Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (19 page)

“ ‘Vere Jerusalem est ilia civitas,
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas,
Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est premium.’

Wish and fulfilment can severed be ne’er, nor the thing prayed for come short of prayer! That always seemed to me the most perfect of all definitions of heaven. But then, look who wrote it, poor devil! He knew all about wish and non-fulfilment, and things falling short.”

“Simon,” said the Vicar, “I don’t know whether I really ought to admire you for it, but you must be the only fellow I ever met with the effrontery to think of Abelard as a poor devil. Here you are, here’s—” He had been about to say “Walter Ruiz”; instead he said, courteously but serenely: “—the man you’re looking for.”

A low, cropped grave, turfed over within a granite kerb, under the bough of a hawthorn tree. Grey old stones, seamed with fine viridian moss, leaning all round. A plain pillow stone at the head of the small enclosure, and inscribed on it:

W
ALTER
R
UIZ

Born May 8th, 1929,

Drowned, March, 1962.

“I will bring my people again

from the depths

of the sea.”

“He wasn’t Ruiz, you know,” said Simon, standing gazing down at it with a shadowed face. “Nobody’ll ever know now who he really was. I don’t know why, but I feel bad about that. Even if we could think of him by a name, and a face, and say: Poor old Smith, three years next month since he was washed up!—even that would be something, give him a place to exist in, a dimension in which he’d be real. But now he’s nobody.”

“He’s as surely somebody,” said the Vicar placidly, “as you are. And nothing could be much surer than that.”

“But who? Doesn’t that matter?”

“It matters who. It doesn’t matter that we should know who. He’s been identified,” said the Vicar, tucking his hymn-board under his arm, “a long time ago, in the only way that matters in the least now. And by a witness who doesn’t make mistakes.”

“Yes—I see your point.‘I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.’ Yes, he might have done worse. Who provided the stone? You?”

“It’s always been the tradition that the dead from the sea, who had no families here to bury them, should be a charge on the church. Look round you, if you think a foreign name makes a man a stranger here.”

They looked. Half the sea-faring nations of the west lay there quietly enough together, with the scent of the salt shore for ever in the wind that stirred the pale grasses over them. Edvard Kekonnen, seaman. Hugh O’Neill, master-mariner. Alfonso Nuñez, master-mariner. Vassilis Kondrakis, seaman. Two Spanish shipmates, unknown by name. Sean MacPeake, master-mariner. Jean Plouestion, fisherman. Walter Ruiz, or X, fisherman, seaman or master-mariner. “I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.” It didn’t much matter if no one else knew what to call them, the voice they were listening for would have all their names right.

“Yes,” said Simon, a small, wry smile curling the corners of his mouth, “this is the point of departure for a good many heavens, seemingly, Valhalla, Tir-nan-Og, the lot. It’s the sea-going men who made the western islands heaven, I suppose.” He slipped into song again, very softly:

“ 
‘ Far the cloudless sky stretches blue

Across the isle, green in the sunlight
.’

It sounds like Jan Treverra himself designing that paradise, doesn’t it?

“ ‘
There shall thou and I wander free

On sheen-white sands, dreaming in starlight
’.”

“I was thinking much the same thing,” agreed George, smiling. “What was it Dom said about your two epitaphs, that first evening we were up at the Place with you? Something about making the after-life sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas.”

Simon had begun to turn back towards the gravelled walk, his hands deep in his pockets, the air of the Hebridean song still soft and sweet in his mouth. He halted suddenly, stiffening; for a moment he hung perfectly still, then he turned a face sharp and pale beneath its gold with contained excitement.

“Dom said
what
? Would you mind saying that again?”

“He said the Treverra epitaphs made the after-life sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas. Why? What nerve did that prick?”

“The nerve it should have pricked then, if I’d been even half awake. And I was there?” he protested furiously. “I heard this? And I didn’t connect?”

“You laughed. Like the rest of us,” said George, patient but mystified.

“I would! The fate of many another pregant utterance in its time. Why do I never listen properly to anyone but myself? My God, but I see now how it all began, all the first part of the story. You only have to put one bit in place, and all the other pieces begin to slide in and settle alongside. George, come to the Place to-night, will you? We’re dining with the old lady, because Paddy has to go back to school to-morrow. Bring Bunty and Dominic, and come to coffee afterwards. You, too, Dan, please. I’d like you to be there.”

“With pleasure,” said the Vicar equably, “if you want me.”

“I do. I want you all, everyone who was involved in this investigation from the beginning. Because I can see my way now,” said Simon, suddenly shivering in the chilling air of early evening and the tension of his own incandescent excitement. “I believe I can clear up the strange, sad case of Jan and Morwenna, the mystery that set off all these other mysteries. And I will, to-night.”

They gathered round the long table in Miss Rachel’s library, ten of them. The curtains were drawn, and the tide, already well past its height, lashed and cried with subsiding force off the point, in the soft, luminous dark. Miss Rachel sat at the head of the table, dispensing coffee royally and happily, with Paddy at her left because she would not let him out of her reach now that he was regained in good condition and angelic humour, and had forgiven her freely under the pretence of being freely forgiven. On her right, Simon, curiously quiet and strained and bright. Tamsin moved about the foot of the table handing coffee-cups, helped by Dominic. George and Bunty on one side of the table, Tim and Phil and the Vicar on the other. It was a long time since the old lady had assembled such a satisfactory court, she didn’t even seem to mind that it was turning out to be Simon’s court rather than hers. The more he disclaimed it, the more honestly he abdicated, the more surely this evening belonged to him.

“I wasn’t the one who put my finger on the spot,” he was saying with passionate gravity. “That was Dominic. I had to have my nose rubbed in the truth before I could even realise it was there.”

“Me?” said Dominic, staggered. “I didn’t do anything, how on earth did I get in on the credits?”

“You took one look at the Treverra epitaphs, and put your finger on the one significant thing about them.‘They make heaven sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas,’ you said.”

“Did I? It must have been just a joke, then.
I
didn’t see anything significant.”

“You did, though you may not have realised it or taken it seriously. All that pretty verse about year-long summer, and golden sands, and sapphire seas—you saw intuitively what it really meant, and that it was very much this side the grave. Whether you ever examined what you knew or not, you offered it to me, and I didn’t have the wit to look at it properly, and learn from it.”

They saw now, dimly, where he was leading them. They sat still, all eyes upon Simon. His thin, long hands were linked on the table before him. The cigarette he had lighted and forgotten smoked slowly away to a cylinder of ash in the ashtray beside him. The tension that held them all silent and motionless proceeded from him, but only he seemed unaware of it.

“If ever there was a crazy bit of research, this was it. There we were, with Treverra’s own tomb—well, not empty, but empty of the man who should have been in it, and his wife’s coffin unhappily not empty, but most tragically occupied, by the poor lady who had died there, and, as we found out afterwards, by a pretty large sum in old money and jewels. This crazy, sad puzzle, and those two epitaphs for clues, and nothing else.

“You remember Treverra was the adored leader of the smugglers round these parts. We know he also had at least one ship trading legitimately with the West Indies and America. We can guess, now we know about the tunnel from his vault to the Dragon’s Hole, that he must have had the tunnel improved and the tomb dug out at the end of it to provide a safe runway to the harbour and Pentarno haven, for a very practical purpose. What could be more respected than a family tomb? And what could make better cover for the secret road to the sea and the ships? He completed it about six years before he died. Maybe he always had in mind that it might eventually provide a way of retreat, if Cornwall ever got too hot to hold him.

“Well, now, suppose that the authorities and the preventives were closing in on this local hero, and finally had something on him that he wasn’t going to be able to duck? I think there are signs that they would have welcomed an opportunity to bring him down. Most of the gentry dabbled in smuggling, but in a mild, personal way. Treverra went beyond that. Not for profit, probably, so much as for fun. He liked pulling their legs, and leading them by the nose. They wouldn’t forgive him that. He resigned from the bench, where by all accounts he was a pretty generous and fair-minded Justice. I think he knew his scope here was narrowing. And then, you see, any of the local people who heard of any threat to him would warn him. He was the idol of the coast. Yes, I think he knew time was getting short, and made his plans accordingly. Among other things, he wrote his epitaph. And hers, I’m almost sure, was written at the same time, by her, by him, or by both together, I can’t be sure. But I like to think of them sitting here, in this very room, with their heads together, capping each other’s lines, and laughing over the supreme joke of their shared and audacious career. Look at Morwenna’s face! That lovely, fragile creature was a lot more than a sleeping partner.

“So there’s Treverra, only fifty-two years old, in the very prime of his life and vigour and powers, and the authorities closing in for the kill. And what happens?

“Treverra ‘dies’, and is buried. In the tomb he had made for himself, with the swivel-stone in the corner giving access to the cave and the harbour.

“And at night he arises, this ‘dead’ man, after all the decorous funeral business is over and the mourners have gone away. Maybe he was provided with a good crowbar inside the coffin for the occasion, even more probably he was also visited and helped out by his older son after dark. He had two sons. The elder was just twenty at this time, the younger was a schoolboy of fourteen. I think the elder was certainly in all the plans, you’ll see why when we come to the case of Morwenna. Treverra, then, emerges from his tomb exceedingly alive and lusty, and retires gaily by his back way, from which, at low tide, he can reach either Maymouth harbour or Pentarno haven. What does it matter which he used? At either one or the other a boat is put in for him, to take him aboard ship—his own ship or another—and ship him away to the reserve fortune he’s been salting away in readiness in the year- long summer of the West Indies.

“A sunshine cruise to an island paradise, just as Dominic said, if I’d only listened to him. But not Tir-nan-Og! Not even the Bahamas, perhaps, but near enough. According to the records most of his trading had been done with Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados. Somewhere there, I judge, we might still pick up his traces.

“How many were in the know? It’s guesswork, now, but I’d say just the three of them, Jan, Morwenna and their elder son, and maybe the skipper of his ship. There may have been a family doctor in it, too, to cover the deaths, but if so, he kept his mouth tightly shut afterwards to protect himself, and who can blame him? They may have managed without him? It hardly matters now. I’m sure that’s what happened. It accounts for the empty coffin, that was later to be filled and over-filled. And it accounts for what followed.

“For, you see, Morwenna would never have agreed to such a plan if there hadn’t been provision in it for her to join him. Act two was to be the translation of Morwenna. She was to pine away—her own touch, that, I’d swear—and to be reunited with her lord in an earthly, not a heavenly, paradise. After six months the same programme is put in motion for her. She ‘dies’ of a broken heart, and is buried in the tomb prepared for her.”

He broke off there, startled, for someone had uttered an almost inaudible sound that yet had the sharpness of a cry. A quiver passed round the circle, and a rustle of breath, as if they had all been shaken out of a trail , Paddy, flushing hotly, drew back a little into shadow. “I’m sorry! I was only thinking—She was so
little
!”

“They took every possible care of her, Paddy. Or they thought they had. Yes, she was very slight and frail, she couldn’t deal with tombstones herself, they knew that. She had to lie patiently in her coffin until dark, when her son would come to release her, and see her safely down the passage and aboard. The light wooden coffin in which she was carried to the vault was pierced in a pattern of fine holes just above her face—did you notice that, George? The air in the stone coffin would easily be enough to keep her going until night. And she was well provided with funds for the journey, in money and jewellery. The wooden lid would be only very lightly fastened down, so that she could move it herself. And all she needed besides was the heart of a lioness, and that she knew she had.
She
was the one who misquoted Dryden, that I’d swear to. ‘None but the brave deserves the brave.’ To lie and wait several hours alone in the dark didn’t seem terrible to her, not by comparison with what it bought.

“But that night of her funeral, you remember, is recorded as the night of the great storm, when the fishing-boats were driven out to sea. And young Treverra, the new squire, was blown from the cliff path in the darkness, and drowned. A young man in mourning, wandering the cliffs alone—no one would ask what he was doing there.

“I’m afraid, I’m terribly afraid, he was on his way down the cliff path to the church and the vault, to see his mother resurrected and put safely aboard ship for Barbados.

“And no one else, you see, knew anything about her.

“No one else. She was dead, they’d just buried her. If the doctor knew, he’d assume everything was going according to plan, or at least that her son was taking care of her, until he heard of the boy being missing. And that may not have happened until well into the next morning. By then a doctor would know she’d be dead. He’d be afraid to speak. It couldn’t help her, and it could, you see, harm not only himself but Treverra, too. He’d be a wanted man again as soon as it was known he was alive. And nothing and nobody could give Morwenna back to him now.”

“But the ship,” ventured Dominic huskily. “There was a ship lying off for her. Wouldn’t they try to find out what had happened?”

“That’s what makes me think that this time it wasn’t their own ship. It would be risky to chance having it stopped in these waters, obviously. No, this time I think it was a matter of a simple commercial arrangement with some other skipper, in which case they wouldn’t know anything except that they were to put in a boat at such and such a spot and pick up a lady. If they ever did manage to put in a boat in such a sea, it’s certain she didn’t come to keep the appointment. They couldn’t know what that implied, to them it just meant their passenger hadn’t turned up. Maybe they waited as long as they could, maybe they were driven out. What could they do but sail without her?

“And all that money, and the valuables she was to have taken with her, just lay uselessly in her coffin with her for two centuries, until Zeb Trethuan found it and started methodically turning it into money again. Thus setting the stage for the next death.

“Nobody knew about it, you see. Young Treverra’s body was never found, so the vault wasn’t opened for him. His young brother came home from school and took over the estate, but he’d never been in the secret. To him his mother and father had died and been buried, no mysteries, no tragedy but the ordinary, gentle tragedy of bereavement, that happens sooner or later to everyone. By the time
he
died and was buried, St. Nectan’s was already fighting a losing battle with the sand, and they’d built St. Mary’s, high up in the town, and abandoned the old graveyard by the shore. And Morwenna lay there alone, separated from her Jan, and he—God knows which was the unluckier of the two.”

Tamsin had got up from her place very quietly, and gone to her desk. She came back with the folder of the Treverra papers in her hand, and slid out upon the table the two epitaphs.

“Not that I don’t know them by heart,” she said in a low voice. “But suddenly they seem so new and so transparent, as though we ought to have been able to read the whole story in them from the beginning.”

“You think I’ve made out a case, then?” Simon’s eyes met hers down the length of the table, and there was nothing left of challenge or antagonism on her side, and nothing of pursuit or self-indulgence on his. They looked at each other with wonder and grief, and a certain frustrated helplessness, but with no doubt at all.

“I think it’s so unanswerable a case that I don’t know how we missed following the clues Jan left us. It’s all
here
! Don’t you hear him? He couldn’t play any game without making it dangerous to himself, there wouldn’t have been any sport. He told them just what he was about. He made his exit snapping his fingers under the nose of the law, and daring them to follow his trail if they had the wit. But they hadn’t, and neither had we.