A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

“A sunshine cruise to an island paradise, just as Dominic said, if I’d only listened to him. But not Tir-nan-Og! Not even the Bahamas, perhaps, but near enough. According to the records most of his trading had been done with Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados. Somewhere there, I judge, we might still pick up his traces.

“How many were in the know? It’s guesswork, now, but I’d say just the three of them, Jan, Morwenna and their elder son, and maybe the skipper of his ship. There may have been a family doctor in it, too, to cover the deaths, but if so, he kept his mouth tightly shut afterwards to protect himself, and who can blame him? They may have managed without him? It hardly matters now. I’m sure that’s what happened. It accounts for the empty coffin, that was later to be filled and over-filled. And it accounts for what followed.

“For, you see, Morwenna would never have agreed to such a plan if there hadn’t been provision in it for her to join him. Act two was to be the translation of Morwenna. She was to pine away—her own touch, that, I’d swear— and to be reunited with her lord in an earthly, not a heavenly, paradise. After six months the same programme is put in motion for her. She ‘dies’ of a broken heart, and is buried in the tomb prepared for her.”

He broke off there, startled, for someone had uttered an almost inaudible sound that yet had the sharpness of a cry. A quiver passed round the circle, and a rustle of breath, as if they had all been shaken out of a trail , Paddy, flushing hotly, drew back a little into shadow. “I’m sorry! I was only thinking—She was so little!”

“They took every possible care of her, Paddy. Or they thought they had. Yes, she was very slight and frail, she couldn’t deal with tombstones herself, they knew that. She had to lie patiently in her coffin until dark, when her son would come to release her, and see her safely down the passage and aboard. The light wooden coffin in which she was carried to the vault was pierced in a pattern of fine holes just above her face—did you notice that, George? The air in the stone coffin would easily be enough to keep her going until night. And she was well provided with funds for the journey, in money and jewellery. The wooden lid would be only very lightly fastened down, so that she could move it herself. And all she needed besides was the heart of a lioness, and that she knew she had. She was the one who misquoted Dryden, that I’d swear to. ‘None but the brave deserves the brave.’ To lie and wait several hours alone in the dark didn’t seem terrible to her, not by comparison with what it bought.

“But that night of her funeral, you remember, is recorded as the night of the great storm, when the fishing- boats were driven out to sea. And young Treverra, the new squire, was blown from the cliff path in the darkness, and drowned. A young man in mourning, wandering the cliffs alone—no one would ask what he was doing there.

“I’m afraid, I’m terribly afraid, he was on his way down the cliff path to the church and the vault, to see his mother resurrected and put safely aboard ship for Barbados.

“And no one else, you see, knew anything about her.

“No one else. She was dead, they’d just buried her. If the doctor knew, he’d assume everything was going according to plan, or at least that her son was taking care of her, until he heard of the boy being missing. And that may not have happened until well into the next morning. By then a doctor would know she’d be dead. He’d be afraid to speak. It couldn’t help her, and it could, you see, harm not only himself but Treverra, too. He’d be a wanted man again as soon as it was known he was alive. And nothing and nobody could give Morwenna back to him now.”

“But the ship,” ventured Dominic huskily. “There was a ship lying off for her. Wouldn’t they try to find out what had happened?”

“That’s what makes me think that this time it wasn’t their own ship. It would be risky to chance having it stopped in these waters, obviously. No, this time I think it was a matter of a simple commercial arrangement with some other skipper, in which case they wouldn’t know anything except that they were to put in a boat at such and such a spot and pick up a lady. If they ever did manage to put in a boat in such a sea, it’s certain she didn’t come to keep the appointment. They couldn’t know what that implied, to them it just meant their passenger hadn’t turned up. Maybe they waited as long as they could, maybe they were driven out. What could they do but sail without her?

“And all that money, and the valuables she was to have taken with her, just lay uselessly in her coffin with her for two centuries, until Zeb Trethuan found it and started methodically turning it into money again. Thus setting the stage for the next death.

“Nobody knew about it, you see. Young Treverra’s body was never found, so the vault wasn’t opened for him. His young brother came home from school and took over the estate, but he’d never been in the secret. To him his mother and father had died and been buried, no mysteries, no tragedy but the ordinary, gentle tragedy of bereavement, that happens sooner or later to everyone. By the time he died and was buried, St. Nectan’s was already fighting a losing battle with the sand, and they’d built St. Mary’s, high up in the town, and abandoned the old graveyard by the shore. And Morwenna lay there alone, separated from her Jan, and he—God knows which was the unluckier of the two.”

Tamsin had got up from her place very quietly, and gone to her desk. She came back with the folder of the Treverra papers in her hand, and slid out upon the table the two epitaphs.

“Not that I don’t know them by heart,” she said in a low voice. “But suddenly they seem so new and so transparent, as though we ought to have been able to read the whole story in them from the beginning.”

“You think I’ve made out a case, then?” Simon’s eyes met hers down the length of the table, and there was nothing left of challenge or antagonism on her side, and nothing of pursuit or self-indulgence on his. They looked at each other with wonder and grief, and a certain frustrated helplessness, but with no doubt at all.

“I think it’s so unanswerable a case that I don’t know how we missed following the clues Jan left us. It’s all here! Don’t you hear him? He couldn’t play any game without making it dangerous to himself, there wouldn’t have been any sport. He told them just what he was about. He made his exit snapping his fingers under the nose of the law, and daring them to follow his trail if they had the wit. But they hadn’t, and neither had we.

‘Think not to find, beneath this Stone

Mute Witness, bleached, ambiguous Bone—’

You see, he told them, don’t look for me here, you won’t find me. And then, his ‘trackless maze,’ ‘the labyrinth beyond the tomb’—what was that but the real tunnel that opened beyond his tomb? He told them how he made his getaway, kicked up his heels at them and invited them to go after him if they were smart enough. And then, the last four lines, those are for her.

‘There follow, O my Soul, and find

Thy Lord as ever true and kind,