But if these adventures demanded the companionship of Cass, the inspiration of them was Mark’s mother.  Just as in the nursery games of Lima Street it had always been she who had made it worth while to play with his grenadiers, which by the way had perished in a troopship like their predecessors the light dragoons a century before, sinking one by one and leaving nothing behind except their cork-stands bobbing on the waves.

Mrs. Lidderdale knew every legend of the coast, so that it was thrilling to sit beside her and turn over the musty pages of the church registers, following from equinox to equinox in the entries of the burials the wrecks since the year 1702: 

     The bodies of fifteen seamen from the brigantine Ann Pink wrecked
     in Church Cove, on the afternoon of Dec. 19, 1757.

     The body of a child washed into Pendhu Cove from the high seas
     during the night of Jan. 24, 1760.

     The body of an unknown sailor, the breast tattooed with a heart and
     the initials M. V. found in Hanover Cove on the morning of March 3,
     1801.

Such were the inscriptions below the wintry dates of two hundred years, and for each one Mark’s mother had a moving legend of fortune’s malice.  She had tales too of treasure, from the golden doubloons of a Spanish galleon wrecked on the Rose Bar in the sixteenth century to the silver dollars of Portugal, a million of them, lost in the narrow cove on the other side of the Castle Cliff in the lee of which was built St. Tugdual’s Church.  At low spring tides it was possible to climb down and sift the wet sand through one’s fingers on the chance of finding a dollar, and when the tide began to rise it was jolly to climb back to the top of the cliff and listen to tales of mermaids while a gentle wind blew the perfume of the sea-campion along the grassy slopes.  It was here that Mark first heard the story of the two princesses who were wrecked in what was now called Church Cove and of how they were washed up on the cliff and vowed to build a church in gratitude to God and St. Tugdual on the very spot where they escaped from the sea, of how they quarrelled about the site because each sister wished to commemorate the exact spot where she was saved, and of how finally one built the tower on her spot and the other built the church on hers, which was the reason why the church and the tower were not joined to this day.  When Mark went home that afternoon, he searched among his grandfather’s books until he found the story of St. Tugdual who, it seemed, was a holy man in Brittany, so holy that he was summoned to be Pope of Rome.  When he had been Pope for a few months, an angel appeared to him and said that he must come back at once to Brittany, because since he went to Rome all the women were become barren.

“But how am I to go back all the way from Rome to Brittany?” St. Tugdual asked.

“I have a white horse waiting for you,” the angel replied.