The Warden’s principal concern had to do with the will of Number Twenty, Abel Meredith. This was the one with slightly over two thousand pounds, originally going to Meredith’s brother in Canada. His conversation with Henry Wood, Number Twelve, in which he had implied that half the money went to Canada, the rest to him, had led to Andrew Snow, Number Eighteen, remembering an earlier conversation with Meredith, in which he, Number Eighteen, was told all the money was going to the brother in Canada. And that had led directly to the old men requesting their wills back. All of them had voiced their concerns about Meredith’s will and where his legacy was going. He had said nothing, but he knew he had to do something. Otherwise the old men, led by that slippery Number Twelve, might complain to the Silkworkers Company in London.
The inmates of the Jesus Hospital eased the pains of their days at the Rose and Crown, famed for its barmaid and the smoke. Monk had never visited the place, feeling it would be beneath him to be seen drinking in the same place as the residents of the almshouse. Five minutes’ walk in the opposite direction was the Duke of Clarence, a place that was pretending not be a pub at all, but some sort of superior watering hole for people coming for boat rides on the Thames or going for lunch or dinner at the expensive hotel on the island up the road. Even the public bar in the Duke of Clarence looked as though it might contain a couple of stockbrokers from the City. It was here, the previous evening, over two pints of mild and bitter, that Monk formulated his plan for the next morning.
Breakfast was nearly over in the Jesus Hospital. The tomato ketchup and the HP sauce had been sprayed over pairs of sausages and a helping of fried bread this morning, accompanied by what the old men thought were two rather mean rashers of bacon. As the meal came to an end and the last cups of tea were passed round, the Warden came in and knocked on the table nearest the door for quiet.
‘Gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Silkmen, forgive me for interrupting your breakfast, but I felt I had to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.’ Monk was speaking quite slowly and very loudly for the benefit of his audience. ‘Yesterday a number of you came to see and asked, very properly, if you could have your wills back. I agreed, as I should, to these requests. But some of you also voiced concerns about the will of our late colleague Abel Meredith, Number Twenty. Maybe I am wrong here but I felt that there was an implication that I might have tampered with this will in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth.’
Monk paused at this point and gazed round the old men. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a couple of pieces of paper. ‘This is Abel Meredith’s will. I am going to hand it round so you can all read it. Whatever you might have thought, you will see that all the money goes to his brother in Canada.’ With that, Monk handed the documents to Jack Miller, Number Three, and sat down. This was indeed the original will. This was part of the plan Monk had concocted in the Duke of Clarence the evening before. Monk thanked God he had kept the earlier version hidden inside his special floorboard.
It took some time for the papers to be passed round the company. Spectacles had to be found. Meredith’s writing was not of the clearest and often needed decoding by a neighbour. The strain of reading through such a paper, surrounded by your fellows in the hospital, made some of the silkmen so nervous they had to stop for a rest in the middle of it. Those who had read it fidgeted uneasily in their chairs, keen to escape into the quadrangle outside for a good gossip about its contents. After nearly an hour they were finished. Number Three, Jack Miller, gave the will back to Monk.
‘Thank you very much for your time, gentlemen,’ he said and walked out of the dining room. As he strode back to his office he smiled as he thought of the second part of the plan concocted on his mild and bitter in the Duke of Clarence. This was going to be his revenge on the Jesus Hospital. The original would go back into its floorboard. The will he would send to the London solicitors, however, would be the one he had forged some time earlier, the one that left half the money to the brother and the other half to him. Monk knew how long the legal niceties could take. Correspondence to and fro from Saskatchewan might add a couple of months to the timescale, particularly if the Canadian lawyers, like so many in England, were partners in the well-known firm of Slow and Bideawhile. It might be a year or more before the thing was settled. And by then some of the old men would have forgotten. And the others would be dead.
The silkmen of the Jesus Hospital may have drunk in the Rose and Crown, Thomas Monk may have patronized the Duke of Clarence, but Johnny Fitzgerald was staying in the expensive hotel on the island in the river a quarter of a mile from Marlow. The new owners originally wanted to call it the Champs Elysees after the great thoroughfare in Paris. They settled for the Elysian Fields instead, a name they thought brought a touch of glamour, a suggestion of divine food and wine and maybe a faint hint of naughtiness, Turkish belly dancers perhaps, or girls imported from the Moulin Rouge.
Lord Francis Powerscourt left home early to take breakfast with Johnny Fitzgerald. He planned to visit all his key players in one day to tell them about the Silkworkers codicil, for this, he thought, put the whole case in a different light.
‘Good God, Francis,’ said Johnny, pausing in his progress through a small mountain of kedgeree, ‘you’re not trying to tell me that the whole case may revolve round a piece of paper over hundreds of years old written by some bloke who had just escaped the Black Death? And that the bloody thing may be a forgery?’
‘I am,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And there’s more. You will recall that stuff I just told you about there being a vote and that eight out of ten of the members had to approve any alterations to the rules?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, all of your old gentlemen have a vote. They have to become members of the Silkworkers Company when they sign up for the Jesus Hospital. Twenty votes is quite a lot. They could be more important than we think.’
‘Nineteen, actually,’ said Johnny indistinctly through a final mouthful of kedgeree. ‘Dead men don’t vote.’
‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt.
‘For God’s sake, Francis, won’t you eat something? You’re making me nervous sitting there like a high court judge at the Old Bailey not having anything at all apart from a tiny slice of toast. Have a poached egg or two, in heaven’s name.’
Powerscourt began to work his way through the eggs dumped on his plate by his friend.
‘I suppose you want me to run this lot up the flagpole with the old boys,’ said Johnny, glancing at a very pretty young American lady at the next table whose husband was complaining loudly to the waiter about the coffee. ‘I wonder why they haven’t talked about it before. I don’t recall a single mention of it in all the time I’ve been marooned down here.’
‘Valuable work you’ve been doing, Johnny, valuable work.’ Powerscourt grinned at his friend. ‘I suspect they have all been sworn to silence, the old men. The one thing Sir Peregrine can’t have is publicity. His whole scheme might collapse once it got into the papers.’
Johnny stared silently at a couple of slices of ham. ‘I don’t think it’ll be any good asking them about it in the Rose and Crown,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll have to try them one at a time. The man Wood, Number Twelve, maybe that’s who I’ll start with. He’s got a pretty suspicious mind.’