A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  Well. To this day, Jeremy blames me for what happened next. All I did was scrooch a little closer to him. Can I help it if men keep their mobile phones in their pockets? And is it my fault that those damned mobiles are so touch-sensitive that the minute I bumped into Jeremy, his dumb phone started to talk in that mechanized female voice?

  “Say a command!” the voice chirruped loudly. Before Jeremy could hastily turn it off, the impatient fembot spoke again, this time, I swear, in a more annoyed tone. “Say a command!” she repeated.

  Now all three thugs, plus the two Mosleys, whirled in our direction, just as the moon decided to peek out again through a pocket in the gauzy clouds, thereby shining a most unwelcome light on us. Suddenly, the Mosleys’ motley crew dropped everything, and they all began to run toward us.

  “Come on, Pen!” Jeremy exclaimed, grabbing me rather roughly, I must say, and dragging me off in the only direction we could possibly go to get away from the bad guys: down the slope of land toward the sea, where the horseshoe-shaped rock stood as a portal to our escape. But if you think this is an easy thing to do in your nicest evening shoes and dress, guess again.

  When we hit the beach, we tore off as fast as we could go, with the Mosley crowd in hot pursuit. First we ran past Basil’s cottage, which was locked and dark. God knows where he was tonight. Fortunately, having just been down here with Basil, we had a better sense of the strange terrain than the Mosley guys did. We knew how to weave our way around the rock pools and cliffs in the dark . . . whereas those other guys stumbled in an attempt to keep up.

  We rushed onward, where the wind and sea were rougher, but I knew what Jeremy was thinking: if we hurried, we might reach that cleft in the rock and vanish into it unseen; and in the dark the Mosley guys would never even guess that it was there.

  I heard a loud popping sound and realized that someone had fired a shot. The sea was swirling across my ankles and the jagged rocks that we picked our way around; the wind whistled up against the sheer wall of the cliffs. Jeremy had a flashlight but didn’t dare shine it. He just felt his way along the cliff, until his fingers found the keyhole-shaped opening.

  “This way, Pen,” he said softly, darting inside and drawing me in with him.

  It was a leap of faith. Well, a squish of faith. We were, after all, banking on Basil’s crazy story that he’d seen Paloma go into this opening and yet live to come back out again, so many years ago.

  We soon discovered that this unassuming cleft in the cliff wall led into a deeper cave than we’d realized. It was more like a narrow tunnel, about five feet wide and barely six feet high, with a curved but very jagged ceiling and walls. So we had to be quite careful not to scrape our heads or hands against them. The ground beneath our feet was sandy and rocky, with little eddies of water here and there.

  Only scant minutes later, we could hear the Mosleys’ men thumping around just outside the cave. They ran right past it, so there was silence for a moment, during which we watched from inside. A short while later, the men returned, angrily walking up and down the shoreline and gazing out to sea, as if waiting to see if we’d tried to swim for it.

  “They can’t hold their breath forever,” I heard one of them say.

  We backed off, and stood quite still. One of them struck a match, but only to light a cigarette. Smoke wafted in the air. We could hear their voices as they stood there trying to figure out what to do, but I couldn’t make out the words. I started to get the feeling they were going to camp out for awhile and roast marshmallows or something.

  Jeremy sensed this, too, and very carefully he pulled me deeper into the cave with him.

  “How long are they going to stay there?” I whispered, trembling.

  “Depends on how big their operation is tonight,” Jeremy said quietly, “and how badly they want to catch us.”

  We decided to retreat even farther, following the cave-tunnel, which abruptly turned left and continued. As soon as we’d made that turn, Jeremy was finally able to switch on his flashlight. After we’d walked about twenty-five feet, the tunnel opened into a much wider chamber. Sharp rocks jutted out everywhere from the walls, and without our light, the cave would have been treacherous indeed.

  Cautiously we made our way deeper into this larger chamber. Jeremy shone his light dead ahead so we could watch where we stepped, until at last we reached the very back wall.

  I gasped when I saw it. For, flat against the wall was a big, lifesized rock construction, which, clearly, human hands had made. It resembled a huge doughnut with a knot at the top, so that it looked like a giant engagement ring mounted against the back of the cave.

  “Look!” I whispered, stepping forward to trace my fingers around the strangely familiar carvings decorating it—that very same mesmerizing pattern of swirls, whorls and spirals which I recognized from three places—Paloma’s sketch, Basil’s Scarlet Knot stone, and Great-Aunt Penelope’s doodles in her notebook. What we were now standing in front of was a nearly six-foot tall replica of the Scarlet Knot.

  “Jeremy,” I whispered, “remember what Paloma told her interviewer? She said she was haunted by the ghost of Prescott’s mother, so she believed she had to return the stone to its source. Prescott must have shown her this place when they were courting.”

  “Which is why she came back here toward the end of her life to return it,” Jeremy agreed.

  “Right,” I said. “It all matches up perfectly with Aunt Pen’s minutes about the Great Lady. Do you think Basil took Aunt Pen in here to see this?”

  “Of course,” Jeremy replied. “No wonder she let him into her club.”

  After what I guess was about a half hour, Jeremy went back to check on the tunnel where we’d come in. I had turned on my little pencil-sized flashlight and waited hopefully.

  Very soon though, Jeremy retreated back to the chamber where I was waiting.

  “I can’t tell if the Mosleys’ men are still out there, because the tide’s coming in, fast. I couldn’t get far enough to see outside. The tunnel is filling up with seawater,” he said grimly. I saw that his shoes and pants were wet. “It’s too late to try to swim for it. This whole place is going to be flooded soon,” he warned.

  I glanced around wildly, looking for some escape, but already the seawater had been seeping into the inner chamber itself. I watched, horrified as the tide now came swirling in rapidly with sudden force, already lapping around the giant-sized Scarlet Knot.

  But then Jeremy noticed something interesting. “Look!” he said, pointing to where the rising tide was sloshing up over the bottom curve of the “wedding band” of the Scarlet Knot. The water seemed to spill over the stones and disappear.

  “It’s acting almost like a drain,” he said, examining it. “There’s got to be some place behind that rock where the water is going.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked in alarm when Jeremy shone his light between the Scarlet Knot and the actual wall of the chamber, then began to wedge himself in there.

  He didn’t answer at first, just kept feeling around with his arm and leg. “There’s a narrow opening back here!” he announced. “I’m going to try to get through it and see what’s on the other side!”

  Before I could even object, within seconds, he disappeared. I waited for what was probably only a moment but seemed interminable. Then I heard Jeremy’s voice calling out to me.

  “Come through, Penny!” he said. “Hurry! There are two steps down, once you get in.”

  I flattened myself against the crevice where he’d vanished. The area was worn smooth here. I held my breath and pushed forward, and for a moment I found myself wedged between two rock walls. I pushed again . . . and then popped out on the other side.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  There is an old saying, that when you’re in a situation where there’s no way out, the only answer is to go deeper in. And so, in we went.

  Behind the Scarlet Knot was a labyrinth of well-constructed tunnels that was truly astonishing. The first on
e where we’d just landed was about fifteen yards long, with stacked stone walls and a corbelled stone roof shaped in a curve overhead. The floor was hardened earth. Although some of the seawater had indeed seeped in at the mouth of this tunnel, the tunnel itself was built on an upward slant, so that as we walked up it, very soon we were on higher and drier ground.

  “Look at how the walls and roof are stacked. They’re different from the first caves we came through. These are man-made,” Jeremy marvelled. “So it’s got to lead somewhere, right?”

  “Unless it’s a burial chamber,” I said gloomily. But since the tunnels continued, so did we.

  “We should keep moving until we’re far enough away so that the high tide won’t reach us,” Jeremy said. “Then, when the tide goes out again, maybe we can go back out the way we came.”

  “Wish we’d managed to call Alfred before all this hit the fan,” I said, glancing at my phone’s diminishing battery power, and turning it off to save whatever spark of life was left in it.

  “Well,” said Jeremy, “we can hardly expect to get Wi-Fi in a prehistoric tunnel.”

  “You don’t think we’re going to run into lions and tigers and bears in their lair, do you?” I asked, shuddering from the chill. Jeremy gallantly took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders.

  “No, all the woolly mammoths are long gone,” he assured me. So, we soldiered on.

  We moved through another stone tunnel to the left, which took us to higher ground still, and then a sharp right, where the new tunnel widened slightly.

  Now, let me just say that when it comes right down to it, you’d really be hard pressed to find a nice soft landing in a cave. I mean, look. Rocks are not really made to be beds or easy chairs. But we knew we had to hunker down, so we did the best we could. Jeremy finally found a very wide, flat rock, and sat down with his back to the dry wall.

  “I hope they didn’t sacrifice virgins on that stone slab,” I said apprehensively.

  “Come on, babe,” he said, opening his arms wide so that I could sit in his lap and rest my head against his warm chest. “I always wanted to go camping with you.”

  At first, I found myself dropping off to sleep, but then I awakened suddenly, as if I’d heard an unfamiliar noise but could not recall it. It was probably the deep silence that was so eerie to me. Finally, though, we both fell into a deep, undisturbed sleep.

  I knew it was morning for one reason only. Light. Not much, but, as any miner will tell you, whatever shaft of sunlight you can get is paradise when you’ve been stranded underground. This was a long, thin ray of sunshine that came down like a laser from a tiny sliver between the rocks in the ceiling over our heads. Jeremy awoke when he felt me turn my head, and now I pointed at the light. We got up carefully, and nearly stumbled on something rectangular that we had not seen in the dark of night.

  It was a crate of three dusty, black, unmarked glass bottles, stoppered and sealed, and filled with a mysterious liquid. The bottles were blank. Only the box itself bore the name of the wine: Napoleon madeira. “Wow,” Jeremy said. “If this actually is what it says it is, then it’s probably the best madeira ever made. They still talk about it at wine auctions today, as if it’s the Holy Grail.”

  Dimly I remembered, from my work on a ridiculous TV biopic called Joséphine, Queen of the Romantics, that Napoleon, who suffered from a stomach ailment, was, at the end of his life, unable to quaff the barrels of wine that had been sent to him. So it was divided up into bottles, and afterwards it was unclear what became of them.

  “There are legends far and wide of discoveries of these lost bottles,” Jeremy explained.

  “Is this that ‘eternal wine’ you told me about, that never goes bad?” I asked in awe.

  Jeremy nodded. “Do you realize what it could mean?” he said. “We may have just stumbled onto Blackstrap Doyle’s smuggling caves. Which would make sense, because Prescott gave Paloma the little Scarlet Knot that must have originally come from here!”

  “Ohh,” I said. “But, this tunnel was surely built long before Blackstrap arrived on the scene.”

  Jeremy was still gazing upward. “The ceiling here is flatter than the others. Maybe we should see where that crevice overhead opens to. We might be able to get out of this cave, right here and now.”

  “But how can we reach the ceiling?” I asked.

  Well. Let me tell you what my caveman did. He started gathering stones. And he labored on his little construction site until he’d built me a staircase of my own that went all the way up to, if not heaven, at least to the light. Jeremy climbed first, to test it with his own weight. Once he reached the top, he then had to heave and ho and push and shove with all his might against the section of the ceiling where light was peeping through. At one point he very nearly lost his balance, and I feared that he would topple and fall. But he hung on, and he finally broke open a piece of the roof above us.

  “Let’s go!” he said triumphantly; and then he, and I, popped through it.

  I somehow imagined that we’d end up in a meadow, or at least at the mouth of an above-ground cave. And indeed, at first, we did seem to be in just another cave, albeit one with many shafts of light streaming in. But then Jeremy swept his flashlight around, and I saw that we were in a place so familiar, I simply couldn’t believe it.

  We were in Grandmother Beryl’s basement.

  Chapter Forty

  “Fuggy-holes,”said Barbara the archeologist. “That’swhat the Cornish call them. But in archeological terms they are known as fougous.”

  She pronounced it “foo-goo”, which, as far as I was concerned, was as funny and unscientific-sounding as fuggy-holes.

  You can imagine how shocked she and the environmentalists were when Jeremy and I came tearing out of Grandmother Beryl’s house, still dressed in our evening attire from the previous night, albeit smudged with cave dirt. My face looked as if I had been playing in a coal scuttle. Jeremy’s hair was full of white powdery dust, from the way he’d shouldered those roof-stones just like Atlas.

  We had run across the fields where the environmental team was doing their morning survey of the western section of the property. Jeremy paused to phone Alfred the cop, to inform him about what we’d seen of the Mosley brothers’ operation, while I began to explain our adventure to Barbara and Peter.

  “Caves?” Barbara asked immediately. “What caves?”

  Jeremy quickly joined us, and brushing off his jacket, he described the peculiar construction of the network of tunnels from which we’d emerged. At first Barbara’s expression was hard to read. I fully expected her to dismiss those tunnels as old, disused copper and tin mines, which no doubt had been a boon for Prescott Doyle’s smuggling operation.

  But while everybody else was marvelling over the Napoleon madeira, and conjuring up stories of smuggling, Barbara moved thoughtfully closer to me and spoke in a low voice. “Take me there, right now,” she said. “I want to see the tunnels for myself.”

  So Jeremy and I brought her into Grandmother Beryl’s basement and we retraced our steps. We began with the spooky far end of it where we’d popped out. With a ladder we all managed to lower ourselves down, and Jeremy led the way back through those elaborate stone-roofed tunnels with their sharp turns. Barbara was silent at first, as we all beamed our flashlights around for her to get a good look. And that was when she told us what she believed they were.

  “Fougous are tunnels built by the Celts,” Barbara explained, as she wandered around in growing delight. “Nobody really knows why they built them. Maybe to store food, or to have a hiding place from the enemy, or to store their weapons. They are all over Cornwall, but I’ve never seen a network of them quite like this.”

  We continued onward, until we finally reached the area behind the giant replica of the Scarlet Knot. We showed her how we’d squeezed in, and we all went through that narrow passage until we got into the main cave chamber. The tide was out now, so we stood there awhile, gazing at the remarkable stone formation t
hat looked so much like an engagement ring.

  Barbara stepped right up to it, shining her light at various spots, staring with a new intensity.

  “It looks to me like a megalithic Celtic entrance stone,” she said slowly. “Hmm, you can quite clearly see that very interesting pattern of a triskele design.”

  Jeremy and I waited for her to explain further. It took Barbara a second to notice that we weren’t familiar with the term.

  “Three spirals together, and then another three, and then another three,” she explained, moving her fingers reverently over all those swirls, whorls and spirals that were carved into the stone. “The Celts loved the number three, believing that everything important happened in three’s. Birth-life-death. Sun and moon and stars. Land, sea, sky. Et cetera. I’m thinking that this find is from the Neolithic period, which is from 5000 B.C. to 1000 B.C. I’d say we’re talking early Iron Age.”

  “Wow,” I said. Then I asked, “You called it an entrance stone?”

  “Yes,” answered Barbara. “They are usually connected to a ceremonial site of some sort; you know, it’s a gateway to something. Obviously this one leads to all the fougous behind it, and ends at the property we were inspecting. So, there must be a reason that all these tunnels lead there.”

  Now Barbara made us take her outside, via the cleft in the cliffs, exactly where we’d originally entered from the beach. We walked along the shoreline, back past the rock pools and Basil’s cottage. Basil himself was out in the water in a little boat, fishing. He waved to us, and we waved back, then we passed under the horseshoe-shaped rock, until we got to Grandmother Beryl’s cove and the steps leading upward to her house.

  When we reached the western property, Peter, the team leader of the environmentalists, had more news for us. “We uncovered a few stone markers,” he told Barbara. “Think you’re going to want to take a look.”

  We hurried across the field, where we saw the stones he’d found, which were flattish granite rocks, all about four and a half feet tall; and each were shaped like a rectangle topped with a head-and-shoulders, giving them a bit of personality. They lay in a neat row on the ground.