Ampersand Papers (2 page)

Then people began actually to turn up on the doorstep (or beneath the portcullis) of Treskinnick totally unheralded. Several even got into Lord Ampersand’s presence, and had therefore to be treated with courtesy – or what Lord Ampersand considered to be that. It was altogether vexatious and insupportable. Lord Ampersand, after serious consultation with his son-and-heir Lord Skillet (Lord Ampersand was the sixth marquess), gave orders that his personal standard was no longer to be flown from the West Tower to apprize the world that he was in residence. But this measure proved to carry no great effectiveness, since only the nobility and gentry (and of course the local people generally) had the significance of such a flag at all securely lodged in their heads. However, the servants were instructed simply to tell any unfamiliar visitor that neither his lordship nor her ladyship was at home. This produced at least a breathing-space in which the beleaguered marquess could set his mind to work.

These people were all after what they called the family papers, and it was true that there was a litter of such stuff all over the castle. The library, which its owner thought of merely as the place in which he occasionally consulted Burke’s
Peerage
and similar essential works of reference, and to which he also repaired from time to time for a quiet read of
Country Life
or
Horse and Hound
, contained stacks of letters and bills and out-of-date inventories and rent rolls which had been thrust unregardingly into capacious chests and cupboards over a good many generations of Ampersand activity or its reverse. But that wasn’t all. There were, indeed, few rooms in the castle that didn’t harbour in desk or drawer or wardrobe minor accumulations of the same sort. So a radical clear-up would be the thing. Get whatever could conceivably be intruded upon by persons in the researching way bundled together and lodged in some forbidding and virtually inaccessible resting-place: a dungeon, perhaps, or something like that.

It seems probable that at this point Archie Digitt (Lord Skillet, in fact) again took a hand in considering the problem. There was undeniably something a shade freakish about Archie; it might even have been said that as an Ampersand he wasn’t entirely sound. Archie had some very odd friends, and interested himself from time to time in wholly incomprehensible business enterprises. He also had a
penchant
for rather brutal practical jokes such as might have gone down very well among cronies during the reign of Edward VII, but which tended to render an archaic effect in the more anaemic age of the second Elizabeth. Archie cast his eye on the North Tower.

The North Tower of the castle was the one that pretty well jutted out over the sea a long way below. It had been so built, one imagined, in the joint interest of defence and sanitation. Behind the battlements crowning it there was a lead roof in very tolerable order, but apart from the large chamber thus protected it was substantially derelict. The staircase – a spiral staircase in the upper ranges – had largely crumbled into impassable rubble long ago. But this didn’t mean one couldn’t reach the top storey, and indeed the roof. Lord Ampersand’s father had in his later years developed an interest in birds, as it is perfectly proper for a country gentlemen – or a great landed proprietor – to do. The situation of Treskinnick Castle being as it was, sea-fowl had become his more particular study, and it had occurred to him that the top of the North Tower would be a peculiarly advantageous perch from which to pursue this avocation. But how to reach it? The fifth marquess was a man alike of means and of resource. Carpenters were requisitioned from here and there about the estate, and they constructed for his lordship a wooden staircase, vaguely akin to those external fire-escapes that run up the outer walls of multi-storey buildings, which began in the inner ward of the castle, presently made a right-angled turn, and then rose to an aperture admitting to the top floor of the tower. From this in turn a trap-door gave access to the roof. The fifth marquess had an excellent head for heights; as he went up and down his new staircase it didn’t at all trouble him that only a skimpy handrail interposed between himself and vacancy; nor that the whole structure, being somewhat amateurish in design, wobbled a little when in use. His wife was terrified of the whole affair, and wouldn’t have dreamt of trusting herself to it. But the fifth marquess saw a good deal of his marchioness, one way and another, and enjoyed a certain sense of security in his new aerie.

The sixth marquess took no interest in birds – unless, indeed, he was squinting at them along the barrel of a gun. He had never climbed to the top of the North Tower in his life, and saw no reason to do so simply because he had become its proprietor. It therefore fell wholly out of use, and the wooden staircase became an ill-maintained, rickety, and treacherously slimy structure. The foot of it had even been encased in a tangle of barbed wire, since it would be annoying if some foolhardy visitor to Treskinnick tumbled off the thing and into the sea.

What Lord Skillet had thought of seemed itself attended with an element of risk. Why not constitute that large upper chamber something that could be called a muniment room; fix over the entrance to it, in a temporary way, one of those rope-and-pulley affairs used to hoist things up into warehouses; and then deposit in it by this method all the Ampersand papers that ever were? The sort of people who devoted themselves to antiquarian pursuits and crackpot researchings would certainly not be of a temper to remain undaunted by so arduous – indeed perilous – a path to knowledge. They’d take one look, and thereafter give Treskinnick a wide berth.

Lord Ampersand was at first rather shocked by the levity of his son’s proposal. But as well as being funny, there was something faintly malign about it that appealed to the arrogant side of his nature; he indulged in a ludicrous fantasy of a wretched professor of something or other losing his nerve on that staircase, and being unable to budge whether up or down. Like the famous Duke of York, Lord Ampersand thought. He was recalling, with characteristic inaccuracy, an old song.

So this bizarre plan was actually put into effect. Everything that the Ampersands judged anybody might get nosy about (and the appearance, at least, was of there being several tons of it) was bundled into large skips and baskets, and then hoisted to its new home. Lord Ampersand, who didn’t inherit his father’s fondness for cliffs and chasms, directed operations from ground level. Lord Skillet ascended the staircase and surveyed results. Not being quite satisfied that an adequate effect of disarray had been achieved, he ordered the superimposition upon sundry stacks and crates of paper of a variety of objects not commonly to be found in repositories of the written word. An anchor and anchor-chain, a worm-eaten dinghy, and a decayed fishing-net together with some lobster pots witnessed to the marine situation of Treskinnick Castle; there were numerous stuffed animals – deer and badgers and foxes and otters and beavers – such as contemporary taste no longer judged agreeable in public rooms; and a good deal of furniture which had been more or less broken up by fractious children and disaffected servants during the preceding two or three centuries.

Lord Ampersand highly commended his son’s diligence, and even entered so fully into the spirit of the occasion as to cause the printing of an engraved card, designed as being in future the sole reply that inquiring learned persons should receive. It read:

The Ampersand men were particularly tickled by the final bit of information and its price-tag. But Lady Ampersand wisely censored it, pointing out that if several char-à-bancs full of trippers were thus enticed to Treskinnick the village women who would have to be hired to slop them out their tea would demand an outrageous wage, so that the venture must be a dead loss. Lord Skillet, who had long ago ceased trying to make his mother see a joke, reluctantly concurred in the deletion.

During the next few months perhaps as many as half a dozen hardy explorers penetrated to Treskinnick Castle. Of these the yet bolder ascended to the muniment room, looked around them, and took their departure cautiously but in evident haste. It became known that the present Lord Ampersand was mad, that his heir was madder, and that among their aberrations had to be numbered a wholly perverted sense of humour. Quite soon the learned became discouraged, and the family was left in peace.

‘Here is a letter from Agatha,’ Lady Ampersand said at breakfast one morning. (Agatha was Lady Ampersand’s sister.) ‘She encloses a cutting from
The Times
.’

‘What should she do that for?’ In Lord Ampersand’s head it had been established long ago that Agatha was a damned interfering woman. ‘
The Times
comes into the house every day. I notice it regularly on the table in the hall. And Ludlow looks at it when he irons it, and tells me if anybody’s dead.’ Ludlow was the marquess’ butler. ‘As it happens, nobody has died for years, so your sister can’t have sent you an obituary. So what is it? Not some rubbish about Archie being had up again for speeding, I hope.’

‘Nothing of the kind. It’s about somebody called Shelley. A poet.’ Lady Ampersand gave thought to this. ‘
The
poet,’ she emended concessively. ‘He was in the books at school.’

‘Shelley? I know all about him.’ It pleased Lord Ampersand to show his wife from time to time that he was quite on the ball. ‘Years ago, when I was at the House–’

‘I thought you’d never been to the House, Rollo. Or not after taking your seat.’

‘Not the House of Lords, my dear. The House. Christ Church.’

‘Oh, I see. The Oxford one. Of course.’ Lady Ampersand was a little at sea. ‘And you met Shelley? How interesting!’

‘Certainly not. Shelley was dead. He must have been, since there was this memorial to him. That’s what I’m telling you about.’

‘Yes, Rollo. Do go on.’

‘Once, when I was up at the House, I strayed into one of the colleges. I can’t think why.’

‘But isn’t the House Christ Church? Isn’t that just what you’ve said?’

‘Of course it is. One ought to know these things, my dear.’

‘And isn’t Christ Church one of the colleges?’

‘Certainly not. I was there for three years, and I don’t recall such a suggestion ever being made. I strayed into one of the colleges, as I say, and there was this memorial to Shelley. Uncommonly indecent thing.’

‘Would he have been one of the professors?’

‘Something of the kind, no doubt. But what is this stuff in
The Times
about him?’

‘It says he had a circle.’

‘Shelley had a circle? Doesn’t make sense. Might as well say that Shelley had a triangle. Or a trapezoid or a rhombus.’ Lord Ampersand had brilliantly recovered these figures from studious Eton days.

‘A set, Rollo. Shelley had a
set
. He came of very decent people in Sussex, it seems, although his father was only the second baronet. And some of his set were of really good family. Lord Byron was one of them. The sixth Lord Byron. He wrote even more poetry than Shelley did.’

‘Long-haired crowd, eh?’ It was plain that Lord Ampersand was not favourably impressed. ‘You still haven’t told me why Agatha has unloaded this rubbish on you. Ludlow, take away this toast. It’s burnt.’

Ludlow, whose attendance at the breakfast-table was one of his employer’s more outrageous insistences, judged that this injunction could be sufficiently obeyed by raising a single eyebrow to an assisting parlourmaid – who removed the offending toast so nervously that she contrived to scatter a good many crumbs down Lord Ampersand’s neck. Lord Ampersand made no protest. He was always quite as well-disposed as was at all proper to the more personable of the female domestics about the place.

‘Agatha’s eye caught the name of Digitt, Rollo.’ Lady Ampersand was now consulting the cutting received from her sister. ‘Adrian Digitt.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘A son, it seems, of the second marquess’ younger brother. There’s quite a lot about him. It seems that he had a circle too. Or several circles. He revolved in several circles. Whereas Shelley revolved only in his own.’

‘Balderdash, my dear. Utter balderdash, the whole thing.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ Lady Ampersand was a patient – sometimes even a persistent – woman. ‘Agatha says it may be important. She believes that Adrian, although rather far out, may have spent part of his life at the castle. He had left his wife, you see. Perhaps because of all those circles.’

‘Sounds a bit dubious, to my mind. But go on.’ Lord Ampersand held his wife’s wisdom in considerable regard, although he was not always entirely civil to her. She came of a large family and had been, he liked to say, ‘the pick of the bunch’ – whereas Agatha would have been the bottom of the barrel. ‘Go on,’ he repeated encouragingly. ‘Did Adrian know this fellow Shelley?’

‘Very well, it seems. The article says that Shelley was a difficult person, but that he was devoted to Adrian Digitt, and that it is now clear that Adrian was one of the two people who knew how to manage him. The other was a man called Peacock – who was quite obscure, I imagine, and certainly didn’t move in the best society as a Digitt would naturally have done.’

‘Naturally not. But I still don’t see what’s important, or even quite proper, about a member of my family taking up with a lot of scribblers. And fiddlers and daubers too, likely enough. Except for Lord Byron, of course. He may have been all right.’

‘It’s really the review of a book, you see, that Agatha has sent. And she has marked what she thinks is the most important passage. It’s where the writer says that few men in England can have been as widely and warmly esteemed by people destined to be famous as, it is now apparent, was Adrian Digitt.’