To the Hilt
Page 29
I had thought I would need time’s perspective to know what I’d done, but the power of the concept seemed to have taken over and made me its instrument. The picture might not comfort, but one wouldn’t forget it.
During the past few weeks I had painted that picture, the brewery’s money had been found, and I’d discovered how far—how deep—I could go into myself.
I had met Tobe and Margaret and Chris.
I’d slept again with Emily and would stay married for as long as she wanted.
I had come to a compact with Patsy.
There wasn’t a great deal I would undo.
Shakily, I went out of the bothy and walked on the weak knees to where Himself and Zoë Lang were gesticulating in each other’s airspace with none too gentlemanly fury.
Himself stopped abruptly, alerted by whatever he saw in my face.
“What is it?” he said.
“The money is found.”
“What money?” Zoë Lang demanded.
Himself didn’t answer her. He stared at me alone with the realization that what had been paid for had been miraculously delivered.
Zoë Lang, thinking that I had found some treasure or other within the bothy, strode off in that direction and disappeared inside.
“Tobias found the money in Bogotá,” I said.
“Using the list?”
“Yes.”
Himself’s rejoicing was like my own; unexpressed except in the eyes, a matter of central warmth rather than triumphal whoops.
“Prince Charles Edward’s hilt,” he said, “is irrelevant.”
We looked around at the determined searchers. None of them was now metal-detecting in the right place, but they might succeed if they went on long enough. The prize had been within their reach: they had dug quite near it.
I thought ruefully that this lot wouldn’t burn me to make me tell them where to look. Zoë Lang wouldn’t strike a match. I wouldn’t have wanted her to be Grantchester.
“Will they find it, Al?” my uncle asked.
“Would you mind it very much?”
“Of course I would. That woman would crow.”
I said, “If she perseveres long enough ... she will.”
“No, Al,” he protested.
“When I hid it,” I said, “it was from burglars, not from a zealot with a mission. When her cohorts give up, that’s when she’ll start thinking. Up until now, I’d guess she believes she’s dealing with simple minds, yours and mine. She suffers from the arrogance of the very brainy: she doesn’t expect anyone to keep up with her on level terms.”
“Your mind is far from simple.”
“She doesn’t know that. And my mind is simpler than hers. She will find the Hilt. We could go away and not watch her gloat.”
“Leave the battlefield!” He was outraged. “Defeat may be unavoidable, but we will meet it with pride.”
Spoken like a true Kinloch, I thought, and remembered briquettes flaming.
Zoë Lang came out of the bothy and walked towards us still carrying a metal detector, which was basically a long black stick with a white control box near the top and a flat white plate at the bottom.
When she reached us she ignored Himself and spoke directly and with penetration to me alone.
“You will tell me the truth,” she said in her old voice. “I am sure you are a very good liar, but this time you will tell me the truth.”
I made no reply. She took it as assent, which it was.
She said, “I saw that picture. Did you paint it?”
“Yes.”
“Is it you who has hidden the Kinloch Hilt?”
“Yes.”
“Is it here ... in your bothy? And would I find it?”
I said, after a pause, “Yes ... and yes.”
My uncle’s mouth opened in protest. Zoë Lang flicked him a glance and thrust the metal detector into his arms.
“You can keep the Hilt,” she said. “I’ll look for it no longer.”
Himself watched in bewilderment while she told one of her helpers to round up the searchers, that they were leaving.
“But Dr. Lang ...” her helper objected.
“The Hilt isn’t here,” she said. “We are going home.”
We watched while they picked up their spades and pickaxes and metal detectors and drifted across to their minivan transport; and when they’d gone Zoë Lang said to Himself, “Don’t you understand?”
“No, I frankly don’t.”
“He hasn’t seen the picture,” I said.
“Oh.” She blinked. “What is it called? Does it have a name?”
“Portrait of Zoë Lang.”
A tear appeared in each of her eyes and ran down her wrinkled old cheeks, as Jed’s wife Flora had foreseen.
“I will not fight you,” she said to me. “You have made me immortal.”
Himself looked long at the picture when Zoë Lang had driven away in her small white car.
“Immortal,” he said thoughtfully. “Is it?”
“Time will tell.”
“Mad Alexander, who messes about with paints ...”
I smiled. “One has to be slightly mad to do almost anything, such as hiding a treasure.”
“Yes,” he said. “Where is it?”
“Well,” I said, “when you gave me the Hilt to hide all those years ago, the first thing I thought about was metal detectors, because those things find gold almost more easily than any other metal. So I had to think of a hiding place safe from metal detectors, which is actually almost impossible unless you dig down six feet or more ... and underwater is no good, because water is no barrier.”
He interrupted, “How does a metal detector work?”
“Well,” I said, “inside that flat white plate thing, there is a coil of very thin wire. The batteries in that white box, when you switch them on, produce a highfrequency alternating current in the coil, which in turn produces an oscillating magnetic field, which will induce a responding current in any metal near it, which will in turn excite the coil even more, whose increased activity can be interpreted as a whine—and that’s putting it simply.”
“You’ve lost me,” Himself said.
“I had to look it up,” I agreed. “It’s a bit hard to understand.”
He looked around at all the little dug-up heaps of unprecious metal.
“Well, yes.” I grinned. “I buried a lot of things to keep searchers busy.”
“Really, Al.”
“The childish mind,” I said. “I couldn’t help it. I did it five years ago. I might not do it now.”
“So where is the Hilt?”
“It’s where I hid it when you gave it to me.”
“But where?”
“Everyone talks about buried treasure...” I said, “so I didn’t bury it.”
He stared.
I said, “The metal that most confuses a detector is a sheet of aluminum foil. So to start with I wrapped the Hilt in several loose layers of foil, until it was a shapeless bundle about the size of a pillow. Then I took a length of cotton duck—that’s the stuff I paint the pictures on—and I primed it with several coats of gesso to stiffen it and make it waterproof, and then I painted it all over with burnt umber acrylic paint, which is a dark brown color and also waterproof.”
“Go on, ” he said, when I paused. “What then?”
“Then I wrapped the foil bundle in the cotton duck, and super-glued it so that it wouldn’t fall undone. Then all over the surface I super-glued granite pieces”—I waved a hand at the gray stony ground of the plateau—“and then ... well, the more metal you offer to a detector, the more it gets confused, so I put the hilt bundle where it was more or less surrounded by metal ...”
“But,” he objected, “they dug up that whole old oven, and the Hilt wasn’t in it ...”
“I told you,” I said, “I didn’t bury it. I glued it onto the mountain.”
“You did ... what?”
“I glued it granite to granite, and covered it
with more granite pieces until you can’t distinguish it by eye from the rock around it. I check it fairly often. It never moves.”
He looked at the metal detector in his hands.
“Turn it upside down,” I said.
He did as I said, waving the flat round plate in the air.
“Now I’ll switch it on,” I said, and did so. “And,” I said formally, laughing, “my lord, follow me.”
I walked not up onto the hill, as he obviously expected, but into my corrugated iron-topped carport.
The waving upside-down metal detector whined nonstop.
“If you go to the rear wall,” I said, “and stand just there”—I pointed—“you will hear the indistinguishable noise of the Honor of the Kinlochs, which is up on the carport roof, where it joins the mountain. If you stand just there, the hilt of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s ceremonial sword will be straight above your head.”