I made what sense I could of it all, telling him that the commune believed in the transmigration of souls, that service to mankind in this life was what would be remembered in the next and that they trained themselves in simple crafts which could be useful at some future time when the survivors of inevitable disaster – disease, starvation or atomic pollution – had reverted to the same state as neolithic man.
To my surprise he thought there might be something in it.
‘Making a bloody mess of our world we are, Mr Colet, and that’s a fact. But what has it got to do with underwater fishing?’
‘I think you’d be on safe ground in describing Mr Marrin as a keen naturalist,’ I said, ‘but with an original point of view of his own. He was not interested in description or discovery, but what you and I and the fish have in common. All life is one and that sort of thing.’
‘Thank you very much, Mr Colet. You make it all much clearer than those poor … er, yes. And I can’t get anything very exact about the missing objects.’
‘Which of them?’ I asked, feeling that I was now accepted as a friend and confidant of the late Simeon Marrin.
‘Some small objects of gold. And according to members of the commune a golden bowl of great value. It was in a casket which was smashed.’
‘Oh, he made them. That was his hobby. He wasn’t a very experienced goldsmith but he enjoyed it. He once told me that his work had only the value of the gold.’
‘You don’t know, I suppose, where he bought it?’
I replied that I had never asked him, and then thought that I ought to try to conform to the evasive and contradictory answers which he would have got from the more credulous members of the commune.
‘I’ve heard some nonsense about mining and also that he had a process for extracting gold from sea water.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘Yes, but I believe it would cost far more to extract than its worth.’
‘So it would not be possible in his laboratory?’
‘No. If you’re thinking of all that lead, mercury and other stuff in the lab I’m pretty sure it was for experiments with alloys.’
‘Would you say it was widely known that he had so much gold on the premises?’
‘I don’t know. Not widely, I should think. But you had better ask the members of the commune that. They gave hospitality freely. It looks to me as if someone knew he had fallen out of his boat and drowned and then made a dash across country to get at the gold.’
‘He may not have been drowned, sir. It could have been a blow at the back of the skull which killed him.’
I wondered whether an autopsy could tell whether he drowned after being knocked out by the blow and falling in, or whether it came by accident while he was still just alive. There couldn’t, I think, be conclusive evidence either way after eighteen hours at the mercy of the tide and tangling with a salmon weir.
I could guess what had happened. Marrin had tumbled out of the dinghy, rigid with terror, and though the lias below Hock Cliff is softish rock there are chunks of hard stone imbedded in it. If he had crashed his head on one, that accounted for the swiftness with which the ebb had carried his body away.
‘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.
Summon the Bright Water Page 9
