The Pretty Little Box
Page 3
But he was lucky, and taken south with other prisoners. Because of his knee, he was allowed to ride in a lorry with the other serious wounds.
He was just congratulating himself on his success and his future when an aircraft swooped down out of the sky and fired at the British troops guarding the column of prisoners. Many of the Germans scattered across the torn countryside, eager to escape, but he stayed with the lorry. Frantic as the firing came closer, he reached out and pulled two of the more seriously wounded against his body as a living shield. One of them took the bullet surely meant for him. He was lying there, covered in the dead man’s blood, still wedged between the head wound and a bad stomach, when an orderly lifted the canvas and stared in at them.
He wanted to feel some guilt over the officer’s death, but he had survived, and he told himself over and over again that the Hauptmann wouldn’t have lived anyway.
In the end he was transported to northern England and a camp that was never warm, but he was grateful. When he was searched before boarding the convoy ship that was to carry him to Britain, the little book was found and taken from him. He understood little of what the men examining him were saying, but the officer seemed to be of the opinion that he’d stolen it from a church or museum, and confiscated it.
It was the only souvenir he was likely to have of his months of service in the German army, but he took its loss philosophically. After all, he was well out of the war, and he was likely to come through it with only a bad leg and nightmares to show for it.
The officer who had taken the little book from a prisoner was killed two weeks later, shot in the back by one of his own men as they charged across No Man’s Land. They’d had words two nights before. Chesterton had been caught pilfering the belongings of the dead, and threatened with charges if he didn’t make restitution.
Easier to kill the Captain…
The little box was sent to England with the rest of the Captain’s belongings. By the time his body was recovered, no one realized he’d been shot by his own side.
His little sister saw the pretty box in the battered trunk that been returned by the Army, and she begged to have it. Her mother, too broken-hearted by the loss of her son to care, had taken to her bed to grieve, and the elderly woman who had been Nanny to the children of the house saw no reason not to let the little girl have the book. It smacked of Papism, she thought, but the child wouldn’t know that, and it was comforting for her to have something of her brother’s. After all, his medals and his uniforms, his pipe and the letters from his family were not suitable for a girl. And there was the possibility that Charlotte would lose interest in time. It was hardly the sort of thing to appeal to a child for very long.
But there Nanny was wrong. Charlotte found some solace in the pretty little box with the even prettier little book inside, and she kept it in the drawer of the table by her bed. At ten she still found it hard to read the script, but she loved the pictures and sometimes looked at them before she fell asleep, thinking that her brother must have done the same in a far-off trench. That was somehow comforting.
It didn’t occur to anyone in the household to wonder how the Captain had come by the book. It had been in his belongings, and that was enough for them.
Over the years that followed, the little book was taken out less and less often, until it failed to see the light of day at all. Charlotte’s memory of her brother faded until he looked more like the portrait of him in his uniform hanging on the wall of the parlor than the young man she’d known. She had forgot the sound of his voice, and he’d been so much older that although she had worshipped him while he was there, they had not shared very much. He was playing tennis with friends while she was playing with her dolls, and he had gone to be a soldier when she was only eight.
It was the day of her marriage that she took out the little box again. She had wanted to carry something of her childhood with her as she walked down the aisle, and it had been the perfect thing: her brother’s little book. And her mother agreed that it was quite handsome with the spray of lilac she carried as her bouquet.
She set the little box aside when the moment came to throw her bouquet to her bridesmaids. She tossed it high over her shoulder, and turned amid much laughter to see who had caught her flowers. In the excited embraces that followed—her best friend had caught them—she forgot the little box, leaving there on the table by the stairs. One of the inn’s staff found the book there, in its pretty little box, and asked the owner of the inn if he knew where it had come from. He thought the Vicar must have left it behind, but when Sally Evans went round to ask the Vicar, he shook his head and told her that it didn’t belong to him, and he had no idea how it had got left after the reception.
“Someone will come and claim it,” the owner told Sally then. “Tuck it away somewhere safe until they do. I don’t want to be told any of my people are thieves.”
And there it stayed, in a drawer of the cluttered desk in the tiny room that the inn’s owner called his office.
But Sally Evans remembered it, and she went into the desk a month later to take it for herself. It was just the thing, she’d thought for the past three weeks, to give to her sister for the baby she was expecting in three months’ time. She didn’t have anything else to give her sister, and if she was honest with herself, she really didn’t want to spend her own hard-earned money for a baby gift. She didn’t care for the man her sister had married, and as far as she was concerned, if the baby took after him, she would be glad she hadn’t gone out to buy something she couldn’t afford to begin with.
And so it was that when Geoffrey Hugh Thomas Masters was born, he was in possession of a small book of hours that had made his mother rather angry and his father rather amused. After all it was a very odd gift for a baby and would have to be put away until he was older.
Geoffrey Masters at the age of six was allowed to sit in his father’s lap and look at the pretty pictures in a small book with gold trim that glowed richly in the light from the reading lamp at his father’s side, and it caught his attention in the way that none of his other toys had. He begged to be allowed to look at it, and his fascination with it didn’t diminish with time. Even at the age of twelve, when most boys were playing cricket or rugby, he joined in with enthusiasm, but his heart belonged not to sport but to the pretty book that was his—and yet not quite his. But which was to be his finally when he was grown up.
Geoffrey Masters was a very good student at his local Grammar School, a prize pupil. Much was expected of him, and it was clear that his future would be bright. The Church, Foreign Service, even the Law, they said, they being his teachers and his parents. A boy that bright? He could be anything.
When he went away to University, he asked to take his book with him. And permission was given, after some reluctance on his father’s part. Eighteen was not as responsible as twenty might be. But he agreed, because his wife had never liked the little book or its box, and had held it against her sister all those years.
It had never occurred to her—but it had to her husband—that the little book was valuable. It was simply a cheap way out of giving a proper gift, as far as she was concerned. Her husband had a feeling it might be worth more than a christening cup. But it wasn’t his, and so he’d thought no more about that. Except to be sure that Geoffrey took good care not to damage it. He wondered from time to time how Sally had come by it, but she hadn’t liked him and so he didn’t feel comfortable asking her.
Sally had had something of a checkered past. Her sister insisted that she had even driven a man to suicide, although the official verdict at the Inquest had been accidentally shooting himself as he cleaned his revolver. The fact that Sally had been present at the time of death never came out, although her sister knew she hadn’t slept in her own bed that night.
When Geoff came down from University, his parents met his train and waited eagerly for him to tell them what he’d decided to do with
his life.
Afterward, his mother had cursed her sister, and his father had had a good laugh.
Geoffrey Masters wanted to be a bookseller. And with his O Levels in hand, he had taken a position as a lowly clerk in the local bookshop, paid a pittance but with promises of advancement.
He didn’t expect to own a bookshop of his own until he was at least forty. It was enough to be working in one, surrounded by hundreds of volumes of every size, shape and description. Even the smell, slightly musty and yet tantalizing, appealed to him. He spent his obligatory years in the British Army, and came back to that same bookshop, grateful to find his position had been held for him.
Geoff was forty-seven when the shop’s owner died. His widow had been glad to sell up, and Geoffrey had been ready with his offer. But he never took the little book to his shop. Many of his browsing clients wanted only to look at books and even to stand by the shelves reading them, but seldom wanted to buy anything. Such a treasure was wasted on them. And the collectors who could appreciate its beauty would also know its value.
It stayed in his personal library at home, and he’d already shown it to his own son and explained how it had turned him away from the Church and the Law and even Foreign Service.
He knew it was the most valuable possession he had, and would probably ever have. He’d asked his Aunt Sally several times how she had come by it, but what she told him made little sense.
“It was a gift, after I’d served at a wedding reception years ago. The bride left it for me.”
Geoffrey couldn’t quite believe that, knowing the value of the book. But as an explanation, it would have to do. And even if he’d wanted to sell it—which he never would, under any circumstances—he wasn’t quite certain that it wasn’t known to the police, who might have been searching for it for years. He couldn’t quite believe that his Aunt Sally had nicked it from a museum or a private collection, but it was more than likely that someone had left it behind at the inn where she’d worked most of her life, and she hadn’t turned it in. The police might even have questioned her. Still, Aunt Sally was a champion liar, and she just might have made them believe her.
The last thing he wanted was to have to give the little book up, even if the rightful owner came forward. The bedrock reason, if he dared admit it to himself, for leaving it safely at home.
It was his only crime, keeping what must surely be stolen goods, but he thought he might be able to live with just one sin on his heavenly account.
And when the time came to pass it on to his son, he would never tell him about Aunt Sally. Instead he would simply say that a family friend had brought it to his christening and given it to his own father for safekeeping until he was old enough to value it.
But his son fell into bad company, and the only good thing he did in life before drugs took it was to father a child. A boy.
And Geoff took him in and raised him. And sat with him in the big chair by the hearth, showing him the pretty book as his own father had once done when he was the same age.
But as he looked at the fair hair and blue eyes—so like his son—staring up at him in wonder as he talked about the box and the little book, he prayed he would live long enough to be sure this child would know what a treasure it was.
As the years passed, he began to see that this was how he was meant to pay for his own feelings about the book. For never searching for the true owner. For fearing that it would never be loved and kept safe as he had loved and protected it.
By eighteen his grandson had his first—but certainly not his last—encounter with the law, narrowly missing being tried for manslaughter in that motorcar accident. The police hadn’t known that the boy—hardly a boy now—had also pilfered from his grandparents and taken the keys and the vehicle without permission.
The little box with its precious book was kept under lock and key now
There was only one answer left to Geoff Masters.
He went to his solicitor and added a codicil to his will.
The little box with its precious contents was to be buried with him, next to his heart. Buried, he insisted, not cremated.
His sin. His solution.
But there was a niggling worry at the back of his mind even as he congratulated himself on his decision.
What about the undertaker? Barton and Sons had a spotless reputation, even though the firm belonged now to Barton’s grandsons. Was there any way to be absolutely sure his last wishes were carried out?
Or would the tempting little box with the beautiful book inside be removed just before the coffin lid was bolted down? Who would ever know, if it was?
THE END
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Charles Todd
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4982-5
This edition published in 2018 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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