The Episode at Toledo

by Ann Bridge

  ‘Yes, that should give the Hispanos all they need,’ he said, in a satisfied tone. ‘In fact they were thrilled to pieces when I passed on what you told me on the telephone; it seems they’ve had their suspicions of The Wolf for some time. Now haven’t you had a PIDE man up there too? What is he doing?’

  ‘Chasing the other two! He hasn’t been shown these papers. H.E. thought it better not; quite unusually, this PIDE man is rather a ham-fisted type, and speaks no Spanish. We should have got next to nothing if my wife hadn’t got the little priest over.’

  Ainsworth asked after Mrs. Atherley—‘A horrid thing to happen—I hope she’s not too much upset?’

  ‘No, thank you—she takes these things in her stride! She wouldn’t even go to bed till she had got hold of the Father, and coerced the wretched Major Belmonte into letting him shrive the assassin at once. Oh, and look, Ainsworth—here is something else she insists on.’ He took an envelope from his pocket. ‘This is a letter, typed, to the boy’s mother, to tell her that he is dead, but that a priest was with him, and that he is being given a Christian burial.’

  ‘Who signed it?’ Ainsworth asked at once.

  ‘Luzia Ericeira—we thought that best. And the only address we’ve given is ‘São Pedro do Sul, Portugal.’ But my wife is very anxious that you should give it to the woman yourself, and tell her about it, kindly—from Martinez’ notes you’ll be able to explain what happened. Oh, I’m not sure if the letter says that he had the Doctor, but he did—Dr. and priest.’

  The Intelligence man looked again at the notes in Fr. Martinez’ fine clear script.

  ‘Yes, I think I can do it from that,’ he said. ‘Someone will have to go to this village anyhow, to check—we’d better do that ourselves.’ With well-trained thoroughness, he felt the envelope all over. ‘There’s something in it,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A bit of the man’s hair—the Condesa cut that off and put it in,’ Nick Heriot said.

  ‘Very nice—very thoughtful. Well, we’d better get going. Johnnie, turn her, will you?’

  While Miller was turning the car Ainsworth took Atherley aside. ‘If these clues about the wineshop and the old mercado enable our Spanish colleagues to round up El Lobo and his little lot, it ought to be all right for this other American,’ he said. ‘Time’s getting on. When do you and the Ambassador think of coming back?’

  ‘Well, nothing’s settled yet. I think H.E. hoped for a bit more shooting—of course the Duke isn’t too keen on that until he knows that there are no more Spaniards with rifles hanging about! I’ll let you know when anything is decided. Give me a ring when you’ve seen la Viuda, and tell me how she took it. My wife will want to know.’

  ‘I’ll do that thing.’ He also got into the car, and drove off with his companion.

  Richard and Nick did not go back to the frontier by the road; they struck up the hillside behind them for a couple of hundred feet, and then strolled along. The withered yellowish grass was full of small, pale-pink autumn crocuses, with strap-shaped petals; Nick gathered a bunch for Luzia. ‘We have these in the Pyrenees too,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think she went high enough to see them there.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Atherley commented; he too sought for flowers to pick, but found little except some dull purplish thistle-y plants, and a sort of whortleberry in fruit—however he took all he could.

  ‘Varias qualidades de floras!’ the Portuguese frontier-official commented when they dropped down on to the road quite near the barrier—and Richard agreed that, yes, they were botanistas, but that it was getting late in the season for flowers. The man asked if they had seen a car coming from Spain?—‘It must have turned back, for it did not reach the frontier.’ Richard said blandly that they had paid no attention; they were seeking flowers, not automoveis!’—at which the man laughed. He saluted politely as they drove away.

  They ate a late lunch in Chaves, and got back in time for tea, to find their host calmly satisfied, and Major Belmonte jubilant—the other two Spanish agents had both been captured. The local police, by his latest orders no longer inhibited from doing anything to alarm the intruders, had pursued their search with the utmost vigour; the country-people, indignant that ‘an out-rage had been perpetrated’, and on a lady from the Castelo, had co-operated with all their might, and the wretched men, lost and hungry, had been found trying to make their way to the frontier in the desolate stretches of the Terras de Barroso, not far from Chaves. They would be handed over to the Spanish authorities after further interrogation, but Belmonte was fairly satisfied that they had received no co-operation locally. ‘Except from us!’ Luzia put in irrepressibly.

  ‘How so?’ her Father asked.

  ‘We employed them, and housed and fed them, Papa.’

  ‘Nonsense, my child. So tomorrow we shoot again,’ he concluded cheerfully.

  After tea Richard and the Ambassador took a stroll in the garden, and Richard reported his meeting with Ainsworth, and the latter’s confident expectation that Fr. Martinez’ information would enable the Spanish Security Police to clear up the ‘cell’ completely.

  ‘Well, that will be a mercy,’ Sir Noël said. ‘We don’t want any more near misses! I’m thinking more about Hetta than any American V.I.P.’s; it always seems to be she who gets it—just as it’s always she who produces the crucial information. How is she standing up to it all?’

  ‘Pretty well, I think,’ Richard said slowly. ‘But I’ve been thinking, H.E.—I have a feeling that it might not be a bad idea to get her out of the Iberian Peninsula altogether till this next baby is safely over. It can’t do an unborn child much good to be being shot at or tipped out of cars all the time, however quietly the mother takes it.’

  ‘I agree. Where should you send her? To her Mother in the States?’

  ‘Definitely not that! Dorothée isn’t much good with people,’ Richard said temperately, ‘I haven’t thought it out yet—my own people are dead, except for one old Aunt who’s nearly as tyrannous as Countess Páloczy! But I expect we could arrange something.’

  ‘What about the Heriots? I should have thought they would be ideal—they both seem to like her immensely.’

  ‘I must think it out, and talk to her,’ Richard said. ‘I’m glad you approve, anyhow. I may lay you on to help to persuade her! She hasn’t many friends in England, except old Mrs. Hathaway—and I hardly think her flat would run to taking in a nurse and baby, as well as an expectant Mother. But she’d be sure to have good ideas.’

  Hetta did not take very kindly to the notion of a five months’ separation from her husband when he first put it up to her.

  ‘Where should I go?’ she asked. ‘Our house is let for another year—and I do not want to be away from you. I see no necessity.’ However she agreed that he might write to Mrs. Hathaway, and ask her advice—and Luzia presently coming in, she put the matter to her. ‘You do not mind, Richard? Luzia also has good ideas.’

  Luzia was rather startled at the scheme—she considered it gravely.

  ‘Do you know, I think it might be a good plan,’ she said at last. ‘These people are very tenacious—and even here, where you came for safety, you have not been safe.’ This fact had bitte deeply into the girl’s mind; she could not get over it. Then she produced her good idea. ‘But as well as Mrs. Hathaway, why do you not write to Miss Probyn? She has a young baby herself, and her husband also is abroad. You might live together.’

  Hetta was much better pleased with the plan under this aspect; she remembered Julia Probyn as a wise confidante and a tower of strength, at the time of her first visit to Gralheira—and Richard too approved strongly when he recollected that ‘Miss Probyn’ was now Mrs. Philip Jamieson, and that her husband was pretty high up in British Intelligence. That they should live together seemed too much to hope for, but if Hetta could even be settled somewhere near her, it would be an excellent thing. He wrote, guardedly, to Mrs. Hathaway, explaining that for ‘a variety of reasons’ he thought his wife would be bette
r in England until her second child was born, and invoking her good offices to find a suitable place, since their own house was not available. As before, the two young women both wrote to Julia, but in Luzia’s case a good deal less guardedly. ‘It is really important that she should go away as soon as possible. In Spain, when that American was there, she was involved in a nasty car accident, which was not purely accidental, and broke her wrist; it was due to the same people who menaced her before, when you were with us. And only three days ago she had another narrow escape—here, at Gralheira! Now it is thought that these people will be caught, and dealt with, and that all will be safe for her—but how does one know? She ought to be in England, at least till this second child is born; all these incidents cannot be good for it. Do please try to arrange something, quickly.’

  Of course Richard Atherley wanted to know what they had written—his wife showed him her letter; Luzia’s was already stamped and sealed.

  ‘I was very careful,’ she protested. ‘I only said that she had broken her wrist in an accident that was not an accident, in Spain, and that there had just been another incident, here—and that it was caused by the people Miss Probyn knows about, from when she was here before.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t sound too bad, but they’d better go by bag, anyhow,’ Richard said firmly. Gil was due to return to Lisbon next day; Richard put both letters in one envelope, with English stamps, and asked the young man to hand it in to the Chancery messenger at the British Embassy. On Luzia’s instructions he addressed it to Gray’s Inn, the Jamiesons’ London home—‘By now Miss Probyn must be returned from Scotland, I think’; Richard of course sent his to Mrs. Hathaway’s Mayfair flat. Then they sat back to await results.

  Ainsworth telephoned a couple of evenings later. He had plenty to report. He and Johnnie Miller had gone to the village near Pamplona, and sought out la Viuda Elizondo; as Richard had surmised, she could not read, but she had wept over the lock of her son’s hair, and clung to the letter after it had been read to her. They had gone on to visit the village priest, where Ainsworth had first, tactfully, arranged for a mass to be said for the repose of the boy’s soul; then he had made some enquiries. Molineiro, the surname he had given to João, was of course a false one, but his Christian name was Francisco all right; he was not a bad lad, el Cura said, until the Communists got hold of him—then he became full of wild and silly ideas, went to meetings instead of sticking to his work, and ceased attending to his religious duties; eventually he left home and went, it was believed, to Madrid. The priest had burst out in anger against the Communists, coming from the cities into peaceable godfearing villages, deluding the young men, corrupting their minds, and often, as in Francisco’s case, luring them away—at least five had gone from his own parish. And not only from the cities—from abroad, these contaminators came, he heard; from Moscow, probably.

  Ainsworth, not a particularly religious man, had been touched by the evident relief of the middle-aged priest on hearing that the boy had ‘made a good end’, and was to be given Christian burial. ‘That is right, isn’t it?’ Ainsworth asked, interrupting his narrative.

  ‘Yes, he was buried yesterday—Dom Pedro, the chaplain, gave him the full treatment; Nick, the boy you met with me, went, and so did the keeper and some of the servants. And the ladies made a couple of wreaths.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ This point cleared up, Ainsworth went on, more guardedly, with his account. Armed with the information he had brought them, which filled out their own suspicions, the Spanish Security Police had pounced on ‘that pub he mentioned’, and had secured ‘the person in the fleece’, and the whole gang. ‘It was quite a big organisation, run on orders and cash from the late lamented Dr. Beans’s capital’—Richard realised that this meant Prague—‘and our local colleagues are tickled pink. So are the Yanks—after that earlier show of your wife’s they had really begun to get the wind up about this next visit; not before it was time! But now it’s “safer than safe” as the ads say, again thanks to her. Day is making a signal to that effect to the Capitol city! By the way, I hope she’s none the worse?’

  Richard duly reported this to his chief.

  ‘Yes, well that all sounds very good. But I hope you will stick to your plan; we shall both be easier in our minds if you do.’

  ‘I intend to—as soon as we can get a place arranged in England. It’s awkward that our own house is let, but I’m sure that Mrs. Hathaway and Mrs. Jamieson between them will be able to fix something. Shell have to come back to Madrid, of course, to do some packing, winter clothes and so on—but I don’t think we need worry for that short time.’

  ‘No. Back to Madrid—I don’t like the sound of it. This is an idyllic place; one could be happy here for ever! However, I suppose next week we shall have to make a move—we mustn’t shoot all the dear old Duque’s birds. But I must say I rather envy young Heriot, settling down here to make it his life’s work, with that lovely creature.’

  ‘Yes—and I think he’ll make a go of it,’ Richard agreed. ‘He’s full of frightfully sensible ideas about modernising without spoiling, and making use of the local products.’

  In fact, now that the vintage was over, and he had learned all he could about that, Nick’s thoughts, in the intervals of partridge-shooting, were beginning to turn again to the utilisation of that major product of the forests, the resin. He had happened one day to pass the railway siding on the estate, and seen the huge piles of metal barrels being loaded on to trucks and chugging off to the coast, to be exported at a needlessly low price, and it bothered him. He decided to raise the subject with his Father, and get his reaction—after all, he was more or less in their host’s age-bracket. Being Nick, he began diffidently; but the result was almost startlingly encouraging.

  ‘Oh, ah; I was thinking about that myself,’ Lord Heriot said, stuffing tobacco into the bowl of his pipe—they were in the smoking-room. ‘I was down by the railway t’other morning before breakfast, and saw all those tons of stuff waiting to be shipped off. The Duke tells me he gets a wretched price for it. Much better to do something with it on the spot, and get a higher-priced product to sell.’

  ‘What would you do with it?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Well not make linoleum—that’s one of the great outlets for resin, but it stinks appallingly; smell it for miles! Varnish isn’t quite so bad, but it’s quite bad enough.’

  ‘Plastics?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Don’t know a thing about them; I got the idea that they only used this modern synthetic stuff for them—do they call it phenolic resin? Cheek to call it resin at all! No, I should set up one or two small distillation plants, like they do in the Landes, and make turpentine; that’s a nice light, clean smell, doesn’t travel like linoleum—and there’s an endless market for turps.’

  ‘Do they distil turps in the Landes?’ Nick put the question eagerly.

  ‘Oh yes. That old Count Thingummy—your Mother would remember his name—that died last year, went in for it in a big way as part of his forestry; he showed me all over his place once, when we were staying there. He was very scientific about it all, and a good man of business into the bargain. When his plantations were twenty years old, and about forty feet high, he used to plan his thinnings, and bleed them to death—they actually call it gemmage à mort—before he felled and sold them for pitprops, so he got a double profit there; the rest he left standing, about eighty to a hundred to the acre; they were bled twice a year, what they call gemmage à vie, and they’ll stand that for another 60 or 70 years. Then clear-fell and sell as pulpwood, replant, and begin all over again.’ He puffed his pipe. ‘Very sound business,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Slow, but sound.’

  ‘What sort of pines are they in the Landes?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Same as here, maritima—believe they call it something else, now.’

  ‘Pinaster?’ Nick queried.

  ‘I daresay.’

  ‘Well, I wish the Duke would start some distillation plants,’ the young man said. �
��It would give more employment, and keep the young men at home; it worries Luzia, the way they’re starting to drift off to Oporto. And it would obviously pay him to.’

  ‘Don’t suppose he’s ever thought of it. He has no need to worry about money, and he’s a bit set in his ways. Look at those wash-stands!’

  Nick laughed. ‘I know. And I’m a bit shy of suggesting things, especially till we’re married. Even then I don’t know how he’d take it.’

  The old peer looked very benevolently at his modest elder son.

  ‘Like me to throw a fly over him?’

  ‘Very much so! Especially as you’ve seen all this in France yourself. It would come better from you.’

  The fly-throwing took place that very evening, in the drawing-room. Lord Heriot was never one to beat about the bush; his fly fell with a loud plop.

  ‘I wonder you don’t do something with all that resin of yours here on the place, Duke, instead of selling it in its natural state, for next to nothing.’

  ‘It is not quite as bad as that,’ his host said smiling. And like Nick, he asked Lord Heriot what he would suggest? ‘In Oporto, I know one firm buys it for soap-making, but I should not care to make soap at Gralheira—it smells!’

  ‘Ah, and linoleum smells even worse. No, I wasn’t thinking of that—what I had in mind was small distillation-plants for making turpentine, on the spot; get a much better price for that, and halve your freight-charges, if not more.’ He repeated what he had told Nick about the defunct French Count’s enterprises in the Landes. Ericeira showed some slight interest, and enquired about the size of the plants?

  ‘Oh, quite inconspicuous,’ Lord Heriot reassured him. ‘Tuck them away anywhere in the woods, so long as there’s a track that’s carrossable for lorries, to bring the barrels in and take the turps out.’

  Luzia became eager. ‘Papa, this could be marvellous! It would give work to the young men, and keep them at home.’ She turned to Lord Heriot. ‘What is this turpentine used for?’