Hy Brasil

by Margaret Elphinstone

  When they went through Ishmael was standing in front of a glass case mounted on a pedestal in the centre of the room. It had been cleverly lit: the goblet seemed to shine from within, illuminating Ishmael’s dark face like the light in a Rembrandt painting. Of course the goblet, thought Hook appreciatively, was entirely correct for a Rembrandt, which made the analogy even more piquant. It was of green glass, with a crest impressed on the side depicting a galleon in full sail. Ishmael was wearing his grey Sunday suit, and he held his hat against his chest as if in homage to the beautiful object that lay before him. Hook, with whom Ishmael had worked closely when he’d been employed in the government’s Finance Department, was quite aware that in fact it was no such thing. Ishmael paid homage to nothing but his incalculable Presbyterian God, and had never made a theatrical gesture in his life. He had taken his hat off at the door because that was natural to him, and he held it in that idiosyncratic way because he always did, especially when confronted with an item that interested him.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ishmael, looking up. ‘There you are, m’dear. Hiaye Jim. What do you think of our treasure, eh? I like the way Nesta’s set it up. Clever.’

  ‘Oh, she’s clever,’ said Hook.

  He stood beside Ishmael and read the description that was discreetly pinned to the floor of the case:

  Goblet of clear glass, with transparent dark green folded foot. Unusual print on bowl with impressed design depicting stylised galleon under sail. Venetian style, early seventeenth century. Unique decorated impression suggests a possible origin in the Low Countries. Raised May 29th, 1997, from Spanish ship Cortes (foundered October 31st, 1611), Ile de I’Espoir, Hy Brasil.

  ‘Nesta will want to know what you think of this display,’ said Hook. ‘It was you that fished it up, I gather?’

  ‘No, it was Jed Honeyman.’ Ishmael looked at Hook dispassionately. ‘You must have known that. The photo was on the front page of the Times.’

  ‘And there it is,’ said Anna, pointing. ‘It’s much clearer than it was in newsprint, too.’

  Hook looked at the goblet in the photograph, clasped in the young man’s hand. There was pathos in the image: when had a human hand last touched that smooth green glass? And whose? There had been a moment when someone had been alive, and thought, and hoped, and expected something other than the long drowned years that lay ahead. ‘Full fathom five thy father lies …’ no, that was inappropriate. It was a pity it had to be young Honeyman. The goblet was a lovely thing, pale green darkening towards its fluted base, almost as if the colour of the sea had washed off on it. The bowl was straight-sided, pleasantly asymmetrical, and slightly grainy. In the middle was the crested impression that had driven Baskerville into a state of almost unprecedented excitement. Apparently there were no known examples of a galleon impressed into glass. Possibly it was the specific whim of the Spanish admiral whose bones now rested in the submerged foothills of Despair.

  ‘Of course,’ said Ishmael, ‘this is bound to mean that the project will go on.’

  ‘Is that what you think, Ishmael?’ said Hook softly.

  ‘Yes. We’ve done six more dives since then, and we’re finding—’ Ishmael stopped abruptly. ‘Good evening, Mr Baskerville.’

  ‘Ah, Baskerville.’ Hook turned to meet the chief museum curator and librarian of Hy Brasil, an old colleague of his who had at various times held less publicly known government appointments. Hook was a tall man, but Baskerville in spite of his advanced years and pronounced stoop, still towered over his President like a somewhat down-at-heel angel of death. An odour of age, unaired clothing and stale incense hung about him, as if he had recently been unearthed from a damp vestry. ‘Now here’s your exhibit. Rather pleasing, don’t you think?’

  Baskerville frowned over the glass case. ‘It’ll be safer in the museum.’

  ‘Well, in a couple of weeks that’s where it’ll be,’ Ishmael pointed out. ‘But you can see how it makes a centrepiece for the photographs.’

  Baskerville glanced disparagingly at the photo of Jared, and turned to the next. This was in colour, a composition of blues and greens, glass and sea. ‘Very nice. But the goblet should be in the museum. The insurance for this was a nightmare, and the thing’s beyond price anyway. Do you realise what it would fetch in America?’

  ‘It’s not going to America,’ said Hook abruptly. ‘We’ve had enough of that sort of thing.’

  Ishmael and Anna quietly faded into the next room. The exhibition was filling up, and they were soon separated. Ishmael extricated himself from a discussion about the shocking state of road repairs, and obstinately returned to the photographs on the walls. In this section Nesta had returned to an earlier obsession of hers, in a series of studies of dry stone walls. Ishmael examined them with professional interest, as one who had both taken photographs and built walls. When Nesta appeared beside him, dressed strikingly in a robe of midnight blue, and a necklace and bracelets of silver and lapis lazuli, Ishmael said to her as if they were in the middle of a conversation, ‘You’ve caught the balance there in the boulders. They look precarious, but they take the wind. The holes are the whole point. Anything that adapts to the wind acquires a certain grace, I think. Like sails.’

  ‘Or sand dunes. Instead of just resisting it, you mean?’ Nesta turned her back on the rest of the company. It was soothing to talk to Ishmael, although she soon stopped listening to his explanation of the mathematical properties of wind resistance. Instead she amused herself briefly, as she often did while men talked, by imagining what he would be like in bed. Since she liked both Ishmael and Anna the image she conjured up was less misanthropic than usual. She smiled at him charmingly, and said she remembered doing triangles of velocity at school.

  When Jared saw them through the crowd his first thought was to join them, but he was waylaid by the landlord of the Red Herring before he got there. ‘Did you see these?’ said Ernest.

  Jared looked at the photographs, in black and white, of lava formations in various parts of the country. He stopped for quite a time in front of a poster-sized representation of the Frenchman’s Cave, in which the basalt pillars were highlighted by the afternoon sun, a study in light and form surrounding the opaque mass of the interior. If he looked at the photo with his eyes half shut the shape in the middle turned itself from black emptiness into an animal crouched between shafts of light. In fact all the photos in the section gave an ethereal quality to solid rock, which, said Jared to Ernest, was doubly artful because it was true: if you did touch them, all you’d actually feel was shiny paper.

  ‘You’re an intelligent young man, I believe,’ said Ernest, ‘But sometimes you make comments that would be remarkable in a child of six.’

  ‘I’ll assume that’s a compliment. Hallo, here comes someone you should meet.’

  Ernest turned round. ‘But I have met her, with Colombo. A very fair young lady. Is she yours?’

  ‘I don’t expect she believes in possession,’ said Jared. ‘Sidony!’

  The fair young lady started, looked round, and blushed. ‘Oh, it’s you. I thought you’d gone back to Despair.’

  ‘I did, but I came back. Sidony, I gather you’ve met Ernest, who’s the landlord of the Red Herring in Dorrado. You’ll have to stay there, because it’s the best inn in Hy Brasil. Ernest, she’ll give you a write-up that’ll keep you fully booked from now till the apocalypse. That is, if you’re nice to her.’

  ‘Ah yes, so you’re the young lady who’s writing the book.’

  Jared tweaked her arm. ‘He’s worth talking to, but I’ll come back presently and rescue you.’ He winked at Ernest and wandered on, feeling unaccountably pleased with himself.

  ‘The goblet,’ Baskerville was repeating to the third passer-by that he’d managed to stop, ‘should be in the museum.’

  ‘It will be,’ said Colombo. ‘But it makes sense to have it like this first, the subject surrounded by images of itself, as it were. I like that. Is it security you’re worried about? But here comes another su
bject. Hi-aye, Jared. Care to stand under the spotlight too?’

  ‘Good evening, Mr Honeyman.’ Baskerville turned stiffly round, but ignored the hand that Jared extended to him. ‘As you see, Ms Kirwan has the exhibit on loan as you requested. But it ought to be in the museum.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Jared, and strolled over. ‘It looks pretty good, doesn’t it? If you were fished up from the bottom of the sea and placed under a bright light, Colombo, I suppose you’d reckon it must be the resurrection?’

  ‘As the fisher-up, I can’t imagine where you think that puts you,’ said Colombo. ‘Mind you, there’s been all sorts of people through here remarking on how beautiful you are. Perhaps you should be kept in the museum too.’

  ‘What? Oh right, that picture. I suppose none of them mentioned giving me some money? Don’t look at me like that; I meant a grant for marine archeology. Stop laughing, Colombo. I’m quite serious.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that. Mr Baskerville, now that the lad’s produced the goods will he get his pay-off, do you think? I mean, if he’s actually filling your cases at the museum with priceless objects, surely you’ll write him a reference? You’re on the Mayda Trust, aren’t you?’

  In the catalogue the first room was called simply ‘stone’, and the next ‘water’. The first thing Sidony saw as she came through into ‘water’ was a green glass goblet in a pool of light, surrounded by three silhouetted figures, each one arguing from his corner like characters in a play. Even the words they spoke seemed to have been rehearsed a hundred times before.

  ‘But it won’t lie there for ever,’ Jared was saying. ‘Not now people know that it’s there. If we’re not allowed to get on with it now, this year, then someone else will. Someone from outside Hy Brasil.’

  ‘They can’t do that in territorial waters without permission.’

  ‘Want to bet? And if the country really is going bankrupt, that’s an argument for, not against, doing it now. First because who’s to say the government won’t sell the site to the Americans just to get the cash? And second, we’re supposed to be encouraging tourists, aren’t we? Well, you can’t beat a salvaged galleon if you want to do that. It’s the next best thing to Kidd’s treasure. And if we in Hy Brasil salvage the stuff, we keep it here where it should be, in Hy Brasil. There’s too much gone out of the country already, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘You can’t argue with that, Baskerville,’ said Colombo. ‘No one made more fuss than you did when the Ravnscar treasure went to New York.’

  ‘That was a wanton act,’ said Baskerville. ‘To disturb what had lain safe from the beginning of our history. Are you sure you’re not doing the same though, Mr Honeyman?’

  ‘You’d like me to have left it where it was, would you? You’d like it not to be here in this room now? You’d like none of these pictures to exist? You’d like it to lie on the sea bed until the end of time and no one ever see it again? At that rate none of us should ever try to make anything happen.’

  ‘“Vacant heart and hand and eye,”’ murmured Colombo. ‘Isn’t that it, Baskerville? “Easy live and quiet die.”’

  Baskerville looked at him from under formidable eyebrows. ‘So you’ve been down there, too, MacAdam?’ he said softly.

  ‘I had nothing to do with what you’re thinking of. I felt as badly as you, if that were possible. But I think I understand why it was done. It can’t be changed, therefore it has to be forgiven. Everyone deserves that.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re all getting at,’ said Jared irritably. ‘We learned that poem at school, I think. But Colombo’s never been diving in his life. No offence meant, but I wouldn’t want to take him either. He’s not the type. What’s more I haven’t done anything like what Lucy did, and never would, and I don’t need forgiving. There’s no comparison. I don’t see how you could possibly make one.’

  ‘We’ll leave Lucy out of this!’ cried Colombo. Sidony, who’d been apparently engrossed in the pictures on the wall, started, and they all saw her at the same moment. Colombo introduced her to Baskerville with such smooth aplomb it was difficult to believe the sudden flash of anger had been real. But they were all affected by it. Baskerville was unexpectedly affable, and agreed with Colombo that Sidony should visit him in his office at the museum. It must be useful to be a pretty girl, Jared thought cynically, as he leaned against the doorway that led through to ‘earth’and watched them being so warily polite. He seemed to have become invisible to all of them; maybe it was just as well. But when Baskerville and Colombo went on into ‘stone’, Sidony said that she wanted to look at the rest of the photographs in here. She was unaware of Jared, and when she thought she was alone she breathed a big sigh, and stood in front of the goblet, and gazed at it thoughtfully. He stood quite still and watched her.

  Eventually she looked up and saw him. She didn’t seem startled that he was there, but just said, as if following a train of thought, ‘I’ve seen it before somewhere, but I can’t remember where.’

  ‘No one’s seen this one before,’ said Jared. ‘Except for the picture in the paper. It’s been in Baskerville’s workshop at the museum until today.’

  ‘I’ve never been there. It must have been another one just the same. It had the same crest on it.’

  ‘What?’ She’d fairly caught his attention. ‘You’re sure of that? You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘So it’s at Ravnscar?’

  ‘What? No, I don’t think it was. I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Sidony, you must! ‘He had her by the shoulder, but he seemed unaware of it. ‘It’s important. You’ve no idea how important it is. Please try to remember!’

  ‘Ah, Sidony! We meet again.‘Olly West was advancing towards her, both hands held out. Sidony ignored one outstretched hand and shook the other. Jared walked away abruptly. He found Ishmael and Anna getting ready to leave, and went outside with them. He was talking all the way, with excited gestures.

  Nesta watched him go, and remarked, ‘Something’s got him going. And I don’t think it’s my work.’

  ‘No m’dear, I don’t think it is.’ Hook looked out of the window, and watched Jared climb into the back of Ishmael’s Grand Cherokee. Ishmael and Anna got in after him, the doors slammed, and they bumped away through the rutted car park. ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Young Honeyman cuts me dead, at least, he did so quite pointedly this afternoon. I can’t say I blame him, but it’s a novel experience.’

  ‘Take it to heart then, Jim. You’ve not been kind to him.’

  ‘But you have, m’dear.’ Nesta raised her brows at him. ‘It’s a very charming composition,’ explained Hook. ‘You’ve made the little devil look positively seraphic. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up getting his money as a result.’

  ‘I know you don’t want him to.’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘Why not, Jim? I just don’t understand why not?’

  ‘You don’t need to understand, m’dear. I just wished you’d picked another subject, that’s all. On the other hand I wouldn’t want you to limit yourself. Would you like young Jared to raise the Cortes?’

  Nesta looked him in the eye. ‘Yes, Jim, I would.’

  ‘Very well, m’dear. Never say I’m beyond influence. Next year he shall.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Here comes our tedious Baskerville. Say no more. Young Honeyman is forgiven, but he mustn’t know that yet. But you, my love, may privately rejoice.’

  Nearly everyone had gone now. Colombo was alone in the final section. He stopped for several minutes in front of the last photograph in the exhibition. He knew it well, so he’d hardly glanced at it this evening, though he’d taken the trouble to eavesdrop as the viewers shuffled by. The picture appeared to be of a naked man standing on the back of a whale. The form was simple: a straight line transecting a curve. A lot of people this evening had exclaimed at it. Most had noted the similarity between the photograph and the nati
onal emblem of Hy Brasil. A few had speculated in detail as to how the photograph had been done. When members of the amateur camera club came by the discussion had become technical and complicated. Ernest had asked Colombo his opinion. ‘Simple,’ Colombo had said. ‘It’s a man standing on the back of a whale. Presumably she took it from a boat.’ Cornered by the camera club in a body, he’d gone further and announced truthfully that he believed in miracles, and after that they’d left him in peace. Now that he was alone, he stood and contemplated the image one last time. It was early morning in the photograph. The man had his back to the rising sun, so that the light fell white across his back and shoulders, and his face was left in shadow. He was an image created in patterns of light and dark, seemingly without substance and devoid of personality, pared right down to form. The sky was soft as milk behind him. The back of the whale was smooth and black under his feet. It had also been extremely cold.

  ‘Colombo? You’re still here?’ Nesta saw what he was looking at and smiled. For a moment their eyes met, full of laughter. ‘Everyone’s gone,’ she said loudly. ‘We’re opening the last bottle. Come on through.’

  The evening had been, predictably, a success. Over two hundred people had come, and two-thirds of the photographs had been sold. Hook opened a final bottle of red wine, and poured out glasses for Nesta, the gallery staff, Colombo and himself. ‘So you’ll give her a good write-up, MacAdam?’

  ‘Not only good, but true,’ said Colombo. ‘I might even go back to the office and do it tonight.’

  ‘You’ll do it justice, won’t you? Plenty of description, mind, and not just your own opinion. These reviewers always seem to think readers are going to be interested in their convoluted internal processes. But you’re a reporter, MacAdam. You understand about facts.’

  ‘I don’t believe in facts,’ said Colombo, ‘But I’ll describe everything as well as I possibly can. That I promise you, sir.’