Cry of a Seagull (10 page)

Alan bent and whispered something that Rose could not hear over the tumult of rain and wind. But as a disembodied watcher, she was close enough to see that the horse raised his head slightly. His eyes opened wider for a moment and brightened with a message of life that passed between him and the boy. Then the light went out and the noble head sank into the mud.

With a cry of despair, Alan stood up and ran towards the doomed buildings. Someone thrust a small child and a tiny lamb into his arms, and he climbed with the few remaining people up the side of the valley, away from the relentless flood waters.

At the top, he turned away from the straggling crowd of peasants and crying children and cows and pigs and goats. As Rose looked back with him, seeing what he saw, she could hear through the wind the melody of the beautiful lament, ‘Death of a Hero'.

The stream over which Favour had made his last triumphant leap was now one with the surging river. It had risen over the horse's hindquarters and was reaching to his shoulders. He lay there with the water washing over him, like the brown donkey lying at the edge of the sea.

‘The water, the water …' Rose gasped. She woke in tears, not knowing where she was.

‘Rose,' Mr Vingo said gently, and she was back in the room, crying, her hands clutching the edge of the bed.

‘You are deeply affected by the music.' Frank Foley bent forward to look at her curiously. ‘I'm not surprised. I found it wonderfully moving.'

‘Sorry.' Rose wiped her eyes and shook back her hair. ‘It's just that I …' she stammered, still dizzy from the impact of what she had seen. ‘Mr Vingo told me – I mean, I know some of the story, so I …'

‘Are you all right?'

She nodded, not looking at him.

Mr Vingo gave her a vast clean handkerchief, and poured out orange squash for everybody, to give her a chance to recover.

‘It's spectacular music for what is certainly a very dramatic story,' the librarian said. ‘The water flooded everything. The little houses of the settlement were swept away, the fishing boats were swamped, and foundered. Later, it seems, there was a landslide higher up the valley, which dammed the waters of the river into a lake – what they now call Noah's Bowl. The villagers camped for a while on higher ground, and then, because they were fishermen as well as farmers, they travelled west and eventually settled near the bay. They called their new home Newcome, because they were newly come there.'

‘How do you know all this?' Rose asked.

‘There are a few ancient records, fortunately, otherwise we wouldn't know anything about that primitive little settlement in the valley below the castle.'

But Rose knew. From the jutting rock where Favour had so often waited for her, she had seen the huddle of houses and barns, and the tiny white boats at anchor far below.

‘As the water receded below the lake,' the librarian went on, ‘it left a broad marsh where the river mouth and the harbour used to be, farther east of here, along the coast, beyond the headland of Sandy Neck. It's a bird sanctuary now, although they say that at dead low tide you can sometimes still see a small part of the rocks that once formed the harbour wall.'

‘Ben?'

‘Mm-hm.'

Ben was sitting on the side of his dinghy, which was pulled up on the beach, unravelling some fishing line and whistling.

‘Remember when you said …' She paused.

‘Said what?'

‘Said you'd take me out in the boat and show me how to run it, and I couldn't come then, because I—' She had forgotten what reason she had made up.

‘When do you want to go?' Ben looked up and smiled.

‘Tomorrow, could we? Just you and me. Not fishing. There's something I want to explore.' She told him what Frank Foley had said about the marsh and the traces of the old fishing harbour. She did not tell him the reason she desperately needed to go there, which was because of the donkey. The horse would give her clues, Mr Vingo had reminded her. Her dream of Favour's death, and the conversation with the librarian afterwards – these could be clues to where the donkey was, or rather where he would be when the scene with the gang and the boat had actually happened, and he was forced to swim for the shore.

Seeing the vision on the cinema screen of the donkey collapsing exhausted at the edge of the sea, and then seeing, with Alan, the body of the horse with the water over him – these
two things were connected, and must be meant to tell her something.

Perhaps the beach where the donkey was going to be stranded was somewhere near the old harbour.

The tide was going out when they set off. Rose brought biscuits and apples. Ben brought binoculars in case they could not get the boat close enough into the shore to see anything.

The Kellys' little dinghy was pulled up on the beach, tied to a stake by the breakwater along with some other small boats. Ben put the oars and rowlocks into the dinghy, and he and Rose pulled it down to the sea.

‘Want to row out?' Ben asked.

‘No thanks.' Rose wasn't very good at rowing. No sense making a fool of herself right at the beginning of the trip.

‘Get in the bow then, so you can tie her up to the mooring.'

Ben pushed off the dinghy, wading in the water up to the bottom of his shorts, and got in himself. Rose sat happily on the small seat in the bow and admired his muscular back as he rowed her the thirty or so yards out to where the Kellys' boat, a flat-bottomed fibreglass whaler, was moored with several others in the sheltered corner between Long Beach and the promontory of Sandy Neck.

She tied the painter of the dinghy to a cleat on the stern of the handsome blue and white whaler. Then she and Ben got into the larger boat, and he showed her how to put its mooring rope through a fairlead and wind it round two other cleats, and pull the round buoy aboard.

When Ben had checked the petrol guage and started the engine, Rose uncleated the dinghy painter and tied it to a ring on the buoy, then untied the whaler's rope and threw the buoy back in the sea. Ben pushed the throttle lever slightly forward to engage the gear, then farther, and they shot away through the calm sea. In a short space of time, they had left far behind the little tubby dinghy and the round white buoy with its bobbing pole.

The sun was in their faces and there was almost no wind. Rose sat happily in the stern, but Ben told her to come and sit
by the wheel in the middle of the boat. She had steered a car on a moorland track with her father, but this was very different. When you turned the wheel, the boat did not respond immediately, and when it did, it turned too far, unless you compensated at once by turning it the other way.

‘Put some starboard wheel on,' Ben said when the bow swung to port. ‘Whoops – don't go in circles. Take it off and correct it back to a straight course.'

Rose was tense, gripping the wheel and trying too hard, but after a while she began to relax.

‘Relaxing makes it easy,' Ben said. ‘You're doing fine.'

‘I love it!' The speed through the water was exhilarating. The sea was fairly calm, the sun was warm, the flat-bottomed boat slapped over the small waves. Rose felt that her face was one huge grin, the corners of her mouth blown backwards by the wind and the salt spray.

Beside her, Ben looked like that too.

‘Let's just go on and on like this out to sea for ever and ever!' she called to him.

He laughed. ‘I thought you wanted to go round the headland. Come on, we've got to think about changing our course.'

They were beyond the end of Sandy Neck, and could see part of the shoreline on the other side. ‘See those three dead trees? If you line up the middle one with that water tower farther away, that should bring you round the point well away from the rocks.'

They were out in the open sea now, and as she turned the wheel, Rose could see on her left the treacherous rocks beyond the end of the point, and the disorganized sea tumbling and foaming round them.

‘It's all right like this when you can see them,' Ben said, ‘but they're almost submerged at half tide, and it can be hellish rough out here when the wind and current are wrong. Pity it's so calm now – put a port wheel on, Rose, that's it, keep your eye on the tree and the tower – makes it too easy for you.'

‘If it wasn't easy, I probably couldn't do it,' Rose said.

‘Shut up. You can do anything.'

She looked at him. Did he really think so?

‘Don't run yourself down,' he said. ‘Don't be like those stupid girls who squirm and make baby faces and go, “I'm hopeless!'”

‘
Do
they?' Rose was fascinated by this glimpse of Ben's other life.

‘They think it's cute, but it's boring,' he said, and they laughed and shouted, ‘Boring! Boring! Boring!' together into the wind.

Rose was so happy that she had to bring herself back with a jerk to remember why she had come on this trip, and what it was for.

Safely round the broad headland, they turned towards the land and ran along fairly close to the shore, eating apples and looking for the opening of the marsh. They passed a few inlets and rocky clefts, but nothing that seemed like the place where Rose had seen the vision of the donkey lying at the edge of the sea. She stood up, holding the wheel, and strained her eyes to see something that might look familiar. Ben was using the binoculars, and at last he saw the flat, greener patch that looked like marshland.

‘Bird sanctuary,' he said. ‘I know that place. Dad and I have anchored off it to fish. Makes the seabirds furious. They come and dive round your head, either looking for fish and bait in the boat, or because we're on their fishing ground. Go in a bit closer and let's have a look. Take it easy. It may be shallow, and Dad will have a fit if we scrape the propeller.'

So this was the estuary where once the little farming colony and the fishing village had been. The landscape was so changed from what Rose had seen, looking down the valley from the landward side, that she would not have known it was the same place. You would never know there had been a river here, and houses and people and their animals, and boats in a harbour. The marsh was a flat wilderness, the land and water intermingled. Flocks of birds rose from it together, wheeled in formation and settled by joint consent. Seabirds poked about in the mud, or rocked complacently on
the water. As Ben took the wheel to bring the boat as close in as he dared, a cloud of gulls rose raucously into the air and swooped in circles and glided on long currents of air, screaming their opinion.

Rose scanned the coast with the binoculars. She adjusted them to a fine focus, and on the left, a darker patch of sea resolved itself into the flat top of a rock, rising and falling in the movement of the waves.

Ben stopped the boat and took the glasses. The boat drifted, so he went to a locker in the stern and threw out a small anchor attached to a fixed rope. Soon, with his acute sight, he spotted what he swore was an iron ring embedded in the top of the rock.

‘This must be the place.' He gave the glasses to Rose. ‘Look, that was where boats were tied, all those hundreds of years ago. That's fabulous, to think of all the things that must have happened here. People sailing back from explorations, pirates, smugglers stealing in at night, people out on the harbour wall to see the fishermen coming back after a storm. Well, we've proved it all, haven't we, Rose?'

But they had not proved what Rose needed to know. There was nothing here that was anything like the beach she was looking for. She felt depressed and disappointed. When Ben asked, ‘Want to take her back?' she only said, ‘All right.'

Ben backed the boat to slacken the line and hauled in the anchor. The sun had disappeared and the waves had increased with the rising wind. Ben showed Rose how to steer into an oncoming wave at an angle, so that it wouldn't swamp the boat, or knock it sideways. It was more of a challenge, but Rose's heart was not in it. When Ben took the wheel to get them back round the rocky headland, she was quite relieved.

She went to sit in the bow of the boat, soaked and salty, but the wind could not blow her mind free of her heavy thoughts.

‘Come on, Rosie, you take her in.'

She managed so competently to put the boat in reverse and slow it down at the right time to edge up to the buoy, that when it was moored, Ben made her row him to the beach as well.

His father had seen them coming in and was on the beach to help them pull up the dinghy.

‘How did Rose do?'

‘Marvellous,' Ben said. ‘She's a natural.'

Rose felt better. He would take her out again. She had done well, she wasn't boring.

But always at the back of her mind, not very far back, but just behind what was happening in the present, she was aware of the little exhausted donkey, lying in the waves … waiting for her?

Thoughts of the donkey were pushed a bit farther back by events at the hotel. Somehow everything seemed to be going wrong at once.

Guests came in and out for a night or two, but Professor Watson did not come back, although they had hoped he would when he cooled down. Bernard and Toni had finished their work and gone, and the Mumfords were due to leave soon, to spend the summer in their own house.

‘The sooner the better,' said Mrs Ardis, who could not stand them.

‘Not this year,' Philip Wood told her, ‘with the tourist business so slow. Until the summer people start to fill all the rooms, we need those blasted twins.'

‘First time they've been needed in their lives,' Mrs Ardis grumbled.

‘And at this moment, they need
you
.' Philip looked up at the bell indicator in the passage.

‘Drat.' Mrs Ardis went towards the kitchen. ‘It's that feckless poltergeist again. Phantom of the bells,' she said over her shoulder spookily.

‘Look, don't upset them.' Philip's nerves were frayed at the edges these days. ‘Go up and see what they want.'