Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

‘If I remember rightly, Tidesman wrote an article at the time saying the very same thing.’

  ‘Ah well, that was Baskerville. He’d defend Jack in public, of course. They were two of the four, after all. Well, I grant you Tidesman was pretty frank, but I’m not sure what that amounts to. I’d give something to know what hand Baskerville did have in Jack’s disappearance. He’s very thick with the President, after all. Always has been.’

  ‘But Tidesman’s never quit on freedom of speech. He called it … what was it now … “an unjust ostracism”. Jared’s father had been ostracised, Tidesman said. But you don’t think he really meant it?’

  ‘He might have added, “and the one who really suffers for it is the boy”, though no one mentioned that at the time of course, nor ever has. The Honeymans were always Episcopalians, of course, but I doubt if Jack’s boy has darkened the door of a church since he was twelve years old. And Jack’s never been heard of since. It’s tough on a lad; easier if his father were dead really. Less of a betrayal.’

  ‘The Mayda Trust should have given Jed his money, no reason why not, surely? It seems to me all he ever talks about is salvage, and it would do the country good to find treasure right now. But having to do it like this, not having the proper gear, must be terribly frustrating. He needs it to be a proper job.’

  ‘He had a damn good job, and seemingly he threw it away, but maybe he just wanted to come home.’

  Voices always seemed so strange just after the dive. The sun touched Jared’s cold hands and he spread them out to the warmth, palms upwards. He’d changed the top half of the wetsuit for a shirt, and the sun was warm on his neck, but his fingertips were still white. Braced against the tossing of the boat, he very carefully picked up the goblet again from the safe nest he had made for it with his seajacket, inside the finds box.

  It wasn’t black at all: it was a delicate green, dark at the base, and translucent in the bowl, like seawater. He ran his fingers over it. The stem widened out into a fluted base; the shape under his fingers was like overlapping petals. There were circular ridges under the bowl of the goblet. And on the side of the bowl, he saw for the first time, a rounded bump.

  ‘It’s got a crest on it! Moulded into the glass! Oh, look at that! Just look at that.’

  Ishmael shifted over to sit beside him, and looked over his shoulder. ‘Oh my!’

  ‘It’s a ship, see! It’s a galleon. Three masts, look, and under full sail. I mean, that’s obviously what it’s meant to be. Isn’t it? Pressed into the glass. It’s amazing. The odd thing is … Kirwan, look at this!’

  Kirwan smiled at him. If the photo she’d just taken came out right, it would be one of her best. She’d picked the right day to come. Not just because she’d caught the moment when the first real treasure, still wet from the sea, hit the light, but also because she was almost sure that at the same time she’d captured a moment of pure exultation in Jared’s face, an expression of such joy that it could never have lasted for more than an instant, whatever created it. The treasure found. She laughed to herself. It sounded like the caption to a Victorian oil painting of rural life.

  Ishmael was saying, ‘Pass me the chart again.’ Per handed a rolled-up chart forward. ‘You know what this means? There’s your find. We can’t assume now there’s nothing beyond this edge. I mean, we can’t possibly extend our area now, but you do see that if this is only six inches from the edge of the site, we can’t think of that as a definitive boundary.’

  ‘God, no. You’d want to go at least six feet further back. Well into the lava fissure, in fact. Excavate all the cracks in the rock. Christ, if only we had some money. We can’t stop now! Not possibly!’

  Ishmael was packing his camera into its bag again. ‘No,’ he said, after a pause. ‘We won’t stop now.’

  He looked up and met Jared’s eyes. Jared reddened. ‘I wasn’t thinking that you …’

  ‘No,’ said Ishmael. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home. But you’re right, Jed, we don’t want to stop now.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘When we get home,’ said Ishmael.

  Kirwan was staring politely out to sea, implying that her thoughts at least were far away. Per coughed, and tapped the ash out of his pipe into the water. Ishmael rolled up the chart of the wreck. Jared turned the goblet round and round in his hands, apparently deep in thought.

  ‘I’ve seen it before,’ he said suddenly. He looked up and saw them all looking at him. ‘This goblet. It’s the same one: same fluted base, same crest. I recognise it.’

  ‘Maybe you dreamed it,’ said Ishmael.

  Jared took this quite seriously. ‘That’s what I thought at first. Down there I thought it was just the – you know – just the inevitability of the thing. You see, I knew as I was uncovering it what it was, before I saw it whole. As if I’d dreamed it all already. But in the light – it’s hard to explain – I recognise it. And when I saw the crest properly, I knew I’d seen it before. Not in a dream, but really.’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ said Ishmael mildly. ‘There’s plenty of things in Hy Brasil they say came ashore from the Cortes. They’d have needed more than one wine goblet, I imagine.’

  ‘If everything that’s said to be off the Cortes really had come from there,’ remarked Kirwan, ‘It would have to have been about the size of QE2.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Per. ‘Plenty of old stuff about. You used to be up at Ravnscar a lot too, when you were a lad. The old man would have had stacks of antique glasses up there. No doubt but what it’ll remind you of some of them.’

  ‘No,’ said Jared obstinately. ‘It was one just like this. And you’re right; it was supposed to have come ashore. You saying that reminded me. It was Nicky’s. Nicky had it at Ferdy’s Landing. He used it to keep matches in, on the mantelpiece. It wasn’t just a bit like this one, it was the spit of it. It had the same crest on it: a galleon under sail. Nicky always said that was the Cortes.’

  ‘Could well be,’ said Ishmael. ‘Why don’t you find it? Take it up to the museum and let Baskerville look at them together.’

  Jared stared at him. ‘But I don’t know where it is! I’ve not seen it since … since thirteen years ago. I don’t know what they did with any of Nicky’s things.’

  ‘Presumably everything was left in the house,’ said Kirwan. ‘You didn’t find any Spanish goblets when you moved into Ferdy’s Landing, did you, Ishmael?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So Nicky Hawkins had one like that?’ said Per. ‘Fancy that, now.’

  ‘Might it still be lying about somewhere at Ferdy’s Landing? Hidden away, maybe?’ asked Kirwan.

  All three men shook their heads. They’d all worked on the renovations at Ferdy’s Landing. ‘I gutted the place,’ said Ishmael simply. ‘Took it right back to the stone. All new timber. There couldn’t have been a sixpence still there and us not find it. Anyway,’ he was stowing the tanks in the rack on the gunwale, ‘we should get a move on, if Kirwan wants to go into the caves still. It’ll be calm enough round there, won’t it, Per?’

  ‘Short of a flat calm you’ll hardly get a better day,’ said Per. ‘Another half hour and we’ll get right into the Frenchman’s Cave if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I do,’ said Kirwan. ‘I want to get those basalt columns with the afternoon sun. And you never know, after Jed’s find on the beach the other day, we might find a stash of cocaine in there while we’re at it.’

  ‘No,’ said Jared. ‘Frenchman’s Cave would be a daft place for smugglers. You can only get into it maybe a dozen days in the whole summer. And even if you could drop it off from the sea, who’d collect it from there? You need to sell drugs on as fast as possible, not stick them in a place they can’t be got at for weeks.’

  ‘You mean they’d pass their sell-by date? But surely they don’t go off?’

  ‘No, but in the smuggling trade you pay up front, strictly C O D. So that’s all your capital tied up, or more likely a load of debt. You’d hardly want to l
eave it sitting in a tidal cave, would you?’

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t gain much interest there,’ admitted Kirwan. ‘Sorry, Jed: I clearly haven’t thought it all through properly.’

  She was more than old enough to have been his mother, and every time Jared spoke to her he realised he was giving her something new to laugh at. But oddly enough he didn’t resent it. It had never occurred to Jared before that Nesta Kirwan fell into the category of sexually desirable women. When he was a boy he used to meet her once a year when she came round to do the school photographs. He’d been vaguely aware of her as small for a grown-up, dark, and faintly exotic in an undefined way. She’d belonged in the same category as teachers, except that she never looked grim, and always smelled nice. She still smelled nice. It was unusual to smell expensive perfume when diving from an open boat off Despair. All day her presence had supplied a certain frisson which had been missing from Jared’s life for over a year. He wondered, fantastically, whether she might want to extend her photographic research over another day, and whether he dared invite her to stay over on Despair tonight. He was almost sure he would not dare, but the idea opened up a train of improbable thought that was not at all unpleasant. He glanced at her as the boat got under way, and saw that she was regarding him with friendly amusement. He guessed that she knew what he was thinking, and realised that even if she did, he didn’t care.

  ‘Well, I haven’t really thought about it either,’ he said aloud. ‘But after I found that packet, it did cross my mind that if there’s a contact on this coast, it’s most likely down Ogg’s Cove way. The Lyonsness side is too overlooked. Once you’re into the sound, Ishmael, for example, could watch every move you make from Ferdy’s Landing.’

  Ishmael looked round. ‘You think I’m keeping a round the clock watch for passing smugglers? I have a job to do. Ferdy’s Landing isn’t going to bother them.’ Kirwan passed round a box of sandwiches, and Ishmael took one without looking at it; he was watching the cliffs again. ‘Jed, if anyone is smuggling off this coast, there’s only one person who could possibly be in their way, and he’s in this boat and he isn’t me or Nesta or Per. Mind you, I don’t think anything of the kind. The tide could have brought that packet from anywhere: Dorrado, Tuly, North America, God knows. Drugs are serious money, twenty-first century style. You’re not about to find the answer in a sea cave.’

  ‘No, but smuggling’s still smuggling. OK; this is cocaine, not Spanish gold, but you still can’t send it by e-mail. Someone still has to get their feet wet. Things still have to be packed in sacks, and someone still has to put them somewhere. And if they don’t want to be noticed, and they come by sea, the possible places haven’t changed that much since Kidd. That’s a fact, Ishmael. You can’t say it isn’t.’

  ‘Well,’ said Per peaceably, ‘We’re not the coastguards so we don’t need to worry about it. We should get moving if we’re going into the caves. Kirwan can do her pictures, and maybe she’ll give each of us a copy. I’d like that. I can look at it when I’m shorebound for good.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you ever will be, but you shall all have your copies,’ Nesta promised. She turned away from them and towards the cliffs of Despair, into the wind.

  SEVEN

  Sidony Redruth: Ravnscar Castle. June 1st.

  Notes for Undiscovered Islands (working title).

  I LIKE LIVING with Lucy. I realised this yesterday as we sat on over the remains of breakfast drinking our coffee, to the soothing accompaniment of cooing doves, who were immersed in their springtime courtships outside the open window. The sun came in and caressed us through the romanesque embrasure that lit the table, and the warmth of it was bringing out new flowers on the cyclamen in the middle of the table. They hung exotically over the milk and marmalade. Somehow they reminded me of Lucy. Even their virginal white seemed appropriate, for Lucy has a nun-like aura about her, in spite of her sleepy sexiness, which may leave me cold, but I’ve seen fairly clearly the effect it has on Colombo. Possibly I’m a little envious. My sixth sense, in which, being a rational woman, I put little trust, tells me that Lucy’s snowlike purity is deceptive. In fact the whole of life at Ravnscar has an element of illusion about it. I find I keep touching the walls as if to reassure myself of their stony substance. They’re always hard and chilly under my fingers, even when I dream about them.

  We have no difficulty in talking, Lucy and I. I think she’s lonely. I would be, living just by myself in Ravnscar, but then I find it hard to judge other people’s experience of loneliness, because I’m a twin and although Arthur and I are not at all alike there’s always a bit of me that feels strange without him. I don’t know if that’s because we shared a childhood or an even more cramped space before that. I get the impression that Lucy has always been more or less alone. I see her as she was yesterday, sitting across from me at the round table in the window where we have breakfast, and I see … what? A woman a little older than me, early thirties maybe, with thick black hair that’s rapidly growing out of the short style into which it’s been cut. Her hair really is black, not dark brown, though when the sun catches it there are red lights in it. Her eyes are not black but very dark brown, dark enough to give you the impression you’re looking into the depths, not just at the colour of someone’s iris. Her skin against her white shirt looks tanned and sleek. She’s already a little bit plump, but in a healthy sort of way, as if it’s from olive oil rather than ice creams. She wears much tighter jeans than I do; I’d find them hot and uncomfortable but I’ve never seen Lucy look hot. I’ve yet to see her hurry over anything either. There’s a lack of stress about this place which I like. I can feel myself slowing down in it.

  Each meal takes about two hours. This is when I find out about Lucy. The rest of the time she simply potters. I can’t make up my mind if she’s the archetypal housewife or the ultimate museum curator. The place is packed with antiques, from fossils of ammonites through to Bell’s prototype telephone, and more or less anything you could think of in between. I asked Lucy, who was drifting around the Great Hall absentmindedly wielding a duster, if the things were arranged in any order. She looked down at the Dresden shepherdess in her hands and thought for a while.

  ‘Two orders,’ she said at last. ‘Aesthetic, and random.’

  She’s very ready to talk whenever I waylay her as she drifts about her domain, and she always gives me useful information about its history. She’d write a better guidebook than I ever will.

  ‘The keep is fifteenth-century,’ she told me, as we stood on the black-and-white diamond-tiled floor at the foot of the circular central stairway, ‘from the Portuguese period. But the foundations are much older, and the passages underneath were used hundreds of years before that. They’re natural.’

  I’d been looking at the walls and wondering how well I would sleep if I kept an assortment of pikes, halbards, lochaber axes, scimitars, cutlasses, daggers, a two-handed claymore, muskets, duelling pistols, prototype revolvers, flintlock rifles and a small cannon arranged in tasteful geometrical patterns in my front hall, but the passages grabbed my attention. ‘Caves, you mean? Natural ones?’

  ‘Oh yes, they’re lava tubes from a prehistoric eruption of Mount Prosper, apparently. One goes right through the side of the mountain and comes out above Ogg’s Cove. In all the earthquakes and eruptions of Mount Prosper, Ravnscar has never been touched. It’s safe because the rock is hollow underneath. There are caverns. Some you can get into, some not. And some not always.’

  ‘Why not? Because of the tide?’

  ‘No, not because of that. Nothing changes down there. The air temperature, for example, is always the same. No day and night. No seasons. It’s nice when you go down in winter. Warm. Cool at this time of year, of course. You need a jumper.’

  ‘But why only sometimes?’

  As usual it took her a long time to answer. ‘They were used, these places,’ she said at last. ‘Ravnscar has a long history.’

  ‘And your family too? You’ve always b
een here?’

  ‘Since the 1590s. Too long.’

  I opened my mouth to ask why too long, and shut it again, for fear of being intrusive, till I thought of an easier question. ‘What about all the furniture and stuff? Did your family collect all these things?’

  ‘My grandfather was an antique dealer.’

  ‘Oh,’ I tried not to sound disappointed.

  ‘And my great-grandfather was a pirate. Of a long line.’

  ‘Wow! And now you look after all these treasures?’

  ‘At the moment it’s what I feel like doing. I sell things sometimes. I worked for an antique dealer in New York. Making money’s in my blood, remember.’

  ‘Isn’t it hard getting rid of stuff you’ve always had in the family?’

  ‘I’m not sentimental. Didn’t you inherit anything from your family you’d rather be rid of?’

  ‘Not really. Guilt, I suppose, but that isn’t quite the same. No one would want to buy it, anyway.’

  ‘I thought you were writing a book?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Lucy. ‘Your family imbues you with guilt: that’s what families are for. What do you do? You make it into something tangible and sell it. Sometimes I think a castle full of junk is a soft option, but then I can’t write.’

  ‘Yes you do. I’ve seen you.’

  ‘Ah, that’s different, that’s not for sale.’

  ‘Private?’

  ‘Very.’

  I knew that. On my third day at Ravnscar I’d been sitting at the round table in the embrasure of the kitchen window writing a letter to my parents, and I’d noticed, in the pile of magazines and back numbers of The Hesperides Times, a yellow ring-binder entitled, in fine italic script, Chemistry Notes. It didn’t sound enticing, but I casually flicked it open all the same, at a page closely handwritten in purple ink.

  … and other times I want to forget everything and just let myself love him back, but I know that would be the worst thing I could do to either of us. I know that I must never let myself …