“Most precious and unusual cargo.” If this is what I believe it to be, the document may well shed light on what I’ve found to be a rather obscure episode in Lady Hurwell’s life—an episode that ended with her receiving a large insurance settlement from Lloyd’s. It would also shed some light on a persistent maritime mystery connected with Lady Elizabeth and the loss of the “Pride of Africa” jewels. I knew that my first job was to convince the remaining members of the family to give me further time to study these papers…although I took the precaution of using my phone camera to photograph them by the glow of the flashlight, just in case. My next job would be of a rather more extended nature, and might in fact ultimately entail a journey—a journey all the way from that dark and dusty attic to the shores of North America, in search of the final resting place of the SS Pembroke Castle.
29
Lake climbed the final narrow, curved steps, then moved to one side, puffing from the exertion, to afford the others room to join him. Normally, the lighthouse top was a favorite spot of his: the view from the generous, 360-degree windows was remarkable, the solitude much appreciated. Today, however, the view was marred by a dirty, swollen sky. And with four people crowding the small space, solitude was in short supply.
He looked on as his companions arranged themselves around the tower: Carole; Constance, distant and elegant as usual; and Pendergast. The FBI agent was wearing a black cashmere coat, which served only to make his alabaster skin look that much paler.
Lake shifted uneasily. Despite himself, he could not help but feel a trickle of resentment lingering from his last meeting with Pendergast. “I assume,” he said, “you didn’t ask us up here to enjoy the view.”
“That assumption is correct,” Pendergast said in his bourbon-and-buttermilk voice. “I would like to bring you up to date on the status of our investigation.”
“So you’ve reconsidered,” Lake said. “Keeping me in the loop, I mean.”
“The fact is, we have reached a point in this affair where it seemed prudent to share our findings.”
Something in Pendergast’s voice silenced Lake’s gathering reply.
“A hundred and thirty years ago, on the night of February third, a desperate group of Exmouth natives—I am not certain how many, but I’d imagine the number was fairly small—led Meade Slocum, the lighthouse keeper, up here and forced him to extinguish the light. It’s possible, of course, that Slocum was a willing conspirator, but his ultimate fate—a broken neck, and the obvious guilt he felt, with his drunken talk of the lighthouse being haunted and the crying of babies—suggests otherwise.”
“Extinguish the light?” Lake asked despite himself. “Why?”
“Because another light was being substituted for it. Out there.” And Pendergast pointed a mile to the south, down the shoreline, where a finger of nasty, jagged boulders known as Skullcrusher Rocks stretched out into the ocean, boiling with surf. “A bonfire.”
“I don’t understand,” said Carole.
“This was following the ‘lean winter’ of 1883, the year Krakatoa erupted. The next summer, crops failed in many places around the world, New England included. Exmouth was starving. The intent of this group was to lure a ship onto the rocks and then plunder it. In one sense, they were successful: the British vessel Pembroke Castle was, I believe, deceived by the false light and foundered upon those rocks. In a larger sense, however, the group failed. Instead of rich cargo, the Pembroke Castle’s manifest consisted of passengers: so-called fallen women from the slums of London, some pregnant, others with small children, bound for a fresh start in Boston at an as-yet-unbuilt home for unwed mothers.”
“The historian,” Lake blurted out. “McCool. That’s what he was researching.”
Pendergast continued. “I do not know what happened to the passengers, though I greatly fear the worst. What I do know is that the captain of the vessel was walled up in your basement, no doubt in an attempt to torture him to disclose the location of the ship’s valuables.”
“My God,” Carole murmured.
“I don’t get it,” said Lake. “Why dig up and remove the skeleton after all these years?”
“Because the captain never disclosed the location of those valuables.” Pendergast paused, looking past Lake toward the cruel rocks and the ceaseless, roaring surf. “Unbeknownst to the marauders, the ship and its mission had been financed by an English noblewoman, Lady Elizabeth Hurwell. She paid for the venture. And to finance the women’s home she intended to establish in Boston, she sent along the so-called Pride of Africa, a fabulously valuable set of rubies, which would be worth several million dollars today. She entrusted their care to the captain. After the wreck, the captain—no doubt seeing the mob on the beach and comprehending that his ship had been deliberately lured onto the rocks—would have done the only thing possible. There was no time to bury the jewels. And so he hid them in the safest place he could.”
There was a pause.
“And where was that?” Lake asked.
“He swallowed them,” Pendergast replied.
“What?” Lake exclaimed.
“Even under torture, the captain never divulged the secret,” Pendergast went on. “His torturers suspected there was treasure on the ship, but they never learned it consisted of rubies—stones that were not much larger than pills. His remains, and their concealed fortune, slumbered in your basement for more than a century, the body’s location known to no one—save for the descendants of the original atrocity. And then, one day, a historian came to Exmouth looking for information on the Pembroke Castle. In researching a biography of Lady Hurwell, he’d learned that the ‘Pride of Africa’ gemstones were on that ship. And he must have mentioned it…to the wrong people, who in turn put two and two together.”
“Two and two…” said Lake slowly. “Good Lord…I think I see where this is going.”
“That’s why your wine cellar was ransacked. The descendants of the Pembroke Castle looters learned about the jewels from McCool and deduced they must have been swallowed by the captain. If so, they would still be in the niche with his skeleton, ready for the taking. And they took not only the jewels, but the skeleton as well—the less evidence left behind, the less chance of linking them to crimes both old and new. Unfortunately for them, they missed a single bone.”
Lake took a ragged breath. He felt shocked; horrified; and yet in a strange way thrilled. A fortune in gemstones, in his basement all these years…but, as he considered the story in totality, it began to seem more than a little far-fetched. “This is pretty fancy speculation, Mr. Pendergast. I’m no detective, but do you have any actual physical evidence to support your theory that a ship was deliberately lured and wrecked on our shore, or that its captain swallowed a fortune in gems?”
“I do not.”
“So why this bit of theater? Why bring us up here to show us the coastline—rather a long coastline, I might point out—where this ship might have been wrecked deliberately—when all this is speculation?”
A brief pause, then Pendergast answered. “To keep you—as you yourself requested—‘in the loop.’”
Lake sighed. “Well, all right, fair enough. Thank you.”
The pause that followed this was longer. Lake, wondering if perhaps he’d spoken too bluntly, took another tack. “And you think these same people who ransacked my cellar killed the historian?”
“Yes.”
“What about the other murder—Dana Dunwoody?”
“That is less clear. There is much that remains to be done. First, as you so helpfully pointed out, we must find hard evidence of the Pembroke Castle’s fate. And then we must determine why the killers carved the so-called Tybane Inscriptions into their victims’ corpses.”
Lake nodded. “There’s a lot of disagreement around town about that. Half think the murders are the work of a group of idiots playing at witchcraft. The rest insist the inscription business is a red herring to mislead the police.”
“That is precisely the dil
emma we must solve.”
“But you don’t think it might be people seriously practicing witchcraft?” Carole asked.
“That is an open question.”
“Come now!” said Lake with a laugh. “Those witch legends are just that—legends!”
This time it was Constance who spoke up. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “I’ve learned that a coven of witches did indeed settle in the marshes in the late seventeenth century after fleeing Salem. And the colony did not die out. It relocated, somewhere to the south.”
Lake looked at Carole. Her face was pale and frightened. He could well understand it—the thought that the people who had ransacked their basement were not only thieves but murderers was disturbing indeed. But witches? That was truly ridiculous.
“And now, Mr. Lake, you are fully apprised of the state of the investigation. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll get back to the business at hand.” And with that, Pendergast led the way down the circular stairway from the lighthouse tower in silence, Lake bringing up the rear, descending slowly and thoughtfully.
30
It was half past two when Pendergast parked the Porsche Spyder at the end of Dune Road. He got out of the car and Constance did the same, watching as he opened the trunk and extracted a metal detector and a canvas satchel full of equipment. He was wrapped up against the weather in a sou’wester and heavy oilskin coat. The day had grown grayer still, the air so humid it seemed composed of tiny droplets of salt water. Yet there was no fog, and the visibility was good: she could see the Exmouth lighthouse, where they had spent part of the morning talking to Lake, about a mile to the north.
She followed Pendergast along a narrow, sandy path toward the water. Where the path rose to a height of land he paused, gazing eastward, his head moving almost imperceptibly as he scrutinized the coastline. The afternoon had grown chill as well as gray, and Constance’s concession to it had been to dress in a Fair Isle sweater and midcalf skirt of muted tweed.
Constance was familiar with Pendergast’s silences, and she was comfortable spending time with her own thoughts, but after fifteen minutes she felt impatience getting the better of her. “I know you don’t like to be asked prying questions, but what are we doing here?”
For a moment, Pendergast did not reply. Then he broke off his scrutiny to turn toward her. “I fear our sculptor friend has a point. My theory about the shipwreck remains a figment of my cerebrum. We are here to gain proof.”
“But the Pembroke Castle was lost a hundred and thirty years ago. What kind of proof can we find after all these years?”
“Recall what I told you before.” And he pointed south toward a distant section of the coast that angled sharply outward into the sea. “That hook of the shoreline would act as a net. If a ship had foundered on it, there would have been debris.”
Constance glanced in the indicated direction. “How can you make such a deduction from the current topography? Surely thirteen decades of storms would have altered the shoreline.”
“Were we on Cape Cod, I might agree with you. But the coastline here is sand interspersed with rocky areas that act like a series of natural breakwaters, preserving its shape.”
He fell silent again, making another survey of the windswept scene. Then he reshouldered the satchel. “Shall we?”
Constance followed him down the bluff toward the shoreline. This section was studded with cruel-looking boulders as big as automobiles. Even at this distance she could see that their flanks were covered with razor-sharp barnacles. The surf thundered among them, sending up huge spumes that lingered in the heavy air. Spindrift blew off the angry combers that rolled in ceaselessly toward land.
Pendergast stopped well short of the rocks. He laid the metal detector on the ground, then removed a GPS unit, binoculars, digital camera, and a mysterious device, which he placed on the ground as well. Next, he drew out a map and unfolded it, holding down the corners with stones. Constance saw that it was a large-scale topographical map of the Exmouth region, with a ratio of 1:24,000, heavily notated in Pendergast’s neat script. He examined the map for several minutes, frequently looking up from it to scrutinize some point along the coastline. Then he folded it back up and replaced it in the satchel.
“Eleven thirty PM,” he said, more to himself than to Constance. “The wind would have been blowing from that direction.” He looked northeast, toward the lighthouse. “And the light would have been extinguished.”
He picked up the GPS and the strange device and began walking southwestward, moving tangentially to the shoreline. Constance followed, waiting as he paused now and then to consult the GPS. He stopped at a point that placed them between the lighthouse and a nasty line of jagged rocks that stretched out into the sea.
“The bonfire would have been built well back on shore, and on a high point, perhaps the crest of a dune,” he murmured. “It would not have been a large fire—maintaining an illusion of distance being important—but it would have burned hot and bright.”
More pacing back and forth; more consulting with the GPS unit. Then, taking the sou’wester from his head and stuffing it into a pocket of his coat, Pendergast lifted the unknown device and pointed it in various directions, sighting along it as a surveyor might sight along a theodolite.
“What is that?” Constance asked.
“Laser range finder.” Pendergast took a number of measurements, comparing them to the GPS readout. After each measurement, he moved to a new location. Each move was progressively smaller.
“Here,” he said at last.
“Here what?” she said, half exasperated with Pendergast’s inscrutability.
“Here would have been the ideal place to situate the bonfire.” He nodded south, toward the fang-like series of rocks surrounded by blistering surf. “That reef is known as Skullcrusher Rocks. You will note that our location lies on a line with the Exmouth lighthouse, but in such a fashion as to place Skullcrusher Rocks, there, between the lighthouse and a passing ship. A ship on a southerly course, keeping near the shelter of the coast because of the storm, would have used the Exmouth Light to guide it around the northern shore of Cape Ann. If you move the light a mile south, the ship, using the false light as its bearing, would steam right into those rocks—which on a dirty night would be invisible.”
Constance looked at the ground around them. They were standing on a shingle beach, covered in small, even pebbles. It stretched away to both the north and the south.
Pendergast went on. “With a high-tide storm surge and a northeast wind, the debris would have washed in all around us.”
“So where is it? Or was it? The reports said no debris was ever found. A three-hundred-foot ship can’t just vanish.”
Pendergast continued staring out toward the rocks, his eyes narrowed, the wind stirring the blond-white hair back from his forehead. If he was disappointed, he showed no sign. Finally he turned and looked north.
Something in his stance and expression stopped her. “What is it?” she asked.
“I want you to turn around slowly—do it casually, don’t excite attention or suspicion—and look at the rise of dunes to the north, toward Exmouth.”
Constance ran a hand through her hair, stretched with feigned leisureliness, and swiveled around. But there was nothing—just a bare line of dunes covered with a thin mantle of sea grass, whipping in the wind.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“There was a figure,” Pendergast said after a moment. “A dark figure. As you turned, he disappeared back behind the dunes.”
“Shall we investigate?”
“By the time we get there, I’m sure he’ll be long gone.”
“Why are you concerned? We’ve seen other people wandering these beaches.”
Pendergast continued gazing northward, saying nothing, a troubled expression on his face. Then he shook his head, as if to throw off whatever speculations were running through his mind.
“Constance,” he said in a low voice, “I am going to ask y
ou to do something.”
“Fine, so long as it doesn’t involve swimming.”
“Would you have any objection if we were to remain here for some time?”
“No. But why?”
“I am going to undertake a Chongg Ran session.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here. I would appreciate it if you could ensure that I remain undisturbed, save on one condition—if the figure, any figure, were to reappear again, atop that line of dunes.”
Constance hesitated only a moment. “Very well.”
“Thank you.” Pendergast looked around once more, his gaze bright and penetrating, as if committing every last detail to memory. He knelt. Then—smoothing away some pebbles and making a small depression in the sand for his head—he lay down on the beach. He tightened the belt of his oilskin coat, pulled the sou’wester from his pocket, and arranged it beneath his head as an improvised pillow. Then he folded his arms across his chest, one over the other, like a corpse, and closed his eyes.
Constance studied him for a long moment. Then she glanced around, noticed a large piece of driftwood rearing out of the sand about ten feet away, walked over to it and took a seat, her back rigid, carriage erect. The beach was utterly deserted, but had there in fact still been an observer hovering nearby, something in Constance’s demeanor might have suggested to him a lioness, watching over her pride. She became as motionless as Pendergast: two still figures, set against a dark and lowering sky.
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