Page 114 of One Summer

‘Break the contract, give back the book advance and get a job.’

Betty pats him on the back at this, as if she fully approves of this plan of action.

‘Keep going,’ she whispers.

‘You make me happy, Lindy. And I was miserable for so long that I thought it was karma. I thought I deserved to be unhappy because I let my ego make my decisions, and I took a stupid risk that almost killed me. That could have killed other people who had to rescue me.’

‘Oh, is that Ted I can hear barking?’ Betty says, as Ted suddenly realises there are visitors at the door that he needs to alert everybody to within a one-mile radius. She walks across the lawn to the gate leading to the back garden.

Caleb clears his throat. ‘Come back to Loor.’

‘Give me one good reason.’

He takes something out of his pocket and shows it to me, and for a moment, I wonder if it’s going to be something ridiculous, like a ring, but it’s not; it’s something even better.

‘I love you, Lindy, and I will never keep anything from you again.’

He hands me the little piece of Lost at Sea Lego I found in the baby waves.

He’s kept it in his pocket all this time.

‘Before I met you, I was drowning,’ he says. ‘You gave me a lifejacket. Let me be yours.’

He leans down and kisses me, and when he pulls away, Betty is back from the garden holding Ted, who’s licking her neck as if he hasn’t seen her for a year.

‘Guess what I forgot to tell you?’ Betty asks, before answering her own question. ‘Max has been busted.’

‘Huh?’ I say, reeling from this strange confluence of people and topics.

‘Your ex – Max – been exposed for planting a ring in the ground and pretending to find it. You know, the medieval “Alas for fayte” ring that he used to propose to Greta?’

‘Max found that ring,’ I say, frowning.

‘No. Another detectorist found it at Detectorville and lent it to Max – for a hefty fee, of course – solely for the video recording, and on the strict understanding that he’d get the ring back afterwards and take it to the Finds Liaison Officer for official registration.’

‘But Max used it to propose to Greta.’

‘Exactly. All of mudlark YouTube is on fire with the scandal!’

I listen, open-mouthed, as Betty explains how Max got swept up in the moment and proposed to Greta with a ring that wasn’t his, and how she won’t give the ring back, since she accepted it in good faith. It’s a mess. They’ve broken up, Greta’s run off with the ring, and the other detectorist – the true owner of the ring – is suing Max for all he’s worth.

‘Now that…’ Betty says, ‘is karma.’

SEPTEMBER

Epilogue

Treasure

The XP Deus 2 – the gift I bought Max but never gave him – is finally out of my suitcase, correctly assembled and beeping beautifully as I use it to scan a pasture, with full permission from the landowner – Halloon – who was only too keen to agree to my request, just so long as I promised to purchase a wheel of his finest cheese, which I’m planning to share with Ted, Nemo and Maurice. This ground is pristine; it’s been in Halloon’s family for centuries and as far as he knows, it’s never been metal-detected, as permission has never been granted.

There could be a hoard of ancient gold coins here, Caleb keeps telling me. A pewter cauldron full to the brim with them.

Caleb is holding my newly purchased spade and pinpointer probe, since he gallantly agreed to do the digging, and so far we’ve found five aluminium cans, four ring-pulls, three mysterious globs of lead and two spendable pennies from the eighties.

There’s one signal that comes through shrilly and then seems to disappear entirely, leaving us baffled.

‘Mole with a gold tooth,’ Caleb says, and I smile and make a mental note to share this hypothesis with Henny when I see her in the Merry Maid later.

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