by Karl Fish
‘It’s getting late, Agatha. You go bed soon,’ Nan advised.
‘I’d like to wait up for Uncle Gideon, if that’s OK?’ she replied and was met with a disapproving frown. It was ten o’clock and way past Aggie’s bedtime. It was also way past the several hours Gideon had expected to spend in London. He had not returned. Aggie worried he could have been caught in an air-raid and was, therefore, holed up somewhere. It was likely, as they were frequent and unrelenting in the capital. Ambledown, by contrast, was quiet and unscathed. If she listened carefully, the last of the summer crickets could be heard chirping before they hibernated or died.
Sleep was beginning to defeat Gideon’s young charge. Nan brought in blankets and hot milk as she lay there drifting in and out of sleep. Nan dimmed the nightlight and left Aggie alone with her thoughts while she retired to her quarters.
Aggie wasn’t sure how long she had dozed for when she heard a repetitive clack at the window. At first, she thought hailstones were falling but there were too few noises. She turned the light off fully so there was just darkness and crept on all fours to the window. There was a splinter of moonlight between the blinds that she peered through. Hiding out of sight of the main street but visible to her from the window was the mischievous smile of Eric Peabody. He was hopping lightly from foot to foot and breathing hot air into his hands in an attempt to stay warm. Once he spotted her, he made light work of the stone steps leading to 1a. Aggie made her way to the front door to let him in. His fingers had already poked their way through the letterbox and he was shoving an envelope through.
‘SShhhh!’ he whispered. ‘Don’t unbolt the door or nuffink.’
Aggie took the large envelope he was softly posting through.
‘I got as many as I could with the old crest. But I’ll ’ave to get ’em back tomorrow. D’ya ’ere.’
‘Of course,’ Aggie whispered back. ‘Thank you!’
‘Welcome,’ he replied.
‘I was expecting to see you all after detention.’
‘Yeah ... Sorry ’bout that. I’ve been in the attic all this time, sifting through all the treasure. And Gem went an chopped ’er ’air off, didn’t she? McGregor ’it the roof. Lizzy couldn’t risk leaving her alone. She said Cecile was told. Didn’t she turn up?’
‘Oh, yes, she did. Poor Gem. Hope she’s OK.’
‘Apart from looking ridiculous, she’ll be fine.’ Eric laughed and sauntered back into the shadows as shrewd as a scavenging fox.
Aggie made her way back into the living room. The fire was almost out but its subtle embers provided enough warmth for an hour or two yet. She re-lit the nightlight, but kept it low, and began to deal the photos out from within the envelope as if she was playing a huge game of patience. She ran them vertically to represent each decade and then horizontally to represent each year. Eric was right, there were lots of them. Before 1900 and just up until this current war. There was forty years’ worth at least.
‘I’m thirteen,’ she said to herself, beginning to count backwards on her fingers. ‘It’s 1943 now so that’s right, 1930, the year I was born.’ She picked up all photos after 1930 and placed them back in the envelope. ‘They had both been to university before Egypt and it was several years after when Mum fell pregnant with me,’ she spoke to herself, confirming her mother’s and Gideon’s history to herself. ‘That could be anywhere between twenty or even twenty-five years,’ she confirmed to herself in a whisper.
Once again, counting backwards, she eliminated any photos prior to 1905.
‘I doubt they started school much before seven or eight,’ she continued, removing a few more years. Re-arranging the remaining photos into a single timeline, she then began to work across the images, waiting to see her mother and uncle smiling back at her – from carefree children through to moody teenagers.
She spotted Gideon at once. Firstly in 1919. He was so slender, about twelve years old by then, beanpole thin and with his unmistakable flop of hair and foolish grin that spanned his face. He was broader now. His face carried more weight for certain but back then he was stick thin. It was definitely him. He was at the far-right end of the photograph. She scoured the girls who were fewer in number and placed either at the front of the photograph or to the left. The boys outnumbered them by about two to one so that should have made her job easier. Staring intently on the far left was a girl whose features mimicked Gideon’s exactly. She was slender, tall, and with a foolish grin. It must have been her. Florrie had only ever had photos of her in her adulthood, her early twenties. Aggie was sure it must be her. She referred to the footnote below, which displayed the pupils’ initials
Top Row L-R – C.S-M
That wasn’t right. Her mother’s name had been Charlotte Elizabeth Belchambers. She had never been married so it could never have been a maiden name either, and besides, her uncle was also a Belchambers. She looked across to the right-hand-side of the initials:
H.S-M
How could that be wrong too? Both of them had the same hyphenated surname, which was a peculiar coincidence, but their forenames were also wrong. It must be a clerical error she thought. Or she hadn’t interpreted it correctly.
Aggie then proceeded to look at the surrounding years. Sure enough, there they were again, on the photo from the year before and the year before that. Same grins, but younger each time. Same positions and, much to her dismay, the same initials used. There was no chance it could have been wrong over so many years. She must be interpreting something incorrectly. She picked up the photo dated 1920. True to form, there they were; both of them bookends. But their smiles had been lost and a seriousness cast over their faces. Same initials, same confusion and then Aggie spotted the proof that she needed. Her mother, or at least she was ninety-nine per cent sure it was her mother, was wearing her blazer. A dark grey mark was present where once the crest had been but no longer was. It was her, it had to be. Aggie squinted. The age of the image and the size of the mark were not clear.
‘Aggh, the magnifying glass,’ she thought to herself. Making light work of the stairs, she bounded into her room and procured the worn velvet box and its precious contents from within the dolls’ house where she had hidden it. She returned to the living room where the nightlight still provided her with enough means to look at the magnified image in detail. As she pored over the photograph, the opaque edges, those that looked like they had been etched to emphasise the design, cast a circular pattern of light as she focused the glass in and out. Aggie had seen children use glass, magnified and other, to burn ants using the heat from a strong summer sun but she wasn’t aware that the small amount of light offered from her internal nightlight would cast any at all. It allowed her to target her mothers’ jacket and focus on the crest. Sure enough, it was missing from her jacket.
Aggie fetched the blazer from the landing coat hook. She turned it inside out and began to look for the initials Nan had suggested were marked inside. It was so obvious to her now but having looked for CEB before, she hadn’t spotted them. Drawn in an intricate calligraphy and intersecting each other like a Venn diagram the three initials presented themselves: CSM.
What did CSM stand for?
It was late now and her eyes grew heavy. She couldn’t remember anything linked to the initials CSM. Perhaps she would have better luck in the morning when there was more light and she could focus. Surely Nan would know. She’d been around for as long as Aggie could remember, or perhaps Sister Harvey or Nelly Parker would know. For now, she snuggled up and fell asleep, downstairs, so she could greet her uncle once he returned.
Chapter 29
The Russian
He’d been there from the beginning. Mainly in the background, keeping a low profile. Adapting as best he could to the scorching Egyptian heat having journeyed from his arctic Siberian home via several years of adventuring. Fate had convened so his arrival was at a time of revelation in Cairo.
Carter, of course, would win all the plaudits after the most famous discovery of them
all, Tutankhamen. Ilya Debrovska was there, patiently waiting in the background. He didn’t seek the limelight. Quite to the contrary, his objective was to remain concealed. His fortune would be made by offering services to those who sought to ship and transfer the great findings of the time – through legitimate or illicit fortitude. That all changed after the accident, and several years later the second great war came.
What had brought him to a rural corner of the United Kingdom and a market town on the English coast couldn’t be further away from the ancient monuments of Mesopotamia or the Pyramids of Giza. As he stood there, blanketed by darkness and a covering of famous British rain cloud, he waited patiently for the thunder to come and the torrential rain to conceal the intimate sounds of his housebreaking.
Though it was neither Sphinx nor Luxor’s finest, Huntington Hall was nevertheless an impressive country pile. Its rambling grounds maintained pomp despite the challenges of war. Tonight, its mullioned windows reflected and refracted the palette of dark purple skies as they awaited the formidable rains that were coming.
Late August storms were common after the glorious blistering summer that this part of the British coast had been lucky enough to receive. Ilya waited at a distance under an ancient yew that offered shelter, protection, and a platform for covert surveillance. Peering through a single spyglass, dressed in black, a satchel tightly strapped across his torso while his face concealed by a balaclava accentuated those envious emerald eyes. Beneath his legs, at the foot of the ancient tree, was a sack of dead animals. It contained several corpses of roadside mammals that Ilya had gathered over the previous week. Its pungent odour was gut-retching to humans and at least a hundred-fold fodder for its canine targets. As its stench wafted through the night air, the Russian stood upwind as heavy, bell-sized blobs of storm water began to rain down.
This was not the first time he had been a hidden observer at the hall. He had waited weeks, lived isolated outside of the village where he would make his entrance when the time was right, assuming his hunches were about to come true. His accent and appearance would warrant too many unwanted approaches from the locals, including local law enforcers. So, for now, he exiled himself far away to a hidden woodland habitat.
A converted Rolls Royce Silver Shadow glinted against the moonlight and pulled up at the grand entrance. The driver disembarked, unbuckled two long wooden planks that had been customised to strap perfectly to the passenger side of the vehicle and placed them over the stone steps to Huntington Hall’s entrance.
‘Do hurry up, Henny,’ the stub-nosed Lady Huntington-Smythe hollered through the door. A serving girl desperately tried to tiptoe with an umbrella followed close behind her predicting her whims and ensuring she did not get wet. ‘And be very careful with him. He’s terribly fragile.’ The Lady switched her attention and was now asserting her position over several serving staff who were busily navigating an elderly gentleman in a convalescent chair out from the grand entrance.
Lord Huntington-Smythe was in his eightieth year, though surely, it would be his last. He was immobile and now reduced to a shaking skeletal form. The large wooden chariot, part-used to move him around and part-used to park him conveniently at a window for most of the day, had two large brass wheels at the rear. The transportable device was long enough to be a daybed and at its pinnacle, a much smaller and troublesome wheel sat beneath the volume of blankets used to warm the elderly aristocrat.
After ten minutes of negotiating the challenges of the chair, the staff had finally wrangled it and hoisted it into the prestigious vehicle. The front wheel-end hinged backwards and with intricate movement, the chair provided the impression that Lord Huntington-Smythe was sitting upright in the passenger seat of his prestigious automobile.
‘We will follow on behind,’ the lady instructed the driver as she did every Sunday evening. ‘Enter via the rear of the building. They are waiting for us,’ she reminded him, as she did every Sunday evening.
‘Oh, I do hope The Crown has not overdone the Lamb, Mother,’ Henrietta Huntington-Smythe said. She was dressed as if she was meeting the Queen and not going for dinner at The Crown, Public House.
‘Rest assured, Mr Paine is aware of our reservation and he will endeavour for perfection, dearest Daughter.’
The Lady and Henrietta then took their ride, via chauffeur, in another Rolls Royce, and followed Lord Huntington-Smythe’s car as it pootled at only five miles an hour through the long gravel driveway, past uniformed topiary and into the dark rural night.
If he hadn’t had seen it himself, he could not have imagined the eccentric ridiculousness presented in front of him. If his plan worked, this would be a swift break-in and the most rewarding one of his career. He had spent weeks watching the Huntington-Smythes’ routine, meticulously gathering information, months investigating what he believed was true, and now it was only moments away before he could uncover the answers that would offer him a far greater reward then he had first imagined.
Observing the luminous hands on his wristwatch, he recorded that it would be no greater than ten minutes once the cars had left, that the staff would enjoy Sunday Supper too. It appeared it was the only night of the week they received a break from the Huntington-Smythe family. Sure enough, within ten minutes the gatekeeper’s steps could be heard crunching up the gravel and his shouts were heard in the great house.
‘Dog’s away!’ came his voice.
The Huntington-Smythes kept several large patrol dogs on their grounds. Tethered at systematic posts they were an efficient deterrent to local vagabonds and thieves. On Sunday Supper, the handlers locked them away with the estate’s pack-hounds so that they would not be disturbed during their dinner, drinking, and card games. It was a little reward from the employment of such a family. The dogs would be returned several hours later, and the Huntington-Smythes would be none the wiser.
Ilya waited. Patiently.
‘All away,’ came another servant’s voice as the house staff strode across from the Hall and headed to the staff quarters where their favourite meal and time of the week was about to unfold. Their lapsed judgement of security was the real benefit to the on looking Russian.
Taking the sack at arm’s distance, Ilya returned to his BSA motorcycle that was camouflaged by ivy close by, down a nearby track. The thunder echoed in the background.
‘One, one hundred,’ he muttered to himself as he began the thunder-and-lightning game with himself. It was important. A sheet of lightning could illuminate the estate and he couldn’t risk even an observed silhouette to reveal him.
Kicking the starter motor and revving the throttle gently, the reliant dulcet tone of the BSA’s engine fired up with ease. He tied the sack to the rear exhaust pipe and slowly began to accelerate down the pitch-black country road. For now, he kept his lights dimmed. He had walked the route a hundred times and was now accustomed to the road’s idiosyncrasies.
Passing the locked iron gates with the intertwined ‘Double H's’, which protected the entrance to Huntington Hall, he smiled to himself. Shortly, he would have what he needed. He revved the engine a little and drove steadily downhill to where a cobbled-stone bridge met with a tributary of the River Amble. A subtle current was flowing steadily south and he knew as the rains became heavier, it would flow quicker. Lightning flashed. His silent count was over twenty so the storm was at least twenty miles away, as the crow flies, he thought. Plenty of time to remain concealed in the darkness. Stopping briefly, he unravelled the sack that was beyond repugnant and removed the remains of the animals’ torsos with his bare hands. The remains of half of a fox and several decimated rabbits were unceremoniously scattered around and into the riverbanks. Their lifeless limbs and odorous bodies would soon travel downstream, attracting the right kind of attention far away from the hall. He entwined the sack in the rope and placed it within a plastic bag that he sealed and carried under his arm. Washing the remains of blood and guts in the stream he then replaced his leather gloves and dispensed of his overalls a
nd watched them travel downstream.
Reversing the bike around, he drove slowly back to the hidden lay by to once more cover his getaway vehicle in the hedgerow of ivy. By foot, he wandered a short distance to where the brick fortifications of the boundary wall were at their shortest. It was still a good seven to eight feet high. From the satchel, a rope and grappling hook were hoyed vertically. Several tugs and the assurance the ageing stonework would not falter under his weight, and in no time at all, he had climbed and conquered the wall as his plan moved onto stage two. He reversed the hook and rehung the rope, leaving it suspended in situ. This would be his failsafe should he require it.
Another flash of lightning, this time forked, lit up part of the sky. The slow rumble of thunder in the background came again. ‘One, one hundred,’ he repeated as he paced the boundary wall back several hundred yards to the momentous iron-gate with the Double Hs. From the grounds’ side of Huntington Hall, he then lifted the large iron latch bolt that secured the gate from the inside. There was no human alive who could manage the lift from the roadside, the iron bars made that too difficult, but from the Hall-side it could be achieved. It was heavy but he managed to lever it enough to swing the gates open. Removing the blood-stained sack from its plastic enclosure, he dragged it up the gravel pathway towards the grand entrance. The rain, which was descending ever quicker and in golf-ball-sized drops, masked his carefully trodden path. Lightning came again and he hid behind one of the many finally coiffed conifers that lined the driveway. This time he had counted to eleven. The eye of the storm was approaching faster but his plan was still on track.
Past the grand entrance and to the rear of the main house were the servants’ quarters. He could hear the joviality and humour above the storm. ‘Perfect,’ he thought to himself. As with blackout rules across the country, the servants’ quarters were shrouded in darkness behind wooden shutters. As he approached the point between their quarters and the kennels, he heard the dogs howling and causing a commotion. The storm always set the pack on edge. Moving slowly now, ensuring he was camouflaged in darkness for fear of a lightning strike revealing his identity to anyone who indirectly may spot him, he approached the kennel. The hounds must have sensed the scent of the decomposing mammals as they wildly upped their howling and flung themselves at the kennel door. He couldn’t risk opening the door from the ground for being torn apart. Instead he tied the rope onto the large iron lever that barricaded the door and ascended the flint outbuilding to its roof. With a steady wrenching of the rope the ironwork lifted up and released the doors. He dropped the sack, sending it ground wards, with a subtle thud on the floor. At that very moment, an ogre’s rumble of thunder bellowed into the night. The dogs’ heckles were up and the pack howled wildly.