A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (34 page)

There is an old saying, that when you’re in a situation where there’s no way out, the only answer is to go deeper in. And so, in we went.

Behind the Scarlet Knot was a labyrinth of well-constructed tunnels that was truly astonishing. The first one where we’d just landed was about fifteen yards long, with stacked stone walls and a corbelled stone roof shaped in a curve overhead. The floor was hardened earth. Although some of the seawater had indeed seeped in at the mouth of this tunnel, the tunnel itself was built on an upward slant, so that as we walked up it, very soon we were on higher and drier ground.

“Look at how the walls and roof are stacked. They’re different from the first caves we came through. These are man-made,” Jeremy marvelled. “So it’s got to lead somewhere, right?”

“Unless it’s a burial chamber,” I said gloomily. But since the tunnels continued, so did we.

“We should keep moving until we’re far enough away so that the high tide won’t reach us,” Jeremy said. “Then, when the tide goes out again, maybe we can go back out the way we came.”

“Wish we’d managed to call Alfred before all this hit the fan,” I said, glancing at my phone’s diminishing battery power, and turning it off to save whatever spark of life was left in it.

“Well,” said Jeremy, “we can hardly expect to get Wi-Fi in a prehistoric tunnel.”

“You don’t think we’re going to run into lions and tigers and bears in their lair, do you?” I asked, shuddering from the chill. Jeremy gallantly took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders.

“No, all the woolly mammoths are long gone,” he assured me. So, we soldiered on.

We moved through another stone tunnel to the left, which took us to higher ground still, and then a sharp right, where the new tunnel widened slightly.

Now, let me just say that when it comes right down to it, you’d really be hard pressed to find a nice soft landing in a cave. I mean, look. Rocks are not really made to be beds or easy chairs. But we knew we had to hunker down, so we did the best we could. Jeremy finally found a very wide, flat rock, and sat down with his back to the dry wall.

“I hope they didn’t sacrifice virgins on that stone slab,” I said apprehensively.

“Come on, babe,” he said, opening his arms wide so that I could sit in his lap and rest my head against his warm chest. “I always wanted to go camping with you.”

At first, I found myself dropping off to sleep, but then I awakened suddenly, as if I’d heard an unfamiliar noise but could not recall it. It was probably the deep silence that was so eerie to me. Finally, though, we both fell into a deep, undisturbed sleep.

 

I knew it was morning for one reason only. Light. Not much, but, as any miner will tell you, whatever shaft of sunlight you can get is paradise when you’ve been stranded underground. This was a long, thin ray of sunshine that came down like a laser from a tiny sliver between the rocks in the ceiling over our heads. Jeremy awoke when he felt me turn my head, and now I pointed at the light. We got up carefully, and nearly stumbled on something rectangular that we had not seen in the dark of night.

It was a crate of three dusty, black, unmarked glass bottles, stoppered and sealed, and filled with a mysterious liquid. The bottles were blank. Only the box itself bore the name of the wine:
Napoleon madeira
. “Wow,” Jeremy said. “If this actually is what it says it is, then it’s probably the best madeira ever made. They still talk about it at wine auctions today, as if it’s the Holy Grail.”

Dimly I remembered, from my work on a ridiculous TV biopic called
Joséphine, Queen of the Romantics,
that Napoleon, who suffered from a stomach ailment, was, at the end of his life, unable to quaff the barrels of wine that had been sent to him. So it was divided up into bottles, and afterwards it was unclear what became of them.

“There are legends far and wide of discoveries of these lost bottles,” Jeremy explained.

“Is this that ‘eternal wine’ you told me about, that never goes bad?” I asked in awe.

Jeremy nodded. “Do you realize what it could mean?” he said. “We may have just stumbled onto Blackstrap Doyle’s smuggling caves. Which would make sense, because Prescott gave Paloma the little Scarlet Knot that must have originally come from here!”

“Ohh,” I said. “But, this tunnel was surely built long before Blackstrap arrived on the scene.”

Jeremy was still gazing upward. “The ceiling here is flatter than the others. Maybe we should see where that crevice overhead opens to. We might be able to get out of this cave, right here and now.”

“But how can we reach the ceiling?” I asked.

Well. Let me tell you what my caveman did. He started gathering stones. And he labored on his little construction site until he’d built me a staircase of my own that went all the way up to, if not heaven, at least to the light. Jeremy climbed first, to test it with his own weight. Once he reached the top, he then had to heave and ho and push and shove with all his might against the section of the ceiling where light was peeping through. At one point he very nearly lost his balance, and I feared that he would topple and fall. But he hung on, and he finally broke open a piece of the roof above us.

“Let’s go!” he said triumphantly; and then he, and I, popped through it.

I somehow imagined that we’d end up in a meadow, or at least at the mouth of an above-ground cave. And indeed, at first, we did seem to be in just another cave, albeit one with many shafts of light streaming in. But then Jeremy swept his flashlight around, and I saw that we were in a place so familiar, I simply couldn’t believe it.

We were in Grandmother Beryl’s basement.

“Fuggy-holes,”said Barbara the archeologist. “That’swhat the Cornish call them. But in archeological terms they are known as
fougous
.”

She pronounced it “foo-goo”, which, as far as I was concerned, was as funny and unscientific-sounding as fuggy-holes.

You can imagine how shocked she and the environmentalists were when Jeremy and I came tearing out of Grandmother Beryl’s house, still dressed in our evening attire from the previous night, albeit smudged with cave dirt. My face looked as if I had been playing in a coal scuttle. Jeremy’s hair was full of white powdery dust, from the way he’d shouldered those roof-stones just like Atlas.

We had run across the fields where the environmental team was doing their morning survey of the western section of the property. Jeremy paused to phone Alfred the cop, to inform him about what we’d seen of the Mosley brothers’ operation, while I began to explain our adventure to Barbara and Peter.

“Caves?” Barbara asked immediately. “What caves?”

Jeremy quickly joined us, and brushing off his jacket, he described the peculiar construction of the network of tunnels from which we’d emerged. At first Barbara’s expression was hard to read. I fully expected her to dismiss those tunnels as old, disused copper and tin mines, which no doubt had been a boon for Prescott Doyle’s smuggling operation.

But while everybody else was marvelling over the Napoleon madeira, and conjuring up stories of smuggling, Barbara moved thoughtfully closer to me and spoke in a low voice. “Take me there, right now,” she said. “I want to see the tunnels for myself.”

So Jeremy and I brought her into Grandmother Beryl’s basement and we retraced our steps. We began with the spooky far end of it where we’d popped out. With a ladder we all managed to lower ourselves down, and Jeremy led the way back through those elaborate stone-roofed tunnels with their sharp turns. Barbara was silent at first, as we all beamed our flashlights around for her to get a good look. And that was when she told us what she believed they were.

“
Fougous
are tunnels built by the Celts,” Barbara explained, as she wandered around in growing delight. “Nobody really knows why they built them. Maybe to store food, or to have a hiding place from the enemy, or to store their weapons. They are all over Cornwall, but I’ve never seen a network of them quite like this.”

We continued onward, until we finally reached the area behind the giant replica of the Scarlet Knot. We showed her how we’d squeezed in, and we all went through that narrow passage until we got into the main cave chamber. The tide was out now, so we stood there awhile, gazing at the remarkable stone formation that looked so much like an engagement ring.

Barbara stepped right up to it, shining her light at various spots, staring with a new intensity.

“It looks to me like a megalithic Celtic entrance stone,” she said slowly. “Hmm, you can quite clearly see that very interesting pattern of a
triskele
design.”

Jeremy and I waited for her to explain further. It took Barbara a second to notice that we weren’t familiar with the term.

“Three spirals together, and then another three, and then another three,” she explained, moving her fingers reverently over all those swirls, whorls and spirals that were carved into the stone. “The Celts loved the number three, believing that everything important happened in three’s. Birth-life-death. Sun and moon and stars. Land, sea, sky. Et cetera. I’m thinking that this find is from the Neolithic period, which is from 5000 B.C. to 1000 B.C. I’d say we’re talking early Iron Age.”

“Wow,” I said. Then I asked, “You called it an entrance stone?”

“Yes,” answered Barbara. “They are usually connected to a ceremonial site of some sort; you know, it’s a gateway to something. Obviously this one leads to all the
fougous
behind it, and ends at the property we were inspecting. So, there must be a reason that all these tunnels lead there.”

Now Barbara made us take her outside, via the cleft in the cliffs, exactly where we’d originally entered from the beach. We walked along the shoreline, back past the rock pools and Basil’s cottage. Basil himself was out in the water in a little boat, fishing. He waved to us, and we waved back, then we passed under the horseshoe-shaped rock, until we got to Grandmother Beryl’s cove and the steps leading upward to her house.

When we reached the western property, Peter, the team leader of the environmentalists, had more news for us. “We uncovered a few stone markers,” he told Barbara. “Think you’re going to want to take a look.”

We hurried across the field, where we saw the stones he’d found, which were flattish granite rocks, all about four and a half feet tall; and each were shaped like a rectangle topped with a head-and-shoulders, giving them a bit of personality. They lay in a neat row on the ground.

“We left them lying flat, but exactly where we found them,” Peter said. “They seem to have been arranged on a diagonal line.”

Barbara spoke to no one, and instead began circling the field, sometimes kneeling, sometimes standing on tiptoe.

“She looks like a Native American scout,” I said. “What’s she after?”

“Not sure,” said Jeremy, fascinated.

When she returned to us, Barbara, who initially did not strike me as a particularly excitable person, now looked highly animated, her eyes glinting.

“I have to call in my team,” she said, as if her fellow archeologists were the only ones who’d really understand how truly fantastic this all was. So she got on her phone and conferred with her pals at her office. When she was done, she spoke to Jeremy, me and Peter in a low voice.

“Look, here’s what I think,” she said. “We need to excavate this area, and find out if there are more stones like this. Thanks to Peter, we already have a permit to do so. But once we begin, it’s going to be hard to keep it quiet. And if news about this find hits the press, then all the antiquities dealers and looters will descend on us.”

My ears picked up the word “find”, which she’d used before. Barbara must have noticed the expression on my face, because she smiled conspiratorially now.

“I can get the geological survey going today,” she said, “but after that, we need to clear the site of grass and stuff before we can start a proper dig. That’s going to take a bunch of interns to help.”

She probably meant she wanted to hire some posh grad students from universities in London.

But I had a better idea. “Hey, if you want to keep it quiet, then deal with the locals, not the London crowd,” I said. I turned to Jeremy. “Let’s call Alfred and bring on the eco-warriors.”

“You mean the ones that kidnapped Rollo?” Jeremy asked incredulously.

“Why not?” I said. “They’re supposed to do community service. I can’t think of a better service to Port St. Francis, can you?”

 

And that’s how Colin and Alfred were put in charge of the very penitent eco-warriors. Over the next few days, they were like an advance army, carefully clearing and assisting under Barbara’s team leadership. And every evening, Alfred posted twenty-fourhour police guards around this new “historical site of interest”, which included Grandmother Beryl’s house.

Then the dig began in earnest, and over the next few weeks Barbara uncovered more marvels as her team dug trenches, and sifted, and dug some more. I looked at the newly excavated stones that the archeologists were re-assembling, standing them up now in the rows where they’d been discovered. Apparently over time the stones had fallen and sunk, but Barbara believed that they once stood in a very distinct and formal arrangement of lines that emanated outward like the spokes in a wheel.

On one bright, sunny day, even I could see that what the archeologists were reconstructing was beginning to look like a miniature Stonehenge. The dig had expanded slightly into Shannon and Geoff’s farmland, so they came to watch and help out when they could.

Shannon paused to talk to me about it. She said, “Look. Geoff was right about the ley lines. See how this row of stone markers forms a line that goes straight through the farm? Remember he told you that for some reason the crops grow taller here? Energy,” she said, her eyes shining. “The ancients knew how to channel the best energy.”