Death of a Burrowing Mole

1

A Rumour of Buried Treasure

^ »

Dear Godmother,’ (wrote Bonamy Monkswood), ‘thank you very much for my birthday cheque. As usual it will come in uncommon useful. I wonder, though, whether I’ve collared it under false pretences, as Tom Hassocks and I have changed our minds about going to Greece. Instead, we are planning to spend the whole of the summer vac hunting for buried treasure.

‘What happened was this: towards the end of the term Tom was rooting about in a secondhand bookshop in search of material for his thesis on sheepfarming, when he came upon this folder containing half a dozen numbers of the county magazine. The copies were nice and clean and the folder, which was one of these clip-in affairs which are nearly as handy as having a bound volume, looked as good as new, so Tom thought that, when he had done with it, it would make a present for an uncle he is keeping in with, the old boy being a bit of an enthusiast for old customs and local legends and so forth, and the mags are crammed with such.

‘Well, Tom thumbed them through and, although there was nothing much which would help his thesis along, there was this account of a ruined castle and its hidden treasure. I know these romantic stories are two a penny, but this particular one seemed more authentic and more likely than most.

‘The castle, built by the Normans on a hill which had been an early Saxon stronghold abandoned after the end of the Danish wars, was enlarged and altered during the Middle Ages and was held by the Royalists against Cromwell’s troops during the Civil War.

‘Well, the story told in the county magazine was that gold, silver and jewels had been collected from various Royalist sources and stored at the castle until they could be melted down or sold abroad to aid the Royalist cause.

‘When the garrison realised that the castle could not withstand further siege, but would have to surrender in the end, the treasure was dropped into a castle well in the hope that it would be safe there until the king got on top (which, of course, he never did) and the treasure resurrected and used to carry on the war.

‘When the castle was surrendered and evacuated, the Parliamentary army never found the stuff because, out of spite for having been kept at bay so long, they trained their artillery again on the empty buildings and reduced them more or less to rubble. The fallen masonry blocked the well so effectively that nobody knew where it had been and so the treasure, according to the account in the magazine, has never been found and must still be there. Apparently there is a cryptic reference to it in the county records.

‘I’m not saying that I regard this as anything more than a fairy-tale; on the other hand, there may be something in it. Very few people inside the castle itself knew anything about the disposal of the treasure or even of its existence, and it is quite likely that those few who had been trusted with the secret were killed when the castle was taken.

‘Tom has written to the owner of the estate on which the shell of the castle stands and has received permission to do a little restoration work. No mention of the treasure, of course, but I suppose that, if we do find anything, it will be crown property unless the coroner decides it belongs to the landowner. I am not up in these things, and anyway we have not found the stuff yet!’

‘And I shall be mighty surprised if they do,’ said Laura Gavin, when Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, the godmother to whom the letter was addressed, gave it to her to read. ‘If Bonamy wants a fortune, he should join an American tennis circuit or rob a bank.’

‘He does not appear to be a fortune hunter, but I hope he will keep us in touch with his activities,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I can think of no pastime more enchanting than looking for buried treasure. I even envy beachcombers. Theirs must be the happiest of existences, don’t you think? Bonamy does not name the castle. I wonder which one it is?’

‘I know which one it is – at least, I think I do,’ said Laura. ‘From the clues he gives, it must be Castle Holdy. I remember taking Hamish there one afternoon when he was nine. He enjoyed scrambling about among the ruins and the lower part of a newel staircase in the keep is still there. He climbed up as far as it went and I exercised great self-restraint and forbore to warn him to be careful. The staircase ended rather abruptly and there was a sheer drop of thirty feet with a mass of broken masonry at the bottom.’

‘You did well to issue no warning, but I would not be surprised to hear that you stationed yourself on the fallen masonry to catch him if he overbalanced.’

‘I did, but I didn’t utter a word except to answer him when he emerged and called down to me, “Here I am.” I have a theory that it makes children unsure of themselves if you tell them to be careful. Of course, accidents do happen, but, in my opinion, a self-confident, self-reliant child is a safe child. Kids know pretty well what they can do and what they can’t do. The trouble comes when they’re given a “dare”. I brought Hamish up to say, “I’ll do it, if you’ll do it first.” I’m not at all sure that he took the advice, though.’

‘If you and Hamish were able to scramble about on the hill and climb the ruins, I take it that the castle is open to the public.’

‘You mean we might go along and take a look? Yes, the ruins are open to the public all right. What’s more, there is no charge for admission, so far as I remember.’

‘So we shall enrich our experience and save our pockets at one and the same time, and that constitutes a bonus so unusual that it would be a pity not to take advantage of it.’

‘When do we go?’

‘Well, the weather is clement, the school holiday season is not yet upon us and we have no outstanding commitments.’

‘If Castle Holdy is the one I think it is,’ said Laura, ‘there is a pleasant seaside town not so very far from it. We could lunch there and visit the ruins in the afternoon. The place is called Holdy Bay. It’s a quiet, modest little town and will remain peaceful until the school summer holidays begin, and those are still nearly three weeks off, I think. The town itself is more bracing than other places near by, because, owing to the irregularities of the coastline, it faces almost due east instead of south. It would do us no end of good to take the air there.’

‘It sounds delightful. It is a long time since I spent a day in an English watering-place.’

‘I hope it has remained as it was, that’s all. It’s years since I took the children there. Gavin looked after Eiladh on the beach while I took Hamish to Holdy Castle, I remember, but mostly we stayed on the sands.’

‘The university term still has a day or two to run, so the boys will not have begun their search yet. Let us go to Holdy Bay tomorrow, and survey the castle ruins at our leisure on the following day.’

Except for a housing estate on its outskirts and a caravan park on the seaward side of this estate, Holdy Bay had remained unspoilt. Its streets were narrow, its houses were old, and its two hotels were solid, unpretentious and comfortable. Laura booked two rooms for two nights at the Seagull and after lunch she left Dame Beatrice at the hotel and went out to renew her memories of the town.

There was now a small yacht station in the arm between the old stone jetty and where the promenade ended, and at the landward end of the jetty there was a training school for deep-sea divers, but there were still the firm, flat sands, the bold headland to the south, the long, tapering peninsula to the north, and behind the promenade the grassy banks with park benches. There were no ugly shelters on the promenade, no beach huts, and the two hotels were back in the town.

She walked to the end of the jetty, to where the local pleasure steamer tied up during the holiday season, and then returned to the promenade, left it at the coastguard station and walked up the hill at that end of the town. At the top she took her binoculars out of their case and raked the landscape until she picked out the remains of the castle keep. As the crow flies, the castle was surprisingly close at hand.

On the following morning she and Dame Beatrice drove along winding roads to visit it. They were quickly out of the town and before they entered the next village the road appeared to double-back upon itself to curve round the foot of the hill which culminated at the high cliff Laura had seen from the promenade. Soon it crossed a bridge over a disused railway line and, a few miles further on, Laura stopped the car at a viewpoint from which there was a sight, in the far distance, of the castle. It was away to the left of the panorama which was spread out in front of and below the sightseer, for the road wound among low hills and was well above sea level.

An expanse of unbroken moorland was bordered by an even greater expanse of shimmering water. The lay-by into which Laura had driven the car was protected from a long drop to the moor by a stone wall. She got out to admire the view. Beyond the moors and the brackish tidal estuary below her, she could see a town, but the chief point of interest was the castle keep. It stood out, a melancholy but dignified shell, on top of the hill she remembered from years back. She returned to the car and said, before she backed it carefully on to the narrow road, ‘Hamish is going on for thirty now.’

‘Eheu!Fugaces labuntur anni,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘True, but how sad! One feels with the poet:

‘Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.’

They drove on in silence. There were banks with their tall, summer grasses, birdsfoot trefoil, horse-shoe vetch, scabious, purple milk-vetch, ragged robin and ox-eye daisies, and on the hedges, which had been left untrimmed, there was wild clematis. Blackberry bushes were in flower and, at one place, there was a copse of hazels.

Laura pulled up again, got out of the car, jumped a ditch and returned with a spray of three hazel nuts in their green bracts accompanied by two heart-shaped, double-toothed leaves. She presented the spray to Dame Beatrice, who pinned it to the lapel of the summer jacket she was wearing and said, ‘Three wishes!’

The narrow road made a last bend, went under instead of over the next railway bridge, and then it made a T-junction with the road which led one way to the village of Holdy and the other way further inland to the town Laura had seen from the viewpoint.

She followed the signpost to the village. A stream ran alongside the road and there was a small waterfall. The village, stone-built and unspoilt, offered a parking-space for the car and in the small square there was a tea-shop which Laura marked down for future reference. She locked the car and then she and Dame Beatrice followed the little stream round the foot of the castle mound, climbed the slope and picked their way through the arch of the castle gatehouse, which was partially blocked with fallen masonry.

Beyond this there was an expanse of almost level ground. Then came the steepest part of the hill crowned by the remains of the keep. Dame Beatrice looked at the fallen blocks of stone.

‘I am reminded,’ she said, ‘of a remark overheard by E. M. Delafield at Corfe Castle in Dorset and immortalised by her in The Diary of a Provincial Lady. A woman standing near the “Lady” said to her companion, “That bit looks as if it had fallen off somewhere.” ’ Laura surveyed the debris with an indulgent eye. ‘There is enough work here to keep the young men out of mischief for weeks,’ she said, ‘never mind what’s fallen off where.’

Shortly after returning home, Dame Beatrice received another letter from Bonamy:

‘Dear Godmother,

‘We have been outflanked! What do you think? Tom and I had hardly made our preliminary survey when two other interested parties turned up, although, thank goodness, they are not treasure-hunters like ourselves and neither will they be given any clue to our intentions.

‘One party seems to consist of a man and four women. The plump woman is his wife, then there are a gorgeous one, a little, thin one and a six-footer – a most intimidating young female, from whom, I should think, John Betjeman drew his portrait of the Olympic Girl. She makes me feel like the ‘unhealthy worm’ he refers to as himself.

‘The first hint we got that this gang were on the premises was when Tom spotted the caravan parked at the foot of the hill. The other party consists of two men and the first we knew of them was on our return from lunch at a pub-cum-hotel in the village. A couple of workmen were putting up a notice outside the gatehouse which read: Scientific work in progress. No admittance.

‘Of course Tom asked what the hell and the men said they didn’t know. They were only carrying out orders. While we were arguing, the other parties turned up and warned us off. I took over from Tom, as there were ladies present and his language, even in these lax times, is apt to be unguarded, and pointed out that we had a vested interest and must be allowed admittance to the site. I informed them that we were undergraduates and that we had permission from the landowner to work on the ruins. I spoke of vacation commitments and a thesis we had to write. I spoke well and eloquently.

‘It turns out that the larger party want to make a survey of the site with a view to restoring the various parts of the castle – the flanking-towers, the postern gates and all that sort of thing – while the two men are planning to dig for evidence of a Saxon cemetery or a Danish tomb, or some such. They want to dig trenches and shift rubble and make sections and all those sort of Sir Mortimer Wheeler things which modern archaeologists do when digging up the past.

‘Well, thank goodness, we were all civilised enough to come to an understanding. The big party did not see that their work would interfere with that of the archaeologists, so that was all right, and Tom and I have offered assistance to both sides. In the end I think Tom and I may be the gainers, as it seems navvies have been hired to do some of the heavy work, so here’s hoping that, among the lot of us, somebody uncovers our well!’

‘I wonder what effect, if any, the notice at the gatehouse will have on the general public,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘My bet is that they’ll respect it,’ said Laura. ‘The sort of people who would go to look at a ruined castle would be law-abiding. Others will think it’s something to do with nuclear power and the atom bomb, or else that an oil-rig is going to be set up. Those are the things people connect with warning notices nowadays. They may stand and stare, but they won’t encroach. That’s my view.’

‘You appear to have your finger on the public pulse.’

‘I do better than that. I test its blood pressure,’ said Laura, ‘a thing the politicians seldom do.’

‘In any case, five able-bodied men and the Olympic Girl, plus a posse of strong-armed workmen, should be intimidating enough to keep even the most intrepid sightseer at bay,’ commented Dame Beatrice. ‘It occurs to me to wonder whether Bonamy and Tom have done wisely in offering their services to the others.’

‘I don’t see that they had much option. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” is the only sensible motto in these unheroic times,’ said Laura.

There was a lengthy postscript to Bonamy’s letter:

‘In case you may know any of them, Edward and Lilian Saltergate are the married couple, both of them architects, and both have impressive letters after their names. His are B.Arch., ARIBA, and she is MA and FSA. The girls they have with them are Fiona Broadmayne (the large, hefty one) and Priscilla Yateley (the little, thin one). As for the third girl, the glorious Helen of Troy, to our horror she turns out to be a college lecturer and a Ph.D. Her name – just for the record, because it’s no use for anything else – is Dr Susannah Lochlure, and I can tell you the “lure” is there all right. She is the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley, but also a Fellow of the Historical Association. “ ’Tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true.”

‘Tom had marked her down as his bit of crumpet while we are here, and says he is devastated now he knows that she ranks among the untouchables, but it doesn’t so far seem to have affected his appetite. She really is the most gorgeous bit of plum cake, though.

‘I don’t think Tom would have stood much chance with her, anyway, even were she less exalted than turns out to be the case. The two chaps who are proposing to dig up the landscape are a middle-aged man named Professor Veryan and a much younger fellow, a don at Veryan’s university, called Nicholas Tynant. He belongs to the elf-lock-over-the-forehead school of thought, looks shockingly like the portraits of Rupert Brooke, and is obviously keeping a proprietorial eye on the lovely Susannah.

As for the sweet girl undergraduates, they are both very definitely non-starters from Tom’s point of view. Priscilla shrinks and wilts if anybody so much as looks in her direction and is hardly what one would call an armful, anyway, and Fiona is utterly terrifying, apart from the fact that she quite obviously despises the male sex and is half a head taller than either of us, besides having a presence (to put it politely) which blots out the landscape.

‘So what with Priscilla (I have a hunch she writes poetry!) almost swooning at the sight of us, Fiona utterly despising us, and Susannah, that glorious goddess, unaware, it seems, of our existence, we are dependent on the motherly kindness of the plump, unruffled Mrs Saltergate. She and Saltergate talk of taking a holiday cottage in the village instead of staying for two months in their hotel. If that comes off, we may be able to wheedle her into getting our bibs and tuckers washed for us, otherwise we shall have to use the launderette in the nearest town, and that costs money.

‘On the surface, everybody seems to conform to one known type or another, so I do not think any one of them would be worthy of your scalpel. Meanwhile Tom and I are confident that, between Saltergate’s reconstructions and Veryan’s excavations, our well will get itself expertly uncovered and then our real fun will begin. We were somewhat taken aback at first when we found there were to be all these cuckoos in our nest, but now, although I think both parties will work Tom and me until our sweat bedews the hillside – Veryan has already laid off two of the four workmen he had hired to do the digging – our gains will more than off-set our losses. Perhaps you will pop along and watch us at work some time? It will be a scene to strike pity and terror into the human heart.’