by Howard Mason
John was now on absolutely safe ground as far as Babington and Pettigrew were concerned, and rather enjoyed his first essay in impersonation, while I spent the weekend tucked away in the attics of the west wing of the castle, waited on by old Nana, who would bring me graphic accounts of the proceedings going on at the other end of the building.
Nana, in all this, was splendid. If Master John wished to stay at home in my place, if I had found a nice young lady at last and wanted to stay on that barbarous Continent, it was all right with her. It would be nice to have Master John home again, she had written; she expected he had grown a good deal, and he must be very brown, with all that sun. Poor lamb, fancy he was wounded; she would soon have him well. No, she wouldn’t tell anyone, especially not that nosy old parson who was always coming up and poking about the place; trust her to fool them all. And she had, too; so had James Gurney, the butler, who was now a bent old man past doing anything except to sit polishing silver in his pantry.
The real difficulty was the damned parson. I went to see him and suggested that he might wish to be relieved of the annual duty I had put upon him; but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was an obstinate old man of eighty-four, who persisted in believing that he was fit for another twenty years, and seemed indeed likely to live that long. I was put in a spot; I could hardly change the routine now without upsetting him and causing comment.
Six months went by, and I had still come no further to solving this problem. I had by this time established my intention of retiring to a life of seclusion, and had tidied up a good many details; I had found the name of a good doctor in the neighbouring town, whom John could summon in case of need; I had embarked for the first time in my life on a study of gardening, and dismissed the old gardeners with a tale of having promised the job to my old batman. During this time John and I lived a kind of composite life as Lord Stonybridge, each taking his turn as the occasion arose; we fell into a pleasant routine of it, and began to take it quite for granted. A visitor might be announced, as we sat together in the library: “The parson? That’s you, George,” John would say, returning to his bulb catalogue; or “The doctor, John; your turn,” and John would rise, grumbling, and go down to the hall. There was one thing we were spared, and that was tiresome relatives. I had never had much to do with the Charles’s or the Olivers; for they had both, as you know, married young and against our father’s wishes, and got themselves killed shortly afterwards, so that their families never had much chance of becoming, so to speak, part of the Stonybridge family circle. Well, you know that yourself; your father and your uncle never had much to do with me. I didn’t even bother to visit them, during those months; I knew John would never be bothered by them, and if ever they took it into their heads to propose themselves for a visit, he had only to find some excuse to refuse them.
Yes, everything was running smoothly, and only the Vicar continued to live on and on, more obstinate than ever. “Done it for you for twenty years, my boy. No need to change now. Life in the old dog yet.” It was infuriating. Many a time I thought almost seriously of getting him in for sherry and poisoning his drink. I did once invite him to dinner, and pressed him continually with strong drink and a great deal of very rich food, and far too much port, hoping to bring on a heart attack. But he tucked away all my meat and half my cellar without turning a hair, and turned up bright as a button to read matins in his church at eight o’clock the following morning.
The release, when it came, was merciful; for me, if not for the Vicar. He caught a cold from delivering a too lengthy sermon from his chilly pulpit, which was in a nasty draught from a gap in the roof. The cold turned to pneumonia, and he died.
After that I stayed only for long enough to see John comfortably settled, with a new gardener, a new greenhouse, and a trunkful of books on the cultivation of tropical plants in cold climates. When the new parson arrived in the village to take the old Vicar’s place, John invited him up to the castle, regretted that his health made regular church attendance impossible for him, promised a substantial annual sum for the repair and maintenance of the church roof, and prepared the way for his annual request for the affidavit.
I returned to Germany and to Sarah, assuming the name of von Arnhem; and John remained at Stour, sending me annually two-thirds of the trust income, and retaining the rest, which was all he wanted, for himself.
Since I had never taken any interest in the House of Lords, after taking my seat over twenty years earlier, John remained similarly aloof from politics. He became a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, and later was elected to the Athenaeum, which between the two of them provided all the social life he needed; and settled down to a peaceful, contented life among his plants.
As for me, I married Sarah, and found, here at Cochem, the first real contentment I had ever known. We travelled, when we pleased and for as long as we pleased; and in the winters, we devoted ourselves to the study of Curtius, which proved an absorbing though an unrewarding passion.
* * * *
Unrewarding; yes. We never learned Curtius’ secret. Nor Joseph’s.
“Look for the schoolmaster’s letter in the globe.” Those had been Joseph’s departing words to me; and, believe me, we looked.
We had learned a little about Curtius, from the old family histories in the library. He was not a lovable character, by all accounts. He had gained the inheritance by murdering his half-brother, and his alien Italian blood made him disliked and feared; he was known to his contemporaries as “Curtius the Spider.” He had a passion for chess, and was a master of the game; he was thought to have gone mad, and died before he was fifty. Those were the snippets of information we found, and, at first, nothing more.
And then we found a reference, in one of these books, to an English tutor, engaged by Curtius in 1550 for the instruction of his sons; one Master Nicholas Truelove, of Gloucester, a schoolmaster.
It was Sarah who thought of the globe in the old schoolroom, here at Burg Endert. It was a child’s globe of the world, she said; it had some historical interest, because it was one of the earliest to be used for the teaching of the new geography—the geography of a world that had been flat, and was become round.
She had often looked at it curiously, a battered little object, standing on a wooden pedestal, that had taught generations of Cochem children their world. The charting of the land and sea areas on its curved face was largely fanciful, with Europe covering half the globe, and great areas labelled “Terra Incognita,” decorated with mermaids and dolphins. The globe could, she said, have been hollow; it seemed a likely enough hiding-place for a tutor’s last message, or an indiscreet letter which he had written and wished to conceal.
Unfortunately, the globe was no longer at Burg Endert.
It had been sold, along with some of the other contents of the schoolroom, to one of the dealers whom Sarah had been forced to call in after the war. They had taken all kinds of things, some valuable, others trivial; the globe had gone, she thought, in a “lot” with some of the schoolroom books and furnishings.
Of course we tried to recover it, but it had, by that time, long passed out of the original dealer’s hands, and we were unable to trace it. We wrote, over the years, to antique dealers and curiosity shops all over Europe, but without success. I suppose someone had taken a fancy to the object, and bought it as a curiosity; it must have had some little historical value. It was a great pity, but there it was.
We still had Curtius’ chessmen—but without the red bishop. I had been allowed to take the rest of the set with me from Cologne, when I was returned to my prison-camp. One of my fellow-prisoners carved me a little bishop out of bone, to complete the set—we play with it often, Sophia and I. You shall see it, later on.
So there it stood; we were unable to satisfy our curiosity, greatly as it pricked us. And it has remained unsatisfied. Though I have hopes; yes, I have hopes. But as to that, well, we shall see.
I have often thought (he continued after a slight pause) of my mother and her fine hopes for her four sons. Two of them killed in their early youth; one banished to Ceylon; one mouldering of inactivity at Stour, with too much money and nothing he wanted to do with it. At least the two of us snatched happiness and the life we wanted. I have never regretted it; and nor, I think, has John. Poor fellow, so he’s gone. You must look after his gardens, young man; I hope you’ll do that.
I suppose you wondered what had happened to all the Stonybridge capital, when you came to find the cupboard was bare. I don’t blame you; I should have been very annoyed myself, in your place. The answer’s simple enough.
When I reached the age of sixty—it was, let me see, in 1929—the trust was dissolved, and the capital became mine—or rather, John’s. The freed income was larger than it had been under the restrictions of the trust, and the capital had accrued; but we were not to get much more in fact, because taxes ate up the increase.
Since we were both perfectly satisfied with the existing arrangement, there seemed to be no good reason for altering it. John left the administration of the capital in the hands of Babington and Pettigrew, no longer as trustees but simply as his solicitors; and he continued to send me my share of the income.
It was a few years later—’36, I think it was—that Babington and Pettigrew packed up; they had been doing badly, and sold the firm and its goodwill to a man called Mott; they remained, I believe, as sleeping partners. John didn’t take much of a fancy to Mott, but he seemed competent enough, and John let things go on as they were.
Until, of course, this second war appeared on the horizon.
I won’t tell you of our life here under the Nazis. They left us alone, and we left them alone. We sometimes thought of moving, but our roots had grown too deep. And we couldn’t go back to England. There could only be one Lord Stonybridge in the country. But by 1937, when war was beginning to seem possible, if not certain, it seemed essential to get some capital out of England to me, before it was too late. For if war came, John would be able to send me nothing.
So we moved to Switzerland. (It was there that my wife died, you know; Sophia and I returned only a year ago.) And gradually, over the course of the next year, John realized the greater part of the capital and transferred it to my account, in the name of von Arnhem, in the National Bank of Switzerland. He did it very carefully; he took everything out of Mott’s hands, and managed the whole business of selling up by himself. The money was dotted about in a number of different investments, and he was able to sell out without creating much of a stir—except, no doubt, in the offices of Mott, Babington and Pettigrew. I shall be interested to learn what they were able to tell you.
You will realize that while John had no family to provide for, I had by this time not only Sarah, but Sophia also to think of. John needed only enough to keep himself for his remaining years; I wanted something substantial to leave for my daughter. As for the Stonybridge heir, well, of course, I thought it would be Oliver’s son; your uncle. He was doing nicely then, as a barrister; as far as I was concerned, he would have to make do with the entailed estate. Sophia was more important.
Well, he died, and your father died, and now you tell me young Oliver got himself killed shooting tigers; I’ve outlived the lot of ’em; and here you are. I suppose you came looking for your money. I don’t blame you. I don’t know how you found me, and I don’t know whether I’m going to give you anything, now that you have; but we’ll see. We’ll see how you shape. It’s getting dark. Draw the curtains, Sophia; so.
PART THREE
Curtius the Spider
CHAPTER I
Lord Stonybridge hitched himself higher in his canopied bed, thumped at his pillows peevishly, and demanded his tea.
This, when a German manservant brought it, turned out to be an old-fashioned English meal on a large scale, with a lot of heavy silver and white linen and food, and Stony settled down to it with every sign of zest, working his way through the platefuls of buttered scones and plum cake with an appetite which seemed as relentless as the Vicar of Stour’s. For the moment, he was too occupied to talk; and on the whole, I was glad of this respite.
His story had given me plenty to think about; and the first thoughts that passed through my mind, as I dispassionately watched Sophia licking butter off her fingers with an air of cat-like detachment, were not perhaps such as to do me credit.
I thought, for instance, that Stony was still a very rich man; that there was a chance, if he took a fancy to me, that he might leave me some of that money; that the bulk of his fortune would however go to Sophia, who was his only child; and that Sophia Scrivener was, considered all round, a distinctly promising filly, still at the two-year-old stage perhaps, but already showing signs of excellent form.
In fact, on form alone, she seemed to me to be well worth backing, quite apart from the prize stakes which were involved; but these considerations, I told myself, would have to wait. For the moment, there were other problems in hand, and I drank a cup of tea and addressed my mind to them.
It seemed to me that I ought to be feeling satisfied; but I wasn’t. I was feeling cheated, flat, and vaguely depressed.
That I felt cheated was not surprising. I had set out to look for three-quarters of a million pounds, and all I had found was an obstinate and vigorous old man eating plum cake. In the meantime, I had been to a lot of trouble and expense and got myself assaulted, knocked out, and drugged; and at the end of it, I was no better off than I was when I started. If anything, I was rather worse off, unless I could milk Stony for the expenses of my trip. I thought of the unpaid bills lying on my desk in Flood Street, and felt irrationally annoyed with the old man, sitting there swilling the best Lapsang-Suchong in his comfortable bed in his comfortable castle; he certainly knew how to look after himself, I thought; and remembering that gloomy barrack at Stour, it seemed to me that he had been well repaid for all his trouble. You could have Stony Castle for Burg Endert any day, as far as I was concerned. But that was beside the point.
For the point, as I saw it, was Curtius’ red bishop.
The bishop’s past had been accounted for well enough; but his present and his future were problematical. It was the bishop, in fact, which accounted for my feeling of dissatisfaction. He was a loose end. But a loose end, I thought, which was going to lead somewhere.
At the moment, he was sitting in the pocket of Mr. Walter Mott; and what Mr. Mott was doing at the moment, I would have given a great deal to know.
The thought of Mott revived me from my state of depression; because it occurred to me, with renewed force, that although Stony’s fortune had proved to be a dead end, there must still be something very profitable at stake in this wild goose-chase that Mott had led me on. Something, in fact, that had already led Mott to the lengths of theft, fraud and violence, and which was even now leading him down-river in the direction of Trier with three days’ provisions in the back of his formidable car.
For it was not, after all, Lord Stonybridge’s fortune that Mott had been after. It couldn’t be. Lord Stonybridge’s fortune was sitting cosily in Herr von Arnhem’s bank in Cologne; and there was nothing Mott could do about that. He couldn’t even have known about it. Either he was working on false information about it, and was on the wrong track altogether; or he was after something else.
Now, when Stony had told me about Joseph and his “schoolmaster’s letter in the globe”—the globe that had been sold over thirty years ago from Burg Endert—my first thought was that Mott had somehow got hold of that globe and its contents.
It was a nice, simple theory, and it seemed to explain a good deal; yet, now that I came to think it over, there were a good many things which it left unexplained.
How, to begin with, could he have come into possession of the globe? Why, after more than thirty years of oblivion, should it have found its way into Mott’s hands—Mott, of all people,
who was already so closely connected with Burg Endert and its owner? It seemed a strange coincidence; too strange. There was a missing link somewhere, I thought; and I didn’t know what it was.
For if Mott did have that letter—had he, then, never been after the Stonybridge fortune at all? If not, why had he taken so much trouble to keep me in the dark about Stony’s affairs? What had Hedge got to do with it? In any case, what was Mott doing now? Why had he left Cochem? Why had he made no attempt to see Herr von Arnhem? Could it be that he was, after all, on a false track? Was he following a red herring?
Red herring. Red bishop. He still had that red bishop.
This is where I came in, I thought, frustrated.
I set down my cup and looked across at Stony, who was finishing his meal. It seemed to me that it was time I told him of my own part in the story, and of my ideas about Mott. The trouble was, I didn’t want to tell him about Braun. He evidently hadn’t seen The Times’ brief account of the Braun case; maybe he never got beyond the sports column. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be much point in informing him, as I should have to do if I told him the truth, that his marriage had been bigamous and that his daughter was, strictly speaking, a bastard; so I decided to skip the Braun part.
I was just wondering how to get around it, when, suddenly, I remembered something.
I got up and crossed to the bed.
“Look, Lord Stonybridge—”
He glanced up. “Arnhem’s the name, my boy, and don’t you forget it. Can’t have the servants hearing you. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
“All right.” I paused. “That tale of Joseph’s—about the letter in the globe.”
He pricked up his ears. “Yes?”
“Have you told me the whole story?”
“Ah.” He fixed his eyes on me, with a wary look. “What makes you think I haven’t?”
