‘The trouble is, he’s not used to that kind of work. You can see that. Poor he may be, but he’s obviously a gentleman.’
Joe Tench stood up, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
‘It’s ten past eight,’ he said, ‘time I was out in the fields. I’ll be in at twelve. And don’t worry about Mr Sanders. You know what they say: a creaking gate lasts longest. He’ll be all right. And he pays up regular.’
Mr Sanders cupped his chin in his hands and looked in the mirror on his dressing table. With an almost violent act of imagination he could see his younger self staring back at him. But the younger self didn’t have bloodshot eyes, or a feeble man’s tremors about the temples. God! He was a wreck. Wrecked and ruined.
But he would go ahead with what he had sworn to do. Jeremy Oakshott was a clever man, who would be able to tease out the meaning that would lie unspoken behind the words that he would utter when they met. For Jeremy had, rather to his surprise, responded to the brief note that he had sent him. Perhaps for old times’ sake?
He completed the trimming of his moustache, and dressed carefully in the dark blue town suit that he favoured. A tear on the left shoulder, that had revealed the lining, he had treated with black ink, so that the white didn’t show. His shoes, though down-at-heel, he had polished to a brilliant shine. He would not have to stay here at Mrs Tench’s much longer. He had £10 in half-sovereigns left. That should see him through to the end of his project.
It was time to subdue his recalcitrant hair. He picked up a jar of Hollerith’s Citronella Pomade, and unscrewed the cap.
The village of Hadleigh, where the Tenches lived, lay in a wooded valley near Forest Hill, some five miles out of Oxford. It was a working village, with a smithy, an oil shop, a number of workshops, and a livery stable. Most of the men were agricultural labourers, though a few, like Joe Tench, augmented their living from their own smallholdings. A public house, the Bull, lodged in two whitewashed cottages knocked into one, formed the social nucleus of the village.
The Tenches’ boarding house looked on to the main street, at the end of which, situated discreetly behind high thorn hedges, was a huddle of detached stone-built houses known as Hob’s Lane. One of these houses belonged to Hadleigh’s physician, Dr David McArthur. He and his wife were early risers, who liked to take breakfast on a little wooden veranda overlooking the back garden.
‘Those lilac bushes, Mary,’ said Dr McArthur, ‘are starting to exert themselves in a way I don’t like. I’ll root them up at the end of autumn, and plant something else.’
His wife, who was sitting opposite him at the cast-iron table, had finished her breakfast, and had turned her attention to the previous Friday’s edition of Jackson’s Journal, Oxford’s daily paper.
‘I agree about the lilacs,’ said Mary McArthur, ‘but everything else is very nice – those alliums, the foxglove (you could poison the whole village with those!) and the gypsophila – “baby’s breath”, they call it – which is charming in its way.’
Dr McArthur looked at his wife, and thought how lucky he had been to win her affection all those years ago in Edinburgh. He had entered the School of Medicine in 1869, and had been walking the wards at the old cramped and crowded Royal Infirmary, before it moved to the new building in Lauriston Place. Mary had been a nurse there.
‘It’s Monday today,’ said Dr McArthur. ‘So in two days’ time—’
‘It will be Wednesday.’
‘Precisely. And I’ve contrived to leave the whole day free for our visit to Oxford. I’ve always wanted to hear Mrs Herbert Lestrange ever since you came back from visiting your sister in London in June last year, and told me about her lecture at the Queen’s Hall. Did you meet her? Speak to her, I mean. I forget what you said she lectured on.’
‘No, I didn’t speak to her,’ said Mary McArthur, ‘but I was content merely to listen. I admire her for all that she has achieved since her husband’s tragic death. By the way, Jeremy Oakshott was there. At the Queen’s Hall, I mean. I gather that they’ve met more than once. I think he’s falling for the lady!’
‘Well, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Although he’s unmarried, he’s not really what I’d describe as an “old bachelor”. And of course they’re both experts on the Middle East, in their own particular fields.’
‘That’s what she lectured about, David. Her archaeological discoveries in Syria, among the old Crusader castles. She showed us some lantern slides that she had made of her work. She’s been out there again, and apparently she’s made some spectacular discoveries that will set academia in an uproar. That’s the rumour, anyway.’
Dr McArthur took a card from his pocket, and read what was written on it aloud.
The Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, Oxford,
cordially invite you to a lecture entitled
‘New Discoveries at Krak des Chevaliers’
to be given by
The Honourable Mrs Herbert Lestrange
In the college hall at 2.00 pm
On Wednesday, 5 September, 1894
RSVP
‘Hugo Harper, the Principal of Jesus,’ said Dr McArthur, ‘is a man of very wide interests, though mathematics is his forte. He’s in very poor health, and is not entirely loved by the Fellows, I’m afraid.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, Jesus is a Welsh college, and Harper wants to widen its remit, so to speak. But look! It’s nearly nine. I must open the surgery. There’s plenty for both of us to do before Wednesday.’
2
At Jerusalem Hall
Jeremy Oakshott stepped out of the prison cell, and stood in the stone passage while the warder slammed the iron door shut, and locked it with one of the keys hanging in a bunch from his belt. The passage echoed with the savage noise: this particular warder believed in reminding the wretched inmates of HM Prison Oxford that they were not locked up there for the good of their health. They were an affront to him, to the good citizens of Oxford, and to society in general.
‘You’ll do no good with John Smith, Dr Oakshott,’ said the warder. ‘He’s a bad ’un through and through. He’s due out on the fifth, and I don’t doubt that he’ll be back here again in a week or two.’
‘Well, Warder, you may be right. You are right. I don’t suppose he ever reads the tracts I bring him. But we have to try, you know. Being a prison visitor can be rewarding occasionally. I expect I’ll see you again towards the end of the month.’
The warder escorted his companion to the gate, and watched him as he walked away from the prison in the direction of Queen Street, which would take him back to Carfax and civilization. A nicely dressed gentleman, with thinning hair, and a slightly defeated way about him, but always pleasant and soft-spoken. How old was he? No more than forty-five, though he somehow contrived to look older. He’d sometimes ask the most peculiar questions. ‘What’s it all about, Warder?’ he’d say. Well, what was the answer to that?
Dr Oakshott was a good man – far too good to be wasting his time on riffraff like Smith. Robbery with violence was Smith’s speciality. He’d left behind him a string of terrified shopkeepers and householders, all to a lesser or greater extent bludgeoned and battered into permanent ill health. Twice he had got away with murder by threatening witnesses. One day he’d go too far, and find himself on the gallows.
Jeremy Oakshott turned into Leper’s Lane, a winding alley lying behind the great chapel of New College. Jerusalem Hall lay ahead of him, its crumbling ivy-covered gatehouse still supported by massive wooden buttresses erected after the collapse of its foundations in 1879. There was talk of rebuilding it, but nothing had come of it. Jerusalem Hall had been founded after the Second Crusade in 1153 by Sir Guy de Bolingbroke, in thanksgiving for the preservation of his life during the attack on Damascus.
Jerusalem Hall was a poor relative among the family of Oxford Colleges. The bijou hall and chapel were noted for their beauty, though later buildings, raised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were plain
and nondescript. There was a Rector, ten Fellows, and an undergraduate body of forty young men. The Fellows received no stipend, and were expected to support themselves. It was a fulfilling but beggarly existence for a man like Oakshott, a man of what his friends politely called ‘slender means’.
His companions in the senior common room openly sympathized with him over his poverty – all the dons knew each other too well for him to take offence – and one or two of them consoled him by bidding him remember that his enormously wealthy uncle, much advanced in years, and ailing, had no doubt left him all, and that one day he would be a very rich man.
Oakshott knew all about the Crusades, as he was a Reader in Mediaeval History, but that morning his mind was elsewhere. Could that man John Smith be redeemed from his life of violent crime long enough to be given employment of quite a different kind? Despite the warder’s views – based, admittedly, on long and bitter experience of recidivists – Oakshott thought that something could be done with John Smith.
Tonson, the porter, emerged from the small lodge to greet him, and the man’s cheerful ‘Good afternoon, sir!’ brought him out of his reverie. ‘There’s a letter for you, Dr Oakshott. It came just after you left for the gaol this morning.’
Oakshott took the letter, and crossed the quadrangle. It was small by Oxford College standards, no bigger than Mob Quad at Merton, and the great gothic windows of the hall and chapel seemed to have huddled together, as though jostling for position in the confined space.
Oakshott lived in a suite of rooms on the first landing of staircase V. The book-lined walls of his study enclosed him in their welcome embrace. On his desk, placed in front of a window which gave him a view of an ancient flint wall above which rose the north side of New College Chapel, lay the as yet unfinished manuscript of the second volume of his great work on the Crusades.
Dr Jeremy Oakshott sat down at his desk, and opened the letter that Tonson had handed him. It was from Michael Sanders, confirming that he would call upon Dr Oakshott as agreed, on Tuesday morning at ten o’clock. Oakshott thought, he doesn’t say what he wants. Money, certainly; but I’ve a feeling that there’ll be more than that.
Michael Sanders… . Oakshott’s mind took a regretful leave of the present, and visited a past world that he had long tried to forget. He was a boy again, enjoying a carefree childhood in Henning St Mary, where, as the son of the schoolmaster, he felt quite special and important. In his mind’s eye he could see Wellington Lodge, where Michael had lived with his parents, and across the upper ward of the Herefordshire village, facing Ford Lane, he saw Priory House, an imposing villa set in spacious walled gardens. Vivien had lived there.
How happy they had been! He and Michael, both sent to Uppingham School, a place of learning which they had both enjoyed, and where they had both acquitted themselves well; and Vivien, educated at home by governesses, always there in the vacations to delight them both with her beauty and vivacity. Was Critchley right? Did madness really run in families? Oh, what a blight had fallen on them all, and on their families!
With a conscious effort Oakshott jerked himself back to the present. He laid the letter aside, and dipped his pen into the ink well. Soon, his mind had expelled any thoughts that were not relevant to the treacherous activities of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I during the Second Crusade.
That night, Oakshott had a dream. He was sitting at one end of the long table in the dining chamber of Hazelmere Castle, his Uncle Ambrose’s preposterous sham-gothic mansion hidden in a wooded estate some miles from Oxford. Uncle Ambrose sat in his great oak throne at the other end of the table. His head, with its skin tightly drawn across the cheekbones and its sparse hair, seemed more skull-like than ever.
‘One day, Jeremy,’ said his uncle, waving a hand vaguely in the air, ‘all this will be yours.’
Even in the dream-world, a part of Jeremy Oakshott’s mind thought of the hundreds of thousands of pounds that Ambrose Littlemore’s father had amassed in the heady and dangerous days of the railway mania. It was wealth of that kind that had enabled him to build his fantastic dwelling, part castle, part cathedral, where every turn on every stair startled the visitor with a grotesque, writhing and often morbid corbel in the form of a tormented spirit in Hades. A friend of Oakshott’s, an architect, told him that the whole place was poorly and cheaply built on questionable foundations, as Uncle Ambrose’s father had been fond of a good bargain.
Then, hovering behind his uncle’s chair, Oakshott made out another figure, a tall, spare woman in her fifties, who laid a thin hand on his uncle’s shoulder. A ghost of a smile played about the woman’s lips.
This was a recurrent dream, but the woman – it was his Aunt Arabella – was not always present. Whenever she appeared Oakshott felt a sudden alarm, which often jolted him awake. But this night, a new figure emerged from the dormant part of his mind to take form and shape. The light from the many candles in the dining chamber dimmed, and an unseen door opened to admit a young woman in a white dress, a woman with long auburn hair falling loose over her shoulders.
‘Vivien!’
Jeremy Oakshott woke with a start, his heart pounding. Had he cried out? He felt for the box of vestas on his night table and lit the candle. No, all was quiet in the old college. He rose from bed, and pulled open the curtain. He looked up beyond the black bulk of New College chapel to the star-lit sky. Vivien did not belong to that dream. He asked himself why she had appeared, and immediately made a little exclamation of vexation. Why pretend? He knew very well why Vivien West had walked into his uncle’s phantom chamber that night. He also knew that the white dress that she wore was, in fact, a shroud.
‘It was good of you to invite me here, Oakshott,’ said Sanders. ‘I thought you’d be disgusted at my reminding you that we were at school together—’
‘They were happy days, Sanders, and you did well to recall them. The carefree sixties! Uppingham was a wonderful place in retrospect. With the passing of the years, one forgets the beatings!’
Sanders had arrived punctually at Jerusalem Hall, and the old clock above the gatehouse was striking ten as the genial Tonson brought him upstairs to the door of Oakshott’s rooms. He had ordered tea to be brought before his visitor arrived, otherwise he would have felt compelled to offer his guest something stronger, which would not have been wise.
‘This is a quaint old place,’ said Sanders, glancing round the ancient room. ‘But it’s a haven, isn’t it? I believe you live here, in the college, with service and all found? It’s very – very satisfying, isn’t it?’
Oakshott laughed.
‘Yes, old fellow, it’s very satisfying – all found, including coal and candles! But come, now, what can I do for you?’
How wretched Sanders looked! He had become one of the shabby-genteel, hovering perilously near the workhouse. He had employment of sorts, but first opium, and then drink, had made him a shadow of his earlier self. He had been such an attractive, outgoing boy at school.
Sanders did not meet his eye. He sipped his tea, and looked thoughtfully at the carpet. His hands were trembling, and a vein was pulsing at his temple.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about old times, Jeremy,’ said Sanders. ‘What times you and I had in our youthful days. I think of the jolly girls we knew, and particularly of … well, you’ll know who I mean. Such a tragedy. It ruined me, you know. They brought in a verdict of “murder by a person or persons unknown”, but a lot of people wondered… . Half a lifetime has passed since then, and with time, old hidden secrets rise to the surface. People begin to remember things, and tell others …’
‘Look here, Sanders,’ said Jeremy Oakshott, ‘I know you’re too proud to ask for help, so I’ll save us both embarrassment by assuring you that I am only too happy to assist you, if only for old times’ sake. Yesterday I sent you a cheque for £100 – no, please don’t thank me; you’re more than welcome. I expect you’ll find it waiting for you when you get back today. It’s made out to ‘Bearer’, so you’ll be a
ble to cash it over the counter at any bank. Meanwhile, here’s a five pound note to tide you over.’
Sanders got up from his chair, and took the note that Oakshott offered.
‘I’m so very much obliged to you, Oakshott,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I shall see more of you now that we’ve met again after all these years. There was so much, you know, that bound us both together. As you may recall, I approached you ten years ago, hoping to renew our friendship, but you were very distant, as I remember, and nothing came of it. Is your Uncle Ambrose any better? It’s so sad that wealth and health don’t often go hand in hand!’
Sanders rose, and walked towards the door. He paused on the threshold, and said, ‘Yes, they declared that it was a mystery, but you and I know the truth of the matter. I can’t put it into words, because it’s too frightful for anyone to hear. But I can imagine a time when I, for one, may feel obliged to speak out.’
When Sanders had gone, Oakshott sat for a while in thought. A hundred pounds had been about right; any lesser sum would have created the wrong impression. Poor, wretched man! The two of them were inextricably linked by events in the past, and it had been almost inevitable that one day he would have to take care of him. Ten years ago he had made it clear to Sanders that his applications for relief were not welcome. It was too late to maintain that approach now.
He rummaged among the many papers on his desk and found the invitation that Hugo Harper had sent him to attend Mrs Herbert Lestrange’s lecture at Jesus College. Nothing would be allowed to interfere with that. Perhaps, when the lecture was over, he would be able to have a word with her? His own knowledge of the Crusades was universally recognized as little short of phenomenal, but Celia Lestrange had actually been on those ancient fields of battle, and in the very fortresses which the Crusaders had manned. They had corresponded for some time. It would be a wonderful privilege to meet her again.
Jeremy Oakshott and his friend Jonathan Grigg, college lecturer in Chemistry, emerged from New College Lane, and made their way past the Sheldonian Theatre into Broad Street. Wednesday had proved to be one of those delightful days that looked backward to summer rather than forward to an uncertain autumn. It was warm, with a gusty breeze billowing their masters’ gowns behind them as they walked.
An Oxford Anomaly Page 2