A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Come, William. We will go for a walk. We do no good worrying here.”

  They walked into the woods. It was a fine day, presaging a warm spring and it was the direction of their walk that decided Claude on his course of action.

  “I will tell you something,” he began hesitantly, not continuing until they had reached the chapel in the woods and settled on one of the stone benches that flanked the doors.

  “I haven’t long for this life.” It told him something of his nephew-son-in-law that there were no false denials of the truth of his words. “And there is something I really cannot trust to your brother.”

  “Henry?”

  The name was rarely spoken by either of them.

  “You must listen to me and remember what I say. On the day your father died, he entrusted me with his writings. There were four folders of papers, a notebook and a letter. In his years of retirement he had written about his life and his work…” Claude noticed that William showed a high degree of interest but had the sense not to interrupt. “…much of which, in the service of this country, must remain secret for many years. History, my dear boy, is agreed upon by men who have the power to determine what they want history to be and how they wish themselves to be remembered.” He paused, waiting for William to say something in agreement but he didn’t, he just showed continuing interest in everything his father-in-law said. “Your father wished certain lies should be exposed and truths to be known. On the day he died I promised him that I would give the volumes to Henry on his twenty-first birthday. Your father believed the custodian had to be Henry,” Claude sounded apologetic, “because he is the elder.”

  “That is something I have long ago come to terms with.”

  Claude looked relieved that the younger man seemed not to blame him.

  “I have not read the volumes, it would have been an imposition too far on my friend’s good will, but I have my suspicions as to the overall gist of the contents. That is why, when the time came, I could not do as your father wished.”

  He paused, looking at William to see if there were any signs that he was passing judgement on Claude. There were none so he continued.

  “I handed Henry the letter only, with the notebook that I know contained only the ciphers to interpret any sections of your father’s writings that had been consigned to paper in code. I did not give Henry the diaries, I am afraid I could not do as your father asked because I could not bring myself to trust your brother.”

  Claude paused, overcome with a spasm of pain. William knew well enough not to fuss but to leave him be to recover his breath.

  “Perhaps I have done wrong but what is done cannot be undone. The other volumes I have kept, may your father’s spirit forgive me. These I have hidden away as I could not bring myself to destroy what your father had wanted preserved. I could not bring myself to destroy them so I have hidden them.”

  “They are well hidden I suspect.” William showed interest rather than the condemnation Claude had no doubt would have come from his brother.

  “It is my hope that they are not discovered for many years, though I have every wish that one day they will be found and their contents revealed. When that day comes they will undoubtedly tell the strangest of tales and have the strongest of implications for England, its government and the monarchy.”

  “Is this connected with my father’s visits to the South Atlantic?” William asked tentatively.

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “You will tell me nothing of that though.”

  “The story must wait.”

  “Does Henry know any of this?”

  “I trust not.”

  “You want me to have responsibility for them?”

  “I do. But you will be bound to your father’s demands, just as Henry is.”

  “And those were?”

  “That, if found, the packets are not to be opened until the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the year nineteen hundred and fifteen.”

  “I am unlikely to be able to do that.” William smiled his gentle smile.

  “You will hand the knowledge on to your son on his twenty-first birthday. He is entering the world today, in 1915 he will be sixty-three years old. If they have been found he may then open the bundled papers. You must maintain contact with your brother, William, he has the cipher and without that much of the story will remain a mystery. Do not lose contact with Henry. Your son must continue contact with Henry’s son or the cipher and the writings will never be together.”

  “You are confident I will have a son.”

  “I am.”

  “Where are these secrets held?”

  “Josephine has a locket. I bought it some years ago to give to my daughter Mary Lettice who lies inside this chapel.”

  “It is a beautiful pendant, I have long admired it. She wears it always.”

  “It is no pendant. It is a locket with a finely worked secret catch. Inside there is an inscription Mary Lettice. That will point any future generation to my poor daughter lying here.”

  “That is where my father’s papers are?”

  “Indeed.”

  “I will do as you say. I will pass the knowledge on and please know that I will not break your pledge to my father.”

  “I know you will not.”

  “It may be difficult to maintain contact with Henry. What if the cipher book is with Henry’s descendants and they do not know to what it relates? What if the folders are found but there is no way of making the code comprehensible? I cannot believe you have not set something in place should that be the situation.”

  “They will open the notebook and they will be pointed towards The Lodge. They will come here and the clues will be joined together.”

  Claude placed his hand over that of William. It was, the younger man realised, one of the very rare times they had touched so intimately.

  “It’s at times like these that one needs friends is it not?” Claude broke the silence. “Sir Bernard was a good friend to me. We came from very different places, he and I, yet we came to respect and, I believe, have some affection for each other.”

  “You know more about him than you have ever told me.”

  “I’m afraid the answer has to be ‘yes’ to that, William. I know more about your father than I can ever tell you and it is a great sadness that you will never know. Be borne up by the knowledge that your son will.”

  “You are very mysterious, sir.”

  “That I have had to be is one of the greatest sadnesses of my life.”

  There seemed nothing more to say so the two men sat lost in their own, very differing, thoughts. It was a silence interrupted some time later by a woman’s voice.

  “I thought I would find you both here.”

  “Patience. How…?” Claude hardly dared ask.

  “Both well. William, you have a son and Josephine is resting. She is tired but she has come through well.”

  “I have a son?”

  Patience sat by her husband and took his hand. “Claude, my dear, come out of the chill. You must take care of yourself.”

  “That is of no matter at all my dear. There is a son. The line is secure for another generation.”

  “The baby is well formed but small. She had no difficulty out of the ordinary.”

  “What shall we call the boy?” William asked, amazed that the sounds that still reverberated in his ears represented an ‘ordinary’ delivery.

  “Have you no ideas?”

  “I had thought of Bernard, after my father.”

  “That is good.”

  “In fact I had thought of Bernard Claude Oliver Lacey as a grand collection of names.”

  “I am touched, no I am honoured, that you should want your son to carry my name.”

  “He will be instructed to call his sons, in due course, William and Henry and that time William will be the elder.” William thought he had successfully hidden the bitterness from his voice and was rewarded with a handshake from his father-in-law and a kiss on
both cheeks from Patience.

  “Let us go back to the house. Josephine will want to show off her son to his father.”

  Patience tucked her hands between the arms of her husband, to her right, and her son-in-law, to her left and led them back to The Lodge.

  *

  “Come upstairs and see your son. You, husband, can break open the bottle you have kept for just this occasion.” Patience led William upstairs to his wife’s bedroom.

  He stood staring in wonder at his son lying in his crib. What life would he have? What changes would he see in the world? What would the world be like when he, in his turn, looked down in amazement at the miracle that would be his son? What would he learn about his family that he, William, could never know?

  Never had William felt the burden of continuity that was ‘family’ as strongly as he did at that moment. He felt he knew that moments like this were what everything in the entire world was all about.

  “You are so very clever, my love.” He tore himself away from his son and turned his attention to his wife.

  “He is perfect, is he not?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Life could not be better, could it?”

  “We are truly blessed.”

  *

  It was a little more than a year before Josephine was asking her husband, in despair, “Are we truly cursed?”

  *

  Their son, Bernard, had proved to be a difficult baby, falling ill frequently, and the doctors were surprised that he survived infancy. The boy caught fevers and colds and the constant worry about their son took its toll on both parents. It was with little ceremony that they marked Bernard’s first birthday since there was resignation in the household that he would not reach another.

  In the January of 1853 Claude Olivierre died.

  He had had a fever for some days and had been confined to his bed but seemed well enough to be supplied with his daily newspaper. He had been reading a report in The Times when he had rung the bell by his bed that called Patience to his side.

  “Louis had overreached himself,” he said, waving his hand ineffectually at the paper.

  “Louis?” Patience asked, frightened by the colour in her husband’s face.

  Claude held up the newspaper and Patience caught a glimpse of a report concerning President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “He was elected, he had legitimacy, now he has called himself Emperor! He has no right.”

  “But what is that to us, Claude?” Patience asked soothingly.

  “He has let us all down. The man is son of a whore and will act as a whore’s son.”

  Claude recollected himself and realised he had gone too far in his anger.

  “I knew… I knew the man’s father. Many years ago. I knew him.”

  “But that was brother to Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  “Louis, yes, brother. But Louis was not the father. His wife was a whore. All in that family were whores.” Patience knew that Claude was not well and listened helplessly as his delirium led him to talk of people he should long ago have forgotten. “Hortense could be nothing other than a whore. She was the daughter of her mother. La fille de sa mère.”

  Patience tried to calm her husband as he raved, unaware of the words he uttered.

  “Elle est morte. Morte. Tout le monde est mort.”

  “Claude? Who is dead? Claude? Talk to me.” Patience was becoming more anxious.

  He turned his face to look at her and spoke with a clarity he had not shown for some days. “Louis will fail. He believes himself to be greater than he is, mieux que moi; il va échouer!” Claude looked into his wife’s eyes one last time. “Je suis coupable, je suis désolé. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime.”

  She held his hand gently as colour left his face and she wondered who it was he was saying he had loved.

  She watched as the minutes passed, as he quietened, as his frame seemed to shrink in front of her eyes. She watched in silence, holding his hand, until there was no movement in his chest and no breath in his body.

  Her husband, the man she had always known was not Claude Olivierre, was dead.

  *

  A little more than a month later William and Josephine followed a second coffin to the grave in the town’s burial ground as Patience joined her husband.

  Not for the first, nor the last, time William thought of the stone tomb in the chapel in the woods and the mysterious papers secreted there. Not for the first time, nor for the last, he was filled with regret that it was too late to find an answer to his questions.

  “Are we cursed?” Josephine asked wearily as they laid her mother to rest next to her father; her mind full of worry for her son who lay in the house, dangerously ill with diphtheria.

  “No.” William spoke more harshly than he had meant to. “No.” He softened his voice. “We have Bernard, we have each other, we have our home, we must never forget how much we have to be thankful for.”

  Chapter 9

  Tuesday

  Skye knew that Fergal must have said something to Carl because the next day, as they worked together in the library, she noticed the professor’s attitude towards her was less arrogant than it had been in the days before, though he still demanded she make him a cup of coffee every hour.

  “Good God!” Carl exclaimed into the silence.

  “What?” Skye’s immediate thought was that she had done something wrong.

  “Look, girl! Look!”

  She looked at the front of one of the books she had just placed on the table and read out loud, “Papers of The Royal Geographical Society. So?”

  “Look at the list of contributors.”

  Skye looked down the list of article titles and names. “Oh my God!”

  “Exactly. William Lacey.”

  “Our William Lacey? Bernard’s younger son?”

  “Why else would it be in this library? I knew the way forward lay here. What more have we here on this pile?”

  “More with the same cover and same size.”

  “Please hand them over.”

  “You said please. That’s the first time all week.”

  Skye caught the professor’s eye and was surprised to see that he was smiling.

  “Fergal did tell me not to be hard on you. He said you really were nothing like your father. In fact he gave me a lecture about not visiting the iniquities of the father on the children, a concept that is rather close to my own heart. I promised him I would behave better in future. Now go back up to those shelves and see what else there is. Please.”

  Soon there was a collection of three dozen volumes of varying size on the table.

  “William Lacey was a prolific writer,” Carl said thoughtfully.

  “Look at this.” Skye read the title of a pamphlet she had found squeezed between two larger books. “Notes on the geology of the Chiltern Hills in the vicinity of the market town of Princes Risborough by an enthusiastic Amateur supporting the Uniformitarian view. They went in for short titles then.”

  “What date is that?”

  “1842.” Skye interpreted the Roman numerals at the bottom of the page.

  “So how old would William have been?”

  “When was he born?” She referred to the copy of the family tree she had on her iPad. “1822. So he’d be about twenty years old,” Skye answered, adding a question. “What’s uniformitarian?”

  “That is not one of my fields of expertise but I believe it was when scientists began to put forward the idea that the world was not created in the one catastrophic God-wrought event as religionists believed.”

  “People believed that?” Skye was incredulous.

  “It was the official church line that the world had remained unchanged in the four thousand or so years since its instant creation.”

  “People really believed that the world was only four thousand years old?”

  “I understand that there are people in otherwise quite civilised parts of the United States of America who still do,” Carl replied sardoni
cally. “But our young William Lacey was obviously ahead of his time. Judging from the number of papers he published it seems he became a real professional. Where else has he written about?”

  Skye looked through the volumes. “There’re lots on England, he seems to be working on geological maps, refining and correcting them. Here’s something from South Africa, and here there’s lots about hunting minerals in Australia. Now how about this?”

  “What?” Carl prompted as Skye went suddenly quiet. “Come on. What is it?”

  “Preliminary Notes on The Geology, Flora and Fauna of the Crown Colony of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.” She handed him the pamphlet. “I know. There is no such thing as coincidence.”

  Carl opened it carefully.

  “There’s an inscription,” he said slowly. “To my dearest wife Josephine, who chose me above another and who waited. I promise there will be no more travels.”

  “William Lacey married Josephine? That must be Josephine Olivierre surely? But they were cousins.”

  “Many first cousins married in those days,” Carl responded. “Think Victoria and Albert.”

  “It explains how a Lacey came to be in The Lodge though doesn’t it? William Lacey will have moved in when he married Josephine.”

  “Possibly, possibly. But, my dear Skye, think what it means.”

  “Pardon?”

  “If Claude was who we suspect him to have been, and William Lacey, your great-great-grandfather, is his son, then you are a direct descendent of the Emperor.”

  “And so is my father! Shit! He’ll absolutely hate that.”

  Carl did not immediately respond.

  He was coming to terms with many things.

  If they could prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that Sir Arthur was a direct descendent of the Emperor, and that his family title had begun because another ancestor, Sir Bernard, had been a spy, then it would undoubtedly be the end of his ambitions. Not even his most fervent supporters would take him seriously.

  He eventually put some of his thoughts into words.

  “We must not get ahead of ourselves. We must work through all this. We must learn all there is to know about everyone on that family tree.”