The Late Scholar

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The Late Scholar Page 7

by Jill Paton Walsh


  ‘My predecessor,’ he said, ‘rather lost his way. He was very thrifty with small sums of money, Your Grace, but out of his depth with large ones. He could see trouble brewing, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He resigned his college fellowship six months ago, and I was elected to take over. Now I in turn am out of my depth, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why did you accept the post?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Well, somebody has to do it,’ said Winterhorn. ‘I’m the maths tutor, you see, and the fellows seemed to think that would make me competent with money. I can add up a rising deficit, all right; but as to what to do about it . . . I can think of economies, but every one I suggest is rejected with indignation. I will gladly show you the books; they will enable you to see why the land offer is so tempting.’

  ‘You are telling me you have responsibility without power,’ said Peter.

  ‘In the constitution of this college, yes, that’s about it.’

  ‘You could do with some professional advice, I think.’

  ‘Alas; too expensive,’ said Winterhorn.

  ‘Ah,’ said Peter. ‘Are you too, perhaps, very sensitive to small sums and at sea with great ones?’

  ‘I will be grateful for your advice, Your Grace,’ said Winterhorn. ‘When would you like to inspect the books?’

  Peter spent a dismal afternoon with Winterhorn, trying to unravel the story which the accounts revealed. There was nothing wrong with the book-keeping; and the revelation in chief contained in the account books, which should have come as no surprise to Peter, was the huge expense entailed in running a college. It was the investments that appalled him; on that front something useful could be done less controversial than selling the port, sacking half the fellowship, or allowing the beautiful gardens to return to scrubland.

  When he left Winterhorn, Peter returned to base, and settled into an armchair, his gown ready draped over the back of the chair, all set to brave the dragons by going in to Hall dinner, when he heard voices outside the door. Bunter’s was one of them, uttering the magical words ‘Your Grace,’. Although Peter still detested hearing himself so called by Bunter, after long years during which ‘my lord’ had been his appellation contrôlée, since Bunter was not now addressing him, the words could only mean that Harriet had arrived. He jumped up to greet her.

  She entered the room saying, ‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?’

  He opened his arms to her, and said, ‘Come and be my beamish girl.’

  Harriet came. They did not hasten their embrace. But by and by she said, ‘No callooing and callaying is allowed, Peter, if the Jabberwock is still at large.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you till tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Well, the doctor came a day early to see your mother, and the Le Fanu speech was a lunchtime one,’ she said. ‘And when it was done I thought I’d come up to Oxford right away. You seem to need a bit of help.’

  ‘So it wasn’t that you were missing me?’ he asked wistfully.

  ‘Of course not!’ she said, laughing, ‘but Oxford is a temptation.’

  ‘Oh, bother Oxford!’ he said. ‘And look, my dear, I am about to go and dine at High Table. Did you think to bring your gown?’

  Bunter coughed discreetly at the door. ‘I have found a gown, Your Grace,’ he said to Harriet. ‘There was one behind the door of the study in the main part of the house.’

  ‘The property of the vanished Warden, no doubt,’ said Peter. ‘It will do. Can you face the old lions roaring in their den right away and without warning, Harriet?’

  ‘I should think so,’ she said calmly. ‘Can we sit together?’

  ‘You are likely to be the only woman guest,’ he said, ‘and therefore yours is the place of honour at the right hand of the most senior fellow present. Don’t know if that puts us together. It might. But if we’re not together we will between us have a larger sample of the fellows dining tonight. Come – the Senior Common Room first.’

  There was a lively buzz of voices in the Senior Common Room, which hushed for a moment as Peter and Harriet entered.

  For a moment they stood isolated in the crowded room, as though everyone thought they might have flu. Then the intrinsic good manners of the company towards outsiders, if not towards each other, supervened, and Ambleside approached them and was introduced to Harriet.

  Peter was soon talking to Mr Vearing; a not wholly fascinating discussion of the various ways to travel between Oxford and Cambridge, with complaints about the time taken waiting at Bletchley to make the necessary change. ‘And what, after all, is Bletchley?’ Vearing was asking plaintively, when the butler announced dinner was served.

  They began to file down the stairs, through the archway below Peter’s quarters, and along one side of the quad towards the door of the Hall. In front of them the Hall windows glowed softly with the muted light of candles. Ambleside led the way, and the Wimseys followed him. As Peter had predicted, Harriet was directed to sit on Ambleside’s right, at the head of the table. People filed in and took up their places. The buzz of voices from the undergraduates sitting at the long tables in the body of the hall hushed, and a frozen-faced college butler handed Peter a wooden board with the college grace printed on it.

  ‘You are, of course, the senior person present,’ said Ambleside, ‘but you may delegate that task to me if you wish.’

  Peter looked sternly at Ambleside and began to read the grace steadily and clearly.

  No Benedictus benedicat for St Severin’s – their college grace was long and Ciceronian.

  Then, with a clatter of chairs being drawn up to tables, everyone sat down.

  The table at which they sat, with a long line of silver candlesticks down the centre, was just too wide to permit conversation across the board, unless the speaker raised his voice, especially with the hubbub of voices from the tables below, where the students were sitting. They sat at narrower tables, but were uninhibited about raising their voices. Mr Vearing, opposite Peter and beside Harriet, was talking to her eagerly, but Peter could not hear what was being said. His attention was commanded by Mr Oundle, on his left side, who was trying to engage him in conversation about the latest films. Peter had not seen Les Belles de Nuit, he had to confess, nor yet Limelight. Mr Oundle gave him up for lost, and began to talk politics. He was a true blue conservative, and very unsure about Anthony Eden. This dislike arose not from anything the Deputy Prime Minister had actually done, but from the fact that he, Oundle, had been consulted by Eden’s speech writers, and had seen drafts of the speeches which deviated from the King’s English.

  ‘It’s the Queen’s English now,’ observed Peter mildly.

  ‘Is there a difference?’ asked Oundle rhetorically. ‘I fervently hope not.’

  ‘There will be in time,’ said Peter.

  ‘That will be deplorable,’ replied Oundle. ‘I shall not myself deviate by a syllable from correct usage.’

  ‘My language is foul, and yours is Fowler?’ said Peter, and added with one of his sudden quirky smiles, ‘or know your Onions.’

  This quip crossed the barrier of the table, because the man sitting nearly opposite Peter laughed.

  ‘Onions?’ said Oundle.

  ‘C.T. Onions, I imagine,’ said the man opposite. ‘Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Oundle. ‘Very droll.’

  Peter was looking around the table. He observed that Harriet, though perfectly calm, was trying to talk more to Ambleside and less to Vearing. Vearing was ignoring the man on his right, and bending all his attention on Harriet. The ruby in her engagement ring caught the candlelight as she reached for her wine glass, and flashed briefly at him. She caught his eye, and returned his gaze, looking steadily at him as though she had been a queen and he a courtier. Well, he was her courtier, married to her or not. He became impatient with the company, and only courtesy prevented him from looking at his watch.

  The man on his left introduced himself and said, ‘So you have visited o
ur manuscript, Denver? What do you think?’ Peter thought it best if he didn’t answer that.

  ‘It is perhaps more interesting than beautiful,’ he replied diplomatically.

  ‘Would you sell it if it was yours?’ he was asked.

  Alas for the King’s English, Peter thought. ‘How can I answer that?’ he replied. ‘My circumstances are not those of this college.’

  ‘You’d have enough money to keep it on a whim, I suppose,’ said the other. ‘But be honest, if the roof was falling off your ducal palace you’d sell a thing like that to keep the place watertight – you know you would.’

  But Peter was spared the need to answer that; at that moment the Vice-Warden rose from his seat. Everyone stood, and a shorter Latin grace was presented to the most junior fellow present, who read it rapidly in a monotone. The company filed out, and the Vice-Warden, with Harriet at his side, led the way to the Senior Common Room. Here port and claret, fruit and cheese awaited them on another candlelit table, and there was no formal order of precedence.

  Peter joined Harriet and Ambleside.

  ‘I hope this fellow has not been dismissive about your chosen art form, Harriet,’ he said.

  ‘Who, me?’ said Ambleside, in a tone of injured innocence.

  ‘You told me within these last twenty-four hours that in detective fiction anything goes,’ Peter reminded him.

  ‘Well,’ said Ambleside carefully, ‘I take it that the Duchess would not claim that the same standards of rigour are required of her as are required of the writer of an academic thesis. Nobody imposes that.’

  ‘Nobody but myself,’ said Harriet. ‘I impose the highest standards of rigour that I am capable of.’

  Now suddenly everyone within earshot was listening. ‘But after all it doesn’t actually matter if you make a mistake in a detective story,’ said Trevair. ‘There are no consequences.’

  ‘There you are wrong,’ said Harriet. ‘The smallest slip-up, the smallest mistake, brings armfuls of letters from indignant readers expostulating with you, and every one needing an answer. And of course it is humiliating to be found out having made a mistake. It is after all a profession to be a writer, and one should aim at professionalism.’

  ‘Yours is an avocation; but surely not a profession,’ said Trevair.

  ‘It is the means by which I earn a living,’ said Harriet.

  ‘But duchesses don’t need to earn a living,’ said Troutbeck.

  ‘But I have not always been a duchess,’ said Harriet smoothly.

  ‘Oh, indeed not!’ said Vearing. ‘You certainly did not need high rank to bring you to public attention.’

  Peter fixed his monocle in his eye and bent on Vearing such an icy and disapproving stare that that gentleman fell silent, and uttered not another word while the port was in circulation. When the company rose from the table, Peter said, ‘I’m going to mill about, Harriet. But signal if you need further protection.’

  ‘I shall mill myself,’ she said. ‘Who teaches law here?’

  But Harriet, as soon as Peter left her side, was approached by two fellows, one young and one older, eager to discuss her books with her. She sat down at the table with one of them on each side, and allowed herself to bask in their attention.

  ‘At least you can get your work published,’ said the man on her left. ‘I’m Gervase, by the way. I have spent ten years on a work of literary history, and OUP won’t have it.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Harriet. ‘What does the rejection letter say?’

  ‘It is too technical. Minority interest. That sort of thing.’

  ‘What is the subject?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘The relations of the Vespasian Psalter Gloss and the Ancrene Riwle,’ he said.

  ‘I must admit that does sound a bit technical,’ said Harriet. ‘Have you tried other publishers? What about Cambridge University Press?’

  ‘They said it was too popular,’ said Gervase gloomily. ‘I thought of taking to crime; you know – knock off a detective story when I have the time.’

  Harriet asked him to pass the cheese, and turned to her other companion. He too wanted to talk about unpublished work. The problem, he thought, was that work was sent to others who worked in the field in question. They all had a motive to put down aspiring rivals.

  ‘At least I don’t suppose you get the kind of review that drives you to suicide,’ Gervase said.

  ‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘Suicidal impulses usually last only five minutes, and are dispersed by crumpling the offending newspaper page and binning it.’

  ‘Ask around a bit,’ Gervase said. ‘Ask about The Review.’

  But around them the company was beginning to disperse. Peter came to the back of her chair, and asked if she was ready to leave, and she gladly got up and went with him.

  ‘Let’s get some air,’ he said when they stepped out into the quadrangle. It was a clear, moonlit night. Arm-in-arm, they walked out into Parks Road, and turned right. Up past Keble College, towards the University Parks.

  ‘So what did you make of all that?’ Peter asked.

  ‘I suppose they are no odder than any other senior common room,’ said Harriet. ‘But did you notice the oil and water effect?’

  ‘One lot not mixing with the other lot? It was sharp of you to notice that on your first encounter with any of them. What’s the magic trick?’

  ‘Only that I saw people suddenly turning away from someone; suddenly taking an interest in the port . . . suddenly changing the subject as the milling around brought different people close to each other. But Peter, that’s natural, isn’t it? If people are seriously at odds with one another but must still socialise all the time, how else can they keep the peace? Doesn’t any cocktail party contain people trying to avoid each other?’

  ‘And people trying to make sure their catty remarks hit home,’ said Peter. ‘Yes. You are right.’

  ‘I did think that Vearing man was a bit odd,’ said Harriet. ‘Really rather creepy. He kept telling me he thought he and I must have a lot in common, with a kind of meaningful emphasis. Looked forward to knowing me better . . . That nice John Ambleside kept trying to rescue me, but the table seating made it hard. Eventually I told Vearing that I had nothing in common with him that I knew of.’

  Once in the Parks they made for the river and the little footbridge over it. As they passed along the riverside path they heard from under a willow tree the sound of soft laughter, and languorous murmurings coming from a moored-up punt. They laughed softly themselves.

  ‘Come here, Harriet,’ said Peter. ‘Why should the young have all the fun?’

  In a while she released herself and said, ‘Still continue as thou art, Ancient person of my heart . . .’

  ‘Hell, Harriet,’ said Peter indignantly, ‘I need no such assistance as the ancient person in that ditty required! As I shall demonstrate this very moonlit night.’

  They walked on as far as the footbridge, and leaned over the rail watching the multiplied moon dancing in the rocking surface of the river.

  ‘I like you in a gown,’ said Peter, ‘as well as I like you in anything you wear.’

  ‘I have a slight unease about wearing one, just the same,’ said Harriet, as their return path offered them a prospect of Keble, its Fair Isle jersey of patterned brickwork softened to near invisibility, and its fine proportions clearer than in daylight.

  ‘Why so, Domina?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s an MA gown, and I only took one degree,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘I was afraid you might be spooked, even after all this time, by poisonous messages stuffed into the sleeve.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ said Harriet, almost unconsciously reaching into the long tapering pocket in which the sleeve of an MA gown ends.

  Even by moonlight Peter saw her expression change. She brought out into the air a slip of paper. He saw with relief that it wasn’t covered with cut-out and pasted letters.

  ‘What does it say?’ he ask
ed.

  ‘It’s very small spidery writing,’ she said. ‘I can’t read it in this light.’

  ‘Let’s guess,’ he said, taking her arm again as they walked on. ‘I know – it’s a laundry list!’

  ‘It’s a reference to a review,’ said Harriet. ‘Someone was making dark remarks about a review at dinner.’

  ‘That’s too tame,’ said Peter. ‘I think it’s the Black Spot.’

  ‘Peter, the Black Spot administered to the vanished Warden might not be funny at all.’

  ‘You are quite right, Harriet. I apologise. It’s the piffle habit again.’

  They walked on, fairly rapidly now, to the Parks gates, and the streetlamps on Parks Road. By the light of the first streetlamp they read the note easily. It said: Consider your position.

  Chapter 5

  The following morning found Peter and Harriet sitting at breakfast, with Bunter in attendance.

  ‘Bunter, please sit down with us,’ said Harriet. ‘This is a professional discussion, and you are part of the team.’

  Bunter pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘Officially, I suppose, Peter,’ said Harriet, ‘you could just rule on the matter of the manuscript, and go home. The duties of the Visitor do not include murder investigation.’

  Peter looked at her like a little boy denied an expected treat.

  She laughed. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Of course . . . Can’t have murderers at large. So what have we got?’

  Peter outlined to her the death of Enistead, and the two odd incidents. ‘It won’t have escaped you, Harriet, that if Enistead’s fall was not accidental, and if the two strange incidents were attempted murders, then the murder methods . . .’

  ‘Are from cases of yours . . .’ she said.

  ‘Which you have used in detective stories,’ he finished.

  ‘Well, after all, Peter,’ she said defensively, ‘the very first time you proposed to me you offered as an inducement your ability to provide plots for me.’

  ‘So I did,’ he said. ‘Let’s draw a veil over that occasion, however.’

 

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