A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (31 page)

“They’re just kids,” I said to Alfred. “Can’t you have them do community service or something?”

Alfred grinned. “I sure can,” he said. “Any time you need an army of workers, you just let me know.”

S
o everyone got back into their cars—the cops and “warriors” driving off together—and that left me, Jeremy, Trevor and Rollo in our car. For a few moments we drove in silence.

“Jeremy, old boy,” Rollo said suddenly. “Damned sporting of you to raise the cash and come out here tonight. I’ll probably never hear the end of it from Mum.”

Under the circumstances, we thought it best not to tell Rollo about Great-Aunt Dorothy’s refusal to pay her own son’s ransom. Jeremy just mumbled, “Don’t mention it.”

“Rollo,” I said after a moment. “What was it that you discovered about the case and wanted to tell us? Did it have to do with these kids?”

Rollo shook his head vigorously. “No, no. It’s about that rocking-horse.”

“Did you sit on it?” Jeremy could not resist asking.

Rollo coughed, embarrassed. “Always wanted one when I was a boy. Bad idea to give it a gallop, obviously. Damned thing buckled, and I can tell you, it would have been unsafe for anybody. It’s just too old, I suppose. Dry as kindling wood. Anyway, I found something odd twisted up inside the handle when it fell off.”

He thought for a moment as if trying to recall where he’d put it; then he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a piece of yellowed, lined paper that was all curled up in a narrow roll. Rollo flattened it on his knee to smooth it out, so that I could read it.

At once, I recognized the paper and the handwriting. It was Great-Aunt Penelope’s childhood scrawl, and the page looked as if it had been torn out of the notebook of her Explorers’ Club minutes.

“Extraordinary thing,” he said, handing it to me. “Signed by Beryl, Aunt Pen, and my father . . . and some bloke named Basil!”

I leaned forward in the dim light and squinted at the page. It said:

All around the poem were more of Great-Aunt Penelope’s funny little doodles. But now, all those swirls, whorls, and spirals looked familiar for another reason.

“Jeremy!” I exclaimed. “Look at these drawings on this page— don’t they look a lot like the illustration that Paloma drew of the Scarlet Knot?”

Jeremy glanced over at it. “Yeah, they do,” he agreed.

My mind was reeling suddenly, because words and images that had been fragments in this case were now coming together like bits of a jigsaw puzzle. “Could it be that Aunt Pen’s ‘magic stone’ and Paloma’s Scarlet Knot are one in the same? Did the kids’ club find the ring?”

Rollo had been scrutinizing the signatures. “Who the bloody hell is this Basil Parnell?” he asked. “They call him the ‘keeper of the stone’.”

Jeremy pondered this, then said, “Obviously some friend of theirs. I wonder if he’s still alive.” He picked up his phone and called for information.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “He can’t still be here. I mean, we’re talking about a little boy from the 1920s. Why, by now he’d have to be . . .”

“In his mid-nineties,” Jeremy said briskly. After a few moments fiddling with his mobile over the information, he said, “Well, if the guy is still around, he’s either not listed or doesn’t have a phone.”

“Shannon and Geoff know every local on the coast,” I suggested, and I phoned them, knowing they’d be awake because of Shannon’s younger brother being involved in all this. I had to waste precious time going over the whole kidnapping with Shannon because by now she’d heard the news and wanted to know how Rollo was doing. Finally I asked about Basil Parnell.

“Basil? Oh, sure,” Shannon said easily. “He’s lived here all his life. His family’s been around for ages. They’re all fishermen. He’s the last of them. He lives all alone in a shack by the sea.” She gave me directions, which I relayed to Jeremy.

“It’s nearly midnight. Let’s go there first thing tomorrow morning,” Jeremy said.

“Do me a favor, old boy?” Rollo asked. “Drop me off at my car back at the farm, will you? I’m going to drive straight to London tonight. I’ve had all the excitement I can take. And I hope I never see Cornwall again!”

Now, as I’ve said before, there are cottages and there are cottages. Basil Parnell’s home really
was
what you’d think of as a genuine, fairy-tale cottage—the kind a little elf would live in. In fact, with its weather-beaten brown roof and its greyish-white-shingled sides, it looked more like a mushroom that had sprouted up in a sandy patch between the rocks of the cove.

This was not a cottage-by-the-beach; it was a cottage
on
the beach, just beyond the horseshoe-shaped rock near Grandmother Beryl’s cove. It was so close to the sea that Jeremy and I could barely hear each other speak over the roar of the crashing waves as we approached the front door the next morning.

We knocked, but I didn’t see how anyone inside or out could hear us above the cacophony of ocean, gulls and wind. Yet neither one of us wanted to just walk right in. We stood there uncertainly, until I saw the stooped figure of an old man on the beach making his way toward us along the shore.

He seemed to appear right out of the mists, having just come round the bend. He moved with slow, deliberate steps, and he wore a fisherman’s hat and sweater, with his pants’ legs rolled up, so that the waves that rushed toward him and away again didn’t soak him.

As he drew nearer, I observed that he had a long white beard, and long white hair that hung down his back. He was carrying a bag made of fisherman’s netting, which had shiny silver-backed fish inside. When he saw me, he smiled and revealed that he had several teeth missing.

“Penelope?” he shouted above the roar of the sea. “You can’t be Penelope, can ye?”

“My great-aunt was Penelope Laidley,” I shouted back at him. He put a hand to his ear and shook his head. I leaned closer and called out, “Are you the Keeper of the Stone?”

He looked up at me sharply, then at Jeremy. Slowly, he walked into his house. Jeremy and I glanced at each other, and followed him in. He didn’t tell us not to. He just went up to a small, chunky wood table and started to clean his fish.

The cottage was basically one big room that appeared to serve as parlor, bedroom and kitchen, for it had a bed, a rockingchair and a table with a lamp in one corner; while the opposite corner was occupied mainly by a sink, a cupboard, table and an icebox. In between stood a black wood-burning stove, which had a kettle on top. From the bedroom area was a partial view of a curtained alcove containing a closet-sized cubbyhole with a tiny bathroom.

“Basil,” Jeremy said, “you do know what we’re talking about, don’t you?”

Basil looked up, then went back to his fish. “I’m an old man,” he said finally. “I forget lots of things, all the time.”

“Come on, Basil,” I coaxed. “We know you know.”

He looked me in the eye now. “You be always full of tricks,” he said sulkily. “You trying to trick me again?” He sounded plaintive, like one kid afraid of the wrath of another. “You know I wouldn’t tell. You made me swear. In blood.”

“He thinks you’re Aunt Pen,” Jeremy murmured to me out of the corner of his mouth.

I saw with a pang of amused sympathy that Basil, after all these years, was still afraid of breaking the blood oath of the little Explorers’ Club. I tried to think of what Great-Aunt Penelope would have sounded like as a kid.

“Oh, stop being such a baby. I’m not trying to trick you,” I said in my best imitation of a formidable, bossy English girl. “I only want my friend Jeremy to see it. I’m going to let him join our club. So come on. Where is the stone?”

The knife that was scraping the scales off the fish and slicing through the silver skin stopped suddenly. Basil looked at me keenly now, as if trying to make up his mind. Slowly, he put down his knife on the table. He went to his little sink and washed his hands, and dried them carefully on the worn-out towel that looked as if it had hung there since the beginning of time.

Then he turned slowly to face us, and reached into the pocket of his trousers, which were baggy on his wiry frame. He held out his hand in a fist. But he didn’t open it yet.

“You won’t tell the Lady that I took it, will ye?” he asked plaintively. “She be a ghost bride. She walked in the cave and put it there. Her gown be all wet. She went away and never come back.”

I glanced at Jeremy, who just shrugged. “No, I won’t tell the Lady that you took it,” I said.

Basil studied my face closely, then, quite suddenly, he opened his fist.

But what lay there was not a ring. Nope. It was a doughnutshaped stone with a reddish bump at the top like a knot. I recognized it instantly from the picture in the magazine for Paloma’s interview. But what I hadn’t realized was that when Paloma said “stone” she did not mean “gem”, she meant “rock”. I knew this was right, however, because the ring-like “band” of this stone had all those swirls, whorls and spirals carved right into it, just the way Paloma had sketched it, only these were all blackened now, and weirdly fascinating to behold.

“The Scarlet Knot,” I breathed. I looked at Basil and said, “You found it in a cave?”

When he nodded, I said, “Let’s go back there where you first saw it. Can you lead the way?”

“G’wan. You know,” Basil said cagily, putting the stone back in his pocket. “I showed it to you the day I found it. That’s why you let me join your club. You told me to hold on to this stone, till you came back again.”

And he told us that when Great-Aunt Penelope, Grandmother Beryl and Great-Uncle Roland returned to school in London that autumn, they swore Basil to secrecy before making him the “Keeper of the Stone”. And then, as kids do, they all moved on to other pursuits in the next summers . . . chiefly romantic interests in little picnicking and kissing parties.

“Been a long time. Thought I’d never see you again,” Basil said, charmingly shy. I think he must have been a little in love with Great-Aunt Penelope. He hesitated. “I like the stone. It be lucky for me.”

“Basil, please take me to the cave,” I said. “I forgot the way there. And I want to show it to my friend. You can tell him the whole story of how you found it.”

Basil had finished with his fish, and now he put it on a plate and into the tiny icebox. Then he sighed and took the fisherman’s hooded rain-jacket from a peg on the wall. He slowly, methodically pulled on a pair of rubber boots. Then he picked up a flashlight and gestured for us to follow him outside.

“I thought you be the smugglers at first,” Basil confided as we walked along. “They war bad men.”

“What’s he talking about?” I muttered to Jeremy.

“Maybe he thinks I’m Blackstrap Doyle,” Jeremy grumbled.

“The Great Lady war walking on the beach in her fine white gown here,” Basil told us, having to shout above the roar of the ocean as he directed us along the jagged shoreline beyond his cottage.

With a sure-footed gait, Basil showed us how to get around the craggy rocks that we waded past, splashing knee-deep in the sea, where pockets of water, left behind by the tide, collected in large, deep puddles and ponds that the locals call “rock pools”.

I was wearing my little plastic beach shoes today, but I still had to move slowly to avoid slipping. Jeremy climbed ahead of me, then turned back to help me make my way across the slippery rocks, until we reached the next beach, which was more pebbly than sandy.

After this, the beach narrowed considerably, up against sheer cliffs and caves. The wind blew hard and noisily now, and the sea came banging in against the rocks, leaving behind a thick white mist like a little fog-cloud who’d wandered too close to earth. Just around the corner, I could see the earl’s headland thrust out over the sea, but the manor house was shrouded in fog.

Basil had already stopped. We were in an area of steep, formidable cliffs that towered over us. Basil squinted out to sea, and, following his gaze, I saw that about twenty feet from the shoreline there was a big, jagged black rock, sticking up out of the swirling tide and resembling, to my mind, a gigantic Hershey chocolate kiss.

This rock seemed to be a marker to Basil, for he suddenly veered left now, and approached a cleft in the cliff wall, which I would not have noticed on my own. This opening in the cliffs was like a narrow, six-foot-tall keyhole. Basil fished around in the voluminous pockets of his seaman’s oilskin rain-slicker, and came up with his high-powered flashlight.

“She war in thar,” he said, beaming the light inside to show us that we were at the mouth of a cave. We squinted to look in. But already it was flooded with seawater.

“Her dress be all wet,” Basil said matter-of-factly. “She be the ghost bride.” He backed away from the cave opening, then glided toward it as if in a trance, to mimic the Great Lady’s actions.

I could picture it vividly now; Paloma walking on the beach, dragging her wet dress across the shore, hence the myth of the ghostly “bedraggled bride”.

“She left the stone in the cave?” I asked quizzically.

He nodded. “But she war afraid of the tide coming in,” Basil said.

Jeremy looked at Basil keenly now. “Did she see you when you were watching her?” he asked.

Basil actually blushed. “I be behind the rocks,” he admitted.