“You have… if you have the name of the culprit, give it to me. I am chancellor to…”
Volpe raised a hand.
“Please, Marchese. I have little time to indulge in discourse on protocols.”
Glenbuchat stood up in annoyance.
“I will see if His Majesty will receive you,” he said stiffly. He turned to the Cardinal’s bedchamber, knocking softly before entering. A moment later, he reappeared and beckoned to Count Volpe.
The old Cardinal was sitting in a chair by his bed.
When Glenbuchat made no move to withdraw, Volpe said: “Eminence, I would have a few words with you alone.”
At once Glenbuchat began to protest but Cardinal York said quietly: “You may wait outside, my lord. I will call you when needed.”
With an expression of annoyance, Glenbuchat withdrew, shutting the door behind him. For a few seconds the Cardinal and Count Volpe remained in silence, their searching eyes meeting as if duellists preparing to engage.
“Well, Eminence,” Volpe said, after a while, “is it worth my while to order a search of the room and belongings of Father Vane for your jewels?”
A few moments passed and then the Cardinal gave a long, low sigh.
“You are undoubtedly a very clever man, Count Volpe,” he said.
Volpe shook his head.
“It required little cleverness, only logic. To make this look like theft it was but poorly done. Little thought was given to arranging opportunities by which a thief might have stolen the jewels, which might have confused me. With few opportunities to dwell on, what was left, however improbable, had to be the solution. You, yourself, removed the jewels and dropped them out of the tiny window to where this Father Vane was waiting below to receive them. Is that not so?”
Cardinal York lowered his head.
“I thought that I would have had a little more time to arrange things, but before I had a chance, Glenbuchat demanded sight of the document which we had put in the safe the night before and, in doing so, realized the jewels were no longer there. I tried to stop him making an official furore but there was little I could do.”
“So no theft had been committed?”
“As you have deduced. Count Volpe, I am old and weary. Tired of pretending to something that I know that I cannot have and, frankly, that I do not want to have. My grandfather suffered a mental decline after his exile and took refuge in religion. My father was, all his life, a depressed and gloomy individual, resigned to failure from the years of ill fortune. He became a refugee, dying in Rome with only the Holy Father insisting on addressing him as King of England. My brother, as you well know, ended his life ended his years as a depressive and a drunk. I have found solace in serving Holy Mother Church. I live frugally and in poverty. Why should I keep these remaining baubles of happier times for my family? I will never be, and never want to be, King of England, Scotland or Ireland.”
Volpe waited patiently and then asked: “But the descendants of your family? They might have been entrusted with the jewels?”
“There is no issue after me. My brother had a daughter, illegitimate, who married the Duke of Albany and died the same year as my brother. I am the last of the Stuarts. Let the offspring of the Brunswick-Luneberg-Celle family keep the throne. After all, they’ve had it for so long I’ll wager no one in England can even remember our family except with bitterness.”
“So I presume that this incident was but a surreptitious handover of these Crown Jewels to…?”
“Let us say that they have been passed on to the nations over which our family once ruled.”
“What will you tell the likes of Glenbuchat? He will be angered at the demise of his cause.”
“He has lived in the past too long. I will make my confession in due course and hope the new Holy Father, once we have elected him, will allow me to retire to Frascati to end my days in peace as a due servant of the Church.”
On 14 March 1800, after three months in conclave in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, the Cardinals elected Giorgio Barnaba Chiaramonti as Holy Father. He took the name of Pius VII. One of his first acts was to disband the Order of the Noble Knights of Our Lord and replace them with a new unit called the
And the mystery of the Stuart Crown Jewels? When the Princess Alexandrina Victoria was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India at Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838, she wore a newly reworked State Crown. The famous Stuart Sapphire occupied a prominent position on it and today it is one of the two famous sapphires that rest in the collection of the British Crown Jewels.
The Flung-Back Lid by Peter Godfrey
All that day, the last day of March, the cableway to the top of Table Mountain had operated normally. Every half hour the car on the summit descended, and the car below ascended, both operating on the same endless cable. The entire journey took seven minutes.
Passengers going up or coming down gawked at the magnificent panorama over the head of the blase conductor in each car. In his upper-station cabin the driver of the week, Clobber, hunched conscientiously over his controls during each run, and was usually able to relax for the rest of the half hour.
In the restaurant on the summit, Mrs Orvin worked and chatted and sold curios and postcards and buttered scones, and showed customers how to post their cards in the little box which would ensure their stamps would be canceled with a special Table Mountain franking.
In the box-office at the lower station, the station master, Brander, sold tickets for the journey, and chatted with the conductor who happened to be down at the time, and drank tea.
Then, at 5.30 p.m., the siren moaned its warning that the last trip of the day was about to commence. Into the upper car came the last straggling sightseers, the engineer on duty, Mrs Orvin, and the conductor, Skager. Alone in the lower car was the other conductor, Heston, who would sleep overnight on the summit.
Then two bells rang, and the cars were on their way. For the space of seven minutes Clobber and the Native labourer, Ben, were the only two on top of the mountain. Then the cars docked, and Heston stepped jauntily on to the landing platform.
He joined Clobber, but neither spoke. Their dislike was mutual and obvious. They ate their evening meal in silence.
Clobber picked up a book. Heston took a short walk, and then went to bed.
Some hours later, he woke up. Somewhere in the blackness of the room he could hear Clobber snoring softly.
Heston bared his teeth. Snore now, he thought, snore now. But tomorrow…
