The Legend of the Golden Key Read online

  I had seen it dart in below the bank on my side, and while I couldn’t see it now, I knew exactly in my mind’s eye just where it was. Slowly I slipped my arm in round the bank until I knew my hand was close to it. Then gently, very gently, I splashed the water against it with my fingers. All the time I kept going closer and closer, until in there in the darkness it couldn’t tell the difference between my hand and the water. By this time it was lying straight across the palm of my hand. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell. I moved up to its gills, and the next instant I whipped it out.

  It’s a nice trick that, when you get the hang of it, but it’s not as easy as some people make out. Juno showed us how to do it when we were only nippers and not allowed near the river at all. Of course, he’s a past master at it. He can lift a rabbit or a chicken just as handy. Any farmer in the valley will tell you that.

  In next to no time we had two nice trout rolled up in big green dock leaves to keep them fresh.

  ‘Well,’ said Curly, ‘if these don’t make Old Daddy Armstrong tell us about the legend, nothing will.’

  Next minute there was a shout from the top of the Whin Hill that nearly struck us dead with fright. Then we realised who it was. It was only Shouting Sam.

  Sam’s a bit odd – mad, some people say – and you would know him anywhere. He’s long and thin, his trouser legs are tied with strips of sacking from the knees down, and he always carries the loudspeaker from an old gramophone together with an assortment of wires. That’s how he gets his name, for he believes that when he throws the wires over a tree or bush, he can broadcast through the horn. Mind you, it’s not everybody he’ll broadcast to. He’s a bit choosy that way. He never sends messages to anybody but presidents, or prime ministers, or kings and queens.

  ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo,’ he bellowed through the horn. ‘Calling Your Royal Highness the Queen of England. Calling your Royal Highness the Queen of England. Are you receiving me?’

  Well, that’s our Sam. That’s the way he always starts, and thereafter, assuming apparently that he’s being received loud and clear, it’s his custom to launch into a discourse, as Mr Stockman calls it, about letters and messages he thinks he has received from the Queen or whatever head of state he’s supposed to be talking to. It’s always the same, and this time was no different from any other.

  ‘But what on earth is he talking about?’ asked Cowlick when we told him who the strange figure was.

  ‘Your guess is as good as ours,’ said Doubter. ‘But I know one thing. We’ll catch no more fish here after that racket.’

  There was no doubt about that, so we gathered up our catch. By this time Sam had quite an audience, including my mother who was listening from the hen-pen gate, and Mr Stockman who was working close by getting a field of corn ready for the combine harvester. Mr Stockman has always been very good to Shouting Sam. He always feeds him when he’s passing through and lets him use the Whin Hill for his broadcasts. Of course, some people say he’s just as mad as Sam to be putting up with it, but we know Mr Stockman; he’s just over-kind.

  Leaving Sam to his broadcasting, we headed down the river towards the fairy fort on Wariff Hill. We had another look at a clump of alder trees we were pretty sure were hiding otters, and from there we cut up over the fields to the plantation where Old Daddy Armstrong lives.

  Shafts of sunlight flitted across our faces as we made our way through the trees towards the thatched cottage with its carefully kept vegetable patch. We found the old man leaning over the green half-door, only one side of his braces up over his faded flannel vest, as usual, and smoking his stubby, silver-banded pipe.

  When we emerged from the trees and skirted the vegetable patch, he gave us a wave with his pipe, and we knew he was in good form. He’s a great man, and if you ever meet him you couldn’t help but like him. He’s got a beard the colour of his grey woollen waistcoat, and it nearly touches the point of his nose when he chews his tobacco, and he walks bent over and uses a stick. Yet he’s fairly active considering he’s nearly ninety if he’s a day.

  When he got too old to swing the blacksmith’s hammer, Old Daddy Armstrong retired to his little white-washed cottage. However, he didn’t take life much easier. He spends his days gardening and looking after his goats and hens, and, of course, making wine when the berries are on the bourtree. He sells a lot of the goats’ milk and the wine to the Kings. Felicity calls for it every so often.

  He was highly pleased with the trout, and invited us in.

  * * *

  Like all thatched cottages, Old Daddy Armstrong’s is gloomy inside, but the glow of the peat fire, and the smell of a pot of potatoes he had just boiled to mash with meal for the hens, made it nice and homely. He eased himself into his creaking rocking chair beside the big open fireplace, and asked Doubter, he being the tallest, to fill the kettle from the white enamel bucket on the table and hang it on the crook, while he relit his pipe.

  When the kettle was on and his pipe was going and we were all seated around him on the stone floor, we got to talking.

  ‘So you want to know about the Legend of the Golden Key?’ he asked. We nodded eagerly.

  ‘You don’t think it’s an old wives’ tale then – like some folks will have it?’

  I gave Doubter a dig in the ribs with my elbow as I knew he was quite capable of saying he didn’t believe a word of it and ruining the whole thing. He got my message and we all said no, we didn’t think it was an old wives’ tale.

  Mr Armstrong, who had been looking into the fire as if wondering whether he should confide in us or not, finally screwed up his face and said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you.’ He thought for a minute. ‘It goes back … oh, more than two hundred years.’

  We whistled with surprise, hardly able to believe anything could go back that far.

  ‘Indeed it does,’ he went on. ‘It goes back to the time of an ancestor of young Mr Rochford-King, a man called Sir Timothy King. King’s the family name of course. They’re a very old family. They came here around the year 1600 as far as I can gather from Felicity. However, it was in later years that the legend was born. In fact, it was just before the 1798 rebellion.

  ‘Whether it was because times were so hard or not, I couldn’t say, but Sir Timothy was a desperate miser and kept a tight fist on whatever gold he received for his services to the Crown. As fate would have it, he had a beautiful daughter, a lovely lass by all accounts – long silken hair, pretty as a picture. Things weren’t too bad until the girl’s mother died. When she was alive she saw to it that in spite of Sir Timothy’s miserliness their daughter was kept in a manner befitting the lady she undoubtedly was. But when she died, things changed.

  ‘The story goes that Sir Timothy wouldn’t allow his daughter to go anywhere or to entertain friends, and he was very stingy in the matter of clothes. He even paid off some of his servants and made her do the work. But she was beautiful, and she had a lover, a handsome young fellow with black hair, like Curly here. He was from somewhere nearby, but he had one big drawback – he wasn’t one of the gentry. He had no money worth talking about, and money was the only thing that counted with Sir Timothy. He wanted his daughter to marry somebody with land and money – not that he ever gave her the chance.

  ‘Well, to cut a long story short, he wouldn’t hear tell of them getting married. Wouldn’t hear tell of it at all! Then he had an idea. He was a great man for conundrums, or riddles. He was always making them up and offering people such and such if they could solve them. Of course, he always made the riddles so difficult it was almost impossible to solve them. It made him feel generous and smart at the same time.

  ‘Anyway, he refused for a long time to give his daughter and this young fellow permission to marry. Then one day he sent for them. He told them he would give them permission to marry and provide his daughter with a dowry of half of all the golden guineas he owned if … and it was a big if …’

  ‘If they could solve a riddle?’ exclaimed Cowlick.

  ‘Right –
a riddle that contained three promises, one for each leaf of the shamrock, some people say. He told them that as a precaution against a possible attack by rebels, he had hidden half of his golden guineas outside the castle, but within the estate.’

  ‘What are guineas?’ asked Totey.

  ‘Guineas were the most valuable coin they had in those days. They were made of solid gold and were worth one pound and one shilling, which was a lot then. Nowadays they would be worth a fortune. But as I was saying, Sir Timothy had hidden half of his golden guineas outside the castle, but within the estate, so that if there was a rebellion the rebels wouldn’t find it. As a matter of fact, the Catholics and Presbyterians joined forces in the 1798 rebellion shortly afterwards and some of them were hanged when it was put down. They called themselves the United Irishmen.

  ‘Anyway, Sir Timothy promised the young people his consent to marry, and the gold he had hidden, if the young man proved himself worthy by solving the riddle he had composed as the key to the hiding place and thus to their marriage. You all know the words:

  The man is dead

  But life allows

  He’ll run forever

  Beneath the boughs

  And in his path

  There lies the key

  To wealth, happiness

  A bride-to-be …’

  ‘The Legend of the Golden Key,’ I said.

  The old man nodded. ‘The young fellow spent week after week, month after month, trying to solve the riddle. He searched every inch of the estate and every tree, including the trees over there in the family graveyard by the side of the castle, the animal graveyard at the back of it, and of course, the Gallows Tree. But no matter how much he searched, he couldn’t solve the riddle of the running dead man that would lead him to the key.

  ‘In the meantime, Sir Timothy, knowing fine well the lad wouldn’t be able to solve the riddle, gave his daughter a present of a bracelet – a chain with a golden guinea attached – and told her when the right man came along he really would give her a handsome dowry of them. But those two young people were head over heels in love with each other.’

  ‘Just like Mr Rochford-King and Felicity,’ I sug-

  gested.

  The old man raised a bushy eyebrow and sort of looked at me as if to say that wasn’t any of my business, before going on, ‘As I was saying, they were very much in love with one another, and the father’s efforts to keep them apart only brought them closer together.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they elope?’ asked Curly.

  ‘They could have tried, I suppose, but by all accounts they didn’t. You must remember that the people who owned castles in those times also owned the best horses in the land – they still do in many cases. They had to have the best for themselves and their soldiers or they’d soon have been defeated in battle. So what was the use in eloping? Sir Timothy would have sent his best men after them on his fastest horses and caught them, and, don’t forget, they’d have hanged a man in those days for a lot less. Why do you think that big tree at the back of the castle is called the Gallows Tree? Many a poor soul was strung up there, maybe for no more than stealing a sheep. So you can guess what chance the young lad would have had if he was caught stealing Sir Timothy’s daughter!’

  ‘What did they do then?’ asked Cowlick.

  ‘I suppose they decided they just couldn’t live without each other. Their favourite meeting place was down by the lake in the estate, and one night, hand-in-hand, they threw themselves into the Devil’s Cup. As you know, the water flows into the Devil’s Cup and disappears underground. And the two of them were never seen again.’

  ‘Then how did the people know where they went?’ asked Doubter.

  ‘Ah, they knew all right. You see, Sir Timothy had begun to suspect that his daughter was having secret meetings with this young man after he forbade them to see each other, and as it so happened he checked her room that night and found she was gone. He immediately ordered his men out to look for them. All they found was the bracelet lying on top of the wall above the Devil’s Cup … and they might never have found that if they hadn’t seen the golden guinea glittering in the light of a full moon.’

  ‘What happened after that?’ asked Totey.

  ‘Well, the man must have been mad to treat his daughter the way he did in the first place, and after the young couple committed suicide, he went clean out of his head. Maybe it was only then he realised how much she meant to him. Maybe he really did have her best interests at heart when he told her he wanted her to marry well. Who knows? At any rate, it wasn’t long before he was reduced to a raving lunatic. The remainder of his gold soon dwindled, and he died, to all intents and purposes penniless, having steadfastly refused to draw upon the gold he had hidden, let alone divulge its hiding place to a single soul.

  ‘Over the years,’ added Old Daddy Armstrong, ‘the castle has been renovated and parts of it rebuilt, but it has never given up the secret that Sir Timothy King took with him to the grave. Neither his brother, who inherited the castle, nor anyone since has been able to solve the legend. At some stage it was inscribed on Sir Timothy’s headstone over there in the family graveyard, and it can be seen there to this very day. It and the bracelet, which has been handed down from generation to generation, are the only known links with the hidden gold. Felicity wears the bracelet now as a present from Mr Rochford-King to mark their engagement. So there you are. That’s the story of the Legend of the Golden Key, as far as I know it.’

  3. SEEING THINGS

  We thanked Old Daddy Armstrong and left. Needless to say, we were no less thrilled with the story than Cowlick. At the same time it would have ended there had it not been for a chance remark Juno made when we called up to see him on the Cotton Bog Road a few days later.

  Juno and his family had originally been travellers, but at some stage had forsaken their life on the open road and settled in the corner of a field they had somehow acquired from Mr Stockman. Juno lived with his wife and children in a couple of caravans that used to be drawn by cars but which now were permanent fixtures, while his mother Rosie lived in a brightly painted wooden one that used to be drawn by a horse. He always made sure that the horse-drawn caravan was parked out near the road so that it could be seen by passing tourists, for in the summer some of them paid him to look inside it and see how people like him lived in the old days. We knew he still hankered after the old days himself, as he was always talking about them and still kept two or three piebald horses.

  Anyway, we found him busy skinning a rabbit he had strung up by the hind legs from a corner of his mother’s caravan. It was a fine big rabbit with a broad back and we could see there’d be plenty of eating in it. As I said before, when it comes to catching a fish or snaring a rabbit, there’s no one in the valley can match him, except maybe my father.

  Prince bristled up to a yapping mongrel that had come out from under the caravan and Juno turned to greet us.

  ‘Ha!’ he smiled. ‘If it’s not my young buckos from below.’

  ‘Hi Juno,’ we replied and sidled up beside him.

  As we watched, Rosie came down out of the cara-

  van.

  ‘Have you not done that yet, Juno?’ she shouted.

  He gave us a wink and shouted back, ‘A few minutes more, mother, just a few minutes more.’

  ‘Saints preserve us,’ she complained, ‘we’ll all die of the hunger this day if you don’t get on with it.’

  ‘Tapser, alanna,’ he whispered, ‘what can I do for you?’

  Alanna is a word he uses when he’s talking to me or any of the boys. He told us once it’s an Irish word they sometimes use when speaking to friends down in the South where he comes from.

  ‘We want a badge for Cowlick,’ I said, pointing to the ones that decorated the belt of his baggy blue trousers.

  Juno makes these badges himself from scraps of copper he has left over after making little ornamental jugs and things for people’s mantelpieces. The rest of us had already bo
ught one each and we considered them good value for fifty pence.

  ‘Right,’ he said, and, wiping his hand on the side of his trousers, he took down a tin box from just inside the doorway of the caravan. ‘Take your pick, Cowlick. Usual price of course. Must live, you know.’

  Cowlick picked through the badges until he found one in the shape of a horse’s head that took his fancy.

  ‘Now,’ said Juno pocketing the money, ‘what about your fortune? As a favour, I’ll get mother to tell the fortune of all five of you for the price of one. How’s that for a bargain?’

  We shook our heads. We had no more money, and even if we had it wouldn’t have made any difference, for there’s something very peculiar about Rosie and that crystal ball of hers, and we didn’t want anything to do with her.

  Juno went on with his skinning. ‘Ah, ’tis a great pity.’ He turned to emphasise what he was going to say with his penknife. ‘You know, there are fortune-tellers and fortune-tellers, but my mother, she’s the best. There’s not many have the power to penetrate the mysterious mists of time that veil the future. But she has, and no mistake.’

  ‘I know, I know, Juno,’ I said. ‘It’s not that we’re doubting you. It’s just, well …’

  ‘Okay, alanna, but you don’t know what you’re missing.’ We watched him working at the rabbit. After a few minutes he turned to us again and, pretending to be serious, said, ‘Tapser, you’re sure you’re not from a travelling family?’