The Old Vengeful

Which left only the old lady, with all her family debris—the Honourable Algernon being a younger son, with nothing to his name except his name . . . But it's the other names that ring the bell—eh, Miss Loftus?'

She knew then. Even before he reached down and opened the box-lid, she knew, because she had polished those names dozens of times.

' Amos Ratsey, Jas. O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan . . .' he read dummy3

from the plate inside the lid. 'All the names of Dr William Willard Pike's grateful patients—' With the Respectful Compliments of Amos Ratsey, Jas. O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan, Edward MacBaren, Chas. Lepine, Michael Haggerty, Jas. Fitzgerald, Edmund Hoagland, Thomas Flower, Patrick Moonan of Portsmouth, Southsea and Cosham' —grateful patients all ... Or maybe not, perhaps?'

'Why not, Professor?' asked Aske.

'Who were they, Mr Aske? Men of some substance, undoubtedly— Ratsey and O'Byrne were, certainly!' He nodded. 'They did not combine their enterprises until 1815, but in 1812 they both held valuable contracts for supplying naval stores, and did business in the dockyards. And after the war they branched out into war surplus in the South American trade—guns and uniforms as well as stores and provisions . . . for the freedom fighters of those times—all quite respectable, as well as being profitable.' He smiled.

'Men of substance—such men as might well respectfully compliment their physician on his patriotism, and could afford to buy him a new set of the tools of his trade.'

'So what, then?'

'So who were the rest of them? Amongst my friends and contacts locally, and among the excellent employees of the Central Library and Museums staffs, not one of those names rings any bell as a local gentleman in the Portsmouth district of that time.' Wilder shook his head. 'There was a Tom Flower who plied his trade ferrying officers to their ships—a dummy3

one-eyed fellow with an exemption certificate in his pocket, to keep the press-gang off his back . . . And a 'Jim Fitzgerald'

jailed for sedition in 1814, for damning the King's eyes and wishing Parliament hanged, among other things . . . But neither of them sound like Dr Pike's grateful patients.'

'Well, you'd hardly expect to trace everyone from those days, surely?'

'You'd be surprised, dear boy. It was a much smaller world then. I would have expected more than two at the first trawl.'

He looked at Aske shrewdly. 'And I would certainly have expected Dr Pike himself.'

'Dr Pike ... himself?'

'There was no physician of that name practising in the Portsmouth region in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. And neither is there a Pike in any naval list my friends in Greenwich can turn up.' The shrewd look came to Elizabeth. 'Pandora's box, you have here, my dear: we open it, and whatever there may once have been in it, only mysteries pop out of it now.'

Aske shook his head. 'He needn't have been a Portsmouth man— but that won't do, will it! Not if Ratsey and O'Byrne were local . . .'

'No. But he could have been signed on by the captain of the Vengeful in a foreign port on a temporary basis—ship's surgeons came in all shapes and sizes in those days. Only the same objection still holds good—the inconvenient Messrs dummy3

Ratsey and O'Byrne—how did he know them, then?' Wilder shook his head back at Aske.

Aske made a face. 'But even if we can trace them all somehow, in the end . . . that still won't tell us what was in the box.' He looked sidelong at Elizabeth. 'Even if we were in a position to guess, we can never know, not now.'

'No, Mr Aske,' said Wilder. 'But we could try another guess . . . which would make the contents of the box, if any, altogether unimportant.'

'What?' Momentarily Aske had been wrapped up in his own imaginings; which, Elizabeth supposed, were of Colonel Suchet's ultimate Portsmouth Plan. 'If any?'

Wilder spread his hands. 'We are assuming, quite reasonably, that the box contained something of value. But suppose, Mr Aske, that it was the box itself which was the thing of value? What do we have then?'

Elizabeth stared at the box. 'A list of names—'

'A list of names! Precisely, Miss Loftus. Amos Ratsey, Jas.

O'Byrne, Octavius Phelan—a list of names where no one would look twice at them, even if that was what he was looking for.'

'Good God!' exclaimed Aske. 'Not 'Jas.' for 'Jasper'—'Jas.'

stands for James—James O'Byrne— James Burns!'

'Ah. . .' Wilder picked up Aske's excitement. 'That small adjustment means something to you, does it?'

'James Burns does, by God!' Aske stepped round to get a dummy3

better view of the inside of the lid. 'And half those other names are Irish—that fits too.'

'More than half, dear boy,' amended Wilder mildly. 'Am I to assume from this that James O'Byrne, alias Burns, was a French agent? And the others were his friends? His spy-ring, or whatever the term they favoured then? A Franco-Hibernian group, anyway—wild geese come home to roost, eh?'

Had that been his guess all along, wondered Elizabeth; but because he hadn't lost his good teacher's preference for drawing out his pupils he'd let them come to it in their own way?