pirate’s, the large, uneven brow might have belonged to a justice of the peace, and in fact had, for several years, until the squire had felt it more tactful to withdraw from the bench. The eyes were the roving, adventurous eyes of a lawless poet, and that joyous mouth would have looked well on the young, the gallant, the irresistible Falstaff.
Simon stood back from the wall, and looked the most celebrated of the Treverras full in the eyes.
George thought: They really seem to be looking at each other, measuring each other, even communicating. And although they look so different, isn’t there something intensely alike about them? Both privateers, a little off the regular track, not quite manageable by ordinary rules, not quite containable by ordinary standards.
“He had one ship trading across the Atlantic, and three or four small craft fishing and coasting here. And smuggling, of course. They all did it. It wasn’t any crime to them, it was business and sport—”
“Could it be,” whispered Dominic in Tamsin’s ear, “that Simon has his tenses wrong?”
She turned her head so rapidly that the fine red hair fanned out and tickled his nose. She gave him a lightning look, and again evaded his eyes.
“I hope they got everything away safely last night,” he said even more softly. He couldn’t resist the innocent swagger, and it was hardly disobeying orders at all. This time she didn’t look at him, but he saw her lip quiver and her cheek dimple, and she said to him out of the corner of a motionless mouth, like an old lag at exercise:
“You certainly are a sharp young man, Dominic Felse, be careful you don’t cut yourself.”
“And here’s his wife. Morwenna, her name was.”
“She was lovely,” said Bunty, surveying the unexpected charcoal drawing on grey, rough paper, heightened with white chalk and red. Fragile but striking, like the creature it encompassed. Fine, fiery dark eyes, a delicately poised head balancing a sheaf of piled black hair.
Miss Rachel beamed satisfaction from the background.
“I used to be thought very like her when I was younger.”
“Actually,” murmured Tamsin in Dominic’s ear, “she’s the living image of Jan, if you cover up that jaw of his.”
“And these are the famous epitaphs?” George stepped close to the two framed photographs on the wall below Morwenna’s portrait.
‘
“You’ll find it easier from these transcriptions. Those photographs were made last time the church was cleared of sand, fifteen years or so ago. Whoever took them did a nice job on the angle of the light, and the lettering isn’t much eroded, but it’s eccentric. Here’s the text.”
Simon read aloud, in the, full, rapt voice of self-forgetfulness, as though the reflected image of Treverra stirred within him; and it was not often, Tamsin told herself, watching, that Simon forgot himself.
‘O Mortal Man, whom Fate may send
To brood upon Treverra’s End,
Think not to find, beneath this Stone,
Mute Witness, bleached, ambiguous Bone.
Faith the intrepid Soul can raise
And pilot through the trackless Maze,
Pierce unappalled the Granite Gloom,
The Labyrinth beyond the Tomb,
And bring him forth to Regions bright,
Bathed in the Warmth of Love and Light,
Where year-long Summer sheds her Ease
On golden Sands and sapphire Seas.
There follow, O my Soul, and find
Thy Lord as ever true and kind,
And savour, where all Travellers meet,
The last Love as the first Love sweet.’
“That was for himself. And this one is hers. Some say Jan wrote it before he died, knowing they wouldn’t be parted long. Some say she wrote it herself in his style. Sometimes I think it’s more remarkable than the other.
‘Carve this upon Morwenna’s Grave:
NONE BUT THE BRAVE DESERVES THE BRAVE.
Shed here no Tears. No Saint could die
More Blessed and Comforted than I,
For I confide I shall but rest
A Moment in this stony Nest,
Then, raised by Love, go forth to find
A Country dearer to my Mind,
And touching safe the sun-bright Shore,
Embrace my risen Lord once more’.
There was a brief and curiously magical silence, and no one wanted to break it. It was not that the poetry was so lofty, but rather that it was so elusive, as though every phrase in it had at least two meanings, and therefore at any line you could lose your way, but if at every line you took the correct turning you would find yourself at the centre of a maze, always an achievement, and sometimes a revelation.
“Any reactions?” asked Simon, poking a deliberately brutal finger through the web of hallucination. “Apart from the fact that here was a bloke who knew his folk-verse and his Dryden equally well?”
Tamsin prodded Dominic in the ribs unexpectedly. “Go ahead!” she hissed in his ear. “Say something profound!”
Startled, he blurted out exactly what was in his mind. “They make the after-life sound like a Christmas sunshine cruise to the Bahamas.”
CHAPTER III
FRIDAY MORNING
« ^ »
YOU,” SAID MISS RACHEL, waiting for Paddy in the arched gateway of the kitchen- garden with silver-hilted stick at the slope, like a superannuated angel drafted to the gate of paradise in an emergency, “you are a thoroughly bad boy.”
“Yes,” said Paddy in glum resignation, “I thought I should be.” He hoisted the outsize basket from his carrier and dangled it sulkily. “Well, you won. I’m here, and I’ll pick apricots, even if I won’t like it. What more do you want?”
“Come inside here, and put that basket down for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”
He complied, but with an audible groan. He’d ridden up from the farm on his reluctant errand with nothing worse in his mind than scorn for all women and their conspiratorial tactics, a feeling which gave him a certain sense of detachment and superiority. A baby could have seen through this move to keep him away even from the sand- dunes on this of all mornings. His mother again, of course, enlisting Miss Rachel’s aid. What else could it mean?
