Simon

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘There ’tis!’ exclaimed Amias, pointing.

  ‘I say, what a queer place,’ said Simon, with bated breath.

  ‘I wonder if Pentecost is there.’

  ‘Umm. So do I.’

  For a moment, neither of them moved, then Amias squared his shoulders and strode forward. ‘Come on, let’s go and see.’

  Simon marched after him, clutching the box in which was the brown chrysalis. They made their way through the tangle to the open doorway of the cottage, and halted again. The cottage was so low that the roof came down almost to their eye-level: once it had been thatched, but now the rotten reeds were covered over with moss like emerald velvet; the open door looked as though it had not been shut for years; the threshold was choked with nettles, and there was no sign of anybody inside.

  ‘Let’s knock,’ said Amias, and rapped gently at the open door.

  They listened, but nothing happened; then they scuffled their feet and called politely, ‘Pentecost, are you at home?’

  Still nothing happened.

  ‘He’s out,’ said Amias, between exasperation and relief. He gazed thoughtfully at the door for a few moments, and then made up his mind. ‘Well, I don’t see why we should come all this way for nothing. I’m going to take a look inside.’

  ‘I don’t think we ought to,’ said Simon flatly.

  But Amias sniffed at him—he had a peculiarly insulting sniff—and advanced right into the doorway. Simon followed as in duty bound, and they stood together peering into the gloom, their hearts thumping uncomfortably. Neither of them knew what they had expected to see, but what they did see in the farthest and darkest corner was a dim white shape that suddenly spread its arms and swept forward right into their faces, with a piercing mournful cry that made their blood jump. They sprang back, and for an instant, as they turned to run, they caught sight of a strange oval face with huge eyes, then the thing was planing away on ghost-white silent wings.

  ‘It was only a white owl,’ shouted Amias. ‘Only a silly old white owl!’ And he laughed, and shouted it to the trees. ‘A white owl—a white owl!’ But he did not stop running until he reached the edge of the clearing, and neither did Simon.

  In the shelter of the woodshore, they halted and faced each other.

  ‘A white owl; that was all it was,’ said Amias.

  ‘Silly, to be scared off by a white owl,’ said Simon slowly. ‘I’m going back.’

  ‘Come on,’ commanded Amias; and back they went.

  They had just reached the doorway again, when they heard a new sound, so like the shriller overtones of the gale that at first they were not sure they had heard it at all; then, as they stared into each other’s startled faces, rising shrill and sweet and clear above the turmoil, the sound of a fiddle playing, not a tune, but simply an accompaniment to the wind in the trees.

  They spun round, and there, leaning against the trunk of a bird-cherry, with his fiddle tucked beneath his chin, stood Pentecost Fiddler. He was watching them under the brim of his slouch hat, and the moment they looked round he stopped playing and came forward, a mocking smile curving his long lips.

  ‘So you thought you’d have a good look at the warlock’s lair, while the warlock was out, did ye, my fine young gentlemen?’ said Pentecost, looking down at them.

  ‘We didn’t!’ said Amias indignantly. ‘We came to see you. We didn’t know you were out.’

  ‘And then the white owl flew out of your house, and—we ran away; and so of course we had to come back again,’ added Simon, who was painfully truthful.

  ‘Ah, yes, poor Bess. Her would be more startled than you were.’

  ‘Is she yours?’ asked Amias.

  ‘No more than I be hers. Her shares the shelter of my roof now and again, that is all.’ He drew his bow slowly across the strings, making for a few moments a kind of soft regretful music that had no tune in it, and looking thoughtfully at the two boys the while. Then he broke off, and demanded mockingly, ‘Weren’t you afeared to come here-along? Haven’t you heard that Pentecost Fiddler be kin to the Fairy Kind? Bain’t you afeared that I shall witch you into white mice? Abracadabra, hellebore and toadflax. Grrr!’

  The boys stood their ground, though with quaking stomachs, and gazed back at him. For a wonder, it was Simon who answered first, grinning with sudden friendliness up into the fiddler’s strange dark face.

  ‘No,’ said Simon.

  ‘Good,’ nodded the fiddler. ‘And now, do ’ee tell me why you did come.’

  Simon had forgotten about the chrysalis; it had never been much more than an excuse for the adventure. But now he remembered it, and held out the box. ‘We found this in some earth that we dug up,’ he said breathlessly. ‘At least, we put the earth in a pot to grow something special in, and then we broke the pot, and that was how we found it; and we don’t know what it is, and we thought maybe you could tell us.’

  Pentecost tucked his fiddle and bow under one arm and, opening the box, took out the chrysalis. For a little while he was silent, turning it over and over in his thin brown hands. Then he asked, ‘Was there any bindweed close by where you dug ’un up?’

  ‘Oh yes; it grows all over the bank that we got the earth from,’ Amias put in.

  ‘Aye, I thought as much. ’Tis a chrysalis of one o’ the hawk moths. I’ve only seen but one like it before, and I can’t tell ’ee its name because it bain’t got one, so far as I know. The caterpillar has a li’l crimson horn in the middle of its head, like as it might be a li’l unicorn. You could call it a Unicorn Moth; that ’ud be as good a name for it as any.’

  ‘What shall we feed it on?’ asked Simon.

  ‘You won’t need to feed ’un at all. Put it in a dark place, and maybe ’twill turn into a moth, come the spring. If the moth was to lay eggs, and the eggs was to hatch into caterpillars, then you’d need to feed them on the leaves of the bindweed.’

  ‘I see. We’ll not forget. Thank you very much,’ said Simon, as he took back the chrysalis in its box.

  Amias, who had been standing first on one leg and then on the other, put in, ‘I say, Pentecost, could we see inside your cottage?’

  ‘’Twould be a fine tale to tell, for sure, wouldn’t it, young maister? That you set foot inside Pentecost Fiddler’s door.’ The man’s voice had grown mocking again.

  ‘We shouldn’t tell anyone,’ said Amias.

  ‘We don’t tell about things.’ Simon backed him up.

  Pentecost’s mouth quirked at the corners. ‘Come in, then,’ he said, and led the way indoors.

  It was very dark in the one-roomed hovel, for there was no window, only the open door behind them; and it smelled musty because of the rotten thatch. But there were fresh rushes piled against one wall for a bed, with an old horse-blanket to cover them, a clean pitcher in one corner, and a skillet and an iron spoon hanging beside the hearth; and most surprisingly and wonderfully, on the rough shelf above it, the model of a ship with all sails set. A lovely little ship, roughly, yet skilfully made, and so full of life that she seemed to hover on the edge of movement, as though next instant would bring her dipping forward out of the shadows like a gull in the hollow of a wave.

  ‘Ah, I thought you’d like her,’ said Pentecost, laying his fiddle on the bed-place as the boys made for the hearth and stood gazing up at the shelf on which she stood. He took her down, handling her deftly and gently, as he had handled the chrysalis, and carried her to the light.

  ‘Did you sail in her?’ asked Amias, while Simon touched the prow with one careful finger.

  ‘Aye, I’ve been a ship’s fiddler in my time,’ said Pentecost. ‘Sit on the capstan head, I would, playing me fiddle to keep the time, while the capstan hands ’ud go tramp-tramping round and round, and the anchor cable coming dripping in, and the lads aloft in the rigging, ready to break out the sails. I finished with the sea half-a-dozen year agone, but maybe I’ll go back one day, me and the old fiddle.’

  ‘What was her name?’ asked Amias.

  ‘The
Destiny. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Destiny. The first ship ever I served in, she were; and she were Sir Walter’s last.’

  ‘You mean you actually served under Sir Walter Raleigh?’ shouted both boys at the same instant.

  Pentecost took the model away from them and returned it to its shelf. ‘Aye, on thicky last voyage.’

  ‘I say, tell us about it,’ Amias begged.

  ‘Playing me fiddle in a waterside tavern, Deptford way, I was, when Sir Walter come in. He stands listening for a bit, and then he says: “How’d you like to make a fortune? How’d you like to plunge your hands in your very own gold, up to the elbows?” “I’d like that proper,” I says, “but where be the gold?” And he sits down on a beer cask (he was a bit weak in the legs, after fifteen years caged in the Tower), and he says: “In El Dorado. All there waiting to be dug out of the dark earth; but I needs a capstan fiddle for my ship, afore us can get it.” So I says, “I’m your man.”’

  ‘That was when King James let him out of the Tower to fetch him gold from the New World?’ put in Simon.

  They were sitting in a row on Pentecost’s bed by that time, with Pentecost in the middle, his fiddle across his knees, and an eager listener on either side.

  ‘Yiss, that was it. But it weren’t only the gold he went for, ’twas for the adventure. One last adventure, look ’ee; and he knowed well enough it were his last. I heard him one night, talking to his son as went with him. “Walt,” he says, “us’ll show this new weak-kneed breed what Elizabeth’s seamen were; us’ll drub the Dons out of Guiana, if need be,” he says. “And after that—maybe a longer and a swifter voyage than this; but there’s good shipmates of mine awaiting at the landfall.” And then he says something that sounds as if it comes out of a book, about the Islands beyond the Sunset, and the trees of golden apples as grows there.’

  ‘The Hesperides!’ Amias chimed in excitedly. ‘Father’s got that book.’

  The fiddler nodded. ‘Aye, that were the name he called ’em by . . . But there weren’t no Isles of Golden Apples; weren’t no gold at all; and the boy was killed before a Spanish fort; and Sir Walter Raleigh come home to face the music. Plenty of other countries he could have gone to; the French would have been glad enough to have him, and there’s some would have cut and run for it; but he wouldn’t strike his colours to do a thing like that, not my old Captain.’

  ‘And so King James put him back in the Tower and cut his head off, to please the Dons,’ said Amias fiercely, after a little silence. ‘King Charles wouldn’t ever have done a mean thing like that.’

  ‘Tell some more about Sir Walter,’ said Simon.

  ‘Nay, my dears, that be enough for one day; and ’tis time you was on your way back to Torrington. Maybe another time I’ll tell ’ee more,’ said Pentecost, and drawing his long legs under him he got up.

  The two boys scrambled to their feet, and stood gazing up at him. ‘We can come again, then?’ said Simon hopefully.

  ‘Aye, come along when you like. But don’t ’ee go upsetting Bess if her should be here and I should be from home.’

  ‘We won’t,’ they promised. ‘And thank you, Pentecost,’ and Simon picked up the box with the chrysalis in it, which had all but escaped his mind again.

  ‘Oh, we almost forgot,’ said Amias, turning in the doorway, ‘We know your name, but perhaps you don’t know ours: I’m Amias Hannaford, and he’s Simon Carey.’

  ‘’Tis a maister fine thing for a man to know the names of his guests,’ said the Fiddler, and his eyes twinkled under his drooping hat-brim. ‘Good day to ’ee, my dears.’

  ‘Good day,’ they said, and they went out.

  Pentecost Fiddler did not come to the door to see them off, and when they halted on the woodshore and glanced back the cottage looked completely derelict once more.

  ‘You wouldn’t think anyone lived there at all,’ said Simon.

  ‘No,’ Amias agreed thoughtfully. ‘You know, if you were wanting somewhere to hide, Solitude would be an awfully good place. I’ll wager if Sir Walter Raleigh had hidden here, King James would never have found him to cut his head off.’

  ‘If you didn’t know it was here, you’d never find it,’ Simon said, and as they plunged away into the trees he added triumphantly, ‘and if you did know it was here, you’d be scared of coming to look, because of the Good People—everybody except us, that is.’

  It had been an adventure worthy of the wild golden afternoon, and the full splendour of it held them silent until they had almost got back to Taddiport. Then Simon dropped the chrysalis box, the lid fell off, and the chrysalis fell out, and they had to scramble after it among the bramble roots.

  ‘Got it,’ Simon said, and put it carefully back in the box. ‘Funny, it being a sort of unicorn,’ he said.

  Amias peered at the chrysalis, his eyes brightening with an idea.

  ‘We could say, “As sure as unicorns can fly,” and “as sure as unicorns lay eggs,” and everybody’d think we were quite mazed—and all the time it would be true.’

  ‘Umm,’ said Simon, and put the lid on again.

  Neither of them mentioned the matter farther, but from that day forward ‘As sure as unicorns’ became a kind of private catch-phrase between the two of them.

  II

  The Last Day’s Freedom

  ON A STILL September afternoon Simon and Amias lay up in the high orchard behind Lovacott. It was their last day of freedom, for next morning they were riding for Tiverton, to become scholars at Blundell’s School; and in the intervals of helping to get in the harvest, they had taken leave of all their old haunts: no mean task, for they knew and loved every inch of the country for miles around. They were just back now from a long day in the Taw valley; and only the day before they had been to say good-bye to Pentecost. In the year since that wild autumn afternoon when they had called on him with the unicorn chrysalis—which had most disappointingly failed to turn into a moth—Pentecost Fiddler had become a great friend; and Solitude, in the character of the Golden City of Manoa, had known them very often, though they had contrived to keep their visits secret from the rest of the world. Now it would know them no more until Christmas time. The last day was nearly over, and the next four years stretched ahead very drearily, lit by only the short holidays at Christmas and Harvest. The one consolation was that they would be in it together. Nothing was quite unbearable so long as they were in it together, not even school.

  ‘Oh, I wish we were sixteen!’ said Amias, plucking up a grass stem and biting it savagely.

  ‘Four years,’ groaned Simon. ‘Oh well, they’ll pass, I suppose; and then I shall come home and help Father farm Lovacott, and you’ll be prenticed to your father. You’ll make a mighty funny doctor.’

  ‘I shall make a very good doctor,’ said Amias, with conviction. He took the grass stem out of his mouth and squinted at the bitten end. ‘Only I should like to have a few adventures first. Run away to sea or something. I’d have my long bright rapier, and go and fight people; Barbary Pirates, perhaps—or I might be a pirate.’ He warmed to his theme, with a kindling eye. ‘I’d do things like Sir Walter Raleigh did: go looking for gold in the New World, and sacking Spanish cities and things; a red beard I’d have, and I’d be the Terror of the Spanish Main! Then I’d come home and be apprenticed to Father. You could come too, and be my trusty Master Gunner.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Simon.

  If Amias turned pirate, then Simon would certainly be his Master Gunner, because where Amias led, Simon followed, loyally digging him out of the trouble his brilliant ideas so often got him into. But all the same, he thought, it would be good, when one was through with the Spanish Main, to come home to Lovacott.

  From where he lay, up here in the high orchard, he could look down through the dipping branches of the old cider trees and see Lovacott: the house and outbuildings, the home paddock and his mother’s beloved garden close, like the heart of a flower of which the three petals were the three big demesne fields, Sanctuary and Salutation in
the valley, and Twimmaways joining the orchard just behind him and sloping over the hill-top towards the village. His father had once tried to change the names of Sanctuary and Salutation into Easter and Wester Meadows, but tradition had been stronger than him, and the two fields remained Sanctuary and Salutation, as they had been when they were held from the shaven-headed monks of Fris’tock Priory. The Careys had held Lovacott and the village of Heronscombe, first from the monks and then in their own right, from the days of Agincourt, and the place was in their blood. Back in Elizabeth’s reign, when so many of their kind had built themselves grand new houses and left the old one to become the farm, Simon’s grandfather had refused to do any such thing, merely adding a kitchen door and more windows to the house-place, and building a range of farm buildings on the south side, so that the courtyard need no longer have the midden and the pigs in it. So the Careys had remained at Lovacott, fitting into it as perfectly as a nut fits its brown shell; and at the thought of tomorrow’s leave-taking, a stab of homesickness shot through Simon. All the same, if Amias wanted a Master Gunner, of course he had only to say the word.

  ‘Lovacott would make a splendidly good fortress,’ Amias said, after they had chewed grass in silence for a bit. ‘I mean, the way it’s built solid all round the courtyard, and with Diggory’s gatehouse and all. Of course we’d have to stop up the kitchen door and all those outside windows, so that the enemy couldn’t climb in through them.’