The Camelot Caper (18 page)

A slow, catlike smile replaced David's sobriety.

“No, I think I'll show you instead. Would you mind…”

“Driving all night.”

“Poor girl.” He laughed exuberantly. “No; I've a fancy to spend the night in Glastonbury. At the pilgrims' inn. It seems appropriate. Just how appropriate, you shall see, tomorrow night.”

 

They came into Cornwall by night, under a wayward moon that raced across the sky behind threatening clouds. It was well past midnight when David turned up the steep lane. By the rusted iron gates he stopped the car and switched off the engine.

“From here on we go like little mice,” he said. “If you must talk, whisper. But don't talk.”

“I'm going crazy with curiosity,” Jess complained. “Can't you tell me a little something? What are we going to find? What makes you so sure we'll find anything? I'm scared.”

David had cuddled the car close up against the stone wall, so close he couldn't open his door. He shoved her over and slid across the seat.

“I'm not absolutely sure we'll find what I'm looking for, but I suspect they won't waste time now that they believe we've gone for good. And it would take far too long to tell you what I suspect. You wouldn't believe me; this is so far out that it must be seen to be believed. So—let's go along and see it.”

They were both dressed for prowling, David in a dark sweater and slacks, Jess in a similar costume, with a scarf flattening her curls. David took her by the shoulders and looked her over. Jess tilted her head back and batted her eyelids at him. His mouth curved up and he gave her a quick hard kiss and let her go.

“None of that, now. Let's conceal your distracting beauty.”

He stooped and came up with a handful of dirt which he applied to Jess's cheeks. Then he smeared his hands over his own face.

“That should do it. We don't want to be seen,
though I don't think there's any real danger. Remember, no talking.”

They met their first block at once. The gates were locked this time, with a rusted chain and a very new, shiny padlock. David climbed the wall, at the cost of ripped trousers and scraped knuckles. Lying flat across the top, he dragged Jess up, and then lowered her down inside. They set off across the grounds.

The softness of the soil, after the recent rains, made their progress almost inaudible. Jess felt sure it was also invisible; the overgrown state of the landscaping provided ample cover, and the moonlight, flickering on and off like a bad light bulb, was confusing to vision. She trotted along after David, obeying his peremptory hand signals, stopping, crawling, and running as he did. She was damp and breathless before they came in sight of the house.

It crouched on its rise of ground, a humped heap of darkness against the mottled sky. Lit by pallid moonlight, the towers looked like ivory horns on a massive beast's head. The house was dark, except for one square of light high up in the façade; it looked like the cover of one of Jessica's favorite books.

David crouched in the shadow of a gnarled
lilac bush. One of the heavy, hanging sprays of blossom brushed Jess's cheek and she turned her face into the perfumed wetness.

To her relief, and her surprise, David did not head for the house. She had never seen anything, not even the dentist's office, that she wanted less to enter. But she was completely baffled when her guide cut off toward the back of the house and the sea cliff. It took another half hour of slow, hard going before she realized where they were going, and still she did not know why.

Under the shadow of the belt of trees which fringed the far pasture David stood upright and proceeded less cautiously. Any noises they made, snapping twigs, or rustling leaves, would be taken for the movements of night animals. It was very dark under the trees; the moonlight sifted through the branches to shape silver lace patterns on the damp ground, but gave little illumination. Jess could hear the sea now, but the muted crash of water far below was almost lost in the keening of the wind in the branches overhead.

“It's going to rain,” she whispered.

David made no response to this irrelevant comment. He had reached the edge of the little wood and peered out from behind the shelter of
a thick bole. Jess peered out from behind the shelter of his shoulder. There was nothing to be seen except the pasture, and the ragged slope of a slight rise just ahead. But she heard sounds which were not made by night animals, nor surf, nor wind. They were strange sounds, like little bells ringing softly. Like metal sounding on metal or stone…

To her disgust, David dropped flat on his stomach and began to crawl. She tried to cheat, bending over as she walked, but David caught her at it and made threatening gestures. Jess groaned as she lowered herself to the ground, which seemed to contain every undesirable feature ground could contain—patches of mud, sharp stones, prickly weeds.

They inched along, one after the other, up the slight slope and over it. David's hand in her hair stopped Jess, who was concentrating on prickly weeds and could see nothing farther away than two inches ahead of her nose. David was now squatting on his heels, and she lifted herself up to a similar position.

In front of her was a low stone wall which surrounded the pasture where her grandfather had carried on his expensive archaeological activities. And someone seemed to be archaeologizing, if that was the word, now. The semimu
sical clinking sounds made sense to her, now that she had that identification in mind; they were the sounds of shovels or picks, or some metal implements, on stone.

David need not have bothered to blacken his face; the muddy countenance he turned toward her had picked up so much additional disguise that he was barely recognizable. Jess was admiring the rare collection of botanical specimens that adorned his hair when she realized that she must look just as bad. Thoughts of this sort do very little for a woman's morale, even when she is supposed to be thinking of more important matters, and for a few seconds she missed the meaning of David's dumb show. Finally he grabbed her by the neck and pulled her face up to his.

“Take a look,” he hissed, like a stage villain. “But be careful. They're out there, all right.”

Their two black faces rose, like spouting mud pots, over the top of the wall. Then Jess forgot dishevelment and discomfort, and stared in utter amazement.

The light was now very poor; the clouds had gathered to hide most of the sky, and only a frail sliver of sly moon peeped through. She made out the workers as two dark shapes, and could see nothing, at first, of what they were working
at. Then the moon found an opening in the clouds and the shadows took on form.

The ground was broken by a deep ragged trench, and one of the figures was working in it. As she watched, Jess's brows drew together in a frown of bewilderment.

She had always thought that archaeologists dug things up out of the ground. These men were putting things into it. Not treasure chests, nor dead bodies, nor anything else so
outré
, but—stones. From a pile on one side of the field one figure staggered to the trench carrying a big, shaped stone. He lowered it to the man inside the trench, and went back for more.

This weird procedure went on for ten minutes, while Jess tried to make sense of it. Obviously she was missing something; the two men couldn't possibly be building a wall under the ground, though that was what it looked like.

One of the men was her cousin, and again Jess was moved to something resembling pity, for John had, as usual, the hardest part of the job. He was the stone carrier. The activities of his partner—who must be the objectionable Algernon—were hidden from her, but she was willing to bet they were easier than stone carrying. The blocks were massive things; after ten minutes her cousin was staggering and clutching the stones to his
manly chest as if he were afraid of dropping them—which he probably was; if one had landed on his foot it would have smashed half the bones. Yet even in his gasping exhaustion and general misery, he had not lost all his insouciance; dropping the last block on the edge of the trench, he wiped perspiration from his face with his sleeve, and did two steps of a popular dance.

“That's the lot,” he said, without troubling to lower his normally low-pitched voice. “Think it's enough?”

“For now. Tomorrow night we'll start on the gate.”

Jess heard a suppressed snort from David. The expression on her cousin's face when he heard this depressing news was so disgusted that she wanted to laugh too. He contemplated his muddy, bleeding hands with fastidious disgust, wiped them on the seat of his trousers, and sat down on the ground.

“For the love of God, Freddie, must we have a gate? I thought you said archaeologists never have enough money to dig everything up.”

“You ass, we don't know what parts they'll want to dig, and we can hardly limit them without arousing suspicion.” A head appeared at the lip of the trench; it was followed by the rest of
Freddie. He was the second man, Algernon—the one who had twice flattened David. Jessica's amusement went up in smoke. She never had liked Algernon, and she didn't like Freddie—what a name, almost as bad as Algernon—any better.

Her cousin had collapsed at full length on the ground, and did not see his ally's face; which, Jess thought, was perhaps just as well, for Freddie gave his sensitive associate a look which could have scorched rock.

“You know I've been against this from the start,” he grunted, sitting down cross-legged. “Give me a fag, will you?”

An arm and hand, graceful even in their battered state, rose up from the grass and extended a cigarette. Freddie took it and went on with what was evidently a long-standing argument.

“We can drop the whole damned business so far as I'm concerned. It's not too late to go back to my scheme.”

“But, dear old boy,” said Cousin John's lazy voice from the grasses, “we lose so much lovely, lovely money that way. You don't think the professionals will detect any little errors in our wall, do you?”

The other man shrugged and blew out smoke.

“Some may do. But their criticisms will be denounced by other experts, who will defend us for the sheer fun of attacking their professional rivals. That's precisely the trouble with the lot of them, none of the old fools ever agrees with one another. They're petty-minded, jealous old devils. And gullible! They can make themselves believe anything they want to believe. Look at Piltdown man; the whole bloody scientific world fell hook, line and sinker for a bad fake.”

“You ought to know,” said Cousin John, in that tone of sweet malice which Jess knew so well.

The comment stung, as he had known it would; Freddie looked at him with a face so ugly that Jess recoiled, even behind the shelter of the wall.

“I've told you that was a lie. That swine Barton kept me from my degree out of pure professional jealousy.”

“Professional?” murmured the sly, sweet voice. “Dear Mrs. Barton; how charmingly she administered tea and sympathy. But the rest of us were courteous enough to be discreet.”

Jess bit back an exclamation as Freddie's hand darted toward the handle of the pickax which
lay next to the ditch. She knew her cousin must have seen the gesture; but his long limbs never moved, and after a second or two, Freddie's fingers loosed their hold.

“You're going to bait someone into murdering you one day,” he said.

“Not while I can give that someone his share of half a million pounds,” was the contemptuous reply. “Freddie, you have absolutely no sense of humor. You must learn to laugh at yourself, old boy. Now, then, how much more is there to be done here? We've got to let it cook for months, perhaps a year; the sooner we finish the sooner it begins to pay off.”

There was another, louder snort of amusement from David, and Jess popped her head down out of sight, poking at him warningly.

“What was that?” asked Freddie; Jess heard a rustle of grass.

“An owl. Sit down, you exhaust me.”

“Couldn't be anything else, I suppose.” Freddie sat down, producing more rustling noises. “Well, I think we'll stop when we've built the gate. And the grave, of course.”

“Look here, damn it all, I thought we'd decided not to have a grave. I mean—one can't have a grave without a body.”

“We can have a skeleton easily enough,” said
his ally contemptuously. “But bones are difficult to fake properly, with the new scientific tests. And they'd have to fit the traditional descriptions—size, age, and that. No, we shan't have a body, but we must have a grave if we're to explain the treasure. I've got it all worked out. An empty grave, robbed in antiquity—a cache of objects, secreted by the thieves in panic as their crime is detected…. It makes a lovely tale.”

A weary groan from Cousin John was the only response, and Jess felt that it was safe to take another look. She was beginning to understand now; but she still couldn't believe it.

“We'll finish up tonight by planting the ring,” Freddie said briskly. “Before you lose it again.”

“That's not fair, I've never actually lost it.” Cousin John rose up, stiffly, like a warrior's effigy from a tomb. “The ring, yes. What did I do with it?”

“I shouldn't have given it to you,” said Freddie. “After all, I was the one who took the risk of retrieving it.”

“Yes, and I have a smallish bone to pick with you on that,” Cousin John said. He stood up and began to investigate his pockets.

“That bone's been overly picked. You're too
squeamish, Johnny boy. At your insistence, I didn't even damage the fellow much.”

“All that blood,” said Cousin John. “Nasty. Ah, here it is.”

Freddie took the ring and dropped back into the trench. Muffled scrapes and bangs issued from the depths. Standing on the edge, Cousin John balanced himself and peered down.

“I say, don't plant it too far down. That's one item we do want them to find.”