by Giles Milton
‘It is clear,’ says the vizier in a voice of disquiet, ‘that we have found our man. He represents a threat to the stability of our empire. He represents a threat to the life of our most wise, most noble and most magnanimous sultan, the incomparable, the effulgent, the ineffable Mehmet (may Allah preserve him).’
‘His privities should be severed from his body,’ counsels Hamed Efendi, ‘and his seed should be flung into the Bosphorus.’
The vizier acknowledges this remark with a gracious nod. ‘And what did you learn?’ he asks, turning to Abdul Ali and noting with distaste the blood on his jerkin.
‘Well,’ replies Abdul in a studied voice, ‘the patriarch handed the Englishman an imperial crystobull – yes – a decree signed by Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Byzantine emperor.’ He allows himself a theatrical pause and takes the opportunity to roll his eyes. ‘But what this decree said, alas, we do not know. Our witness expired before we could find out more.’
‘A pity,’ says the vizier as he plays with his beard. ‘Your methods do not always speak of finesse.’
‘If I may be allowed,’ says Hafise. ‘It means this: Humphrey Trencom is not Humphrey Trencom at all – he is Humphrey Palaiologos, a descendant of the infidel Emperor Constantine. He is here, I believe, in search of his throne.’
The three men lean forward as her words take effect.
‘But why is he awaiting a signal from the patriarch?’ asks the vizier. ‘And what does he hope to find at the Porta Aurea?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Hafise.
‘And nor do I,’ says Abdul Ali the executioner.
‘And nor do I,’ says Hamed Efendi.
‘And nor, for that matter, do I,’ added a frustrated Edward Trencom, some 302 years after the above meeting took place. All he knew for sure – and he knew it from the journal of Ralph Pryor – was that two days after Humphrey Trencom fled Constantinople aboard a vessel bound for Salonika, agents of the Grand Vizier discovered a small, stone-lined cave underneath the Porta Aurea.
It was empty. There was nothing there.
25 APRIL 1969
On Friday, 25 April 1969, the postman delivered a long-awaited letter to Number 22, Sunnyhill Road. It was addressed to Mr Edward Trencom and bore the postmark of Salonika in Greece. Edward picked it off the mat with great excitement and noticed that his hands were shaking. ‘This is it,’ he thought. ‘This is really it.’ After checking that Elizabeth was still busy in the kitchen, he took the letter into the living room, leaving the rest of the post on the mat.
‘Anything interesting?’ called Elizabeth. ‘Anything for me?’
‘Nothing that’ll change the world,’ replied Edward. ‘I’ll bring them in a minute.’
He opened the letter with such haste that he tore the envelope all down one side. ‘It must be from Papadrianos,’ he thought. ‘It can only be from him.’ As he unfolded the paper, he realized that it was indeed from Andreas Papadrianos.
Although the contents were exactly as Edward had been led to expect, he was so taken aback to have at long last received the letter that he twice dropped it onto the floor. And when he picked it up for the second time, he noticed that his hands were trembling so uncontrollably that he was unable to keep the paper still.
‘You will fly to Athens on May 10th,’ read the letter. ‘You will then change onto flight AH240 to Salonika. Here you will be met and taken to the rendezvous. Everything will then be revealed.’
Edward pulled the tickets out of the envelope and checked them. ‘Everything’s been arranged,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘And now I must go. I have to go. I can at last solve everything.’
‘Were there any bills?’ called Elizabeth from the kitchen. ‘They said they’d resend the electricity bill.’
‘Hmm?’ said Edward. ‘No bills, darling. I’ll bring them to you in a minute.’
‘And I was expecting that catalogue,’ she added. ‘The new needlepoint catalogue.’
‘Ah-ha,’ said Edward, who was so lost in his thoughts that although he could hear Elizabeth talking to him, he did not register a word. He read the letter for a second time, and then a third, as if to confirm that his eyes were not flashing false messages to his brain. And then, with a troubled smile, he folded the letter in two and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
2 MAY 1969
It was just after 6.30 p.m. on a glorious spring evening. Edward and Elizabeth had been driving for the best part of three hours, chasing the sun as it scored a line through the sky. It was fast approaching that time of day – Edward’s favourite – when the meadows would turn yellow and the sky royal blue.
‘Just look at the shadows,’ said Edward as they drove past a field that was lined with poplars. ‘You could play giant chess in there.’ The trees had been stretched into impossible shapes by the low sun and cast a hatchwork of slanting stripes that reached towards the furthest boundary.
Edward and Elizabeth turned off the A357 and onto the submerged country lanes, following the signs for Mappowder, Melcombe and Plush. From here, it was another twenty minutes to their destination, the little village of Piddletrenthide.
Their visit to the Piddle Valley had been Edward’s idea – one that Elizabeth had at first resisted. She wanted him to spend less time on his family history – not more – and didn’t want to feel that she was aiding and abetting him. ‘And what about Mr George?’ she asked. ‘He’s been slaving away in the shop for weeks now. Isn’t it about time you started to help him restock the shop?’
‘I will – I promise. When we come back from Dorset. It’s just that, well, I must first find out what happened to Humphrey Trencom. I need to know whether or not he died in his native Dorset. If I could find out that then I’d be happy. You see, I need to discover where he was buried. I need to know what happened to him.’
Elizabeth slept on what Edward had said and eventually decided that a trip to the Piddle Valley might be just the tonic they needed. ‘And if it really will get him back to Trencoms,’ she said to herself with a heavy sigh, ‘then I suppose it’s worth it. But …’ She folded her arms and watched a squirrel race across the garden. It paused as it approached the bird bath, looked her directly in the eye and then dipped its feet into the water.
‘Oh dear,’ thought Elizabeth, lost in her own world. ‘Where will it all end?’
They had booked two nights in the Coach and Horses in Piddletrenthide, an oak-framed building whose painted sign declared that it had been a hostelry since the reign of King James I. It was owned by Mr and Mrs Singleton, a husband and wife team in their late fifties who had a most unhealthy vice, one shared by many a middle-aged couple in this part of Dorset. And while their collective behaviour did not contravene any law laid down by parliament, it most certainly transgressed the boundaries of what might justifiably be considered good taste.
Their vice was this: Clive and Clarissa Singleton had a ‘thing’ for all things floral. The walls of their bed and breakfast were lined with floral wallpaper. The beds were covered in floral drapes. There were buttercups on the curtains and cornflowers on the carpet. And when you laid down your weary head at night, you found yourself sinking into a fuschia-patterned pillowcase.
This passion for flowers was not uncommon in the rural bed and breakfasts of England in the late 1960s. From Abberly to Zennor, one could find coaching inns and hostelries whose crumbling plasterwork was held together with swathes of floriferous paper. It was as if every surface and every bed had been sprinkled liberally with plant feed and then sprung spontaneously into bloom. Yet the Coach and Horses took this floriculture to new extremes. Under the horticultural tutelage of Mr and Mrs Singleton, the guest bedrooms gave the impression of a flower garden gone to seed.
Only one item of furniture in Edward and Elizabeth’s bedroom was devoid of flowers: a sturdy four-poster whose upper deck was carved with the date 1616. It was not a large bed – Edward could rub the wooden footboard with the soles of his feet – but it was certainl
y beautiful. That night, as Mr and Mrs Trencom tucked themselves into their flowery bower, Elizabeth admired the gleaming corkscrew pillars and the wonky oak headboard.
‘Imagine all the people who have slept in this bed,’ she said. ‘Darling, think how many generations of people have, well …’ She placed her arm over her husband’s chest and her right leg over his left knee. She was playing with her thoughts, daring herself to say aloud the idea that was currently running through her mind. ‘Think,’ she said in a whisper, ‘of all the children that must have been conceived in this bed.’
She sensed that Edward was miles away. ‘Mmm?’ he said as he stared blankly at a particularly garish spray of carnations. ‘Yes, perhaps even Humphrey himself slept here – in this very bed.’
Elizabeth let out a disappointed sigh. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘perhaps he did. And perhaps he didn’t.’ She moved onto her side, pressing herself even closer to Edward with the intention of getting her husband to think rather less about Humphrey and rather more about her. Yet she feared that the moment had already passed.
‘I wonder,’ yawned Edward, ‘if he ever did get back to Dorset. What do you think, darling?’ And, without even waiting for a reply, he clicked off the light and curled up his legs. Elizabeth knew that this was his sleeping position and that she’d have to act fast. She sat up in bed, leaned right across him and planted a kiss on the end of his nose.
‘Are you really so tired, Mr Cheese?’ she said. ‘I’m sure your friend Humphrey would have played ball.’
There was a moment’s pause before Edward turned over, kissed Elizabeth’s left ear and then affectionately nibbled her elbow – an action that was so ticklish she squeaked.
‘Beware,’ he said with a low growl, ‘it’s not only the bedbugs that bite.’ And with that, he slipped out of his pyjamas.
The couple came down early for breakfast and tucked into poached eggs, grilled tomatoes and a great slab of fried back bacon. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ said Elizabeth as she wiped her mouth with a floral-patterned napkin. ‘That’s well and truly set me up for the day. Even I can face Humphrey now.’
They had arranged to visit Piddletrenthide church later that afternoon, in order to check the register of deaths in the church archives. But first they were going to see the source of the River Piddle, which lay some two miles to the north of the village. It was Elizabeth’s idea. For some reason that Edward failed to understand, she was keen to see where it bubbled out of the ground.
‘I simply can’t see why you’re so interested,’ remarked Edward. ‘I’m sure there won’t be much to see.’
‘Oh, Edward,’ she replied, ‘you can be so unromantic at times. And you of all people. I’d have thought you’d love to visit the source of the river, see where it actually springs from.’
‘Eh?’ said Edward, whose mind was immediately transported back to the flood at Trencoms. ‘Well – I think I’ve had quite enough of water recently.’
There were many people living in this valley – including scores of long-dead Trencoms – who considered the Piddle to be one of the great rivers on earth. It was not, of course, on quite the same scale as the Amazon or Nile. No Victorian adventurer had ever hacked his way upstream in search of its elusive source; no army of panners had trudged across the flood meadows in the hope of striking gold. But the Piddle was one of the more enchanting rivers in this part of the world. Twenty-two and a half miles in length, and replenished by scores of becks and rills, it had bestowed its name on more than half a dozen mellifluous-sounding villages.
Edward and Elizabeth drove to Highton Farm, parked their car at the edge of the lower meadow and clambered over a low stile that had clearly seen better days. As Elizabeth took her first step, she discovered that terra firma lay some five or six inches below the surface. ‘Ayeee – wet feet.’
She was disappointed to find that it was not possible to locate the exact point from which the river sprang to the surface, for there was no single source. Rather, the water leached from the ground in more than a dozen places, forming a squelchy sponge that was studded with sedge and marsh-grass.
‘Don’t you think it’s exciting to come to a river’s source?’ said Elizabeth suddenly. ‘To think that this is where it all begins.’ She was staring at the ground, watching the water ooze and swell to the surface. In places it blew itself into translucent little air-filled bubbles as it broke the surface. They puffed themselves up, wobbled precariously in the breeze and then popped into nothingness.
‘It’s joined by other branches, of course,’ continued Elizabeth, ‘other streams which add water, which change it. And yet it always remains the same.’
Her mind was half on the River Piddle and half on the family tree that Edward had been showing her over breakfast. Yes. A river was like a tree – an upturned one – with each little rill and stream contributing something to the principal trunk.
‘Well – yes and no,’ said Edward after a long pause. He had not been listening to Elizabeth at first but now that he was, well, he was not at all convinced by what she was saying. ‘You see, darling, the tributaries add water – and they change the flow of the river. Remember the stream we saw at Puddleton Down? The one that joins the Piddle? It completely altered the river’s character. It looked different afterwards – it became wider, slower, more sluggish.’
‘Yes, I know, but it was still the same old Piddle. Can’t you see? It’s still one river.’ Edward could be so infuriating and Elizabeth was determined to stand her ground. ‘It’s the Piddle here,’ she said, pointing to the marshy earth, ‘and it’s the same Piddle when it reaches the sea.’
Edward kept his silence. His wife was wrong. She was very wrong. One branch – one seemingly insignificant little branch – could utterly change the main stream.
Edward had made two previous trips to the Piddle Valley and visited the parishes of Puddletown, Briantspuddle, Tolpuddle and Piddlehinton. He had searched through the records of baptisms and deaths and combed the lists of Trencom marriages. In so doing, he had managed to build up quite an archive about the early Trencoms. This was the first time he had been able to contact the archivist at Piddletrenthide and he was most excited at the prospect of searching for a record of Humphrey’s death.
‘If I can discover whether or not he made it home from Constantinople,’ he said to Elizabeth,’ then I might be able to find out what he was bringing home – what was inside the package – and where it is now.’
‘Assuming it still exists,’ cut in Elizabeth.
‘Yes, assuming it still exists.’
The church of All Saints was situated on the west bank of the river, a Norman building that had been remodelled in the fourteenth century. According to A. G. Smithers’s History of the Piddle Valley, it was the most interesting of all the Piddle churches. ‘With its Norman porch, Elizabethan chancel and its array of funerary monuments,’ wrote the author, ‘it must surely rank as the architecturally richest parish of the valley.’
Edward pushed open the lychgate, entered the churchyard and sniffed at the branches of the overhanging yew tree. Elizabeth followed him, noticing that the ground was sprinkled with little red berries.
‘I’d have thought it was most unlikely the actual headstone will still be here,’ she said, as Edward began studying the upright slabs of stone. ‘Even if it was, it must be faded by now. I doubt that you’d be able to read the inscription.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Edward as he worked his way methodically through the churchyard. ‘There’s one here from 1723.’ He found a John Trencom, an Emilie Trencom and two Martin Trencoms; there was also a Katherine Trencom and an infant Job Trencom. ‘You know what, darling? There was a Job Trencom in the Piddlehinton churchyard,’ he observed. ‘And I think there was a Katherine as well.’
Soon he had checked every stone in the churchyard without finding a single Humphrey. ‘I think you must be right,’ he said. ‘The oldest headstone was the one from 1723 – that must be at least thirty years
after he died.’
He pushed open the west door of the church and stepped down into the nave. Edward held his nose for a second and then took a long, deep inhalation of breath. ‘How strange,’ he thought. ‘How very strange.’ His nose, which had failed him on at least five occasions in the last two days, was suddenly back on form. The church smelled of watercress. Yes, water-cress and mushrooms. It was the same smell that Edward had detected in the pages of Humphrey’s book.
‘You know what?’ he said to Elizabeth. ‘If history has a smell, it’s this.’
The two of them looked around the church for a couple of minutes, examining the funerary monuments and old brasses. Then, just as Edward began reading a short pamphlet about the building, there was a squeaking of hinges and the door opened. ‘Ah-ha – you must be Mr and Mrs Trencom,’ said a jovial lady who bounded up to Edward and Elizabeth and shook them heartily by the hand. ‘I’m Joyce Woolley, the curator. Reverend Bailey told me you’d be coming.’
‘Yes,’ said Edward, ‘thank you – thank you. You see, I’m trying to find an ancestor of mine,’ he said. ‘A chap called Humphrey Trencom.’
‘Ah-ha,’ replied Mrs Woolley. ‘Well, let’s see what we can find.’
She trotted off to the sacristy and returned with a heavy folio that was embossed with the words, All Saints: Register of Deaths 1680–1691.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me. When do you think Hubert died?’
‘Humphrey,’ said Edward, politely correcting her.
‘Sorry, sorry – did I say Humphrey?’ she said.
Edward looked at Elizabeth, who signalled a smile with her eyes. ‘He died in 1685,’ said Edward, ‘or at least I think he did. That’s really what I need to check. And I’m presuming he was buried here, but I’m not certain.’
The register was difficult to decipher. It was written in an ungainly, cursive hand that had turned every twirl and letter into a spirograph of squiggles and loops. In places it looked as if an ink-toed spider had danced a quadrille across the page.
