Neither let us down. The dinghy was aground, heeling over but still dry, just behind the Guscar Rocks, her ghostly helmsman trying to make the vanished port of Woolaston.
There was nothing we could do but wait alongside her for the tide to rise, and ensure that she remained on an even keel until she was on the shale beach where Marrin and I had come ashore from the rocks. It was after midnight and there was not a sound but the suckings and splashings of the river. The dim line of the railway embankment cut us off from the world.
Meanwhile, we discussed what should be done with the twenty or so pounds of gold which we had and the much larger quantity which remained in the cave.
‘What do you think happened to them?’ she asked.
‘All we know is that the tribes of the marshes did not know what gold was and had no use for it. My guess is that the adventurers never returned to the cave or the ship, and that the pet of the voyage died there.’
‘Perhaps they were taken away and worshipped like the gods which Uncle Simeon was training the colonists to be.’
‘Or made the common mistake of the half-civilised in taking a dance of welcome for a war dance and opening fire with whatever weapons they had.’
We moored the boats – safely this time – to a bush overhanging the bank, and slept a little in each other’s arms on the short, sheep-nibbled grass of a Severn lawn.
‘I could stay here for ever,’ she said.
An express from South Wales hurtled past on the embankment, the roar and the lights reminding us that we were not on a private planet of green earth and salt water orbiting the Milky Way overhead, but in a demanding modernity from which relief could only be obtained by labour on the land and by pretences, like those of Broom Lodge, that the world of machines did not or in the future would not exist.
First light was showing in the east and a cock broke the silence.
‘Where do we go now?’
There at least I could answer her with certainty.
‘Down on the ebb. We can’t do anything else. We might try New Passage. Your uncle knew what he was doing, and if we pick up his mooring we can get off at half tide.’
‘You’re going to try again?’
‘We have two more days when the Stones will be well above water and it will be late dusk. After that we might have to wait a fortnight or a month to get it right.’
True enough. But I was impatient to find more evidence, if there was any, rather than more ingots.
So New Passage it was. Dead tired and hungry, we took an early bus to Bristol where I bought an old army valise to carry the aqualung and the rest. That was enough to persuade a hotel to accept two very shabby travellers whose only other possession was a bag containing enough wealth to buy the place.
Bathed, clean and breakfasted some energy returned, and we wandered through the town searching antique shops in the hope of finding such a cylinder as I had in mind. Old leather buckets there were, but too wide. Umbrella stands of china, but they might break. A wooden roller of God knows what use, but the hollow centre was not big enough. Eventually I bought the brass case of – I think – a six-inch naval shell which had been polished up and had an ashtray to match, fitted to the top. I got the reluctant proprietor, proud of his ingenuity, to remove the ashtray and to bore three equidistant holes in the top to which the end of the rope could be attached. After that, fifty feet of rope was easy enough to find in a seaport, and we returned with our purchases to the curious glances of a hotel porter who must have thought them odd for a pair of lovers.
Next day we went by train to Gloucester and by bus to Bullo, where we recovered my car and returned to Bristol. In the late afternoon we drove out to New Passage, took both boats off Marrin’s mooring and anchored off the rippling dark water which covered the Stones to wait for the bottom of the tide in the late dusk. This time there was no risk of being watched from the Welsh coast, but while picnicking in the dinghy we were hailed three times to warn us of the invisible rocks.
They emerged from the sea like a herd of slow monsters, quickly uniting to become the flat and weedy desert of the English Stones. We made our usual inlet, then walked out to the blowhole where we lowered the shell case on the end of its rope. It was checked only once, easily clearing the obstruction, and we could feel it hit the bottom at a depth of forty feet.
As soon as there was no perceptible current in the Shoots I went in. No adventures or dangers of any sort this time. Our cylinder was resting on the slope which led up to the funnel. I loaded it with the remaining ingots and watched it disappear as Elsa pulled it up. That done, I searched the terrace for any other evidence of man, sweeping the silt gently and methodically away with my eyes and my torch so close that I could miss nothing. I found only two flint arrowheads of early neolithic type: one close under the back wall, the other more or less in line and two yards out. That only proved that one or both parties had discovered the bow. I should have expected the immigrants to have it, but not necessarily the fishers and hunters along Severn banks. Apart from the gold, there was no sign that the cave had ever sheltered man.
I came up before the turn of the tide. Elsa was staring at the pile of ingots she had emptied out of the shell case, their colour still faintly showing gold in the starlight. I knew that my first haul had weighed about twenty pounds. This lot was double as much. So we had sixty pounds in all.
‘Broom Lodge must have some of it,’ she murmured, ‘since that was what Uncle Simeon wanted and so do I. But I’m damned if they get the lot! Have you got everything you have been risking your life for?’
‘I’ve got everything I could want, my darling.’
‘I didn’t mean a tall bit of nonsense with fair hair. Are you going to add a chapter to history and tell them seamen got here with gold soon after the melting of the ice?’
I said that I had not had time to think about it.
‘Piers, who knows where our world is going? We too might have to sail off to the unknown with this as cargo.’
‘And sell it for half a deer and some sausages. Or shall we start up the first bank and credit ourselves with £600 a troy ounce?’
‘Is that what it’s worth?’
‘Roughly £432,000.’
I had intended to take both boats up to Bullo with the tide. One reason was that the dinghy belonged to the commune and Dunwiddy would want to know what had happened to it; another reason was that the rowing boat could not remain much longer at New Passage without arousing curiosity. But when it came to the point, I funked the voyage to Bullo. With a five-knot tide under me and as much again from the engine it could easily be done in four hours by any fisherman who knew the river, but I disliked the thought of navigating the channel in the dark and I was not at all sure whether I should reach the horseshoe bend before or after the bore. So I decided to put into Sharpness where Elsa would meet me with the car and the gold, and leave Bullo for another day.
That run to Sharpness with the boat in tow was, I think, the most melancholy hour of my life. Yet so black a mood should have been impossible when I loved and was loved in return and had no financial worries. I foresaw the betrayal which I mentioned at the outset of this report. A professional betrayal. I was bound in honour to put the ingots on show and publish the story of the find. But if I did so, my reputation as a serious scholar would be ruined. Despondency was of course affected by the high, black banks on both sides of the channel, cutting out all sight of the land and filling me with apprehension as if I were a shade alone in Charon’s boat taking the ferry over to hell.