Could see, too, why the Butlers would have chosen it to hold the goods they smuggled in from Brittany aboard the Sally. They’d have likely dropped her anchor round the headland at high tide, and under cover of the darkness rowed the contraband to shore. It would have taken several men to do the work, and I remembered how the book I’d read at Oliver’s had said it was a point of pride that no one in Polgelly had betrayed this cave’s existence to the constable.
When he had searched the house that day, the day he’d found me there alone, the thing that he’d been looking for had probably been hidden safe down here.
I wondered what it was.
Behind me, Susan moved towards the row of barrels. ‘Look at these. Your Butler brothers left these, I expect.’
Mark didn’t think it likely. ‘They’re not old enough. Besides, they weren’t all empty when I played here. I’ll lay odds that was Dad’s private stash of whisky.’
‘I’m surprised he let you play here,’ Susan said.
‘He didn’t know. He would have had my hide if he’d found out.’ Mark took an idle step away, and accidentally his foot kicked something out of place that scuttled with a rasp across the stone. He bent to pick it up.
I asked, ‘What is it?’
‘Just a bit of strapping from a barrel, I’d imagine.’ He tossed it back into a corner. ‘Not like the treasures we used to find.’
Felicity set down the spent candles. ‘What sort of treasures would those be, then?’
‘Lots of things. Musket balls, sometimes. Old coins. I’ve got some of them still, in a drawer somewhere.’
Susan, who had still not quite forgiven him for keeping the cave secret from her, said to him accusingly, ‘I’ve never seen those, either.’
‘Yes, well, pirates hide their treasure. They don’t show it to their sisters, do they?’
‘If they want to go on having meals cooked for them,’ Susan said, ‘they do.’
Mark’s smile in that dim light was hard to see, but I could tell he knew, as I did, that when Susan set her mind to something she would not be swayed. ‘I’ll try to dig it up,’ he promised, then he paused as a faint rumble filled the cavern.
Felicity, hearing it too, announced, ‘Thunder.’
‘So it is,’ said Mark. ‘We should start back, those rocks aren’t so easy to climb in the rain.’
I hung back a bit and took one final look over my shoulder as though by force of will alone I could push through the barriers of time and see the cave as Daniel would have known it. But I only saw the darkness and the dripping stone and hollow walls that told me I had come too late. Three hundred years too late.
Outside, Mark’s voice called, ‘Eva?’
I turned again and stepped out of the silence through the cleft beneath the waterfall, and heard the singing of the sea.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back at the house, Susan gave Mark no rest till he’d gone up to look in his room for the childhood treasures he’d claimed he still kept ‘in a drawer somewhere’. In spite of his earlier vagueness, he must have known exactly where they were because it wasn’t long before he came back down and set a slightly grimy biscuit tin between us at the kitchen table.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘My plunder.’
Susan gave it an experimental shake. ‘What’s in it?’
‘Have a look and see.’
He put the kettle on to make the tea and watched with patience while we sorted through his ‘treasures’: small bits of polished glass and stone, a limpet shell, a tarnished metal button, the cork from a wine bottle, two shilling coins and a ha’penny, some woman’s earring with worn plastic pearls, the promised musket balls, and underneath all that a length of rusted metal so misshapen that it wasn’t recognisable as anything. Until Felicity reached out to pick it up and gently brushed the flakes away.
I stared, then, as the cold chased up my spine.
Susan asked her friend, ‘What’s that?’
‘Some kind of knife.’
She looked to Mark, who shrugged and said, ‘I think I found it in behind the barrels. Don’t remember.’
It was in fact a dagger, small and neatly made to fit the hand that held it so precisely that whoever faced it in a fight would only see the blade. I knew, because I’d seen it twice myself already.
Susan touched it lightly. ‘What’s the handle made of?’
Felicity peered at it. ‘Bone, I think.’
Not bone, I could have corrected her. Shell. Some sort of shell like abalone that could show its colours in the light. But it was mostly gone and what remained was crusted thick with dirt, and there would be no way I could explain how I had known. Instead I asked her, ‘May I hold it?’
It felt strange in my grasp, cold and rough, not the smooth deadly thing it had seemed when I’d seen it in Daniel’s hand just a few days ago. Just a few days … Had it been only that? It seemed an age, and I wondered again at how quickly he’d come to be someone I missed, when he wasn’t there.
Susan said, ‘It looks so old.’
And Felicity, watching me, had an idea. ‘Eva, why don’t you take that and show it to Oliver? He knows a lot about weapons and things. He could tell you how old it is. And what it’s worth, even.’
Mark didn’t think it would be worth much. ‘Not in that state.’
But Felicity told him, ‘You never know. The strangest things can fetch the highest prices, sometimes.’