The Old Vengeful

'That bastard Mitchell played his cards close to his chest!'

murmured Aske savagely to himself.

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'Mitchell?' inquired Wilder.

'Never mind him, sir.' Aske blinked. 'What was in the box?'

'Nothing, Mr Aske. It was empty.'

'You mean . . . they lost what was in it?'

'I mean just what I said: it was empty when they opened it. If Tom Chard is to be believed . . . and I see no reason why he shouldn't be . . . neither he nor Timms had ever seen the inside of it until they opened it for themselves. Lieutenant Chipperfield brought it with him from the Vengeful, and he took it with him when he escaped from the fortress. And he gave it to Midshipman Paget, and Paget gave it to them. And they opened it—and it was empty.'

Elizabeth and Aske stared at each other, and it was a toss-up which of them was more at sea now, thought Elizabeth—at sea in an open boat, shrouded in mist, with an empty box for company.

'So what did they do?' Elizabeth broke the silence.

'They rowed all that day, and most of the night.'

'In the fog?' said Aske, suddenly irritable.

'They were picked up by a fishing boat, off Ramsgate. They were lucky, Mr Aske.'

'Lucky?'

'They could have been rescued by the navy—by one of the blockade ships.'

Aske nodded. 'Then it would have been back to duty? But the dummy3

fishermen didn't turn them in, you mean?'

'That is correct.'

'So they deserted—'R' for 'Run'—I remember, Professor.

They'd had enough of the Royal Navy!'

Wilder nodded. 'Also correct. And it would have been worse for Timms—if he'd chosen to be an American, anyway.'

'Of course! Because the Yankees were at war with us by then!' Aske whistled through his teeth. 'It would have been Dartmoor Prison for him—would it?'

Wilder inclined his head doubtfully. 'They might have taken a more lenient view. They weren't always uncivilised. But there was that risk, certainly.'

It was no wonder they'd run, decided Elizabeth. Life ashore if you were poor could have been no picnic anywhere in those days. But life afloat in the twentieth year of the war with France would have been a worse bargain. And if any men had done their bit, Tom Chard and Abraham Timms had done theirs.

'And yet that isn't the whole truth, I suspect,' said Wilder gently. 'I think . . . from what Tom Chard said between Parson Ward's lines ... I think they still reckoned they were under their officer's orders.' He paused. 'I think that they were simple men—Timms less simple than Chard, but both essentially simple men.' His eyes fell to the Vengeful box. 'It is possible that I am imagining too far now . . . but they had their orders . . . and they had that. . . and simple men tend to dummy3

approach life's problems literally.'

'And what was their problem?' Aske sniffed. 'Other than keeping out of the press-gang's clutches?'

'It was very simple—and very complicated. They had the surgeon's case, by which the Lieutenant had set such store . . . but they didn't know what to do with it, Mr Aske.'

The box was beginning to hypnotise Elizabeth: it had come ashore from the Vengeful, against the odds of shipwreck; and it had travelled to Lautenbourg—and out of Lautenbourg, down an unclimbable cliff; and it had travelled across France in the midst of a twenty-year war, and had come through the waves from the dying midshipman into a stolen boat—and then into a Ramsgate boat, good luck cancelling bad—and finally ashore . . . the odds building up and multiplying all the way . . . and somehow, in the end, to Father, and to her . . . and now it was here, in a strange house, hypnotising her.

'They'd have done best to chuck it overboard,' said Aske. 'If it was empty—'

'But they didn't.' Wilder sounded almost triumphant in his statement of the obvious. 'It is here. So that was what they didn't do—that, at least, is certain!'

'So what did they do with it?' Aske swivelled towards Elizabeth. 'How did your father get it, Miss Loftus?'

Elizabeth looked at Professor Wilder helplessly. 'His crew gave it to him—the survivors—?'

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'They bought it from White and Cooper, Antiques, of Southsea, Miss Loftus.' Wilder nodded. 'Binnacles and barnacles, and a wealth of maritime knick-knackery, much of it spurious and all of it over-priced, according to David Audley's young man. But old Mr Cooper—who was young Mr Cooper then—remembers buying it, and selling it ... And he bought it from the intestate estate of Mrs Agnes Childe, of Cosham, with a job lot of junk, because he wanted some choice items which had been included in the lot, which he had spotted . . . And, fortunately for us, old Mr Cooper is old enough— and rich enough—not only to remember his sharp practice, but to exult in it . . . And to remember that Mrs Agnes Childe was nee O'Byrne, of Ratsey and O'Byrne, ship's chandlers and merchants of Portsmouth—two very old-established families of Hampshire, in business and commerce . . . and in Parliament too, after the Reform Bill of 1832, in the Whig interest.' He was looking at Elizabeth now.

'Agnes married the Honourable Algernon Childe, who got himself killed in 1915, at Ypres, with the Grenadiers.