like when the volcano erupts in those old Maria Montez jungle adventure films. Anybody'd feel annoyed if a stranger suddenly barged in to root in the larder to see what was worth pinching.
A few early visitors arrived while I was gaping at the wheel. Judging from their knowing reactions I must have been the last person on earth to hear about Lady Isabella's existence. It was very annoying. They milled about exclaiming at the beautiful machine.
Yet… no bell, no ding-dong.
I walked round as far as I could go. Then back. A group of visitors climbed the steps down which Janie had wriggled so seductively to entice me home the evening before last. We saw the tremendous humming axle, the radiating struts seeming so gigantic they were like so many fairground complexes, stolen and cast into some skeletal giant.
I touched and listened, touched and listened. Nothing. A rather matronly lady was giving me the eye. A month before I'd have had to, because I like older women, but being this close to my find gave me a greed-based willpower. There was no time to waste. I drifted away, leaving them gaping at the axle.
The road became a mere track up the incline, very stony and almost precipitous in parts. To the right the cleft below became practically a ravine, littered with fallen masonry and chimneyed mine vents. A narrow gout spun water out of the rock and let it fall abruptly. God knows what cold deep subterranean chasm it squeezed up from.
About halfway up the hillside the crashing noise of the water ended. I noticed the sound of Lady Isabella had faded.
I stopped to rest on the wall of a shallow stone cistern, wondering what Janie was doing. The great wheel turned silently down in the valley between me and the sea.
Lovely.
It was about ten o'clock. The pale sun was catching the wheel's colours and flicking them about the mountainside. The main beams started out a silvery gold. By the time they flashed on to the dark browns and greens all about me they were a brilliant tangerine, a Thai enamel silver box's colour. They make these boxes now, real silver but cheap and modern. There are only about six modern designs knocking about so far, basically an opaque white or a translucent tangerine. Dishonest people are said to use deep-heat physiotherapy lamps and two hours' cooking at the back end of a good quality vacuum cleaner without its filter bag, to mimic the appearance of antique enamel. It works, but only if you look from a mile off. Look with a microscope. Uneven crazed surface=modern, faked. Even surface, with the occasional large deep 'bubbled'
area, may be the real thing. Give me the first offer.
A motor-cycle skittered into view, way down below on the Laxey road, the rider anonymous in his bulbous helmet. Funny old place to be riding, I thought. I rose and began the climb again. Maybe he was training for a scramble race cross-country.
Whatever it was, he was booming up the track behind me like the clappers.
I was only a hundred yards from the most ghoulish of the mine shafts when the bastard nearly ran me down. Now, it could have been an accident. I admit that. The track was only about four feet wide there. Like a fool, I had my eye on the mine ruins, not bothering to glance behind at the approaching rider. Maybe my apprehension was focused uneasily on the workings. Whatever distracted me, I was hellish slow, only managing to chuck myself to one side and not completely escaping. The maniac's handlebar slammed into my hip, spinning me like a top. There I was, clinging dazed to the stony bank while the dust shower settled. He didn't even stop.
My shirt and trousers were both torn. You could see the bruise swelling before your very eyes and blueing. Ugly. I was shaking so much it took me three goes to lift a stone and put it on the lump. I wetted it from a hillside ooze and sat there trembling, trying to press the damp cold stone on to my side to stop the swelling. The trouble is, once a person's inside motor-bike gear he becomes unrecognizable. He hadn't seemed heavily built. Quite slight, encased in leather crammed with insignia and no number plates that I could recall.
Three or four times I fancied I could hear a distant crackle but wasn't sure of the direction. My hip was murder when I pulled myself together and resumed walking. I carried the stone to chuck at the swine if he came back. It's funny what goes through your mind after a bit of a scare. Algernon's thin. He's also a bike fiend. The rider was too small for Beck. It was too crude a method for my friend Edward Rink, and anyway he'd only to knock me off after I'd found the stuff for him, not before. I wondered if the rider could have been a woman. Not Janie, surely. Kate? The question was, did she really attempt to do for me? Or was it just a stray stupid rider showing off?
I was opposite the mine shaft. I stopped to listen. Nothing again. Water welled from the rock and ran along the aqueduct in a steady flow. I was out of sight of the wheel now. No houses, no people. Only derelict buildings, the ungainly beam engine projecting its huge arm, the trickling water and the stone track.
From where I stood the cleft was only forty yards wide. What had they mined in those days? It looked grim on a pleasant sunny day like this, with holidaymakers trekking up to the cafe and then down to the sea for dinner. On a rainy winter's day it must have seemed to the miners like a freezing hell.
Old Bexon must have been tough if he'd come all this way. Could an elderly man, gradually sickening in his final illness, climb down from the track, across the cleft and into the mine? I limped back and forth for some time. There seemed no way across.
Maybe it would be wise to follow the path to the crest. The miners had had to get over there somehow in the old days, and I could make a quick check to see if that bloody rider was lurking over the hill or not. I was starting to hurt and had to rest a minute. I threw the stone away. Seven long seconds to hit the bottom of the shaft with a faint splash. A hell of a fall, even for a stone.
Bleak places have this effect on me. I get restless and start working out how far's civilization. Not that countryside isn't great on a postcard but it needs watching. I only want Wuthering Heights not to spread about too much. A hundred yards further on I found the causeway. A series of small arches had supported it, but now only their stubs stuck upwards from the little valley's floor. Some wise man had dismantled it. I'd have danced from relief if I hadn't just been injured. If there was no way across for me there'd been no way across for old Bexon. It couldn't be done. And lugging a leaden coffin over there would need a helicopter. I was saved. No dark deep hidey-holes for jubilant Lovejoy. Home again, still empty-handed. I turned back, relieved but disappointed.
I went over the possibilities on the way down. A list of named spots - nothing at any of them. The most likely spot was here, near Lady Isabella. But I'd got no vibes near the wheel herself. And in any case she was well- maintained, cleaned and painted. Obviously had plenty of vigilant engineers about and was, from what I'd seen, a popular tourist spectacle. The wheel seemed far too public. Yet some place near Lady Isabella was obviously the place a man like Bexon would remember best. Wasn't it?
Janie was sitting on a big flat rock near the car park chucking stones into the water.
