by Howard Mason
The conditions were that I, George Albert Bernard, should reside for not less than eleven months of the year at Stony Castle, Stour; and that the gardens of the castle were to be maintained by my efforts in the manner to which they had been accustomed. These conditions fulfilled, I should receive from the trustees an annual sum of nine thousand pounds, which would, of course, be considerably diminished by taxes, even in those days.
If I failed to satisfy the trustees that the conditions had been fulfilled, the income was to go to the Royal Horticultural Society of Great Britain for the purpose of research. To Oliver’s and Charles’ families, he left a small bequest; John was, of course, left nothing at all.
The only concession my father had made was that, when I had attained the age of sixty, the trust would be dissolved and the capital would become mine to do with as I pleased.
He was taking no chances. I suppose he thought that up to the age of fifty-nine, I might still be capable of undertaking trips of polar exploration; and that once I had attained my three-score years, I should be likely to settle down to spend my declining years at Stour.
To a young man of thirty-one, the age of sixty seems a very long way off indeed. Three-quarters of a million pounds would be no more use to me at that age, I thought, than they would be if they were buried with me in my tomb. And in the meantime, I could look forward to one of two things: utter penury, or thirty years of incarceration at Stour. I didn’t know which was the worse.
There was very little money coming in from the estate, and what there was would be eaten up by the estate itself. The Arctic, of course, was out of the question in any case. I couldn’t afford it without the income, and if I got the income I couldn’t go away.
The trustees, who were Burnley and a fellow-solicitor in the same firm, were scrupulous-minded, and though they sympathized with my predicament, they wouldn’t part with a penny until, each year, they had received a signed declaration from the Vicar of Stour, stating that to the best of his knowledge I had resided continuously at Stony Castle for the past year, excepting for holiday periods not exceeding one calendar month.
I suppose, looking back, that I was a fool not to make the grand gesture and break away from it all, to go out and try to earn a living. I considered it often enough; oh yes. But to turn down nine thousand a year is much more difficult than it may seem. I told myself that I was trained for nothing, that I had no chance of being able to support myself even in discomfort; perhaps I was just concealing from myself my own lack of courage. And then, the years go by so quickly. Every spring, as that damned map of a garden began to show its first gleams of colour, I would say: this is the time, now, while it is not too late; and every autumn would find me gloomily contemplating the withered continent. I tried to be a good landowner; the business of the estate occupied my time, and I had nothing else to do.
And so fourteen years slipped by; and then it was 1914. The war, for me, came like a blessing in disguise, rescuing me from the rich, gloomy tomb of my life in my forty-fifth year.
* * * *
(Here Lord Stonybridge’s narrative was interrupted while lunch was served in his bedroom. During the meal I had to restrain my curiosity, for he had a hearty appetite and wouldn’t allow conversation to interfere with his food. When the meal was over, he went on with his story for a while, after declaring his intention of taking his usual nap at three o’clock.)
The war (he continued) released me from Stour; it also released my brother John from Ceylon.
Over all these years, we had communicated with friendly irregularity, and I had from time to time sent him money, of which I had more than enough, and he very little.
I had offered him a home at Stony Castle, and money to live on; and he had sometimes considered coming back to England. But like me, he had become settled in the routine of his life, and had indeed got married some years back, to the daughter of a local planter; he could never quite bring himself to the point of tearing up his roots and transplanting himself once more. When the war came, he had joined, as I did, the regiment to which our dead brothers had belonged; and so we found ourselves together again, in the same battalion.
We fought together, in France; and in 1915, I was taken prisoner, and found myself in a German camp, with the war barely begun.
I stayed in that camp for six months. It was as bad as being incarcerated at Stour, only considerably less comfortable. After six months, I escaped.
If you’ll ask me another time, I’ll tell you all about that escape; I daresay you won’t much care to hear it now. It seems all these young fellows nowadays escape simply in order to write a book about it. I could have written one myself, if I’d felt like it; I daresay I could teach them a thing or two.
Where was I? I escaped; and I slipped down the Rhine in a stolen skiff, and hid in these hills; yes, those hills you can see out there.
I had stolen some clothing, and did the best I could for food; and in these hills, that isn’t much. I became bolder, after a time, and used to come down to the village at night, to take a drink in one of the Bierstuben. There were a lot of strangers about in the village, in those days, and I found it easy enough to pass unnoticed. I practised my German phrases for weeks before I made the first venture; I’d picked up a bit of it in camp. I got a few odd looks, but nobody questioned me. I would sit in a dark corner and listen, listen, to try and pick up a bit more of the language without which I couldn’t hope to get any further.
And then one evening, when I had become quite proficient at understanding the speech, I overheard some of the villagers talking, in subdued whispers, about the owner of the castle on the hill, the Burg Endert. I had already learned that this was the Graf Joseph, the latest of a line that was several centuries old.
And what they were saying amounted to this: they suspected that the Graf was a traitor to his country.
I couldn’t grasp all that they were saying, but I heard more than once the word Spion—spy. It was a word which in those days, not only in Germany, was often bandied about when someone was either unconventional in his behaviour, or simply disliked or feared; rather as, in the Middle Ages, the most unpopular lady of the village would find herself labelled a witch. There was something superstitious in these breathy whispers; the gossip of Cochem villagers who had probably never seen a secret document or a disguised radio aerial in their lives, but who liked to think of these things existing, adding a spice of excitement to the dreary hell of their war.
Nevertheless, I was intrigued by what I heard; and feeling that there was nothing to lose except my freedom, which was at best dubious, cold and hungry, I decided to visit the castle and see what I could. If, after meeting the Graf, I decided that his patriotism was unimpeachable, I would do my best to beat a hasty retreat. Failure could only mean a return to my prison camp, and there was always the chance that this unknown lord of the castle would help me.
And so, for the first time, I visited this castle.
I pretended to be an unemployed labourer, looking for work. I gained an audience with the Graf without difficulty, and spun him the story I had invented.
The Graf Joseph was an interesting man, and a clever one. I believe that he spotted me for what I was, at about the same moment that I, summing him up, decided to throw myself on his mercy.
I said, in English: “I’m an escaped prisoner. I have come to ask your help”; and waited for my doom to fall.
He looked at me curiously. He was a handsome man, tall, with the Italian blood of the Cochems strong in him. He answered me, also in English, nearly as good as my own:
“What do you wish me to do?”
I said boldly: “A bed and some food, and later on, help in getting back to England.”
He said: “If you are what you say you are, I shall give you shelter, though I doubt if I can do more than that. If you are not what you say you are, then I shall have you shot and dropped into the ri
ver. What is your name?”
I said: “My name is George Scrivener, and I am the Viscount Stonybridge of Stour.”
“In the peerage of England, or of Ireland?”
“Of England.”
“Your regiment?”
“The Coldstream Guards.”
“Rank?”
“Major.”
“You were taken prisoner?”
“On March 2nd of this year, at Arras. I escaped six weeks ago, and have been living in the hills ever since.”
He stared at me reflectively, and said at last:
“It must be cold, in the hills. You’ll be glad to feel a bed under you again.”
I said: “Thank you,” and felt that I knew the meaning of thankfulness for the first time in my life.
* * * *
I was given a small room—the one above this, which was then his. He never told me much about his work for England. Sometimes he was away for several days, and I could only conjecture what he did on these visits. He was a great lover of England, and also of Ireland: he had married an Irish girl.
Sarah. What shall I tell you about Sarah, at this stage? She was very kind to me. If she had fears about sheltering a prisoner, she kept them well concealed. About her fears for her husband, she was more open. They both knew that he was treading on very dangerous ground; and what I had to tell them about the Cochem rumours which had brought me to the castle gave Sarah many an anxious night. She had not been interned, because Joseph had used his influence, which was, or had been, considerable.
Their servants were all faithful, and knew what their master was doing. Their loyalty was to him, as the master of Endert, rather than to the cause which he was serving. I lived in my room at the top of the castle all that winter, and became as one of the family.
In the evenings, when the curtains were drawn and the doors barred, I would come downstairs and play chess with Joseph.
He was a very fine player, and he nearly always beat me. I had only picked up the game during my stay in the prison-camp. But I improved, as the winter wore on, and the game began to have a great fascination for me.
The chessmen we used were very old, and had been in the family for hundreds of years. You will have seen their image in the portrait on the stairs; or has Sophia shown them to you? Yes, they were those of Curtius.
It was many months before I began to realize that Joseph possessed a secret.
It was not the secret of his work for England. That, between us, was something light and unspoken, ever present, but deliberately ignored in our intercourse. I knew as much as he could afford to tell me, and had no desire to learn more.
No; this was something else. It was as though there was something on his mind, something personal, that he wished, at times, to tell me, but at the last moment could not. Often, as we sat over the chessboard in the lamplight, with Sarah sewing by the fire, he would pause, and lift his head, and open his mouth as though to speak. He would look thoughtfully towards Sarah, then back towards me; and if I reminded him gently that it was his move, he would nod, absently, and set down his piece thoughtlessly, sometimes making a foolish mistake.
Perhaps it sounds as though I were making a mountain out of a mole-hill; indeed it is hard to describe this conviction I had, this feeling that there was something of which he wished to unburden himself, and of which not even Sarah knew. It was always on such occasions, when we were sitting quietly, in the evening mood for confidences, that the restlessness came upon him; and I began to notice that these incidents frequently happened on the nights before he was due to leave on one of his dangerous visits.
At first I connected his unease merely with the danger that lay ahead of him; then I began to feel that, though he indeed feared his death, what really troubled him was this need to tell someone of his secret, in case he failed to return.
I have been speaking of the winter of 1915 and ’16. (It was early in ’15 that I was captured, and I escaped in the following September.) It was in the spring of ‘16 that I first broached the question to Sarah.
She listened to me with a worried air; and when I had finished, she told me that she had had the same conviction ever since the year after she had come to Cochem, on their marriage; which had taken place only a year or two before the war. But she had never liked to question him directly, thinking that it must be something to do with his work.
Our conversation took place on Tuesday in April. And then, exactly a week later, came the knock on the door.
We were playing a game of chess at the time. The police arrived quite suddenly, and unannounced. I learned, long afterwards, that one of the younger servants had been responsible for their visit. Though faithful enough, this lad had confided in one of the girls of the village, when he was drunk. He afterwards killed himself, by jumping into the river, when he realized what he had done.
The police were quite polite; they wanted Joseph to come with them for questioning. Since I had no papers, and since they had been dropped a hint about me, I was taken along, too.
They had suspected Joseph for some time; but they had to move cautiously at first, because Joseph was a man of substance, of importance, and they couldn’t afford to make a mistake. They allowed him to pack a bag and to say goodbye to his wife; and then we embarked for Cologne.
There we were placed in adjacent cells in the police station. I suffered a thorough interrogation, and it did not take them long to identify me as a missing prisoner. When they had satisfied themselves who I was, they became more inquisitive. They asked me what I could tell them about Joseph, Graf von Cochem.
Naturally I told them nothing; only that he had given me shelter, thinking me a tramp, and not knowing who or what I was. They weren’t satisfied with this; they became erroneously convinced that I, being a peer of the English realm, must be a person of considerable importance, intimately acquainted with Lloyd George and privy to the darkest secrets of the War Office. That I had spent so many months in the house of the Graf Joseph, himself an important personage suspected of espionage, seemed to them a highly suspicious circumstance. And so, determined to uncover the deep plot in which the pair of us were clearly involved, they put us both into the same cell and left us together, hoping to overhear us, through the spyhole of the cell, discussing our nefarious affairs.
They were pleasant days that we spent together, in that tiny cell, before the police became more violent in their methods. Joseph was a man who took things philosophically, with calmness; and we talked of many things, though never of what our eavesdroppers wanted to hear.
The real charm of those first days was that Joseph, when he had packed his bag and left the castle, had brought with him his set of chessmen. The police had granted his request for it courteously enough, for at that stage, as I have said, they were still without evidence against him. And so, for hours, we sat and played chess together; and the police outside the door, puzzled by our failure to discuss anything of diplomatic or military import, came to the conclusion that, with these endless games of chess, we were somehow communicating with each other in some form of code, in which every Queen’s pawn had its significance, every move of a bishop its hidden meaning.
It was an ingenious idea, and once we had learned of what we were suspected, we spent many hours trying, for our amusement, to work out a code on these lines; but it proved to be very difficult. We did get as far as organizing a complicated system involving the initial letters of the pieces and gambits, but it was altogether too slow as a means of conversation, and we never got further than a few phrases, though Joseph did once manage to convey a whole sentence, which was:
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO HAVE FOR DINNER?
and which gave our guardians something to think about, for they had been following the construction of our code with interest.
If I am describing these days at some length, it is because I have been trying to put off for as lo
ng as possible my memories of their sequel.
It was after we had been in our cell for eleven days that we embarked, one evening, on our last game of chess together. We did not know that it was to be our last; but Joseph was worried, nevertheless, because he knew the police had dallied long enough, and were nearly ready to act. He had learned from their recent questions that they had found out a good deal about his activities; and they had warned him that more violent methods would shortly be employed in order to persuade him to deliver up the names of those accomplices who had assisted him in his work.
And so, that evening, Joseph was uneasy, as he had often been before.
When, halfway through the game, he found himself in check, and paused at some length to consider how to extricate himself, I took advantage of the moment to ask him, point-blank, if there was anything he wished to tell me, or any message that he would like me to take to Sarah, if ever he failed to return to her and if ever I became a free traveller.
He looked at me, and then, setting his elbows on the table between us, began to speak.
“If I don’t come back to Cochem,” he said, “I don’t know what will happen to Sarah.
“They’ll confiscate my goods, may even take Burg Endert. Sarah will be interned, at the least; she may be imprisoned and questioned, if they don’t find out all they want from me.”
I nodded, watching him.
“If Germany is defeated, she may be able to get back to Endert. But she’ll have no money; the State will have seen to that.” He paused, fingering a chessman; it was a bishop. He went on: “If I tell you what I’m thinking of telling you, you may be able to see to it that Sarah becomes rich, very rich. Will you do as I ask?”
I agreed, of course, saying: “Doesn’t Sarah know anything of this?”
