Summon the Bright Water (22 page)

‘We shall go back this evening and have another look at slack water,’ I told the major.

‘Useless, old boy! You said so yourself. And bloody dangerous!’

‘I’ve eaten armadillo and it was quite good.’

‘You’re in one of your dreams, come off it!’ Elsa said.

‘I am, but you started it. Glyptodont was a cousin of the armadillo.’

The major pointed out that there would be no bones left.

‘Nor of its master. Nor of his ship,’ I said. ‘Nor of Nodens nor Arthur nor the quick-witted Odysseus. But bones are not the only memorial.’

In the afternoon we had to leave earlier than I intended in order to get off the mud. The ebb was still rolling down the river in a yellow flood, and Marrin’s dinghy had not enough power to cross the tideway to the English Stones before we were carried down the Shoots. I was afraid that the first place we could put in to would be the port of Avonmouth, but managed to bear away to starboard and anchor in the shelter of Gruggy Island which formed the right-hand bank of the gorge and was partly showing. There we had to stay for two more hours in full view of the Welsh coast until slack water. A passing coaster hailed us to know if we wanted help. I understood why Marrin only went out when low water was at night and kept his rowing boat in the mouth of the pill at New Passage.

When the force of the tide died away, we crossed to the inlet in the Stones where we had been the night before and where I could change into full gear for the dive unobserved. At about seven the Shoots became as motionless as a pond and I went in carrying a small bag of stout canvas. The cave was not easy to find again, for I had been carried past it at speed and surfaced well to the north. When at last I saw it a good ten minutes of slack water had been wasted.

I swam into the mouth, keeping well clear of the bottom though it was the usual Severn mixture of mud and sand and probably safe. Ahead of me my light showed a vertical face of rock, about the height of a man, which at first I thought was the end of the cave, but it wasn’t. On the top of this little cliff was a flat ledge running back a few yards, with a slope to the right of it which ended in a nearly perpendicular funnel. It occurred to me even then that if this fissure carried on as it started it might end in a blowhole at the surface of the Stones.

The ledge had a floor of fine silt which did not appear to have been disturbed. I swept it away to reveal the bare rock beneath, but at the expense of being half blinded by the cloud I created. Below the cleft I touched something which I thought was an oddly shaped shell and pulled it out. It was encrusted with sea growths but so exactly ring-shaped that it had to be a man-made object. Time was forgotten. I was wild with excitement. I wriggled over the silt, swashing a space all round me like a cock salmon looking for eggs to fertilise in the bed of a stream. I don’t know what Marrin was after when he first entered the cave. It would not have been salmon but doubtless had something to do with life in the dark deep. He was very much in my mind, but without fear. I was conscious that I must be imitating all his movements. And then his hand had struck, as mine did, little flat pebbles which slid easily upon each other, scoured clean by the gentle wash of the silt.

I took two of them in my hand and sank down to the mouth of the cave where I was clear of the haze of silt and had a faint sheen of evening light from the surface. They were gold ingots, roughly the size and shape of a beech leaf and a quarter of an inch thick. Putting them in my bag along with the ring, I returned to the back of the ledge where I had found them and cleared three neat blocks of ingots which suggested that they had been tied together or packed in a wooden case. The outer surfaces of each block were heavily encrusted with marine growth, which had held it together.

With the thoughtless greed of gold fever I filled the bag, and of course found that the load and I could never reach the surface; so I put back a few ingots and then discarded the lead weights of my belt to the approximate equivalent of what was left in the bag. On swimming to the mouth of the cave I found that the tide had turned and was running more strongly than the day before. I was still below neutral buoyancy but able to come up then and there if I dropped either gold or lead. I chose lead rather than to lose forever several thousand pounds at the bottom of the Shoots. I came up all right but to the roof of the cave, carried by a surge running into it. Back to the ledge I went, scraping along the roof and, lacking the experience of a professional diver, confused by the weight being in my hand, not round my waist.

Obviously I needed to be heavier in order to get clear of the cave mouth, and was about to add three or four ingots to my belt – since there was no hope of finding the discarded lead weights – when another of the intermittent surges caught me and washed me into the funnel. I could see through the water that far above me there was light. I could also see that the cleft was not nearly wide enough for my body to go through. Panic-stricken scrapings with knees and elbows got me clear, and by the time the next surge arrived I was firmly anchored to the floor of the ledge, one hand in a deep crack and the other feeling for more gold to fill the bag and keep me down. I no longer cared how much of it was lost for good when I was safely out of the cave and could throw it away. Marrin’s treasure had seemed likely to do a better job than he had done.

This time I was able to walk beyond the mouth of the cave and hung there pitching ingots into the interior until I was buoyant. Then the face of the gorge began to rush past and I surfaced at much the same point as the day before. The dinghy was too near the current of the flowing tide to be reached by swimming, so I came ashore at the nearest outcrop of the Stones and walked and waded to Elsa and our little harbour.

She was less alarmed than the previous evening, assuming that what I had done once so easily I could do again. As for me, I had had enough and was determined not to dive in the Shoots again for all the gold of the Americas. I dropped the bag on the bottom of the dinghy and showed her the contents.

‘So this is where the golden cauldron came from!’ she exclaimed.

I replied that I was fairly sure it had not. All Marrin’s deceptions were at last clear to me. He could not sell the ingots as they were without giving some explanation of the origin, and so he melted them down and made them into brooches, ashtrays and the rest, which dealers would accept without question as the output of Broom Lodge.

‘But then why the pretence of alchemy?’ she asked.

‘Well, you once told me that he knew a lot about it and used to experiment at home. I think he used the mysterious origin of the gold to increase his hold on the inner circle, encouraging them to believe whatever they liked. He made the cauldron and it was for use at the ceremonies, not for sale. Even Sir Anthony Aslington was astonished by its strange beauty, and the major considers the damned thing is holy.’

‘Any more glyptodonts?’

A wild but just possible guess occurred to me.

‘No. But I may have found the pet’s collar.’

‘I think it was for a woman’s hair,’ she said, chipping away a crust. ‘The ends don’t meet.’

‘They don’t on a dog collar either.’

‘But they must have taken their wives on the ship.’

‘They took their wives and children to the highest ground and left them. And I’m not going back there to look for tiaras.’

Elsa shuddered. My description must have been vivid.

‘No! That horrible funnel!’

‘There’s just time to see if it comes to the surface,’ I said.

We left the dinghy and walked across the Stones to a point a little way back from the edge of the Shoots where a blowhole should appear if the cleft went right up through the rock. All the pools were motionless except one where the water and the floating weed pulsated up and down with an occasional spurt of foam.

It was now obvious to me why Marrin had never cleared the lot out at one go. Weight was the answer. He had no one to help him; he could never be dead sure of his time of arrival; and he would have found the same problem that I had – too heavy or too light and the fast tide ready to punish any miscalculation. So he decided to take no risks, leaving his treasure where it was and drawing on it in small quantities as required.

But I did have a helper. My determination never to dive again vanished. I had asked for trouble by arriving too late and staying too long. Provided I plunged in at the first sign of slack water and remained below for not more than ten minutes, there was little danger.

‘If we had some sort of smooth cylinder that won’t catch on the rock and lowered it down the blowhole at the end of a rope…’

‘You are not to, Piers. You said you wouldn’t.’

‘But this is easy. You at the top. Me at the bottom filling the cylinder. We can collect the lot in one dive, or two if the weight is too much.’

‘What are we to do with them?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll work it out. There are so many duties.’

The pools were filling now, and we had a longer and more devious walk back to our harbour, often with the rising tide rippling round our ankles. The dinghy was not there. I could see it a quarter of a mile away on its course for Gloucester.

It was my fault. I should have foreseen it. The dinghy was moored with the painter coiled round a large boulder at the far end of the inlet. Rendered half-witted by tiredness, excitement and the safe return to Elsa, I had never looked at the mooring when we walked off to find the pool. Meanwhile the rising tide had lifted the painter off the boulder.

Swimming was quicker than walking. I told Elsa to stay on a ridge of the Stones which would be the last to be covered, and struck out for the New Passage pill and Marrin’s rowing boat. It was where the ebb had left it, high above the water on a slope of mud, fortunately steep. I was nearly up to my waist in it before my feet touched a strip of gravel at the bottom of the stream and the boat slid into the water.

‘We’ll never catch up the dinghy,’ she said when I had rescued her.

‘No. But wherever the tide takes her, it ought to take us.’

She was no longer in sight, for it was after sunset. I rowed out to the point where I reckoned she would have been when we last saw her, shipped the oars and allowed the Severn to take over.

More embarrassment was to come. Evidently we had been watched for some time from the Welsh coast and when the dinghy was seen floating away we were taken for two very foolish tourists stranded on the Stones and in danger of drowning. A boat was racing out and came alongside.

‘That your dinghy what’s gone up river?’ the boatman asked.

The last thing we wanted was for him to chug up-river ahead of us, overtake the dinghy and find out what I had been diving for. How right Marrin had been to confine his explorations to the hours of darkness!

‘Don’t you bother!’ I said cheerfully. ‘We’ll catch her up in Slime Road.’

I think he was impressed that I knew the name of the main channel on the right bank.

‘If she don’t go up Oldbury and come to grief on the rocks. I wouldn’t bet on it. And what the goodness were ‘ee doing on the Stones with all that underwater rubber on ‘ee?’

‘Fishing,’ I answered and was searching for the least improbable lie when Elsa piped up in a sweet little-girl voice:

‘I wanted a swim and there wasn’t anywhere else.’

I took my cue and added apologetically, ‘You know what women are.’

‘Serve you right! Where you from?’

‘Chepstow. Came down on the tide.’

‘And that there boat?’

He couldn’t possibly have seen me take it out from New Passage.

‘Towing it, in case the girl wanted to go and bask on a sandbank.’

‘What she want to do that for?’

‘You see, I do love to sunbathe with nothing on,’ Elsa said.

The boatman must have been a good Welsh methodist, for he sheered off at once. If we were bound for hell anyway, it didn’t make much difference when we drowned.

‘Good night!’ Elsa called. ‘And thank you for wanting to help us.’

The fast flood had now swept us under Severn Bridge and into Slime Road, so it had probably done the same for the dinghy. She’d be pretty safe there, bumping her way up from soft bank to soft bank. The tide was not yet high enough for shipping to be proceeding up-channel. That was lucky. If the dinghy were picked up by some enterprising mariner and natural curiosity led him to see what was in the bag, we were not likely to hear any more of her – especially as my clothes were in the bottom indicating that the owner might have gone for a swim which was his last.

Twice we nosed into shore to examine possible dinghies; one turned out to be a stranded log and the other a drowned cow. We left it to the tide to do what it wished with us until we came to the tip of the Shepherdine Sands and had to make up our minds between the main channel and the Lydney channel. The boat, caught by a swirl, twisted round uncertainly three times until I back-watered and directed us, stern foremost, into the Lydney channel. Elsa, watching the wide and promising expanse of water the other side of the sands, protested. I replied that the dinghy might have been caught by a similar whirlpool and that we should put our trust in Nodens and the Roman Manual for pilots.

Neither let us down. The dinghy was aground, heeling over but still dry, just behind the Guscar Rocks, her ghostly helmsman trying to make the vanished port of Woolaston.

There was nothing we could do but wait alongside her for the tide to rise, and ensure that she remained on an even keel until she was on the shale beach where Marrin and I had come ashore from the rocks. It was after midnight and there was not a sound but the suckings and splashings of the river. The dim line of the railway embankment cut us off from the world.

Meanwhile, we discussed what should be done with the twenty or so pounds of gold which we had and the much larger quantity which remained in the cave.

‘What do you think happened to them?’ she asked.

‘All we know is that the tribes of the marshes did not know what gold was and had no use for it. My guess is that the adventurers never returned to the cave or the ship, and that the pet of the voyage died there.’