On top was a piece of paper, written in a script that was perfectly legible, and all the more shocking for being so.
‘Read if you can, and a curse on him who will not understand. May he have my misfortune.’
Jay let out a cry of terror that echoed around the beautiful hall.
‘Do not approach,’ he said to the woman as she came running over. ‘The package is cursed.’
She retreated swiftly. ‘Are you all right?’
‘So far.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
He read the curse again and considered its wording. ‘Read if you can...’ Well, he could read, although a curse which could not be understood was of little power. A curse if you will not understand. Did that mean a curse if you do not understand, or a curse if you refuse to understand? What if he simply could not understand, because the script was meaningless? He would not understand, but not because he refused to do so. Besides, the curse might apply to the text he had just read, not to the content of the book. That he had read and understood, he thought, in all its possible meanings.
Jay thought, weighed the options, then reached for the book. ‘It is all right,’ he called out. ‘I have disarmed the curse. It can do me no harm.’
‘I think,’ he added in an undertone as he opened it.
The book was some forty pages long, written on both sides of the paper with a fine black ink which had not faded in any way, although it was difficult to tell the age. He peered at it carefully; evidently it was made up of letters, but few made any sense to him. He flipped through the pages one after the other, hoping that somewhere it would turn into something recognisable, but the manuscript refused to cooperate. Nor was there any explanation which would allow him to unravel the meaning. He needed to take it to Henary. He might understand it.
11
‘What’s all that stuff downstairs, Professor?’ Rosie asked after an absence of several days when, unaccountably as far as he was concerned, she had failed to drop in for tea and a chat.
‘Eh? Oh, that all belongs to Mrs Meerson,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondering. I went down there to look for Jenkins. Who is she? A friend of yours?’
‘Angela? A very old friend, yes. She mainly lives in France, and is storing all of that stuff until she takes it there, although she never seems to get around to it. I inherited it from Tolkien when he retired and needed space for his library.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Another friend. She was keeping it in his garage, and didn’t know what to do with it all when he moved, so I said she could have the cellar. It’s not as if I ever use it.’
Lytten looked at Rosie curiously, but did not press the matter. ‘Now, what are we going to do about Professor Jenkins? I confess I am quite worried about him.’
The Mysterious Affair of the Missing Cat was indeed a concern. It was most unusual behaviour. Even how he had got out of the house was unknown.
‘A locked room mystery,’ Lytten pronounced. ‘Someone broke in and stole the cat, carefully locking the door as they left, in which case — why no ransom note? Or the cat has learned to fly, and escaped up the chimney on its own. Or — and here I fix you with my piercing gaze and force a confession out of you — it was you, Rosalind Wilson, who stole the cat, constructing an elaborate story to throw me off the scent. Means, opportunity.’
‘But no motive,’ the girl said. ‘I mean, Professor, really. Who on earth would want your cat?’
‘Very true. No one in their right mind would want Professor Jenkins. That’s what comes of taking your plots from books. Life, alas, is always new and different and rather more complicated. We must be looking for a lunatic. Or, of course, the idiot animal just wandered off, got confused and is now hopelessly wedged under a piece of furniture, too fat to move, too lazy to cry out, like Winnie the Pooh in the rabbit hole. It will no doubt wait until I am fast asleep and then start yowling until I rescue it, foul night-waking cat.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Shakespeare, my dear. The Rape of Lucrece.’
Rosie blushed.
‘A fine poem, although not his best. Based on the Roman legend. Do you know the story? It is very famous as a tale of the consequences when the powerful abuse their position...’
This gave Lytten an opportunity to discourse while he made the girl some tea, ranging from Ovid right the way through Shakespeare and Hogarth, then on to a recent opera he had seen and thoroughly disliked.
‘We are our past, my dear, and if you want to know the future you have to know what has already taken place. The past is everywhere in us. Even in little things, like names. Take yours, for example.’
‘What about it?’ Rosie did not like her name. It was the sort of name grandmothers had. She wanted a modern name. Like Sandra.
‘You are named — accidentally or on purpose I could not say — after the most perfect character in all of English literature.’
‘Really?’
‘You are. Rosalind, in As You Like It, is by far the finest of Shakespeare’s inventions. She is bold, witty, intelligent, kind, beautiful and not at all soppy. Often enough his women are either silly or murderous. Rosalind is magnificent in all respects, so much so that I am sure she must have been based on someone he knew and admired greatly. So, my dear, you were once Shakespeare’s beloved. Not many young girls can boast of such a thing.’
‘I should say not,’ she replied, greatly impressed.
When Rosie received a message a few days later saying that Lytten had been unexpectedly called away and asking her to keep an eye open for Jenkins in his absence, she was delighted. She was worried about the cat, but excited because it meant she would have a free run of his cellar for a while. She had had a very bad fright in Lytten’s house. She did not like to be frightened; it happened only very rarely, and she was now suffering from an overwhelming, burning curiosity. She had lain awake at night, thinking. Dancing in her head as she stared at the ceiling were the jumbled memories of the cellar, the dank, gloomy squalor, the smell, the dust. Then the birds, the soft wind, the beauty...
The more she thought, the more she doubted her own sanity. Psychological disturbance, the Professor had called it. How could it have happened, after all? She was a reasonable girl, and had tried to come up with an explanation, although she was hampered by a reluctance to tell anyone what she had seen.
The only thing she could think of that made any sense was that Lytten had in his basement — or this Mrs Meerson had — a new and terribly clever cinema machine, or a new type of television. But she was pretty certain that neither had mastered the art of making you feel the wind, or smell pine needles in the heat, let alone creating young boys who offer to serve you.
No. It was either a delusion or it was real. The former might mean she was insane, which would distress her parents, so she felt obliged, for their sake, to establish the truth. As Poirot himself was fond of saying, she needed more evidence before the mystery could be solved.
The first opportunity came a couple of days after the delivery of Lytten’s note. She told her mother she planned to stay on for an extra choir rehearsal, which was entirely believable. Rosie sang well, and this year they were going to perform Zadok the Priest with (as a concession to what teachers considered modernity) some catchy numbers from The King and I for afters. Rosie — whose burgeoning tastes were beginning to drift far from Broadway musicals but who could still appreciate a good tune — was quite happy to sing anything. Ordinarily rehearsals took place on Thursday, but an extra one would not be queried. This gave her a blank couple of hours in which to settle the matter of the cellar once and for all.