The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘When I had been running things around there for a while he asked me to marry him. “You see me easy out of this world,” he said, “and I’ll see you all right after I’m gone.” ’

  ‘You didn’t mind that?’ asked Peter gently.

  ‘He didn’t want to lay hands on me,’ she said. ‘He just wanted someone for company, and someone to leave things to, since he hadn’t got family of his own. I don’t mind being kind to someone who is kind to me. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I asked David, of course, and he thought it was okay. A bit unusual, he said, but then unusual suited me. And then it turned out that Andrew and David got on terribly well. Andrew was interested in things that interested David. Seems he had been picking up bits and pieces from the furrows when he was ploughing, and David thought there must be a Roman villa somewhere on the land, and maybe an Anglo-Saxon village too. They had a fine old time telling each other things, and going down to the local for a drink. We all had quite a good time together for a few months. Michael Troutbeck came calling nearly every week, and Andrew said, “It isn’t me he comes to see, it’s you, my dear,” and I didn’t know the truth of that till later.

  ‘And then David died, and the bottom fell out of everything.’

  ‘David – you mean David Outlander?’ Peter asked. ‘Emily, was he your lover?’

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What? What in God’s name makes you think that?’

  ‘You carry his picture round with you, even escaping from a locked house.’

  ‘I did love him more than anyone in the world,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘He was my brother.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Peter, ‘we didn’t know that.’

  He waited for her to recover a bit, but she paused only a little before going on.

  ‘It knocked the stuffing out of Andrew. I wasn’t surprised at what it did to me; David and I had always been close. But I hadn’t realised how Andrew would feel. But then, you see, it was Andrew who found him. David used the beam above the trapdoor in the hayloft to do it. Everything went horrible for us. Andrew could hardly get out of bed most days. All we knew was it had something to do with a book in the college library that David had written about. Andrew knew that; David hadn’t told me. I’d have told him what I thought about getting miserable about a book, any book.

  ‘We were having a very hard time. Michael Troutbeck came very often, just to cheer us up, he said. I believed him, I didn’t know any different. He and Andrew talked a lot. Then Andrew cut his finger on a bit of barbed wire out in the field somewhere, and it went septic, and he got a very high temperature, and the doctor tried something called M and B, but it didn’t work. I think Andrew didn’t want it to work. He said to me, “Everything’s yours now, Em. If you don’t want it all yourself, you do something with it David would have liked.” ’

  She paused.

  ‘Give yourself a break now,’ Peter said. ‘This is all very painful for you.’

  ‘I want to tell you, though,’ she said. ‘It’s good to tell somebody.’

  ‘Have a cup of tea and a turn round the garden, and then we’ll go on,’ said Harriet.

  Peter joined neither the cup of tea, nor the turn round the garden. He watched from the window as the three women in the house wandered across the lawn, and toured the borders, bursting with the glories of early summer. His gaze lingered on the graceful form of the unfortunate Mrs Cutwater. But surely some cavalier would come riding to her rescue. He wished whatever cavalier appeared good luck.

  In half an hour Emily was back again. She seemed calmer. ‘After the funeral, Michael Troutbeck came more often than before. He told me he loved me. He talked to me a lot about how we should marry and go abroad. I felt as if I hadn’t a layer of skin left on my body, and it was nice to think somebody cared about me. You’ll think me a fool. I think I was a fool, but I let him put a ring on my finger, and keep on talking. He told me all this stuff about the college getting into arguments, wanting to sell the book that David had thought so highly of, and I thought David would have hated the thing to be sold to America – not that I have anything against Americans, but it’s so far away. So I said to Michael Troutbeck there was something he could help me with: he could give the farmland to the college so they wouldn’t have to sell the book. The land would be worth a fair bit, and that would be doing what Andrew asked me to do.

  ‘He said he would see to it, but then he got rather strange. He didn’t want me to talk to anyone about it, and he got terribly angry when he found out I had written about it to a friend in Scotland. He got some servants in: a cook and a gardener, he said to give me a break from housework in a big house all by myself, and I thought that was kind of him, but then they kept watching me. They offered to take my letters to the post, and they began to lock the door. After you came to the house the door was locked on me all the time, and they did something to the phone, so it made funny noises and kept cutting out. For a while I thought he was just looking after me, but then I began to wonder why I wasn’t to talk to anybody.

  ‘I said to him I would have thought somebody in the college might have liked to say thank you for a present of all that land, and he went storming round the room shouting at me, telling me I would spoil everything for us if I tried talking about what I didn’t understand. He said he would kill to keep the plans on course. I think he was just letting off steam, but for a moment I believed him.’

  ‘How frightening for you,’ said Harriet.

  ‘It got worse,’ said Emily. ‘I wandered into the kitchen looking for a drink one evening when the cook had a day off, and there was a copy of the Oxford Mail on the table, so I sat down to read it. And it gave me a horrible shock. It said the college was thinking about selling their Alfred book to afford to buy some land. It was the whole thing turned on its head; I didn’t want them to buy the land, I wanted to give it to them, so that they could keep the book. So somehow it was the exact opposite of what I meant to do.’

  ‘What did you feel about that?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I felt betrayed. I didn’t want him touching me any more, I wanted to get away from him. He kept saying he was doing what Andrew wanted, looking after me, and giving away my property was a silly little girl thing to do, and he was only after protecting me and acting in my best interests. And then he said we were going to need the money.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’ Peter asked.

  ‘I asked him what for. And he told me that all that lovely talk about going abroad and seeing the world, and showing me the south of France, and Italy . . . it was going to be very costly. So I said, let’s stay in England then. And he said he couldn’t do that, he needed to be out of harm’s way.

  ‘So I said I wasn’t in harm’s way in England if he would just leave me alone. And he said I had a choice. I could sign the deed to sell the land, and go abroad with him and have a nice time, or he could have me sectioned and put in a mental home. He said he could easily do that; he had friends who would do it to me on a nod and a wink. And he said if I started telling anyone about the quarrel about the land it would make it easy to convince people I was mad. And he said once I was called mad he could take over Andrew’s estate and do what he liked with it. And he said anyway there was madness in my family – hadn’t my brother committed suicide? So then I remembered your card, stuck behind that plate, and I tried and tried to telephone you.’

  Peter had become very flushed during this account. Harriet, almost shaking with rage herself, recognised this as anger.

  At this point suddenly Freddy appeared. ‘I might have known you would be here,’ he said cheerfully to Peter. ‘Where there’s trouble . . . There is a gentleman, unknown to me, and a police officer having a ferocious argument at my front door. I just slipped round and let myself in at the back. Drinks, anyone?’

  ‘Please, don’t let him talk to me,’ said Emily Cutwater.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Peter. ‘He
will never talk to you again. He is about to be arrested for murder.’

  Chapter 22

  Peter and Harriet spent the night in the second-best spare room in Freddy’s ample house. ‘That’s just about the nastiest thing I have ever heard,’ said Peter, ‘and I have heard plenty of nasty things in my time.’

  ‘Poor, poor woman,’ said Harriet. ‘She has been in hell.’

  ‘Let’s call it purgatory,’ said Peter, ‘since we will get her out of it.’

  ‘I have been wondering what she could possibly do,’ said Harriet. ‘That farmhouse will be full of bad memories.’

  ‘I didn’t want to suggest this while Troutbeck was still at large,’ said Peter, ‘because he would have come looking for her. But shall we take her home to Denver for a while? Would you mind?’

  ‘Not at all. Good idea.’

  ‘I had a sort of idea you didn’t take to her.’

  ‘I didn’t, at first. She seemed hostile and defensive. But I didn’t then know what was happening to her.’

  ‘You don’t suspect my motives?’

  ‘I have reason not to,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, moon of my desire, that has no wane . . .’ said Peter.

  ‘Stop quoting, Peter, and come to bed,’ she said.

  As they drove through Oxford on their way back to St Severin’s they found the streets thronged with people in gowns. A light wind blew the black grosgrain out behind them, tugging at their shoulders like wings. The white rabbit fur of BA gowns weighed some of them down; they grabbed at their mortar-boards or trenchers to stop them flying off. They were pouring out of the Examination Schools, and thronging the High. A procession of laughing young men and women, so very oddly clad, were making for Christ Church Meadow, accompanied by friends with champagne bottles and picnic baskets.

  ‘Exams over,’ said Harriet. ‘School’s out.’

  ‘Alas, regardless of their doom the little victims play,’ said Peter.

  ‘Not all of them are regardless,’ Harriet said. ‘Jackson wasn’t.’

  ‘He’s doubtless somewhere in the throng,’ said Peter. ‘The best of luck to him.’

  Somehow the quadrangles of St Severin’s College on a sunlit morning, with the shadow of death no longer hanging in the air, struck them again as beautiful. Proportionate and calm.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Peter, ‘let’s roll up our sleeves and have at this Augean Stable.’

  A meeting of the fellowship. Everyone present except three – no Vearing, no Troutbeck, no Warden. Ambleside presiding. Peter explaining. Carefully, step by step, he took them through events, and his investigation. There were shocks; not everyone had known the full tally of assaults, and at the news that the Warden had written that destructive review himself there were raised and agitated voices, and expressions of disbelief.

  ‘This is terrible, terrible,’ said Mr Cloudie. ‘Three murders; one fellow sectioned, one to hang. How will we ever recover?’

  ‘Colleges have long lives,’ said Peter. ‘This will be lived down. But at the present moment you have work to do. You have lost three fellows, and have appointments to make. I advise you to emend your statutes, so that a matter once settled by vote cannot be raised again for – shall we say five years? – and you should heal the breach that has opened up between you. A good place to start would be to acknowledge that people taking the other view from your own are not necessarily less devoted to the college than you are. It is true that there has been real malignity at work here, but that canker is now removed. I think also that in financial matters the days when the Bursar can manage the money as well as the domestic affairs of the college are now over. You should seek, and pay for, proper financial advice. I can recommend somebody to you. And I suggest that you restore to your statutes the clause forbidding the sale of college property above the value of fifty thousand pounds, or some such sum, without unanimity or the approval of the Visitor.’

  ‘But have I understood you?’ said Gervase. ‘In the end you are telling us we can have both the book and the land?’

  ‘It would seem so,’ said Peter, ‘if Outlander’s sister can forgive you for the Warden’s conduct.’

  ‘We must make emends,’ said Ambleside. ‘We must bring Outlander home. I don’t mean exhumation,’ he added hastily, ‘I mean a decent memorial.’

  ‘I think I have done what I can for you now,’ said Peter. ‘I am leaving you to your own devices. You may summon me to install the new Warden when you have elected him.’

  Ambleside proposed a vote of thanks to the Visitor. Peter extracted himself from the babble of excited voices, and rejoined Harriet.

  ‘Your mother will be glad to see us,’ said Harriet. ‘And she will like Emily Outlander, I’m sure.’

  It took a few days, however, to extract themselves from Oxford. Emily had things to sort out before leaving the farmhouse. She dismissed Troutbeck’s choice of servants, and found a neighbour willing to keep an eye on the house.

  Harriet dined in Shrewsbury College. The golden light of a late summer evening was still shining through the windows as they rose from the table.

  ‘Can you play bowls?’ asked Dr Baring of Harriet.

  ‘I’m like the man who was asked if he could play the violin,’ said Harriet. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried.’

  The company strolled out towards the bowling green, which had not been there in Harriet’s time; she rather thought that corner of the garden had been devoted to compost heaps and tool sheds. Helen de Vine eagerly instructed her; how to hold the bowl, and roll it towards the jack, or if evilly minded towards an opponent’s bowl to knock it from an advantageous position. To her own amazement, Harriet proved adept at this, and won the first round.

  ‘Give her a violin, someone,’ said Dr Baring.

  To gusts of laughter they left the game and went indoors.

  The next day Harriet delivered her promised talk on detective fiction and literature.

  There had been no such distinction, she pointed out, when Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone, or when Dickens wrote Edwin Drood.

  A girl in the audience asked what was the oldest detective story she knew.

  ‘It’s in the Book of Daniel,’ Harriet told her, ‘the story of Susannah and the elders. Do you remember? Susannah is accused of adultery by two lustful elders whom she has refused her favours. And Daniel separates the two accusers, and asks each of them to say under which tree they saw her lying with a young man. And one of them says under a mastic tree, and the other says under an oak tree. Case dismissed. That’s a good detective plot. Now, can anyone think of an earlier detective than Daniel?’

  Her talk was received with gratifying applause.

  Peter owed George Mason both dinner and an account of things; on the evening when Harriet was delivering her talk he dined in Balliol, and did his duty by George.

  Not till old friends had been satisfied did the Wimseys feel free to go.

  One morning early, when Peter was walking up from Magdalen Bridge, having taken a punt for an hour to reassure himself that falling in was an aberration he could put behind him, he met Jackson coming down the High. Jackson was looking extremely unhappy.

  ‘Oh, Your Grace,’ he said to Peter, ‘you wouldn’t do something for me, would you?’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Peter.

  ‘They will be pinning up the lists of exam results this minute outside the Examination Schools,’ said Jackson. ‘And everybody will be there – and I can’t bear to go and look.’

  ‘And if you haven’t got a first you want to skulk away and bury your head in shame?’ said Peter. ‘Skulk right there, and I’ll go down and look for you.’

  He turned back towards the bridge. The great curving street opened itself to view, with that crucially placed tree at the curve beside Queen’s College; green leaf breaking the vista of grey stone. Peter trotted down to the Examination Schools. The crowd of youngsters reading their fate in the lists got in each others’ and Peter’s way. Groans and cheers
filled the air. A girl was in prime position at the top of the steps, reading out names and classes to people.

  ‘Jackson, from St Severin’s?’ Peter called to her.

  ‘He’s got a first,’ she said, and Peter went back up the High with a light heart to relieve Jackson’s anxiety.

  ‘Moreover,’ he said, when he had given the news, ‘the Boethius will still be in St Severin’s library next year; I can promise you.’

  Emily Cutwater didn’t stay long at Denver; old friends turned up, anxious to reconnect with her now Troutbeck was out of the way. She put the farmhouse up for sale and bought herself a pleasant house in Witney. When she left them, Peter and Harriet took the promised trip to Venice.

  ‘When you actually get to a great and famous tourist sight, you always see why it’s great and famous,’ Harriet said.

  They were riding back from Torcello in a gondola. ‘Does it actually remind you of Oxford?’ she added.

  ‘I’d say I’m very glad we don’t have to choose,’ he said.

  ‘You mean, we can come here again?’

  ‘Any time you can stand the train ride,’ he said. ‘But this is the occasion on which I want to buy you some Murano glass. Would you like some of those gold-flecked beads to wear?’

  ‘Thank you, Peter,’ said Harriet, ‘the golden glass is lovely. But I don’t want to wear it. I’d rather have those ornate golden candlesticks.’

  ‘Yours for the asking,’ he said.

  They were very fragile, and had to be packed in large crates full of wood shavings and crumpled paper. But they arrived safely at Denver. Harriet put them on a mantelpiece, where they were doubled in a large mirror, and between them she put the only survivor of the set of ivory chessmen that Peter had bought her in Oxford once, long ago.