To the Hilt (13 page)

“But that’s nonsense!”

“People believe her.”

“But you’ve never been to the brewery. Not for years, anyway.”

I agreed. “Not for years.”

“Anyway,” said my uncle, “it was Ivan himself who took the Cup out of the brewery, on the day before his heart attack. He told me he was feeling deeply upset and depressed. His firm of auditors—what’s that chap’s name, Tollright?—were warning him he was on the point of losing everything.... And you know Ivan ... he was worried both about his workpeople losing their jobs and about himself losing face and credibility ... he takes his baronetcy and his membership of the Jockey Club very seriously ... he could not bear having his whole life collapse in failure.”

“But it wasn’t his fault.”

“He appointed Norman Quorn to be Finance Director. He says he no longer trusts his own judgment. He’s taking too much guilt onto his own shoulders.”

“Yes.”

“So when he could see bankruptcy and disgrace ahead, he simply walked out with the Cup. ‘Sick at heart’ was the phrase he used. Sick at heart.”

Poor Ivan. Poor sick heart.

I asked, “Did he take the Cup to Park Crescent? Is that where you collected it from?”

My uncle half laughed. “Ivan said he was afraid it would be as accessible in Park Crescent as in the brewery. He wanted to keep it out of any asset pool and he didn’t want to leave a paper trail, like renting a bank vault, so he left it ... you’ll laugh ... he left the treasure in a cardboard box in the cloakroom of his club. Left it in the care of the doorkeeper.”

“Hell’s teeth.”

“I fetched it from his club. Gave the doorman a thank-you. Brought the Cup up here, in my car. James and I drove up here together as usual, you see. The family flew up, of course.”

James was his eldest son, his heir.

“I didn’t tell James what I’d got,” Himself observed thoughtfully. “James doesn’t understand the word ‘secret.’ ”

James, a friendly fellow, liked to talk. Life, to my cousin James, was mostly a lark. He had a pretty wife and three wild children, “all away sailing this week,” explained Himself, “when they should be back at school.”

My uncle and I left the dining room and walked outside round the whole ancient complex, as he liked to do, our feet quiet on the sheep-cropped grass.

“I asked Ivan how much the King Alfred Cup was actually worth,” he said. “Everyone tends to refer to it as priceless, but it isn’t, of course. Not like the Hilt.”

“How much did Ivan say?” “He said it was a symbol. He says you can’t put a price on a symbol.”

“I suppose he’s right.”

We walked a way in silence; then he said, “I told Ivan I wanted to get the Cup valued. If he wanted me to get you to look after it, I had to know its worth.”

“What did he say?”

“He got very agitated. He said if I took it to a reputable valuer he would end up losing it. He said it was too well known. He began panting with distress. I had to assure him I wouldn’t take it to anyone that would recognize it.”

“But,” I said, “no one else could give you a reliable estimate.”

He smiled. We rounded the southernmost comer and turned our faces into the endless wind.

“This afternoon,” he said, raising his voice, “we’ll find out.”

 

 

The valuer summoned to the castle was neither an auctioneer nor a jeweler, but a thin eighty-year-old woman, a retired lecturer in English from St. Andrews University, Dr. Zoë Lang, with a comet tail of distinguished qualifications after her name.

My uncle explained he had met her “at some function or other,” and when she arrived, gushing but overwhelmingly intellectual, he waved a vague hand in my direction and introduced me as “Al... one of my many nephews.”

“How do you do?” Dr. Lang asked politely, giving me a strong bony handshake with her gaze elsewhere. “Cold day, isn’t it?”

Himself made practiced small talk and led the way into the dining room, where with gentle ceremony he sat his guest at the table.

“Al,” he said to me, “there’s a box in the sideboard; right-hand cupboard. Put it on the table, would you?”

I found and carried across a large brown cardboard box stuck all over with sticky tape and conspicuously marked in big black handwritten capitals, “BOOKS. PROPERTY OF SIR I. WESTERING.”

“Open it, Al,” Himself instructed without excitement. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Dr. Lang looked politely interested, but no more.

“I have to warn you again, Lord Kinloch,” she said in her pure Scots voice, “that almost no significant works of goldsmith’s art survive from the ninth century in England. I have done as you asked and kept your request private, which has been no hardship as the last thing you want, I’m sure, is ridicule.”

“The last,” Himself agreed gravely.

Dr. Zoë Lang had straight gray hair looped back into a loose bun on her neck. She wore glasses and lipstick, and clothes too large for her thin frame. There was a small gold brooch but no rings. Something about her, all the same, warned one not to think in terms of dry old virginal spinster.

I ripped off the sticky tape and opened the box, and found inside, as promised, books: old editions of Dickens, to be precise.

“Keep going, Al,” my uncle said.

I lifted out the books and underneath came to a gray duster-cloth drawstring bag enclosing another box. I lifted that out also.

The inner box, in size a twelve-inch cube, was of black leather with gold clasps. Between the clasps, stamped in small gold letters, were the words “MAXIM, London.” I freed the box from its protecting bag and pushed it across the table to Himself.

“Dr. Lang,” he said courteously, pushing the box on further into her reach, “do us the honor.”

Without flourish she undid the clasps and opened the box, and then sat as still as marble while I felt her surprise in mental gusts across the table.

“Well,” she said finally, and again, “
Well ...
” Inside the box, supported by white satin-covered cushioning, the King Alfred Gold Cup lay on its side. I had never actually seen it before and nor, from his expression, had my uncle Robert.

No wonder, I thought, that Ivan had wanted to keep that cup for his own. No wonder he wanted it hidden and kept safe. That cup must have come to mean as much to him as Prince Charles Edward’s sword hilt had come to mean to the earls of Kinloch, the affirmation that the personal stewardship of symbolic treasures should not be whisked away by ephemeral gray faces who wouldn’t, down the decades, care a jot.

King Alfred’s Cup, bigger than I’d imagined, was in shape a wide round bowl on a sturdy neck with a spreading foot. The rim of the bowl was crenellated like many castles (Windsor, but not the Kinlochs’): its sides glittered with red, blue and green inlaid stones and overall it shone with the warm unmistakable golden glow of twenty-two karats at least.

With almost reverence Dr. Lang lifted out the astonishing object and stood it on the polished wood of the table, where it gleamed as if with inner light. Dr. Lang cleared her throat and said, as if pulling herself down to earth, “King Alfred never saw this, of course. It’s shaped like a chalice, but if King Alfred ever used anything like this to take communion, it would have been much smaller and of course very much lighter. This cup must weigh five or more pounds. No ... sad as I am to say it, this cup is modern.”

“
Modem?
” Himself echoed, surprised.

“Certainly not medieval,” regretted the expert. “Almost certainly Victorian—1860, or thereabouts. Very handsome. Beautiful, even. But not old.”

The cup had what looked like a pattern engraved right round the top below the crenellations and again round the lower third of the bowl. Dr. Lang looked attentively at the patterns and smiled with obvious enjoyment.

“The cup is engraved with a poem in Anglo-Saxon,” she said. “No trouble spared. But it’s still Victorian. And I doubt if those colored stones are rubies and emeralds ... though you’d need to get an informed opinion for that.”

“Can you read the poem?” I asked.

She glanced at me briefly. “Of course. I taught Anglo-Saxon for years. Wonderful vigorous poetry, what little’s left of it. No printing presses or copying machines then, of course.” She fingered the bands of engraving. “This is Bede’s Death Song. Very famous. Bede died in 735, long before Alfred was born.” She turned the cup round, searching with her fingers for the beginning of the verse. “In literal translation it says, ‘Before that sudden journey, no one is wiser in thought than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be adjudged to his soul, of good or evil, after his death-day.”

Her old voice held the echo of years of lecturing to students; the authority of confident scholarship. At seventeen I had run away from that sort of slightly didactic tone and deprived myself of much enlightenment in consequence, and all these years later I found I still irrationally resented her perfectly justifiable consciousness of the high ground of superior knowledge.

Be ashamed of yourself, Al, I thought. Be humble. Bede’s Death Song’s message was of taking stock of the good and evil one did on earth because hell after death was a certainty. Unimaginable centuries later I believed that the only real hell was on earth and usually undeserved: and I was not going to discuss it with Zoë Lang.

I took it for a certainty that Ivan knew what teaching was engraved on his cup. He had judged and found himself culpable and was harder on himself precisely because his standard for his own probity had been set so high. I wondered if he valued the Cup more for what was inscribed on it than for its intrinsic worth.

“So how much,” Himself was asking his expert, “should one insure this cup for?”

“Insure?” She pursed her lips. “You could weigh it and multiply by the current price of gold, or you could maintain it is a valuable and interesting example of Victorian romanticism, or you could say it’s worth dying for.”

“Not that.”

“People die in defense of their property all the time. It’s a powerful instinct.” She nodded as if to emphasize the point. “I don’t think you could insure this cup for any more than its worth in gold.”

Its weight in gold wouldn’t save the brewery or go anywhere near subtracting even a significant naught.

My uncle thoughtfully restored the Cup to its box and closed the lid. The whole room looked a little darker at its eclipse.

“The accounts of King Alfred burning the cakes and suffering from hemorrhoids were all tosh,” Dr. Lang said in her lecturing voice. “King Alfred suffered from spin doctors. But the fact remains, he is the only king in Britain ever to be called great. Alfred the Great. Born in Wantage, Berkshire. He was the fifth son, you know. Primogeniture wasn’t supreme. They chose the fittest. Alfred was a scholar. He could read and write, both in Latin and his native tongue, Anglo-Saxon. He freed southern England—Wessex—from the rule of the invading Danes, first by appeasement and sly negotiation, then by battle. He was
clever.
” Her old face shone. “People now try to make him a twentieth-century-thinking social worker who founded schools and wrote new good laws, and the probabilities are that he did both, but only in the context of his own times. He died in 899, and no other well-authenticated king of that whole first millennium is so revered or honored, or even remembered. It’s a great pity this remarkable gold chalice here isn’t a genuine ninth-century treasure, but of course it would have been either stolen at once or lost when Henry the Eighth devastated the churches. So many old treasures were buried in the 1530s to keep them safe, and the buriers died or were killed without telling where the treasures were hidden, and all over England farmers still to this day find gold deep in their fields, but not this cup. Alas, it wasn’t around in the days of Henry the Eighth. I think, actually, that the proper place for it now is in a museum. All such treasures should be cared for and displayed in museums.”

She stopped. Himself, who disagreed with her, thanked her warmly for her trouble and offered her wine or tea.

“What I would like,” she said, “is to see the Kinloch Hilt.”

Himself blinked. “We have only the replica on show.”

“The real one,” she said. “Show me the real one.”

After less than three seconds he said, smiling, “We have to keep it safe from Henry the Eighth.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we have had to bury it to keep it.” He was making a joke of it and, unwillingly, she smiled tightly and settled for a sight of the copy.

We walked down the long passage where once relays of footmen had hurried with steaming dishes from kitchen to Great Hall, and Himself unlocked the weighty door that let us into the castle proper.

The Great Hall’s walls, thanks to the theft of all the tapestries, were now for the most part grimly bare. The display cases, since the disappearance of the priceless dinner service, were unlit and empty. The long center table, where once fifty guests had dined in splendor, bore a thin film of dust. Without comment my uncle walked down the long room under its high vaulted ceiling until he came to the imposing grilled glass display unit at the far end that had once held the true Honor of the Kinlochs.

Himself flicked a switch. Lights inside the glass case came to brilliant life and beamed onto the gold-looking object inside.

The replica hilt lay on black velvet, and even though one knew it was not the real thing, it looked impressive.

“It is gold-plated,” its owner said. “The red stones are spinel, not ruby. The blue stones are lapis lazuli, the green ones are peridots. I commissioned it and paid for it, and no one disputes that this is mine.”

Dr. Zoë Lang studied it carefully and in silence.

The hilt itself, though larger than a large man’s fist, looked remarkably like the King Alfred Gold Cup, except that there were no crenellations and no engraving. There was instead the pommel, the grip that fitted into the palm of the hand: and instead of the circular foot, only the neck into which the snapped-off blade had been fastened.