The Mask of Destiny

by Richard Newsome

  ‘That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,’ Ruby said. She wiped a clear patch in the window where her breath had fogged it up. ‘It’s like we’re stepping back in time.’

  Mr Fry guided the helicopter in a broad sweep around the top of the castle. They gazed down on a corkscrew of narrow laneways that wound their way up from the city gates to the top of the mount. The place appeared to be deserted.

  ‘I’ll have to put down on the mainland,’ Mr Fry’s voice sounded through the intercom. ‘Too windy to risk the causeway.’

  Minutes later, Gerald, Sam and Ruby were standing on French soil, at the start of a narrow ribbon of elevated roadway that stretched into the bay—the only way onto the island. Ruby wrapped her arms across her chest, bracing herself against the chill of the sea breeze.

  ‘I’ll secure the chopper,’ Mr Fry said. ‘I understand there’s a hotel on the island. I suggest you go ahead and book some rooms there. I’ll follow shortly.’

  Gerald pulled his backpack onto his shoulders as Mr Fry started the process of tying down the chopper’s rotor blades. ‘You should go back to London,’ Gerald said. ‘Right away. Tell them I ordered you to fly around in circles to put the police off our track while we took a train to Scotland, or something.’

  Mr Fry paused in his efforts. He looked at the Archer corporate logo on the side of the helicopter—an archer at full draw set against a blazing sun. ‘Young sir,’ he said. ‘Your great aunt may have thought me worth little more than a set of teaspoons, or so it would seem from her will, but in your hour of need, the name of Fry—St John Fry—will not be doubted. I shall stay the course.’

  Fry stood tall, his broad-chested physique silhouetted against the lights of the island. Waves slapped against the side of the causeway and the wind whipped across the marshland behind them.

  ‘Wow,’ said Sam. ‘Way to go, St John.’

  The waves sent plumes of spray across the roadway as Gerald, Sam and Ruby made their way to the island. Water reached high on either side as they neared the castle gates. Gerald shifted his pack on his shoulders and stared up at the sheer stone walls that loomed over them.

  ‘I thought Beaconsfield looked creepy at night,’ he said. ‘But this is something else.’

  They ascended a ramp towards the fortified entryway, past a huge French flag snapping in the wind. Gerald suddenly realised they were in France and a jolt of excitement shot through him. They were on the hunt again. And despite everything—the accusation of murder, the escape from London—he found himself alive with the prospect of fresh adventure.

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Almost midnight,’ he said. ‘There’d better be a room at this hotel.’

  They passed through the city gates—two enormous wooden portals that looked like they’d stood sentinel over the castle for centuries—and under a portcullis, its rusted spikes pointing to the ground. A cobbled laneway wound ahead of them. It was so narrow people leaning from the high windows on either side of the street could have shaken each other by the hand. A line of street lamps, like orbs of yellow mist suspended in the air, lit the way. Finally, they saw a shingle hanging above a doorway: ‘Hôtel de St Michel’. Light filtered out through glass panels in the door.

  Gerald pushed his way inside. A bell above the door tinkled.

  A dark wooden counter filled the tiny reception area. From behind it, a man stirred. He peered at Gerald over the top of his newspaper with an eye wary of late night arrivals.

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘Uh, bonjour, monsieur,’ Ruby said.

  ‘Bonsoir, mademoiselle,’ the man replied. His eyes darted from Ruby to Gerald to Sam.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Ruby stammered. ‘Evening. Um, avezvous une chambre pour la nuit?’

  ‘You want a room?’ the man said. ‘Just the three of you?’

  ‘We’ve got a, um, guardian,’ Gerald said. ‘He’s just coming.’

  ‘He had to lock up the helicopter,’ Sam said.

  The man’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Helicopter?’ he said. ‘You came here in a helicopter?’

  Ruby flashed Sam a furious look. ‘No, of course not. How would we ever get a helicopter?’ she said.

  The man rubbed a hand down his chin. ‘I thought I heard something. Just before.’

  ‘No, no—just my brother’s idea of a joke,’ Ruby said. She leaned over the top of the counter and whispered to the man, ‘Mon frère est un imbécile.’

  The man studied Sam through his glasses then gave a nod. ‘Evidently,’ he said.

  ‘Hey!’ Sam said. ‘I understood that.’

  The man ran his finger down a ledger on the desk in front of him. ‘I have a room available,’ he said. ‘But it is not cheap.’

  Gerald pulled out his black American Express card. ‘That’s not a problem,’ he said.

  The man eyed the card narrowly. ‘From young runaways arriving late at night in helicopters, I accept cash only.’

  Gerald returned the stare then peeled off a handful of fifty-euro notes. ‘I hope this will cover breakfast too,’ he said.

  The man thumbed through the wad of cash, his eyes lighting up. ‘For this monsieur, I will lay the eggs myself.’

  Sam looked like he was about to vomit.

  The man gave them a large brass key and Gerald led the way up the narrow staircase to the fifth floor. By the time he jiggled the key into the lock and stumbled into the tiny room, he didn’t know which was feeling heavier: his legs or his eyelids.

  ‘What about Mr Fry?’ Ruby yawned, plopping down on the bed by the window. ‘Should we have got him a room as well?’

  ‘He’s big enough to look after himself,’ Sam said. He flopped onto another bed.

  ‘Do you think that guy downstairs suspected anything?’ Gerald said. He collapsed onto a couch and kicked off his shoes.

  ‘The way he was eyeing off your cash, the last thing he’s going to do is report you to the police,’ Ruby said. ‘By breakfast, he’ll be your best friend.’

  Gerald bit into his croissant and had the uncomfortable feeling that Ruby’s prediction from the night before was coming true. The old man from the hotel reception had topped up Gerald’s hot chocolate twice already and was hovering, ready to oblige, at the merest hint that Gerald needed something.

  ‘I wish he’d go away,’ Gerald said to Sam over the table in the crowded dining room. ‘He’s creeping me out.’

  ‘He’s probably hoping for an enormous tip.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, here’s a tip. Don’t overcharge for broom cupboards and call them hotel rooms. And which one of you was snoring? Sounded like someone attacking a tin roof with a chainsaw.’

  ‘That’d be Ruby,’ Sam said. ‘She’d wake the dead.’

  Ruby snapped shut a guidebook that she’d picked up from reception on the way through to breakfast. ‘You may get a chance to test that theory if you don’t be quiet. Now, if you two have finished, maybe we should concentrate on finding the casket and getting the police off Gerald’s back. Okay?’

  Gerald and Sam mumbled agreement.

  ‘According to this book, the castle is actually an abbey, an ancient church. It was built over a thousand years ago. The battlements have kept invaders out for centuries.’

  ‘So the casket could be hidden anywhere inside the town or the abbey?’ Sam said. ‘Terrific. Shouldn’t take us more than a zillion years to find it.’

  ‘Don’t be a clot,’ Ruby said. ‘Gerald, what was the name of the third son? The one who smuggled the ruby casket out of Rome?’

  ‘It was Lucius Antonius, wasn’t it? Quintus was the father. Gaius took the diamond casket to England and Marcus took the emerald one to India.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  ‘About 400AD, Professor McElderry reckoned.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Sam said.

  ‘Well, if this abbey and all its spires and walls only started construction around 1000AD, what was here when Lucius popped by on his little holiday six hundred years earlier?�
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  Sam blinked at his sister. ‘A bare rock?’

  ‘Top of the class, Poindexter. I bet Lucius hid the casket in a cave and then this lot was built on top of it.’

  ‘So how do we find it under a jillion tonnes of stonework?’ Sam asked.

  Ruby pointed to the backpack at Gerald’s feet and clicked her fingers.

  ‘What did your last slave die from?’ Gerald said as he kicked the pack across to Ruby.

  ‘Insolence,’ Ruby said. She pulled out Gerald’s sketch.

  ‘This shows the island from the bay side,’ she said. ‘See? The road back to the mainland is behind it.’

  Sam chewed on a bread roll. ‘So? Gerald drew that when he was in one of his bizarre trances. It could mean anything. Or nothing.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ruby said. ‘But Gerald’s trances always seem to point somewhere useful. I say we head out to the other side of the island and look at this exact view.’

  ‘How do we get out there?’ Gerald said. ‘We’d need a boat.’

  ‘You can walk.’ The words sliced through their conversation like a razor. ‘Some more hot chocolate, monsieur?’ The man from the reception hovered at Gerald’s elbow, a milk-stained pot in his hand.

  ‘Um, thanks,’ Gerald said. ‘That’d be great.’

  Steam fingers curled up the flow of chocolate as it poured into Gerald’s mug.

  ‘The tide is out so you can walk into the bay,’ the man said, refilling Sam and Ruby’s mugs in turn. ‘But take care. When the tide turns, it comes in at the speed of a galloping horse. And there is quicksand.’ His voice dropped. ‘It clutches at your legs like the devil himself has reached up to steal your soul and leave your bones to the gulls. People have been caught. And drowned.’

  Ruby smirked. ‘Quite the tourist trap then,’ she whispered to Gerald.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Sam. ‘Last night there were waves crashing against the walls. You couldn’t walk anywhere. We saw them from the chopper.’

  He let out a sharp yelp and grabbed at his shin.

  Ruby forced a laugh. ‘My brother and his jokes.’

  ‘Très drôle,’ the man said, without a flicker of a smile. ‘Monsieur will find that the tides here are about the largest in the world. At low tide you can walk halfway across the bay, if you are game.’ He checked the clock on the wall. ‘You have two or three hours before the water comes in again.’

  The man drifted back to the kitchen.

  Sam shot his sister a filthy glare. ‘What’d you kick me for?’

  ‘You don’t think three kids turning up after midnight is suspicious enough that you have to go on about the helicopter as well?’ Ruby said.

  ‘Speaking of which, I wonder where Mr Fry is,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Sleeping in if he’s got any sense,’ Sam said, rubbing his shin. ‘We better get moving if we’re going to beat that tide.’

  As they walked out through the reception, the old man bobbed up from behind the counter. ‘Will you be staying another night?’ he asked, one hand resting on the till, a look of hopeful greed on his face. ‘I can have the room serviced straightaway.’

  Gerald glanced at the others. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.

  ‘Your friend. Your…’ the man paused, ‘your guardian. He asked me to tell you he had to check on the car. He’ll be back later.’

  ‘Car?’ Sam said. ‘We don’t have a—’ Sam caught sight of his sister’s coiled right leg just in time to check himself.

  ‘He is not friendly, your guardian,’ the man said. ‘Not one for conversation.’

  ‘No, I guess not,’ Gerald said.

  ‘And the breakfast? It was to your liking?’

  ‘It was okay.’

  The man’s eyes darted down to his hand by the till, then back to Gerald.

  ‘It was good? Yes?’

  The telephone rang. Gerald put his hands in his pockets—and left them there. ‘We might see you later,’ Gerald said to the man, and opened the door to the narrow laneway.

  Ruby was the last one onto the street. As the door swung closed, she caught a glimpse of the man speaking on the phone. He had a sour look on his face.

  ‘Maybe you should have tipped him,’ Ruby said.

  The first of the day’s tourists were making their way up to the abbey. A monk in a flowing blue habit gave Gerald, Ruby and Sam a cheery bonjour as he walked by.

  ‘For some hot chocolate and a stale lump of bread?’

  Gerald said.

  ‘My French is pretty rusty—but when he answered that phone call, I think I heard him say something like: recompense.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I think it means reward.’

  Gerald looked through the glass of the hotel door. The old man was still on the phone, staring right back at him.

  Bare feet squelched into wet sand, sounding like a triple-headed sludge pump across the bay. Gerald sank almost to his knees and strained to extract his foot from the boggy silt to take another step.

  ‘This stuff’s like my mum’s pea soup,’ he said.

  ‘It really grabs hold of you,’ Ruby said.

  Three trails of foot holes, like mortar strikes in the tidal flats, snaked back to the island. Gerald, Sam and Ruby, their shoes hanging by knotted laces around their necks, were finding it hard going as they trudged further into the drained swamp that was the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel at low tide.

  Gerald stopped to take a bottle of water from his backpack. He sank a little deeper. ‘We’re hundreds of metres out. This must be getting close,’ he said. He took a drink and passed the bottle to Sam.

  Ruby held the sketch up. The position of the spire, the steep stone walls, the curve of the bay, the pitched roofs of the abbey and the fortified town below—it was like she was staring at a photograph taken from right where they were standing.

  ‘Well, Gerald, it’s your party,’ she said. ‘Do you recognise anything? Feel anything?’

  Gerald took the sketch in both hands and concentrated. He studied the illustration, then the real thing. There was an uncanny accuracy, even down to the swooping gulls.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not a clue. Maybe if I had the ruby.’

  Sam peered over his shoulder. ‘The only real difference is that in your drawing the tide’s in. Those waves are tossing up a fair bit of spray.’

  ‘Maybe we need to try again at high tide,’ Gerald said. ‘Find a boat and come back.’ He went to take a step but his legs were held tight in the boggy sand—he overbalanced and toppled onto his hands, sinking into silt up to his wrists.

  ‘You might not have to wait that long,’ Ruby said. ‘I think the tide is already coming in.’ She clamped her hands behind her right knee and tugged. The rising water spilled into the gaps around her legs and filled the holes with a sandy soup.

  ‘Uh oh,’ Gerald said.

  They stared out at the centre of the bay. Where just minutes before there had been a broad expanse of silt and sand baking in the late morning sun, there was now a smooth sheen of water, reflecting the sky like an enormous mirror.

  ‘I’m stuck!’ Ruby said. She heaved on her legs, grabbing at one knee and then the other. ‘I can’t move.’

  Sam took a step towards his sister, straining to get his feet above the marshy silt.

  ‘Don’t struggle,’ he said. ‘It’ll just suck you in harder. Here, grab my hand.’

  Ruby reached out and clasped her brother by the wrist.

  ‘When did you become a quicksand expert?’ she said.

  ‘Um…watching Tarzan movies,’ Sam said.

  ‘Terrific.’

  Gerald lifted himself upright and was shocked to find the water was up to his calves. ‘The guy at the hotel wasn’t kidding,’ he said. ‘This is rising fast.’

  He drove his knees to one side, then the other, trying to break the suction that gripped his legs. He threw himself down again. This time the water was almost up to his elbows. Muttering a string of curses, he strained forward and finally slid out fr
om the sand to lie face down in the water. He rolled over and edged closer to Ruby, grabbing her other hand.

  ‘Try to lie down,’ he said. ‘Then slide your legs out.’

  Gulls twisted and looped above them, their guttural cries sounding across the bay. The panic welled in Gerald’s stomach. Sam was now lying in the water too, and he yanked his sister backwards until she sat down with a splash. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘This is no time to be a princess.’

  Gerald and Sam tugged on her arms and finally Ruby’s legs slipped out. She was a sodden sandy mess.

  Gerald glanced back to Mont-Saint-Michel—about four hundred metres away. ‘We’re going to have to run,’ he said.

  They set off with a flurry of spray and silt. Gerald had seen the lifesavers running through the shallows at Bondi beach countless times, lifting their feet above the waves to escape the drag of the water. He knew he couldn’t stop or the sand would grip him again. It was sprint or sink.

  They covered the final hundred metres to the cliff as if all the hounds of hell were on their heels. Gerald collapsed onto a flat rock and sucked in huge breaths. Sam and Ruby fell either side of him. They were wet, covered in sand and exhausted. But they were safe.

  Gerald raised himself onto his elbows and gazed back at the bay. It was full of water. From sandpit to swimming pool in a matter of minutes.

  They were sitting at the end of a low promontory that jutted out a short distance from the cliff face behind them. The sandy shoreline that wrapped round that side of the island had disappeared under the rising tide. Waves pushed up either side of the rock shelf, breaking onto the base of the cliffs.

  They were getting cut off.

  ‘We need to get higher up,’ Gerald said. ‘I don’t fancy getting washed back out there again.’ They laced on their shoes and set out for higher ground.

  Thick vegetation to the left and right forced them to scramble straight towards the cliff. Far above, the walls of the town stood over them.

  ‘What do you reckon that mark on the rocks is?’ Sam said, pointing to a stain that ran along the escarpment ahead of them. ‘High water?’