Grave Goods (Tamara Hoyland Book 3) Page 10

  ‘Ah yes. The priceless treasure.’

  ‘It would be priceless, literally. How could you put a figure on it? Tamara’s training and temperament did not lead her to think of such things in financial terms. The least important of the attributes of the Horn treasure, as far as she was concerned, would be its cash value. She took a pencil and paper from the mantelpiece, and quickly made a drawing for Jeremy of what the treasure looked like.

  ‘All those jewels . . .’ Jeremy murmured. ‘It’s positively vulgar.’

  ‘To mediaeval eyes they would have been intoxicating, a foretaste of heaven’s splendour. Each stone had its own mystical significance, you know,’ Tamara said.

  ‘It is really a symbol of the misuse of wealth and power,’ Jeremy mused.

  ‘A very anachronistic view,’ Tamara replied severely. ‘Poor down-trodden peasants couldn’t eat precious metals or stones, obviously, or do anything else useful with them either. The sight of them would have been cheering.’

  ‘Bread and circuses.’

  ‘Exactly as television is now. Something bright to look at, something to take your mind off present gloom and problems. Looking at these things would have given people an idea of how nice it would be in heaven.’

  Jeremy stared disapprovingly at Tamara’s drawing. ‘It’s all sociologically deplorable,’ he said. ‘And in any case, I don’t see how the Carolingian crown jewels found their way to a secret vault in Thuringia. Wouldn’t they have been needed for some coronation or other? Not that I can see why anyone cared. Perhaps I’m lacking in historical imagination.’

  ‘It seems possible,’ Tamara told him, ‘that this lot could be the third set of Imperial regalia – the Holy Roman Empire, that’s it. We do know that the later emperors used to be crowned three separate times, once in Rome, once in Lombardy and once in Aachen. Two of those crowns are in museums. If this is the third, it could have been the booty of some mediaeval brigand. That would be perfectly plausible. Actually, Jeremy, I’m thinking of writing a Note for Antiquity about it, quoting Artemis’s authentic description of the treasure in situ. I wish her letters hadn’t gone. Will you testify for me that it really existed? You’ll have to give me some details about where you found the trunk they were in.’

  ‘As I told you, I picked up Clementine Bessemer’s trunk at a sale in Devon. It was a house that was being sold up, about to be demolished I think. They were digging away the land for china clay around there. So it was one of those auctions where you find everything: chamber pots, family portraits, unidentifiable gadgets, photograph albums – lots of those.’

  ‘I know those old albums. There’s something very poignant about them,’ Tamara said. ‘Brown snaps curling away from cellophane corners, with white writing. Lots of forgotten names and faces.’

  ‘They are not the sort of thing I’d buy,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And I don’t know who did buy them,’ he went on. ‘But I did look through one or two. Now, there was one snap I remember, a set of kids posed all over a garden, in fancy dress costume.’

  ‘Oh how I hated fancy dress parties!’

  ‘This must have been before the war.’ He screwed his eyes closed trying to visualise what he had seen. ‘A woman in a sort of belted sack with a hat pulled down to her eyebrows.’

  ‘A cloche.’

  ‘And buttoned shoes, pointed, with a cross bar.’

  ‘That would be in the nineteen-thirties.’

  ‘Yes, a fancy dress party in the thirties, with pictures of the children posing about – the sort of thing I went to myself.’

  ‘What about it, Jeremy? That’s what you’d expect to see photos of in an old album.’

  He said slowly, ‘There was one kid I remember, two or three of the pictures were of him. Posing alone for a camera, once on a sort of platform thing, like an upturned waggon, and then another sitting in a great chair with arms like a throne, and one with a pony. There was a man in the picture too, what was it . . .?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Tamara said impatiently.

  ‘It might, yes. Because you see, I remember what the little boy in the photographs was wearing. He was dressed up as a king. He was holding a sword, broken, but still long, and too heavy for him so that it trailed on the ground; he couldn’t have played games with it, just held onto it for the photograph. And he had a crown on.’

  ‘I daresay he did, if he was dressed as a king. I used to dress up as a queen in a crown, too.’

  ‘The crown was too big for him, too. It was down over his forehead. He had very short hair, which stuck up inside the crown in a sort of tuft. You could see that he would take the crown off the moment the camera clicked. They were rather good pictures.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The crown was a circle, with lumps on it that must have been jewels.’

  ‘Pretend jewels, presumably.’

  ‘They caught the light. You could see that in the snapshot, the sun reflected off them. And there was a crucifix sticking up in front. Just like your drawing, Tamara, just the same.’

  ‘I suppose the child was wearing a ring and carrying a chalice,’ Tamara said sceptically.

  ‘I can’t remember . . . no. He couldn’t have been. The ring would have been far too big.’

  ‘Just what are you suggesting, Jeremy?’

  ‘I think I may have seen a photograph of the Horn regalia, the Treasure.’

  ‘Very likely, I must say! – worn as fancy dress in rural Devonshire in the nineteen-thirties!’

  ‘I have a good visual memory. You need it, in my profession.’

  ‘Crowns and swords all look much the same,’ Tamara said. ‘It’s what archaeologists call functional stasis.’

  Jeremy Ellice was pacing up and down the long room, stepping aside to avoid furniture with practised ease. A track was worn across the matting, like a cow-path across a field. As he moved, he automatically adjusted the books that lay on every flat surface, sometimes picking one up to carry to another table on the other side of the room, sometimes pausing to stroke a binding or glance at a title page. He said, ‘You know, Tamara, if the Horn Treasure had been stolen from that dungeon . . .’

  ‘From an impregnable castle in its lonely mountains?’

  Jeremy picked up the books on the bedside table. ‘These are the books I got for Margot. I must put them in the shop.’ A white card floated to the floor and he bent to pick it up.

  Tamara said, ‘If Artemis took the treasure herself and passed it on to someone else–’

  ‘Who could have brought it to England and passed it on to Clementine Bessemer, so that it was with her other belongings in Devonshire–’

  ‘But that can’t be right. It was seen at Drachenschloss in 1917. By the Kaiser, at that.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jeremy said, ‘why should Artemis have taken it?’

  ‘She might have thought she had a right to take it, for her son. She was convinced that he was his father’s rightful heir.’

  ‘That idea of morganatic marriages is very unpleasant to our generation, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just as distasteful as the idea of marrying for money,’ Tamara agreed.

  ‘How do you think Margot got hold of this?’ Jeremy Ellice exclaimed, reading the words on the card he had picked up. ‘Joachim, Prince of Horn, it says.’

  Tamara took it from him. The name was engraved in copperplate. Pencilled underneath were the words, London Lodge Hotel. She said, ‘That will be the present prince, not Artemis’s husband.’

  ‘Oh I see, of course. Where do you suppose . . . Margot didn’t mention him. Do you suppose she wrote?’

  ‘She probably asked for any information he could provide, it’s the usual thing to do. It was in the books you bought Margot about Court life.’

  ‘I hope I shall be able to shift them. Margot seemed so keen to acquire them that I plunged a bit.’

  ‘I suppose they are outside your usual field – like photograph albums.’

  ‘I prob
ably should diversify,’ Jeremy said gloomily. ‘I certainly shan’t get rich at this rate.’

  ‘Into costumes, for instance?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Tamara said, ‘I was wondering about that sale you went to in Devon. Would you have noticed if the dressing-up gear you saw in those photographs had been on sale, too? I mean, a crown, or a sword or anything?’

  ‘I always look at the mixed lots. You never know, country auctioneers can make idiotic mistakes. But one could hardly overlook a set of crown jewels.’

  ‘I just wondered whether they could conceivably still be there,’ Tamara said.

  ‘You mean, if Artemis really did make off with them, and they really were in Devonshire in the nineteen-thirties? Perhaps they are, just waiting to be found. Waiting to make someone’s fortune.’

  Tamara looked at his gaunt but suddenly eager face. Annoyed with herself, she said, ‘They wouldn’t be, of course. It was a silly idea. Even if they ever were there, they would have gone for scrap in 1940. It was only a passing thought.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  London Lodge was not listed in the motoring handbooks or the Michelin Guide to the British Isles, being deficient in plumbing, car parking spaces and television sets. The Prince of Horn perhaps made his choice out of the Good Hotel Guide, which described it as an agreeable oasis of eccentricity in an increasingly standardised desert of sanitised hotels, and an original experience for unstuffy visitors.

  The rooms had no telephones, and the proprietor’s baby tended to disturb the guests, but the views of the Thames were spectacular, the furniture valuable and the food unique. Tamara had more than once been taken to dinner in the ‘heliotrope-scented conservatory tactfully converted into a dining room’, and knew where to find the alley that led from the outside lavatories into the residents’ lounge; she also knew that the set dinner was served at eight o’clock, and that the tyrannical owner would banish from his premises any customer who was so disrespectful of the food as to smoke, disagree with his choice of wines, or leave the room during the meal.

  Tamara crossed the lounge, where Crown Derby coffee cups were already set out on a low stool in front of a log fire. In the dining room, guests shared a single oval table and were served by waiters dressed as butler, footman and parlourmaid. The proprietor always took the head of the table and discoursed on the seasonings and garnishes as different dishes were carried on silver platters for the company to admire. Through the lounge door, Tamara saw a procession of servants on their way to make sure that each person at the table simultaneously received a miniature soufflé arising out of a pastry mould. A delicious aroma of smoked fish followed them; there would be several more courses still to come.

  All the dinner guests assembled for sherry (cocktails being forbidden, since they spoiled the palate for fine wine) before dinner; it must have been at that time that the girls, who later changed into black dresses with white frilly caps and aprons, rushed around the bedrooms in their pink prints and mob caps to turn down the beds, for when Tamara let herself into the Prince of Horn’s room she found a banked-up fire burning in a polished grate, an invitingly turned-back linen sheet on the four poster bed and a pair of pink silk pyjamas laid ready on the chaise longue. The room was decorated in full Victorian style, down to the basin and ewer on a stand in the corner; for use, not decoration. The hotel’s bathroom was magnificent, but there was only one. A copper kettle was warming on a brass trivet beside the fire, and a curved mound at the foot of the bed showed that a stone hot water bottle had been inserted. The several tables in the room were covered with lace cloths, and bore numerous small china ornaments and posies of everlasting flowers.

  Incongruously modern in this revivalist setting, a black leather briefcase was lying on an embroidered footstool. It was fastened by a combination lock. ‘The briefcase hasn’t been invented that I couldn’t open in ten seconds and you lot in ten minutes,’ the instructor at the house in Bayswater had boasted. Tamara had been a star pupil at that particular skill. The Prince of Horn’s case took one and a half minutes to open.

  It contained a stack of papers: a copy of the original edition of the drawings of the Horn Treasure, published in Paris in 1862; a sale catalogue from the house in Devon where Lady Clementine Bessemer’s trunks had been sold, with the number of that lot circled in red ink, and several unattributed paintings underlined; a formal letter from Margot Ellice wondering whether the present Prince of Horn could help her in her research, its address Paul Losinsky’s west London apartment; and a photocopy, pale grey paper with only slightly greyer type, of Margot Ellice’s work, both the first part, of which Tamara had read a copy, and the second.

  The second part was short. As her work progressed, Margot Ellice had either decided to let Artemis’s own words speak for her, or had not yet had time to transpose them into a third person narrative. Large chunks of the letters were copied in Margot’s accurate typing.

  Artemis had returned from Coburg to her son and her husband’s family. She wrote from Drachenschloss with great caution, frightened that her words would be quoted by those who spied on her, and much of her letters consisted of innocuous accounts of the weather, the scenery, and Heinrich’s amusing behaviour.

  That winter, two professors from the University of Bonn visited the Castle to study its antiquities and report on them to Prince Frederick William, who had learnt to take an interest in such things from his cultured wife and her father, the Prince Consort. The Family of Horn was much displeased at this impertinent intrusion, but a Prince of Prussia’s wishes were obeyed by even the haughtiest noblemen, in marked contrast to the indifference that Prince Albert’s advice had evoked in the late Earl of Bessemer. Prince Waldemar of Horn had felt obliged to agree that Professor Gottfried and Mr Ehrenstamm should be admitted to the vault at Drachenschloss under the outraged eye of the Chamberlain.

  Naturally, dear sister, the two gentlemen do not stay in the Castle. I believe that they put up in a village some five miles distant, and they are of course not received by their serene highnesses. I have been able to exchange some words with them, for I have more freedom from supervision since I am no longer the wife of a reigning prince, and am seldom accompanied by attendants. My movements, I believe, are a matter of indifference to the Family.

  Artemis made use of her freedom. One night, having been excused from dinner on account of a headache, she and her son left the castle of Drachenschloss. The next letter was dated January, 1860.

  Hotel du Parc, Versailles.

  My dearest sister, I write to acquaint you with the news that I have this day been united in matrimony, in the deepest secrecy and concealment, with my dearest Philip. This letter comes to you from France as you see, but we shall not breathe easily, nor cease to fear vengeful pursuit, until we are on the shores of my own dear country that is to be Philip’s adopted home, the land of liberty and justice.

  So how had she died that April in Thuringia? Gripped by the story, Tamara read eagerly on.

  *

  I count the moments until I can embrace you and present to you my beloved son. Henry is already on the happiest of terms with his new papa, and with his aunt, our own dear Mrs Lambert, whose name we intend to take as our own the better to conceal our whereabouts from those who may come seeking Artemis or Heinrich von Horn, or Artemis Bessemer, or Philip Ehrenstamm.

  *

  So Artemis had married Jeanette Lambert’s brother, the young Jewish philosopher. Philip Ehrenstamm, Philip Lambert – it came to Tamara that she knew the name. It swam to the surface of her mind from the buried depths of her history studies at school: Philip Lambert, author of Meditation au sujet des philosophies politicales, in two volumes, published some time in the eighteen-eighties.

  *

  My only regret, dear sister, is that by this deed Philip has cut himself off forever from his own father and family in Berlin. We two, and dear Jeanette, and you and our son, shall be all in all to each other.

  *


  Would Clementine have been any better pleased at the introduction of a Jew to her aristocratic family, than the Ehrenstamms at their Philip ‘marrying out’?

  *

  A new and happy life awaits us far from the tyrannous whims of princes or autocrats, in the free shores of my own country. We have fled like fugitive criminals from the place over which my son should rightfully reign. In time I shall tell you of our hazardous journey. Let me now merely say that my dear Philip was waiting for us at the rendezvous we had agreed, when we crept from the Castle at dead of night, never to return before my son comes into his own again. I brought with me only the merest necessaries, packed, along with a token of my son’s rightful property, into two bags. We have been forced to sell the little jewellery left me (since Prince Waldemar claimed most as family heirlooms) in order to finance our travels, and God willing we shall arrive in England within the week.

  *

  Her son’s rightful property? Had Artemis von Horn taken Charlemagne’s treasure from the vault before leaving Drachenschloss for ever? She believed that it was her son’s by right. She would not have thought that she was stealing. Tamara wondered whether Philip Ehrenstamm would have taken the jewellery to his father’s shop; but no. The first place the von Horns would have begun the search for their missing treasure would be any establishment connected with the professors who had been permitted to see it.

  What must Philip Ehrenstamm have thought when he discovered that Artemis had brought the treasure with her? He would have been horrified, probably, but lumbered, and as determined as the von Horns to keep it secret that the treasure was no longer in the vault. And then his scholar’s conscience would have driven him into making sure that a permanent record was published; but when Professor Duvallier at the Sorbonne received the anonymous drawings, he, like everyone else, would have supposed that they were records of a collection that remained where it had always been.

  Dear Clementine, I am sure that you will believe my assurance that I have taken only that to which my son is entitled. Subterfuge is forced upon us, but might is not right.