Текст книги "Summon the Bright Water "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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‘And where can we find you, Mr Colet, if there is any point on which we think you might be able to help us?’

I gave him my London address, saying that I was on my way to South Wales but would be keeping in touch with Miss Marrin since I should like to be present at the funeral.

Elsa had disappeared while we were talking and I now went to find her. She seemed to be distraught rather than mourning her uncle and begged me to keep in touch with her. I promised to do so. Her last words as I returned to my car were a whisper:

‘Dear, dear Piers, get me out of here!’

I shall, and please God I shall not be taken away from you or you from me.

I drove away to the silent brink of Severn, rippling with the wind against the tide, and considered my position. If the police ever began to suspect me, they would then want to know where I was staying after I left Broom Lodge and where I was on the night that Marrin died. I can’t account for my movements, and if I were a magistrate I should commit for trial this now-elegant economist with his pretended interest in ancient history by which he gained the confidence of the late Simeon Marrin. But, after all, why should the police investigate my movements? I was a respected and respectable academic, the understanding friend of the commune and eager to help them.

So, with luck, it should appear quite natural if I resumed occasional appearances at Broom Lodge as a casual visitor. That allowed me to keep our love alive and to whisk Elsa out of there if the commune dissolved into anarchy. Meanwhile she could relay to me as much as the police chose to tell her.

The only disquieting thought was that my life and liberty depended on the major, who alone knew of my secret movements. So long as he stayed in the district I had to keep in close touch with him. He was an admirable burglar – provided that he had worn gloves as he intended – but he was not a man to talk himself out of trouble.

So there it was! I still had no clue to the site of the hoard which Marrin had been robbing while putting up his smoke screen of alchemy, apart from the very valuable information that it was on the other side of the river. Also it was essential to get the cauldron out of the hands of the tonsured long enough for an expert examination. That should not be impossible. For example, there might well be an In Memoriam ceremony for Marrin which I could surprise. But if the wolf were to pad through the darkness behind those unsuspecting druidicals, the den was indispensable as his headquarters.

It was then that a compromise occurred to me: to adopt a dual personality. Outwardly I should remain the economist attracted by Elsa, which would explain visits to Broom Lodge. At the same time and chiefly at night I should be the secret investigator on the part of history and the public. Personality No. 1 would be Piers Colet, an innocent bystander whose life of learning and travel had been beyond reproach. Personality No. 2 would be the wolf hidden in its forest den, ready to track and to spring.

So I have returned to the den, where the major’s damned bag of golden bits and pieces is safely hidden. Elsewhere I keep the diving equipment together with a suitcase containing the clothes of Personality No. 1. Details of changing back to him have proved more difficult than I foresaw – for example, access to my car, neatness, telephoning Elsa supposedly from South Wales. Meanwhile I have been out every night – without any result – and during the day have written this simple and factual account of the events leading to Simeon Marrin’s death which, if it should ever have to be used in my defence, will not, I hope, be rejected as an ingenious fabrication. As I have said, his death was the last thing I wanted. What I do want is to recover the cauldron and manage a clear run so that I can take it to the British Museum for a verdict. After that can begin the search for what remains of Marrin’s find.

Chapter Two

All this and no nearer to the source of the gold! A week ago I was beginning to feel that Personality No. 2 and his precious den were quite unnecessarily dramatic, that there was nothing to prevent me carrying off Elsa to London and that the site of the burial where Marrin had found the bowl might be better investigated by archaeologists who were personal friends and knew me well enough to accept as much of my story as I chose to tell them.

But circumstances took over, such simple circumstances starting from my curiosity about charcoal and leading so rapidly to – well, among other things, another unfortunate accident. But I can’t deny that I intended the merciless hunting and haunting of these druidicals and that Elsa’s mention of sacrifice merely increased my contempt for them.

Her uncle had kept her very much in the dark. After all, church servants have more to do with dusting the pews than with doctrine. She thinks that Uncle Simeon joined this esoteric sect before Broom Lodge came into being and that it was to the sect that its former owner, the retired and heretical parson, left the place. The handful of druidicals was too small to run it, so Marrin hit on the fashionable idea of a working commune, the members of which would be sympathetic to reincarnation, meditation and fairly unorthodox Buddhism, and easily take him as their guru. These industrious and estimable innocents accepted that there was a higher state of spirituality into which one might be initiated when found worthy, but few were interested. I see an almost exact parallel, not religious but financial, in the machinations of a company promoter who registers a small company with nominal capital destined to act as the majority shareholder in a much larger concern to which an unsuspecting public has contributed the funds.

The druidicals had of course nothing in common with the Order of Druids which makes a nuisance of itself at Stonehenge and has no more to do with the original Druids than the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes has to do with buffaloes. Their religion was the real goods, so far as it could be reconstructed, combining the little we know of the supposed wisdom of the Celtic priesthood, reincarnation and all, with the natural animism of forest dwellers. Spirits were everywhere – under the earth, under the trees, under the tides of the Severn – and at the command of man if approached with the proper respectful mumbo-jumbo. Among them could be the spirit of a hero, not unlike a Graeco-Roman god, who had done great service to his fellows and remained in race memory. Above the divine spirits were archangels and above them, at the point where all religions merge, the absolute and eternal.

Some of this I had from the major who informed me that many of the beliefs could be contained within the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism. He was shocked by his old friend Simeon, but not as exasperated as an agnostic snorting at so much nonsense. After all, the Church accepts or did once accept angels and evil spirits, though I rather think it draws the line at spirits who are neither one nor the other, invisibly leading happy lives of their own.

When he did not turn up at Marrin’s funeral I hoped that the only reason was religious objection to the possible rites of sending the defunct on to godhead; but it could be that he was suffering from a sense of guilt and on the verge of confession. I called his home number to see if he was there. His housekeeper – no doubt of canonical age – said that so far as she knew he was still at Broom Lodge. So it seemed likely that my knight errant from the Horse Guards had gone off on pilgrimage to Glastonbury or some other Arthurian site, meditating stirrups or the Grail.

Myself, I did attend the funeral; a meeting of the whole commune with the usual speeches and unusual prayers. Marrin was then carted off and conventionally cremated without any further service at all. Let him rest in peace. He was a superb craftsman. The police had raised no objection to cremation, so I could hope that the fracture of the back of the skull had been ascribed to natural causes for the time being. Microscopic examination may have shown fragments of identifiable rock.

So long as I avoided curiosity and possible suspicion by showing myself too often in the neighbourhood of Broom Lodge there was no reason why Personality No. 1 should not move freely, apart from the difficulty of changing into him; nor was Elsa accountable to anyone for her absences. So a luxurious double room was booked at Thornbury, safely across the river, for Mr & Mrs Piers Colet and for the first time we were free to make love with abandon, sleep in each other’s arms, eat and drink and laugh together. ‘Get me out of here!’ she had begged me immediately after her uncle’s death, but now she was hesitant, and all she would say in answer to my insistence was, ‘Wait, my darling!’ I supposed that she was moved by a reluctant feeling of duty to the commune. But we were not yet so accustomed to each other that I could make a good shot at the cause of occasional reticence.

While we were walking in the hotel garden, putting off as long as possible the moment of parting, she suddenly asked me:

‘Why do they go to Wigpool?’

‘I think for iron ore, unless they are just having fun underground.’

‘It couldn’t be for iron,’ she said. ‘Uncle Simeon bought the supplies for the blacksmith’s shop. It’s all full of rods and plates already.’

But all the same it could be for the ore. In one way Marrin was no fraud. It was all very well to learn to handle iron, but that scanty remnant of humanity, reborn into the neolithic culture which he foresaw, would not know how to get the raw material.

‘I’m prepared to bet anything that they are mining the iron ore with pick and shovel,’ I said, ‘and somewhere in the Forest are smelting it with coal. Or better! Smelting it with charcoal on the off-chance that our descendants think coal is only useful for chucking at chickens.’

‘Well, they do try to smelt it.’

‘At Broom Lodge?’

‘No. Somewhere in the Forest. I remember he had some leaflets printed inviting schoolchildren to watch a demonstration. It seemed quite innocent and good propaganda for the commune. I did wonder if it had anything to do with their silly sacred ingots, but they come from Wigpool, I think.’

‘What sacred ingots?’

‘They are on a table by the entrance to the lab, and the initiates bless them when they pass. I wish I knew what they are doing at Wigpool.’

‘Easy! I’ll find out and tell you.’

‘But if they find you hanging about?’

‘They won’t. Don’t you bother!’

‘Piers, where are you living?’

‘You know I am always travelling.’

‘Just one hotel to another?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And all of them smell of coal?’

‘Darling, what did you say to me? Wait!’

‘Don’t take risks, Piers!’

‘In search of what? The golden cauldron?’

‘You were taking risks long before that disappeared.’

‘Diving with your uncle?’

‘Where’s his second suit, Piers?’

‘Offered to Nodens, I expect.’

‘They do offer things to somebody,’ Elsa said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Piers dear, I don’t know how I know. I watch their faces as I’ve watched yours. And I wonder. And when things are missing I ask questions and get answers I don’t believe.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Animals and flowers and … diving suits?’

‘And you think the altar is at Wigpool? Then they have the cauldron there!’

‘They might have. But, Piers, please, no!’

When we had gone our separate ways, I recrossed the Severn Bridge and left my car in a public car park at Chepstow. With such a number of tourists on their way to and from South Wales or the valley of the Wye the park was always full of cars, and mine was safely lost among them. In any case no one at Broom Lodge except Elsa knew its number. I then took a bus into the Forest and so by footpaths across country to my den.

I had been underrating Elsa’s powers of observation, partly because she was so young, partly for her lack of interest in the religious aspects of Broom Lodge. But she was ageless woman all through, sensitive to discordancies of collective mood or individual deviations from the norm, even if as slight as a change of wind in woodland. She was content to notice without seeking, as I would, at once to explain.

Nodens had turned up several times as if he were a patron saint of the colony. Natural enough. His temple dominates the Severn and the Forest, and I am surprised that early British bishops did not build a church on the hill top and dedicate it to St Nodentius, martyr and miner, whose head was cut off by the prefect of the port, kippered in salmon oil and thereafter able to heal the sick.

In fact the inscriptions show that he was greatly honoured by the Romans, who always recognised a useful god when they saw one. The river and the Forest were his, and his specialities were healing and finding lost property.

Writing those words has suddenly illuminated that curious incident of the lost watch. Carver was perhaps not looking up to heaven to see if there was a magpie in the branches above him; he could have been sending up a prayer of thanks to Nodens.

I have some sympathy for what was genuine in Marrin. Nodens could well have been an ancestral hero, older than Romans or Celts, who in time became a god. It’s a pleasant thought (for which I have no evidence whatever) that he might have been the marine engineer who planned the voyage of the great stones of Stonehenge all the way round Wales, across the Severn estuary and up the Avon.

Such practical details of life in the past fascinated Marrin as they do me. That is why we got on easily together. It is also why he desperately wanted me out of the way. Our interests were close enough – though his crazily extended from past into the future – for him to be afraid that my specialised knowledge might expose the secret of how he financed his colony.

The smelting of iron ore seemed a good point at which to start investigation. So next day I decided to be a private eye and play the major’s game of calling at pubs on the northern side of the Forest. In order to appear businesslike I used my car and Personality No. 1, carrying 2’s outfit in case of need. What I wanted to know was where I could buy a quantity of charcoal. At the big factory, I was told, which supplied the chemical industry. But did anybody still burn charcoal by the old method? Yes, two enterprising ex-miners were hard at it and coining money, though you wouldn’t think it to look at ’em. They had developed a new and profitable market: the suburbs of the larger towns within easy reach where families had fallen for the new craze of outdoor barbecues.

And so to the fairy-tale scene of a charcoal burner. The pyramid of wood smouldered under its bee-hive cover of turf and clay, pouring out trickles of smoke from the vent holes. Alongside the oven were stacks of beech and oak, and a hut where one of the partners was always on duty day and night. Apparently a charcoal pit is more of a nuisance than a baby. It must be inspected every two hours in case it bursts into flame; and there is only one way to build the shallow pit which contains the bee-hive. That is to learn it from your father who learned it from his father.

All this the burner on duty told me, a cheerful grin splitting his black-dusted face, evidently pleased to have company. I arrived at the point which interested me by saying that I couldn’t understand how charcoal could produce enough heat to melt iron from the ore, and got the most suprising answer.

‘Cor! Shouldn’t a believed it meself! But now ‘ee canst go see it done. Customers of mine they are. ‘Eathen Mohammedans, I’m told, but no ‘arm in ’em. All live together and do everything as it ain’t done no more. Now, if ’ee ‘urries –’ he pulled out a printed sheet from his pocket and consulted it. ‘Aye, there’s frying today! Nip on down to Flaxley Woods, and you’ll catch ’em at it twixt road and stream.’

I knew exactly where he meant and hurried, after changing in the car to Personality No. 2. Car and 2 were not supposed to be seen together, but the risk was small and any future developments seemed likely to call for No. 2 and his feet. Not far off the road was a quarter circle of low cliff left by ancient diggings, and below it open grass where time and the rains had smoothed spoil from the mine into a bumpy amphitheatre. There a furnace had been built of uncut stones mortared with clay. Near it was the Broom Lodge van containing sacks of charcoal.

A huge pair of bellows projected from the bottom of the kiln, worked by Raeburn stripped to the waist with the sweat pouring down his chest. Ballard was holding a mould in tongs, about to catch the drip from the furnace. Three small groups were watching: one of children and a schoolmaster, another of passers-by, and a third of four middle-aged and scholarly-looking men who might have been social historians or assistant directors of a folk museum.

They were getting their iron on the spot. At the back of the hollow and at the foot of the low cliff a band of ore showed plainly, which probably petered out too soon to have been of interest to a miner. A better demonstration for schoolchildren I cannot imagine. There was the whole process from the rock to the ingot.

One question, however, puzzled me. The home-made ingots were far from commonplace, but why should they be sacred? I guessed at a very tentative answer. The whole set-up could be a most ingenious blind like Marrin’s alchemy. Since there was no easy method of smelting iron secretly, he had decided to do it publicly. It was certainly ore from the surface rock which was being extracted, but if ore from quite another source (say, their revered Wigpool) went into the furnace, no onlooker would be any the wiser.

After returning to my car and driving it further between the trees, I slipped back to the free show. I wanted to know what the pair of metallurgists would do when they knocked off, and I had discovered a satisfactory lair from which to watch. There miners of unknown ancestry and language had been ruthless in chasing the ore, leaving behind a landscape of miniature crags which reminded me – though the sweeping, green shelter of a great oak confirmed that I was in England – of some painting of cypresses hanging in a grey Mediterranean gorge. A branch of the oak could be reached from a sharp pinnacle or rock. I climbed the tree and between the leaves had a perfect view of the furnace and the open ground.

The spectators drifted away, the high-brows remaining to the last and asking questions of Raeburn and Ballard, who were visibly impatient. Left alone, the two ran off the little remaining iron and cleared the slag. They showed no respect for the stuff and threw it into a pit. No suggestion of sacred ingots there! They then recharged the furnace with charcoal.

After satisfying themselves that no one was watching, they unloaded from their truck two little bags of a powdered mineral which looked like a very shiny coal and loaded the furnace with it. Raeburn, the bellows operator, swore. That was most irreverent in view of what followed but even devout Druids must be human.

‘God damn the bloody tin!’ he said, and turned again to the bellows.

So that was the metal of the sacred ingots. At first sight all that deception just to get a few slugs of tin seemed unnecessary. But one must remember that no smelting could be done secretly in the Forest, for the fire watchers would have been down at the first plume of smoke or the glare of the furnace by night; nor could it be done underground in the Wigpool workings. Ventilation would be a problem, especially if using charcoal.

But why not at Broom Lodge, teaching the craft to the whole commune instead of to the inner circle only? The answer lies in the mysteries of their creed, the confusion of past and future which also attracted the major, though he managed to find it compatible with Christianity. To Marrin and his followers those earliest workable minerals, gold, tin and copper, were to be venerated, and the process of ore to ingots was more sacred still. They were re-enacting the magic whereby the wizards of the tribe transmuted stones to arrowheads.

No doubt Marrin’s end-product was going to be bronze. Somewhere he had a source of the sacred tin. Copper he would have to buy – cheating, but it was most unlikely that he would ever find a vein of ore. Probably he was producing the alloy by means of his electric furnace, pending the elaboration of some more traditional method, to be occulted by oak grove, river mist or cave.

When dusk was beginning to fall the tin was flowing from the charcoal into the mould, enough for a small ingot of not more than three cubic inches. With ritual bows they set it aside to cool and solidify, and then retired to the cab of the truck to eat and drink.

I felt the presence of Nodens. I can only put the miracle down to him for I am not mischievous – at least not often. I decided to give these pagan puritans something to think about: an ingot really deserving veneration containing the protest of a happy neolithic hunter against distasteful industry. Inspired by a little chip of flint exposed at the foot of my oak, neat and thin enough to be an arrow head, though I don’t think it was one, I slid down quietly from the tree, spat on it for luck, rubbed it clean in my handkerchief and dropped it into the centre of the ingot so that it remained like a gem floating on the surface. Nodens was amused. Together we had created a myth. He is obviously a god whose divine nature it is to rejoice in the improbable. A finder of lost property could be nothing else, especially if he had stolen it in the first place.

When the two returned, their behaviour was even more exaggerated than I expected. They got the hunter’s message all right. After silent prayer they fetched a black velvet cushion from the truck and with the tongs reverently placed the ingot upon it. When the cushion naturally began to smoke, they recovered common sense and looked around for a safe high altar upon which the ingot might be placed, setting it temporarily on the flat top of the very pinnacle from which I had climbed my oak. It astounds me how the ultra pious of any religion will always choose some esoteric explanation of the otherwise inexplicable rather than ascribe it to human intervention. And that is a pity because it merely provides ammunition for those who scoff at the possibility of any unknown source of power.

The pair stood by their truck, discussing whether they should leave the ingot in the impressive position where it was or carry it back to Brother Evans. They decided on Brother Evans. Lord help the community I thought, if that pretentious fool had succeeded Marrin! The inner circle might accept him as High Priest, but I doubted if the main body of honest and innocent colonists would take his orders.

‘He’ll still be up there,’ one of them said.

I sneaked hastily back to my car and took the main road through the Forest which they, too, would have to follow unless they meant to go down to the river, which was unlikely. At a crossroads some four miles away I had a good chance of discovering where ‘up there’ was. They would turn left for Broom Lodge and right for Wigpool. If they drove straight on it would be to an unknown destination, and I dared not follow too closely.

I got away just ahead of them and parked in cover by the cross roads. They turned right. I gave them five minutes and cautiously circled Wigpool Common until I was approaching the Bailey Rock – or where I believed it to be, for the major’s report of his expedition had merely mentioned it. I could not find any good hiding place for the car and finally left it parked among others outside a Methodist chapel where some fête or committee meeting was in progress. Then I set out on foot.

Narrow lanes and open tracks seemed to lead in all directions. My chief fear was that the truck would find me, not I the truck. It was just after lighting-up time and I could only hope that the druidicals were good citizens and that the headlights of their oncoming truck would give enough warning for me to dive into the nearest ditch. I need not have bothered. This last finger of the Forest, pointing north, was so remote that I saw no wheeled vehicle whatever.

However, I did see tyre tracks when I was crossing an open field. Since they were recent and led to a spinney where there was no gate, I was interested. They could of course have been made by a farmer inspecting his fences, but he had neither returned nor driven off to either side and apparently had gone on into the spinney. In that case he must have cut the wire and replaced it. Close examination showed that he had done just that, and inefficiently – odder and odder and very unfarmerlike, unless he had gone in to haul out timber. There was no sign of that, so I climbed the barbed-wire fence – making my hard-worn trousers more disreputable than ever – and followed the tracks. They led me into a thicket of bramble and decaying pine trees, leaning or uprooted by the wind, and there was the major’s ancient Humber.

It looked very much as if Brother Evans had the same reactions as Marrin when threatened. Around the forlorn and friendly old car there was no sign of life except swooping bats. A detective no doubt would have come up with a dozen deductions, but the only one I could make was that the car must be at a safe distance from the shaft where the ‘geologists’ were prospecting with the full knowledge of the local villagers.

Prospecting for what? For gold, the major had thought at first. But that I was sure was nonsense. I myself had suggested that they were communing with spirits of the earth, which seemed to me quite a likely lunacy if there was a black lake somewhere underground. The answer now was more prosaic. They were searching for tin among the remaining pockets of iron in a mine long since deserted.

I reckoned that it was no good looking for the truck, which must have left long since if Brother Evans had been driven back to the site of the furnace to inspect and collect the fabulous ingot, so my only hope was to find the shaft, though it was nearly dark. I retraced my steps to the Bailey Rock and started again to explore the open country to the north of it, feeling that I had been too obsessed by the shadowy forest. I could find no recent heaps of spoil nor any hut. But there need not be either. A hole in a slope or low cliff would be enough. I remembered such a slope where half an hour earlier I had tripped over rusty bits of machinery overgrown by long grass. A small mine must have once been thereabouts, so I followed the foot of the slope.

I nearly walked slap into a sentry. He was sitting on a pile of pit props and away to his left was a jagged patch of black which had to be the entrance to the shaft. He heard me, but by the time he had got to his feet and started to flash a torch around I was lying flat in cover. A few sheep were sleeping not far off and I think he must have assumed that the slight noise was due to one of them, for he settled back on his pit props and lit a pipe. Working round him on lower ground, I crossed the wheel marks of traffic coming and going on a rough lane which confirmed that I was in the right place. So I crawled up the slope and made myself comfortable on the grass above the sentry, prepared to wait until something happened. As usual I was hungry, having had nothing since a breakfast of scraps in the den, but food could wait. By way of charcoal and schoolchildren I was on the scent of the golden cauldron. This was where it was, stolen by Evans and Co. before Marrin’s executors could get at it and now presiding over their futile ceremonies when it ought to be on a table in the British Museum with experts in committee around it to decide its date and provenance.

The truck returned with Evans, Raeburn and Ballard. They picked up the sentry and drove off after a short conversation which I was not near enough to overhear. A light drizzle of rain had drifted into the Forest from the Welsh mountains and under the low cloud, darkness and silence were absolute. I came down to the mouth of the shaft and walked along the passage until I was stopped by a wall of solid timbers reinforced by bands of iron, which had evidently been in place for years, presumably to keep out adventurous children. I could find no opening in the sides of the shaft offering a way round it and would have assumed that I was in the wrong place if it had not been for the scatter of pit props. Depressed by the wet mist and the difficulty of finding any concealed entrance in broken ground and thick night I gave up and tried to return to the Methodist chapel and my car. Tried, I write – for the country was like an open maze in which the shortest apparent route led nowhere and the longest way round was usually right. When I slumped into the driving seat I was tired out and damned if I was going all the way to the Chepstow car park.

I left the car on a forest track close under my hill and staggered shivering up to the den with the bag containing the tweed suit of that sane and ordinary economist, Personality No. 1. My own supplies of alcohol were finished. So was the major’s whisky. But after stripping off soaking clothes, his magnificent rug enabled me to get some tepid sleep with knees to chest. I hoped that he at least was fed and warm and dreaming of the Grail. It seemed unlikely. Remembering the Box Rock, I was obsessed by the thought of that black pool reported to be at the bottom of the workings.

In the morning I spread out No. 2 outfit to dry, though I could not see how the devil it was going to when even the midday sun hesitated to enter my safe but gloomy home. Then I drove into Chepstow and consumed an immense breakfast at the hotel. Resting in the lounge afterwards and reviewing the events of the night, the pile of pit props came to mind. I had not looked at them closely, but memory behind the eyes recalled ragged ends in all and a deep split in one. Now surely Marrin would have bought new and trustworthy props? He could well afford them and he was always thorough. The pile of props could be another of his ingenious frauds. That man ought never to have been a professional prophet. He’d have been famous as a designer of sets for the National Theatre. Under the pile, easily to be moved and rearranged, could be an entrance which by-passed the barrier.