Following young Billy’s directions they took the second right turn after the A44 intersection and headed down a narrow unnamed road for a hundred yards or so, then turned onto a wooded country lane with a small sign that read L’ESPOIR in faded white letters painted on a rusted milk can perched precariously on a pile of stones.
“The Hope,” translated Holliday, reading the sign. They drove down the lane, the dense scrub of witch elm and lime trees on either side of them almost brushing against the car. An old steel farm gate yawned open on the right. Peggy turned the car into the scruffy front yard of L’Espoir.
There were half a dozen buildings scattered about in a loose cluster around the main farmhouse including a pair of sagging, half-timbered barns, something that might have once been a stone granary, and a more recent Dutch-style open structure with a very old-looking curved, corrugated, and rust-stained iron roof. Instead of hay under the roof there was an eighteen-foot coble dinghy overturned on sawhorses desperately in need of paint. Holliday could read the name on the transom: Dawn Treader. Clumps of grasses grew waist high everywhere in the yard except on a gravel-strewn patch where the oil leaks of cars and farm machinery had stained the soil.
There were two ancient-looking Volkswagen campers beside the Dutch barn, an even older Morris Minor estate wagon up on blocks beside the granary, and a relatively new-looking but extremely muddy Land Rover parked beside the farmhouse. Off to one side there was a weed-choked pond surrounded by a bank of dried-out bulrushes. All of this was enclosed by a shielding fortress ring of hedges, trees, and shrubbery run amok.
“Not much hope here,” said Peggy, pulling up beside the Land Rover. They climbed out of the car and stood looking at the farmhouse in the early-afternoon sunlight. The house was as much a hodgepodge as the rest of the property: a central building of thatched-roof stone with a sagging half-timbered extension that could easily have been sixteenth or seventeenth century and finally a “modern” brick extension that looked like early Victorian, all of it cobbled together with struts, timbers, and unsuccessful patchworks of stucco and plaster. At first glance there didn’t seem to be a window or doorframe still hanging true.
There were three doors on the near side of the farmhouse to choose from. Holliday knocked on the most substantial, an oak-planked slab with iron strap hinges, the wood stained almost black with the passage of time.
A moment later they heard shuffling footsteps and then the drawing of a heavy bolt. The door opened. The man who answered the knock was tall and a little stooped, with thinning hair that looked as though it might have once been blond but that was now a peculiar color of nicotine gray. He appeared to be in his eighties, and once upon a time he would have been called handsome. He wore bright red half-framed reading glasses on a long aquiline nose, a tatty green cardigan that was missing a button or two over a striped white shirt and wrinkled cotton trousers that were splattered with paint. There were expensive-looking slippers on his feet, and a tumbler with an inch of amber liquid in his left hand.
“Yes?” he said.
“Sir Derek Carr-Harris?”
“Mr. Carr-Harris will do,” he answered, almost sheepishly. “The ‘Sir’ makes me feel too much like a country squire out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Sir Watkyn Bassett in The Code of the Woosters or something. And you are?”
“John Holliday and Peggy Blackstock.”
The man standing in the doorway beamed.
“From America. Henry Granger’s nephew and his granddaughter, yes?”
“That’s right,” nodded Holliday.
“How wonderful!” Carr-Harris said. “Do come in!” He stood aside and waved them in with his whiskey glass. They stepped into a short hallway lined with bookshelves, and Carr-Harris closed the door, bolting it behind him. He led them into a large, high-ceilinged living room; the rafters were made of hand-hewn beams two feet thick.
There were framed paintings on the walls, all oils and all from the British Romantic School of the early nineteenth century: bucolic country scenes with buxom milkmaids and Turneresque sailboats setting out on stormy seas. Where there weren’t paintings there were roughly made bookcases. Between two of the bookcases there was a tall, Victorian walnut gun case with a glass door. There was a vaguely musty smell that came either from the books or the moldy thatch in the roof. There wasn’t the faintest sign of a woman’s touch anywhere in the room.
Peggy wrinkled her nose.
The furniture was old, worn, and unpretentious, club chairs and a couch or two drawn up in a vague circle around an oval hearth rug that stood in front of an enormous stone fireplace. There was a large utilitarian desk off to one side with an old IBM Selectric typewriter on it surrounded by piles of books and papers. Carr-Harris folded himself into one of the club chairs and waved Peggy and Holliday to a couch. They sat.
“So how is dear old Henry?” Carr-Harris asked. “Well, I hope, although one mustn’t expect too much at our age of course.”
“He’s passed away,” said Holliday.
“Oh, dear,” murmured Carr-Harris. He took a long swallow of his drink and sighed. “He was very old,” he said philosophically. “Like me.” He took another sip of whiskey and looked lost in thought for a few moments. “I saw him quite recently,” he said finally. “The Old Members Lunch at the College, you know.”
“In March,” said Holliday.
“That’s right,” said the elderly man.
“That’s why we’re here,” said Holliday.
“Ah,” nodded the old man. “You found the sword then. Well done, young fellow. Henry said you would, you know!”
It was a long time since Holliday had been referred to as “young fellow.” He smiled.
“You knew about the sword?” Peggy asked, surprised.
“Of course I knew about the sword, young lady. I’ve known about it since Postmaster. Nineteen forty-one or thereabouts.”
“Postmaster,” said Holliday, making the connection. “The photograph of you and Henry on the wall of his office.”
“That’s right,” said Carr-Harris. “It was no great secret. Henry and I were working with that young Fleming lad in Naval Intelligence, the one who wrote all those dreadful penny dreadfuls.”
“James Bond,” supplied Peggy.
“Umm,” nodded Carr-Harris, polishing off his drink. He set the glass down on a small table beside his chair, then fumbled around in the pocket of his sweater and brought out a package of unfiltered cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one and took a deep drag, easing himself back into his chair.
It was an odd sight; Holliday was used to seeing smokers in craven little huddles in their narrow ghettos outside of office buildings, not in mixed company, and he certainly wasn’t used to seeing smokers in their eighties. Carr-Harris was clearly a man from a different age and time.
“What was Postmaster?” Peggy asked.
“Like something from a Hornblower novel,” said Carr-Harris, chortling happily. “A cutting-out expedition.”
Peggy frowned. “Cutting out what?”
“A ship,” answered the old man. “An Italian liner called the Duchess of Aosta. We suspected her of being used as a mother ship for German U-boats. She was based on the island of Fernando Pуo off the coast of Guinea in West Africa. I believe they call the island Bioko or some such now.”
Holliday wondered what any of this had to do with the sword, but he kept silent and let the old man rummage in his memories.
“The name Postmaster was something of a joke,” said Carr-Harris, puffing on his cigarette. “It’s what they call an undergraduate student at Merton College, and all of us were from Balliol. Silly. They were the ones who’d organized the whole thing, including Maid of Honour.”