“Ben!” Sue called from the kitchen. “When are you going to get that grotty parcel out of the lounge room?”
That was all I had been waiting for. I had known that if I had grabbed the box any earlier she would have complained that there was work to be done about the house first. But now I had my excuse. I was only doing what she had asked. I picked it up and carried it downstairs to my room, my study, my television room, the room where all my bits and pieces were on display.
It only took me half an hour to find the pin-hole in the partition that divided the ink bottle compartment from the section underneath. I had measured with a pair of callipers and knew that there was an empty space, a space that might not be empty. I had felt the spring in the piece of wood under the top section of the writing slope. As soon as I inserted the pointed end of a bodkin and tapped it gently on whatever was inside, I heard and felt the contact of metal on metal, a release pin. I had pushed gently, but nothing had happened, and so I pushed a little harder, and then harder still, fearing that something was going to break and then, with a small clicking sound, the large flap popped up. There was one section cut out to hold gold coins, but it was empty. I had never expected it to be otherwise. My luck wouldn’t have allowed it. But alongside this section there were papers, copies of bills from the regiment, a bundle of letters, and this one solitary letter folded carefully and placed in an envelope and addressed to the Captain’s wife in beautiful copperplate handwriting. The bundle of letters, tied round with faded pink ribbon, seemed to be all addressed to him, and all in the same hand, and presumably from his wife. But they could wait. Here was a letter not yet sent. Why?
There could only be one reason, the Captain had never left China, and the letter had never been found and sent on to his wife. It had remained for all those years hidden in his writing box. But then again, maybe the box had been stolen from the Captain, along with the letters, and everything else it might contain. And whoever had stolen it had removed the gold sovereigns, the gold guineas, the pieces of ivory, and all that was precious and hidden in the small compartment behind the flap that the dealer had so smugly displayed. But that person hadn’t found this compartment. They hadn’t been as diligent as me, and they had missed the letters.
It was useless making assumptions. First I had to read the letter. I slowly spread the brittle pages out on the table, taking my time, treating the fragile sheets of paper with the care they deserved. There were three of them; small pieces of paper by today’s standard, maybe only the size of the pages of a paper-back novel. The first and second pages were full, but the third was only half-complete, and there was no signature on the bottom, and no loving endearments that he would have put there when he would have signed off. The letter was incomplete. I started reading the spidery copperplate hand:
Peking, China
19th August 1900
My Darling Alice,
Words can not express my longing for you. I think of you each day. Your photograph sits on my bedside table and is the last thing I see each night, and the first of every morning.
The cause goes well for us. The cowardly Boxers are in full retreat and we have been harrying them at every turn. Tomorrow I will set out with the regiment to travel up country and teach them an even more severe lesson. They are ill-equipped and, were it not for their overwhelming numbers, they would not have afforded us any real sport. This afternoon myself and four of my brother officers, I think you know Albert Cunningham and James Martin, and two others who I think you have not met, will be leading a party of Lancers to clean out a small group of these devils which has been harrying our encampment and which could become a nuisance if not checked before we leave tomorrow.
I hope that the children are well. We must try and dissuade Arthur from his want to become a soldier like myself, his father. Far better for him were he to follow in the footsteps of my elder brother, George, and delve into the world of commerce. I know that we have spoken of this many times and that our financial situation has always been such that this avenue was an unlikely one for Arthur to follow. You will be overjoyed to learn however, my dear one, that circumstances have come my way which will cause that situation to be a matter of the past. I have sent a letter to George with last week’s packet, asking for his advice. However I will say more on that later, as I can hear the Sergeant Major calling the men to horse. I will finish this letter to you, dear one, upon my return in a few days time, and make certain that it reaches the very next mail packet for England.
And that was where the letter ended. He had put it away from prying eyes and had ridden out with his fellow officers and men, and, presumably, had not returned. Or perhaps his encampment had been overrun by Boxers and the box had been taken.
I loosened the bundle of envelopes that had been hidden with the unfinished letter; there were four of them, all containing letters from his wife, one of them complaining of the unhappiness of being a soldier’s wife, of the uncertainties, the loneliness, and the absence of a father to their three children. I felt sad then, knowing that if he had been killed, everything that she had feared would have come true. She would have become a widow, the children fatherless. I wondered whether his son had followed him into the army or whether his brother George may have taken pity and taken Arthur under his wing. But it had all happened well over a hundred years ago and Alice Jenkinson-Smythe’s suffering and anguish would have long since become merely a distant family memory.
But what had he meant when he wrote that circumstances have come my way which will cause that situation to be a thing of the past? It could only mean that he had come into money, or was coming into money, and not the sort of money that one could win at a card game. It couldn’t be inherited money, for if he had received news of an inheritance then his wife in England would have heard of it first, and it would have been mentioned in her letters to him. He had found something, something that was either money, or which he could turn into money. But what?
I heard Susie come into the room.
“What are those?” she asked.
“The laugh’s on you, Suze,” I replied, the grin splitting my face. “There was another secret compartment, one which that smart-alec antique dealer fellow at the dirt market never knew about.”
“And those papers were in there?” she asked.
“Yep,” I said smugly.
“Any gold or ivory?” she asked sarcastically.
“Give it a rest,” I replied.
“Okay, I’m sorry. You were right. Are they worth anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not much as letters, but you never know.”
“Letters?”
“Yeah, letters,” I said. “Those ones are letters to the guy who originally owned the box, the guy whose name is on the plate on the lid. They’re from his wife. And this one,” I pushed the three pages around so that she could see them more clearly. “Is an unfinished letter he wrote to his wife when he was stationed in Peking.”
“Beijing,” she replied.
“This was in 1900. It was Peking back then.”
“Okay. What’s it say?”
“Read it yourself,” I replied.
I waited while she went and fetched her reading glasses.
“He didn’t finish it,” she said after she had finished reading the third page.
“I know. That’s what I said.”
She read through the letter a second time and then looked up at me.
“What do you think happened to him?” she asked.
“I’d say that they ran into trouble with that little up-country excursion. Maybe they underestimated the size of the Chinese force, or their weapons. Maybe he fell off his horse either on the way there or on the way back, and broke his neck. Maybe some Chinese coolie speared him with a pike or blew his head off with an ancient musket. I’ve got no idea.”
“We might be able to find out through the internet,” she suggested.
“That’s a point,” I replied. “At least we sho
uld be able to find out when he died, if he did. He might’ve been late getting back and knew that he’d be missing the mail boat so left the letter for another day, and someone just pinched the box in the meantime.” I stood back and looked at the age-stained box and wondered how many hands it had passed through since the 19th August 1900, the day he had written the letter. Then I turned back to Sue. “I don’t think it’s really important what happened to him,” I continued. “What’s important is what he says about their financial situation.”
“What financial situation?”
I pointed to the paragraph where he mentioned that something had come along which would change their circumstances.
“What’s it mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know exactly, but I’d say that he came into money somehow, or it was coming his way. What do you know about the Boxer rebellion?”
“Not much,” she replied. “I can remember a few bits and pieces from that film with Charlton Heston in it. What was it called?”
“55 Days of Peking,” I said.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“So our guy was probably involved in the either the defence of Peking or the relief,” I said.
“What was the date of his letter again?” she asked.
“19th August 1900.”
“Okay,” she replied. “Let’s look it up on the internet.”
Susie was a great one for the internet. If you wanted to know anything, from the meaning of a word or to the time of the next train and what the fare would be, she would use the internet. I followed her into the spare bedroom and watched over her shoulder as she went through her procedures and pulled up some information on Wikipedia about the Boxer rebellion.
“There you are,” she said, pointing to the screen. “The legations were relieved on the 14th of August 1900. He wrote the letter on the 19th, so maybe he came in with the relief force.”
“Yeah, but he still could’ve been there during the siege. Let’s see what his wife’s letters say. They might give us some sort of clue.”
We went through his wife’s letters, but they didn’t take us any further. The dates were all months apart and gave no indication as to where he might have been when he received them.
“Not much help then,” I said.
“No problem,” she replied. “What regiment was he with?”
“The 16th Bengal Lancers.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s what it says on the box.”
“He might have changed regiments after he purchased the box,” she replied.
“Bloody hell, Suze! These guys stayed with the same regiment. They didn’t shift around. And anyway, that’s the address on the envelopes his wife sent him.”
“Okay, okay. No need to get shirty.”
It took her all of five minutes. I stood back in silent frustration for the first minute as I tried to read what was on the screen, only to be cut off as she switched from one page of some website to another. I picked up the letters from the Captain, and rapidly scanned them again, hoping to pick up something we had missed.
“See, there!” she exclaimed triumphantly, pointing to the screen once more. “The 16th Bengal Lancers. They came in as part of the relief force. He wasn’t there at the start.”
“Can you find out what happened to him from that thing?” I asked.
“I’ll try. What was his full name and rank?”
I gave her the details and this time the answer was at hand within a minute. Captain M Jenkinson-Smythe had been killed in an ambush on the 24th of August.
“Poor bastard,” I said.
“Why?” she replied. “He was a soldier. That’s what happens to soldiers. He went out to kill Chinese, but they killed him.”
“Jesus, Suze, you’ve got no compassion have you.”
“Not for war, no.”
“But he left a wife and three children, and she never received his last letter, even if he never got to finish it.”
“How do you know he had three children?” she asked.
“It’s in her letters. She mentions them. There’s Arthur and two younger ones.”
“Why not send the letter on to them then?” she suggested.
“What us?” I asked.
“Yes, why not?”
“Who to?” I replied. “It was a hundred and ten years ago!”
“Well, he had three kids, and they probably had kids. He should have some descendants. Send it on. It’ll be fun.”
“Fun?” I asked.
“Yes, it’ll keep you amused. Maybe we can find out whether they ever came into the good fortune he was talking about.”
“Yeah, why not,” I replied. “But how do we contact them?”
“Well, you’ve got the address of where he used to live with his wife. We could send a letter to that address, and then we could send letters to every other Jenkinson-Smythe living within a radius of a hundred kilometres. There can’t be too many of them.”
Susie found six other Jenkinson-Smythes in our selected area, and another ten when she extended the search radius by another fifty kilometres. There was none living at the old address as far as she could find.
So I wrote to the six, and sent a copy to the original address. My letter was fairly simple, just telling the recipient that I had purchased the box in Beijing and that the secret compartment had revealed an unfinished letter from the Captain to his wife, as well as several letters to him from his wife. I gave our email address and asked if they would either email or write a letter back to me if they had any connection with the Captain or his family.
And that’s where the matter lay. We heard nothing. I had thought of writing to the other ten persons with the same name who lived in the wider area, but kept putting it off. In the meantime I had waxed and polished the box and put it up in pride of place on top of the campaign chest left to me by my grandfather.
It was almost a month later when the email arrived.
Hi, Ben Dunlop.
Many thanks for your letter. I must apologize for not writing to you before this, however I have been out of the country on business. Yes, Captain Montgomery Jenkinson-Smythe was a relative of mine, or rather, the brother of a relative of mine, my great-grandfather, George Albert Jenkinson-Smythe. Would it be possible to email copies of the letters that you have? There is a trunk in the attic containing some of my great-grandfather’s papers which I have been meaning to get to for a number of years. It would seem that now is the time.
Regards
John Jenkinson-Smythe
I asked Susie to scan and attach the Captain’s letters on to an email, and we sent them off within the hour. I asked John Jenkinson-Smythe whether he could tell me anything about the Captain’s family, and whether his son Arthur had gone into the army or into business. I also asked whether the family had come into the windfall that was going to change their circumstances. He replied back the next morning to say that as far as he was aware, the son had gone into the army and had been killed in the trenches during the First World War. And that was all he said.
“He didn’t tell you much,” Susie murmured when I showed her the email. “It was hardly worth all the trouble.”
“The widow evidently didn’t get the inheritance, or whatever it was though,” I replied. “I wonder what happened to it?”
“We shall probably never know,” she replied. “It’s all been lost in the mists of time.”
A week later I received another email from John Jenkinson-Smythe.
Hi Ben.
You have stirred my interest in the family history. I was wondering as to whether you would be prepared to sell the chest to me. I was thinking of something in the order of £1,500, plus whatever the cost of postage might be. If you are agreeable, and I hope that you will be, could you please give me details of your bank account, and an estimate of the freight charges, and I will deposit the money into your account without delay.
Regards
John Jenkinson-Smythe
&nb
sp; “Sell it to him,” Susie urged. Fifteen hundred pounds is about two and a half thousand dollars. You only paid a hundred and fifty for it!”
“I don’t want to sell it,” I replied.
“But you can buy another one,” she said. “How much would another one cost?”
“Probably a bit less than half of what he’s offering, that’s if I could find one. They’re pretty few and far between.”
“But you could probably find one though?”
“Possibly,” I said hesitatingly. “It might take a bit of time.”
“Well, sell it then!” she replied. “It’ll help to pay for the trip.”
And then she saw the puzzled look on my face. “What is it?” she asked.
“Why is he prepared to pay twice the market value?”
“Because it belonged to his ancestor, to his great-grandfather’s brother. He’s probably proud of his family’s connection to the Boxer rebellion or something. You know what you men are like.”
“But he hasn’t even seen it!”
“What’s that got to do with it?” she asked.
“There are writing boxes, and there are writing boxes,” I replied.
“What are you talking about?”
“You can buy a common or garden writing box on eBay for about three hundred dollars.” I pointed to the box. “This one is top of the range and probably worth fifteen hundred, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.”
“So?” she asked.
“So I never told him anything about the box. He doesn’t know whether it’s a good one, whether it’s got plenty of brass strapping, whether it’s got a working lock, or even whether the hinges are broken or still in their original condition. He doesn’t know how big it is, and size is a factor when considering value. He doesn’t even know what condition it’s in.”
Dark Eye of the Jaguar Page 2