War Game

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.'

'And just what is the significance of that, Professor?'

'Time and place, man—time and place.'

'The Steynings were related to the Parrotts, I gather.'

'More than that. Nathaniel Parrott's heir was his daughter, his only child. And she was married to Steyning's only surviving son. The other two Steyning sons had already been killed in the war. So Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had the same granddaughter— their joint heiress.'

'Steyning was a strong Parliament man, obviously.'

'Fanatical. Parrott and Steyning were two of a kind, even though Steyning was past his soldiering days. Both fanatical Parliament men—and fanatical Puritans too. Blood, politics and religion, Audley: you can't bind two men more closely than with those three.'

Despite his dislike of Nayler, Audley found himself nodding agreement to that. Family and politics and religion . . . dead dummy5

children and a live grandchild . . . those were the solid bricks of the Steyning-Parrott alliance. The Civil War had only bound them tighter together, becoming a make-or-break cause for both families.

And the gold . . . normally the possession of gold divided men more than it united them, but in these peculiar circumstances it would have been the best cement of all—a loan on behalf of their joint grandchild's future, an investment in the service of everything that they believed in.

'So, when you think about it intelligently, Audley, Standingham Castle was the one place Parrott could really feel safe in between North Devon and London.'

Audley frowned. 'You mean—he went there deliberately? The newspaper report said he was chased there by the Royalists.'

Nayler gave a derisive snort. 'My dear Audley—you don't really believe what the newspapers say, do you? Besides, he may simply have been chased where he intended to go.'

'Even though it was being besieged?'

'The siege was a rather intermittent affair, or it had been up to then, certainly. And Standingham was a great stronghold too; Monson was considerably reinforced that last time, of course.'