Ampersand Papers (6 page)

‘You said yourself that one has to be careful. And it’s a position of trust, in a way. Sutch might prove to be Snatch, and start pocketing things.’

‘What a suspicious fellow you are, Charles! But, of course, what you say is perfectly true.’ Lord Skillet hesitated. He might have been a man weighing the wisdom of making a confidence to a not wholly reliable person. ‘As a matter of fact, Charles, I have a slight suspicion that something of the sort may have been happening somewhere already.’

‘I don’t understand that, at all. If you don’t believe there are any papers in the castle…’

‘I said
somewhere
. And I didn’t, you’ll recall, turn down flat your notion that some of Adrian’s effusions may lurk in some quite different locality. And the admirable Dr Sutch, being anxious to nail the job, has done a little preliminary research already. Apparently the first thing one does is to rake through the likely learned journals for any recent mention of the chap you’re interested in. And there has been some interest in Adrian Digitt, as you know, on the part of the kind of people who write in such things. Sutch has turned up an affair of the sort in an American journal. By a Shelley fan, I gather. He reports that something or other of Adrian’s has lately been acquired by a private collector in California, who is refusing even well-accredited scholars access to it. That’s not uncommon over there, it seems. No striking commercial motive involved. Just dotty acquisitiveness. Sort of squirrel instinct. But it
might
be because this collector has come by what he
has
come by in some underhand way. That’s not uncommon either.’

‘It sounds plausible.’

‘Of course it does. One of Sutch’s jobs would have to be keeping a look-out for any further quiet goings-on of the same flavour.’

‘I see.’ Charles looked hard at his cousin, who at the moment was innocently pushing over to his side of the table the bill presented by the waiter. ‘You mean that something like theft may be going on, we don’t know where? That there really is a cache of Adrian’s scribblings in existence, and that it is being unobtrusively pilfered from, and the booty being equally unobtrusively fed into the market?’

‘You express the possibility admirably, my dear Charles, which is just what I’d expect of you. You haven’t any ideas yourself as to where it might be happening, and by whose agency?’

‘Of course I haven’t, Archie. I’ve been taking no active interest in all this, at all. It has simply turned up in our chat during this very pleasant meal.’

And Charles Digitt produced his wallet, and extracted from it a couple of five-pound notes. He had a strong feeling that the little party had now better break up – break up and be thought about. Unsurprisingly, he was conscious that here might be deep waters. Did Archie really know about the situation at Budleigh Salterton? Was he actually suspecting his cousin of having already slipped into a pilfering role there? Was he in effect saying, ‘Charles, my boy, have a care! Sutch is keeping an eye on you’? Or was the boot, so to speak, on the other foot? Perhaps Archie himself was the pilferer, and the field of his operations nothing other than the North Tower of Treskinnick Castle. This sudden communicativeness on Archie’s part might be a ruse designed to deflect suspicion from himself if it did become known that Adrian Digitt’s remains were beginning unaccountably to surface here and there. Was there anything impossible about this? Charles Digitt took another hard look at his cousin (and at everything he either knew or imagined of his cousin’s character) and decided that definitely there was not.

With expressions of mutual esteem (and clearly in an atmosphere of deep mutual distrust) the two gentlemen – or the two prospectively successive noblemen – parted outside the restaurant.

Lord Ampersand knew almost at once that he wasn’t going to care greatly for Dr Sutch. Dr Sutch was an egghead in the literal acceptation of the image; he was bald, and had a massive domed forehead reminiscent of the disagreeable people who know all the answers in competitions in the field of Universal Knowledge mounted by the BBC. Whether Dr Sutch in fact possessed Universal Knowledge was never to appear, since he turned out to be a man wholly commanded by one thing at a time. At the moment that one thing was the Ampersands. He always said ‘the Ampersands’ when meaning all the Digitts who were around or ever had been around. This in itself a little irritated Lord Ampersand, who wouldn’t himself have said ‘the Marlboroughs’ or ‘the Salisburys’ when he meant a whole gaggle of Churchills or Cecils. Perhaps it wasn’t positively incorrect, but it was faintly wrong – which was something a good deal worse in Lord Ampersand’s view of the matter.

Dr Sutch, moreover, was a pedant, by which is meant one given to unseasonable displays of erudition. Having at least a rapidly assimilative mind, he had got up his client’s family rapidly and in overpowering detail, and he lectured the Ampersands on every aspect of it. Lady Ampersand rather liked this. She had always felt it would be nice to know a little about her husband’s people, but the topic was one upon which her husband could inform her only in a muddled way. History was mysterious to Lord Ampersand, even although he was constantly looking up such contemporary manifestations of it as were to be found in
Who’s Who
. Dr Sutch, although not exactly a courteous man, had notions about courtesy, and one of them constrained him to feign the belief that he was never doing other than remind Lord Ampersand of circumstances and connections already stored in Lord Ampersand’s capacious mind. Lord Ampersand was infuriated by this.

So the question quickly arose as to what was to be
done
about Dr Sutch. To have him resident in the castle presented formidable difficulties in the way of protocol. To receive him at the family table for long would be totally insupportable. He couldn’t very well be told to go and mess with Ludlow. To have meals served to him in a private room (as had obtained under former Ampersands for attorneys, the visiting dentist, and people of that sort) would be cumbersome – and also, in some perplexing way, counter to the spirit of the time. So Lord Ampersand decided – reluctantly, since considerable expense would be involved – to have the fellow put up at the Ampersand Arms. It was said to be quite a decent little pub, and was no more than a couple of miles away. Dr Sutch tended to corpulence, so the walk would do him good.

The next question to arise was where this tediously learned person should prosecute his researches. Lord Skillet, when consulted, at first professed to favour the billiard room, but this was perhaps only to annoy his sisters, since it was to the billiard room that they regularly summoned the humbler females of the region to receive instruction on various aspects of domestic economy and godly living. Lord Ampersand himself vetoed the library, pointing out that it was his habit to do a great deal of reading there. He was inclined to favour bringing all the stuff down from the North Tower to the old stables – where his wife had vetoed that promising notion of tea at 60p a head. Finally it was decided that the walk to and from the Ampersand Arms was not in itself adequate to the safeguarding of Dr Sutch’s health. He had better tackle that staircase as well, and do his rummaging where all the junk was stored already. Lord Skillet discussed this proposal with Dr Sutch. Rather surprisingly, Dr Sutch proved entirely amenable to it.

Once established, Dr Sutch sprang another surprise, conceivably occasioned by a rapidly formed conviction that the comforts of the Ampersand Arms were not such as to commend a long uninterrupted stay there. His work at the castle, he explained, would have to be on a part-time basis. He’d put in Mondays and Tuesdays on what he called the Ampersand Papers. During the rest of the week he would be continuing his antiquarian research for the Duchy. Lord Ampersand was a good deal impressed by this, and agreed to it at once. It was quite something to be employing a fellow who was at the same time in the service – as it must be – of none other than the Prince of Wales.

Nevertheless, this looked like slowing things down. But now Lord Skillet made an obliging suggestion. Although he had found Dr Sutch for the job, it was only because his interfering Aunt Agatha had prompted his parents to insist on employing a person of that kind, and most of Archie’s references to the ‘pro’ were of a satiric or derogatory cast. With unusual good-humour, however, he undertook to do some of the donkey-work himself. Sutch had pointed out that it wasn’t only worm-eaten dinghies and triumphs of Victorian taxidermy that were plainly irrelevant to his task; there was also a great deal of mouldering paper which nobody could mistake for anything not fitly to be made a bonfire of or chucked into the sea; if Lord Skillet had a go at that it would be a very obliging thing.

So Archie, too, turned up twice a week at the castle and pottered around the North Tower. It couldn’t be said that he was in any direct sense keeping an eye on Dr Sutch, since on those days Dr Sutch was absent on his royal occasions. But he may have been keeping an eye on what Dr Sutch had been about.

And then Charles Digitt began to turn up occasionally as well. Was he, in turn, keeping an eye on Archie? This came into nobody’s head. And as he turned up only at weekends, when his cousin invariably had mysterious engagements elsewhere, he had the run of the place to himself. Lord Ampersand, as usual, welcomed the heir presumptive amiably enough; he explained to his wife, as he regularly and most conscientiously did, that Charles was entitled to know about anything that was going on at Treskinnick. And Lady Ampersand was delighted to have her nephew as a weekend guest. It was, she said, nice for the girls. This expression cloaked her persuasion that Charles had more than a cousin’s fondness for Geraldine, and that some eleventh-hour happiness would be achieved by her younger daughter as a result. A marriage between first cousins, she knew, was sometimes disapproved of on mysterious eugenic grounds. But the vicar (and the bishop) would have nothing against it, and on other accounts it would be an extremely suitable thing. Lady Ampersand sometimes started to count out on her fingers the somewhat disabling span of years sundering her posited lovers. But she always wisely gave up when she had arrived at the number ten.

But at Treskinnick Castle for a time, at least in a metaphorical sense, all went merry as a marriage bell (as the sixth Lord Byron had remarked of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before the Battle of Waterloo). It was true that Dr Sutch, so far, had nothing to report. He appeared to have a conviction, irksome but to his credit as a serious scholar, that his commission was to delve into the entire, and for the most part entirely unremarkable, chronicles of the Digitt family. On one occasion he even announced with satisfaction that he had ‘got as far as the Civil War’. Lord Ampersand, although not very well-informed on the doings of Oliver Cromwell and Charles, King and Martyr, obscurely surmised that such massive public disorder could only have occurred a long time ago – even longer ago than Shelley and Lord Byron had occurred. But he was gratified to learn (or rather to be reminded) that Treskinnick Castle had been besieged and reduced in the course of whatever had then been happening. It appeared that this fate had befallen a great many other castles at the time, and it would be rather humiliating had Treskinnick been left out. Lord Skillet made fun of the irrelevance of this august historic occasion to the present circumstances of the Digitts, which were as reduced as the castle had been in the mid-seventeenth century. But in this judgement Lord Skillet, as it happened, was to be proved wrong.

A day came upon which Charles Digitt and Dr Ambrose Sutch did meet. Charles stretched one of his weekends into a long weekend, and on the Monday morning made his way up to the muniment room. It struck him as he began the hazardous climb that he was at a slight disadvantage in this proposed interview. He had a strong curiosity about Dr Sutch, but there was no reason to suppose that Dr Sutch had the slightest curiosity about him. No doubt the learned man would be civil. Yet he might perfectly well feel that here was merely a troublesome interruption of his dedicated task at Treskinnick.

The North Tower being a very massive affair, the chamber immediately under its roof was as large as a modest banqueting hall. Abundant as were the accumulated treasures of the Digitts in a paper and ink way (whether in bound volumes and letter-books or in dispersed bundles either trussed up in string or merely flapping around) there was tolerable space to move about in. The deer, foxes, badgers and otters – and also numerous plaster-and-paint versions of improbable-looking fish – had all been moved to one half of the room, and had an odd appearance of patiently awaiting attention they weren’t going to get. At the other end the various bits and pieces of nautical equipment had been piled up, one thing on top of another, in a higgledy-piggledy fashion.

Quite a lot of muscular effort must have been involved, and Charles wondered who had provided it. He couldn’t imagine Archie doing much in that line, or Ludlow being at all readily persuaded to muck in. A species of
corvée
levied around the estate was no doubt the answer. Certainly in one way or another the decks had been cleared for Dr Sutch. Down the length of the room two long trestle tables had been set up, and on these were piles of paper presumably in process of being set in order. There were also a couple of large steel filing-cabinets which must have been hoisted to their present elevation at considerable risk to life and limb.

All in all, Dr Sutch’s present surroundings didn’t much suggest the dignity of scholarship; nevertheless Dr Sutch received his visitor with all the aplomb of the Director of the British Museum or Bodley’s Librarian in the University of Oxford proposing to do the honours of his institution to one of the Crowned Heads of Europe.

‘Mr Charles Digitt?’ Dr Sutch asked with a grave bow.

‘Yes, I’m Charles Digitt. How do you do?’

‘How do you do?’ Dr Sutch shook hands. ‘May I venture to wish you many happy returns of the day?’

‘Oh, thank you very much.’ Charles had quite forgotten that it was his birthday, and it had been an occasion of which his kinsfolk at Treskinnick must have been culpably incognizant. ‘You must be quite a chronologist,’ he added rather feebly.