Knight Without Armour
KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I
PROLOGUE
“There died on the 13th inst. at Roone’s Hotel,
Carrigole, Co. Cork, where he had been staying for some time, Mr. Ainsley
Jergwin Fothergill, in his forty-ninth year. Mr. Fothergill was the youngest
son of the Reverend Wilson Fothergill, of Timperleigh, Leicestershire.
Educated at Barrowhurst and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he was
for a time a journalist in London before seeking his fortune abroad. Since
1920 he had been closely associated with the plantation rubber industry, and
was the author of a standard work upon that subject.”
So proclaimed the obituary column of
The Times
on the morning of
October 19th, 1929. But
The Times
gets to Roone’s a day and a
half late, and Fothergill was already beneath the soil of Carrigole
churchyard by then. There had been some slight commotion over the burial; an
English priest had wired at the last moment that the man was a Catholic. This
seemed strange, for he had never been noticed to go to Mass; but still, there
was the telegram, and since most Carrigole folk were buried as Catholics
anyway, the matter was not difficult to arrange.
There was also an inquest. Fothergill had apparently died in his sleep;
one of the maids took up his cup of tea in the morning and actually left it
on his bedside table without knowing he was dead. She told the district
coroner she had said—“Here’s your tea, sir,” and that
she thought he had smiled in answer. Nobody found out the truth till nearly
noon. Then a doctor who happened to be staying at the hotel saw the body and
said it must have been lifeless for at least ten hours.
Just in time for the inquest a London doctor arrived to testify that
Fothergill had consulted him some weeks before about a heart complaint. It
was the sort of thing that might finish off anyone quite suddenly, so of
course all was clear, on the evidence, and the verdict ’Death from
natural causes’ came in with record speed.
The whole affair provided an acute though temporary sensation at
Roone’s Hotel, which, though the season was almost over, chanced to be
fairly full at the time owing to a cruiser in harbour. Roone himself was
rather peeved; he was just beginning to work up his place after the many
years of ‘trouble,’ and it certainly did him no good to have
guests dying on him in such a way. He was especially annoyed because it had
all got into the Dublin and London papers—that, of course, being due to
Halloran, Carrigole’s too ambitious journalist, who would (Roone said)
sell his best friend’s reputation for half a guinea.
As for the dead man, Roone could only shrug his shoulders. Rather crossly
he told the occupants of his crowded private bar how little he knew about the
fellow. Never set eyes on him till the September, when he had arrived from
Killarney one evening with a small suitcase. Evidently hadn’t meant to
stop long, and at the end of a week had sent to London for more luggage. Very
quiet sort, civil and all that, but somehow not the kind of chap a fellow
would naturally take to…Yes, practically teetotal, too—nearly as bad
for business as the Cook’s people who came loaded with coupons for all
they took and drank nothing but water. “Although, by the way,”
Roone added, “he did come in here for a nightcap the evening
before—I remember serving him.”
“Yes, I remember too,” put in a plus-foured youth. “I
made some casual remark to him about something or other just to be polite,
that was all—but he hardly answered me. Rather surly, I thought at the
time.”
At which Mrs. Roone intervened, tartly: “Of course it was easy to
see what he was stopping on here for, and more shame to him, I
say.”
Everyone in the bar nodded, for everyone had been waiting for that matter
to be mentioned. There had been an American girl staying at the hotel with
her mother; the two had been the only guests with whom the dead man had
struck up any sort of acquaintance. He had gone for drives and picnics with
them; he had taken his meals at their table; he had sometimes danced with the
girl in the evenings. He was after her, Mrs. Roone said, bluntly, and as he
had plenty of money the artful old mother was trying to hook him.
“Oh, so he had money, then?” enquired the youth in plus-
fours.
“Money? Why do you suppose that London doctor came all the way here
to give evidence at the inquest if it wasn’t for, a fine fat fee? As a
matter of fact, there were some people here a few weeks ago who said for
sober truth they knew he was worth half a million—all made out of
rubber, so they said.” Mrs. Roone’s voice rose to a shriek as she
added: “Half a million indeed, and old enough to be the girl’s
father, as well as liable to drop dead at any minute! Disgraceful, I
say!”
“D’you think the girl was after him too?”
“Maybe she was. Girls will do anything for money these
days.”
Here a youthful, red-cheeked naval lieutenant interposed.
“Personally, Mrs. Roone, I think I’d give her the benefit of the
doubt—the girl, I mean. I spoke to her once or twice—danced with
her once, too—and she seemed to me a very quiet, innocent sort of
kid.”
He spoke rather shyly, and a colleague, who had drunk quite enough,
shouted: “Innocent? Too dam’ innocent for you, eh,
Willie?”
“Anyhow,” answered Mrs. Roone, with final truculence,
“the way they both cleared off was quite enough for me. The very
afternoon that we were all fussed and bothered about finding the man dead, up
comes the old woman to have her bill made out in a hurry—must get
away—catching the boat at Queenstown, or something or other.
Disappointed, I suppose, because her k trick hadn’t worked in time. I
didn’t see the girl before they left.”
“Well, well, she’s had a narrow escape,” said Roone,
drinking, “though maybe not the narrowest she ever will have if
she’s going to go about dancing with young naval lieutenants,
eh?”
They all laughed. Just then
The Times
arrived, and somebody in the
bar, opening the paper casually, discovered Fothergill’s obituary. They
all crowded round and read it through with growing exasperation—it told
so little that they would have liked to know. The son of a country parson, a
public-school neither good nor quite bad, Cambridge, journalism, rubber. What
could anyone make of it? The youth in plus-fours fully expressed the general
opinion when he commented: “Doesn’t sound a particularly exciting
career, does it?”
“And it says nothing about a wife,” said Roone, “so I
suppose he never married.”
That was doubtfully accepted as a probable conclusion.
“Well, well,” added Roone, pouring more whisky into his soda,
“he wasn’t my kind of chap, and I don’t care who hears me
say so. Neither a good Catholic nor a good Protestant nor a good anything
else, I should say.”
Which seemed the end of a rather unpleasant matter.
Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill was born in 1880. He had five
brothers and four sisters, and his father’s living yielded seven
hundred a year. His mother died in 1881, having never quite got over her most
recent contribution to the family, and the Reverend Wilson, left to keep
house with ten children, wandered helplessly about his parish as if he were
the last person on earth responsible for his own situation. He was a large,
heavily-built man, with fat hands and a bald head; he did his job in a dull,
conscientious way, and thrashed his elder children irregularly and without
relish. He was an Evangelical and a Gladstonian Liberal; he disliked Dissent,
had hated the Oxford Movement, and had a superstitious horror of Rome. It was
his habit to preach hour-long sermons explaining the exact meaning of Greek
and Hebrew words to a congregation largely composed of farm-labourers.
A widowed sister came to keep house for him in due course; her husband had
been an army officer, accidentally killed in India in an age when few
officers of either service ever died of anything more exciting than cirrhosis
of the liver. Aunt Nellie never tired of boasting of her unique bereavement,
and it was she who had principal charge of Ainsley. She had been a school
teacher in earlier life, and along with two of his sisters the boy obtained
from her a fairly complete grounding in reading, writing, simple arithmetic,
and the sort of geography that consists in knowing what belongs to England.
Barbara and Emily, fifteen months and two and a half years older than their
brother respectively, had no aptitude for learning anything of any kind;
Ainsley, even by the age of five, had far outstripped them. He was, indeed, a
bright, fairly good-looking child—dark-eyed, dark-haired, well-
moulded, but perhaps (Aunt Nellie thought, doubtfully) ‘a little
foreign- looking.’
Timperleigh was a dull village in the midst of passable hunting country,
and the Reverend Wilson, despite his small income, managed to hunt once a
week during the season. It meant that the elder children could not be sent to
a good school, but that did not trouble him. He hunted in the same joyless,
downright manner as he preached and thrashed. Sometimes the hunt would meet
in the rectory drive and the children would run about among the horses and
dogs and have their heads patted by high-up gruff voiced men in scarlet
coats. Ainsley liked this, but not quite so much as he enjoyed having tea in
the kitchen with Cook. She was called Cook, but she was really only a
good-natured person of middle age who, being also mentally deficient, had
been willing for years to do all the rough work of the household in return
for a miserably poor wage. Ainsley was fond of her, and the look of the large
rectory kitchen, with the window-panes slowly changing from grey to black and
the firelight flickering on all the pots and dish-covers, gave him a
comfortable feeling that he was certain only Cook could share. And her talk
seemed far more thrilling than any fairy-story; she had been born in
Whitechapel, and she made Whitechapel seem a real place, full of real people
and real if horrible happenings; whereas Capernaum, which his father talked
about in Sunday sermons, and Gibraltar, which Aunt Nellie insisted belonged
to England, were vague, shadowy, and impossible to believe in.
When Ainsley was seven, his father was killed in a hunting mishap. Aunt
Nellie, behind a seemly grief, was again rather thrilled; next to being
trampled to death on an Indian polo-ground, to die on the hunting-field was
perhaps the most socially eligible of all earthly exits. The boy, quite
frankly, felt no grief at all; he had had hardly anything to do with his
father, having not yet attained the age of chastisement. Nor was he old
enough to realise the problem presented by the existence of himself and his
nine brothers and sisters. There was practically no money, not even an
insurance; the family, in terms of hard cash, was scarcely better off than
that of a deceased farm-labourer. Fortunately the Reverend Wilson had been
one of as large a family as his own, and communication was soon and
inevitably opened up with uncles and aunts, many far distant and some almost
mythical. After long and peevish negotiations, the family was divided somehow
or other amongst such relatives, until only the two youngest remained Then,
in sheer desperation, a letter was written to Sir Henry Jergwin, whose wife
had been Aunt Helen, and after whom the youngest Fothergill had been
hopefully but so far fruitlessly named. Could Sir Henry do anything for
Barbara, aged eight, and for Ainsley Jergwin, aged seven? The great man
commanded the children to visit him at his London house; they were taken
there by Aunt Nellie and solemnly exhibited. After a week he decided; he
would have the boy, but not the girl. So Barbara, after further struggles,
was pushed on to one of the other uncles, while Ainsley came to live at a big
Victorian house in Bloomsbury already inhabited by his uncle, a secretary, a
butler, a cook, a coachman, three maids, and a gardener.
