The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  Not having trained as a compositor, Harriet took a second or two to decipher it.

  And when Peter saw it he said, ‘Well, well. So the King over the Water re-enters the scene . . .’

  ‘But why?’ Harriet wondered aloud. She was sitting with Peter over a pre-dinner drink, and had just completed a long and detailed account of her London trip, describing to him as carefully as she could the conversation with John Taylor. She had also confessed her unease at not having played entirely fair with that gentleman.

  Peter said, ‘My dear Harriet, if we played all our cards face up on the table with every person we talked to in the course of an investigation, how could we get along, do you think?’

  ‘Of course you are right, Peter,’ Harriet said. ‘I suppose I’m just out of practice.’

  ‘Weigh your scruples in the balance against a further possible death,’ he said.

  ‘I did,’ she declared, ‘and I cajoled the information out of him. But I don’t have to feel good about it.’

  ‘No, you don’t have to do that,’ he said. ‘In fact getting a blunt conscience is one of the risks we run. Of course, what we do is always in a good cause; but thinking oneself necessarily in the right is a serious moral hazard. But you have, Harriet, advanced matters triumphantly by finding the author of the dreaded review. So don’t be too hard on yourself.’

  And Harriet repeated, ‘But why?’

  ‘Why what, exactly?’

  ‘Why should the Warden launch a savage attack on one of his own fellows?’

  ‘Let’s try to think why. I concede at once that it is a very odd thing for someone to have done.’

  ‘Did he want to get rid of Outlander?’ said Harriet. ‘I mean, by forcing his resignation, rather than by killing him.’

  ‘That supposition just re-poses the question why?’ said Peter. ‘We haven’t heard that Outlander was loathsome. We haven’t heard that he spilled the port or ate peas on the wrong side of his fork. And he had quite a phalanx of people who supported him, either for his work or his person.’

  ‘So he did. Well, suppose the Warden wanted to spike the guns of someone who was Outlander’s friend and supporter? How would that seem?’

  ‘Rather extreme,’ said Peter.

  ‘No, not necessarily. Because the review writer would not have expected to trigger suicide; just resignation. Or perhaps merely the non-renewal of Outlander’s junior fellowship.’

  ‘People aren’t usually thought responsible for the unforeseeable consequences of their actions,’ said Peter.

  ‘Why did the TLS let the Warden review a book about an Alfredian manuscript?’ said Harriet. ‘Did he have the expertise?’

  ‘I believe he is a historian. Or was a historian. And he was clearly a sort of titular owner of the manuscript,’ said Peter.

  ‘I think that’s what’s nagging at the back of my mind as odd; too odd to be true. How could it be that the Warden of this college wants to cast doubts on the authenticity of a college treasure?’ said Harriet.

  ‘You read my mind,’ said Peter. ‘I was just wondering that. Speculate, Harriet.’

  ‘I’m going to take into account the use of that casting vote, always to keep the MS,’ said Harriet. ‘And I wonder . . . Peter, if people here were already casting lustful eyes on the MS, or the value of it rather, to solve college problems, before these controversial votes began to be cast, is it just conceivable that someone could think that casting doubt on its authenticity would make it not worth selling? Would make the college keep it?’

  ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea,’ said Peter. ‘And we both of us concluded that that is what Vearing was doing when he came and told us that the MS was a fake. But in the event quite a lot of people in Oxford sprang to Outlander’s defence, and asserted the signal importance of the MS. So the result of the review was effectively to enhance, rather than diminish the importance of the thing. So was that what the Warden hoped to achieve?’

  ‘Either one thing, or its opposite, you mean?’ asked Harriet. ‘Does either possibility get us anywhere?’

  ‘Didn’t someone tell us that Vearing was close to the Warden?’ asked Peter. ‘Perhaps that gentleman could tell us which way round that reason should run. Worth a try, anyway.’

  ‘We need your help, Vearing,’ said Peter. They had decided to visit him in his room rather than summon him. Most people are more at ease on their own ground. Vearing, as befitted his position as a fellow of long standing in the college, had fine rooms with glorious mullioned windows overlooking the gardens. Over one of the windows an oar was hanging horizontal, with a painted inscription on the blade. His study was book-lined – that was natural – but the books were leather-bound sets of antiquarian appearance. If he read anything new, he kept those books in his bedroom. A tapestry hunting scene hung on the end wall; the chairs round the fireplace were deep and comfortable, and the table was Victorian with an elaborate inlay of garlands of roses, interrupted in their circuit of the rim by the books and papers laid out upon it. A gentlemanly aura of a country house had been imported into the college rooms. There was, thought Harriet, looking round, nothing in sight that was newer than that oar, dated 1918.

  Peter opened the discussion. ‘We have come to talk to you, Vearing, quietly, about the Warden.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is, if that’s what you mean,’ said Vearing at once. And then: ‘You’d better sit down.’

  They sat; Harriet a little further from the fireplace, leaving Peter and Vearing face to face across the hearthrug.

  ‘Are you worried about him?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I am, I am,’ said Vearing. ‘Of course.’

  ‘We were wondering what you could tell us about the Warden’s reaction to Outlander’s book,’ said Peter.

  ‘Not much,’ said Vearing. ‘He took a friendly interest of course. We all did.’

  ‘And then that review . . .’ said Peter.

  ‘An outrage,’ said Vearing. He had begun to look warily at Peter, with equally wary glances at Harriet.

  ‘We understand you are close to the Warden; one of his friends,’ said Peter.

  ‘I was, yes. I mean to say, I am,’ said Vearing.

  ‘But you don’t know where he is?’ said Peter.

  ‘No; he did not confide in me so far as to explain himself.’

  ‘But since you are his friend you might be able to guess where he would go – to a family member somewhere, or some favourite retreat at home or abroad?’

  ‘He and I went on a walking tour in the Dolomites once,’ said Vearing. ‘It was before the war.’

  ‘But you cannot guess where he might have gone now?’

  ‘If I knew I would have told the Vice-Warden. His absence is very inconvenient to us all. Very inconsiderate.’

  ‘What sort of a Warden is he when he is here?’ asked Peter. ‘What sort of a fist does he make of being captain of the college?’

  ‘He was very good when first elected,’ said Vearing. ‘Very active and shrewd. But that was a while ago; more than twenty-five years. He is an old man now; we ought to have a fixed age for the Warden to retire, but we don’t. Most colleges don’t. He hasn’t liked the dispute about the MS. Rather at sea about it all, I would say.’

  ‘Could he just have fled?’ asked Harriet.

  Vearing turned his gaze on her. ‘That might be right,’ he said. ‘That might be just what he has done.’

  ‘We can’t ask him,’ said Peter. ‘So we are asking you. Bear with us, Vearing. Do you know what he felt about the MS? Not in his public stance about it, but in his secret heart?’

  ‘Historians tend to like documents,’ said Vearing. ‘In that he was true to type, I would say. It’s not his period, of course; he was a sixteenth-century man.’

  ‘So you don’t think he would have talked down the MS, as you did the last time you spoke to us, transparently to devalue it and make it seem less desirable to sell it? That wouldn’t have been like him?’

  Vearing got up a
bruptly and began to stride about the room. ‘He didn’t want it sold,’ he said. ‘And he thought he was losing the battle against the Troutbeck faction to sell it. He was as sick of the whole thing as we all are. But I don’t think he would put a pretend opinion in circulation to get his way. He isn’t a dirty tricks sort of man. Is that any help?’

  Peter was silent.

  ‘Ah, I see what I have just said,’ said Vearing. ‘I myself tried just such a dirty trick on you. I am condemned out of my own mouth. It’s a great mistake, isn’t it, Your Grace, to love anything or anyone too much. I used to think the bachelor life of an unmarried don was a bleak and narrow one. But I think of it now as safety.’

  ‘I might offer many terms of description about life in St Severin’s,’ said Peter quietly. ‘But at the present time, the word safety would not be one of them.’

  ‘I feel perfectly safe here,’ said Vearing coldly.

  ‘I hope that you are, Vearing,’ said Peter, rising to go. Harriet rose too, and walked to the window.

  ‘You have a lovely view of that copper beech here, Mr Vearing,’ she said. The bay window she had walked to had a window-seat in it, with ornate cushions piled in it at each end. A book had been slid behind one of the cushions, just a corner showing. The book was no calf-bound antiquity; it had a yellow dust-cover. Of course any book could have a yellow cover; but the detective fiction published by Victor Gollanz was so well known for yellow jackets that the Italian for a detective writer like herself was actually ‘Giallista’.

  Chapter 14

  ‘Whoever he is, he is getting increasingly efficient, and increasingly violent,’ said Peter. ‘Whereas we, I’m afraid, are getting increasingly bogged down and ineffectual.’

  ‘Peter, what would stop this happening, if we cannot?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Strings of murders, do you mean? Sooner or later the murderer makes a mistake, or is caught red-handed. But the body count is already pretty dreadful. No mistake so far.’

  ‘I meant, what would resolve the conflict in the college, and make further homicide pointless?’

  The two of them were walking round the Parks in the dusk, before going to supper with Peter’s old friend George Mason.

  ‘The sale of the Boethius would conclude the matter. And so, perhaps, might the withdrawal of the offer to the college to buy the land,’ said Peter. ‘And if this goes any further there won’t be enough fellows left to constitute a college.’

  ‘Yes; there will be a group of tutors in traditional subjects and an inviolate library.’

  ‘Colleges teach, Harriet.’

  ‘And do research, Peter.’

  ‘Which ought to come first?’ he wondered aloud.

  ‘Both,’ said Harriet firmly. ‘One doesn’t work without the other. To learn from someone who is still alive above the neck, and still learning themselves, is like drinking from a fresh spring, someone said, but “he that learneth from one who learneth not drinketh the foul mantle of the green and standing pond.”’

  ‘What about All Souls?’ he asked her. ‘No undergraduates to be taught there. Does that stymie their research?’

  ‘All Souls is the odd one out,’ she said.

  ‘Consider how frightfully odd is,’ he began to quote to her, ‘The fate of the fellow whose goal’s . . .’

  ‘To prove that men are all bodies,’ she went on happily.

  ‘While inhabiting rooms at All Souls!’ they finished in unison.

  ‘We are incurably frivolous,’ she said, penitent. ‘We ought to be appalled and sombre at what we are discussing.’

  ‘We need the frivolity,’ he said. ‘Neither the sun, nor death, can be stared in the face.’

  They walked on to their evening with George, during the whole course of which they managed not to talk about St Severin’s, nor to quote to each other or to him. George was a gentleman who appreciated their need for a break. He was also very amusing talking about politics, meaning those of Westminster, not of Oxford. So many figures in public life had attended Balliol that there was endless gossip to be had at George’s table. The Minister for Housing, for example, one Harold Macmillan, had been a Balliol man. But at Eton, George told them, he had been so sickly he had not been thought to be going to amount to anything. Pneumonia nearly killed him, and he had been withdrawn from school to the care of private tutors before coming up to Oxford.

  ‘If we had a degree in building houses he’d be eminent enough,’ George said. ‘He’s the Right Honourable now, but do you know something? If his firm employs you, or publishes you, you have to address him, and refer to him, as “Mr Harold”.’

  ‘I rather like that idea,’ said Harriet.

  ‘George,’ said Peter, ‘you weren’t at school with Macmillan, were you?’

  ‘Didn’t overlap him, no, Peter. Neither of us did. He’s much younger than us. But his illness was in the gossip stream; and of course we get a lot of Etonians at Balliol. Why do you ask?’

  ‘A floating thread, that’s all,’ said Peter, and they began to talk about cricket.

  Harriet sat, sipping her port, and listening to this talk about and in Peter’s world. This was just what she had once so feared in prospect – the whole deal entailed in ‘marrying above herself’. She would have to admit now that it was often fun, and fascinating, and that she could justifiably pride herself on having made a good fist of it, and above all of having made Peter happy. She would not grudge him a short wallow in nostalgia with an old friend like George. And sure enough, by and by George remembered his manners and turned the talk towards her. He had just read After the Funeral, and he wanted Harriet’s views on Mrs Christie’s technique.

  Harriet obliged him. Mrs Christie was an admirable technician, in many ways, but not perhaps brilliant at conveying subtleties or depths of character. Her work was not likely to engage one’s sympathy, only the kind of keen curiosity that the element of mystery in a detective story evokes.

  ‘That’s just it!’ said George. ‘I simply hate getting engaged as you call it. I don’t like my emotions molested when I’m reading something. I like the challenge to brain-power.’

  ‘I think then you are likely to enjoy Agatha Christie more than something by me, George,’ said Harriet. ‘I rather hope so.’

  ‘Oh, but now I have met you, Harriet, of course I shall read you,’ said George.

  ‘That’s such an odd reason for wanting to read a book,’ said Harriet. ‘If you meet a brilliant doctor, George, do you wish to contract the disease they specialise in?’

  ‘Ah,’ said George. ‘Pax. I admit defeat. That’s quite a sparky girl you’ve got there, Peter.’

  ‘Thank you, George,’ said Harriet, smiling. ‘It’s quite a while since anyone called me a girl.’

  ‘Don’t mind old George,’ said Peter, as they walked home, arm-in-arm, past the vacant gaze of the Caesars on the rails of the Sheldonian.

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m not a shrinking violet, Peter.’

  ‘Quoting again,’ he said. ‘It’s getting extreme. Perhaps we should have a quoting box, like a swearing box, and owe it sixpence every time we utter someone else’s excellently phrased thought.’

  ‘Sounds ruinous to me,’ said Harriet. ‘What was that floating thread you mentioned to George?’

  ‘School legends,’ Peter said. ‘The way people know things about other people they weren’t at school with, if they were at the same school at some later time. Stories about ogre schoolmasters, tricks played on matron, naughtiness and bullying and illness . . . things that float down from generation to generation. Do you get it now?’

  ‘You are thinking about Oundle’s illness,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Exactly. And it would have been rather spectacular if he bled dramatically as a boy, in class, or on the playing field.’

  ‘Dramatic enough for Outlander to have heard about it years later. But Peter, Outlander was dead long before poor Oundle.’

  ‘Yes. But what Outlander knew, someone else
he talked to might have known. Think how casually we now know about Macmillan’s pneumonia.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a job to try to pick up now on gossip that Outlander might have indulged in, several years ago.’

  ‘It’s my old obsession, Harriet. It’s when you know how you know who. And it might help matters along a bit to know how something might have got known.’

  ‘But Outlander might have talked to anyone or everyone.’

  ‘I know. This rabbit won’t run forward; it won’t allow us to deduce who knew about Oundle. But it might run backward; when we have someone in the cross-wires it might explain how they knew.’

  ‘But Peter, the murderer didn’t have to know about Oundle. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps we are just determined to connect Oundle’s death with one of my stories, one of your cases. And what about Trevair?’

  ‘I grant you, Trevair doesn’t fit in either my corpus or yours,’ said Peter gloomily.

  ‘He voted to keep the MS; all the other victims have been sellers. And he died by a fatal fall. Neither of us ever encountered or used that.’

  ‘It’s all coincidence you think?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Trevair is very odd,’ said Harriet, pursuing her own train of thought. ‘It’s like an Agatha Christie murder – a crime could conceivably have been done like that, but you couldn’t plan to do it. Nobody could foresee your sudden need to play Bach, or your forgetting to lock up and return the key.’

  ‘I suppose murderers are as impulsive as any other sort of people,’ said Peter. ‘Maybe more so. But it’s time to think intensively about Trevair.’

  ‘I suppose he was Cornish, with that surname?’ asked Peter. He and Harriet were talking to Ambleside about Trevair, the following morning.

  ‘Yes, I think he was,’ said Ambleside. ‘He was a friend of A.L. Rowse, the famous historian, that I do know. But he might have met Rowse through the LSE, rather than through Cornish connections.’