The Long Farewell (16 page)

‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’ Appleby felt it was only fair to make a civil response to this gratifying estimate of his financial rating.

Mr Moody swallowed a pill. Then he raised a hand and pointed over Appleby’s shoulder. ‘That’s mine,’ he said.

Appleby turned his head. All he could see was the death of General Gordon. ‘Is it, indeed?’ he said. ‘That’s most interesting.’

Mr Moody’s pointing finger described a semicircle. ‘And that’s mine too. But there’s somebody disputes it, and says it’s his.’

This time Mr Moody was indubitably indicating the execution of Queen Mary. Presumably he was the enviable proprietor of the Victorian masterpieces in oils after which these engravings had been made. Appleby tried to think of some apposite question. ‘Are they in good condition?’ he asked.

Mr Moody had finished his champagne and risen painfully to his feet. He was still clutching his cables, and it appeared that he was proposing to withdraw with them into privacy. ‘Condition?’ he said. ‘Absolutely first-class, Mr Appleby. Soaked in blood. Drenched in it.’

‘Blood?’ Appleby could only echo this weakly.

‘I’ve gotten a lot of things like that.’ Mr Moody nodded – confidentially, mysteriously. ‘I’ve gotten things that nobody knows.’

It wasn’t precisely from his sherry that Appleby had to spend a little time sobering up. When he went into the small hotel dining-room he found it crowded, and he was shown to a table already occupied by another diner. This was a middle-aged man who was paying little attention to what he ate, being absorbed in the pages of what appeared to be a magazine. But he closed this when Appleby sat down, and murmured a polite good-evening. Appleby responded – and decided at a glance that his retreat from Urchins had not in fact dispensed him from academic society. This person could only be a don. Appleby glanced at the journal he had set down. It announced itself – in an elegant red type on a grey ground – as
The Review of English Studies
.

One oughtn’t to be caught peering at another fellow’s reading. But the stranger, following Appleby’s glance, smiled amiably. ‘It’s not
Mind
,’ he said, ‘and it’s not
The Journal of Classical Archeology.
It’s not even
Nature
. So I’m afraid I can’t offer it to you with the greatest confidence. Still it’s pretty good in its way. Certainly as good as my own affair – or perhaps a wee bit better. That’s why I keep an eye on it. Of course, our affair is more specialized.’

‘You edit a journal, sir?’ Appleby asked politely.

‘The Elizabethan and Jacobean Quarterly
. You won’t have heard of it.’

‘Well, I have – as a matter of fact.’ Appleby paused. He found it impossible to believe that the learned person opposite had found his way to the neighbourhood of Urchins at this particular juncture entirely by chance. ‘I can’t claim to read it regularly. But I have got hold of it from time to time to read papers by an old acquaintance of mine. You probably knew him. Lewis Packford.’

The stranger received this for a moment in silence. He was probably doing much the same sort of thinking as Appleby. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said presently. ‘And Packford’s death has been a very shocking thing. Incidentally, there’s some extraordinary stuff about it in the evening papers.’ He paused. ‘My name is Charles Rushout.’ He tapped
The Review of English Studies
. ‘I try to teach this sort of thing – or the literature with which it is somewhat tenuously connected – to the young people in the University of Nesfield.’

‘How do you do. My name is John Appleby. I am a policeman.’

‘How do you do.’ Rushout had taken this bald announcement very well. ‘Your name, if I may say so, is familiar to me. Am I right in thinking that you run Scotland Yard?’

‘My dear Professor, you would be right in thinking that Scotland Yard runs me.’

Rushout smiled – and at the same moment, with an expertness scarcely to be predicted of a scholar, summoned a waiter with the flick of a hand. ‘Don’t you think,’ he asked, ‘that we might share a bottle of claret?’

Appleby nodded. ‘I have an idea,’ he said, ‘that we might quite usefully share rather more than that.’

‘It isn’t this stuff in the evening paper,’ Rushout said presently, ‘that has brought me down to this part of the world. I’d set out – as you can easily calculate – before that appeared. My first idea was simply to write to Packford’s executors. But I suddenly felt, for some reason, most uneasy about this enormously important thing. So I decided to come straight here, and to call on poor Packford’s brother in the morning. The suggestion, here in the newspaper, that Packford’s death may have been a matter of murder and theft makes me sorry I didn’t act sooner. If the book is really lost, it’s a calamity.’ Rushout applied himself appreciatively to his claret. ‘In fact I can’t bear to think of it.’

‘You interest me very much.’ Appleby reached for the bottle and replenished his companion’s glass. ‘But I ought to say that this report in the paper is in no sense inspired by the police. I’d very much like to know by whom it
was
inspired. If I had the faintest hope that the paper would tell me, I’d be on the line to them now.’

‘You mean it may be without substance?’ Rushout brightened. ‘The book may be safe?’

‘There is certainly some substance behind the story. As for the book, it may be safe enough, whatever it is. But I very much doubt it.’

‘You don’t know about it? You don’t know about the
Ecatommiti
?’ For a moment Rushout looked surprised. ‘But naturally you don’t. Packford had, I gather, been dropping hints. But he hadn’t come out with it. The paper he intended to send me for the
Elizabethan and Jacobean
was to be the first public word about it.’

‘I seem to remember,’ Appleby said, ‘that the
Ecatommiti
cropped up in a conversation I had with Packford in Italy not very long ago. It’s Shakespeare’s source for
Othello
?’

‘Well – yes and no. It’s a collection of yarns put together by an Italian we usually call Cintio, and published in 1565. One of the yarns is the Othello story. But it’s never been known whether Shakespeare worked straight from the Italian – a language there’s no positive evidence that he knew – or from a translation into French – a language he almost certainly had some knowledge of. Some people have supposed that he must have come across an English version now unknown to us. But Packford had settled the matter – and much more. He’d somehow acquired – I gather from a source in Verona – a copy of the original Italian, copiously annotated by Shakespeare himself. It’s the greatest Shakespearian find of the century. Indeed, it sounds to me like the greatest ever.’

‘You haven’t seen it?’

‘No. As far as I know, Packford at the time of his death had shown it to nobody. All I had from him was a letter announcing his discovery and saying that he proposed to send me a paper about it for publication later.’

‘It would have been far and away his most sensational contribution to scholarship?’

‘Oh, decidedly. I hope it still will be – although it must be a posthumous achievement now… I think there may be another half glass.’

Appleby poured the claret. ‘If this book turns up, there is bound to be a tremendous debate whether the annotations are really in Shakespeare’s hand?’

‘Inevitably.’ Rushout chuckled. ‘It will keep people busy for years. But Packford, for whose judgement most of us have a vast respect, was quite confident in the matter.’

‘Substantial specimens of Shakespeare’s hand are extant?’

‘Well – yes and no, again. There are signatures. And there is a substantial whack of a manuscript play, quite reasonably to be ascribed to him on literary grounds, in a hand which some of the best authorities declare to be the same that executed the signatures. And Packford declared that the annotations were indistinguishable from either.’

‘You gathered that he was excited about the business?’

‘Very much so. He did, you know, become tremendously enthusiastic. His letter assured me that the annotations gave a marvellous insight into the mind of the dramatist as he first addressed himself to his material.’

‘His enthusiasm might upset his judgement there.’

‘I think it very well might. And poor Packford was no literary critic, one is bound to admit. Even if the annotations were quite commonplace – which seems not terribly likely – he would readily convince himself of their profundity. But on the whole scholarly and palaeographical side of the matter he would be very shrewd.’

Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘Would you say that Packford,’ he then asked, ‘was thinking about his discovery at all in terms of money? I happen to know that his affairs were embarrassed – so embarrassed that even he couldn’t be unaware of the fact. Didn’t his find, if genuine, represent a fortune?’

Rushout drained his glass and nodded. ‘Undoubtedly. I haven’t, of course, any notion of a figure. But it would be staggering. You know the sort of fancy prices that have been given in the present century for paintings which people have taken it into their heads to declare among the very greatest in the world. I’d suppose this book, although it’s only a batch of rather inferior yarns scribbled in by a busy working dramatist, would certainly command money of that order.’

‘Don’t you think,’ Appleby asked, ‘that there’s something a bit queer about the whole thing? How did Packford come by the book? If from somebody in Verona, did that somebody know, or didn’t he know, what he was selling? If he knew, how did he ever come to part with the thing at any figure Packford could rise to? If he didn’t know, how was contact between seller and purchaser ever made? I have it from another source, I may say, that Packford paid a thousand pounds. That seems just wrong, when you come to think about it. It’s far too little to have been a reasonable offer to make to an informed person for such a treasure. And it’s surely a good deal too much to offer for a copy of Cintio’s work if Shakespeare’s association with it was unsuspected by the owner.’

‘I agree with you. There is a great deal of force in what you say.’

‘And there’s another puzzle. If Shakespeare really visited Italy, acquired a Cintio, and scribbled in it copiously with the notion of blocking out a play, why did he then leave the book behind him? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable to shove it in his luggage and bring it home? Then again, he
did
write a play about Othello. Did he do it from memory?’

Rushout chuckled. ‘My dear Sir John, you are starting in on just the sort of questions that all the learned will be asking – supposing that the book is safe and sound, and presently given to the world. There are numerous possible answers. Shakespeare may have visited Italy rather late on in his career, and written
Othello
on the spot. Or he may have gone there as a young man, come across the
Ecatommiti
, scribbled on it and then abandoned it. Later on, and back in England, he may have remembered his abortive interest in the story of the noble Moor, and got hold either of another copy of the Italian or of the French translation of it.’

‘Yes, any of these things is possible.’ Appleby spoke this time with his eye on the dining-room door. He was awaiting with some curiosity the arrival of Mr Moody for his dinner and his bottle of champagne. ‘I ought to tell you,’ he said, ‘that there are several people at Urchins now who possess a more or less professional interest in our topic. Have you heard of some sort of learned joke about a fellow called Bogdown?’

‘I think I have.’

‘Well, the members of the Bogdown Society, or whatever it is called, were gathered at Urchins at the time of Packford’s death. And they are there still. In addition to which there is Packford’s widow, who also belongs to the learned world.’

‘A widow?’ Rushout was surprised. ‘I’d no idea he was married.’

‘Nor, till the other day, had anyone else. And that’s not entirely the end of the story. But the important people at the moment are those who might take a special interest in Cintio. None of them, so far as I can tell, knows the whole story you have told me. But some of them know quite a lot. Prodger, Limbrick, Rixon. Do these names convey anything to you?’

‘Certainly they do. And they would all be very interested indeed.’

Appleby still had his eye on the door. ‘And Sankey – does that convey anything?’

‘No. I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Prodger had a good deal to say about an American collector called Sankey. But I think he may have got the name wrong. He’s been muddled by
Gospel Hymns
.’

‘Gospel Hymns
?’

It was at this moment that Mr Moody entered the dining-room. Appleby indicated him with a swift gesture. ‘You wouldn’t associate
him
with
Gospel Hymns
?’

Rushout looked quite blank. ‘I’ve never seen him before. And I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘That is Moody. Presently he’s going to drink champagne. Prodger gets his name wrong, simply because, once upon a time, another Moody collaborated with a Sankey in making a hymn-book. But you, Professor Rushout, know nothing about
this
Moody?’

Rushout hesitated. For a moment, indeed, he seemed thoroughly confused. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. ‘I only declared that I’d never seen him before. Nor has he ever seen me.’

‘May I take it, then, that you have corresponded?’

‘Yes.’

Appleby smiled. ‘You’ve told me quite a lot, over this very tolerable claret of ours. Might it be a good idea if you told me a little more?’

The editor of
The Elizabethan and Jacobean Quarterly
received this proposition without enthusiasm. ‘Aren’t we,’ he asked, ‘getting on to something quite irrelevant?’

‘It certainly isn’t irrelevant that the chap over there – who is one of the biggest collectors of this, that and the other thing in America – should be lurking within a few miles of Urchins. That it’s irrelevant that you and he have corresponded is something which, of course, you are at liberty to maintain. But perhaps’ – and Appleby looked ironically at his companion – ‘a moment’s further thought will suggest some connexction to you, after all.’