Ampersand Papers (7 page)

‘A facility in committing dates to memory is a useful, if humble, endowment to one in my walk of life, Mr Digitt. It enables me, for instance, to remind you that the anniversary of your father’s death falls the day after tomorrow. Lord Rupert would then be fifty-seven, had he been spared to us. A life most unhappily cut short in its prime.’

‘Yes, quite.’ Charles didn’t altogether like this facile command of the family annals, although these particular instances of it were harmless enough. ‘How is the hunt for Adrian getting on, Dr Sutch?’

‘We cannot, things being as they are’ – and Dr Sutch gestured comprehensively round the muniment room – ‘expect any very immediate success. But meanwhile, I am getting my bearings in a general way. It is curious to reflect that on his deathbed Adrian Digitt, as a devout Anglican, may have been distressed by the news of Dr Pusey’s condemnation and suspension at Oxford following upon his sermon on the Holy Eucharist. That was preached, you will recall, on the 14th of May. It was an interesting year, seeing both the publication of Liddell and Scott’s
Greek-English Lexicon
and the foundation of
The Economist
by James Wilson. Yet who is to say what was that year’s most important event? It saw, too, the beginning of Sir Richard Owen’s
Comparative Anatomy and
Physiology of Invertebrate Animals
.’

‘By Jove! Did it really?’

‘Which was concluded in 1846, and enlarged in 1855.’

‘Well, well!’ Charles wondered whether he was being made fun of. ‘Have you met Miss Deborah Digitt?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I have not had that pleasure.’ Dr Sutch appeared a little startled. ‘Do you recommend it?’

‘It’s just that she’s a bit of a historian herself.’ Charles at once regretted having mentioned this Budleigh Salterton connection. It was in his interest to keep Deborah out of the picture for the present. ‘Knows a little about the family, and that sort of thing. But probably less than you do.’

‘I must make a note of it. I gain the impression, Mr Digitt, that your father also took an interest in the subject. How unfortunate that he died before you were of an age much to discuss it with him.’

‘I was two.’ Charles felt some satisfaction in thus showing command of at least one chronological fact.

‘But precocious, no doubt.’ Dr Sutch seemed to judge that this inane remark was deftly complimentary. ‘I have been working, as I have explained to my clients, on the period of the Civil War. Do the fortunes of your family at that period hold any special interest for you?’

‘I can’t say that they do.’ Charles was conscious that Dr Sutch had put his question with an odd sharpness. ‘I gather the castle got bashed about a good deal. It’s a period that has its interest in the history of warfare, I suppose. Owners of places like this imagining they were still in the Middle Ages, and able to dig in and resist a siege. Then up come chaps with really powerful up-to-date cannon and start pulverizing them. This tower clearly suffered a bit. But it puzzles me, rather. I’m not a soldier, of course. I’m an architect.’

‘Ah, yes. I don’t doubt, Mr Digitt, that you will contribute notably to our national heritage in that field.’

‘Thank you very much.’ Charles judged this decidedly overpowering. ‘I hope that crazy staircase doesn’t worry you. The idea of it was to contribute notably to birdwatching, I believe. Its present use has been a whim of my uncle’s, and of my cousin Archie’s. I gather Archie has been lending you a hand.’

‘Yes, indeed. Lord Skillet is being most helpful.’

‘He seems a little worried by your discovery that some papers of Adrian’s are thought to have arrived in a private collection in America.’

‘He is rightly worried, of course. Yet I judge that anything of the sort is likely to be of minor importance.’

‘I had a chat with my cousin a little time ago, as a matter of fact, about places other than Treskinnick in which some sizable cache of the stuff might be found. Do you yourself think there may be anything in that?’

‘It is not a possibility to be neglected, Mr Digitt. As you know, there was the period of residence in Italy.’

‘I don’t know anything about a period of residence in Italy.’ Charles felt something like his uncle’s irritation at thus being politely credited with information there wasn’t the slightest reason to suppose he had. ‘Do you mean that Adrian Digitt lived in Italy for a time?’

‘Most assuredly he did. For a substantial period before his final domestication here at Treskinnick he occupied the
primo
piano nobile
of a small
palazzo
on the Grand Canal at Venice.’

‘The dickens he did! That must have cost him a pretty penny.’

‘Not perhaps at that period. But the fact opens up – does it not? – a further field of investigation. There may be papers mouldering away in Venice now.’

‘But the story is, Dr Sutch, that Adrian put in his last years here at the castle in trying to set all his stuff in order. So he’s not likely to have left much in Venice – or anywhere else on the Continent.’

With this argument Dr Sutch was constrained to agree – although obviously with reluctance. Charles felt it unnecessary to hint to him that Lord Ampersand was most unlikely to stand him the cost of a little tour in Italy on the strength of this nebulous hypothesis. Charles was coming to suspect Dr Sutch of being a humbug. He didn’t know what kind of humbug, but of the general idea he was pretty confident. How had Archie come by the chap? It was a point on which Archie had remained suspiciously vague. Was Sutch what might be called a creature of Archie’s? Or was he fooling Archie, or at least planning to do so?

These dark thoughts came to Charles partly because he sensed that Dr Sutch, for all his grave and deferential manner, was having dark thoughts about
him
. He had made no move to show Charles how he was actually going to work in the muniment room. It had been an unsatisfactory interview, and Charles resolved to put an end to it.

He moved to the door giving on to the little wooden platform in which the external staircase terminated. Although he had no particular fear of heights, he realized that he would be taking a firm grip of himself as he emerged and began the descent to the castle’s inner ward. Only the sea lay at a crazy depth below. Or at least one could see only the sea; actually there was a narrow band of tumbled rock rounding the promontory on which Treskinnick lay, and along this one could make one’s way at low tide. But to glimpse this from above one would have to lean out over the staircase’s handrail in a manner scarcely short of the suicidal.

‘It’s really a dreadful place!’ he exclaimed impulsively. ‘I’m surprised, Dr Sutch, that you put up with it. Just a little sweat – and possibly the loss of one or two menial lives – could get the stuff down for you to ground level. And there’s no end of room for it in the rat-ridden pile.’

This had been a nervous and disagreeable speech – as Charles Digitt knew even as he uttered it. But Dr Sutch, who was holding open for him a door which might have given access only to vacancy, received it impassively.

‘The present muniment room,’ he said, ‘although chargeable as being a shade eccentric, undoubtedly has its convenience. It affords seclusion for unintermitted work. I have very few vexatious interruptions while up here.’

At this, Charles took a civil leave of Dr Sutch and began his descent. He was enough of a Digitt to tell himself that he had just been made the recipient of a piece of damned impertinence.

It was on the following day, Tuesday, that Dr Sutch sought an interview with his employer – or with his secondary employer, as the matter should perhaps be expressed, bearing in mind his primary obligation to the Royal House of Windsor. It was not altogether easy to achieve, since Lord Ampersand had by this time come to regard his learned hireling as an unmitigated pest. Lord Ampersand, in whom a certain infirmity of purpose was sometimes to be remarked, was on the verge of abandoning the notion that there was money in Sutch – or in Sutch’s burrowings in the North Tower. He reminded himself that Skillet had on the whole remained thoroughly sceptical about the entire project. And that Skillet was a smart chap was a fact that sundry small family episodes, some of them not of the most edifying sort, had borne in on him from time to time. Once or twice he even meditated giving Sutch what he would have termed a week’s wages in lieu of notice, and bundling him out of the castle. But Lady Ampersand had discouraged him in this drastic proposal, pointing out that such an admission of fiasco might lead to ridicule on the part of her husband’s friends and neighbours. At this, Lord Ampersand, a sensitive man, had growled that he’d give the fellow his head, and pay for his oats and hay at the Ampersand Arms, for a further month. After that, they’d see.

The situation was the more annoying in that Sutch had come to conceive himself as enjoying the freedom not only of the North Tower but also of the castle as a whole. He prowled around the place in an irritating way. On several occasions he had been known to accept a glass of port from Ludlow’s pantry, gossiping with him the while. This was something which Lord Ampersand would sometimes do himself. He seldom made himself at all agreeable to his butler (as he did, it will be recalled, to the younger maidservants), but he held feudal notions of what was proper from time to time in point of condescending behaviour to his more senior retainers. But in Dr Sutch the thing was shockingly unbecoming.

It was Ludlow who acted as an emissary. He presented himself to his master in the library (in which, in fact, Lord Ampersand had formed the habit of going virtually into hiding) and announced that Dr Sutch presented his compliments, and begged the favour of a few words with his lordship. So there was nothing for it. The man had to be let in. Dr Sutch entered, and made a remarkably formal bow.

‘I hope I do not make a troublesome request,’ he said. ‘But I should be grateful if I might borrow your lordship’s copy of Mackenzie’s
The Castles of England
.’

‘Ah, um,’ Lord Ampersand said.

‘It has excellent illustrations. And might I have, too, Clark’s
Medieval Military Architecture
– which you will recall as being in two volumes – and Oman’s
Art of War in the Middle Ages
?’

‘Certainly, certainly, my dear sir.’ Lord Ampersand felt awkwardly placed. As he lived in a castle, and as that castle had a substantial library, it seemed probable that he was indeed the proprietor of the works mentioned. And as he was at this moment sitting in the middle of that library, it might no doubt be expected of him that he could rise, take a few confident steps in the right direction, and produce Mackenzie, Clark and Oman as at the drop of a hat. But it was a dilemma not too difficult to resolve. ‘Please take anything that interests you,’ he said. ‘The catalogue will guide you. That is, if there
is
a catalogue. And I do seem to remember one.’

Dr Sutch received these candid remarks with another bow.

‘Certainly there is a catalogue, my lord, and I shall gratefully avail myself of it in a moment. But a word of explanation is perhaps necessary – if you are so obliging as to afford me the time.’

‘Yes, of course. Do sit down.’ Lord Ampersand, although disapproving of Sutch’s manner of talking as it were out of an etiquette book, managed to be reasonably civil. ‘Go right ahead.’

‘You will remember the unfortunate events that succeeded at Treskinnick upon the death of the second marquess.’

‘Ah, um.’

‘The third marquess had never been favourably disposed towards Adrian Digitt, and had resented his father’s harbouring him. When he came into the title he insisted that Adrian be never mentioned again in the family. He regarded him as one who had formed deplorable associations.’

‘A bit uncharitable, eh? Natural, though. Those poets, and so forth.’

‘The question is, how might this attitude have affected the disposal of Adrian Digitt’s doubtless abundant literary remains? We have been acting on the supposition, I think it may be said, that they were simply neglected and then forgotten about. What has been brought together in the North Tower are essentially papers so treated. But there are other possibilities. I disregard one of these as barely conceivable. I refer, of course, to the third marquess’ making a bonfire of everything that Adrian had left behind him. I would not disgrace myself, my lord, by believing that any Digitt could do quite that.’

Lord Ampersand could not repress a frown – or scowl. He disliked this orotundity; he disliked being continually addressed as ‘my lord’ as if by a flunkey; and he disliked what had certainly not been a tactful use of the word ‘quite’. But he continued to restrain himself.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what more?’

‘There is the possibility that the papers were very deliberately and carefully stored away; hidden, in fact, somewhere in the castle where no casual search would find them. By adopting such a course, the third marquess would effectively have got rid of papers which he probably regarded as scandalous, and at the same time would not have had on his conscience the actual destruction of what were, after all, valuable literary documents.’

‘But they wouldn’t have been all that valuable then, would they?’ Lord Ampersand felt that he had stumbled upon an acute question. ‘And we were quite well-off in those days – not scraping round after sixpences and shillings, you know. If the chap disliked the stuff, I’d expect him just to put a match to it. Unless matches hadn’t yet been invented, that is.’ This further precision of thought on his own part so pleased Lord Ampersand that he glanced at Dr Sutch almost with cordiality.

‘Adrian Digitt’s papers would even then have been widely regarded as valuable, my lord, even if not notably so in a pecuniary sense. Scholars and men of letters would have a great regard for them. You will remember the disfavour visited upon those among Byron’s friends and associates who took it upon themselves to effect a similar, though limited, act of destruction.’

‘Ah, um. But what has this got to do with fishing out books about castles and motes and places? Treskinnick was originally a mote, you know. Not a doubt about that. Once looked into it myself.’