by Susan Cooper
No one took any notice. Barney went on dreamily to himself, “It’s like one of Mother’s drawings, the ones she calls perspective sketches. It looks like a picture, not a map at all really. You’ve got the bump of this hill coming over the edge of the harbour when you look down, and the headland curving like that”—he traced his finger through the air over the view before him—“and those stones on top of it make the funny little knobs on the side of the map . . .”
“Golly, he’s got it!” Simon shouted, jerking Barney out of his reverie. “That’s what it is, look! It is a picture, and not a map, and that’s why the shape looked all wrong compared with the guide-book. Look, you can see—” He took the manuscript carefully from Great-Uncle Merry’s hands and held it up in front of them, against the long rocky arm of Kemare Head. And as they looked from the headland back to the manuscript, the scrawled brown lines suddenly seemed so obviously a picture of the scene before them that they wondered how they could possibly have thought it was a map.
“Well then,” Jane said, incredulity spreading over her face as she looked from one to the other, “this must be the proper place. The beginning of the maze. All this time without knowing it we’ve been standing on the very same spot as the man who drew the picture. Just think!” She looked at the manuscript in awe.
“Well, come on,” Barney said, glowing with excitement at what he had discovered. “We know where he started from. How do we find out where he went from here?”
“Look at the picture. There’s a sort of blodge marked on this headland.”
“There are blodges all over the place. Half of them are blots and the rest are dirt marks.”
“The marks of age,” Great-Uncle Merry said sepulchrally.
“No, but this one’s intentional,” Simon persisted. “Right here, where—gosh! It must be that rock you’re leaning on, Gumerry!”
His great-uncle looked round critically. “Well, it’s possible, I suppose. Yes indeed, it’s possible. A natural outcropping, I think, not erected by the hands of men.”
Barney got up and trotted all round the rock, gazing closely at its yellow lichened scars and every small crevice and cleft, but noticing nothing unusual. “It looks very ordinary,” he said in disappointment, reappearing at the other side.
Jane burst out laughing. “You look just like Rufus, sniffing along after a rabbit and then finding there’s nothing there after all.”
Barney slapped his knee. “I knew we should have brought Rufus. He’d have been terrifically useful on a hunt, sniffing things out.”
“You can’t sniff things out when they’ve been hidden for centuries, idiot.”
“I don’t see why not. You wait, I bet you he’ll help.”
“Not a hope.”
“Where is he, anyway?”
“With Mrs. Palk. Shut up somewhere, I suppose, poor thing. You know Father said he wouldn’t have him in the house any more when he got in a rage the other night.”
“Mrs. Palk takes him home every evening.”
“If she hadn’t taken him home yesterday evening he might have caught the burglars.”
“Gosh, so he would.” There was a moment’s silence as they all digested the thought.
“I don’t trust Mrs. Palk,” Jane said darkly.
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Great-Uncle Merry said easily. “From what I know of that dog he’d just have licked their hands and told them to go ahead.”
“He doesn’t like Mr. Withers,” Barney said. “He came to meet us wagging his tail when we came in off the boat yesterday, but when he saw Mr. Withers his tail went right down and he barked. We all laughed about it at the time,” he added thoughtfully.
“Well, we’ll bring him out tomorrow. But we shall have to go home soon and we still aren’t any nearer the beginning. Gumerry, could this rock really mean anything?” Simon rubbed its grey surface doubtfully.
“Perhaps it’s in line with something,” Jane said hopefully. “Like a compass bearing. Look on the map, I mean the picture.”
“Doesn’t help. It could be in line with any one of those blodges.”
“Well then, we ought to find out where all the blodges are and go and see if there’s anything near one of them.”
“But that would take months.”
“Oh!” Barney stamped his foot with impatience. “This is awful. What are we going to do?”
“Leave it,” Great-Uncle Merry said unexpectedly.
“Leave it?” They stared at him.
“Leave it until tomorrow. Come to it with fresh minds. We haven’t much time, and it’s going to be a race in the end, but we’re all right at the moment. The other side doesn’t know that we’ve found anything. They watch me like hawks, but they don’t suspect you, and with any luck they won’t. You can afford to go away and think about it for tonight.”
“Won’t they come back and burgle us again?” Jane said nervously.
“They wouldn’t dare. No, that was a long shot—they staked everything on being able to find a clue the first time, and they failed. They’ll try something different now.”
“I wish we knew what.”
“Great-Uncle Merry,” Simon said, “why can’t we tell the police it was them? Then they wouldn’t be able to come after us at all.”
“Yes,” said Jane, eagerly. “Why not?”
“We can’t possibly,” Barney said with conviction.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
They looked at Great-Uncle Merry.
He said non-committally, “Why didn’t you tell the police that you thought you knew what the burglars had been after?”
“Well—they’d have laughed. They’d have thought it was just an old bit of paper.”
“And if we’d gone to them it wouldn’t have been a secret any more and we shouldn’t have been able to follow up the map.”
“And anyway,” Jane said, with a return of the old guiltiness, “we hadn’t told Mother and Father about finding it in the first place.”
“Well,” Great-Uncle Merry said, “you would have said to them, ’We found an old parchment in the attic and we think that’s what the burglars were looking for when they turned the house upside-down.’ And our worthy sergeant, who is satisfied that the culprits were just hooligans, would have smiled indulgently and told you to go away and play.”
“That’s right, that’s just it. That’s why we didn’t.”
Great-Uncle Merry smiled. “Now, I could go to him and say this manuscript is a clue to a kind of ancient cup, called a grail, that is hidden in Trewissick. It tells the real story of King Arthur. The man from the yacht called the Lady Mary wants it, and he burgled the house, and he has me followed night and day to discover if I have found it before him. And what would happen?”
“They’d go and arrest Mr. Withers,” Simon said hopefully, but he sounded less convinced than before.
“The sergeant would go to Mr. Withers, who would of course have a perfect alibi for the night of the burglary, and he would question him rather apologetically about my odd-sounding story. Mr. Withers would impress him as a courteous and gentlemanly antique-dealer on a harmless holiday with his pretty sister.”
“That’s what we thought he was.” Barney pointed out.
“The sergeant knows of me,” Great-Uncle Merry went on, “and knows I do things that sometimes seem”—he chuckled—“eccentric. He would think things over, and he’d say to himself: Poor old Professor, ’tis all been too much for ’n at last. All that book-learnin’, tidn’ natural, it do ’ave turned the poor old chap’s head.”
“You do it even better than Simon,” Jane said admiringly.
“I see now,” Simon said. “It would just sound fantastic. And if we told the sergeant about Mr. Withers and his sister asking questions about old books, it would just seem perfectly normal to him and not suspicious at all.”
He looked up and grinned. “Of course, we couldn’t possibly tell them. Sorry. I didn’t think.”
“No!”
“Of course not.”
“It’s much more than that,” Jane said impulsively. “I’ve got a feeling . . .”
“Well—if you all have a feeling, if you understand just a little of the things I was trying to say earlier on, then that’s more than enough. But I am not happy about having the three of you mixed up in this at all, and I should be even less happy if I thought you didn’t have any idea of what you were doing.”
“You make it sound fearfully serious,” Simon said curiously.
“So it is. . . . I worry because I can only be on the edge all the time, acting as decoy, making them think they have nobody to bother about except me. So that you are left all on your own, with the responsibility of unravelling this.” He touched the manuscript in Simon’s hand. “Step by difficult step.”
“Smashing,” Barney said happily.
Simon glanced at his brother and sister and drew himself up, trying to look as dignified as it is possible to look in shorts and sandals.
“Well, I’m the eldest—”
“Only by eleven months,” said Jane.
“Well I am, anyway, and I’m responsible for you two and I ought to be spokesman, and—and”—he floundered, and then gave up all attempt at dignity in a rush—“and honestly, Gumerry, we do know what we’re doing. In a way it is a kind of quest, like Barney said. And it isn’t as if we were altogether on our own.”
“All right,” Great-Uncle Merry said. “It’s a bargain.” And he shook hands solemnly with each of them in turn. Everyone looked at everyone else, wide-eyed and a little breathless, and then they all suddenly felt rather foolish, and burst out laughing. But behind the laughter they were dimly aware of a new kind of comforting closeness, in the face of possible danger.
When they packed up, and were starting down the hill, Great-Uncle Merry said, stopping them in their tracks, “Take a good look at it first.” He swept his arm out over the harbour, the cliffs and the sea. “Take the real picture back with you too. Learn what it looks like.”
They looked across from the slope once more. The sun was setting down in the westward sky, over Kemare Head and the Grey House, lighting the top of the headland and the strange grey rocks that prickled its skyline. But the harbour was already darkening into shadow. As they looked, the sun seemed gradually to fall, until the unbearable brightness of it was over the outlined fingers of the group of standing stones, and the stones themselves became invisible in the blaze.
• Chapter Seven •
“Well, I think it’s underneath the Grey House.”
“Yes—look how the burglars tried to take up the floor.”
“But they were looking for the map, not the grail.”
“No they weren’t. Remember what Great-Uncle Merry said. They didn’t know what they were looking for, nor did he. It might have been a clue to it, like the map, or it might have been the thing itself.”
“Well, the clue was there, why shouldn’t the thing itself be there as well?”
“But look, idiot,” Simon said, unrolling the map, “the Grey House isn’t marked. There isn’t even a blodge. It just wasn’t there then. Remember our Cornishman lived nine hundred years ago.”
“Oh.”
They were sitting on the grass half-way up Kemare Head, at the side of one of the rough-trodden tracks which ran zigzagging up its slope. Great-Uncle Merry had left them on their own. “A day’s grace to find the first clue,” he had said, “while I draw off the hounds. Just one piece of advice—don’t start till the afternoon. Spend the morning on the beach or something. Then you’ll be sure the hounds are gone.”
Then he had gone out fishing for the day with Father, who was intent on trying a part of the sea off a headland a mile down the coast. And sure enough, as their small boat puttered out of the harbour with Father at the tiller and Great-Uncle Merry towering stiff-backed in the bows, the yacht Lady Mary, gleaming white in the sun, had within minutes moved silently out after them, her engine purring faintly over the quiet morning sea. Watching from the house, they had seen her sails gradually unfurl and billow as she came into the bay. She took a wide course out to sea, but one from which Great-Uncle Merry and Father would always be just in sight.
Up on the headland now the afternoon sun prickled their bare legs, and there was a small breeze. “Oh dear,” Jane said despondently, edging a blade of grass from its sheath and nibbling it. “This is hopeless. We just don’t know where to start. Perhaps we should go back to where we were yesterday.”
“But we know what things look like from there.”
“Well, so what? Which things?”
“Well—the headland, and the sea, and the sun—and those stones up on the top there.” Barney gestured vaguely above their heads, up the slope. “I think they’ve got something to do with it. The Cornishman must have been able to see them. Gumerry says they’re three thousand years old, so they’d have been almost as ancient-looking nine hundred years ago as they are now.”
“You can certainly see them clear enough from the other side.” Simon sat up, interested.
“But they’re such a long way across,” Jane pointed out. “I mean, the first clue might be that you have to take ten paces to your left, or something. It always is in stories about buried treasure. But to get to the standing stones, up here, from over there, you’d have to take thousands of paces right across the harbour. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” Simon said. “It could be the thing like compass bearings again. You know—perhaps we have to get something in line with something else to lead us on to a third thing.”
Barney closed his eyes and screwed up his face, trying to bring back a picture of the scene they had gazed at so hard the evening before. “D’you remember when the sun set yesterday?” he said slowly. “The biggest standing stone was right bang in line with the sun, from where we were. I remember because you could only see it if you didn’t look straight at it, if you see what I mean.”
Simon looked closely at the manuscript again, excitement beginning to dawn on his face.
“D’you know, I think you’ve got something there. This round thing drawn here over the standing stones, that we thought was just decoration—perhaps it’s supposed to be the sun. I mean, if he knew the map wouldn’t be found for years and years and years he’d have to use signs like the sun that wouldn’t be likely to change.”
“Come on then, let’s go further up and look.” Jane jumped eagerly to her feet; and then suddenly she froze, stock-still. “Simon, quick,” she said quietly, in a strained, tight voice. “Put the map away. Hide it.”
Simon frowned. “What on earth—”
“Quickly! It’s Miss Withers. She’s coming up the path, and someone else with her. They’ll be right on top of us in a minute.”
Simon hastily rolled up the manuscript and stuffed it into his rucksack. “Who is it with her?” he hissed.
“I can’t see—yes, I can.” Jane turned away quickly as if it hurt her to look, and sat down again. She was very flushed. “It’s that boy. The one who knocked me over. I knew he was mixed up in all this somehow.”
They heard voices then, coming nearer up the slope. Miss Withers’ clear tones floated up to them. “I don’t care, Bill, we have to check on everything. He may already have—” Then she was on them, silhouetted against the skyline, and she stopped short as she saw the three children all sitting looking expressionlessly up at her. The boy stopped too, glowering.
For a moment Miss Withers stood with her mouth slightly open, taken aback. Then she pulled herself together and f
lashed a smile at them. “Well!” she said pleasantly, coming forward. “What a nice surprise! All the Drew family at once. I hope you boys didn’t feel too tired after all that sea air we gave you the other day.”
“Not a bit, thank you,” Barney said in his clearest, most public voice.
“It’s a marvellous boat,” said Simon, equally distant and polite.
“And what are you all doing up here?” Miss Withers inquired innocently. She was wearing slacks, with a sleeveless white blouse that made her arms look very brown; and her dark hair was tumbled by the breeze. She looked very attractive and healthy.
She glanced at Jane expectantly. Jane gulped. “We were just looking at the sea. We saw your boat go out this morning.”
“We thought you’d be on board her,” Simon added, without thinking.
A flicker of wariness crossed Polly Withers’ face. She said easily, “Ah, I’m not the best of sailors, as I probably told you.”
Simon looked deliberately down at the sea. It lay as flat and unrippled as a pond. Miss Withers said, following his gaze, “Ah, it’ll blow up later, you mark my words.”
“Oh?” Simon said. His face was expressionless still, but there was the faintest note of insolent disbelief in his tone. For the first time Miss Withers’ smile faded slightly.
Before she could say anything, the boy with her spoke. “Miss Polly be allus right about the sea,” he said gruffly, glaring at Simon. “She do know more about ’n than all they old men down there put together.” He jerked his head contemptuously down at the harbour.
“Oh—I haven’t introduced you,” Miss Withers said brightly. “Do forgive me. Jane, Simon, Barnabas, this is Bill, our right-hand man. Without him the Lady Mary couldn’t do a thing.”
The boy flushed darkly and looked down at his grubby sneakers after a quick glance up at her. Jane thought pityingly: he thinks she’s wonderful.
“We’ve met before,” Simon said shortly.
Barney said: “How is your bicycle?”
“No better for your askin’,” the boy snapped.
“Watch your manners, Bill.” Through the sweet smile Miss Withers’ voice was cold and tight as a steel wire. “That’s not the way we speak to our friends.”