A Sickness in the Soul Page 11

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Two sons and two daughters, I believe. The daughters married into old Norfolk gentry families like their own. I’m not sure about the sons. Sorry I can’t tell you more.’

  There was nothing for it; Foxe would have to go to Hutton Hall and ask Sir Samuel and his wife about the pendant. Arriving in his new carriage would help him gain admittance, but it would hardly be enough. Especially if Sir Samuel was as status-conscious as the librarian had suggested. Presenting himself as a mere bookseller would ensure he was turned away on the instant. He set aside the following afternoon for the purpose. In the meantime, he would take the time to run through all he knew so far about all three mysteries before him. He might also award himself another visit to Sally Jones — purely in the cause of relaxation and the cleansing of his mind. A medicinal visit, you might term it.

  Foxe didn’t get much sleep that night, though he counted that as a benefit, not a problem. Thanks to Sally Jones, his mind was refreshed, even if his body was somewhat fatigued. Now, having ascended the heights of passion, he thought the descent into normality should not be too abrupt. He therefore decided to delay his visit to Hutton Hall one more day and first obtain a letter of introduction from the mayor. Thanks to Halloran, this was swiftly accomplished. The letter stated that Mr Ashmole Foxe had been appointed by his worship to enquire into a number of recent crimes in the city, including one which involved an item of jewellery, seemingly associated with the Valmar family. The item bore the Valmar coat of arms and had been discovered in the possession of a vagrant found dead in the city. Sir Samuel Valmar was therefore requested to give Mr Foxe whatever assistance he could.

  Whether even that would serve to win Foxe an interview with Sir Samuel and his wife remained to be seen. Foxe could only go to Hutton Hall the next day and find out. In the meantime, Alfred was sent with Foxe’s card to request a meeting. It was all very formal and entirely in accordance with the proper etiquette in such matters. Sir Samuel was known to be a stickler for correctness.

  Foxe’s care was not wasted, since it served to gain him at least an entry. That it could do no more was soon proved. Sir Samuel and his wife received Foxe with a very ill grace. He’d worn his best and most conservative clothes for the occasion; even put a powdered wig on his head, which he hated doing, since it was hot and itchy. Before he left home, he asked Mrs Crombie to look over him and ensure everything was neat and tidy. She’d said he looked more like a prosperous physician than anything else. He even dressed his coachman in something like a proper livery.

  Sir Samuel and his wife received Foxe in their withdrawing room. The house, Hutton Hall, looked exactly as his friend Mr Lavender, the cathedral librarian, had described it. At first glance, it was a substantial place made of red brick, with large windows and tall chimneys, probably built in Tudor times. Only after that did you see that it stood within a moat. The driveway ended in a place where a carriage might turn, but still a short distance away from the entrance to the hall itself. To reach that, the visitor had to walk across a stone bridge over the moat and across a small courtyard. The hall’s restricted site may have also accounted for its odd arrangement. It had two uneven wings either side of a massive porch. All three of them then extended upwards in an arrangement of pillars and windows. Finally, despite the height of the building and a steep roof, it was topped off with clumps of spindly chimneys, shaped like Grecian columns in brick and finished with elaborate decoration. To add to this eccentric arrangement, some of the central part of the house was constructed of stone. It also had the sort of windows Foxe associated with a church. Maybe that part was older than the rest?

  The couple themselves proved to be more or less as Foxe had expected. Sir Samuel was dressed, as you might expect of a Tory squire, in a sober suit of good cloth without frills or embroideries. Lady Valmar wore similarly austere and somewhat old-fashioned clothes, though enlivened by a fine petticoat of gold brocade. Sir Samuel regarded Foxe with evident distaste.

  ‘We can spare you no more than five minutes, sir,’ the baronet barked. ‘Only doing that out of courtesy to the lord mayor. It is not our habit to answer questions from persons not known to us — especially not persons engaged in commerce. State your piece, sir, and let’s have done with it.’

  Foxe explained how the pendant had been found. That almost had him ejected at once. Both denied the possibility that any vagrant could have anything to do with them. No one in the house was missing; certainly no one who might be living as a vagrant.

  After that, Foxe produced the pendant and showed it to them. He was observing them carefully as he did so and felt convinced that both recognised it, the wife especially. As it was handed to her, she gave a sudden start, before resuming her mask of aristocratic boredom. Sir Samuel agreed the coat of arms did indeed belong to their family, but that was as far as he was prepared to go.

  ‘Thing must’ve been stolen from a family member sometime in the past,’ he said, handing it back to Foxe. ‘Can’t imagine who that might be.’

  Foxe turned to Lady Valmar, but she simply shook her head.

  ‘My wife and I have no knowledge of this pendant or the person who was found wearing it, sir. That’s all there is to it. I’ll bid you good day. The footman will see you out.’

  Foxe was sure both had been lying to him.

  Brock and Mrs Crombie, between them, proved to be excellent sources of information on the Valmar family. Foxe learned that Sir Samuel was a member of a small group of local gentry who exhibited strong Tory leanings in an otherwise solidly Whig county. Twice before, Sir Samuel had stood for parliament. Both times his Whig opponent had beaten him easily, due to support from Norfolk’s many wealthy merchants. After the second defeat, Sir Samuel had abandoned the idea of a political career. He was heard blaming what he termed, “a rabble of tradespeople and attorneys with no breeding whatsoever” for his drubbing at the polls. The notion that voters might need to be won over had clearly never occurred to him.

  To add to his discomfort, it was at around the time of his second trouncing that his eldest son and heir, George, left. George had grown into an independent-minded young man with almost the opposite outlook on life to his father. It was merely a matter of time before the two came into a head-on conflict. What provoked the final breach, both Brock and Mrs Crombie believed, was the son declaring he intended to enter parliament. Worse still, he would present himself to the voters as a member of the Whig faction associated with the notorious young radical, John Wilkes. He also, according to Mrs Crombie, refused to marry the young woman his father had chosen for him from amongst his Tory cronies.

  As a result of this clash, George Valmar was ejected from the family home and disinherited. Everyone knew that was what actually happened. His father, however, put it about that his eldest son had gone on a journey overseas, where he had unfortunately died. The second son was therefore treated as the heir to the family’s wealth and title. He was the spitting image of his father, both in looks and in character. A hard-hearted, stony-faced, pompous old-style country squire lacking refinement or imagination. Father and son were interested mostly in the hunt and the shoot. To this the father added extracting as much money from the family estate as he possibly could. Sir Samuel, as the local magistrate, was the terror of anyone caught poaching game on his estate. As a landlord, he was well known to be grasping and merciless with those who fell into arrears with their rents. His remaining son, Frederick, was reputed to be as relentless in his pursuit of women as his father was in seeking out poachers. Aside from that, he was simply idle.

  After his supposed disappearance and subsequent death, the eldest son was never spoken of again in the Valmar household. No memorial to his memory was erected in the parish church amongst the tombs and monuments to other members of the family. As far as he could, his father simply wiped George’s name from all family records.

  ‘What of Lady Valmar?’ Foxe asked. ‘His mother.’

  It seemed she was never consulted o
n anything. Her sole role was to look after the house — and do as she was told, naturally.

  ‘If this George Valmar wasn’t dead, what happened to him?’ Foxe asked next. ‘Did he really go abroad?’

  No one knew for certain, it appeared. There had been rumours for a while, some more fantastic than others. People claimed he had left for the American colonies, where he had made a fortune as a fur trader. Others said he had thrown his lot in with a notorious privateer and was roaming the Caribbean in search of Spanish treasure ships. The most likely answer was the least romantic. He had struggled to survive and finally become a fencing-master in London, using the only skill he had been taught.

  Mulling this over, Foxe became even more convinced that the pendant he and Mistress Tabby had found was a genuine keepsake of the Valmar family. How the dead vagrant had come by it was far more difficult to determine. It could hardly be the missing son himself. Whether he had become a colonial fur-trader, a privateer or a fencing-master, he wouldn’t have ended up homeless on the streets of Norwich. Perhaps it was as that pompous old fool, Sir Samuel, had claimed. The vagrant had simply stolen it. Yet, if he had, why not sell it? If you were so poor that you had to sleep in a filthy alley and beg for food, why keep a piece of solid gold jewellery which could end your poverty for months or even years?

  Another thing, Lady Eleanor Valmar had definitely recognised the pendant. Foxe was sure of that. When he produced it and handed it to her husband, Foxe had noticed how she jumped and let out a small gasp — before she mastered her feelings again and denied any knowledge of the thing. If only he could manage in some way to speak to her on her own, without that bullying husband around. Sadly, that seemed impossible. There would be no point in returning to Hutton Hall. Foxe was convinced Sir Samuel would have instructed the servants to turn Foxe away at once, should he have the temerity to return.

  Another dead end.

  10

  A more compliant person than Foxe would have abandoned any interest in the vagrant with the expensive pendant by this time. He would also have set the mystery of Dr Danson’s death aside as of lesser importance. In their place, he would have devoted all his attention to discovering who murdered Lord Aylestone.

  Foxe was not such a man. The killing of Lord Aylestone mostly bored him. Not only was he already convinced he knew the identity of the murderer, after a whole day spent in thought he was even confident he knew in broad outlines how the killing had been done. All he lacked was enough proof to present the mayor and Viscount Penngrove with a sound basis for a prosecution. Doing that was a mechanical process, requiring nothing but determination and attention to detail. The kind of thing any competent clerk might undertake. Besides, the mechanics of trial and conviction were of little importance to Foxe — especially when he couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy for the perpetrator of a particular crime. He could not condone murder, of course. He knew he would have to complete the case eventually and send the poor fellow to the gallows. Nonetheless, that could wait a little, while he satisfied his curiosity concerning other, more interesting problems.

  Now, for example, it was high time for him to seek another meeting with the delightful and comely Mrs Danson.

  Foxe was welcomed by Katherine Danson with the all the courtesy and elegance which had been so sorely lacking in his reception at Hutton Hall. He revelled in it. At the same time, he would, of course, have denied that his fascination with her husband’s death had anything to do with the lovely widow herself. No one who knew him would have believed this for an instant. When it came to attractive and capable women, Foxe was like a moth drawn to a flame.

  After they were both seated, and normal polite preliminaries were over, Foxe asked Mrs Danson what she knew of the letter which the butler had mentioned. The one that had arrived a few days before her husband’s murder. The letter which had made him so excited that he set aside his normal reclusive habits and prepared to receive a visitor. A visitor who was to be admitted to his innermost sanctum, his library.

  Unfortunately, she told Foxe she recalled nothing about it herself. Her late husband never mentioned it in her hearing. Seeing Foxe so cast down by this response, she hastened to add a rider. He might, she said, have kept the letter. He kept almost everything sent to him personally. If so, it would be in his desk — most likely in the top left-hand drawer. That was where he kept all his personal papers. Mundane letters or accounts to do with the household he left to her to deal with. Indeed, he allowed her to take care of all such things without reference to him. She then rose, took a set of keys from a drawer, and handed them to Foxe.

  ‘You may look for yourself,’ she said. ‘If I may, I will leave you to do that without me. Gunton will take you to the library and leave you to it. I’m sure you’ll manage better on your own.’

  Back in Danson’s splendid library, Foxe was like a child in a sweet-shop, tasting one delight after another. He could not restrain himself from wandering about and feasting his eyes on shelf after shelf of neatly bound volumes. Here a volume on the history of Norfolk, there a series of essays on the layout of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. Placed on its own lectern he found a copy of “Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language”. That ponderous title, as Foxe knew, covered the epic poems of the ancient bard, Ossian. The ones so recently discovered and translated by Mr James Macpherson. Foxe leafed through several pages, marvelling at the tales of Ossian and his father Fingal, his son Oscar and beautiful lover, Malvina. For a while, he stood transfixed, lost in that twilight world of the ancient inhabitants of these islands of Britain. Only after some minutes could he pull himself away and resume his search for anything which might throw light on Dr Danson’s life and death.

  A small book on the desk now caught his eye. Opening it, he found it filled with entries in a neat, though spidery hand. It appeared Dr Danson was methodical about his books, in the way of a good many obsessive collectors. On these pages he had noted down the title and author of each volume, together with details of where and when he purchased the book and the price he paid. After that came a cryptic entry like “Upper E, middle, number 6”. It took little deduction to work out this indicated where the book was to be found on the shelves. Danson had clearly developed a simple system which would serve to let him find any book in an instant. Indeed, now that he took notice of such things, Foxe found neat pottery labels at the top of every stack of shelves. They were arranged from A, on the wall nearest the door through which he had entered, to P, on the door opposite. Danson had set out his treasures according to his own system, noting in the ledger the exact shelf where each was to be found and its place there, numbered from left to right.

  It was entirely due to Danson’s methodical arrangement that Foxe made the most important discovery of the day.

  His eye had been caught by the entry in the ledger for the book Mr Anthony Smith was so eager to obtain. Danson had bought it from a person referred to as “Kendall” some twelve months before, paying the princely sum of three pounds and fifteen shillings for it. The idea at once crossed Foxe’s mind that, if Mrs Danson would be willing to sell it to him, he could sell it on to Smith and make a handsome profit in the process.

  However, when he went to the place indicated in the record, the book was missing. Had Danson taken it down to read it and left it somewhere else in the room? Foxe made a lengthy and careful search of the library but failed to find it. Had Danson lent it to someone? There were indications that he did, very occasionally, lend someone a book. Foxe found careful notes of the few such loans on slips of paper between the relevant pages of his catalogue. Each contained the date of the loan, the name of the person who had borrowed the volume and, later, the date of its return. After that, the completed slip had been pasted into a second ledger, which Foxe found in the top drawer of the desk. He wasn’t surprised so few loans had been recorded. Danson was possessive of his books, as well as being a natural recluse. Would he have
lent out a rare volume for which he had paid so much? Foxe could find no mention of him ever doing so.

  Foxe leaned back in the chair Danson had used at his desk and pondered the situation. Another mystery — perhaps a significant one. Mr Smith had been most eager to get a copy of the self-same volume. Had he also visited Danson on the day he came to see Foxe, found him willing to sell for a handsome profit, and taken the book away with him? Foxe couldn’t believe it. Danson had been obsessive in everything connected with his library. Surely he would have noted down the details of the sale? He leafed through all the pages of the register of books. Nothing.

  Finally, Foxe remembered why he had asked permission to return to the library in the first place. He should be looking for the letter Danson had received. The one which made him both excited and willing to entertain a visitor in this, his innermost sanctum.

  He began a systematic search of the desk drawers. He unlocked each in turn, turned out its contents, then put them back and re-locked the drawer. Finally, he found what he assumed to be the correct letter. It was a brief note, roughly sealed and signed with the name the butler had told him the stranger had given, Mr Cornelius Wake. For the rest, the signature proved to be all that was readable. The letter itself consisted of groups of four letters of the alphabet, none making recognisable words. A cipher! Despite going back through all the other papers which he had found so far, Foxe failed to unearth anything to help him decipher it. He’d have to try to work it out for himself.