Edward Saxton was the Fellow and Director of Studies in English at a small Cambridge college, and concurrently a lecturer in that subject at that university. His special interest, on which he had given a course for over fifteen years, was the work of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith and lesser poets of the eighteenth century who were then collectively regarded as precursors of the Romantic movement. The events recounted here took place in 1962, when Edward was forty-five years old; a thin, rather tall figure with a perceptible stoop.
He still lived where he had done when his wife had died suddenly two years earlier, in what called itself an old mill house in a village some miles east of Cambridge. He had a green shooting-brake and used it to drive himself to and fro most days during term. One such day in late spring found him in the college room he used for teaching, a few minutes before his first pupil was due.
This pupil was unlike his others in more than one way. To begin with it was a girl he expected, an undergraduate at one of the women’s colleges. Also unusually, she was so interested in her subject that, over and above a weekly tutorial hour with her own Director of Studies, she had come to an arrangement whereby she showed her work to Edward four times a term. This was due partly to his personal qualities and partly to her third point of singularity, a family connection with him.
Lucy Masterman was a niece of Louise, Edward’s dead wife, child of her elder brother, now in her second year at the university and nearly twenty years old. She was sturdy, dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, with large watchful brown eyes, a feature she had shared with Louise. She still retained the artless manner she had shown as a little girl, though Edward had sometimes thought she found it came in handy when dealing with grey-haired scholars like himself.
That manner was in place when, punctual as ever, she arrived. Indeed, that morning it was slightly more marked than usual, if anything, but when he looked back afterwards it seemed no time at all before Lucy was reading him her essay, and scarcely longer till she was illustrating her set theme, ‘Gray’s use of the rhymed quatrain in his Elegy’.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife (she read)
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Lucy’s comment was that the simple inhabitants of Gray’s village might have been surprised to receive such a weighty tribute, with its heavy, regular rhythms and its tendency to epigram. A stanza such as the following, she went on, might have sounded more comfortable and comprehensible:
But if one should return whose errant mind (she read)
From rustic toil once took him far abroad,
All then would labour merely to be kind,
And crave his presence at their humble board.
The excitement that filled Edward on hearing these last four lines was quite unfamiliar to him, and it was not paralleled by anything that happened later. It had reached its full strength almost at once, and he could not remember afterwards how he had restrained himself from giving way to his feelings. For a moment he was young again, when anything had seemed possible. As Lucy paused, he asked her to stop for a minute in tones suited to a real command, and in an uncharacteristic movement got up and paced the floor.
‘Did you know, Lucy,’ he said in his diffident tenor, when nearly half that minute had passed and he was himself again, ‘that that stanza appears nowhere in any received text of the Elegy?’
She blushed easily, as he had noticed. She did so now. ‘I thought it might be a cancelled stanza from one of the extant manuscripts.’
‘The so-called Eton manuscript has seven such stanzas, none of which even approximately resembles in any way the four lines you have just read me.’
Her blush deepened but she said nothing.
‘In any case Gray would never have written those lines,’ he pursued.
‘You seem very sure.’
‘So would you be, my dear, if you were once to hear in them what I heard. Read them aloud again.’ As soon as she had finished, Edward said, ‘There. Does that sound all right to you?’
‘Well …’
‘What about the rhymes?’
She looked at her page again and this time noticed something. ‘Oh.’
‘Precisely. Mind and kind are perfectly acceptable, if a little trite. Abroad and board, despite the words’ similarity to the eye, are not acceptable, as any speaker from the west of England or Ireland or America outside the South would spot immediately.’ If Edward’s habitual manner had anything vague or preoccupied in it, there was nothing of either to be seen in him by this time.
Lucy perhaps saw this. She said tentatively, ‘Abroad rhymes with Claude and Maud, and …’
‘And fraud. And board with abhorred and harpsichord and what you will. No poet of the eighteenth century, certainly not one as fastidious and well educated as Gray, could even have contemplated such a false equivalence.’
‘So my sententious quatrain is a fake.’
‘I’m afraid so. The work of a contemporary speaker of standard English, at a guess, possessing a good but not intimate knowledge of English poetry of the period, and more certainly a defective ear. Now. To begin with, not your work, Lucy?’
‘No. I found it in a cupboard in one of the guest bedrooms at home among some sheets of typing paper, which was what I’d really been after, the typing paper. I’d come across it there ages before and I’d just left it and forgotten about it until I needed some, some typing paper. You know how you do. And it was just there in with the other sheets, the sheet with that stanza typed on it.’
‘But who’d typed it, who’d written it, have you any idea?’
‘Not really. Some guest, I suppose. I’m often not there, you know, at home. Most of the time, in fact.’
‘Can I see it, the paper you found?’
Lucy hesitated. ‘I chucked it away. Probably somebody going in for one of those weekend competitions in the New Statesman or somewhere. You know – write some lines in the manner of this or that well-known poem.’
‘Very likely.’ This explanation, like the rest of Lucy’s last couple of remarks, did not satisfy Edward, but the light fog of boredom in which he habitually lived had begun to seep back in, and for the moment he could not understand or quite believe in the animation of his first response to what now seemed four rather ordinary lines. ‘But … what made you put it into your essay like that, in a way that suggested as strongly as possible that it was a bona fide part of Gray’s poem?’
‘Oh, that was just rather silly.’ Lucy showed some discomfort at being asked such a question. ‘I was wondering if you’d spot it, but I knew you would and of course you did as soon as I finished reading it, didn’t you?’
‘Almost. But I still don’t quite see what you hoped to gain from your little deception.’
‘Nothing at all. It was just a joke.’
Edward’s response to this information suggested he was no stranger to jokes, but had got out of the habit of responding to them. Perhaps he had come to find it an effort to laugh. ‘I thought as much,’ he said, laughing now. ‘But it seems to have recoiled on your own head, Lucy dear.’
‘What? Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose it has a bit. In a way.’
‘Well, I think we might get on with things, don’t you?’
And in no time she was citing the carrying-over of the sense between the sixteenth and seventeenth stanzas as the only case in the entire poem, and pronouncing on the significance of that. It was a well-written essay, one that showed some real feeling for literature, as Lucy’s always were and always did. When she had finished reading it and discussing it and its subject with Edward, they agreed that for next time she should consider the justice of Johnson’s remark, ‘In all Gray’s odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away.’
She was rising to go when Edward said to her, ‘Have you really no notion at all who it was that put together that piece of pseudo-Elegy you found?’
‘None whatever, I’m afraid. As I said, I’m not usually there.’
‘It might have been interesting to know.’
The matter was left at that for the time being.
Some weeks later, Edward was sitting in the common room of his college drinking a glass of sherry before dinner. He regularly did so whenever he dined in college, and he did that most nights, not because he particularly enjoyed either the fare or the company but because he preferred them to the alternative, a solitary meal prepared by himself in his kitchen at the old mill house. He was on visiting terms with several married couples both in Cambridge itself and in the country outside, but he was not the kind of man to attract or to welcome any kind of regular arrangement for getting himself fed by friends. Now and then he dined out in another college, and once or twice a term he spent the weekend at the house of his brother-in-law, but the evening in question was what his evenings generally were.
The presence in the armchair next to his of Roger Ashby, the Fellow in Modern European History, had over some years become an expected part of those evenings. Edward had no objection, except when Ashby commented on what he saw as the similarity of their situations, having divorced his wife four years previously and not remarried. This proved not to be one of those occasions. Instead, so to speak, he asked in a meaning tone if Edward had seen the newspaper that day.
‘Not yet,’ said Edward. He had explained more than once to Ashby that he held off doing so until the time of his final snack and his nightcap at home.
‘Thing in it that’s bound to interest you. A fellow claims to have discovered some previously unknown lines from Gray’s Elegy. Which if I mistake not is a poem that lies within your field, my dear fellow-toiler?’
‘Very much so. Does the paper quote the passage in question?’
‘Yes, but I fear … Ah. Excuse me.’
While Ashby crossed the room and returned to his seat, Edward felt in himself an onset of that same excitement that had visited him when Lucy started to recite her spurious stanza. Now as then, he found it hard to sit still.
‘Yes,’ said Ashby, turning to the middle pages of the captured newspaper and clearly preparing to read the relevant part aloud.
Edward forestalled that by saying, ‘Let me see if I already know how those lines run.’
‘I thought you said you hadn’t yet—’
‘Nevertheless, I have a feeling I may know them. You can hear me if you would.’
Ashby gave in with a fairly good grace, and said nothing while Edward recited verbatim what he had heard from Lucy at that tutorial. This feat of memory drew no appreciation from Ashby, who kept his eyes on what was before them and moved his head tentatively in small lateral jerks. ‘Is that all?’ he asked finally.
‘Yes. Am I right?’
After a headshake of greater amplitude than before, Ashby said, ‘Well, it might be best if I simply read you what’s here.’
‘I’d sooner see it with my own eyes,’ said Edward. He had a well-founded distrust of the other man’s willingness or ability to read anything aloud without oral annotations of his own. The words on the page proved to be set out in a way that obscured their function as part of a stanzaic scheme, but he soon rectified that in his mind and read:
Should one retrace his steps whose foolish dream
From righteous labours lured him far astray,
None but would hail him as he drove his team,
And court his company at close of day.
Secure all night within his peasant cot,
Each morn he treads the land that gave him birth,
And contemplates some not unhonoured spot
To house his weary bones in native earth.
Edward had fully taken in these lines before it occurred to him to do as much as glance at the surrounding matter. This informed him that the two stanzas quoted had come to light among a packet of manuscript papers in the library of a London house whose name meant nothing to him. The authenticity of the documents was uncertain, but was being checked by experts in eighteenth-century literature and in the history of writing materials. The finder of the papers wished to remain anonymous while verification was still proceeding, but was himself a well-known authority on the poetry of the period.
Some minutes had gone by since Edward had begun to read, a longer interval than Ashby normally let pass in silence. He turned out to be on his way back from the buttery hatch carrying two glasses of sherry, and soon overrode Edward’s protest that a single drink before Hall was as much as he allowed himself.
‘Have you formed any opinion on the authenticity of those verses?’ asked Ashby.
‘My first tentative impression,’ said Edward carefully, ‘is that their author is unlikely to have been Thomas Gray.’ His mind was still perturbed at this unlooked-for sequel to the Lucy stanza, as he called it to himself, and what it might mean.
‘You are clearly not one of the experts consulted by the anonymous finder. Which is a little surprising, isn’t it? Given your well-known eminence.’
‘Thank you, Roger, but there are quite a few others of at least equal eminence.’
‘Really. Perhaps less ready than you to detect a forgery.’
‘That’s possible too, of course.’
‘Whereas a successful forgery would be worth a great deal of money.’
‘These days a reasonably careful and physically prepossessing forgery of such a famous poem, even if openly acknowledged to be a forgery, would be worth a substantial sum, especially in America. It would be interesting to have a look at that manuscript. I wonder whether—’
What Edward wondered competed unsuccessfully with the buzzing of the internal telephone. Answering this was something Ashby seemed to like doing. He threaded his way across the room between couples of old dons and young dons and a parson or two and spoke into the instrument. When he hung up his eyes were on Edward.
‘Call from Suffolk for you in the lodge,’ said Ashby. ‘A Miss Masterman.’
Edward was picking up the receiver in the porter’s lodge in much less time than he had taken over the newspaper. He was breathing quite fast as he gave his name.
‘This is your favourite pupil and relative,’ said the familiar youthful voice. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, but why aren’t you in Cambridge?’
‘Revising for exams, of course. You could give me a tip or two there, especially over the Metaphysicals. It’s been simply ages since we saw you down this way. I was just thinking, if you happen to be free, why don’t you turn up at your usual time on Friday?’
‘My dear Lucy, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.’
The warmth of Edward’s response was clearly a little surprising to Lucy. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, that is good news, I must say. I’m afraid it’ll be deadly dull, just me and the aged parents.’
‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘Couldn’t it? I was going to offer an inducement, but it seems you don’t need one.’
‘What sort of inducement?’
‘Just, there’s a bit more to tell you about, you remember, that Gray’s Elegy thing. You know, that cod verse I stuck in my essay.’
He very nearly screeched at her to tell him instantly, but thought he had better refrain in the circumstances. Instead, he asked her, ‘You’ve seen the paper today, have you?’
‘Well yes, but what about it?’
‘Look again. Page 7.’
‘A second and more successful attempt, or at least a subsequent one.’
Lucy had settled herself on the floor of her parents’ drawing room in one of those squatting attitudes impossible for any normal male west of Suez. ‘Are we sure about that? If it matters, that is.’
‘That sort of thing always matters,’ said Edward from the sofa. ‘No, we’re not sure, how could we ever be, but there’s a strong suggestion in the fact that this time he avoids the cockney rhyme we noticed in your text. Presumably he noticed it too. Could I have another look at what you’ve shown me?’
‘My text, golly!’ said Lucy, passing him the typewritten sheet.
‘M’m. Yes, this is a workpaper all right, leading to fair copy, probably with one or two precursors. Earlier efforts to you.’
‘Thank you, Uncle.’
‘How certain are you that there are no other bits hanging about somewhere?’
‘As certain as I can be without taking the bloody place apart brick by brick.’
‘All right, Lucy. Well, there it is. I’d give a lot to know who it was that cooked up this stuff.’
‘Would you? What would you do if you did know? What good would it do you?’
‘Put it down to interest. Or instinct. I just want to know.’
‘Would it help to know who typed what you’ve got there?’
‘What are you talking about, of course it would. A hundred, a thousand to one they’re the same person. Why? Surely you’re not going to tell me you know who it was? I don’t think I could stand another shock.’
Lucy jumped up from the rug and seated herself next to Edward, turning her top half round towards him in her best unselfconscious style. ‘I’m afraid I have been rather saving this up to tell you face to face.’
‘Like the typescript. All right, but please keep it as short as you can.’
‘Of course, what do you take me for? The first thing was me tracing the typewriter. That was easy.’
She brought out a sheet that, while a little crumpled, resembled in its general appearance the one he already held. Edward compared them.
‘The typings are certainly very similar,’ he said after a minute or two.
‘More than just very similar. Look at the “d” in mind and abroad and so on. The bulgy part has got a little break in it near the bottom. You see? And the “s” all over the place, too far over to the right. And the “h”. Almost like an “n”.’
After a shorter interval, Edward said, ‘Yes, I do see. But what …’
‘It belongs to my dad. As soon as I saw it, the original one, I thought I knew it. Somebody staying here for the weekend borrowed it off him one afternoon. Would you like to know who it was?’
‘Oh, I suppose I might as well, now we’ve come this far.’
‘Good. He’s called Colonel Orion Procope.’ She spelt the surname. ‘Three syllables, stress on first,’ she explained. ‘Strikes a chord?’
‘There’s a restaurant in Paris called something analogous, but I’m afraid I’ve never heard of any such person.’
‘I’ve an idea there’s a Sir in front of most of that or perhaps a Lord hanging about somewhere, and I’m pretty sure there’s an MC after it. Evidently he did something jolly gallant in the desert. Any better?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Well, I had a shot, at least. Mind you, the colonel, which is how he likes to be addressed – Colonel Orion Procope has rather got the look of, you know, someone who changes his name about a bit. Anyway, you’ll have the chance of judging such things for yourself in a little while.’
‘What!’
‘My turn to be sorry,’ said Lucy, neither sounding nor looking particularly sorry. ‘Yes, he’s coming to dinner. I promise that’s the last of my surprises.’
‘For this weekend at least. Well, that’s a comfort.’
Before they went off to change, Lucy released some further crumbs of information about the gallant colonel. He lived no great distance away, across Suffolk, near the coast; having never married, he lived there on his own, ‘apart no doubt from the occasional fisherman’, according to Lucy; he got invited over for the weekend a couple of times a year, for dinner or Sunday lunch two or three times as often; he might never have been invited at all but for his apparently lonely situation, ‘and he most likely wouldn’t have been even so, if Mum weren’t such an old softie’; he had first met Lucy’s father in the course of some ‘strangulatingly boring’ piece of business in the City of London; he had never been known to say much about his history.
Edward had his usual room at the eastern end of the house, usual at least since Louise’s death. For some months after that death, he had thought he would never have been able to come down here again, but when once he decided to try, it had not proved so difficult. These days, in fact, the place was only fitfully one where he had known some happy moments with her; he valued it more for itself, for its spaciousness, though it was not very grand or very old, and its silence. He liked this part of East Anglia too, never sunny for long, but at some time every day full of light from its enormous sky, which Constable had never forgotten.
Of course this was Lucy’s place too. Now that she was momentarily out of his sight, he found it easier to think of her as an entire person, easier too to consider with some objectivity her resemblances to her aunt, seen in her colouring and the look of her face with its round eyes and arched brows, and felt rather than seen in the way she held herself, upright but with head a little bowed. He now doubted the truth of his earlier impression that the glance of those brown eyes had grown more direct recently. But was he accurate in supposing that he saw her first of all as a version of Louise?
He was tying his tie at the dressing table when out of the tail of his eye he caught a distant movement through the east window. He soon saw a car descending a low hill in the nearer distance. For a few seconds it vanished before reappearing and entering the short driveway, an expensive-looking car sprayed a very dark blue picked out with crimson. After it drew up, just beyond rather than below where Edward was standing, nothing happened for a short time. Then a youngish man in a dark suit and a chauffeur’s cap got out of the driving seat and another about Edward’s age out of the passenger’s seat. What could be seen of the latter showed him to be an average sort of man in a dinner jacket, not tall, not short, with a mop of brown hair that seemed to have kept most of its colour, but there was something about the presumable Colonel Procope that made Edward draw cautiously back from his window.
There was no trace of that something to be seen when in due course the two men met. Indeed, the colonel made a favourable impression with his generally straightforward manner and the restrained warmth with which he greeted the three Mastermans. When he came to Edward, he managed to convey satisfaction at meeting one he had heard good reports of. He was quite unmilitary in his appearance, which by including a remnant of stubble by one ear and a loosely tied tie rather suggested some colleague of Edward’s, or the popular idea of one. It might perhaps have been said that he talked a little too quietly for perfect manners.
The first patch of conversation that Edward remembered afterwards came during dinner, and was preceded by a brief warning look, or glare, at him from Lucy.
‘Oh, colonel,’ she said, ‘I am right in thinking, am I not, that you got a medal for something brave you did in the war?’
Before answering, Procope moved his eyes to her and only then turned his head, a slightly disconcerting trick Edward had noticed in him before. ‘A medal?’ he echoed with humorous pomposity. ‘Come, every Tom, Dick and Harry gets a medal. What they gave me was a decoration, what? The old MC, you know. In fact, Lucy girl, you know perfectly well.’
‘I wanted to be sure because one of my college mates I happened to be telling about you said she was pretty sure she remembered her father saying he’d known somebody with your name or something like it in the war in North Africa somewhere.’
‘When you’ve got your breath back, tell me what unit he was in.’ The colonel made a vaguely conspiratorial face at Lucy’s mother, Kate Masterman, who beamed back at him. The two were certainly on good terms, Edward thought, but in no more than a companionable way, without any trace on Kate’s side of the old softie of her daughter’s description.
Lucy seemed to search her memory. ‘Could he have been a Desert Rat?’
‘Certainly he could. I had very little to do with them. They were strictly the Seventh Armoured; I was with the Tenth. Most of the time.’
‘Of course, Edward was in the desert too, weren’t you, uncle?’
‘Only for a couple of weeks,’ said Edward discouragingly. He had seen his share of action, but had got no nearer ‘the desert’ than Anzio in Italy.
If Lucy had hoped to drive Procope into some sort of corner, to force him into undue reticence or talkativeness, she was disappointed. In five minutes or so he had shown that he had either experienced fighting in North Africa at first hand or been thoroughly briefed by somebody who had. Whichever it was, Edward could see nothing at all in him of any kind of man that might have tried to fake a couple of Gray’s Elegy quatrains. On the other hand, it had to be conceded that he did look a bit like one given to changing his name about, as Lucy had put it. Edward felt this strongly enough to see something false in the chummy au revoir the fellow sent Kate when the two women left the table.
So, what with one thing and another, Edward was more than adequately surprised to hear Procope say, almost as soon as the door was shut, ‘I gather you’re a great authority on Thomas Gray, Dr Saxton. The chap who wrote the Elegy.’
‘I suppose one might put it like that. Nice of you to anyhow, colonel.’
Procope made one of his faces. ‘Well, it’s true. Now you obviously think Gray’s pretty good as a poet, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to turn yourself into an authority on him.’
‘Yes, at least pretty good.’
‘Sorry. Of course, I know I’m a complete what-you-may-call-it, a layman, an amateur, but I’ve always been fond of the old hoary-headed swain and the rest of it. Time was when I could have repeated whole chunks that I’d got by heart. Don’t you worry, Toby, I’m not about to start polluting your dining room with a poetry recital.’
Toby Masterman made some inoffensive remark. To Edward’s eyes he looked indisputably more like a military man than his guest, but like nothing positive that could be thought of, stout, almost florid, unlike his dead sister with a completeness once mildly comic to Edward and now the cause of mild thankfulness. The only surprising thing about him was that he had produced Lucy.
After a laudatory word or two about the port now in circulation, Procope said with renewed vivacity, ‘Things being as they are, I consider myself lucky to have run across an expert like you, Dr Saxton, just when there’s been this thing in the paper about some extra verses of the poem seeming to have turned up from somewhere. You must have seen that, naturally. Tell me, off the record, so to speak, what did you think of them, those verses? I quite see you may prefer not to commit yourself until you know more about the thing.’
Edward tried to remember that the question had come from the apparent author of the verses in question. ‘Well,’ he said cautiously, ‘as regards poetical merit, what I saw struck me as distinctly below par, below the general standard of the Elegy, but then what Gray wrote is so familiar that one can’t be sure. What I’m trying to say is, it’s hard to compare the known with the unknown.’
‘I’m pretty hopeless myself when it comes to anything like that. But I value your opinion, welcome it too, because it throws some light on a question I have to admit interests me more, the authenticity of those eight lines. Taking into account your first reaction to them as poetry, do you think they’re Gray’s work or not? As far as you can tell.’
This seemed to Edward one to fend off. ‘That’s more difficult,’ he said. ‘Not really one for me at all. I don’t know enough about Gray’s lesser contemporaries to be sure.’
‘You’re too modest, Dr Saxton. You must have some feeling one way or the other.’
‘I wouldn’t like to commit myself to any such feeling without looking at the stuff again.’
‘That’s easily arranged.’ Procope brought out a wallet from which he carefully took a neat newspaper cutting. ‘It just so happens, as they say.’
Edward tried to feign a pleased interest as he looked again at what Roger Ashby had shown him earlier that week. He felt himself blushing to a degree that might have rivalled Lucy, and did his best to put on a fit of coughing. It was extraordinarily hard to read the printed words as opposed to looking in their general direction.
‘I’m sorry, Toby,’ said Procope, ‘we’ll be finished in a minute.’
‘Take your time, I’m quite comfortable as I am.’
‘You saw the piece, did you? What do you think?’
‘I think the port is with you,’ said Toby.
Possibly because he was seeing the stanzas in changed circumstances, Edward all at once found in them something he had not noticed before, something that brought on in him a more intense agony of dissimulation. He decided he had to speak and might as well speak the truth.
‘In my opinion these lines are not the work of Thomas Gray,’ he said.
‘Ah! Thank you! Thank you, Dr Saxton, for delivering the kind of verdict that I slightly hoped you would see your way to.’
Instead of frankly goggling at the colonel, Edward tried to look no more than politely interested and expectant.
‘As I told you just now, I’m a total amateur in literary matters, interested as I may be in one or two of them, but even so, or perhaps for that very reason, I find it pleasant when a professional confirms my subjective judgement.’
This time Edward managed to say, ‘Yes, I see.’
‘I take it you’ve been approached by whoever’s concerned and asked for your expert opinion? No? Well, they’ll come to you, never fear. When they do, I hope you’ll denounce this impudent fabrication. As before, that’s only a, what did I say, a slight hope of mine, a modest one. Because, although the matter has aroused my curiosity, it matters to me personally not at all whether those lines are genuine or spurious. Not one scrap. I haven’t even taken a bet. What do you say to that, Toby?’
‘I say we should consider joining the ladies.’
When the colonel had departed and Lucy slipped away to bed, Edward forgathered with Toby and Kate for a nightcap in a corner of the drawing room. Outside the house the stillness seemed absolute.
‘Interesting sort of chap, Colonel Procope,’ said Edward experimentally.
The experiment was not a success. Kate said she thought the colonel was rather pathetic, Toby said more apologetically that neighbours had become thin on the ground, and the topic lapsed before Edward could get out his prepared quip about the fellow reminding him of some dishonest smallholder. A moment later Kate asked Edward how he thought Lucy was looking, at which point Toby shifted in his chair in a way suggesting that there had been enough recent discussion of his daughter to last him for a bit.
This time Edward spoke guardedly. ‘She looks fine to me,’ he said, and was not surprised to hear from Kate that mere outward looks were a trifle compared with inner wellbeing or the lack of it, and that it was here that Lucy gave grounds for concern, having just broken suddenly with an altogether suitable near-fiancé.
‘About nothing at all,’ said Kate. ‘All of a sudden he became a frightful bore.’
‘For my money he’d been that all along,’ said Toby. ‘Full of, well, full of what there was of himself. Damn it, the girl must be allowed to make a mistake and change her mind now and then. She’s not twenty yet.’
‘It’s much more than that, as you know. She’s thoroughly discontented with her whole generation of young men and always has been. You’d have thought Cambridge would have opened her eyes, but from that point of view it’s been a total washout.’
‘Oh, Katie, give the poor little thing a chance. She needs time.’
‘If there’s anything I can do,’ said Edward.
‘It’s sweet of you, dear Edward, but I get the impression that where that girl’s concerned you’re impossibly distant and grown-up. Oh, she’s very fond of you, of course, so she ought to be, but as a remote sort of uncle-figure, which after all is what you are. You do enough for her by encouraging her interest in literature.’
And that ought to be enough for any uncle-figure, thought Edward a little later as he undressed in his single bedroom. He switched off his light and looked out over the soundless landscape. In a corner of his mind were an excitement and something to be looked forward to with a tiny thrill. The excitement was from Gray and Procope, the something was the prospect of conferring again with Lucy. But a thrill of any size that arose from that prospect could be no more than a function of habit and memory.
‘And I’m quite sure he meant it,’ Edward told Lucy the next morning, by way of winding up his account of the conversation with Colonel Procope.
‘But he can’t have,’ she said.
‘On one assumption, it would indeed be all one to the colonel whether those stanzas are genuine or not. It would not concern him either which they are shown or taken to be. Let’s see if you can find grounds for …’
He stopped speaking because she seemed to have stopped listening. They had reached the gate of the small paddock, which they now entered. Lucy clinked the handle of the pail she was carrying, not loudly but it appeared loudly enough to attract the attention of a large horse standing by the far hedge. This animal at once came trotting over to them with what to Edward was excessive eagerness. Seen close to, it looked about the size of a full-grown elk, reddish-brown in general colour but with black mane and tail and large off-white teeth. These it showed prominently while it breathed noisily at them, butted Edward in the chest and without ceremony set about bolting the contents of the pail.
‘You remember Boris,’ said Lucy and, when Edward looked uncomprehending, added a trifle impatiently. ‘You know, after Boris Godunov.’
‘I thought it was Virginia, after Virginia Woolf.’
‘That was the little mare I had ages ago. She’s gone. It’s Boris now.’
Indeed it was Boris now, in the extra sense that Lucy’s attention was all directed that way, with none to spare for Edward. Presently she threw a rope round the horse’s neck and in a flash was on its back. For a moment she sat there very still and straight and seeming taller than before; Edward almost caught his breath at her look of dignity and power. Then she was off, away, just a girl trotting and cantering her horse round her father’s paddock. He, Toby, had prophesied that the horse would be disposed of about the time she found herself a man.
As soon as he profitably could, the man she was with at the moment said, ‘Now, Lucy, I want you to do a little experiment for me.’ While she shut the gate behind them he took out his copy of the stanzas, but did not at once hand it over. ‘Try to forget that this might or might not be part of Gray’s Elegy. See if you can manage to forget the fact that it’s in verse, which shouldn’t be all that exacting considering the lubberly way the paper has set it out. Now. You’ve no idea what this might be, you’ve just this moment come across it written on a pad. Right, here it is.’
Lucy halted on the gravel drive to read. He thought it marvellous that she found no evident difficulty in doing so without artificial aid and in what was not much better than average daylight, living as he did in a world where everybody wore glasses, most of them all the time, like himself. In his eagerness he tried to prompt her by suggesting she should attend only to the meaning of what was in front of her, but she spoke at the same time, and with a shake of the head at his own ineptitude he told her to go on.
‘What it says … if somebody who went wrong or went to the wrong place should retrace his steps, come back to his starting-point, he’d be perfectly …’
‘Secure. The best word out of however many dozen it is. Though not at all Gray’s kind of thing, a sort of pun, Latin securus, se plus cura, free from care, also modern secure, in a state of security, not at risk from hostile undercover moves or surveillance.’
‘In fact the message of the whole thing seems to be …’
Edward was too excited to notice that he had again interrupted. ‘The message. That’s what it is. A message. Well done. It suddenly hit me last night. What is the characteristic of that newspaper and no other, almost no other anywhere? All right, there are several, but the one that interests us is that it goes all over the world.’
‘Far astray.’
‘If you wanted to send a message to somebody you couldn’t locate, perhaps you couldn’t even say with any certainty what country he was in, what better means could you think of? Almost, what other means at all? Exposed as a forgery or not, you really could afford to be indifferent. You might even leave drafts of it lying about.’
‘Provided your man saw it.’
‘Admittedly you’d have to take your chance on that, but you might be able to bet he’d see that paper every day. Of course he’d have to have some sort of interest in literature thrown in, but with a thing like the Elegy it wouldn’t have to be a specialized one. And if there’s silence at the other end you just have to think of something else. You’re no worse off.’
They had reached the road before Lucy said, ‘All right, let’s have the rest of it, whatever it is.’
‘How do you know there’s more to come?’
‘By not being blind or deaf. Come on, Uncle – shoot.’
‘Very well, here goes. One. Colonel Orion Procope, MC. When I told you I’d never heard of anybody called that, I was speaking the truth. But I’d only to catch sight of him to be pretty certain I’d seen him before, and in some kind of sinister context. Nothing more specific than that till this morning when I woke up remembering who he was and where I’d seen him. I still couldn’t remember his original name, and I knew it wasn’t him in the flesh I’d seen, just a few photographs, which did nevertheless belong to a sinister context.
‘Two. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Do they mean anything to you, Lucy?’
‘Not much. Weren’t they Communist spies, years ago?’
‘Eleven years ago to be precise, in 1951. At any rate, that was when they were exposed and fled to Russia, where they still are.’
‘Oh yes, our security coppers made a frightful boob.’
‘Not really. It was the weekend and they couldn’t get hold of anyone to sign the warrants for the arrests. Respect for the law.’
‘Something pretty boobish about that.’
‘I agree it could never have happened in Russia.’
‘M’m. I accept the rebuke,’ said Lucy. ‘But how did you know about the warrants?’
‘It’s not a secret. But the answer to your question takes us to Three. Edward Saxton, D.Litt. Where’s this pub I’ve heard so much about?’
‘You can see it from here.’
‘So I can. Before we get there, let me just say that about that time I did a bit of work for MI5, to be known henceforth between you and me simply as the company, if you follow me. I’m not in your league as an unfolder of mysteries, but I won’t tell you the rest till I’ve a glass of beer in my hand.’
It was cool, dark and quiet in the saloon bar. Edward and Lucy took their drinks over to a window that gave a view of an unfrequented stretch of road and a green hedgerow with woodland beyond it, all with their colours sharpened by the mild sun. No petrol fumes lingered, only country scents. Edward sipped beer appreciatively.
‘One can get tired of drinking wine day in and day out,’ he said. ‘Though not very soon, I suppose. Now, let me go on briefly. Years ago I helped the company a bit over the matter of defective patriotism among former Cambridge men – you may remember that both Burgess and Maclean had been undergraduates at that university. There were others never or not yet brought to book, half a dozen of them, among whom was the man now known as Colonel Procope, who escaped prosecution for lack of evidence. Nothing could have been proved either against his close friend, perhaps more than close friend, whom I knew as Green, but evidently Green was up to something our side didn’t know about, because he cleared off to Russia too, just three weeks after good old Guy and Donald. Green read English at Cambridge, which isn’t exactly incompatible with an interest in literature, though I agree—’
‘I take it Green is still in Russia. But if he gets the colonel’s message he’ll soon be on his way back.’
Edward frowned and looked worried. ‘I wish we could do better, but I don’t think we can at the moment.’
‘So what’s our next step?’
‘I don’t honestly see we’ve got one. What we have is surmise, and nobody seems to be even contemplating anything illegal, I’m sorry to say. It would be interesting to have a tap put on Procope’s telephone, but also out of the question. All we can do is keep our eye on the paper.’
‘Would it help if we knew how he got them to print that stuff?’
‘I’ll have a word with the company. About that and other matters.’
Lucy looked at Edward, who held her gaze. She said, ‘I’d never have taken you for a …’
‘Careful.’
‘… tradesman as well as an expert on Gray.’
‘Tradesmen come in all sizes and shapes. What time is lunch?’
As they were on their way out, the landlord nodded politely to Edward and said to Lucy, ‘How’s my old friend Boris?’
‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you, Mr Littlejohn.’
‘Have you taken him on a proper excursion yet?’
‘I thought next week, perhaps.’
‘He’d enjoy it,’ said the landlord, who with his neat suit and generally scrubbed appearance looked like the citified person he was not. Laying a polished horseshoe on the counter, he said, ‘Anyway, here’s a present for him.’
‘Oh, he’ll absolutely love that. I’ll nail it on his stable door.’
Revision, especially of the Metaphysicals, and bad weather combined to put off the day on which Lucy ceremonially nailed the horseshoe to Boris’s stable door. But when that day came it was so clear and bright and the forecast so promising that she planned a proper excursion for him and her on the morrow.
She was up at six and, with her old tweed coat over her nightdress, fetched the horse to his stable facing the kitchen and put chaff and corn in the manger for him. A heavy dew sparkled on the grass, the sky was a slightly veiled but cloudless blue, and there was the kind of hush everywhere that she had noticed before at the start of a fine hot day. She got more or less ready before cooking herself a substantial breakfast of fried egg, bacon and tomatoes, no more than sensible before a day’s riding. By this time the paper had arrived and she glanced at it as she ate.
Her eye was caught by a short item saying that the supposed additional stanzas of Gray’s Elegy, the discovery of which was recently reported, had been shown to be a modern forgery. The finder’s request for continued anonymity was being respected. This information revived Lucy’s almost-lapsed interest in the matter, and even brought her a mental picture of Colonel Orion Procope being completely indifferent to the news, but she dismissed it and him from her mind in the course of making sandwiches with fresh Cheddar, chopped onion and plenty of sweet pickle. This done, she prepared a thermos of tea, leaving enough tea over to take up to her parents’ bedroom with some arrowroot biscuits she privately considered dead boring.
The grandfather clock in the hall struck eight; time for grooming and saddling up. Lucy’s saddle, a birthday gift, was of army pattern, which meant among other things that it had plenty of hooks on which to hang a haversack with her provisions, a nosebag with Boris’s stuff, her black fisherman’s sweater and a blanket of his. She was ready, and of course he knew it at once and made for the outdoors. A minute later she was walking him down towards the road, quite a striking figure in her twill jodhpurs and man’s shirt, hair drawn back under a dark-green scarf, with the upright posture Edward had noticed.
As the sunshine grew stronger, the two of them were making good time, mostly over grassland or greenwood floor, so good that Lucy began to think she would fulfil her hope of reaching the coast before turnabout time and showing Boris the sea, perhaps taking him for a gallop along the sands if the tide was right, for a paddle if not. She had been talking on and off to him since they started, and when she mentioned these possibilities he turned his ears back to listen, but on being asked how he felt about them he simply took no further interest.
From earlier outings with Virginia, Lucy was confident that somewhere along their line of march she would find a good place for a rest, and sure enough not long after one o’clock they came to a shady spot with a patch of turf next to the road and a culvert over a stream, only a little one but enough to water Boris and wash the dust off his feet. Then, having loosened his girth, she put on his nosebag and he munched contentedly, swishing his tail against flies. She ate sandwiches, drank half her tea and read a chapter of her paperback copy of Dr Zhivago. Before they moved on she got into the saddle and let him crop grass for a few minutes.
Lucy was expecting to come in sight of the sea quite soon when she realized she was heading more or less directly for the village near which Colonel Procope lived. A glance at the map she carried in her haversack showed her that by the shortest route she was about two hours’ easy riding-time from it. That route, however, involved a longish stretch of road and, although Boris never complained, she knew he preferred to avoid road travel where possible, so a few minutes later she turned aside on a more roundabout approach. Only then did it occur to her to wonder how long it was since it had first entered her head to seek out the colonel and what she hoped to achieve by doing so. She found no answer to either question, and soon put them aside in favour of taking in the look of sunlit greenery and wild flowers and the lulling pleasure of having a healthy, strong, good-natured horse under her. But she still moved along a curving path that led to Procope’s village.
When at length she reached it she found little to see: a few smartened-up cottages, some boring modern houses, a church decorated in the usual flint, but also a post office, and that was obviously her first port of call. With the sound of rock music in her ears, she tied Boris to a convenient rail and went inside among picture postcards and toffee bars as well as stamps and telegram forms.
Instead of a fat old woman with glasses and a pencil stuck in her hair, Lucy found a fresh-faced one little older than herself, in dark slacks and a tee-shirt bearing the name and device of a brand of American cigarette. No less unexpectedly, this person reduced the music to almost nothing without being asked, and smiled a welcome.
‘Colonel Procope?’ she said at once when the name was mentioned. ‘Straight down the hill over there, lane at the bottom on the left, a bit under a mile along on the left. Say twenty minutes’ walk. I suppose it’d be quicker on horseback. That is your horse out there, is it?’
‘Thank you. Yes.’
‘Work at a riding stable, do you?’
‘No. No, he’s my very own horse. I keep him at home and look after him there myself.’
‘That’s nice,’ said the young woman vaguely. She looked out of the window and then over her shoulder before glancing at Lucy and away again. ‘You, er, excuse me asking, but would you be a great friend of his worship the colonel?’
‘Certainly not. My parents see him occasionally but only as a neighbour.’
Lucy thought this description sounded pretty hollow, but it evidently reassured the other girl, who said with another smile, ‘I thought you weren’t, well, his type, kind of thing. Er, he’s not exactly popular round here at the moment.’
‘What’s he been up to?’
‘Not that he’s ever been very highly thought of in these parts, but just the other day, see, he went too far. One of the village lads, young Tommy, well, he’s only a boy, really, not too bright if you know what I mean, anyway, Tommy was playing round the colonel’s place, just like a kid, you know, he wouldn’t be doing any harm, and his nibs flies into a tremendous rage, shouts at him, says he’ll give him a thrashing if he doesn’t make himself scarce that minute. Then laughed and said he was only joking.’
Lucy thought for a minute. ‘Did Tommy tell you all this?’
‘His mother had to like drag it out of him.’
‘Rough luck on poor little Tommy. Did he say anything else?’
‘No. Oh, there was one bit, he said there was something funny about the shed in the colonel’s garden.’
‘M’m. What sort of something funny? I suppose he didn’t say.’
‘Not really. Something about a hole. His mother said he sounded frightened.’
The girl behind the counter herself spoke with sudden reluctance, as if she repented a little of having been so informative. Lucy took her cue, bought a couple of chocolate biscuits and departed.
Twenty minutes later the biscuits were inside Boris and he was standing in the shade and out of view while Lucy, also out of view, sat looking down on Colonel Procope’s domain. This consisted of a small stone-dressed cottage of no particular consequence, a couple of wooden outbuildings and a fragment of land with a spinney at one end and an open gateway on to the road or lane. This was a rough-and-ready affair that on one hand became no more than a track and on the other led to a bridge across a considerable stream. On the far side of the little valley, a more serious road led westward towards Ipswich, Cambridge and other important places.
Nobody was to be seen moving around or near the cottage, not even through the modest but serviceable pair of field glasses that Lucy habitually carried in her haversack and had hitherto shown her nothing more dramatic than the odd pair of nesting waterfowl. It was more than likely that there was nobody in the cottage either. The sense of adventure that had uplifted her since she had reached the village began to subside, leaving her with a half-memory of more childish would-be exploits, adventures of the mind founded on reading and day-dreaming. She was on the point of calling off her fruitless vigil, remounting Boris and making for home – it was too late now for any trip to the coast – when a large dark-blue car she had glimpsed across the valley came into her view again making for the cottage. In due time it slowed up, drove through the gateway, stopped, and set down a figure she recognized without her field glasses as the eccentric colonel. Lucy had calculated that one or other of the outbuildings must be a garage, but if so Procope made no immediate use of it; instead, he went and unlocked the door of a small shed. Seen through her glasses now, he looked carefully about him before going inside. Though Lucy had no fear of being seen as long as she kept still, she found this intensive survey disturbing in some way. It took a full half-minute to complete, at the end of which time he did enter the shed and no doubt locked the door after him. There was no sign of the younger man who had acted as chauffeur in the past, nor of anybody else.
Lucy waited without result. She was again about to leave when she saw the door of the shed open and Procope emerge. After locking up once more, he gave a somewhat abbreviated repeat of his all-round scrutiny, then moved to the front of his cottage, which was out of her view, and presumably went in at the front door. When another ten minutes had passed without incident, she left her observation post, went to reassure Boris, who stood placidly tethered to a handy tree, and walked down the grassy slope towards Procope’s abode, expecting any moment a challenging shout at best. None came. Still nothing happened when she reached the shed and peered in through a small window.
The interior was dark, and her own reflection kept hampering her attempts to see inside, but quite soon she found a vantage point that gave her a limited view. It was not so limited that she failed to make out part of a shallow trench dug in the earth floor of the shed at one end. So that was the hole young Tommy had seen: a trench. But what was a trench doing in a shed? Was it a trench?
Lucy’s heart had begun to beat fast. Trying not to think, only to act, she hurried back to Boris and rode in a sort of semicircle along the slope, down and back till she was approaching along the lane from the village. At Procope’s gate she dismounted, having done just enough thinking to run up an elementary story about finding herself in the district with time to spare and paying a call on the off chance that he would be at home.
The front door of the cottage had an old-fashioned bell pull that set up a tuneless jangling somewhere inside. Nothing happened for so long that Lucy had almost made to ring again when the door was flung open to reveal Colonel Procope.
The declining sun clearly illuminated a look of eager welcome on his face which very soon gave place to puzzlement, consternation, anger if not more. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’
She had her back to the light; she was far from his mind; her hair was hidden; he had never done more than glance at her. These points occurred to her later; for the moment she was aware only that he had not recognized her. It seemed to her suddenly important to remain unrecognized. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, trying to look as well as sound rustic and gawky, ‘but I wondered if my horse could have a drink of water.’
‘Certainly not! Get out!’ He was shouting and glaring, his fierce eyes doubly strange under the brown thatch of hair. ‘If you don’t, if you’re not gone by the time I finish talking’ – his voice rose to something like a scream and a fleck of saliva hit her cheek – ‘I promise you I’ll set my dogs on you and I won’t be calling them off!’
There was no need on Lucy’s part for any mimicry of someone badly disconcerted and frightened. She was back in the saddle, and had cantered a hundred yards towards the village, before she had time to reflect that any available dogs of the sort implied would assuredly have made a tremendous noise at the first sound of an unexpected visitor. Later still it occurred to her that no horse needed to be taken in search of water with a whole river a bare hundred yards away, but that was not going to matter now.
She arrived back at the post office in time to get some change and was soon on the telephone to Edward’s college, to the porter there who advised her to ring the old mill house, then to Edward himself who listened to her account of events without asking any questions, except where he would find her on his arrival in something under the hour. Lucy went to the saloon bar of the designated pub on the far side of the village green, which was nice enough but not as nice as Mr Littlejohn’s, and very slowly drank a half-pint of shandy (heavy on the lemonade).
Bit by bit her excitement ebbed away and with it all pretence of certainty, all her former sense of having happened to catch Colonel Procope on the point of committing some fearful atrocity. He had responded with surely disproportionate anger to a stranger’s innocent intrusion, for such it had been to his knowledge, and had perhaps shown something of the same earlier to young Tommy. There were a dozen possible explanations for that. He was secretive about his shed, inside which he had dug a trench, and that trench might to a fevered fancy like her own – she admitted it now to herself – have been a grave. And it might have been an unknown number of other things besides. He, the colonel, had fabricated eight lines in the general style of a two-hundred-year-old poem to send a message to a friend who quite likely had been a spy. What had Edward called the basis for that notion? Surmise, perhaps leaving a ruder word unspoken. What he would call her more recent notions Lucy dreaded to think.
Her heart sank further when at last he arrived. She knew immediately from the way he looked round the bar, spotted her, came over, greeted her with a touch of solicitude, that he had not taken her tale seriously. He had turned up for merely avuncular reasons, to give her moral support and to calm her down. His manner was studiedly non-committal when she acted on his request to go over things again.
‘So according to you,’ said Edward after listening to her, ‘you surprised the colonel just as his friend Green, having received and acted on his message, was about to walk in, be killed and be buried in the garden shed. Well now, why would the colonel want to kill his old mate after so elaborately persuading him to come all this way?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, adding stoutly, ‘but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a reason.’
‘True, as far as it goes. How, do you think, would the colonel have known so exactly when Green was due after his long and difficult journey? And how might he have induced Green to call on him?’
‘He’s on the telephone.’
‘True again. If Green was indeed going to appear, he might do so at almost any hour of any day out of, let’s say a hundred.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you happened to come along and poke your nose in at the precise time he was expected.’
Lucy said forcefully, ‘That’s right, perhaps I did, and it’s no argument against the manifestation of an unlikely coincidence to notice that such a manifestation, though perfectly possible, is unlikely.’
‘True a third time. I think. Now I’m going to have a large glass of whisky. What about you? Would you like something of the sort yourself?’
‘No, thank you.’ She was slightly astonished. ‘What, what for?’
‘To strengthen you against a coming ordeal, or what may very well turn out to be one. We’re off back to the colonel’s place to see what we can catch him at.’
‘Oh, are we? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait till dark?’
‘He’ll be on his guard then, and I want to see the ground in the light. The sooner we’re there the better.’
When Edward had returned from the counter with his whisky, she said, ‘Have you told, you know, your friends in the company about any of this?’
He hesitated briefly. ‘No.’
‘Because you don’t want to look ridiculous. As ridiculous as you think my story is.’
Dropping all lightness from his manner, and focusing his attention on her in a way he had never done before, he took her hands in a loose but strong grip. ‘I think it only just conceivable that your story has any substance in it at all. And that’s how you feel yourself, isn’t it? But I’d be a fool if I didn’t follow it up. And I’d be worse than a fool if I didn’t do something to repay the trust you showed in me when you asked me to help you.’
She was not sure she understood all the meaning behind his words, but she caught his tone immediately and responded to it. ‘I’m ready whenever you say.’
He gave a wide grin with his eyes fixed on hers, another new expression, and squeezed her hands for a moment. ‘Good. Now where’s that horse of yours?’
‘I suppose you mean Boris. He’s on the green outside here, or he was when I last looked.’
‘Yes, I thought I saw him,’ he said without much conviction, half got up, remembered his whisky and drained it. ‘Right. Order of march. You lead on Boris. I follow in my trusty shooting-brake, which I should like to pull up and put somewhere out of the way a couple of hundred yards short of the objective. Is that possible?’
‘We’ll pass a bridge over the river on our right. After that I’ll dismount at a point where you should be able to drive off the road.’
He nodded and they left without further ado. Outside they parted in silence, Edward to his car, Lucy to Boris, who showed no resentment at having had to put up with a pretty dull hour, though he was obviously dying to be off somewhere. Before she put her foot in the stirrup she said to him,
‘Now this is probably going to be nothing at all, but on the other hand you may find yourself having to do something pretty serious and grown-up, and I’ll be relying on you. Are you ready for that?’
He tossed his head in a twisty, sporty way that showed he was ready for anything.
‘Okay. Walk march.’
Behind her, she heard Edward start his engine but did not look back. Down the slight hill they went, left into the lane, up to the bridge. The light was still strong, but anyone would have known that evening was not far off. Colonel Procope’s cottage came into sight. Soon afterwards, Lucy dismounted as arranged and led Boris to a point in somebody’s field where he would not be disturbed and could not be seen from the road. Here she tied him to a fencing post by a rope long enough to let him graze wthout getting tangled, gave him some bread she had been saving and stroked his forehead and down to his nose. She told him to stay quiet and not to worry, because she would be back for him. Her heart was beating fast again, this time from fear, not of the colonel or whatever he might do but of his doing nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, of his turning out to be up to nothing worth all this fuss.
Edward’s demeanour, when she joined him in the lane, quite failed to reassure her. His air of serious concentration, his vigilant peering ahead and around, showed her again that he was doing no more than humouring her and was perhaps already rehearsing his indulgent rebuke of her overheated imagination, fondness for sensational fiction and more. So what actually happened when they got to the cottage came as a surprise as well as a shock to them both.
Before Lucy had had time to do more than wonder what Edward had in mind, someone indoors gave a loud scream. It was a different sort of sound from anything she had heard as part of any film or imagined from reading any book; it might have come from a man or a woman or even an animal, and it set up a violent tingling at the back of Lucy’s neck, hot or cold, she could not tell which. There were other noises too that might have been bodies striking against furniture. Somewhere at the back a door opened. Edward caught her arm and led her a few yards in that direction before dropping into a crouch behind an evergreen bush and pulling her down beside him. They heard a shout or two, not nearly as loud as the scream, and then a man unknown to them came out through the doorway in an irregular walk, very much like somebody trying to make his way along the deck of a ship in rough weather. He had not gone far when he collapsed on the ground near a water butt, though his arms and legs still moved.
So far, things had seemed to happen slowly, but now they greatly speeded up. Another man, one with blood on his forehead, one recognizable as Colonel Procope, came running out of the cottage and flung himself on top of the man on the ground. It was hard to follow details, but soon a voice said or called something and the first man no longer moved. The colonel got to his feet and stood for a moment, swaying slightly and panting and looking down at the other, who was dead; Lucy had never seen death before, but she found she knew it when she saw it. Then the colonel took the corpse’s wrists in a businesslike way and started to drag it face upwards towards the shed.
‘That’s Green,’ Edward muttered to Lucy and at once sprang up and ran towards the two figures. She followed. Procope turned and saw Edward and gave him a blow that sent him down into an all-fours position. Lucy went for the colonel, who hit her on the side of the jaw with his fist. She too went down, afraid she might be sick, able to see but not very well, as if through a flyscreen. By the time she was fully herself again, Colonel Procope had shut the door of his expensive car and was driving off, scattering gravel from under his tyres as he turned into the lane. Edward followed, but some distance behind, and when Lucy reached him he had already given up the chase.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘He can’t get far, but he might—’
‘You never know. Come on,’ she said, running past him.
He came up with her. ‘I’ll never catch him in my car.’
‘I’ve got another idea’ – one she thought was hopeless but was going to try.
‘It’s no good.’
‘Just run.’
Lucy soon forged ahead. She had won both the 100 yards and the 220 in her last year at school, but she had run no faster then than now, despite her riding clothes. Her speed may even have increased when she saw ahead of her that, in his haste, Colonel Procope had overshot the bridge and was now backing and trying to turn his car. At one point he must have stalled, for she heard the high rattle of the starter. Then she had run far enough, and at her best speed hurried to Boris, unhitched him and got him back to the lane in time to meet a flushed and gasping Edward.
‘Get up behind me,’ she said from the saddle. She could see the colonel’s car crossing the bridge.
‘What are you—’
‘Do as I say.’
He managed it somehow. Apparently unaffected by the double load, Boris made good time down to the river and stoutly set about carrying them across the ten-yard stream. The water, so cold it burned, reached her knees. That was the end of her remaining sandwiches. Edward’s arms were fast round her middle. She heard the approaching sound of the car. Then they were across and Edward swung himself clear and scrambled up the short slope to the edge of the road, putting his hand inside his jacket as he moved. He turned and faced the oncoming car and what happened next seemed to happen all at once. Lucy heard a loud noise between a pop and a sort of sharp crash and again, although she had never heard a revolver fired before, she recognized it. The car swerved away from her, then towards her, narrowly missing her before it ran on to the verge on the river side and stopped there as suddenly as if it had run into a brick wall.
Boris, who had endured the events of the last minute with the calm of a police horse, blew down his nostrils. Edward turned to Lucy and took her hands more tightly than before. His look just then reminded her of the Edward of years before, when he had been a noted cricketer with, she remembered hearing, an aggressive batting style. For no reason she was aware of, tears sprang to her eyes.
‘I’m not thinking of him,’ she said, not knowing whether she meant Green or Colonel Procope or the two together.
‘Neither am I,’ said Edward.
Near them, Boris contentedly stamped and snorted.
‘One bit of news,’ said Edward. ‘The bullet missed not only him but his car. Some shooting, what? I never could learn even how to hold one of those things.’
‘Just as well. But what happened?’
‘Well, let’s say he spun the wheel round with some idea of spoiling my aim, saw he’d swung too far, went the other way, also too far, and drove straight into a hunk of stone he probably never even saw, fast enough to cause him to bash his head in on the inside of his car. Not a man to react coolly to sudden difficulty or danger, the late colonel. As earlier actions of his had suggested.’
Lucy looked out of the pub window towards the green hedgerow, more brightly sunlit now than when she had last seen it. ‘I suppose we’ll never know what Green had on him that made him worth the colonel’s while to dispose of.’
‘In the colonel’s own far from infallible estimation. What a silly fellow, as well as a thundering nasty one. Our friends in the, er, our competitors were well advised not to trust him with anything of great importance. No, I think you and I probably wouldn’t say thank you for being told the secret of Colonel Procope. What a damn silly name. Can I tempt you to another of those?’
‘Thank you, Edward, in a moment.’ She went on in bit-by-bit style, ‘You know … when I telephoned you that evening, and got you to come out and meet me, I realize now it was all fantasy, really. I just wanted to have a lovely storybook adventure, with you in it. Schoolgirl stuff.’
Edward said quickly, before he could think better of doing so, ‘I wondered whether it might be something like that, but it didn’t bother me at all. I wanted to see you. That was enough.’
‘Oh. But you brought your pistol with you.’
‘So I did.’ He laughed. ‘Just company training. Motto, better safe than sorry. Well, your adventure duly turned up, didn’t it?’
‘It certainly did. That was just as well too.’
‘You wouldn’t have managed any of it but for Boris. How is the old boy?’
‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you.’ She spoke hurriedly and without warmth.
‘What’s wrong? Come on, Lucy, is there something the matter with him?’
‘No, he’s as fit as a fiddle. It’s just, I’ve decided to put him up for sale next week.’
‘What?’ Edward was genuinely amazed. ‘What on earth for?’
‘I think I’m getting a bit old to go on having a horse in that adolescent way.’
He nodded slowly. Something her father had said on that point narrowly failed to reach his consciousness. ‘Well, I suppose you know best. Are you ready for that drink now?’
‘Did anything more ever come out about that forgery?’ asked Roger Ashby.
Edward looked up from his armchair and glass of sherry. ‘Forgery?’
‘Those verses from Gray’s Elegy, wasn’t it? Which you seemed convinced were the work of some forger.’
‘Ah. My conviction proved to be well founded. At least it was confirmed by an announcement to that effect in the paper.’
‘Really. I must have missed that. Who was the forger, were we told?’
‘No. Probably someone quite obscure or even unknown. A mere amateur.’ After some hesitation, Edward went on, ‘Oddly enough, just the other day I happened to run across the fellow who brought the verses to light. Bumped into him at a social gathering. He struck me as rather uncommunicative. My impression was he realized he’d been taken for a ride.’
Ashby did not ask for a clarification of the last phrase. ‘I’d give something to know how he got a load of tosh into the paper. Friends in high places?’
‘Perhaps a kindred spirit. A colleague of mine is looking into it. Now I must leave you for a while. I have to see a man about a horse.’
‘A horse? That doesn’t sound like your kind of thing at all, Edward.’
‘Oh, not to lay a bet, I assure you. I’m buying the animal. With a view to giving it back to the vendor as a sort of present.’
‘Somebody’s birthday?’
‘I suppose you could call it an engagement present.’