter-of-fact: “The full moon.”

  “The full moon?”

  “Jane’s blodge—he drew it round, not crescent-shaped, so it must mean the full moon.”

  “What’s it like now?”

  “You are not going up on the headland to look at the moon tonight,” Great-Uncle Merry said firmly.

  “No, I didn’t really mean that. I don’t think I could manage it anyway.” Simon stifled another yawn. “I wondered whether the moon was full or not now. We should have to wait for ages if it were all thin and new.”

  “It’s full tonight,” Jane said. “I could see it shining in through my bedroom window. So that means it will be almost as bright tomorrow. Would that do, Gumerry? I mean, could we go and look tomorrow night?”

  Before their great-uncle could answer Simon was sitting up again, looking thoughtful. “There’s one thing wrong with all this. If we’ve got a moon that’s only just past full, then we’ve got all the light we ought to have. But the moon changes, doesn’t it? I mean, it rises and sets at different times, and in different places, according to the time of year. Well—we’re in August now, but how do we know that the Cornishman wasn’t working out his clues in the middle of January or April or something, when the moon wouldn’t look the same as it does to us?”

  “You’re just being awkward,” Barney said.

  “No,” said Great-Uncle Merry. “He’s right. But I will say just one thing. I think you will find that this is the right time of the year. Call it luck, call it anything you like. But since you were able to follow the first clue, I think you’ll find you’re able to follow the rest as well. And yes, Jane, tomorrow night would do very well for looking at the moon and the standing stones. Especially well, for a reason you don’t know yet—just after you came up, Miss Hatherton was asking your parents to go and see her studio in Penzance tomorrow, and to stay the night.”

  “Ooh! Will they go?”

  “Wait and see. Go to bed. And try not to put all your faith in the moon. There may be greater problems still waiting for you than you think.”

  Mother stood with her hand on the door of Miss Hatherton’s small beetle-like car. “Now you’re sure you’ll be all right?” she said doubtfully.

  “Oh Mother, of course we shall,” Jane said. “What could possibly happen to us?”

  “Well, I don’t know, I’m not altogether happy about leaving you . . . what with that burglary . . .”

  “That was ages ago now.”

  “So long as you don’t set the place on fire,” Father said cheerfully. Miss Hatherton had promised to take him shark-fishing the next day, and he was as excited as a schoolboy.

  “Don’t let them go to bed too late, Uncle Merry,” Mother said, getting into the car.

  “Now don’t worry, Ellen,” Great-Uncle Merry said paternally from the doorstep, looking like an Old Testament patriarch with the children clustering round him. “I shan’t have a chance to lead them astray with Mrs. Palk living in. We shall all probably die of overeating instead.”

  “Are you sure you won’t all come too?” Miss Hatherton leant across the steering-wheel, blinking in the morning sun. The car lurched slightly as Father squeezed himself into the back. Simon handed in his fishing-rods after him.

  “No, honestly, thank you,” he said.

  “It’s no good, you can’t tear these three away from Trewissick,” Father said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Even trying to get them as far as the next village is like prising a limpet off a rock. I daren’t think what’s going to happen when the time comes to go home.”

  “Well, well, they know their own minds. And I can’t tempt you away, Professor Lyon?”

  “Oh dear,” Mother said. “I’m sorry you’re stuck with them, Merry.” She made a face at the children.

  “Nonsense,” Great-Uncle Merry said. “This is my element. Disgusting place, Penzance, anyway.” He scowled horribly at Miss Hatherton, who grinned amiably back. “Trippers, ice-cream and little brass piskies. Commercialised. You can keep it.”

  “Well,” Miss Hatherton said with a grin, starting the engine, “off to the piskies. We’ll send you a stick of rock, Professor. Good-by. Good-by, children.” The car moved off, a ragged chorus of farewell following it.

  “Good-by!” Mrs. Palk shrilled, appearing suddenly behind them on the doorstep and waving a tea-cloth. The little car chugged up the hill and out of sight.

  “Well now, idn’ that nice, the two of them going off together?” Mrs. Palk said sentimentally. “Quite like old times, I’ll be bound, before their troubles began.” She wagged her tea-cloth at the children.

  “Do you mean us?” demanded Barney indignantly.

  “That I do. Proper ’eadache, you be . . . still, you’ll do, I dare say.” She vanished, beaming, back to the kitchen.

  “Jolly useful, that Miss Hatherton,” Simon said with satisfaction. “Of course I hope they have a lovely time and all that, but it does leave the coast clear, doesn’t it?”

  “That moonlight shadow . . .” Jane said thoughtfully. “You know, I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “No thinking today,” Great-Uncle Merry said firmly. “We can’t do anything until tonight. I haven’t been in the sea since I came down here this year, I think you should all take me down for a bathe.”

  “For a bathe!” Barney’s voice rose in amazement.

  “That’s right.” Great-Uncle Merry glared down at him through bristling white eyebrows. “D’you think I’m too old to swim, is that it?”

  “Er—no, no, not at all, Gumerry,” Barney said, confused. “I just never thought of you in the water, that’s all.”

  “But what about the map?” Jane wailed.

  “We’ve just got going,” Simon said reproachfully.

  “Well, and we shan’t stop. We’ll spend a nice quiet day on the beach in the sunshine.” Great-Uncle Merry grinned at them. “And who knows, perhaps there’l
l be a moon tonight.”

  And there through the windows of the Grey House the moon hung, in the late August evening, when they were back from their day and washing before Mrs. Palk called them down to supper. The sun had flamed down on the beach all day, and they were all tanned—Barney’s fair skin was burning an angry red. But now the moon dominated the sky: a sky deepening after the sunset to a strange grey-black, with all but the brightest stars dimmed by the milky luminous sheen that flowed over sky and sea without seeming to come from the moon at all.

  Simon said, low and excited: “It’s a perfect night.”

  “Mmm,” Jane said. She had been outside to look at the sky, and to study nervously the black outline of Kemare Head rising dark and impenetrable behind the house. Like Simon, she was excited, but the old uneasiness was back as well.

  It would be better, she told herself severely, not to think about the dark, or at least to think of it as the same dark in which the long-ago Cornishman worked out the clues that they were following now. But perhaps in this darkness too there still lurked the evil which had been creeping up on him then, from the unfriendly east, threatening the grail as he sought urgently for a hiding-place . . . perhaps it was waiting for them, out there . . . why was there no light burning on the Witherses’ yacht . . . ?

  “Oh, stop it,” Jane said aloud.

  “What?” said Simon in surprise.

  “Nothing . . . I was talking to myself. . . . Oh good, there’s the bell. Come on.”

  Mrs. Palk, in the intervals of carrying heaped plates from the kitchen and empty ones back out again, was in a very firm motherly mood. Great-Uncle Merry told her that they were going night-fishing off the outer harbour, and at once she began laying great plans for filling thermos flasks with hot coffee, and leaving plates of sandwiches ready in the kitchen for their return. But she would not hear of Barney going too.

  “You’m not goin’ anywhere wi’ sunburn like that, midear, twouldn’ be sensible, now. You stay here wi’ me and have a nice early night, that’d be the best thing by far. If you go out you’ll be rubbin’ and blisterin’ quick as anything, and then you’d find yourself in bed tomorrow when you could be out in the sunshine, and you wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  “I should be perfectly all right,” Barney said, halfheartedly. Mrs. Palk had painted calamine on his sunburned legs, but they were very sore and tender, and although he tried to hide the pain he winced every time he took a step.

  And he was very sleepy after the day spent running and swimming in the open air.

  Great-Uncle Merry said, “I think it would be best, Barney. If you’re awake we’ll come and report to you when we get in.”

  “That ’ee won’t,” Mrs. Palk said. She treated Great-Uncle Merry, for all her respect for “the Professor,” with exactly the same indulgent strictness that she did Simon and Barney and Jane. “He’ll have a good long sleep, undisturbed, till mornin’, and then he’ll wake up fresh as a daisy with all that soreness gone. And he can hear all about everything then.”

  “Mrs. Palk,” Great-Uncle Merry said meekly, “you are a good soul and you remind me overwhelmingly of my old nanny, who would never let me go outside the door without taking my galoshes. Well, young Barnabas, I think . . .”

  “Oh, all right,” Barney said sadly. “I suppose so. I’ll stay here.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Palk beamed. “I’ll go and make ’ee a nice hot drink before bed.” She bustled out of the room.

  “You lucky things,” Barney said enviously to Simon and Jane. “I bet you find all sorts of marvelous clues, just because I can’t come. It isn’t fair.”

  “As a matter of fact you’ll have the most important job of all tonight,” Simon said impressively. “And the most dangerous too. We decided it would be too risky to take the map with us, so you’ll be in charge of it here. You might have to guard it with your life—suppose the burglars came back again.”

  “Oh don’t,” Jane said in alarm.

  “That isn’t very likely, don’t worry,” Great-Uncle Merry said, getting to his feet. “But it’s a responsibility all the same, Barney, so you aren’t altogether out of things.”

  Barney was not sure whether to feel important or pathetic, but he went obediently to bed. Looking back as they set off into the dark, they saw his face pressed white against one of the upstairs windows, and a dim hand waving them good-by.

  “Gosh, it’s cold,” Jane said, shivering slightly, as they went up the road away from the village.

  “You’ll be all right once we’ve been walking for a bit,” Great-Uncle Merry said. He had insisted before they went out that they should wear sweaters and scarves under their coats, and they were grateful now.

  “Everything seems terribly big,” Simon said suddenly. They all spoke softly by instinct, for there was no sound in the dark night but the soft tread of their own feet. Only, occasionally, they heard a car humming past in the village, and, very faint, the wash of the sea and the creak of boats at their moorings in the harbour below.

  Jane looked round at the silver roofs and the patches of black shadow cast by the moon. “I know what you mean. You can only see one edge of everything, there’s always one side in shadow. So you can’t see where it ends . . . and the headland looks awfully sinister. I’m glad I’m not on my own.”

  This was a confession she would never have made in daylight. But somehow in the dark night it seemed less shameful. Simon said unexpectedly: “So am I.”

  Great-Uncle Merry said nothing. He walked along beside them in silence, very tall, brooding, his face lost in the shadows. With every long stride he seemed to merge into the night, as if he belonged to the mystery and the silence and the small nameless sounds.

  Round the corner of the road, away from the harbour, they turned off and climbed over a fence on to the headland. The road curved round inland again, and above them stretched the dark grassy sweep of the slope, up towards the standing stones. In a little while they found the foot-path, and began the long to-and-fro climb to the top.

  “Listen!” Jane said suddenly, stopping in mid-stride.

  There was no sound as they stood there, but only the sigh of the sea.

  “You’re hearing things,” Simon said nervously. “No—I’m sure—”

  Above their heads, from the top of the headland still out of sight, there came drifting down a faint ghostly call. “Whoo-oo.”

  “Oh, Jane said in relief. “Only an owl. Horrible, I couldn’t think what it was.”

  Great-Uncle Merry still said nothing. They began to climb again. Then all at once they hesitated, as if by some unspoken agreement. A dark curtain seemed to have come down all round them.

  “What is it?”

  “A cloud’s come over the moon. Look. It’s only a little one.”

  Like a puff of smoke the cloud drifted away from the face of the moon as suddenly as it had come, and the land and sea were silver again.

  “You said there wouldn’t be any cloud.”

  “Well, there isn’t much, only a few little ones.”

  “The wind has changed,” Great-Uncle Merry said. His voice, out of his long silence, sounded very deep. “It comes from the south-west, Cornwall’s wind. It brings cloud sometimes, and sometimes other things.” He went on up the hillside, and they did not like to ask him what he meant.

  As they climbed after him more clouds came up, ragged and silver-edged in the moonlight; scudding swiftly across the sky as if another wind were up there, stronger and more purposeful than the gentle breeze blowing down into their faces over the slope.

  And then, looming over the dark brow of the headland, they saw the outline of the standing stones. Magnified by the darkness, they towered mysteriously against the silverwashed sky, and vanished unnervingly into shadow whenever a cloud rushed over the face of the moon. In the daylight the stones had seemed tall, but now they were immense, dominating the headland, and all the dim moonlit valleys that stretched inland from the lights of the village tw
inkling faintly below. Jane clutched at Simon’s arm, suddenly overawed.

  “I’m sure they don’t want us here,” she said unhappily.

  “Who don’t?” Simon demanded, bravado making his voice louder than he intended.

  “Ssh, don’t make such a noise.”

  “Oh, grow up,” Simon said roughly. He did not feel happy in the dark emptiness of the night, but he was determined not to think about it. Then he felt a coldness at the pit of his stomach, as his great-uncle’s deep voice came back to them in a way that seemed to confirm all that Jane felt.

  “They don’t mind,” Great-Uncle Merry said softly. “If anything, we’re welcome here.”

  Simon shook himself slightly, pretending not to have heard. He looked round at the stones, surrounding them now, rearing up against the sky. “This was the one.” He crossed to the stone they had found the day before. “I remember this funny sort of hole in the side.”

  Jane joined him, calmed by his matter-of-fact tone. “Yes, that’s it. When we looked across from here we were absolutely in line with the sun, and that rock we started from. Over on that other headland. Funny you can’t see it now. I’d have thought the moon would shine on it like the sun did.”

  “The moon’s in another direction, out over the sea,” Simon said. “Look at the shadow, come on, that’s what we’ve got to follow.”

  “Oh bother,” Jane said, as another cloud crossed the moon and they were left in the dark again. “The clouds are getting much thicker, I wish they’d go away. There seems to be much more wind up here too.” She clutched her duffle coat round her, and tucked her scarf in more tightly.

  “Don’t be long,” Great-Uncle Merry said suddenly out of the darkness. He was standing against another of the stones, swallowed up in its outline so that they could not even make out his shape. Jane felt a shiver of alarm return.

  “Why? Is anything wrong?”

  “No, nothing . . . look, here’s the moon again.”

  The night became silver again; looking up, it was as if they saw the moon sailing through the clouds instead of the other way round; racing smoothly across the sky, passing puffs and wisps of cloud on either side, and yet never moving from its place.