The Triple Goddess (45 page)

‘I must confess, Sir Walter, that it’s a tall order trying to convince people to come up with such a vast sum for an indeterminate return, based on the efforts of one who is generally believed to have died in the age of Shakespeare. I may have overestimated my ability to...’

Ralegh puffed at his pipe. ‘Perhaps I may be of some assistance. I have just described to you how, a long time ago, great riches were laid before me, in which, as a member of the expedition, I shared.’

Arbella’s eyes widened. ‘Go to!...sir. Do you mean that some of it remains? Being able to tell underwriters of that would increase our chance of success a thousandfold.’

Sir Walter brushed a speck of imaginary dust off his sleeve. ‘Alas, no. My personal expenses, as thou art aware, have always been considerable.’ He looked at the window to make sure that it was raven-free, which it was, despite which he leaned forward and lowered his voice.

‘Attend carefully to what I have to say and keep it to thyself, for even my son Carew knows nothing of it. In a fit of unbecoming modesty I am about to tell thee how I, who have loved and lost fortunes, became possessed unexpectedly of great wealth; without any need to battle Spaniards for it, ship it home across treacherous seas filled with pirates, and being obliged to share it with any person. Without, in fact, the expenditure of one troy ounce of effort on my part, the assistance of any other party, or even having to leave my seat.’

‘Whatever can you mean?’

Ralegh relinquished his secretive air and leaned back. ‘It was during the Great Fire of London in the year of our Lord sixteen sixty-six. I was sitting here as I am now, smoking my after-breakfast pipe and watching the city burn; like Nero, except that I had no violin to hand.’

Grammaticus, who had just entered the room, snorted. ‘The affright of hearing you play would surely have quelled the flames unaided. You have as much musicianship in you as that bird.’

The raven Ebenezer had indeed returned to the window-sill; but only briefly, because the bowl of pot-pourri that Ralegh hurled at him took him squarely in the chest, and with raucous cry of ‘A pox on’t’—ravens are accomplished mimics—fell backwards and disappeared.

The knight looked smug. ‘To proceed with my story. As I was marvelling at the incendiary sight, someone burst into the room: a self-important-looking little man wearing spectacles. He was the first stranger I had seen in here, so I was very taken aback. He was all of a twitter, and talking to himself, and, from the way he was scurrying about examining the room, it was obvious that he was in a great hurry to find something.

‘He kept going to the window to see how fast the flames were moving through the city. I feared for my possessions, not from the fire but in consequence of his larcenous motives.

‘Whatever it was the man was searching for, he had some reason for believing it was in here. He had a bag of tools with him, certain of which he used to start pulling up the floorboards, which tempered my relief at realizing that he could see neither me nor anything in the room. To him it was just an empty chamber.

‘He was about to put a hole in my finest Turkey carpet with an augur, when Grammaticus, whom I had summoned as soon as I saw what was about to happen, thus proving that he could also not hear my voice, arrived to help me pull the rug out of the way.

‘After an hour or so of this wanton destruction, there was a great mess, the little man appeared greatly distressed, and we were none the wiser as to what he was doing. The Lieutenant told me afterwards that this was not the only floor he had attacked. There was nothing I could do to stop him, and I was grieved by the amount of work I should have on hand to repair the damage.’

‘Oh please!’, interjected Grammaticus; ‘You never lifted a finger to assist me, just sat there issuing orders and…’

Ralegh raised his hand to forestall further protest. ‘Having checked for the hundredth time to see how close the conflagration was, the person, who was wearing a wig, tore it off and dashed it on what remained of the floor while uttering a string of profanities. Then he left in haste without packing up his tools.

‘The wig I could have shown you, for I kept it, except that several of
them
’—he pointed to the window—‘pulled it off the stand and tore it to pieces in a game of tug o’ war.

‘As soon as the man had departed I...Grammaticus was about to replace the floorboards with the hardware left behind; but before he did so I was inspired to instruct him to take up several more of the planks. My hunch proved correct: I found what the stranger had failed to locate.’

‘Saints preserve us!’ exclaimed Grammaticus; ‘it was my idea.’

Ralegh shook his head. ‘That my servant should be hale of body and yet so addle-pated…these days I am more his keeper than he is mine.’

Arbella was unable to contain herself. ‘Either or both of you, what did you find?’

‘Firkins,’ said Ralegh; ‘ we found butter firkins. But instead of containing rancid fat they held a more solid yellow of infinitely greater worth.’

‘I know!’ cried Arbella; ‘It was Colonel Barkstead’s treasure! It was rumoured to be as much as fifty thousand pounds worth of gold, silver, and jewels. All anyone knew was that it was buried somewhere in the Tower. Many people searched for it over the years in vain.’

Ralegh looked puzzled. ‘Barkstead?’

Arbella said excitedly, ‘That little man you were describing was Samuel Pepys. He was Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, and lived close by on Seething Lane. In his famous diary he wrote about the treasure, and of how he took advantage of the chaos caused by the Great Fire of London, which started on Pudding Lane next to the Monument, to come and look for it. He had adopted the habit of wearing a periwig some three years before.

‘Pepys left without concluding his search, because he was worried about the possibility of his house burning down, which had cost him a deal of money. Instead of prospecting for gold he had to protect his property.’

‘He missed the hoard by barely a foot. How came the treasure to be here?’

‘Sir John Barkstead was a goldsmith who became Lieutenant of the Tower. I suppose he thought the Bloody tower was the safest place to stash his wealth. Barkstead fled at the Restoration of the monarchy in sixteen-sixty without having time to recover it and take it with him, and although he made it abroad he was caught, brought back and executed.

‘No one knew the whereabouts of the fortune he left behind, but that it was somewhere in the Tower was a logical assumption. There was a Mr Wade who came across some seven thousand pounds elsewhere here.

‘But Sir Walter, what did you do with the contents of the firkins? Did you really spend it all?’

‘The purchase of rare herbs, and other ingredients for my experiments, had been proving more expensive than I bargained for. When at a later date Northumberland began calling in my debts, saying that he was running short of funds himself...’

‘…this noble knight,’ continued Grammaticus, ‘was reduced to cheating at cards with the Earl to pay back the money that he owed him. He would have taken his lordship for his last penny if he could, at basset, gleek and primero, but he found that he was losing more when employing deception than if he were playing honestly. Things came to a pretty pass.’

‘So I sold the gold and silver—the jewels it turned out were of inferior quality—settled my debts with the Wiz…’

‘…temporarily cleaning the slate upon which much chalk has settled since…’

‘Tush, man!…and under an assumed name invested the remainder with a man named…whom did we settle on, Grammaticus?’

‘Mayer Amschel Bauer, the son of a Frankfurt Jew who supplied coins to the Crown Prince of Hesse. He later changed his name to Redshield…Rothschild.’

Arbella’s eyes widened. ‘If a Rothschild was responsible for managing the money, he must have got you a significant return. Daddy often tells me how high interest rates were in those days.’

‘The man took a usurious commission, but I will grant that the principal compounded many times.’ Ralegh went to the desk, withdrew a piece of paper from the drawer, and gave it to Arbella. It was a cancelled draft, drawn on the Rothschild Bank, for a million and a half guineas.

‘Wow! A million...this is too amazing. But the date on this note is a hundred years ago. What happened to it all? No disrespect, sir, but even a spendthrift like yourself can’t have got through more than a fraction of such an amount.’

‘None of it came my way as wages, you can be sure of that,’ growled Grammaticus. ‘Had it been possible for one of my perennial constitution to succumb to starvation, my master would still have demanded of my skeleton that it set meat upon the table.’

Ralegh assumed his martyred expression. ‘How the man bleateth. Contrary to what his impertinence would have thee believe, my appetites are simple to the point where you might almost call me frugal. To answer your question: jewels I have ever had a passion for, and I bought many, good ones.

‘Thou mayst view them if it liketh thee, but do not tell my son. I have kept this matter from him, for fear that he would alert my wife to the stones’ existence. All my son knows about are the few baubles behind the loose brick under the tapestry, which he rudely drew attention to the other day. Although Carew sees his mother rarely, they remain on good terms and I cannot afford...well, Bess has got it into her head that I am substantially in her debt.’

‘I can’t imagine how,’ said Grammaticus; ‘after the pattern of disbursements you were forever making without consulting her from the wealth she inherited from her family. Nor shall she forget that jewel of hers you pawned, the one the Queen gave her. It is no wonder that she hates you.’

‘Would I like to view them, Sir Walter?’ said Arbella; ‘oh yes please!’

‘Very well,’ said Ralegh; and then, portentously, ‘Grammaticus! Bring forth the chest.’

The ancient retainer shuffled to a dark corner in the back of the room, and drew aside a curtain that was hanging from a rail. Revealed was a brass-bound wooden trunk. After dragging it part way into the room and raising the lid, Grammaticus stood back panting from the effort.

Arbella approached almost nervously and half closed her eyes as she looked in, as if she were about to be dazzled. Which she was: the chest was inset with compartments containing an extraordinary miscellany of jewels of every colour and description: enormous pearls, including some that were black and some rosy pink; rubies, emeralds, hyacinths, jacinths, topazes—at first those were all she could take in.

But then...there was a magnificent star sapphire that must have rivalled the five hundred and sixty-three carat Star of India. And there were many cut diamonds, several of which looked nearly as big as the largest of the Cullinans, the Star of Africa, so admired by Arbella in her White tower dream, which weighed in at five hundred and thirty carats.

Her eyes now wide again, Arbella turned unsteadily, and spoke in a voice so breathy that she hardly recognized as her own. ‘Your West Indian treasure-house cannot have contained such gems as these. When Colonel Thomas Blood stole the Crown Jewels, as now they are called, which used to be here in the Martin tower, he would have willingly exchanged them for these.’

‘As thou canst see,’ Ralegh said proudly, ‘there is much greater variety here than in that paltry royal collection.’

‘The Koh-i-Noor diamond, which was added much later, was said to be worth more than the entire amount of wealth that is generated around the world in seven days.’

‘It sparks my interest. If it is within the Tower I would like to see it.’

‘Don’t get any ideas. It is reputed to bring misfortune or death to any male who owns or wears it.’

‘Were it mine, the mortal aspect of the threat would be lost upon me.’

Arbella’s head cleared. ‘Look, Sir Walter, the fact is that you realized more than enough money from the Barkstead treasure sale and the Rothschild investment to have funded an expedition then or at any time since.

‘So why did you elect to purchase jewels with the proceeds instead? You could have set out any time you pleased, and irrespective of your fortunes overseas still had plenty left to live off upon your return.’

‘Then I was not ready. But now that I am for the first time eager to depart on the voyage to end all voyages, one that is more important to me even than the one I have shared with thee today, I have no further use for this treasure, even to look upon it. Pray have the chest removed. For though no one has ever doubted my word, a promise must be kept before a man’s sincerity is proven. I should ask, however, that thou beest kind enough to arrange with Grammaticus for it to be done in the morning, while I am still in my bedchamber, and not up to witness its removal.

‘Any time before ten of the clock shall be suitable.’

Chapter Thirty-One

Arbella confessed the visit to Carew in every detail, and when she was finished he sat with a look of profound contemplation. ‘So,’ she resumed, ‘I didn’t press him, but I took it as more of a Yes than a No. His response seemed a bit ambiguous, or equivocal, to me but then I hardly know him. You would be the one to judge.’

‘You learned of the treasure,’ said Carew, ‘which I had no inkling of. As to his motives and intentions, I would say you are in as good a position to assess them as I am. He evidently is comfortable in confiding in you, and seems to gain solace from doing so. Closure is what he seeks, and I don’t just mean to his life.