by Susan Cooper
“Yes,” Jane said. After all I probably shall, she added defensively to herself.
“’Tis a beautiful old place. Long way though—up the hill at the top of the village. You can just see the tower through the trees going up Fish Street, from the quay.”
“I think I know.”
“Don’t get sunstroke, now.” Mrs. Palk sailed benevolently out with the dishes, and in a moment Jane heard “Abide with me” echoing with rich gloomy relish down the hall from the kitchen. She ran upstairs, looked hastily round for a place where she might hide the manuscript case, and finally tucked it among the covers at the foot of her bed, so that it could lie along the edge of the mattress and leave no bump. Then before her nervousness could get the better of her new idea, she went out, clutching her guide-book, into the sleepy afternoon sun.
The church at the top of the hill seemed cut off from the sea. Jane could see nothing from there but trees and the hills, and even the little village houses ended some twenty yards down the road. The square grey church with its low tower, and the big gate-posts opposite it, might have been in any wooded valley a hundred miles from the sea.
In the churchyard a wizened old man in shirt-sleeves and braces was cutting the grass with a pair of shears. Jane stopped near him on the other side of the wall. “Excuse me,” she said loudly, “but is that the vicarage over there?”
The old man, wheezing, straightened himself by holding one arm round to push himself in the small of the back. “A’s right,” he said laconically, and then just stood there, staring without expression, watching her all the way across the road and up the drive. Jane heard her feet crunching on the gravel, enormously loud in the silent afternoon. The big square grey house, its windows empty and lifeless, seemed to dare her to disturb it.
It was a very scruffy house, she thought, for a vicarage. The gravel of the drive was clotted with weeds, and in the rambling garden hydrangea bushes grew spindly and neglected, with the grass of the lawns as high as hay. She pressed the bell-push by the side of the peeling door, and heard a bell ring faintly inside the house, echoing a long way off.
After a long time, when she had just begun to decide with relief that no one was there to answer the bell, she heard footsteps inside the house. The door opened, creaking resentfully as if it did not often open at all.
The man standing there was tall and dark, untidy in an old sports jacket, but at the same time forbidding, with the thickest black eyebrows that Jane had ever seen growing almost straight across his brow without a break in the middle. He stared down at her.
“Yes?” His voice was very deep, without a trace of accent.
“Is Mr. Hawes-Mellor in, please?”
The tall man frowned. “Mr. who?”
“Mr. Hawes-Mellor. The vicar.”
His face cleared a little, though still the intent blackbrowed stare did not relax. “Ah, I see. Mr. Hawes-Mellor, I’m afraid, is no longer vicar here. He died a number of years ago.”
“Oh,” said Jane, and stepped back off the doorstep, not at all sorry at the chance to go away. “Oh well, in that case—”
“Perhaps I can be of some help,” he said in the deep mournful voice. “My name is Hastings, I have replaced Mr. Hawes-Mellor here.”
“Oh,” Jane said again; she was beginning to find the lone Mr. Hastings and his strange neglected house and garden rather unnerving. “Oh no, I don’t want to be a nuisance, it was only something about a book he wrote, a guide-book to the village.”
A flicker of interest seemed to wake in the vicar’s dark face. “A guide-book to Trewissick? There was some talk that he had written one, but I have never been able to trace a copy. What was it that you wanted to ask? I am afraid that if you are looking for the book I can be of no help—”
“Oh no,” Jane said, not without pride. “I’ve got one.” She held her little guide-book up to show him. “It was just something inside it, about the village, that I wondered if he’d got wrong.”
The vicar stared down at the book, opened his mouth to say something and then seemed to change his mind. He held the door wider open and moved his mouth into an uneasy smile. “Well, do come in for a few moments, young lady, and we’ll see what we can do. I know a little about Trewissick myself after my years here.”
“Thank you very much,” Jane said nervously. She stepped inside the door, hitching up the ribbon on her pony-tail as she followed him down the passage, and hoping she looked reasonably tidy. Not that she would have been out of place if she had been in rags: she thought, looking around her, that the vicarage was one of the most unloved-looking and shabbiest houses she had ever seen. It was big, and rambling, with more sense of space than the Grey House; but the paint was peeling, the walls grubby and the floors all bare with one or two faded rugs. She began to feel rather sorry for the vicar as he strode stiffly along ahead of her.
He led her into a room which was obviously his study, with a big desk strewn with papers, two battered cane chairs with faded cushions, and shelves of books all round the walls. Tall French windows stood wide open to show the stretch of long grass that Jane had glimpsed from the front drive.
“Now,” he said, sitting down behind his desk and clearing a space impatiently in the litter of papers on its top. “Sit yourself down and tell me what you were going to ask Mr. Hawes-Mellor. You’ve found a copy of his book, have you?”
He stared again at the book in Jane’s hand. It seemed to fascinate him.
“Yes,” Jane said. “Would you like to have a look at it?” She held the book out to him.
The vicar took it, slowly, closing his long fingers round the narrow cover as if it were something infinitely precious. He did not open it, but put it down on the desk before him and looked at it so hard that he seemed not to be seeing it but thinking about something else. Then he turned his grave, heavy-browed face towards Jane again.
“You are on holiday here?”
“Yes. My name’s Jane Drew. I’m staying with my family in the Grey House.”
“Are you indeed? That is not a house I am very familiar with.” Mr. Hastings smiled rather grimly. “Captain Toms has no time for me, I am afraid. A strange, solitary man.”
“We’ve never met him,” Jane said. “He’s gone abroad.”
“And this book of yours.” His fingers caressed its cover almost unconsciously. “Is it interesting?”
“Oh, tremendously. I love all the stories about Trewissick when there were smugglers and things.” For a moment Jane wondered doubtfully whether to mention the map after all. But her curiosity overcame any doubts. She stood up and crossed to stand beside him, leafing through the book to the page with the map of south Cornwall. “This was the bit that puzzled me, the shape of the coastline. I wanted to ask if it had ever been different, once.”
Standing behind the vicar, she could not see his face, but his shoulders seemed to stiffen as he looked at the map, and the fingers of his hand lying on the desk curled gently underneath into the palm.
“A curious question,” he said.
“I just wondered.”
“I see there is another line pencilled over the coastline of the map here. Is that yours?”
“Yes.”
“From your imagination?” The deep voice was very quiet.
“More or less. Well, that is. . . I saw something like it somewhere, in a book or something.” Jane floundered, trying to avoid mentioning their manuscript from the attic without actually telling untruths. “If you know about Trewissick, Mr. Hastings, do you know if the coast has always been the same shape?”
“I should have thought so. A granite coast takes a very long time to change.” He was staring at the pencilled line. “You say you saw this outline in a book?”
“Oh, a book, or another map, or something,” Jane said vaguely.
“In the Grey House?”
“We don’t touch the captain’s books,” Jane said automatically, forgetting that the guide-book must be one of them.
“But y
ou have looked around them, no doubt?” The vicar rose to his feet, towering above her, and reached out a long arm to take a book from one of the shelves. He handed it to Jane; it was very old and covered with shiny scuffed leather, and the pages crackled and gave off a smell of musty age when she opened it. It was called Tales of Lyonesse, and a lot of the “s”s were printed like “f”s.
“Have you seen any book there like that?” His voice was persistent. He stood between Jane and the light, and looking up at him, she could see nothing but a faint glint of light reflected from his eyes in the shadowed face. The effect was for a moment exceedingly sinister, and Jane felt creeping over her the small cold uneasiness that was becoming familiar about the holiday: a sense of something mysterious, that everyone else knew about but that was hidden from her brothers and her.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure? A title like that, perhaps? You might have seen a map in such a book?”
“No, really. We just haven’t looked.”
“Might you not have seen a volume on a shelf similar to this?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Jane said, shrinking back in her chair at the urgency that had come into his voice. “Why don’t you ask the captain?”
Mr. Hastings took the book back from her and tucked it back in its place on the shelf. The grave near-frown was back on his face. “He is not a communicative man,” he said shortly.
Uneasiness was nudging more insistently at Jane’s mind, and she began to fidget from one foot to another.
“Well, I must be off home,” she said, using one of Mother’s phrases brightly and hoping it sounded polite. “I’m sorry to have interrupted you.” She glanced rather wildly from the window to the door.
The vicar, standing silent and intent, pulled himself together and moved towards the French windows. “You can come out this way, it’s quicker. The front door is seldom used.”
He held out his hand to Jane. “I am pleased to have met you, Miss Drew. I am sorry not to have been more helpful, but I must say I think it unlikely that our coast here has ever had any characteristics that are not shown on Mr. Hawes-Mellor’s map. He was, I understand, a cartographer of some repute. I am glad you came to see me.”
He inclined his head gravely as he shook Jane’s hand, with a strange, archaic gesture that reminded her suddenly of Mr. Withers when he left the Grey House. But this, she thought, seemed more genuine, as if it were something which Mr. Withers had been trying to imitate.
“Good-by,” she said quickly, and ran off through the long feathery grass towards the drive of the silent shabby house, and the road that led back home.
• Chapter Five •
When Jane reached the Grey House, Simon and Barney were chattering like monkeys in the living-room to Great-Uncle Merry, who sat quietly listening from the depths of a big arm-chair. Both boys were glowing with excitement, and even Barney’s fair skin had been flushed by the wind and sun to a faint pinkish-brown.
“There you are, darling,” Mother said. “I was just beginning to worry about you.”
Simon hailed her with a yell from across the room, “Oh you should have come! It was fabulous, like being right out at sea, and when the wind was behind us we went tremendously fast, far better than a motor boat . . . only we came back in on the engine, because the wind dropped, and that was fun too. Mr. Withers came back with us for a drink, but he’s gone now. Father went with him, to fetch up some of the mackerel we caught.”
“And what’s Jane been doing?” said Great-Uncle Merry quietly from his corner.
“Oh, nothing much,” Jane said. “Wandering about.”
But when all three children were upstairs (sent early up to bed because, Father said ominously when Simon imitated a lightship siren right behind his chair, they were all “overtired”), Jane knocked at the door of the boys’ room and went in to tell them about her discovery and her visit to the vicar. She did not meet quite the enthusiastic response that she had expected.
“You copied out part of the manuscript?” Simon demanded, his voice rising to a squeak of horror. “And showed it to him?”
“Yes, I did,” Jane said defensively. “Well, for goodness’ sake, what harm can that possibly do? A little pencilled line in a guide-book can’t mean anything to anybody.”
“You jolly well shouldn’t have done anything connected with the manuscript unless we all agreed it together.”
“It wasn’t connected with the manuscript, not as far as he knew. I just told him I wanted to find something out about the coast.” Jane forgot any uneasiness she had felt about the vicar in building a defense against Simon’s indignation. “I thought you’d be grateful, my finding out the manuscript map shows Kemare Head.”
“She’s quite right, you know,” Barney said from his pillow. “It’s terrifically important finding that out. For all we knew up to now it might have been a map of Timbuctoo. And if it turns out from what the vicar says that Trewissick hasn’t changed since when our map was drawn, that’s going to help us when we find if there are any clues in the manuscript.”
“I dare say,” Simon said grudgingly, clambering into bed and kicking off all the blankets. “Oh well, yes, it does help. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Then we can start our quest,” Barney said sleepily. “’Night, Jane. See you in the morning.”
“Goodnight.”
But the morning brought more than any of them had bargained for.
Simon woke first, very early. The air was still as warm as it had been the day before. He lay in his pyjamas staring up at the ceiling for a little while, listening to Barney’s peaceful breathing from the other bed. Then he grew restless, so he went out and padded downstairs barefoot, feeling hungry. If he found Mrs. Palk already in the kitchen he might manage to have two breakfasts.
But Mrs. Palk seemed not to have arrived yet. and the house was quite silent. It was not until he reached the flight of stairs leading down into the hall that Simon first noticed something wrong.
Always on his way down to breakfast he stopped to look at the old map of Cornwall that hung on the wall at the turn of the stairs. But when he looked for it this morning, it was not there. Only a rectangular mark on the wallpaper showed where it had hung; and as Simon glanced along the wall of pictures down the stairs he saw there were several more gaps as well.
Puzzled, he went slowly down into the hall. He found several strange naked-looking patches where pictures had been taken down, and the barometer, next to one empty space, was leaning sideways.
Simon went across and straightened it, feeling the bare wooden blocks of the floor cool under his bare feet. Looking down the long hall, he could see nothing else unusual at first. Then he noticed that at the far end, where the sun was streaming in from the kitchen through the open doorway, several of the blocks had been wrenched out and were strewn all over the floor. Simon stared, puzzled.
He started down the hall towards the kitchen, and then on an impulse turned to his right and reached for the handle of the door into the living-room. It squeaked under his touch as it always did, and nervously Simon opened the door and peered round. Then he gasped.
The room looked as though a tornado had blown through it in the night. The pictures hung crooked on the walls, or lay torn from their frames on the floor, and the furniture seemed to Simon’s first startled glance to be completely buried in books.
Everywhere there were books, scattered over the floor, open, closed, upside-down; heaped on the tables and chairs, mounded on the sideboard; and a lonely few still lying on the empty shelves. All the locked bookcases around the walls, that they had been forbidden to touch, were empty. The glass doors hung loose from their hinges with splintered wood showing round their locks; and one or two, completely wrenched away, were propped against the wall. The shelves had been swept clear of everything they held, and the drawers below were open, with papers spilling from them loose on to the chaos of books on the floor. There was a faint musty smell, and
a thin pall of dust seemed to hang in the air.
For one frozen moment Simon stood staring, aghast. Then he turned on his heel and raced upstairs, shouting for his father.
Everyone was woken out of their early half-sleep by his shouts. Led by Father, they all stumbled out into the passage in pyjamas and night-dresses and followed Simon downstairs, trying dazedly to understand the words tumbling over each other out of his mouth.
“What is it?”
“What’s the matter, is the house on fire?”
“Burglars!” Father said incredulously, following down the stairs. “But you don’t get burgled in a village like—good heavens!” He caught sight of the devastation in the living- room through the open door. As Mother, Jane and Barney followed his gaze they fell silent too, but not for long.
Wherever they went on the ground floor of the house they found the same thing. The doors of bookcases had been ripped off, and the books tumbled off the shelves into a chaotic jumble on the floor. Every locked drawer or cupboard had been forced, and the papers from inside scattered wildly about. Even in the breakfast room half a dozen elderly cookery books had been scattered from a shelf.
“I don’t understand this,” Father said slowly. “The place is practically wrecked, but one or two obvious things that are clearly valuable haven’t been touched. That statuette on the mantelpiece there, for instance, and that big silver cup on the sideboard in the front room. There doesn’t seem any point to it all.”
“Someone was rejoicing in destruction,” Barney said solemnly.
Simon said slowly, “They must have made an awful noise. Why didn’t it wake us up?”
“We’re two floors away,” Barney said. “You can’t hear anything up there. I like this, it’s mysterious.”
“I don’t,” Jane shivered. “Imagine someone wandering about down here all night while we were asleep upstairs. It gives me the creeps.”
“Perhaps there wasn’t anyone,” Barney said.
“Don’t be an idiot, of course there was. Or do you think all the books jumped off the shelves?”