“Simon,” said the Vicar, “I don’t know whether I really ought to admire you for it, but you must be the only fellow I ever met with the effrontery to think of Abelard as a poor devil. Here you are, here’s—” He had been about to say “Walter Ruiz”; instead he said, courteously but serenely: “—the man you’re looking for.”
A low, cropped grave, turfed over within a granite kerb, under the bough of a hawthorn tree. Grey old stones, seamed with fine viridian moss, leaning all round. A plain pillow stone at the head of the small enclosure, and inscribed on it:
WALTER RUIZ
Born May 8th, 1929,
Drowned, March, 1962.
“I will bring my people again
from the depths
of the sea.”
“He wasn’t Ruiz, you know,” said Simon, standing gazing down at it with a shadowed face. “Nobody’ll ever know now who he really was. I don’t know why, but I feel bad about that. Even if we could think of him by a name, and a face, and say: Poor old Smith, three years next month since he was washed up!—even that would be something, give him a place to exist in, a dimension in which he’d be real. But now he’s nobody.”
“He’s as surely somebody,” said the Vicar placidly, “as you are. And nothing could be much surer than that.”
“But who? Doesn’t that matter?”
“It matters who. It doesn’t matter that we should know who. He’s been identified,” said the Vicar, tucking his hymn-board under his arm, “a long time ago, in the only way that matters in the least now. And by a witness who doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Yes—I see your point.‘I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.’ Yes, he might have done worse. Who provided the stone? You?”
“It’s always been the tradition that the dead from the sea, who had no families here to bury them, should be a charge on the church. Look round you, if you think a foreign name makes a man a stranger here.”
They looked. Half the sea-faring nations of the west lay there quietly enough together, with the scent of the salt shore for ever in the wind that stirred the pale grasses over them. Edvard Kekonnen, seaman. Hugh O’Neill, master-mariner. Alfonso Nuñez, master-mariner. Vassilis Kondrakis, seaman. Two Spanish shipmates, unknown by name. Sean MacPeake, master-mariner. Jean Plouestion, fisherman. Walter Ruiz, or X, fisherman, seaman or master-mariner. “I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.” It didn’t much matter if no one else knew what to call them, the voice they were listening for would have all their names right.
“Yes,” said Simon, a small, wry smile curling the corners of his mouth, “this is the point of departure for a good many heavens, seemingly, Valhalla, Tir-nan-Og, the lot. It’s the sea-going men who made the western islands heaven, I suppose.” He slipped into song again, very softly:
“ ‘ Far the cloudless sky stretches blue
Across the isle, green in the sunlight.’
It sounds like Jan Treverra himself designing that paradise, doesn’t it?
“ ‘There shall thou and I wander free
On sheen-white sands, dreaming in starlight’.”
“I was thinking much the same thing,” agreed George, smiling. “What was it Dom said about your two epitaphs, that first evening we were up at the Place with you? Something about making the after-life sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas.”
Simon had begun to turn back towards the gravelled walk, his hands deep in his pockets, the air of the Hebridean song still soft and sweet in his mouth. He halted suddenly, stiffening; for a moment he hung perfectly still, then he turned a face sharp and pale beneath its gold with contained excitement.
“Dom said what? Would you mind saying that again?”
“He said the Treverra epitaphs made the after-life sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas. Why? What nerve did that prick?”
“The nerve it should have pricked then, if I’d been even half awake. And I was there?” he protested furiously. “I heard this? And I didn’t connect?”
“You laughed. Like the rest of us,” said George, patient but mystified.
“I would! The fate of many another pregant utterance in its time. Why do I never listen properly to anyone but myself? My God, but I see now how it all began, all the first part of the story. You only have to put one bit in place, and all the other pieces begin to slide in and settle alongside. George, come to the Place to-night, will you? We’re dining with the old lady, because Paddy has to go back to school to-morrow. Bring Bunty and Dominic, and come to coffee afterwards. You, too, Dan, please. I’d like you to be there.”
“With pleasure,” said the Vicar equably, “if you want me.”
“I do. I want you all, everyone who was involved in this investigation from the beginning. Because I can see my way now,” said Simon, suddenly shivering in the chilling air of early evening and the tension of his own incandescent excitement. “I believe I can clear up the strange, sad case of Jan and Morwenna, the mystery that set off all these other mysteries. And I will, to-night.”
They gathered round the long table in Miss Rachel’s library, ten of them. The curtains were drawn, and the tide, already well past its height, lashed and cried with subsiding force off the point, in the soft, luminous dark. Miss Rachel sat at the head of the table, dispensing coffee royally and happily, with Paddy at her left because she would not let him out of her reach now that he was regained in good condition and angelic humour, and had forgiven her freely under the pretence of being freely forgiven. On her right, Simon, curiously quiet and strained and bright. Tamsin moved about the foot of the table handing coffee-cups, helped by Dominic. George and Bunty on one side of the table, Tim and Phil and the Vicar on the other. It was a long time since the old lady had assembled such a satisfactory court, she didn’t even seem to mind that it was turning out to be Simon’s court rather than hers. The more he disclaimed it, the more honestly he abdicated, the more surely this evening belonged to him.
“I wasn’t the one who put my finger on the spot,” he was saying with passionate gravity. “That was Dominic. I had to have my nose rubbed in the truth before I could even realise it was there.”
“Me?” said Dominic, staggered. “I didn’t do anything, how on earth did I get in on the credits?”
“You took one look at the Treverra epitaphs, and put your finger on the one significant thing about them.‘They make heaven sound like a sunshine cruise to the Bahamas,’ you said.”
“Did I? It must have been just a joke, then. I didn’t see anything significant.”
“You did, though you may not have realised it or taken it seriously. All that pretty verse about year-long summer, and golden sands, and sapphire seas—you saw intuitively what it really meant, and that it was very much this side the grave. Whether you ever examined what you knew or not, you offered it to me, and I didn’t have the wit to look at it properly, and learn from it.”
They saw now, dimly, where he was leading them. They sat still, all eyes upon Simon. His thin, long hands were linked on the table before him. The cigarette he had lighted and forgotten smoked slowly away to a cylinder of ash in the ashtray beside him. The tension that held them all silent and motionless proceeded from him, but only he seemed unaware of it.
“If ever there was a crazy bit of research, this was it. There we were, with Treverra’s own tomb—well, not empty, but empty of the man who should have been in it, and his wife’s coffin unhappily not empty, but most tragically occupied, by the poor lady who had died there, and, as we found out afterwards, by a pretty large sum in old money and jewels. This crazy, sad puzzle, and those two epitaphs for clues, and nothing else.