Audley frowned. 'What d'you mean?'
'She's right—we don't trust each other.' Mitchell leant out of the window, staring downwards to the left. 'Here . . . look down there by the bridge.'
He drew back to let Audley take his place. The line of the little river was thick with trees and even from the high window the heavy foliage of summer concealed whatever might be happening beneath them. But in a gap between two immense chestnuts he could see the bridge itself, and the cluster of Royalists who guarded it, heavily armed with muskets and beer tankards.
He turned back, still frowning. 'I still don't understand.'
Frances made a face. 'I told you, David —they're weird. They have these strict rules, and on one level the whole thing's a childish game. But ... I don't know . . . on another level it isn't a game at all. I get the feeling that what they'd really like is to play it for real, with real pikes and real guns. And that one day that's what it will be.'
Audley nodded slowly. 'I see. And the side that starts first wins—hence the pickets on guard?'
'I don't know. They would say that it's just a convention—
and it gives the crowds a kick to see that they're taking precautions against a surprise attack. . . . But it's more than that. It's not simply that they don't trust each other. They don't
Audley's eyes were drawn to the window again as another dummy5
drummer started drumming, this time from the Royalist lines. He was beginning to understand the full implications of Superintendent Weston's unease: under the cloak of seventeenth-century history the Double R Society seemed to have managed to break the rule that politics must never put on a uniform. To haul any of these people up in court, where they could always take refuge behind their historical knowledge in their ludicrous seventeenth-century language, would make the law a laughing-stock. But here they were, drilled and organised on the divisive basis of late twentieth-century politics nevertheless.
But that was Weston's problem. Or, if there really was anything in it, he could pass it on himself to the Minister as an addendum to his final report; there might well be something for the lawyers to get their sharp little teeth into in those political questions the membership committees had put to these children of his. In the meantime he had other fish to fry.
He looked at Mitchell. 'Tell me about Ratcliffe's gold, Paul.'
Mitchell relaxed into a frayed old cane chair beside the rocking-horse. 'Not Ratcliffe's gold, David. The King of Spain's gold, for my money—the property of His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip IV.'
'Spanish gold?'
'Oh, no. Not Spanish gold—American gold. Or, to be strictly fair, Spanish-American gold. The gold of the fabled Indies.'
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'You mean there's scientific proof for that?'
'I do—and there is. The BM let one of their metallurgists loose on it, and he had himself a field day. I can't honestly say I understand all his jargon, but the burden of it is that you can fingerprint gold like everything else. Some of the differences you can see with the naked eye. Apparently it ranges from deep gold-yellow to yellowish- white if there's a high silver content. But the real scientific clincher is the minute traces of other metals—all sorts of weird and wonderful elements are present in its natural state, according to where it was mined. Even with the modern stuff there are ways and means of narrowing down the source, like whether it comes from the Urals or South Africa. And with pre-1850
gold, when refining techniques weren't so sophisticated, it's even easier.
And this is pre-1850.'
'Oh, sure. The comparison tests don't pin down the age more precisely than that, but it's definitely Spanish- American, mostly from Peru and Colombia, with a bit of Mexican from Sonora and Chihuahua probably.'
'Any stamps on it?'
'Stamps?' For a moment Mitchell looked mystified. 'Oh—
die-stamps or whatever ... no. But then the ingots are pretty crude, not even to any standard weight, which suggests that it was melted down again to remove whatever official marks there were on it originally.'
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'By Edward Parrott, you mean?'
Mitchell shrugged. 'Edward or Nathaniel, your guess is as good as mine. But Edward for choice, I suppose. It isn't at all difficult to melt gold, but he wouldn't have had much time to do it in '43 and I doubt whether Spanish royal mint marks would have worried him very much, either, come to that. ...
So more likely it was Edward.' Mitchell's white teeth showed under his moustache for a second. 'A very warm man, Sir Edward. He knew his gold was hot, so he heated it up again—
if you'll pardon the puns.'
And a very warm young man, Paul Mitchell, too. There wouldn't be much by now that he didn't know about 1643, his insatiable curiosity would have seen to that.
'But then, again, it could have been Nathaniel who did the reheat,' went on Mitchell. 'I've talked to a chap who was a vet in the Army in Burma in '45—1945, that is. He actually knew more about mules than horses and ponies, but his estimate of how much a Dartmoor pony can carry for any length of time comes to the average weight of any eight of Charlie Ratcliffe's ingots, almost exactly. Which is a thought, you know. . . . Not that it accounts for Charlie's brilliant original detective work, of course.'
'And have you got any leads on that?'
'A little.' Mitchell's tone was smugly casual. 'You know the BBC's doing a TV programme on it?'
'In 'The Testimony of the Spade' series, yes. BBC Two.'
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