‘How long ago was this, Headmaster?’
‘Five days ago. It was the first day of the snow. I met Gill on his way into town to post the letter in person, slipping and falling over as he went.’
Mrs Hamilton’s first class that day was with the Lower Sixth. She told the boys she was a temporary replacement for their normal French oral teacher who had a bad attack of influenza. She expected to be with them for a week, maybe more. Then she took the register in French and made a note by each name to remind herself who they were. Fettiplace Jones, red hair. Johnston, prominent nose. Jackson, curly brown hair. Kingham, very tall. She announced that she was going to speak French to them all the time. And she proposed that they should read together, each boy taking it in turns to read a page. She had brought the book with her and said they were going to start with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, the opening story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, translated into French the year before. Mrs Hamilton had tracked it down to a small bookshop in Bloomsbury specializing in French literature and translations the day before.
Ellis opened the bowling. ‘Pour Sherlock Holmes,’ he said examining every word very carefully as if it were a bomb and might go off at any moment, ‘elle est toujours La Femme.’ He staggered on to the end of the page and passed the book to his neighbour. As with most Englishmen, Mrs Hamilton reckoned, they probably understood about three quarters of it and could guess the rest, but she doubted if they could book themselves a hotel room in Brittany, let alone order supper.
Jackson was adequate, Smythe quite fluent if rather slow, which he was. David Lewis, the mimic, had a perfect accent and impeccable diction. His passage told how Dr Watson, returning home from a case via Baker Street, sees Holmes at the window of 221b and goes up to speak to him. Lewis told her, in almost perfect French, that he had been twice to France on holidays and had picked up his accent listening to the French middle-class discussing the food in hotel dining rooms.
The story moved on through the lesson with the King of Bohemia revealing his true identity and the mysterious Irene Adler making her presence felt. But it was not the woman in the story who fascinated the boys, it was the woman teaching them, here in their own classroom. Women at Allison’s made the beds, they cleaned the floors, they prepared most of the food and looked after the washing. What they had never done until this moment was teach, and look glamorous at the same time. Mrs Hamilton had wondered beforehand if she would remind most of them of their mothers. They were so starved of female company and so full of teenage energy that they saw her in quite a different light.
For Lady Lucy, of course, masquerading here in her earlier name of Hamilton, the object of the detective story was quite simple. After a couple of days, maybe even before the end of ‘Une Scandale en Boheme’, she could turn the conversation to murders generally. Had any of the boys been unfortunate enough to come across a murder? What, they had only recently had one right here in the school? Vraiment? Mon Dieu! Quel horreur! Maybe they would tell her something then, something they had not told the police or their teachers.
‘Alors, le papier ici,’ West Minor at the end was not one of the fluent ones, ‘est fabrique en Boheme! Et le monsieur qui a ecrit le petit mot, il est Allemand…’
Mrs Hamilton was quite pleased by her first lesson. David Lewis, the finest mimic in the school, couldn’t take his eyes off her. After school, he decided, his imagination working overtime, he would follow her home and find out where she lived.
Inspector Miles Devereux thought he would have liked to go to university. His two eldest brothers had managed it before the money ran out, one to the sedate quarters of Selwyn College, Cambridge, the other to more romantic pastures, Worcester College, Oxford, with its lake and its fifteenth-century monks’ cottages. As he made his way up Gower Street towards University College he wondered what it would be like to be a student right in the heart of London. William Burke had sent him the name of a Professor Wilson Claypole, an expert in the period around the Black Death, who had been one of the academics vouching for the authenticity of the Silkworkers codicil.
The Inspector expected some aged figure, dry as dust and dull as ditchwater, who would soon lose him in the intricacies of fourteenth-century script and idiosyncrasies of expression. Claypole, in fact, turned out to be only a few years older than he was. He wore a very smart suit and a Garrick Club tie. With his polished boots and expensive haircut he looked more like a society solicitor or a successful barrister than an academic.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said and waved Devereux to a chair. ‘Welcome to University College. We don’t have the ivy climbing up the walls and the ancient port maturing in the college cellars like they do at Oxford and Cambridge, but we like to think we’re more modern here, more in tune with the latest thinking and the latest scholarship. Now then, I haven’t got much time. I’ve got to be at the House of Lords in forty-five minutes. That codicil you’ve come to talk to me about, I perfectly understand why you’ve come. You can’t take somebody else’s word for it being genuine, you’ve got to come to the horse’s mouth. Which in this case, as it happens, is me! I am the horse!’ Professor Claypole snorted heartily at his quip.
‘I’m not an academic like yourself,’ said Devereux.
‘No indeed,’ said Claypole and laughed again.
‘But I would like to know how you’re sure it’s the real thing.’
‘Good question, Inspector. Let me try an example from your own field. When you charge a man with murder, are you always one hundred per cent sure he did it? Would you still arrest him if you were eighty-five per cent sure? Seventy-five per cent sure? You don’t have to reply to that question, by the way, I’m not sure I’d really like to know the answer. But with the codicil, of course, you can’t be absolutely certain either. Not with a thing that old. It’s not possible. There’s a man called Galt at St Andrews up there by the sea in Scotland who’s done a lot of work on fourteenth-century documents and their use of language. He’s certain it’s real. The thought behind the codicil, that emergency measures may be needed in the aftermath of the Black Death, that’s absolutely typical of the time. I’ve always thought it is impossible to overestimate the influence of the Black Death, your friends and family decimated, divine punishment arriving for your sins, never sure if you’re not going to wake up with nausea, vomiting, lumps all over your body. That, for me, was the most convincing aspect of the thing, the fact that the author, who was probably a lawyer of some sort, was so frightened by what had happened, so unsure of what the future might hold, that he thought his livery company should be prepared, should be ready to take whatever steps might be needed in the face of a second catastrophe, of God abandoning his people to their fate all over again, the last days coming to Threadneedle Street and London Wall. If you believed in God, and as far as we know most of them did, the Black Death must have seemed the Great Betrayal.’
‘Am I right in saying that the main opposition to your view comes from our friend in Cambridge?’ Devereux had heard about academics being rude about each other. This was the first time he had seen or heard it at close quarters.
‘Well, you could say our friend in Cambridge is the only opposition. I suspect he hasn’t even read Galt’s work, for a start. They’re quite restricted in their attitude to scholarship up there in the Fens. If it wasn’t invented in Cambridge, it doesn’t really exist. Tait’s main argument concerns who might benefit from it. That doesn’t carry as clear a message for me as the textual analysis of the wording. I think the benefit question is more or less irrelevant. Man’s barking up the wrong tree.’