Mr. Jensen gave a quick frown. “Gold, certainly. Don’t forget it was used as currency then. But it won’t be so much the gold as the guns that they’ll be going for today.”
“Guns?” said Sloan. “Guns before gold?” He was faintly disappointed. Pieces of eight had a swashbuckling ring to them.
“They’re easier to find underwater,” said Jensen. “And if I remember rightly she had a pair of Demi-Culverin on board and some twelve pounders.”
Sloan was struck by a different thought. “Armed merchantmen were nothing new, then?”
“If you worked in a museum, Inspector, you’d realise that there is nothing new under the sun.”
“Quite so,” said Sloan.
Mr. Jensen came back very quickly to the matter in hand. “There are treasure-seekers, Inspector, who would blow her out of the water for her guns and not care that they were destroying priceless marine archeology. Do you realise that everything that comes out of an underwater find should be kept underwater?”
“She doesn’t,” observed Sloan moderately, “appear to have been blown out of the water yet.”
“Matter of time,” said Jensen, resuming his restless pacing. “Only a matter of time. Depends entirely on who knows she’s been found and how quickly they act.”
“I can see that, sir.” There were villains everywhere. You learned that early in the police force. “There must be something that can be done about stopping her being damaged.”
“Done? Oh, yes,” said Jensen. “For those in peril in the sea, Inspector, we can get a Department of Trade protection order making it an offence to interfere with the wreck or carry out unlicenced diving or salvage.” He turned on his heel suddenly and faced Sloan. “But we’d need to know where she was. How did you say you’d come by this barbary head?”
“I didn’t,” said Sloan quietly, “and I’m not going to.”
Elizabeth Busby felt strangely relaxed and comforted after her cry at the graveside. She was sure that her aunt would have understood her need to leave the house and seek out a quiet spot in the out of doors. Celia Mundill would have understood the tears too—there was a marvellous release to be had in tears. And Collerton graveyard was certainly quiet enough—it was a fine and private place for tears, in fact.
True, Horace Boiler from Edsway had rowed past on his way upstream but he hadn’t disturbed her thoughts at all. Perhaps this was because those thoughts were still too inchoate and unformed to admit intrusion from an outside source. Perhaps it was only because—more mundanely—she hadn’t liked to lift a tear-stained face for it to be seen by the man who had been going by.
She felt much better in the open air; she was sure about that. Collerton House had begun to oppress her since Celia Mundill had died—it wasn’t the same without her warm presence, ill as she had been. It wasn’t the same either—subconsciously she stiffened her shoulders—since Peter Hinton had so precipitately taken his departure. There was no use baulking at the fact—no matter how hard she tried to think of other things, in the end her thoughts always came back to Peter Hinton.
She had felt at the time and she still felt now that a note left on the table in the hall was no way for a real man to break with his affianced. If he had felt the way he said he did, then the very least he could have done was to have told her so—face to face. A note left behind on the hall table beside the signet ring she had given him was the coward’s way.
For the thousandth time she took the folded paper which Peter Hinton had written out of her pocket and—for the thousandth time—considered it. Its message was loud and clear. It could scarcely have been shorter or balder either.
There was not a word of explanation as to why a man who had quite unequivocally declared that he wanted to marry her should suddenly leave a note like that. Time and time again she had turned it over to see if there had been more—anything—written on the back but there wasn’t.
There still wasn’t.
She had resolved not to keep on and on reading the note—and forgotten how many times she had made the resolution. She’d broken it every day. She didn’t know why she needed to look at it anyway. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what it said. Sadly she folded it up again and put it away.
She sat back on her heels then, more at peace with herself than she’d been all day. There was something very peaceful about the churchyard—you could begin to see what it was about a churchyard that had moved Thomas Gray to write his elegy and why her aunt hadn’t wanted to be cremated. There was something very soothing, too, about the sound of the water lapping away at the edge of the churchyard grass. Cray hadn’t had that at—where was it? Stoke Poges.
Elizabeth reached over and picked out the flowers that she had brought with her on her last visit. They were fading now. That gave her something to do with her hands and that was soothing too. As she carefully started to arrange the roses in the vase she began to understand why it was that her aunt’s husband had been so insistent about his wife’s grave being within the sound of the water.
“She’d spent all her life by the river,” he’d said, immediately selecting the plot that was closest to the river’s edge.
The sexton had murmured something about flooding.
“But she loved the sound of the river,” Frank Mundill had insisted.
The sexton had hitched his shoulder. “You won’t like it in winter, Mr. Mundill.”
Architects spend at least half their working lives persuading recalcitrant builders to do what architect and client want and Frank Mundill had had to prove his skill in this field in the five minutes that followed.
“It couldn’t be too near the river for her,” he had said.
“The first time the Calle comes up,” sniffed the sexton obstinately, “you’ll be on to me. You see.”
“I won’t,” undertook Frank Mundill.
“And there won’t be anything I can do then,” said the man as if he hadn’t spoken.
“I shan’t want you to do anything.”
“It’ll be too late then,” said the man obdurately. “Mark my words.”
“My wife was born over there, remember.” Frank Mundill had waved a hand in the direction of Collerton House. He introduced a firmer tone into his voice. “She loved this river.”
His gesture had reminded Elizabeth Busby of something and she had taken herself off at that point to have a look at her grandparents’ grave. That was over by the church—not far from the west door. And next to it was the polished marble monument to her great grandparents. Cordon Camming—he who had invented the Camming valve—had made it clear that he intended to found a dynasty too. He’d bought half a dozen plots around his own tomb; the sexton hadn’t hesitated to remind Frank Mundill of this.
The word “dynasty” had started up another unhappy train of thought, in her mind at the time, not unconnected with Peter Hinton, and she had drifted back to the river’s edge where the exchange between Frank Mundill and the sexton was drawing to a close. By the time she had reached the two men, the site of the plot for the grave of her aunt had been agreed upon and the sexton, if still not happy about it, at least mollified.
“She’ll be content here,” she heard Celia Mundill’s widower insisting as she drew closer.
Elizabeth hoped then and hoped now as she tended the flowers on the grave that this was true. It was still summertime, of course, and flooding was a long way from her mind as she took away the last of the dead flowers from her previous visit. She sat back on her heels while she carefully picked out the best rose for the centre position. Her aunt had known she would never see this year’s Fantin-Latour roses on the bush—she’d told Elizabeth so in spite of all Dr. Tebot had said—but there was no reason, she told herself fiercely, why she shouldn’t have them on her grave.
As she placed each succeeding stem of the double blush-pink clusters of flowers in the grave’s special frost- proof vase she began to see why it was that this particular rose had been such a favourite—and not only of Celia Mundill but of Henri Fantin-Latour and the old Dutch flower painters—of real artists, in fact.
Involuntarily her lips tightened into a smile.
There was a family joke about the word “artist.” Grandfather Camming had called himself an artist and filled canvas upon canvas to prove it. The family had tacitly agreed therefore that he must be known as an artist. Other artists—those who did improve as time went by, those whose pictures were fought over by art galleries—even
