"Would you like to have a look, David? Would that be okay, Clarkie?"
"Of course, sir." She turned to Roche. "It's a beautiful old place, sir—it was a crime to let it go to wrack and ruin. But Master David's put that right." She gave Wimpy a sly look.
"All it needs now is a woman's touch, to my way of thinking, sir, Mr William."
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Wimpy shook his head. "No sign of that on the horizon, I'm afraid, Clarkie. And it'd need an exceptionally resilient young woman to handle our David—let alone capture him."
"Hmm ..." Ada Clarke pursed her lips, but didn't deny the assessment. "A mistress it needs, I still say."
"It's had one or two of those, by golly!" Wimpy chuckled.
"I didn't mean that, sir—and well you know it! There were too many of them up to the war . . . But there's never been a real lady since—since—" she broke off suddenly, staring at Wimpy blankly for an instant, then seeming to notice Roche again as a stranger just in time. "There now! You want to go up to the house, and I've got my Charlie's tea to think about—
if you should see him you tell him to come on back now, he's up there somewhere—" she rose from her chair and began fussing over the plates and teacups "—and there's some parcels for Master David you can take up for me while you're about it, and save me the bother—"
VI
THEY MADE THEIR way up the long, curving gravel drive between great banks of hawthorn and briar and elder interlaced with blackberry branches.
"Going to be a good year for blackberries." Wimpy nodded at the cascades of unripe greeny-red fruit. "Charlie never cuts the hedges back until after the jam-making and bottling—
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always wonderful picking along here."
Roche balanced the parcels with which he was loaded, and attempted to sort out his thoughts. He was aware that he had been fed with a great deal of information about David Audley, which might be priceless because it was of a kind that money and conventional interrogations would never have bought, except that he still didn't know why it should be so valuable.
"I used to pick them along here with Charlie when we were both boys," continued Wimpy. " 'Pick one—eat one' was our motto, as I recall."
Wimpy, as well as Ada Clarke and Charlie, was an old retainer of the Audley family, Roche decided. But there must be a class difference in the relationship which he hadn't yet worked out.
"You knew him—Nigel Audley—before Oxford?"
"Oh yes. My father was up there with his father—the one that was killed in 1917. . . They were both at Balliol at the same time. Only Dad was clever and poor and Audley grand-père was clever and rich . . . But they rowed in the same eight, and they became friends. And they stayed friends even after Dad metamorphosed into a poor schoolmaster, like me after him—
it's in the blood, I'm sorry to say, dear boy!" He bobbed his head at Roche. "Only I didn't really get to know Nigel until Oxford—I knew Charlie better until then, as a matter of fact.
Poor old Charlie!"
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Poor old Charlie . . . . This had been—and still was—a strange intertwining of people and families, across the boundaries of class and money, here and in Oxford, and through two world wars, which had turned the schoolmaster into Audley's guardian and the housemaid into something more than his nurse.
"She brought him up, in effect—Mrs Clarke?" The question followed the thought.
"David?" Wimpy nodded. "In effect—I suppose she did. In association with St. George's and Immingham and Rudyard Kipling, you might say— they brought him up too, just as much, no matter how much he resisted them."
"He . . . resisted them?"
Wimpy twisted a smile at him. "Not on the surface. One thing a boarding-school teaches you . . . is to conform or go under.
And yet the saving grace of the British system is that it always manages to throw up a percentage of eccentrics and rebels nevertheless, to leaven the lump. So they have the great potential for good or evil..."
Bloody-minded, remembered Roche. That had been Latimer's assessment, and since Latimer was a product of the same system he should know a fellow spirit.
"I'm not sure that David has decided which horse to back,"
continued Wimpy. "Perhaps you'll be the catalyst—you're the man he could be waiting for. Freddie Clinton could be right."
Roche frowned. "What d'you mean? Right about what?"
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Wimpy walked in silence for a time. "What do I mean? I think I mean. . . if you could recruit David—if he came to you of his own free will this time, not as a conscript, like in the war—"
"They don't conscript people into Intelligence."
"Wrong word? It was Intelligence or back to regimental duty, but after what he'd seen in Normandy that wasn't a choice . . . No, what I mean is, if you can'get him to give you his loyalty freely just once, then that'll be it. 'Whether she be good or bad, one gives one's best once, to one only. That given, there remains no second worth giving or taking'—
Pertinax in Puck, once again. I don't think he's given his best yet, to anyone or anything. That's all."
It was more than enough to Roche: it was dust and ashes bitter in his mouth. No one was a greater authority on the second best than he: he had spent years giving it, ever since Julie. Whoever Pertinax was, he was right.
"We're getting close to the house. It's just round the curve ahead, through the trees," said Wimpy. "It really is a fascinating old place—"
"What was wrong between Audley and his father?" asked Roche.
"Nigel?" Wimpy half-stumbled, tipping the topmost of his share of the parcels into the trackway ahead of him. "Damn!
Mustn't damage the merchandise. Can you rescue that book for me, old boy? You're not so heavily laden as I am."
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The division of the parcels had appeared equal to Roche, but it seemed churlish to refuse the request. He set down his own burden—of books also; all the parcels contained books by the shape and feel of them—and set about recovering the fallen volume, which had half emerged from its torn wrapping.
He couldn't resist the temptation to examine it—it would be a history book, something to do with Visigoths or Islamic doctrines, for a bet—
But it wasn't. Or rather, it wasn't quite: the garish dustcover illustrated the head of a warrior as though picked out in stained-glass, one-eyed and bearded and helmeted— The Twelve Pictures, by Edith Simon. Letting the remnants of the wrapping drop, he opened the book.
' The Twelve Pictures' is a novel as rich and wonderful as a medieval tapestry— a tapestry of beauty and terror. . .
"Interesting?" inquired Wimpy politely.
Roche looked up at him. "It's an historical novel—about Attila and the Huns." He couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice.
"Is it, indeed?" Wimpy reflected the surprise back at him. "I wouldn't have thought that would be quite his style of light reading—not these days ..."
That was it exactly. Oxford and Cambridge were notoriously addicted to whodunits and mysteries—they were even given to writing the things. But historians (and although Audley wasn't an academic he was certainly an historian) were dummy5
surely the last people to indulge in third-class relaxation in their own chosen subject.
"Let's have a look at the others," exclaimed Wimpy, his eyes alight with mischief and curiosity. "We shouldn't. . . but I can never resist temptation, old boy!"
It was hardly the place to start tearing open parcels, in the middle of a leafy lane, but the little schoolmaster had set down his parcels and was ripping at them before Roche could suggest as much.