The Ely Testament Read online

  ‘I hope not too,’ said Mute, rising from his seat. ‘Let me accompany you part of the way.’

  Tomlinson picked up his top hat and brushed at some imaginary speck on his frockcoat. He had the bearing and manner of a gentleman, thought Mute, but his clothes did let him down. Using a door which issued directly on a passageway, the two left Mute’s office and went down a narrow flight of stairs and so out into the close air of Dunstan’s Alley. Together they strolled towards Eastcheap. Perhaps Mute wanted to see in which direction Tomlinson was heading. Or perhaps he hoped the other man would let slip something more about the mysterious document and the fortune it was supposed to signify. But he did not.

  When they were near the Monument to the Great Fire, Tomlinson asked whether he’d ever been to the top of the column. Mute said he had, once, but had no intention of climbing those hundreds of steps again. So when Tomlinson suddenly announced that he was going to nip up the tower – in order to get the measure of London once more, he claimed – Mute was fairly sure it was a means of getting rid of him. His mild irritation was compounded when Tomlinson remarked that he ought to be getting back to his desk at Funereal Matters, back to his paper column while Tomlinson climbed a real column. Tomlinson laughed at his own joke, an irritating high-pitched laugh. So far, so witty, but then Tomlinson compared his old friend to a galley-slave who’d slipped his fetters for a moment. No doubt, the comment was (quite) humorously intended but Mute prided himself on his independent, freelancing spirit, and the words were unexpectedly hurtful. Particularly so when Mute thought of the ten pounds which he’d recently handed over. He’d lose face by asking for it back. Besides, he wasn’t sure that Tomlinson would give it to him.

  They shook hands but Mute looked daggers at Tomlinson’s retreating back as he walked towards the base of the Monument. The only thing that pleased him was the threadbare quality of Tomlinson’s coat. As for the talk of intriguing documents and fortunes that could be converted into cash, he was more inclined now to think of it as flimflam. That’s all. Wasn’t it?

  A Death at Scott, Lye & Mackenzie

  Mr Alexander Lye did not often visit the law firm which bore his name as one of the partners. When he did turn up at the office in Furnival Street near Holborn, it was usually to scrawl his signature at the bottom of some document, nothing else. The more junior and less charitable members of the firm wondered whether he knew what he was signing, since he seemed so old and doddery.

  Tom Ansell, who’d been with the firm for not much more than a year, might have gone along with the prevailing opinion of Mr Lye had he not endured a brief bout of questioning from the old man. They met outside the aged partner’s door one morning as Tom was returning from consulting Mr Ashley, the senior clerk, something he did quite frequently in his early days with the firm of Scott, Lye & Mackenzie. No sooner had Mr Lye emerged and closed his door behind him with a withered, claw-like hand than he was shaken by a violent fit of sneezing.

  Tom stood there, clutching a wad of documents to his chest, and giving the old man time to recover. He had spoken to Alexander Lye on a single previous occasion, and despite having been introduced by the other senior partner in the firm, he was unsure whether Lye realized who he was at the time. Certainly he did not expect to be recognized again.

  Now Mr Lye straightened himself and dabbed at his streaming eyes with a dirty-looking handkerchief. Judging the moment – enough to show concern but not enough to be detained – Tom said briskly, ‘You’re all right, I hope, sir.’

  Lye raised his gaze. He had direct blue eyes, set in a nest of wrinkles. Despite the sneezing discomfort, there seemed to Tom to be some mischief in them. Lye’s gaze narrowed slightly. He said, ‘You know, Mr Ansell, I sometimes believe that our real business is dust.’

  Tom was so taken aback to be recognized that he did no more than repeat, ‘Dust, Mr Lye?’

  ‘All these documents, wills and bills, what are they but magnets for dust?’ said Lye, nodding towards the bundle which Tom was clutching. ‘Then they turn to dust themselves. Which irritates the nostrils. But at least our documents outlast our clients, Mr Ansell.They turn to dust even sooner than their wills and stuff. The ultimate destination of paper and people and everything else – dust.’

  Mr Lye spoke with relish. Tom nodded and made to go past him, thinking it was perhaps as well that the senior partner paid only occasional visits to the law office. But the old man continued to fix the younger one with his pale-blue stare and said, ‘Helen is well, I trust? You are looking after her, Mr Ansell? She deserves to be looked after.’

  Helen was Tom’s wife. They were not long married. He smiled at the mention of her. Really, he could not object to the personal nature of old Lye’s question. Helen was the daughter of the (now deceased) other partner in the firm, Alfred Scott.

  ‘She’s very well,’ said Tom.

  ‘No announcements to make?’

  This was probably code for: Is she expecting a child? Tom was used to hearing – or rather overhearing – such roundabout comments, particularly from Helen’s mother as well as his own. It was one thing to be quizzed by mothers about happy events or loss of appetite or a gain in weight, but it was quite another to be peremptorily questioned by an old lawyer. So Tom said, ‘Announcements? Let me see. Helen has ambitions to be an author. She had a short story published in Tinsley’s Magazine recently.’

  ‘Did she? Well, she was always a bookish sort of girl.’

  Alexander Lye’s tone suggested slight disapproval of girls who were bookish, let alone women who were writers. But babies must have been hanging in the air, for he then seemed to make another oblique reference to the subject by saying, ‘I hope your own affairs are in order, Mr Ansell, now that you are a family man. Your final dispositions and wills et cetera.’

  ‘Oh yes, quite in order,’ said Tom.

  ‘You would be shocked at how many fellows, educated fellows at that, even educated fellows whose trade is the law . . .’ Mr Lye paused and appeared to lose the thread of what he saying before picking it up again, but more feebly, ‘. . . you’d be shocked, I tell you.’

  ‘Shocked by what?’

  ‘At the fact that they do not take the time to put their affairs in order, of course. What do they go and do instead? They go off and die intestate. Highly irresponsible, you know. Consider the burden one is leaving for one’s would-be heirs if one does not leave a will behind.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lye.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how young you are. As soon as you have a bit of property, as soon as you have extended yourself into a family, look to your affairs. What do these young men think? That they are going to live for ever? Ha!’

  The idea of living for ever caused Mr Lye genuine amusement. His face creased. He looked as though he was about to have another sneezing fit. Then he pulled himself together. ‘Well, my dear sir, I bid you good morning. I have business to attend to even if the rest of the world has not.’

  He moved away down the passage with an odd motion, alternating between a shuffle and a lope. Tom didn’t know what to make of him. Some of the legal dust which Lye had been talking about seemed to have settled down in the old man’s brain. But his blue stare had been shrewd enough, and the comments about attending to one’s affairs were well meant in a dull, lawyerly sort of way.

  Two or three weeks went by before Tom Ansell saw Alexander Lye again. It was a beautiful morning in early October, with the sun bathing the windows of Furnival Street in a golden light and showing up an infinite quantity of dust motes inside the chambers of Scott, Lye & Mackenzie. The specks hovering in the sunlight caused Tom to think of Mr Lye and his remark about dust, the ultimate destination of everything.

  Then, passing the open door to Lye’s office, he observed that this was one of those occasional days when the aged partner put in an appearance. He was sitting at his cluttered desk. Mr Ashley the senior clerk was standing beside Lye, bending forward slightly, his forefinger indicating some place on a document in front
of them. Lye had a quill pen in his hand. Ashley glanced up at Tom, his brow even more furrowed than usual.

  Tom walked on. He heard Lye sneezing, violently. Then there was a thump as if a heavy object had fallen from a shelf. He heard Ashley utter some words that sounded like ‘Oh for heaven’s sake.’ Tom stopped. He looked round. Ashley stuck his head out of the door. He was gazing directly at Tom but seemed unaware of his presence.

  ‘Is something wrong, Mr Ashley?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake.’

  Tom walked back. By now Ashley had emerged into the passage, muttering the same phrase several times over in an irritated tone. No one else was in the passage. Tom peered round Lye’s door. He saw the dust motes dancing in the shafts of sun, the smeared windows between their heavy drapes. He saw shelves with books arranged any old how and the desk covered with heavy legal volumes and beribboned sheaves of paper, with blotters and inkstands and pen-holders. In the centre of all this clutter, he saw the mottled dome of Alexander Lye. It was positioned on the desk like a ball. Mr Lye had fallen forward on his nose, fallen very neatly in the single clear space but on top of the document which he had doubtless been about to sign. His right hand grasped the quill pen. Tom thought that Lye must be the only person in Scott, Lye & Mackenzie still to be using a quill rather than a metal dip pen. He also thought that Lye would never again be using a pen of any sort.

  Mr Ashley came back into the room. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ he said once more.

  Helen Gets a Commission

  ‘He was shocked,’ said Tom to Helen that evening. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen old Ashley put out. He kept repeating himself as if he was irritated or angry that Lye had dropped dead in front of him. But I think it was his way of showing how distressed he was.’

  ‘Mr Ashley has been with the firm longer than anyone now that Alexander Lye is gone,’ said Helen. ‘I find it hard to believe Mr Lye really is gone, though. He seemed ageless.’

  The Ansells were sitting after supper in the small drawing room of their rented house in Kentish Town. The evening was dank and Helen was glad that she had asked Hetty, their maid-of-all-work, to light a fire before it got dark. On an otherwise unoccupied evening Tom and Helen would have been reading, Tom perhaps casting his eye over the newspaper or the Cornhill Magazine while Helen might have been working her way through the latest novel by Mrs Braddon. But this evening they were preoccupied by the death of Alexander Lye and, while there was not much to say about it, they nevertheless felt they ought to say something and then to go on saying it.

  Helen had known the old lawyer ever since she had been a little girl. For his part Tom had hardly known Lye at all but, because he was the first on the scene apart from Mr Ashley, he had to repeat the story several times over to other people in the firm. He restricted himself to the bare facts: the sneezing, the sound of Lye’s head as it struck the desktop, the utter suddenness of the event.

  In the moments following the death Tom took charge because Ashley seemed incapable of doing anything. No one else had yet appeared. After another glance around, Tom shut the door to the dead man’s room and ushered the senior clerk back to his own office. There he gently instructed him to sit down before going off to find David Mackenzie who was, as usual, wreathed in pipe smoke behind his own desk.

  The firm’s only surviving partner was grateful for Tom’s calm manner and his discretion. Once Mr Mackenzie had arranged things – sending another junior lawyer, Will Evers, round to the undertaker’s; seeing that Mr Ashley was fortified with a brandy and water while trying to get him to return home for the rest of the day (Ashley refused to go, respectfully); attempting to subdue the more excitable accounts of Lye’s death which were already circulating round the chambers – once David Mackenzie had done all this he clapped Tom on the shoulder.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything much, Mr Mackenzie.’

  ‘Then thank you for what you didn’t do. Didn’t go telling the first person you saw but came to me, didn’t go encouraging a gaggle of people to crowd round poor old Lye’s door and stare and gawp. Instinctively you knew that decorum ought to be preserved.’

  Then there was a pause before he said, ‘I’ve known Alexander Lye for longer than I can recall.’

  ‘His death must be a great shock to you.’

  ‘No doubt I shall feel it in the course of time,’ said Mackenzie in quite a cheerful tone while struggling to relight his pipe which, by Tom’s reckoning, had remained unlit for almost an hour – a record. ‘But at the moment I feel as Brutus felt about mourning for his old friend on the fields of Philippi: “I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.” The Bard of Avon, you know.’

  Now Tom said to Helen, ‘And once he’d quoted Shakespeare, Mackenzie referred to Lye as a “wily old bird”. An odd thing to say about your friend and partner just after he’s dropped dead, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it will be inscribed on his tombstone,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t mean that Mr Mackenzie is unfeeling.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I didn’t feel very much,’ said Tom. ‘There was a definite excitement in the office, though, especially when Mr Lye’s corpse was being carried out by the undertaker’s men. Not much work was done for the rest of the day. I certainly didn’t do much.’

  ‘Poor Mr Lye,’ said Helen, then, ‘I had a letter today, Tom.’

  It took Tom a moment to realize that his wife was deliberately changing the subject. He looked expectant and got up to stir the dying embers of the fire with the poker.

  ‘It was a letter from Arthur Arnett. He is the editor of The New Moon.’

  ‘The New Moon?’

  ‘It’s a periodical – a monthly periodical, as the title indicates.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen it.’

  ‘That is because the first issue has yet to come out. But plans are well advanced and I believe it is appearing imminently. Mr Arnett has promised me an advance copy.The New Moon will be a magazine for town and country, Mr Arnett says, and it will be a publication for men and women equally.’

  ‘Wide ranging then,’ said Tom, rattling the poker so as to start a few feeble spurts of flame among the embers.

  ‘He has asked me to contribute to it. He read my story in Tinsley’s Magazine and obtained our address from Mr Tinsley himself. In his letter, Mr Arnett was kind enough to compliment me on my eye for detail, and my facility at description.’

  ‘You’re going to write another story for him?’

  ‘No. He has asked me to compose a factual piece on any town or city I like, London aside. He stipulates only that it must be a place of inner beauty so I suppose that rules out an industrial town. He wants me to visit it and then to describe its buildings and byways, its corners and curiosities. I am to convey the quintessence of the place to the reader. Mr Arnett says that, by such means, we may introduce the inhabitants of these British Isles to one another. After all, we are sometimes more informed about the furthest outposts of the Empire than we are about our own backyards.’

  Tom bent forward to kiss Helen, to plant a chaste kiss on her pale forehead. He did this partly to avoid having to comment directly on what she’d just said. The way she recited the editor’s words – so many of them! – suggested she had read his letter several times over. Tom sometimes thought these literary types had a very convoluted way of expressing themselves, with their quintessences and inner beauties and their plans for introducing British citizens to each other. Even so he was glad for Helen. He had been proud, very proud, when she had a story entitled ‘Treasure’ published in Tinsley’s. It pleased him to see the name of Helen Ansell set in italic type almost as much as it pleased her.

  ‘Mrs Helen Ansell,’ he said, ‘intrepid reporter from our own backyards.’

  ‘Be careful, Thomas.’

  ‘Or should that be intrepid reportress? Seriously, though, may I accompany you on one of these visits?’

  ‘That depends on your attitude.
’

  ‘Where are you going to choose? What place shall we visit?’

  ‘I don’t know yet where I shall go, Tom. I will have to think about it. Mr Arnett does not need the article for a while. He also said that he could not offer me much money.The New Moon is still very new, you see.’

  Tom was not surprised to hear this but he did not say so. Instead he gave Helen another, longer kiss, and then, because the fire was losing its warmth and the night drawing on, they went upstairs to bed.

  Mr Lye’s Deed-Box

  When Tom arrived at Furnival Street the next day, he was greeted in the lobby by Mr Ashley. The senior clerk had evidently been waiting for him to appear. It was unusual, almost unheard of, for Ashley to be found out of his office. If he wanted to see anyone, that person was expected to visit him. Yet here he was, waiting for Tom in the lobby. Graves, the ex-military man who was the doorman and general factotum for the offices of Scott, Lye & Mackenzie, looked on in surprise, especially when Ashley drew Tom to one side.

  ‘Mr Mackenzie wishes to see you – urgently,’ he said. ‘He was here before eight o’clock this morning despite the weather.’

  This sounded like a comment on Tom’s slightly late arrival in the office. It was a foggy morning, which somehow had the effect of retarding the traffic even though things seemed to bustle along as usual.

  ‘Do you know what he wants to see me about?’

  ‘Confidential, very confidential.’

  An odd way of being confidential, thought Tom, to be intercepted by Ashley and then whispered at in a corner of the lobby where they might be seen by the doorman as well as anyone passing. It crossed his mind to ask Ashley if he had recovered from the events of the day before but he decided not to. Instead, he thanked the clerk and made his way to David Mackenzie’s office.