Audley studied the map. The village in the old queen's day had been huddled around the river crossing, with the castle on the hillside above—
'What's this other castle?' He pointed to the map.
'That's nothing. Or there's nothing there, anyway—that's the old castle site, it says,' said Digby dismissively. 'It'll all be in the book—this is our castle
If you follow the ramparts round you'll come to the kitchen garden on the north side, but you'll be out of sight of the castle all the way.'
It was on the tip of Audley's tongue to suggest that he could dummy5
read a map as well as the sergeant, if not better, having been reading maps since before the sergeant was out of his nappies. But there had been nothing in the sergeant's voice except helpfulness, any more than there was nothing now but politeness in the way he offered the old guide-book once he had folded the map back into it. So perhaps young police sergeants naturally took senior Home Office officials to be doddering incompetents when it came to practical matters.
'Thank you, Sergeant,' he said with equal politeness. 'I'm sure I shall manage very well now.'
Digby regarded him doubtfully for a moment. 'Well, it's half-past now. Cotton can ring the caretaker, that'll pin him down.
And then I'll deal with the gardener in the pub.'
'If he's there.'
'If he's not, then he's on his way. Half an hour every night without fail, Cotton says, and I can make him stay longer.
Will an hour be enough for you?'
Five minutes.
Audley looked down at the venerable guide-book which, according to Digby, would answer all his questions about Standingham Castle.
The History of the Village and Castles of Standingham. By The Reverend Horatio Musgrave, BA, Resident Minister of the Methodist Congregations of Standingham, Worpsgrave and Long Denton.
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On the next page the Reverend Musgrave himself frowned up at him out of a luxuriant frame of hair and side- whiskers and beard, the very pattern of the late Victorian clergyman.
'The felicitous tranquillity of Standingham in our own peaceful and enlightened times conceals a sad history of fratricidal warfare and intermittent pestilence which cannot but provoke the reflection that the blessings of education and scientific progress, sustained and advanced as they have been by the proper study of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, have conferred on the British Nation signal benefits which are nevertheless insufficiently understood by the generality of the population.'
Evidently the Reverend Musgrave was determined to use his history to point a moral, if not to adorn a tale, in the best Victorian tradition. Which, in the circumstances of less peaceful and felicitous times, his latest reader might be allowed to skip—
'That same happy juxtaposition of highways and waterways in the midst of an industrious and prosperous agricultural community which has lately resulted in the extension of the Great Western Railway's passenger and goods services to the district served to identify the earliest settlement at the confluence of the rivers Irthey and Barwell as a place of some importance—'
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More paragraphs to skim across. Anglo-Saxon ploughman, marauding Danes, iron-fisted Normans with the tax-man's Domesday Book in their baggage, adulterine castles going up like mushrooms when the kings were weak—and coming down smartly when they were strong . . . the Black Death wiping out the original settlement beside the Barwell, and the new settlement beside the Irthey being burnt during a peasant rising . . . well, no one could say that the Reverend Musgrave was really exaggerating the horrors of everyday life in rural Standingham in the good old days—
'It was in the early fifteenth century that Sir Edward de Stayninge was granted the right to crenellate his manor on the ridge above the Barwell, on the site of the earthworks of the earlier castles; of which there yet remains not one stone upon another to testify the feudal pride before which the might of France crumbled at Crecy and Agincourt. For having espoused the cause of the wicked Richard Crookback, slayer of the innocent Princes in the Tower—'
Well, that figured. Because if there was one thing for which the lords of the manor and the villagers of Standingham alike could be relied on, it was to back losers. If there was a lost cause to hand, or a disaster of any sort going, then Standingham was first in the wrong queue; it was only to be dummy5
expected in due course that Sir Piers de Stayning, having lost the 'e' off his name, should also ride to Bosworth Field in 1485 with the wrong army and lose the rest of it.
A cycle bell roused him from the contemplation of late medieval lawlessness to catch twentieth-century law in all its majesty: whether it was because of the price of petrol or from a wise return to old-fashioned police methods, PC Cotton's superiors had provided him with a bicycle rather than a car.
And for a bet, the sight of a large, properly-helmeted policeman on a tall bicycle moving steadily and silently round his patch under his own power did more to deter the local lads from petty crime than an anonymous car driver in a bus conductor's flat cap.
Just a couple more minutes of the Reverend Musgrave, then
—and he could finish the sad history on foot anyway . . .
'It was not until the second decade of the sixteenth century that a collateral descendent, Sir William Steyning, having secured the reversion of his uncle's estates, commenced the construction of the great house on the Irthey Ridge, across the pleasant open valley of the Willow Stream. Using stone from the castle ruins, he raised a residence in the Tudor manner which, though still taking the style 'castle', was yet an edifice at once more commodious and more comfortable than the frowning fortresses of earlier times, testifying both to the greater
