Read Online Summon the Bright Water by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page B

nickname of mine, considering the woodland features of the ceremony handed down from pagan and poetical Britons. I knew the names of four of them: the chanter, Evans, a sulky fellow who strutted like a hierarch which Marrin never did; Raeburn, who had poured the brew into the cauldron, an excellent craftsman with a sense of humour in daily life; Ballard, the curate-looking chap who had been digging up tulips when I first arrived; and Carver, a compact little holy man who had passed the cauldron to Marrin.
    Evidently it was such a rite as this which the major suspected and considered a blasphemous misuse of the cauldron, far worse than the half-pagan heresies somehow related to the mysteries of metals. Transmutation I did not believe, but those herbs, of which the heavy scent flowed off under the branches further than the smoke of the torch, suggested that Marrin was a devoted student of ancestral pharmacy and that the laboratory itself was no pretence.
    I slept long and late, recovering from the previous two nights and such exercise as I had not taken since tracing the once-cultivated fields on the coast of Greenland. I found myself stiff but fit. The first job was to buy supplies from somewhere miles away where I had never been before. Coleford to the north and on the edge of the Forest seemed a likely spot. It turned out to be an ugly little Victorian town like most of the mining settlements, but with everything I needed. Having noticed a fire-watching tower which commanded most of the Forest, I decided against using my ruined hearth in case the plume of smoke was noticed, and bought a Primus stove and a frying pan. With eggs, butter, cheese, bread fresh from the oven, meat, green stuff and a variety of cans, plus a bottle of brandy to disguise the taste of coal in the sparkling water from the nearest stream, I returned home to my plantation.
    My mind was a blank on how and where to make my next attack on Broom Lodge. According to the major, Marrin seldom left the estate during the day. Night – well, it was pointless to go out every night in the hope of something happening. The best bet was for the corpse to create some diversion, in order to walk off with that chalice and obtain an expert’s opinion.
    In the reddish light of the torch the two-handled cauldron had again seemed to me of great age. Could it be, I wondered, that Marrin was passing off his own work as two thousand years old or better? Highly improbable that he could deceive the authorities at the British Museum! And if he had, we should all have heard of the extraordinary find. The papers would be full of it.
    A photograph, then, from several angles. The major could probably manage that. But would photographs of the cauldron be enough to tell an expert whether the goldsmith was living or long dead? I doubted it. However, once my mind began to run on photographs a secondary object presented itself. How about some shots of the turtle? I knew a zoologist who would remember me well, though I had not seen him for some years. He would give me his opinion by return of post if I asked for it. The beast could not be so obscure that neither he nor his colleagues could fail to identify it.
    At any rate it was a scheme to fill up an otherwise empty day. So I wrote a note to the major: ‘Can you secretly take some close-up photographs of the turtle in his laboratory and leave them here? I believe they may give us a line on what he is doing.’
    This time I was very careful to approach Broom Lodge from the back, avoiding the paths, moving from tree to tree and ready to drop into the bracken at any moment. I had more trouble than I expected in finding the stump of the ash sapling. That done, I covered the letter with a cushion of moss and marked it with a white sliver of wood.
    No one was about except a party of two men and two girls on the nearest track, walking in a dream of the Forest of Arden and prettily singing a madrigal, so I determined to have a look in daylight