"Hmm. . . . Not only the local story but the old, old story. No wonder no one believed it later on—'the dying survivor babbling of treasure' would have been the kiss of death to it."
"But in this instance it was the truth, Audley."
It looked as though Professor Nayler belonged to the wise-after-the-event brigade.
"It certainly looks that way, I agree."
"I should think so. The idea that this young man—what's his name . . . Ratcliffe—could rob Fort Knox does seem a somewhat quaint conceit, if I may say so. But then I suppose you Treasury people have to leave no stone unturned, eh?"
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Audley wondered idly for a moment how his opposite number in the KGB would have conducted this inquiry, then thrust the thought out of his mind. That way lay sinful and very dangerous heresies.
"We're rather more interested in establishing why the—ah—
young man was so sure the gold existed. After all, the experts said it didn't."
"Oh no, not all the experts, Audley. No indeed!" Modest pause for the shaking of distinguished head. "I've long had my suspicions about that little episode. “
"You thought the gold did exist?
"I thought there was a strong possibility." Nayler was hedging slightly now. "Of course there was no direct evidence, of course. As things stood it was—ah—a mere footnote. Or not even that, really."
Message received: if Nayler had really believed as much, which was bloody doubtful, he hadn't been willing to commit himself in print as saying so. But no matter—
"No direct evidence? Meaning there was indirect evidence?"
"Circumstantial evidence Or shall we say inferential evidence?"
We could say what we liked as long as we said something useful, thought Audley tightly. "Apart from the timing of the disappearance of the Conception and the wreck of the Elizabeth?"
"Oh yes, indeed. I shall be saying as much on the television dummy5
shortly, on their 'Testimony of the Spade' programme— BBC
2, of course."
Of course. No vulgar commercials there —except for Professor Nayler.
"Indeed? Well, you wouldn't care to give me a brief preview? I
—and the Treasury—would be in your debt then, Professor.
For our ears only, as it were?" Uriah Keep couldn't do better than that, by God!
"I don't see why not. It's really quite simple when you know how to interpret the facts. . . . You see, Audley, the gold went to ground in North Devon after it was landed. Edward Parrott was a prudent man, he knew exactly what would happen if word of it reached the Government. He ... he knew the score, you might say—if you will forgive the colloquialism."
Pompous bastard!
"You mean—he didn't want to hang in chains with the other pirates in execution dock?"
"Hang in chains?"
"You said it was the blackest piracy."
"And so it was, Audley, and so it was. But I mean the political score. You mustn't think of the Parrotts as mere nobodies; they were squires and gentlemen. Edward Parrott sat for Hartland in the first three of Charles I's parliaments—he owned the seat. And his son Nathaniel sat in the other two, the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. So they were dummy5
very well aware of the political situation."
Audley cudgelled his memory viciously. He knew now exactly the game Nayler was playing—and winning, petty though it was: the price of information was that he must crawl for it, admitting his ignorance.
On your knees then, Audley—for God, Queen and Country!
"What was the political situation?"
"Tck, tck, tck!" Nayler tutted contentedly down the line at him. "You have forgotten a lot, haven't you, my dear fellow!
All those tutorials, all that sherry old Highsmith poured down you—has it all gone for nothing?"
God bless my soul! thought Audley in genuine surprise, remembering for the first time how Nayler had envied his happy and boozy friendship with old Dr. Highsmith, which had made their early evening tutorials as much social occasions as academic ones. Had that really been niggling the silly man for a quarter of a century?
But the sudden recollection of those evenings was like a benison—those summer evenings, long and cool, and winter ones dark and cosy, with the mist rising off the river. . . . And the quick irony of Nayler's sarcasm now was that it unlocked his memory as nothing else could possibly have done: old Highsmith had been a born teacher saddled with an arrogant young ex-soldier who fancied himself as a budding medievalist and maintained that nothing of very great interest had happened after the year 1485—
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The tide of memory surged back: Charles I had angrily dissolved his Third Parliament one March day in 1629—
which Firth had called "the most gloomy, sad and miserable day for England in five hundred years"—and hadn't called another for eleven fateful years—
And it had been whisky, not sherry.
Audley nodded to the shade of Dr. Highsmith through the dirty window of the phone box.
"Yes, I'm afraid you're right, Professor. It's all gone now, all quite gone," he admitted abjectly.
The shade grinned and nodded back at him approvingly. The old man had always held that what one knew about oneself was what mattered, not what other people thought they knew.
Nayler sniffed contemptuously. "The Eleven Years' Tyranny, Audley. The King tried to govern without Parliament. So he had to have money—this was the time of Ship Money and monopolies and the revived Forest Laws—surely you remember that?"
Humbly now—"Yes, I do now you mention it."
"I should think so too! And there was Edward Parrott—or Sir Edward Parrott he had to become compulsorily because he owned estate worth more than £40 per annum, and pay through the nose for it; that was another of the King's tax-raising dodges—there he was, sitting on the greatest single treasure to reach this country since Drake sailed into dummy5
Plymouth fifty years before . . . and there was nothing to equal it until Anson took the Manilla galleon a century later . . . there he was, sitting on a king's ransom. Or in that political situation it was more like a kingdom's ransom.
Certainly it would never have been sent back to Spain—
never."
A kingdom's ransom. Well, maybe it was still that—in the wrong hands at the wrong moment in time . . .
"And he was against the king, of course."
"Edward Parrott?" Nayler made a judicious sound. "Say rather, Edward Parrott was for Edward Parrott. He belonged to an older era—he could remember Drake and the others, he'd sailed with them as a young lad. And by the 1630s he was an old man too—that last shipwreck ruined his health. It was his son, Nathaniel—your Parrott, Audley—he was the one who was against the King. A left-wing back-bencher in Parliament in 1640, he was—one of the Vane-St. John faction."
"So why did he wait so long to lay hands on the gold?"
"Because he didn't know where it was, that's why. Not until the very end, in 1643, when his father was dying."
"How do you know?"
"For certain, we don't know. But by '43 he was an up-and-coming Parliamentary officer, one of Cromwell's trusted lieutenants, we do know that. And we also know that he left his command in the Midlands right in the middle of the dummy5
campaigning season, when things weren't going too well for Parliament, to be at his father's deathbed. Through Royalist country, too, that meant."
"And that wasn't filial piety?"
"Filial stuff and nonsense! There was no love between them."
"Only gold?"
"Nothing else makes sense. The old man died on August 1, according to the Parish burial register. Ten days later Nathaniel was at Standingham Castle."