Over Sea, Under Stone

  “Ah well, let’s hope it doesn’t blow the marquee away as well,” Mrs. Palk said, putting an enormous jug of creamy yellow milk on the table.

  “What marquee?”

  “What!” Mrs. Palk opened her eyes. “Haven’t ’ee seen the posters? Why, ’tis carnival day today. People come in from all round, even from St Austell. All sorts of things go on . . . there’s a swimming gala in the harbour, then the band comes out, and there’s dancing all the way up the street from the sea. They play the ’Floral Dance.’ You know the tune, surely.” She began to sing lustily.

  “I know it,” Simon said, “but I thought they only danced it somewhere else.”

  “Helston,” said Jane. “The Helston Furry Dance.”

  “’Es, so they do,” Mrs. Palk said. “I reckon they copied it from us myself. Everyone knows Trewissick’s Floral Dance, it was danced in my grandmother’s time. Everyone dressed up gay and fancy in costume, and there’s a great crowd in the street all dancin’ and laughin’. No one goes out fishing today. There’s a great marquee in the field behind the village, and all kinds of stalls and games, and wrestling. . . . Then when the sun begins to go down they crown the carnival queen, and they stay round the harbour long after it gets dark, and dance in the moonlight . . . ’tis a long time before anyone wants to go to sleep in Trewissick, carnival day.”

  “What fun,” Jane said.

  “Hmmm,” said Simon.

  “Oh, you mustn’t miss it,” Mrs. Palk said earnestly. “I shall be there every minute, ’tis like the old days all over again. Eh, but now here I stand talking and your scrambled eggs will be getting hard on the stove.” She turned and sailed out of the room.

  “It does sound fun,” Jane said reproachfully to Simon.

  “I dare say. We’ve got other things to do. Of course if you’d rather go to the carnival than find the grail. . . .”

  “Sssh!” Barney looked nervously at the door.

  “Oh, don’t worry about her, she’s all right. Great-Uncle Merry’s a long time coming down, isn’t he?”

  “I didn’t mean it,” Jane said meekly. “Actually what I want to do more than anything is get back up on the headland, so we can go and find that rock.”

  “We can’t go without Gumerry. I wonder if he’s awake?”

  “I’ll go and see.” Barney slipped from his chair.

  “Hey, where be off to?” Mrs. Palk nearly collided with him, carrying her tray through the door. “Sit down and eat this now, while ’tis hot.”

  “I was going to call Great-Uncle Merry.”

  “Now you leave him be, poor old gentleman,” Mrs. Palk said firmly. “Gadding about in the middle of the night, tidn’ natural at his age, no wonder he’s having a good long sleep. Night-fishin’, indeed. And not a fish to show for it after all that traipsin’ about. You proper wearied him last night, I reckon. You remember we aren’t all as young as you three.” She wagged her finger at them. “Now you get along into the sun after your breakfast, and let him have his sleep out.” She departed again, shutting the door behind her.

  “Oh dear,” Jane said, abashed. “She’s right, you know. Great-Uncle Merry is quite old really.”

  “Well, he’s not doddering,” Simon said defensively. “He doesn’t seem old at all sometimes. He went like a rocket last night—and carrying you. It was all I could do to keep up with him.”

  “Well, perhaps this is the after-effect.” Jane’s conscience was beginning to nag. “Last night must have been an awful strain on him, what with one thing and another. I don’t think we should wake him up. It’s only nine o’clock, after all.”

  “But we haven’t made any plans or anything,” said Barney.

  “Perhaps we just ought to wait here till he does wake up,” Simon said despondently.

  “Oh no, why should we? He wouldn’t mind if we went on to the headland. He can follow us when he’s had his sleep.”

  “Didn’t he say we shouldn’t go anywhere without him from now on?” Barney said doubtfully. “Or anyway, not without telling him?”

  “Well, we can leave a message for him with Mrs. Palk.”

  “No, we can’t!”

  “Barney thinks Mrs. Palk is one of the enemy,” said Simon sceptically.

  “Oh, surely not,” Jane said vaguely. “Well anyway, we don’t really have to leave a message. He’s bound to guess where we’ve gone. There’s only one place any of us would want to go, and that’s to the rocks on Kemare Head.”

  “We can say to Mrs. Palk that he’ll know where we’ve gone. Just like that. And then she’ll tell him and he’ll understand.”

  “We can say we’ve taken Rufus for a walk,” said Barney hopefully.

  “That’s not a bad idea. Where is he?”

  “In the kitchen. I’ll go and get him.”

  “Tell Mrs. Palk while you’re there. And tell her we’ll see her at her beloved carnival. We probably will anyway.”

  Barney bolted the last of his scrambled egg and went out to the kitchen, munching a piece of toast.

  Simon suddenly had an idea. He got up and crossed to the window, and peered out down the hill. He turned back quickly to Jane. “We might have known. They’re watching us already. That boy’s at the bottom of the road, sitting on the wall. Not doing anything, just sitting there, looking up here. They must be waiting for us to come out, because they don’t know whether we found a clue last night that will lead us somewhere.”

  “Oh, gosh.” Jane bit her lip. Their night on the headland had left her more deeply nervous than ever before. It was as if they were fighting not people, but a dark force that used people as its tools. And could do what it liked with them. “Isn’t there a back way out of the house up to the headland?”

  “I don’t know. How funny, we’ve never looked.”

  “Well, we’ve been doing other things. I suppose even if there was one, they’d be watching it.”

  “Well. . . the only person who’d be likely to know about a back way is that Bill, and he’s at the front. There’s no harm in looking.”

  Barney had come back, with Rufus lolloping joyfully at his side. “There is a way,” he said. “You can get through the hedge at the top of the back garden. I found it one morning before you were up. Rufus showed me, actually—he was dashing about and suddenly he disappeared, and then I heard him barking miles away outside, half-way up the headland. You come out into a lane and then you’re out on Kemare Head before you know it. It’s a good way out because they wouldn’t expect us to go through—there’s no gate or anything.”

  “Gumerry won’t know about that way,” Jane said suddenly. “He’ll come out the front way, and they’ll follow him, and it’ll be just as bad as if they’d followed us in the first place.”

  “No fear,” Barney said confidently. “He’ll shake them off somehow. I bet you this is one time they won’t have the slightest idea where we are.”

  When the children were gone and the house lay silent, Mrs. Palk spent two brisk hours working downstairs. She took care not to make a noise. Then she sat down in the kitchen to drink a leisurely cup of tea.

  She made the tea very strong, using one of the captain’s best cups: very large, and made of thin, almost translucent, white china. She sat at the kitchen table sipping from it, a look of great secret satisfaction on her face. After a while she went to a cupboard under the sink, pulled out her big shopping-bag and took from it a brilliant jumble of coloured ribbons, with an elaborate feathery structure not unlike a Red Indian head-dress. She set this on her head, looked at herself in the mirror, and chuckled. Then she carefully put it aside and poured out some more tea in a fresh cup. She put this on a tray and sailed out into the hall and up the stairs, a great smiling mysterious galleon of a woman.

  Without knocking, she opened the door of Great-Uncle Merry’s room, went in, and set down the tray by the bed. Great-Uncle Merry was buried in the bed-clothes, breathing heavily. Mrs. Palk pulled back the curtains to let the light pour into the dim room, bent dow
n and shook him roughly by the shoulder. As he stirred she drew back quickly and stood waiting, beaming down at him with her usual doting motherly smile.

  He yawned, groaned and clutched his head sleepily, running his fingers back through the untidy white hair.

  “Time to get up, Professor,” said Mrs. Palk brightly. “Nice long rest I let ’ee have, after all that gadding about last night. Done ’ee good, I’ll be bound. Not all as young as we used to be, are we now?”

  Great-Uncle Merry looked at her and grunted, blinking himself awake.

  “Drink ’ee’s tea now, and I’ll go and get ’ee’s breakfast.” Mrs. Palk’s rich voice flowed on as she turned to twitch the curtains tidy. “Can have it in peace and blessed quiet for once. They children have been out for hours.”

  Suddenly Great-Uncle Merry was very wide awake. He sat up straight-backed, a startling sight in his bright red pyjama jacket. “What time is it?”

  “Why, ’tis gone eleven.” Mrs. Palk beamed at him.

  “Where have the children gone?”

  “Now don’t ’ee worry about them. They can look after their-selves well enough for one day.”

  “Little idiots—where are they?” His forehead creased.

  “Now, now, Professor,” Mrs. Palk said chidingly. “Gone off to save ’ee a journey, they have, as a matter of fact. Thoughtful, well-brought-up little things, they are, for all their mother’s a bit higgledy-piggledy, begging your pardon. Gone off to Truro for ’ee.

  “Truro!”

  Mrs. Palk smiled innocently. “’Es, that’s right. Young Simon answered the telephone this morning. Nasty machine,” she added confidingly, shuddering slightly. “Near scared me out of my life, screeching away. Talked to the man on the other end for a long time, he did. And after, he came to me and said, all serious, bless his heart—’Mrs. Palk, he says, that was a friend of Great-Uncle Merry’s on the telephone from the museum at Truro, saying he’s got to see us all very urgently about something.’”

  “Who was it?”

  “Wait a minute now, Professor, I’m not finished. . . . ’I reckon we ought to go off at once if our great-uncle’s still asleep,’ young Simon says to me, ’and catch the bus. Then he can come on after us when he wakes up.’”

  “Who was it?” Great-Uncle Merry insisted.

  “Simon didn’t give me no name . . . very important he made it sound. So off they all went, the three of them, and got the bus into St Austell. ’Don’t you worry, Mrs. Palk,’ they said, ’just you tell our great-uncle for us.’”

  “You should never have let them go alone,” Great-Uncle Merry said curtly. “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Palk, I should like to get up.”

  “’Course,” said Mrs. Palk indulgently, still smiling and unruffled, and she sailed out of the room.

  Within minutes Great-Uncle Merry was downstairs, fully dressed, frowning to himself and occasionally muttering anxiously. He waved away his breakfast, and went striding out of the Grey House. Mrs. Palk, watching from the doorstep, saw his big battered car appear on the road and roar off, leaving a great black smear of smoke hanging in the air as it disappeared out of the village.

  She smiled to herself, and went back into the Grey House. A few moments later she came out again, the small secret smile still hovering round her mouth; locked the door behind her and went off with her shopping-bag down the hill to the harbour. A few bright red and blue feathers nodded over the top of the bag as it swung at her side.

  • Chapter Ten •

  “This isn’t nearly as simple as I thought it would be,” Simon said, frowning. He looked about him at the jagged grey rocks. “From the standing stones last night it looked as if there was just one lump of rock here, sticking out on its own. But there are so many of them, and they’re all so big.”

  The wind blowing in from the open sea tossed Jane’s pony-tail to and fro on the back of her neck. She looked back inland. “It’s just like being out at sea. As if we were cut off, and looking at the land from the outside.”

  The end of Kemare Head was a more desolate place than any they had yet seen, even with the sunlight glittering on the water far below, and the smell of the sea in the wind. They stood in the midst of a bleak patch of rocks, rising bare out of the grass almost at the headland’s tip. The ground fell away before them in a steep grassy slope, and from there the sheer edge of the cliff dropped to meet the other rocks, two hundred feet below, where the white waves endlessly grunted and sighed. They could see no sign of life or movement anywhere around.

  “It’s lonely,” Barney said. “It feels lonely itself, I mean, somehow. Different from us feeling lonely. I wonder what the next clue is, if there is one.”

  “I don’t think there is,” Jane said slowly. “This is so much an end of a place. It doesn’t lead anywhere, everything leads towards it. . . . Funny how we didn’t see anybody at all on the way up. There are usually one or two people wandering about, even on the headlands.”

  “There certainly were last night,” Simon said.

  “Oh don’t, I keep trying not to remember. But there just isn’t a living thing up anywhere near here. I think it’s odd.”

  “Mr. Penhallow says the locals keep away from the end of the headland,” Barney said, clambering to perch above their heads on one of the rocks. Rufus tried to climb up beside him, slithered back again and licked his ankle, whining. “They don’t like the standing stones much either, but they never come up here at all. He wouldn’t talk about it much. He said people thought the rocks were haunted, and unlucky, and he sounded as if he believed it himself. He said they call them the Gravestones.”

  “They call the standing stones that?”

  “No, these rocks here.”

  “Funny, I should have thought it would be the other way round. The others do look rather like gravestones in a kind of way. But these are just rocks, like any other rocks.”

  “Well, that’s what he said.” Barney shrugged his shoulders and nearly overbalanced. “Just that people didn’t like them.”

  “I wonder why.” Jane gazed up at the nearest crag of rock, rising just above her head. Simon, next to her, tapped idly at its surface with the old brass telescope case, the manuscript safely rolled up inside; Barney had ceremonially handed it back that morning. Then suddenly he stopped tapping and stood stock-still.

  “Whatever’s the matter? Have you found anything?” Jane peered at the rock.

  “No . . . yes . . . Oh, it’s all right, I’m not looking at anything. Don’t you remember, in the manuscript? I can hear Great-Uncle Merry saying it now. Where the Cornishman said he hid the grail. Over sea and under stone.”

  “That’s right, and the same when they buried the strange knight, what was his name . . .”

  “Bedwin,” Barney said. “Golly, I see what you mean. Over sea and under stone. Here!”

  “But—” Jane said.

  “It must be!” Simon hopped distractedly on one foot. “Over sea—well, we couldn’t be anywhere that was much more obviously over the sea, could we? And under stone. Well, here are the stones.”

  “And this must be where they buried Bedwin as well!” Barney hastily slithered down from his rock. “And that’s why they call it the Gravestones, and think it’s haunted. They’ve forgotten all the real story, because it’s hundreds and hundreds of years ago. But they remember that bit, or at least they remember people being frightened to come here, and so they don’t come either.”

  “Perhaps they’re right,” Jane said nervously.

  “Oh come off it. Well, anyway, even if Bedwin’s ghost was floating about somewhere, he wouldn’t want to scare us because we’re on the same side as he was.”

  “Great-Uncle Merry said something like that last night.” Jane screwed up her forehead to remember.

  “Oh never mind, don’t you realise what this means? We’re there, we’ve found it!” Barney spluttered with delight. Rufus, catching his mood, pranced joyfully round them barking into the wind.

  Simon loo
ked at him. “All right then. Where is it?”

  “Well,” Barney said, pausing a little. “Here. Under one of the rocks.”

  “Yes, well, just stop rushing about like a madman and think for a minute. What do we have to do, dig them all up? They’re part of the headland. It’s all rock. Look.” Simon took out his penknife, a hefty steel weapon with two big blades and a marlinspike, and went down on his knees to dig away the earth at the foot of one of the crags. He tore away tufts of grass, dug a hole, and three inches from the surface came to solid rock. “There. You see?” He scraped at the rock with his knife-blade, making a depressing grating sound. “How can there be anything buried there?”

  “It doesn’t all have to be like that,” Barney said rebelliously.

  “Perhaps there’s a different bit somewhere,” Jane said hopefully. “If we all three divide up and search every inch we’re bound to find something. We ought to have brought spades with us really. Come on.”

  So Barney went to one end of the rocks and Jane, twenty yards away, to the other. Simon, glancing nervously down at the steep edge of the headland, went round to the seaward side and began working his way in from there. They clambered up and down, over the sharp-edged granite, searching the patches of wiry grass between the rocks, tugging at boulders to see if they would move and show a place where something could be buried underneath. But no stone ever shifted an inch, and they found nothing but granite and grass, with no hint of a hiding-place.

  Jane was holding something carefully in her hand as they came together again. “Look,” she said, holding it out. “Don’t you think it’s peculiar finding a sea-shell up here? I mean how on earth could it have got up from the beach, specially if no one ever comes up here?”

  “It’s more like a stone than a shell,” Simon said curiously, taking it from her hand. It was a cockle-shell, but its hollow was solid and hard, filled with what looked like rock; and the surface of the shell was not white and roughened like those they found on the beach, but smooth and dark grey.

  “A visitor must have dropped it,” Barney said easily. “Visitors wouldn’t be frightened of coming up here, they wouldn’t know anything about what the Trewissick people say.”