The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘They could have been distracted, I suppose? A mob of undergraduates pouring through the gate, or someone enquiring for a letter by pigeon post?’

  ‘They don’t think so, sir. They have naturally been racking their brains over it, and talking to each other about it. And another thing, my lord. It can be a chilly few steps from the Warden’s Lodgings here, to Hall, under that open arch. On cold nights the Warden wears an overcoat over his gown, and leaves the coat on a hook at the back of the Hall. It’s still there, my lord.’

  ‘Righty-ho,’ said Peter. ‘Miss Manciple, you have been very helpful. Thank you. I will let you know at once if we find anything. Bunter, ask the Domestic Bursar to step up here urgently, will you?’

  St Severin’s dining hall was an archetype of such halls. At one end there was a large oriel window, designed to cast light on the dais and the High Table. Its heraldic stained glass dimmed and romanticised the light it offered, throwing gouts of vert, sable, or azure and gules upon the distinguished faces sitting below it. The Hall was lined with ancient linen-fold panelling, adorned with portraits of patrons and past Wardens in golden frames. Above soared a massive hammer-beamed roof. Mr Winterhorn, the Bursar, presented himself quickly enough, and accompanied Peter.

  Peter stood on the dais, and contemplated the assembly of college servants gathered in front of him.

  ‘We are about to organise, with your help, a very thorough search of the college,’ he told them. ‘Every nook, cranny, cupboard, from the roof spaces to the remotest corners of the cellars. Every inch of the gardens, every greenhouse or tool-shed. Everywhere. The Bursar will assign an area for search to each of you. You will search in pairs, and report back to myself or the Bursar when your search is complete.’

  A hand was raised among the throng. ‘What are we looking for, sir?’

  ‘I shall take you into my confidence,’ said Peter. ‘You are looking for the Warden.’

  A horrified gasp rose to be lost among the roof beams.

  ‘He’s not been seen here for three months or more, sir,’ said the Senior Common Room butler, Mr Thrupp.

  ‘We are assuring ourselves that the Warden is not on college premises, alive or dead,’ said Peter soberly. ‘When we can be sure of that we can search the rest of the world for him. I have two other things to ask of you. First, that if you were to find a body, or any suspicious thing, you should not touch or move anything. It would hamper the police investigation that would have to follow. And second, though I think you would all realise this without my asking it of you, the honour of the college – your college – would be badly damaged if news of this morning’s activities were to get out. You all know what a hive of busy gossip Oxford is. I hope I may rely on your discretion.’

  Peter himself decided to join the party to search the cellars. They were extensive, stretching below ground to the full area of the buildings above them. The old buildings, that is. The search party was led by Mr Thrupp, who seemed anxious, and was keeping a sharp eye out for his fellow searchers.

  ‘People sometimes think, Your Grace,’ he said to Peter, ‘that all these cellars reveal a riotously bibulous fellowship in the past. But in fact cellars were necessary because of rising damp. The modern buildings, of course, are standing on the ground with good damp courses.’

  Peter agreed. ‘But nevertheless, Mr Thrupp, there does seem to be plenty of drink down here.’

  ‘The college does keep a good cellar, Your Grace,’ Mr Thrupp said. ‘Various of the fellows in the past have been very knowledgeable.’

  ‘I’ll say they have,’ said Peter, gently removing a bottle from the nearest rack, and holding it up, level, to read the label. ‘How many of these have you got?’

  ‘Five dozen,’ said Mr Thrupp. ‘But diminishing, of course.’

  ‘Wine is made to be drunk,’ said Peter approvingly, ‘and can be kept too long.’

  But the search party had moved ahead, into the next of the sequence of undercrofts, and Mr Thrupp hastened after them.

  Peter, lingering, reading the rack labels with interest, heard him calling in alarm, ‘No, no! On no account disturb the racks! That is port, gentlemen, port!’

  Joining them, Peter saw a row of bewildered faces.

  ‘How can we look behind them racks,’ one of the party was asking, ‘if we can’t lay hands on them to shift them forward a bit?’

  ‘I could get under there, I think,’ piped up a scrawny youth.

  Everyone looked at him. He seemed about fourteen, though he must have been older, and he was indeed short and very thin. He coloured a bit at the blaze of attention. ‘I’m Sidney, sir,’ he said, addressing the butler. ‘I’m new in the gardens, sir.’

  ‘Well, if you can wriggle under there and make sure there’s nothing behind it,’ said Peter, ‘the college will be indebted to you, and you shall have half-a-crown from me. Now, can we have two of the heaviest of you to hang on to each end of this rack, and keep it steady while Sidney here does his stuff.’

  Sidney flung himself on to the dusty flagged floor, and wriggled his way forward.

  ‘It’s a bit dark down here,’ he reported. A torch was rolled under the racks towards him. For a few seconds the rack was lit from below, outlines of bottles and flashes of deep red within them appearing spookily here and there while Sidney wielded the torch.

  Then the boy began to reappear, feet first, then waist and shoulders. It looked as if he might have trouble getting his head out, but, turning right ear upwards, he managed it.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, getting on to his knees to stand up, ‘there’s nothing there but dust.’

  Much less dust than before, thought Peter, seeing the amount of it now adhering to Sidney’s clothes. A random scatter of applause greeted Sidney as he stood up, and Peter immediately bestowed the promised half-crown.

  It must by now have been hitting home to everyone in the party what they might be hoping or fearing to find. There was palpable tension as they moved on through the warren of cellars. The remotest rooms were empty and dusty. Mr Thrupp shone his torch around all four corners of a room, and moved to go on.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Peter. He went to the furthest corner, and picked up something. ‘Your torch here, Mr Thrupp,’ he said.

  The torch showed him to be holding an empty bulbous dark-green glass bottle with a long tapering neck, and a small stamped medallion on its side.

  ‘You haven’t got any more like this anywhere, have you, Mr Thrupp?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Is it worth something, sir?’ said Mr Thrupp.

  ‘I’d have to look it up. Consult a friend,’ said Peter, turning the bottle in his hands. ‘But I can see at once that it is very old, and very valuable.’

  An inexplicable tremor went through his audience.

  ‘How old is old, sir?’ said Mr Thrupp.

  ‘Seventeenth century somewhere,’ said Peter.

  ‘And that’ll be worth more than Sidney’s half-a-crown, then, sir?’

  ‘I’m not expert enough to value it, Mr Thrupp; my line is incunabula, not glass.’

  ‘Give us a guess, sir.’

  ‘Somewhere upwards of a hundred pounds,’ said Peter.

  ‘Just one? Just one bottle?’ came a voice from the back of the party.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Peter.

  Whereupon suddenly gales of laughter engulfed the group. Laughter possessed them till they were clinging to each other and weeping with it. The low arch of the vault magnified the sound, and echoed it around them.

  ‘Will somebody let me in on the joke?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Well, you see, sir,’ said a gardener, ‘a bit back there was trouble with the young gentlemen climbing over the wall, and landing in the herbaceous border. Lots of damaged plants, sir, and breaking the head gardener’s heart. So the college decided to put broken glass all along the top of the garden wall, like it is now, sir. But the Bursar . . .’ – he could hardly speak for laughter – ‘when he got an estimate it said ten pounds for the broken
glass, and he said, that were rubbish. We got a load of glass ourselves, he said, and he sent two of us in here with lump hammers to smash up dozens and dozens of bottles like that one sir, and take the bits out in barrer-loads to give the men what was putting it atop the wall. So he saved his tenner, sir, didn’t he?’

  ‘That was you, George, you musta missed one!’ cried someone.

  In another storm of laughter Peter managed to establish that the thrifty Bursar was not Mr Winterhorn, but his predecessor, a man who had been not much loved by the staff.

  The laughter stopped abruptly when they continued the search. But they found nothing other than the oddly shaped bottle.

  Peter returned to his room to await the reports of the other search parties. Not every senior member had readily consented to have his rooms searched; Bunter had threatened a personal search conducted by the Visitor if necessary. The unwilling had conceded. The head gardener’s grief at a search of his herbaceous borders, and the chef’s grief at incursions into the buttery pantries, had been overcome. Every inch of St Severin’s from roof-tiles to underground depths had been inspected.

  But not a single trace of the Warden had been found. Wherever he was, he wasn’t in college, living or dead.

  Chapter 3

  It is hard to sleep peacefully in an unfamiliar bed. Peter woke at five the next morning; tried to go to sleep again, and failed. He got up and dressed, resolving to go for a walk. Would the main gate be locked? No matter; there was a street gate in the wall that enclosed the Warden’s garden, and he could let himself out that way. The light was swathed in mist, like clouds of tissue paper, the air was still and cold. Peter walked briskly, going south. He stopped briefly on the corner of the Broad, to admire the just faintly visible volumes of the counterpointed glories – Gothic Old Bodleian, Classical Radcliffe Camera, Gothic St Mary’s Church, all seeming to float like faded aquatints on the hazy air.

  As he passed All Souls he noticed that some literate vandal had scrawled on the college walls ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?’ on one side of the ornate gates, and ‘Take heart, ye are worth many such,’ on the other side. With regrettable complicity Peter laughed. The Warden of All Souls was John Sparrow. As he passed the Radcliffe Camera he saw that that, too, bore a message – a brief one. ‘I am a camera,’ it said.

  Peter left the buildings to talk to each other, and crossed the High, going down Magpie Lane to Merton Street, and out on to Christ Church Meadow. The great avenue across the top of the meadow was appearing against the backdrop of mist like a Rembrandt engraving, inked in detail on white paper. Peter walked straight across it and made for the bank of the Thames. He thought he would like to revisit the College Barges, moored along the meadow below Folly Bridge. One by one the old ceremonial barges used on the Thames in London by the ancient City Guilds had been bought by Oxford colleges, and towed upstream to serve as boat clubs and viewing platforms when the races were held. Peter had not been a rowing man, but he had shouted and waved his hat and cheered the Balliol eight heartily often enough. By the time he reached the row of glamorous elaborate old vessels, all different, lining the river, the rising sun was infusing the mist with a red-gold glow. In shabby splendour the barges looked like a sideshow for the Fighting Temeraire. The dawn gilded them with ephemeral glory.

  Peter clambered down the sloping bank, and hauled himself up by the rails to scramble on board his barge. He wouldn’t have done this to any but Balliol’s, not even St Severin’s. Once on the deck he could lean over the rail on the far side of the barge, and enjoy a fine view of the river, gently steaming with curls of the evaporating mist. The river was not quite empty of life; there were one or two gulls circling. Legend suggested that the gulls came inland when there were storms at sea, but if that were so there was very little calm weather to be had on English shores, for there were nearly always gulls on the river. A pair of swans glided past, their wings lifted in graceful curves to serve as spread sails in the light breeze.

  A solitary oarsman appeared, rowing smoothly upstream in a scull. The pleasant soft plashing of his oars fell into the wide silence. Peter watched appreciatively as the man came by him, rowing smoothly but strongly against the race caused by the breakwaters in the bridge. The water broke into golden rings at each dip of his oars, and haloed his head, and it was only as he reached the shadow of the bridge that Peter realised he was watching not a blond youngster, but a white-headed older man. An impressively fit older man, Peter noted. Perhaps he himself should add rowing to his activities; he would bet you got good biceps from pulling those oars.

  Quite suddenly the sun soared above him, leaving him in the common light of day. The mist softened and retreated. Every crack in old timber, every blister in old paintwork was revealed. Peter climbed back from barge to bank, and began the walk home to breakfast.

  The oarsman had looked vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t place quite who he was. Perhaps he was a chimera from his own remembered youth.

  ‘I need some information from you, and some assistance,’ said Peter to Ambleside. ‘I would like you to list for me all the deaths or mishaps that have occurred in the fellowship during the last eleven months or so – effectively since the issue of the sale of the MS became hot – and the cause of death if you know it, and the side on which the deceased would have voted in the dispute, as far as you know.’

  Ambleside looked glum. ‘If I may say so,’ he said, ‘the train of thought evinced in that request is a touch melodramatic.’

  ‘It is devoutly to be hoped so,’ said Peter. ‘But it is my job to eliminate possibilities until only one remains.’

  Ambleside looked unhappy. ‘Allow me to say, Your Grace, that in my understanding your duties are confined to the settlement of disputes within the fellowship.’

  ‘And if something rather worse than a dispute has been going on?’

  Ambleside looked unhappier still. ‘There have been two deaths among the fellows in the time you indicate,’ he said. ‘I will find you the information you asked for.’

  ‘Could you also put a notice in the Senior Common Room, inviting any fellow who would like to put a case to me, on either side of the dispute, to call on me at any time they find convenient, between breakfast and Hall? Shall we say from tomorrow morning for the next three days?’

  Ambleside looked happier at that request, and hastened away to set about it.

  It was a lovely, sunny, late morning. Of course there would be lunch in Hall, but Peter decided against that. There would be some awkwardness, whoever he chatted with. Instead he trotted down Parks Road into Holywell Street, and dived into the Turf Tavern. There he found a seat in a sunny out-of-doors corner, and ordered a pint and a Stilton ploughman’s. The place filled up rapidly with loudly conversational young people. Peter buried himself in his copy of The Times, dealing with waves of nostalgia. Had he and Harriet ever eaten here? He thought not. Harriet in Oxford belonged to his more adult days. He sighed as he remembered that in those adult days, try though he had – he really had tried – he had been enveloped in the aura of grandeur that had for so long denied him Harriet’s consent to marry him. He would have taken her to lunch or dinner somewhere quiet and expensive . . . more fool he. And now the grandeur syndrome was much worse, and much harder to escape. Snap out of it! he told himself, it was dukedom that has brought you here. You will have to Duke it all the way.

  He became aware that someone was hovering at his table. He lowered The Times enough to look over it at this person: a young man with red hair, wearing a Harris tweed jacket.

  ‘I say,’ this young man said, betraying himself immediately as Jackson from the timbre of his voice, ‘are you that Duke person who is supposed to be calling the dons to order at Sever’s?’

  ‘I am a duke,’ said Peter, ‘and therefore a fortiori I am a person. Sit down, Mr Jackson, and let me have the benefit of your opinions.’

  The young man sat down. ‘How do you know my name?’ he said, but then like Pilate did
not stay for an answer. ‘It’s no good talking to me, you know. I don’t have a vote on the matter.’

  ‘But you have strong feelings about it?’

  ‘If they sell the Boethius this summer, I’m sunk,’ Jackson replied. The pitch of his voice made him sound merely plaintive, but his face was sombre.

  ‘Let me buy you a beer,’ said Peter, ‘and you can tell me all about it.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Jackson said, once they were settled with full glasses, ‘I am hoping to do a D.Phil when I graduate. I want to work on the college copy of the Boethius. If they sell it I can’t. My whole career is derailed.’

  ‘Let’s begin at the beginning,’ said Peter. ‘What are you reading now? History? Greats?’

  ‘English. Course Two.’

  ‘I ought to know what Course Two is . . .’ said Peter.

  ‘Lots of Old English. Then Middle English. One third history of the language, the rest literature up to and including Milton.’

  ‘Whatever made you do that?’ asked Peter. ‘English with not a single Romantic poet? English with not a single Victorian novelist?’

  ‘It was King Alfred,’ said Jackson. ‘We had to learn Anglo-Saxon in our first term, and one of the texts was his Preface to another thing he translated – besides the Boethius, I mean – Cura Pastoralis. I was slogging through it word by word, and I began to realise it was funny – no, that’s not what I mean – it was ironical. It was so civilised. And it was the voice of a Dark Ages king. And the Boethius is even more interesting. Alfred put it on his list of the books everyone ought to know, but it was difficult. Abstract. He made it concrete to help his people get it. When it comes to an idea like contingency, he is writing that it’s like the way the spokes depend on the hub, and the rim on the spokes of a wheel . . . and he keeps letting you see what he feels about being a king . . . Oh, God, am I boring you? Carrying on too much? My friends say I do . . .’