The Salisbury Manuscript (9 page)

‘He indicated something of the sort,’ said Tom.

‘Fortunately, I have a nephew, Walter. He is the person who showed you in here just now. He is the . . . the son I should like to have had, Mr Ansell, I do not see any reason to conceal that from you. It was one of the happiest days of my life when Walter came to live here with me, as it was earlier when he told me that he wished to enter the Church. In due course, and with God’s grace, Walter will inherit the Downton estate. Unlike his father, Walter has not disgraced himself in the expectation of plenty. Rather, he has chosen a spiritual vocation and a life of service. When he comes into his inheritance, I know that he will restore propriety to the Slater line.’

‘You do not expect that to be long?’

‘I do not expect what to be long?’

‘The time when your nephew comes into his estate.’

‘Why do you say so, Mr Ansell?’

‘Because, well, from what you have been saying, Canon Slater, it does not sound as though your brother has the prospect of a long life in front of him.’

‘Perhaps not. Yet we should not hasten any man’s death by expecting it too fervently. We are in God’s hands after all. My brother Percy may have a few years in him still, despite his feebleness. Now, Mr Ansell, let us turn to the reason why you are here.’

Felix Slater got up and crossed to the corner of the room occupied by the Old Testament pictures. With surprising dexterity he squatted on his haunches in front of the wooden chest which Tom had noticed earlier. Retrieving a key from his pocket, he fiddled with the lock. Something about his posture, the hunched shoulders and the thin legs, reminded Tom of a heron. Slater opened the lid of the chest and reached inside. He brought out an item wrapped in cloth and, clutching it, went back to his seat behind the desk. Then, with a gesture that recalled a conjurer, he whipped off the cloth cover to reveal nothing more exciting than a large, leather-bound volume with a kind of hasp attached to it. It had the appearance of a memorandum book or a ledger.

He raised the book and seemed about to pass it to Tom. Then he hesitated and said, ‘Here, Mr Ansell. You may have a brief look. This was written by my father and it is an account of a period in his life, an early period, during which he pursued an existence which it would be kind to call unrespectable and rackety. A less charitable description would be disgraceful and immoral. These are his memoirs cast in the form of a diary. I propose that they should accompany you back to London, back to the offices of Scott, Lye & Mackenzie, where they shall remain in your vault – or in your safe – or in whatever place you store important items entrusted to you by your clients. There they are to stay secure until after my death at which time Walter, my nephew, shall decide whether to read his grandfather’s words or whether to dispose of them unread. The decision shall be his. That is only proper. After all, whatever my father’s faults, he was a Slater, and my nephew is a Slater also.’

Tom sensed that he was listening to a well-worn explanation. Felix Slater had produced it before, not for the benefit of another human being perhaps but inside the privacy of his own head. He was justifying his decision not to destroy something which he plainly found disturbing, even dangerous. He was also putting a great deal of faith and trust in his nephew, Walter.

Tom said, ‘Can I ask you, Canon Slater, whether your nephew is aware of this . . . this book? Has he actually seen it?’

‘He knows of it. He may have glimpsed it, yes. He has heard that it is written by his grandfather. But more than that, no.’

‘Then are you sure that
I
should be looking at it?’

‘It is only for this moment, Mr Ansell. After all, since you are going to take it back to London, you should have some idea of what you are carrying with you. However, you will be able to look inside it only this once. You can see that there is a hasp here and a small lock on one side. My father wished to keep his words literally under lock and key. A wise man, in that respect at least. Now, I intend to retain the key once I have surrendered the book to Scott, Lye & Mackenzie. It wouldn’t be difficult to force the hasp, but of course such a thing would never occur in a respectable law firm.’

There was a twitch of the thin mouth. Canon Slater was making another joke. Tom took the book from him and rested it on his lap. He felt the weight of it on his knees. There was brass hasp, heavy and intricate. On one side was a raised plate into which was set a small keyhole and its apparatus. Felix Slater took up his pen and the sheet of paper which he’d been working on when Tom arrived. The signal was clear: Tom Ansell had been given a few moments to glance through the memoirs of the early life of the late George Slater, for probably as long a time as it would take his son to reach the end of the page he was writing.

Tom was baffled. He could not see why Felix Slater was permitting him to look at these memoirs, however briefly. Slater would be more than entitled to ask him to take the book to London unexamined. Nevertheless he opened it. The pages had the look and feel of a sketch pad although the paper was too thin. There were no lines or margins but only blank spaces waiting to be filled. Tom wondered whether George Slater had had the book specially made up, with the brass hasp and lock. There was a frontispiece of sorts even if it said nothing more than:
I certify the
account which this volume contains to be a true and faifthful
record of the years noted and dated within
. It was signed
George
Henry Slater
and below the signature the date was given as the twelfth of June, 1843. The writing was neat and precise, close but easy to read, almost feminine. No sign of debauchery here. Below this, in a different hand, was a note saying:
Received from my brother Percy among other
effects of my father
. This was signed by Felix Slater, followed by the address of Venn House, Salisbury and dated the fifteenth of July, 1873. Evidently, it had taken Felix a few months to decide he didn’t want the book in his house.

Tom turned to a page at random. He scanned it. He was used to reading quickly, skimming through documents with their thickets of legal phraseology. But what he read now was a story, an anecdote. George Henry Slater had certainly moved in elevated circles because the story concerned that well-known and atheistical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. If Tom was looking for scandal, however, he was to be disappointed.

George Slater recounted how he had been walking with Shelley and another friend called Hogg by the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens. Shelley was suddenly seized with the desire to make and float a paper boat, an activity to which he was apparently addicted. He had no scrap of paper on him (and neither did his two friends) except for a bank-post bill to the tune of fifty pounds.

Tom read:
Shelley dithered for a long time but at last gave
way to his obsession; with a few swift and practised movements
he twisted the bank-bill into the likeness of a boat and committed
it to the water, watching its progress with even more anxiety
than usual. Those who throw themselves on fortune lock, stock
and barrel are sometimes rewarded and so it was in this case. A
breeze blowing from the north-east gently conveyed the costly
craft to the south bank where, during the last part of its journey,
Shelley waited for its arrival in a spirit of patience. By this
exercise he gained nothing and might have lost a great deal but
I saw how, mixed with his anxiety, he took pleasure not so much
in the risk to his property as in the dexterity needed to build the
little boat.

This was dated June, 1811. Underneath was written another paragraph:
Everyone knows that Percy Shelley’s
attraction to water at last proved fatal. He, who could scarcely
be dragged away from a pond or a puddle when out walking,
was lost in a storm at sea off La Spezia in Leghorn in July, 1822.
The boat which he and Williams embarked in would have been
adequate on the Serpentine but it was ill fitted for the rigours
of the open sea. I cannot help thinking that Shelley courted his
end and took poor Williams with him. My acquaintance the poet
never learned to swim
.

This section was dated May, 1843. Tom thought that George Slater had most likely transcribed his youthful diaries into this book, perhaps tidying them up and editing them. At the same time he added an extra note or commentary, reflecting his later thoughts. The first part of this entry, about the fifty-pound note, made for a charming story, if it was true. Charming if it wasn’t true, come to that. And if it was typical of what was in Slater’s memoirs then Tom couldn’t see where the problem lay.

On the other side of the desk Felix Slater’s hand moved unceasingly across the sheet of paper. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard ball. The Canon did not once look up at Tom, who opened the father’s volume at another random page. This one seemed to describe the activities of a supper club, drinking, bawdy conversation and more drinking. Towards the end he read:
Hewitt, J and
I paid Jane Wilson 2 shillings. She danced nude and then lay
down and posed for us. We might have had her but, in truth, she
was a bad model and altogether not agreeable
.

This, like the Shelley entry, was dated (to the summer of 1812) and Slater had added an 1843 note to the effect that it was unlikely a single one of them could have had Jane Wilson, not because she was disagreeable but because they had drunk so much. They were all in a useless ‘droop-like state’. Curiously, as the writer said himself, although he could remember all this he could not remember who ‘J’ was. As to the provenance of Jane Wilson he gave no clue. Presumably she was a servant of some kind, perhaps one waiting at table, and so beneath notice. Or perhaps a prostitute, and so even more beneath notice.

Quickly, Tom shuffled a few pages further on. Again he hit gold and he felt the blood come into his face. It was a brief description by George Slater of how he’d had a woman up against a wall in Shepherd Market. It hadn’t been a very enjoyable encounter: too quick and he’d spent much time afterwards wondering whether he’d caught a ‘dose’. He hadn’t contracted anything, a later footnote revealed. Tom was amazed, not so much at the encounter as at the run-of-the-mill manner in which it was recounted and the fact that he’d written about it at all.

Once more he turned a few pages. Ah, respectability again. Or a sort of respectability. This time Tom encountered Lord George Gordon Byron. Mr George Henry Slater claimed to have been in the famous poet’s company when the latter declared: ‘Incest is no sin. It is the way the world was first peopled. The Scriptures teach us that we are all descended from one pair, and how could that be unless brothers married their sisters? If it was no sin then, it cannot be a sin now.’ Underneath, Slater had added the later comment:
There was long a
rumour that Lord Byron committed incest with his half-sister,
Augusta Leigh. I do not know whether the rumour was true
but it is certain that the notion of incest was attractive to him
because of its very forbiddenness; this was not the only time he
spoke of it
.
I remember that he uttered these particular words
in his customary style, somewhere between mischief and
earnest
.

Tom glanced up at Felix Slater but the cleric appeared to be wholly absorbed in his work. Tom wondered what he was writing. For sure, the Canon’s words must be more respectable than what was recounted in his father’s neat hand. Tom still felt hot and – though it was ridiculous – guilty for what he was reading. He took one more dip into the book but on this occasion found nothing more dramatic than a description of a morning’s hunting on the Downton estate.

By this time Slater had come to the end. He concluded in the same way, grinding the nib of the pen into the paper. He blotted what he’d written and put the sheet to one side.

‘Well, Mr Ansell, you have seen enough, I dare say.’

‘It is an interesting volume.’

‘That is one word for it, though not the word I should have chosen. My dilemma is that I cannot now do away with this record of my father’s even if I wish it had never been found or that he had never written it. Or, rather, I might wish that parts of his life had not been so very
rackety
. The volume you are holding might, I suppose, have a historical value one day.’

As Slater said this, his eyes flicked towards the cases containing the primitive artefacts. Tom realized that whatever the man’s feelings about his father – unease, embarrassment, even anger or disgust – he could not bring himself to destroy what George Slater had committed to paper. The Canon had a respect amounting to reverence for old things, whether they came from a few decades before or whether they stretched back through many centuries.

‘You would like me to take this now?’

‘No, no. I wish you, Mr Ansell, to draw up a memo to be kept with this book of my father’s. You should outline briefly the circumstances under which I came by it – that is, it was among items freely passed to me by my older brother Percy – and state that it is given for safekeeping into the hands of Scott, Lye & Mackenzie. The book is not to be opened again until after my death. Then, and only then, my nephew Walter Slater is to be entrusted with it.’

‘You say, Canon Slater, that it was freely passed to you by your brother?’

‘I have a letter to that effect.’

‘Then that should be included with the other material. Or if not the original letter, then a notarized copy. For the record, you understand.’

‘Very well.’

‘And we need a name for it in the memorandum.’

‘Call it . . . the Salisbury manuscript. You will see that I have formally acknowledged receipt of it at the front,’ said Canon Slater.

‘Very well. The Salisbury manuscript. And what if your nephew predeceases you? Who is to decide the fate of the book then?’

Felix Slater looked discomfited, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. ‘Then I suppose it should be left to his heirs and descendants. You can add a note to that effect. You are to bring the memo to me tomorrow, if you please, and I will sign it. After that, you are to take everything back to London. I need hardly add that I require you, as a representative of your firm, to keep the strictest watch over the book. Please do not let it out of your sight until you have seen it safe and secure in your vaults.’