A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Wow,” Fergal said, leaning back in his chair, his hands around the hot mug. “Have we really been that horrible?”

  “I know I don’t know what to look for but then neither did either of you,” Skye continued. “We did the family tree just in case we found something. Carl said right at the beginning that it was our only lead so we followed it. Neither of you knew where to look to prove Claude wasn’t Claude any more than I did.”

  “She has a point there,” Carl conceded to Fergal.

  “Well I did find something else in those chests. You never asked me. So I didn’t tell you.”

  “You’ve found something that you think might be useful?”

  “I think so. But then what would I know?”

  “I will ignore your petulance,” Carl said as Skye left the kitchen without another word.

  “Have we really been that arrogant?” Fergal asked quietly.

  “In retrospect, and with the best of intentions, I think perhaps we may have been,” Carl admitted.

  They sat in a silence broken only by the chiming of the hall clock until Skye returned carrying an orange supermarket plastic bag.

  “We’re sorry to have taken you for granted, Skye.” Fergal was more conciliatory.

  “I’d accept this apology if I thought you really meant it,” she said as she placed the bag on the table in front of Carl. “Audrey always said that ‘sorry’ actually meant ‘I’ll change the way I do things’ so I’ll reserve judgement on whether you’re sorry or not.”

  “Well, are you going to show us what’s in that damned bag or do I have to open it myself?” Carl asked, more sharply than he meant to. He could not understand how the girl could have felt so hard done by that she would have kept anything that might be important from him.

  Skye was determined to show Carl and Fergal that she had something other than imagination, hearsay and anecdote to contribute. “You know those crates up in the attic? The ones I’ve spent a couple of days going through?” Skye leant both elbows on the table. “Everything was in boxes and old wooden fruit crates apart from three wooded chests that reminded me of the one I found in the chimney. They were nothing like as old,” she continued quickly as she noticed both Carl and Fergal looking at her sharply, “but they seemed well-made. The first one had a name painted quite clearly on the top.” She paused.

  “Well, what was the name? Get on with it,” Carl urged impatiently.

  Skye took out her phone and showed them the photograph she had taken.

  “Captain Sir Augustus B. Lacey Bart.” Fergal read quietly.

  “You told us yesterday you’d found that, along with his frankly rather amateurish attempt at investigating his family. So what is new?” Carl snapped.

  “Did you think those bits of paper were all that were in the chest?”

  Carl and Fergal looked at each other and it was Fergal who found the words first.

  “Did we?”

  “You didn’t even bother to ask what else I’d found. You moved on to Bertie’s story because that was what you’d planned to do and you weren’t going to change your plans for anything I might say were you.”

  “Well, was there anything else? You’re obviously not going to tell us without our pleading.”

  “Well it was full of documents and letters. People in the nineteenth century wrote letters all the time, didn’t they? And they kept them. What’s going to happen in years to come when the only communication people have had is by e-mail or on Facebook or Twitter or some such?” She was enjoying having their attention and was going to string out her story as long as possible. “Anyway, in the chest were just a lot of papers and letters, stuff about South Africa, though they showed that he was out there as some sort of administrator and he never fought. There was a lot about York and trains. Anyway, what I did find that is really exciting is this.”

  “At last,” Carl muttered under his breath.

  Skye took the notebook out of the supermarket carrier bag and handed it without explanation to Carl. He gave her a look of frustration that she had withheld this until now.

  “Have you opened it?”

  “Of course. If you remember you told me off for having no sense of curiosity, but I put it back exactly as it was, with the ribbon.”

  Carl slid the piece of paper from the faded pink tape that tied it to the notebook and unfolded it. He began to read. “Henry, you are the elder, you are my heir, I address you alone. Attached to this letter are the pages of my diaries with which you are now entrusted. They are to remain sealed until the fifteenth day of July in the year nineteen hundred and fifteen. You are to hand them to your eldest son on the twenty-first anniversary of his birth and he to similarly pass them to his eldest son until the due date, on which day they may be opened. Never forget that you were loved and respected by your father who entrusts this to you in the sure and certain trust you will abide by his wishes.”

  “Bloody hell!” Fergal reached over and Carl handed the letter to him. “Bernard wrote this, the original Bernard?”

  “Perhaps all is not going to remain a mystery after all,” Carl said thoughtfully.

  “What’s inside the book?”

  “It looks like code. There’s just rows of groups of numbers and letters, it all looks like gobbledegook,” Skye answered.

  Carl opened the notebook and slowly turned page after page. “This isn’t written in code. I would suggest that it is the code cipher, the key to how to interpret something else that is written in code.”

  “It will be used to decode the diaries,” Fergal said firmly.

  “What diaries?”

  “The ones the letter refers to. See, it says ‘diaries’ not ‘codebook’,” Fergal pointed out.

  “So we’re no better off.” Skye was disappointed. “I haven’t really found anything important.”

  “Was there anything that looked like a diary in the chest?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t looking, was I?”

  “Upstairs,” Carl commanded.

  The two men followed Skye up the very differing staircases from the ground floor, up to the top bedroom floor that had once been the staff’s rooms, through what looked like a cupboard door, up steep, irregular steps to a narrow landing with two doors, both open.

  “No wonder you were told not to come up here as a child,” Carl said warily. “That floor looks none too safe.”

  There was enough light from the small windows for them to see the jumble of boxes and crates.

  “Possibility of a lifetime’s research here,” Fergal said to no one in particular.

  “Which box?” Carl asked and Skye led them to Gussie’s chest.

  “Look, here’s the others. “This one’s Gussie’s.” Skye reopened the chest.

  “This one’s Bertie’s.” Fergal read the engraving on the small brass plate “Sir Augustus Albert Lacey Bt.”

  “And this one’s Sir Henry’s. Sir Henry Lacey Bt.”

  “How did they come to be here?” Carl finally asked.

  “When the baronetcy came to Bernard,” Skye answered firmly. “It’s the only explanation. Bernard must have had them brought here.”

  “That makes sense,” Fergal added. “He would have wanted everything to do with the baronetcy under his roof wouldn’t he?”

  “It rather depends what’s in them,” Carl said firmly, unhappy that he had not thought of that explanation.

  Each one opened the chest they stood by and looked through the contents.

  “I can’t see anything that looks like a diary,” Fergal said, his disappointment obvious in his voice.

  “Not even in Henry’s,” Carl added. “And that’s where they should be.”

  Skye stood up sharply, then anxiously brushing the tangle of cobwebs from her hair. “Yuck!”

  “Well we’re not going to find them here are we? Not if they aren’t in one of these three trunks,” Carl said sensibly. “Let’s go downstairs and think.”

  *

  “We have a mys
tery,” Carl said as they all settled in their chairs around the kitchen table.

  “What’s that?” Fergal asked.

  “We have missing diaries, we have a letter and a codebook all found in Sir Bernard’s grandson’s papers. Presumably Bernard handed them to Henry—”

  “He couldn’t have done, could he?” Skye interrupted.

  “No? Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Bernard died when Henry and William were still children and he wouldn’t have entrusted them to a ten-year-old boy, would he? Even if he did know he was about to kill himself.”

  When the men didn’t reply she continued as if what she said was completely obvious. “He would have given them to his friend and neighbour Claude, wouldn’t he? He would have given them all to Claude and asked him to give them to Henry when he was old enough, probably on his twenty-first birthday since that’s what he wanted his son to do.”

  “Plausible,” Carl said thoughtfully.

  “Say Claude had them.” Fergal took up Skye’s reconstruction. “He would have known what they contained so would he have given them to Henry? His friend asked him to but would he have done? From what you said you read in his letters to William it was clear he didn’t particularly trust Henry so he may not have wanted the boy to have such dynamite information. He probably thought Henry would open and read the diaries as soon as he got his hands on them.”

  “So he destroyed them? All but the one he had given to Henry?” Skye asked, desperate that Claude had not done that.

  “I don’t think he would have destroyed them, not them all anyway,” Fergal said thoughtfully.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was an honourable man and couldn’t bring himself to completely go against his friend’s wishes?”

  “Or perhaps he thought that Bernard would have told his son to expect something on his twenty-first.”

  “Well he certainly got this letter and this book at some time.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he did what his father had asked him to do in the letter.”

  “What was that?” Carl asked.

  “Well, he handed them on to his son. He must have, mustn’t he, because they were in Gussie’s chest,” Skye answered confidently.

  “Perhaps there was some good in Henry after all. He must have kept them all those years and given them to Augustus.”

  “But Augustus couldn’t give them to his son because he never knew him,” Skye added.

  “And his wife wouldn’t have known anything about it so the knowledge was lost.”

  “And the notebook stayed here, in that chest.”

  “Which was transported to The Lodge when Sir Bernard inherited the title and all that went with it.”

  “And no one knew of the existence of the other diaries. Ta da!” Skye finished the reconstruction with a flourish.

  Fergal picked up the cipher book and turned the pages. “Does this mean that the diaries are written in code?”

  “That would be entirely in character if the first Sir Bernard was the spy we think he was.”

  “But, young people, we may know now of the existence of the diaries but, I would point out, we are absolutely no nearer to finding them.” Carl picked up the notebook and turned the pages slowly while Fergal and Skye watched in dispirited silence.

  After a few moments Carl carefully teased open two sheets to reveal a small fragment of paper edged tightly near the spine of the book.

  “You very nearly missed that.”

  Carl pulled gently at the fragile paper and with some difficulty read the spidery writing. “Listen. Sir Bernard Lacey left four volumes of memoirs which tell everything. On his last day he charged me to pass them to his elder son. I regret that I could not do as he bid. I thought to destroy history but did not, rather the volumes lie hidden. I leave it to the Fates to decide if they are to be discovered and will not disclose the hiding place. I will give you just one ball of thread. Whoever you may be, wherever you are, whatever the year, in whatever circumstance lies the world in which you live, look to my Josephine’s locket. It’s signed off with the initials CO. Claude Olivierre.”

  “Ball of thread?” Skye asked, mystified.

  “You obviously had no classical education, my dear girl. A ball of thread was used to lead Theseus from the labyrinth. It means there are clues.”

  “Oh.”

  Fergal saved her by changing the subject. “He says there are four diaries. We must find them. Claude tells us that they ‘tell everything’. No wonder he couldn’t trust young Henry with the diaries. He wouldn’t give them to Henry if they’d fallen out in any way—”

  “Which they did, over who was to marry Josephine,” Skye insisted.

  “Well he wouldn’t want his secrets in Henry’s hands would he?”

  “But where are they?”

  “Look to my Josephine’s locket,” Skye repeated.

  “And how on earth do we find that?” Fergal asked.

  “Even if it still exists after, what, one hundred and fifty years?” Carl brought them down to earth. “We must think this through.”

  “He would have known that his daughter would have been long dead in 1915 so the clue must refer to something that would survive after she was gone. He wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of laying this ‘ball of thread’ if he had thought there was a chance it wouldn’t survive.” Fergal tried to approach the problem logically.

  “A portrait?” Skye suggested.

  “Excellent thinking Skye.” Carl smiled, patting her hand paternally. “Is there one?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. There aren’t any portraits of anyone hanging anywhere in the house.”

  “If one existed it would be in the attic wouldn’t it?” Fergal said reasonably.

  “Up you go again, Fergal. I’m far too old and tired to climb all the way up again. Skye, stay here please. I want to talk to you.”

  Carl said nothing for a long ten minutes in which the only sound was the hall clock striking the half hour.

  “Shall I…?” Skye was going to suggest going up to help Fergal, but Carl shook his head as soon as she opened her mouth and she stayed quiet.

  After a further five minutes Carl asked Skye, in a conversational tone, what she would do if they proved that she was descended from Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “What would I do? I can’t see it would make much difference to me. I mean, there are descendants of all these important people from history going around, living their own lives and no one knows or cares who they are.”

  “But it would be quite important to your father wouldn’t it?”

  “It would rather prick his jingoistic bubble, wouldn’t it? Has he actually any ancestors who were one hundred percent English?”

  “If I remember rightly Patience was.”

  “I’m not even sure she was. Didn’t Fergal say that Colonel Shaw’s wife was described as ‘Anglo-Indian’ and he couldn’t tell whether that meant she was part Indian or simply born in India of English parents?”

  “So it is entirely possible that there is not one ancestor who is one hundred percent English in his immediate pedigree,” Carl said thoughtfully then chuckled to himself, shaking his head gently from side to side.

  “So perhaps his great-great-great-grandfather was English. Certainly his mother was American, his father half-Welsh, his great-grandmother probably half-Corsican. The foreign connections go on and on,” Skye agreed.

  “What is provable is that there’s very little ‘English born and bred’ about him, whatever he says in all his nonsensical speeches.”

  “Do you think it would be enough to expose him and lose him the support of those who would help him?” she suggested.

  “I think perhaps it would not be enough in itself, but with the expenses debacle, perhaps it would be. But would you want his bloodline to be used by his political opponents against him? It would mean you would come under intense scrutiny as his daughter.”

  “Th
at wouldn’t bother me one bit. Honestly it wouldn’t,” she added swiftly when she saw Carl look sceptically over his glasses.

  “All we have to do then is to prove as much of it as possible beyond any reasonable doubt.”

  *

  A few moments later Fergal came in with a small picture in his hands.

  “There was a portrait of this woman when she was young but the frame was really heavy, there was a descriptive label on that which said ‘Josephine’. I think this photograph is of the same person though, obviously, somewhat older.”

  “Could there be a photograph of Josephine?” Skye asked. “Surely she was dead before photographs.”

  “Not necessarily,” Fergal answered. “When did she die?” He looked at his notes. “1888. There would be portrait photographers then, easily.”

  “Certainly, this could have been taken any time in the 1870s.” Carl tried to sound as if he knew more about the history of photography than he did.

  “Before William died in 1878?”

  “Certainly.”

  “She looks like you, Skye,” Fergal said, thoughtfully.

  “You mean I look like her. She’s a little older than me I think.” Skye grinned.

  “There’s something else that ties you to this lady who we have every reason to believe is Josephine.” Fergal stopped and Carl and Skye waited for him to continue. “Look at the pose. She’s sitting there with her hand nonchalantly on something that’s hanging around her neck.”

  “A pendant,” Carl said.

  “Just any old pendant?” Fergal asked, almost grinning with expectation. He knew the answer to his question.