by Bart Casey
“That was a good story about the emir of Kuwait, Miss Hamilton,” said Denis. “I didn’t used to be so negative, you know.”
“Please don’t call me ‘Miss Hamilton,’ Denis. It makes me feel ancient. Call me Margaret. And it’s a blessing to be realistic—just don’t go too far with it. Leave some room for hope—at least that’s what I tell myself, anyway.”
After a pause, she continued, “My favorites at Whipsnade are the rhinos and the tigers. But I do like the sea lions as well. They have a lunchtime show at their pool at feeding time. They do tricks and dive into the water. It’s great fun and I think the animals like to have the people there cheering. Mia, I think you’ll like the sea lions. You can look at this brochure as we drive over.” Margaret handed the book to Denis to pass to her in the backseat.
~
Half an hour later, they came up to the gates of the park. Margaret paid at the gate, and was given a guide map, which she handed to Denis.
“Let’s drive around the perimeter and get a feel for the place. Denis, I’ll go around to the left and you can tell us what we’re passing by on the map. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Denis. “It looks like we go past something called the children’s zoo on the left and then up by the birds, wolves, and Indian rhinos.”
“I’ll go slowly, and call out when you see something,” said Margaret. Both of the kids sat up straight and looked very sharply out of their windows.
“Oh, there are the rhinos,” said Mia.
Margaret thought Mia’s English was actually very good, which was a blessing. She pulled over to the side of the road. “We can get out, and stand by the fence near them, if you like,” said Margaret slipping off her seat belt and opening the door. “Come on.”
Leaning on the fence, they all watched the rhinos out in front of a little shelter in their huge compound. Then Margaret continued, “Mia, those are the very rare ones—the great Indian rhinos. When I was last here with my cousins, there were less than a thousand left in the world. But they were breeding them here. I don’t know if there are more now or not—but they are very rare. We can find out how they’re doing when we stop at the shop and visitor center later.”
Mia ran a little way along the fence from Margaret and Denis to get a better view.
“Isn’t it funny,” said Denis to Margaret, “that people can build a place like this and be so kind to the animals when, where we used to live, the same sort of people are killing each other?”
“I don’t know what to say, Denis. I haven’t got any explanation either. I have to travel sometimes to trouble spots around the world for work, and I just can’t believe what goes on. I keep thinking people will come to their senses—but here we are.”
“Do you think they will find our parents?” Denis asked. “I mean, we should have heard something by now, don’t you think?”
“We should know something soon, I hope. Along with your embassy, my friends down in Sarajevo are looking into it, and I’ll hear from them on Monday about other things. But maybe they’ll have some news on your parents as well. It may not be good news, Denis, but we’ll have to wait and see. But I know your parents must have been very glad to get you and Mia settled in our village, where things aren’t perfect, but it’s at least safe now. That was their plan—and it was a good one for both of you. Remember that and make it work. And you’ve got to help Mia too—and not just keep her aware of the worst. It’s very tough not knowing, but we just have to carry on. I wish I could fix things, but I can’t.”
Denis was glad Margaret was straight with him. It was a relief to get some real advice on what he and his sister were facing.
The rest of the visit went down very well. Mia even became a bit of a chatterbox at the children’s zoo, where younger kids can be hands-on with the animals. She giggled constantly while holding a baby penguin handed to her by a young female zookeeper, and that seemed to break the last dam of her reserve, because after that her comments flowed freely as they ogled the Siberian tigers and watched the sea lions leap high into the air before landing in the water at the feeding show. After that, the three of them had their own lunch sitting on a blanket next to the parked car by a herd of grazing Thomson’s gazelles. And then they went through the visitor center and gift shop, leaving with books, videos, and a stuffed penguin for Mia.
The mood was pretty merry on the drive home. “You should think of that as your first visit of many,” said Margaret. “We only saw a fraction of the place. We didn’t even get to the zebras or the birdhouse, where they fly all around you—oh, and the butterflies are the same—and land on your shoulder.”
“Thank you for taking us, Margaret,” said Denis.
“Yes, thank you,” said Mia, from the back, smiling, clutching her penguin.
When they got back to their house just after three in the afternoon, Mrs. Quick was waiting, and Mia sat down with her to talk about the visit, leaving Margaret with Denis for a moment.
Margaret turned to him. “I’ll let you know what I hear from my colleagues on Monday, Denis. If I can’t come over, I’ll call you at least. All right?”
“Yes. Thanks, Margaret,” he said.
“And Stephen is also all over the embassy to find out more. So you and Mia aren’t all alone in this.”
“That’s good to know,” he said. “I do like him...and you.”
Margaret smiled.
~
Driving away from the Jurics’, Margaret realized she’d had enough of her journalism career. It had all seemed very grand to travel the world and write up stories to educate the public about injustices and suffering in the world. But now she knew that the public was not much interested, thank you very much, as long as Tottenham Hotspur was bashing Chelsea that night at football. Her purpose had been admirable, but her path was wrong. Nevertheless, she still wanted to make a difference.
She could make a difference with these two kids, Mia and Denis, and will, she thought, if their family doesn’t reemerge somehow.
Maybe this was where Anne Vavasour might come in. My saucy, independent-minded ancestor has already brought me back from the brink of abandoning Stephen. Perhaps she can help me again with her treasure trove. Imagine what could be done with the money. The flow of refugees into Britain from the Bosnian war was swelling. It certainly wasn’t just the few poor souls in Hampstead. Under the current British policy, legitimate refugees could settle in, with a helping hand from the government and various charitable organizations, and weather out the storm. Then, when the trouble at home was over, they could decide—themselves—whether they wanted to return to their native land or stay and assimilate into Britain. Germany might allow them in, but not let them put down roots to become tomorrow’s Germans. There they’d have to clear out in eighteen months and go home—or somewhere else. My beloved France might grant asylum, but realistically that was more likely to be reserved for fleeing dignitaries and artists rather than the ruined poor.
Based on her time at Shelter from the Storm, she knew the refugees needed more than a flat and an allowance. They had to have some kind of welcoming mentoring to really help them with healing and fitting in. Britons themselves needed to be educated on how to welcome and save these people. The British love to support charities. Surely some of them could be mobilized into an active force to help with that. People of all ages...kids helping kids, teens helping teens, and adults befriending adults, all trying to make sense of a new life hundreds of miles away from the one they knew. Perhaps this money could be put to work to help make that happen. Wouldn’t that be good? She would talk to Mrs. Arnold, the patron for Shelter from the Storm, with all her government connections, about this later. Maybe Margaret could help that charity grow by starting new chapters all around Britain. That would be worth doing.
Next, however, Margaret had to focus on her dinner in London that night with Soames while Stephen was sounding out Professor Rowe up near Oxford. As the main talking point, she finally had a copy of Stephen’s hard-foug
ht inventory, listing all of the 146 items in the Vavasour trove along with an annotated description of each piece so Soames would know just what they were talking about. Then hopefully he’ll be able to give an informed opinion about value, as well as some commercial guidance on how to proceed to best advantage. With any luck, by Monday or Tuesday they should be able to update Detective Harris and start working with him on solving her father’s murder.
~
About the same time Margaret was heading into town for dinner, Stephen was noticing there were no tourists in sight at Horton-cum-Studley on this early October Saturday. Not even one of England’s prettiest villages could take the gloom off its cold gray day there, although there was an enervating fresh mist of moisture carried on the breezes from the brook running near Professor Rowe’s house. Stephen smiled as he remembered his mother’s admonition for the English winters: “Damn the electric bills—light the house, and then add plenty of fresh flowers.”
Professor Rowe’s housekeeper was apparently from the same old school, because the house was ablaze with lights, and vases of imported flowers from the supermarket adorned the hall and study, where the old man was waiting for him.
“Good afternoon, professor.”
“Hello, Stephen. Where’s your pretty gel?”
“Oh, Margaret’s not with me today, sir. She’s busy in the city, so it’s just me today, I’m afraid.”
“That’s fine. Would you like some tea? Mrs. Wells is in the house just now and bringing us a nice tea will be her last official act this weekend.” Professor Rowe reached over to the wall and pressed an ancient buzzer, which sounded in the kitchen, a tribute to the wiring of a bygone age in England when servants hovered at one’s beck and call.
“How did you get on with all those papers?” Rowe asked Stephen.
“Very well, sir. It took me quite a while—a month, actually—but I’ve managed to go through them all and write up an informal descriptive inventory. It’s not done properly, in the formal way with all the bibliographical detail, but I have tried to include enough details so an appraiser won’t have to charge poor Margaret a full fee, as if they had to start from scratch with the collection. There are one hundred forty-six separate items and I’ve sketched out a brief summary of the appearance and content for each one.”
“That’s marvelous, my boy. I’m proud as Punch that my former student could still wade through all that, even after you’d escaped from school and gone out into the modern world. Perhaps there’s hope for classical English studies after all.”
Stephen opened his briefcase and extracted his inventory, which was contained in a one-inch-wide three-hole-punch binder bought for less than two pounds from the Ryman’s stationery store in his village. “I’m afraid it looks just like a school report, professor. But I hope it will be quite a bit more illuminating than that,” he said, opening the binder and walking it over to the professor in his chair.
Mrs. Wells appeared at this point, with her tray laden with teapot, cups, saucers, milk and sugar, and the obligatory plate of Huntley & Palmers biscuits from the supermarket. Stephen eyed the oval ones with red jelly medallions above the vanilla crème filling. They had been his favorite as a child, and now they were tempting him to become even more comfortable in the role of schoolboy with his old professor. But he chose to stay on edge.
Rowe took the binder and set it down on the table next to him. “Very good. We’ll have a look at that in just a moment. Shall I be mother?” he said as he took upon himself the task of pouring tea as Mrs. Wells exited the room. “Thank you, Mrs. Wells. Have a good weekend,” said the old man to her back. The door closed silently and Rowe handed Stephen his tea. “No milk or sugar, I seem to remember,” he said.
“That’s right. Thanks.”
“Sir Henry Lee and his mistress, Anne, were two remarkable characters,” began the professor. “And to think he was able to live with her so properly. I mean, he waited until his sainted wife and children were all dead before he took up with Anne in any public way at all. Who could fault him for that? He even seemed to get Queen Elizabeth’s tacit approval for her, with that Ditchley masque and portrait and all that. And Elizabeth was not a monarch to forgive past grievances—she was like her father in that. You know, it’s made me think that perhaps that scoundrel Aubrey was right when he reported Sir Henry might have been a natural child of Henry VIII, and so half brother to Mary and Elizabeth. Usually you can disregard almost everything that Aubrey said, but that point would explain a lot, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir. Aubrey may have been right, for once.”
“Well, let’s see what you’ve got here,” said Rowe, lifting Stephen’s binder.
The conversation continued for the best part of two hours as the professor paged through the binder and looked up at Stephen above his reading glasses, peppering him with questions. At one point near the middle of the inventory, Rowe scanned ahead, quickly looking over all the remaining items. The old professor kept his poker face as he noted there was no mention of the scribbled and crossed-out full script of Macbeth that Soames had stolen—so perhaps Stephen never even knew he had it. “And this is everything, Stephen? Nothing not yet in it?”
“Yes, sir, that’s the lot,” Stephen answered. “I did have one question about that Heminge letter, however. I think it’s there as item eighty-five.”
Rowe turned to it and read Stephen’s brief description. “Yes, it’s rare to find a Heminge letter. I must say, I can’t think of another one. Of course, his name is all over the payments and receipts the King’s Men received for their plays at court. The payments to the company were always made to Heminge and those court registers are some of the chief ways we know which plays were played where and when.”
Stephen said, “There was a reproduction of his signature in Halliwell’s life of Shakespeare from the 1840s—and that was a very useful start in validating the identification. But then I actually saw two more of his signatures up in Stratford, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s collections, and another scribbled one at the British Museum.”
“Yes, he was a very active businessman, with signatures on various leases and lawsuits from the time. Ran an alehouse too, you know—as well as acting in the plays.”
“Yes, sir. But it’s that reference in the letter that puzzles me. He’s thanking Anne for ‘the cut that woke the Dane’ and then sending her back something. And then he wrote he had ‘pry’d it back from J’s’ or something. Would it be some copy of Hamlet, do you think? You know, Hamlet the melancholy Dane?”
Stephen asked.
Rowe was disturbed. He simply couldn’t help himself by not answering a clever student’s question, even if he would be getting perilously close to the neighborhood of his own felonious activities with Soames. He loved to show his students how much more he knew than them.
“No, dear boy. It wouldn’t have been Hamlet. I think the answer is in this rather remarkable prompting scroll you have right at the beginning as item two—just after the Burghley letter.”
“The lines for Lady Macbeth? You recognized it as a promp-ting tool?”
“Yes, that’s the one. In fact, together with the copy of the Ditchley entertainment for Queen Elizabeth, it’s the diamond in the crown for this collection.”
“But how would that be related to the Heminge letter?” asked Stephen.
“I think you’d have to go back to the context and setting for when the play Macbeth first appeared—I think Chambers tentatively dated it to 1606. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir. He says he thinks it would have first appeared early in 1606. But he’s not quite certain of that in his commentary. Others say August 1606.”
“You are a good student, Stephen—I couldn’t be prouder. Well, let me tell you. It was August, I believe. All the hacks point out that Shakespeare wrote his Scottish play to pander to King James I, who was also King James VI of Scotland, as every schoolboy going unwillingly to school would know. Macbeth is all about Scotland and al
so much about witchcraft, which was a well-known area of study for King James, who prosecuted witch hunts in Scotland and even wrote a book about witches called Daemonologie in 1597. What the hacks never mention, however, is that while James was interested in witches, his wife’s brother, King Christian of Denmark, was positively obsessed with them. While he was on the throne of Denmark and Norway, more than fourteen hundred of his loyal subjects were burned at the stake as witches. I think he’s been called the ‘Witch Hunter King.’ And then it so happened that King Christian and three hundred sixteen of his court came to visit James and Queen Anne of Denmark in July and August 1606—this is some of the material I was freshening up on before your visit. There aren’t too many records of this visit because, by all reports, it was a continuous drunken bacchanal. I actually hoped our conversation might come to this point today, because I put aside something to read to you about it.”
The old professor stood up from his chair and stretched briefly before walking over to one of his bookshelves lining the study. He picked out one leather-bound volume with a bookmark. “This is Nugae Antiquae, a collection of antique nuggets, if you will, from the antiquity of King James’s time, among others. I want to read you this from a letter written by Sir John Harrington in 1606: ‘My good friend, In compliance with your asking, now shall you accept my poor accounte of rich doings. I came here a day or two before the Danish King came, and from the day he did come until this hour, I have been well nigh overwhelmed with carousal and sports of all kinds. The sports began each day and in such manner as well nigh persuaded me of Mahomets paradise. We had women, and indeed wine, too.’”
The professor continued, “He goes on a bit and then comes to this description of one evening’s entertainment with a play or masque of some sort: ‘One day, a great feast was held, and, after dinner, the representation of Solomon his Temple and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was to be made, or (as I may better say) was meant to have been made before their Majesties, by device of the Earl of Salisbury and others. But, alas! As all earthly things do fail to poor mortals in enjoyment, so did prove our presentment thereof. The Lady who did play the Queen’s part, did carry the most precious gifts to both their Majesties; but forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell at his feet, tho I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand, to make all clean, His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled himself before her and was carried to an inner chamber.’
