War Game (7 page)

“Yes … well, that was due to a series of unfortunate accidents. The treasure fleet put into Havana
en route
from the mainland ports—Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello and so on. But two of them had been damaged in a storm, and they transhipped their gold into the
Concepcion
and the
San Salvador
. And then, during the second storm in the Atlantic, when the fleet was scattered, the
San Salvador
sprang a bad leak and they transhipped again when the weather moderated. So the
Concepcion
was carrying a quite exceptional cargo when the third storm broke.”

“And then they were scattered again?”

“That’s correct. But the
San Salvador
made port and the
Concepcion
didn’t— that was how the first news of the loss reached Europe.”

“I see. Whereas in fact old man Parrott scooped it up for himself?”

“That was the legend in North Devon, certainly. It was never substantiated, of course.”

“You mean, they took a treasure ship with a ton of gold—and nobody blabbed?”

“Ah—no, Audley. It wasn’t quite like that. The story was that Edward Parrott landed the gold secretly at Shipload Bay, because England was at peace with Spain and what he’d done was the blackest piracy and couldn’t possibly be publicly admitted. And then he stood out to sea again and made for Bideford—the
Elizabeth of Bideford
was his ship. But then the storm caught him—“

“Another storm?”

“They called that year ‘the Year of Storms’, Audley. The fourth one that summer took six ships between Padstow and Hartland Point—including the
Elizabeth of Bideford
on the rocks of Morwenstow. Only three of her crew made the shore and lived.”

“Including Edward Parrott, I take it?”

“Including Edward Parrott. And none of them talked.”

“Then how did the legend start?”

“I said three got ashore and lived. There was a fourth who came ashore farther down the coast, a very young boy. The local story was that he babbled of a great treasure of Spanish gold before he died.”

“Hmm… . Not only the local story but the old, old story. No wonder no one believed it later on—‘the dying survivor babbling of treasure’ would have been the kiss of death to it.”

“But in this instance it was the truth, Audley.”

It looked as though Professor Nayler belonged to the wise-after-the-event brigade.

“It certainly looks that way, I agree.”

“I should think so. The idea that this young man—what’s his name … Ratcliffe—could rob Fort Knox does seem a somewhat quaint conceit, if I may say so. But then I suppose you Treasury people have to leave no stone unturned, eh?”

Audley wondered idly for a moment how his opposite number in the KGB would have conducted this inquiry, then thrust the thought out of his mind. That way lay sinful and very dangerous heresies.

“We’re rather more interested in establishing why the—ah—young man was so sure the gold existed. After all, the experts said it didn’t.”

“Oh no, not
all
the experts, Audley. No indeed!” Modest pause for the shaking of distinguished head. “I’ve long had my suspicions about that little episode. “

“You thought the gold did exist?

“I thought there was a strong possibility.” Nayler was hedging slightly now. “Of course there was no direct evidence, of course. As things stood it was—ah—a mere footnote. Or not even that, really.”

Message received: if Nayler had really believed as much, which was bloody doubtful, he hadn’t been willing to commit himself in print as saying so. But no matter—

“No direct evidence? Meaning there was indirect evidence?”

“Circumstantial evidence Or shall we say inferential evidence?”

We could say what we liked as long as we said something useful, thought Audley tightly. “Apart from the timing of the disappearance of the
Conception
and the wreck of the
Elizabeth
?”

“Oh yes, indeed. I shall be saying as much on the television shortly, on their ‘Testimony of the Spade’ programme— BBC 2, of course.”

Of course. No vulgar commercials there —except for Professor Nayler.

“Indeed? Well, you wouldn’t care to give me a brief preview? I—and the Treasury—would be in your debt then, Professor. For our ears only, as it were?” Uriah Keep couldn’t do better than that, by God!

“I don’t see why not. It’s really quite simple when you know how to interpret the facts… . You see, Audley, the gold went to ground in North Devon after it was landed. Edward Parrott was a prudent man, he knew exactly what would happen if word of it reached the Government. He … he knew the score, you might say—if you will forgive the colloquialism.”

Pompous bastard!

“You mean—he didn’t want to hang in chains with the other pirates in execution dock?”

“Hang in chains?”

“You said it was the blackest piracy.”

“And so it was, Audley, and so it was. But I mean the
political
score. You mustn’t think of the Parrotts as mere nobodies; they were squires and gentlemen. Edward Parrott sat for Hartland in the first three of Charles I’s parliaments—he owned the seat. And his son Nathaniel sat in the other two, the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. So they were very well aware of the political situation.”

Audley cudgelled his memory viciously. He knew now exactly the game Nayler was playing—and winning, petty though it was: the price of information was that he must crawl for it, admitting his ignorance.

On your knees then, Audley—for God, Queen and Country!

“What was the political situation?”

“Tck, tck, tck!” Nayler tutted contentedly down the line at him. “You have forgotten a lot, haven’t you, my dear fellow! All those tutorials, all that sherry old Highsmith poured down you—has it all gone for nothing?”

God bless my soul! thought Audley in genuine surprise, remembering for the first time how Nayler had envied his happy and boozy friendship with old Dr. Highsmith, which had made their early evening tutorials as much social occasions as academic ones. Had that really been niggling the silly man for a quarter of a century?

But the sudden recollection of those evenings was like a benison—those summer evenings, long and cool, and winter ones dark and cosy, with the mist rising off the river… . And the quick irony of Nayler’s sarcasm now was that it unlocked his memory as nothing else could possibly have done: old Highsmith had been a born teacher saddled with an arrogant young ex-soldier who fancied himself as a budding medievalist and maintained that nothing of very great interest had happened after the year 1485—

The tide of memory surged back: Charles I had angrily dissolved his Third Parliament one March day in 1629—which Firth had called “the most gloomy, sad and miserable day for England in five hundred years”—and hadn’t called another for eleven fateful years—

And it had been whisky, not sherry.

Audley nodded to the shade of Dr. Highsmith through the dirty window of the phone box.

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right, Professor. It’s all gone now, all quite gone,” he admitted abjectly.

The shade grinned and nodded back at him approvingly. The old man had always held that what one knew about oneself was what mattered, not what other people thought they knew.

Nayler sniffed contemptuously. “The Eleven Years’ Tyranny, Audley. The King tried to govern without Parliament. So he had to have money—this was the time of Ship Money and monopolies and the revived Forest Laws—surely you remember
that
?”

Humbly now—“Yes, I do now you mention it.”

“I should think so too! And there was Edward Parrott—or
Sir
Edward Parrott he had to become compulsorily because he owned estate worth more than £40 per annum, and pay through the nose for it; that was another of the King’s tax-raising dodges—there he was, sitting on the greatest single treasure to reach this country since Drake sailed into Plymouth fifty years before … and there was nothing to equal it until Anson took the Manilla galleon a century later … there he was, sitting on a king’s ransom. Or in that political situation it was more like a kingdom’s ransom. Certainly it would never have been sent back to Spain— never.”

A kingdom’s ransom. Well, maybe it was still that—in the wrong hands at the wrong moment in time …

“And he was against the king, of course.”

“Edward Parrott?” Nayler made a judicious sound. “Say rather, Edward Parrott was for Edward Parrott. He belonged to an older era—he could remember Drake and the others, he’d sailed with them as a young lad. And by the 1630s he was an old man too—that last shipwreck ruined his health. It was his son, Nathaniel—your Parrott, Audley—he was the one who was against the King. A left-wing back-bencher in Parliament in 1640, he was—one of the Vane-St. John faction.”

“So why did he wait so long to lay hands on the gold?”

“Because he didn’t know where it was, that’s why. Not until the very end, in 1643, when his father was dying.”

“How do you know?”

“For certain, we don’t know. But by ‘43 he was an up-and-coming Parliamentary officer, one of Cromwell’s trusted lieutenants, we do know that. And we also know that he left his command in the Midlands right in the middle of the campaigning season, when things weren’t going too well for Parliament, to be at his father’s deathbed. Through Royalist country, too, that meant.”

“And that wasn’t filial piety?”

“Filial stuff and nonsense! There was no love between them.”

“Only gold?”

“Nothing else makes sense. The old man died on August 1, according to the Parish burial register. Ten days later Nathaniel was at Standingham Castle.”

“And just what is the significance of that, Professor?”

“Time and place, man—time and place.”

“The Steynings were related to the Parrotts, I gather.”

“More than that. Nathaniel Parrott’s heir was his daughter, his only child. And she was married to Steyning’s only surviving son. The other two Steyning sons had already been killed in the war. So Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had the same granddaughter— their joint heiress.”

“Steyning was a strong Parliament man, obviously.”

“Fanatical. Parrott and Steyning were two of a kind, even though Steyning was past his soldiering days. Both fanatical Parliament men—and fanatical Puritans too. Blood, politics and religion, Audley: you can’t bind two men more closely than with those three.”

Despite his dislike of Nayler, Audley found himself nodding agreement to that. Family and politics and religion … dead children and a live grandchild … those were the solid bricks of the Steyning-Parrott alliance. The Civil War had only bound them tighter together, becoming a make-or-break cause for both families.

And the gold … normally the possession of gold divided men more than it united them, but in these peculiar circumstances it would have been the best cement of all—a loan on behalf of their joint grandchild’s future, an investment in the service of everything that they believed in.

“So, when you think about it intelligently, Audley, Standingham Castle was the one place Parrott could really feel safe in between North Devon and London.”

Audley frowned. “You mean—he went there deliberately? The newspaper report said he was chased there by the Royalists.”

Nayler gave a derisive snort. “My dear Audley—you don’t really believe what the newspapers say, do you? Besides, he may simply have been chased where he intended to go.”

“Even though it was being besieged?”

“The siege was a rather intermittent affair, or it had been up to then, certainly. And Standingham was a great stronghold too; Monson was considerably reinforced that last time, of course.”

And maybe the incentive was greater, thought Audley grimly. With a ton of gold as the prize Black Thomas would probably have chanced his arm on the gates of Hell.

“Hmm … You said ‘time’ as well as place, Professor.”

“I did indeed—don’t be dense, my dear fellow. Time and place are what makes the thing certain in my mind. There was absolutely no other reason why Parrott should ride out of his way to Standingham—it wasn’t as though the news of his father’s death was of the least importance to anyone. He should have gone straight back to his regiment, where he was urgently needed. That’s Point One.

“And Point Two is that he took far too long to get there in any case. That is, if he’d still been travelling the way he’d come. Which of course he wasn’t, because now he had a ton of gold to transport. And that would mean wagons or pack horses, probably pack horses—or pack ponies, seeing that he was coming from the West Country. But for much of the route he’d be passing through Royalist-held territory, so that would mean using back-roads and circling the main towns and villages. Quite a deal of night-marching too, I shouldn’t wonder … all of which would play the very devil with the men and the animals.”

True enough, Audley conceded grudgingly. The man might be a bastard, and for sure he was being wise after the event, but he’d done his work properly all the same.

“I see. He had to have somewhere to rest up
en route
.”

“At last you’re beginning to see the light! Somewhere safe, with someone he could trust. Preferably about halfway to London. Standingham Castle and Sir Edmund Steyning.” Nayler paused. “All inference, of course—all hypothesis. But when you throw a ton of gold into the scales you’ll see that I’m right… . And if you’re looking for more detail, I suggest you switch on your little television the Sunday after next and it’ll all be there.”

Indeed it would. And Charlie Ratcliffe’s claim to fortune would be established to the satisfaction of tens of millions, too; established so that even those who loathed everything which he stood for would concede his right to his loot.

So the gold was real.

And the emergency was real.

The phone pipped for more money and he automatically fed the last of his change into it.

“Are you phoning from a call box?” Nayler managed to make the simple question sound contemptuous.

“Uh-huh… . One more thing. Professor: where do the Ratcliffes come into the story?”