“But he knows that it has a secret compartment,” she tossed in. “Doesn’t that mean that it’s special?”
“Most of them have some sort of secret compartment,” I replied, trying to make some sense of his offer. “He’s offering far too much.”
“So, sell it anyway.”
I thought about it for a few minutes longer and then said to Susie: “I think I’ll send him an email and tell him that I’ll start looking around for a replacement before I consider selling it to him.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want. It’s your money. But think what else you could buy with two and a half thousand dollars. If you leave it too long he might change his mind.”
“I’ll risk it,” I replied.
I sent off an email in reply and got one back from him promptly the next morning.
“What does he say?” Susie asked.
“He’s increased his offer to two thousand pounds, plus another two hundred if I’ll send it by courier.”
“Two thousand?”
“Yeah, a bit over three thousand dollars. You know, there’s something not quite right about the whole thing. He’s too eager.”
“So,” she asked. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to email and say that I’m going away for a couple of weeks. I’ll tell him that I’ll give him a decision when I get back.”
“How is that going to help?”
“It’ll give me two weeks to try and sort out what he’s really up to,” I replied.
“What can he be up to?” she asked. “All he wants is a bit of family history for God’s sake.”
“No. He’s too anxious. He’s in too much of a hurry.”
I sat and looked at the writing box. It was a good one, but not worth anything like what he had offered, and I was finally tempted to accept his price. There were other things I could buy with the money. I had found a campaign desk listed in Sydney on the internet. The price Jenkinson-Smythe was offering would cover what they wanted for it. All I would have to pay would be the freight. The desk was a relative rarity, at least for the Australian market. In the UK it would have been half the price, but the freight and import duty would have almost trebled the amount that I would have had to outlay.
And that thought made me question his offer again. Surely he would have done some homework on pricing. All he had to do would have been to check with a few dealers in the UK and he would have found out what campaign boxes were bringing on the open market, retail price.
I opened the box and took out the letter the Captain had started to write to his wife, and read it through again.
“It’s the letter to George!” I burst out.
“What?” Susie exclaimed from the top of the stairs. “What letter?”
She came clomping down the stairs.
“It’s the letter to George!” I said again.
“Who the heck is George?” she asked.
“His brother! George was Captain Monty’s brother!”
“So?”
“Here,” I replied eagerly. “Read the letter he was writing to his wife. Read the second half of the last paragraph where he mentioned the change in their financial circumstances. See, there!” I pointed to the last few lines. “See. He says that he has already written to his brother, George, to ask his advice.”
“Yes, so?”
“I bet he’s found the letter to brother George!”
“Who has?” she asked, looking puzzled.
“John! John Jenkinson-Smythe, the guy in England.”
“I’m getting confused.”
I slowly counted to ten.
“It’s like this,” I said. “Captain Monty either gets his hand on a large sum of money or something of value, or he hears about it and knows that he can get hold of it. He then writes to his brother, to George, and asks for his advice. He probably asks him what he should invest it in.”
“Yes, so?”
“Well, he no doubt told George what it was all about and John, the guy in the UK who wants to buy this box, has the letter that Monty wrote to George and now he knows what it’s all about as well. Okay?”
“So far. But where does that take us?”
“Well, just suppose that Captain Monty told George that he had somehow got hold of something of fairly considerable value, maybe money, maybe jewels, or maybe gold, and that he was going to bring it back with him when he returned, and that he wanted brother George to help him convert whatever it was into cash and invest it for him. Suppose he then told George that he had written down all of the details about this, ah, windfall, on a piece of paper and had hidden that piece of paper in a safe place in case anything should happen to him in the meantime.”
“Are you telling me that there’s gold hidden in this box after all?”
“No. What I’m saying is that Captain Monty might have told George that he had hidden directions to the location of the money, or whatever, in a safe place.”
“And the safe place is?”
“Yeah, in the writing box.”
“You think there’s another secret compartment in that thing?”
“Why not? I’m certain this bloke John thinks there is.”
“You know what, Ben?”
“What?”
“You are still just a kid who’s never grown up.”
“We’ll see.”
Two
I spent the rest of that afternoon going over every inch of the writing box. I had a pair of callipers and took every sort of measurement that one could imagine, but there was nothing. I tapped each and every surface, shone a bright light into every corner and crevice, but there was nothing that I hadn’t already found. I went to bed that night and tossed and turned, seeing nothing but the box and its smooth polished sides and metal base. In the morning I sent off another email to John Jenkinson-Smythe telling him that I was inclined to sell, but that as I was going away for a couple of weeks, I’d get back to him with my final answer on my return.
Later in the day I went back to the box. I was certain there was another secret cavity, but where? The only solution was to have it x-rayed, but I didn’t know how to go about getting it done, and knew that I would feel like a fool if I had to approach some doctor with that sort of enquiry. And besides, I also knew what Sue would say if I spent a couple of hundred dollars, or more, on a medical search that resulted in another dead end. I’d had my chance of a free x-ray and I’d missed it. Customs at Brisbane Airport had pushed it through their machine looking for drugs. It would have been easy to ask them if I could look over their shoulder and take a peek. The last time we’d been to China I had brought back a sheet of marble in a square wooden frame faced with glass. There was a piece of cardboard between the glass and the sheet of marble, displaying the piece of marble as circular. Customs had x-rayed it and shown me the picture. The marble was actually a round disc. I had thought it was square. They had wanted to know what was hidden in the corners of the square frame. I had them take the back off the frame, revealing wads of newspaper crammed into the corners. I could have gone through the same procedure with the box.
I measured it again.
As I rolled it on to its side for perhaps the hundredth time, I decided to clean the base, which was covered with a thin sheet of steel for about two-thirds of its length. I looked at the steel, now quite rusty and pockmarked after more than a hundred years lying in the corner of some Chinese farmer’s house.
But then I thought, why would the box need to have a steel plate, even a thin steel plate, fixed as part of its base? If there was steel on the bottom, then why not steel on the sides and top as well? The sides and top were all made from thick pieces of solid mahogany. They were strong, but not as strong as the thin sheet of steel that was inlet into the base.
I fetched the hard scrubbing brush from the laundry and scoured away the dust and dirt that had accumulated over the years, and looked closer. It was then that I saw the small pin-hole a quarter of the way in from one end. I grabbed a s
afety pin from Sue’s sewing drawer and pushed it in, finding resistance but at the same time, a slight upwards movement of maybe a millimetre or so. I quickly pulled the large drawer out from one end of the box; something I had done many times before as I had sought the elusive secret cache, and then inserted the end of the safety pin into the tiny hole again. This time there was hardly any resistance at all. The point of the pin seemed to push something up as it continued on, all the way into the hole.
I shone the torch into the cavity left by the drawer I had removed, expecting to find nothing but the point of the pin poking through the bottom of the drawer slide. But it was not the end of the pin that met my eyes. It was a flap, a sort of trap-door, which was now tilted up. There was just enough room to enable me to slide my hand into the drawer compartment and grasp the flap. I teased it out, held my breath, and shone the torch back into the opening.
The base of the box had a shallow hollowed-out space, maybe twenty-five centimetres square and about two centimetres deep. And in this space was a packet, wrapped in what appeared to be thick brown paper and tied with string. I teased that out as well and then bellowed to Sue.
“What’s all the noise about?” she yelled from upstairs.
“Down here!” I shouted. “Quickly!”
“What the hell is it?” she said walking into the room, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Look!” I replied, thrusting the packet almost into her face. She looked at the packet, then at me, and then back at the packet.
“Where was it?” she asked quietly, not certain as to whether or not I was pulling her leg.
“In there!” I said excitedly. “Under the drawer! There’s a secret trap-door! Look!”
I showed her the pin-hole and then shone the torch inside the drawer cavity so that she could see how clever her husband had been.
“Oh my God, Ben!” Her eyes lit up. “You were right! What’s in it?”
“How the hell should I know!” I shot back. “I haven’t opened it yet.”
“Do you think it’s gold?”
“It’s heavy enough,” I replied, hefting the flat parcel in my right hand.
“Well, open it then. Hurry! Quick!”
“Okay, okay. It’s been there over a hundred years. It’s not going to vanish in a puff of smoke.”
It took me a minute or two to untie the knot in the string. It had dried out over the years and the knot had become extremely tight. However the truth was that my hands were shaking so much that I was having trouble getting my fingers to work properly.
“Cut it!” Sue said irritably.
“No. This is history. I don’t want to damage it.”
The paper was so dry as to be almost brittle, but I managed to unwrap it without breaking it where it had been folded, and we both stared at the contents – one largish bundle and six smaller ones, all of them wrapped in either silk or some similar fabric; and three or four sheets of writing paper folded in half beneath these bundles, written in the same hand as the letter from the Captain to his wife and, last of all, a plain stiff sheet of paper, some sort of rough map.
“Which do we look at first?” I asked. “The bundles, or the letter?”
“The bundles,” she replied. “The big one first.”
“You do it,” I said. “My hands are shaking too much.”
I watched as Sue reached down and picked up the larger of the bundles and started to unwind the silk.
“Bloody hell!” I exclaimed as the last turn was unwound. “It’s a cross!”
It was a gold cross, a religious one, presumably Christian, about ten centimetres from top to bottom; and still as bright as the day it had been wrapped by Captain Montgomery Jenkinson-Smythe and secreted in his writing box. The cross itself was studded with precious stones, or what I took to be precious stones, with one large, almost black, stone in the middle, overlapping the arms of the cross, too large to be real, and a bit loose in its setting. The cross seemed almost too thick to have fitted into the shallow hiding place.
“How old do you think it is?” Sue asked.
“I’ve got no idea,” I replied. “We know it’s at least a hundred and ten years old, because that’s when he put it in there. But where would he get a Christian cross in China? Surely they were Buddhists, or Taoists, or something similar.”
“You’re forgetting your history,” Sue said. “One of the causes of the Boxer rebellion, or uprising, was that the Chinese, or some of them, wanted to get rid of the Christian missionaries. They felt that the missionaries were destroying Chinese culture. Once the Boxers started on the missionaries, murdering them and their families, and killing thousands of Chinese converts, they then started in on the rest of the western community. The Boxers decided they wanted all foreigners out of China, and not just the missionaries.”
“Where did you get all this from?” I asked.
“I read it up after we sent those letters to the various Jenkinson-Smythes in England. You should spend more time learning things from the internet and not just wasting time chasing up your bits and pieces on eBay.”
“If I hadn’t learnt a bit about campaign boxes from eBay, I probably wouldn’t have bought this box.”
“Yes, all right. Don’t go on about it.”
I knew it was an argument I couldn’t win so I blocked off the answer I had on the tip of my tongue and picked up the cross again.
“So you think maybe this belonged to one of the missionaries?” I asked.
“It’s possible.”
“Whoever it was must have been a fairly high-up guy in the church,” I replied. “This thing would have cost a fortune!”
“All paid for by the flock,” she said sarcastically.
“The flock?”
“Yes, all paid for by those thousands of small contributions made each week by the faithful; contributions that would have put some extra food on the table of many a poor family, but instead were used to glorify the regalia of some high-up person in the church.”
“I thought you were in favour of religion,” I said.
“I am, but not at the expense of the masses.”
“Let’s open the other bundles,” I replied, not wanting to get into another discussion on religion.
Five minutes later we had all of the bundles unwrapped – three small gold items, three of jade, and the cross. One of the gold pieces, a medallion on a long gold chain, was probably European whereas the other two looked Asian. The jade was definitely Asian, and presumably Chinese. There was dust on the jade. When I brushed it off I could see what our guide had meant when he had said that almost all of the jade for sale at the dirt market, at Panjiayuan Jiuhuo Shichang, had been modern copies. The three pieces on the table before us were intricately carved, the lines clean, the curves smooth-flowing, the proportions perfectly complementing each other.
“They are truly beautiful,” Sue said. “I couldn’t really understand why people were attracted to jade, but now I think I know why.”
“But this is real jade,” I replied. “This is antique jade, not the rubbish they were trying to fob off onto us in China.”
She picked up another piece and then quickly put it down again.
“I think it’s time we read the letter,” she said. I nodded and had to draw my eyes away from the small treasure trove lying on the table before us.
There were four sheets, written in the same hand as the earlier letter, and addressed in the same manner, but without reference to date or place and unsigned. No doubt he intended to add endearments and maybe a postscript to the letter before it would be sent.
My Darling Alice
As soon as you have received this from the brother officer to whom I have entrusted its safe delivery, please write to me and let me know that it has arrived safely.
It is of the utmost importance that you tell no one of your receipt of these wonderful things, not even my brother officer who has delivered the package into your hands, for I will have to
ld him nothing of its contents, only that it contains a love token that I had made for you before we left India.
The only one with whom you may speak is my brother George. As I told you in my letter, I have asked George as to what we might do with this ‘windfall’, a windfall which has come to me, and which has come to you and our children as the reward for my service to our Queen and country, but which might be frowned upon if word were to reach the Times or any other such newspaper, or even to Parliament.
These things which I now send to you are only a part of that which we took that day, and the rest and remainder will await me until such time as this engagement is finished.
But, my Darling, we are at war with the Boxers, or the Society of the Righteous Fists as they are here known, and in times of war things may happen which we would prefer did not happen. You will find with this letter a map and a plan of the location of the rest and remainder of our windfall. If the worst should happen and I should fall, then I trust that George will take my place and recover all of those things which I have secreted away. I know, my Darling, that you will see George right and pay him more than handsomely should he be required to perform this service.
But do not worry, my Darling. These Boxers are ill-armed and un-trained. They fight against our troops like the dervish. They charge against our rifles with their swords and pikes, waving and shouting, and fall like the autumn leaves. Have no fear, for I have none myself.
You will ask, I have no doubt, as to where I recovered these treasures, for surely they are indeed treasures. It is a simple tale, as many of such are wont to be. It was luck and nothing else which led me to them.
It was on the 16th. The Chinese Empress had departed from the city on the previous day and all was in turmoil. There were still small bands of the Boxers sneaking from place to place, and I was out with a small party of my Lancers, taking care of these blackguards. It chanced that we came across a small party which rapidly took cover within the grounds of what I now know to be the Temple of Agriculture, and which lies some two miles from the Legation as the crow flies. I reined in my men, had them draw sabres and then charged after the brutes. We had cut down half of their party when the remaining five lay down their pitiful weapons and asked for quarter. Three of them then turned and ran towards the temple building, no doubt hoping to take refuge within its confines. My men made quick work of them. The remaining two prostrated themselves on the ground and started pleading in that sing-song manner of the oriental. I made short work of them with my revolver.
Dark Eye of the Jaguar Page 3