Fool's Gold (A Lord Ambrose Mystery) Page 10

  But there was the city, spread out before us in the morning sun, the silvery twiddles and fiddles of the towers all sharp and clear against the sky, and in the distance, the faint sounds of clocks striking. They were all pell-mell out of time, as Alexander Pope noticed a century or so ago, and contradicted one another in their melodious voices, but one might discern that it was round about ten o’clock in the morning, give or take a quarter-hour or so.

  Ten o’clock in the morning! Now that’s the time for youth to leave off the revels of the previous night and set about recovery, for now is the season of the parties and balls, the picnics and pleasures of long grass. Indeed, as I rode down Headington Hill, I saw there were still some bleary-eyed youths strolling toward the city, with one or two women in gauzy dresses that had ill withstood the rigors of the previous night. The Headington alehouse known as Louse Hall was still in operation, I presumed.

  I had almost a mind to call in and drink a bumper or two with Mother Louse, for old times’ sake, but the damnable conscience of maturity made me—not forswear—but at least postpone it.

  Over Magdalen Bridge we went, a youth crying out, “That’s a fine horse, sir!” as we passed, and we made our way up the High Street and thence turned down St. Aldate’s, with Wren’s great gateway on the left, remembered as if in a dream from the days of my youth.

  For there at Christ Church had I been entered, as a nobleman scholar, with a gold tassel upon my mortar-board, with my own servant and my cellar. I was sixteen years of age, and eager for everything, and my guardians, distant family cousins, did not deny me what was considered appropriate to my rank and wealth. So I had an allowance of five hundred a year, a set of rooms overlooking Tom Quad with my own furniture and china, and four dozen bottles of wine, and a dozen each of port, sherry, claret and Madeira. How clearly I remember the wine-merchant’s bill!

  It took me, as a young man, a little time to discover that what I sought was not to be found in Oxford. This process of elimination started at Christ Church, where “m’tutor,” an affable mouse who slept curled up on cushions for much of the day, attended on me sometimes and begged me to read a little Virgil, which I occasionally condescended to do. Once or twice I visited anatomy lectures, where I usually found some Dutchman hacking dogs about to little purpose. There was, I recall, a pig-pen maintained outside the Divinity School, which received the bones discarded after the anatomy lessons.

  I would probably have sunk into the dull and barbaric amusements of my contemporaries, keeping a bear in my rooms and so forth—at the highest, performing in private theatricals or publishing my own poetry. Or perhaps I should have emulated the vast indolence of my teachers, had I not been possessed of a disposition which naturally recoiled from such tedium, and had the good fortune to meet the personage whom I purposed to see now, on this visit of my older self to the haunts of youth.

  But it would have to wait till later, for he was not to be found in Christ Church. I entered beneath the tower of that over-built and pompous foundation, greeted the porter with my name and asked for a guest-room and a place in the stables for my horse, and watched with some amusement while that stout luminary bestirred himself and sent for a comrade out of the Old Tom tavern for support. “I don’t think, my lord, you will see anything changed since you were in residence, though there have been terrible goings-on in that little place across the road.” (He meant Pembroke College, which lies just the other side of St. Aldate’s.) “I do hear tell they are making their Fellows pass their examinations! Would never do here—this is a gentleman’s college, I say. Hey, Jenkins! This old member of the House is none other than a lordship, so stir your stumps, now!”

  Oxford dearly loves a lord!

  A few coins changed hands—to be exact, from my palm to his. And then, arrangements made, I crossed the road, to the poorest place in Oxford.

  “Is Dr. Twiddie in the College?”

  Even the porter of Pembroke looked half-starved. The place was tiny, a huddle of rooms round a cramped courtyard and a few unsavory lodging-houses. Nevertheless, it had been in this rabbit-warren that I had discovered the one shining light of my Oxford career, the sole source of any intellectual aspirations which inspired me to open a book or a set of tables.

  From time to time we had corresponded, but not since my return from Greece. For aught he knew, I was dead and moldering in a Levantine grave or providing food for oriental fishes.

  I dashed in under the Pembroke College gateway, where Samuel Johnson had once lodged. He too had made a return visit to the scene of his youthful studies: I recollect being told by an old college servant that the great doctor had grown so large he had to be pushed up the winding stair to the rooms he had occupied as a student. The college seemed to be reviving itself, however: I saw with surprise that the Chapel appeared to be in some process of repair. What dreary times are overtaking Oxford!

  The staircase I had been wont to climb, one which led off the courtyard, was however as rotten as ever: one day, the timbers would give way and one of the finest brains in the country would be precipitated to its end down a stairwell.

  I banged upon the inner door of the set of rooms. The outer stood open, probably too warped to be properly shut. There was a shuffling within, and then someone was peering up at me, someone whose head was about level with my shoulder.

  “Why, Ambrose Malfine! I feared you were lost to us forever!”

  I gazed at Dr. William Twiddie, whose name had been such a source of mirth to the young bloods. Doubtless, the jokes and laughter on that name still echoed round the quads of Oxford, and doubtless they were still ignored with the matchless serenity of its possessor.

  Inside, the room was a shock, to one who knew Oxford. It was in immaculate order, with rows of bookshelves neatly arrayed with volumes clean and well-dusted, and piles of paper tidily stacked on a huge desk. At the far end of the room was a long table, fitted up with all kinds of glass pipes and retorts and small burners, where again the sense of order and cleanliness prevailed.

  “Well, Ambrose, you had a mighty quick mind, so I am not surprised you have returned to us. Do you intend to take up studying again?”

  “No, I fear I must disappoint you! But I have come to ask you for information, for you are the most knowledgeable man in England on the topic which I have in mind.”

  The Fellows of Oxford colleges are not noted for bashfulness, and even Twiddie placed truth above modesty.

  “Now that poor Beddoes is dead—but you will have heard of that?”

  “Yes, but I was away from home for many years, Dr. Twiddie. I confess I know little of what has passed here.”

  “Ah yes, you went to Greece, did you not? I recall you were a regular young fire-eater—a real revolutionary spirit. Those were stirring times! I recollect Dr. Beddoes—the best chemist we ever had—he went off to France; he was all for the Jacobins, yet I fancy he was disappointed in them. At any rate, I account him the finest scientific brain of his time. He left Oxford, you know—but he died, he died! Ah, I am older and the young men are younger, as it seems to me.”

  There was a melancholy sigh as he said this. How sad, thought I, to be always greeting new pupils, to feel oneself every year older and older in regard to them!

  “And Dr. Henderson? Was he not a friend of Beduoes?”

  “Ah, he is gone, too! And there were the strangest rumors…”

  I had heard of some of them. John Henderson had been an exceptionally gifted Fellow of the college, though before my time. Not the least of his talents was a remarkable facility in languages, so that he spoke Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and could assume not merely a language but the dialect of any locality in Europe, so that he could pass for an inhabitant. When I had become a student in Oxford, I had desired to learn, not the classical Greek which could be spouted by the line by any jackass who had his arse whipped, but the Cretan dialect spoken on my mother’s island.

  Already, it seems to me now as I look back, I must have formed some idea of going th
ither, to the windswept castle of Mala Fina on its rocky promontory, where lay my Cretan inheritance. I stumbled toward it, as you might say, and as a new student in Oxford I inquired me out some guidance for my footsteps.

  And met with such remarks as, “Ah, you should have been here in Henderson’s day, for he knew the Greek of the islands! And there is no one now in Oxford who could teach you. Why should we be interested in what the peasants speak nowadays?”

  Henderson’s departure had been Oxford’s loss. He was, for example, as well as a linguist, a considerable medical man, and a charitable one as well; in a fever epidemic he had sold one of his treasured books to buy drugs for the treatment of the poor. His science, I knew, displayed the same genius as the rest of his talents. I wondered, now, what had become of him.

  “Where did Henderson go? Is he dead or alive?”

  “In a manner of speaking, both, some say. None knows quite where he went, except that he disappeared, if that is what you might call it, some years ago.”

  “What can you mean, Dr. Twiddie?”

  “There were strange stories…but I am being very inhospitable, Ambrose. Why do not you take a turn with me in the Summer Common Room, and have some refreshment?”

  Pembroke College did not abolish all old customs, as has lately been the fashion in some colleges, in favor of more virtuous practices. It has retained its comfortable old sitting room perched on the ancient Town Wall, and it was with some pleasure that I entered into it after some twenty years’ absence. It is a low paneled room, with some fly-blown prints and musty portraits upon the walls, and small circular tables dotted about, their surfaces marked unaffectedly with rings. Here we now took our seats, Dr. Twiddie calling out as we passed the buttery, and I shortly perceived that the Fellows still kept a damned good claret.

  “Ah, poor Henderson,” sighed the good old Twiddie, his thoughts evidently still running on his former colleague.

  I sipped, pausing to think about that whimsical creature. “He often went to bed at daybreak, as I was told, and rose in the afternoon,” said I.

  Twiddie responded more sharply than I might have expected. His head came up suddenly from his glass of claret, and he looked at me with his small shrewd periwinkle eyes.

  “Aye, it may be from that custom of his that some of the stories began.”

  “Stories? He was always eccentric…” I had in mind the wild extravagant tales still circulating in the college in the days of my youth—that Dr. Henderson had once forgotten to eat for five whole days, that he always slept in a wet shirt. Yet Twiddie’s tone had implied something more than these affectionately-regarded quirks.

  “Yes, there were things whispered all over Oxford—oh, that was a few years before your time, of course. We took good care they should not come to the ears of the students.”

  “What kind of whispers?”

  Twiddie shifted on the worn cushions of the chair.

  “That he…well, it is absurd…they said that he had communion with…”

  “What, he took up Christianity?”

  “No, do not jest…that he had communion with ghostly powers. That he sought to speak with the dead.”

  “Good God! A Fellow of an Oxford college!”

  “Yes, and one who had been a leading scientific brain of his generation. But some of his own actions gave rise to that kind of talk, you know—he was himself partly to blame. He looked at books that had scarcely been opened since the Middle Ages.”

  “Perhaps any scientist might meet with such accusations, if he delves into uncommon studies?”

  “Yes, and it is true that he went far into the byways of knowledge—and also that he was apt to take large drafts of something more than ordinary inspiration…”

  Twiddie coughed. I had forgotten that comfortable Oxford habit of hinting at another’s vices.

  “He was a drunkard, you would say.”

  “Well, perhaps that construction might be placed…he was not always inebriated, you know. Just…upon occasion.”

  “Sometimes upon important occasion?”

  “In a word, yes. But, Ambrose, he had a reputation for something far worse…”

  “For what, pray? Ravishing the college cook? Selling the silver plate? Come on, Twiddie, tell me. I can scarce contain myself!”

  “No, sir, I’ll say no more. No doubt the poor fellow is long dead and I’ll not speak ill of him.”

  And I could not draw him further on the subject.

  CHAPTER 12

  The information I had received about Dr. Henderson was fascinating, but it was not what I had come to Oxford to hear. I was there, in fact, to make a particular inquiry of the most advanced men of modern science, whose mastery of a certain subject should exceed that of any in Europe.

  Twiddie and I were comfortably seated in the King’s Arms, to which tavern we seemed to have repaired for lunch by almost unnoticeable degrees, ambling up St. Aldate’s for a breath of air, and so strolling, talking, idling along till our appetites were sharpened, we found ourselves at a table, opposite a large cold roast and a black flagon or two.

  On the way, in the Broad there was a woman with a painted face came up and clapped her arms about me and swore she had once been hauled up into my rooms through the window, but, oh St. Peter! I denied her as a matter of policy if not of forgetfulness. I did not wish to lose Twiddle’s company.

  So, when we had safely ’scaped the avenging harpy and scuttled along into the tavern, I broached to Twiddie the purpose of my visit.

  “Ah, now that is a most interesting chemical question!”

  “I had thought that you, sir, as one of the leading experts in the study of chemistry, might be able to assist me. It is in connection with the decease of a young man.”

  “Well, it is very good of you to take the bonds of friendship so faithfully, Ambrose.”

  I had not actually lied, of course.

  Twiddie went on: “But, as a matter of fact, I am not the authority on the subject. The person you seek is Professor Daubeny—he is the Professor of Chemistry. But I could introduce you to him.”

  “Oh, that would answer the case exactly! Then I would have the pleasure of consulting you and Professor Daubeny together—two great scientific minds at once!”

  “Very well, I’ll send a note inviting him to dine with us this evening.”

  Paper, ink and a quill were soon obtained and the potboy dispatched, returning very shortly afterward with a handsome letter of thanks.

  “But, Ambrose, will you not tell me what this is all about?”

  “Dr. Twiddie, if you will walk with me down the High Street, I will begin the story on my way. I have a particular errand to perform which I fancy will advance my present studies considerably.”

  The day continued warm, the scents of lilac and early roses drifting over old gray walls from sheltered college gardens as we walked. What a very fine city is Oxford, when there are no tiresome scholastic duties to perform!

  “I wish to call in here, Dr. Twiddie, if you please.”

  “Very well, Ambrose.”

  The good doctor sounded rather puzzled, as indeed he might, for we had stopped at a jeweler’s shop, the window displaying chiefly some pieces of silver, as a snuff-box with the arms of the University, gilt labels for wine-decanters, and the like.

  Bellamy & Son. Suppliers of fine plate to the Gentry and Nobility. The engraving of coats-of-arms a speciality.

  We entered beneath the sign. The shop was small and dark, belying the rather grand exterior, but the shopkeeper was as obsequious as his signboard implied, rushing forth and bowing low.

  “Will it please your worships to take a chair? In what way may 1 be permitted to assist your lordship?”

  I wondered how the devil he had recognized me and then apprehended that this was his usual mode of address to a potential customer. Groveling raises in me a powerful desire to kick the perpetrator, but I desisted.

  “There is nothing I desire to purchase, but there is something I wi
sh you to perform for me.”

  “Oh, indeed, any service at all, my lord, any service…what a handsome flask!”

  It was Cyriack Jesmond’s hip-flask. The late Cyriack Jesmond, I should say.

  Dr. Twiddie gazed on in astonishment.

  “But not made here, my lord. West Country workmanship, I should say. Why, here is the Exeter hallmark.”

  The little man knew his business. As he peered at the flask, he had lifted it near to his face, and commencing to unscrew the top, sniffed at it curiously.

  “But what has been in it? Not just the cognac which is ordinarily placed in a gentleman’s hip-flask, I think. Now what does your worship want me to do with it? Do you wish me to dispose of it? I think I could name you a fair price…”

  “No, no. What I want you to do, Mr. Bellamy, is to cut it open. But first, kindly supply me with a small flask into which I may pour the dregs left in this.”

  “Cut it open, sir? So that the inside is exposed?”

  Well, yes, that had been my intention and I intimated as much.

  Bellamy (or his father) was used to the whims of gentlemen, however strange. “Very well, sir, it will take but a few minutes. I have my tools at the back here. Would it please you to wait.”

  The drops of brownish liquid left in the bottom of young Cyriack’s hip-flask were soon decanted into a small crystal bottle, which I placed in my pocket.

  Then we sat in Bellamy’s (or his son’s) chairs, listening to the grinding of a wheel cutting through soft metal, and he shortly hurried back, with the flask in two halves, as neat as if it had been an oyster-shell broken apart. The smell now hung heavily in the air of the little shop.