So that was the way of it: to get at the gold Charlie Ratcliffe had torn up the memorial to his ancestor with no thought of reassembling it afterwards.
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But that absence of piety in Charlie Ratcliffe was hardly surprising; what was surprising was that he had known exactly where to dig. And, judging by the depth of the crater, where to dig deep indeed.
I put myself into Nathaniel Parrott's shoes.
Hiding a ton of gold ingots presented a great many problems, the more so when it had to be done in the middle of a siege, with the garrison all around. For if Parrott and Steyning had decided that the castle was doomed they could hardly rely on death shutting all the mouths of those who might have an idea of the hiding place.
Although in fact death had done just that very neatly indeed.
Too neatly?
And, by God, death had also covered up the hiding place too, for this was the site of the original explosion—the site of the powder magazine.
Audley stared into the crater. Clever and devious and ruthless, Nayler had said, and they'd been all of that, Parrott and Steyning—all of that and more.
The powder magazine would have been strictly out of bounds.
They had dug their hole in it, and dug far deeper than was necessary.
And then filled it in.
And then made a brand new hole above it—and who would think of looking for a hole in the bottom of another hole?
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And they had killed the men who had hidden the treasure at the same time.
Audley frowned. The men had included Edmund Steyning himself.
'Colonel Parrott, the sole survivor among the senior officers, took to horse and essayed to escape
—'
The murderous bastard!
The murderous double-crossing bastard.
'You got what you came for?' The question was a formality; Burton had been watching him intently.
'Yes.'
Like Nathaniel Parrott—like Charlie Ratcliffe: it had maybe taken a murderer to spot a murderer.
'That's good, then,' said Burton.
Not really so good, thought Audley. There was nothing more here for him, on the scene of a successful seventeenth-century crime. If there was any chance of catching Charlie Ratcliffe it could only be somewhere back on the site of the twentieth-century crime, beside the Swine Brook.
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6
AUDLEY hated English heatwaves. He could put up with foreign hot weather, even Washington weather, which was natural and inevitable. But English heat was like a betrayal by an old and dear friend whose greatest virtue had hitherto been a comfortable and reliable moderation.
And worst of all was hot English darkness, which always made him wonder, when he awoke after a few minutes (or was it a few hours?) of sweaty, unrefreshing sleep, whether he was in England at all.
He reached across tentatively under the single sheet to reassure himself. There were only two thighs in the world like that. Once upon a long ago time there had been other thighs, but none of them had had Faith's superb temperature control, cool in summer and warm in winter.
He was at home in his own bed in the midst of a heatwave, with the weathermen's records melting one by one around him—
Not since the summer of 1948 ...
Not since the summer of 1940 . . .
Hot and dry.
But the summers of the 1640s, especially the summer of '43, had been warm and wet, which spelt poor harvests and bad, unhealthy military campaigns.
No more doubts now. He had been thinking of the summer of dummy5
'43 when he had finally drifted off. Now he would think of it again for want of anything better to think about.
Anno Domini One Thousand, Six Hundred and Forty-Three.
What had 1643 to do with 1975?
He felt the sweat running down his throat.
Nothing.
But that had been a bad summer for Parliament and the Roundheads, no two ways about that. Maybe not with hindsight, because even defeat was teaching Master Oliver Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax their new trade the hard way, the way Grant and Sherman had learnt it.
