A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  “Hey!” he said, sitting up in surprise when I carried his breakfast to him on a tray. He sniffed appreciatively and peered at it as I set it down in front of him. “That’s quite a yeoman’s breakfast,” he commented. “The only thing missing is baked beans and kippers.”

  “You English amaze me,” I said. I bounced on the bed alongside him. As he ate, I gave him the news.

  “Aunt Pen’s club had a great adventure!” I announced. “But I can’t tell what it was, because just when it started to get good, she slipped into some kind of poem. See? Can you figure out what she’s talking about?”

  Jeremy squinted at the notebook, reading it carefully with his second cup of coffee. Then he just shook his head. “Nope,” he said.

  I persisted. “Aw, c’mon. Try harder. You’re English. Figure it out, will ya? It says here, Only the Black Rod decides. What can that possibly mean?”

  Jeremy munched his toast thoughtfully.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s a term from the House of Lords in Parliament, where the Black Rod is basically a sergeant-at-arms. He’s in charge of things like security—making sure people behave, ejecting unruly members, that sort of thing. In medieval times, the sergeant-at-arms was more like a bodyguard to a king.”

  “Aha, the S.-a.-A.!” I exclaimed, riffling the pages back to the one which listed all the club officers. I pointed to the officer’s name.

  “Look at who the club’s sergeant-at-arms was,” I said. “Good old Great-Uncle Roland. In charge of security, you get it?”

  “More likely they put him in charge of the dirty work,” Jeremy said, re-reading the poem. “Sounds to me like their dog died and he had to bury it.”

  I fell silent for a moment. Looking over the whole thing, that’s exactly what it sounded like. And yet, I felt I had to pursue this to see if that’s really all there was to it.

  “I’ve been wanting to take a drive out to Grandmother Beryl’s house anyway,” I said. “Just to keep an eye on it. I think I’ll go poke around there again.” I peered out the window. “It stopped raining,” I said hopefully. “The sky is still full of clouds, but at least they’re whitish clouds.”

  Jeremy picked up the breakfast tray and carried it into the kitchen. “I’m going with you,” he announced. When I objected mildly, he said firmly, “Let me put it this way—if I don’t get out of this cottage today, I will go stark, raving mad.”

  The sun had peeped out a bit already, which gave me the bright idea of cycling to Grandma’s house. Maybe it had to do with Aunt Pen’s club—I felt I had to get into the mind-set of a bunch of kids on summer vacation. Jeremy, who was feeling much better, loved the idea.

  So we pedaled down the quiet lane that wound its way around the farm, and then out toward the sea. In the distance I could barely make out the headland and the castle where the mysterious earl was ensconced, counting his shillings or whatever the landed gentry do in their spare time. I guess I had old nursery rhymes on my mind, and I sang one as we cycled along:“The king was in his counting house,

  Counting out his money;

  The queen was in the parlour,

  Eating bread and honey . . .”

  When we arrived at Grandmother Beryl’s place, it seemed as if the house and grounds were holding their breath, watching us with an expectation that something was going to happen for which they’d long been waiting.

  The silence was so deep that I could hear the clunk when I tapped my kickstand and left the bike at the front of the house, and we went squish-squishing across the rain-soaked lawn. As we reached the garage, a startled thrush fluttered out of the big shrubs, and a few flustered squirrels chattered about our arrival.

  Jeremy heaved open the little munchkin door at the back of the garage, and we went up into the schoolroom, half expecting to find Great-Aunt Penelope, Grandmother Beryl and Great-Uncle Roland seated in the small chairs and holding one of their secret club meetings.

  But it was still a slightly sad, abandoned children’s room, covered in dust. As we walked around peering into various cupboards, looking for a clue to the coded message, all we found were the usual signs of childhood preoccupations—a favorite seashell, a set of miniature horseshoes for children to practice with, and a number of rubber balls of various sizes. Strange to have these little trinkets outliving their owners.

  “Okay, Penny Nichols,” Jeremy said. “It’s your Great-Aunt, so start thinking the way a spunky little kid detective thinks.”

  I sat down quietly in one of the little school-desks, watching the shifting rays of sunlight casting shadows on the floor, and I listened to the distant, soft shushing of the ocean.

  “Penny?” I heard Jeremy saying. “What are you thinking?”

  “The Black Rod,” I answered. “It’s not Great-Aunt Penelope’s mind we have to get into. It’s Great-Uncle Roland’s. If you were a little boy, where would you hide something important?”

  Jeremy didn’t even hesitate. “Some yucky place where grown-ups and girls would never go,” he said.

  “The basement of the house,” I said instantly. “Even Harriet didn’t want to go down there.”

  “There’s a door on the side that leads right in,” Jeremy recalled.

  “Bring the flashlight,” I reminded him. “No electric in there.”

  We went out of the garage to the house, where a short flight of four stone steps led down to a very solid wooden door. But the place where the lock met the wood framework of the house was rotted from years of rain, so it wasn’t that hard for Jeremy to force it open. He shone his light inside and we stepped into the dark cellar. Then he waved the flashlight in a series of sweeping arcs so that we could look before we leaped.

  “God, it’s more like a cave than a basement,” I observed, glancing around apprehensively. “And the ceiling’s so low.”

  The walls were stone, and here and there was a very narrow window that let in weak light. There were vast spiderwebs everywhere—overhead around the supporting beams, and in every dark, damp corner.

  There was something so deathly in the musty, underground smell, and I found myself stepping very gingerly across the earthen floor, so I confess that I let Jeremy do the dirty work of feeling along the stone walls for any conceivable hiding place. The cellar was not shaped as a rectangle, but more like a twisting and turning tunnel. We peered about, but it soon became apparent that Grandmother Beryl had used the basement only as a root and wine cellar, and nothing more.

  Disappointed, we emerged like a couple of moles, blinking in the light of day. This time, Jeremy used my health-club lock to padlock the door.

  It had been so long since the weather was fine that we found ourselves automatically drawn to Grandfather Nigel’s garden, with its hedges and rectangular beds of herbs and flowers, and the path leading down to the sea. We could hear bees buzzing where they were busily investigating the rose, hollyhock and bergamot plantings, and the patch of hyssop, and fragrant thyme, lavender and rosemary.

  In that dreamy atmosphere, I drifted trancelike through the yard, feeling as if I were walking across a Ouija board, and I myself was the little heart-shaped wood planchette that you put your fingers on to let the spirits guide you to their message. When I stopped, though, I felt I was only halfway there. Jeremy had been watching me quizzically.

  “I keep thinking about that poem,” I said finally, digging into my pocket where I had copied it out on a sheet of paper. “The bit about resting where flowers will not grow,” I said, perplexed, handing him the page. “So maybe it’s under the stone path in the garden?”

  Jeremy took the paper from me and examined it. “No!” he said suddenly, moving swiftly toward Grandfather Nigel’s gardening shed. “It’s got to do with this business of I lie beneath the house of fish. Remember what Harriet told us when she gave us the tour of this place? She said the gardening shed was originally a kippering shed.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t really know what that meant,” I admitted.

  “Kippers. Fish. It’s whe
re they used to smoke them,” Jeremy said, hauling open the door to the shed. I peered over his shoulder as he gazed inside, studying the watering cans and tools to see what else was on the shelves. But there were only some neatly arranged seed packets, garden spades and various clippers.

  “I rest where flowers will not grow,” I repeated.

  Jeremy cocked his head a moment, then crouched and ran his fingers along the wooden floor of the shed, until he found a metal ring, similar to the one in the little back door of the garage.

  “Look,” he said, “this whole piece of flooring picks up. Nigel must have used it as a storage cupboard or something.” He grunted as he began to heave up the section of flooring, which was about five feet long.

  This gave me a pause. “Gee,” I said, “what if your dead-dog theory is correct, after all? I really don’t want to recover a lot of old canine bones.”

  “A bit late for that now,” Jeremy said briskly, setting the panel aside and shining his flashlight into the hole. I peered over his shoulder again, and saw a thick wooden box. Jeremy brushed the earth away so that he could read faded letters printed on it.

  “It’s a piano box,” he said. “Well, it’s for a piano seat. It’s not going to be easy to pull the whole box out. Want me to just break it open?”

  A wayward dragonfly came flitting over, landed on the box for a moment, then flew away.

  “Yes, open it,” I said. Jeremy took a shovel and banged it against the outer edges of the box. The wood split fairly easily, revealing a thick sheet of vinyl, which he cast aside. Below it, something in a distinctly human shape was wrapped, again and again, in white cellophane, like a mummy.

  “Oh, God,” I said, feeling a bit faint. “You don’t suppose they actually murdered some kid they didn’t like, do you?”

  “Let’s hope not,” Jeremy said. “Hand me those pruning shears.”

  He leaned forward and awkwardly managed to cut part of the cellophane away. It had held remarkably well, but it was old, and gave way enough so that he could peel back the layers, as if opening a present.

  And then, involuntarily, I let out a shriek.

  For the face that stared up at me was a woman’s, with round black eyes and pink cheeks and a red mouth, and tendrils of wavy black hair framing her face. She had dark eyebrows and a finely chiseled nose and chin, and a rounded, high forehead. She seemed dressed in a purple, fitted gown that was edged in white lace and cut low to reveal her suntanned bosom.

  “It’s only a wooden statue of some sort,” Jeremy told me hastily. “Crikey, Aunt Pen practically embalmed her,” he said, brushing away a scattering of mothballs from all around it.

  “Sorry for the scream,” I gasped. Gently, very gently, Jeremy lifted the figure out of the box. Something stirred in my memory from years of scavenging props in antiques stores, and I realized what it was.

  “It’s a masthead!” I exclaimed. “You know, a figurehead that they put on the front of ships for luck. In ancient times they thought it could scare away sea monsters, and for centuries after that, sailors kept using them for good luck. I wonder where this came from? Let me see that poem again.”

  Jeremy handed me back the paper. I had copied out a bit of the kids’ club minutes, too, and now my eyes locked on to it:

  The 21st of August. Officers of the C.S.E.C. discover the Great Lady. Her ghost has haunted these shores for many a decade. We shall give her a proper burial. Only the Black Rod decides where to bring her to her final resting place.

  “Jeremy!” I exclaimed. “All this time, while we’ve been focusing on the Shakespearean lodger, there’s been some other history to uncover here, right under our noses!”

  “Well, not exactly our noses,” Jeremy said, blowing his now. “Look. Let’s put this right back where it was, and bike home and get the car so we can bring the Great Lady out of here before somebody else finds her. Harriet said we could take what we wanted.”

  “Right,” I said, and we hastily rewrapped her and put her back, and replaced the flooring. We even covered it up with the watering can and other tools.

  Then we hopped aboard our bicycles and pedaled like mad down the country lane toward the farm and our cottage. The sky was already clouding up again, but it didn’t look like it would rain yet.

  “Know what I think?” I called out to Jeremy.

  “Yes,” he shouted back. “You think there’s more to this story, and you’re hoping it will somehow do the trick and save your grandma’s house.”

  “Aw, c’mon. Maybe Shakespeare didn’t sleep there,” I said, “but somebody interesting sure did.”

  We were pedalling side by side now, close to the turn-off for the farm, when there came a sudden roar from behind. A splitsecond later, a truck was bearing down on us full bore.

  “Penny, look out!” Jeremy shouted. The truck aimed itself straight at us, and we had no choice but to drive our bikes right off the road.

  I didn’t stay up on my wheels for very long. I flew left, and the bike flew right. The ground, although grassy enough, was lumpy and bumpy in a big way, and I went tumbling into a steep but shallow, muddy ditch. It all happened so fast that my mind was like an outside observer, and I seemed to experience it all, oddly enough, in slow motion.

  I heard Jeremy’s bicycle go crashing off on the other side of the ditch. But I couldn’t see where he’d landed, and I got up and frantically crawled along to find him, shouting out his name above the roar of the truck, which had gunned its engine and gone screeching away.

  “I’m over here. I’m all right!” he shouted back. “Are you hurt?”

  I was still stunned, and completely unaware of my skinned knees dripping blood. So I just said rather idiotically, “I think I’m okay.”

  Jeremy had gotten up and come stumbling across the ditch to my side. “You are too hurt,” he said, looking up furiously for the culprit, who had disappeared, leaving the road dead silent now.

  I glanced down. “No, it’s nothing,” I said. “Just a flesh wound,” I joked. Jeremy examined it.

  “What the hell was the matter with those guys?” I said indignantly. “They were trying to kill us, weren’t they?”

  “No,” Jeremy said shortly. “If they’d wanted to kill us, believe me, we’d be dead. They just wanted to scare us off.”

  I would like to say that I stoutly refused to be bullied, that I sneered in the face of death. But, the fact is, I was scared. However, not so scared that I hadn’t already made up my mind about our next move.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Shaken, but not stirred, we returned to the cottage and bandaged our wounds. Then we jumped into Jeremy’s Dragonetta and went right back to Grandmother Beryl’s, where we retrieved the Great Lady masthead. Jeremy laid it carefully on the rear seat. All the way back, we speculated as to who was out to get us.

  “Could be anybody in town,” Jeremy told me. “They all hate us, because of the Shakespeare debacle.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Harriet and her Legacy Society? They’d poison our tea, maybe, but not run us off the road,” I said jokingly.

  “Well, then how about Colin and his Vandals and his Visigoths?” Jeremy countered. “Those kids are always swooping around town on their bikes. Like bats out of hell.”

  “Right,” I said. “Bicycles. Not cars and trucks.”

  “Colin has a truck,” Jeremy pointed out. “Know what those T-shirts say in Cornish? Death to second-homers.”

  “But it wasn’t Colin’s truck,” I argued. I stared at him accusingly. “You know perfectly well you don’t think it’s the locals. Right?”

  Jeremy was busy fiddling with his mobile. “Hah. An e-mail from Rupert,” he announced, looking enormously pleased with himself. “The temporary injunction against the sale of Beryl’s house and the surrounding grounds has come through. I can tell you now that I was never entirely sure we’d get it.”

  “That’s terrific! So, what have we gained, exactly?” I asked.

  “It buys us time,
pending an environmental study,” he explained. “This means nothing can be sold until a team of environmentalists have examined it. We can do the whole show—we’ll get nature experts in there to comb the area and take tests looking for vernal springs and endangered species and the whole lot—anything that can prove that the land has natural value for conservation purposes, in case we can’t turn up anything of historical value. We’ll stall as long as we can.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Jeremy paused thoughtfully. “I have to warn you, the Mosley brothers don’t like to be crossed and they take no prisoners. We are now the biggest thorn in their side, with this injunction.”

  “So, it was the Mosleys who ran us off the road, right?” I asked.

  Jeremy admitted, “Anything’s possible with those guys. In fact, with their political connections, they may have already heard about the injunction even before I did!”

  We had reached the cottage and now we carried our Great Lady masthead inside, where we laid her out on the kitchen table and got down to the business of examining our new find.

  “This is your field. What do you make of it?” Jeremy asked.

  “Well, most mastheads are sort of whimsical and mythological, you know, like a Grecian sea goddess or a mermaid, with long flowing hair and fish scales and all,” I said, as he used his phone to snap pictures of the wooden figure. “But I’ve never seen one so lovingly rendered, with such finely detailed features. See how beautifully sculpted her eyelids, nose, mouth, jaw and brow are? Just look at the hair—it’s all wavy around her face, but tied into a bun at the nape of her neck. From the looks of her hairstyle and outfit, I’d say she’s from the mid-1800s.”

  I moved around the table and peered more closely. “See all the pleats in her gown? And the pattern of the bodice, and the ruffles and layers in her sleeves!” I marvelled. “I mean, you seldom get such a well-dressed lady to adorn the front of a ship! Look at her fingers!” I said, pointing to the left hand, which was raised across her body and rested just beneath her throat. The other arm hung close by her side, with the hand clasping a wide-brimmed hat, so cleverly sculpted that it just looked like a silk hat made to match her dress.