The Snowfly (21 page)

“I should say! Smashing idea for an expedition, Anj. Be rather like visitin' a zoo run by the mentally infirm,” Charlie said, slapping his hands on the table. “But now it's troutin' time and we'll deal with Mister Key later.” He lowered his chin and glared. “This time we'll see who the Angler of the Beat is.” He flashed a mock-fierce face. “I shall thump your colonial arse this afternoon, Rhodes.”

But the outcome was the same and at dinner Charlie was as pleased as if he had done all the catching. “Bleedin' spectacular!” he proclaimed over port and Cuban cigars.

 

•••

 

The next day we got into Anjali's Land Rover and drove up to the huge house on the hill.
Palace
was more like it, a castle that had been tamed with sculpted gardens in front and back. The flowers were multihued and fragrant, their scent wafting down into the gorge. I had smelled them on the river.

We were met at the front door by a butler who looked surprised to see Charlie.

“Auntie in?” Charlie asked.

“Mister Charles?”

Charlie glared comically at the servant, “No, I'm his bleedin' doppelgänger. Where is she, Lewis?”

The unsmiling servant pointed down the hall.

We walked into a hall that was close to fifty yards long. The walls were festooned with oil portraits. Hair and clothing styles suggested that the paintings stretched back hundreds of years. A lot of the subjects wore military uniforms or armor.

An old woman in a wheelcair sat by a large window, which had been cracked open. She had binoculars in hand and a novel open in her lap.
Slaughterhouse Five,
by Kurt Vonnegut, newly released and already a bestseller. A gray sweater was wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. A small multicolored dog was squeezed into the chair beside her. It looked like a small cocker spaniel.

“Auntie?” Charlie said, stepping between her chair and her window. He knelt down on one knee in front of her. “You are looking ravishing today, darling.”

“Indeed,” she said after an extended silence. The dog's ears perked up, but the old lady's hand stroked the dog's head and it relaxed. “You are looking quite fetching yourself, nephew.” She gazed fondly at Charlie and asked, “How are Arsenal these days?”

“Barely competent,” Charlie said.

“You should be managing the side.”

Charlie laughed. “I thought you didn't want me in that gutter sport.”

“I'd purchase the side, of course. It would be perfectly acceptable for a peer to be the executive in such an undertaking.”

I wasn't processing all this. Was she suggesting that she buy Arsenal for Charlie? What peer? I kept my mouth shut.

“Got that out of my system,” Charlie said.

“Trout,” she said. “And sporting in the kip.”

He laughed happily. “You'd know.”

“Don't be impertinent.”

“It's accurate.”

She granted a little smile. “Perhaps. What brings you to your knees in front of me?”

Charlie grabbed my elbow and pushed me in front of his aunt. “This is Bowie Rhodes. American journalist, former Vietnam war correspondent.”

“Godawful little war,” she said. “A legacy of the French.”

“He's a top-shelf trout man. Caught yesterday . . . how many, Anji?”

“Twenty-six in the morning, twenty-one in the afternoon.”

The old lady looked astonished. “In
our
river?”

“Impressive, what?”

“Unthinkable,” the old woman said. “Forty-seven? Are you sure?”

“Yes, ma'am.” I figured it was my turn to talk.

“On what?”

“Size twenty Adams.”

“American dressing?”

“Yes.”

She seemed relieved. “Well, that explains it. They are not used to it. You simply surprised the poor dears, I should think. Ambushed them.”

Her tone of voice suggested something less than approval.

“Sir Thomas Oxley,” Charlie said.

“Fine man,” Auntie said. “His grandson Harold asked me to hold his glove and promptly shoved his ungloved hand up my dress at Ascot one year.”

“Shocking,” Charlie said, grinning affably.

“Yes, and when he had finished I told him to remove it and never put it there again. My horse won.”

Charlie laughed so hard he nearly cried. Anjali looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Two of a kind,” she said, forming the words but not saying them out loud. “Both pots.”

“What about Oxley?” Auntie asked her nephew. She seemed physically feeble, but her mind was keen, her tone and manner indicating that she was accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed without question.

“I believe he had books.”

She nodded. “He did indeed, but I should think they've all been sold off by the idiots running the Trust. Incompetent sods, the lot of them. I should think all the intelligence in that family settled in one and never moved on.”

“Enthusiastic collector, was he?”

“Quite. Saw the books once. At the Hampshire place.”

“Greavy House. Belongs to Ozzie now.”

She looked surprised. “That one's not dead yet? Will be soon, I expect. Worthless as Chamberlain.”

“Did you know M. J. Key, Auntie?” Charlie asked. “Another beau of yours, perhaps?”

“
Charles Jowett,
” Anjali said in a low, scolding tone.

“Bugger off, Anji. She doesn't mind, do you, Auntie?”

“Miss Toddywalla is a lady, Charles dear, and you are a
scalawag,
but no, I don't mind. Yes, I knew Mister Key. He was a man who followed his own path. Excellent mind, you see, but premature on some matters. Appalling style as a writer, but his ideas carried the day. Content over style, which in my experience is unusual in this world. Key was not at all prolific with the pen. The man traveled to angle and nobody can say they really knew him. I most certainly did not.” There was a sudden misting in her eyes and her voice dropped. “Not that I would have objected, mind you. Handsome fellow, strapping and rugged.”

Charlie's hand went to her shoulder and rubbed affectionately. “He leave family?”

“Not likely,” Auntie said. “Had the bachelor disease with no time for women or men, just fish and his sciences.”

“Biology,” I said, butting in. And maybe cryptography, I thought, but left this unsaid.

The old woman looked askance at me. “Mathematics,” she said emphatically.

“He taught in America,” I said, trying to recover.

“Balderdash,” she said. “Never! Ghastly thought. Why should you think such a thing, Mister Rhodes?”

I was really confused. If there was an M. J. Key of England, who was the M. J. Key who taught in East Lansing?

“I must be mistaken,” I mumbled.

“I should think so,” Auntie said, but it was said sympathetically. “He died in 1939. I attended the funeral.” Her eyes went to Charlie to see if he was supporting me.

Key died in 1939? Then who wrote the book in 1943? Or the manuscript? The farther I got into this, the more muddled it got. Could her Key be the same man who had taught in East Lansing?

“Ever hear of the snowfly?” Charlie asked his aunt, whose back stiffened. She sat rigidly in her wheelcair.

“In what context?” she asked tentatively.

“How many contexts does a trout dressing have, Auntie?” Charlie asked with a dismissive chuckle.

“Ah, yes, the dressing. I've heard of it. The hatch is supposed to be something that occurs rarely but, when it does, brings monstrous fish to feed. Timing and location are not predictable. Pure rot, I always thought.”

It did not escape my attention that she had asked in what context Charlie wanted to know about the snowfly. What did she mean?

“May I ask a question?” I asked.

“This is not an interrogation,” Anjali said, her voice conveying concern for the old woman.

“You may,” Auntie said. “Anjali dear, I am more than able to take care of myself.”

“You asked Charlie in what context he wanted to know about the fly.”

“I did, didn't I?”

“What did you mean by ‘context'?” I asked.

Her eyes avoided me. “I'm an old woman and can't account for every word I utter. I dare say no human being can.”

She was being evasive and somehow I wasn't surprised. Every time the subject of the snowfly surfaced, conversations took odd and unexpected twists. Still, she had at least recited the outline of the myth as I'd first heard it so long ago in Idaho. Having opened this line of inquiry, I decided to keep pushing her.

“Some in America maintain that Key was a spy, a Nazi sympathizer.”

“Nonsense,” Auntie said. “Worse, it's scandalous! Key was an English patriot.”

“He spoke German.”

She harrumphed loudly. “He was a mathematician. If an American historian spoke Italian in those days, did that make him a Mussolini supporter?”

“It has been suggested that Key was involved in espionage during the war.”

The old woman crooked her head and stared at me. “Intelligence is not espionage,” she said, “though espionage is indeed one facet of intelligence. And Key was deceased, you must remember.
Before
the war.”

Interesting distinction, which I interpreted as confirmation that Key had been in intelligence. “Are you telling me he was not involved in intelligence?”

“I'm not telling you anything, Mister Rhodes.” Her voice was rock hard. She turned to Charlie. “I'm tired and I'm old, Charles, and need my siesta. Do you and your guest mind?”

“ 'Course not, Auntie.” He leaned over and kissed the top of her head and nodded for Anjali and me to leave.

We got reserved bows and quizzical looks from servants as the three of us departed to drive back down to the cottage in the valley below.

Until now Anjali had done all the cooking, but today it was Charlie in the kitchen.

“He can cook?” I asked her.

“Charles can do anything except go in one direction.” It was not a compliment.

“His aunt said something about a peer.”

Toddywalla looked over at me. “Lady Hoe is his aunt,” she said. “Hereditary. When she passes, Charlie will become Lord Hoe. Auntie is a direct descendent of Sir Francis Drake. Hoe was the name of the ground where he was bowling when the Spanish Armada was sighted. He finished his game before taking to his ship. Showed no fear. He was rewarded for his bravery and service.”

Charlie Jowett a peer of the realm? It was almost comical. “Will Charlie take it?”

Anjali smiled gently. “He has no choice.”

“Why do you call Lady Hoe ‘Auntie'?”

The tall woman sat silent for a moment. “Because it would be awkward to call her Mum.”

My mouth must have hung open as I tried to process this revelation. She was the daughter and he was the nephew, which made Anjali his first cousin. I was surprised at how relieved I was by this knowledge.

“She was on in years when she had me. It was scandalous, of course. My father was a soldier in the Indian army, a colonel. He was married to another woman. Lady Hoe returned to England and I was born here.”

Something puzzled me. “But if you're her daughter, shouldn't you assume the peerage when she is gone?”

“This is England and Charlie is the family's eldest male heir. If he wasn't around, it would go to me.”

“That doesn't seem fair,” I said.

Anjali smiled. “Charlie gets the title and hereditary lands, but I get the rest.” Her tone made it clear that the rest amounted to a lot. “Auntie's cause is women's rights, after all.”

Dinner was traditional, very English, and delicious. Roast beef (cooked longer than I liked), potatoes roasted in garlic and rosemary, peas with onions, a thin but savory gravy, a thick and powerful horseradish sauce, and Yorkshire pudding. We polished off three bottles of a very dry claret.

Afterward we stoked the fire and sipped brandy. Cornwall's adjacency to the sea gave it a mild climate, neither hot nor cold, and allowed for the cultivation of a wide array of certain fruits and flowers. I had noticed palm trees in the back garden of Drake Hall, the huge house on the hill. But the nights were damp and cool, even in summer, and a fire was much welcomed.

“Up to tacklin' the Drake again tomorrow?” Charlie asked as we listened to the fire crackle.

“That's what we came for.”

“Is it?” Charlie asked, his tone shifting to serious.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“All this business about Oxley and Key and the snowfly. Not on one of your journalistic forays, are you?”

I laughed. “The snowfly is strictly personal.”

“Well, old chum, it being personal, I shall ring up Ozzie Oxley when we get back to London and see if a visit can be arranged.”

“Thank you very much. Do you mind me asking what your aunt did during the war? She was rather tight lipped about this subject.”

Charlie sighed. “Bletchley Park, Enigma, all that.”

Now I guessed why she was evasive about Key. “She was a codebreaker?”

“No idea, old boy. I know only that she was at Bletchley, but precisely what she did will go to her grave with her. That whole generation is like that, you see? Swore to queen and country to never reveal the work.”

I had a hunch she had known Key at Bletchley, but if she had it was unlikely she would ever confirm it. But if Key was dead, how could she have known him there? There was some connection she was holding back. Could there have been more than one M. J. Key? Joe Daly had told me he knew somebody who knew all there was to know about codebreaking during the war. I would have to follow that lead when I got back.

Charlie retired first, leaving Anjali and me seated by the fire.

“You're cousins,” I said.

“Did you think we were lovers?”

I ignored the remark. “You followed me around with a camera.”