The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Peter. ‘For the record, Mr Cloudie, I believe you.’

  ‘Well, that’s something I suppose,’ said Mr Cloudie. ‘Nobody else does.’

  ‘I have a rather special reason to believe you,’ said Peter.

  Dancy next. He had rooms on the top floor of a front quad staircase. The porter thought he was in his room. Peter heard a piano being played as he ascended the stair. He assumed he would interrupt a music lesson, but when he tapped and entered he found Dancy alone, playing in solitude. The poor man had not heard Peter’s knock, and was startled at his appearance.

  Attempts at explaining his reason for calling were difficult; Dancy really was deaf, at least temporarily. Peter whipped out a notebook and pen and the conversation was conducted in writing on his part. Dancy could speak with ease; and he had not been deaf long enough to have acquired the loud voice that sometimes accompanies deafness. His account of the accident was just the same as Ambleside’s. Peter asked him what he had been doing in the bell-tower in the first place, and Dancy said he was comparing one of his tuning forks with the note of the treble bell when it was lightly struck.

  ‘My own fault, don’t you know,’ he said, ‘my own fault. I had forgotten the ringing practice. I am very absent-minded. Though of course, I didn’t expect the bell-chamber to be locked. I don’t think they usually lock it. But perhaps they do, and I had forgotten that.’ He offered Peter a seraphic smile. ‘I am often rather absent-minded,’ he said. ‘On that occasion I was rehearing in my mind a passage from The Art of the Fugue, by Bach. Do you happen to know it, Your Grace?’

  Peter said, or rather wrote, that he did. Indeed that he tried to play it sometimes. He had wept tears over the last note . . .

  ‘Yes,’ said Dancy, ‘so have I. The death of Bach is silence . . . for now I can hear nothing except humming and whining sounds. But they tell me I shall recover by and by, at least partly.’

  ‘For now you can’t hear, but you can play?’ asked Peter.

  Once again Dancy’s face lit up. ‘I can hear it very clearly when I am playing,’ he said. ‘I can hear any error in the mind’s eye, so to speak. It comforts me to play; sometimes I can forget the deafness altogether. And what light it casts on Beethoven!’

  ‘I salute you,’ Peter wrote. ‘And thank you for your help.’

  The invitation to the fellowship to drop in and discuss their views with Peter was not long in bearing fruit. First to appear were a Mr Oundle and a Mr Martin, carrying rolled-up documents, and hoping that they might explain to His Grace the merits of the proposal to buy land.

  ‘Is Troutbeck joining us?’ asked Peter.

  ‘No; we gather he has had his say.’

  ‘But we are here as an informal deputation,’ Mr Oundle said. ‘We thought perhaps that it would be better if just the two of us spoke for all of us who wish to acquire the land. May we show you? Is there somewhere we could unroll these maps and plans?’

  Unasked, Bunter appeared and removed candlesticks and a salt-cellar from the dining table at one end of the room, and then removed an embroidered runner, leaving the table bare.

  ‘Sherry, I think, Bunter,’ said Peter.

  ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ said Bunter, adopting his stiffest pose.

  The map was unrolled first. The contentious land was outlined in blue. It was quite extensive, and there was a road on each side, roads running out of Oxford like the spokes on a wheel, so that the land between them was wedge-shaped. A little brook crossed it. Two stands of trees were marked.

  ‘As you see, Duke,’ said Mr Oundle, ‘this is a sitting duck for development. Excellent road access; a level site. No particular difficulties for construction . . .’

  ‘Is it grade one agricultural land?’ asked Peter.

  ‘We understand it is grade three,’ said Mr Martin.

  ‘Why?’ asked Peter. ‘I mean, why isn’t it grade one?’

  ‘Too damp for arable,’ said Mr Oundle. ‘It’s grazing land, basically.’

  ‘It isn’t so hugely valuable, then,’ Peter said, ‘unless it gets reclassified as development land.’

  ‘We expect that to happen,’ said Martin. ‘Oxford is bursting at the seams, and there is a desperate need for more housing.’

  ‘Housing like this,’ said Mr Oundle, unrolling a sheet of architects’ drawings on top of the map.

  The drawings showed blocks of flats arranged round a small park with a pond. A parade of shops and a school occupied one of the two road frontages. Bright blue skies with fluffy clouds had been provided above this panorama, and little sketchy people with shopping bags and children in prams walked the streets. Toddlers were feeding ducks on the pond. Idyllic.

  Bunter having appeared with the sherry, Peter invited his guests to sit down and talk it over.

  ‘The gist of your proposition, correct me if I’m wrong, is that you should acquire this land at agricultural prices, get planning permission, and sell it on at a substantial profit. Is that the idea?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Mr Oundle told him. ‘It might do better if we leased it for development and held on to the ground rents for the future.’

  Bunter, having poured the sherry, retreated to the far end of the room.

  ‘I do see a snake in the woodpile,’ Peter said. ‘If the council want the land they can take it from you at its price for agriculture. And when you ask them for planning permission that thought is likely to occur to them, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hence the need for haste,’ Mr Martin said. ‘We need to buy the land and get it reclassified quickly. We need to write contracts with several developers so that it will be difficult for the council to take over the whole area . . . we need to do this before any coherent plan to redevelop emerges. We need to be ahead of the game.’

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

  Both men shook their heads. ‘We need to get this decided, and act with dispatch,’ Mr Martin replied.

  ‘But with the best will in the world this is a gamble,’ Peter said. ‘It might not pay off.’

  ‘But on the other hand,’ Mr Oundle said, ‘there is very little downside. Honestly, Your Grace, the loss of the manuscript would not seriously damage the college, whatever you may have been told about it. And may I suggest that you should ask the Bursar to put you in the picture as to the college finances before coming to a conclusion?’

  ‘I am always open to suggestions,’ said Peter. ‘And now may I ask you something. Whose land is this? Who is the self-damaging person who wishes to sell the land cheaply to the college, instead of gambling on its future value for himself?’

  The two men exchanged glances. Neither of them, Peter noticed, had more than sipped their excellent oloroso sherry. He noticed Mr Martin’s fingers tighten on the stem of his glass. But his voice did not alter. ‘A friend of the college. Wishes to remain anonymous. For personal reasons.’

  ‘I see,’ said Peter. He hoped the note of anger in his voice escaped them. Did they take him for a fool? He thought of asking if the gentleman in question was a friend of either of the men in front of him; but he thought better of it.

  ‘Well, I can see the force of your argument,’ he said, ‘but it is a matter of cool calculation, isn’t it? Not a thing to get het up about.’

  ‘What we are getting het up about, Your Grace, as you put it,’ said Mr Martin, ‘is nothing less than the survival of the college in any state to pursue its stated purposes. To continue as a house of learning, rather than as a mausoleum for antiquities.’

  ‘I see that you feel very strongly about it, old chap,’ said Peter.

  ‘Nothing like as strongly as some others,’ said Mr Oundle. ‘You should hear Troutbeck on the subject.’

  ‘Should I?’ said Peter. ‘Well, why aren’t I hearing him? Why does he send you to speak in his place?’

  ‘He has already made himself clear to you, we understand,’ said Oundle. ‘We thought perhaps you should see that many of us agree with him.’

>   The moment the deputation had rolled up their documents and left him, Peter dispatched Bunter to a London train, and a trip to Lincoln’s Inn to see if it was possible to discover from the Land Registry the name of the shy friend of the college. And then, ignoring the possibility of more visitors responding to his invitation, he went out for fresh air, and punted himself in solitary glory from Magdalen Bridge to Bardwell Road and back.

  When Peter returned to his room he found he did have a visitor waiting for him, though not an expected one: a smart, rather beautiful woman in early middle age, wearing slacks and a tweed jacket over a green silk shirt.

  ‘Mary Fowey,’ she said, offering him her hand. ‘I understand you want to talk to me about the St Severin’s Boethius.’

  ‘How kind of you to come,’ said Peter, taking the proffered handshake. ‘I was hoping to call on you later today.’

  ‘The MS is here,’ she said. ‘Shall we go and look at it together?’

  The two of them descended to the ground floor, and crossed the quad to the library.

  The library had been built by someone who thought of it as sacred space; it resembled a chapel, having a fine hammer-beam timber roof, beautifully carved seventeenth-century bookcases, and Gothic windows glazed in plain greenish bubble-filled panes of glass.

  The room was dark, and needed the reading lights with which every desk was provided. Along the back wall of the room a row of glass-fronted bookcases displayed the treasures of the house; those, that is, that were not in one of the locked display cases that occupied the centre aisle. ‘I took the liberty of asking your librarian to meet us here,’ said Mary Fowey. ‘Ah, here he is . . .’

  A pallid young man rose from a desk where he had obviously been engaged in pasting acquisition slips into a leather-bound folio catalogue volume. He introduced himself and brought a bunch of keys from his pocket, with which he unlocked one of the display cases. He slipped a pair of white cotton gloves on to his hands, and carefully lifted a book to place it on a book-rest on a nearby table. The three of them sat down at this table.

  The contentious volume was small and chunky. It was written on vellum, and bound in vellum, once white and now rather dirty. It had been tightly bound, so that it closed if not held open. Two more pairs of white gloves were found for Peter and Miss Fowey. Very gingerly, cradling the volume in one hand, Peter held pages open with the other. He was looking at an even hand, written without word breaks, in ink now faded to brown, in an elegant rounded uncial script. The scorch marks of which Troutbeck had complained disfigured the outer margins of the pages, and had caused the eroded edges to nibble at the end of the lines of text. There were no decorated initials, and no illustrations. In a very small medieval hand and in bluer ink a line of interposed glosses ran along above the Latin lines.

  ‘You are wondering what all the fuss is about,’ said Mary Fowey.

  ‘I don’t know a lot about manuscript,’ said Peter. ‘Incunabula are my field. Educate me, Miss Fowey.’

  ‘Well, The Consolations of Philosophy is in no way a rare volume,’ she said. ‘It was immensely popular in its time; a world bestseller in late antiquity. Dozens, probably hundreds of copies of it survive in libraries all over Europe. And it comes up for sale now and then. If you wanted a copy you could ask Quaritch to look out for it for you, or someone in Rome, and it could be had by and by. And this copy, as you see, lacks charm. But it is undoubtedly very old. I believe it has been dated to AD 600 or thereabouts.’

  ‘So what is the fuss about?’

  ‘The fuss is about the gloss. I’m not on firm ground here – we should ask Elaine Griffiths. But the copy is old enough . . .’

  ‘Old enough for what?’

  ‘To have belonged to King Alfred. So this could indeed, as some have been saying, have been the copy he used when he made his famous translation into Anglo-Saxon.’

  ‘So this might be a holy relic indeed,’ said Peter, gently laying the book down on the book-rest in front of him. ‘Boethius is a saint and martyr, and Alfred is the only king we call Great.’

  ‘Well, I don’t get reverent about relics,’ said Mary Fowey. ‘I’m an atheist and a scholar.’

  ‘You don’t get a shiver down the spine at the thought of who might have held this book?’ asked Peter.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Each to his own. Do you?’

  But Peter did not feel confessional confronted with this brisk, authoritative woman.

  He opened the book again, and using his monocle as a reading glass, and choosing a page at random, he inspected the gloss.

  Da com thear gan to me heofencund Yisdom . . .

  ‘I wish you luck making any sense of that,’ said Miss Fowey. ‘As I said, you need Elaine Griffiths.’

  She took her leave. Whereupon Peter’s new friend, young Jackson, emerged from behind a bookshelf.

  ‘I could help you a bit,’ he said.

  ‘Please do,’ said Peter.

  ‘This line says: when I had sung this mournful song, there came in to me Heavenly Wisdom and greeted my sorrowful mind . . . Well, it doesn’t say exactly that because it doesn’t bother with the obvious little words like “in” and “to”. You are reading the Latin line, and the gloss just helps you with words you might not know.’

  ‘It’s a sort of crib, you mean?’

  ‘Just so. This gloss is in West Saxon, which is the sort of English Alfred spoke. And it would have helped him – we know how he worked.’

  Peter raised a sceptical eyebrow at Jackson, and waited. The librarian, who had been standing quietly by, went and fetched a heavily calf-bound volume from the shelves, embossed with the imprint of the Early English Text Society. Jackson eagerly opened it. ‘Look,’ he said.

  Peter looked. Anglo-Saxon on the verso of each page, modern English on the recto. The text of the first page said:

  King Alfred was the translator of this book, and turned it from book Latin into English as is now done. Sometimes he set word by word, sometimes meaning by meaning as he plainly and most clearly could explain it, for the various and manifold worldly occupations which often busied him both in mind and body. The occupations are very difficult to be numbered which in his days came upon the kingdom which he had undertaken . . .

  ‘Poor chap,’ said Peter. He felt both awe-struck and ashamed of himself. What was a dukedom to manage compared to a kingdom invaded by the Danes?

  And now he prays everyone who lists to read this book that he would pray for him and not blame him if he more rightly understands it than he could . . .

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Jackson.

  ‘It’s very good,’ said Peter. ‘I shall go and pray for him right away.’

  St Severin’s had, of course, a chapel handy. It was Victorian Gothic, with stained glass designed by William Morris. A holy water stoop at the door. Just the sort of thing that made Peter uncomfortable. He was pleased to find the east window depicting Boethius instructing students, and willing to admire a Jacobean pulpit presumably surviving from an earlier chapel. There was an organ loft or a minstrels’ gallery across the back, above the door, with several carved angels, wings spread, purporting to be bearing the weight of it on their backs. Peter inspected them with interest. Much older than the chapel, he thought. Looking properly medieval, though recently repainted and with gaudily gilded wings. Peter liked inspecting church architecture, of any period. But praying? He was perfectly at home with church services, ready to read the lessons in the parish church at Denver, ready to be present at baptisms, marriages and funerals, but solitary prayer was something rather too High Church for him. Nevertheless . . .

  ‘I assume,’ he said to the space above the altar, about amidships to the Boethius window, ‘that your servant Alfred met with your eschatological approval. I certainly hope so. As for me, I must leave that with you.

  ‘And whether that is a prayer or not,’ he added to himself, ‘is also a question for whatever God may be.’

  He left the chapel and returned to his
rooms, deep in thought. He had not felt like confessing to the snappy Mary Fowey what he felt about relics, as she called them. But he remembered, for example, when on a Foreign Office errand to Prague he had stood in the Villa Bertramka. Someone had lifted the lid of Mozart’s piano, and invited him to play . . . to touch the very keys that Mozart touched . . . had that meant nothing? Or – another thing – Harriet’s wedding present to him, an autograph letter from John Donne on divine and human love: were that to be proved a fake would it make no difference? The question answered itself as soon as it was put, with a lurch in the guts . . .

  There was no doubt about it: Peter had placed himself as a worshipper of relics. But the day’s work had put a different light on matters in St Severin’s. He had realised – of course he had – that the tensions and cross-currents in the college were inflamed by some very strong feelings. He had assumed that when he got to the bottom of it he would find some bitter rivalry, some old grudge, most probably having nothing to do with the dispute itself; most probably driven by personal hatred. But perhaps the problem with the manuscript was not hatred, but love? A much more dangerous thing.

  Chapter 4

  The suggestion that had been made to Peter that he should seek out Mr Winterhorn, the Bursar, had obvious merits, and the day after his encounter with the contentious manuscript, he set about it; he invited Mr Winterhorn for a drink before lunch.

  When Winterhorn appeared he had the nervous look of an undergraduate arriving for an admission interview, and Peter took a minute or two to settle his guest with a glass in his hand, and to chat idly about the story of the glass bottles. Winterhorn opened up.