Free Brodmaw Bay by F.G. Cottam

find quite so many servants of Satan in such an isolated spot. Either that or the informers who had summoned him had been particularly spiteful and convincing.
    Beyond the left claw of the Brodmaw breakwater, there was a shore beneath a cliff. This shore was strewn with boulders. The legend was that these rocks were the litter left by careless giants from a game of quoits played in ancient times. In the witch trials, suspects had been chained to them at low tide. Cromwell’s man had argued that any woman who survived this ordeal was guilty. The innocent, drowned, would blamelessly ascend to paradise. A total of twenty-eight women drowned chained to the rocks. By the time he read this, James already assumed that Jacob Ratch had probably been clinically insane.
    There was a circular plain where the rising land finally flattened to a plateau to the rear of Brodmaw Bay, overlooking it. This grassy circle was marked out by a series of ancient standing stones. There were twenty-one of them and they were evenly placed and dated from the Neolithic period. Nobody knew their exact significance. But they had fostered their own legend over the centuries.
    The stones were said to be the remains of a druidic temple dedicated to the summoning of the Singers under the Sea. There were no images of the Singers. But James did not very much like the idea of them. To hear their chorus was to suffer their curse. It delivered madness and death. He could not imagine why even the most self-aggrandising druid would wish to summon them. It sounded a very dangerous party piece. He wondered if the women chained to the rocks on the shore accused of witchcraft had heard their song with the incoming tide.
    Brodmaw Bay had been home to two illustrious sons. One had been an early nineteenth-century prizefighter called Gregory Abraham. After beating all comers in Cornwall, he had beaten the Devon and Somerset champions too. He had boxed a champion from Ireland at a sporting club on the Strand. They had fought one another to a standstill over seventy-five rounds. His fame growing, Abraham had boxed an exhibition with Lord Byron, an enthusiastic amateur pugilist. He had retired, prosperous, to run a tavern in his home village.
    Then there had been Adam Gleason, a soldier-poet in the Great War who had been killed in 1916 . His one volume of verse was still on the West Country A-level curriculum. James thought that Gleason fitted the flower of youth stereotype of Western Front sacrifice very neatly. He had been brave, good-looking and only twenty-nine years old when he met his death on a night patrol in no-man’s-land.
    Abraham’s tavern was still open, a pub now renowned for its seafood and run by one of Gregory’s direct descendants. A marble statue of the bare-fisted battler stood outside it, his bare torso mighty above his britches, his hands raised in a guard. It had been built after his death, the money to pay for it raised by generous public subscription.
    Not far from the pub there was a high street monument to the Great War dead and, beside it, a bust of Adam Gleason on a plinth. A plaque was screwed to the plinth and into its brass face had been engraved a stanza from one of his sonnets.
    In the photograph of this commemorative sculpture James found, fresh flowers sat in a bronze vase before it. They seemed symbolic of a place that cared for its own and its heritage; a place that was confident in its identity, a settlement guided by tradition and continuity in which such contemporary blights as vandalism and graffiti simply did not exist.
    Nowhere was perfect. From Brigadoon to Balamory, the perfect place to live was no more than a seductive fiction. But Brodmaw Bay was picturesque of itself and occupied a quite beautiful piece of coastline. It seemed genuinely unspoiled. It was quiet and prosperous. It fitted perfectly their family dream of living somewhere serene and lovely at the edge of the sea. Over the next couple of days, he would discover