Summon the Bright Water by Geoffrey Household

ramblings, at once suggested itself. Unlike the red cliffs of the Severn, it was made of low lias clay and had been eaten back by the tides, leaving a flat terrace of rock at the edge of the shore. It was certainly easy to land there, but what for? However, leaving out the inexplicable diving equipment, Hock Cliff was a very possible site for treasure buried long ago on good, solid dry land well above the highest level of the river but now exposed by erosion. It was a theory which could be proved or disproved immediately.
    I put on suit, life jacket, mask and aqualung and dropped into the mouth of the baby pill, being careful to keep my feet off the bottom. Marrin put-putted out of Bullo and passed close inshore, but could not possibly see me in the gathering darkness. I slipped out and followed, swimming well clear of the Box Rock, of which only a small part was showing above water. The dinghy was now far ahead of me, but occasionally I caught a glimpse of it when it bounced on the vicious wavelets of the ebb and the wake showed white. The sound of the engine told me that he was bound straight down-channel and not bearing a little to port as he would if he intended to land below Arlingham. I was about to give up and make for the Arlingham shore myself when the engine stopped and I thought I heard the splash of his heavy anchor; sound travelled half a mile over the sleeping Severn. So I kept on swimming until I could make out the dinghy anchored below the wood at the top of Hock Cliff. There seemed no reason why he should stop there. He still had his clothes on. I think now that he had arrived earlier than he intended and was waiting for the tide to fall a foot or two further. There turned out to be a handy little inlet in the rock terrace where the dinghy could safely lie when he left it, but he could not yet be sure of its position because the whole terrace was still awash, with the ebb dancing over it fast enough to hole or swamp the dinghy if he made a mistake.
    I was in danger of being carried past him but managed to reach the edge of the terrace underwater and clung there by my fingers, as if I were a climber on a rock face, until I found a cleft which enabled me to relax and lift my head to watch the dinghy and Marrin. The ebb spat its silt at me and I remembered my agony in the quicksand. Then came disgust at the ceremony I had witnessed for the propitiation of my soul. Well, it wasn’t propitiated. Far from it! I was suddenly exasperated by all this folly – the silly side of them as Elsa had called it. Marrin, I had told the major, would break down as soon as he knew I was alive. And he’d break down worse still if he had a little additional evidence that I was dead.
    Looking back I think that I myself was possessed by a devil which knew exactly what it was about. Blood sacrifice and fireworks are unnecessary when there is an eager human spirit ready to give a temporary home. To break him at any cost was what I wanted, to have him gibbering the truth of the gold and his reason for murder.
    The dinghy was nearer in than I thought, riding just off a peninsula of the terrace. Marrin had anchored none too soon. I swam along the angle between rock and mud like a Severn lamprey seeking blood to suck until with two good kicks I could reach the mooring. The mysterious jerk on the rope produced some startled movement on board which then quietened down.
    With hands and knees grasping the stem and out of sight, I put head and shoulders over the bows dressed exactly as I was when he tried to kill me and remained perfectly still. He was standing in the stern looking for the inlet. When he turned round and saw me, he stared, frozen. Then he tried to fend off this motionless phantom with movements of the arms as if he were swimming or clearing a mist of smoke before the eyes. Not surprisingly the dinghy tipped – if I helped it at all it was accidental – and he went overboard with a coughing yell, crashing his head on the