War Game

goddamn teeth. If he was so taken with the war he could have joined the Sealed Knot eight or nine years ago, never mind dummy5

the Double R lot.'

Frances shrugged. 'So he was busy being a flea in the establishment's ear.'

'Telling soldiers in Ulster how to desert, and all that jazz?'

Mitchell echoed her scornfully. 'You think so?'

The drummers sounding the changing of the guard on the ridge and at the bridge had long finished, and for a moment only silence came in through the window. So obviously Mitchell didn't know absolutely everything about everybody, thought Audley; he certainly didn't know the circumstances of Frances Fitzgibbon's widowhood and recruitment.

'And all that jazz, yes,' said Frances evenly.

'But it was a little lie, Frances dear. And it was a little unnecessary lie on the face of it. Because I've been talking to some people who know him—the last two-three years he's been working on a post- graduate thesis on the Paris troubles of '68—and the thing that comes over is that he never talked about the Civil War until about a year ago. Or about his family either, come to that. He was plain Charlie Ratcliffe until then, but then he started to let slip his real name was Steyning-Ratcliffe—and that's also when he joined the Double R Society.'

'All right.' Frances spread her hands. 'So that's when he was bitten by the Civil War bug.'

'Then why didn't he admit it? I mean, he should have said

'Until a year ago I'd forgotten all about the family treasure dummy5

legend and I didn't know Cromwell from a hole in the road'.

But instead he said 'I've been studying the period for many years, I've always been fascinated with its political parallels with our own revolutionary struggles'. And that just wasn't true.'

'And what was true?' said Audley.

Mitchell looked at him triumphantly. 'What was true was that about eighteen months ago he ran out of bread —he's on an LEA research grant, which doesn't go very far these days.

So when he dropped out of circulation for a time no one thought twice about it. In any case, he's always going over to Paris to do research and gab with his revolutionary friends there. But my little BBC girl just happened to find out what he was really doing. Quite by chance, actually, because one of her unemployed graduate friends was in on the same job ...

which was sorting the archives of the Earl of Dawlish and packing 'em up ready for the Historical Manuscripts Commission to catalogue and calendar.'

'The Earl of where?' Frances sounded disbelieving.

'Dawlish. It's down the south coast somewhere, near Torquay.'

Frances shook her head. 'I've never heard of the Earl of Dawlish.'

'You wouldn't have done, because the title's been extinct since 1944. The archives have been given to the HMC by the Honourable Mrs. Somebody Someone, the last earl's niece.'

dummy5

'So what do they reveal?' asked Audley. 'Get to the point, man.'

'Yes . . . well, the point is that the Earldom of Dawlish was created in 1690 by William III for services rendered by a certain George Dangerfield, who'd helped to raise the West Country against James II in 1688—'

Frances took a deep breath. 'But—'

'Who in turn happened to be the grandson of a certain John Dangerfield— wait for it, Frances—who was the boon companion and crony of Captain Sir Edward Parrott, our Nathaniel's piratical father. How's that for size, then?'

Mitchell smiled at them both. 'And what is even more to the point is that John Dangerfield corresponded regularly with John Pym in Westminster. There are copies of letters he wrote to Pym in 1642 and 1643 in the archives, which means that he had a courier of some kind who was prepared to run the gauntlet through Royalist country.'

For a moment no one spoke, then Frances said: 'But he didn't write about the gold.'

Mitchell's face creased with sudden irritation. 'Aw—come on, Frances! What d'you want, a miracle? Look at the way it fits in—' he raised a hand with the little finger extended '— one—

Charlie Ratcliffe, who isn't interested in Civil Wars or family history, gets a job sorting seventeenth-century documents; two—' a second finger came up '—the documents he sorts belong to a neighbour of his gold-robbing ancestors, the Parrotts; three—Charlie is suddenly in love with history and dummy5

ancestor worship; four—Cousin James dies; five— Charlie starts looking for gold, and finds it; six—' the second thumb came up '—Charlie quietly suppresses all reference to one.'

He seized his little finger again. 'Which means if there was evidence of the gold's existence, then Charlie's got it.'

Audley rubbed his chin. 'It would only be just that—evidence of its existence.'

'Oh, sure. Nathaniel couldn't have known he'd have to hide it en route. But you wanted to know why Charlie was so sure there was gold to be found, and I reckon I've given you a pretty damn convincing sequence of possibilities. Everybody who ever looked for that gold could only hope that it wasn't a legend. But Charlie—he knew it was there somewhere. And I'd guess that Nayler knew it too.'

Audley looked quickly at Mitchell. Not only a warm young man, but a hot one was Paul Mitchell. Because that