The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Whereas the manuscript?’ Peter prompted him.

  ‘Is a small codex of tenth-century pages in an eighteenth-century binding, rendered largely illegible by fire and water . . .’

  ‘Was it in the Cotton fire?’ asked Peter, unable to dissemble his interest.

  ‘Or some other fire,’ said Troutbeck impatiently, ‘rather too enthusiastically put out with gallons of water. The thing is ugly; it has no display value at all. We incur the costs and responsibility and in exchange attract the curiosity of a few, a very few, medievalists.’

  ‘Your benefactor, meanwhile, is not aware of what is going on, I take it?’ Peter asked. ‘Who is he or she?’

  ‘The benefactor is no longer on the scene. It was a bequest by which we acquired his book. Nevertheless he requested secrecy,’ Troutbeck said. ‘I do not really feel that I should break his confidence on my own. When you come to Oxford, of course you will be talking with us officially; but I should warn you that by no means all of the fellowship have the interests of the college at heart. There are factions among us – people bitterly at odds with each other. I am sure you will hear the question explained to you in very misleading ways.’

  ‘I don’t think you mentioned what the codex is a manuscript of?’ said Peter.

  ‘Some Dark Ages martyr called Boethius,’ said Troutbeck.

  Peter positively smiled at him. ‘Then you have no need to tell me who your benefactor was,’ he said. ‘There is only one person possible. And it seems clear why the book was given to St Severin’s. You should stay to lunch. I have much more to learn from you.’

  But at that moment Bunter knocked and entered. ‘There is a person on the telephone, Your Grace, urgently desiring to talk to Mr Troutbeck,’ he said.

  ‘Please show Mr Troutbeck to the telephone,’ said Peter.

  The morning room door was left open behind them. Peter heard their footsteps across the hall, but although he could hear the sound of Troutbeck’s voice, he could not catch the words, and hoped that Bunter was eavesdropping with his usual skill.

  Peter easily overheard for himself the words exchanged by Bunter and the guest as they returned across the hall.

  ‘Not bad news, I hope, sir?’ said Bunter.

  ‘No, excellent news, in fact,’ Troutbeck said. ‘Very tragic, of course . . . I thought I was in a spot, though. I had relied on a duke to be more interested in land than old manuscripts.’

  ‘It would depend on the duke, sir,’ said Bunter impassively, showing Troutbeck back into the room.

  Troutbeck was having some trouble looking sombre. ‘I am afraid I have been wasting your time, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘A senior member of the college having unexpectedly died last night, the voting will no longer be deadlocked. I think we shall be able to manage without troubling you any further. And I must get back immediately; there will be things to sort out in poor Enistead’s affairs.’

  ‘Oh, jolly D,’ said Peter duplicitously, ‘unless, of course, this deceased fellow was a friend of yours.’

  Troutbeck had the grace to blush slightly. ‘Not a personal friend,’ he said, ‘but a colleague of many years . . . one is naturally distressed . . . so sudden . . .’

  Peter walked his guest to the door and down the steps to his car. He opened the driver’s-side door for Troutbeck, and stood watching the car crunch away along the drive.

  ‘And I imagine the deceased was of the party that voted against you,’ he murmured to himself.

  When the Sunbeam was out of sight he returned to the library and looked again at the letter that had summoned him to Oxford. It bore two signatures, one of Terence Cloudie, Senior Fellow; the other of John Ambleside, Vice-Warden. It had not been signed by Troutbeck.‘Whatever is going on?’ Peter asked, rhetorically addressing the rows of noble tomes on his own well-furnished shelves. ‘Wait till I tell Harriet!’

  Telling Harriet did have to wait, however. She and Peter had long worked out a way of dealing with the everyday complexities of their lives. They could talk briefly at breakfast and at lunch; between those times Harriet retreated to her study to write. Peter never lacked things to do – he had the estate to run. Not till the evening did they sit together, Harriet reading, Peter sometimes playing the piano, and with time to let talk expand. On the day of the visit from Mr Troutbeck there had, by lunchtime, been two letters in the second post, and a further visitor from Oxford. The letters had evidently been written before the writers knew of ‘poor Enistead’s’ death; they were from fellows taking different sides in the dispute, each putting their case. Peter glanced at them, and put them aside for attention later, partly because the appearance of another unfamiliar car approaching along the drive threatened to cut short his time to consider them properly.

  Bunter announced, ‘A Mr Vearing to see you, Your Grace,’ and retreated.

  Mr Vearing was a man of middle age, grey-haired, thin and dignified, casually dressed in cavalry tweeds and a wine-coloured waistcoat. He looked rather crumpled – either he had slept in his clothes or he was not accustomed to trouble much about his appearance. An atmosphere of anxiety and discomfort emanated from him. He had a lean and rather lived-in face, and a slightly short-sighted frown, and approached Peter with extended hand.

  ‘Vearing,’ he said, ‘fellow of St Severin’s.’

  Asked to sit, he lowered himself into the available armchair. There was not a touch of deference about him – something that Peter noticed with approval.

  ‘You must wonder why I have taken the trouble to come,’ he began, ‘when I suppose you will shortly be coming to Oxford to take matters in hand.’

  ‘I have not yet decided whether I must visit Oxford,’ said Peter untruthfully, ‘or if I may read what you fellows have to say, and deliver my opinion from the safety of my own home.’

  Vearing looked slightly disconcerted. ‘This is a very important matter, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘I had thought you would need to hear the views of all the fellows . . .’

  ‘If so,’ said Peter mildly, ‘why not wait till I arrive at the college, and tell me what you think then?’

  Vearing straightened up a little in his chair. ‘I have spent many years teaching undergraduates, and graduate students, Your Grace,’ he said, ‘and I have observed a recurring phenomenon. That is that when invited to consider two sides of a controversy people are apt to give most weight to the position they have encountered, or have had put before them, first. It is relatively hard for a second position to dislodge their allegiance to the earlier one.’

  ‘Really?’ said Peter. ‘I would have thought that scholars would be more rational.’

  ‘I could give you a familiar example,’ said Vearing. ‘In the nineteenth century, those who were thrown into misery by losing their faith – Arthur Hugh Clough for example, or Matthew Arnold, or George Eliot – retained a nostalgia for religious belief which pursued them all their lives.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Peter. ‘That is an interesting question, although not the one that has brought you here this morning. I suppose you mean that you think if you put your side of the case to me before anyone has put the counter-argument, you will sway my judgement decisively in your direction. But I am not an undergraduate, Mr Vearing, nor even a nineteenth-century agnostic.’

  ‘Of course not, Your Grace. I did not mean to imply . . . the truth is I know nothing about your education, having realised only yesterday that the fate of the college lay in your hands – and by right of birth, rather than a right of office. I hope you will not blame me if I say that that is a situation that should not have been allowed to happen.’

  ‘About that at least we may agree with each other,’ said Peter.

  Bunter had appeared, carrying a coffee tray with a splendid silver coffee pot and Royal Worcester cups.

  When the coffee had been poured, Peter invited his guest to make his case.

  ‘I am afraid to say,’ he began, ‘that some of the fellows of the college – exactly half of them in fact – are determined to commit a
crime against the purposes of the college. For the sake of the money they wish to sell a precious manuscript volume from the college library, and spend the proceeds on a speculative venture in land. The volume in question is an early copy of a work by the saint for whom the college is named. It seems to me – and to my party in the dispute – to be an act of vandalism to auction it off to the highest bidder, who would probably be some unheard-of college in America . . .’

  Vearing’s strong feelings were apparent in his heated expression and heightened colour. The coffee cup he was holding rattled gently in its saucer. He had not so much as sipped it.

  ‘Don’t let your coffee get cold, old chap,’ said Peter.

  ‘Forgive me, Your Grace,’ Vearing responded, hastily gulping his coffee. ‘Feelings run high on this matter, including mine.’

  ‘Well, it’s a dilemma, I do see that,’ said Peter. ‘But surely not a matter of life or death. Even the life or death of a college.’

  ‘It would be a slow death, admittedly,’ said Vearing. ‘The sale of the manuscript would deplete the resources of the college library. And it would announce to the world that St Severin’s is no longer a safe place for the preservation of treasures of the past. That it no longer values scholarship above money . . .’

  ‘Wouldn’t that depend upon what the money raised was spent on?’ asked Peter innocently. ‘Couldn’t you have some jolly new student lodgings, or a lecture room?’

  ‘Quite a few of the best minds in the senior common room will resign,’ said Vearing, ‘so the new lecture room will be given over entirely to the teaching of those who favour money over scholarship.’

  ‘Will you yourself resign if the manuscript is sold?’ asked Peter. He watched while Vearing just perceptibly hesitated.

  ‘I would have to,’ he replied. ‘And I have come to implore you, since matters are so evenly balanced . . .’

  ‘They may not be balanced as evenly as you think,’ said Peter. ‘Now that Enistead is dead . . .’

  Vearing looked blank for a moment. Then, ‘What?’ he cried, jumping up. ‘When? How? But when I left Oxford this morning, admittedly very early, nobody had told me about it.’

  ‘The news reached me this morning,’ said Peter. ‘As to when or how the man died I am in the dark. You look like death yourself, Mr Vearing – can I offer you a stiff drink?’

  ‘Just give me a minute to compose myself,’ said Vearing, sinking back into his chair. ‘This is a great shock. There have been too many mishaps and incidents among us recently.’

  ‘I take it Enistead would have voted for the retention of the manuscript?’ said Peter, when a minute or two had elapsed.

  ‘What?’ said Vearing. ‘Oh, yes; he was fiercely of the opinion that the manuscript had to be retained in perpetuity. For the honour of the college. He was the old-fashioned kind of fellow; not a published word to his name . . .’

  ‘So as matters stand now, when the vote is taken again, the let’s-sell-and-be-damned party will prevail?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Vearing, rather melodramatically sinking his face in his hands.

  ‘What about the Warden?’ asked Peter. ‘Mightn’t his vote even things up again? Stalemate, admittedly, but not the sale of the book? When does his leave of absence expire?’

  ‘Well,’ said Vearing, ‘he hasn’t exactly taken formal leave of absence, so that one would know how to answer your question. He’s just gone – nobody knows where.’

  ‘Does anybody know why?’

  ‘I don’t, certainly.’

  ‘And how long has he been gone?’

  ‘Since just after the last college meeting. That was in Hilary term, so about three months.’

  ‘And when is the next vote to be taken?’ Peter asked. ‘Where are we in the academic year?’

  ‘Three weeks into Trinity term,’ said Vearing. ‘The vote must be taken before term ends at the end of June.’

  ‘I think,’ said Peter, ‘that I can take neither the one side nor the other in the dispute that so divides you until I have investigated more fully. You are right, Vearing, that it is time your Visitor paid you a visit. Expect me very shortly.’

  It took Peter quite a time to explain all this to Harriet at lunchtime. ‘Are you sure you are not over-egging the pudding?’ she asked him. ‘It sounds improbably melodramatic. The sort of thing I might make up.’

  ‘Who, me?’ asked Peter. ‘No, I am trying my best to convey to you what the gentlemen of Oxford have taken such trouble to convey to me this morning. All the way from Oxford, and driving themselves. Though I suppose the train is rather a bore.’

  ‘The connection to Denver from Cambridge is quite good, really,’ said Harriet, musing.

  ‘But Oxford to Cambridge by train is notoriously bad,’ said Peter.

  ‘It can’t be that bad,’ said Harriet, ‘when there is a don who comes across from Oxford to buy his books in Cambridge. Someone in Heffers told me when I was last in the shop.’

  ‘What can you buy in Heffers that you can’t buy in Blackwell’s?’ asked Peter.

  ‘What he does buy is detective stories, I am told. I have no idea what Blackwell’s is like as an emporium for detective stories; we aren’t in Oxford often enough. And the oddity doesn’t end there. If what he wants is out of stock, and they order it for him, he won’t have the books sent to him. They wait until he comes and fetches them in person.’

  ‘All the world is mad, save thee and me,’ said Peter, ‘and even thee’s a bit odd.’

  ‘I should think,’ said Harriet, not rising to this, ‘that you had better talk to those who have not attempted to talk to you first.’

  ‘Yes. I must go to Oxford, and soon. I could get away the day after tomorrow. Will you come too?’

  ‘What a nice idea, Peter. I would love to. But I can’t come on Wednesday; – I have a paper to deliver to the Sheridan Le Fanu Society this Thursday in London and I haven’t written it yet. And one of us should be around on Friday when the doctor comes to give your mother a check-up. You must go tomorrow; I shall join you on Saturday.’

  ‘I am no longer used to doing things without you, Harriet. I don’t like the idea at all.’

  ‘You can manage for three days,’ said Harriet crisply. ‘I am not asking you to do without Bunter.’

  And then, when Peter looked woebegone, she said, ‘Cheer up, Peter! When I join you in Oxford we shall have lots of fun – you shall detect and I shall burrow in the Bodleian, and we have many old friends to see.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I am supposed to adjudicate, not to detect, but it rather sounds as though detection might be required. Meanwhile, do you have any helpful suggestions to make about this situation, which resembles, as you remarked, something you might have made up?’

  ‘I should institute an immediate search for the Warden,’ Harriet said.

  Chapter 2

  The journey from Duke’s Denver to Oxford is a tiresome trawl along minor roads, none of them seeming to wish to expedite travel. One could go through Haddenham and Huntingdon, Bedford or Northampton, Buckingham or Banbury, Woodstock or Bicester.

  The Romans, who were the first road-makers whose work survives on the face of England, needed, evidently, to radiate from London or Colchester, and had no need of cross-journeys.

  It was honestly just as easy for Peter to nip down to London on the Great Cambridge Road, have lunch with Freddy Arbuthnot at the Bellingham Club, and then zip up to Oxford on the A40. Which is therefore what he did.

  ‘Is it just my pretty face, Peter,’ Freddy asked him, ‘or are you up to your old tricks again and wanting to pick a chap’s brains?’

  ‘Weeell,’ said Peter, ‘since you ask . . . why don’t you have the lobster, Freddy, and we’ll get a bottle of Sancerre.’

  ‘I see you really do want something expounded,’ said Freddy, visibly brightening and ordering the lobster as invited. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I don’t exactly know what I want to know,’ said Peter,
‘you’ll have to help me.’

  ‘The blind to lead the blind any day of the week,’ said Freddy. ‘Give me a clue.’

  ‘Well, what do you know about speculation in land?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Freddy, easing the thread of pink flesh from a lobster tendril, and waving it around on the end of his prong. ‘But I know a man . . .’

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Peter.

  ‘Where is this debatable land?’ asked Freddy.

  ‘Outskirts of Oxford. Someone is giving an Oxford college a chance to buy it.’

  ‘Ah. Possible building land?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘Might be dicey, seems to me,’ said Freddy. ‘There’s all this council housing going up everywhere, and the powers that be can requisition land at the agricultural value if they like. Owners wouldn’t make a penny. You really need to go and talk to the planners in Oxford. But I suppose your brainy pals will have done that.’

  ‘I don’t know if they have,’ said Peter. ‘But I’ll find out. Thanks, Freddy.’

  ‘Have you heard of Crichel Down?’ asked Freddy.

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Should I have?’

  Let’s just say that you will have by and by,’ said Freddy. ‘A word to the wise, if you follow me.’

  ‘And when I have heard of Crichel Down,’ said Peter, ‘will it tend to encourage, or to discourage the purchase of tracts of land on the verges of urban areas?’

  ‘The fact that I cannot tell you, Peter,’ said Freddy, ‘is an indicator of a level of risk.’

  ‘Wait and see, you mean?’

  ‘Indeed, wait and see.’

  ‘And if the principals in this affair cannot afford to wait?’

  Freddy shrugged eloquently.

  The old familiar way into Oxford, then. Down Headington Hill, which offers no prospect of the towery city; along a nondescript street to the roundabout always called ‘The Plains’, with no sight yet of anything remarkable; and then a turn on to the bridge, on the far side of which rises Magdalen College tower – Gothic at its most austere and beautiful, and shedding like falling petals into the memories of anyone who ever heard them, the voices of the choirboys from aloft, singing an annual welcome to the first day of spring. Peter was far from immune to this bitterly intense nostalgia; he too had lain in a punt with his friends on more than one dewy morning, and heard the song, and adjourned to eat breakfast cooked on a campfire in the meadow below the bridge. Thinking of punts he remembered sleeping in one, overcome with weariness, while Harriet watched him, and when he awoke something unspoken and irrevocable had happened between them.