The Inheritance

by Simon Tolkien

  “Yes. But he had a wife and daughter too, you know, although whether that was for cover or because he couldn’t acknowledge the truth about himself, I don’t know.”

  “What happened to them?” asked Sasha, unable to resist asking the question, although it cost her an almost superhuman effort to keep her voice steady.

  “The wife left him. And he lost everything. His fellowship too. The last I heard he was lecturing miners’ sons in South Wales.”

  “Well, he’d better watch himself if he tries molesting them,” said Ritter. “Or he’ll end up underground for good.”

  Sasha couldn’t stand it anymore. While Cade and the sergeant were still laughing, she got up, pushing her chair back against the wall behind her.

  “I think maybe the sergeant’s right. I’m not feeling so well after all,” she said, holding her napkin up to her face to hide the tears that were starting in her eyes. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while.”

  “You do that, my dear. And I hope you feel better soon,” said Cade benevolently. “We’ve got important work to do tomorrow.”

  Sasha hated Cade more than ever after that evening. She could not look at him without thinking of her father shambling around Oxford in his old unmended clothes. In the evenings, Cade would sometimes lean on her shoulder as they came down the stairs from the manuscript gallery, and she would think how easy it would be to push him forward and watch him break up like an old doll as he turned and turned, bouncing off the bannisters until he hit the ground at the bottom with a final thud.

  But she did nothing. The stakes were too high, and Cade was her only hope of finding the codex and the cross. And so she watched herself even more closely than before, burying her hatred beneath a cool, professional exterior that deceived even Ritter. He was the one that she always feared. She couldn’t rid herself of the sense that he suspected her. But perhaps he had that effect on everyone. There was only one person he had ever been loyal to, and that was Cade. Still, they were both dead now. And Jeanne too, although Sasha didn’t want to think about Jeanne. It was too horrible what had happened. She wished she could’ve done something more to protect the poor woman from her monstrous husband, but at the same time she realised her own impotence. The sense of defeat that she had felt after trying to confront Ritter in the kitchen was still fresh in her mind. The man was a force of nature, and she was glad he was dead.

  And she had the codex. That was what mattered. She’d fulfilled her bargain with Silas, although more than once in the last few days she’d considered throwing him over. The thought of his watching her from a distance, taking pictures of her body, revolted her. She remembered how his eyes had always been drawn to her disfigurement. That was what he’d photographed. She didn’t need to see the pictures to know that. Silas had told her that he’d burnt them. He’d given her his word about that, and she was minded to believe him. But still they had existed. Policemen had leered at them together. She knew they had. And all because of Silas. Sasha hated him almost as much as his father, but yet she had given false evidence for him. She’d given him his alibi and possibly condemned his brother to a horrible death, she thought bitterly.

  It was all too much. She’d think about Stephen some other time, she told herself. When she was feeling stronger. But in her heart she knew that the only way to survive was to cut him out of her consciousness forever. It was a small price to pay for the codex, even if it meant diminishing herself, and she knew that there would almost certainly be other even more difficult sacrifices she would have to make if she was ever to get her hands on the cross of St. Peter.

  The train drew into Oxford, and Sasha gathered her things together. The railway station reminded her, as it always did, of the time she’d come here as a little girl to visit her father. She’d been too young to travel alone, and so her mother had accompanied her on the journey. But her mother had made her feelings clear by dressing in black, complete with a veil, just as if she was going to a funeral, and she had ignored her daughter all the way, immersing herself instead in a thick book of Catholic sermons. When they got to Oxford, her father was waiting on the platform in the rain. He looked bedraggled and unkempt in an old mackintosh, and his thinning hair stuck to his skull in clumps. Sasha had been looking forward to seeing him for weeks, but when she saw him she felt ashamed. She didn’t run to him when he recognised her but instead hung back, taking her cue from her mother’s look of contemptuous disdain.

  Sasha understood now, all these years later, how important that day had been for her, which is why she remembered it so clearly. She had been hoping that the train taking her mother and her toward Oxford would also reunite them with her father. But it had been a childish dream. On the platform, Sasha’s mother would not go near her husband, not even to pass the time of day. Sasha remembered how her father had taken a few hesitant steps toward them until his wife’s evident antipathy stopped him in his tracks. Sasha’s mother said nothing. She didn’t need to. The arrangements had already been made by letter. She just looped Sasha’s hand around the handle of her small tan suitcase and pushed her forward toward her father. It had been like crossing a border between enemy countries, Sasha thought now as she stood in the same place where she had been twenty years earlier. She’d been too young for such an ordeal.

  Her father had been working at an obscure art college in the suburbs, filling in for somebody else for very little money. He had no car and there were no buses at the station, so they walked for what seemed like hours through the rain, with him carrying her suitcase, until they got to the dingy little flat that was his temporary home. The next day Sasha woke up on a camp bed with a fever and had to go back to her mother’s early. Soon afterward Sasha’s visits to her father had stopped altogether and her mother had not seen fit to even inform her absent husband when Sasha was assaulted by the teacher at her school. In fact, she had even found a way to blame Sasha’s father for what had happened, and in later years it became an article of faith for Sasha’s mother that the vivid burn mark covering her daughter’s neck and shoulders had been put there by God as a punishment for the sins of her husband.

  Sasha also believed that the burn was no accident. But unlike her mother, she didn’t think it had anything to do with her father. The disfigurement made her different from other people, and she believed that she had been singled out because it was her destiny to achieve something special. She was going to find the cross that should have been her father’s. She had known from the first that it would not be easy, but she was determined that no one would stand in her way. Cade deserved exactly what he had got: a bullet in the head. And now she had the codex. It was the key to the cross’s hiding place. She was certain of it. She would make better use of it than he ever had.

  Sasha hailed a taxi outside the station and gave the driver an address in North Oxford. It was good to have a place of her own at last, even if it was only a bed-sit in someone else’s house. She had left the manor house immediately after Inspector Trave’s visit, while Silas was still in hospital, and had rented the room under an assumed name. It felt safe. No one would find her there.

  She told the taxi to wait and went upstairs. The book was where she had left it, hidden among her clothes, with Cade’s mysterious sheet of notepaper tucked inside. She put it in a briefcase that she’d bought for the purpose and went back down the stairs. Twenty minutes later she was standing outside the door of her father’s room. There was no reply to her knock, and so she turned the key and went inside.

  Andrew Blayne was sleeping in his chair. His head had fallen forward onto his chest, and his mouth was slightly open. His breath was uneven, and Sasha, watching from the doorway, felt for a moment like she was waiting for him to die. There seemed no good reason why another breath should come to rattle his thin, fragile frame. Except that it did. Again and again. His body’s mechanism would tick on until everything was worn away. It seemed cruel to Sasha. At least his trembling hands were still while he slept. Better perhaps that everything
should be still and that her father’s pain should end forever.

  The room was cold, and Sasha went over to the fireplace and tried without much success to stir the coals back into some semblance of life. The noise woke her father.

  “Half your books are missing. And where’s the gramophone?” she asked, but she already knew the answer to her question. There was a pawnbroker’s ticket on the mantelpiece next to where she was standing. “I’ve got money,” she said. “For God’s sake, let me give you some, Daddy.”

  “No, I’ll be all right,” said Blayne. “It was only to tide me over until the end of the month.”

  Sasha wondered if he would last that long, but there was nothing she could do if he would not let her help him. She leant over and pulled the codex out of the briefcase, placing it in her father’s trembling hands.

  “Here’s something to take your mind off your troubles,” she said. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s the real thing.”

  “The codex of Marjean.” Blayne said the words like they were a prayer or some magical incantation. Tears stood out in the corners of his watery blue eyes as he slowly turned the thick vellum pages.

  “Where did you get it, Sasha?” he asked. There was fear in his eyes now, supplanting the first look of wonder.

  “Cade had it all the time,” she said. “It’s a long story, and I can’t tell it to you now. I need you to look at this.”

  Carefully, Sasha opened out the folded sheet of notepaper with the series of numbers in columns that she had first seen in Cade’s study, when Silas had taken the codex out of his father’s chess box.

  “This was inside the codex,” she said. “I need to know what it means.”

  “It’s Cade’s handwriting. I recognize the way he wrote his sevens. They were always distinctive,” said Blayne, examining the paper. “It must be his key to the code.”

  “I know that,” said Sasha impatiently. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three days? I’ve tried everything, but they’re numbers, not letters. You can’t read numbers.”

  “The numbers must be telling you the position of the letters in the codex,” said Blayne quietly. He was holding the piece of paper in one hand and comparing it with the first page of the codex. “How extraordinary,” he went on after a moment. “It must have taken him more than ten years to get this far.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of the dates. We can assume Cade got possession of the codex in 1944, and then he went to France and got shot in 1956. Twelve long years. And all the time he can’t have known that there was a code to break at all. He was in the dark. The frustration must have been terrible.”

  “You don’t know it was twelve years. It’s just a guess that he went to Mar-jean in 1956 because of the codex.”

  “Maybe. But it’s a good guess.”

  “I don’t care what kind of guess it is,” said Sasha, unable to contain her irritation. “I haven’t got twelve years. I need to know what these numbers mean now.”

  “Well, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking like that, Sasha. Good codes are like the insides of old clocks. You have to work on them slowly. And you need to get inside the mind of the man who made the code in the first place. He didn’t think like we do.”

  Sasha clenched her fists, trying to hold back her exasperation, and her father smiled.

  “You used to do that when you were a child,” he said. “Look, don’t despair, Sasha. We have Cade’s key. And with it the knowledge that there is a code and that it can be cracked. There will be pleasure in this for me. It will make me forget my landlady for a little while. I’m very grateful to you.”

  Sasha couldn’t help laughing. She felt relieved: if anyone could decipher Cade’s key, it would be her father. She could tell from the look in his eye that his curiosity was aroused. She didn’t need to worry that he wouldn’t do his best.

  She got up to leave, but at the door he called her back. There was a look of anxiety on his face, and he had put the codex back on the table. His hands were trembling more than ever.

  “What if I do crack this code, Sasha? What will you do then?” he asked. His voice was full of fear.

  Sasha stood in the doorway without answering. She didn’t need to. Blayne knew the answer to his own question.

  “You’ll go to France just like he did, won’t you?” he said. “And something terrible will happen to you.”

  “No, it won’t. I can look after myself.”

  “How? You’re a woman on your own, and he had that man Ritter with him. From what you tell me, he was lucky to come home alive.”

  “I’ll be more careful. I’ve told you before, Daddy. I’ve come too far to stop now.”

  “Maybe. But I haven’t. I don’t need to look at this book,” said Blayne, making a show of pushing it away.

  “Ah, but you will,” said Sasha with a smile, “I know you too well. It’s in your blood. And whatever you find out, you owe it to me to tell me.”

  “So you can kill yourself with my blessing?”

  “No, I won’t kill myself,” said Sasha, crossing over to her father and putting her hand on his shoulder. “I tell you what I’ll do. If you crack the code, we’ll decide what to do with it together. And, in the meantime, you must take this, and I’ll go to the pawnbroker and get your things back.”

  Sasha had put three ten-pound notes on the codex as she spoke, and now she picked up the pawn ticket and kissed her father on the crown of his head before turning to leave.

  “It probably won’t matter anyway,” he muttered. “The codex didn’t take Cade to the cross, and he cracked the code.”

  Sasha opened her mouth to respond, but then thought better of it. Let her father console himself with such reflections if he wanted to, she thought. They did no harm. And there was no reason why she needed to tell her father how much she believed in the codex. The book would take her to the cross. She was sure of it. Cade’s failure didn’t deter her. He had simply taken a wrong turn somewhere. That was all.

  At the door she glanced back into the room and saw that he had picked up Cade’s sheet of notepaper again and was running his shaking finger up and down the list of numbers.

  The sight renewed Sasha’s optimism, and she took the stairs two at a time. Outside she made for the High Street. She could get a bus there to take her home. She smiled at the word. A bed, a chair, and a wardrobe didn’t make a home. But the room was safe and warm. And she could close her eyes and go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that Silas and his cameras were far away and that she had got from him all that she had ever wanted.

  She leant against a recess in the wall opposite Queen’s College and idly watched the passing cars. It was the rush hour and the traffic was moving slowly in both directions. Soon a red light farther down the road brought the flow on her side to a complete halt, and her eyes rested on a black Jaguar that had stopped almost parallel with where she was standing. There was a man driving, and a woman beside him in the passenger seat. They were obviously arguing. The woman was gesticulating almost violently with her hands, and the man kept twisting around toward her to deliver a flurry of angry words before turning back to check the road in front of him.

  With a start Sasha recognised Stephen’s girlfriend, Mary. She hadn’t seen her since the night of the murder. And now here she was, arguing with this strange foreign-looking man inside an expensive car. There was something about his high cheekbones and narrow eyes that made Sasha uneasy. Of course there was nothing wrong with Mary’s finding another man to spend her time with, given where Stephen was heading. But the choice seemed strange. Mary had struck her as so sweet natured and devoted to Stephen when she had visited the manor house in the week before Cade’s murder, and yet here she was now with this hard-looking man. He looked capable of anything. Involuntarily, Sasha turned away from the car and faced the wall, pretending to look for something in her empty briefcase. Without knowing why, she realised that she didn’t want Mary to see her. The ploy se
emed to have been successful, for when she turned back a minute later, the Jaguar had disappeared from view, and her bus was coming up the road toward her.

  Sasha settled herself into a corner seat and thought of the Marjean codex open on her father’s table. He would translate Cade’s numbers into letters. She was sure of it. And the letters would tell her the way to St. Peter’s cross. Cade had failed to find it, but she wouldn’t make the same mistakes. It was her destiny to have it. She knew it was. Closing her eyes, Sasha pictured the cross in her hands. The wood was ancient, cut from one of the oak trees that used to grow in such profusion on the hills around Jerusalem. Jesus Christ had been nailed to it by the Jews, and Simon Peter had worn it around his neck until the Romans crucified him too. The jewels had come later. They authenticated the cross and made it heavy, too heavy to wear according to the old authors. They spoke of great uncut rubies and emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, and Sasha imagined the lights of the gemstones mixing together in the candlelight of Charlemagne’s church to create a precious rainbow, an earthly representation of the lights of heaven. Sasha longed for the cross. It was a wonder of the world, worth nothing less than everything to obtain.

  By the time she got back to her room, Sasha had entirely forgotten about Mary Martin and the man in the car. As so often happened, the thought of the codex and the cross had driven every other experience right out of her head.

  NINETEEN

  Above all Stephen felt a sensation of weight. The air itself seemed heavy, pressing down on his chest, making it difficult to breathe. It wasn’t at all how he had imagined it was going to be. He had pictured the witness box as an opportunity, his chance to convince the doubters, to win them over to his side. But it was nothing like that. He directed his answers at the jury just as his barrister had told him to, but the jurors’ faces remained impassive. There were no connections to be made. He was surrounded by people hanging on his every word, and yet he was completely alone.