Death of a Burrowing Mole

Laura pulled up again, got out of the car, jumped a ditch and returned with a spray of three hazel nuts in their green bracts accompanied by two heart-shaped, double-toothed leaves. She presented the spray to Dame Beatrice, who pinned it to the lapel of the summer jacket she was wearing and said, ‘Three wishes!’

The narrow road made a last bend, went under instead of over the next railway bridge, and then it made a T- junction with the road which led one way to the village of Holdy and the other way further inland to the town Laura had seen from the viewpoint.

She followed the signpost to the village. A stream ran alongside the road and there was a small waterfall. The village, stone-built and unspoilt, offered a parking-space for the car and in the small square there was a tea-shop which Laura marked down for future reference. She locked the car and then she and Dame Beatrice followed the little stream round the foot of the castle mound, climbed the slope and picked their way through the arch of the castle gatehouse, which was partially blocked with fallen masonry.

Beyond this there was an expanse of almost level ground. Then came the steepest part of the hill crowned by the remains of the keep. Dame Beatrice looked at the fallen blocks of stone.

‘I am reminded,’ she said, ‘of a remark overheard by E. M. Delafield at Corfe Castle in Dorset and immortalised by her in The Diary of a Provincial Lady. A woman standing near the “Lady” said to her companion, “That bit looks as if it had fallen off somewhere.” ’ Laura surveyed the debris with an indulgent eye. ‘There is enough work here to keep the young men out of mischief for weeks,’ she said, ‘never mind what’s fallen off where.’

Shortly after returning home, Dame Beatrice received another letter from Bonamy:

‘Dear Godmother,

‘We have been outflanked! What do you think? Tom and I had hardly made our preliminary survey when two other interested parties turned up, although, thank goodness, they are not treasure-hunters like ourselves and neither will they be given any clue to our intentions.

‘One party seems to consist of a man and four women. The plump woman is his wife, then there are a gorgeous one, a little, thin one and a six-footer – a most intimidating young female, from whom, I should think, John Betjeman drew his portrait of the Olympic Girl. She makes me feel like the ‘unhealthy worm’ he refers to as himself.

‘The first hint we got that this gang were on the premises was when Tom spotted the caravan parked at the foot of the hill. The other party consists of two men and the first we knew of them was on our return from lunch at a pub-cum-hotel in the village. A couple of workmen were putting up a notice outside the gatehouse which read: Scientific work in progress. No admittance.

‘Of course Tom asked what the hell and the men said they didn’t know. They were only carrying out orders. While we were arguing, the other parties turned up and warned us off. I took over from Tom, as there were ladies present and his language, even in these lax times, is apt to be unguarded, and pointed out that we had a vested interest and must be allowed admittance to the site. I informed them that we were undergraduates and that we had permission from the landowner to work on the ruins. I spoke of vacation commitments and a thesis we had to write. I spoke well and eloquently.

‘It turns out that the larger party want to make a survey of the site with a view to restoring the various parts of the castle – the flanking-towers, the postern gates and all that sort of thing – while the two men are planning to dig for evidence of a Saxon cemetery or a Danish tomb, or some such. They want to dig trenches and shift rubble and make sections and all those sort of Sir Mortimer Wheeler things which modern archaeologists do when digging up the past.

‘Well, thank goodness, we were all civilised enough to come to an understanding. The big party did not see that their work would interfere with that of the archaeologists, so that was all right, and Tom and I have offered assistance to both sides. In the end I think Tom and I may be the gainers, as it seems navvies have been hired to do some of the heavy work, so here’s hoping that, among the lot of us, somebody uncovers our well!’

‘I wonder what effect, if any, the notice at the gatehouse will have on the general public,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘My bet is that they’ll respect it,’ said Laura. ‘The sort of people who would go to look at a ruined castle would be law-abiding. Others will think it’s something to do with nuclear power and the atom bomb, or else that an oil-rig is going to be set up. Those are the things people connect with warning notices nowadays. They may stand and stare, but they won’t encroach. That’s my view.’

‘You appear to have your finger on the public pulse.’

‘I do better than that. I test its blood pressure,’ said Laura, ‘a thing the politicians seldom do.’

‘In any case, five able-bodied men and the Olympic Girl, plus a posse of strong-armed workmen, should be intimidating enough to keep even the most intrepid sightseer at bay,’ commented Dame Beatrice. ‘It occurs to me to wonder whether Bonamy and Tom have done wisely in offering their services to the others.’

‘I don’t see that they had much option. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” is the only sensible motto in these unheroic times,’ said Laura.

There was a lengthy postscript to Bonamy’s letter:

‘In case you may know any of them, Edward and Lilian Saltergate are the married couple, both of them architects, and both have impressive letters after their names. His are B.Arch., ARIBA, and she is MA and FSA. The girls they have with them are Fiona Broadmayne (the large, hefty one) and Priscilla Yateley (the little, thin one). As for the third girl, the glorious Helen of Troy, to our horror she turns out to be a college lecturer and a Ph.D. Her name – just for the record, because it’s no use for anything else – is Dr Susannah Lochlure, and I can tell you the “lure” is there all right. She is the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley, but also a Fellow of the Historical Association. “ ’Tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true.”

‘Tom had marked her down as his bit of crumpet while we are here, and says he is devastated now he knows that she ranks among the untouchables, but it doesn’t so far seem to have affected his appetite. She really is the most gorgeous bit of plum cake, though.

‘I don’t think Tom would have stood much chance with her, anyway, even were she less exalted than turns out to be the case. The two chaps who are proposing to dig up the landscape are a middle-aged man named Professor Veryan and a much younger fellow, a don at Veryan’s university, called Nicholas Tynant. He belongs to the elf-lock- over-the-forehead school of thought, looks shockingly like the portraits of Rupert Brooke, and is obviously keeping a proprietorial eye on the lovely Susannah.

As for the sweet girl undergraduates, they are both very definitely non-starters from Tom’s point of view.