Over Sea, Under Stone

by Susan Cooper

  Mr. Withers pulled down the edges of his immaculate blazer with a precise, feminine gesture. “You’re quite right, Polly, we mustn’t be late.” He swung his white smile round the room like a lighthouse. “Vayne is our skipper—the professional on board. And an excellent chef too. You must sample his cooking tomorrow. Well now, shall we see you all down in the harbour, if the weather is fine? Nine thirty, perhaps? We will have the dinghy waiting at the quay.”

  “Splendid.” Father moved with him out into the hall, and everyone straggled after them. On the way Polly Withers paused, and looked up over Simon’s head at the old Cornish maps hanging among the oil-paintings on the dark wall. “Do look, Norman. Aren’t they marvellous?” She turned to Mother. “This really is a wonderful house. Did your uncle rent it from a friend?”

  “A Captain Toms. We’ve never met him—he’s abroad. Quite an old man—a retired sailor of some kind. I believe his family have owned the Grey House for years.”

  “A fascinating place.” Mr. Withers was looking about him with a professional eye. “He has some beautiful old books, I see.” He reached one hand idly down to the door of a long low bookcase in the hall; but it would not open.

  “I keep everything locked,” Father said. “You know what it is with a furnished house—one’s always nervous of damaging things.”

  “An admirable principle,” Mr. Withers said formally. But his sister was smiling down at Simon. “I bet it’s a wonderful place to explore, though, isn’t it?” she said. “Have you children been looking for secret tunnels and things yet? I know I should have done, in an old house. Do let us know if you find one.”

  Simon said politely, feeling Barney’s anxious eyes on his back: “Oh, I don’t think there’s anything like that here.”

  “Well, till tomorrow, then,” Mr. Withers said from the doorstep; and they were gone.

  “Isn’t that terrific?” Barney said eagerly, when the door closed. “A whole day out on that yacht! D’you think they’ll let us help sail her?”

  “Mind you keep out of their way until you’re asked,” said Father. “We don’t want any casualties.”

  “Well, you could be ship’s doctor.”

  “I’m on holiday, remember?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us you’d met them?” demanded Simon.

  “I was going to,” Father said meekly. “I expect I was too busy being irritable.” He grinned. “You can let Rufus out now if you want to, Barney—but he’s not going on the boat tomorrow, so don’t ask.”

  Jane said suddenly: “I don’t think I will either.”

  “Well, for goodness’ sake!” Simon stared at her. “Why ever not?”

  “I should get seasick.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t—not under sail. There won’t be any smelly old engine running. Oh come on, Jane.”

  “No,” said Jane, more firmly. “I’m not batty about boats like you are. I really don’t want to go. They won’t mind, will they, Father?”

  Simon said in disgust: “You must be nuts.”

  “Leave her alone,” said his father. “She knows her own mind. No, they’ll understand, Jane. No-one would want you to be worried about getting ill. See how you feel about going in the morning, though.”

  “I do think it would be safer not,” Jane said. But she said nothing about her real reason for not wanting to go. It would have sounded too silly to explain that she felt a strange uneasiness about the tall white yacht, and about the smiling Mr. Withers and his pretty sister. The more she thought about it, the sillier it seemed; so that in the end she convinced herself, as well as everybody else, that her reason for avoiding the trip was nothing but fear of seasickness.

  But again nobody knew where Great-Uncle Merry had gone.

  • Chapter Four •

  A white morning haze lay over the sea, and down in the harbour the boats shifted idly on still water, bright under the sun. Jane peered down from her window. The fishing-boats were deserted, but she could see two small figures clambering from a dinghy beside the quay.

  Simon said, behind her: “I brought this for you to look after, if you really aren’t coming.” She turned and saw him holding out a grey woollen sock. It looked peculiarly stiff and cylindrical.

  “What on earth’s so special about your socks?”

  Simon grinned, but lowered his voice. “It’s the manuscript. I couldn’t think of anything else to put it in.”

  Jane laughed, took the sock and pulled the manuscript out half-way. But even though she handled it gently, the edges cracked and crumbled ominously as they caught in the wool. “Hey,” she said, alarmed. “If that’s going to happen every time, the whole thing’ll fall to bits in a week. It was all right up in the attic, lying there for years without anyone touching it, but if we’re going to carry it around—”

  Simon looked anxiously at the curled parchment, its battered edges dark with age, and saw cracks that had not been there before. He said, troubled: “But we’ll have to handle it so much if we’re going to find out what it means . . . wait a minute, though. That room—”

  Leaving Jane baffled, he seized the manuscript and ran downstairs to the small dark door on the first-floor landing which led to the passage they had discovered on the way to the attic. It was still unlocked. He stepped down into the tiny passage, and across to the bare, austere room that they had decided was the captain’s bedroom. It was just as it had been the day before, and the telescope case was still lying on the window-sill.

  Simon picked up the case, and unscrewed it. The thread of each half was bright and untarnished, shining with a faint film of oil; and the copper lining inside, when he held it up to the light, glinted dry and clean. He dropped the rolled manuscript inside. It fitted perfectly, resting snugly between the two halves when he screwed them together again. Simon looked thoughtfully round the room, as if it might tell him something. But there was nothing but the silence and the mysterious lived-in emptiness, and he closed the door again, gently, and ran back upstairs.

  “Look,” he said to Jane. “Might have been made for it.”

  “Perhaps it was,” said Jane, taking the case.

  “You’d better hide it somewhere,” said Simon. “What about the top of our wardrobe?”

  “I’ll think of a good place,” said Jane thoughtfully.

  But Simon, half-way back to his own room already, hardly heard her; already his mind was racing ahead to the day on the Witherses’ yacht. And by the time he, Barney and Father were gone, in a great scuffle of argument over oilskins and pullovers and bathing-trunks, Jane was almost beginning to wish she had changed her mind and gone too.

  But she said firmly, to Simon’s final jeers: “No. I’d only spoil it all if I got sick.” And instead she stood watching from the window as they ran down to the quay, and the little dinghy bobbed out to the tall, slim white yacht.

  Her mother, easel under one arm and a bag of sandwiches and paints in the other hand, looked at her doubtfully. “Darling, are you sure you aren’t going to be lonely?”

  “Goodness no,” said Jane stoutly. “I shall just wander about, it’ll be fun. Honestly. I mean, you don’t get lonely when you’re painting, do you?”

  Mother laughed. “All right, independence, you wander. Don’t get lost. I shall be up above the harbour on the other side if you want me. Mrs Palk’s going to be here all day, she’ll get your lunch. Why don’t you take Rufus for a walk?”

  She went out into the sunshine, her eyes already vague with the shape and colour of her painting. Jane felt a wet nose push at her hand, looked down at Rufus’ large hopeful brown eyes, laughed, and ran off with him down into the village, through the small strange streets and the Cornish voices lilting from the doorways of the shops.

  But all the morning she felt curiously restless, as if something were jostling to push itself to the front of her mind. As if, she thought, her mind were trying to say something to her that she couldn’t quite hear. When she brought Rufus home, to collapse in a panting red hea
p in the kitchen beside Mrs Palk, she was still thoughtful and subdued.

  “Nice walk, lovey?” said Mrs Palk, sitting back on her heels. She had a bucket of soapy water beside her, and her face was red and shiny; she had been scrubbing the grey slate floor.

  “Mmm,” Jane said vaguely. She fiddled with the bow on her pony-tail.

  “Have ’ee’s lunch ready in just a minute,” Mrs Palk said, scrambling to her feet. “My, just look at that dog, proper wore out. Needs a drink of water, I’ll be bound—” She reached for Rufus’s dish.

  “I’ll go up and wash.” Jane wandered out through the hall, the cool dark passage with the sunlight shafting in on one of the old maps that Polly Withers had exclaimed over with delight. Miss Withers . . . why should she and her brother have seemed sinister? They were perfectly ordinary people, there was no real reason to think otherwise. It was kind of them to have asked everyone out for the day on the yacht. . . . Odd, though, that remark she had made about exploring, and finding things. . . .

  Finding things. Half-way up the stairs, Jane remembered with a sudden shock of guilt that she had left the manuscript alone all the morning, shut in its new case in the drawer of her bed-side table. Should she have taken it with her? No, don’t be silly, she thought; but she scuttled up the stairs and into her room anxiously, and felt a surge of relief as she saw the case lying quietly glinting in the drawer.

  She drew out the brown roll of parchment and took it to the window, gingerly straightening it out. The lines of cramped black lettering gave her the same shiver of uneasy excitement that she had felt in the attic, at that moment when suddenly they had all three realised what they were looking at. She peered at it, but the squat chunks of words were no more legible now than they had been then. She could just make out the initials of the words that Simon had said were Mark and Arthur.

  How were they ever to find out what it all meant?

  She looked down at the bottom of the curling sheet, at the few thin wavering lines that they had thought might be a map. In the dim light of the attic there had been little there to see; but now Jane had the full white glare of midday. She bent closer, suddenly realising that there were more lines in the map than she had noticed at first; lines so faint that before she had mistaken them for cracks. And among them, fainter still, some words were written.

  It was a very rough map, as if it had been hurriedly drawn. It seemed to be coastline, looking rather like a letter W lying on its side, with two inlets and a headland. Or was it two headlands and an inlet? There was no way of telling which side was supposed to be the sea. And although she could just see that there was a word written across one of the projecting arms of land—or sea—it was made totally unreadable by one of the breaks in the ancient crumbling parchment: a crack crossing the word out as neatly as if it had been a thick ink line.

  “Bother,” said Jane crossly, aloud. She realised as she said it that she had become determined in the last half-minute to have some discovery of her own about the manuscript to announce to Simon and Barney when they came back from their day on the boat. That was what had been niggling at the back of her mind all the morning.

  One other name was written across the map. If it was a name. The letters were small and brown, but more distinct than those on the rest of the manuscript. Jane worked them out one by one and found they made three words. “Ring Mark Hede.” She stared, disappointed. It meant nothing. Ring, mark, heed,” she said experimentally. It wasn’t even a place. How could a place have a name like that?

  The clang of the ship’s bell in the hall came echoing up the stairs, breaking into the stillness of the sea’s murmur and the distant gulls, and she heard Mrs Palk calling faintly below. “Jane! Ja—ne!” Hastily she rolled up the manuscript and dropped it back into the telescope case, screwing the two halves tight together. She opened the drawer of her bed-side table, hesitated for a moment, then shut it again. Better not to let it out of her sight. She snatched a cardigan from the bed, wrapped it round the case, and ran out and down the stairs two at a time.

  But she ran too fast. Swinging round a comer of the first-floor landing, she bumped heavily against a long low wooden chest lying in the shadows, and yelped with pain. It would have to be the same leg she had hurt down on the quay . . . but as she bent to rub her knee, something drew her attention away. The chest she had knocked against was the one they had noticed the day before, with the lid locked. “Native gold and ornaments,” Simon had said, and then found he couldn’t open it. But now the lid had sprung open a few inches, and was rocking gently up and down. It must have been stuck, not locked, her collision had jerked it loose.

  Curiously Jane lifted it fully open. There was not much inside: some old newspapers, a big pair of leather gloves, two or three heavy woollen sweaters and, half hidden, a small black-covered book. A very dull treasure, she thought. But the book might be interesting. She reached down inside and picked it up.

  “Ja—ne!” Mrs. Palk’s voice was nearer, coming up the stairs. Guiltily Jane dropped the lid and bundled the little book inside the folds of her cardigan with the telescope case. Mrs. Palk’s face puffed into view through the banisters.

  “Coming,” Jane said meekly.

  “Ah, there, thought ’ee’d gone to bed. Gettin’ too fat for they stairs, I am.” Mrs. Palk beamed at her. “Lunch is on the table. I were takin’ me pastry out of the oven or I’d not have kept ’ee so long.” She waddled back to the kitchen. A mounded plateful of ham and salad waited for Jane in the dining-room, like a small bright island in the glossy sea of the polished mahogany table. Beside it was a dish of gooseberry tart and a small jug of cream.

  Jane sat down and ate everything absently, leafing with one hand through the little book she had found in the chest. It was a guide-book to the village, written by the local vicar. “A Short Guide to Trewissick” said the title-page, in flowing, curly type. “Compiled by the Reverend E.J. Hawes-Mellor, M.A. (Oxon.) LL.D. (Lond.), Vicar of the Parish Church of St John, Trewissick.”

  Not exciting, thought Jane, her interest dying. She flipped through the narrow pages, full of details of “rambles” through the country-side around. The words from the manuscript were still swimming before her mind. If only she could have something to tell Simon and Barney about the map. . . .

  It was then that the guide-book fell open at its center page under her fingers. Jane glanced down idly, and then paused. The page showed a detailed map of Trewissick village, with every street, straight and winding, patterned behind the harbour that lay snug between its two headlands. The churches, the village hall, were all separately marked; she saw with a quick thrill of pride that the Grey House was marked by name, on the road that led up to the tip of Kemare Head and then faded into nothing. But what caught her attention was the name written neatly across the headland. It read: “King Mark’s Head.”

  “King Mark’s Head,” said Jane slowly, aloud. She reached down to the bundled cardigan lying beside her chair, drew out the telescope case, and unrolled the manuscript on the table. The words stared up at her, cramped and enigmatic: “Ring Mark Hede”. And as she looked she saw that the first letter of the first word, blurred with age and dirt, might very well be not an “R” but a “K.” She gulped with excitement and took a deep breath.

  King Mark’s Head: the same name on both maps. So that the map on the manuscript from the attic must be a map of Trewissick—of that very part of Trewissick on which the Grey House stood. The strange words must be an old name for Kemare Head.

  But when the first delighted shock had washed over her she looked again from one map to the other, and her spirits sank a little. There was something very odd about the wavering outline of the coast drawn on the old manuscript; something more than the inaccuracies you always found in a rough free-hand drawing. The lines of the coast were not the same as those on the guide-book map; the headlands bulged strangely, and the harbour was the wrong shape. Why?

  Puzzled, Jane fetched a stub of pencil from the sideboard and
did her best to draw a faint copy of the manuscript coastline over the one on the guide-book. There was no doubt about it; the shapes were not the same.

  Perhaps the manuscript didn’t show Trewissick after all. Perhaps there were two headlands in Cornwall called King Mark’s Head. Or perhaps the coast had changed its shape in the hundreds of years since the manuscript had been drawn. How on earth were they to find out?

  She put the manuscript reluctantly away, and stared at the two outlines, one in print, one in pencil, that she now had on the page of the book. But still she could find no answer. In exasperation she flipped back the pages of the book, and suddenly caught sight of the title-page again.

  “. . . the Reverend E.J. Hawes-Mellor, M.A. . . .”

  Jane jumped to her feet. That was it! Why not? The vicar of Trewissick must know all about the district. He was the expert, he had written the guide-book. He would know whether the coast had changed its shape, and what it had been like before. That was the way to find out—the only way. He was the only person who wouldn’t ask why she wanted to know; he would think she was just interested in his book. She must go and find him, and ask.

  And then think how much she would have to tell Simon and Barney when they came home . . . .

  That was the final thought which decided Jane, normally the shy member of the family, on the way she would spend her afternoon. She turned quickly as the door opened, and Mrs. Palk came rolling in. “Finished, ’ave ’ee? Enjoy it?”

  “Lovely. Thank you very much.” Jane gathered up the guide-book and the precious woolly bundle of her cardigan. “Mrs. Palk,” she said tentatively, “do you know the vicar of Trewissick?” Surely, she thought, with all those hymns . . .

  “Well, not meself personally, no.” Mrs. Palk became very grave and solemn. “Bein’ chapel, I don’t have no contact with’n, though I see ’n about, of course. Tur’ble clever man, they do say the vicar is. Was ’ee thinkin’ of takin’ a look at the church, midear?”