by Дик Фрэнсис
I took it for a certainty that Ivan knew what teaching was engraved on his Cup. He had judged and found himself culpable and was harder on himself precisely because his standard for his own probity had been set so high. I wondered if he valued the Cup more for what was inscribed on it than for its intrinsic worth.
'So how much,' Himself was asking his expert, 'should one insure this Cup for?'
'Insure?' She pursed her lips. 'You could weigh it and multiply by the current price of gold, or you could maintain it is a valuable and interesting example of Victorian romanticism, or you could say it's worth dying for.'
'Not that.'
'People die in defence of their property all the time. It's a powerful instinct.' She nodded as if to emphasise the point. 'I don't think you could insure this Cup for any more than its worth in gold.'
Its weight in gold wouldn't save the brewery or go anywhere near subtracting even a significant nought.
My uncle thoughtfully restored the Cup to its box and closed the lid. The whole room looked a little darker at its eclipse.
'The accounts of King Alfred burning the cakes and suffering from haemorrhoids were all tosh,' Dr Lang said in her lecturing voice. 'King Alfred suffered from spin-doctors. But the fact remains, he is the only king in Britain ever to be called great. Alfred the Great. Born in Wantage, Berkshure. He was the fifth son, you know. Primogeniture wasn't supreme. They chose the fittest. Alfred was a scholar. He could read and write, both in Latin and his native tongue, Anglo-Saxon. He freed southern England - Wessex - from the rule of the invading Danes, first by appeasement and sly negotiation, then by battle. He was clever.' Her old face shone. 'People now try to make him a twentieth-century thinking social worker who founded schools and wrote new good laws, and the probabilities are that he did both, but only in the context of his own times. He died in 899, and no other well-authenticated king of that whole first millennium is so revered or honoured, or even remembered. It's a great pity this remarkable gold chalice here isn't a genuine ninth-century treasure, but of course it would have been either stolen or lost when Henry VIII devastated the churches. So many old treasures were buried in the fifteen-thirties to keep them safe, and the buriers died or were killed without telling where the treasures were hidden, and all over England farmers still to this day find gold deep in their fields, but not this Cup. Alas, it wasn't around in the days of Henry VHI. I think, actually, that the proper place for it now is in a museum. All such treasures should be cared for and displayed in museums.'
She stopped. Himself, who disagreed with her, thanked her warmly for her trouble and offered her wine or tea.
'What I would like,' she said, 'is to see the Kinloch hilt.'
Himself blinked. 'We have only the replica on show.'
'The real one,' she said. 'Show me the real one.'
After less than three seconds he said, smiling, 'We have to keep it safe from Henry VIII.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean we have had to bury it to keep it.' He was making a joke of it and, unwillingly, she smiled tightly and settled for a sight of the copy.
We walked down the long passage where once relays of footmen had hurried with steaming dishes from kitchen to Great Hall, and Himself unlocked the weighty door that let us into the castle proper.
The Great Hall's walls, thanks to the theft of all the tapestries, were now for the most part grimly bare. The display cases, since the disappearance of the priceless dinner service, were unlit and empty. The long centre table, where once fifty guests had dined in splendour, bore a thin film of dust. Without comment my uncle walked down the long room under its high vaulted ceiling until he came to the imposing grilled glass display unit at the far end that had once held the true Honour of the Kinlochs.
Himself flicked a switch. Lights inside the glass case came to brilliant life and beamed onto the gold-looking object inside.
The replica hilt lay on black velvet and, even though one knew it was not the real thing, it looked impressive.
'It is gold plated,' its owner said. 'The red stones are spinel, not ruby. The blue stones are lapis lazuli, the green ones are peridots. I commissioned it and paid for it, and no one disputes that this is mine.'
Dr Zoл Lang studied it carefully and in silence.
The hilt itself, though larger than a large man's fist, looked remarkably like the King Alfred Gold Cup, except that there were no crenellations and no engraving. There was instead the pommel, the grip that fitted into the palm of the hand: and instead of the circular foot, only the neck into which the snapped-off blade had been fastened.
The ceremonial sword that Prince Charles Edward had hoped to use at his coronation as rightful King of England and Scotland had been made for him in France (and, amazingly, paid for by him personally) in 1740. It had been his own to give, and on impulse, in gratitude and despair, he had given it.
Dr Lang, with fervour and unexpected fanaticism, said intensely, 'This imitation may be your own, but I agree with the castle's custodians that the real Honour of the Kinlochs belongs to Scotland.'
'Do you think so?' Himself asked politely, good manners and jocularity in his voice. 'I would argue with you, of course, and I would defend my right of ownership…' He paused provocatively.
'Yes?' she prompted.
He smiled sweetly. To the hilt.'
CHAPTER SIX
'Al,' Himself asked thoughtfully, as we walked back from seeing Zoл Lang out to her taxi, 'how far would you actually go in defending the Honour of the Kinlochs?'
'Up to and including the hilt?'
'I'm not joking, Al.'
I glanced at his heavy troubled face.
"The answer,' I said, 'is that I don't know.'
After a pause he asked, 'Would you have given up the hilt to the four men who attacked you if they'd told you what they wanted and had used more than their fists?'
'I don't know.'
'But how much urge did you have anyway to tell them where to look?'
'None,' I said. 'I didn't like them.'
'Al, be serious.'
"They made me angry. They made me feel futile. I would have denied them anything I could.'
'I don't ask for you to suffer to keep that thing safe.
If they attack you again, don't let them hurt you. Tell them what they want to know.'
I said with humour, 'You wouldn't have said that two hundred years ago.'
'Times change.'
We went peacefully into his house and into his dining-room, where the black cube containing the King Alfred Gold Cup still lay on the table. We checked briefly to make sure that the gold prize was still inside, and I ran a finger over the faint indentations of Bede's Death Song: consider the evil one does on earth, because a reckoning awaits.
Was it good or evil, in changing times, to pay for physical relief on earth with one's eternal honour?
Where did common sense begin?
At what point did one duck the scream?
I had no need to ask such questions aloud. Himself - my august uncle, my hereditary clan chief - was the product of the same ancient ethos and conditioning that I had received from his brother, and I had willy nilly inherited the mainstream Kinloch mind, stubbornness and all.
Himself and I re-enclosed the black cube in its drawstring bag and replaced it in the cardboard box with the copies of Dickens on top. I restuck it all as best I could with the wide brown fastening tape, though the result couldn't be called secure, and we put the box back in the sideboard for the want of anywhere better.
'We can't leave it there for ever,' my uncle said.
'No.'
'Do you trust Dr Lang?'
I was surprised by the question, but said, 'I would trust her to be true to her beliefs.'
'Think of somewhere better for the Cup, Al.'
'I'll try.'
At his own request I hadn't told him to the inch where to find the hilt, though he knew it was somewhere at the bothy. After much consideration we had, as a prec
aution against us both inconveniently dying with our secret untold, like Henry VIII's evaders, entrusted Jed with the basic information.
'If you have to,' Himself had said to him, 'dig around and pull the bothy apart stone by stone. Otherwise, forget what we've told you.'
Jed couldn't, of course, forget it although he had never alluded to it since except to say once that he felt overwhelmed by our faith in his loyalty. If Jed had been going to betray us to the castle's administrators he could have done it at any time in the past few years, but instead had taken the game of hide and seek into his own private world in enjoyment, and it was certainly the basis of the solid friendship between the two of us.
Jed came back to the castle late in the afternoon, still with my gear in the boot of his car, wanting to know if he could drive me home to the bothy.
'No,' Himself said decisively. 'Al will stay here tonight. Sit down, Jed. Get yourself a drink.'
We were by then in the room my uncle considered his own private domain, a severe predominantly brown room with walls bearing stuffed fish in glass cases and deers' antlers from long-past battles on the hills. There were also three of my paintings of his racehorses and one painting of his favourite gun-dog, much loved but now dead.
Jed fixed a glass of whisky and water and sat down on one of the elderly hard-stuffed chairs.
Himself as usual made the decisions. 'I see Al seldom enough. He will stay here tonight and tomorrow night to please me, and on Monday morning you can take him to the bothy and the police station, and anywhere else you care to. I'll be fishing the Spey next week. I have guests Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I'll be out on the moor with the guns…' He outlined his plans. 'James returns from sailing tomorrow. He'll be staying on here. His wife will take the children back to school. All clear, Jed?'
'Yes, sir.'
Jed and he discussed estate affairs for a while and I listened with half an ear and tried to imagine a good temporary home for Bede's Death Song engraved in gold.
I had asked Zoл Lang to read the poem aloud in Anglo-Saxon, and with enjoyment she had done so, her love of the old language giving the words shape and meaning and new life. I couldn't understand a syllable, but I could hear the throb and the pulse and the strong alliteration, and when I commented on it she'd told me a shade patronisingly that all Anglo-Saxon poetry had been written to be spoken, not read. The excitement, even the intoxication, she said, was engendered by the rhythmic beat as much as by the vivid imagery of the words. The poems describing battle could set sword-arms twitching. 'The Dream of the Rood' would make a Christian of an atheist.
Himself and I had listened respectfully, and I thought how much the outward appearance of age could colour one's expectation of a person's character. I wanted to paint her as young, vibrant, fanatical, with the ghost of the way she looked now superimposed in thin light grey lines, like age's cobwebs.
I strongly sensed a singular individual powerful entity that might have intensified with time, not faded. We were dealing with that inner woman, and should not forget it.
If I underpainted thickly in Payne's grey mixed with titanium white, I thought, and then brought the essential person to glowing life with strong bone structure in a faithful portrait, no colour tricks or linear gimmicks, and then scratched down into the grey for the unthinkable future… then with a steady hand and a strong vision I might produce a statement of terrible truth -or I might finish with a disaster fit only for the bin. To have the technique and the courage weren't always enough. Apart from vision as well, one needed luck.
Hide King Alfred's Gold Cup… my mind wandered back to the task in hand.
Hiding the Cup, for all its worth in gold, wasn't in the same sphere as hiding the hilt. Ivan might prize the Cup for reasons of his own, but as a symbol it wasn't entangled with history and an earl's beheading and generations of clan honour. The King Alfred Gold Cup had been fashioned a thousand years after the great king's days of glory: a tribute to him, undoubtedly, but never his own property.
The King Alfred Cup might be worth killing for… but not suffering for, or dying.
And yet… I asked myself again if I would have given the demon walkers that Cup if I'd known what they were looking for, if I'd had it to give, and I thought quite likely not. Anger… pride… cussedness.
Mad, weird, ridiculous Alexander.
The problem with hiding anything in the castle was that Himself was rarely in residence, while the administrators were not only in and out all the time but were also actively hunting treasure. In the family's private wing lived a full-time overall caretaker with his housekeeper wife, a conscientious worker who eviscerated private cupboards in the name of spring cleaning. The sideboard in the dining-room wouldn't shelter even a peanut for long. The discovery on the premises of a golden wonder, even if not the hilt, would have leaked into informed circles like burst pipes. If hiding the Cup involved hiding also any awareness of its existence, as I supposed it did, then the castle was out.
The castle grounds were out also, thanks to an efficient gardener.
So where?
Any thoughts anyone might have had about a peaceful evening were at that point blasted apart by the earthquake arrival of my friendly cousin James, who had listened to a gale-and-rain weather forecast and decided to run for port a day early, along with his boisterous family, who habitually lived fortissimo at Indy-car speed.
When the invasion stampeded upstairs to arrange bedrooms, I telephoned my mother and asked after Ivan. Things were no worse. There had been no further agitated crisis in the brewery's affairs: insolvency had gone into hiatus for the weekend.
'And Patsy?' I asked.
'Not a sound from her since yesterday morning.'
'My uncle Robert sends his regards.'
'And ours to him,' my mother said.
James, red haired and freckled, wandering by with gin and tonic in fist, asked amiably how the 'old boy' was doing.
'Depressed,' I said.
'Father says someone decamped with the brewery's nest egg.'
'Nest egg, chickens, battery hens, the lot.'
'What a lark, eh? How long are you staying?'
'Till Monday.'
'Great. Father's always saying we don't see enough of you. How are the daubs?'
'In abeyance,' I said, and gave him a lightweight account of the trouble at the bothy.
'Good Lord!' He stared. 'I didn't think you had much there worth stealing.'
'Jeep and golf clubs, and bits and pieces.'
'What rotten luck.'
His sympathy was genuine enough. James would always summon nurses to patch up one's wounds.
'Did they take your pipes?' he asked, concerned.
'Luckily they're in Inverness. The bag had sprung a leak.'
'Are you entering the contests this year?'
'I'm not good enough.'
'You don't practise enough, that's all.'
'The winners are nearly always army pipe majors. You know that. Why do I bother to say it?'
'I just like to encourage people,' he said, beaming; and I thought that that in truth was his great gift, to make people feel better about their lives.
The piping contests, held every autumn, took place from the far north all the way south to London. I had once or twice tried my hand in a piobaireachd competition, but it had been like a novice downhill skier taking on Klammer or Killy, an interesting experience memorable only for not having made an absolute fool of oneself.
Besides, I had political problems with some of the pibrochs, the ancient laments for the deaths and defeats of history. I couldn't - wouldn't - play 'My King has landed at Moidart', because the King that had landed was Prince Charles Edward, rightful King of England by descent, but disqualified (since Henry VIII's quarrel with the Pope) because of being Roman Catholic. Prince Charles Edward landed at Moidart in the Western Isles to begin his fateful march towards London, a thrust for the Crown, however understandable, that had led to the ruination o
f Scotland. In the wake of Prince Charles Edward's defeat at Culloden, the English, to remove the threat of a third upheaval (the 1715 and 1745 rebellions having been barely unsuccessful), had notoriously chased the Scots from their lands and had tried to wipe out nationhood by outlawing the speaking of Gaelic, the wearing of the tartan and the playing of the pipes. Scotland had never recovered. Sure, the tartan, the pipes and the slightly sentimental allegiances had crept back, but they were tourist attractions contrasting affectedly with the drab slab functional housing round the commercially regenerated modern city of Glasgow.
The direct descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, had brought ruin, still unresolved, to most of Scotland - though even at Culloden, sixty per cent of those fighting against the Bonny Prince had been Scots themselves, not English - and although to please my uncle I guarded the lethal gift to my ancestor, I couldn't feel anything but fury for the inept, selfish, vain and ultimately faint-hearted Prince. I played laments for those he'd damaged. I played laments for the damage he'd done. I never felt love for the man.
Saturday evening passed in the chaos indigenous to James's family, and in the morning when I went downstairs in search of coffee I found Himself in the dining-room looking around him as if in bewilderment at an empty cardboard box, old faded leather-bound copies of Dickens, an empty black cube with white satin lining and a grey draw-string duster bag all lying about haphazardly on the floor.
The sideboard door stood open. The King Alfred Gold Cup had gone.
There were squeals from the kitchen next door. Children's voices. High.
Dazedly my uncle opened the connecting door and I followed him into the large unmodernised kitchen, an expanse of black and white tiling still called on old castle plans 'the cold preparation room'. Shades of old vegetables, I thought. Food nowadays mostly arrived at the castle in caterers' vans, wrapped in film and ready to heat and eat.
James was leaning against the sink, coffee mug in hand, indulgent smile in place.
His three unruly children - two boys and a girl - scrambled around on the floor, all of them wearing large saucepans on their heads with the handles pointing backwards. Spacewatch good guys, we were told.