“I’ll take you,” Angela volunteered, “Deirdre has said the Bedingfeld’s are happy to give us the loan of their Rover.”
Albert was in a quandary. He had the feeling that, at the time being, his physical capacity for Angela’s proximity had reached a saturation point.
A very strong feeling.
The phrase ‘my cup runneth over,’ came to mind, and he wished desperately, for the first time, that he’d learned to drive, or that he had his little purple moped. “I don’t . . . I . . . can take a bus.”
“But I. . .
“No,” said Albert peremptorily. “I want . . . I need some time alone to think about . . .” think about what? Think, Albert! Think! “the workshop at that college.”
“But, you asked Huffy to take you. . .”
Being with Huffy, whose perpetual monologues on theEarth and All That Therein Dwelleth From the Perspective of An Englishman Who Didn’t Really Know, didn’t require active participation on behalf of those within earshot so, Albert thought, being with him was a lot like being alone in a room with noisy wallpaper.
The same could not be said of being with Angela; the rising racket of all those tiny sirens and corpuscles. . .
Balfour, God bless him, intervened. “It’s my night off, sir,” he said as he helped Brigit clear the table. “I’m going to The King’s Arms in Swaffam for trivia night and would be happy of your company.”
“Yes!” said Albert, hauling himself up the lifeline with all his might. “When?”
“Would twenty minutes give you time to. . .”
Albert didn’t need twenty minutes. “Yes,” he said and, without farewell, wiped his mouth, dropped his napkin on the table, got up and left the room leaving Angela, Jeremy Ash, and Brigit to wonder what they would.
Albert had never ridden in a Citroen. It was like a desiccated Volkswagon Beetle propelled by an overworked lawnmower motor. Albert, rocking contrapuntally in a seat that didn’t seem securely anchored in place, wondered if the bolts or nails or rivets or whatever they were that held the infrastructure together were just a bit too small for the holes they were in. The vehicle rattled and shuddered at every little irregularity in the road and, as they drove over the cobblestone intersection announcing their entrance into Swaffam proper, set up a mechanical symphony in which Albert detected a chorus singing,“We’re falling apart! We’re falling apart! For God’s sake, slow down! We’re falling apart!”
He gripped the metal frame to either side of his seat with both hands and revised his opinion of Balfour who, chattering contentedly, much like Huffy but with better diction and less vitriol, shifted up and down through the gears and stomped the pedals in happy ignorance of the impending apocalypse.
He must be mad.
Somehow, despite the odds, they arrived at their destination, the Swaffam Museum, outside of which hung helpful flags declaring that’s what it was. Albert wondered, not for the first time, why everything and everyone in the world wasn’t similarly labeled. It would make things so much easier. “The King’s Arms is down this way,” said Balfour as Albert climbed out of the car, his bones still oscillating at roughly 440 cycles a second. ‘A’ for Albert. “You can meet me there when you conclude your business, or I’ll wait here if you are detained. Say ten o’clock?”
Albert reminded himself, again, to invest in a watch one day. He’d have to be on the lookout for a watch store. Maybe there would be one in the neighborhood of the vest store, and he could get a watch like Sir had, and hang it on a chain.
There would probably be a clock inside the museum. Or Gloria would have a watch.
“Okay.” He shut the door, very gently, not wishing to be an accessory after the fact in vehicle’s demise, and watched as Balfour drove off in a cloud of blue smoke and blissful oblivion.
Maybe Gloria could drive him home.
He was about to knock on the museum door when it swung open. “I was looking out for you,” said Gloria, greeting him. “Who’s that who brought you?”
“Balfour,” said Albert, pointing at the dissipating cloud of smoke.
“Quite the lap of luxury there. Well, here, do come in. Let me have your coat,” she slipped it expertly from his shoulders as if she’d been stripping musicians all her life. “I’ve put the kettle on. Bit of a nip in the air, isn’t there? Come this way. This way . . .”
Albert followed to a small lighted alcove to the right, where a tea kettle squatted on a single coil hot plate. Steam hissed busily from the spout and, now and then, the lid popped up, belched, and plopped down again with a sound like a high hat.
“Should be ready in a minute or two,” Gloria said. She opened the door of a little cabinet on the wall and took two cups from the shelf. These she set beside the teapot where they waited in wide-mouthed anticipation.
She began to make other arrangements, at the conclusion of which cookies, teaspoons, a carafe of milk, a jar of honey, two small plates and napkins had appeared on the table. As she worked, she spoke.
“As I said in my note, you’ll never in a million years guess what I found! This afternoon . . . I was sifting through some of the old private papers of the Scroop family. . .”
“Scroop?”
“They later changed the name to Scrope, but in Tiptoft’s time it was Scroop.”
The change didn’t strike Albert as an improvement, but he didn’t think it his place to say. He was suddenly appreciative of his own last name which, with three syllables, was much more musical than Scroop. It saddened him to think what playmates would have done with such a name during recess, and how generations of little Scroops must have suffered.
That’s probably why they changed it; ‘Scrope’ didn’t rhyme with ‘poop’. About the only thing that could be said for it.
As these thoughts cascaded through his mind, Gloria put on white gloves, much like those his mother used to wear when she went into town and, removing a little piece of paper from a sandwich bag, coaxed it carefully, even lovingly, open on the desk.
There was a gooseneck table light at her elbow, and she turned it fully on the document. “I believe this is a copy, written some time in the seventeenth Century, judging from the penmanship, but please don’t touch it without gloves.”
Albert hadn’t brought any. “What does it say?”
“Well, what it says may not be as important as what it is,” said Gloria unhelpfully. “The words themselves are doggerel. A children’s poem. But I suspect they convey a hidden message.”
“A code?”
“Yes.”
Albert thought of the letter he’d come across behind the picture of the sad lady in his room at Mizz Grandy’s boarding house, in Tryon, North Carolina. That had contained a kind of code.
“Are you any good at breaking codes?” she wondered.
A quick mental survey produced a staggering list of things Albert wasn’t good at. Taken alphabetically, breaking codes would have been near the top. “No.”
“Nor I,” said Gloria. “Perhaps together we can make some sense of it.”
Albert thought that both of them working together would be very much the same as Gloria working alone, but not wanting to dampen her optimism, he didn’t say anything.
“It was among a little bundle of the personal effects of Annabella Howe - nee Scrope. The penmanship, compared to other documents in the bundle, is surely her own. But the language is not that of an educated lady, hence my belief that it’s a copy.” She read aloud:
“A fistful of jewels from a bag
A treasury fit for a King
Ye little man laughed
At his word ‘pon the wall
‘My Lord, thour’t a wicked ol’ thing!”
Said he
For his Lord was a wicked old thing.
“Welf got a hole in his head
And Larky, he drug him away
Where the wall meets the stair
They’re both buried there.
Hear what the bells above say.
S
ays Mirth
Hear what the bells have to say
“Ma, who’d have thought her a lady?
But a stone, it can buy an estate
From a gambling earl
Who wagered his pearl
And John says: “surprises await!”
Crafty John
Says “surprises await!”
The look Gloria gave him at the conclusion of her reading was bursting with expectation. “Well? What do you think?”
‘Absolutely nothing’ was probably not the response the woman was hoping for, so Albert searched for something else to say. “So, that’s doggerel.”
Gloria was taken aback. “Yes, but . . . surely it’s a code, isn’t it?” An ash of doubt flitted into her eye. “Don’t you think so?”
And if it was? “It might be.”
“Then we can decipher it! More tea? It lubricates the brain.”
Albert hadn’t drunk any of his first cup yet. He wondered how she had managed to finish hers, since she was the one doing all the talking. Maybe it lubricated the tongue, as well. “No, I’ll just. . .” He jiggled his cup on the table.
While Gloria went about her errand, Albert walked around the table for a better look at the document. Having forgotten the injunction about gloves, he held down the edges of the paper with his fingertips. What if he started by inserting what a word or phrase might mean in place of what it said? He read to himself.
‘A fistful of jewels from a bag.”
Well, that might mean someone had taken a handful of jewels from a bag. So far, so good.
‘A treasury fit for a King.’
Not just any king. King with a capital ‘K’. A specific king. He glanced to the end of the poem. ‘John’. “Wicked King John,” he said aloud.
“Did you say something?” said Gloria from behind a little cloud of steam.
“No, I was just. . .” His breath quickly lost interest in delivering whatever he’d meant to say.
‘A treasury fit for King John.’
Maybe breaking a code wasn’t so hard after all.
‘Ye little man laughed.’
“Little Man.’That would be Foss, the dwarf.
“Foss laughed.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you with this kettle boiling,” said Gloria from the alcove. “Be there in two shakes.”
Albert, looked up at her. That was one of those familiar phrases he had never been able to make sense of. Two shakes of what? He stared at her for a few seconds, but nothing shook.
He resumed his study.
‘At his word ‘pon the wall.’
“His word,” Albert whispered, so as not to disturb Gloria and thereby hinder her shaking, when and if she ever got around to it. “His word. His name. His name on the wall. F-O-S-S.’
Albert felt an unexpected and totally unfamiliar tinkling of excitement. He was breaking a code!
‘My Lord, thour’t a wicked old thing.’
Another capital. ‘L’. Not just any lord, but a certain one. Not God. Mrs. Gibson said, quite often, that God is good, and goodness is God. So wicked old thing didn’t apply. Who, then? ‘My Lord.’
Who was speaking? The writer or Foss? He said the previous two lines to himself, which made it clear that Foss was the one speaking. So, who was his Lord, if not God?
“King John.” Simon had been right, John was a wicked old thing. “Wicked King John.”
‘Welf got a hole in his head.’
He’d never heard of anyone or anything named Welf. But it must have been someone. Probably a man, though it might as easily have been a dog. People named dogs strange things. But it sounded like a man’s name. So, how would he get a hole in his head? Either he had an accident, or somebody hit him. What was the result of a hole in the head? It would depend on the size of the hole. But it must have been pretty serious to have earned a place in the poem.
So serious a hole would have produced a lot of blood.
The bloodstones.
His heart was beginning to race. Things were suddenly coming together, almost by themselves.
‘Larky, he drug him away,”
Suddenly Albert was a witness to a seven hundred year-old crime. Having stood in the very place still marked, so many centuries later, by the indelible stain of Welf’s blood, he could imagine the man struck down, lying on the floor, dead or dying, and being dragged away.
Dragged by whom? By Larky. Why by Larky? To hide a crime. Why hide it? Because Larky was the murderer!
Dragged where?
‘Where the wall meets the stair, he buried him there.’
‘Where the wall meets the stair.’What was there? There had to be a space of some kind behind the Foss Wall. But if so, it had been sealed over long ago, probably during one of the renovations Simon had told him were so crucial to the survival of such an old building.
‘Where the wall meets the stair,’he read again. And again,‘where the wall meets the stair.’He envisioned the scene in is mind. There was no place for a door there, certainly not in the structure as he’d seen it.‘Where the wall meets the stair.’ Where the wall met the stair there was, what? A joint. A joint is a separation. A place where two things come together.
Or come apart?
The stairs themselves, he was pretty sure, were one solid chunk of whatever they were made of - stone or concrete or iron or wood. But what if they were somehow moved aside? That would be a big project. He’d have to give Simon a lot more money.
What was left if you removed a stairway?
In the background, the telephone jangled tunelessly. Gloria picked it up and, for the next few minutes, her one-sided conversation stitched the silence.
Thought of a stairway brought to mind Jeremy Ash’s years of silent suffering beneath the stairs in the room that, for the first years of his life had defined the borders of his world.
He shuddered, and blinked to dispel the memory, but a trace of it lingered.
A place beneath the stairs.
‘Where the wall meets the stair’.A placebehind the stairs? Under that nonsensical shelf?
That’s why the Foss brick had been put there, to mark the presence of a little room or chamber.
Why had it been built?
Albert smiled with his bottom lip. A seven-hundred year-old murder had been solved. And now he suspected why the hidden space had been created, and what was in it.
“Ma, who’d have thought her a Lady?’
Ma? Mother? Whose? Most likely the writer’s. There was the capital letter again. Not just any lady, but a Lady. Like Sir’s Lady.
‘Who’d have thought her a Lady?’So, there must have been a time she wasn’t one. Then she was. What could happen to change a woman into a Lady?
Albert had heard mention of things that happened to women from time-to-time. Biological things. He had nebulous memory of similar things happening to people who, when the moon was full, turned into vampires or animals. Maybe that’s what this was, but that inkling was drained of life by the next three lines.
‘But a stone, it can buy an estate
From a gambling earl
Who wagered his pearl.
Someone—an earl—had gambled his pearl for a stone, probably a diamond or something. That’s the kind of thing people gambled for.
But why gamble one jewel for another?
What if it was one of those metaphors Albert never got? Not a real pearl, but something else of value; something that was very important to the earl?
‘Buy an estate.’
His home?
A big home, like Oxburgh Hall?
The writer’s mother had, unexpectedly, come into considerable property.
“Well, sorry to have taken so long,” said Gloria, arranging herself on the chair beside Albert. “That was my god-daughter, asking if I’d volunteer at the Oxfam store Friday week.” She allowed her teacup to come to rest on the table, and wrapped her hands around it. “it’s always something, isn’t it?”
The words took
Albert as much by surprise as if a halibut had appeared in mid-air, struck him in the face and fried itself. Like ‘you never know’, this was one of those indisputable truths that should be taught in school; emblazoned on the sky; printed on little buttons you could pin to your sweater. That’s exactly what life was, always something.
He bowed his head almost reverently, though Gloria took no notice. “Yes. It is.”
“Pardon? Is what?”
Albert looked up. “Always something.”
Gloria fidgeted, suddenly aware of something in those dark and depthless eyes she could only compare to the look of a newborn—images of a previous existence still floating in the fluid of its sight—attempting to draw a new world into focus. “Yes. Well, why don’t we see if we can make some sense of this, shall we?”
The phone rang again and, with good-humored exasperation, Gloria got up and went to answer it. When she came back, Albert had gone.
The front door of the museum was open, and she stepped out onto the top step.
Apart from a sweeping machine, the street was quiet. To the south, the road curved away toward open country. To the north, a solitary figure, his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat, was walking briskly in the direction of the King’s Arms.
“Well there, Gloria. That should tell you something.”
What it told her was a mystery the ages were left to entertain.
Chapter Twenty One
‘And John said: ‘Surprises await.’
Albert found a pen in his bedside table, affixed to a pad of paper bearing the Oxburgh Hall logo or crest. He’d seen similar pads in hotel rooms, with the names of the hotel printed on them. Presumably these were intended as reminders that the items were property of the hotel, like the towels and bathrobes and carpets and televisions and little refrigerators, and there would be repercussions for their unauthorized use.
To Albert, life was a series of actions with unintended consequences. He elected not to tempt fate. No doubt Balfour or Brigit had been instructed to count the pages in the notebook and notify the Bedingfelds if one were missing. Unpleasantness would ensue.
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 27