The Old Vengeful (32 page)

Elizabeth and Aske stared at each other, and it was a toss-up which of them was more at sea now, thought Elizabeth—at sea in an open boat, shrouded in mist, with an empty box for company.

“So what did they do?” Elizabeth broke the silence.

“They rowed all that day, and most of the night.”

“In the fog?” said Aske, suddenly irritable.

“They were picked up by a fishing boat, off Ramsgate. They were lucky, Mr Aske.”

“Lucky?”

“They could have been rescued by the navy—by one of the blockade ships.”

Aske nodded. “Then it would have been back to duty? But the fishermen didn’t turn them in, you mean?”

“That is correct.”

“So they deserted—‘R’ for ‘Run’—I remember, Professor. They’d had enough of the Royal Navy!”

Wilder nodded. “Also correct. And it would have been worse for Timms—if he’d chosen to be an American, anyway.”

“Of course! Because the Yankees were at war with us by then!” Aske whistled through his teeth. “It would have been Dartmoor Prison for him—would it?”

Wilder inclined his head doubtfully. “They might have taken a more lenient view. They weren’t always uncivilised. But there was that risk, certainly.”

It was no wonder they’d
run
, decided Elizabeth. Life ashore if you were poor could have been no picnic anywhere in those days. But life afloat in the twentieth year of the war with France would have been a worse bargain. And if any men had done their bit, Tom Chard and Abraham Timms had done theirs.

“And yet that isn’t the whole truth, I suspect,” said Wilder gently. “I think … from what Tom Chard said between Parson Ward’s lines … I think they still reckoned they were under their officer’s orders.” He paused. “I think that they were simple men—Timms less simple than Chard, but both essentially simple men.” His eyes fell to the
Vengeful
box. “It is possible that I am imagining too far now … but they had their orders … and they had
that
…
and simple men tend to approach life’s problems literally.”

“And what was their problem?” Aske sniffed. “Other than keeping out of the press-gang’s clutches?”

“It was very simple—and very complicated. They had the surgeon’s case, by which the Lieutenant had set such store …
but they didn
’
t know what to do with it, Mr Aske
.”

The box was beginning to hypnotise Elizabeth: it had come ashore from the
Vengeful
, against the odds of shipwreck; and it had travelled to Lautenbourg—and out of Lautenbourg, down an unclimbable cliff; and it had travelled across France in the midst of a twenty-year war, and had come through the waves from the dying midshipman into a stolen boat—and then into a Ramsgate boat, good luck cancelling bad—and finally ashore … the odds building up and multiplying all the way … and somehow, in the end, to Father, and to her … and now it was
here
, in a strange house, hypnotising her.

“They’d have done best to chuck it overboard,” said Aske. “If it was empty—“

“But they didn’t.” Wilder sounded almost triumphant in his statement of the obvious. “It is here. So that was what they didn’t do—that, at least, is certain!”

“So what did they do with it?” Aske swivelled towards Elizabeth. “How did your father get it, Miss Loftus?”

Elizabeth looked at Professor Wilder helplessly. “His crew gave it to him—the survivors—?”

“They bought it from White and Cooper, Antiques, of Southsea, Miss Loftus.” Wilder nodded. “Binnacles and barnacles, and a wealth of maritime knick-knackery, much of it spurious and all of it over-priced, according to David Audley’s young man. But old Mr Cooper—who was young Mr Cooper then—remembers buying it, and selling it … And he bought it from the intestate estate of Mrs Agnes Childe, of Cosham, with a job lot of junk, because he wanted some choice items which had been included in the lot, which he had spotted … And, fortunately for us, old Mr Cooper is old enough— and rich enough—not only to remember his sharp practice, but to exult in it
…
And
to remember that Mrs Agnes Childe was
née
O’Byrne, of Ratsey and O’Byrne, ship’s chandlers and merchants of Portsmouth—two very old-established families of Hampshire, in business and commerce … and in Parliament too, after the Reform Bill of 1832, in the Whig interest.” He was looking at Elizabeth now. “Agnes married the Honourable Algernon Childe, who got himself killed in 1915, at Ypres, with the Grenadiers. Which left only the old lady, with all her family debris—the Honourable Algernon being a younger son, with nothing to his name except his name … But it’s the other names that ring the bell—eh, Miss Loftus?”

She knew then. Even before he reached down and opened the box-lid,
she knew
, because she had polished those names dozens of times.

“
Amos Ratsey, Jas. O
’
Byrne, Octavius Phelan
…
”
he read from the plate inside the lid. “All the names of Dr William Willard Pike’s grateful patients—
‘
With the Respectful Compliments of Amos Ratsey, Jas. O
’
Byrne, Octavius Phelan, Edward MacBaren, Chas. Lepine, Michael Haggerty, Jas. Fitzgerald, Edmund Hoagland, Thomas Flower, Patrick Moonan of Portsmouth, Southsea and Cosham
’
—grateful patients all … Or maybe not, perhaps?”

“Why not, Professor?” asked Aske.

“Who were they, Mr Aske? Men of some substance, undoubtedly— Ratsey and O’Byrne were, certainly!” He nodded. “They did not combine their enterprises until 1815, but in 1812 they both held valuable contracts for supplying naval stores, and did business in the dockyards. And after the war they branched out into war surplus in the South American trade—guns and uniforms as well as stores and provisions … for the freedom fighters of those times—all quite respectable, as well as being profitable.” He smiled. “Men of substance—such men as might well respectfully compliment their physician on his patriotism, and could afford to buy him a new set of the tools of his trade.”

“So what, then?”

“So who were the rest of them? Amongst my friends and contacts locally, and among the excellent employees of the Central Library and Museums staffs, not one of those names rings any bell as a local gentleman in the Portsmouth district of that time.” Wilder shook his head. “There was a Tom Flower who plied his trade ferrying officers to their ships—a one-eyed fellow with an exemption certificate in his pocket, to keep the press-gang off his back … And a ‘Jim Fitzgerald’ jailed for sedition in 1814, for damning the King’s eyes and wishing Parliament hanged, among other things … But neither of them sound like Dr Pike’s grateful patients.”

“Well, you’d hardly expect to trace everyone from those days, surely?”

“You’d be surprised, dear boy. It was a much smaller world then. I would have expected more than two at the first trawl.” He looked at Aske shrewdly. “And I would certainly have expected Dr Pike himself.”

“Dr Pike … himself?”

“There was no physician of that name practising in the Portsmouth region in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. And neither is there a Pike in any naval list my friends in Greenwich can turn up.” The shrewd look came to Elizabeth. “Pandora’s box, you have here, my dear: we open it, and whatever there may once have been in it, only mysteries pop out of it now.”

Aske shook his head. “He needn’t have been a Portsmouth man— but that won’t do, will it! Not if Ratsey and O’Byrne were local …”

“No. But he could have been signed on by the captain of the
Vengeful
in a foreign port on a temporary basis—ship’s surgeons came in all shapes and sizes in those days. Only the same objection still holds good—the inconvenient Messrs Ratsey and O’Byrne—how did he know them, then?” Wilder shook his head back at Aske.

Aske made a face. “But even if we can trace them all somehow, in the end … that still won’t tell us what was in the box.” He looked sidelong at Elizabeth. “Even if we were in a position to guess, we can never know, not now.”

“No, Mr Aske,” said Wilder. “But we could try another guess … which would make the contents of the box, if any, altogether unimportant.”

“What?” Momentarily Aske had been wrapped up in his own imaginings; which, Elizabeth supposed, were of Colonel Suchet’s ultimate Portsmouth Plan. “If any?”

Wilder spread his hands. “We are assuming, quite reasonably, that the box contained something of value. But suppose, Mr Aske, that it was
the box itself which
was the thing of value? What do we have then?”

Elizabeth stared at the box. “A list of names—“

“A list of names! Precisely, Miss Loftus. Amos Ratsey, Jas. O’Byrne, Octavius Phelan—a list of names where no one would look twice at them, even if that was what he was looking for.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Aske. “Not ‘Jas.’ for ‘Jasper’—‘Jas.’ stands
for James
—James O’Byrne—
James Burns
!”

“Ah…” Wilder picked up Aske’s excitement. “That small adjustment means something to you, does it?”

“James Burns does, by God!” Aske stepped round to get a better view of the inside of the lid. “And half those other names are Irish—that fits too.”

“More than half, dear boy,” amended Wilder mildly. “Am I to assume from this that James O’Byrne,
alias
Burns, was a French agent? And the others were his friends? His spy-ring, or whatever the term they favoured then? A Franco-Hibernian group, anyway—wild geese come home to roost, eh?”

Had that been his guess all along, wondered Elizabeth; but because he hadn’t lost his good teacher’s preference for drawing out his pupils he’d let them come to it in their own way?

“Franco-Irish-American, perhaps.” Aske’s second thoughts were more cautious. “We’ve still got a lot of checking ahead of us … but it does fit some of
our
facts quite well—don’t you agree, Miss Loftus?”

Elizabeth nodded, yet found herself drawn to the expression on the old man’s face: it was as though he was willing her to go on, to build more elaborately on their card-house of guesses.

A tragedy
, he had said. And there was a hint of sadness in that look of his, which reminded her of that.

“Amos Ratsey and James … Burns,” she began tentatively. “If they were spies, they were never caught, were they?”

Wilder shook his head. “No. They both flourished like the proverbial green bay-tree after the war. That is a fact—a historical fact.”

“Huh! They cut their losses, and joined the winning side,” said Aske. “But after the retreat from Moscow they didn’t have much choice—Moscow, and then the failure of the American invasion of Canada … and then Napoleon was beaten at Leipzig, and Wellington crossed the Pyrenees from Spain—what else could they do but keep their heads down and hope no one rumbled them?”

Amos Ratsey and James Burns had lived to keep their secret—a secret which Tom Chard hadn’t known when he told his part of the tale, years afterwards, to Parson Ward. But that wasn’t a tragedy—it was more like the luck of the Irish. So what—

“What I’d like to know is how the devil Agnes—what was her name? Agnes
née
O’Byrne, anyway—how she got hold
of that
?” Aske pointed at the
Vengeful
box. “Chard and Timms must have brought it ashore. But what did they do with it then, I wonder?”

That was it: Humphrey Aske had been tracking her own thoughts, but somehow he’d overtaken her on the home straight.

She stared at Wilder. “They gave it to James Burns, of course. Is that what they did, Professor?”

“I don’t know, Miss Loftus.” He stared back at her. “Yet that would seem like another very fair guess … Or, let’s say, I can think of no other way it could have become an O’Byrne family heirloom.”

Aske frowned. “Why on earth did they give it to him?” He shook his head. “Timms and Chard weren’t spies, for God’s sake, were they?”

“That they were not, Mr Aske. I think they were good men and true—true to their salt, even the American. I believe that they must have come ashore with it, but they didn’t know what to do with it. So they read the names on the lid—or Abraham Timms did—the names and the places … and they decided to deliver the box to one of those names. They may have looked for Ratsey first—or maybe O’Byrne was the first name they traced.” He shrugged. “It’s even possible they were aware they ought to give it to someone in authority, but they couldn’t do that, could they?”

“You’re darn right! Not if they were also busy deserting! Even going back to Portsmouth would have been like putting their heads in the lion’s mouth—that would be one hell of a risk for them. But why should they want to do that?”

“Why indeed?” Wilder’s voice was gentle. “Why do men do brave deeds—if I knew that I would be wiser than I am! How did the O’Byrne family get the box? We don’t know—but they
did get
it … And why did O’Byrne keep the box?” He smiled. “But he
did keep
it, for here it is—and that was an irrational act. And that is what men do, Mr Aske: they act irrationally, as their instincts prompt them to do.” He stopped smiling. “Or it could be that Chard and Timms were simply keeping faith with men they admired—‘
a
noble-hearted and humane officer
’
was how Tom Chard described his lieutenant—and little Paget was a ‘
high-spirited young gentleman
’
…
Keeping faith is another irrational act, more often than not. But men will persist in doing it.”

Elizabeth shivered. “How awful!”

“Awful?” Aske snuffled as though amused. “If it’s true, I’d like to have seen Burns’s face when they turned up with it—it must have put the fear of God up him!” He chuckled. “And then the relief when he twigged they were deserters! I’ll bet he filled their pockets with guineas to enable them to make themselves scarce, too … If it’s true it’s a damn good story, I’ll say that for it!”

Elizabeth was scandalised. “But it’s an awful story, Mr Aske! The lieutenant and the midshipman—they went through all that, and then they died for nothing—
absolutely nothing
!” The enormity of the
Vengeful
tragedy suddenly enveloped her. “They all died for nothing, really—“