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 dummy3
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 dummy3
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 dummy3
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 dummy3
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 dummy3
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—"
"Chard and Timms got away, remember!" Aske moved to make amends.
"But they gave the box to Burns—of all men—"
Aske seemed to be trying not to smile. "But it didn't matter either way by then, Miss Loftus. There wasn't going to be an invasion by then, anyway. It was all for nothing from the start
—that's what I mean. Don't you see the irony of it?"