A thorough young man. ... He took in the inscription again. It summed up very well the sad plight of the moderate man pushed at last by the extremists to take his stand, and discovering then that he had delayed too long and that the only chance left to him was to join one hated side or the other.
Like—who was it? The man had also had a memorial dedicated to him, on, a battlefield of this same Civil War where he had fallen, he remembered having seen it years before.
"Are we going to see Weston?" Mitchell repeated.
Who was it? It suddenly became important to Audley to dredge the name out of his memory, as though it was the key to other forgotten things. Mitchell wouldn't have forgotten, damn him.
Not John Hampden. He had a memorial somewhere—at dummy5
Charlgrove, where Prince Rupert and the Royalists had killed him. But Hampden had been a Parliamentarian.
This man had been a Royalist . . . and a poet—
Falkland!
Little Falkland, with his ugly face and his shrill voice; but everyone had loved him for his kindness and his generosity and his learning. . . . And when the last hope of a negotiated peace had vanished and he had understood at last that whoever won, the moderates on each side had lost, he had saddled up and joined the King's cavalry and had calmly and deliberately ridden to certain death.
Suicide while the balance of the mind was undisturbed.
But not a mistake that David Audley would make.
"This quotation—" he looked at Mitchell "—who's it from?
Falkland?"
"No." Mitchell eyed him curiously. "Why d'you ask?"
"Because I want to know. Not Falkland?"
"No." Mitchell stared at the memorial. "It could have been at that, I suppose. . . . But actually it was William Waller, the Parliamentary general. He was writing to old Sir Ralph Hopton before they fought each other at Landsdown—they'd been comrades years before in the German wars—"
"I remember." Audley nodded. Surprisingly he did remember, too: Hopton had written first, hoping to win over his old friend, or at least to win time. And Waller had rejected his overture, but in the' noblest terms—
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With what a hatred I detest this war without an enemy . . .
He felt his confidence begin to flow again, diffusing inside him like the warmth of a hot drink on a freezing day. Mitchell was a very thorough young man, as he had proved again this minute. But that was a virtue to be used, not to be feared.
"Right. I shall now see Superintendent Weston and the sergeant." He didn't want either of them with him down there beside the Swine Brook: each would put him off his stroke, though in very different ways. But in any case they would be better employed elsewhere. "By myself."
They looked at him questioningly, and that was good.
"When does the—the Double R Society fight its next battle?"
"Easingbridge, the day after tomorrow —Saturday," said Mitchell promptly. "They're putting on a performance at the annual fete and flower show. Do you want us to be there?"
"Can you get a horse in time?"
Mitchell shrugged. "If you pushed me —I guess so."
"I'm pushing." Audley turned to Frances. "And you must be there too."
"No problem." She nodded readily. "All I need is a costume."
"Good. . . . Now, in the meantime, Frances, I want you to research the Roundhead—ah—''
"Wing." Mitchell supplied the word.
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"The Roundhead Wing. And particularly how Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe fits into it. But don't be too obvious with the questions." He swung back to Mitchell. "And you, Paul—"
"Let me guess. Would a ton of gold be close?"
"Close enough. What d'you know about it?"
"Only what's been in the papers. The Brigadier told me to lay off it until you gave the word, just to check out Swine Brook Field." The corner of Mitchell's mouth lifted. "But I can add two and two as well as the next man."
"And what do you get?"
"Giving Charlie Ratcliffe a fortune is like handing a stick of gelignite to a juvenile delinquent: he's going to want to play with it one way or another, and either way something's going to get damaged."
"A whole box of gelignite, more like," said Frances.
So they'd done their homework, and something more. But with two like this that was to be expected.
"You want me to go down to Standingham?" asked Mitchell.
Audley shook his head. Sending someone as keen as Mitchell to Standingham was just asking for something violent to happen, and that would never do.
"Not yet. It's research for you, my lad. I want to know all there is to know about that gold of Ratcliffe's—chemical analysis, and so on. And I want to know more about the history, too. The experts all said there wasn't any gold; I want to know why he thought differently."
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Mitchell perked up at that. "You think somebody sparked him off?"
"At the moment I don't think anything, except my feet ache."
Audley turned towards Frances, steadying his eyes on her face with a conscious effort. He must think of her as someone's daughter. "I want you to concentrate on the Double R Society, Frances, remember. It's only information I want, nothing else."
He watched them climb the gate and disappear down the track between the hedgerows.
He had laid that last bit on rather too thick, the bit about information. There wasn't anything she could get other than that, and the frown she had given him back said as much. He must try to sound more like his usual belligerent self next time.
He began to descend the hillside.
At one time or another he had walked across quite a few battlefields, he reflected, and many of them had featured ridges not unlike this one: Vimy and Waterloo, Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and Senlac Ridge at Hastings, Hameau Ridge on the Somme where he had first got to know the real Paul Mitchell. . . . One of his ancestors had even died on a ridge at Salamanca, riding at General Le Marchant's side.
Of course this ridge was small beer compared with those, but dummy5
it now shared with them the lack of any distinguishing mark which singled it out as a place where men had once buckled down to the serious business of killing each other. Just as the more recent marks of the Double R Society's mock-battle had faded, so there were no residual emanations of King Charles I and his Parliament, the Lord's Anointed and the Lord's Elected Representatives.
Or, presumably, of what had also been staged here on behalf of Mr. Charlie Ratcliffe.
He could see Superintendent Weston waiting for him.
If Cox had said Weston was a sharp fellow then he was a sharp fellow; because Cox himself, for all that he looked like a retired PT instructor, had a mind like a cut-throat razor.
So it would be better to make a friend of Weston than to try and bullshit him with the letter of introduction he carried in his pocket.
"Superintendent Weston?"
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor . . . retired PT instructor . . .
none of those, certainly. Say, a middle-aged country doctor with the authority of half a lifetime of births and deaths behind him.
"Dr. Audley." The Superintendent advanced towards him, but the sergeant stayed back like an obedient gun-dog waiting for his signal.
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Confidence tempered by caution.
"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Superintendent."
"That's all right, sir. It's quite nice to have an excuse to get away from my desk for an hour or two."
Caution plus neutrality. But no overt hostility, and in Weston's place Audley knew that he would be hopping mad behind an identical façade.
"Your Chief Constable will have told you why I'm here."
Audley paused significantly. "It's on the instructions of the Home Secretary."
Weston nodded slowly. "In connection with the Ratcliffe investigation." He matched Audley's pause, second for second. "And you want my sergeant."