‘Water, please.’

I heard Fergal’s voice speaking again in my mind. Me now, I would rather meet my thirst with ale and cider, same as everyone. It faded again, but when Claire set my own glass in front of me I was half-tempted to ask her for cider.

I didn’t, of course. But it seemed so much harder this time to fit back in the slot I belonged in. Especially here in the kitchen, where I spent so much of my time in the past, I found things didn’t feel right. I missed seeing Fergal’s black scowl and quick smile, and Jack rocking his chair on two legs with his back to the wall and his eyes full of mischief, and Daniel … I really missed Daniel.

‘Your hair looks amazing like that,’ Susan said to me, mixing her salad. ‘You ought to put it up more often.’

‘Thanks.’

Oliver confessed he hadn’t noticed. ‘You didn’t have it up this morning, did you, at the church?’

‘No. I …’ Lifting one hand, I self-consciously pushed in a hairpin more firmly. ‘I felt like a change.’

Susan teased us both, ‘Are you two having early morning trysts now in the church-hay?’

‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘With Mr Teague about? Not likely. No, your PR wizard here was scouting out the final resting places of Trelowarth’s famous smuggling Butler brothers.’

Mark, returning with his treasure box in hand, said, ‘Them again?’

Susan said, ‘Well, it’s colour that we’re after, Mark, and smugglers do provide it. That’s what brings the tourists in.’

Mark shrugged and set the box down and we all leant in to take a look at his assorted treasures.

Oliver was taken with the musket balls, although he made a small correction. ‘If you found these in the cave, I’d think it much more likely that they came from a pistol than a musket. I can’t imagine someone having room to fire a musket in that space, they’d use a pistol at close range.’

I looked at the seven small metal balls lying so deadly and still on his palm.

‘Can’t you tell from the size of them what sort of gun they were fired from?’ I asked.

‘Well, not really. Both muskets and pistols were smooth-bored, they didn’t leave marks to identify, and because of how they worked, the balls and shot were smaller than the barrel of the gun, you had to leave a bit of room to wrap a bit of paper round them before loading. Standard navy issue muskets used a larger ball, but blunderbusses and some other muskets could use smaller shot, like these.’ He stirred the balls round with his finger. ‘But at a guess, I’d still say these came from a pistol, just because of where you found them.’

I was thinking of the pistol I’d seen Daniel tuck inside his belt last night when he’d gone to keep an eye on Jack, down at the Spaniard. Just last night …

My eyes closed briefly on the memory as I tried to focus on what Oliver was telling us.

‘I’ve got a matchlock pistol down at the museum that takes shot about this size.’

‘A matchlock pistol?’ Susan asked. ‘What, do you use a match to fire it?’

‘Not a match as we would think of it. A match in those days was a sort of … well, a sort of …’

‘Fuse,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’ Oliver’s glance praised my research. ‘A slow-burning fuse, that’s right. You have been swotting up, haven’t you?’

Mark took the dagger with care from the box. ‘Right then, Einstein, how old would this be?’

‘Wow,’ said Oliver, rolling the metal balls back where they’d come from and taking the dagger with reverence. ‘That’s really beautiful.’

Only a man who loved history, I thought, could find beauty in something so ruined by time. He turned it so the sunlight from the window caught the small bit of the handle that remained. ‘That’s shell, I think.’

Score one for Oliver. I waited, frankly curious to see how close he’d come in his assessment to the truth.

He said, ‘Now this could be a smuggler’s knife.’

‘Why’s that?’ Mark asked.

‘Well, someone who spent time at sea. They all had knives this size. A multi-purpose gadget, really, good for cutting rope or cutting food or eating with. You wouldn’t be without one on a ship. But this,’ he turned it to the light again, ‘is really lovely workmanship. You see here, if I hold it just like this,’ he said, and palmed the handle, ‘you would barely see the blade. Whoever made this knew what he was doing.’ Looking at it closely he considered Mark’s first question. ‘How old is it? Hard to say with this corrosion, but I’d hazard Restoration era maybe, from its shape. The 1660s, 1670s, somewhere in there.’

He’d impressed Mark. ‘That’s pretty precise.’

‘Yes, well. I have a thing for knives, actually. Care to sell this one?’ He knew what Mark’s answer would be, I could tell from the smile in his eyes.

‘Not much point,’ Mark said, taking the knife back and tucking it safe in the box with the rest of his treasures. ‘There wouldn’t be much value to it, not in that condition.’

If Oliver knew what the dagger’s true value was, he didn’t bother to share it. Instead he gave up with a shrug that made Claire give a cluck of her tongue and come over to study a tear in his sleeve.

‘You’ve a bad scratch under there,’ she told him. ‘Let me get a plaster.’