The Devlin Diary (41 page)

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you home soon,” she says. She’s placed her own cloak over him, but his shivering has grown worse. He seems on the verge of losing consciousness, but he rouses himself and tries to rise up on his uninjured arm.

“Hannah,” he says, “your eyes…”

“Shhh, my love, not now. Rest easy. There will be plenty of time for that kind of talk.”

“No, I mean…your eyes…your headaches.” He stops, struggling for breath. “You need spectacles,” he says, and closes his eyes.

Fifth week of Michaelmas term

“S
O IT WAS
Maitland all along,” Claire said. She and Andrew sat at the Wren-designed table in R bay with Hannah’s diary between them.

“Gone ’round the bend with passion and rage,” Andrew said, nodding. “It’s clear he loved the princess, though it seems a twisted kind of love. But why did he believe that all those men were conspiring against her? Why would King Charles conceal the truth of his own sister’s death?”

“Maybe he was afraid that if he accused the Duc d’Orleans of murder, he would alienate King Louis.”

“Except that Charles adored Henriette-Anne. One would think that he’d be willing to endure a bit of a cold shoulder from Louis for something as important as punishing his sister’s murderer.”

“But what if the price of justice was war? England could never have won a war against France.”

“I don’t think Louis would have declared war on England just to keep the Duc d’Orleans from the executioner,” Andrew said, “no matter how much he loved and indulged his brother. But one never knows. We’ll certainly never know unless we find the sequel to this diary.”

They had come to the Wren to put the diary back where it belonged, but once they’d arrived they’d felt a distinct disinclination to do so, perhaps because it had left them with so many unanswered questions. Had Edward survived? Had he and Hannah fallen in love? Had she been allowed to practice medicine, or had she been forced to give it up?

Also unanswered was the meaning of the photocopied page found on Derek Goodman’s body. Over a week had passed, and the police still hadn’t made an arrest. More than a few Trinity fellows groused that Derek Goodman’s death was really just an accident after all; with their investigation, the police had done nothing but tarnish the reputation of their school.

The only way to learn the answer to most of these riddles was to find another of Hannah’s journals, hopefully one that began soon after the first ended. And there was no other way to find it than to search the contents of R bay.

“I’ll start on the upper shelves,” Andrew offered, “if you’ll take the lower.”

For the next few hours they spoke little except for brief exclamations of hope that were quickly dashed or vague mutterings about how, honestly, there were really too many books in the world. A belief that was disregarded when either of them came across something truly fascinating. Andrew spent more time than was necessary poring over
A systeme of anatomy: illustrated with many schemes
by Samuel Collins, Doctor in Physick; Claire spent a rapt quarter hour with
An essay on the art of deciphering
by John Davys. Usually a soft “ahem” from the other was enough to remind them of what they were there to do. By the end of the afternoon, they’d scouted every book that looked even remotely like Hannah’s diary without finding its sequel, or anything else written by her.

“So much for the Barclay collection,” Hannah said. “Who is Barclay, anyway?”

“The Earl of Barclay, I believe. If memory serves, his collection was left to the school in the early nineteenth century.”

“So how did the Earl of Barclay end up with Hannah’s diary?”

“A good question, but not one I’m sure we’ll be able to answer. Back
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the collections bequeathed to the Wren usually came from people who had carefully compiled a private library and didn’t want the books to be dispersed or destroyed. Later on, even though the library was filled to capacity, the college still took in donations—only now they tended to be the result of someone’s cleaning out the attic, and were comprised not only of books but miscellanea. In fact, in the early nineteenth century, the Wren Library was rather like a giant cabinet of curiosities, displaying rare coins, archaeological finds, Egyptian mummies, a collection of globes, and locks of Newton’s hair. Tourists would come in to see not only the books, but these other rarities.”

“Where is all that stuff now?” Claire asked.

“Most of it has been sent off to the appropriate museums. However, I think at least one surviving lock of Newton’s hair is still here.”

“Where?”

“Downstairs in the archive.”

So the rumors were true: there were storage rooms beneath the school that housed the college’s treasures. “The archive?” Claire asked hopefully.

“You don’t believe those stories about gold bullion and precious jewels, do you? It’s not a pirate’s cave; there are more old papers than anything else. I’ve toiled away in the archive before, and to be honest it’s not all that pleasant. It’s bloody cold, and there are—” Andrew stopped midsentence.

“There are what?”

“Spiders. Hold on.” The faint vertical line between Andrew’s brows grew deeper as he searched his memory. “While I was researching the Rye House Plot—which is the name given to a failed conspiracy to assassinate King Charles in 1683—I came across an intriguing story about Thomas Clifford. I never followed it up, though, as it happened long before the Rye House Plot began and wasn’t directly connected.”

“Who’s Thomas Clifford?”

“He was lord treasurer from 1672 to ’73. He started out as a lowly squire from Devonshire, but he became Arlington’s protégé and so was often in attendance on the king. The king gradually came to rely
upon him; in 1672, Clifford was the one who proposed the Stop of the Exchequer to raise money for the Dutch War, for which Charles was grateful. The king subsequently made him Baron of Chudleigh and appointed him treasurer.

“It was a decision that made Arlington furious, but Charles knew better than to hand the keys to the treasury to someone as profligate as Arlington. The result, however, was that mentor and protégé were enemies forever after, and though both were members of the king’s council and part of the Cabal, they were constantly at each other’s throats. Although neither was in office long enough to triumph. Not long after Hannah’s diary ends, both Arlington and Clifford were toppled from power.”

“What happened?”

“In the spring of 1673, Parliament repealed the king’s Act of Indulgence, which allowed greater freedom of worship in England, and passed something called the Test Act. It was a repudiation of the religious tolerance the king had tried to encourage, and a direct attack on Catholics in England. Every office holder was required to take various oaths of allegiance and public communion in the Church of England. Clifford, Lord Arlington and even James, Duke of York, resigned their government posts rather than renounce their Catholic religion. Not long after giving up his office, Clifford was found dead.”

“How did he die?”

“That’s what’s so intriguing—no one seems to be quite sure. He died in his own bedroom, that much is certain, but the circumstances surrounding his death are rather murky. John Evelyn, a close friend, hinted at suicide. The first earl of Shaftesbury, another member of the Cabal, swore that Clifford had once told him that his horoscope had foretold that he would rise to be ‘one of the greatest men in England, but it would not last long, and that he would die a bloody death.’ But as we now know, by 1673 Clifford didn’t need a horoscope to convince him of that: just like Roger Osborne, Dr. Briscoe, Sir Henry Reynolds, and Sir Granville Haines, Thomas Clifford was at Dover and at Saint-Cloud the night Henriette-Anne died.”

“You think he may have been murdered?”

“Very possibly.”

“But Maitland was killed in December 1672 at the Fleet.”

“All we know for certain is that Maitland was stabbed and then fell into the river. We don’t know if he died.”

“How are we going to find out if he lived? There doesn’t seem to be a second diary. How are we going to discover what really happened?”

Andrew grinned. “The Clifford family papers are downstairs in the archive.”

“Jesus, it really is cold,” Claire said, hugging her arms to her chest and wishing she’d worn her coat.

Andrew shut the door behind them and turned on a light switch. Six fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling flickered to life. “It used to be the wine cellar,” he explained. “But it was turned into an archive when the new cellar was built under Whewell Court.”

“When was that?”

“About two hundred years ago.”

The archive seemed to be the same size as the Wren Library directly overhead, with a low ceiling that was traversed by thick wood beams. The floor was composed of large flagstones, and the walls looked as though they’d been carved out of rock. To help overcome the inherent problems arising from its aged origins, Trinity had installed an air system that reduced dust and regulated temperature and humidity. Even so, it smelled faintly cavelike: Claire detected a whiff of cool limestone with a hint of damp. Rows of sturdy metal shelves held stacks of cardboard boxes, some brown, some white. Antique oak cabinets interspersed with a few simple wood tables lined the walls. The archive was neatly kept, not quite the jumbled warehouse she had imagined it to be, and it had a homey, old-fashioned ambiance, in part because all the boxes were labeled by hand. Claire followed Andrew into the aisle marked C through E, past boxes marked Cardiff, Cedars, Chesterton, and Childers, before arriving at Clifford. The Clifford family papers took up two entire sections of shelving. Twelve boxes, Claire counted, with no dates on any of them. “When were these left to the library again?” she inquired.

“Sometime around the beginning of the nineteenth century, I believe,” Andrew replied.

“And Thomas Clifford died in 1673? That’s well over two hundred years of papers.” On Andrew’s face she saw the same hesitation she suddenly felt: it was a very big haystack they were diving into, without any real assurance that a needle was even in there.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

On the one hand she knew it would be sheer tedium; on the other was the possibility of finding answers to one or two of their questions. “Absolutely,” she said, even though her fingers were already cold. “The question is, where do we start?”

“At the beginning, of course.” Andrew reached up to remove the highest box on the left. “It stands to reason that the oldest papers would be stored here.”

It was a reasonable assumption, but unfortunately not one that was shared by the person who had organized the collection. But perhaps “organized” wasn’t the correct word for the state in which they found the papers. Even after examining the contents of the first four boxes, they could discover no rhyme or reason to the way the papers were kept. They found a jumble of tax records and ledgers from the family estate at Ugbrooke, bundles of letters to various Cliffords unfortunately not named Thomas, a few small, well-loved books of poetry, the circa 1764 notebooks of a schoolboy named Henry Clifford, age ten, and a large family Bible from the century before. Inside the front cover, Thomas Clifford’s date of birth and death were written in a small, precise hand, along with Thomas’s numerous children and many descendants, about three generations’ worth.

Andrew pointed to the date next to Thomas Clifford’s name. “Fourteenth of August, 1673.”

“Then how could Maitland possibly be responsible?” Claire asked. “Even if he lived after falling into the Fleet, Hannah knew enough about his crimes to have him condemned to death. He would have been taken to Tyburn long before August.”

“It certainly seems so,” Andrew agreed.

They continued sorting through boxes while Claire pondered an
odd truth: while she and Andrew Kent worked together, they got on spectacularly well. They shared many of the same enthusiasms and interests, toiled in mutual harmony, communicated well, and in general were at their most pleasant. But the moment things became more personal, it all went awry. Claire had the distinct feeling that if she tried to broach a personal subject—say, why she had been kissing Derek Goodman that night—she would encounter a wall of English reticence. How could they get beyond it if they couldn’t talk about it?

She stole a glance at Andrew. He was riffling through a packet of what looked like eighteenth-century legal documents, brow knitted in concentration, that stray lock of hair falling unnoticed across his forehead. Intense, intelligent, attractive, and sexy, in an understated, professorial sort of way. In all honesty, it wasn’t just his restraint she feared. What if she tried to discuss their relationship—what else could she call it?—and he told her he was still involved with Gabriella Griseri? She’d look like a fool then, and she’d have to avoid him for another six months. No, better not to say anything at all.

By the time they set box number nine on the table and opened it, Claire was realizing just how cold the archive was and that dinner was about to be served upstairs in the hall. She was on the verge of suggesting they take a break when she dug up a sheath of yellowing papers bound by a slender red ribbon. The date caught her eye first—11 October 1672—then the list of names: Countess Castlemaine, Mlle. de Keroualle, Duke of Monmouth, Nell Gwyn, Prince Rupert, Madame Severin. Along the right-hand side, next to each name, was a series of monetary figures: £700, £500, £1,200.

Claire set the bundle on the table in front of Andrew. “Look at this.” He quickly scanned the top page and untied the ribbon. Underneath were a dozen or so similar pages; not identical, but with the same roster of names, with varying amounts of money listed next to each.

“There are weekly intervals between each of these documents,” Andrew pointed out. “All of them dated 1672.”

“Almost as if it were a payroll,” Claire added.

“It
is
a payroll,” Andrew said decisively. “A secret payroll. Everyone
on the list is very close to the king—his mistresses, his son, his cousin. It would have caused quite a stir if anyone realized that the king was giving money to his, well, let’s call it extended family—directly from the treasury.”

“Maybe it wasn’t directly from the treasury,” Claire offered. “What if this was funded by another source of revenue entirely? You said that the king made Clifford a baron for the Stop of the Exchequer. What if that wasn’t the only reason he was given a title and named lord treasurer?”