I seized the jar from his hand and made for the door. I remembered only then that when I had gone out from the lab in the small hours, after taking my second dose, I hadn't pocketed the key but had left it in the lock.

"We weren't doing anything," said Teddy, aggrieved, "we were only looking through the empty rooms below." He turned to Vita. "There's a little dark room full of bottles, just like the stinks lab at school. Come and look, Mom, quick — there's something else in one of the jars like a dead kitten—"

I was out of the library in a flash, and down the small stairway in the hail leading to the basement. The door of the lab was wide open, and the light was on. I looked quickly around. Nothing had been touched except thejar holding the monkey. I switched off the light and stepped into the passage, locking the door behind me and pocketing the key.

As I did so the boys came running through the old kitchen, Vita at their heels. She looked concerned.

"What did they do?" she asked. "Have they broken something?"

"Luckily, no," I said. "It was my fault for leaving the door unlocked." She was peering over my shoulder down the passage. "What is through there anyway?" she asked. "That object Teddy brought up looked perfectly ghastly."

"I dare say," I answered. "It happens that this house belongs to a professor of biophysics, and he uses the small room behind there as a laboratory. If I ever catch either of the boys near that room again there'll be murder!"

They stalked off, muttering, and Vita turned to me. "I must say," she said, "I think it's rather extraordinary of the Professor to keep a room like that, with all sorts of scientific things in it, and not make certain it's kept properly locked."

"Now don't you start," I said. "I am responsible to Magnus, and I can assure you it won't happen again. If you had only come next week instead of turning up this morning at an unearthly hour, when nobody expected you, it would never have happened."

She stared at me, startled. "Why, you're shaking!" she said. "Anyone would think there were explosives in there."

"Perhaps there are," I said. "Anyway, let's hope those kids have learnt their lesson."

I switched off the basement lights and walked upstairs. I was shaking, and small wonder. A nightmare of possibilities crowded my mind. They might have opened the bottles containing the drug, they might have poured the contents into the medicine-glass, they might even have emptied the bottles into the sink. I must never again let that key out of my sight. I kept touching it in my pocket. Perhaps I could get an impression made of it, and keep both; it would be safer. I went into the music-room and stood there, staring at nothing, thrusting my finger-tip into the little hole in the key.

Vita had gone upstairs to the bedroom. Presently, I heard the tell-tale click of the telephone from the bell in the hall. It meant she was speaking from the extension upstairs. I went and washed my hands in the downstairs lavatory, and then wandered into the library. I could still hear Vita talking from the bedroom overhead. Listening to conversations on the telephone is not a habit of mine, but now some furtive instinct made me cross to the instrument in the library and pick up the receiver.

"…So I just don't know what to make of it," Vita was saying. "I've never heard him speak sharply to the boys before. They're quite upset. He doesn't look awfully well. Very hollow-eyed. He says he's been sleeping badly."

"High time you got down there," came the answer. I recognised the drawl; it was her friend Diana. "A husband on the loose is a husband on the prowl, I've told you so before. I've had experience with Bill."

"Oh, Bill," said Vita. "We all know Bill can't be trusted out of your sight. Well, I don't know… Let's hope it will be fine and we can all be out a lot. I believe he's arranged to hire some boat."

"That sounds healthy enough."

"Yes… Well, let's hope that Professor of his hasn't been putting Dick up to something. I don't trust that man. Never have, and never will. And I know he dislikes me."

"I can guess why that is," laughed Diana.

"Oh, don't be idiotic. He may be like that, but Dick certainly isn't. Very much the reverse."

"Maybe that's his attraction for the Professor," said Diana. I replaced the receiver very gently. The trouble was, with women, they had one-track minds, and to their narrow view everything male, be it man, dog, fish or slug, pursued but a single course, and that the dreary road to copulation. I sometimes wondered if they ever thought of anything else.

Vita and her friend Diana nattered on for at least another fifteen minutes, and when she came downstairs, fortified by feminine advice, she made no reference to my scene in the basement, but, humming gaily and wearing an apron of bizarre design — it looked as if it had apples and serpents all over it — set about cooking us steaks for supper heaped about with parsley butter.

"Early bed for all," she announced as the boys, heavy-eyed and silent, yawned their way through the meal — the seven-hour journey in the car and the jaunt in the harbour was catching up with them. After supper she installed herself on the sofa in the library, and set about mending the rents in my trousers torn in the valley. I sat down at Magnus's desk murmuring something about unpaid bills, but in reality looking once agaln through the Lay Subsidy Roll for Tywardreath Parish for 1327. Julian Polpey was there, Henry Trefrengy, Geoffrey Lampetho. The names had meant nothing when I first read through the list, but they could have registered unconsciously in my mind. The figures might still be phantom figures that I had followed to the valley, passing the farms that still bore their names today.

I noticed an unopened letter on my desk. It was the one the postman had given me that morning; in my flurry at the family's arrival I had laid it down. It was just a scrap, typewritten, from the research student in London.


'Professor Lane thought you might like this note on Sir John Carminowe,' it read. 'He was the second son of Sir Roger Carminowe of Carminowe. Enrolled in the military 1323. Became a knight 1324. Summoned to attend Great Council at Westminster. Appointed Keeper of Tremerton and Restormel castles April 27th, 1331, and on October 12th of the same year keeper of the King's forests, parks, woods and warrens, etc., and of the King's game in the county of Cornwall, so that he had to answer yearly for the profit of the pannage and herbage within the said forests, parks and woods, by the hand of the steward there, and deputy keepers under him.'

The student had written in brackets, 'Copied from Calendar of Fine Rolls 5th year Edward III.' He had added a further note beneath, 'October 24th. Patent Rolls, for same year (1331), mentions a licence for Joanna, late wife of Henry de Champernoune, tenant-in-chief to marry whomsoever she will of the King's allegiance. Pay fine of 10 marks.'


So… Sir John had got what he wanted and Otto Bodrugan had lost, while Joanna, in anticipation of Sir John's wife dying, had a marriage licence handy in some bottom drawer. I filed the paper with the Lay Subsidy Roll, and getting up from the desk went to the bookshelves, where I rembered seeing the numerous volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, legacy of Commander Lane. I pulled out Volume 8, and turned to Edward III. Vita stretched herself on the sofa, yawning, her repeated sighs following one another in swift succession. "Well, I don't know about you", she said, "but I'm off to bed."

"I'll be up in a moment," I told her.

"Still hard at work for your Professor?" she asked. "Take that volume to the light, you'll ruin your eyes."

I did not answer.


Edward III (1312–1377), king of England, eldest son of Edward II and Isabella of France, was born at Windsor on the 13th of November 1312… On the 13th of January 1327 parliament recognised him as king, and he was crowned on the 29th of the same month. For the next four years Isabella and her paramour Mortimer governed in his name, though nominally his guardian was Henry, Earl of Lancaster. In the summer of 1327 he took part in an abortive campaign against the Scots, and was married to Philippa at York on the 24th of January 1328. On the 5th of June 1330 his eldest child, Edward the Black Prince, was born.

Nothing there about a rebellion. But here was the clue.

Soon after, Edward made a successful effort to throw off his degrading dependence on his mother and Mortimer. In October 1330 he entered Nottingham Castle by night, through a subterranean passage, and took Mortimer prisoner. On the 29th of November the execution of the favourite at Tyburn completed the young king's emancipation. Edward discreetly drew a veil over his mother's relations with Mortimer, and treated her with every respect. There is no truth in the stories that henceforth he kept her in honourable confinement, but her political influence was at an end.

Bodrugan's too, what he possessed in Cornwall. Sir John, only a year later appointed Keeper of Tremerton and Restormel castles, a good King's man, was in command, with Roger, playing it safe, imposing silence on his valley friends, the October night forgotten. I wondered what had happened after that meeting at Polpey's farm when Isolda risked so much to warn her lover; whether Bodrugan, brooding on what might-have-been, returned to his estates and thought about his love, and whether she, when her husband Oliver was absent, met him perhaps in secret. I had been standing beside them both less than twenty-four hours ago. Six centuries ago…

I put the volume back on the shelf, switched off the lights and went upstairs. Vita was already in bed, the curtains pulled back so that when she sat up she could look through the wide windows to the sea.