The Old Vengeful (31 page)

Cathy nodded seriously. “That’s like at school: if they ask you what you’re doing, and you say ‘nothing’ they never believe you, they think you’re doing something bad. Poor you!” She nodded again, sympathetically this time, then frowned suddenly. “But where’s Paul? I bet they didn’t catch
him
!”

So Paul had made another conquest. But instinctively Elizabeth decided to leave his reputation intact.

“No, they didn’t catch him, Cathy.” Anyway, there was an element of truth in that: Paul had always been way ahead of them in expecting the worst. “He’s gone to London.” Besides, there was another and more pressing matter. “Hadn’t we better go and meet the old gentleman?”

“Yes—“ Cathy’s answer was cut off by a sudden bleeping, muted but insistent, which seemed to come from inside her “—
oops
! That means Mummy’s puddings have to come out of the Aga!” She produced a slim pocket calculator from her smock. “I got this for my birthday—it’s jolly useful, because it reminds me of things … He’s in the library, Elizabeth—just down the end of the passage there. Can you find your way while I take the puddings out of the oven?” She started to turn away.

“What old gentleman?” Aske called after her.

“The one that knows all about Elizabeth’s ship, Daddy says— Daddy asked him to come, he says—“ Cathy disappeared through a door in what was presumably the puddings’ direction.

Aske looked at Elizabeth. “A disconcertingly precocious child, as well as a typical only child—
persona non grata
indeed!”

“She’s probably learning Latin, that’s all,” said Elizabeth defensively.

“A typical Audley child, more like. ‘Grata’ may agree with ‘persona’, but she doesn’t agree with me, Miss Loftus. And who is this old gentleman who knows all about your ship?”

“I don’t know—except that he has hair coming out of his ears and is apparently very polite.”

“Ah! Now that is a positive identification on both counts, if ever I heard one!” Aske perked up. “Let us go and meet the great Professor Basil Wilson Wilder, Miss Loftus—down the passage, was it?”

Elizabeth followed him into the green-shaded gloom of the passage, the windows of which were half-obscured by the wisteria on the front of the house. There was no help for it, but she felt daunted by the prospect ahead, not so much because two elderly professors in one day were too many, as by the memory of Father’s enraged correspondence with this same Professor Wilder, both in public and in private, over the
Vengeful
renaming. The two men had never been friends aftgr an earlier Wilder review
of From Trafalgar to Navarino
, which had mildly disagreed with Father’s assessment of Collingwood. But after the
Vengeful
letters even the mention of the Professor’s name had been taboo.

Aske held the door open for her, courteous as ever.

It really was a library, not merely a room with books in it: it was as totally book-lined as the ante-rooms in Professor Belperron’s apartment, except that the book-spines were much more colourful, and the room itself was beautiful, with its oak-beamed ceiling and intricately geometric Persian carpet on an unpolished stone-flagged floor, and a great blaze of flowers in the open fireplace, and—

And there, on a low table in front of the fireplace, was Father’s
Vengeful
box—her
Vengeful
box—

The old gentleman rose slowly from an immense leather chair, his back to her, refolded his
Guardian
unhurriedly and placed it on the box, and turned towards her.

“Miss Loftus, I presume?”

Age … yet with that indefinable twinkle, not of second childhood, but of victorious longevity, a quality Elizabeth had only observed once before, in a very old lady—a great lady, who had somehow combined age with inextinguishable youth, and had made it beautiful.

“Professor Wilder?” It had never occurred to her that a man could achieve that same beauty; but of course it had nothing to do with being a man, any more than it had to do with age—it was the triumph of mind over both those conditions.

“Mr Aske—we meet again!” The tiniest nuance of… it was not distaste, for this man was long past any desire to wound any other creature, whatever his second sight saw hidden in it… it was more like sympathy neutralising the instinctive but unfair emotions which Paul had for Aske, with which he had infected her. “What a pleasure!”

“For me too, Professor.” Aske’s voice thickened, as though he was unwilling to admit his own feelings sincerely. “But what brings you here—to us—hot-foot?”

“Hot-foot?” Wilder tested the image. “In this age of the motor-car that is almost a contradiction—
my
feet become cold with inactivity when I am carried urgently from one place to another … not like Roger Bannister, with his four-minute mile at Iffley—or Pheidippides carrying the news of Marathon to Athens, eh?” He smiled. “But
hot-foot
nevertheless—yes!” He transferred the smile to Elizabeth, and then re-edited it to seriousness. “Miss Loftus … we have never met until now, but as one of your school governors I have heard of your prowess with our history scholarship girls, and I have admired your results from afar. You have a rare gift, I think—rare, because those who have it tend to gravitate to university teaching … But you have not, and I am glad of it.”

In that instant all Elizabeth’s plans for enjoying her ill-gotten gains as a rich woman went out of the window: if this old gentleman thought she must teach, then she must teach.

“I very much regret that circumstances have militated against our meeting until now. But that is in the past—“ he twinkled at her “—and now we meet at last!” He became suddenly serious. “I was sorry to hear about your father’s death, my dear. Because … in our time we had our differences, for which I must take my share of the blame, I fear … but he was a considerable scholar in his own field.”

“Differences” was an understatement, and the lion’s share of the blame for them had been Father’s, but he was burying the past gently and generously for her benefit.

“In the circumstances, it would not have been appropriate for me to write to you—I do not think you would have wished that. Yet… in these new circumstances, I am glad of the opportunity to be of service to you.” He frowned slightly, and cocked his head, and looked into spaccjust above her shoulder. “You know, I have been practising that little speech in preparation for you, and it sounded perfectly admirable inside my head. But now that I’ve heard it… it does sound not only pompous, but thoroughly insincere.” His eyes came back to her. “Perhaps I had better not ask you to give me the benefit of your doubt. So shall I say rather that I find your quest vastly interesting? Will that do?”

Aske advanced from behind her into the corner of her vision. “But I didn’t tell you what the quest was, Professor.”

“No …
you
didn’t, Mr Aske.” Wilder bent down and lifted the
Guardian
off the
Vengeful
box for a moment. “But your … friend, Dr Audley, has rectified that omission.” He looked at Elizabeth. “All the relevant papers your father collected are in there, Miss Loftus … together with photo-copies of the Irene Cookridge material.”

“And what did Audley ask you to do with it?” inquired Aske.

“To study it, Mr Aske, to study it… To let my imagination range freely over it. What else?” Professor Wilder answered inquiry with inquiry. “When you came to ask me about the prisoner-of-war usages of the time, you indicated a certain urgency. David—Dr Audley— re-iterated that urgency. And he gave me a secretary and a young man to do my leg-work, which served to emphasise the urgency. But urgency is no friend to the historian—urgency is for the journalist, it is the necessary spur to his skill, his art … For the historian what is required is time and tranquillity, for the slow sifting of the facts, and for the gradual and hesitant advance towards glimpses of truth—that is the historian’s art.” He smiled at Elizabeth. “There! I’m doing it again! And all you want to know is what I can imagine for you!”

Elizabeth smiled back. “And what can you imagine, Professor?”

He stared at her, and suddenly he was no longer smiling.

“A tragedy, I think, my dear. Or perhaps not altogether a tragedy, because if two men died for this box of your father’s, two men were also saved in some sense by it.”

“For the box?” Aske frowned at the
Vengeful
box.

“Two men died?” said Elizabeth.

“Lieutenant Chippcrficld and Midshipman Paget.” Wilder nodded. “Two good and brave young men. But didn’t you know that?”

“I didn’t know about the midshipman, Professor. We’ve only traced them as far as Coucy-le-Château.”

“Where?”

“Coucy—“ But of course he couldn’t know—or Audley hadn’t told him about that. “Where Lieutenant Chipperfield died in France, Professor.”

“Ah! The great tower? You’ve been following them in France, I was forgetting! I have been tracking them in England—Tom Chard and the American, Timms.”

“That leaves a gap in the middle, between Coucy and here,” said Aske. “But obviously they crossed it somehow.”

“You haven’t read Miss Cookridge’s papers?” Wilder seemed surprised. Then he gestured towards the box. “But that can be easily rectified.”

“Don’t bother, Professor—just tell us.” Aske looked at Elizabeth. “We’re used to having the facts doled out to us one by one. I think they wanted to see how much we could make of them as we went along.”

Wilder studied them both for a moment, as though he didn’t know quite what to make of that flash of bitterness. “There isn’t much to tell, Mr Aske. After Chipperfield died they went on towards the Pas de Calais.”

“With Paget dressed as a girl?”

“At first. But not for long.”

“He didn’t like being a girl, I’ll bet.” Aske nodded.

“He took command, Mr Aske, nevertheless.”

“At the age of thirteen?”

“He was a warrant officer and Chipperfield naturally passed on the command to him. ‘
Mr Chipperfield instructed Mr Paget as to his wishes, and these we did then execute to the best of our power
’
, that is what Tom Chard said. It was the old navy, Mr Aske: the Lieutenant gave them their orders, and the orders lived on after he was dead.”

“So they headed for the Pas de Calais …”

“For Dunkirk. That was almost certainly the plan from the start— to steal a boat at Dunkirk.”

“Why Dunkirk?”

“Because the Dunkirkers were celebrated for their pro-British sympathies. Only the year before we’d released a couple of dozen of their people—men they particularly wanted—in gratitude for the way they’d treated the survivors from a wrecked Indiaman. And there’d long been an unofficial live-and-let-live understanding between the navy and the local fishermen. Also Napoleon himself notoriously disliked Dunkirkers—and they reckoned he was more their enemy than King George, who at least didn’t conscript their sons and get them killed … If Chipperfield had ever served in the Channel Fleet he’d have known that. And I think he did know it.”

“And they did steal a boat,” said Elizabeth.

“Not without difficulty—with tragedy, in fact.” He sighed.

“That was where the midshipman got it?” said Aske.

The Professor gazed at him for a moment, then nodded.

“The boats were guarded, inevitably. And the beaches themselves were patrolled—indeed, while they were lying up in the dunes the patrols were increased, with the addition of soldiers as well as mounted gendarmes.”

Aske caught Elizabeth’s eye, but didn’t interrupt.

“After four days their water ran out, and they were of a mind to give up the attempt, and try again later. But then there came a thick sea-mist, and they chanced it.” Wilder paused, and then lifted a hand in a sad little gesture. “Paget was killed as they were manhandling the boat into the sea—a mounted gendarme came out of the mist behind them, and took one shot at them—‘
but one ball was discharged, yet that a fatal one
’
… I suspect those are Parson Ward’s words, rather than what Tom Chard said. But that’s probably true of much of the Chard narrative, it’s a sight too pedantic in places for an unlettered man, though the sense is right… No, what I think Chard meant was that the odds against a French policeman hitting what he was aiming at with a cavalry carbine were about one in a million. But this was that one-in-a-million that had the boy’s name on it.”

After all they’d been through, thought Elizabeth, after all they’d achieved against impossible odds, it had been a too-cruel end for Chipperfield and Paget both, who might otherwise have lived to be admirals. But then how many other admirals and generals—and prime ministers and surgeons and scientists … and good husbands and loving sons—had been cut off by chance bullets ahead of their time? Even Father’s shell, which had only maimed him, had changed history to bring her here. But there was no point in mourning any of these mischances; one could only trust that the cause had been just, the quarrel honourable, as King Harry’s soldiers had hoped before Agincourt.

“So he handed them that box,” Wilder pointed at the
Vengeful
box on the table, “and he died.”

“
That box
?” repeated Aske incredulously. “Are you telling us that they carried
that box
all the way from … from Lautenbourg—no, all the way from the
Vengeful
—?”

“That’s what it looks like. ‘The surgeon’s case’, Tom Chard calls it.” Wilder nodded. “That box, I think—yes.”

Aske stared at the box. “But—for God’s sake—what was in it?” Then he looked at Elizabeth. “Did you know this—about the box?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “What was in the box, Professor?”

“That bastard Mitchell played his cards close to his chest!” murmured Aske savagely to himself.

“Mitchell?” inquired Wilder.

“Never mind him, sir.” Aske blinked. “What was in the box?”

“Nothing, Mr Aske. It was empty.”

“You mean … they lost what was in it?”

“I mean just what I said: it was empty when they opened it. If Tom Chard is to be believed … and I see no reason why he shouldn’t be … neither he nor Timms had ever seen the inside of it until they opened it for themselves. Lieutenant Chipperfield brought it with him from the
Vengeful
, and he took it with him when he escaped from the fortress. And he gave it to Midshipman Paget, and Paget gave it to them. And they opened it—and it was empty.”