A formidable team, thought George, considering them. Simon and George himself would have passed for presentable enough physical specimens by most standards, but here they were the light-weights. Tim stood an inch or two less than either of them, but was half as broad again, and in hard training from the outdoor life he had led in all weathers. Sam Shubrough was a piece of one of the harder red sandstones of the district, animated. But the greatest surprise was the Reverend Daniel Polwhele.
The Vicar of St. Mary’s, Maymouth, stood six feet three in his socks, and looked like the product of several generations of selective breeding from the families of Cornish wrestlers. He wore the clothes of his calling with a splendid simplicity, and was neither set apart by them nor in any way apologetic for them. Shouldering a couple of crowbars, he looked as much at home as with a prayer-book, because he approached everything in the world with a large, curious and intelligent innocence, willing to investigate and be investigated.
He was probably forty-five, but dating him was the last thing you’d think of trying to do. He had a broad, bony Cornish face, without guile but inscrutable, and a lot of untidy, grizzled dark hair that he forgot to have cut, and eyes as thoughtful, direct and disconcerting as a small boy’s, but more tolerant.
The great waste of sand opened before them, and the great waste of sea beyond, a vast still plane and a vast vibrating plane. Through the tamarisk fronds they saw to the left the fanged head of the Dragon jutting out to sea, and nearer, at the southern end of the length of Pentarno sands, the low pebbly ridge of the Mortuary, dark with the rim of weed that built up there with every incoming tide. To their right was the clean, bright sand where young Paddy ran down to bathe every morning and every afternoon during the holidays. And here, tucked away on their left at the blown limit of the dunes, was St. Nectan’s church. They saw it first by the small, squat tower and the little peaked roof over the empty lantern where once there had been a bell. Then, as they entered the small, cleared bowl, the whole building stood before them; very small, plain as a barn, with tiny, high lancet windows pierced here and there without plan or pattern, a narrow, crooked, porchless door with a scratched dog-tooth border almost eroded away, and a rounded tympanum with a crude little carving that could barely be distinguished now.
“Saxon, all the base of the walls,” said the Vicar, bounding out of the back of the Land-Rover and approaching George as he stood contemplating the relic. “Windows and door and lantern very early Norman. The roof was re- slated not long before they gave it up as a bad job and built St. Mary’s. The foundations go right down to the rock. We keep losing this, but St. Mary’s will fall down first.”
The permanence and elemental quality of the sea pervaded the little church, the laboriously cleared graveyard with its stunted stones and erased names, the feathery curtains of tamarisks. Only the large grey hulk of the Treverra tomb, a stone cube rising about three feet above the surrounding ground, still obstinately asserted its own identity.
Before the tomb there was a railed-in pit, stone-lined and narrow, like a Victorian area. The iron gate swung freely on its newly-oiled hinges, and the fresh drift of sand was already filming over the steps of the staircase that descended to the low, broad door.
“I thought we should be sure to have an audience,” said Simon, coming from the Porsche with a large iron key in his hand.
Tim laughed. “We have. Don’t you know ’em yet? Half Pentarno and a fair sprinkling of Maymouth is deployed wherever there’s cover along the coast road, moving in on us quietly right now. By the time we’re down the steps and inside they’ll be massing all round the rim. Only just within sight, they won’t cramp you, but they won’t miss a thing.”
“One of my choirboys,” said the Vicar brightly, “borrowed my binoculars this morning. I didn’t ask him why. I fancy most of the trebles are up on the Dragon’s Head, passing them round. It’s more fun that way. Shall we go down?”
They already had their gear piled outside the sunken door. Simon trod gently down the steps, disturbing the furls of blown sand, and fitted Miss Rachel’s key into the huge lock. It turned with ready smoothness, a fact on which, George noted, nobody commented. Sam Shubrough’s benign red face was serene in ambush behind his noble whiskers, his eyes as placid as the sea. They entered the vault, letting in daylight with them to a segment of rock flooring, thinly and idly patterned with coils of sand that must have drifted under the door. It fitted closely, or there would surely have been much more. A well-sealed place, dry and clean, the walls faced with stone slabs, shutting out even the saltness of the sea air. Treverra had made himself snug.
Tim switched on the electric lamp he was carrying, and set it on the stone ledge that ran all round the walls at shoulder-height. Sam added a second one at the other side. And there they were, the two massive stone coffins, each set upon a plinth carved clear and left standing when the vault was cut deep into the rock. They occupied the whole centre of the chamber between them, a narrow passage separating them, a narrow space clear all round them. There was nothing else in the vault.
Plain altar tombs, their corners moulded into a cluster of pillars, the lips of their lids decorated with a scroll- work of leaves and vines, and a tablet on each lid brought to a high finish to carry the engraved epitaph. By these they were identifiable, even if the one coffin had not been larger than the other, and perhaps two or three inches higher.
“
This was Treverra. And the other one, close to his side as in life, was the lady, that frail beauty with the brilliant and daring face. She must have been every inch his match, thought George tracing the deliberate misquotation from Dryden spelled out in challenging capitals over her breast:
“NONE BUT THE BRAVE DESERVES THE BRAVE.”
Did a man ever think of that? Surely not! It was a woman making that claim for herself. Not wanting to be understood; wanting, in fact, not to be understood, but delighting in the risk. Why should she give that impression even in dying? She pined away. Only somehow it hadn’t looked like a pining face.
The Vicar hefted the crowbars into the tomb. He stood holding them upright by his side, like the faithful sentinel, and looked again, long and thoughtfully, at the two coffins. “I’d like to say a prayer first.”
He prayed with his head unstooped and his eyes open, and in his own unorthodox way.
“Help us if we’re doing well,” he said, “and forgive us if we’re not. Lord, let there be peace on all here, living and dead.” He looked at the bold words on Morwenna’s coffin, with respect and liking in his face. “And reunion for all true lovers,” he said.
Simon said: “Amen!”
“And now, how do you want to handle it?”
Simon disposed his team as practically as the Vicar prayed, and with the same sense of purpose.
