‘My friend – Fickling – told me that suspicion between the two institutions went so far that his friendship with a master at the Choir School was disapproved of.’
The young man said quickly: ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s the friendship itself which is frowned upon.’ Then he flushed and said: ‘Dr Locard has asked me to convey his apologies, Dr Courtine. He will not be able to help you this morning as he had hoped. He has to prepare for the meeting of the Chapter. Some important business has unexpectedly arisen.’
‘That is most regrettable from my point of view.’ It was of a piece, I reflected, with the invitation to dinner which the Librarian had offered and then withdrawn, and it reduced even further my chances of finding what I was seeking.
The young man must have seen the disappointment on my face for he offered me a cup of coffee before I resumed my dusty labours in the undercroft and added: ‘When Pomerance arrives he’ll light the fires so if we wait a while it will be warmer.’
I accepted with gratitude, though reflecting that the heat would not penetrate to where I would be working. As he led the way to the snug bay in which he made coffee, he said: ‘I think I can tell you without betraying any confidences, that there is something of a crisis today. The Chapter meeting will be long and difficult.’
I remembered Gazzard saying that the school was to be discussed this morning and assumed that the crisis was connected with the gossip I had heard in the tap-room last night. I was unwilling, however, to put Quitregard in an embarrassing situation by asking him any questions. We seated ourselves and waited while the kettle boiled.
‘Of course I’m very sorry that Dr Locard is unable to lend me his valuable assistance,’ I remarked. ‘But I fear that all the help in the world would not advantage me. Even if the manuscript is here I could spend six months searching down there and still miss it.’
The young man looked a little self-conscious as he bent over the stove. I wondered if he was embarrassed because he had overheard me talking to Dr Locard about this. ‘I wish I could help you,’ he said. ‘I would give anything to find it for you, and I’m sure Dr Locard would much prefer it to be found by one of his staff.’
‘I wish so too. Dr Locard talked of you in very flattering terms and was kind enough to say that he might be able to release you for a few hours to give me the benefit of your assistance.’
‘Did he?’ Quitregard turned away to reach down a jar of coffee and said over his shoulder: ‘However, I’m dismayed to have to tell you that Dr Locard reminded me only yesterday afternoon how important it is that we continue with our cataloguing of the manuscripts and has given me work that will keep me occupied for the next week or more.’
‘That is unfortunate. But I have at least had the advantage of Dr Locard’s advice. His interpretation of the single piece of evidence I have was masterly. I should explain that it is a letter written by an antiquarian of the Restoration called Pepperdine who ...’
‘I have to confess that I overheard your conversation,’ the young man said apologetically, looking up from his labours over the coffee-pot. ‘I had no reason to assume it was confidential.’
‘It wasn’t in the least confidential. But in that case you will know how brilliantly Dr Locard read beneath the surface appearance of the evidence to find its truer significance. It was an impressive demonstration of historical analysis.’ He bent over the kettle so that I could not see his face. I went on: ‘And you probably also heard us talking about the new perspective the letter gives on the Freeth affair?’
‘Yes, I did. And it’s an incident which I’ve always been fascinated by.’
‘In that case you will be interested to learn that I am to hear yet another version of it this afternoon. Yesterday I went to read the inscription on the wall of the New Deanery.’
‘The famous Satanic inscription,’ Quitregard said turning round with a smile. ‘Though I doubt if it has anything to do with the death of Dean Freeth.’
‘No, indeed. It was in connection with the story of Treasurer Burgoyne that I went to read it.’ The young man raised an eyebrow to express equal scepticism. ‘But that’s beside the point,’ I went on. ‘I was going to tell you that I happened to fall into conversation with the old gentleman who now lives in the house, and he invited me to tea tomorrow.’ I corrected myself. ‘I mean this afternoon.’
Quitregard looked astonished. ‘Really? Mr Stonex?’
‘Yes. He mentioned that he knows a story about Freeth’s death which he inherited with the house. He is to tell it to me this afternoon.’
‘I can’t tell you how surprised I am. You are honoured indeed. He is very reclusive. Or perhaps you are not so fortunate. I’ve heard that he is far from gracious.’
‘Well he was perfectly charming to me.’
Quitregard raised his eyebrows. ‘You astonish me immensely, Dr Courtine.’
‘That anyone should be charming to me?’ I asked playfully.
He smiled. ‘Such an invitation is quite at odds with all that I have ever heard about him. And I grew up in Thurchester and have heard gossip about him all my life. He is friendly to children only – in fact, only to the boys of the Choir School which he attended himself. As it happens, I saw him talking to one as we were arriving.’
‘And what is said about him in the town?’
‘Although he is a personage who is much talked about, very little is known for sure about him. He is very prominent in his capacity as the sole proprietor of the Thurchester and County Bank.’
‘It’s possible that he is affable only to people who have no knowledge of his position in this town – like children and strangers. But I may take it, then, that he is wealthy?’
‘Did he not give you that impression?’ the young man said with a smile.
‘Very far from it. His appearance was somewhat threadbare. And the house looks – from the outside at least – to be in a poor way.’
‘He is – not to mince words – a famous miser and spends as little as possible on himself and his comforts and nothing on anyone else’s. But the truth is that he is one of the town’s wealthiest citizens – probably the wealthiest. Yet he lives in the most frugal and reclusive manner. I have never heard of anyone being invited into his house.’
‘He has no friends or relatives?’
‘No relatives with whom he is on good terms – or any sort of terms – though it is said that he had a sister with whom he quarrelled many years ago. And certainly no friends.’
‘Then I have been favoured indeed. I wonder how I shall be received. What shall I find?’
‘I shall be intrigued to hear from you,’ the young man said with a smile. ‘The house will be clean and tidy for a woman comes every day to take care of it. Everything will be in its exact place but you will notice that nothing in the house has been newly purchased. Apart from his collection of old maps, he has an absolute horror of spending money.’
‘Is he merely eccentric, or is it something more serious?’
‘He is not in the least deranged. Perhaps I should not even say that he is eccentric since a prosperous banker to whom people entrust their money can hardly be said to be eccentric – but, rather, that he is an original. And his originality might be said to lie in the extreme orderliness of his life. He is like Kant, the philosopher, whose daily movements were said to be so regular that the citizens of his town would set their watches by him.’
‘Is there any reason for his punctiliousness in regard to time and for his unsociability?’
‘Both seem to arise from his terror of being robbed. They say that he keeps a fortune in cash and gold in a hiding-place in his house. I have no idea if that is so. I would imagine that he entrusts his valuables to the strong-room at the bank. But that is the belief in the town and I suppose that it might have been prompted by the elaborate precautions he takes to avoid being robbed. And perhaps he now has to take such precautions only because of the belief that his house is worth breaking into.’
He laughed
and I smiled with him.
‘What are these precautions?’
‘He receives nobody at the house. Hence the unusual honour accorded to yourself.’ Here he half-rose and gave me a little mock-bow. I was beginning to like this young man a great deal. ‘The house is never left unoccupied and he himself leaves it only to go to the bank. There is only one set of keys which he keeps on a chain on his person and so nobody apart from himself has a key – not even the single servant – an old woman, Mrs Bubbosh, who comes every day to clean and do the laundry and prepare his meals.’
‘If she has no key and Mr Stonex spends much of the day at the bank, how does she enter and leave?’
‘A very good question. This is one of the most original elements of the old gentleman’s way of life. He admits her at seven and she makes his breakfast. He leaves the house at half-past seven, locking her in.’
‘She is locked in all day?’
‘Until he returns for his luncheon at noon. And all the windows are barred by shutters which are locked so that she cannot let anyone in. The old woman has a few hours’ leave in the afternoon for her employer’s dinner is brought by a waiter from an inn nearby. It arrives punctually on the stroke of four. So he opens the door only at those times: seven, four, and six when Mrs Bubbosh returns and he goes back to the bank. He comes home at nine for his supper and she goes home.’
‘When I met him yesterday he mentioned his dinner. I thought he said he was expecting it, and yet it must have been long after four for I left here at a quarter past when your colleague closed the Library.’
Quitregard smiled. ‘I think you must have misunderstood him. I assure you that any alteration in his daily routine would be widely talked about in the town.’
‘The rigidity of his daily round intrigues me. I wonder if there is something in his past that he is trying to protect himself from.’
The young man looked at me quizzically.
‘People sometimes attempt to shield themselves from painful memories by adopting a fixed pattern in their lives.’ At the worst time in my life I had turned myself into a figure on an old clock – popping up from my desk or out from my study merely for meals, lectures and tutorials. The youthful librarian clearly had no idea what I was talking about, so I dropped the subject. ‘How long has he led that life?’
‘He has been miserly and solitary all his life, but it was about eight or nine years ago that he started to take such elaborate precautions.’
‘If he has no relatives, what does he plan to do with all his carefully guarded wealth?’
‘The town would love to know the answer to that.’
‘Has the town no conception at all?’ I asked with a smile.
‘The town suspects – and certainly hopes – that he will leave it to the Cathedral Foundation for the benefit of his old school. He holds it high in his somewhat flinty affections for he had a difficult childhood and one or two of the masters at the school were kind to him.’
The Cathedral clock sounded the hour and I stood up. ‘Well, this has been very pleasant but I must return to work.’
Quitregard also rose to his feet. ‘You are going to continue to search in the undercroft?’
‘Indeed,’ I said, surprised by his question after what I had told him.
He hesitated for a moment as if he was on the point of saying something he found awkward, but then he laughed and said: ‘I’m afraid it will be cold. Pomerance has not arrived to light the fires yet. He knows Dr Locard is as a rule busy with the Chapter meeting on Thursdays and is usually late that day.’
I thanked him for the coffee and went down to the heaps of mouldering manuscripts and resumed my search. Quitregard’s question had seemed idle enough but it made me wonder: was this arduous search the right course of action? Something had begun to occur to me even while I was talking to the young man. The Librarian’s strange conduct in cancelling his invitation, breaking his appointment and, Quitregard had implied, withdrawing the assistance of his staff, had made me start to wonder if Dr Locard – so obsessed with scholarly rivalry and elaborate bluffs and counter-bluffs – could be envious of my discovery that Grimbald’s manuscript might be in this building. Could it be that he had decided that he would find the manuscript himself? As Mrs Sisterson’s unguarded words had implied, it might be humiliating to him to have such an important discovery made under his own nose by an outsider, and he and his assistants were about to start cataloguing the remaining material quite soon. Austin had warned me about his ambition and, he had implied, his unscrupulousness, and although I had accepted the former I had declined to see the latter quality in him. Had I been naive? Had Dr Locard deliberately given me advice that would lead me into wasting my time? Had he, in fact, done to me what he had convinced me Pepperdine had done to Bullivant? Could it be that he had decided to enter the field of Anglo-Saxon scholarship and that was why he had read my article and Scuttard’s response – which was otherwise a surprising coincidence?
All morning I sorted through piles of cobwebbed and crumbling manuscripts, my task made harder by the fact that Pomerance failed to appear – although he could have shared only the physical and not the intellectual part of my labours. At noon I left the Library, tramping with difficulty through the snow which had by now been trampled into slush and then frozen into a mass of icy mud and stones. I went to take my luncheon at the inn to which I had gone the evening before, though this time I did not enter the public-bar. When I returned at a little after one I found Quitregard making coffee and accepted his invitation to share it with him.
Just as the kettle boiled Pomerance burst in crying: ‘The Guv’nor’s won! Sheldrick’s down. They’ve knifed him properly. He’s cat’s meat now. He’ll have to sack himself. All the fellows were talking about it.’ Then he stopped suddenly at the sight of me and his long bony face turned quite crimson.
Quitregard smiled. ‘Sit down and have a cup of coffee, Pomerance.’ The young man slumped into a chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. ‘He’s just come from choir practice,’ he explained to me. ‘Where I understand singing occurs in the occasional pauses in the flow of gossip.’
‘I say, that’s not fair. The choirmaster is a real dragon. He makes us work jolly hard.’
‘Then perhaps I should emulate his dragon-like qualities.’
‘That reminds me,’ Pomerance said, ‘I won’t need to have tomorrow afternoon off.’
‘But what about the service for the organ?’
‘Oh, that has been cancelled.’
Quitregard looked at him in astonishment.
‘There’s something rum up with the Cathedral,’ Pomerance explained. ‘So the organ will be out of use from after Evensong tonight.’
‘Something rum?’ Quitregard echoed. ‘Can’t you deploy the resources of the English language with a little more finesse, Pomerance?’
The young fellow shrugged to indicate that he knew no more.
‘The workmen may have done some slight damage to the base of a pier,’ I said, delighted to be able to contribute some information about his native town that Quitregard did not have. Gratifyingly, the young man turned to me in surprise. With a flourish I added: ‘And there’s a mysterious smell.’
Pomerance wrinkled up his nose. ‘Yes, it’s utterly foul. It was beastly having to sing when you wanted to keep your mouth shut.’
‘I can’t believe you’ve ever wanted to keep your mouth shut since you drew your first breath,’ Quitregard said. ‘But when will the service take place?’
‘Probably next week.’ The youth glanced quickly at me and then turned back to his colleague: ‘And by then it’s very likely that there will be a new organist.’
Quitregard smiled. ‘Possibly. We will see.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s time for me to return to my labours. My somewhat hopeless labours.’
Quitregard glanced at Pomerance. ‘Go and start copying yesterday’s work into the register, like a good fellow.’
The young
man drained his cup and got up.
‘I missed you this morning, Mr Pomerance,’ I said with ironic politeness. ‘Will you be able to come down and give me a hand later?’
‘Oh no,’ he said immediately. ‘The Guv’nor says I’m not to any more.’ Then he caught Quitregard’s eye and reddened.
‘Hurry along now, old chap,’ his older colleague said mildly and the youth walked down to the other end of the long gallery.
I waited for Quitregard to say something but he seemed to be lost in his thoughts. To break the silence I asked: ‘Are the reverend canons really so fierce with each other?’
He smiled. ‘They are for the most part honest and intelligent men who find it curiously easy to attribute to their colleagues the most heinous motives.’
‘I know the truth of that from my own college. It’s extraordinary how a group of entirely honourable men can come to see each other as unprincipled demons simply because they take a different position on some issue.’
‘And almost invariably their suspicions are unjustified.’
‘I believe I can guess what the real issue is in this case.’
He looked at me in astonishment. ‘Can you?’
‘It’s universal, is it not?’
‘Is it?’ He turned away to sort out the used crockery.
‘It is widely known that most of the Thurchester canons are High – the Dean especially – but that others are on the Evangelical wing. Every Chapter in England has such a division.’
He turned back to me and nodded pleasantly. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘I assume Dr Locard is High?’
‘Vertiginously.’
‘But Dr Sheldrick is Low,’ I suggested.
He nodded. ‘Almost perfectly horizontal.’
‘Well, there is the whole explanation. I imagine the canons have been bickering – I beg their pardon, disputing – for years about the usual issues of incense and vestments and anthems and so on. But presumably something much more serious has been debated today.’ When he said nothing I asked: ‘As the Chancellor, does Dr Sheldrick have any responsibility for the Choir School?’
The Unburied Page 17
