Paddy smoothed her in one breathless sentence: “Hallo, Aunt Rachel, I’m terribly sorry about the rest of the apricots, it was all a mix-up, I meant to come back. Would some of them be all right to-morrow? Mummy’s making jam with those. No, I don’t mind, really I don’t. I’m glad. Yes, I do mean it. Can we keep Tamsin for to-day? She was the one who found me last night—one of the two, that is, Dominic was the other. ’Ess, me dear, I’ll be up- along soon as I can. To-morrow for sure, because I’m going back to school Monday, you know. O.K., I’ll tell her. ’Bye, Aunt Rachel!”
He hung up, grinning. “She says to tell you Alice has instructions not to keep lunch hot for you.”
“Good!” said Tamsin, linking her other arm in Dominic’s. “That means I’ve got the whole day off. Come on, let’s go and pan gold in Paddy’s cave.”
They went down the steep path from the Dragon, where Simon had risked his neck on Paddy’s cycle, three abreast, linked and light-hearted. At the edge of the harbour they halted to buy three immense cones of candy- floss, and went down the harbour steps in single file, flourishing them like torch-bearers in a procession, and nibbling the fringes like fire-eaters. They paid no attention to anyone or anything but their own mid-September holiday happiness, reprieved from yesterday’s shadow. But a girl who was just hurrying out of the narrow, rocky alley behind the six colour-washed cottages of Cliffside Row checked and drew back at sight of them, and stood in the shadow of the rocks, watching them recede, linked and hilarious, down the slate-coloured sands.
The tide was nearing its lowest ebb, and beyond the pebbly stretches the finer sand gleamed moist and bright in a watery sun. The three young people, the taller boy, the visitor, on the right, young Paddy Rossall on the left, Tamsin Holt in the middle with her arm about Paddy’s shoulders and the other boy’s arm about hers, bore steadily sidelong into the cliff face, and halted to finish their hectic pink torches before they vanished into the black mouth of the Dragon’s Hole.
Paddy looked back up the beach towards the coloured cardboard stage set, the impossibly charming and gay toy theatre of the harbour and the town. He saw another flare of candy-floss, primrose-gold, burning at the corner of the dark alley behind the cottages, and recognised Rose Pollard, a round, soft, appealing doll in neutral Shetland sweater and tartan trews, standing there braced and alert. She seemed—he couldn’t be sure, but that was how it struck him—she seemed to be watching them, and wondering, and hesitating. And when she moved at last, it was to draw back softly into the shadow; but his eyes, following movement rather than colours, assured him that she had not gone away, and his intuition, already sharpened beyond ordinary this morning, warned him that she had not stopped watching.
“I can’t believe it,” said Tamsin disgustedly. “We’ve walked how far?—more than half a mile underground, and suddenly the whole thing folds up in a blank wall. And you said yourself the stone’s been worked with tools in places, so somebody was interested in improving the passage for use. Why would it just stop, without arriving anywhere?”
Dominic’s eyes followed the beam of Paddy’s torch from stone ceiling to stone floor. To call it a blank wall that faced them was simplifying things; it was a rough confusion of broken planes, sealing off the small chamber into which the passage had opened. But quite certainly there was no cleft nor hole in it through which they could pass. This was the end of the journey.
“Maybe the passage was an end in itself,” he said. “There’s room among some of these side-pockets we’ve passed to store any amount of contraband. The whole complex could be a pretty good hiding-place. And they may have taken steps to hide the entrance even better, when it was in use.”
“But, look,” said Paddy acutely, “if the passage was to be the cache, they didn’t need half a mile of it, a hundred yards would have done. They could have got a ship-load of stuff in that first bulge. You don’t chip your way along half a mile underground unless you’re aiming to
“I have to admit,” agreed Tamsin thoughtfully, after pondering this for a minute, “that he’s got something there.”
“Do you suppose we’ve missed a turning somewhere? It may go on in another direction.”
“We could have a more thorough look on the way back. We’ve got time, it’s not much after twelve. And there’s nothing for us here.”
They turned back rather reluctantly, all the same; nobody likes going back by the same route. It is, as Paddy had rightly observed, a fundamental predilection of human nature to want to get somewhere, even if most arrivals turn out to be disappointing.
The floor on which they walked had been smoothed in places by stones deliberately laid. Sometimes it was naked rock, sometimes this levelled causeway, and sometimes, especially where the narrow cleft opened out into a broader passage, there was deep, fine grey sand. With a light, the whole half-mile of it was easy, no more than a stony walk; and all these later reaches were dry, for over the entire length the level climbed very gently, and bore away inland from the Dragon’s Hole at a brisk right incline.
“Where do you suppose we are?” asked Paddy as they turned back, playing his light ahead of them on both rough walls. “Half a mile is farther than the neck, we must be right under the high part of the town.”
“I don’t think we’ve borne as far to the right as that,” objected Dominic. “I’d say somewhere just the other side the Head, under the dunes.”
“It’s so straightforward here,” said Tamsin, stepping out merrily in the lead, “you hardly need a light.” And promptly on the word she tripped over a stone that tilted treacherously out of the sandy floor, and went down with a squeak of protest on hands and knees.
Dominic and Paddy both reached solicitous hands to help her up, but for a moment she sat scowling, dusting her hands and examining her nylons. “Damn! Somebody owes me a new pair of stockings.” A ladder was trickling playfully downward from her right knee.
“I’ll buy you some new ones with my guinea,” offered Paddy generously. “That was pretty much how I found it, actually, only I had more excuse, because I didn’t have a light that time. You sure you’re not sitting on a pirate’s hoard?”
“Not unless he hoarded granite sand. But there was something sharp, look, it broke the skin.” She sifted fine sand through her fingers, probed the indentation her knee had made, and raised from beneath the surface a thin ring of yellow wire, with edges that barely met. “That’s the secret weapon. Not a pirate’s hoard, but maybe a smuggler’s ear-ring.” She rubbed it on her sleeve, and it gleamed encouragingly. “I believe that’s what it is. It looks like gold wire.”
They ran the torch carefully over every corner of the sanded floor, but found nothing more. Tamsin pocketed her find, and they resumed their methodical walk back. There were broken bays in the rocks here and there to be explored, but all of them proved to be dead ends; and as they drew nearer to the Dragon’s Hole tiny trickles of
