The Claresby Collection: Twelve Mysteries (2 page)

“Pretty much,” Laura nodded. “Sextus Propertius, a poet.”

“Okay; so we deduce that Gerald had money on his mind when he, or someone else, composed the painting. And there is an anomaly, you say?”

Laura nodded. Rupert studied the picture further and then said, “I’m guessing that there is something odd about the house, but I can’t work out what. Bear with me whilst I take it outside and compare art with reality.”

Laure trailed behind Rupert as he bounded down the stairs, out through the front door and across the overgrown lawn to the place where Gerald was shown in relation to the house. He looked from painting to house a few times with rapt interest.

“Fascinating to see how little it has changed over the centuries. The chimneys are different, which could be accounted for by decay or strong winds. Those stables have gone and the entrance has been rebuilt, but other than that, remarkably unaltered.”

“And the deliberate error?” pushed Laura.

“Well, the extra window on the front of the house, of course.”

Laura nodded. “Yes, to the left of the entrance – the first area of wall at the far end before the angle where the library is set forward. There are only three windows there. That has traditionally been a music room.”

“So, where the fourth window is shown – is there a secret blocked up room?”

Laura shook her head. “No, the extra window is set in an area of wall that is simply windowless. Exactly behind it is that nice chintz settee. Come back inside and I’ll show you.”

The two of them made their way down the moonlit lawn and inside to the music room. Laura turned on the light. It was a pretty, cosy room with a large piano, bookshelves and a number of tall backed chairs and a selection of settees with floral covers. There were indeed three large windows to the front – two at one end, then a gap, then another window. Inevitably Rupert started tapping at the wall and floor around the area where the window had been shown in the painting, pushing the settee away from the wall to do so. Laura watched him indulgently for a few minutes before saying, mildly;

“I can promise you that there is nothing there. The wall is of normal thickness, there are no hidden spaces either inside or out. This part of the house has been taken apart to look for the treasure because of that painting. The only result is that, the walls having been rebuilt, this is the one part of the house that does not leak. Other than that...” she shrugged her shoulders dismissively.

“Okay,” conceded Rupert. “But the position of the window must have some relevance, otherwise why bother drawing our attention to the spot. Let’s go and take a look at the other painting.”

The second painting showed a view looking away from the house to two low hills a few miles away. The view had changed very little in substance, although areas of trees had been cleared, a road constructed and a few more houses had appeared in the distance. In the foreground of the picture, very conspicuous and spoiling both the composition and the pleasant impression of a landscape at sunrise, was a gravestone in the shape of a cross.

“Before you ask,” Laura intervened, “There is not and, to my knowledge, never has been a stone or monument in that particular place. Although the view of the sunrise over the hills is painted from Claresby Manor the gravestone, had it been there, would only have been about a hundred yards from the house itself. Nobody would have buried treasure there in full view. And, as before, generations of my family have dug holes there just in case: nothing!”

Rupert was squinting at the picture. “Something was written on the grave though, but is has darkened so much over the years that I can’t make out what it says.”

“Turn the picture over,” advised Laura. “My great grandfather transcribed a version there when it could still be made out.”

Rupert turned the picture over. A scrawling dark pen had written the words –
To the furthest reach where the sun does not reach
. “What are we supposed to make of that?” he mused.

“We have generally interpreted it as meaning death – or the state of death. You are welcome to form another opinion, but I doubt if you will get any sense out of it. Like I say, we have gone down this path before and only found a dead end.” Laura yawned. “Anyway, I hope you don’t mind an early night. You can help yourself to the blue bedroom – you know where everything is.”

“Okay.” Rupert placed the picture down and gave Laura a brotherly hug and kiss. Only his wistful glance after her as she left the room suggested feelings other than the purely platonic.

It was still dark when Rupert crept into Laura’s room. Although purposeful, he paused a moment to relish the sight of her sweet face, peaceful on the pillow, her hair glowing in the soft moonlight. However softened he was by this vision, it did not stop him from gently shaking her shoulder and softly calling her name.

“What? What is it?” Suddenly awake, Laura sat up with a jump and stared at Rupert. “What’s happened?” she asked.

“It’s all right, don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s just that I have worked out the clues. I’m pretty sure that we can find the treasure – it’s just that it might help if we watch the dawn.”

“Dawn? It’s still pitch black,” grumbled Laura, nevertheless getting out of bed and slipping a dressing gown over her white cotton nightdress. “It must be about four in the morning!”

The two of them, still in night clothes, stumbled downstairs and out into the damp of a chilly pre-dawn. Fortunately the sky was clear, so there was the prospect of actually seeing a sunrise.

“You see,” explained Rupert as he dragged a wooden bench over to a spot on the lawn just in front of the house where the music room was, “I realised that we just weren’t thinking far enough – literally. Old Gerald made it clear that the spot where the window wasn’t had significance. He also showed the dawn over the hills. Put those together and we have to follow the trajectory to the furthest reach where the sun does not reach. I think he means the most distant point of the grounds of Claresby Manor on the west side of the house. Wait, see the sun come up and it should make sense.”

The situation of the hills in the East with just a small space between them meant that any dawn light would first penetrate that gap. As it did so, they both saw the sun first strike the house at an angle, where the window had been put in the painting. In response, Rupert leapt up and marked the angle at which the sun hit the house.

“Now it is a case of geometry,” he said, happily. “We need a map to Claresby Manor and its grounds. I hope the boundaries haven’t changed over the centuries. I’m going to follow the angle and continue the line through the house, out the back and to the furthest reach on the shadow side of the house!”

Laura obligingly provided map, ruler and pencil and even went to the cellar to find a couple of spades. She was not the smallest bit excited by Rupert’s discovery; indeed she had long since given up any hope of rescuing Claresby Manor. Despite her reluctance, she was soon to be seen walking through the dewy damp of the grass, into the woods and to the mixture of broken down wall and wire fence that made up the boundary of Claresby. It was a pleasant, soft light now and the sun even bestowed a modicum of warmth to the air. Rupert had located the spot he wanted, but looked about him as if for some kind of confirmation. The mature beauty of the house could be seen through the trees and up a rise, and they were indeed where the sun did not currently reach. The ground was uneven and pieces of wall and fallen stone gathered in rough hollows. At last Rupert found a place that pleased him.

“It has all pretty much returned to nature and Gerald must have meant any hiding place to blend in with the landscape, but I still think that you can imagine that there is a slight rise in the ground and a dip where an entrance might be – a bit like where the ice house is over the other side.”

“Well, I’m inclined to be sceptical,” replied Laura, “but, yes, I guess there could be. Do we have to dig?”

“Of course.”

Laura sighed but picked up her shovel. If she was reluctant to begin with, her reluctance soon faded. In all the time she thought about buried treasure being in or around Claresby she had imagined a chest buried in the ground. It was soon clear that they were uncovering something quite different. Rupert was correct; there was an underground structure, rather like an ice house. By the time they had uncovered the few steps down and the rotted wooden door the two of them might have been exhausted, but they were driven by adrenalin. Laura had gone back to the house for a flask of coffee and sandwiches to sustain them and had also brought out a couple of powerful torches. Once the earth was cleared from the entrance, Rupert was able to pull the damp wood of the door away with his bare hands and force it open on its rusty hinges, the lock itself having virtually fallen away. What met their eyes in the torch light was a beautifully constructed set of steps leading to a room below. Roots had broken through the stonework in places and hung eerily down, but other than that the space was remarkable dry and undisturbed with only a few earth falls.

“It looks sound,” ventured Rupert cautiously. “I think it is safe for us to go down.”

“Well, I’m not going to go away and leave it unexplored now!” exclaimed Laura, her cheeks flushed with excitement and anticipation.

“Let me go first – and step carefully.”

The space below was just enough for two adults to stand up in. There was certainly treasure – two big chests and a shelf carefully stocked with gold and silver plate. But there was something else. Slumped in one corner was a skeleton, readily identified by the round helmet still on the skull as one of Cromwell’s roundhead soldiers.

“Well,” sighed Laura. “It looks like we’ve solved one mystery and found another!”

Pickled Toad with Diamonds

Rupert Latimer stared at the object with disgust barely concealed on his large, rather ugly face.

“What is it?” he ventured finally.

“What does it look like?” countered Laura Mortimer, rather irritably, as if she had expected a more enthusiastic response.

“Well,” proceeded Rupert cautiously, “it looks like a pickled toad with diamond eyes.”

“There!” said Laura, in a rather patronising tone, “you retain your reputation as a solver of puzzles. It is a work by Sebastian Fullmarks entitled “Pickled Toad with Diamonds”. Apparently a toad traditionally represents evil or a demon and diamonds the opposite; purity and light. Hence the whole work is deemed to express the fundamental spiritual dichotomy of life itself: the choice between light and dark, good and evil – or a dangerous symbiosis of them both!”

“Oh,” replied Rupert, clearly underwhelmed. “It’s rather ugly: did it cost much?”

“I refuse to answer,” replied Laura with dignity. “It is a work of art and therefore price is not important.” A statement such as this is always euphemistic for a price tag that would pay the national debt of a small third world country and, indeed, there had been seven figures on the label when Laura had first laid eyes upon it.

“Is it an investment?” questioned Rupert, trying to extract some logic from Laura’s actions in purchasing the obnoxious item.

“Yes; exactly. Since we found the Claresby treasure I have all this money sloshing about and I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. There is no point in putting all the money in the bank in these days of credit crunch and fiscal meltdown. I thought I’d put some into object d’art so that if the world’s banks collapse, I still have something.”

“You might just as well have left the treasure where Gerald put it,” commented Rupert.

Laura quelled him with a look and, as a semi-permanent guest in her house, Rupert was in no position to level any criticism at her life-choices. The two had met in their first term at Cambridge when both were struggling with homesickness and the shock of actually being expected to work for their grades. Rupert was in Gonvilles and Caius (which Laura dismissed, rather crudely, as sounding like a venereal disease) whilst Laura was very nearly of Newnham College studying History of Art. In fact she had dropped out after her first term and returned to her beloved Claresby Manor, whilst Rupert had gamely stuck out his three years of Archaeology and Anthropology. The friendship had endured and when, as a first class honours graduate in Arch and Anth, Rupert had inevitably found himself making an inadequate living selling crosswords over the internet, Laura had invited him to share her very large and rather lonely house. Everybody naturally assumed that they were lovers and, as Laura was vivacious and pretty with a halo of auburn hair, Rupert rather hoped that they would eventually be proved right. In the meantime he was left pointing out to those inclined to disparage his occupation given his excellent qualifications, that it takes a genius to format crosswords for Kindle.

“At least it will give us something to talk about over the weekend,” mused Laura. “I’m beginning to doubt my wisdom in inviting Delilah Hawkes alongside Samantha Pearson; Samantha is an art critic – I think I showed you her blog “Sublime Art”. She is an outspoken adversary of everything modern, particularly installation art and anything she considers a gimmick. Delilah, on the other hand, loves anything controversial and hates what she calls “fusty” art or anything representational.”

“At least,” intervened Rupert, “they should agree in disliking your toad; it may be a gimmick, but it undoubtedly represents, well, a toad.”

“Of course,” continued Laura, pushing her hair behind her ears and ignoring him, “Floyd Bailey will argue with anyone after he’s had a few drinks – and he has always had a few drinks, even at eleven o’ clock in the morning. I do respect his constitution.”

“He is a brilliant portraitist,” conceded Rupert. “If you ever consider adding a portrait of yourself to your remaining ancestors in the gallery, he’s the man for the job: I don’t know anyone else who stands a chance of capturing the beauty of your colouring and the delicacy of your features.”

Rupert’s comment was made in a matter-of-fact tone, but it still brought a pink tinge to the porcelain skin of Laura’s pretty, oval face.