PART TWO

Lord Stonybridge’s Story

He told me, as he had promised, all about it. He took his time in the telling, with interruptions for lunch and later for his afternoon nap, which he announced his firm intention of taking as usual. During this time I took the opportunity of sending a wire to Nobby, telling him to join me, since he was clearly wasting his time at Stour; and it looked as though I was here, for the present, to stay. In fact, one of the servants was sent down to Cochem to collect my small baggage; the car, however, I left where it was, since it couldn’t be brought up to the castle.

I have reproduced Stony’s story in his own words, as far as I remember them, but I haven’t attempted to convey the peculiar flavour of his speech, which had been crystallized, as it were, in the St. James’s Street and Warwickshire of pre-1914 England, and had become more arrogantly English, rather than less so, after years of exile in Germany.

He took his time about it, as I say, rambling over his childhood and youth in a leisurely way; he was clearly enjoying himself, and no amount of pressing would bring him to the point before he chose to come to it. Still, I was quite prepared to listen to a bit of Stonybridge family history, and the story is not without interest.

There were the four of us (he began); myself, the eldest; John, who was a year younger; and, coming a long way after us, Oliver and Charles—your grandfather.

John and I both took after our mother; we got on well together, and were very close, while Oliver and Charles formed their own alliance.

Our mother was a charming woman, lively and easygoing. As for our father—your great-grandfather—he was a sterner proposition. Though he was eccentric enough in his own way, he had strong traditional views about the upbringing of children and their duties to their parents, and John and I found him something of a trial. In one thing only, we two resembled him: we were both remarkably single-minded in the pursuit of our tasks or pleasures. While Charles or Oliver would tinker with a hobby for an hour and abandon it unfinished, John and I would stay out for a whole day in the woods with a shotgun, cold and tired, rather than come home without having potted a bird or a rabbit; and John would devote weeks to the unremitting search for some particular butterfly that he wanted for his collection. Semper petimus; it was our only streak of Stonybridge blood.

My father devoted most of his days to the Stour gardens. You will have seen them. He was one of the keenest of its guardians, and it was always a source of regret to him that I, as the eldest son, cared not a fig for gardening. You can imagine his delight when, at an early age—about twelve or thirteen—my brother John began to take an interest in it. Soon John became as fanatic a gardener as our father; he used to hate his summer term at school, because it made him miss the early flowering of Europe; and he would knock down any one of us who happened to tread on the beds or break a flower.

The first important thing that happened in our family took place when John was twenty, and I was twenty-one.

The year was 1890; and for some time my father had been growing restless, because the unchanging stability of Europe allowed him no opportunity for change and development in the garden. And it was then that he took it into his head to dig up the Garden of Europe and replant the whole thing as a large-scale map of the Middle East.

“Europe is finished,” he would mutter to himself as he sat up in his tower with his binoculars, looking out across his herbaceous continent. “Dead as a doornail. Middle East’s the thing. Middle East’s the place of the future. We must scrap Europe and start again.”

There was consternation in the family. For nearly seventy years now the Stonybridge Garden of Europe had grown and flourished, and here was my father, getting old now and not very strong, proposing to undo the work of his great horticultural forbears and embark on this ridiculous new scheme. My mother pleaded with him; but it was John who took action.

John was the hardest hit of all by this whim of our father’s. He loved passionately every inch of the great flower-bed, and he was affronted to the very marrow by the prospect of destruction and change. And so, while my father embarked on his scheme, my brother quietly sabotaged it.

Every day, on my father’s instructions, the gardeners dug up plants and removed them to the nursery, cut the turf into new patterns, filled in a river here, an inland sea there; and every night, when my father was safely ensconced in his library on the far side of the castle, my brother John went out into the gardens and dug it all up again. He replanted, he relaid turf, as fast as the gardeners could pick it up; and thus, with this desperate rearguard action, he maintained the frontiers of Europe, holding the advancing lands of Asia at bay.

Of course, my father knew who was doing it. He was furious. His temper, always uncertain, flared up like a bonfire till my mother feared for his health and sanity. For nearly a week this battle raged; and then my father put his foot down.

He sent poor John away.

From being the most popular of us four sons, John had now become in complete disgrace. He was cut off with a shilling; or rather, with the price of a single fare to Ceylon and a letter of introduction to a tea-planter.

In those days, a young man of good family with no special gifts, if he had not been trained for the army, the church, or the diplomatic service, didn’t have a great deal of choice before him. Like many another younger son, John was forced to accept his fate and learn to plant tea.

Poor John! How he hated it at first. He would send me letters, which I collected from the postmistress in the village, for he was forbidden to write to us. He pined for the Stony gardens; and he wept to think of what was happening to them in his absence.

But as it turned out, once my father had vented his spleen on his unfortunate second son, he suddenly lost all interest in his scheme for the Middle East. He was one of those men who flourish on opposition; and once the chief source of it was gone, he dropped his idea as suddenly as he had adopted it, like a spoilt child who wants the new toy only as long as he is forbidden to have it.

Not that he ever forgave John; his son had offended him, and long after the origin of the quarrel had been forgotten, he continued to nurse his bitterness towards him. As for John, he grew gradually accustomed to his life in Ceylon, and settled down to the cultivation of rare tropical flowers, which had given him a new interest in life.

As for me, I remained at home, bored to tears, missing my brother, growing impatient of my father’s rapidly deteriorating moods and temper. My younger brothers, Oliver and Charles, left home altogether as soon as they were old enough to take their commissions in the Guards. They lived their own lives in London, both marrying young and with out my father’s approval: Oliver a little milliner, and Charles a girl on the stage. For my father, these unfortunate marriages were the last straw. I was the only hope left to him, and he saw to it that I remained at home and learned to look after the estate.

When I was nearly twenty-five, my mother died. My father gradually shut himself up in his tower, and I grew desperate. It was then that I discovered the wonders of polar exploration.

I had always had an interest in the Arctic; and reading one day of an expedition that was about to set off for the polar regions, I knew suddenly that this was what I wanted to do. I applied to join the expedition, and was accepted. I had just enough money from my mother to enable me to undertake the trip; for of course my father would give me none.

When I told him of my intention, he flew into a rage worse than that which John had suffered. Was I going to leave him all alone at Stour, to go off and get myself killed in some tom-fool stunt among the ice-floes? Not over his dead body. Suppose I never came back? What was going to happen to the gardens, to the castle, to the family? My younger brothers were at this very moment fighting in Africa, in the Boer War. I was the only member of the family who could be of any use to him.

But I was firm in my determination; and when my two brothers, Charles and Oliver, were killed in the same action near Pretorius, I allowed not even this disaster to shake me from the course I had chosen. The far north had become my passion; I said good-bye to my father, and went.

I went to the Arctic; and when the expedition was over, I returned to England only for long enough to refit myself and sign on for another journey. If you’ve never been to the North, you’ll never understand what it is that draws one back there. Whatever the draw was, I succumbed to it.

It was in 1900 that my father finally died. I returned to England, feeling little sensation of loss, and indeed interested only in the prospect of obtaining, at last, the fortune which was now to be mine. My mother’s money was nearly gone, and my father’s death came for me like the answer to a prayer.

Or so I thought, as I went with a light heart to hear the family solicitor, a man called Burnley, read my father’s will.

My father had been very cunning. In spite of our quarrels, he had never led me to suppose that I would be cut off with a penny, like poor John. I was, after all, the heir to the property and the title, and these must be kept up. But he had said to himself that he would be damned if his heir, his only remaining son, should spend his life making dam’-fool Arctic explorations, with no one to look after the castle and the gardens that had been his life. And so all his unentailed fortune he left to me in trust, with conditions.

The conditions were that I, George Albert Bernard, should reside for not less than eleven months of the year at Stony Castle, Stour; and that the gardens of the castle were to be maintained by my efforts in the manner to which they had been accustomed. These conditions fulfilled, I should receive from the trustees an annual sum of nine thousand pounds, which would, of course, be considerably diminished by taxes, even in those days.

If I failed to satisfy the trustees that the conditions had been fulfilled, the income was to go to the Royal Horticultural Society of Great Britain for the purpose of research. To Oliver’s and Charles’ families, he left a small bequest; John was, of course, left nothing at all.

The only concession my father had made was that, when I had attained the age of sixty, the trust would be dissolved and the capital would become mine to do with as I pleased.

He was taking no chances. I suppose he thought that up to the age of fifty-nine, I might still be capable of undertaking trips of polar exploration; and that once I had attained my three-score years, I should be likely to settle down to spend my declining years at Stour.

To a young man of thirty-one, the age of sixty seems a very long way off indeed. Three-quarters of a million pounds would be no more use to me at that age, I thought, than they would be if they were buried with me in my tomb. And in the meantime, I could look forward to one of two things: utter penury, or thirty years of incarceration at Stour. I didn’t know which was the worse.

There was very little money coming in from the estate, and what there was would be eaten up by the estate itself. The Arctic, of course, was out of the question in any case. I couldn’t afford it without the income, and if I got the income I couldn’t go away.

The trustees, who were Burnley and a fellow-solicitor in the same firm, were scrupulous-minded, and though they sympathized with my predicament, they wouldn’t part with a penny until, each year, they had received a signed declaration from the Vicar of Stour, stating that to the best of his knowledge I had resided continuously at Stony Castle for the past year, excepting for holiday periods not exceeding one calendar month.

I suppose, looking back, that I was a fool not to make the grand gesture and break away from it all, to go out and try to earn a living. I considered it often enough; oh yes. But to turn down nine thousand a year is much more difficult than it may seem. I told myself that I was trained for nothing, that I had no chance of being able to support myself even in discomfort; perhaps I was just concealing from myself my own lack of courage. And then, the years go by so quickly. Every spring, as that damned map of a garden began to show its first gleams of colour, I would say: this is the time, now, while it is not too late; and every autumn would find me gloomily contemplating the withered continent. I tried to be a good landowner; the business of the estate occupied my time, and I had nothing else to do.

And so fourteen years slipped by; and then it was 1914. The war, for me, came like a blessing in disguise, rescuing me from the rich, gloomy tomb of my life in my forty-fifth year.

* * * *

(Here Lord Stonybridge’s narrative was interrupted while lunch was served in his bedroom. During the meal I had to restrain my curiosity, for he had a hearty appetite and wouldn’t allow conversation to interfere with his food. When the meal was over, he went on with his story for a while, after declaring his intention of taking his usual nap at three o’clock.)

The war (he continued) released me from Stour; it also released my brother John from Ceylon.

Over all these years, we had communicated with friendly irregularity, and I had from time to time sent him money, of which I had more than enough, and he very little.

I had offered him a home at Stony Castle, and money to live on; and he had sometimes considered coming back to England. But like me, he had become settled in the routine of his life, and had indeed got married some years back, to the daughter of a local planter; he could never quite bring himself to the point of tearing up his roots and transplanting himself once more. When the war came, he had joined, as I did, the regiment to which our dead brothers had belonged; and so we found ourselves together again, in the same battalion.

We fought together, in France; and in 1915, I was taken prisoner, and found myself in a German camp, with the war barely begun.

I stayed in that camp for six months. It was as bad as being incarcerated at Stour, only considerably less comfortable. After six months, I escaped.

If you’ll ask me another time, I’ll tell you all about that escape; I daresay you won’t much care to hear it now. It seems all these young fellows nowadays escape simply in order to write a book about it. I could have written one myself, if I’d felt like it; I daresay I could teach them a thing or two.

Where was I? I escaped; and I slipped down the Rhine in a stolen skiff, and hid in these hills; yes, those hills you can see out there.

I had stolen some clothing, and did the best I could for food; and in these hills, that isn’t much. I became bolder, after a time, and used to come down to the village at night, to take a drink in one of the Bierstuben. There were a lot of strangers about in the village, in those days, and I found it easy enough to pass unnoticed. I practised my German phrases for weeks before I made the first venture; I’d picked up a bit of it in camp. I got a few odd looks, but nobody questioned me. I would sit in a dark corner and listen, listen, to try and pick up a bit more of the language without which I couldn’t hope to get any further.

And then one evening, when I had become quite proficient at understanding the speech, I overheard some of the villagers talking, in subdued whispers, about the owner of the castle on the hill, the Burg Endert. I had already learned that this was the Graf Joseph, the latest of a line that was several centuries old.

And what they were saying amounted to this: they suspected that the Graf was a traitor to his country.

I couldn’t grasp all that they were saying, but I heard more than once the word Spion—spy. It was a word which in those days, not only in Germany, was often bandied about when someone was either unconventional in his behaviour, or simply disliked or feared; rather as, in the Middle Ages, the most unpopular lady of the village would find herself labelled a witch. There was something superstitious in these breathy whispers; the gossip of Cochem villagers who had probably never seen a secret document or a disguised radio aerial in their lives, but who liked to think of these things existing, adding a spice of excitement to the dreary hell of their war.

Nevertheless, I was intrigued by what I heard; and feeling that there was nothing to lose except my freedom, which was at best dubious, cold and hungry, I decided to visit the castle and see what I could. If, after meeting the Graf, I decided that his patriotism was unimpeachable, I would do my best to beat a hasty retreat. Failure could only mean a return to my prison camp, and there was always the chance that this unknown lord of the castle would help me.

And so, for the first time, I visited this castle.

I pretended to be an unemployed labourer, looking for work. I gained an audience with the Graf without difficulty, and spun him the story I had invented.

The Graf Joseph was an interesting man, and a clever one. I believe that he spotted me for what I was, at about the same moment that I, summing him up, decided to throw myself on his mercy.

I said, in English: “I’m an escaped prisoner. I have come to ask your help”; and waited for my doom to fall.

He looked at me curiously. He was a handsome man, tall, with the Italian blood of the Cochems strong in him. He answered me, also in English, nearly as good as my own:

“What do you wish me to do?”

I said boldly: “A bed and some food, and later on, help in getting back to England.”

He said: “If you are what you say you are, I shall give you shelter, though I doubt if I can do more than that. If you are not what you say you are, then I shall have you shot and dropped into the river. What is your name?”

I said: “My name is George Scrivener, and I am the Viscount Stonybridge of Stour.”

“In the peerage of England, or of Ireland?”

“Of England.”

“Your regiment?”

“The Coldstream Guards.”

“Rank?”

“Major.”

“You were taken prisoner?”

“On March 2nd of this year, at Arras. I escaped six weeks ago, and have been living in the hills ever since.”

He stared at me reflectively, and said at last:

“It must be cold, in the hills. You’ll be glad to feel a bed under you again.”

I said: “Thank you,” and felt that I knew the meaning of thankfulness for the first time in my life.

* * * *

I was given a small room—the one above this, which was then his. He never told me much about his work for England. Sometimes he was away for several days, and I could only conjecture what he did on these visits. He was a great lover of England, and also of Ireland: he had married an Irish girl.

Sarah. What shall I tell you about Sarah, at this stage? She was very kind to me. If she had fears about sheltering a prisoner, she kept them well concealed. About her fears for her husband, she was more open. They both knew that he was treading on very dangerous ground; and what I had to tell them about the Cochem rumours which had brought me to the castle gave Sarah many an anxious night. She had not been interned, because Joseph had used his influence, which was, or had been, considerable.

Their servants were all faithful, and knew what their master was doing. Their loyalty was to him, as the master of Endert, rather than to the cause which he was serving. I lived in my room at the top of the castle all that winter, and became as one of the family.

In the evenings, when the curtains were drawn and the doors barred, I would come downstairs and play chess with Joseph.

He was a very fine player, and he nearly always beat me. I had only picked up the game during my stay in the prison-camp. But I improved, as the winter wore on, and the game began to have a great fascination for me.

The chessmen we used were very old, and had been in the family for hundreds of years. You will have seen their image in the portrait on the stairs; or has Sophia shown them to you? Yes, they were those of Curtius.

It was many months before I began to realize that Joseph possessed a secret.

It was not the secret of his work for England. That, between us, was something light and unspoken, ever present, but deliberately ignored in our intercourse. I knew as much as he could afford to tell me, and had no desire to learn more.

No; this was something else. It was as though there was something on his mind, something personal, that he wished, at times, to tell me, but at the last moment could not. Often, as we sat over the chessboard in the lamplight, with Sarah sewing by the fire, he would pause, and lift his head, and open his mouth as though to speak. He would look thoughtfully towards Sarah, then back towards me; and if I reminded him gently that it was his move, he would nod, absently, and set down his piece thoughtlessly, sometimes making a foolish mistake.

Perhaps it sounds as though I were making a mountain out of a mole-hill; indeed it is hard to describe this conviction I had, this feeling that there was something of which he wished to unburden himself, and of which not even Sarah knew. It was always on such occasions, when we were sitting quietly, in the evening mood for confidences, that the restlessness came upon him; and I began to notice that these incidents frequently happened on the nights before he was due to leave on one of his dangerous visits.

At first I connected his unease merely with the danger that lay ahead of him; then I began to feel that, though he indeed feared his death, what really troubled him was this need to tell someone of his secret, in case he failed to return.

I have been speaking of the winter of 1915 and ’16. (It was early in ’15 that I was captured, and I escaped in the following September.) It was in the spring of ‘16 that I first broached the question to Sarah.

She listened to me with a worried air; and when I had finished, she told me that she had had the same conviction ever since the year after she had come to Cochem, on their marriage; which had taken place only a year or two before the war. But she had never liked to question him directly, thinking that it must be something to do with his work.

Our conversation took place on Tuesday in April. And then, exactly a week later, came the knock on the door.

We were playing a game of chess at the time. The police arrived quite suddenly, and unannounced. I learned, long afterwards, that one of the younger servants had been responsible for their visit. Though faithful enough, this lad had confided in one of the girls of the village, when he was drunk. He afterwards killed himself, by jumping into the river, when he realized what he had done.

The police were quite polite; they wanted Joseph to come with them for questioning. Since I had no papers, and since they had been dropped a hint about me, I was taken along, too.

They had suspected Joseph for some time; but they had to move cautiously at first, because Joseph was a man of substance, of importance, and they couldn’t afford to make a mistake. They allowed him to pack a bag and to say goodbye to his wife; and then we embarked for Cologne.

There we were placed in adjacent cells in the police station. I suffered a thorough interrogation, and it did not take them long to identify me as a missing prisoner. When they had satisfied themselves who I was, they became more inquisitive. They asked me what I could tell them about Joseph, Graf von Cochem.

Naturally I told them nothing; only that he had given me shelter, thinking me a tramp, and not knowing who or what I was. They weren’t satisfied with this; they became erroneously convinced that I, being a peer of the English realm, must be a person of considerable importance, intimately acquainted with Lloyd George and privy to the darkest secrets of the War Office. That I had spent so many months in the house of the Graf Joseph, himself an important personage suspected of espionage, seemed to them a highly suspicious circumstance. And so, determined to uncover the deep plot in which the pair of us were clearly involved, they put us both into the same cell and left us together, hoping to overhear us, through the spyhole of the cell, discussing our nefarious affairs.

They were pleasant days that we spent together, in that tiny cell, before the police became more violent in their methods. Joseph was a man who took things philosophically, with calmness; and we talked of many things, though never of what our eavesdroppers wanted to hear.

The real charm of those first days was that Joseph, when he had packed his bag and left the castle, had brought with him his set of chessmen. The police had granted his request for it courteously enough, for at that stage, as I have said, they were still without evidence against him. And so, for hours, we sat and played chess together; and the police outside the door, puzzled by our failure to discuss anything of diplomatic or military import, came to the conclusion that, with these endless games of chess, we were somehow communicating with each other in some form of code, in which every Queen’s pawn had its significance, every move of a bishop its hidden meaning.

It was an ingenious idea, and once we had learned of what we were suspected, we spent many hours trying, for our amusement, to work out a code on these lines; but it proved to be very difficult. We did get as far as organizing a complicated system involving the initial letters of the pieces and gambits, but it was altogether too slow as a means of conversation, and we never got further than a few phrases, though Joseph did once manage to convey a whole sentence, which was:

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO HAVE FOR DINNER?

and which gave our guardians something to think about, for they had been following the construction of our code with interest.

If I am describing these days at some length, it is because I have been trying to put off for as long as possible my memories of their sequel.

It was after we had been in our cell for eleven days that we embarked, one evening, on our last game of chess together. We did not know that it was to be our last; but Joseph was worried, nevertheless, because he knew the police had dallied long enough, and were nearly ready to act. He had learned from their recent questions that they had found out a good deal about his activities; and they had warned him that more violent methods would shortly be employed in order to persuade him to deliver up the names of those accomplices who had assisted him in his work.

And so, that evening, Joseph was uneasy, as he had often been before.

When, halfway through the game, he found himself in check, and paused at some length to consider how to extricate himself, I took advantage of the moment to ask him, point-blank, if there was anything he wished to tell me, or any message that he would like me to take to Sarah, if ever he failed to return to her and if ever I became a free traveller.

He looked at me, and then, setting his elbows on the table between us, began to speak.

“If I don’t come back to Cochem,” he said, “I don’t know what will happen to Sarah.

“They’ll confiscate my goods, may even take Burg Endert. Sarah will be interned, at the least; she may be imprisoned and questioned, if they don’t find out all they want from me.”

I nodded, watching him.

“If Germany is defeated, she may be able to get back to Endert. But she’ll have no money; the State will have seen to that.” He paused, fingering a chessman; it was a bishop. He went on: “If I tell you what I’m thinking of telling you, you may be able to see to it that Sarah becomes rich, very rich. Will you do as I ask?”

I agreed, of course, saying: “Doesn’t Sarah know anything of this?”

“No; I have never told her. I hardly know why; perhaps it was because I wanted to make certain for myself first; also I was afraid, when this work of mine started, that she might be questioned, and reveal something. I am a covetous man, Stonybridge, though you may not think so; I wanted to make quite sure that my rather valuable information didn’t fall into the wrong hands.” He was talking half to himself, musing; I was becoming very curious. “I didn’t learn of it myself until a year ago,” he went on. “It was when we were restoring part of Burg Endert after the big fire. That was when I found out about Curtius—you remember the portrait on the stairs?”

I nodded again; I had often studied Curtius, and those familiar painted chessmen. I had liked the picture.

Suddenly Joseph picked up the bishop which he had been toying with; a red one. He held it in front of him, observing it, and said: “This is the key, Stonybridge, this little bishop.” He held it up. “Do you see his sly face? Look at his crooked smile: he knows, he won’t tell; you can trust him.” He laughed. “I have become very fond of this little bishop, Stonybridge. He grows on you. He is different, you know, from the others in the set; had you noticed?”

I hadn’t noticed; and I had no time to notice it now, because there came a rattle of keys at the cell door. Two of the guards had come to take Joseph away.

He looked up at them, and said calmly: “I suppose you would not allow me to finish my game?”

“No time for that,” said the guard.

“A pity. My king is in check.” He pushed his chair back from the table; he still held the bishop, and for a moment I thought he was going to hold it out for me to take. Then, as though changing his mind, he slipped it into his pocket. “Too late,” he said. “I’ll keep him now, to bring me luck. But if ever you get back, Stonybridge, you might look for the schoolmaster’s letter in the globe.” They had him at the door now; he said, smiling: “I feel lucky to-day. Perhaps one day we’ll have an opportunity to finish our game.”

I saw one of the guards turn to the other and raise his eyebrows, with a slight shrug; and I knew that the game would never be finished.

They took him away then. He was an admirable man, the Graf Joseph, and I imagine that he died well.

* * * *

(Here Stony broke off for the second time, to take his nap; and I considered telling him what I knew of Johann Braun, of Godesberg Asylum. But there didn’t seem to be much point in distressing him unnecessarily, and I decided to let the Graf Joseph sleep in peace in his anonymous pauper’s grave. When I heard the rest of the story, I was glad I hadn’t told him.)

* * * *

As for me (he went on), after a day or two I was moved from the cell at Cologne, and taken, eventually, back to the military prison from which, so many months before, I had escaped. The authorities had abandoned their view of me as an important figure in possession of secrets of state, and, back in my camp, I was treated like any other officer.

The first person I saw, when I entered the mess-hut on the day of my return, was my brother John.

He had been taken prisoner only a few months after my escape, of which he had learned from some of my fellow-inmates. He had been wounded, and though his wound was healed, he was still suffering from shell-shock, which had left him nervy, depressed, and slightly deaf. His depression had been added to by the fact that he had received news of the death of his wife in Ceylon, while he was a prisoner; and he was therefore doubly glad of my arrival, for I was able to help a little to relieve the tedium of prison-life, which gave him too much time to think of his troubles. We had plenty to talk about, between us.

I don’t know exactly when it was that the idea came to us of sending John home to Stour in my place.

It was some time towards the end of the year, which was 1917. We thought the war was going on for a good many years more. And we knew that after the war we would both have to go back: John to his empty home in Ceylon, I to the gloomy barrack of Stour. It was not a pleasing prospect. Not for us the pleasant dreams of home and future which kept up the spirits of our companions; only a return to a manner of life which had, for me at least, become completely meaningless.

Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about Sarah. You will have already guessed that she became my wife.

At the time I first knew her, during those months of hiding, she was a girl of twenty-three. She was the first woman who had ever meant anything to me; and since she was in love with her husband, if she was aware of my feelings, she never showed it.

Now that Joseph was dead, my one idea was to make my way back to Cochem as soon as I could and look after her. I never allowed myself to have any doubts about her. I knew, with what I thought was a deep instinct, but which was probably simple arrogance, that she would marry me. I didn’t know whether she would want to come back to England, to Stour, with me; but the truth was that, with or without Sarah, I didn’t want to go back myself.

I wanted to go back and stay at Burg Endert where I had spent those happy, dangerous months. And I wanted to find out the secret of Curtius, seventh Count of Cochem.

Perhaps you will have gathered by now that I am a man of singular perseverance in my ideas, once they have taken hold of me. I see you smile; perhaps I over-estimate myself. It is true that my perseverance in fourteen years of dreary guardianship of Stour is not a thing of which I am proud. But in that case circumstances, in the form of nine thousand pounds a year, were too much for me.

I was still up against circumstance, but this time a war, a woman, and an unsolved mystery had combined to strengthen my resolve. This time, I would shake the dust of Stour from my feet once and for all.

Or so I told myself, and John, as we hibernated through that long winter. The trouble was that in shaking off the dust of Stour I would shake off my only financial resources. And I wanted money, not only for myself, but for Sarah; as Joseph had said, the State would have little concern for the wife of a dead spy, and all his own resources would almost certainly have been impounded.

It was John who first made the actual suggestion. We had been speaking of the gardens of Stour; and we talked, idly enough, of the great changes that would have to be made in the garden, once the peace treaties, if they ever came, designed the new face of Europe. It would, we imagined, be a herculean task.

John said: “I wish I could go back and do it.”

I said: “Why not?”

He said: “I think I will.”

Then he said: “You don’t want to go back, do you?”

“No.”

“Need you?”

We stared at each other.

And so the idea was born.

Of course it wasn’t really serious at first. During those long months of imprisonment, we found some amusement in working out the details of a wonderful plan to effect a switch of identities. We worked it out rather as though it were a plot for one of those plays in which the real Duke turns up at the end of the second act; you know the kind of thing; usually he proves his identity with a birthmark, and everybody turns out to be twins.

Unfortunately we had none of those conveniences to help us with our own plot. We used to derive considerable entertainment from fantastic ideas of disguises, and forgeries, and so on, and evoked the picture of John calling on the Vicar of Stour in a false beard and horn-rimmed spectacles.

But none of our plans could get us over our two main difficulties. The first was the Vicar, who had always signed my annual affidavit to the Trustees. He had known me since I was a child, and would call on me from time to time, ostensibly to enquire after my spiritual welfare and satisfy himself that I was indeed in residence, but mainly in order to ask for a contribution to the Church Roof Fund, in whose cause he was indefatigable. There was of course nothing binding me to obtain the affidavit from him, for any responsible person who knew me, such as the local J.P. or doctor, would have served my turn; but to change now, after all those years, would seem odd and invite comment, and the Vicar therefore constituted a problem.

The second difficulty was Burnley and his fellow-trustee.

It was true that during the years I spent at Stour before the war, I hardly saw either of them, simply sending in my annual affidavit, and receiving my annual income. Once the thing had become a routine, I used only to pay an occasional visit to them when in London, to discuss some investment or other business which could as easily have been conducted by letter.

But it was almost certain that when I returned from the war, they would want to see me to discuss the business arising from my long absence. And however alike John and I had been thought to be in our extreme youth by doting relatives, there was no doubt that now, in our middle years, we could hardly hope to be taken for each other. True, we were of the same build, and height; we both had our mother’s family nose; our voices were not dissimilar; but, in addition to all the little dissimilarities of feature, and John’s darker complexion, burnt by twenty-five years of Indian sun, we had naturally all those differing expressions, differing manners of raising an eyebrow, of laughing, or speaking, that are so much more revealing than the actual lines of a face. Only a very short-sighted man would ever have taken John for me in broad daylight, if he had known me at all well.

These were our stumbling-blocks. As for the servants at Stour, these consisted now of our old nurse, who was nearly seventy, and a butler who was nearly as old, both of whom had always sympathized with John and me in our battles against our father, and who could, we thought, be relied on to help us in this last battle against a dead man’s obstinacy. These two had, with the aid of daily girls from the village, looked after the castle throughout the war, in my absence. The daily girls were always changing, and could be changed again (not that I had ever been on intimate terms with any of them; that was a hobby of my father’s, which I had not inherited).

I had never had many close friends in England; my one crony with whom I had made many of my polar trips had been killed in the war, and there was no one else whom I had any particular desire to see again. As for my acquaintances in Stour itself, these were few and unloved. Nevertheless, if our plan were to bear fruit, John would have to live almost the life of a recluse; he could hardly invite my neighbours to tea.

I was thinking about this latter problem, one day when John and I were indulging our fancies in the usual way. I said:

“It’s no good, John. The village people. You’d be bound to be seen.”

John said: “Would I? You know I’m not social, George. I’m deaf as a post, now, and I’ve not much use for people. I’m used to a solitary life.”

I said: “Yes, but you can’t incarcerate yourself completely at Stour. Why, man, I tried it myself, and it nearly drove me mad.”

“You were a young man then; and besides, you are not me.” He told me then that he wanted nothing more than a quiet home in which he could devote himself to the cultivation of tropical flowers and to the replanning of the Stonybridge Garden of Europe. “Even if I simply accepted your offer of a home there with you, George, I still shouldn’t ask any more. Why should I want to go and take tea with the local spinsters, or sherry with the curate? Damned nuisance, country neighbours, if you ask me. They want to take cuttings from your plants, and they call on you after luncheon. No, I should take a firm line right away; tell ’em I’m an invalid, that I’m deaf, that the war has left my nerves in a bearish state; it’s true, damn it. Plenty of breathing-space within our own Stony walls. All I want, George, is a few hundreds a year and my own greenhouse. And if I can help you, into the bargain, then I shall be satisfied.”

It was then, I think, that I first realized John meant it seriously; and that I meant it seriously, too.

And so, we planned, and waited.

We had plenty of time for it, and nothing else to do. This time we got down to it in earnest. And we found a way, as we thought, out of our two major difficulties, and indeed out of any others that might arise.

I would go back to England myself, and stay for six months to a year, as it should prove necessary. I would visit Burnley and settle my business; I would call on any old acquaintances who might wish to look me up after the war; I would arrange the Stour servant problem satisfactorily; I would make it known in the village that the war had left me invalidish and that I intended to retire to a secluded life, taking no part in village activities. To make things doubly safe for John, I would go back as a man considerably changed by the war: I should feign a little deafness, darken my skin with a stain, perhaps, copy as best I could John’s manner of speaking and moving; and take to wearing rimless spectacles, which are infinitely more misleading than the horn-rimmed variety more commonly adopted, one is led to believe, in these cases. These things would not substantially alter my identity, but they would prepare the way for a somewhat changed appearance in Lord Stonybridge. The point was, of course, that while John could hardly be expected to disguise himself as me for the rest of his life, it was a simpler matter for me to make a fair shot at an imitation of John for six months; after which everything would be ready for him to step into my place. Since John himself had been absent from England for more than twenty-five years, there was no danger of him being recognized for himself.

As for the second of our major problems, the Vicar of Stour, I must confess that we were never very happy about the method we finally hit upon. This was as follows: during my stay at Stour, I should suggest tactfully to the old man—he was a contemporary of my father’s—that he was getting a bit too far on in years to wish to be bothered with this annual chore, and I should then make arrangements to have the same task performed by some other local dignitary, choosing one whom I had never met. When I had selected him, John would be brought privily down to Stour, and it would be John who would meet and arrange things with the man I had chosen. This would be, so to speak, a trial run for him; a little prologue to his long playing of the part of Lord Stonybridge.

There remained only the problem of what should become of Captain the Hon. John Scrivener, M.C., when John had abandoned him to take up his new identity. Clearly he would have to die; otherwise we might become involved in all kinds of inheritance problems. (With John “dead,” there was no difficulty about the inheritance; neither of us had sons, and the title would go, on the death of Lord Stonybridge, to Oliver’s boy. If ever Sarah should bear me a son, it would be no sorrow to me to see him lose the title; he would have my money, which would be far more useful to him than Stony Castle or a handle to his name. And as it turned out, she bore me only Sophia; and a very charming girl she’s turned out, too, as I see you’ve noticed, young pup, having eyes in your head. Where was I?)

Yes, John had to die; and it was his own suggestion that he should commit suicide. I should say, appear to commit suicide. It was perhaps a rather drastic solution, but the idea appealed to John; he said it had dramatic possibilities. Indeed the whole scheme had given the fellow a new lease on life; it quite bucked him up; he used to spend hours happily tracing his new signature over and over again below mine, until he had the hand to his satisfaction. The truth is that we had both come to look upon the whole enterprise as a kind of glorious revenge against our father. We sat in that prison-hut spinning our plot in the same spirit of vengeful cunning with which, thirty years before, as schoolboys, we had sat in the summer-house at Stour, plotting to outwit some new and outrageous disciplinary measure of our father’s. It was childish, perhaps; but it was agreeable. You didn’t know my father.

Well, John was to die; and the moment he was to choose would be the day, if it ever came, of our release from prison by the victorious Allies. In the first confusion of liberation, he would stage his suicide, leaving a note which would convey something of the state of deep nervous depression in which his war experiences and the death of his wife had left him, and his inability to face repatriation. He would disappear; and since there would be no body, there would be no inquest. He would, in time, be presumed dead.

Such was the plan we concocted; and if you think it was an odd thing to do, well, three years in a German prison-camp does breed odd things. It suited us both, and gave us each what he wanted: money to live comfortably, each in the place he chose, and the satisfaction of having at last escaped from the wreck which our father had very nearly succeeded in making of our lives. (Perhaps I exaggerate: I admit that in my own case, Stour on ten thousand a year might be considered a very luxurious wreck. I was, shall we say rather, becalmed; expensively becalmed. As for John—well, if you would like to go and plant tea, you’re welcome; by all means go and plant it. John had had enough.)

Yes, I suppose I could have abandoned my heritage and set out to earn a living; but what would have been the fate of a man of my age—which was bordering on fifty—cast into that post-war world with neither training nor experience of any kind? And then, the thought of allowing all that money to go to the Royal Horticultural Society was, in spite of my respect for that admirable body, a painful one.

We knew what we were doing all right; so you needn’t look at me like that, young man. You can’t teach your great-uncle to suck eggs.

* * * *

Well, we did it. And some things were made easier for us than we had imagined. When I got back to Stour, and wrote to Burnley, I found that his fellow-trustee had died during the war, and he himself had now retired from the business. The firm had been taken over by a new partnership, under the name of Babington and Pettigrew. Under the terms of my father’s will, the trusteeship had now descended to them.

When Burnley wrote to this effect, I immediately invited Babington and Pettigrew to come down to Stour and make my acquaintance. Or rather, the acquaintance of John. (This was to forestall any offer on Burnley’s part to effect a meeting between us all so that he could introduce us. The offer duly came, but I indicated that I was very busy at Stour and would prefer to meet them there, while promising a visit to Burnley himself, for a chat, later on. This I duly accomplished in my own person.)

John was now on absolutely safe ground as far as Babington and Pettigrew were concerned, and rather enjoyed his first essay in impersonation, while I spent the weekend tucked away in the attics of the west wing of the castle, waited on by old Nana, who would bring me graphic accounts of the proceedings going on at the other end of the building.

Nana, in all this, was splendid. If Master John wished to stay at home in my place, if I had found a nice young lady at last and wanted to stay on that barbarous Continent, it was all right with her. It would be nice to have Master John home again, she had written; she expected he had grown a good deal, and he must be very brown, with all that sun. Poor lamb, fancy he was wounded; she would soon have him well. No, she wouldn’t tell anyone, especially not that nosy old parson who was always coming up and poking about the place; trust her to fool them all. And she had, too; so had James Gurney, the butler, who was now a bent old man past doing anything except to sit polishing silver in his pantry.

The real difficulty was the damned parson. I went to see him and suggested that he might wish to be relieved of the annual duty I had put upon him; but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was an obstinate old man of eighty-four, who persisted in believing that he was fit for another twenty years, and seemed indeed likely to live that long. I was put in a spot; I could hardly change the routine now without upsetting him and causing comment.

Six months went by, and I had still come no further to solving this problem. I had by this time established my intention of retiring to a life of seclusion, and had tidied up a good many details; I had found the name of a good doctor in the neighbouring town, whom John could summon in case of need; I had embarked for the first time in my life on a study of gardening, and dismissed the old gardeners with a tale of having promised the job to my old batman. During this time John and I lived a kind of composite life as Lord Stonybridge, each taking his turn as the occasion arose; we fell into a pleasant routine of it, and began to take it quite for granted. A visitor might be announced, as we sat together in the library: “The parson? That’s you, George,” John would say, returning to his bulb catalogue; or “The doctor, John; your turn,” and John would rise, grumbling, and go down to the hall. There was one thing we were spared, and that was tiresome relatives. I had never had much to do with the Charles’s or the Olivers; for they had both, as you know, married young and against our father’s wishes, and got themselves killed shortly afterwards, so that their families never had much chance of becoming, so to speak, part of the Stonybridge family circle. Well, you know that yourself; your father and your uncle never had much to do with me. I didn’t even bother to visit them, during those months; I knew John would never be bothered by them, and if ever they took it into their heads to propose themselves for a visit, he had only to find some excuse to refuse them.

Yes, everything was running smoothly, and only the Vicar continued to live on and on, more obstinate than ever. “Done it for you for twenty years, my boy. No need to change now. Life in the old dog yet.” It was infuriating. Many a time I thought almost seriously of getting him in for sherry and poisoning his drink. I did once invite him to dinner, and pressed him continually with strong drink and a great deal of very rich food, and far too much port, hoping to bring on a heart attack. But he tucked away all my meat and half my cellar without turning a hair, and turned up bright as a button to read matins in his church at eight o’clock the following morning.

The release, when it came, was merciful; for me, if not for the Vicar. He caught a cold from delivering a too lengthy sermon from his chilly pulpit, which was in a nasty draught from a gap in the roof. The cold turned to pneumonia, and he died.

After that I stayed only for long enough to see John comfortably settled, with a new gardener, a new greenhouse, and a trunkful of books on the cultivation of tropical plants in cold climates. When the new parson arrived in the village to take the old Vicar’s place, John invited him up to the castle, regretted that his health made regular church attendance impossible for him, promised a substantial annual sum for the repair and maintenance of the church roof, and prepared the way for his annual request for the affidavit.

I returned to Germany and to Sarah, assuming the name of von Arnhem; and John remained at Stour, sending me annually two-thirds of the trust income, and retaining the rest, which was all he wanted, for himself.

Since I had never taken any interest in the House of Lords, after taking my seat over twenty years earlier, John remained similarly aloof from politics. He became a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, and later was elected to the Athenaeum, which between the two of them provided all the social life he needed; and settled down to a peaceful, contented life among his plants.

As for me, I married Sarah, and found, here at Cochem, the first real contentment I had ever known. We travelled, when we pleased and for as long as we pleased; and in the winters, we devoted ourselves to the study of Curtius, which proved an absorbing though an unrewarding passion.

* * * *

Unrewarding; yes. We never learned Curtius’ secret. Nor Joseph’s.

“Look for the schoolmaster’s letter in the globe.” Those had been Joseph’s departing words to me; and, believe me, we looked.

We had learned a little about Curtius, from the old family histories in the library. He was not a lovable character, by all accounts. He had gained the inheritance by murdering his half-brother, and his alien Italian blood made him disliked and feared; he was known to his contemporaries as “Curtius the Spider.” He had a passion for chess, and was a master of the game; he was thought to have gone mad, and died before he was fifty. Those were the snippets of information we found, and, at first, nothing more.

And then we found a reference, in one of these books, to an English tutor, engaged by Curtius in 1550 for the instruction of his sons; one Master Nicholas Truelove, of Gloucester, a schoolmaster.

It was Sarah who thought of the globe in the old schoolroom, here at Burg Endert. It was a child’s globe of the world, she said; it had some historical interest, because it was one of the earliest to be used for the teaching of the new geography—the geography of a world that had been flat, and was become round.

She had often looked at it curiously, a battered little object, standing on a wooden pedestal, that had taught generations of Cochem children their world. The charting of the land and sea areas on its curved face was largely fanciful, with Europe covering half the globe, and great areas labelled “Terra Incognita,” decorated with mermaids and dolphins. The globe could, she said, have been hollow; it seemed a likely enough hiding-place for a tutor’s last message, or an indiscreet letter which he had written and wished to conceal.

Unfortunately, the globe was no longer at Burg Endert.

It had been sold, along with some of the other contents of the schoolroom, to one of the dealers whom Sarah had been forced to call in after the war. They had taken all kinds of things, some valuable, others trivial; the globe had gone, she thought, in a “lot” with some of the schoolroom books and furnishings.

Of course we tried to recover it, but it had, by that time, long passed out of the original dealer’s hands, and we were unable to trace it. We wrote, over the years, to antique dealers and curiosity shops all over Europe, but without success. I suppose someone had taken a fancy to the object, and bought it as a curiosity; it must have had some little historical value. It was a great pity, but there it was.

We still had Curtius’ chessmen—but without the red bishop. I had been allowed to take the rest of the set with me from Cologne, when I was returned to my prison-camp. One of my fellow-prisoners carved me a little bishop out of bone, to complete the set—we play with it often, Sophia and I. You shall see it, later on.

So there it stood; we were unable to satisfy our curiosity, greatly as it pricked us. And it has remained unsatisfied. Though I have hopes; yes, I have hopes. But as to that, well, we shall see.

I have often thought (he continued after a slight pause) of my mother and her fine hopes for her four sons. Two of them killed in their early youth; one banished to Ceylon; one mouldering of inactivity at Stour, with too much money and nothing he wanted to do with it. At least the two of us snatched happiness and the life we wanted. I have never regretted it; and nor, I think, has John. Poor fellow, so he’s gone. You must look after his gardens, young man; I hope you’ll do that.

I suppose you wondered what had happened to all the Stonybridge capital, when you came to find the cupboard was bare. I don’t blame you; I should have been very annoyed myself, in your place. The answer’s simple enough.

When I reached the age of sixty—it was, let me see, in 1929—the trust was dissolved, and the capital became mine—or rather, John’s. The freed income was larger than it had been under the restrictions of the trust, and the capital had accrued; but we were not to get much more in fact, because taxes ate up the increase.

Since we were both perfectly satisfied with the existing arrangement, there seemed to be no good reason for altering it. John left the administration of the capital in the hands of Babington and Pettigrew, no longer as trustees but simply as his solicitors; and he continued to send me my share of the income.

It was a few years later—’36, I think it was—that Babington and Pettigrew packed up; they had been doing badly, and sold the firm and its goodwill to a man called Mott; they remained, I believe, as sleeping partners. John didn’t take much of a fancy to Mott, but he seemed competent enough, and John let things go on as they were.

Until, of course, this second war appeared on the horizon.

I won’t tell you of our life here under the Nazis. They left us alone, and we left them alone. We sometimes thought of moving, but our roots had grown too deep. And we couldn’t go back to England. There could only be one Lord Stonybridge in the country. But by 1937, when war was beginning to seem possible, if not certain, it seemed essential to get some capital out of England to me, before it was too late. For if war came, John would be able to send me nothing.

So we moved to Switzerland. (It was there that my wife died, you know; Sophia and I returned only a year ago.) And gradually, over the course of the next year, John realized the greater part of the capital and transferred it to my account, in the name of von Arnhem, in the National Bank of Switzerland. He did it very carefully; he took everything out of Mott’s hands, and managed the whole business of selling up by himself. The money was dotted about in a number of different investments, and he was able to sell out without creating much of a stir—except, no doubt, in the offices of Mott, Babington and Pettigrew. I shall be interested to learn what they were able to tell you.

You will realize that while John had no family to provide for, I had by this time not only Sarah, but Sophia also to think of. John needed only enough to keep himself for his remaining years; I wanted something substantial to leave for my daughter. As for the Stonybridge heir, well, of course, I thought it would be Oliver’s son; your uncle. He was doing nicely then, as a barrister; as far as I was concerned, he would have to make do with the entailed estate. Sophia was more important.

Well, he died, and your father died, and now you tell me young Oliver got himself killed shooting tigers; I’ve outlived the lot of ’em; and here you are. I suppose you came looking for your money. I don’t blame you. I don’t know how you found me, and I don’t know whether I’m going to give you anything, now that you have; but we’ll see. We’ll see how you shape. It’s getting dark. Draw the curtains, Sophia; so.