Over Sea, Under Stone

by Susan Cooper

  “Oh yes you do. I can’t think why you weren’t ill in the train like you usually are. Just think of those waves in the Atlantic, and the mast swaying about, and nobody with an appetite for their breakfast except me. . . .”

  “Oh shut up, I’m not going to listen”—and poor Jane turned and ran round the side of the mountain of fishy-smelling boxes, which had probably been having more effect on her imagination than the thought of the sea.

  “Girls!” said Simon cheerfully.

  There was suddenly an ear-splitting crash from the other side of the boxes, a scream, and a noise of metal jingling on concrete. Simon and Barney gazed horrified at one another for a moment, and rushed round to the other side.

  Jane was lying on the ground with a bicycle on top of her, its front wheel still spinning round. A tall dark-haired boy lay sprawled across the quay not far away. A box of tins and packets of food had spilled from the bicycle carrier, and milk was trickling in a white puddle from a broken bottle splintered glittering in the sun.

  The boy scrambled to his feet, glaring at Jane. He was all in navy-blue, his trousers tucked into Wellington boots; he had a short, thick neck and a strangely flat face, twisted now with ill temper.

  “Look where ’ee’s goin’, can’t ’ee?” he snarled, the Cornish accent made ugly by anger. “Git outa me way.”

  He jerked the bicycle upright, taking no heed of Jane; the pedal caught her ankle and she winced with pain.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, with some spirit, “You came rushing up without looking where you were going.”

  Barney crossed to her in silence and helped her to her feet. The boy sullenly began picking up his spilled tins and slamming them back into the box. Jane picked one up to help. But as she reached it towards the box the boy knocked her hand away, sending the tin spinning across the quay.

  “Leave ’n alone,” he growled.

  “Look here,” Simon said indignantly, “there’s no need for that.”

  “Shut y’ mouth,” said the boy shortly, without even looking up.

  “Shut your own,” Simon said belligerently.

  “Oh Simon, don’t,” Jane said unhappily. “If he wants to be beastly let him.” Her leg was stinging viciously, and blood trickled down from a graze on her knee. Simon looked at her flushed face, hearing the strain in her voice. He bit his lip.

  The boy pushed his bicycle to lean against the pile of boxes, scowling at Barney as he jumped nervously out of the way; then rage suddenly snarled out of him again. “—off, the lot of ’ee,” he snapped; they had never heard the word he used, but the tone was unmistakable, and Simon went hot with resentment and clenched his fists to lunge forward. But Jane clutched him back, and the boy moved quickly to the edge of the quay and climbed down over the edge, facing them, the box of groceries in his arms. They heard a thumping, clattering noise, and looking over the edge they saw him lurching about in a rowing-dinghy. He untied its mooring-rope from a ring in the wall and began edging out through the other boats into the open harbour, standing up with one oar thrust down over the stern. Moving hastily and angrily, he clouted the dinghy hard against the side of one of the big fishing-boats, but took no notice. Soon he was out in open water, sculling rapidly, one-handed, and glaring back at them in sneering contempt.

  As he did so they heard a clatter of feet moving rapidly over hollow wood from inside the injured fishing-boat. A small, wizened figure popped up suddenly from a hatch in the deck and waved its arms about in fury, shouting over the water towards the boy in a surprisingly deep voice.

  The boy deliberately turned his back, still sculling, and the dinghy disappeared outside the harbour entrance, round the jutting wall.

  The little man shook his fist, then turned towards the quay, leaping neatly from the deck of one boat to another, until he reached the ladder in the wall and climbed up by the children’s feet. He wore the inevitable navy-blue jersey and trousers, with long boots reaching up his legs.

  “Clumsy young limb, that Bill ‘Oover,” he said crossly. “Wait’ll I catch ’n, that’s all, just wait,”

  Then he seemed to realize that the children were more than just part of the quay. He grunted, flashing a quick glance at their tense faces, and the blood on Jane’s knee. “Thought I heard voices from below,” he said, more gently. “You been ’avin’ trouble with ’n?” He jerked his head out to sea.

  “He knocked my sister over with his bike,” Simon said indignantly. “It was my fault really, I made her run into him, but he was beastly rude and he bashed Jane’s hand away and—and then he went off before I could hit him,” he ended lamely.

  The old fisherman smiled at them. “Ah well, don’t ’ee take no count of ’n. He’m a bad lot, that lad, evil-tempered as they come and evil-minded with ut. You keep away from ’n.”

  “We shall,” Jane said with feeling, rubbing her leg gingerly.

  The fisherman clicked his tongue. “That’s a nasty old cut you got there, midear, you want to go and get ’n washed up. You’m on holiday here, I dessay.”

  “We’re staying in the Grey House,” Simon said. “Up there on the hill,”

  The fisherman glanced at him quickly, a flicker of interest passing over the impassive brown wrinkled face. “Are ’ee, then? I wonder maybe”—then he stopped short, strangely, as if he were quickly changing his mind about what he had been going to say. Simon, puzzled, waited for him to go on. But Barney, who had not been listening, turned round from where he had been peering over the edge of the quay.

  “Is that your boat out there?”

  The fisherman looked at him, half taken aback and half amused, as he would have looked at some small unexpected animal that barked. “That’s right, me ’andsome. The one I just come off.”

  “Don’t the other fishermen mind you jumping over their boats?”

  The old man laughed, a cheerful rusty noise. “I’d’n no other way to get ashore from there. Nobody minds you comin’ across their boat, so long’s you don’t mark ’er.”

  “Are you going out fishing?”

  “Not for a while, midear,” said the fisherman amiably, pulling a piece of dirty rag from his pocket and scrubbing at the oil-marks on his hands. “Go out with sundown, we do, and come back with the dawn.”

  Barney beamed. “I shall get up early and watch you come in.”

  “Believe that when I see ’n,” said the fisherman with a twinkle. “Now look, you run and take your little sister home and wash that leg, don’t know what scales and muck have got into it off here.” He scuffed at the quay with his glistening boot.

  “Yes, come on, Jane,” Simon said. He took one more look out at the quiet line of boats; then put up his hand to peer into the sun. “I say, that oaf with the bicycle, he’s going on board the yacht!”

  Jane and Barney looked.

  Out beyond the far harbour wall, a dark shape was bobbing against the long white hull of the silent yacht. They could just see the boy climbing up the side, and two figures meeting him on the deck. Then all three disappeared, and the boat lay deserted again.

  “Ah,” said the fisherman. “So that’s it. Young Bill were buying stores and petrol and all, yesterday, enough for a navy, but nobody couldn’t get it out of him who they was for. Tidy old boat, that’n—cruisin’, I suppose. Can’t see what he made all the mystery about.”

  He began to walk along the quay: a rolling small figure with the folded tops of his boots slapping his legs at every step. Barney trotted beside him, talking earnestly, and rejoined the others at the corner as the old man, waving to them, turned off towards the village.

  “His name’s Mr. Penhallow, and his boat’s called the White Heather. He says they got a hundred stone of pilchard last night, and they’ll get more tomorrow because it’s going to rain.”

  “One day you’ll ask too many questions,” said Jane.

  “Rain?” said Simon incredulously, looking up at the blue sky.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Rub
bish. He must be nuts.”

  “I bet he’s right. Fishermen always know things, specially Cornish fishermen. You ask Great-Uncle Merry.”

  But Great-Uncle Merry, when they sat down to their first supper in the Grey House, was not there; only their parents, and the beaming red-cheeked village woman, Mrs Palk, who was to come in every day to help with the cooking and cleaning. Great-Uncle Merry had gone away.

  “He must have said something,” Jane said.

  Father shrugged. “Not really. He just muttered about having to go and look for something and roared off in the car like a thunderbolt.”

  “But we’ve only just got here,” Simon said, hurt.

  “Never mind,” Mother said comfortably. “You know what he is. He’ll be back in his own good time.”

  Barney gazed dreamily at the Cornish pasties Mrs Palk had made for their supper. “He’s gone on a quest. He might take years and years. You can search and search, on a quest, and in the end you may never get there at all.”

  “Quest my foot,” Simon said irritably. “He’s just gone chasing after some stupid old tomb in a church, or something. Why couldn’t he have told us?”

  “I expect he’ll be back in the morning,” Jane said. She looked out of the window, across the low grey wall edging the road. The light was beginning to die, and as the sun sank behind their headland the sea was turning to a dark grey-green, and slow mist creeping into the harbour. Through the growing haze she saw a dim shape move, down on the water, and above it a brief flash of light; first a red pinprick in the gloom, and then a green, and white points of light above both. And she sat up suddenly as she realized that what she could see was the mysterious white yacht, moving out of Trewissick harbour as silently and strangely as it had come.

  • Chapter Two •

  Next day, as they sat eating breakfast, Great-Uncle Merry came back. He loomed in the doorway, tall and hollow-eyed under the thatch of white hair, and beamed at their surprised faces.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “Any coffee left?” The ornaments seemed to rattle on the mantelpiece as he spoke; Great-Uncle Merry always gave the impression of being far too big for any room he was in.

  Father reached out imperturbably to pull up another chair. “What’s it like out this morning, Merry? Doesn’t look so good to me.”

  Great-Uncle Merry sat down and helped himself to toast, holding the slice in one large palm while he spread butter on it with Father’s knife. “Cloud. Thick, coming in from the sea. We’re going to have rain.”

  Barney was fidgeting with unbearable curiosity. Suddenly, forgetting the family rule that they should never ask their mysterious great-uncle questions about himself, he burst out: “Gumerry, where have you been?” In the heat of the moment he used the pet name which he had invented when he was very small. They all used it sometimes still, but not for everyday.

  Jane hissed quietly between her teeth, and Simon glared at him across the table. But Great-Uncle Merry seemed not to have heard. “It may not last,” he went on conversationally to Father, through a mouthful of toast. “But I think we shall have it for most of the day.”

  “Will there be thunder?” Jane said.

  Simon added hopefully, “Shall we have a storm at sea?”

  Barney sat silent while their voices eddied round the table. The weather, he said to himself in exasperation, all of them talking about the weather, when Great-Uncle Merry’s just come back from his quest.

  Then over their voices there came a low rumble of thunder, and the first spattering sounds of rain. As everyone rushed to the window to look out at the heavy grey sky, Barney crossed unnoticed to his great-uncle and slipped his hand into his for a moment.

  “Gumerry,” he said softly, “did you find it, what you were looking for?”

  He expected Great-Uncle Merry to look past him with the familiar amiable-obstinate expression that greeted any question. But the big man looked down at him almost absently. The eyebrows were drawn forbiddingly together on the craggy, secret face, and there was the old fierceness in the dark hollows and lines. He said gently, “No, Barnabas, I didn’t find it this time.” Then it was as if a blanket came down again over his face. “I must go and put the car away,” he called to Father, and went out.

  The thunder rolled quietly, far out over the sea, but the rain fell with grey insistence, blurring the windows as it washed down outside. The children wandered aimlessly about the house. Before lunch they tried going for a walk in the rain, but came back damp and depressed.

  Half-way through the afternoon Mother put her head round the door. “I’m going upstairs to work until supper. Now look, you three—you can go where you like in the house but you must promise not to touch anything that’s obviously been put away. Everything valuable is all locked up, but I don’t want you poking at anyone’s private papers or belongings. All right?”

  “We promise,” Jane said, and Simon nodded.

  In a little while Father muffled himself in a big black oilskin and went off through the rain to see the harbour-master. Jane wandered round the bookshelves, but all the books within reach seemed to have titles like Round the Horn, or Log-Book of the Virtue, 1886, and she thought them very dull.

  Simon, who had been sitting making darts out of the morning paper, suddenly crumpled them all up irritably. “I’m fed up with this. What shall we do?”

  Barney stared gloomily out of the window. “It’s raining like anything. The water in the harbour’s all flat. And on our first proper day. Oh I hate the rain, I hate it, I hate it, I hate the rain. . . .” He began to chant morosely.

  Simon prowled restlessly around the room, looking at the pictures on the dark wallpaper. “It’s a very dreary house when you’re shut up inside. He doesn’t seem to think about anything but the sea, does he, the captain?”

  “This time last year you were going to be a sailor too.”

  “Well, I changed my mind. Oh well, I don’t know. Anyway, I should go on a destroyer, not a potty little sailing-ship like that one. What is it?” He peered up at the inscription under an engraving. “The Golden Hind.”

  “That was Drake’s ship. When he sailed to America and discovered potatoes.”

  “That was Raleigh.”

  “Oh well,” said Barney, who didn’t really care.

  “What useless things they discovered,” Simon said critically. “I shouldn’t have bothered about vegetables, I should have come back loaded with doubloons and diamonds and pearls.”

  “And apes and peacocks,” said Jane, harking vaguely back to a poetry lesson at school.

  “And I should have gone exploring into the interior and the rude natives would have turned me into a god and tried to offer me their wives.”

  “Why would the natives be rude?” said Barney.

  “Not that sort of rude, you idiot, it means—it means—well, it’s the sort of thing natives are. It’s what all the explorers call them.”

  “Let’s be explorers,” Jane said. “We can explore the house. We haven’t yet, not properly. It’s like a strange land. We can work from the bottom all the way up to the top.”

  “And we should have to take provisions with us, so we can have a picnic when we get there,” said Barney, brightening.

  “We haven’t got any.”

  “We can ask Mrs Palk,” said Jane. “She’s making cakes for Mother in the kitchen. Come on.”

  Mrs Palk, in the kitchen, laughed all over her red face and said, “What will ’ee think of next, I wonder?” But she gave them, neatly wrapped, a stack of freshly-baked scones cut in half, thickly buttered and put together again; a packet of squashed-fly biscuits, three apples and a great slab of dark yellowy-orange cake, thick and crumbling with fruit.

  “And something to drink,” said Simon commandingly, already captain of the expedition. So Mrs Palk good-humouredly added a big bottle of home-made lemonade “to finish ’n off.”

  “There,” she said, “that’ll take ’ee to St Ives and back, I reckon.”
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  “My rucksack’s upstairs,” said Simon, “I’ll get it.”

  “Oh really,” said Jane, who was beginning to feel a little foolish. “We aren’t even going outdoors.”

  “All explorers have rucksacks,” Simon said severely, making for the door. “I won’t be a minute.”

  Barney nibbled at some yellow cake-crumbs from the table. “This is smashing.”

  “Saffron cake,” Mrs Palk said proudly. “You won’t get that in London.”

  “Mrs Palk, where’s Rufus?”

  “Gone out, and a good job too, though I dare say we shall have his great wet feet all over the floor afore long. Professor took’n for a walk. Now stop pickin’ at that cake, midear, or you’ll spoil that picnic o’ yours.”

  Simon came back with his rucksack. They filled it, and went out into the little dark passage away from the kitchen, Mrs Palk waving them farewell as solemnly as if they were off to the North Pole.

  “Who did she say had taken Rufus for a walk?” said Jane.

  “Great-Uncle Merry,” Barney said. “They all call him the Professor, didn’t you know? Mr. Penhallow did as well. They talk as if they’ve known him for years.”

  They were on the first-floor landing, long and dark, lit only from one small window. Jane waved her hand at a big wooden chest half hidden in one comer. “What’s that?”

  “It’s locked,” said Simon, trying the lid. “One of the things we mustn’t touch, I suppose. Actually it’s full of native gold and ornaments, we’ll collect it on the way back and stow it in the hold.”

  “Who’s going to carry it?” demanded Barney practically.

  “Easy, we’ve got a string of native porters. All walking behind in a row and calling me Boss.”

  “Catch me calling you Boss.”

  “Actually you ought to be the cabin-boy, and call me Sir. Aye, aye, Sir!” Simon bellowed suddenly.

  “Shut up,” said Jane. “Mother’s working at the other end of the landing, you’ll make her do a smudge.”

  “What’s in here?” said Barney. There was a dark door in the shadows at the far end of the landing. “I haven’t noticed it before.” He turned the handle, and the door opened outward with a slow creak. “I say, there’s another little corridor down some steps, and a door at the end of it. Come on.”