The Spanish Cave

by Geoffrey Household

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT

  FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY

  The Spanish Cave

  Geoffrey Household

  To my Father

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight: Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  “WHAT’S holding it?” exclaimed Pablo Candelas, hauling on the anchor rope. “A thousand demons! What’s holding it?”

  The little fifteen-foot boat rocked as he tugged. His brown, hairy arms hauled until the gunwale was nearly level with the water; but the anchor would not come up. Pablo hoisted the mainsail and, letting out the slack of the rope, tacked back and forth over the anchor, hoping to loosen its grip on the bottom. Each time the cable tautened without giving an inch, and the boat came up into the wind with sail fluttering.

  “Keep her so, Ricardito,” said Pablo, giving up the tiller to his companion.

  He balanced himself on the locker in the bows, and filling his bare, bronzed chest with a mighty breath plunged down into the green water.

  Ricardito, otherwise Mr. Richard Garland, and usually known to his friends and elders as plain Dick, kept the boat into the wind. Hand on the tiller, he waited for Pablo to reappear. Dick was twelve. His seamanship was newly acquired, and he was always thrilled when the fisherman showed confidence in it. Pablo, after taking him up and down the coast in all kinds of weather, had seen that the wiry little foreigner could be trusted to do what he was told, and thereafter had treated him just as if he were one of the boys of his own village, who learned to sail a boat almost as soon as they could walk.

  Dick’s parents had died two years before the story begins. Then he had left his London home and sailed off on a freighter down Channel and across the long swells of the Bay of Biscay to Spain. He had chosen to live with his elder brother, Hal Garland, who was a railway surveyor in Asturias on the north coast of the Peninsula. At Villadonga, the little village which was his brother’s headquarters, he had picked up Spanish very quickly. As soon as he could speak it he was no longer lonely. The Spaniards, who are the most hospitable of people, did their best to make the boy feel at home. The men liked his courage, his frank, grey eyes, and big, humorous mouth. The women teased him because his short, tow-coloured hair was always standing on end, and behind his back said that he was “very distinguished.” All the villagers respected him; some even addressed him as Don Ricardo. They considered that he must have miraculous intelligence to speak two languages, for none of them spoke more than one.

  Dick felt the boat shiver as Pablo, deep down under the keel, wrestled with the anchor. A few seconds later, the fisherman bobbed up alongside, his hair plastered over his eyes, his long black moustache dripping water, and looking for all the world like a big, bristly, good-tempered seal.

  “Give me the knife, Ricardito,” he said.

  Dick picked up the keen knife which they used for cleaning fish, and handed it to him. Pablo stuck it in the wide, red sash at his waist.

  “Are you going to cut the rope?” asked Dick.

  “No,” answered the fisherman. “The anchor’s caught in a little thing—quite a little thing—and I want to cut the seaweed which is holding that little thing to the bottom.”

  “What is it?” Dick asked.

  “You’ll see,” said Pablo. “As the song says, the waters of the sea are vast, and no one knows what’s at the bottom.”

  Pablo went down again, and after a short stay below clambered into the boat and began to haul up the anchor.

  “Keep her steady, Ricardito!” he ordered. “We’ll stay right over this spot a while.”

  The anchor came aboard. One of the flukes was jammed in a round, white object. Pablo gently worked it free, and handed the white thing to Dick without a word. It was a human skull. Only in pictures of the pirate flag had Dick seen one before. He held it on his knees and looked at it without fear, though his heart was beating fast with excitement.

  “Can I keep it?” he asked.

  The fisherman shook his head.

  “It belongs to him who is down below,” he said.

  “Do you know who he was?” enquired Dick.

  “Might be one of many,” answered the fisherman grimly. “Give it him back, Ricardito, and let me take the tiller.”

  Dick dropped the skull overboard. The north wind heeled the boat over, and they scudded merrily along the coast towards Villadonga. Dick noticed that they had been anchored some two hundred yards off the Cave of the Angels, a natural grotto in the cliffs, and asked Pablo if many boats had been lost thereabouts; but the fisherman would not give a definite answer to any of his questions. “Maybe yes” and “maybe no” were all he would say. After a while Dick gave up trying to get information, and fell silent. He watched with a new interest the coast along which they sped. He had always been attracted by the mystery of that beautiful shore, but now it fascinated him. Perhaps it could answer the questions that Pablo would not.

  Facing the sea was a line of low, irregular cliffs, furrowed with many ledges and crannies by which, as Dick well knew, one could climb down to the water’s edge without difficulty. Standing on top of the cliffs, you seemed to be on a sea-wall, for the ground sloped gently down on the landward side, so that by going a few hundred yards away from the sea you descended almost to sea level. Here and there the wall was broken by narrow clefts up which the swell of the Atlantic boomed and thundered. Wherever it had forced a way through the cliffs, the water spread out peacefully, forming tiny coves floored with silver sand, where the bathing was perfect. Dick knew one such cove where the sea entered through a natural archway. There were many caves in the face of the cliffs, and there must have been many more hidden under the sea, for right inland were ponds of salt water fed by underground channels. The level of these ponds rose and fell with the tides, and their water bubbled and spouted mysteriously in time of storm.

  Pablo rounded a low, flat-topped island of rock, called the Cayo de la Ofrenda—Offering Key—and sailed the boat into the sandy, sunlit estuary that lay hidden behind it. Half a mile up the little river Dick saw the trees and red roofs and white walls of Villadonga, standing among green fields where fat red cows pastured all the year round. He loved that first glimpse of Villadonga. In the soft, golden light of the September evening it looked more peaceful than ever—a home made to welcome adventurers. Pablo moored the boat to an iron ring hanging from the quay, and Dick jumped ashore. He said good-bye to the fisherman in a hurry, for he was eager to tell Hal about the skull. Taking with him a basket of the rock bass they had caught, he ran up the village street towards their house.

  Dick burst into the living-room, but found that Hal had not yet come home. So he took the rock bass to Paca, their fat cook, and told her what else they had fished up from the sea.

  “Mercy on us!” exclaimed Paca, looking round the kitchen as if she expected something to jump out at her. “A skull, did you say?”

  “Yes, a real skull,” answered Dick.

  “Where were you when you found it?”

  “Off the Cave of the Angels.”

  “The Cave of the Angels!” repeated Paca, making the sign of the cross. “And what was Pablo thinking about to take you to the Cave of the Angels?”

  “We were fishing,” said Dick, “and that’s the best place for rock bass. What’s the matter with it? I’ve often climbed down to the cave. There’s nothing in it but an old saint, anyway.”

  “Now don’t
let me hear you talk like that, young man!” snapped Paca. “Get out of my kitchen at once!”

  “Oh boil yourself!” grumbled Dick in English—an expression which was quite lost on Paca; but he got out.

  There was nothing but an old saint in the Cave of the Angels; a rough statue of St. Andrew, one of the patron saints of fishermen and not a person of whom anyone ought to speak disrespectfully. All the same, Paca herself, when the kettle boiled over or the fish burned, had been heard to speak disrespectfully of any and every saint. Dick thought she had been unfair to him. Then it occurred to him that perhaps Paca had wanted to get rid of him. Perhaps, like Pablo, she didn’t want to answer questions.

  “Now I wonder just what is the matter with the Cave of the Angels,” said Dick to himself.

  He retired to his hammock in the garden, slung between an apple tree and an orange tree, and fell to wondering whether, when the oranges ripened—for he was tired of apples—he would be able to pick them without getting out of the hammock.

  In an hour’s time Hal came striding up from the village. He was twelve years older than Dick; a powerfully built young man, who loved making things with his own hands.

  Dick scrambled out of the hammock.

  “Hi, old man! Where have you been?”

  “Hello, kid!” Hal answered.

  “Why didn’t you come back before? I’ve got something to tell you. Do you know what happened to-day?”

  “More or less,” said his elder brother, grinning.

  “Oh lord, Hal!” exclaimed Dick in a disappointed voice. “You know everything!”

  “Well, let’s hear your end of the story,” said Hal.

  So Dick told him all about their fishing expedition, and what they had found.

  “How did you know, Hal?” he ended.

  “I heard a lot of gossip while I was coming up the street. They were all chattering about Deeckie and Ricardito and Don Ricardo. So I turned into the inn to get the news.”

  “What did Pablo say?” asked Dick eagerly.

  “Mighty little,” Hal answered. “Nobody said very much. Dick, they give me the impression that they just don’t want to talk about it to outsiders.”

  “That’s what I think,” said Dick. “Hal, can they have …?”

  He paused, for on second thoughts he knew that none of his beloved friends down in the village would cover up a crime. He could imagine Pablo using the long knife in his sash, but he couldn’t imagine him lying about it afterwards.

  Hal smiled, knowing what Dick had been about to say.

  “No, there’s not been a murder. You hit on the remains of some poor fellow dead long since in following the sea. There’s nothing strange about that. It happens often enough in every fishing village. But what is strange, Dick, is that they’re sort of frightened. I believe that finding the skull off the Cave of the Angels has reminded them of something.”

  “Then why don’t they say what it is?” asked Dick.

  “I don’t know,” Hal replied. “They are funny people. Maybe it has reminded them of some superstition that they are all ashamed of believing.”

  The blue smoke drifting up from the chimney, and carrying an odour of fragrant wood and delicate frying, reminded them that they were late for supper. Their house suggested generous feeding for man and beast. It was an old farmhouse with thick walls of grey stone, a roof of heavy red tiles, and an archway in the middle holding two long, clumsy country carts. On the left of the archway was the vast, stone-floored kitchen, and on the right the living-room. Over all was a second storey, surrounded by a worm-eaten wooden balcony. The house had nothing modern in it but the electric light. That Hal had provided by damming the mountain stream which ran through the garden, and making it drive a home-made waterwheel harnessed to a dynamo.

  Indignant because they had not come on time, Paca served them supper with a stern face. When Paca was stern Dick always wanted to laugh. She seemed to swell visibly. She set her lips in a hard, straight line, and her heavy, black eyebrows fairly bristled. To Hal she was very polite, saying “yes, Don Enrico,” and “no, Don Enrico,” instead of answering him back as if she were a sporting maiden aunt of his—the attitude she took when she was in a good temper. Every time Dick sniggered, she looked at him out of the corners of her eyes with an air of rebuke as if he had laughed in church.

  “Er—how beautifully you fry fish, Paca,” said Hal, trying to make peace in the family.

  “They would be better if the señores came on time,” retorted Paca, “instead of chit-chattering in the garden.”

  “Paca,” said Hal, “anything that is prepared by your unrivalled hands”—he blew them a kiss in his best Castilian manner—“is good whether we are late or not.”

  “Eh, man!” exclaimed Paca.

  She became fat and jolly again all of a sudden, winked at Dick as much as to say that she didn’t believe a word of it, and bustled out to the kitchen to return with a vast earthenware bowl of wild strawberries which she herself had picked for them on the hills.

  Whether the cause was too many strawberries or a presentiment of the ordeals to come, Dick had nightmares all night and was glad that Hal’s room was next to his own, and the door wide open between them. But he did not admit that, even to himself.

  Dick spent his mornings with the village priest, Father Juan, learning Latin and Greek. He loved to learn anything new, and so the grown-ups around him—since people are always ready to explain whatever interests them most— taught him all they could. Pablo taught him fishing, and how to sail a boat. Hal taught him how and where to camp in the wild mountains. The wine-merchant showed him how to make barrels—a very difficult art. And Doña Mariquita, who was the widow of a Spanish grandee and had a daughter of Dick’s own age, taught him to play the guitar.

  Father Juan was tall and thin and very courteous. He had a high forehead and a wide, gentle mouth. A little wart grew on his cheek, and two long white hairs sprouted from it. Dick always wondered why Father Juan did not cut them; but as a matter of fact the priest had seen them in the mirror for so many years that he had got used to them and altogether forgotten they were there. He treated all people as if they were his equals. He would talk to Dick about his troubles in the parish and to Pablo about mediæval manuscripts. They loved him because he did it so naturally; it never occurred to him that they did not know as much as he. Yet Father Juan was not a bore, for he talked in such a clear and simple way that his listeners could always grasp the subject and be interested by it too.

  That morning in the priest’s library they did, as usual, an hour’s Latin and an hour’s Greek. Then arrived the period to which Dick always looked forward; a break of quarter of an hour while Father Juan discoursed on whatever happened to be in his mind—politics or fishing or the latest news from far-off America or the history of Asturias. Dick used to lead him on, for as often as not Father Juan would seem to forget all about the third hour of lessons which was still to come.

  “Well, my son,” he would say after the hour had passed in talk, “we’ve decided whether we think that King Pelayo really drove the Moors out of Asturias or not. That is time well spent.”

  And Dick, learning all the while, would feel that he really had decided something.

  When the break came that morning, Father Juan said with a smile:

  “I suppose you’re bursting to hear all about the Cave of the Angels, Ricardito.”

  “You do know all about it, don’t you, padre?” asked Dick eagerly.

  “Not much more than you do, really,” answered the priest. “From time immemorial there has been a belief along the coast that the Cave of the Angels is in some way dangerous. I expect that one of the early Christian missionaries in Asturias gave it its name to try and make the people less afraid of it.”

  “But why should they think it dangerous?” asked Dick.

  “No reason at all that I know of. I don’t think a man or a boat has ever been lost there. But often nets and anchors have brought up bones an
d pieces of iron and old weapons. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were an undersea current setting into the cliff which sweeps up all the loose matter on the rock bottom. Do you think that’s possible, Dick? You know the coast pretty well.”

  “It might be,” answered Dick, flattered at the natural way in which Father Juan asked his opinion, “but there’s no surface current, and a ledge runs out under water from the cliff, so that the sea is only about twenty feet deep at low tide.”

  “It’s more than that right below the cave,” said Father Juan.

  “What!” exclaimed Dick. “Have you sounded it?”

  “I tried to. But in one place I couldn’t find bottom at fifty fathoms.”

  “I don’t believe even Pablo knows that,” Dick said admiringly. “What were you doing there, padre?”

  “As the humble priest of this parish,” replied Father Juan simply, “it’s my duty to find out all I can about it.”

  There and then Dick firmly made up his mind to investigate the Cave of the Angels and its surroundings for himself. But he wanted to know more of what he might meet there.

  “Father Juan, you don’t think there’s anything in what the village believes? You don’t think the cave is spooky, do you?”

  Father Juan looked him full in the face with gentle, steady eyes.

  “I know it is not,” he answered with absolute certainty. “You shouldn’t believe the old wives’ tales, Ricardito. There is nothing in all creation that a boy with a brave heart and a clear conscience need fear.”

  “Well, I don’t,” replied Dick. “I just wanted to hear you say so, though.”

  And for the rest of the hour Father Juan told him all the horrible folk-tales of Asturias, and then explained every one of them away.

  “Hm,” said Father Juan, looking at his watch. “Now that we’ve decided there are no such things as ghosts, I suppose we’d better have some lunch.”

  In the afternoon Dick went to call on Doña Mariquita. She was not in, but her daughter was. Twelve-year-old Maria de los Dolores Pelayo y Carvacal de Torrelavega, Condesa de Ribadasella, direct descendant of the very King Pelayo, who had won back Asturias for the Christians, was churning butter in the dairy. To her friends she was known as plain Lola Pelayo. The villagers called her la condesita— the little countess. Father Juan occasionally addressed her by one or all of her titles. She was a slip of a long-legged girl, as delicate as a flower on a long, wavy stalk. She had a pale ivory skin, masses of straight black hair, and dark blue eyes. She was loveliest when she was very thoughtful or very angry. At other times she looked the mischievous little imp that she was. Although she was a countess, she and her mother had hardly any money; but they lived well, for they owned three cows, some chickens, a garden full of fruit and a house that five hundred years earlier had belonged to the captain of the Count of Ribadasella’s guard.