CHAPTER TEN
Colonel Durston’s collection
THE INTERIOR OF the great house was a shipwreck – dark, damp, silent, strewn with abandoned objects, its gloom tinged by an ethereal greenish light that seeped through the shutters and the layers of ivy. Where the rain had penetrated the ceilings the floorboards had given way, infesting the ruin with a heavy, spore-laden smell of mildew and rotted timber.
Fairfax followed Lady Durston from the rear of the house via what must have once been the domestic offices towards the state rooms at the front. Her white shirt danced ahead in the shadows as she moved from one exposed joist to the next. In the wavering gleam of her lantern, images loomed out of the darkness – a stag’s antlers mounted on the wall of the passageway, a pink plastic figure without arms or hair propped up next to a door. In the dining room, a long, sheeted table was surrounded by two dozen high-backed chairs similarly shrouded, giving the effect of a feast of ghosts. In the ceremonial entrance hall, at the bottom of the staircase, weeds grew beside a rusted gong. Pale rectangular patches on the walls showed where the pictures had been removed. Hanging over it all was the stench of decay.
She opened one of the big panelled doors opposite the staircase. At the far end of the long room a latticework of subaqueous lime-coloured light pressed against the closed shutters. She tried to unfasten them, but the task was beyond her. ‘Mr Fairfax …’ there was a trace of irritation in her voice, as if it pained her to ask for his help, ‘if you’d be good enough to assist me?’
She held up the lantern. The shutters were nearly twice his height, fastened by a long brass bar that he had to strike repeatedly from underneath with the palm of his hand until it became loose enough to lift. The hinges of the panels cracked as he dragged them open. Through the tall glass, fogged by grime, the drive and the lake lay still in the sunshine, frozen like a painting. He turned. The room had once been the library, but only a few torn volumes remained. At some time, birds had clearly invaded it down the chimney. An ancient layer of twigs and feathers carpeted the floorboards. The long rows of bare shelves and the top of the soot-stained fireplace were marbled by petrified droppings.
She said, ‘The library was destroyed years back. My father-in-law used to say nothing burned so well on a cold winter’s night as a good book.’
Fairfax looked around at the empty, bird-limed bookshelves. Surely Morgenstern must have written a book himself, given his eminence? If so, might he not have presented a copy to the family in the big house, even if they, with their gun dogs and their hunting parties, could not have understood it? It would have been a polite gesture for a tenant to make. But it would have gone up the chimney on a frosty night along with all the others. How many volumes had been used for fuel – not just in Addicott but all over England? Countless millions. Hundreds of millions! How much knowledge had been lost?
One large item of furniture stood sheeted in the centre of the room. Lady Durston unveiled it in a single flourish: a library table with a peeling red leather top. She cast aside the sheet and pulled open the central drawer. She felt around inside and took out a key, then led Fairfax to the corner of the room, where there was a door, small and discreet, covered in the same faded and peeling crimson paper as the walls. No handle, only a small keyhole. She unlocked it and gave him the lantern. He looked at her, uncertain what was expected of him.
‘Tell me what you think.’
The chamber was small and stuffy, barely sufficient for one person to move around. He guessed it must have been the muniment room, where the family had stored their documents. A circular window, heavily barred, admitted just enough light to show shelves crammed from floor to low ceiling with a profusion not of paper but of glassware: flasks and beakers, tubes and coils, rods and funnels, hundreds of pieces, few of them whole, all very fine and of a type he had never seen before. He picked up the largest fragment, a cylinder perhaps three inches in diameter and a foot tall, broken at the top but with its base intact. Nothing so precise and delicate could be manufactured nowadays. He shone the lantern through it. A toothcomb of lines and numbers was engraved in red along one side, and when he wiped away the dust, he saw that there were letters, ‘ml’ and ‘cl’, marked off in numbers: 10, 50, 100.
She called from the library, ‘Look in the cupboard on the left.’
He hitched up his cassock, kneeled with the lantern beside him and opened the door. A rusted object, as long as his forearm, was lying on a piece of cloth – heavy, with a snub tube protruding from one end. Attempts had been made to clean it. Beneath the rust, patches of metal gleamed. But the attempt to burnish it had been abandoned and what must once have been moving parts were corroded into a solid mass.
‘Do you see it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘It appears to be some sort of firearm.’
‘So my husband thought. He found several on our land. That was the best preserved.’
Fairfax cradled the weapon in his hands. It looked quite unlike the long muskets issued to the army, although guns were unfamiliar to him. As a priest, he was exempt from military service. He brought it up to his shoulder, where it rested cold and sharp against his cheek, and squinted along the barrel. He sensed something malevolent about it – useless rusted block though it was – and replaced it in the cupboard. He straightened, dusted off his cassock and stepped back into the library.
Sarah Durston was leaning against the table. ‘Remarkable, no?’
‘Beyond remarkable! I’ve never seen the like. Plainly the glass had no domestic purpose. Nor was it made for decoration, although some of it has a certain beauty.’
‘It has flummoxed me for years. But now perhaps I understand. Might it not have belonged to a professor of the science of physic?’
He saw at once that she was right. ‘Doubtless Morgenstern brought it here from London.’
‘To do what?’
‘That I cannot guess.’ He looked back at the muniment room. A picture of an alchemist came into his mind – a wizard bent over bottles full of bubbling liquids and noxious smells – although it seemed unlikely, given the cool intelligence evident in Morgenstern’s letter, that he was anything of the sort. ‘How long has it all lain there?’
‘Five years. My late husband collected it.’
‘All of it?’
‘All.’
‘Why?’
‘A question I asked a hundred times, but never could he give a proper answer. I suppose his hope was that he would one day find a meaning in it, and it would lead to richer treasure.’
‘But it must have taken an age to gather so much.’
‘Oh yes,’ she sighed. ‘Years.’ She studied him, weighing him up. ‘Have you heard much of Sir Henry Durston, Mr Fairfax?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No village gossip overheard? People do love to talk.’
‘None.’
‘Then I should tell you something of him.’ She glanced out of the window. ‘He was older than I – a colonel in the Wessex Regiment, wounded in the late war against the French. From that ill fortune all our others flowed. He came back from the fighting badly broken. The house was hardly better than you see it today. The income from our tenants was insufficient to meet the cost of our debts, let alone carry out repairs. We should have sold up and moved away. But the Durstons are a stubborn lot – they lasted here a thousand years – or were, I should say, for Sir Henry was the last of the line, the thirty-fifth baronet.’ She turned to look at Fairfax. ‘So he gambled all his hopes for our recovery on what might lie beneath the land.’
‘What? In buried treasure?’
‘I see your wonderment, and believe me, I shared it. But his fancy was not entirely idle. Family tradition held that objects of great value had been hidden on the estate. He was out in all weathers searching, like a man who had lost something and sought to find the spot where he’d mislaid it. But all he recovered was glass and weapons. Those, and the usual rubbish from the past – pla
stics and suchlike – objects entirely worthless. The glass meant nothing to him either, for he’d never heard of Morgenstern.’
‘And yet he kept it?’
‘Hours he spent with it, cleaning it and arranging it in different configurations, as if there lay in it a clue to something else. He believed the fact that guns lay near the glass had some significance – maybe a greater treasure required to be protected. But for all his speculations, it stayed old glass. He knew it was contrary to the law to keep it, yet he could never quite bear to part with it – nor, after he was gone, could I, for it was just about all of him that was left to me.’
‘How long did he search?’
‘Every day for two years.’
‘Why did he stop?’
‘He drowned himself in the lake.’
‘Oh my dear Lady Durston – I am very sorry to hear it!’
She waved away his sympathy. ‘I disclose all this in confidence. As far as the world knows, it was a tragic mishap, so that Father Lacy could bury him in consecrated ground. But now that I have seen that little book, I think perhaps he might have come upon something of value after all. I hope so, for I was often impatient with him and accused him of wasting his strength on idle dreams. I fear it created some bad feeling between us.’
‘Well, it must be of historical value, certainly, if not – alas – monetary.’ Fairfax could imagine the colonel’s increasing desperation as, time and again, rather than jewellery or gold, he dug up pieces of glass. The wounded soldier, the young wife, the decaying house – what a tragic scene it suggested, like something out of a play! A thought occurred to him. ‘Did Father Lacy know of the colonel’s collection?’
‘Not as long as my husband was alive. Henry was always very wary of the parson – he felt he talked too freely.’
‘But afterwards?’
She looked him directly in the eye. ‘We reach the point at last, Mr Fairfax. The truth is, Father Lacy came to see me a fortnight past and asked me if I’d ever heard mention of someone called Morgenstern in connection with my house. The name was an unusual one, so I have not forgot it. I told him truthfully I had not. That was all. He offered nothing further, mentioned no book, nor marriage register neither.’
‘But you showed him the glass?’
‘I did. I thought I could trust a man of God.’
‘And what was his response?’
‘He pretended indifference but I could see by the trembling of his hands when he touched it that his passion was aroused. He desired to know how the pieces had been found – separately or together.’
‘And what was your answer?’
‘The truth. That they came from one place.’
‘From the ruins of the lodge, presumably?’
‘No.’
‘From the grounds of the house?’
‘No.’
‘Where then?’
‘From the very edge of our land, high in the woods – a remote spot called the Devil’s Chair.’
He recalled her distant and preoccupied manner at the graveside, the way she had removed her glove to trickle earth on to the coffin lid. Now he saw the reason for her brooding. ‘The Devil’s Chair is where Father Lacy fell to his death.’
She nodded. ‘I saw no reason not to tell him. It was only broken glass, and a few rusted weapons that had brought me nothing but misery. Let him look if he wanted. What reason should I care?’
‘And afterwards, when his body was recovered – you told no one of why he was up there alone? Not the sheriffs, nor the magistrate?’
‘I considered it.’ For the first time she looked uncomfortable. ‘But to tell a single part of the story would have meant to tell it all – to confess myself possessor of a criminal collection.’ The tone of her voice altered. She held out her hands to him, entreating him to understand. ‘We are clinging to the wreckage here, Mr Fairfax, and there are plenty in Axford and beyond who would like to see me out of this house. Besides, I thought his death merely an evil chance.’
‘And now?’
She did not answer.
Fairfax stared at her for a few moments and then began to pace around the library. His mind was restless with possibilities. He could not keep still. At last he halted in front of her. ‘I must tell you frankly, Lady Durston, I think that was an error.’
‘Why?’
‘You weren’t to know it, but no sooner had he visited here and seen all this than Father Lacy changed the locks at the parsonage and hid the church registers. A stranger was seen in the village on the day he died.’
‘That I did not know.’
‘I believe you. But what does it all signify? He must have been fearful of something – and it would seem rightly, as it proved. Does anyone else know of his visit here, aside from me?’
‘No.’
‘Captain Hancock?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘What about your women – might they have seen him come or go?’
‘If they did, they have not mentioned it. Your questioning alarms me, Mr Fairfax.’
‘Believe me, that is the last thing I desire. But consider what befell him. He came here in the week before his death – what day to be exact?’
She thought it over. ‘It was on the Sunday – in the afternoon. As I was leaving after the service that morning he asked if he could call on me.’
‘So that was what – the twenty-fourth of March? And he died the following Tuesday week, on the second of April. Consider it: after thirty years of walking the length and breadth of the valley without mishap, nine days after coming here, he fell to his death. The bishop will reckon that a most sinister coincidence.’
She looked at him in alarm. ‘You will not tell him any of this?’
‘I have no choice. I must report what I have discovered.’
‘Then I am ruined.’
‘Oh, come now, surely not!’
‘But I am! Sheriffs and priests will descend upon this house and our lives here will be finished.’
‘I refuse to believe it. If the objects had been precious, or if some had been sold – yes, perhaps. But no judge would convict a woman, especially one of your rank, of the crime of hoarding broken glass.’
‘How little you know of the world, and of the peril of a woman alone in it, with no husband to protect her!’ She folded her arms and stared at the floor. Half a minute passed before she spoke again. ‘Well then, make your report if you must – but at least make no mention of my name.’
‘How can I not? All turns upon the evidence of Morgenstern’s presence in this valley so many centuries ago, and how it came to light. Your talk with Father Lacy is the central fact.’
‘Could we not perhaps examine this matter further by ourselves, and not involve the Church for the present?’
The brazenness of the suggestion startled him. ‘Lady Durston,’ he said coldly, ‘I can hardly conceal from my lord bishop urgent information about the death of a brother priest.’ He was aware of sounding pompous – cruel, even – but really, what else was he to say? ‘I could not think to do it.’
‘Oh, Father Fairfax,’ she said, her eyes cold with contempt, ‘are you really so lacking in simple Christian charity?’
Afterwards Fairfax was to count it a great good fortune that their conversation was at that point interrupted. Had it not been, he was sure he would have clamped his saturno back upon his head and insisted on being shown off the premises. Instead, just as he was preparing to make a suitably cutting reply, he happened to glance beyond her shoulder to the library window, through which he noticed a now-familiar figure in a pony and trap coming up the drive towards the house.
‘Captain Hancock,’ he blurted out in surprise, ‘and for the second time today!’
‘What?’ She swung round to follow his gaze, and let out a groan. ‘He has invited himself to supper – I had clean forgot.’ They watched Hancock drive past the front of the house and disappear behind the rhododendrons towards the stable yard. Suddenly it was as if the
ir argument had never happened. ‘You must join us, Mr Fairfax.’
‘I would prefer not,’ he said stiffly.
‘But I insist on it.’ And to his amazement, she reached out and clasped his hand. ‘I would count it a very great personal favour if you would make the table three instead of two, but I beg you not to say a word to Captain Hancock of what has passed between us.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The supper party
HE CONTINUED TO protest that he ought to return to the parsonage, that he had no wish to interrupt a private arrangement – which was indeed the truth – but she would not hear of it. She was anxious that they should not be seen emerging from the rear of the house together, so at her suggestion they left through the front door. Its mortise lock, heavy bolts and huge ring handle were as big as those of the cathedral. As it opened, it dragged in tendrils of ivy that clutched at the doorposts as if the house was reluctant to allow these rare visitors to escape. She locked it behind her, slipped the key into her pocket, and together they made their way around the side of Durston Court towards the stables.
By the time they reached the courtyard, Hancock had descended from his buggy and was standing with his back to them on the threshold of Lady Durston’s sitting room. He was holding a bouquet of blue jacarandas pointing downwards, tapping it against the top of his boot, oblivious to the falling petals. She called out, ‘Captain Hancock!’ at which he turned with a broad smile of anticipation that shrank on seeing Fairfax. ‘I have been giving Mr Fairfax a tour of the grounds. He is joining our little supper. I hope you approve.’
There was something heroic in the way Hancock struggled to hide his disappointment. ‘Not at all. A fine idea.’ He remembered the flowers, glanced at them in embarrassment and thrust them into her hand. ‘They were not worth picking. Best throw them away.’
‘I would not think of it.’ She put her nose to the jacarandas. ‘How strange that something so beautiful should have so little scent. I shall put them in water directly. Come in, gentlemen. I must go and change out of my gardening clothes. Take a little of our gin while you wait. I shall have a jug sent in.’
The Second Sleep Page 10
