The Attenbury Emeralds (22 page)

As they trundled back on the Tube to Green Park, Peter said, ‘Oxford next, I think. We have Bunter’s photograph, and Miss Pevenor’s transcription. Someone will surely be able to read it for us.’

‘Any excuse will do,’ said Harriet, ‘for the towery city.’

‘I expect there is someone in Cambridge, if you would prefer,’ said Peter.

‘Cambridge is very beautiful,’ said Harriet, ‘but it is not ours.’

‘Oxford, then,’ said Peter. ‘Tomorrow.’

18

But as it happened, Bunter shot their excuse from under them. He was brimming with satisfaction as he took their coats and hats in the hall.

‘I am delighted to tell you, my lord, my lady,’ he said, the moment they were disrobed, ‘that I have secured a translation of the words on the suspect emerald.’

‘The devil you have!’ said Peter. ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant. And how, may I ask, did you do it?’

‘As you know, m’lord, m’lady,’ said Bunter, almost smiling as he spoke, ‘I teach a WEA course in photography on Wednesday afternoons in Fulham.’

‘
I
didn’t know that,’ said Harriet. ‘Beyond knowing that Wednesday was your afternoon off, I have never enquired.’

‘Your ladyship is very considerate of my privacy,’ said Bunter. ‘But having had such satisfaction over many years in practising photography, and having been so often useful to his lordship in that way, I have been giving some time to helping others to the same satisfaction as I have had myself. I am completely self-taught, my lady, but of course Hope has been able to assist me in any matter in which I find myself at a loss.’

Harriet was distracted by the thought of Bunter at a loss, but Peter cut straight to the chase. ‘How has this helped you to decipher Persian, Bunter?’ he asked.

‘A young lady in my class is an Iranian by birth,’ Bunter answered, ‘and it occurred to me to show her the photograph I took in Mr Snader’s office, and to ask for her comments. She was puzzled at first, and told me that she did not read Arabic. But then on looking more closely she realised that the words were in Persian. She told me that having come to England as a young child she was not fully fluent in her native tongue, but she managed even so to tell me…’ Bunter was talking on his feet as they mounted the stair together, and as they reached the library door, he opened it triumphantly, and added, ‘What the words said.’

‘Be done with the theatricals, Bunter, and tell us all,’ said Peter.

‘On the table, my lord,’ said Bunter.

Two sheets of paper were lying side by side on the library table. The first one was a note made in Bunter’s handwriting, so long ago.

‘
I will not cease striving until I achieve my desire…
’

‘That is what is on the Attenbury stone,’ said Peter.

‘Just so, my lord. You told me at the time, and I made a note of it. And this’ – Bunter indicated the second sheet of paper – ‘is what is on the stone in the bank.’

The second paper said: ‘
or my spirit leaves my own body
’

Harriet took up both sheets of paper, and read out: ‘“
I will not cease striving until I achieve my desire, or my spirit leaves my own body
.” Well, that’s clear enough.’

‘What do you take to be clear enough, Harriet?’ Peter asked her.

‘That the stones belong together. The inscriptions make perfect sense paired like this.’

‘They do. But logically, the stone in the bank cannot be the Attenburys’. QED I had been wondering if the Maharaja’s stone might have been floating about in England somehow, and had thought of trying some way to approach the distant potentate tactfully about it…Because tracking the movements of his jewel would require his co-operation. Care and diplomacy required.’

‘Diplomacy comes naturally to you, Peter,’ said Harriet.

‘I was about to tell you, my lord,’ said Bunter, ‘that the potentate in question is not at the moment very distant. The court pages in this morning’s
Times
indicate that he is visiting London this month and staying at the Savoy.’

‘Good lord!’ said Peter. ‘I have occasionally wondered if he was a real person at all. But fictional persons do not breeze into London and stay at the Savoy.’

‘They might,’ objected Harriet. ‘They can do it more easily than real people can and more easily afford it.’

‘They could also, I suppose, own fictional jewels. The problem with that is that I saw and held the Maharaja’s jewel, which was too tangible by far to be an act of the imagination. But, tally-ho! Bunter, present my card at the porters’ desk at the Savoy, and request an appointment to see the great man at his earliest convenience. Oh, and let Miss Pevenor have that translation in the post, would you?’

It was a foggy early evening when they set out for the Savoy. Not the white fog which from time to time enveloped their house at Paggleham but the dirty grey London fog, smelling of the coal smoke with which it was laden. In only a few yards a pedestrian would have soot-rimmed nostrils, and soot-lined lips tasting foul to the tongue. Harriet’s petticoat, still one made of parachute silk from the war years, would be filthy for four inches above the hem by the time they reached their destination. The street lights had shrunk into themselves, dimly bright but casting no brightness. There were very few cars, and those were crawling along the kerb, moving more slowly than the Wimseys were walking. But there was a weird sort of beauty about it. It had the capacity to make the familiar look like a ghostly mystery. All sounds were deadened, and the two of them walked in silence, because opening one’s mouth allowed the entering caustic miasma to burn in one’s throat. Both of them had wrapped their scarves over the lower half of their faces. We look, thought Harriet, like bit-part actors in a Hitchcock film.

‘Shall we turn back?’ Peter asked her, as they passed the Royal Academy.

‘No, we don’t need to,’ she replied, in a voice muffled in her scarf.

Peter drew her arm through his as though he thought he might lose her, and they trudged on.

‘They’ll have to do something about this some day,’ he observed as they crossed Piccadilly Circus and headed down the Haymarket.

‘People in England can’t do without coal fires,’ Harriet said.

‘Anthracite,’ Peter replied, and with that they were silent till they reached the entrance to the Savoy. A cloud of fog accompanied them through the doors and dispersed at the sight of the good fire burning in the lobby. They could see each other’s breath as they both exhaled vigorously to expel the foul air from their lungs.

The receptionist phoned up to the Maharaja’s room, and a resplendent servant all in white with a bright red turban appeared to escort them up in the lift.

The Maharaja rose from his sofa, and advanced to meet them with extended hand. ‘Lord Peter!’ he exclaimed. ‘After all these years I would have known you anywhere!’

Peter stopped dead in astonishment. ‘Mr Nandine Osmanthus!’ he said. ‘Good lord! Mr Nandine Osmanthus, may I introduce my wife, Lady Peter…’

The Maharaja turned his attention to Harriet. A man of about Peter’s age, she thought, with a lean, intelligent face. He greeted her gravely in perfect English. He was, in contrast to his servant, very plainly and austerely dressed, wearing a dark grey silk achkan, over western trousers. Then as they all sat down a sudden flash of light made her notice his only adornment – a large diamond on the buckle of his left shoe.

‘Now, it will be about those emeralds that you wish to see me,’ he said. Unasked, his servant placed little tables beside them, and brought green tea in paper-thin china cups. ‘In what way are they causing trouble at the moment?’

‘You remember, I am sure, coming many miles to confirm that Lord Attenbury’s emerald was one of a pair with your own?’

‘What a palaver!’ said the Maharaja, laughing. ‘I got arrested by the British police, my God!’

‘That may not have been the only indignity you suffered, appearing under a pseudonym, as you did,’ said Peter.

‘I thought it would be fun to escape my all-too-burden-some identity,’ he said. ‘A young man’s trick. You, Lord Peter, treated me with perfect courtesy. A model English lord, I thought you. Unlike, if may say so, your host.’

‘You might have had a better reception if you had appeared as yourself,’ Peter offered.

Harriet listened, bemused. Why should Peter feel defensive about old Lord Attenbury’s discourtesy?

‘I was on his ground,’ observed the Maharaja. ‘It is not how we are treated in England that has been a cause of grievance, Lord Peter, but how we have been treated in India.’

‘I have never been to India, I am afraid,’ Peter said.

‘My dear fellow! You must come, you must both come. I shall do you proud. Would you like to go on a tiger hunt?’

‘I would rather hunt manuscripts,’ said Peter. ‘To see them; not to acquire them unless they were honestly for sale.’

‘You are sure you would not like to play the English lord in my country? Shoot a few tigers and take them home as rugs? Then you can say casually to your guests, “I shot that fellow myself when I was hunting in Sinorabad.”’

‘Not at all my kind of thing, I’m afraid,’ said Peter. ‘But I would like to see the observatory at Jaipur.’

The two men sat silently for a moment, taking the measure of each other.

‘And you, Lady Harriet, would like to buy jewels and silks, and ride on an elephant?’

Harriet said, ‘Yes, I would like to ride on an elephant. My interest in jewels is confined to their capacity to be the crux of interesting plots.’

‘As certain emeralds might be?’ he asked, smiling.

‘It is your own emerald we have come to ask you about,’ Peter told him.

‘That is my own affair, surely,’ said the Maharaja.

Peter paused, like a chess player considering the next move. ‘We believe it to be at this moment in the Attenbury strongbox in a bank vault,’ he said.

‘You are entirely mistaken,’ said the Maharaja. ‘The one emerald remaining to my family was returned by me to my mother’s custody on my return from the mission on which I encountered you, in 1921. And since that time it has been on display in a little treasury my family established in the palace in Sinorabad for the delectation of tourists. And, of course, to collect a fee for the privilege of gawping – is that how you would put it? – at items of immeasurable value. You can read of it, mentioned in
Barham’s Guide
for Indian travellers, and you shall see it when you visit me; the show also contains some very fine Mughal manuscripts. However, my curiosity is aroused; what makes you imagine that my jewel is now place-holding for Attenbury’s?’

‘I had better tell you the whole story, I think,’ said Peter. He launched into the tale of the bank manager’s mysterious visitor, and the alleged substitution of the jewels.

‘The inscriptions are the key to this mystery,’ said the Maharaja.

Peter unfolded from his wallet the two sheets of paper with the inscriptions written on them. The Maharaja made a great show of finding his gold-rimmed reading glasses, and holding the papers up to read them. And then his demeanour changed. Suddenly the playful, supercilious guarded manner was dropped.

‘You know where the stone is that carries these words?’ he cried, flourishing the paper that said:
‘or my spirit leaves my own body’
.

‘Indeed we do,’ said Peter. ‘It is the one in the Attenbury box which the present Lord Attenbury is being told is not his because another can prove ownership of it. I must ask you directly: is that other person you, or one of your agents?’

The Maharaja left that question unanswered. He said, ‘At last, at last, the third stone has turned up! My father and grandfather always believed it would surface somehow, somewhere. And now it is found. And do I understand that it belongs to someone who would like to sell it? This is wonderful, wonderful!’

‘A third stone,’ said Peter. ‘My wife did wonder what kind of setting could look right with just two. But if there are three…’

‘The inscriptions seem to show otherwise,’ said Harriet quietly. ‘They are continuous. And what would the third one say?’

‘My dear lady, the inscriptions you have brought me do happen to make sense together. But they are not continuous. What a pity it is,’ he went on, ‘that after hundreds of years of common history the balance should be so one-way. We have acquired widespread knowledge of English, and a new democracy. Good railways, and a sense of the law; our departing rulers have acquired a few tiger-skin rugs and a liking for curry. You have had the worst of it. But so few of you have learned of our culture, which is the equal of yours. If you had known a little Persian you would have seen at once that we are looking at a verse by Hafez. Look, I will write it for you in English. First the words on the Attenbury stone: “
I will not cease striving until I achieve my desire
.” Then the words on my stone: “
Either my body joins my beloved
” and finally the words on the stone so long missing: “
or my spirit leaves my own body
.” Together they make up famous lines from a very great poet.’

‘And they were made as a love-gift,’ said Harriet, touched.