It was too late to get out of Lydney into the fairway across the top of Lydney Sand, so I took the channel between the shore and the Shepherdine Sands, where in my opinion the Roman galleys rowed up to their basin, and thanked the lord that the dinghy drew only about eighteen inches. I ran aground once with the Guscar Rocks in sight, but was off again without incident, while Elsa needlessly held her breath, out into the main shipping channel and under Severn Bridge. We were now aiming for the Shoots and if I was carried through I could never get back again before the flood, so I hugged the messy left bank, which would have given a Severn pilot fits, and very cautiously nosed my way along the English Stones until I found a miniature harbour about the size of a bus. It may well have been there that Marrin anchored his rowing boat while he walked out to the Shoots.
I had often wondered why he found it advisable to cross from Bullo to Hock Cliff and then drive the rest of the way down-river, instead of taking the road through Chepstow to the Welsh bank and making a crossing of a mere mile to the English Stones. Now I understood it. The Welsh coast was too close. Although he dived, so far as I know, only when slack water fell in the hours of darkness, he risked being seen starting out, returning, mooring. Somebody was sure to be sufficiently curious to follow him and find out what the hell he was doing at the edge of the Shoots. However, if he rowed out from New Passage, utterly deserted, he would be lost against the background of the Stones, sure of the secrecy of his movements and – more important still – of his return with a cargo in the bottom of the boat.
I scrambled out to the west end of the English Stones, and there below me was the last of the ebb sliding as smoothly as a conveyor belt and a lot faster down the deep channel of the Shoots, not more than five hundred yards wide between the Stones and Gruggy Island. Then I went back to the boat to change and out again to a smooth shelf with a clean-cut edge to it. The cliff looked like the gorge wall that it was, and I sat there with the water some eight feet below me until the level had dropped another inch or two and all was dead calm. New Passage and Severn Beach were too far away for me to be clearly seen, and I hoped that from the Welsh coast I would appear only a foolhardy caravanner in a life jacket mucking about on the Stones.
I had told Elsa that I should not be more than twenty minutes underwater and would give her a wave when I was about to dive. When she waved back I plunged in. The silt, no longer carried by the current, was sinking with me like a sparse flurry of yellow snow. Visibility was very poor, but better over the clean rock bottom close under the cliff. I passed a sloping ledge halfway down, which could have been a beach, and a much wider one nearer the bottom worn by the ice. The face of the rock was cut by vertical fissures and crevices much like the many inlets on the surface of the stones. I worked southwards until I came across a promising cave, which might well have been inhabited in the Stone Age, and explored it at length, my interest now being purely and enthusiastically archaeological without a thought of Marrin and his gold.
I found nothing. When I shot out into the channel I was seized by an invisible, irresistible power and swept northwards along the side of the gorge. The tide had turned. Keeping with difficulty close to the cliff, I was taken on an underwater tour faster than I could swim and had a salmon-eye view of the rock formations as I was hurried past. I surfaced just in time and found myself swirling round the northern corner of the Stones. From there it was easy enough to swim to our miniature harbour. Elsa was on the rock with her eyes so firmly fixed on the point from which I had dived that she didn’t see me until I came alongside her.
On that last sweep past the face of the Stones I had spotted two points of genuine interest. One was just such a shelter as I had described to Marrin. There was a wide stone ledge with the cliff above it deeply undercut, marking the bank of the river as it would have been – at a guess – two or three thousand years after the ice had retreated towards Scotland and before the river had become a tidal estuary. To one side of the shelter was a darkness which looked as if it might be a cave. The second interesting discovery was a little deep-water harbour where a boat could lie safely, given a heavy stone or a pinnacle of rock to act as a bollard.
The combination exactly suited Marrin’s requirements, but what in God’s name he had been diving for I could not imagine. A treasure of gold was no more likely than the nest of a sea serpent preying on mariners. The skills of the riverside family, if there was one, behind their curtain of hides at the entrance to that cave would have been limited to bone fish hooks and tridents with points of flint. Elsa suggested that a Spanish galleon might have gone aground on the Stones, but there would be some record of such a spectacular wreck supplying enterprising Gloucestershire fishermen with cash and timber for years to come. My whole hypothesis was ridiculous and archaeologically impossible.
We crossed the river and put up for the night at Beachley, almost under the Severn Bridge, intending to return to Bullo, or as near as we could get, on the next day’s tide. Elsa telephoned Broom Lodge to let the major know where we were. Some minutes passed before she could get hold of him. Meanwhile the person on the other end, who she thought was Raeburn, far from treating her as holy told her that she must return, almost adding ‘or else’. Denzil too was short and, without mentioning me or our address, said that he would drive over in the morning. It sounded as if he might be having trouble with the pagans.
He turned up after breakfast. It appeared that the six druidicals were spending their nights in the forest and their days in sleep. They did not work and they did not attend the gentle periods of meditation, separating themselves completely from their once-happy companions who were worried about them rather than resentful.
The bag of Marrin’s little masterpieces had been found, but the inner circle did not share in the open-hearted rejoicings of the community. They never ascribed the return of the lost property to Nodens as I was sure they would. They knew too well that Elsa must have taken the cauldron from the laboratory and assumed that she was responsible for the entire burglary. From their silences and the contemptuous arrogance of their faces the major had the impression that they were not taken in by his explanation that the burglar had buried the bag intending to return for it later, and that they thought it was Elsa who had done it.
‘We’ll have no peace until the bowl is back,’ he said.
‘Better tell them that it’s a modern fake and get a certificate from the museum.’
‘It is not a fake, Piers.’
‘Still the Grail?’
‘It can be the Grail recoverable in spirit but not in fact.’
‘Like Arthur’s cavalry?’
‘At last you have understood, Piers. Indeed like Arthur’s cavalry.’
I let it go at that. The major’s abstruse heresies were endurable after dinner or in the peace of the forest, but not soon after breakfast.
He knew nothing of our expedition to the Shoots and I told him the whole futile story.
‘It didn’t fit your bright water and shadow, but long ago it might have done.’
‘Just daydreams, old boy. Get ’em while I’m shaving sometimes. Mustn’t take them too seriously.’
‘You weren’t shaving when you told me the glyptodont was a pet. You had been taking pictures of it for me.’
‘Pet? Did I say pet? What sort of pet?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, now. Like a rabbit.’
‘The glyptodont wasn’t a bit like a rabbit.’
‘But edible.’
‘One doesn’t usually eat pets.’
‘Like a rabbit,’ he repeated. ‘Buy it to eat and then become too fond of it.’