The Hidden Man

by Robin Blake

  On the fourteenth of August, Preston’s Burgesses had ‘report that the forces of Parliament are at Clitheroe, and mean next to bear down as fast as may be possible on Preston, and that the Duke’s scattered force will scarcely have time to prepare’. Terrified, they resolved to ‘entrust unto three faithful friends, and former Mayors of the Corporation, the bulk of the town’s exchequer, to be divided between them, that they remove each privily for the duration of the present emergency to a safe place, whereof no man save them will know the whereabouts.’

  This memorandum confirmed the triple division of the treasure Methuselah had told of. I looked where the names of the three hand-picked trustees were given: Jonathan Greenwood, Francis Harty and, yes, Benjamin Peel. I said,

  ‘According to Methuselah’s account, the Burgesses had to pay Cromwell out of their own pockets. Did it happen like that, Tom?’

  Atherton was still reading and concentrating hard, frowning and protruding his lips.

  ‘What happened was that none of the treasure could be retrieved in time. The Burgesses’ contributions from their own pockets were to be treated as loans, repayable when the three chests of money were dug up and returned.’

  ‘And…?’

  Atherton turned a couple of leaves and put his finger on a line of scribal writing.

  ‘Well, look here! Methuselah was right.’

  He read out, against a date some three months after the battle of Preston, a resolution ‘that Sergeant Wilkinson be paid three shillings per diem to search for that part of the town’s treasure entrusted during the late emergency to Benjamin Peel Esq., and hid by him before his death in the battle.’

  ‘Three shillings a day? It’s a sizeable outlay. Did the sergeant find the hoard?’

  ‘Let’s see.’ Atherton turned another page. ‘No, he didn’t. There’s another resolution by the Burgesses a week later, ‘That the three shillings paid daily to the Sergeant shall cease, him being unable to find the treasure hid by Ben: Peel; and, further, That a bounty be offered of five pounds to any man that shall give information leading to the return of the same to the Corporation treasury’. I think we can assume that two-thirds of the hidden money – Harty’s and Greenwood’s portions – were safely recovered long before this, but that Peel’s allocation could not be found.’

  ‘All because, as it confirms here, poor Peel was killed in the battle.’

  ‘And the treasure entrusted to him is still there – wherever he hid it. A tantalizing thought, is it not?’

  ‘Do we have an indication of what the treasure consisted of?’

  ‘Yes, look, it is all clearly laid out here.’

  He showed me, opposite the last resolution to offer a reward, a sheet had been glued onto the page. It was headed ‘SCHEDULE: GOLD AND SILVER BELONGING TO THE CORPN THAT JON: GREENWOOD, FRAN: HARTY AND BEN: PEEL TOOK TO HIDE IT’. The Moot Hall clock began striking ten as I glanced through, but five had not sounded before I’d stopped reading and asked Tom Atherton for a scribal copy.

  Walking back to the office I reached out the spoon from my waistcoat. It glinted as I spun it between my fingers and I wondered. There had been two unhelpful things about the schedule Atherton had showed me. There was no indication of how the treasure had been divided between Greenwood, Harty and Peel. And there had been no mention of any apostle spoon. Most of it had been money – gold coins, silver crowns and a few of smaller denomination. Various items of plate were also listed: a gold chafing dish; sauce boats; a candelabrum; and a pair of silver lamb and flag figures, emblems of the town. However, there was a compendium item at the bottom of the list: ‘such sundry silver items as forks, spoons, rings, buttons, etc. value fifty shillings’.

  Could what I held in my hand have been one of these sundry items? Obviously it might have been, but the schedule document could not be used to prove that it actually was. And to consider the matter more broadly, we did not even have a hoard. Was this whole suspicion a mare’s nest?

  * * *

  Behind my desk once more I resolutely put seductive thoughts of buried treasure out of my mind. There was work to do on Pimbo’s inquest which, wanting to get it over before Midsummer’s Day, I had decided to hold on the day before, the coming Wednesday. I first sent Furzey to secure an inquest room at the Friary Bar Inn, as being close to where Pimbo lay, and on his return I put him to work raising a jury. Meanwhile I drew up summonses for the principal witnesses. I wrote them out for Robert Hazelbury, Michael Ambler, and the young apprentice Roger Waterton. I turned out two other speculative summonses, one for Ruth Peel, though I had not definitely decided to call her, and another for Zadok Moon, though he might not be found in time to be called.

  What to do about Miss Peel was a question that turned on another – what use should I make of Phillip Pimbo’s New Year Resolutions? On the previous night I had showed them to Elizabeth, and she had made me see them in a different light.

  ‘Well, I was half right, Titus,’ she said. ‘Miss Peel was not his mistress, but he wanted her to be just as she told you.’

  ‘And, perhaps reluctantly, his wife. She forced a marriage proposal out of him.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  ‘No he doesn’t. He says nothing of whether she wants marriage. He assumes she wants to be his wife, because she refuses to be his mistress. That is typical of a man.’

  ‘Well, looking at this as possible evidence, the main thing is the point about making himself rich very quickly in order to marry her.’

  She wanted to interrupt but I stopped her.

  ‘No. Let me first think this out aloud. Phillip Pimbo knew that he would need much money – twenty thousand pounds, he had been told – to establish his bank. But this document gives, does it not, the urgent reason behind this ambition? His desire for Ruth Peel led him to gamble through Zadok Moon for very high stakes in a Guinea voyage. That, it seems to me, is like putting all your money on the turn of a card. If the voyage went wrong he would get no other chance to keep his resolve within the limit of time he set himself. So now. Let’s say it did go wrong. Would he not despair? And despairing, might he not end his life? If that is what happened then this document is a vital piece of evidence.’

  ‘Have you thought it through now, Titus? May I speak?’

  ‘If you please, my heart.’

  ‘This document may be what you say, but it is also much else. It is eloquent. It speaks of Pimbo’s tender heart, of his love as well as his lust, of his character. Granted, he doesn’t let Miss Peel think for herself – men rarely do with women, though you are a great exception, my love! But Mr Pimbo does not force himself upon Miss Peel, does not attack or bear down on her. In short, he is not at all like Mr B. in Pamela. That man is a cunning, stalking beast of the desert until Pamela tames him at the last. Pimbo is more like a confused and worried farm animal.’

  ‘On Saturday you said he was playing God. Does a farm animal play God?’

  ‘Not face to face, but he might in his will.’

  The picture of this in our minds made us both laugh out loud.

  ‘How does what you said help to explain his death, though?’ I asked, a little ashamed that we had made sport of the dead.

  ‘It does, supposing that all along he wanted to be a beast of the desert; if he meant to prove to this imperious woman – that was the word you used of her – that he was her equal in firmness of character. So suppose then that he concocted a fantastic, far-fetched, all-or-nothing solution for his woes: to win her with one enormous manly stroke of profit. And finally, suppose that he failed. Would his life not then be ashes?’

  I realised that I could not after all spare Ruth Peel. She must give evidence and be confronted with Phillip Pimbo’s sheet of resolutions. So next morning, having sent for one of the Parkin brothers who, as constables, I could use to convey summonses, I thought further that the court might benefit if it heard also from a disinterested witness in the Pimbo household. So I wrote a second summons
addressed to the young maid Peg and, within the hour, I had dispatched both documents to Cadley Place by hand of Esau Parkin.

  * * *

  While I was sending these out, an item of post came in. It was from Luke Fidelis, written earlier in the morning from the Mermaid Inn, Liverpool.

  Dear Cragg,

  I have been on the scent but the quarry still eludes me. I know Zadok Moon is in this city but he lies low – I cannot tell why, but I have the name of one that knows him, and I think knows more. Indeed I suspect this whole business runs deeper than we had apprehended and I intend to alter my plans and stay here today to look into the matter further. Please let my appointed patients (listed below) know that I shall call not this afternoon but tomorrow instead. None is seriously ill (let us hope).

  I am etc. LF

  I glanced through the list of seven patients. Three were lady residents of Preston, for whom the doctor’s visit might perhaps be more social than medical. Two of the other four were Burgesses – a wine merchant and a shoemaker – and two were servants in wealthy houses, one of them Lord Derby’s. Fidelis’s practice, I reflected, was growing, and becoming more fashionable.

  The fact that he was prepared to give up a day of appointments, and fees, only to satisfy his curiosity over Pimbo’s death suggested to me that there was a limit to his worldly ambition, and his desire to be Preston’s largest doctor. He was not my personal officer, and these were not official inquiries, yet he wanted to pursue them, though he had nothing to gain by it unless it was the fun of testing himself against the puzzle.

  I thought also about Moon. Was he in hiding, or did ‘lying low’ only represent Fidelis’s colourful figure of speech? I tried to imagine Zadok Moon, and saw before my mind’s eye an intense, wiry figure with a thin nose and black hair, added to the beard that Ruth Peel had mentioned. This Moon of my thoughts had fierce eyes and was a demon of quicksilver energy, doing terrific bouts of work followed by thorough indulgence – wine, women, horses and the card table. He was in all things confident and capable, but never too serious. I rather liked him.

  When I told Elizabeth at dinner how I had constructed this character she laughed and said I happened to have made a man very much opposite to his partner Phillip Pimbo.

  ‘So, they were complementary,’ I said. ‘It makes their partnership something that Mr Philosopher Plato would have been quite delighted with.’

  ‘And I shall be quite delighted if Mr Moon turns out to be fat, stupid and very dull.’

  Stealing half an hour in my library before the afternoon’s work, I picked up Montaigne and made a start on the essay ‘Of the Power of Imagination’, thinking it might illuminate the puzzling process by which the mind always feels compelled, in Shakespeare’s good words, to give to airy nothing a local habitation, as I had done in imagining Zadok Moon. I found the Frenchman’s thinking, however, running along different paths. The imagining he deals with is not an airy nothing, but a force capable of making real things happen outside the bounds of the head: for example, that we may catch a disease by thinking too much about it. I wondered how Luke Fidelis would regard that.

  Reading on I came to a curious sentence: ‘’Tis a common proverb in Italy that he knows not Venus in her sweet perfectness who has never lain with a lame Mistress.’

  The words naturally brought Pimbo back into my mind, and his feelings towards Miss Ruth Peel. Nothing, says Montaigne, is straightforward in physical love, and nothing should less surprise us than that the thought of a bodily imperfection might throw someone into amorous longing. But as Montaigne might also say, the word that counts here is thought. So was Pimbo’s erotic mind excited by Miss Peel’s deformity? And was that the mainspring of all his other decisions?

  Chapter Nine

  LUKE FIDELIS KNEW Liverpool, but few at Liverpool knew Fidelis. In Preston a man’s life was open to scrutiny wherever he went, but in Liverpool your actions might go unremarked by anyone for several hours, or even days, for the great seaport had a thousand times more strangers in it than it had acquaintances. Its business was conducted not by single men but by companies of them, competing with other companies, in affairs which are bound I think to be habitually as secretive as possible.

  This was not – at least it was not in those days – a town that enjoyed refined amusements, though there was no shortage of rough entertainment for the sailors, as in a theatre, cockpits, gaming houses, fight booths, freak-shows and brothels. But, for the class of men engaged in business, economic activity took the place of fun. The port was always in a ferment of business; it bubbled with news. Men talked of ships into and out of the river, of privateers, and pirates, and of ship-loads lost at sea; of the prices and tariffs on this or that cargo; and always of profit, and loss. Discourse of this kind was conducted at coffee houses in and around Pool Lane and Castle Street, which stretched between the Exchange and the enclosed dock. Here they drew up bills of lading and exchange, made lists of crew and chandlery, pored over maps and charts. They told each other tales of Spanish prizes counted in doubloons, of fabulous cargoes lost in storms, of slave revolts and plagues.

  Pinchbeck’s Coffee House in Paradise Street was buzzing with just such conversation as Fidelis sat down. He had waited several minutes for a vacant table and was hungry and thirsty after his ride from Preston. He ordered food and drink before asking the serving girl for an interview with Mr Pinchbeck himself.

  The man made Fidelis wait a little longer, as must be expected of one that regards himself as a person of importance. Pinchbeck, who had formerly been a Sergeant-Major in the Grenadiers, had begun to affect in middle life a weary manner that, while still being recognizably that of a non-commissioned officer, suggested one that bore the burden of social importance.

  ‘Zadok Moon, you say?’ he asked, tapping his chin with a crook-finger. He had graciously acceded to Fidelis’s invitation to sit down, but refused refreshment. ‘Yes, I know the name. There’s been mail for him posted to and collected from here, I can say that.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘An ordinary fellow. Wears a seaman’s beard, but that’s not remarkable here.’

  ‘So he may have been to sea?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘What is his dress?’

  ‘Ordinary – but not shabby.’

  ‘And what is his age?’

  ‘Middling. Closer to thirty than forty.’

  They were no further on when Fidelis’s meal arrived. As Pinchbeck was telling next to nothing about Moon, Fidelis abandoned the interrogation. He picked up his knife and Pinchbeck left his customer to enjoy his plate of boiled ham and pickles.

  After satisfying his appetite Fidelis ventured out again. Going from coffee house to tavern to coffee house, he asked after Moon and, receiving no satisfactory answer, began to wonder why the man was so elusive. He also, as he progressed, started to suspect that there was someone following behind him. He pretended to look with consuming interest into the window of a print-seller, in the hope of noting someone conspicuously idling in the street behind him. There was no such thing. At another moment he saw a blind beggar crouching in a doorway across the street who, after a few moments’ observation, he found to be just as blind and destitute as he appeared.

  Fidelis walked on, past the theatre which appeared to be closed, and on to Castle Square, where he joined the audience for another kind of show, but one that required no ticket: an acrobat was tying his body into knots. Fidelis took a certain medical interest in such performances, and stayed to watch, though he glanced around from time to time. Somewhere near the theatre a few minutes earlier he’d noticed a woman dodging along in his wake, and he was keeping a sidelong eye out for her. But he was momentarily distracted by an extreme of bodily contortion and did not notice the woman was by his side until he felt her tugging at his sleeve.

  ‘Only a bit of silver will have me, kind Sir,’ she wheedled. ‘Just a couple of shillings is all I ask and you can have my company for half an h
our, you can.’

  She leaned forward so that her broken-toothed mouth was beside his ear.

  ‘I’ve got a place to meself, and with a bed in it too,’ she whispered.

  Fidelis looked at her. She was not young, and nor was she pretty. Her face needed a wash with soap, and the ragged hem of her dress trailed on the ground. He sent her briskly on her way, for her approach had reminded him to look at his watch. He had another engagement, and in a politer part of town.

  * * *

  He left the Castle behind him and walked up Castle Street, past the Exchange and into a district whose streets were recently built, and whose inhabitants prided themselves in sobriety and respectability – at least in public. He turned into Edmund Street and approached the door of a well-kept house, the brasses on the door brightly polished, the windows clean. It was opened discreetly by a woman.

  Without saying a word she led him into the parlour where the drapes were closed, and candles had been lit. A bass viol lay on the floor beside an upright chair and a stand with a sheet of music open. On a table was a salver with two glasses and a bottle of port, from which she poured. They touched glasses and drank, and then she poured again for him alone.

  While he sipped the wine she sat in the chair, took up the viol, placed it between her legs and began to play a slow, beguiling, amorous tune. All through it her eyes remained fixed on his and a teasing smile drifted across her lips.

  Coming to the end she lifted the bow from the strings and waited. Luke drained the wine glass and moved to her side, from where he could see the sheet open on the music stand. This was something jauntier, a sea shanty. Among Fidelis’s attributes was the possession of a more than serviceable baritone voice and after a few opening notes from Mrs Butler’s viol he ran through the song. I have heard my friend sing on a number of occasions and, though I cannot say he puts great feeling into it, he sings with energy and accuracy.