Through the Rectangular Window
Three black crows stalked the grass in front of the Smugglers’ Chapel, their raucous cries echoing through the trees as the four friends approached. To Rebecca’s surprise, they did not fly off when they approached them, standing eyeing them silently.
‘A murder of crows. Very Hitchcock,’ murmured Drew. He realised the others had not grasped his meaning. ‘The Birds? One of the scariest films ever!’
Rebecca raised her eyebrows, looked at Laura and shook her head.
‘Why are we here, Becks?’ asked Laura, passing through the doorway.
Rebecca indicated the stained-glass windows, the gesture suggesting that here was the answer. Rupert, Laura and Drew exchanged baffled looks as she ran her eyes over it from top to bottom, examining it minutely. She turned and looked all around the chapel, then back to the window. Her gaze alighted on something. Her eyes widened. She crouched down by a stone frieze on the opposite wall and ran her hands over the carved stone.
She looked back to the window. With a quick intake of breath she ran over to the pulpit and clambered up the side of it. She reached up. In her hand she was holding the section of glass and she now slid it over a section of the window, jumped back down and came round in front of them.
Drew, Laura and Rupert were completely mystified. ‘So … What now?’
‘Wait, wait!’ Rebecca held a hand up. ‘When the sun comes back out, I think you might just see.’
‘The sun?’ said Laura, shaking her head in bemusement.
‘You see how the window is casting coloured light into here. Well, that bit of glass being left in the casket was no accident. It is a clue left by Kraus.’
‘A clue to what, McOwan?’ asked Drew.
At that moment, the sun reappeared and there was an immediate and dramatic illumination inside the chapel. Shafts of coloured light beamed from the window across the floor and walls of the little chapel.
‘Yes!’ she shouted in delight. ‘Look!’
On the wall, an incredible transformation had taken place. What had previously resembled a simple carved decoration had now taken on a much more intricate and definite pattern.
‘A map!’ gasped Rupert.
* * *
‘We know Kraus made this window, that he was a master craftsman. We know he knew the secret and we suspect he found the gold. Your grandfather and Von Krankl wondered what had become of the gold, what he had done with it and why there was no clue … well here it is.’ She gestured dramatically to the window, through which light was still pouring.
‘He hid all his secrets here, somewhere he thought nobody would ever think of looking.’
‘Except you!’ Laura regarded her admiringly.
‘So what is this telling us?’ Rupert was closely examining the frieze.
‘Well, we had already discovered the map reference in the flags there which gave us the submarine’s location. What we did not suspect was that instead of the treasure, Kraus had hidden the last piece of the jigsaw there, that pane of glass. It was pretty clearly something made to fit into something bigger. If you look up at Sir Lytton’ All heads turned to where Rebecca now pointed. ‘You will see he is pointing to something … but there was only a blank section of glass. We thought it was the monastery, because that is in the piece further over, but look! With the new piece over the blank piece, some ingenious trick of Kraus’, related to how light diffuses through layered glass, transforms it magically into what you now see.’
‘A gate, a tower? … ‘ Laura began, squinting. She stopped, making no sense of it.
The others crowded forward to look.
‘What do you make of it, Rebecca?’ asked Rupert.
Rebecca was slowly nodding at the picture now laid out before them. ‘I have seen this in my dreams. I see the Monk, sometimes in a Tower beyond a gateway, bent over something and crying.’
‘Bent over a grave perhaps?’ said Drew. Rebecca nodded.
‘I think so … Emily’s grave.’
‘But Emily wasn’t buried? I thought that is what all this was about?’ said Laura.
‘Well she wasn’t buried on holy ground, and we think her bones are those in the casket. But they were put there in 1945. She died three hundred years before that and the Black Monk must have put her remains somewhere.’
‘Good point,’ nodded Rupert.
Laura bent down to read some writing carved into the frieze. ‘The richness of my life lies here. Oh, he surely means Emily! What a beautiful thing to write about her!’
‘Hopeless romantic,’ murmured Rebecca into her ear.
‘Rupert, isn’t there a folly of some sort somewhere in the grounds?’
‘You mean the old Bell Tower? Down at the end of the orchard, all horribly overgrown.’
‘Might the tower in this frieze be that tower?’
‘Possible,’ nodded Rupert. ‘But it’s a folly. There’s no bell or anything.’
‘Only I know the true location … My life’s work, Saladin’s nemesis, where to look,’ said Laura. ‘Kraus’ message left on the wall in the crypt,’ she reminded everyone.
‘Well then, no time to waste. We’d better try and find this orchard,’ said Drew, clapping Rebecca on the shoulder and leading her towards the door.