by Cathy Ace
“Your what?” asked Alice. “Did you keep going with that stupid thing you began as a boy?”
“Okay, stop,” I said. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to all this. I’m just going to cut to the chase, as they say. For years Owain’s prison—which he began to build for himself as a boy—has forced him to believe that the puzzle plate told him that a treasure was hidden in the Roman temple. He never realized that the plate was a fake, a very clever fake—in that it was relatively modern—though it did, in fact, point to a treasure.”
“Please explain that, Cait,” said Idris with some urgency. “You said it last night. What do you mean?”
I said, “David was onto something. I found a book in a locked drawer in the stables that was about Bletchley Park, where they had teams of code crackers and creators during the Second World War. You told me, Alice, that some hush-hush stuff went on here during those years, and I know for a fact that the Welsh language was used during the war for secret communications. Code crackers would enjoy working with a wealthy man who could make a fake puzzle plate. They’d see it as a great joke. I believe that’s what happened; your husband worked with the eggheads to create the plate. It had to be more modern than you thought, Owain, if only because the ‘Cadwallader’ form of your family name was used, rather than the original version of ‘Cadwaladr,’ which was in use during the period when the Swansea Pottery was working. You also mentioned, Alice, significant renovations being undertaken before you moved back here permanently after the war, especially to the fireplaces. And then, of course, there were the portraits of you and your husband. Having seen both of them, and being able to imagine them in their original positions, they, and the puzzle plate, told me all I needed to know. Do you want me to go through the verse, Idris?”
“Yes, please, so long as you tell us all what it means,” he replied eagerly.
“Right then, the first two lines—‘Where the fire meets the earth, where the water meets the air / Where the face of beauty smiles, the treasures will be there’—frame the whole riddle and set us up for the rest. The next two lines are a couplet containing a specific clue—‘Black gold in a seam, now popping with a spray / For every humble man, there is a time to pray.’”
“Exactly,” interrupted Owain. “My tunnel from the coal cellar—‘black gold in a seam’—to the temple of Neptune, which is mentioned in the next two lines. See?”
“That’s a part of your own, personal prison, Owain,” I replied. “Coal in a coal cellar doesn’t ‘pop with a spray,’ it only does that when it’s burning. Those two lines are referring to fireplaces. And you kneel down when you pray like a humble man, so all you ever had to do was kneel down in front of the fireplaces, and that’s where you’ll find your treasure.”
“Well I’ve done that hundreds of times, thousands, in fact,” said Dilys, “and I haven’t found any treasure.”
“You don’t have to ‘find’ it,” I replied. “It’s in plain sight. Every single fireplace in this entire castle is lined and faced with gold tiles. Gold tiles. They aren’t just glass tiles backed with gold leaf. I believe you’ll find they are actual gold, covered with a glass film. Someone will have to have enough guts to pry one off, but I bet you’ll see I’m right if you do.”
All heads turned to the fireplace in the room, and I could see eyes grow round. All except Owain, who said, “So, what does the next couplet mean?”
“Ah, yes,” I replied, “let’s consider that one. ‘The breath of Llŷr and Neptune’s tears—the same, there is no doubt / When they are gone, what gold is left, we cannot live without.’ What could that mean? What can no one live without?”
“Water,” said Owain. “The Roman temple has a cistern at its heart. The water came down the hill into the cistern through a gaping mouth of Neptune, was held in a cistern, and when the cistern was full, the water came out of the mouth of another face of Neptune and flowed into the sea.”
“I agree that’s how the temple worked,” I said, “but the answer, in this case, isn’t water, it’s salt. And, of course, when sea water evaporates—when water meets the air—what you have left is salt.”
“Preposterous,” exclaimed Owain, gleeful that he had another chance to throw his favorite insult at me, no doubt.
I glared at him as I responded. “Alice’s, or should I say Alicia’s, mother was the granddaughter of a Bolivian salt miner and a Patagonian weaver of wool. You told me that, Owain, and the portrait of Alice certainly contained enough Bolivian creatures, and even a Bolivian landscape, to emphasize that part of her heritage. There’s also a great big pile of salt on the table next to Gryffudd in his portrait, in which he’s holding a map of South America. The map even has an X on it, for goodness sake! I believe that, somewhere in your library, you’ll find papers that show that Alice has significant land rights to an area of the Salar de Uyuni area of Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flats. They’re shown in the background of her portrait.”
“I own salt?” said Alice. “Why is that good thing? Isn’t there enough salt in the world? Salt’s cheap, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Yes, Alice, it is. But the impressive thing about the Bolivian salt flats is that they have been discovered to consist of a crust of salt that covers what is likely to be somewhere between fifty to seventy percent of the world’s supply of lithium.”
“They make batteries with lithium, don’t they?” asked Idris.
I nodded. “Yes, they do. And the world has never been more in need of batteries—especially with the way things are moving toward the greater adoption of electric cars.” I noticed that Idris sat more upright, a gleam in his eyes.
“Don’t get too excited yet, Idris,” I said. “The Bolivian government has made it quite clear that they will only allow nationals to exploit the lithium reserves. I’m sure that Owain’s genealogical research will prove very useful when you’re required to prove that there is a Bolivian bloodline, which might allow you to capitalize upon your land rights.”
“Good work, Owain,” said Alice with pride. “You’ve always been a clever boy.”
Owain looked at his mother with great surprise, then returned his gaze to me, sullen again. “So what about the next two lines? What about them?”
“Ah yes. ‘The worthy man sees treasure through the silver and through glass / The vain man only ever sees the beauty that will pass,’ is something that I came to understand when I was talking to Siân last night. I was recalling an instance when I’d seen how blood had managed to get between the silvering on the back of a mirror and the glass to which it was adhered. Although the fireplace shown in the portrait of Alice seems to be a fantasy fireplace—I haven’t seen one like it in the castle—I know that the dressing table shown is real. It’s the one in my bridal boudoir. Did you move that dressing table out of your own bedroom, Alice?”
Alice Cadwallader shook her head. “Not exactly. The dressing table didn’t move, my bedroom did. The room you are in used to be my bedroom. The dressing table was far too big and heavy to be moved. The bed, too. They just stayed where they were. And that fireplace in the painting? The artists made it up. Said it was something he’d once seen, and it would make a nice background.”
“The bed is massive,” said Eirwen, “so I can see why you’d leave that where it was. It suits the room. But why would a dressing table be that hard to move?”
“I believe you’ll find that the mirror is entirely backed with gold,” I replied, “behind the silvering, between the mirror and the wood backing. Did you have any other mirrors in your room, at that time, Alice?”
The old woman nodded. “Gryffudd used to say I was a woman who was unable to pass a mirror without looking into it, so he made sure I had a lot of them.” She thought for a moment. “The old boy was making fun of me, wasn’t he?” She chuckled. “Well, maybe, I’ll have the last laugh after all.”
“Where are all the mirrors now, Alice?” asked Eirwen, now as eager as her husband.
“Here and there
,” replied Alice. “Don’t go making a load of bad luck for yourselves. I’ll point them out so you don’t have to break every single one in the house. It could mean there’s a lot of gold here.”
I nodded. “So the rest of the verse might be right. ‘Cadwalladers will never leave the castle of the gray / As long as ancients rest in peace and old walls not give way / By the rushing of my lifeblood, I swear this on my grave / The wise man will discover them, and my kin be ever saved.’ By the way, Owain,” I added, “I believe the reference to walls not giving way is a nod to the fact that the river was diverted, and presumably walled to allow it to do so, by your father’s father, thus preventing it from running straight through this very room.”
Owain slurped his tea very noisily. I could tell he wasn’t going to admit defeat until he was surrounded by gold tiles and plaques.
“So did David work that all out then?” asked Rhian in disbelief.
“No,” I said, “he didn’t. Though he did work out that the plate was much more modern than Owain believed, and I think it likely that he was on the right track about the mirrors. I noted as I looked around the castle, and particularly in the music room, that anything that was metal, and everything that was gold-colored, was scratched and marked. I know that everything here has age, but I don’t mean in that way. I found a collection of items in David’s desk in the stables that are used to test for gold. Magnets don’t adhere to gold, so metal can be checked that way. But, otherwise, if you rub a stone against an object you want to test, then apply certain liquids to that scraping, you can find out if it’s gold. Being in everyone’s rooms to ‘fix their radiators’ would have allowed David to test everyone’s mirrors, metal radiators, and even furnishings. Of course, it allowed him to partake of other activities as well.” I glanced toward Janet, who blushed. “If David was, as you told me yourself, Rhian, one for the ladies, and I understand there’s been a fairly good supply of young ones coming and going as Alice’s nurses, then he’d have probably been in many parts of castle, at many times of day and night. Lots of chances for snooping.”
“But I still don’t understand why he got pushed down the stairs, or who did it,” cried Rhian with frustration.
I said, “Rhian, there’s no easy way to say this. I’m pretty sure that your mother had her suspicions about David’s less-than-husbandly activities, and I think even you had more than a clue, too. I knew that he and Janet were involved because she had the faintest trace of his aftershave about her uniform—which is why being close to her yesterday gave me a bit of a sore throat.” I responded to the puzzled expressions around the table by saying, “But that’s a long story involving childhood tonsillitis. And I picked up a note he’d written to her on what I discovered to be a pad of paper he used for ordering items he needed for his ‘handiwork.’ That said, there’s one person here who cannot have been in any doubt about David’s penchant for Janet, and the other nurses, and that’s Alice. Right?”
“He was a very unpleasant, and frequently unfaithful, husband, Rhian,” said Alice sharply. “I saw what he did to those poor girls. They were disposable to him. He broke their hearts. You said I could probably tell a tale or two about men, Cait, and you’d be right. I was a very attractive girl, and I don’t deny that I made a very good marriage, at a young age, to a man much older than myself, with whom I had little in common. I will also not insult you all by denying that my husband and I had relationships outside our marriage. But it was David who really turned me against all men. Showed me how nasty they all are when it comes down to it. When the nurses came to me, desperate to leave, I told them to say it was my fault that they were resigning, so that no blame would attach to them. Then I’d see him do the same thing to the next one. This one? Janet? She wasn’t here a week before he started on her.”
I added, “He liked to work on women who thought themselves less than perfect, invisible in many ways. Women who hadn’t had much attention paid to them, am I right?”
Alice’s lips wrinkled into a sneer. “Easier for him to control them that way. And I put up with it. Until he started on Mair. I’d heard it all before, and when I heard him try it on with her, well, that was it. You know, don’t you?” she said, directly to me.
I nodded.
“Very well then, no point denying it.” She sounded resigned.
“What do you mean, Mother?” asked Mair. “David never made any moves on me.” She sounded almost disappointed. “We were friends. We had adventures.”
Alice shook her head sadly as she looked at her daughter. “There’s no point denying it, Mair. I heard him. You know very well the way sound travels around this place. It’s all those passages in the old walls. I was having a nap. Janet had given me some of that lovely milk I like so much. It was yesterday afternoon. Oh no, it can’t have been yesterday—it must have been the day before. Or before that? Anyway, I was lying there, just dozing, when I heard him tell you that you had to slow down, that you wanted it too much, and that he’d have to start to ration you. You were very upset, Mair, don’t deny it. I heard you crying, and I’ve heard a lot of them like that. Of course I was shocked—especially when he said you wanted ‘too much.’ But then I’m your mother, I think of you as a child still. But I knew I had to act. I got into my chair right away, took my walking stick so I could close the door of my little lift, and got myself down to the top of the stairs to the kitchen. But he wasn’t there. So I went to the other door under the main stairs, and tried that side. I found him. And I told him in no uncertain terms that he was to leave you alone. He laughed. At me! And I pushed my little controller to go forward to be able to smack him one with my stick, because he deserved it, but my foot pedals must have hit him and pushed his legs from under him, because the next thing I knew he was bouncing down the stairs on his chin.”
Silence.
Alice looked more deflated than usual. “I didn’t mean to hurt him more than a slap. But I had to save you, my dear child. You mean the world to me, you and your brother, and I didn’t want you to have your heart broken. Because that’s what he would have done.” Alice’s voice was more tender than I’d heard it, and Mair was beginning to cry.
“Mother, he wasn’t my lover. Nor would he have ever suggested that. We were arguing about my cigarettes. He used to buy them for me, and bring them to me, here. Yes, we’ve been having a bit of an adventure grubbing around in the temple, but even I knew he was a bad lot, and I wouldn’t have done that to you in any case, Rhian. You have to believe me—there was nothing between us.”
“I believe you,” said Rhian quietly.
“Cigarettes?” said Alice in disbelief.
“Yes, Mother, cigarettes. David was the one who brought them to me. You know very well I hardly ever leave this place. How did you think I got them?”
After a moment Alice said to me, “How did you know it was me?”
I said, “There was a transfer of paint from the interior of the door of your little chair lift to your foot pedals, and then onto the front of David’s jeans. The line where your pedals hit him left a mark. By the way, Dilys, did you change David’s trousers after he was dead? Just to make sure he looked neat and tidy when he left here?”
Dilys nodded. “I wanted him to look respectable,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“But you couldn’t change his sweater because his body had already become rigid?” I pressed.
Dilys nodded.
“But what about the hand prints on his back?” asked Bud. A good question.
“Janet? Maybe you’d like to explain that,” I said.
All eyes turned to look at the young woman, who was anything but bright and bouncy.
She flushed. “I didn’t have a date with David that day, because he had a meeting with you, Bud. So I really did go for a nap. But something woke me. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but this place is weird—banging and knocking and voices from nowhere. With what you’ve just said, Alice, it might have been you going back into
your room, I don’t know. Anyway, I decided to go down to see if I could find him after all, and there he was, at the bottom of the steps, dead. I didn’t know I’d left handprints. I rolled him over a bit, just to see if he really was dead, so maybe that’s what happened.”
“Probably transfer of coal dust from his jeans to his back,” Bud said. “About that coal dust,” he added. “Why did he have so much on his clothes? Didn’t you and he have coveralls, Owain?”
Owain blanched. “A bit of fisticuffs earlier on, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’d been in the cellar just after lunch, and he told me I wasn’t working hard enough to break through the cistern walls. I was still in my coverall, and he’d taken his off.”
“And how did you know it was David and Owain down there, Cait?” continued Bud.
I allowed myself to smile. “The boots in the cellar. I eventually realized that the sizes on the boots were British sizes, not Canadian ones, and I didn’t even know if they were men’s or women’s sizes. I take a size 4½ in the UK, but a 6½ or a 7 in Canada. It was quite possible that the British size 7, so a Canadian women’s size 9 or 9½, could belong to a man—especially one with small feet. Although I noted the selection of shoes that David had in his room, I didn’t look at the size he wore, which was a serious omission on my part. But I’d seen for myself that he had small feet, and that fact had also been commented upon by others. Also, there isn’t a woman here with feet that large. So David, plus someone with size 11, or Canadian size 12 or 13, feet. Idris’s feet are too small, but Owain’s are large.”
Everyone was silent for few moments, then Alice Cadwallader asked quietly, “What will happen to me? I didn’t mean him to die, Rhian. It really was an accident. I—I was very upset when I found out he was dead. I’d never have done that to you. Nor him, of course. You do know that, don’t you?”
Rhian nodded.
Gradually, Bud became the center of attention. He looked uncomfortable. “Please don’t expect me to have an answer about anything that relates to British police procedure. I don’t know what might happen.”