Death on the Lizard

by Robin Paige

  Why, he’s no more an ornithologist than you are, Kate, she whispered excitedly. That’s Captain Kirk-Smythe!

  Andrew Kirk-Smythe had been serving as the Prince of Wales’s bodyguard when Kate had first met him at a house party at Easton Lodge, an occasion indelibly marked in her memory, for it was there that Charles had proposed to her. More recently, she and Charles had encountered him again in Scotland, and had learned that he had become expert in codes and ciphers and was serving in Military Intelligence.3 That Andrew was here on the Lizard, only a few miles from Marconi’s wireless research station, could not be entirely coincidental, a suspicion which Beryl seemed to share.

  Does he know Charles is here? she hissed in Kate’s ear. And why is he holding himself out as a birdwatcher? What’s his real game? But Beryl had a writer’s imagination and was often needlessly suspicious of even the most innocent motives. Whatever Andrew’s game, Kate thought, she would play along, at least for the moment, and learn as much as she could about what he was doing.

  “My apologies for mistaking you, Mr. Northrop. You reminded me of an acquaintance whom I have not seen in several years.” She turned to see that Jenna was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, and Patsy was watching curiously. “I am Lady Sheridan Sheridan, and these are my friends Lady Loveday of Penhallow and Miss Marsden.”

  With a murmured, “At your service, ladies,” Andrew executed a bow. He straightened, replaced his cap, and turned to Kate. “An accident at the wireless station, you say, Lady Sheridan?”

  “I understand that one of Marconi’s assistants was electrocuted,” Kate said cautiously, watching his face.

  If Andrew already knew about this, he didn’t reveal it. He shook his head as if in disgust. “Beastly infernal equipment, if you ask me. They say that generator produces enough electricity to run a trolley. The transmissions make a ferocious noise, too. Quite destroys the peace of the moor. I cannot but think that it is disastrous to the bird life. A Little Bustard I was keeping my eye on has quite abandoned her nest, leaving her eggs to their fate.” He turned to Jenna. “Oh, I say, Lady Loveday. Do forgive my presumption, but I only just heard of your daughter’s accident.” He bowed again. “Please accept my condolences at your terrible loss.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jenna said tonelessly.

  “Yes, terrible,” he went on. “I go frequently to French-man’s Creek, y’know, to monitor several nests there. The water looks serene, but it is quite treacherous, I fear.” He stroked his moustache, drew down his mouth, and spoke with some warmth. “It is no place for a young child, I fear—especially as the boats come from God-knows-where. There are still pirates, you know.”

  The Andrew with whom Kate was acquainted was neither insensitive nor rude, and she was puzzled and offended by this remark. Was he baiting Jenna? No, Kate didn’t think it was that, exactly, although there was something in his voice which revealed strong feeling. Perhaps Andrew was merely trying to caution Jenna, and doing it clumsily.

  Kate started to speak, but Patsy interrupted her. “I cannot believe, sir,” she said stiffly, “that you realize the insulting tone of your remark. It is not only rude and unnecessary, but—”

  “Never mind, Patsy,” Jenna said. Her face was darkly flushed. “Mr. Northrup’s caution is unkind, but I fear quite accurate. The creek is treacherous. It is no place for children. My daughter was not supposed to go there. I don’t know why she disobeyed.” Her voice broke. “I would give anything if I could have prevented it.”

  “I do apologize if I have offended, Lady Loveday.” There was real contrition in Andrew’s voice, and although Kate could not quite make out his expression, his eyes seemed to linger on Jenna’s face longer than was polite. “That was certainly not my intention, I assure you.” He put out his hand and took the card he had given to Kate, which she was still holding. “I am staying at the Oysterman’s Arms,” he added, scribbling quickly, “should someone wish to contact me.” He put his cap back on his head. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I will be on my way. Lady Loveday, your pardon, I implore you. I am a cad.” And with that he was gone.

  “Well, that is God’s truth!” Patsy cried, stamping her foot. “What a rude, horrid man! And what an appalling cheek!”

  Kate pocketed Andrew’s card without looking at it, not wanting to attract the others’ attention. “I wonder what he meant by that remark about boats in the creek,” she said, as much to herself as to the others.

  Indeed, Beryl said wonderingly. What could he mean? It seems such a strange thing to say. And that look he gave her. Why, it’s as if he’s half in love with her!

  “Birdwatchers are often rather strange, aren’t they?” Jenna said, with a gesture which seemed to make light of the episode. But her voice had gone thin and reedy, and Kate heard something in it that she could not quite identify. Was it . . . was it apprehension? She looked more closely and saw that the hand that Jenna put up to brush the hair out of her eyes was trembling.

  “I think it is time we started back,” Patsy said cheerfully. A breeze had sprung up and the fog thickened, and she glanced at the gray sky. “Do you think it might rain? I for one am looking forward to a nice cup of tea when we return to the manor. Aren’t you, Kate?”

  Patsy linked her arm in Jenna’s and drew her away down the path. Kate pulled her shawl more tightly around her and hurried to keep up with them. The three walked back to Penhallow in a gay and spirited conversation, avoiding any mention of Frenchman’s Creek and the rude, horrid stranger they had encountered in the churchyard.

  But while Kate kept up her end of the conversation, Beryl was mulling over what had just happened and wondering what sort of plot might lie behind it. Andrew Kirk-Smythe would not be here on the Lizard, in disguise, unless he had a mission of some sort. Was he on government business? Did his presence have anything to do with Charles’s visit to the Lizard? Was this something Charles should know about?

  And what was the reason behind Andrew’s remark— for Beryl felt sure there was one—about the boats on French-man’s Creek? Pirates were a thing of the past, weren’t they? Or were they?

  By the time Kate and Beryl got back to Penhallow and warmed themselves with a cup of hot tea, Beryl was already deep in an intricate plot involving a seventeenth-century lady, a handsome, devil-may-care pirate, and a small wooden schooner with its sails furled, riding at easy anchor in French-man’s Creek.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Everyone tells me exactly what they have done wrong; and that without knowing it themselves,” said Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid. “So there is no use trying to hide anything from me.”

  “I did not know there was any harm in it,” said Tom.

  “Then you know now. People continually say that to me: but I tell them, if you don’t know that fire burns, that is no reason that it should not burn you. . . . The lobster did not know that there was any harm in getting into the lobster pot; but it caught him all the same.”

  The Water Babies, 1863

  Charles Kingsley

  If Kate and the others had turned as they left the churchyard, they might have seen a small red-haired girl in a blue dress and white pinafore slipping through the trees behind them. And if Beryl had seen her, she would have undoubtedly cried out, Look, Kate! A fairy!

  But the girl, whose name was Alice, might not have been seen at all, for she was pretending that she was invisible. And perhaps she was, for she had seen everything and heard almost everything which went on in the churchyard that morning, and no one at all was the wiser. Alice had watched from the vantage point of the church belfry, where she went each day to feed the pigeons and play at being a pirate’s lookout, stationed at the very top of a pitching, plunging mast, with the wavetops whipping white frothy spume in the Channel seas far below and the wind such a fine, fresh gale in her face that it nearly hurled her from her post and into the violent water, which would have been a very great adventure, Alice considered, without giving a great deal of thought to the consequences.

&
nbsp; It had been an interesting morning even before the arrival of the grown-ups, for there had been a surprise among Alice’s pigeons—a new bird, one which Alice had not seen before, although she thought she knew where it came from. Her usual flock, the ones who met her there most mornings to take the grain from her hand, were all gray-blue, with beaks like gold scimitars and feather capes of iridescent green and purple. This bird was a soft tawny brown brushed with silver, like moor grass in a December frost. Its eyes were rubies and its legs were coral and its wings had been dipped in chocolate. It refused to eat out of Alice’s hand like the others, but when she scattered the grain on the dusty floor, it flapped down from its perch in the rafters and strutted, hungry and hopeful, toward the feast.

  Alice crouched down, peering. To one coral leg was attached a metal band and a tiny metal canister. She took hold of the bird, which made a soft sound in its throat but did not struggle, and managed to detach the canister from the band. Then she set the bird on its feet again and pulled out a fragment of flimsy paper. Something was written on it, very small, and not in any words Alice could read, although she prided herself on being able to read very well, better than Harriet, even.

  She frowned down at it impatiently. What was the use in going to all the bother of writing something if you couldn’t spell a single word right? She wadded up the paper into a tight little ball and thrust it into her pocket. The bird gobbled as much grain as it could hold, and then, with a flurry of chocolate-dipped wings and a soft coo which sounded like goodbye, flew out of the belfry and away, toward Frenchman’s Creek.

  Alice watched the pigeon fly away, thinking about it. She kept on thinking about it until she heard voices and looked down and saw Harriet’s mother and the two ladies who had arrived at Penhallow the previous afternoon. Lady Loveday was carrying her usual basket of roses, and Alice felt the way she always did when she saw Harriet’s mother: desperately sad and guilty and full of regret for what had happened and for her own part in it—although, she reminded herself again, it hadn’t been her fault. The whole thing had been Harriet’s idea, hadn’t it? and all she had done was to go along. Alice wriggled her mouth and said the sentence again, whispering it sternly to herself, “The whole thing was Harriet’s idea, and all I did was to go along.” But her disclaimer of responsibility did not ease her guilt, and she was sure that it wouldn’t appease Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, a stern character in her favorite book, The Water Babies. Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid knew what everyone had done before they even thought of doing it and was ready to hold them all entirely accountable.

  Today, it seemed that Lady Loveday had come to show Harriet’s new monument to her friends, for there she stood in the path, pointing it out. Alice’s mouth curled with a cynical sort of amusement at the thought of what Harriet herself would say to that ridiculous stone angel, flinging its stone pleadings into the empty face of the sky.

  Alice, like Harriet, did not believe in God, or angels, or prayers. She believed in birds on the wide, wild moor; and oak trees older than any human, even a Druid, could possibly know; and the lovely storms which raged and roared around Granny Godden’s cottage in the long, black winter nights, while Alice curled up in her attic bed with a stolen stub of candle and the ragged copy of Treasure Island Harriet had lent her. God, Harriet had said scornfully, was only make-believe and prayers were a lot of empty words. Harriet was so positively negative that Alice had not found a reason to doubt her friend’s declaration of unbelief.

  Which only made it more difficult, of course. If Alice had believed in God, she might have taken some comfort from the thought that He had whisked Harriet off to the beautiful place that the vicar mumbled about in Sunday sermon, where she would no doubt discover Smutty, the dear old black cat who had died in the shed last winter and whom they had buried under the gooseberry bushes. And that ill-tempered boy who had fallen off the cliff and broke his head on the rocks—although perhaps he wouldn’t go to heaven, but to the other place, for in Alice’s opinion, he had been truly beastly.

  As it was, there was scarcely a shred of comfort, for Alice, who was a practical child, could plainly see that even if Harriet had wanted to rise up, she would be weighted down by that wretched marble slab installed on top of her. So Alice swallowed her loss as best she could, and eased the pain a little by imagining that Harriet (like Tom the chimney sweep in The Water Babies), had become amphibious and lived on in the water where she had drowned. And Alice scattered blossoms on the water of Frenchman’s Creek, and in the grass around Harriet’s grave, and sometimes tiny shells and bird feathers, and she had even brought back the doll, although Harriet hadn’t much liked it. Treasure Island was another matter altogether. Alice had no intention of returning it.

  At that moment, the fair-haired man strode around the corner of the church and surprised the three ladies, to whom he was obviously a stranger. He was no stranger to Alice, of course, for she had seen him more than once down by Frenchman’s Creek with his field glasses, watching the boat moored there. In fact, he had been there again yesterday, when Harriet’s mother went to the boat. Alice knew this, for she had seen all three of them: the man with the field glasses, who kept himself well hidden behind the large oak tree on the other side of the creek; and Lady Loveday, who had run to climb into the boat; and the man with the white yachting cap who had put his arms around her and held her for a long time.

  There were moments, like now, when Alice missed Harriet a very great deal, for she had been clever in ways that Alice was not, and immediately guessed things which Alice had to puzzle over for quite a long time. Harriet would have been able to guess in a flash why her mother’s face had turned a dark, dull red when the man with the field glasses spoke to her reproachfully just now—Alice hadn’t quite been able to hear what he said—and why her voice had been so thin and trembly when she replied. Harriet had known why her mother went to the boat, although when Alice asked, she had pressed her lips together in a thin line and said she didn’t want to discuss it. Alice hadn’t pressed, for although the two of them had shared a great many secrets, they both knew that there were some things which were too secret to be talked about. The boat, and the man in it, was certainly one of them.

  After a few minutes, the fair-haired man bowed and walked on, and the three ladies began to make their way back up the path toward the manor. Alice said goodbye to the pigeons. They clucked to her softly, and ducked their gray heads, and the boldest flew down to retrieve the last bit of grain she had thrown on the floor. And then she lifted the trap door and climbed swiftly down the belfry ladder, and ran along the path, hunched nearly double, ducking behind first one headstone and then another.

  For now, of course, she was no longer a lookout posted high on the mast of a pirate ship, but Jim Hawkins, trailing Ben Gunn across the empty beaches of Treasure Island.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  We had an electric phenomenon [at the Lizard station]—it was like a terrific clap of thunder over the top of the masts when every stay sparked to earth in spite of the insulated breaks. This caused the horses to stampede and the men to leave in great haste.

  From the diary of George Kemp,

  Marconi assistant, 9 August, 1901

  Early on Thursday morning, following the hotel clerk’s directions, Charles Sheridan located King’s Chemist Shop on Mullion High Street, then turned and walked down a narrow alley between two white-painted buildings, and went round the back into a cobbled yard. A sign on the wall announced, in large green letters, that he had reached the office of the Devon-Cornwall Constabulary, Thomas Deane, Constable. A red bicycle with wire baskets fore and aft was leaning against the wall beneath the sign and a wire-haired terrier was sleeping beside it.

  Charles rapped lightly on a half-open door. At a man’s shouted “Come in!” he pus
hed it wide and stepped inside.

  The constable’s office was a small, windowless room, stone-walled and stone-floored and chilly, although the morning air was mild. The constable himself was a tall, rangy man in his mid-forties, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his blue serge uniform jacket slung over a nearby chair. With a reading glass and an air of focussed intensity, Deane was studying an Ordnance Survey map spread out on the table in front of him.

  “Good morning, sir.” He straightened and put down the glass. “What can I do for you?”

  Charles introduced himself and explained his errand.

  “Bad business, that,” the constable said, shaking his head. “Very bad business.” He took his jacket off the chair and motioned to Charles to be seated. “Near as I could tell, poor chap fell into the works.” He shrugged into the jacket. “Got a fatal jolt of current.”

  “So it seems,” Charles said, taking the chair. The terrier stood in the door, yawned, scratched, and came to lie down on the rug spread for him in one corner. “When is the inquest?”

  The constable glanced at the clock on the wall above the terrier. “In about an hour, in the school. You’ll be attending, will you?”

  “Yes,” Charles said. He removed his hat, put it on the floor, and took his pipe out of his jacket pocket. “I wonder—did your investigation of the accident happen to take you to the Marconi office in the Poldhu Hotel?”

  “The office?” Deane rolled up the map and stood it in a corner. “Why, no. I kept to the transmitter building itself, where the accident occurred. Not much to see, of course. The body spoke for itself, I’m afraid. One flash, and that was it. The best which can be said is that it must’ve been a quick death.” There was a tea kettle on a gas ring on a nearby shelf, and he turned on the flame. “About the office—why do you ask?”