A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  He looked at the collection of pamphlets, books and periodicals that Skye was carefully placing on the table.

  “Change of plan,” he said abruptly. “I’m going to start reading through these while you carry on looking through the shelves. We must abandon keeping the spreadsheet up to date for a bit, just look along all the shelves for anything that relates to either family.”

  As the collection of pamphlets and booklets that she thought would be useful grew Skye wondered why they had not approached the library in that way two days before.

  “Here’s the Bible.” Skye spoke without much enthusiasm as she placed it on the table.

  Carl immediately opened it and ran his finger down the torn edges where the pages that would have been so valuable had been. “It is as you said, destroyed.” Not waiting for a comment from Skye he resumed his reading.

  Skye did not, at that time, consider the possibility of there being a link between those torn pages and the fragments of confetti she had found three weeks before in Audrey’s box of treasures.

  “What about this?” she said after another hour had passed, breaking into Carl’s concentration.

  “It looks like bound letters. It is. Look, it’s a collection of letters.” She handed Carl the unusually sized book.

  He read the top lines of the first handwritten sheets. Jamestown October ‘43, Jamestown November ‘43, Jamestown Boxing Day. Leafing carefully through the volume he saw letters headed Copy of CO to WL in response to January 1844, Copy of CO to WL Easter Day 1844.

  “William wrote to Claude and Claude kept all the letters,” he said quietly, to himself. “And he kept copies of his replies.” He was in awe of what they had found.

  Carl began to read, every few seconds making comments to which he expected no response.

  “It is like the years have dissolved, the images are so brightly drawn… I have the overwhelming feeling that the last time those words were read was in this room, by Claude himself… Reading these pages is a privilege, no, it is more than that… The words do not exist to describe what I am experiencing… The pages are not history. They are reality that just happened to occur a century and a half ago… I am overwhelmed by the importance of what I hold in my hands.”

  Skye returned to her search of the shelves.

  “What do you think these are?” she asked tentatively, afraid to upset Carl’s concentration.

  “What?” Carl took a few moments to focus on Skye.

  “Look. These were sticking out of a book. Look, this is really interesting.”

  “What is?”

  “There’s pieces of paper stuck into this book.”

  “What book?”

  “A History of British Birds by someone called Yarrell.”

  “Sheets of paper, you said.”

  “Listen. July 1843, Notes on conversation with CO. For the first time the old man talked of his past. He spoke of success, but at the cost of many men’s lives. He spoke of a Cornishman called Jolliffe who had sacrificed everything. He wishes me to go to Saint Helena. There’s a lot more but that’s the gist.”

  “Give me that.”

  Skye handed the sheets of paper to him.

  “This was written by William, the handwriting is the same as the letters I have been reading,” Carl said with, Skye thought, some excitement.

  “Listen. He told me of a soldier who must have had friends at home and in his regiment yet who lay dead, deserted by all except his dog. He told me he had looked on, unmoved, at battles which had decided the future of nations. He told me he had felt no emotions as he had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet, here he was profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. It is an often-quoted story of death on a battlefield,” Carl finished lamely.

  He carefully read the notes made of a conversation held nearly two hundred years earlier and tried to understand what they might mean. “Many people knew of that story of Napoleon and the dog. This might be nothing.” But Skye noticed that he carefully refolded the paper and almost reverentially placed it by the Bible in front of him.

  “Now, please Skye, make absolutely certain that you have not missed one book, one pamphlet or one note stuck inside a book.”

  As Skye turned to the remaining shelves to do as she was told Carl looked at the papers accumulating on the table, and the chest and bag that had started it all.

  He was acquiring evidence of who Claude Olivierre was but it was all coincidental and circumstantial. He had nothing that could not be shot down in the flames of rigorous academic scrutiny. The uniforms could have belonged to another general, the mementoes of the revolution could have been from any paroled officer. It could be pure coincidence that Claude Olivierre had asked the man who would be his son-in-law to travel to St Helena, of all the places in the world, as these notes and letters seemed to imply.

  “Do you want me to leave you to the library? Could I tackle the attics?” Skye asked when she had looked along the last shelf.

  “You have a fixation with the attics. But yes, off you go, see if you can find anything useful. I need time to look through all that we have found.” Carl turned back to the letters, notes and published articles of William Lacey.

  As she unlocked the doors and climbed the uneven stairs into the attics Skye tried not to be disappointed that Carl had been proven right, they had found evidence in the library. She wondered how Fergal was getting on and tried not to resent the success of his lines of research.

  As she began to open and study the contents of the boxes in the attic she was determined to find something of equal importance.

  She had to show them both that her instinct, that the answers lay in the attics, was not wrong.

  *

  “Hello?” Light was beginning to fade when Fergal called out as he let himself into the kitchen of The Lodge. “Is there anyone around? Hello?” He walked through the dining room, into the hall and through to the library where he found Carl sitting in the high-sided chair staring out of the window.

  “Carl? Are you OK? Carl?”

  Carl turned and opened his eyes. He stared at Fergal almost as though he couldn’t see him.

  “Carl? What’s the matter? Where’s Skye? Is everything OK?” Fergal continued.

  Carl didn’t answer as he drew himself back into the twenty-first century.

  “Of course everything’s OK. What could possibly be wrong?”

  “It’s just that it’s bloody late and I couldn’t get in touch with you. I phoned the hotel and they said you weren’t back and I phoned your mobile and got voicemail, three times, and I phoned the landline and there was no reply. I was worried.” Fergal stopped and after a few moments added, “You’ve found something?”

  “I have. Or rather, to give her some due, young Skye did.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s footling around in the attic. I needed silence to look through these.” Carl gestured at the pile of pamphlets and books on the desk. “She was kind enough to feed me coffee and a sandwich some time ago but I think she returned to her attics. I simply don’t understand why she believes that she will find anything of importance in the jottings of the chatelaines of this house. Anyway I let her do as she wished while I, well, while I read some of the most thrilling papers it has been my privilege to hold in these hands.” He looked down at his hands as if he had never seen them before.

  “It’s getting dark. She can’t stay up there much longer,” Fergal said, rather more loudly than perhaps he meant. “You pack up here and I’ll go and get her.”

  As Fergal climbed the final uneven staircase into the attics he could hear Skye singing to herself. He thought she sounded happy.

  “Skye?”

  “Fergal?” she called back. “Stay there. I’m just coming.”

  *

  “Wine anyone?” Skye said conversationally as she put glasses on the table. Neither Carl nor Fergal recognised that she seemed far happier than she had the previous nights.r />
  “Wine? Yes, my dear girl, most definitely wine.”

  Carl watched as Fergal opened the bottle and poured out the wine. “I have had what is undoubtedly the most important day of my career. But first, how have you got on, Fergal my boy?”

  “Well, in that I have established that Skye is a direct descendent of Claude Olivierre—”

  “We know!” Skye interrupted. “Claude’s daughter Josephine married Bernard’s son William.”

  “You know?” Fergal looked crestfallen that his news was not, in fact, news.

  “Don’t look so hard done by, Fergal. I’m sure you have the certificates and all the documentation where I only have an inscription in a book.” Carl couldn’t help smiling at the thought that a chance few words written in the front of a book, possibly as an afterthought, could give as much information as hours of internet research.

  “They married in Newport in July 1851,” Fergal continued. “The marriage was witnessed by Patience and Claude Olivierre. No sign of William’s brother, Henry, and the bride was thirty-one years old, which seems quite old.”

  “And we know why, don’t we?” Skye smiled broadly at Carl.

  “We do.” Carl smiled back. “It appears Josephine was concerned about marrying the boy she grew up with so William went travelling…” Carl started the explanation.

  “…and he was away a little longer than he had thought because he made a successful career as a geologist…” Skye tried to take up the story.

  “…and then he made his fortune finding gold in Australia.”

  “After a spell on St Helena. Yes! St Helena.”

  Fergal looked bemused as Skye and Carl took turns in explaining how much they knew about the life of William Lacey, Sir Bernard’s younger son.

  “We found a batch of letters,” Carl explained. “When William went away he wrote long letters which tell us as much about his relationships with the Olivierres as they do of his activities in his years away.”

  “Not only letters, but articles which were published and you’ll never guess what about—”

  “The geology, flora and fauna of the Crown Colony of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic,” Fergal said, grinning. “I found it as well, though online rather than the real thing. There were other papers, in fact he was one of their most prolific contributors through the late 1840s and early 1850s. I did wonder at the St Helena connection.”

  “Claude asked him to go to St Helena.”

  “How on earth do you know that?” Fergal was intrigued.

  “He said so, in his letters.” Skye was grinning. “He said lots of other things too. I don’t know what they are but there will be loads of important stuff.”

  “There is, as Skye so eloquently puts it, ‘loads of important stuff’,” Carl replied, smiling ruefully. “Loads and loads of very, very important stuff.”

  “So your study of the library has borne as much fruit as mine of the internet.” Fergal grinned.

  “Certainly concerning William and Josephine. And Claude. Oh yes, definitely about Claude.” Carl paused and it was a few moments before he continued. “But, and it’s a very big ‘but’, we must not allow ourselves to get sidetracked into daughters and younger sons, and that is who William and Josephine are.” Carl flashed a provocative smile at Skye. “Time enough for that once we have determined who Claude really was.”

  “Is anyone else hungry?” Skye asked. “Even if you aren’t I am.” She took a large pizza out of the fridge and put it in the oven.

  “I’ve managed to track down a bit more about Claude Olivierre’s early life,” said Fergal as Skye sat down.

  Carl raised an eyebrow and Fergal continued. “I should say I’ve found a reference to him but before we get too excited I should tell you that it doesn’t really ring true.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s difficult to put into words and seems rather silly really, but take the notice of his birth. We already know about Claude’s marriage and the births and deaths of his children but I couldn’t find a birth. Registration of births didn’t really happen in England until 1842 but baptismal, marriage and burial records are available for the Parishes. So I looked again through all the bits and pieces my friend from the local history society had found and came across a short reference to Claude being a ‘jerseyman’. So I looked up Jersey records.”

  “Jersey. That’s interesting,” commented Carl as he sipped at his wine. “It would explain an accent, wouldn’t it? And certain foreign mannerisms? But then we mustn’t force the square of our evidence into the circle of our hypothesis, must we?”

  “Jersey records have been well kept for a lot longer than those of England. I scoured through for Olivierres in all kinds of different spellings but found only two, Claude and Jacques, described as his father.”

  “Only two?” Carl prompted.

  “Not even two really. I could find no records of the birth of Jacques Olivierre, nor any reference to anyone else with that name in any of the twelve parishes on Jersey. I know there could be any number of explanations, I mean, there will have been places I haven’t looked yet or they could have been immigrants, but as far as I can see Claude and Jacques seem to be the only Olivierres who have ever lived on Jersey.”

  “So what are you thinking?” Carl prompted after several moments of silence.

  “I’m thinking that the names were planted.”

  “You don’t think there really was a Claude Olivierre on Jersey?” asked Skye tentatively.

  “No. I don’t. It all seems very one-dimensional. Something about it just doesn’t ring true. I really went into this because I thought it could be key.”

  “It could indeed be,” Carl said encouragingly.

  “Jersey has a Land Register which contains details of pretty much every contract and transfer of property since the early seventeenth century. It’s all very traditionally French with the name of every person who has owned property on Jersey since 1602 noted, as is every property transfer, through death or sale. When a property owner died each family member is named against the proportion of the deceased’s property they acquired. I could find reference to only those two Olivierres, Jacques and Claude.”

  “When did these two exist?” Carl was beginning to pick up on Fergal’s reasons for suspicion.

  “The reference is to a property disagreement between the two, who are referred to as father and son, and an unnamed brother. It was resolved in 1810 and nothing appears in the records after that. The farm was retained by Jacques Olivierre but then there is nothing more about him. They all disappear. I could find no wills, no reference to the property being transferred though the name of its owner in 1821 was de la Haye. I could find no reference to Jacques Olivierre’s death. The list of anomalies goes on.”

  “You are suggesting that he never existed in the first place?” Carl added, his tone of voice indicating to both Skye and Fergal that that was what he had been expecting.

  “That’s what I thought,” Fergal agreed. “Especially as, again and again, any reference to the Olivierres appears at the bottom of a page and appears to have been written by a different hand than the items above.”

  “Suspicious certainly, but not conclusive. You have photos of course.”

  Fergal handed his phone over to Carl, who looked at a number of pictures before handing it back, making no comment.

  “I would be willing to bet a great deal of money that those references were planted in the records to establish some sort of backstory for the man who was known as Claude Olivierre.”

  “But were never followed up on,” Skye added.

  “Exactly,” added Fergal, “Either because ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ were, thought there was no need to continue the charade or because no one knew about it.”

  “Enough of your youthful conjecture,” Carl interrupted. “Well done young man. I think it is reasonable to conclude that Claude Olivierre never existed in Jersey though, when we have more of the broad picture, we may see more.”


  “What do you want me to do tomorrow?” Fergal asked. “I can’t see much more mileage in Claude and I’m worried about Bernard.”

  “Bernard?”

  “Well I’ve found absolutely nothing about him before he was appointed baronet and came to the Isle of Wight in 1815. Nothing. And I’ve looked in military and government records that go back into the 1770s. It really is as if he didn’t exist before then.”

  “Just as I would expect if he was an intelligence agent,” Carl said firmly. “He may have used another name, he may have been one of that small number of people who operated completely outside official channels.”

  “Which is what you think he was?”

  “Yes. And I think we will be very lucky to find anything about Sir Bernard’s career in any official documents at all. So you must concentrate on Henry Lacey,” Carl answered decisively. “His life may give us clues about what his father did and how that may or may not relate to the man called Claude Olivierre. You must find out about Henry. I’ll carry on in the library to see if there is anything about him and Skye, you can continue to fiddle about in the attic. We will reconvene at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Now, please Skye, is that ruddy pizza ready yet? I must eat and then I must sleep.”

  Chapter 10

  1878 to 1882

  Sir Henry Lacey sat in his customary seat by the fire in his club. He had a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. It was unfashionably early and he and his companion were the only two in the room. There was little conversation between them and what there was was terse as no love was lost between the man and his son.

  “How is Lady Mary?” Sir Henry had not lived under the same roof as his wife for twenty of the twenty-two years of their marriage.

  “My mother is well.”

  “Are you not celebrating your majority with her and that infernal brother of hers?”

  “I am. I return to South Audley Street after this interview which, I remind you, was at your request.”