Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

He allowed them half an hour in the red-carpeted Smugglers’ Bar, with its ancient wooden tables and exposed beams hung with kettles and old pewter tankards. The group ate ploughmen’s lunches of bread, cheese, and pickles, or Cornish pasties, washed down with ale. Rowan himself wolfed down a pasty and a pint of bitter before escaping outside to smoke in the cobblestone yard. He savored a quarter of an hour’s solitude, before routing the group out for the afternoon hike.

Susan squinted at the bright noonday sunlight in the inn yard. “How far is it to this stupid pond?” she demanded. “I bought some postcards and I need to get them written.”

“Oh, perhaps a mile,” said Rowan, halving the actual figure on the theory that distance is a state of mind. “There is a connection between this pool and our next stop, Roche Rock. Incidentally, according to legend, Dozmary Pool is the home of the Lady of the Lake, and it is from there that King Arthur received the sword Excalibur.”

“Let’s go,” said Maud Marsh, swinging her cardigan over her shoulder. Thus shamed into obedience, the little group trudged off behind her.

As they crossed the busy A30 to the narrow lane that led to the pool, Rowan Rover began his tale of Cornwall’s legendary villain. “Bodmin Moor is haunted, ladies and Charles, by the spirit of Jan Tregeagle. Whether or not he sold his soul to the devil, I cannot say, but it is beyond question that a local magistrate of that name actually existed in the early seventeenth century. They say he murdered his family and seized the estates of defenseless orphans, but he took pains to bribe the local priests and got himself buried in consecrated ground. Not that it did him much good.” Rowan Rover paused, thinking of his own recent promises to the Deity. He put the parallel firmly from his mind.

“Was he murdered?” asked Elizabeth hopefully.

“No, but after the life he led, he hadn’t a hope of heaven. Anyhow, they say he was called back from the dead to testify in a court case that he had participated in when he was alive. He sat there in court with the smell of the charnel house clinging to his shrunken features and he testified that he had swindled the litigants in the case. The judge decided the matter and dismissed the participants, but Tregeagle remained in court. The man who summoned the ghost said that he considered Tregeagle a problem for the court. And he left.”

“I suppose they summoned an exorcist?” said Kate, who was reminded of yet another movie moment.

Rowan glanced around at the party. They all seemed to be keeping up reasonably well. No one seemed out of breath. Still, he slowed his pace, knowing that there was more than a mile to go. “They called in the clergy,” he said. “And those learned gentlemen decided that their duty was to save Jan Tregeagle from Hell, and that the only way to accomplish that was to give his ghost a task that would keep him occupied for all eternity. They gave him a broken shell and commanded him to empty Dozmary Pool. In order to keep him at his task, they set a pack of demon hounds to watch over him, ready to attack if he stopped bailing.”

“But the pool is still there?” asked Charles, smiling. “Has old Jan emptied much of it?”

“No. Legend has it that a great storm frightened him one night, and he took off across Bodmin Moor, with the devil hounds in hot pursuit. He made it to Roche Rock, a holy place about seven miles west of here. We shall be going there next. They say that he got his head into the window of the clifftop chapel, but his body would not fit through, and the hounds tore at him constantly.”

“There’s a mystery by Mary Stewart called The Gabriel Hounds,” Susan began, with the air of someone about to deliver a plot summary.

Three people spoke as one to head her off. Alice MacKenzie, loudest of the trio, said, “So he’s stuck up there on Roche Rock, being attacked by hellhounds?”

“There’s more to the story,” said Rowan quickly, realizing that it had been a close call. “After a few days of listening to Tregeagle’s screams, the holy man of Roche Rock sent for one of Cornwall’s saints to move Tregeagle elsewhere, and he was set to weaving ropes of sand on the beach at Padstow. But Padstow’s patron saint grew tired of listening to the spirit’s howls of torment, so he shipped him off to Berepper, where he was ordered to clear all the sand from the beach. Unfortunately, during his labors he dropped a sack of sand and managed to permanently seal off the entrance to Helston Harbour with a sandbar.”

“Evicted again?” asked Emma Smith, a folklore enthusiast.

“Yes. He’s at Land’s End now, sweeping the sands from Porthcurno Cove into Mill Bay, but the ocean currents defeat him. They say you can hear his bellows of rage when gale winds blow the sand back on the beach.”

Emma looked thoughtful. “I suppose Jan Tregeagle is really the personification of some ancient Celtic god. The geographic connections to the story make it seem much older than seventeenth century.”

“Very likely,” Rowan agreed. “But he makes a colorful villain, doesn’t he?”

Susan piped up again. “In Minnesota, we have a legendary figure associated with lakes. He’s an Indian called Hiawatha. There’s a poem about him that I had to learn in the eighth grade. It’s by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Have you heard it?” She cleared her throat, and hastened on. “By the shores of Gitchee Goomee, by the shining big sea waters, stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the moon, Nokomis…”

The others contrived to lag as far behind Susan as they possibly could for the remainder of the walk, but her flat voice carried very well across the moors, adding another dimension of agony to the haunted moor. Several members of the group were heard to mutter that they would much prefer to be set upon by hellhounds than listen to another stanza of “The Song of Hiawatha,” and for one altruistic moment Rowan Rover felt guilty about taking Mr. Kosminski’s money.

After a somewhat perfunctory admiration of Dozmary Pool and a few dutiful photographs taken by Charles Warren, the group trudged back to the Jamaica Inn car park, where Bernard was waiting, enveloped in a rock ‘n’ roll cloud.

“We shan’t be going far this time,” Rowan told the driver. “The turnoff for the village of Roche is about seven miles up the A30. I’ll direct you from there.”

“Right you are,” said Bernard, switching back to a classical lullaby. “Did everyone have a nice hike? What was the pool like?”

Alice MacKenzie paused on her way to her seat and scowled. “I was reminded of Lake Superior,” she snapped, stalking away.

Recognizing this reference to Minnesota, the others stole furtive glances in Susan’s direction and fought to keep straight faces.

Rowan Rover, pleased with the tide of popular opinion, reached for his trusty microphone and began to describe the next exhibit. “Our next destination is Roche Rock which is, as I told you, the summit to which Jan Tregeagle fled when he escaped from Dozmary Pool. It was also the home of a succession of Celtic saints, including St. Roche or St. Conan.”

“Why do Celtic saints always have two names?” asked Emma Smith.

“Probably because the Latin clergy always wanted to translate everything into their own language, the bureaucratic old perishers. Anyhow, Roche Rock is a stark pillar of rock rising above the flat landscape, and at the top of it is a ruined chapel, carved into the rock itself. That dates from 1409. Perhaps the hermit in residence kept a light burning in the chapel to guide travelers across the moors.”

“Not another walk!” moaned Susan Cohen, fanning herself with a postcard.

“Not at all,” said Rowan cheerfully. “A climb.” Several minutes later, Bernard turned off the main road and guided the coach through the narrow lanes of the village of Roche. A few hundred yards farther on he turned left, at Rowan’s instruction. Almost immediately Martha Tabram cried out, “There it is!” and pointed to a barren spire of rock set among a tangle of underbrush in the wide plateau of open fields. The great pinnacle stood about sixty feet high and loomed dark and sinister between them and the afternoon sun.