Treasure Preserved, page 1
David Williams
TREASURE
PRESERVED
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
This one for Morris and Joy West
Chapter One
‘Saints alive! I’ve got it!’ snapped Lady Brasset in crisp Bostonian, and only more or less to herself.
She looked up sharply from the faded handwriting she had been studying. A notice on the wall spelled SILENCE in letters big enough to emphasize serious intent.
But it wasn’t the printed stricture that troubled Louella Brasset. Her outburst had been intended strictly to mark private jubilation. Her composure was recovered only after she established she was still the only occupant of the reference room. It was not a much used section of the Tophaven Public Library. She had been alone there practically throughout the two weeks of her researching.
In Louella’s firm view — and she never entertained the other kind — the place was most always empty because there was too darned little to refer to in it. And that was something she aimed to take up with the proper authority in due time. Right now she had more urgent business on hand.
None of the private diaries, boxes, folders and papers arranged on her reading desk had come from the open shelves. They had been especially and inconveniently produced from Archives on demand.
According to George Sims, the Chief Librarian, Archives — meaning things, not a specific place — ineluctably denoted material no one in Tophaven was ever going to want again. Yet for one fool reason or another he was charged to keep everything so designated on the premises, and never allow it to leave them.
The Sydney Marshford Papers were Archives. They had been bequeathed to the library half a century earlier by Randolph Marshford, the last in a short line of Sussex minor gentry. A bachelor, Randolph had died in a run-down pension near the old casino in Nice. His funeral had been at that municipality’s expense — but unwillingly, and definitely not in recognition of the fortune he had dissipated within its boundaries. No one else could be found to pay.
Like most Archives, the Papers had first been housed in a secured storeroom next to the reference room on the first floor of the library. Over the decades, though, they had been demoted. For the previous fifteen years they had been in the attic on some ‘temporary’ shelving erected while the building was being redecorated. Like the shelving, the Papers had stayed there undisturbed. Only a catalogue entry witnessed their existence.
Although the building — scheduled for replacement — was Victorian Gothic with a high-pitched roof, retrieving the Papers had cost the middle-aged if reasonably athletic Sims a graze on his head and a bruised elbow. The wounds he had stoically dismissed: not so the desire to know why the sixty-eight-year-old American-born widow of a Ministry of Defence senior official needed the material in the first place.
It went without saying her Ladyship wasn’t going to tell him or any other Council employee — not until she was ready to strike. His anxiety became daily and genuinely more acute.
Louella Brasset was the scourge of officialdom: the serene champion of countless inconvenient causes and alleged innocent victims of local bureaucracy. Her purposes and powers were ignored only by the determinedly unwary.
There was a general understanding that anyone in local government who detected Louella engaged in private ombudsman activity had a duty immediately to alert the targeted department. The lady was well aware of this. It explained why she was not sharing her current intentions with harmless George Sims of worthy reputation, being a night school lecturer and a youth club leader. It explained also why harmless George Sims, a constant worrier, was spending most evenings after the library closed studying the Marshford Papers even more assiduously than Lady Brasset did during the days. After all, Louella knew what she was looking for.
To date, and for the life of him, Sims could find nothing that made the Papers valuable or remotely relevant to the affairs of present-day Tophaven.
It followed, of course, if the improvident Randolph Marshford had believed his grandfather’s diaries, letters, contracts, bills, tradesmen’s circulars, not to mention the most totally unremarkable memorabilia, had been worth anything at all, he would never have willed them to the library in the first place.
The social historians, professional scandalmongers and the simply curious who had examined the Papers when they first became available had evidently shared Randolph’s opinion. No one had produced a biography or published the diaries. There had been no learned monographs, no deferential references in doctrinal theses to what might have proved a rich source of mid-nineteenth-century minutiæ. There had been nothing in the racier Sunday newspapers: no saucy titbits; no sensations.
Sydney James Marshford, gent. (1797–1869), had been husband, first, to Lucy, and father through that union to Charlotte, Grace, Penelope, Emily, Victoria, Alice, Louise, Alexandra and Beatrice. A year after Lucy’s untimely demise in 1867 — she choked on a cherry stone while returning from Goodwood Races — Sydney, then seventy-one, had married Sarah Castle, a spinster of thirty-seven.
Against the odds, in several contexts, Sarah had produced a son, Albert. Her husband praised divine intervention, though if you took the word of a jealous parlourmaid at the time, the second coachman deserved most of the credit.
Through the testimony of his diaries, Sydney had been a Godfearing man, a loving husband and father, astute in business, rich through his own diligence, a philanthropist, a careful patron of the arts, and a generous local benefactor.
Reading between the lines of those same diaries, other possibly less commendable traits emerged. Sydney had made something approaching a profession out of combining self-righteousness with self-advertisement. He had been strangely — though not apparently improperly-obsessed by womankind, and — this inescapably — he must have been a deeply boring man.
Most of what, by 1860, had become the prosperous Sussex seaside resort of Tophaven had been Marshford family sheep-grazing land at the end of the previous century. Brighton, some miles to the east, had owed its popularity to the Prince Regent. Tophaven, a much later developer, owed everything to the new railway which, in turn, owed everything to Sydney Marshford.
It was Sydney who brought a spur of the iron road across the chalk downs in 1847 when railways were temporarily out of fashion. It was Sydney who had thereby overridden the opposition of other local landowners: most had turned conservationist some time after unwittingly selling Sydney prime parcels of land at what had seemed irresistible prices. And it was Sydney alone who engineered the creation of a whole town on his inherited and acquired acres — albeit a haphazardly arranged development at the outset.
Brighton had been endowed with gracefully plotted Georgian squares and crescents. Tophaven had broken out in rashes of boxy, stuccoed villas, and streets of high, redbrick terraces; the whole, for many years, sadly lacked cohesion.
At first the only plan seemed to have been Sydney’s scheme to become as rich as possible as quickly as possible. That he tempered this with lapses into and later regular commitment to showy benevolence was not to do with underlying virtue: it was social ambition. The church, the town hall, the library itself were erected at Sydney’s expense. Such sponsoring increased his standing in the county and should have increased the eligibility of his team of daughters.
‘My girls are rich in talents if deficient in what passes for beauty: a transient thing, beauty,’ he confided in his diary in June 1858 when Beatrice, his youngest, was already eighteen, and not one of the brood married off.
Sydney commissioned Sir Charles Barry to design the church, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel the town hall. Both of them were offered fees too large to turn down but not large enough to justify their producing wholly original work.
The church closely resembles one of Barry’s London clubs in the Italianate manner: it was 1856 and for liturgical reasons the architect had long gone off ecclesiastical Gothic.
Predictably, Brunel’s town hall — now demolished — looked like nothing so much as a Brunel railway station.
The library was the work of an enthusiastic amateur, the then Archdeacon of Chichester, the cathedral city nearby. He was a friend of Sydney’s and one who fancied his capacities as a natural, untutored architect. The man’s faith was misplaced, at least in this connection, as George Sims was given to confirming frequently and even vehemently when he injured some part of his anatomy while labouring in the labyrinthine attics and basements.
All three buildings came after the railway and lay to the south-west of the station. The land there, running down to the sea, was taking on the semblance of a homogenous community by the late 1850s. All monuments to Sydney’s benevolence and affluence carried plaques with the name of the architect in very small letters, probably at the request of most of them, but with Sydney’s name much larger.
It was the plaques that had first put Louella on the scent.
‘Archive material may only be photostated u
He could hardly believe his luck. She wanted copies. He gazed rapaciously at the small stack of material she had brought down and placed on the counter. The coin-operated copier was just across from where they were standing in the ground-floor lending library.
‘In case somebody damages your Gutenberg Bible, you mean?’ Louella Brasset smiled back disarmingly.
She was still a handsome woman — middle height; neat, slim figure; taut, tanned skin. Her white hair was cut short and loosely waved. She was wearing an oatmeal cardigan and a darker brown skirt, both in cashmere, under a three-quarter length sheepskin coat. The single row of graded pearls suggested good taste without affecting opulence. Louella didn’t tailor her appearance to overawe people like George Sims: her presence did that automatically.
‘I’ll do these for you myself,’ the librarian volunteered. He had only one assistant and she was having her tea. ‘How many copies? I’m afraid they’re 10p each.’
She opened her handbag. ‘Figured you couldn’t split a five pound note …’ She watched the beginnings of a protest to the contrary. In the circumstances Sims would have offered change for the Kohinoor diamond. ‘… so I brought my parking meter statch.’ She jangled the contents of a long red purse.
‘Very thoughtful.’ They moved across to the machine. ‘I’m still wondering what particular aspect of Sydney Marshford’s life …’
‘Fascinating man. Real original. I just need one copy of all these. The diary pages have paper markers. Oh, and the letters … How about I feed the money in if you’ll handle the delicate part? Want to watch those bindings.’
He was too busy memorizing dates — there were no page numbers in the diaries — to make more than noises of acknowledgement.
‘Say, if you’re interested, you can make copies for yourself. Or just keep the markers in.’
Sims looked up with undisguised admiration. You had to face it, she was a good loser.
Louella accepted the show of undeserved homage. She had spent the previous hour upstairs hand-copying the letter and the short diary entries she really needed. The originals were still in the reference room.
She had toyed with simply taking the letter. No one had shown any interest in it for fifty years. No one was going to miss one tiny letter at this stage. Then she had changed her mind. Her late husband had been a lifelong exponent of the rule of law. There had to be standards. More to the point, having to own up to pinching library property could land you in court — and court was where Louella expected to be heading, but strictly on the side of the angels.
She thanked Sims for his help, and tucked the prints into the large envelope she had brought for the purpose. They were copies of things she had chosen almost at random. Only she had made sure they provided no connected commentary on any particular subject. They were aimed at keeping the librarian puzzled for a bit longer.
Today he made no attempt to follow her to the hall where she regularly enjoyed a cigarette before leaving. Usually he went with her and without any finesse tried digging for leads about her Marshford interest. Now she watched him hurry up the stairs clutching his spoils and even before she had left the lending library. He was in pretty good shape too: took the steps two at a time.
Lady Brasset took a last deep draw on the nearly smoked cigarette and stamped it out. Then she got into her Austin Metro and drove it out of the library car park: she never smoked when driving. She turned right at the next corner along the Parade, and left at the T-junction shortly after. This brought her out on to the Esplanade.
It was nearly five o’clock and the mid-November night was closing in. She would still be in time to catch Cynthia before she left the college. The two discoveries were much too important to relegate to a mere phone call. Louella Brasset had a strong sense of occasion. Anyway, Cynthia seemed to be out most evenings: she never really said where. Could be the reference to the lease — the Trings’ lease — didn’t mean anything. It was worth a try though: let the lawyers figure it.
The route took her past the pier. It was still intact, not like the one at Bognor Regis just up the coast. It sprang from the western end of the wide promenade that paralleled the road on the seaward side.
In summer, along here, there were flags and fairy lights and deckchairs and children in swimsuits and harassed mothers in Marks & Spencer sundresses. Now there were just a few old ladies exercising dogs. Everything was put away, the ice-cream kiosks shut up, the pier closed for the winter, the children’s roundabout in the old bandstand battened and canvassed till spring.
There was life still on the other side of the road — shops just closing, pubs just opening at the pier end — and the old Embassy cinema that had managed to survive without becoming a Bingo palace. There were free Monday matinees for pensioners, transport provided if required. Louella had organized that herself — after a battle with the penny-pinching Council. There weren’t as many takers as there should be, after all her trouble. People ought to be more appreciative: she was strong on obligation.
The two star Prince Regent Hotel was on the next corner. It was a favourite of Louella’s: original double-bow windows rising through three floors — and with pepper-pot tops. The upper floors had jutting balconies with delicate, wrought-iron balustrades. It had been a private home once, the principal house in the tiny eighteenth-century village of South Wallerton — now the unidentified eastern edge of railway age Tophaven.
The Prince Regent was a statutory listed historic building — Grade Two and starred. You’d need more than money and influence to get that knocked down. Louella nodded confidently at the thought. The starred listing had been mostly due to her vigilance years ago.
After the hotel came two guest-houses, a nearly anonymous betting shop, a not very serious retailer of fishing tackle who also sold cut flowers, and a quite large monumental mason’s yard with rows of assorted virgin gravestones, their sombre impact lightened by a few bird baths and one immense ornamental well. The bogus well had been there for years. Live sea-gulls regularly perched around it, lending a kind of authenticity while unfairly detracting a bit from the bird baths.
It was here the Esplanade turned sharp left and headed inland, becoming an unglamorous main road. Louella didn’t follow it. Instead she drove straight on into Sandy Lane — a rutted, narrow way that ran beside the seashore unflanked by a promenade. The only indications of civic interest were a cul-de-sac sign and a peeling street nameplate that had obviously not been included the last time Tophaven had renewed such things.
The lane ran for three hundred yards before ending with a farm gate, fencing, and a homemade no parking sign. Beyond was a meadow — a caravan site in summer, but empty now except for four threadbare beach donkeys leaning over the gate waiting for something to happen.
There were three buildings set back at uneven intervals along the way.
The Beachcomber Hotel was nearest to the main road but still too far from the town centre and the march of progress to be a paying proposition. With sixteen rooms, one with private bath, it was the heavily mortgaged and partly modernized property of the nearly bankrupt Mostyn and Esta Daws. Louella drove past the miserable garden in front of the whitewashed building with its jumble of gables and unbalanced annexes added in a more prosperous era. The Daws she considered targets for pity and charity — she more than he: he being a basic fool.
Next came a pair of semi-detached houses called Three Winds and South View. Typical, mid-thirties seaside villas — flat-roofed, steel-framed windows, pebble-dash rendered — they nearly fronted the roadway. The speculative builder who put them up had hoped to make a fortune with a hundred similar pairs, but his business had failed along with his plans for the Wallerton Estate.
Three Winds was owned by Commander Nigel Mane, Royal Navy, retired. He was fifty-seven, a widower and jobless. His youngest and unmarried daughter Tracy lived with him. He was hurrying to post a letter at the corner box as Louella drove by. He waved after recognizing the car.
Next door, at South View, no doubt Lancelot Elderberry was tapping out unenduring literature for consumption by that diminishing army of females for whom his romantic novellas provided innocent escape from unimpassioned reality.
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