War Game (21 page)

“Well, it makes a change from booze and women and fast cars,” conceded Frances. “Except the people to Charlie are likely to be revolutionary people, I suppose. The Marxist heavenly host.”

“Too right! But the point is that one bit of Charlie’s background has been edited out of the record, ostensibly by Nayler because the script was running too long. But my girl says Nayler passed it and Charlie cut it out himself. And it’s the exact bit of Charlie’s past I’ve been looking for all along—the moment when he first met his long-lost ancestor Nathaniel Parrott. Which was a case of like meeting like, I suspect; there’s no surviving portrait of Nathaniel, but if there was I’ve a hunch it’d be a dead ringer of Charlie Ratcliffe looking down on us.”

That was very possible, thought Audley. Families erupted with genius, and then slept for centuries, as the Churchills had done between the first Duke and the appearance of Jenny’s Randolph and her young Winston; no doubt they could do the same with the more uncomfortable qualities shared by Nathaniel Parrott and Charles Neville Steyning-Ratcliffe.

“I don’t know what you’re driving at now, Paul,” said Frances.

“No?” Mitchell glanced quickly at Audley. “You disappoint me, Frances.”

It wasn’t Frances who disappointed him, of course: it was that he had failed to get the same response from teacher. With someone less self-confident than Mitchell a bit of that sort of encouragement might have been in order, but it would do no harm to let him see that he’d have to get up earlier in the morning to catch David Audley in bed.

“What he’s driving at is that Charlie Ratcliffe’s interest in his ancestral treasure —and in the English Civil War—is of rather more recent vintage than he suggested to the Press. Is that it, Paul?”

“More or less.” Mitchell nodded cheerfully enough. “It’s all in the Ratcliffe file, Frances—David’s quite right, it’s not much of a dossier, but it does have a few facts. Including that he didn’t join the Double R Society until about a year ago. And, come to that, he didn’t read history at college either, it was sociology.”

“Surprise, surprise,” murmured Frances.

“No surprise, I agree. But it all adds up to a little terminological inexactitude—he was lying through his goddamn teeth. If he was so taken with the war he could have joined the Sealed Knot eight or nine years ago, never mind the Double R lot.”

Frances shrugged. “So he was busy being a flea in the establishment’s ear.”

“Telling soldiers in Ulster how to desert, and all that jazz?” Mitchell echoed her scornfully. “You think so?”

The drummers sounding the changing of the guard on the ridge and at the bridge had long finished, and for a moment only silence came in through the window. So obviously Mitchell didn’t know absolutely everything about everybody, thought Audley; he certainly didn’t know the circumstances of Frances Fitzgibbon’s widowhood and recruitment.

“And all that jazz, yes,” said Frances evenly.

“But it was a little lie, Frances dear. And it was a little
unnecessary
lie on the face of it. Because I’ve been talking to some people who know him—the last two-three years he’s been working on a post-graduate thesis on the Paris troubles of ‘68—and the thing that comes over is that he never talked about the Civil War until about a year ago. Or about his family either, come to that. He was plain Charlie Ratcliffe until then, but then he started to let slip his real name was Steyning-Ratcliffe—and that’s also when he joined the Double R Society.”

“All right.” Frances spread her hands. “So that’s when he was bitten by the Civil War bug.”

“Then why didn’t he admit it? I mean, he should have said ‘Until a year ago I’d forgotten all about the family treasure legend and I didn’t know Cromwell from a hole in the road’. But instead he said ‘I’ve been studying the period for many years, I’ve always been fascinated with its political parallels with our own revolutionary struggles’. And that just wasn’t true.”

“And what was true?” said Audley.

Mitchell looked at him triumphantly. “What was true was that about eighteen months ago he ran out of bread—he’s on an LEA research grant, which doesn’t go very far these days. So when he dropped out of circulation for a time no one thought twice about it. In any case, he’s always going over to Paris to do research and gab with his revolutionary friends there. But my little BBC girl just happened to find out what he was really doing. Quite by chance, actually, because one of her unemployed graduate friends was in on the same job … which was sorting the archives of the Earl of Dawlish and packing ‘em up ready for the Historical Manuscripts Commission to catalogue and calendar.”

“The Earl of where?” Frances sounded disbelieving.

“Dawlish. It’s down the south coast somewhere, near Torquay.”

Frances shook her head. “I’ve never heard of the Earl of Dawlish.”

“You wouldn’t have done, because the title’s been extinct since 1944. The archives have been given to the HMC by the Honourable Mrs. Somebody Someone, the last earl’s niece.”

“So what do they reveal?” asked Audley. “Get to the point, man.”

“Yes … well, the point is that the Earldom of Dawlish was created in 1690 by William III for services rendered by a certain George Dangerfield, who’d helped to raise the West Country against James II in 1688—“

Frances took a deep breath. “But—“

“Who in turn happened to be the grandson of a certain John Dangerfield— wait for it, Frances—who was the boon companion and crony of Captain Sir Edward Parrott, our Nathaniel’s piratical father. How’s that for size, then?” Mitchell smiled at them both. “And what is even more to the point is that John Dangerfield corresponded regularly with John Pym in Westminster. There are copies of letters he wrote to Pym in 1642 and 1643 in the archives, which means that he had a courier of some kind who was prepared to run the gauntlet through Royalist country.”

For a moment no one spoke, then Frances said: “But he didn’t write about the gold.”

Mitchell’s face creased with sudden irritation. “Aw—come on, Frances! What d’you want, a miracle? Look at the way it fits in—“ he raised a hand with the little finger extended “—
one
—Charlie Ratcliffe, who isn’t interested in Civil Wars or family history, gets a job sorting seventeenth-century documents;
two
—“ a second finger came up “—the documents he sorts belong to a neighbour of his gold-robbing ancestors, the Parrotts; three—Charlie is suddenly in love with history and ancestor worship;
four
—Cousin James dies;
five
— Charlie starts looking for gold, and finds it; six—“ the second thumb came up “—Charlie quietly suppresses all reference to
one
.” He seized his little finger again. “Which means if there was evidence of the gold’s existence, then Charlie’s got it.”

Audley rubbed his chin. “It would only be just that—evidence of its existence.”

“Oh, sure. Nathaniel couldn’t have known he’d have to hide it
en route
. But you wanted to know why Charlie was so sure there was gold to be found, and I reckon I’ve given you a pretty damn convincing sequence of possibilities. Everybody who ever looked for that gold could only hope that it wasn’t a legend. But Charlie—he knew it was there somewhere. And I’d guess that Nayler knew it too.”

Audley looked quickly at Mitchell. Not only a warm young man, but a hot one was Paul Mitchell. Because that was probably the key to Charlie Ratcliffe’s achievement: the faith which moved this mountain was no relative of pious conviction, it was a positive certainty based on inside information. And that, at the moment, was also what made Paul Mitchell formidable too: he still believed with that same positive certainty that he had the inside information about himself.

And doubly hot, because the final conclusion of that sequence of possibilities of his—the seventh finger conclusion— had to be the correct one. Indeed, it was the logical extension of that midnight brainwave which had disturbed Faith: only something of quite extraordinary importance could have caused the Royalist and Roundhead generals to detach men from their field armies at the start of a desperate campaign, the campaign which had ended with the relief of Gloucester and the battle of Newbury, to intervene in an unimportant castle siege which was little better than a private feud.

It was just possible, in fairness, that the Royalists were reacting to a Roundhead intrusion into their territory: a quick cavalry dash was the sort of risk Prince Rupert would have relished. But the solid Parliamentary commanders of 1643 would never have countenanced such a move for precisely that reason. For them there had to be a certainty, and for certainty there had to be—again—inside information.

Which meant that there must have been communication between Colonel Nathaniel Parrott in North Devon and John Pym in Westminster. And what better for that than John Dangerfield’s own private courier?

“David—“ Frances interrupted his train of thought.

And the irony was that almost all the details of this tapestry of events had been known long before Charlie Ratcliffe had chanced on the proof of it. It had all been there fossilised in history, like the bones of the dinosaurs, waiting for somebody to treat it not as a curious and amusing footnote, but as a rock-hard fact.

“There’s someone outside, David,” said Frances.

Audley’s train of thought halted abruptly. He had half-noticed a mouse-like scuffling on the landing, but had dismissed it as the ordinary sound of the house; now, as he roused himself, the scuffling nerved itself into a sharp little knuckle-tap on the door.

“Come in,” said Audley.

The door-knob shivered, then turned slowly. Mitchell came up out of his chair with uncharacteristic clumsiness, catching Champion’s galloping leg on his sleeve and setting the horse rearing and plunging wildly on his stand. As the door began to open—and to open with the same terrifying slowness with which the doorknob had turned—he reached across for the hilt of his sword, for all the world like the young D’Artagnan surprised by the Cardinal’s guard with the Queen’s emeralds in his pocket. Incredibly, he even started to draw the blade; Audley’s hold on reality went spinning as his attention was held by the mad grin of the rocking-horse and the madder sight of cold steel.

Then the sword-hand froze—and relaxed.

In the open doorway were two exquisite children, the seventeenth-century owners of the playroom, the boy an exact miniature of Paul in red taffeta and the girl a tiny blonde mite enveloped in apple-green watered silk.

The sword rasped back into its scabbard. It was an insane world, thought Audley—an insane, wicked, self-destructive world. And he had just witnessed (and, from the pounding of his heart, taken part in) one of its more horror-comic moments.

“Ahah!” The forced jollity of Mitchell’s voice betrayed the same insanity. “Mistress Henrietta Rushworth and Master Nigel Rushworth—well met, once again.”

The little boy’s eyes shifted from Mitchell to Audley, and Audley’s own eyes dropped to the plain buff-coloured envelope the child held to his chest.

“Mistress Henrietta and Master Nigel are going to watch the battle this afternoon,” explained Mitchell. “Isn’t that right?”

“Everyone’s dressed up,” said Mistress Henrietta breathlessly. “Even Grandpa’s going to dress up.”

“Is that so?” said Audley. “Do you like dressing up?”

Mistress Henrietta nodded solemnly. “Why aren’t you dressed up?”

“I didn’t have time—and I haven’t a costume.” But I am dressed up really. It’s the four of you who are in your real clothes. “I shall dress up next time.”

“Next time.” Mistress Henrietta gave him a comforting nod.

“Next time.” Audley nodded back.

“Nigel’s got something for you,” said Henrietta, reaching out for the envelope as she spoke. “The man gave it to Grandpa.”

Nigel quickly lifted the envelope above her reach, though without attempting to offer it to Audley.

“What man?”

“The man with red hair and a red face,” said Mistress Henrietta graphically. “He’s waiting for you downstairs—
Nigel!
”

Nigel solved his problem by taking a step forward and handing over the envelope.

“Thank you, Nigel. Will you tell the man I shall be down in a moment?”

Nigel nodded, took a step back and dug Mistress Henrietta in the ribs with his elbow.

“Lay off!” said Mistress Henrietta angrily.

Blushing to the roots of his hair, Master Nigel bent over and whispered in her ear urgently.

“Oh!” Mistress Henrietta’s gaze shifted from Audley to Mitchell. Then, as her brother straightened up, she searched in the leather bag which hung from her wrist and triumphantly produced a handful of rather crushed parsley. “For you,” she said, holding it out to Mitchell.

Mitchell accepted the gift with one hand, and then swept off his plumed hat in the elaborate figure-of-eight bow with the other. “My lady … and you, sir—“ he looked down at Master Nigel “—remember what I told you—

God for King Charles! To Pym and such carles
The devil that prompts ‘em their treasons parles!

—don’t forget. And if they want to know where your father is, tell them he’s riding with Prince Rupert, like every other true-hearted English gentleman.”

Audley slid the photographs out of the envelope.

Robert Davenport
—a lean, nondescript face sandwiched between the tall black hat and the plain white collar of the Puritan divine.

David Bishop
—button nose and chubby cheeks, a baby-face made more for laughter than for the steel helmet perched incongruously above it.

Philip Gates
—another ordinary Anglo-Saxon face, fair hair falling across eyes which stared in surprise directly into the camera.

John Lumley
—those at least were memorable features, the arched nose and jutting chin framed by the black cavalier wig and beard: it had to be a disguise because that sort of expression went with short hair in the twentieth century, no matter what the fashions of the seventeenth might have decreed.

He watched as Frances and Mitchell swopped the prints between them, noting Mitchell’s cheek muscles tighten with irritation as he came to Lumley’s.