Authors: Charles Palliser
‘A very good question. This is one of the most original elements of the old gentleman’s way of life. He admits her at seven and she makes his breakfast. He leaves the house at half-past seven, locking her in.’
‘She is locked in all day?’
‘Until he returns for his luncheon at noon. And all the windows are barred by shutters which are locked so that she cannot let anyone in. The old woman has a few hours’ leave in the afternoon for her employer’s dinner is brought by a waiter from an inn nearby. It arrives punctually on the stroke of four. So he opens the door only at those times: seven, four, and six when Mrs Bubbosh returns and he goes back to the bank. He comes home at nine for his supper and she goes home.’
‘When I met him yesterday he mentioned his dinner. I thought he said he was expecting it, and yet it must have been long after four for I left here at a quarter past when your colleague closed the Library.’
Quitregard smiled. ‘I think you must have misunderstood him. I assure you that any alteration in his daily routine would be widely talked about in the town.’
‘The rigidity of his daily round intrigues me. I wonder if there is something in his past that he is trying to protect himself from.’
The young man looked at me quizzically.
‘People sometimes attempt to shield themselves from painful memories by adopting a fixed pattern in their lives.’ At the worst time in my life I had turned myself into a figure on an old clock – popping up from my desk or out from my study merely for meals, lectures and tutorials. The youthful librarian clearly had no idea what I was talking about, so I dropped the subject. ‘How long has he led that life?’
‘He has been miserly and solitary all his life, but it was about eight or nine years ago that he started to take such elaborate precautions.’
‘If he has no relatives, what does he plan to do with all his carefully guarded wealth?’
‘The town would love to know the answer to that.’
‘Has the town no conception at all?’ I asked with a smile.
‘The town suspects – and certainly hopes – that he will leave it to the Cathedral Foundation for the benefit of his old school. He holds it high in his somewhat flinty affections for he had a difficult childhood and one or two of the masters at the school were kind to him.’
The Cathedral clock sounded the hour and I stood up. ‘Well, this has been very pleasant but I must return to work.’
Quitregard also rose to his feet. ‘You are going to continue to search in the undercroft?’
‘Indeed,’ I said, surprised by his question after what I had told him.
He hesitated for a moment as if he was on the point of saying something he found awkward, but then he laughed and said: ‘I’m afraid it will be cold. Pomerance has not arrived to light the fires yet. He knows Dr Locard is as a rule busy with the Chapter meeting on Thursdays and is usually late that day.’
I thanked him for the coffee and went down to the heaps of mouldering manuscripts and resumed my search. Quitregard’s question had seemed idle enough but it made me wonder: was this arduous search the right course of action? Something had begun to occur to me even while I was talking to the young man. The Librarian’s strange conduct in cancelling his invitation, breaking his appointment and, Quitregard had implied, withdrawing the assistance of his staff, had made me start to wonder if Dr Locard – so obsessed with scholarly rivalry and elaborate bluffs and counter-bluffs – could be envious of my discovery that Grimbald’s manuscript might be in this building. Could it be that he had decided that he would find the manuscript himself? As Mrs Sisterson’s unguarded words had implied, it might be humiliating to him to have such an important discovery made under his own nose by an outsider, and he and his assistants were about to start cataloguing the remaining material quite soon. Austin had warned me about his ambition and, he had implied, his unscrupulousness, and although I had accepted the former I had declined to see the latter quality in him. Had I been naive? Had Dr Locard deliberately given me advice that would lead me into wasting my time? Had he, in fact, done to me what he had convinced me Pepperdine had done to Bullivant? Could it be that he had decided to enter the field of Anglo-Saxon scholarship and that was why he had read my article and Scuttard’s response – which was otherwise a surprising coincidence?
All morning I sorted through piles of cobwebbed and crumbling manuscripts, my task made harder by the fact that Pomerance failed to appear – although he could have shared only the physical and not the intellectual part of my labours. At noon I left the Library, tramping with difficulty through the snow which had by now been trampled into slush and then frozen into a mass of icy mud and stones. I went to take my luncheon at the inn to which I had gone the evening before, though this time I did not enter the public-bar. When I returned at a little after one I found Quitregard making coffee and accepted his invitation to share it with him.
Just as the kettle boiled Pomerance burst in crying: ‘The Guv’nor’s won! Sheldrick’s down. They’ve knifed him properly. He’s cat’s meat now. He’ll have to sack himself. All the fellows were talking about it.’ Then he stopped suddenly at the sight of me and his long bony face turned quite crimson.
Quitregard smiled. ‘Sit down and have a cup of coffee, Pomerance.’ The young man slumped into a chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. ‘He’s just come from choir practice,’ he explained to me. ‘Where I understand singing occurs in the occasional pauses in the flow of gossip.’
‘I say, that’s not fair. The choirmaster is a real dragon. He makes us work jolly hard.’
‘Then perhaps I should emulate his dragon-like qualities.’
‘That reminds me,’ Pomerance said, ‘I won’t need to have tomorrow afternoon off.’
‘But what about the service for the organ?’
‘Oh, that has been cancelled.’
Quitregard looked at him in astonishment.
‘There’s something rum up with the Cathedral,’ Pomerance explained. ‘So the organ will be out of use from after Evensong tonight.’
‘Something rum?’ Quitregard echoed. ‘Can’t you deploy the resources of the English language with a little more finesse, Pomerance?’
The young fellow shrugged to indicate that he knew no more.
‘The workmen may have done some slight damage to the base of a pier,’ I said, delighted to be able to contribute some information about his native town that Quitregard did not have. Gratifyingly, the young man turned to me in surprise. With a flourish I added: ‘And there’s a mysterious smell.’
Pomerance wrinkled up his nose. ‘Yes, it’s utterly foul. It was beastly having to sing when you wanted to keep your mouth shut.’
‘I can’t believe you’ve ever wanted to keep your mouth shut since you drew your first breath,’ Quitregard said. ‘But when will the service take place?’
‘Probably next week.’ The youth glanced quickly at me and then turned back to his colleague: ‘And by then it’s very likely that there will be a new organist.’
Quitregard smiled. ‘Possibly. We will see.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s time for me to return to my labours. My somewhat hopeless labours.’
Quitregard glanced at Pomerance. ‘Go and start copying yesterday’s work into the register, like a good fellow.’
The young man drained his cup and got up.
‘I missed you this morning, Mr Pomerance,’ I said with ironic politeness. ‘Will you be able to come down and give me a hand later?’
‘Oh no,’ he said immediately. ‘The Guv’nor says I’m not to any more.’ Then he caught Quitregard’s eye and reddened.
‘Hurry along now, old chap,’ his older colleague said mildly and the youth walked down to the other end of the long gallery.
I waited for Quitregard to say something but he seemed to be lost in his thoughts. To break the silence I asked: ‘Are the reverend canons really so fierce with each other?’
He smiled. ‘They are for the most part honest and intelligent men who find it curiously easy to attribute to their colleagues the most heinous motives.’
‘I know the truth of that from my own college. It’s extraordinary how a group of entirely honourable men can come to see each other as unprincipled demons simply because they take a different position on some issue.’
‘And almost invariably their suspicions are unjustified.’
‘I believe I can guess what the real issue is in this case.’
He looked at me in astonishment. ‘Can you?’
‘It’s universal, is it not?’
‘Is it?’ He turned away to sort out the used crockery.
‘It is widely known that most of the Thurchester canons are High – the Dean especially – but that others are on the Evangelical wing. Every Chapter in England has such a division.’
He turned back to me and nodded pleasantly. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘I assume Dr Locard is High?’
‘Vertiginously.’
‘But Dr Sheldrick is Low,’ I suggested.
He nodded. ‘Almost perfectly horizontal.’
‘Well, there is the whole explanation. I imagine the canons have been bickering – I beg their pardon, disputing – for years about the usual issues of incense and vestments and anthems and so on. But presumably something much more serious has been debated today.’ When he said nothing I asked: ‘As the Chancellor, does Dr Sheldrick have any responsibility for the Choir School?’
‘Not directly,’ he replied, glancing up curiously. ‘But one of his duties is to oversee the Headmaster’s conduct of it.’
‘And has the Headmaster’s conduct been questionable?’
‘It has certainly been questioned.’
I was longing to quiz him: what accusations had been made against Dr Sheldrick and why was he apparently being forced to resign if he had merely been negligent in his supervision of the Headmaster? Was there a connection with the mysterious theft from his house on Tuesday evening? But it was clear that I was putting the young man in an increasingly awkward position. I permitted myself one carefully phrased enquiry: ‘It is Dr Locard who has been foremost in insisting that the Chapter take action?’
He smiled. ‘Dr Locard has shown characteristic resolution in what he sees as his duty.’
‘I can believe that he is very resolute,’ I said. ‘And I believe he has a somewhat sceptical vision of human nature.’
‘Perhaps at times too sceptical.’ He stopped and looked at me nervously. ‘If I may speak for a moment with perfect frankness, relying on your discretion ...’
He broke off.
‘You may rely on it completely,’ I responded.
‘I believe that Dr Locard has a tendency to over-complicate matters, and especially the motives of others.’ He paused for a moment and then said cautiously: ‘His scholarship is somewhat combative because of that. For example, with the greatest respect to him, I’m not sure that I agree with his interpretation of Pepperdine’s letter.’
‘Indeed? You don’t accept that Pepperdine tried to mislead Bullivant?’
‘I think he unintentionally pointed towards the undercroft simply because of the ambiguity of what he wrote.’
‘So where do you believe he found the manuscript?’
‘On the upper floor.’
‘But almost all the manuscripts up there have been catalogued.’
‘Almost all. But if it turns out not to be among those that are still uncatalogued, you will have lost very little since if it is in the undercroft, you won’t find it in the next day or two except by the merest accident.’
His logic was impeccable. I wondered if Dr Locard had deliberately pointed me in the wrong direction, and then it occurred to me that the young man certainly suspected that that was the case. ‘You have given me excellent advice. I’m very grateful.’
He could not hide his pleasure and insisted upon accompanying me to the upper floor. There he showed me which shelves held the uncatalogued manuscripts and it was immediately obvious that I could search through them in two or three days. It was so much pleasanter up here – dust-free, light, clean and very much warmer. The conditions in which I was working as well as my prospects for success had been transformed.
I began taking down heavy bound volumes of manuscripts and depositing them on the table and searching through them. After a couple of hours I had examined four and was becoming weary of sitting. I stood up and walked round the table to stretch my legs and as I glanced at the books in the section that had been catalogued, my eye fell on three large folios on one of the uppermost shelves. I climbed onto a chair and saw, written on the spines in a hand characteristic of the late seventeenth century, the words: ‘Records of the Chancery Court of the Liberty of St John’ followed in each case by a set of dates: 1357–1481; 1482–1594; and 1595–1651. They must refer to the long-abolished court – the equivalent of a magistrate’s – which had jurisdiction over the Cathedral Close and I wondered if I might find a reference to the incident in which Limbrick’s father had died and Gambrill been injured. In the hope of satisfying my curiosity and as a brief respite from my labours, I lifted the third volume down and opened it upon the table.
I leafed quickly through it and saw that for each adjudication someone – presumably the clerk of the court – had written a brief account of the charge, the evidence given by witnesses and the decision of the Chancellor. I found the date 1615, which I reckoned must be the earliest that the incident could have occurred, and began to read more slowly. And then, under the year 1625, I found what I had been looking for: Alice Limbrick, relict of the late Deputy Mason of the Cathedral, had laid an information against John Gambrill that he did ‘by negligence or malice’ bring about the death of her husband, Robert Limbrick. She alleged that they had quarrelled because Gambrill had
conceived the desire to take for himself the office of Mason, which office had been promised to her husband
, and had therefore accused her husband – without good cause – of cheating the Cathedral authorities and endangering his fellows by supplying wood of poor quality for the timber bracings.
There then followed a brief account of the accident given by two fellow-workmen who had seen it and by Gambrill himself. Presumably because the three gave the same account, the clerk had not differentiated between their testimony. Gambrill and Limbrick had been working on the vaulting of the tower above the central crossing when the accident had occurred:
They were raising dressed Stone by their Engin when by the slipping of the Knot on a Rope, John Gambrill missed his Footing and fell, to the Destruction of Robert Limbrick who was on high and was thereby grievously injured, his Body broken in an Hundred Places.
The account was strangely unclear but Gambrill’s fall must have brought down the other man in some way.