The Camelot Caper (15 page)

“I forget what we were talking about,” said Jess.

“So do I,” said David softly; and for the next few minutes there was no sound in the room except for muffled, hard breathing. Neither of them heard the soft tap on the door, and neither of them saw it open; the newcomer had to cough several times before they sprang apart.

“Sorry again,” said Cousin John. “Frightful of me to keep interrupting…” His voice and his raised eyebrow implied volumes of unexpurgated material. “Thought you might like a stroll before dinner. Ancestral acres, and all that rot…I keep forgetting you two are engaged! So stupid of me!”

Dazzled as she was, Jess couldn't help being amused at David's expression. Caught off guard, and not quite in his normal senses, he couldn't have carried on a conversation about the weather, much less dealt with Cousin John. So she said demurely, “Well, it's new to us too. But we'd love to see the ancestral acres. Wouldn't we, darling?”

Jess had found the front of the house depress
ing, but the back regions verged on tragedy. What had once been a set of gardens, kitchen and flower, and a group of neat outbuildings, were now ruins overgrown with weeds. The stables had been converted, though not very well, into garages. One of the doors was not only closed but locked, with a new shiny padlock.

They fought their way through a small plantation of trees and found themselves on the cliff edge. The view was glorious. The sun was dipping below the flat horizon, whose pearly waterline blended almost imperceptibly into the flat silver of the sky and reflected the crimson streaks of the sunset. Below, surf creamed on a small secluded beach whose sand looked like white sugar. On either side of the small beach, rocks lifted jagged dark spears against which the sea leaped and bubbled.

Gripped by a sudden, unexpectedly strong emotion, Jess sank to the ground. The family homestead had not given her any sense of homecoming, nor had the others of her own blood made her welcome. Sea and rocks and setting sun and the cool salt breeze roughening her cheeks combined into an all-embracing sense of familiarity. She did not feel, she
knew
, that at some other time, in some other form, she had stood here and watched the sun set over the
western ocean, where the sunken land of Lyonnesse still sends up from the depths faint-chiming echoes of its buried churches.

“Splendid view,” David said, breaking the silence; and for a mad moment Jess resented his lack of understanding, an understanding which she felt, illogically, in the other man, who was in all else her declared enemy. She caught Cousin John's unwilling eye, and knew that he felt the kinship too; he didn't care for the feeling any more than she did. Momentarily his expression was unguarded, and his features, starkly lit by the sunset rays, held anxiety and distress. Then his mouth twisted in a sardonic smile.

“The call of the blood,” he said, in a voice that only she could hear. “Still—it's the only part of the whole ramshackle place that's worth saving. And for what it's worth we've been here for a long time, Jess. That's hewn stone you're perched on. There was a castle here once.”

“You talk as if you expect to lose it—all of it,” Jess said.

“Oh, I shall.” His voice was indifferent, but she had seen through his defenses once, and now she recognized the underlying emotion. “There's not much left, and death duties will take the lot. Just as well, probably.”

Jess stood up. Curiosity moved her, and so
did discomfort; the rock was hard and sharp.

“A castle?” she said, poking at the turf. “Here?”

But she did not need his confirming nod to know that something man-made had once occupied the site. The block on which she had been sitting was roughhewn, and its shape was half obscured by weeds; but that shape was indubitably square. She walked along the cliff-edge and found other isolated blocks, then a line of them, as if they had fallen at the same time from a wall in a single earth spasm or battle.

Hands in his pockets, eyes on the glory in the west, David joined her. He kicked at a block.

“Not a very safe spot for a castle,” he commented. “Right on the cliff edge.”

“It wasn't so close to the edge five hundred years ago,” John said. “The cliffs lose a few feet every year.”

“Yes, but why do you think this was a castle? Probably one of the old tin mines. You see the towers all over Cornwall. About a century old.”

“Anyone with half an eye can tell the difference,” John said rudely. “Ever seen Tintagel? It's just up the coast. Same type of masonry as this.”

Jessica was overcome by a basic human urge, the urge to dig. She squatted on her heels and dug her fingers into the turf.

“Wouldn't it be fun to find something?” she
said, scratching. “A lady's brooch, or a sword, or—why, David! I'll bet this is where the ring came from!”

The enchantment of the sunset and the site had made her unwary, or she would not have spoken; looking up, she was struck by the expressions on the two faces, so different and yet so alike in their surprised reserve.

As usual, Cousin John was the first to recover himself.

“Not likely,” he said casually. “I've always suspected that the ring was one of the old man's fakes. Time we were getting back, don't you think?”

“It didn't come from a medieval castle,” David said slowly. “It's not…” He caught himself, so obviously on the brink of a significant remark that the other two both stared hopefully at him. “You said Mr. Tregarth spent a lot of money on digging. Here? Was he an amateur archaeologist?”

Cousin John's not unhandsome face wore the look of bland innocence which meant, as Jess had learned, that he was about to tell a tall story.

“Amateur is right,” he said wryly. “But not archaeologist.
De mortuis
, and all that, but the old boy was a bit of a nut. Didn't your father ever speak of his mania, Jessie?”

“You mean about being descended from King Arthur?” Jess's hands were hopelessly dirty by now; she abandoned herself in earnest, sitting down on the harsh grass.

“I thought he would. Poor old Uncle Gawain.”

“He never told me much,” Jess said vaguely; she had found something, a hard shape buried under inches of dirt. She broke a fingernail.

“The digging,” David persisted. “He excavated here, trying to prove—what? That this—good God, of course! That this was Camelot.”

“Completely mad,” Cousin John agreed amiably.

“Not so mad at that…Jess, get out of that mud puddle.”

“I've found something! Look—I've found…”

She pulled it out of its earthy grave, breaking two more nails in the process. In the pale, dimming light she held it up and stripped the disfiguring dirt from its elongated shape. It was glass. Thick, brown, opaque glass; crudely made, long, rounded…

“Beer bottle,” Cousin John said with a grin. “That's the sort of thing he kept turning up, poor old soul. Not the bones of King Arthur.”

Jess wiped her hands on the grass and stood up.

“Rats,” she said.

Neither of the men answered. David was staring off across the pasture, his back to the view and a sea which was now pale gold and mother-of-pearl. John was staring at him.

“Time to go,” John said abruptly, and started off without waiting for them.

“All the same, it wasn't so mad,” David muttered. “Somewhere…Where did I read that article….”

“Beer bottles,” Jess said. “Bah. David, it's getting cold.”

“Professional journal? Hardly. Newspaper? Book?”

“If you two don't hurry, you won't get any sherry,” John called back. He had stopped some little distance away and was waiting for them, his slight figure outlined against the sky.

They walked half the distance back to the house in silence. In the failing light Jess had to concentrate on where she was walking. David, his gaze fixed vacantly on the horizon, kept stumbling. A turn in the path brought them around so that the sea cliff and the sunset were on their right, and David stopped.

“What's that?”

Jess followed his pointing hand and saw the object he indicated, outlined starkly against the
darkening sky, its regularity of shape now visible—a long, low hill, like a giant grave.

“That?” Cousin John asked warily.

“Yes, the mound. Looks like a barrow.”

“It is.”

“Didn't Mr. Tregarth excavate there?”

“Matter of fact, he did. Burial chamber was empty. But it didn't interest him; too early for Arthur, you know.”

 

They spent one of the most unpleasant evenings Jess could ever recall spending. David was abstracted to the point of rudeness; his lips kept twitching spasmodically, as if he were arguing with an invisible opponent.

After a poor dinner, served by a silent maid, they moved into the parlor. It was even less prepossessing at night, especially since John insisted on candlelight—for mood, he said. The dim light concealed the dust and shabbiness, but induced shadows and cast unpleasant lights on people's features. By candlelight Aunt Guinevere was something to behold; her hard, immobile features stood out like those of a corpse; her eyes were deep sockets of shadow and her mouth was a grim line.

The only pleasant interlude was when Cousin John consented to play. For an hour the tinny
metallic notes of the harpsichord echoed in the big room. He played brilliantly—Scarlatti, Bach, and some strange stiff little pieces which he said were medieval dances.

“You could have played professionally,” Jess exclaimed, forgetting antagonism in admiration.

“Not good enough,” her cousin replied briefly. “That level of accomplishment requires more discipline than I've got.”

He got his revenge for her induction of this admission later. At the end of the evening he lifted the candelabrum from the table and spoke to his mother.

“Jessie hasn't seen him yet, Mother. Are you going up now?”

His mother nodded, rising, and Jess realized to whom they were referring.

“You mean he's—he's still here?” she gasped.

“Where else would he be?” Her aunt studied her with unconcealed contempt. “We don't have your hypocritical, prettified approach to death. Of course he's here—in his home, where he would want to be.”

The flickering candlelight shivered, as if the hand that held it—Cousin John's long musician's hand—were trembling. It made shadows dance wildly across her aunt's cold face, bringing out mad, shifting expressions. Then David's
hand brushed hers, and David's voice said calmly, “The funeral is tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” Aunt Guinevere said. “And tonight Jessica must see him. It is the custom.”

The procession was headed by Cousin John, holding high his candelabrum. Her aunt followed with folded hands, pacing as solemnly as a priestess. As they passed through darkened halls and drafty rooms, Jess knew that this was all stagecraft, all for an effect, and, like many of her cousin's efforts, it went just a little too far. By the time they had climbed the great staircase and reached the room, she was calm and collected.

It was the master bedroom of the house—Arthur Tregarth's room. High-ceilinged and large, with high windows opening onto the sea view, it was sparsely furnished now except with shadows. Candles burned, their prayer-shaped flames unnaturally still in the airless chamber. They shone on the face of the old man who lay, not in his coffin, but on the bed where he had lain in life.

A heavy-set, middle-aged woman in black rose silently from her chair as they entered. She inclined her head and slipped out of the room; and Jessica took four steps and stood looking down, for the first and last time, on the face of her father's father.

The hard family features which his daughter alone of his two children had inherited were rendered even harder by his old age; sunken and yellowed by death, they were like those of a bird of prey, with a vast hooked nose, jutting chin, and massive forehead from which the white locks were neatly brushed.

She looked, and waited for some stir of emotion, and felt none. None at all, neither bitterness for a wrong which had never been hers, and whose truth she would never know, nor tenderness for a blood tie which was meaningless without love. She wondered if she was expected to touch him, or kiss his forehead; and decided that nothing on earth could make her do so. She stepped back, meeting her aunt's eyes squarely; and the older woman's features showed a certain distant respect.

“It is the custom here to sit with the dead. I don't suppose you'll want to.”

“No, I do not,” Jess said, and again got that odd flicker of respect.

“Good night, then,” her aunt said.

Cousin John followed with alacrity.

“Ghoulish old custom,” he whispered, as soon as the door had been closed. “Can't change them; easier to go along with them, avoid as much as one can. Well, here's your chamber,
Jessie; want me to look for ghosts under the bed?”

While she was still trying to think of a suitable retort, John turned his weapons on David.

“By the by, old man, that ring of Grandfather's…”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever taken a close look at it? A really close look?”

“No. Why?”

“There's some old family tradition about it,” John said dreamily. “All rot, probably, but since the will's going to be read tomorrow—”

“Did Mr. Tregarth leave the ring to you? Is that what you're trying to imply?”

“Not trying to imply anything, dear boy.” Cousin John's eyes opened wider; in the light of the candle, which he was holding at chest level, the effect of the deepening eye sockets, with their inner shine, was distinctly unnerving. “I don't know what Grandfather meant to do with the ring. But I do know he asked Jessie to bring it along—didn't he, Cousin? So I presume he had something in mind.”

Jess felt sorry for David; she could feel his brain spinning as he tried to discover the convolutions within convolutions which might be Cousin John's latest plot. She didn't know what
he was up to either, but, like David, she felt sure he was up to something. After a brief pause David said, “This family tradition. What is it?”