DWELLING AT SOLUTIONS DOME WEALTH
Bloody hell.
I had just decided I’d been pursuing the wildest of all wild goose chases when Colin arrived with a backpack and a long canvas case.
‘What have you got there?’
He unzipped it and took out a big gun.
I looked askance at it. ‘You’ve brought a rifle?’
‘A double-barrelled shotgun. We were under-prepared last time. I’m not going to let it happen again.’
‘You know how to use it?’
‘I do.’
Nothing macho; a simple statement of fact. Once again thoughts of Lemminkäinen rippled through my mind.
He looked at the piece of paper on which I had been scribbling my notes. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to decipher a code.’
He picked up the paper and looked at what I had written. ‘There’s a misquotation here,’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’m sure of it.’ He pointed at the text. ‘It says here our earthly dwelling of this tabernacle. Dwelling is not the right word. It should be house.’
‘I copied it straight out of Cat Haggard’s journal.’
‘Then she got it wrong. When I was small my old gran made me memorise whole chapters of the Bible. This is out of Corinthians. Do you have a copy of the Bible?’
‘I think there’s one somewhere.’
I found it and he riffled through the pages. ‘There you go.’
He was right. I quoted the text aloud. ‘For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle… How odd. How come she made that mistake, I wonder?’
We looked at each other.
‘If it was a mistake,’ Colin said.
Suddenly we were scrambling. We checked all the sources my ancestor had used. Each one contained a misquotation.
‘They’re not mistakes,’ Colin said. ‘They’re misdirections.’
I corrected the words and looked at what we’d got.
HOUSE IN DIRECTIONS ICE TREASURE
‘Re-arrange the words,’ Colin said.
I did so and spoke the words slowly, almost reverently. ‘Directions treasure in ice house,’ I said.
‘Directions for the treasure in the ice house,’ Colin said.
For the first time I was truly convinced that the crown of Muar was real, that my ancestor had somehow been involved in its disappearance and that provided we could take the next step we might even be able to find where it had been hidden. Directions for the treasure in the ice house. You couldn’t get much more specific than that. But there was a snag. If she had indeed left directions in an ice house, which ice house did she mean? The one at the Governor’s House? The one at Aberystwyth, long since razed for the highway, or the one here, at Cat’s Kingdom? It seemed most likely that she meant the one at Cat’s Kingdom. And that had gone down the cliff in the 1929 earthquake.
‘I’m not sure we’re any better off.’ I explained why.
Colin took my hands in his. He smiled down at me, this man who, like Cat Haggard’s great love, was built like a tower. ‘There is a saying,’ he said. ‘Sufficient unto the day.’
‘That is a good saying,’ I said.
‘Then let us abide by it.’ He looked at me, blue eyes twinkling. ‘Where is this famous supper you promised me?’
‘Oh hell…’
I’d forgotten all about it.
‘Maybe we should check in the ice house?’ he suggested.
‘You’ll have a sharp climb. The fridge might be a better bet.’
I poured him a whisky, refused his offer of help and made us a six-egg omelette – big men needed big meals, right? – with a fistful of herbs taken at random from the bottles I had lined up beside the stove. No time for cooked vegies but there was a lettuce and a can of beetroot. A slurp of olive oil and lemon juice and hey presto, instant chef!
I replenished our glasses and we ate. Not bad, despite everything.
‘There’s an apple pie,’ I said.
He looked at me very straight and direct. ‘I have a theory,’ he said.
‘Which is?’
‘That apple pie tastes better in bed.’
My heart pounded my ribs. I suppose I had sensed we might be heading in that direction but I hadn’t expected it yet. We had not kissed; had barely touched and then only by accident. And was I over Tim? Did it matter? Over him or not, Tim was history, any lingering regrets more about hurt pride than love. Let me bury them, then, in this new man. This tower-tall, blue-eyed and black-haired man.
I listened to the promptings of my flesh. I said: ‘Don’t they say theories should always be put to the test?’
‘They do.’
‘Let me make a quick call first.’
I left a message on Averil’s voicemail. ‘Got it!’
I took Colin’s hand. Together we walked into my bedroom.
What a fine man this was. I leant over him, brushing his chest with my breasts, and kissed him, eyes and mouth. Slow, lingering kisses. He touched me. I felt oh God I didn’t know what I felt. His hands were caressing my shoulders, my back. I was a marsh of desire.
‘Wait,’ I said.
He looked up at me. ‘What?’
I got up and put on a robe.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
I fetched a pair of scissors from the kitchen. I opened the back door and cut a rose from the bush. I took it into the bedroom and took off my robe. I said: ‘Are you from Texas, by any chance?’
‘I’ve never been there.’
‘It’s the thought that counts.’
I took the cut rose from behind my back and put it into his hand, pressing his fingers around the stem. ‘Perhaps we can have a yellow rose of Scotland,’ I said.
‘I believe heather is a flower more customarily associated with Hibernia,’ he said.
‘My love is like a yellow, yellow rose,’ I said.
‘Another misquotation?’
‘I follow in my ancestor’s footsteps,’ I said.
I lay beside him. Presently he took the yellow rose and laid it between my breasts.
‘I gave it to you,’ I said.
‘And therefore it is mine to do with as I wish,’ he said. Often he seemed to talk like a dictionary. I did not mind; I thought it was sweet. ‘And what I wish is to present it to you.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s beautiful and therefore to be wooed; she is a woman, therefore to be won.’
I didn’t know the quotation. After making a fool of myself with Wiranto, I wasn’t game to guess, either.
‘Who said that?’
‘Shakespeare. Henry IV.’
‘A tad chauvinistic?’
‘And all the better for it.’
My laughter turned quickly to sighs as desire first shook me and then destroyed me utterly. I had always thought of sex as fun, almost a game, but as Colin made love to me I felt I had entered a holy place. At the end, after visiting sublimity not once or twice but times beyond number, I felt the world twist and hold us in its warm and consoling arms.
I felt myself drift to sleep. While I slept, Cat came. Not as a dream but in the flesh. Afterwards I could not account for it.
I had heard that stressed-out people were prone to sleep walking. I’d heard one woman telling how she’d fallen out of a tree as a kid and had night terrors ever since. I had fallen out of no tree but there I was outside the house in the cold night air, my nightdress pressed against my legs by a strengthening wind, with no recollection of how I’d got there. Beside me stood a woman looking not as the photographs had shown her in later life but as she must have been in the early days of her banishment, blue eyes ablaze with certainty, chin lifted with a determination to raise herself from the pit to which she had been unjustly consigned.
I meant no sacrilege when I told myself I knew how Christ’s disciples must have felt when he appeared among them after his crucifixion, the cert
ainty of who he was warring with the impossibility of a man appearing among the living after he had been three days dead. Cat Haggard had been dead over a hundred years but there she was at my side, smiling at me as though we were friends who had chanced to meet.
Warmed by her smile even in my confusion, I wanted to tell her my worries about the men who’d snatched me in the Walls of Jerusalem.
‘I’m scared they may have a second go.’
For some reason I never doubted she would know what I was talking about.
‘Fear is part of the human condition,’ she said in her West Country English voice. ‘We all have to face it.’
‘Were you never scared?’
‘I denied it once aboard the transport. In truth I was frightened all the time but it is by showing courage in the face of fear that we know who we are. I would not let fear dictate to me any more than I would give space to those who wished to harm me. You must do the same. There are those who persist in their wickedness,’ she said, ‘and it is our duty to stand up against them.’
‘Always?’
‘Always. There is no such thing as turning a blind eye because evil is unrelenting and we have to resist it in every way we can. To observe and take no part in the struggle can never be the answer and those who pretend otherwise either deceive themselves or are in league with the powers of darkness.’
‘Am I dead?’ I asked her. Because how otherwise was it possible for me to be holding a conversation with her?
‘Of course you’re not dead.’ She took my hands in hers and her fingers were warm and strong. ‘There is no past or present,’ she said. ‘All is now. There is a veil that separates us but we are there just as you are there. And sometimes the veil parts so we can see and talk together.’
‘As now,’ I said.
‘As now. And there is magic, too, a magic beyond human understanding. Take no notice of those who say there is no such thing. Magic exists. Accept it for what it is.’
She turned away from me and looked across the sea and I saw her black hair so like my own blowing in the strengthening wind. ‘There’s a halo round the moon,’ she said. ‘We’ll be having rough weather later.’
I followed her gaze and, sure enough, saw clouds building along the southern horizon.
‘You’re right,’ I said. I looked back at her but saw only emptiness. Cat Haggard was gone.
Alone once more, I realised I was cold. Ahead of the storm, I went back into the house.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Colin stirred as I climbed into bed.
‘Where have you been?’
He had not woken properly and within seconds was asleep again. I lay in the darkness, watching the moonlight on the bedroom wall and hearing the faint rumble of surf through the open window, and thought about the experience I had just had.
Swapping confidences with the dead… Hamlet aside, most people would want me locked up in a psychiatric ward for that but I knew my experience had been neither dream nor night-borne fantasy. I had met my ancestor and spoken with her, felt the warm pressure of her fingers on mine. What had she said?
There is a veil that separates us. Sometimes it parts…
It surely had tonight. Night was traditionally the time for ghosts but why should that be? Couldn’t they be around in daylight, too? Were they eavesdropping when we talked? When I let rip in traffic jams, using all those crisp words a dean of history wasn’t even supposed to know? Had Catherine Haggard been snooping on me tonight, remembering the lovely times she’d had with Mungo Jackson while Colin blew my circuits for me? Was she watching me now from the shores of Avalon?
Crazy thoughts amid the darkness.
It took me a long time to go to sleep but I must have managed it eventually because I did not hear the storm that some time in the night came roaring out of the Southern Ocean to batter the house standing full square in its path as it had stood for over a hundred years.
It was still blowing when I woke. In the dawn’s half light I stood at the window listening to the breakers bursting against the base of the cliff and watching the ocean. The seas were cresting white as far as I could see but overhead the sky was clear, with Venus shining in the east. The worst of the storm had passed.
Colin was still sleeping. It was a Saturday, normally a slopping-around, vile-old-T-shirt-and-jeans time, but to hell with that because today I had things to celebrate. I was alive: that for a kick off. I was alive, I had this crazy memory of talking with Cat Haggard last night, Colin and I had found each other and I was in love. Enough to be going on with. Enough to tart myself up, weekend or no weekend, to celebrate what I knew was going to be my wonderful new life.
I tiptoed from the room, hit the shower and fifteen minutes later was shiny as a new two-dollar coin in an ultra-smart open-necked shirt and tailored pants courtesy of Hugo Boss. Dressing myself up for my man…
I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of coffee and sat at the table, cup cradled in my hands, and thought about everything that had happened the night before.
Colin first of all, because overnight Colin had become the front and centre of my life. I had often thought if you could bottle ecstasy you’d be an instant millionaire but feelings like I’d had last night might need to be banned. What did you call something that blew your mind more than a hatful of psychedelic mushrooms? You’d call it dangerous, wouldn’t you? I called it Colin. With Colin McNeil I had found my destiny. Joy? I could have been one of Thomas Aquinas’s angels dancing on the head of a pin. Feelings like that were a scary business because they left you defenceless if things went wrong. That was why those whose love failed felt such pain. No matter! That wasn’t going to happen to me, was it? Of course not.
Then there was the meeting with my ancestor. Something like that happened to you, it was like having the earth turn somersaults beneath your feet. I told myself to put Catherine’s visit behind me and concentrate on the fact that Colin, Averil and I had finally cracked my ancestor’s code. Directions in the ice house…
I had a bad feeling, all the same. Aberystwyth and its ice house were no more and I doubted Catherine would ever have thought of hiding the directions at the Governor’s House; she’d left there long before she started her journal. Which left the ice house at Cat’s Kingdom and that had gone down the cliff in the 1929 earthquake. Some of the ruins were still wedged on a ledge halfway down the cliff. No doubt a trained mountaineer would have found it a doddle but I didn’t know any trained mountaineers, nor was I willing to risk sharing the secrets of the crown of Muar with one. Unless I could work out a way of getting to them myself I had a nasty feeling we were looking at a dead end.
I heard movement from the bedroom so got on with making breakfast. When Colin came through he was confronted not only by a man-size brekkie of bacon, egg, mushrooms and tomatoes – see how well I look after my man? – but by me pirouetting in my Hugo Boss outfit – instant glamour! – coffee pot in hand. A slurp of coffee, a perfunctory kiss – what happened to romance? – a swift demolition of the bacon and eggs and he headed out to continue his take over of Marcus Smeeton’s files. As for Hugo Boss, I doubted he’d have noticed if I’d been wearing grunge. The tribulations of the besotted female…
Later I had a change of plan. Glamour was out. I put on my hiking gear and went to check out the cliff and see whether there was any way someone like me, with a preference for ground and not air under her boots, could have a hope of reaching the wreckage of the ice house.
Like all the dolerite cliffs hereabouts this one was both high and absolutely vertical. Step off and next thing you’d have joined the fishes three hundred feet down. The geological nature of dolerite had created vertical crevices running parallel to one another down the cliff face but there was a ledge of sorts slanting downwards from where I was standing. It was about a metre wide at the top but looked to narrow further down. Near the ice house it disappeared beneath a rocky outcrop in the otherwise vertical face. I told myself it was wide enough to present no danger.
All I had to do was walk along it and not look down. If it got too narrow or too steep I would just turn round and come back.
Even the thought made me sweat yet once the idea had occurred to me I knew I was going to do it. Crazy, yes? But Catherine Haggard was not the only one in my family tree who was as stubborn as a team of mules. What had she said to me? It is only by showing courage in the face of fear that we know who we are.
Right.
While I was quoting other people, what had Lao Tzu said? A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Something like that. I set my foot on the ledge.
Three cautious steps; five. I am prepared to swear there’s a tractor beam at the bottom of the cliff drawing me down. I shall not look. Ten steps now. Why am I doing this?
Twenty steps. The ledge is definitely narrowing. I think it’s growing steeper, too. I’ve been holding myself so stiffly that every muscle is aching. I find it harder and harder to breathe. I must stop. I daren’t stop. Dizziness is the great enemy. Don’t look down. My feet are groping now. I don’t like this. Is the ledge narrower still? I daren’t look. I can only feel. My boot explores. The air is centimetres away. I feel it calling me. I can’t help myself. I stop and turn in towards the face.
My hands feel for some kind of hold on the smooth rock but find nothing. I squint sideways along the ledge. The outcrop I saw from the cliff top is ten metres away. The ledge I am on runs just underneath it. What happens afterwards I cannot see. How I am supposed to get past it I cannot see. My body is a sea of cold sweat. Go on? Go back? If I stay here much longer I may not be able to move at all. Once again Catherine’s words breathe in my ear. It is only by showing courage… All right! Stop nagging me! I edge sideways, sweating but still moving. One centimetre at a time. I come to the outcrop. It is part of the rock wall, a bulge in the otherwise sheer face and wet from last night’s spray. I see no handholds, only the drip of brackish water off the shining rock. The ledge is very narrow now. If I kneel down my feet will be over the void. If I lie down to squeeze my way under the outcrop the depths will be breathing in my ear. I cannot believe the cliff is not trying to push me outwards. I breathe deeply. My hands tremble, my stomach sour with apprehension. I am afraid I shall vomit. Awkwardly I kneel and lie full length. I read a book once about climbers on the north wall of the Eiger Mountain. At the time I thought they were mad. Who’s talking now?
The Governor's House Page 23