permission to do a little restoration work. No mention of the treasure, of course, but I suppose that, if we
‘And I shall be mighty surprised if they do,’ said Laura Gavin, when Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, the godmother to whom the letter was addressed, gave it to her to read. ‘If Bonamy wants a fortune, he should join an American tennis circuit or rob a bank.’
‘He does not appear to be a fortune hunter, but I hope he will keep us in touch with his activities,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I can think of no pastime more enchanting than looking for buried treasure. I even envy beachcombers. Theirs must be the happiest of existences, don’t you think? Bonamy does not name the castle. I wonder which one it is?’
‘I know which one it is – at least, I think I do,’ said Laura. ‘From the clues he gives, it must be Castle Holdy. I remember taking Hamish there one afternoon when he was nine. He enjoyed scrambling about among the ruins and the lower part of a newel staircase in the keep is still there. He climbed up as far as it went and I exercised great self-restraint and forbore to warn him to be careful. The staircase ended rather abruptly and there was a sheer drop of thirty feet with a mass of broken masonry at the bottom.’
‘You did well to issue no warning, but I would not be surprised to hear that you stationed yourself on the fallen masonry to catch him if he overbalanced.’
‘I did, but I didn’t utter a word except to answer him when he emerged and called down to me, “Here I am.” I have a theory that it makes children unsure of themselves if you tell them to be careful. Of course, accidents do happen, but, in my opinion, a self-confident, self-reliant child is a safe child. Kids know pretty well what they can do and what they can’t do. The trouble comes when they’re given a “dare”. I brought Hamish up to say, “I’ll do it, if you’ll do it first.” I’m not at all sure that he took the advice, though.’
‘If you and Hamish were able to scramble about on the hill and climb the ruins, I take it that the castle is open to the public.’
‘You mean we might go along and take a look? Yes, the ruins are open to the public all right. What’s more, there is no charge for admission, so far as I remember.’
‘So we shall enrich our experience and save our pockets at one and the same time, and that constitutes a bonus so unusual that it would be a pity not to take advantage of it.’
‘When do we go?’
‘Well, the weather is clement, the school holiday season is not yet upon us and we have no outstanding commitments.’
‘If Castle Holdy is the one I think it is,’ said Laura, ‘there is a pleasant seaside town not so very far from it. We could lunch there and visit the ruins in the afternoon. The place is called Holdy Bay. It’s a quiet, modest little town and will remain peaceful until the school summer holidays begin, and those are still nearly three weeks off, I think. The town itself is more bracing than other places near by, because, owing to the irregularities of the coastline, it faces almost due east instead of south. It would do us no end of good to take the air there.’
‘It sounds delightful. It is a long time since I spent a day in an English watering-place.’
‘I hope it has remained as it was, that’s all. It’s years since I took the children there. Gavin looked after Eiladh on the beach while I took Hamish to Holdy Castle, I remember, but mostly we stayed on the sands.’
‘The university term still has a day or two to run, so the boys will not have begun their search yet. Let us go to Holdy Bay tomorrow, and survey the castle ruins at our leisure on the following day.’
Except for a housing estate on its outskirts and a caravan park on the seaward side of this estate, Holdy Bay had remained unspoilt. Its streets were narrow, its houses were old, and its two hotels were solid, unpretentious and comfortable. Laura booked two rooms for two nights at the Seagull and after lunch she left Dame Beatrice at the hotel and went out to renew her memories of the town.
There was now a small yacht station in the arm between the old stone jetty and where the promenade ended, and at the landward end of the jetty there was a training school for deep-sea divers, but there were still the firm, flat sands, the bold headland to the south, the long, tapering peninsula to the north, and behind the promenade the grassy banks with park benches. There were no ugly shelters on the promenade, no beach huts, and the two hotels were back in the town.
She walked to the end of the jetty, to where the local pleasure steamer tied up during the holiday season, and then returned to the promenade, left it at the coastguard station and walked up the hill at that end of the town. At the top she took her binoculars out of their case and raked the landscape until she picked out the remains of the castle keep. As the crow flies, the castle was surprisingly close at hand.
On the following morning she and Dame Beatrice drove along winding roads to visit it. They were quickly out of the town and before they entered the next village the road appeared to double-back upon itself to curve round the foot of the hill which culminated at the high cliff Laura had seen from the promenade. Soon it crossed a bridge over a disused railway line and, a few miles further on, Laura stopped the car at a viewpoint from which there was a sight, in the far distance, of the castle. It was away to the left of the panorama which was spread out in front of and below the sightseer, for the road wound among low hills and was well above sea level.
An expanse of unbroken moorland was bordered by an even greater expanse of shimmering water. The lay-by into which Laura had driven the car was protected from a long drop to the moor by a stone wall. She got out to admire the view. Beyond the moors and the brackish tidal estuary below her, she could see a town, but the chief point of interest was the castle keep. It stood out, a melancholy but dignified shell, on top of the hill she remembered from years back. She returned to the car and said, before she backed it carefully on to the narrow road, ‘Hamish is going on for thirty now.’
‘
‘
They drove on in silence. There were banks with their tall, summer grasses, birdsfoot trefoil, horse-shoe vetch, scabious, purple milk-vetch, ragged robin and ox-eye daisies, and on the hedges, which had been left untrimmed, there was wild clematis. Blackberry bushes were in flower and, at one place, there was a copse of hazels.
