A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

CHAPTER II

THURSDAY

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IT’S TO-MORROW, then,” observed Paddy, coming in damp and boisterous from his morning swim, and plumping himself down hungrily at the breakfast table.

Tim looked up from the paper. “What’s to-morrow?”

“The big day. The day we take the lid off the old gentleman. Mummy said Uncle Simon was alerting the squad last night. Wouldn’t do if anybody got caught with his pants down, would it? Except the squire, I suppose it’s all one to him by this time.”

Not at his most gay and extrovert in the morning, Tim squinted almost morosely at his son over his coffee cup, and wondered if anyone, even at fifteen, could really be as bright and callous as this before breakfast.

“I know!” said Paddy, fending off the look with a grin. “That’s no way to talk about the dead. Still, I bet he’s the only one around Maymouth who isn’t excited about this bit of research. 7 am! And if you’re not, you ought to be. It’s your family. And just think, we may be making history.” He reached for the cereal packet as if it had been the crock of gold, and helped himself liberally. “Mummy, how’s that fresh coffee coming?”

From the corridor Phil’s voice retorted hollowly: “Being carried by me, as usual.” She came in with the tray, and closed the door expertly with her elbow.

Paddy received his cup, laced it with brown sugar to his liking, and returned happily to his preoccupation.

“Think we really shall find anything, Dad? In the coffin?”

Phil stiffened, the coffee-pot suspended in her hand. She looked from her husband to her son, and inquired in suspiciously mild tones: “And where did you get the ‘we’?”

Paddy’s eyes widened in momentary doubt and dismay, and smiled again in the immediate confidence that she must be pulling his leg. “Come off it! You wouldn’t go and spoil it, would you? Not when it’s Uncle Simon’s own personal project? I’ve got to be there, of course.” His smile sagged a little; her face hadn’t melted. “Oh, gosh, you wouldn’t make me miss the only bit of real excitement there’s ever going to be in Maymouth?” Inevitably he appealed to Tim across the table. “Dad, you didn’t say I couldn’t. We were just talking about it, and you didn’t say—”

“I didn’t say you could,” said Tim, truthfully, but aware that he was hedging. He looked doubtfully at Phil’s cloudy face, observed the set of her jaw, and could have kicked himself. He should have known that she wouldn’t think grubbing about among tombs and bones a proper occupation for her ewe lamb. Mothers are like that. Especially mothers as achingly unsure of their hold on what they love as Phil.

“No, but I thought you understood that I was taking it for granted. You must have known I wanted to be there, you could have told me right away if you didn’t mean to let me. I’m sorry if I should have asked, but I never thought. I’ll ask now. Please, Mummy, is it all right with you if I go along with Uncle Simon and Dad to open Jan Treverra’s tomb to-morrow?”

He recited this in a parody of his child’s voice, wrinkling his nose at her provocatively; which, according to all the rules, should have been the right thing, and paid off handsomely. But it wasn’t the right thing, and it wasn’t going to pay off. He saw it at once, and was appalled to think he had so stupidly clinched the case against himself. Never reduce anything to a formula; if you do, you’re stuck with it.

“No,” said Phil, gently but firmly, “I’m sorry, but it isn’t all right with me. You’re not going, and that’s that. Now forget it.”

Paddy pushed his chair back a little, brows drawn down over a level and injured stare. “Why not? Why don’t you want me to?”

“Because it’s no place for you, and I’d rather you stayed away from it.”

“Think I’d be having nightmares?” he demanded, suddenly breaking into a broad but uncertain smile. “Now, look, Mummy, I’m fifteen. I know what bones are like, and I know we’re all going the same way in the end. It doesn’t worry me a bit. You needn’t be afraid I’ll turn morbid.”

“No!” said Phil with unmistakable finality, refusing argument. She herself couldn’t be certain of her motives, but she knew that the thought of letting him go down those sand-worn steps into the vault horrified her, and at all costs she wanted to prevent it.

Paddy recognised a closed and locked door, but would not acknowledge it as impassable. He made the mistake of casting a glance sidelong at Simon’s place, where a carelessly folded newspaper left lying showed the state of the day. Apparently he’d breakfasted already, which was unusual and a pity. He could have diverted this disaster if it had threatened in his presence. Paddy pushed away his plate, and smoothed his forehead conscientiously, like a man-of-the-world tactfully recognising when to change the subject.

“Where’s Uncle Simon?”

“No good,” said Tim, not without sympathy. “You haven’t an ally, my boy. He’s gone up to the Place already.”

“Up early, wasn’t he?” The implication that he was looking round for support he ignored, though he knew nobody was deceived.

“Now, look, Paddy,” said Tim with emphasis, “let it alone. She’s said no, and I say no, and that’s all about it.”

Paddy’s fist slammed the table. He jerked his chair back and was on his feet in a blaze of rage. That temper had cost them plenty in patience and forbearance in his early years, but they hadn’t seen much of it lately, and this abrupt flare was as startling as lightning. It was almost a man’s rage, quiet and quivering. The dilated nostrils looked almost blue with tension.

“What are you trying to do, keep me a kid? You can’t! If I’ve got to grow up in spite of you, I’ll do it that way, and be damned to it!”

He didn’t even shout; his voice was lower than usual. And he turned and flung out of the room and out of the house before either of them could draw breath to stop him.

“The awful part of it is,” owned Phil, “I don’t know how honest I’m being about this. I don’t want him to go, I don’t think it’s any place for an adolescent boy. But I know darned well I’m jealous of Simon. He only has to crook his finger, and Paddy comes running. You’d think no one else existed, this last week or so. It scares me.”

“Our own fault, I suppose.” Tim turned glumly from the window and looked her in the eyes long and sombrely. “We ought to have known we should have to tell him, sooner or later. We should have done it long ago. I only wish we had.”

“But how could we know we should have to? I know it’s supposed to be bad policy not to. But we were going to move here, everything was new. Nobody knew us, except Aunt Rachel. Nobody cared. I couldn’t see any reason. And now—how in the world could we ever set about it, after all this time?”

“We couldn’t. We daren’t. There isn’t a thing we can do, except just keep our fingers crossed, and let him alone. It won’t be long now.”

“No,” she agreed, but only half-comforted. “Tim—suppose Simon tells him?”

“No! He wouldn’t do that. He’s always kept his bargain so far, hasn’t he?”

“He’s never really wanted to break it before,” said Phil cynically, “but this time he does. And. much as I like him, I wouldn’t trust him far when he’s after something he wants.”

She got up with a sigh, and began loading the breakfast dishes on to the tray. There had been a time when she had been equally jealous of Simon’s influence over Tim, until she found out by experience that Tim, after his quiet fashion, went his own way, and was very unlikely to be deflected from it by Simon or anyone else.

“Think I’d better go after him?”

“Tim, don’t you dare give way to him, after I’ve gone and committed myself!”

“You’ve committed me, too,” said Tim with a wry grin. “Don’t worry—united we stand! Still, it was pretty much my fault he’d got the programme all set up like that. I think I’d better go and find him, and get him cooled down.”

But Paddy was not in the house, or the garden, or the yard, nor was he visible anywhere on the road to the sea. Tim came back empty-handed.

“His bike’s gone from the shed. Never mind him, let him go. He’ll be back for his lunch. Give him that, at any rate, he doesn’t sulk for long.”

“What’ll you bet,” said Phil sharply, “he hasn’t gone rushing up to the Place after Simon? I bet you! He thinks Simon will get round us. He thinks Simon can get round anybody.”

She plunged upon the telephone in the hall, and dialled the number of Treverra Place.

“Oh, hallo, Tam—”

But it wasn’t Tamsin; the telephone was switched to Miss Rachel’s room, and the old lady was wide awake and only too ready to talk. And perhaps that was better, for if it had been Tamsin and the library, more than likely Simon would have been there to hear one half of the conversation and deduce the other.

“Oh, it’s you, Aunt Rachel. This is Phil. Listen, is Simon there in the library right now? No, I don’t want him, I just want to know. Good, that’s fine. Well, look, if our Paddy comes looking for him, don’t tell him where he’s gone, will you? And don’t let Tamsin tell him. I know he’ll find him in the end, but he won’t think of the vicarage for a while, anyhow—long enough for him to think better of it, I hope.”

“Exactly why,” inquired Miss Rachel curiously, “should he be on his way here, and why don’t you want him to find Simon? Oh, I’ll do what you say, naturally. But I do like to have reasons for what I’m doing.”

Phil sat down and drew the instrument into a comfortable position for a long session. Tim, recognising the signs, sighed and left them to it. What could you do with women? They were as dead set on not being outwitted or defeated as the kid himself, but it wouldn’t be any use pointing out the illogic of their proceedings; they’d never be able to see the analogy.

By the time Paddy had pedalled furiously up the sunken lane and was breasting the climb into the outskirts of May-mouth, he had worked most of the spite out of him, and was coming to the conclusion that after all there was something to be said for his parents’ point of view. Not much, of course, but something. Maybe, after all, he wouldn’t go behind their backs and coax or trick Simon into promising him what they had denied. For pure pleasure he kept telling himself that he would, but the sight of the absurdly tall and ponderous gateposts of Treverra Place forced him to slow his pace and make up his mind. He took the long drive in a weaving course from rhododendrons to rhododendrons, like a contestant in a slow-bike race, fighting it out. He would, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t! He was fifteen, not a spoiled kid in a tantrum. He’d go back at lunch-time, and apologise.

Still, now that he was here he might as well drop in and say hallo to Miss Rachel and Tamsin. In fact, he’d have to, because one of them had spotted him already.

Miss Rachel was parading the stretch of gravel in front of the embattled Victorian front door, upright and stocky in a gaudy tweed skirt and hand-knitted purple jumper, the image of an elderly country gentlewoman from a distance. At close quarters she was more of a stage version of the same character, with a mobile, actress’s face and bold, autocratic gaze, with a sort of instability about the whole impersonation, as if she was only waiting to complete her scene before whipping off the make-up and dressing for quite another role in quite another play. The one thing that didn’t change was that she must always be the central personage. Sometimes she reminded Paddy of Queen Victoria, because of her imperious and impervious respectability and her general shape; at other times he thought of her as a local and latter-day Queen Elizabeth, because she had so successfully charmed younger men after her through most of her life, and could do so still when she really tried. Probably she had stayed single to keep her power, like her great prototype before her, though not for such grand and statesmanlike ends, but for her own personal pleasure.

He was very fond of her. She told him off and complained of him very often, but he didn’t have to be a genius to know that she adored him, and that was nearly enough to ensure his affection in return. What clinched it was the unexpected amount of fun she could be at times, sometimes even his ally against the generation in between. She was all the grandmother he had, and grandmothers are a reassuring article of equipment in any boy’s life.

So when he saw her stumping up and down examining her roses, it was natural enough to him to turn his bicycle from the main drive along the intricate paths between the flower-beds, and ride down upon her in a sudden flurry of fine gravel, circling her three or four times before he put a foot to the ground and halted to face her. He was at peace with himself by that time, and his face was sunny. They’d been stuffy, but he’d been a complete oaf. He wouldn’t do a thing to widen the breach; he’d make his peace like a lamb as soon as he went home.

“Hallo!” he said, uncoiling himself at leisure from the bike and propping it against the huge scraper by the front steps. “You’m looking very pert this morning, me dear.”

“Am I, indeed?” She tapped her stick peremptorily on the stones that bordered the rose-bed, and gave him a narrowed and glittering glance of her still handsome black eyes. “Buttering me up will get you nowhere, my boy, let me tell you that for a start. I’m wise to you. You didn’t come all the way up here to see me, did you? Oh, dear, no!”

“Well, for Pete’s sake!” said Paddy blankly. “What have I done to you this morning? Did you get out of bed the wrong side? I’ve only just set foot in the place, give me a chance.”

“Oh, I know! Innocence is your middle name. But it’s no use, young man, you’re wasting your time. You won’t find Simon in the library. He isn’t here. And Tamsin won’t tell you where he is, either.”

“I wasn’t going to—” he began, stung and enlightened by this attack; and there, remembering in what a state of indecision he had arrived at the gate, he halted and flushed in guilty indignation.

“Oh, no, not you! You wouldn’t dream of running to Simon behind your mother’s back, would you? Don’t think I don’t know what was in your mind. You think he’ll be able to twist your parents round his finger, and get you everything you want, don’t you? Even when they’ve said no. Yes, you see, I know all about it.”

Yes, he saw, and he saw exactly how she had learned what she knew. It didn’t take much imagination to reconstruct. His mother must have been on the line like a tigress. What galled him most deeply was not that she should be so determined to frustrate him, but that she should be able to see through him as through plate glass, and anticipate his moves so accurately. And he’d won his struggle and come to terms with her in his mind before it ever came to the point of action. But she’d never made a move towards reconciliation in her mind, never allowed for the possibility that he might relent and think better of it. Who was going behind whose back?

“Patrick, you’re not listening to me!” The old lady was half-way through the expected lecture, and he hadn’t heard a word.

“I am listening,” he said, with bewildering meekness, only half his mind present, the meek half. The rest, hurt, vengeful and obstinate, ranged bitterly after his mother’s treason. If she wanted that sort of fight, if she could immediately accept battle on those terms, and never give him the benefit of the doubt, well, she could have it that way.

“If they’ve said no, that should be enough for you. You’re not a little boy now, you know enough to realise they have your best interests at heart, and I thought you had sense enough to accept their judgment, even where you couldn’t quite agree with it. Fancy losing your temper over a little thing like that! I’m ashamed of you!”

So his mother hadn’t even kept that quiet. What could you do with women? They were all the same.

“I was ashamed of myself,” he said, with unexampled mildness; which pleased Miss Rachel so much that she never noticed the significance of the tense he had used. So he had been ashamed, for a few chastened and happy moments as he slow-biked up the drive. But not any more.

“That’s better. I know you’re not a bad boy at heart. Now you’re to put it right out of your mind, you hear me? They’ve said no, and that’s to be the end of it. You’re not to pester Simon. You’ll go right home and tell your mother you’re sorry.”

Will I, hell! thought Paddy very succinctly. Aloud he said: “O.K., I’m on my way, Aunt Rachel.” But he took good care not to say where.

She watched him mount his bike with exaggerated solemnity, salute her gravely, and pedal away down the drive again in a caricature of penitence and self-examination. He wasn’t even ashamed of pulling her leg. Practically speaking, she wasn’t in the act at all, she was just a miscalculation on his mother’s part.

And now, since that was the way his mother wanted it, now he would find Simon, if it took him all day.

It didn’t take him all day, but it did take him all morning. He’d tried the church in the sands, and the church in the town, and several other places, before he ran Simon to earth at noon in the lounge of the Dragon, snug in a corner between George and Dominic Felse, with three halves of bitter on their table. Paddy hesitated for a moment, somewhat daunted at having to prefer his plea before witnesses; but in the instant when he might have drawn back, Simon turned his head and saw him hovering.

“Hallo, there!” There was no doubting the welcome and pleasure in his face, but wasn’t he, all the same, a shade sombre this morning, a Simon faintly clouded over? Tomorrow was, Paddy reminded himself with a start of surprise and a slight convulsion of an uneasy conscience, a very serious business. “Looking for me? Anything the matter?” They made room for him, all three rearranging their chairs; he was in it now, he couldn’t back out.

“No, nothing. I just wanted—But I’m afraid I’m interrupting you.”

“Not in the least. Oh, I forgot you two hadn’t met before. This is Paddy Rossall, George. Say good-morning to Dominic’s father, Paddy.”

He had got something out of his pursuit, at any rate. He fixed George with large and hungry eyes. Did he look like a detective-inspector? The trick, he supposed, was not to look like one, but at least George Felse would do pretty well. Tall and thin, with a lean, thoughtful face and hair greying at the temples; not bad-looking, in a pleasant, irregular way. Paddy paid his respects almost reverently, and accepted the offer of a ginger ale.

“What did you want to ask me?”

“Well—if it’s all right with you, could I come along and help you to-morrow?” It was out, and in quite a creditable tone, though he had the hardest work in the world not to embroider it with all manner of persuasions and coaxings. His conscience suffered one more convulsive struggle before he suppressed it. If he hadn’t confessed that his parents had already forbidden it, still he hadn’t told any lies. It was a matter of his adult honour, by this time, not to admit defeat.

Simon sat looking at him for a few moments with an unreadable face, almost as though his mind had wandered away to ponder other and less pleasant subjects. “It’s like this, Paddy,” he said at last, almost abruptly. “I can’t very well say yes to you, in fairness, because I’ve just said no to Dominic here. There are good reasons, you know. Space is short inside there. And then, this isn’t an entertainment, you see, it’s a bit of serious research. It wouldn’t be the thing to turn it into a spectacle. The witnesses are necessary for the record, not for their own satisfaction.”

In the few seconds of silence George and Dominic exchanged a brief, significant glance over Paddy’s averted head. The boy studied his ginger ale as though the secret of the universe lay quivering somewhere in the globule of amber light suspended in it. His face was a little too still to be quite convincing, though the air of commonsense acceptance with which he finally looked up could be counted a success.

“Well, that all makes sense. O.K., then, that’s it. You didn’t mind my asking, though?”

“Paddy, in other circumstances I don’t know a fellow anywhere I’d rather have to help me.”

“Thanks! I’ll remember that. I suppose I’d better be getting back to lunch, then. You won’t be coming?”

“No, I’m lunching here. I told your mother this morning.”

“Well, thanks for the drink.” He tilted the empty glass and slanted a quick smile up at George. “Good thing it was only ginger ale.” He rose, his face still a little wry with swallowing his disappointment.

“Why, in particular?” asked Simon curiously.

The boy divided a bright, questioning glance between them. “Didn’t you really know? You’ve got a real, live detective-inspector sitting right beside you, watching your every move. Mr. Felse would have pinched you in a flash if you’d stood me a shandy.” He waved a hand, not ungallantly. “Good-bye!” He was gone.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Simon, blankly staring. “Are you really?”

George admitted it. “But I don’t know how Paddy found out.”

“I told him,” said Dominic, a little pink with embarrassment at seeming still, at his mature age, to be boasting about his father’s profession. “When he walked back half-way here with me yesterday, after tea at the farm. We hadn’t exactly got off on the right foot with each other, I was rather casting about for acceptable lures. There was Simon—” He smiled rather self-consciously across the table at the great man. “Anyone who knows your Harappa articles almost by heart is practically in with Paddy. And the next bid seemed to be you, Dad. He was duly impressed.”

“There’s still a bit of Paddy left in me,” owned Simon. “I’m impressed. Would you, as a change from sordid modern cases, be interested in my little historical puzzler? Come up to the Place for coffee, this evening, all the family. Try your professional wits on Squire Treverra’s epitaphs. There’s no special reason why they should, but they always sound like cryptograms to me. Anyhow, the whole library is interesting. Not many such families were literate enough to amass a collection like theirs.”

“Thanks,” said George, “we should like to, very much, if Miss Rachel has no objection to being invaded.”

“Miss Rachel loves it. Surround her with personable young men, and she’s in her element.” He smiled at Dominic, presenting him gratis with this bouquet. “I’m sorry I made such shameless use of you just now. Thanks for taking it so neatly. It helped him to accept it, and frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be much of a show for kids, and I’d rather keep him out of it.”

“As a matter of fact,” confessed Dominic ruefully, “I had wanted to ask, only I didn’t quite like to. But of course it’s settled now, anyhow. I don’t mind, if it makes Paddy feel he’s had a fair hearing.”

“I’m sorry to have had to do it, all the same. I suppose it wouldn’t do to ask you to come along, after all? No, I’m afraid Paddy wouldn’t forgive a dirty trick like that, and he’ll be somewhere not far away.”

“Couldn’t possibly risk it,” said Dominic firmly.

“But it really is a pity, because we could make room for one more sound man in the team.” And lightly Simon turned his deep-brown eyes, in their shapely pits of fine wrinkles etched paler in the bronzed skin, and looked innocently at George. “So how about you, George? I’d be very glad to have you there. Will you come?”

Visitors to Treverra Place were treated to a personally conducted tour of the whole house and grounds, both of which, in their way, were well worth seeing. Miss Rachel, bright as a macaw in black silk and emeralds and a Chinese shawl, tapped her way valiantly ahead with the stick she used as an extension of her personality rather than an aid to navigation, and pointed out, even more meticulously than its beauties, the drawbacks and imperfections of her family seat. She loved visitors; they were allowed to miss nothing.

Treverra portraits filled the long galleries on the first floor, and stared from the lofty well of the staircase.

“Most of them very bad,” said Miss Rachel, dismissing them with a wave of her wand. “All local work, we were not an artistic family, but we insisted on thinking we were.” The listeners got the impression that in her own mind she had been there from the beginning. “There’s just one very nice miniature here in the parlour—a young man.”

“It would be,” said Tamsin softly into Dominic’s ear, bringing up the rear of the procession. But she said it with affectionate indulgence rather than cynically. In her own way she was very fond of her formidable old employer.

“The garden,” announced Miss Rachel, pounding across the terrace and threatening it with the silver hilt of her stick, “is a disgrace. It is quite impossible to get proper gardeners these days. I am forced to make do with one idiot boy, and three days a week from the verger at St. Mary’s. There’s positively no relying on the younger generation. Trethuan promised he’d come in to-day and pick the apricots and Victoria plums. And has he put in an appearance? He has not. Never a sign of him, and never a word of excuse.”

“Maybe he wanted to finish scything the churchyard extension today,” suggested Simon vaguely, attendant at her heels. “He left it half-done yesterday, so the Vicar says.”

“If he’s going to be a jobbing gardener in addition to verger,” insisted the old lady scornfully, “he should be one, and plan his time accordingly. He came in yesterday after noon and picked just one tree of plums, and promised he’d be in to-day to finish the job. I was talking to him in the kitchen-garden not two minutes after you left here to go home to tea, Simon, and he said he’d only had an hour to spare, and he’d just looked in to let me know he’d give me the whole of to-day. And not a sign of him. You simply cannot rely on the young people nowadays.”

“Trethuan is not much above fifty,” explained Tamsin in Dominic’s ear.

“And I particularly wanted to send some apricots down to Phil, while they’re at their best. She has such a good hand with bottling.”

“I tell you what,” said Simon promptly, “get Paddy to come and pick them for Phil to-morrow, and keep him out of our hair. He’s dying to get in on the act, it’ll be a good idea to find him something to keep him out of mischief.”

Miss Rachel halted at the low balustrade of the front terrace, spreading her Chinese silks in an expansive wave over the mock marble. Her shrewd old face had become suddenly as milkily still as a pond.

“Paddy?” she said, in a sweet, absent voice. “Absurd! Such a sensitive boy, I’m sure he wouldn’t join you in your grave-hunt for any consideration. Certainly I’ll get Phil to send him up for some apricots, but whatever makes you think he has any interest in your undertaking at St. Nectan’s?”

Simon laughed aloud. “Just the fact that he came and asked if he could be there. Asked very nicely, too, but it didn’t get him anywhere. It’s no horror project, but still it isn’t for growing boys.”

She had resumed her march, but slowly and thoughtfully. Without looking at him she asked innocently: “When did he ask you?”

“This morning, around noon. Why?”

“Oh, nothing! I just found it hard to believe he’d do such a thing, that’s all.” After I had expressly forbidden it, she thought, in a majestic rage, but she kept her own counsel and her old face bland and benign. Something drastic will have to be done about Master Paddy. This cannot be allowed to go on. The child is shockingly spoiled. If Phil and Tim can’t take him in hand, I shall have to.

“And this,” declared Miss Rachel triumphantly, while the grandmotherly corner of her mind planned a salutary shock for Paddy Rossall, “this is our library.”

She always brought her visitors to it by this way, through the great door from the terrace,, springing on them magnificently the surprise of its great length and loftiness of pale oak panelling and pale oak bookshelves, the array of narrow full-length mirrors between the cases on the inner walls, and the fronting array of windows that poured light upon them. By any standards it was a splendid room, beautifully proportioned and beautifully unfurnished. There was Tamsin’s desk at the far window of the range, and the big central table with its surrounding chairs, and two large and mutually contradictory globes, one at either end of the room. And all the rest was books.

On the nearer end of the long table a large, steaming coffee-tray had been deposited exactly ten seconds before they entered by the outer door; and the inner door was just closing smoothly after Miss Rachel’s one elderly resident maid. When there were visitors to be impressed, the time-table in Treverra Place worked to the split second.

“There he is,” said Simon, “the man himself.”

The painting was small and dark and clumsy, a full-face presentation in the country style; commissioned portraits among small county families of the eighteenth century were meant to be immediately recognisable, and paid for accordingly. There was a short, livid scar across the angle of a square rat-trap of a jaw, redeemed by the liveliest, most humorous and audacious mouth Dominic had ever seen. A plain, ordinary face at first sight, until you looked at every feature in this same individual way, and saw how singular it was. The jaw could have been a pirate’s, the large, uneven brow might have belonged to a justice of the peace, and in fact had, for several years, until the squire had felt it more tactful to withdraw from the bench. The eyes were the roving, adventurous eyes of a lawless poet, and that joyous mouth would have looked well on the young, the gallant, the irresistible Falstaff.

Simon stood back from the wall, and looked the most celebrated of the Treverras full in the eyes.

George thought: They really seem to be looking at each other, measuring each other, even communicating. And although they look so different, isn’t there something intensely alike about them? Both privateers, a little off the regular track, not quite manageable by ordinary rules, not quite containable by ordinary standards.

“He had one ship trading across the Atlantic, and three or four small craft fishing and coasting here. And smuggling, of course. They all did it. It wasn’t any crime to them, it was business and sport—”

“Could it be,” whispered Dominic in Tamsin’s ear, “that Simon has his tenses wrong?”

She turned her head so rapidly that the fine red hair fanned out and tickled his nose. She gave him a lightning look, and again evaded his eyes.

“I hope they got everything away safely last night,” he said even more softly. He couldn’t resist the innocent swagger, and it was hardly disobeying orders at all. This time she didn’t look at him, but he saw her lip quiver and her cheek dimple, and she said to him out of the corner of a motionless mouth, like an old lag at exercise:

“You certainly are a sharp young man, Dominic Felse, be careful you don’t cut yourself.”

“And here’s his wife. Morwenna, her name was.”

“She was lovely,” said Bunty, surveying the unexpected charcoal drawing on grey, rough paper, heightened with white chalk and red. Fragile but striking, like the creature it encompassed. Fine, fiery dark eyes, a delicately poised head balancing a sheaf of piled black hair.

Miss Rachel beamed satisfaction from the background.

“I used to be thought very like her when I was younger.”

“Actually,” murmured Tamsin in Dominic’s ear, “she’s the living image of Jan, if you cover up that jaw of his.”

“And these are the famous epitaphs?” George stepped close to the two framed photographs on the wall below Morwenna’s portrait.

‘O Mortal Man, whom Fate—’

“You’ll find it easier from these transcriptions. Those photographs were made last time the church was cleared of sand, fifteen years or so ago. Whoever took them did a nice job on the angle of the light, and the lettering isn’t much eroded, but it’s eccentric. Here’s the text.”

Simon read aloud, in the, full, rapt voice of self-forgetfulness, as though the reflected image of Treverra stirred within him; and it was not often, Tamsin told herself, watching, that Simon forgot himself.

‘O Mortal Man, whom Fate may send

To brood upon Treverra’s End,

Think not to find, beneath this Stone,

Mute Witness, bleached, ambiguous Bone.

Faith the intrepid Soul can raise

And pilot through the trackless Maze,

Pierce unappalled the Granite Gloom,

The Labyrinth beyond the Tomb,

And bring him forth to Regions bright,

Bathed in the Warmth of Love and Light,

Where year-long Summer sheds her Ease

On golden Sands and sapphire Seas.

There follow, O my Soul, and find

Thy Lord as ever true and kind,

And savour, where all Travellers meet,

The last Love as the first Love sweet.’

“That was for himself. And this one is hers. Some say Jan wrote it before he died, knowing they wouldn’t be parted long. Some say she wrote it herself in his style. Sometimes I think it’s more remarkable than the other.

‘Carve this upon Morwenna’s Grave:

NONE BUT THE BRAVE DESERVES THE BRAVE.

Shed here no Tears. No Saint could die

More Blessed and Comforted than I,

For I confide I shall but rest

A Moment in this stony Nest,

Then, raised by Love, go forth to find

A Country dearer to my Mind,

And touching safe the sun-bright Shore,

Embrace my risen Lord once more’.

There was a brief and curiously magical silence, and no one wanted to break it. It was not that the poetry was so lofty, but rather that it was so elusive, as though every phrase in it had at least two meanings, and therefore at any line you could lose your way, but if at every line you took the correct turning you would find yourself at the centre of a maze, always an achievement, and sometimes a revelation.

“Any reactions?” asked Simon, poking a deliberately brutal finger through the web of hallucination. “Apart from the fact that here was a bloke who knew his folk-verse and his Dryden equally well?”

Tamsin prodded Dominic in the ribs unexpectedly. “Go ahead!” she hissed in his ear. “Say something profound!”

Startled, he blurted out exactly what was in his mind. “They make the after-life sound like a Christmas sunshine cruise to the Bahamas.”