“What’s an omphalo-thing?” asked Ernest.
“The title means ‘the Devil’s Belly-Button’,” said Violet, which made Ernest giggle. “He’s put Greek and Latin words together, which is poor Classics. Apart from his stupid ideas, he’s a terrible writer. Listen… ‘all the multitudinarious flora and fauna of divine creation constitute veritable evidence of the proof of the pellucid and undiluted accuracy of the Word of God Almighty Unchallenged as set down in the shining, burning, shimmering sentences, chapters and, indeed, books of the Old and New Testaments, hereinafter known to all righteous and right-thinking men as the Holy Bible of Glorious God.’ It’s as if he’s saying ‘this is the true truthiest truest truth of truthdom ever told truly by truth-trusters’.”
“How do the belly-buttons come into it?” asked Dick.
“Adam and Eve were supposed to have been created with navels, though—since they weren’t born like other people—they oughtn’t to have them.”
This was over Ernest’s head, but Dick knew how babies came and that his navel was a knot, where a cord had been cut and tied.
“To Sellwood’s way of thinking, just as Adam and Eve were created to seem as if they had normal parents, the Earth was created as if it had a pre-history, with geological and fossil evidence in place to make the planet appear much older than it says in the Bible.”
“That’s silly,” said Ernest.
“Don’t tell me, tell Sellwood,” said Violet. “He’s a silly, stupid man.
He doesn’t want to know the truth, or anyone else to either, so he breaks fossils and shouts down lecturers. His theory isn’t even original. A man named Gosse wrote a book with the same idea, though Gosse claimed God buried fossils to fool people while Sellwood says it was the Devil.”
Violet was quite annoyed.
“I think it’s an excuse to go round bullying people,” said Dick. “A cover for his real, sinister purpose.”
“If you ask me, what he does is sinister enough by itself.”
“Nobody did ask you,” said Ernest, which he always said when someone was unwise enough to preface a statement with “if you ask me”. Violet stuck her tongue out at him.
Dick was thinking.
“It’s likely that the Sellwood family were smugglers,” he said.
Violet agreed. “Smugglers had to have ships, and pretend to be respectable merchants. In the old days, they were all at it. You know the poem…”
Violet stood up, put a hand on her chest, and recited, dramatically.
“If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.
Five and twenty ponies, trotting through the dark,
Brandy for the parson, ’baccy for the clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.”
She waited for applause, which didn’t come. But her recitation was useful. Dick had been thinking in terms of spies or smugglers, but the poem reminded him that the breeds were interdependent. It struck him that Sellwood might be a smuggler of spies, or a spy for smugglers.
“I’ll wager ‘Tiger’ Bristow is in this, too,” he said, snapping his fingers.
Ernest shivered, audibly.
“Is it spying or smuggling?” he asked.
“It’s both,” Dick replied.
Violet sat down again, and chewed on a long, stray strand of her hair.
“Tell Dick about the French Spy,” suggested Ernest.
Dick was intrigued.
“That was a long time ago, a hundred years,” she said. “It’s a local legend, not evidence.”
“You yourself say legends always shroud some truth,” declared Dick. “We must consider all the facts, even rumors of facts, before forming a conclusion.”
Violet shrugged. “It is about Sellwood’s house, I suppose…”
Dick was astonished. “And you didn’t think it was relevant! Sometimes, I’m astonished by your lack of perspicacity!”
Violet looked incipiently upset at his tone, and Dick wondered if he wasn’t going too far. He needed her in the Agency, but she could be maddening at times. Like a real girl.
“Out with it, Vile,” he barked.
Violet crossed her arms and kept quiet.
“I apologize for my tactlessness,” said Dick. “But this is vitally important. We might be able to put that ammonite-abuser out of business, with immeasurable benefit to science.”
Violet melted. “Very well. I heard this from Alderman Hooke’s father…”
Before her paleontology craze, Violet fancied herself a collector of folklore. She had gone around asking old people to tell stories or sing songs or remember why things were called what they were called. She was going to write them all up in a book of local legends and had wanted Uncle Davey to draw the pictures. She was still working on her book, but it was about Dinosaurs in Dorset now.
“I didn’t make much of it, because it wasn’t much of a legend. Just a scrap of history.”
“With a spy,” prompted Ernest. “A spy who came out of the sea!”
Violet nodded. “That’s more or less it. When England was at war with France, everyone thought Napoleon…”
“Boney!” put in Ernest, making fang-fingers at the corners of his mouth.
“Yes, Boney… everyone thought he was going to invade, like William the Conqueror. Along the coast people watched the seas. Signal-fires were prepared, like with the Spanish Armada. Most thought it likely the French would strike at Dover, but round here they tapped the sides of their noses…”
Violet imitated an old person tapping her long nose.
“…and said the last army to invade Britain had landed at Lyme, and the next would too. The last army was Monmouth’s, during his rebellion. He landed at the Cobb and marched up to Sedgmoor, where he was defeated. There are lots of legends about the Duke of Monmouth…”
Dick made a get-to-the-point gesture.
“Any rate, near the end of the eighteenth century, a man named Jacob Orris formed a vigilance patrol to keep watch on the beaches. Orris’s daughter married a sea-captain called Lud Sellwood; they begat drowned George and old Devil’s Belly-Button. Come to think, Orris’s patrol was like Sellwood’s Church Militant—an excuse to shout at folk and break things. Orris started a campaign to get “French beans” renamed “Free-from-Tyranny beans”, and had his men attack grocer’s stalls when no one agreed with him. Orris was expecting a fleet to heave to in Lyme Bay and land an army, but knew spies would be put ashore first to scout the around. One night, during a terrible storm, Orris caught a spy flung up on the shingle.”
“And…?”
“That’s it, really. I expect they hit him with hammers and killed him, but if anyone really knows, they aren’t saying.”
Dick was disappointed.
“Tell him how it was a special spy,” said Ernest.
Dick was intrigued again. Especially since Violet obviously didn’t want to say more.
“He was a sea-ghost,” announced Ernest.
“Old Hooke said the spy had walked across the channel,” admitted Violet. “On the bottom of the sea, in a special diving suit. He was a Frenchman, but—and you have to remember stories get twisted over the years—he had gills sewn into his neck so he could breathe underwater. As far as anyone knew round here, all Corsicans were like that. They said it was probably Boney’s cousin.”
“And they killed him?”
Violet shrugged. “I expect so.”
“And kept him pickled,” said Ernest.