The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  The knight looked smug. ‘To proceed with my story. As I was marvelling at the incendiary sight, someone burst into the room: a self-important-looking little man wearing spectacles. He was the first stranger I had seen in here, so I was very taken aback. He was all of a twitter, and talking to himself, and, from the way he was scurrying about examining the room, it was obvious that he was in a great hurry to find something.

  ‘He kept going to the window to see how fast the flames were moving through the city. I feared for my possessions, not from the fire but in consequence of his larcenous motives.

  ‘Whatever it was the man was searching for, he had some reason for believing it was in here. He had a bag of tools with him, certain of which he used to start pulling up the floorboards, which tempered my relief at realizing that he could see neither me nor anything in the room. To him it was just an empty chamber.

  ‘He was about to put a hole in my finest Turkey carpet with an augur, when Grammaticus, whom I had summoned as soon as I saw what was about to happen, thus proving that he could also not hear my voice, arrived to help me pull the rug out of the way.

  ‘After an hour or so of this wanton destruction, there was a great mess, the little man appeared greatly distressed, and we were none the wiser as to what he was doing. The Lieutenant told me afterwards that this was not the only floor he had attacked. There was nothing I could do to stop him, and I was grieved by the amount of work I should have on hand to repair the damage.’

  ‘Oh please!’, interjected Grammaticus; ‘You never lifted a finger to assist me, just sat there issuing orders and…’

  Ralegh raised his hand to forestall further protest. ‘Having checked for the hundredth time to see how close the conflagration was, the person, who was wearing a wig, tore it off and dashed it on what remained of the floor while uttering a string of profanities. Then he left in haste without packing up his tools.

  ‘The wig I could have shown you, for I kept it, except that several of them’—he pointed to the window—‘pulled it off the stand and tore it to pieces in a game of tug o’ war.

  ‘As soon as the man had departed I...Grammaticus was about to replace the floorboards with the hardware left behind; but before he did so I was inspired to instruct him to take up several more of the planks. My hunch proved correct: I found what the stranger had failed to locate.’

  ‘Saints preserve us!’ exclaimed Grammaticus; ‘it was my idea.’

  Ralegh shook his head. ‘That my servant should be hale of body and yet so addle-pated…these days I am more his keeper than he is mine.’

  Arbella was unable to contain herself. ‘Either or both of you, what did you find?’

  ‘Firkins,’ said Ralegh; ‘ we found butter firkins. But instead of containing rancid fat they held a more solid yellow of infinitely greater worth.’

  ‘I know!’ cried Arbella; ‘It was Colonel Barkstead’s treasure! It was rumoured to be as much as fifty thousand pounds worth of gold, silver, and jewels. All anyone knew was that it was buried somewhere in the Tower. Many people searched for it over the years in vain.’

  Ralegh looked puzzled. ‘Barkstead?’

  Arbella said excitedly, ‘That little man you were describing was Samuel Pepys. He was Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, and lived close by on Seething Lane. In his famous diary he wrote about the treasure, and of how he took advantage of the chaos caused by the Great Fire of London, which started on Pudding Lane next to the Monument, to come and look for it. He had adopted the habit of wearing a periwig some three years before.

  ‘Pepys left without concluding his search, because he was worried about the possibility of his house burning down, which had cost him a deal of money. Instead of prospecting for gold he had to protect his property.’

  ‘He missed the hoard by barely a foot. How came the treasure to be here?’

  ‘Sir John Barkstead was a goldsmith who became Lieutenant of the Tower. I suppose he thought the Bloody tower was the safest place to stash his wealth. Barkstead fled at the Restoration of the monarchy in sixteen-sixty without having time to recover it and take it with him, and although he made it abroad he was caught, brought back and executed.

  ‘No one knew the whereabouts of the fortune he left behind, but that it was somewhere in the Tower was a logical assumption. There was a Mr Wade who came across some seven thousand pounds elsewhere here.

  ‘But Sir Walter, what did you do with the contents of the firkins? Did you really spend it all?’

  ‘The purchase of rare herbs, and other ingredients for my experiments, had been proving more expensive than I bargained for. When at a later date Northumberland began calling in my debts, saying that he was running short of funds himself...’

  ‘…this noble knight,’ continued Grammaticus, ‘was reduced to cheating at cards with the Earl to pay back the money that he owed him. He would have taken his lordship for his last penny if he could, at basset, gleek and primero, but he found that he was losing more when employing deception than if he were playing honestly. Things came to a pretty pass.’

  ‘So I sold the gold and silver—the jewels it turned out were of inferior quality—settled my debts with the Wiz…’

  ‘…temporarily cleaning the slate upon which much chalk has settled since…’

  ‘Tush, man!…and under an assumed name invested the remainder with a man named…whom did we settle on, Grammaticus?’

  ‘Mayer Amschel Bauer, the son of a Frankfurt Jew who supplied coins to the Crown Prince of Hesse. He later changed his name to Redshield…Rothschild.’

  Arbella’s eyes widened. ‘If a Rothschild was responsible for managing the money, he must have got you a significant return. Daddy often tells me how high interest rates were in those days.’

  ‘The man took a usurious commission, but I will grant that the principal compounded many times.’ Ralegh went to the desk, withdrew a piece of paper from the drawer, and gave it to Arbella. It was a cancelled draft, drawn on the Rothschild Bank, for a million and a half guineas.

  ‘Wow! A million...this is too amazing. But the date on this note is a hundred years ago. What happened to it all? No disrespect, sir, but even a spendthrift like yourself can’t have got through more than a fraction of such an amount.’

  ‘None of it came my way as wages, you can be sure of that,’ growled Grammaticus. ‘Had it been possible for one of my perennial constitution to succumb to starvation, my master would still have demanded of my skeleton that it set meat upon the table.’

  Ralegh assumed his martyred expression. ‘How the man bleateth. Contrary to what his impertinence would have thee believe, my appetites are simple to the point where you might almost call me frugal. To answer your question: jewels I have ever had a passion for, and I bought many, good ones.

  ‘Thou mayst view them if it liketh thee, but do not tell my son. I have kept this matter from him, for fear that he would alert my wife to the stones’ existence. All my son knows about are the few baubles behind the loose brick under the tapestry, which he rudely drew attention to the other day. Although Carew sees his mother rarely, they remain on good terms and I cannot afford...well, Bess has got it into her head that I am substantially in her debt.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how,’ said Grammaticus; ‘after the pattern of disbursements you were forever making without consulting her from the wealth she inherited from her family. Nor shall she forget that jewel of hers you pawned, the one the Queen gave her. It is no wonder that she hates you.’

  ‘Would I like to view them, Sir Walter?’ said Arbella; ‘oh yes please!’

  ‘Very well,’ said Ralegh; and then, portentously, ‘Grammaticus! Bring forth the chest.’

  The ancient retainer shuffled to a dark corner in the back of the room, and drew aside a curtain that was hanging from a rail. Revealed was a brass-bound wooden trunk. After dragging it part way into the room and raising the lid, Grammaticus stood back panting from the effort.

  Arbella approached almost nervously and half cl
osed her eyes as she looked in, as if she were about to be dazzled. Which she was: the chest was inset with compartments containing an extraordinary miscellany of jewels of every colour and description: enormous pearls, including some that were black and some rosy pink; rubies, emeralds, hyacinths, jacinths, topazes—at first those were all she could take in.

  But then...there was a magnificent star sapphire that must have rivalled the five hundred and sixty-three carat Star of India. And there were many cut diamonds, several of which looked nearly as big as the largest of the Cullinans, the Star of Africa, so admired by Arbella in her White tower dream, which weighed in at five hundred and thirty carats.

  Her eyes now wide again, Arbella turned unsteadily, and spoke in a voice so breathy that she hardly recognized as her own. ‘Your West Indian treasure-house cannot have contained such gems as these. When Colonel Thomas Blood stole the Crown Jewels, as now they are called, which used to be here in the Martin tower, he would have willingly exchanged them for these.’

  ‘As thou canst see,’ Ralegh said proudly, ‘there is much greater variety here than in that paltry royal collection.’

  ‘The Koh-i-Noor diamond, which was added much later, was said to be worth more than the entire amount of wealth that is generated around the world in seven days.’

  ‘It sparks my interest. If it is within the Tower I would like to see it.’

  ‘Don’t get any ideas. It is reputed to bring misfortune or death to any male who owns or wears it.’

  ‘Were it mine, the mortal aspect of the threat would be lost upon me.’

  Arbella’s head cleared. ‘Look, Sir Walter, the fact is that you realized more than enough money from the Barkstead treasure sale and the Rothschild investment to have funded an expedition then or at any time since.

  ‘So why did you elect to purchase jewels with the proceeds instead? You could have set out any time you pleased, and irrespective of your fortunes overseas still had plenty left to live off upon your return.’

  ‘Then I was not ready. But now that I am for the first time eager to depart on the voyage to end all voyages, one that is more important to me even than the one I have shared with thee today, I have no further use for this treasure, even to look upon it. Pray have the chest removed. For though no one has ever doubted my word, a promise must be kept before a man’s sincerity is proven. I should ask, however, that thou beest kind enough to arrange with Grammaticus for it to be done in the morning, while I am still in my bedchamber, and not up to witness its removal.

  ‘Any time before ten of the clock shall be suitable.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Arbella confessed the visit to Carew in every detail, and when she was finished he sat with a look of profound contemplation. ‘So,’ she resumed, ‘I didn’t press him, but I took it as more of a Yes than a No. His response seemed a bit ambiguous, or equivocal, to me but then I hardly know him. You would be the one to judge.’

  ‘You learned of the treasure,’ said Carew, ‘which I had no inkling of. As to his motives and intentions, I would say you are in as good a position to assess them as I am. He evidently is comfortable in confiding in you, and seems to gain solace from doing so. Closure is what he seeks, and I don’t just mean to his life.

  ‘Of course the prospect of exercising free will again, after so long a period of inactivity during this…coda, I suppose would be the best way of describing it, to his life, must be frightening, even to a man of his courage. We’ll see.

  ‘In the meantime, giving up the treasure is a big step towards worldly divestment, and though you must decide for yourself, Arbella, I would encourage you to press on with the slip. If you can make anything of it I think it will mean a great deal to him.’

  ‘I am concerned about you, too. I can’t imagine what it must be like, being in such an indeterminate state of…I don’t know what to call it. Animated suspense, I suppose, rather than suspended animation.’

  ‘Marine-ating in my own juices, is the way I see it. But the older I get—though I don’t feel as if I am aging, it’s more a deepening than an elongation of my life—the greater understanding I have about what I already thought I knew, but did not, or only imperfectly.’

  Arbella nodded. ‘It makes me wonder about the opposite condition, of those who die young, as to whether there is such a thing as premature death. I mean, if I were to get run over by a Number Twenty-Two bus while walking down the King’s Road, have I been short-changed of life? People would say that I had died “tragically”, “ before my time”, and what a cruel waste it was. Mind you, it’s unlikely: a Twenty-Two never comes along when I want one.’

  ‘I could only answer that by putting it the other way round: had you stepped out of the way in time, and called it luck, then yes, you might be said to have cheated death. If it was fated that you should get flattened, then it is impossible to say, because there is no definitive answer to whether or not there is such a thing as Fate, and whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.

  ‘But my opinion is that a life is a life, and whole, irrespective of its length. Living to a hundred does not make a person superior to a person who dies at seventy or eighty, or more complete or fulfilled. But I am no more qualified than the next person on the subject: my predicament is entirely artificial, and longevity has not made me any wiser than the next person...perhaps that answers the question better than anything.

  ‘What I can tell you about is Lloyd’s. Although this is a place, or space, created for the trading of risk, the truth is that there is not a natural-born risk-taker in the Room. If underwriters did not believe that risk can be underwritten—which means not just subscribed to but intelligently assessed and engineered—and that gamblers have short professional lives because they are always playing against the odds, they would not be here. The market is composed of cautious men who understand that risk is an enemy that one needs to keep closer than a friend, if it is to be managed and controlled.

  ‘In that respect, Bullion Bill Goldsack’s greed is as much a façade or ploy as another underwriter’s affectation of ignorance.

  ‘You should always bear in mind, Arbella, that however dismissively some underwriters may turn you down, they are only doing so reluctantly. Their livelihoods depend upon putting business on the books, not rejecting it, just as one cannot catch a fish unless one’s fly or bait is in the water. But it has to be the right business. The premium, or in your present case my father’s treasure, is the fly or bait, and you are the fisherman.’

  Thus counselled, Arbella returned to the non-marine floor to see Black Jack Newbold.

  Black Jack did not fit the image one might have of an underwriter. Like Carew, he never had a queue, but for a different reason: everyone, including his own employees, was terrified of him. Black Jack was a bare-knuckle prizefighter, a pirate who had no need for a patch over one eye to look the part. He had tight curls of jet-black hair, a curl to his iron lip that hammer and anvil would not straighten, and when he spoke it was in a murmur that chilled hearts.

  When several years later Black Jack was jailed for “unorthodox accounting practices”, convoluted schemes to shelter syndicate members’ wealth from tax in la famille Newbold’s overseas bank accounts, the judge could not have been more polite as he passed sentence.

  The judge was one of Black Jack’s Names.

  Although Newbold headed up several important committees at Lloyd’s, he never seemed to do anything but sit at the box staring through his very underemployed claims underwriter opposite, and his very busy book-keeper; and, beyond them, through the plate-glass window into the old Lloyd’s building, now administrative offices, where someone’s secretary favoured low-buttoned blouses.

  Only the most experienced brokers in the market, who knew how to escape with their hides intact, went to see Black Jack, and rarely. Neophytes who had not been warned that he showed psychopathic symptoms, and were attracted by the sight of an underwriter sitting “open” without a broker, were so damaged by their single encoun
ter with him that they stayed away for the next forty years and had nightmares about him.

  Although Arbella was as nervous of the man as anyone, she was determined not to bypass a powerful underwriter who commanded the respect of the following market; for Black Jack was a masterful assessor of opportunity and knew when to get out his pen. She knew that “broking” him was impossible, for he could sum up at a glance whatever was laid before him, and he had no tolerance for accompanying persiflage from twits in pinstriped suits...or skirts.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’ The white queen’s pawn advanced two squares, but the player kept her finger on the piece. Black Jack did not move his head, but hoisted an eyebrow to express disapproval of opinions regarding the fairness or foulness of the day; and that the likelihood of it being good was remote.

  ‘Hrr.’ Black Jack did not play chess. Rather, Shere Khan, Kipling’s tiger in The Jungle Book, emerged from the thicket where he had been dozing with one eye open.

  Arbella unfolded her slip, placed it before him and affected nonchalance, to convey that it was of no interest to her; and either that she was merely going through the motions expected of a broker; or that she might not be responsible for putting it there. A Newboldian eye strayed below the horizontal, and the filament of courtesy was broken. Sensing that something was already amiss, Arbella withdrew her hand quickly, as if she had set down a baited mousetrap and feared for her fingers.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Newbold continued to review the slip.

  Arbella reminded herself that this was just his way. It was an honour to be treated by Black Jack like any common or garden male drinking companion, comrade, or navvy. Aware that wild animals were antagonized by eye contact, she was relieved when her covert glance detected a smirk on Newbold’s face, as if he were amused at receiving confirmation that the world was mad. She frowned at the slip, as if she and Black Jack were on a judicial committee responsible for deciding whether or not to sentence it to be taken forth to a place of public execution and hung from the neck until it was dead.