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“I am well enough,” I replied, “but I collect that Mr. Chizzlewit is not. He no longer sits in chambers?”
“He was much beset by an inflammation of the lung this winter, and undertakes a trial of the waters at Bath. We are hopeful they may prove beneficial. Miss Austen, I must beg you to remain where you stand, and avert your eyes, as the measures we have adopted for the concealment of our keys will admit the confidence of no one.”
The words were uttered with as much courtesy as the intelligence of his grandfather’s indisposition, or his wishes for my continued health; but there was a firmness in tone that brooked no question or delay. I turned my head away, and heard a soft click under Sylvester Chizzlewit’s fingers, as tho’ a panel in the wainscotting had slid back on hidden springs.
“Very well,” he said, raising a formidable ring of keys; “we must now seek the mates of these from Jonas.”
Jonas, it was presently revealed, was an elderly clerk whose white hair sprouted in tufts about his head, and whose back was stooped with a deformity of the spine. He smiled vaguely when roused from his ledgers in the room adjoining Sylvester Chizzlewit’s; his myopic pale eyes roamed over my figure.
“Keys,” he murmured, as if to himself. “But can she be trusted? His lordship thought so, aye — but his lordship’s dead, isn’t he?”
“That will be quite enough, Jonas,” Chizzlewit said sharply. “Pray bestir yourself.”
The old man sighed, and eased his arthritic frame from the high stool on which it was perched. “None too young, is she, and not what his lordship might be expected to favour. A lady-bird, they said, as was in his keeping, but I ca
I was put to the blush, and knew not where to look, but Mr. Chizzlewit preserving a perfect gravity, I attempted insensibility, and followed in Jonas’s muttering train.
The clerk led us down a corridor lit by flaring lamps set into the woodwork, and into a pleasant room devoid of company. A handsome table held down the centre of the room, and several easy chairs were scattered about, but no fire burned in the imposing hearth.
Jonas crossed to the chimneypiece, and took up a position on one side. Mr. Chizzlewit stood at the other. Without a word, the two inserted their keys into indiscernible holes in the woodwork, and at the count of three, sprang the locks in a single motion.
The chimneypiece swung outwards, as tho’ it were a door: revealing a considerable chamber behind, inky with blackness. Sylvester Chizzlewit coolly reached for a taper that lay on the false mantel, and lit it in the flame of an oil lamp. Then he held it aloft.
“I must beg you, Miss Austen, not to attempt to look within. Jonas, we require the Bengal chest.”
TO BE LEFT ALONE WITH MY TREASURE WAS TO FIND again the comforting embrace of a familiar friend. When the door of the patrons’ chamber had closed behind the solicitor and his clerk, I ran my fingers over the raised figures carved in teak (most of them grossly improper), the heavy iron hasps and hinges, and the sloping initials cut on the lid. Then I drew an ornate key from my reticule and — glancing over my shoulder with apprehension, for Jonas’s air of mystery was infectious — set it in the lock.
There were too many riches within. I might have been tempted to peruse the journals that described his lordship’s trek by horseback into the wilds of Central Asia; his visits to the court of St. Petersburg, and his views on the murder of the present Tsar’s father; his abduction of a lady from a harem near Jaipur; or his tête-à-tête with Napoleon Buonaparte, in a Paris prison from which he subsequently escaped, in lowering himself through a series of drains — but I had not come to Chizzlewit’s chambers solely to indulge in memory. Lord Harold was killed in the autumn of 1808, and if memory served, he had been much taken up with government policy at that time, being newly returned from the Peninsula. George Ca
The journal I sought was a slim one bound in bottle-green calf, the chronicle of the Rogue’s final year — begun in January of 1808 and ending abruptly with the first few days of November. I skimmed rapidly through several passages; his lordship had been writing from Oporto. The relevant entries spa
… unfortunate that Gustavus IV should be quite mad, as he is the sole ally on which His Majesty may depend in the region of the Baltic… my man writes from St. Petersburg of the Tsar’s threats to our Swedish King, to suggest that if Gustavus prefers to keep Finland, he had much better join with Russia and drive Britain out of these waters …
… seems clear that our intelligence of the Tsar’s intentions is wide of the mark. I ca
Castlereagh’s ten thousand men are sailing north to Gothenburg, with no clear orders and no one but Sir John Moore to save them … he is to defer to a mad king, who wishes to use British troops to seize Zealand from the Danes …
… I am sick at heart that when we most need troops here in Portugal and Spain, they are sent on a fool’s errand instead, to bait the Baltic tiger … I ca
… Moira tells me of disputes between Ca
… this abortive campaign shall be adjudged a failure of Castlereagh’s, and a discomfiture to Portland’s government …
I could make little of all this; the web of policy, again, too entangled to comprehend. Certainly the abortive defence of Sweden had been followed by the even more ignominious expedition to Walcheren, an island in the Scheldt, which Lord Harold had not lived to see — forty thousand troops, thirty-five ships of the line, more than two hundred smaller vessels, and very little to show for it, while behind our backs, the French arrogantly installed Buonaparte’s brother on the throne of Spain. Again, the pressing need to crush the Enemy in the Peninsula had given way to a fool’s errand in the northern seas. Lord Harold was clearly disturbed by a discrepancy in intelligence— but he wrote to himself in these pages, as a man does when he ruminates upon anxieties in his mind: elliptical and reflective, without the need for explanation. Not for the first time, I wished acutely for his living presence.
One name, however, had leapt out at me from the journal’s pages: Moira. Lord Harold had known Henry’s intimate friend, the debt-ridden Earl. I should have expected it; both men had been bred up as Whigs from infancy.
The plaintive sounding of a clock somewhere in chambers alerted me to the fact that the day was much advanced; Eliza would be wondering if I were lost. I slipped the bottle-green volume into my reticule and locked Lord Harold’s chest.
ELIZA WAS, INDEED, ANXIOUSLY AWAITING MY return — but it was Madame Bigeon who informed me of the fact. Manon’s aging mother answered my pull of the front doorbell. When I would have stepped into the hall, she urged in a rapid undertone, “Pray, mademoiselle, do not for the love of Heaven delay, but go for Monsieur Henri at once!”