The Ely Testament (18 page)

Bella imagined herself wielding the carving knife against Charles Tomlinson. Just as her husband was imagining himself wielding a knife against the same individual. Although, in his case, it was a smaller weapon, designed for slicing paper not meat.

Annals of a Fenland Village

W
hile all of this was going on – Mr and Mrs Chase pursuing their separate courses, the Reverend Eames contemplating his righteous anger at Charles Tomlinson – Tom Ansell was still at Phoenix House. He discovered nothing in the top-floor room, or at least nothing in the form of Alexander Lye's absent will or testament. Under the cold glass eye of the rocking horse, he rummaged through the contents of the leather trunk, uncovering deeds and indentures that were stiff with age, as well as more bills and invoices. There were bundles of correspondence, much of which dated from the previous century. The name Roderick, father to Alexander and Ernest, came up often enough, but there were other Lyes who must have been earlier family members. Some of the letters were personal, others were to do with business or land and property, or the shipment of goods. But there was no will.

Ernest Lye sent up one of the maids with a mug of mild porter. The girl asked Tom if he required any food. Perhaps unwisely, Tom said no. By three o'clock the soporific effect of the porter, the tedium of his task, the coldness of the room and the increasingly poor light were making him impatient to finish for the afternoon. Telling himself that, if necessary, he could return to Upper Fen on another day for a final look round, Tom blundered his way along the dark upstairs passages and went downstairs. He found Ernest in his study, settled in an armchair by the fire, smoking a cigar and reading.

‘No luck?'

‘Not so far. To be frank, Mr Lye, I do not believe that your brother left any kind of will or testament here.'

Ernest Lye nodded and said, ‘Well, now you can report to David Mackenzie with a clear conscience. On a different subject, Mr Ansell, did I hear that your wife Helen is a writer? I rather think that Lydia said something of the sort.'

‘Yes, she is,' said Tom. ‘That is, she has had a story published in
Tinsley's –
which is a magazine – and she is presently at work on a novel.'

‘I'm something of an author myself,' said Ernest, indicating the book in his lap.

‘You are?'

‘I have written the history of Phoenix House and of the little community which surrounds us here. I have called it
Annals of a Fenland Village
. I composed this for my own pleasure and, I hope, the edification of others. It is privately published. What I am wondering, Mr Ansell . . .?'

Ernest hesitated and Tom waited. He had an idea of what was coming next. Ernest stood up.

‘. . . is would you be so good as to take a copy and ask your wife to cast an eye over it? Not to read it from cover to cover, of course, but to glance through a few pages. I would value the opinion of a professional.'

‘I'm sure she'd be happy to do that.'

‘Perhaps she would be in a position to oblige me with her views as soon as tomorrow?'

Tom took the book which Ernest Lye was holding out. It occurred to him that perhaps this was the reason for the supper invitation on the following day. Ernest was eager for Helen's opinion of his work, which naturally meant her good opinion.

Tom left Phoenix House without seeing Lydia Lye or Charles Tomlinson again, although he noticed an extra top hat on the stand and assumed Mrs Lye's cousin was still in the house. The same lad who'd driven him over drove him back to Ely railway station in the dog cart. Tom established that his name was Davey but could get nothing more out of him. The boy did not mention again the mysterious ‘him' in the churchyard.

While he was waiting on the platform for the Cambridge train, Tom leafed through Ernest Lye's history of the house and the village. Lye was so modest or tentative about his authorship that he was merely identified as ‘E.L.' on the title-page. Tom was surprised to realize how deeply
Annals of a Fenland Village
delved into the past. There were allusions to the Germanic tribes and the Scandinavian marauders who settled the region in the Dark Ages, as well as references to Hereward the Wake and the ‘Norman interlopers' against whom Hereward led a heroic resistance. There was quite a bit about the manor house called Stilwell Manor, parts of which had been swallowed up by Phoenix House. Tom was no judge of prose style – he left that sort of thing to Helen – but it seemed to him that Ernest Lye's approach was brisk and straightforward.

As he gazed unseeing out of the window of the train carriage, Tom looked back on a day that hadn't produced much. Not produced anything, really. He felt tired and hungry. He hoped Helen had enjoyed a better time in the company of Mr John Jubb.

Back at the Devereux, he found Helen in good spirits. Not only had she been taken on a thorough tour of some of the Cambridge sights, but in a coffee-house she had met – ‘And this really was the most extraordinary coincidence, Tom!' – had met Mr Arthur Arnett, the editor of
The New Moon
, the magazine to which she was contributing.

‘What was he like?' said Tom.

‘You might find him a little . . . precious,' said Helen.

‘Oh,' said Tom, understanding that it was actually Helen who'd found Mr Arnett a bit precious. He told her a bit about his day and the fruitless search for the missing will, the meeting with Mrs Lye and her warm enquiries after Helen, and the invitation to Ely for the following day. He mentioned the memorable gentleman who was a guest at the house, Mr Tomlinson. Then he said, ‘Oh, I almost forgot. I have a book for you.'

He passed over Ernest Lye's
Annals of a Fenland Village
, explaining that the author was eager for Helen's opinion on his work when they met on the Sunday. To Tom's surprise, Helen seemed pleased to be asked for her views. She flicked through the pages. Her attention was caught by a page here, a paragraph there.

Tom went towards the window of their room. As yesterday, there was a large band of young men playing football in the fading light on Parker's Piece. Tom remembered something else.

‘No more mysterious notes?' he said to Helen.

She looked up from Mr Lye's book. ‘Oh, you mean like the
Macbeth
lines. I had forgotten them, almost.'

‘I expect it was a joke,' said Tom, although privately he did not believe this.

St Ethelwine's

L
ater that same evening, two men were making their way round the north side of St Ethelwine's Church in Upper Fen. One of them was Eric Fort, the occasional representative of the Camden Town undertakers, Willow & Son. The other was Charles Tomlinson, cousin to Mrs Lye and friend to Mr and Mrs Chase. Tomlinson was carrying a shuttered lantern while Fort was toting a bag.

A cold wind was rising, sending leaves skittering through the air. They could not risk showing any light, or no more than a sliver of it, so the two men felt rather than saw their way down the worn and slippery flight of steps that led to the door to the crypt. Once at the bottom they crouched in the recessed entrance. Tomlinson reached into his pocket and extracted a key. He fumbled it into the lock and, after a bit of experimental twisting, turned it.

‘How the blazes . . . how did you . . .?' said Fort.

‘Wait until we're inside,' said Tomlinson, turning the handle and pushing at the door. It opened with a slight creak, nothing more. He and Fort ducked inside. Tomlinson pushed the door to after them, and then slid back the shutter of the lantern. A yellow light spilled across mildewed stonework and on to a floor that was composed of earth and shards of stone. The roof was so low that Tomlinson had to remove his top hat. He placed it carefully by the entrance to the crypt. For once, Eric Fort was glad of his lack of height. It meant that he could keep his hat on and so protect his head from the strands of nameless material – animal? vegetable? – that hung, dripping, from the roof.

Charles Tomlinson fumbled in his coat and produced the pewter hip flask which Fort had grown quite used to seeing. He tilted his head back and seemed to gulp down most of the contents of the flask. Then he sighed happily and the little space was suddenly filled with the reek of alcohol. Fort thought it would have been companionable of Tomlinson to offer him a nip as well. Not that he would have accepted, since he drank sparingly, but the gesture would have been appreciated. Tomlinson, however, was oblivious to such things.

‘Now then, what was your question, Mr Fort?' he said.

‘It doesn't matter,' said the little man, noting the way their voices resonated in this underground chamber.

‘You are wondering how I got hold of the key to the crypt?'

Fort was aware that Tomlinson had connections in this place, that he was related to the lady in the big house. But it didn't seem likely that she would have a key to the church crypt. In any case, Fort had learned that Charles Tomlinson liked to keep his secrets and so didn't expect to be given an answer. Yet he said, ‘You must know the parson here?'

‘The incumbent of Upper Fen? As a matter of fact I do know George Eames,' said Tomlinson thoughtfully, rubbing his prominent chin. ‘Or let us say instead, that I did know George many years ago. We attended the same Cambridge college. Then we had a . . . falling-out over something and have never spoken or seen each other since. But I did approach a certain person who has access to the keys to this place. That person was easily persuaded to lend them to me for a time, and I made a copy of them.'

Eric Fort wasn't surprised. Tomlinson was good at persuading people to do what he wanted. He guessed that the ‘certain person', if it wasn't the parson, must nevertheless be someone up at the parsonage, a woman probably. Most likely, a girl. Yes, Tomlinson was a good persuader.

Fort himself had been moulded into an easily persuadable state by Charles Tomlinson ever since their first meeting in London. And now look where he found himself: in the middle of a cold, damp October evening, standing underground in a crypt in a church in a remote fenland in search of . . . God knows what.

This was the culmination of a short acquaintance which began when Tomlinson first made himself known at the undertakers, Willow & Son. Eric Fort was not a full-time employee of the firm but he was a sometimes-useful presence in their office and he grabbed hold of any little commission that came his way. As an aficionado of English funeral practices and the London cemeteries, Fort was entranced by Tomlinson's talk of how differently foreigners did things in lands which were thousands of miles away, things ranging from the horrid (the practice of suttee) to the charming (the placing of ceramics alongside the body in the ground).

Recently, Tomlinson had sparked some enthusiasm at Willow & Son with his invention of a so-called coffin-bird, a mechanical device intended to be set atop a burial mound while being operated from below by the unfortunate victim of a premature burial. But they were down here in the St Ethelwine's crypt not in pursuit of any coffin-bird. Rather, Tomlinson was engaged on a quest about which he'd been even more cagey than usual. When Fort asked, Tomlinson simply said, ‘We're going fossicking, that's what we're doing.'

It was a mark of his hold over Eric Fort that the little man had been ‘persuaded' to come out to Upper Fen as evening was drawing in, clutching his bag of implements. Fort took a train to Ely shortly after Tom Ansell arrived back in Cambridge. The two did not see each other. Once in Ely, Mr Fort hired a carriage to take him to the outskirts of the village, as per Tomlinson's instructions. If the driver saw anything odd about the request to drop his passenger on the edge of Upper Fen, he didn't show it.

While he was being driven the couple of miles to the village, Eric Fort huddled up against the cold and thought of the odd twists and turns which his life was taking. As well as his occasional work for Willow & Son, he was presently serving two masters. There was not only Charles Tomlinson but the other gentleman for whom he was keeping watch on the Ansells, keeping watch or spying. Precisely why he was required to do this he did not know. But he was being paid for it, and Fort welcomed both the money and the employment. His wife had recently died and he did his best to distract himself with activity.

As Tom suspected, it was the undertakers' man who had been inside the hansom cab that almost knocked down Helen on the approach to Liverpool Street Station. Fort was horrified when he realized what might have happened: death or serious injuries inflicted on an innocent young lady. He ordered the driver to halt but by this time they had run a couple of hundred yards into the fog along Bishopsgate. The driver seemed confused and scarcely aware of the near-accident – Fort thought the man had been drinking – and after he'd tossed a coin and a warning in his direction, he hurried back through the murk.

To his relief, he saw that Mrs Ansell was all right. She and Mr Ansell were both on their feet and brushing distractedly at their garments. There was a policeman in attendance. Fort hung back among the bystanders. Still keeping a discreet distance he observed the Ansells enter the station, then, after purchasing tickets, go into the buffet. Fort would have welcomed a drink himself to steady his nerves but he decided to take advantage of the delay. He caught an earlier train to Cambridge and, knowing their destination, was settled in the lobby of the Devereux Hotel by the time the Ansells arrived. There he overheard their encounter with the solicitors' clerk, Mr John Jubb.

Afterwards, it was Fort whom Helen glimpsed on the streets of the town. And as it grew dark over Parker's Piece, it was Fort who sought out the anonymous terraced house in the anonymous road where his other employer was waiting. There, in the parlour, he gave his report, as you have heard. He was in earnest when he asked the man whether any harm was intended towards the Ansells and he was reassured, or partly reassured, by the other's reply. It wasn't Tom Ansell that Eric Fort cared about, although the solicitor seemed a good enough fellow. No, it was Mrs Ansell. He had been taken with her from the moment he glimpsed her, veiled as she was, by the Egyptian gate at Abney Park cemetery. For Fort, no woman looked more handsome than when she was garbed in mourning clothes.