Unholy Writ

by David Williams

  On his return from Exeter the previous evening, Mrs Banquet had related the tale of Maggie Edwards’s demise in such detail one might have assumed she had been present during the whole unhappy event which, it appeared, had been witnessed by no one. In a spirit of Christian helpfulness, Maggie had been for many years self-appointed, unpaid keeper of the churchyard pathways. This involved no more than clipping the grass edges but it was a task she carried on regularly from spring to autumn – a valuable supplement to the twice-yearly scything of the churchyard grass which Horace Worple undertook on a strictly stipendiary basis.

  The Acropolis referred to by Trapp was the title commonly given by local people to the monument to the first baronet: it was a miniature reproduction of a Roman temple-tomb. Erected by the second baronet in 1630, some years before the building of Mitchell Hall, it stood as better testimony to his genuine regard for classical architecture than did the house itself. Situated mid-way between the largely Gothic church and the mannerist Hall, the monument was as pleasing as it was unexpected. Maggie Edwards had taken a special delight in keeping its surrounds free of weeds and grass, but at the last her enthusiasm appeared to have been her undoing. At some time on the previous Tuesday afternoon she had collapsed and died beside the Acropolis. Her body had not been discovered until some hours later when Lady Moonlight had been returning through the churchyard from a walk by the river.

  ‘There had to be a post mortem, of course,’ said Moonlight. ‘Cardiac arrest, I think they said. Nasty experience for Elizabeth.’

  Trapp nodded. ‘According to the imaginative Mrs Banquet,’ he observed, ‘Maggie died of shock.’

  Neither of the other two men spoke.

  Chapter Three

  Mark Treasure slowed the Rolls-Royce to seventy miles an hour. The feeling of virtue that this induced was without justification since the car had been doing ninety for all of twenty miles. Exit 12 of the Motorway was less than half a mile ahead, which put Mitchell Stoke only twenty minutes away.

  It was ten-thirty on a sunny Saturday morning in April, and the Vice-Chairman of Grenwood, Phipps & Co., respected merchant bankers, reverted to savouring the pleasure of the day and the contentments in store – a train of thought that had been earlier interrupted by the need to concentrate on the sighting of police cars.

  Meetings that Treasure had been committed to begin that day in Kuwait had been cancelled at short notice. Thus, late on the previous afternoon he had enjoyed the luxury of debating ways in which he might employ the unexpectedly free days ahead. Because he was naturally industrious – and temporarily wifeless – it was to his credit that most of his plans had involved work as well as pleasure. This definition might even have been extended (without the credit) to include a momentary fantasy – swiftly dismissed – involving a singularly attractive female graduate from the Research Department. On coming to retrieve an unrequired report on the Middle East the girl had proffered a remark about his now being free to enjoy a proper weekend in England. An instinctive conclusion – in fact correct – that this might constitute an invitation to enjoy it improperly in South Kensington had been an agreeable boost to Treasure’s ego. The prudent decision not to test the speculation had nearly been rationalized into an iron conviction that he had no wish to try when the telephone had rung. It was Arthur Moonlight.

  ‘Come for the weekend, or longer if you can manage it. You can get in some golf, give me some advice, and cheer up Elizabeth,’ Moonlight had said. And so the matter had been resolved.

  Treasure and Elizabeth Moonlight were second cousins, and more or less of an age – both a good deal younger than Moonlight himself, who had not married until his mid-thirties. Treasure valued his friendship with the couple and seldom refused an opportunity to be in their company.

  Tall, good-looking, amusing and first-rate at his work, Treasure combined the attributes of the traditional, inspired amateur in merchant banking with latter-day tutored professionalism. He owed this to necessity since he had not been born into banking. It was said that he had talked his way into Grenwood, Phipps helped by a good degree and a Half-blue for golf. It had taken him a good deal less than the twenty years he had been with the company to prove that, he relied on more than light-hearted verbosity to produce the right results. Now at the wheel of the expensive car that he owned but too seldom drove himself, he might have been mistaken for a maturing but successful actor. This was why the short, jolly-looking young woman begging a lift on the A340 road hardly expected him to stop; but he did.

  ‘I say, awfully good of you,’ she cried heartily through the nearside window which Treasure was lowering by remote control. Slightly confused by her unexpected good fortune and a trifle breathless from her short run after the Rolls, she detached herself from the over-sized knapsack on her back. ‘Might I chuck the papoose in the back d’you think?’ Treasure smiled and nodded, unlocking the rear door with the master switch at his right hand. ‘I say, what an absolutely super car,’ said his new companion settling herself into the front seat beside him. ‘Do the seats eject as well?’ She gave a short, nervous laugh.

  ‘Only after take-off,’ said Treasure gravely. ‘Meantime you can adjust yours in most directions electrically with that little knob.’

  ‘No, honestly?’ said the girl in evident awe, but she made no move to operate the gadgetry despite the fact that due to her height, and the set of the seat, half her view from the car was obstructed by the dashboard. Instead she gave Treasure what he took to be a look of frank appraisal.

  ‘Goodbody,’ she said.

  Treasure was used to compliments but not to gratuitous carnal assessments from strange young women. ‘Thelma Goodbody,’ she continued, thrusting out a chubby hand evidently for shaking.

  Treasure felt relieved, if a shade disappointed. ‘How d’you do,’ he said. ‘My name’s Mark Treasure and I’m heading for Mitchell Stoke. Is that on your route?’ He set the car moving.

  ‘What a bit of luck,’ exclaimed Miss Goodbody. ‘That’s exactly where I’m going … well, almost. I’m making for The Jolly Boatman at Binford, that’s straight across the river from Mitchell Stoke, and I can go over on the chain ferry.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve known that ferry since before you were born,’ said Treasure who figured Miss Goodbody was in her early twenties. ‘So it’s still working?’

  ‘Well, it was the day before yesterday,’ she replied with a smile. ‘I’m using it a lot. You see, I’m doing some research work at Mitchell Stoke – on the church and the Hall. Really I should be staying in the village but the pub there’s a bit pricey, and I gather the food’s not startling either.’

  Treasure agreed with this assessment of The Bell at Mitchell Stoke, a very over-rated riverside hotel which had become undeservedly popular after tasteless ‘modernization’ in the ’fifties. ‘What sort of research are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, literary,’ replied Miss Goodbody. ‘I was jolly lucky to get a postgraduate grant last year to work for a doctorate.’ She swayed forward in a contorted gesture of embarrassment involving contraction of neck, arms and legs. This so reduced her physical contact with the seat that Treasure feared she might roll off. ‘I’m not good enough really, but I’m having a go. My subject’s Shakespeare. He’s awfully overdone, of course.’

  ‘So which bit of him are you doing again?’ asked Treasure.

  ‘Well, I’m writing a paper on first nights, trial performances, that sort of thing. The plays were altered a lot, you know, by Shakespeare himself and the actors – sort of as they went along. And they had a kind of provincial circuit, mostly country houses, for repertory and new pieces. Of course the evidence is terribly slim,’ she ended apologetically.

  ‘But you’re fattening it up,’ said Treasure encouragingly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied with great enthusiasm. ‘I’ve been all over the place – travelling mostly by bus; bit different from your car.’ Miss Goodbody was contracting again.

  Treasure put in quickly, ‘And where does
Mitchell Stoke come in?’

  ‘Oh, As You Like It was probably done there – at least I think so. It was certainly done at Wilton, possibly before London. Nobody knows the dates. There was no quarto, printed, and the play wasn’t properly registered at Stationer’s Hall. That’s where I was yesterday.’ And, as if evidence of industry were required: ‘As well as the British Museum.’ Miss Goodbody was getting into her stride. ‘They think Shakespeare wrote it in 1599. Of course, it’s a terribly open-air sort of play; orchards and forests – that sort of thing – so he could have written it specially for performing outdoors in people’s gardens – don’t you think?’ she added uncertainly.

  Treasure hoped that the basis of Miss Goodbody’s research was bedded in something stronger than the opinions of chance acquaintances like himself. His knowledge of Shakespeare was limited. True, some years before, his wife had done a season with the Royal Shakespeare and he had loyally attended three times to watch what the critics had described as her definitive characterization of Portia in The Merchant. He recalled, too, having seen As You Like It performed in a college garden when he was an undergraduate.

  ‘I should think that’s a quite tenable theory,’ he replied, but with a degree of guardedness his City acquaintances would have considered labelled the proposition as most probably spurious. Miss Goodbody was an unsuspecting innocent in this context. ‘But what makes the garden of Mitchell Hall a front runner?’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Goodbody in a conspiratorial tone, ‘two reasons – and one was just jolly good luck. Have you heard of Eustace Dankton?’

  ‘No,’ Treasure replied, thereby and inadvertently being the second agent in one morning to question that person’s entitlement to the fame that some ascribed to him. ‘Should I have?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Miss Goodbody, ‘but he’s quite well known in his own field. He’s what I’d like to be – a sort of rummager round of old houses looking for ancient documents. He’s made several quite important “finds” in the libraries of stately homes. Just recently he found something actually in the wall of a house that was being knocked down near Northampton. It’s terribly exciting work really. Gosh, that was good driving.’

  Treasure credited the last remark to cool nerves. He had just overtaken a lorry they had been trailing for several miles on a tight stretch of road, in the process narrowly missing a collision with a small yellow car coming from the opposite direction, and at a speed that he considered illegal for all drivers save himself and the very few others who would employ it with discretion. He also determined to continue the journey at a more decorous pace; if necessary, behind slow-moving lorries. The consequences of getting killed with Miss Goodbody would be embarrassing as well as inconvenient. He glanced at his passenger; though distinctly plump, she was comely, and attractive enough to be potentially compromising. ‘Banker and girl die in Rolls’ – he could think of at least one business partner whose sorrow would be tinged with uncharitable doubt. Miss Goodbody smiled back at him, unconscious of his morbid train of thought and the relative compliment it suggested.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued enthusiastically, ‘Mr Dankton did a paper on this Northampton discovery about three months ago. He found a diary, or part of a diary, kept during the Civil War by the father of Sarah Moonlight – she was married to the second baronet Moonlight of Mitchell Stoke. The Moonlights have been lords of the manor there for centuries …’

  ‘I’m on my way to stay with them now,’ Treasure interrupted.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Miss Goodbody, obviously impressed, ‘they’re absolutely super people, and terribly helpful. I cornered Sir Arthur after a lecture he gave to the History Society in Oxford last term – bit of a cheek really, but he was sweet; said I could go over the Moonlight library any time. Only trouble is, there’s not much of it left. Sir Arthur and his wife moved out of the Hall some time ago – but you probably know all about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Treasure, ‘and they had more furniture and books and things than they knew what to do with – the Dower House is quite large but they still had to let go lots of their things. A good many of the books went to university libraries. But you still haven’t told me what was in this diary.’

  ‘Well, it’s all jolly sad really,’ continued Miss Goodbody. ‘Poor Sarah sort of took refuge with her parents when the war was at its height. Her father writes about her grief at leaving her gorgeous new home and her loving husband, in that order by the way. She was even more cut up at having to drop the plans she had for widening the artistic life they were leading. And that’s the bit that Mr Dankton finds significant. There’s evidence in other parts of the diary that Sarah, even more than her husband, had ambitions about being a noted patron of the arts, and that very much included the theatre – carrying on the tradition started by the first baronet. Well, you couldn’t talk about starting a tradition for theatrical patronage at the beginning of the seventeenth century without having something to do with Shakespeare, and the Moonlights were friends of the Pembrokes at Wilton. And that was my first clue.’ Miss Goodbody treated herself to a modest smile of satisfaction. ‘Then I got a stroke of the sheerest good luck when Timothy Trapp was made Vicar of Mitchell Stoke; bit of luck for him too, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I knew about the appointment,’ said Treasure, slowing down the car at a junction in the middle of Pangbourne. ‘So you know the new incumbent? I haven’t met him yet.’

  ‘But Timothy’s famous,’ said Miss Goodbody, as if to suggest that it was only a matter of time before the worthy Trapp was translated to Canterbury, ‘though I suppose some people would say infamous’ – which detracted something from the firmness of the first remark. ‘You see, he’s a dedicated Christian.’

  Treasure was sufficiently acquainted with the inner workings of the Church of England to appreciate that the overt practice of Christian principles on the part of one of its clergy could, in certain circumstances, lead to embarrassment, but he found the charge of infamy a likely overstatement levelled at the incumbent of a living in the sole gift of Arthur Moonlight. ‘Mr Trapp is a friend of yours?’ he enquired.

  ‘Well, he was my brother’s friend first,’ replied Miss Goodbody. ‘They were at the same college, and Timothy used to stay with us in the vacations. After university he joined the Royal Marine Commandos, terribly dashing and exciting. Then he suddenly chucked it, and went into a theological college.’

  ‘You mean he found a latish vocation to be a priest,’ said Treasure.

  ‘Something like that,’ the girl replied, ‘but they got more than they bargained for when they got Timothy. You see, he really lives the life – and it gets him into terrible trouble one way and another.’

  ‘You mean he’s excessively holy?’ Treasure was not yet certain he was going to enjoy making the acquaintance of Timothy Trapp.

  ‘Oh, not in a “pi” sense,’ Miss Goodbody protested. ‘He’s just … well, a priest who practises what he preaches in an everyday sort of way. In his last living, it was in a run-down part of Bristol, he sold all the church plate – it was terribly valuable – to build a home for unmarried mothers. There was an awful row when the authorities found out, and the Church Commissioners had to buy back the plate to save everybody’s face. But by that time the building was finished.’

  ‘But surely the plate was missed,’ commented Treasure, ‘and in any case church treasures are left in trust to successive generations, not, as it were, at the disposal of passing clergymen.’ His sense of moral values made him quite certain of the validity of this statement, even if it did sound pompous.

  ‘It wasn’t missed because nobody ever saw it,’ replied Miss Goodbody. ‘It was in a bank vault, and had been for years. Most of it had been presented to the church by rich merchant adventurers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Timothy argued they’d probably made their money out of slave trading anyway, so the Church shouldn’t have accepted their gifts in the first place.’

  Treasure wondered how many o
f the Church’s riches stored up in England would stand justification against this kind of criterion. ‘Your Mr Trapp sounds as if he’s set to take on the whole Establishment with ideas like that,’ he observed.

  ‘Father Trapp, actually,’ replied Miss Goodbody. ‘He’s terribly High Church. But the Establishment’s winning. He’s been sort of “moved on” from two livings already as well as from his first curacy. They didn’t go for him because he refused to read prayers about stopping the war in Vietnam.’

  ‘You mean he approved of the war in Vietnam?’ Treasure found this proposition hard to credit.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Father Trapp’s champion. ‘He felt that asking God to stop a war suggested to people that God started it in the first place, and that both suggestions were wrong and irreligious. I think he’s right too.’

  Treasure began to wonder how long the worthy Trapp was likely to survive in Holy Orders. ‘Doesn’t Father Trapp have a little difficulty in finding employment?’ he asked.

  ‘More than a little,’ Miss Goodbody agreed, ‘but the Bishop of Oxford has known him since he was an ordinand and he’s rescued Timothy a couple of times already. After Bristol he made Timothy promise to spend a few years thinking, not doing – you know, kind of sorting out his philosophy. If Timothy co-operated then the Bishop said he would help find him a country parish where he could sort of contemplate for a bit – and that’s where Sir Arthur Moonlight came in. The Mitchell Stoke living is in his gift, you know –’ Treasure did know – ‘and Sir Arthur was willing to take on Timothy because the Bishop thinks priests like him should be kept in the Church, not chucked out because they have original ideas,’ she ended almost defiantly.

  Treasure made a mental note to enquire the whereabouts of any valuables belonging to St John’s, Mitchell Stoke, though he assumed – correctly – that Moonlight, being forewarned, would also have been forearmed against the eccentricities of his ecclesiastical protégé. ‘And in the process of “sorting out his philosophy”, your Timothy has also found out something about Shakespeare?’ he enquired.