Over Sea, Under Stone

  Forgetting everything in the overwhelming surge of relief, she dashed forward to the edge of the rocks, taking the boy by surprise so that he grasped at her too late and overbalanced against Mr. Hastings. The man snarled at him angrily and made a last reach for Barney as he stood pressed and staring helplessly against the cliff, his arms hanging down now limp.

  But Simon, twisting up the last of his strength, snatched the grail and the long cylinder of the telescope case from his brother and slipped out of reach, dodging round him to the edge of the waves.

  He shouted urgently, “Gumerry!” As his great-uncle turned, he raised his arm and flung the grail with all his might towards the speed-boat, watching agonized to see if it could cross the gap. At the controls, Mr. Penhallow wrestled to hold the boat steady. The strange bell-like cup wheeled through the air, flashing golden in the sun, and Great-Uncle Merry shot out one arm sideways like a slip fielder and caught it as it curved over towards the water.

  “Look out!” Barney yelled. Mr. Hastings pivoted towards Simon as he drew back his arm to send the manuscript after the cup, darting sideways to keep out of reach. He threw: but as the case left his hand Mr. Withers, rising dripping to his feet in the dinghy, lunged out with an oar in a clumsy attempt to intercept it.

  Jane screamed.

  The oar struck the case in mid-flight. Withers let out a shout of triumph. But in his throat it changed to terror, as the long unwieldy case spun off the oar with the force of Simon’s throw and came apart in the air. The two halves spiralled out away from the boat, scattering fragments of the familiar manuscript that they had studied so often: they saw the small lead case from the cave fall out and splash like a stone into the sea; and almost at the same moment the two halves of the telescope case, with their disintegrating parchment, hit the water and disappeared. The broken pieces of parchment did not float; they were gone at once, as if they had dissolved. Nothing was left but Jane’s handkerchief, bobbing forlornly on the waves.

  And then their blood stood still and cold within them, as an inhuman sound like the howl of an animal rang out over the sea. It was the second long howl that they had heard that day, but it was not the same as the first. Mr. Hastings put back his head like a dog, and gave a great shriek of pain and fear and rage. With two long bounds he leapt from the edge of the rocks, and dived with a mighty splash into the rippled water where the case had gone down.

  They stared at the sunlight dancing on the water that had closed over his head, and but for the mutter of the engines and the sea there was no sound. A movement by the yacht caught their gaze, and they saw the girl being pulled aboard, with her dinghy left bobbing below.

  Bill stood as immobile as the children, gazing open-mouthed at the sea turning golden now under the late sun. Then Withers shouted at him, lurching towards the outboard motor in the remaining dinghy, and as the boat moved off the boy flung himself aboard.

  The children still stood watching. No one moved either aboard the speed-boat, as it swayed towards the rocks on the swell. The dinghy moved out, buzzing like an angry wasp, and then beside it they saw a dark head break the surface, and heard the rasp of desperate gulping breaths. The dinghy slowed, and the man and boy in it heaved the tall black figure aboard. It held nothing in its hand.

  Mr. Hastings lay in the bottom of the boat, choking and gasping for breath, but as they watched he raised his head, the dark wet hair flattened over his forehead like a mask, and put out a hand to Withers to pull himself up. With rage and hatred twisting his face, he looked back at Great-Uncle Merry.

  Great-Uncle Merry stood in the speed-boat with one hand on the wind-shield and the other holding the grail, the sun behind him blazing in his white hair. He drew himself so tall and erect that he looked for a strange moment like some great creature of the rocks and the sea. And he called across the water, in a strong voice that rang back from the cliffs, some words in a language that the children could not understand, but with a note through it that made them suddenly shiver.

  And the dark figure in the other boat seemed to shrink within himself at the sound, so that the menace and power were all at once gone out of him. Suddenly he looked only ridiculous in the skin-wet black clothes, and seemed smaller than he had been before. All three in the boat cowered down, making no move or sound, as the dinghy crossed back to the yacht.

  The children stirred. “Gosh!” Barney whispered. “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m glad I don’t know,” Jane said slowly.

  They watched as the three figures swung themselves aboard the yacht, and almost at once the engine throbbed higher and the Lady Mary’s long white hull slipped away. The broad outboard dinghy trailed forlorn behind, but the other remained, bobbing and drifting empty on the waves.

  The yacht headed out across the bay, past Trewissick harbour and down the coast, until she was only a small white shape on the sun-gilded sea. And by the time they had all climbed aboard the speed-boat, and looked again, she was gone.

  • Epilogue •

  The sound of clapping echoed through the glossy pillars of the long museum gallery, and Simon, very pink in the face, threaded his way back to Barney and Jane through the crowd of gravely smiling scholars and dons. The crowd began to move about again, and voices rose in a general chatter all round them.

  A bright-eyed young man with a notebook materialised at their side. “That was a very nice speech, Simon, if I may say so. This is Jane and Barnabas, is it?”

  Simon blinked at him, and nodded.

  “I’m from the Press Association,” said the young man briskly. “Can I just ask you how large a check the curator presented you with?”

  Simon looked down at the envelope in his hand, put his finger nervously in the flap and tore it open. He took out the neatly folded check, gazed at it for several moments, and without a word passed it across to Jane.

  Jane looked at it, and swallowed. “It says, one hundred pounds.”

  “Gosh!” said Barney.

  “Well, that’s nice,” said the young man cheerfully. “Congratulations. Now then, what will you do with it?”

  They looked at him blankly.

  “I don’t know,” said Simon at last.

  “Oh, come now,” the young man persisted. “You must have some idea. What are the things you’ve always most wanted to buy?”

  The children looked at one another helplessly.

  “Young man,” said Great-Uncle Merry’s deep voice beside them, “if you were suddenly presented with a hundred pounds, what would you buy?”

  The reporter looked taken aback. “Well—er—I—”

  “Precisely,” said Great-Uncle Merry. “You don’t know. Neither do these children. Good afternoon.”

  “Just one more thing,” said the young man, unabashed, writing rapid shorthand squiggles in his notebook. “What were you actually doing when you found the thing?”

  “The grail, you mean,” Barney said.

  “Well, yes, that’s what you like to call it, isn’t it?” said the young man lightly.

  Barney glared at him indignantly.

  “We just happened to be exploring a cave,” Simon said hastily. “And we found it on a ledge.”

  “Wasn’t there talk of someone else having been after it?”

  “Moonshine,” said Great-Uncle Merry firmly. “Now look here, my boy, you go off and talk to the curator, just over there. He knows all about it. These three have had enough excitement for one day.”

  The young man opened his mouth to say something else, looked at Great-Uncle Merry, and shut it again. He grinned amiably and disappeared into the crowd, and Great-Uncle Merry steered the children into a quiet corner behind a pillar.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll have your pictures in all the papers tomorrow, you’ll be written about in books for years to come by a lot of distinguished scholarly gentlemen, and you’ve been given a hundred pounds by one of the most famous museums in the world. And I must say you all deserve it.??
?

  “Gumerry,” Simon said thoughtfully. “I know there’d be no point in telling people the real story behind finding the grail, but wouldn’t it be a good thing at least to warn them about Mr. Hastings? I mean, he got hold of Mrs. Palk and that boy Bill and made them bad, and there’s nothing to stop him going round doing it to everyone.”

  “He has gone,” Great-Uncle Merry said. Two owl-like men in heavy spectacles, passing, bowed respectfully to him, and he nodded vaguely.

  “I know, but he might come back.”

  Great-Uncle Merry looked down the long gallery, over the heads, and the old closed look came back into his face. “When he does come back,” he said, “it will not be as Mr. Hastings.”

  “Wasn’t his name really Hastings at all?” Simon said curiously.

  “I have known him to use many different names,” Great-Uncle Merry said, “at many different times.”

  Jane slid one foot unhappily to and fro over the smooth marble floor. “It seems so awful that a vicar should be so bad.”

  “He must have kidded all the bishops and things into thinking he was good,” Simon said. “Same as he kidded everyone in Trewissick.”

  “Not at all,” Great-Uncle Merry said.

  Simon stared at him. “But he must have . . . I mean, they must have heard him preaching sermons on Sundays.”

  “No one heard him preach on Sundays. And I doubt if he has ever met a bishop in his life.”

  Now they were all staring at him, in such baffled amazement that the sides of his mouth twitched into a half-smile. “It’s quite simple. What they call the power of suggestion. Our Mr. Hastings was not the vicar of Trewissick, nor anything to do with him. I know the real vicar slightly, he is a tall man as well, though rather thin and about seventy years old . . . his name is Smith.”

  “But Mr. Hastings lived in the vicarage,” Barney said.

  “It was the vicarage, once. Now it’s let out to anyone who wants to rent it . . . the parish council decided years ago that it was much too big for Mr. Smith to live alone in it like a pea in a pod, and they found him a little cottage on the other side of the church.”

  “And when I went to find him,” Jane said slowly, trying to remember, “I didn’t ask anyone where he lived, I just said to an old man by the church, is that the vicarage, and all he said was yes . . . he was a rather bad-tempered old man, I think . . . And do you know, Gumerry, I don’t think Mr. Hastings actually told me he was the vicar, I just took it for granted when he said something about his replacing Mr. Hawes-Mellor there. But he must have known I thought he was.”

  “Oh yes. He wasn’t going to disillusion you until he’d found out what you were up to. He knew perfectly well who you were.”

  “Did he really?”

  “From the moment he opened his front door.”

  “Oh,” said Jane. She thought about it, and felt cold. “Oh.”

  “So from that moment we all went on thinking he was the vicar,” Simon said, “and if ever we mentioned him to anybody like Mr. Penhallow they must have thought we meant the real vicar . . . but Gumerry, didn’t you know?”

  Great-Uncle Merry chuckled. “No. That’s what I thought as well. For some time—well, right up to the last—I entertained the most terrible suspicions of poor harmless Mr. Smith.”

  Barney said unexpectedly: “But if you’ve been against Mr. Hastings before, surely you couldn’t mistake anybody else for him?”

  “He changes,” Great-Uncle Merry said vaguely, deliberately looking away again. “There is no knowing what he will look like . . . .”

  And there was a finality in the ring of his voice that forbade any further question; as they knew there would always be when they tried to ask more about the mysterious enemy of their days in Trewissick. This was one of the things from Great-Uncle Merry’s secret world, and even though they had been so much involved, they knew he would keep his secrets as he always had.

  Simon looked down at the check in his hand. “We found the grail,” he said. “And everyone seems frightfully excited about it. But it isn’t any use on its own, is it? The Cornishman said, if whoever found it had other words from him, on the second manuscript that we didn’t even have a chance to look at, then they’d be able to understand what was written on the grail and know the secret of it all. But we shan’t ever know, because the manuscripts are at the bottom of the sea.”

  Barney said, gloomily, “We failed, really.”

  Great-Uncle Merry said nothing, and when they looked up at him, hearing only the hum of voices from the crowd, he seemed to be towering over them as tall and still as the pillar at his side.

  “Failed?” he said, and he was smiling. “Oh no. Is that really what you think? You haven’t failed. The hunt for the grail was a battle, as important in its way as any battle that’s ever been fought. And you won it, the three of you. The powers behind the man calling himself Hastings came very near to winning, and what that victory would have meant, if the secret of the grail had been given into their hands, is more than anyone dare think. But thanks to you the vital secret they needed is safe from them still, for as many centuries perhaps as it was before. Safe—not destroyed, Simon. The first manuscript, your map, will certainly have disintegrated at once in the sea. But that was no more use to anyone once it had led you to the second, and the grail. It might have made my colleagues even more excited”—he glanced round the room, and chuckled—“but that’s no matter. The point is that the second manuscript, down under the sea, is sealed up in its case—which will resist seawater indefinitely if it’s made of lead. So the last secret is safe, and hidden. So well hidden at the bottom of Trewissick Bay that they could never ever begin the long business of searching for it without our being able to find out, and to stop them. They have lost their chance.”

  “And so have we,” Simon said bitterly, seeing again the picture that had never properly left his mind. He thought of the glinting brass telescope case, with both precious manuscripts sealed inside, flying from his desperate hand and then, only yards from Great-Uncle Merry’s safe grasp, jerking away from the raised oar to break and plunge its contents for ever into the sea.

  “No, we haven’t,” said Jane unexpectedly. She was thinking of the same moment, and she was out of the cool marble vastness of the museum, back on Kemare Head in the excitement and the scorching sun. “We do know where it is. I was standing by the only thing that could mark it—that deep pool in the rocks. I was just on the edge, and the lead case went down right in front of me. So we should know where to look if we ever went back.”

  For a moment Great-Uncle Merry looked really alarmed. “I had no idea of that. Then the others will have noticed the same thing—and they will be able to go straight to the spot, dive for the manuscript, and be away with it before anyone has time even to notice they are there.”

  “No, they won’t,” Jane said, pink and earnest. “That’s the best thing of all, Gumerry. You see, we only noticed that pool in the first place because we came across it when the tide was at its lowest. By the time we were on our way back to the beach the water had covered it again. Mr. Withers fell into it, but he didn’t know he had. So if there was ever a tide as low as that again, we should be able to look for the pool and find the second manuscript. But the enemy wouldn’t, because they don’t know about the pool at all.”

  “Can we go back?” Simon said eagerly. “Can we go back, Gumerry, and have someone dive for it?”

  “One day, perhaps,” Great-Uncle Merry said; and then before he could say any more a group of men from the murmuring crowd all round them had turned towards him: “Ah, Professor Lyon! If you have a moment, might I introduce you to Dr. Theodore Reisenstatz—”

  “I am a great, great disciple of yours,” an intense little man with a pointed beard said to Great-Uncle Merry as he took his hand. “Merriman Lyon is a name much honoured in my country. . . .”

  “Come on,” Simon said in an undertone; and the children slipped away to stand on the edge of the crowd,
while the bald heads and grey beards wagged and chattered solemnly. They looked across the shimmering floor to the lone glass case where the grail stood like a golden star.

  Barney was gazing into space as if he were coming out of a trance.

  “Wake up,” Jane said cheerfully.

  Barney said slowly, “Is that his real name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “Great-Uncle Merry—is he really called Merriman?”’

  “Well, of course—that’s what Merry is short for.”

  “I didn’t know,” Barney said. “I always thought Merry was a nickname. Merriman Lyon . . .”

  “Funny name, isn’t it?” said Simon lightly. “Come on, let’s go and have another look at the grail. I want to see what it says about us again.”

  He moved round the edge of the crowd with Jane; but Barney stayed where he was. “Merriman Lyon,” he said softly to himself. “Merry Lyon . . . Merlion . . . Merlin . . .”

  He looked across the room to where Great-Uncle Merry’s white head towered over the rest; slightly bent as he listened to what someone else was saying. The angular brown face seemed more than ever like an old, old carving, deep eyes shadowed and mysterious above the fierce nose.

  “No,” Barney said aloud, and he shook himself. “It’s not possible.” But as he followed Simon and Jane he glanced back over his shoulder, wondering. And Great-Uncle Merry, as if he knew, turned his head and looked him full in the face for an instant, across the crowd; smiled very faintly, and looked away again.

  All the way up the immense gallery, over its glistening stone floor, row upon row of identical glass cases stretched into the distance, with pots, daggers, coins, strange twisted pieces of bronze and leather and wood all shut quiet inside like butterflies caught on pins. The case which held the grail was taller than the rest; a high glass box in a place of honour in the centre of the great gallery, with nothing inside it but the one shining cup, cleaned now to brilliant gold, poised on a heavy black plinth. A neat silver square beneath was engraved with the words: