Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

  A wall with a little rectangular memorial marker.

  A memorial marker with a name.

  “FOSS,” Albert read aloud.

  “Curious that,” said a Voice that Suddenly Appeared.

  Albert started.

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” said the man.

  Albert wanted to tell him that creeping silently up on people and talking out of nowhere was not a good way to keep from startling them, but his mouth had a mind of its own and said the most foolish thing it could think of. “Oh, I wasn’t startled, I was just. . .”

  “I’m James Simon,” said the man, extending his hand, “Vicar. I was up in the pulpit tucking my cheat sheet intoRuth when I saw you.”

  Albert looked up, expecting to see Ruth, but she had apparently gone somewhere, presumably to remove the article the man had tucked into her. He turned to the pastor and took his hand noncommittally. “I’m. . .”

  “Oh, I recognized you clear across the crossing,” said the vicar. “I hate to seem like some kind of blubbering groupie, but I’ve admired your music for years.”

  Albert had heard this before, so he knew exactly what to say. “Thank you.” He turned again to the marker. “‘Foss’,” he said. “What does that mean?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s called the Foss Wall for obvious reasons, but, as the sign speculates, it was probably moved here from the ruins of the original church, upon which this one was built. It might have marked a burial niche at one time. No one really knows, though, if the word refers to a person, or was a place name, boundary sign or what-have-you. There’s the old Roman road, of course, called Fosse Way, but that passes well west of here. Nothing to do with Langar Manor that I know of.” The vicar shrugged. “One of those little mysteries we British are so fond of.”

  “I’ve seen it before. In a painting.”

  “A painting? Of what?”

  “A man,” said Albert. “Robert Tiptoft.” But it wasn’t really Robert Tiptoft, was it? It was Harvest Lossburgh. He produced Angela’s now-crumpled photo of the painting and handed it to the vicar.

  “Ah, yes! Tiptoft. He owned Langar Manor at one time. I believe I saw this painting once at a place called Oxburgh Hall, about two hours east of here.”

  “I’m staying there.”

  The vicar was taken aback. “Oxburgh? Well, what a remarkable coincidence.”

  Albert didn’t think it was, but he didn’t say so. “It’s in a museum in London now.”

  “Is it?” Simon looked closely at the photo and there, just above the subject’s left shoulder, extremely faint but undeniable, was the little marble oblong bearing the letters F-O-S-S. “Remarkable. I hadn’t noticed it,” he said, but ensuing thoughts led his mouth elsewhere. “Curious fellow, old Tiptoft.” He interpreted the look Albert gave him as a question. “Came into a fortune, it seems, but no one knows how. Descended from minor nobility. His father was a soldier under Henry the Third. Then a minor official in Wales or some such place, and Robert seemed likely to follow in his footsteps. Then. . .” the vicar made a gesture with his hands that seemed to indicate some kind of explosion. “Presto! He’s suddenly the richest man northeast of London. Bought up scads of land from Cornwall to Lincoln.”

  “Including this,” said Albert, indicating the abbey with a nod.

  “Very likely. There’s no record of an outright purchase, but he did come into legal possession of the manor—meaning the region hereabouts—apparently as a gift from a fellow named Gerard de Rode, to whom it had been granted as payment or reward, if you will, for services rendered Henry the Second. Son of wicked King John.”

  “Wicked?”

  “King John,” said the vicar. “Robin Hood? Maid Marion?”

  “Made her what?”

  “I, uh. I, well. . . ‘Foss’. Hm. Nobody knows what it means. And right here in the painting all this time.” He returned the photo to Albert.

  A female shadow intruded on the conversation, followed almost immediately by its three-dimensional counterpart. “There you are.”

  This was one of those statements, Albert felt, that required no direct response. “This is Angela,” he said, by way of introduction. “My friend.”

  Angela shook the vicar’s hand as he introduced himself. “It’s a lovely church.”

  “Thank you,” said the vicar. “More a monument to a former movement of God than a church these days I’m afraid. But a lovely place to serve.”

  “Not doing a booming business, then?”

  The vicar demurred. “The giant slumbers,” he said, “but will awaken at the Trump.” Reading something in her eyes, he smiled. “Would I be wrong in supposing you’re not a regular attender?”

  “Not really my cup of tea.”

  “You’ve thought a lot about it, then? About Jesus? About man’s fallen state? About grace and salvation?”

  Angela blushed. “Well, certainly not in what your church would call a traditional way. A one-size-fits-all faith is a little restrictive, isn’t it? I prefer to think there are many ways to God, all equally valid.”

  Albert, who had been studying ‘Foss’, was drawn into the conversation by a dissonance of logic. “You said you don’t believe in God.”

  “Yes. Well, I don’t. Not really; I don’t think. But, if Iwere to believe, it wouldn’t be in an exclusive God, but a more universal God. You know? One who embraced all believers, Muslims, Stoics, Hindus, Buddists, athiests. . . No devil, or hell, or all that.”

  “Your theology has many adherents,” said Simon, “even among my flock.”

  Mrs. Gibson would have something to say, if she was here, Albert thought. He didn’t know what, exactly, but it would be very definite. “The picture was painted here,” he announced.

  “What picture?” Angela asked, happy to change the subject.

  He waved the photograph.

  “I thought you said it was painted in Castle Combe.”

  “Yes.” Albert nodded. “That’s where he was when he painted it. But this is the place Lossburgh had in mind.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “No,” Albert agreed.

  “Lossburgh?” said the vicar. “Harvest Lossburgh?”

  “Yes,” said Albert. “Do you know about him?”

  “A bit, yes. He was one of the first to make a living painting livestock. The art form eventually caught on among the nobility and what-not. One or two of his paintings were up at the Langar Hall. I expect they’re tucked away somewhere these days; but when I was a boy one, at least, hung in the entrance hall, just to the right of the door, and another at the first landing of the stairs. Both bulls, as I recall. I remember being impressed with them at the time. I wonder if I’d feel the same if I saw them now.

  “I’ve never heard of his painting a human subject. He’s buried out in the churchyard.”

  Something like a jolt of kinetic energy shot through Albert’s system. “He is?”

  “Yes. Not sufficiently famous to find a place with the Howes and Scropes in here out of the weather, poor fellow. His stone can’t be read, but it’s location is mentioned in the church records.”

  “Annabella Scrope?”

  “Scrope? No. Oh, you mean Howe.”

  Albert thought he’d meant Scrope.

  “Annabella Howe. I guess you could say she was born Scrope, or Scroope, more or less. Daughter of the little fellow you see over there, kneeling at the feet of the effigies of his mother and father.”

  The vicar drew them toward the sarcophagus in question, marble statues of a man and wife recumbent and, at their feet, a little statue to which he directed their attention. “Emanuel. Last of the Scropes, hence his diminutive stature.”

  “Shot blanks, did he?” said Angela, a remark that was, to Albert, highly enigmatic.

  “Oh, hardly. The old fellow had Genesis 1:28 down pat,” said the vicar with good humor. “Just not with his wife.”

  “Oh! I see,” said Angela, with a wink at Albert, who didn’t.
<
br />   “He had three or four daughters by a maid named Martha Janes, or James, one of whom was Annabella.

  “He adopted her?” Angela asked. “That would have been unusual in those days, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not according to the records, he didn’t,” said Simon.

  “Then, how did she become a Scrope?”

  “Another of those little mysteries the maestro and I were talking about earlier.” He inclined his head toward Albert, but kept his eyes on the little statue of Emanuel Scrope. “At some point she—Annabella—petitioned the King, Charles the Second, to recognize her as the legitimate daughter of an earl which—and this is where the mystery comes in—he did.”

  “Why a mystery?”

  “Well, by no stretch of the imagination was Charles a republican. The likelihood of his acceding to such a request, especially from someone at the somewhat sullied fringes of the aristocracy, was improbable in the extreme. The landscape was peppered with the illegitimate offspring of nobility.

  “Pure bull-headed snobbishness aside, such an action would set a potentially hazardous precedent, both pragmatically and politically.”

  “But he gave her what she wanted?”

  “He did.”

  “Why?”

  “That,young lady is the mystery."

  Angela’s corpuscles bridled at being called ‘young lady’, especially by someone no more than ten years her senior, and one for whose profession she had no particular respect.

  The Marines, in the guise of a middle-aged piano player with horn-rimmed glasses, arrived at that moment. “Is she buried here?”

  “Who? Annabella? No, no,” said Simon. I’m not sure where she ended up. Very likely somewhere much more grand.”

  “How about Robert Tiptoft?”

  “Also not among those present. As far as I know he’s interred in the chapel at Nettlestead, over in Suffolk. I believe one of his daughters, Millicent or Margaret, is buried there as well, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

  Albert wandered back toward the Foss stone; Simon and Angela followed, whispering among themselves.

  The little marble plaque was set into the wall at something less than shoulder-height. Albert stationed himself roughly where Tiptoft/Lossburgh had been situated in the painting, facing right, looking left.

  What was he looking at? A pillar. He pointed at it. “Is that part of the old church?”

  Simon slapped the cold stones of the pillar. “This? No. It’s part of the 19th Century renovation. All of these piers were replaced about the same time.”

  “What was there before, when Annabella Scrope was alive?”

  “The 1600s? Goodness. I should imagine another pier, very similar to this. Must have been; they hold up the roof, you see.”

  Albert remained standing while his brain sat down to think. In the 16th Century, Annabella Howe, illegitimate daughter of Emanuel Scrope, brings Harvest Lossburgh, painter of her father’s cows, to Castle Combe, to paint a portrait of Robert Tiptoft—who had been dead for hundreds of years. And, because he’d been dead for so long and there were no contemporary portraits of him, she had Lossburgh paint himself as Tiptoft. And, for some reason, he had either imagined or Lady Annabella had told him to imagine himselfhere, in front of this very wall in Langar chapel. Proof? The little FOSS cartouche in the background.

  He studied the photograph.

  When Lossburgh had stood there, all those years ago, what had he been looking at?

  But that wasn’t right, was it? Lossburgh hadn’t actually been here when he did the painting. He’d been in Castle Combe. So, had he, in the portrait, been looking at something that had existedthere, or was he looking at something he imagined he would have been looking at had he actually been here at Langar chapel?

  Albert’s brain felt like a particularly old engine recently removed from deep water into which—at some time in the distant past—it had fallen from a great height.

  “Albert?” Angela’s voice threaded the fraying borders of his consciousness.

  “And then he was murdered,” said Albert, as if waking from a dream.

  “Who was?”

  Albert gathered his wits and focused on the speaker. “Lossburgh.” He waved the photograph slightly. “Wherever he was when he made this painting, he waspretendingto behere. Why?”

  Angela took the photo from him and studied it. “And why was he looking across himself like that?” She handed the photo to Simon, who, once again, regarded it minutely.

  “Odd, that,” said the vicar. “May I?” Albert stood aside and allowed the vicar to take his place. “If he’d been standing here, facing this way,” he positioned himself as Albert had done, “and looked across himself like this,” he consulted the photo again, “he’d have been looking, as you said, at nothing but a pier - not this one, of course, but the one it replaced.”

  Albert walked to the pier and examined its circumference from the ground up to a height of about six feet. It consisted of cut stones stacked one on the other, all the way to the ceiling, where they fanned out in support of an arch. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not that he expected there would be, given the pillar’s relatively recent construction, but he’d hoped for at least a whisper of inspiration. That hope was not realized. He hunkered to his knees and, with a forefinger, traced the groove around a flagstone in the floor which countless feet had, over the centuries, polished to a sheen.

  “Robert Tiptoft had owned this chapel in the 13th century.” He looked up at Angela and the vicar. “And Emanuel Scrope—Annabella’s father—had owned it in the 17th Century.”

  “Not only Emanuel,” said the vicar. “Annabella herself came into possession of it, after Emanuel died and she was legitimized by Charles the Second.”

  “And she owned Castle Combe,” said Albert, standing.

  “So,” said Angela. “What’s the connection?”

  “And why would she have had Lossburgh, who was already in Langar, come to Castle Combe to paint a scene set here—at Langar?”

  “Of someone dead four hundred years,” Angela reminded.

  Simon made an ironic sound. “‘A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, hidden in an enigma,’ paraphrasing the late, lamented Mr. Churchill.”

  Whoever the late, lamented Mr. Churchill was, Albert thought, he was a hitter of nails on the head. But he, Albert, could have added one more level of complexity to the equation, why did it matter? Why did he care? Why was he seeing ghosts? Who or what was FOSS and, not least of all, were the strange seas that lapped the shores of that little island in his brain washing him away?

  Huffy was a gambling man, and what he’d gambled on most recently was that Albert would forget that he had asked him to cancel the concert in Rotterdam. Doubling down, he had arranged for the limo to appear at Oxburgh Hall as previously scheduled, collect the maestro and take him to the airfield at Langar where a private jet would convey him, together with Jeremy Ash, of course, to the continent, where another limousine would spirit him to Rotterdamse Schouwburg concert hall in Rotterdam.

  The limo was waiting dutifully when Albert and Angela returned from their excursion to Langar. “I have to go play somewhere,” said Albert. That’s what a limo meant. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Me? I don’t have my passport.”

  “That’s alright,” said Albert. He didn’t have his passport, either. “Huffy will take care of it. The driver will call him.”

  The driver, the one the limousine company had assigned exclusively to Albert during his visits for the last decade, had picked the last few words from the wind and, having ensconced his charges in the rear seat with a nod, made the call on from the radio in his driver’s compartment.

  Albert greeted Jeremy, who was sitting in his favorite place by the driver’s side window, and thought no more of arrangements.

  “I haven’t a thing to wear,” said Angela, a thrill of excitement tickling the fine hairs in the hollow of her back. Huffy would take care of that, too.

  That a
fternoon, during the drive, the flight, the drive, the three hours at the hotel, the Creator had been busy, pouring music into Albert’s brain, there to be storehoused for future transmission to his fingers.

  Miriam Shtump, relict of the late Heinricht Shtump—survivor of Auschwitz, but not the disillusionment attending his return to Holland—gleaned awareness of the world outside her second floor apartment at 77 Provenierssingel street in Rotterdam exclusively from theTrouw,which she purchased for a gilder at the newsagent’s across the canal. This daily trek required her to cross the trolly tracks that embossed the pavement outside her house and marked the spot, vivid in her memory, where her dog, Kern, had met his end some twenty years earlier owing, she was convinced, to the negligence of the trolly operator.

  The morning following Albert’s concert at the large theater of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Miriam sat on the uncomfortable iron bench in the pocked-sized park on the corner where the Provenierssingel met the footbridge and, having spat at the trolly as it passed, as was her custom, unwrapped her breakfast sausage from its scrap of waxed paper. As she ate, she smoothed a section of theTrouw across her lap and read to herself aloud:

  ‘There are but three primary colors, yet they mingle in a palette that, in the hands of a master, produce the translucent beauty of Vermeer’sGirl with the Pearl Earring, the transportive power of Michaelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, the transformative imagery of the crucifixion by any number of inspired hands, the sheer profligate bombast of the ultimate Creator with which the universe is ablaze to the outermost precincts of eternity.

  ‘Three colors.

  ‘What then, can be made of twelve notes?

  ‘Until last night I would have said the question had been settled in full by Beethoven, Pachelbel, Rimsky-Korsakof, Paganini, Mozart: any of a host of luminaries in the musical firmament.

  ‘Then, at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, I met God. I awoke, or, more aptly, was startled, shocked, shaken from a stupor of which I had been unaware. My being was filled with a liquid light. I cursed the inadequacy of my ears to absorb such a magnificent, elemental fury of sound and silence.