The afternoon expedition to the bay yielded more coins, some encrusted fragments, which could have been either ancient navigation instruments or just large and well-rusted nails, shells, two gold rings, a cameo brooch in a silver setting and a digital watch, which was still going but two minutes slow.
  Vanessa added the lost property to the items recovered on the previous expedition and took them to the police house in the village. Around 30% of the lost property found its way back to its owners. Haig sold most of the rest to a firm in Barnstaple. That part of the business paid the running costs of his van and his motorbike.

Low tide came at four-thirty on Friday morning, outside Vanessa's waking hours. Haig made a solo sweep with his metal detector and gathered a modest harvest. As he had mentioned to Vanessa, they needed a really good blow to agitate the sea, stir up its bed and move larger objects to the surface.
  Haig was still in bed when Mikki took her plans out into the garden to pick a spot for her herb garden. She was still calculating which square yard would receive the most winter sunshine while enjoying maximum shelter from the stone wall when Vanessa yawned out of the tower to deliver a mug of coffee. When Mikki woke up, she became fully active instantly. Vanessa was a very slow starter.
  Mikki was threading lengths of string between four wooden pegs to mark out her chosen plot when the minibus arrived, half an hour later. Grandmother, grandfather, their son, his wife, two small boys who looked like twins and a girl of primary school age piled out and stood looking up at the sunlit stone of the tower.
  "Good morning," called a bronzed man of about Haig's age. "They told us at the shop in village that we can look at the lighthouse." His accent was a curious mixture of French and American.
  "That's right." Mikki wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans. "My friend does the tours. I'll just give her a ring."
  Mikki led the group to the ground floor, intending to call Vanessa on the blue, internal telephone. She found her sitting at the workbench, washing sand out of shells.
  "How are you fixed for a tour, Van?" said Mikki.
  "Yeah, sure," said Vanessa with a bright smile. "Hello."
  The tourists murmured greetings in response to her smile. Vanessa dried her hands, then crossed to a peg by the front door. She crammed a peaked cap onto her sun-and-sea-spray-bleached, blonde curls. The black cap was adorned with a large, enamelled Tour Guide badge, gold letters on a dark green field. She took a black cashbox from a convenient niche in the stone wall.
  "We usually charge two pounds a head for the tour. Children half-price." Vanessa opened the box to show her tickets, which she had commissioned from a local printer.
  The tickets were postcards with an address and message side and a picture side, which showed a drawing of the tower and the legend Fullerton's Folly Admission £2 on the left and a sketch map of Farnescombe Bay with the tower's position marked with a red dot. There was a special family rate of £5 for anyone who looked a bit hard up but deserving. Vanessa decided that the French visitors could handle the full rate.
  "But it's ninety-eight steps right up to the top," she added with a doubtful glance in the direction of the grandmother, who was short, round and looked very unathletic.
  The father-spokesman passed on the news. His mother shook her head firmly. She had no intention of attempting ninety-eight steps up and the same number down.
  "Perhaps Madame would like to sit in the garden with a cup of coffee instead?" Mikki suggested, showing off her French.
  The grandfather took a red-striped canvas chair out to a patch of shade and made sure his wife was comfortable while Mikki fetched the coffee. The father-spokesman insisted on buying seven tickets. Vanessa mentioned that he could keep one of them as a souvenir and use the rest as postcards, if he wished. Then she began the tour.
  The stream of holiday visitors wanting a tour of the lighthouse had forced Haig to work out a basic script in order not to appear hopelessly ignorant about the history of his own home. Visitors had been ringing his doorbell almost from his first day there, encouraged by ‘helpful' villagers. Vanessa had learned the script very quickly when she had realized that everything that went into her cashbox stayed hers.
  Vanessa began her tour with the sandy shells and the encrusted bits and pieces on the worktable, gave her visitors a quick look at the spacious, modern kitchen on the floor above, then showed off the collection of shells in display cabinets in the drawing room. The children and their parents were very impressed by the range of colours and sizes of the shells. The grandfather was more interested in the furniture, most of which was over a century old.
  He asked so many questions, through his son, that Vanessa had to look out a binder of plastic wallets. It was full of specifications, bills and receipts for items supplied to Mr. James Fullerton in Victorian times. The old man was in his seventies and he had spent his working life working with furniture. He took great delight in genuine craftsmanship.
  The tour by-passed the private apartments on the next two floors. Forty-two steps higher and three-quarters of a revolution later, the grandfather was confronted by the delights of the carving on the four-poster bed in the guest room. The study offered a selection of bits and pieces which Haig had recovered from the sea. Most of them had been offered to the museum in Barnstaple but declined on the grounds of either cost or duplication.
  Then came the high-point for the children; the chance to shout down to their grandmother from the roof of the tower and an opportunity to look out across the surrounding territory with the powerful telescope, which Haig had provided for the benefit of visitors.
  Mikki was digging when the tour reached the ground again. She had explained her plans to the grandmother, exchanged a little biography, and then her guest had urged her to carry on with her work. One of the boys wanted to explore the steps down from the ground floor while the others were taking their pit stop in the toilet. His grandfather decided not to tackle a further eighty-two steps.
  Vanessa had put her table-display of tee-shirts near the door to the toilet. All three children were telling the world that they had visited Farne Lighthouse when the rest of the family descended into the basement, toward the fall-out shelter. Vanessa let one of the boys use the keycard to open the final steel door. The children seemed a little disappointed that a ride in the rubber boat was not included in their tour, but they found plenty to interest them in the rock pools in the cave and on the rock shelf.
  Vanessa explained to their parents that the tide had been going out for an hour and a half and would continue to do so until the bay was empty. The bay was still quite full, but there was a visible and safe path at the foot of the cliff stretching all the way from Haig's cave round to the sea front at Farne. Even so, it was with a sense of adventure that the French family set off along the foot of the cliff to a rendezvous with the grandparents in Farne village.
  Mikki was looking through the drawers of the workbench when Vanessa reached ground level again.
  "Have you seen those old, leather gloves?" Mikki asked.
  "What, are your hands getting cold?" grinned Vanessa.
  "Jay reckons I'll get them covered in blisters if I don't wear some gloves when I'm digging."
  "What, you mean he's up?"
  "He's giving the cat some lunch."
  "That cat! How come he's always first with everything?"
  "Because he makes a pest of himself otherwise." Mikki had a habit of answering rhetorical questions. It was a symptom of a tidy mind, according to Haig. "Ah! Here they are." The mismatched gloves were of dark brown and black leather. "We're having lunch outside today."
  "Who's making it?"
  "He is."
  Mikki, the student of the food business, tried to give each meal a special touch. She was so much of a perfectionist that the others suspected that she would eat everything, given half a chance, to make sure that it was all up to her high standards. Mikki had made Haig a partial convert to her point of view. Vanessa remained loyal to basic cooking without frills and there was usually a large do-it-yourself element in her meals.
  Mikki could never understand how Haig could be content with one of Vanessa's well-filled ham sandwiches with lemon mayonnaise and sliced olives when a little more effort could turn the basic ingredients, plus a few trimmings, into three interesting salads to go with buttered bread; normally two separate items when Vanessa was in charge of the kitchen.
  As they sat down to Haig's version of an appropriate summer luncheon, served with chilled Devon cider, the trio at the tower had no idea that they were about to begin one of the most exciting afternoons of their lives.

More visitors arrived at the tower just after lunch; two middle-aged Californian couples, who were doing Europe in their summer vacation. Vanessa retrieved her Tour Guide cap and added a further £8 to her tin. Haig occupied himself with his finds of the previous night.
  Mikki seemed to be digging either a wide grave or an escape tunnel when he strolled out into the garden an hour or so later. Vanessa had collapsed into a chair at the workbench. She had been up and down the stairs twice more since the visit of the Californians.
  The cat was watching Mikki, lying in a patch of sunlight on the stone wall, looking down into the excavation with great interest, turning away only when one of the seagulls over the bay screeched close enough to arouse his hunting instincts.
  "How deep are going?" Haig remarked. "China?"
  Mikki's groan turned into a smile when she noticed that he was carrying two frosting glasses of her home-made lemonade. She tugged off one of her gloves and reached for a glass.
  "How are the hands holding up?" Haig added.
  "Great! No signs of blisters. I thought I'd better go down at least two feet and put the top layer at the bottom in case it's a bit salty. Then dig in some peat and use some of that nitrate and potash fertilizer."
  "Sounds fair enough." Haig did not pretend to be any sort of gardening expert and it was Mikki's project. He confined his help to refreshments, advice on the effects of an unyielding wooden spade-handle on soft flesh and arguments against sustained efforts such as: Never be afraid to leave a job half done; it will still be there, waiting for you, when you come back to it, refreshed, later on.
  Mikki returned her empty glass, pulled on the glove and began to dig again. She was mid-thigh deep, tidying up her corners to make them nice and square. Haig circled to stroke the cat. A brick-red nose twitched, sniffed an empty glass, and then Biffo lost interest in lemonade. It was not likely to be to his taste, but he liked to be given a chance to turn up his nose.
  The spade struck pottery, which shattered with a metallic rush. Mikki stopped and peered. Then she put the spade aside and crouched in her excavation. She reappeared holding a double handful of muddy, golden discs and loose earth.
  "Hey, what do you reckon these are?" she called to Haig. "Brass washers without holes? There's millions of them."
  Haig experienced a violent jolt of shock as he reached her. Prolonging the moment of discovery, he balanced the two glasses on Mikki's spoil heap, then reached out and took one of the discs. Wiped free of earth, the gold was as bright and fresh as it had been on the day of its burial.
  The Queen-Empress was in her sixties, gazing imperiously to the left, looking back to the time when one quarter of the map of the world had been coloured British Empire red. Haig turned the coin over. The date on the reverse, beneath St. George slaying his dragon, was 1885, which made the coin more than a century old.
  "What d'you reckon they are?" Mikki repeated. "Are they some sort of Victorian trade token? Like those aluminium washers you see pensioners using for train tickets?"
  "Count them," Haig said through a beautiful smile. He spread a clean handkerchief from his hip pocket on a level stretch of ground. "Then multiply by seventy."
  "Count them? Well, all right." With the ignorant carelessness of youth, Mikki dropped her double-handful of discs onto the handkerchief one by one, muttering numbers in Czech. "Forty-one," she translated. "Times seventy, that's: two thousand eight hundred and seventy."
  "I don't suppose you've ever seen sovereigns in bulk before," laughed Haig, dropping the coin that he was holding onto the handkerchief. "Two thousand nine hundred and forty. Pounds, that is."
  "You're kidding!" gasped Mikki. "You mean these are real, genuine sovereigns?"
  "Can't you tell my the weight?"
  "But there's millions of them down here."
  "Let's have a look."
  Haig stretched out a hand and helped to pull Mikki out of her trench. He took her place at the corner and knelt to examine the source of their bounty. He found some fragments of dark brown earthenware mixed with the gold coins and loose, dark, damp earth.
  "There seems to be a pot of some kind here. Would you get me a trowel? And something to put these in?"
  "Like what?"
  "One of those plastic lunch boxes in the workroom. And you'd better tell Van. She'll never forgive us if we leave her out of something interesting."
  "You'll wait till I get back? Before you dig out any more?"
  "All right if I shift the loose stuff?"
  "Yeah, okay." Mikki sprinted for the porch, running on the excitement of gold fever.
  Haig paused to analyze his own emotions, finding himself in a state of calm excitement. He had already made a really big strike and he knew the excitement and the frantic urge to scrape at the ground with bare hands to free hidden treasures. This time, he could work more slowly and carefully, and savour the period of discovery.

Haig's first big strike had been a triumph of research and persistence. He had discovered lots of historically interesting bits and pieces with a metal detector, but never anything of great value or real archaeological significance. Some research in a university's neglected collection of papers of disputed authenticity had led him to believe that he had found the site of an ancient ford.
  The river had changed its course often over the centuries through the usual processes of erosion of its banks at bends and deposition of suspended silt. Haig had worked out that it was flowing in the twentieth century some five hundred yards to the south of its channel in the ninth century. The ford which he believed that he had discovered was part of a rich pasture in a dairy farm.
  The farmer had been reluctant to give Haig access to his land at first, as if afraid that the presence of a wandering stranger would make his cows dry up. Haig's partnership agreement had made him change his mind. Haig had made no guarantees of finding anything but he had promised fifty per cent of the value of all of his discoveries to the farmer.
  As he had pointed out, it was money for old rope. In law, Wainright owned everything on or buried in his land. In fact, none of the notional treasure was of any benefit to him if it was never found. Haig had the expertise to find any buried treasure and he would be doing all of the work. Terry Wainright, his silent partner, would reap a share of the benefits of that work in return for a simple signature on a contract.
  Haig's first exploration with his metal detector and a crude coring device had come to nothing. He had been conscious of pairs of eyes on him at frequent intervals during the first few weeks of irregular weekday work and he had been careful to report all findings, even if they were just scrap metal.
  Terry Wainright had found a silver penny while trying out the metal detector for himself. He had then spent an optimistic half hour following the slow, careful sweeps of a thorough search pattern. He had found just old tins and pieces of rusty iron from broken tools.
  Haig had called it a day when a long period of autumn wet weather had set in. He had found some bits and pieces that were of interest to a non-expert, like the farmer, but they were just routine as far as Haig was concerned. His lack of success was depressing to a certain extent, but the cores that he had drilled into the ground had shown no sign of the alluvial deposits laid down by a river; which meant that he had not yet found the right area.
  He had returned to the site after a very wet winter and spring. After confirming that their agreement was still in force, he had explained that further research had suggested some more exploration work in an adjacent field.
  Five weeks later, he had scooped hundreds of tarnished silver coins and pieces of scrap out of the ground, along with the rotting remains of the leather bag that had contained them. Haig had crouched on damp grass and just stared at blackened shapes for half an hour before he had spotted Terry Wainright's battered Land Rover driving past on the road.
  Frantic waves had brought the farmer to the scene. While he had played with the coins, letting silver rivers flow through his fingers, Haig had explored the immediate area with his metal detector. He had discovered many more strong signals. A core of earth taken among them, but well away from any of the items, had contained a characteristic river-bed layer.
  Haig had done some fast talking while Terry Wainright had been hypnotized by all that wealth. He had stressed the need for secrecy and security, and the importance of behaving responsibly toward a site of great archaeological significance. He had managed to persuade the farmer to remove just the silver and leave the rest of the site to the professionals.
  While his partner had been busy with that job, Haig had driven pegs into the ground, marked out a grid and plotted the positions of the signals from his metal detector. Then, leaving Mrs. Wainright on guard in the Land Rover with a shotgun while her husband got on with the evening milking, Haig had rushed off to the nearby university.
  He had held preliminary discussions with the professor of archaeology the year before, preparing his ground. Then, the professor had been politely sceptical about his conclusions; perhaps because Haig had kept the site of his ford a close secret. The sight of actual artefacts had changed everything.
  Terry Wainright had brought his solicitor into the secret and got him to draw up a document for the representatives of the university to sign. They had agreed that, in return for unrestricted access to the site, all artefacts found were the joint property of Jeremy Haig and Terry Wainright, according to the terms of their prior agreement.
  The solicitor had turned over 892 silver coins and a heap of silver scrap to the local coroner, who had organized a treasure trove inquest. The archaeologists had moved a caravan into the field and organized a rota of guards to make sure that sneak thieves would not be able to loot the site under their noses. Regular police patrols, authorized by the chief constable of the area as a public relations exercise, had ensured that the archaeologists had remained fairly undisturbed.
  Haig had been hoping that the ford had been the site of a good scrap in Viking times. There were traditional stories of a battle in the area in the 820s, but such unsubstantiated tales are very common. By the end of the first summer of digging, his hopes had been fulfilled beyond his most optimistic expectations.
  The site had surrendered eight swords and three war helmets in conditions ranging from sorry to good. Ornaments and utensils in precious metals, bronze, bone and horn had also been uncovered. Another cache of coins and hack-silver had been found near one of four skeletons of men with clear sword strikes in their bones.
  The archaeologists had left the site in a happy daze. After a long wait, Haig and Terry Wainright had split around one million pounds. They had also served nobly in a successful campaign to have the treasures housed in the university's museum, near to where they had been found, rather than letting the London archaeological Mafia run away with them.
  The Wainrights had given up farming and retired to a life in the sun in Southern Spain. Haig had let a more needy person take over his job, bought his tower in North Devon and invested the rest of his capital. His current shell business and his explorations of Farnescombe Bay with his metal detector were expressions of an urge to make use of things around him that were there for the taking. He had found references to so many wrecks in the local records that he expected the coast around his new home to be very productive over a period of time. His occasional discoveries of gold and silver coins and artefacts proved that there was treasure in the bay. He had never considered looking in the tower or its grounds.
  "All right, what's this wind-up" Vanessa challenged as Mikki dragged her round the corner of the garage.
  "Come and look!" Mikki insisted.
  Vanessa crouched beside the handkerchief and picked up a coin. She compared it with the one on the gold chain round her neck. The sovereign was one that Haig had found in the bay and the landlady of the Seadog's Roost had mounted in a frame with the chain attached as a birthday present for her.
  "Hey, it's real!" Vanessa breathed in disbelief.
  "Look, there's millions!" said Mikki.
  Haig had created a golden mound on the handkerchief by picking up more loose coins.
  "Got the trowel?" he asked.
  "Trowel." Mikki dashed back to the tower.
  "Bloody hell!" grinned Vanessa.
  "Right!" grinned Haig.
  Mikki rushed back carrying the trowel. Coins chinked above him as the girls began to count the coins into a lunch box. Haig chipped at the side of the trench. Almost at once, he uncovered a handle. The container for the coins had been a large earthenware gravy jug. It was six inches tall and about four inches in diameter at its bulbous middle.
  Mikki's spade had struck the lip and smashed into the side of the jug, breaking it into half a dozen large pieces and a scattering of fragments. The jug had been sealed with a large disc of cork, onto which about half an inch of translucent wax had been poured as an airtight seal.
  The chink of coins went on and on. Haig estimated that the jug had contained at least five hundred of them. He made no attempt to put a value on the mounting total using his convenience figure of £70 each. The answer came to a lot. He added more coins to the handkerchief and started a separate pile containing of fragments of the jug. Then he noticed the scrap of paper. It was trapped by a corner between the cork and the rim of the jug.
  Haig pulled it free and looked at it. He closed his eyes, swallowed and opened them again. Rusty ink still conveyed the same message. Haig placed the piece of paper beside the irregular sherds of earthenware and hoisted himself out of the pit. The girls were still counting. They had just finished when he returned with clean hands, the lemonade bottle and three glasses.
  "Six hundred and thirty-two," Vanessa reported. "About. What's that worth? My mouth's gone all dry."
  Haig distributed glasses and poured lemonade before taking a calculator from his pocket. "Forty-four grand."
  Haig kept his tone casual. The girls stared at him, gold fever shining in their eyes. Haig raised his glass to a toasting position then took a long swallow. The girls followed his lead mechanically.
  "Two hundred and ten each; and two for the cat," said Mikki.
  "Hang about," grinned Haig. "Whose garden did we find them in?"
  "There wouldn't be any if I hadn't dug them up," Mikki said through a mild frown as she tried to gauge how serious he was.
  "You mean you'd keep them all?" said Vanessa, outraged.
  "Might do." Haig maintained a relentless, robber-baron smile. "Seeing I found this at the top of the jug."
  Vanessa looked at the scrap of paper, then showed it to Mikki. It took the girls a long time to work out the significance of the copperplate figure 3.
  "You mean there's two more?" said Mikki. "One each?"
  "A bit more careful digging should sort that out," nodded Haig.
  Mikki grabbed the spade and dropped into her pit.
  "Some more careful digging," Haig stressed. "So you don't smash another jug. With the trowel, please."
  Mikki chipped anxiously at the dark soil with the trowel, feeling carefully around in the space left by the broken jug. She found another, identical jug within a few minutes. Haig kept telling her to stop rushing so that she could enjoy the process of discovery. Mikki was more interested in freeing her latest prize from the ground.
  Vanessa took her place to search for the third jug. By the time she had found it, Haig had hit on the idea of using a hot knife to free the wax-plug seal.
  Working to the left of her first find, Mikki had unearthed jug number 1. Vanessa's jug was numbered 5. Haig took a turn in the pit to impose some order on the search. Probing with a spare bicycle spoke, he located a total of eight objects. They had been buried in a double column, at forty-five degrees to Mikki's pit, a corner of which had intersected the third jug.
  The piece of paper in the eighth jug was larger than the others and it had been folded several times. While the girls tipped sovereigns onto a towel on the workbench for counting, Haig examined a note from the past. It was written in slightly shaky, copperplate handwriting.

To whom it may concern, I, James Blackwell Fullerton, being in my seventieth year and feeling the effects of a hard but successful life, beset by grasping relatives, and feeling not the slightest affection for them, do consign to the ground these eight jugs of gold. This metal, dug from the earth of California, provided my fortune. I trust that it will be enjoyed by whomsoever finds it, be you kin of mine, or a stranger, to whom my grasping relatives have sold my home for their selfish pleasure.
  It is my wish that the finder uses this wealth to maintain my home in a sound condition so that ‘Fullerton's Folly' may outlast the sons of the sons of those, who mocked my creation. To the future owner of my home, I transmit my greetings across the years, and my curse if my home has been allowed to fall into disrepair and it is not restored to a habitable condition.
  Yr. humble servant,
   James Blackwell Fullerton
  signed this 14th day of March in the year 1888.

"Weird!" said Mikki when the girls had read the note. "What happens if the person who found the gold isn't the person who owns this place?"
  "It says ‘whomsoever finds it'," Haig pointed out. "But you've still got to spend it on the upkeep of this place. How does it feel to have free board and lodging here for life?"
  "I suppose this is treasure trove," Vanessa said gloomily.
  "Treasure trove only applies if the rightful owner can't be found," said Haig. "I think we need some legal advice on this, because this document seems to be saying we're the rightful owners by virtue of having dug this lot up. Look at the state of you two!"
  The girls realized with mild horror that they were smeared with mud from shoulders to ankles. They looked like half-hearted mud-wrestlers. Haig had managed to get just his knees and his shoes muddy.
  "Why don't you go and get cleaned up while I make a phone call?" he suggested. "I promise not to run off with the loot."
  "You'll have a job," laughed Vanessa. "That lot must weigh a ton!"
  "A good forty kilograms, anyway," said Haig. "And take those muddy shoes off before you go upstairs."
  "Is the front door locked?" said Mikki.
  "Worried about burglars already?" grinned Haig. "Isn't it amazing how much insecurity having something valuable on the premises can create."
  The girls took their shoes off and watched Haig make sure that the front door was closed and the Yale lock had engaged. Haig took his own shoes off before following them upstairs. After changing jeans and shoes, he went down to the drawing room to consult the address book beside the telephone.
  A local firm of solicitors called Hawksworth, Faraday and Faraday had handled the purchase of his tower. Haig had maintained a thread of contact with Nigel Faraday, the junior partner, who was about his own age. Both frequented the Seadog's Roost and Nigel borrowed Haig's inflatable dinghy from time to time for sea-fishing expeditions.
  After a short verbal tussle with an over-inquisitive female intermediary, Haig managed to get through to Mr. Nigel. He was suitably mysterious about the reason for an urgent house call. Intrigued, Nigel Faraday promised to make the five-minute walk from the middle of Farne in about half an hour.