Name To a Face

SIXTEEN

My involvement in this-and hence Kerry’s-began with my researches into my most, indeed only eminent ancestor, Francis Gashry a Member of Parliament for twenty years in the mid-eighteenth century. He was born in London in 1702. His parents, original name Gascherie, were Huguenot refugees from La Rochelle. Most of my information about him came initially from the archives of the Huguenot Association. His political career had its roots in his appointment in 1728 as secretary to Admiral Sir Charles Wager, recently retired from the sea and a member of the Admiralty Board. Wager became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1733. That made Gashry a significant person in the Admiralty without being an official member of staff, though he was later to become one-Commissioner of the Navy, no less.

“But I digress. The crux of the matter is that as Wager’s right-hand man and a semi-detached civil servant, Gashry was the natural choice to tackle a sensitive problem that presented itself in February 1736.

“As you know, nearly thirty years previously, in October 1707, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s flagship, HMS Association, had gone down off the Scillies, with the loss of all hands, including Shovell. Shovell’s body had been washed up on the coast of St. Mary’s and, at some point prior to the arrival of a search party, a precious emerald-and-diamond ring had been stolen from his finger. Attempts to recover it had failed, despite a large reward offered for its return by Lady Shovell. She died in 1732, with the fate of the ring still unknown.

“In February 1736, however, that changed, with the arrival at the Admiralty of two letters passed on to Wager by Lord Godolphin, hereditary-and absentee-Governor of Scilly The first letter was from the Reverend Richard Symons, parish priest for the islands. It reported that one of his parishioners, an aged widow, had made a dying confession to the theft of the ring, which she had kept hidden ever since but now wished to be returned to the Shovell family. Symons explained that he was arranging this through a gentleman called Godfrey Shillingstone, who was in the Scillies at the time conducting antiquarian research, with Lord Godolphin’s blessing, and was due to leave shortly, bound for London, where he would deliver the ring to His Lordship, for onward transmission to the Shovells.

“This would have been excellent news, especially for Wager, who had served under Shovell as a junior officer, but for the contents of the second letter. It was from the Reverend Dr. Walter Borlase, Vicar of Madron, near Penzance, a living controlled, like most others in the area, by Lord Godolphin. Shillingstone had stayed with him for a few nights on his way to the Scillies and had done so again on his way back. Borlase was a magistrate and alderman as well as a priest. He must have been mortified to have to report to his patron, who had previously asked him to assist Shillingstone in any way he could, that the unfortunate antiquarian was dead and the ring missing once more.

“Borlase recounted that he and his wife had been dining out one evening shortly after Shillingstone’s arrival. Their guest had opted not to join them and had remained at their home, where a burglary had occurred prior to their return. The servants had heard nothing. Shillingstone had gone outside, for whatever reason, and been knifed to death. And the ring had been stolen from a desk drawer in Borlase’s study, where Shillingstone had previously lodged it for safe keeping. The lock on the drawer had been forced. Nothing else had been taken. But the ring was gone.

“This would have been quite bad enough, but, to make matters worse, Lord Godolphin had already alerted Shovell’s eldest daughter, Lady Hyndford, to the recovery of the ring and was at a loss how to explain to her that it had been stolen yet again. To get himself off the hook, he argued that the whole problem was Admiralty business, which he was happy for them to deal with as they saw fit.

“Perhaps out of loyalty to his old commanding officer, Wager took the matter on and dispatched Gashry to Penzance with instructions to investigate the circumstances of Shilling-stone’s murder and, if possible, recover the ring. Gashry later wrote a full report of what he accomplished, which is how I know about his mission. The report mouldered in the archives until 1964, when the Admiralty was absorbed by the Ministry of Defence and there was a clear-out of old documents. A junior civil servant called Herbert Shelkin kept a lot of stuff that would otherwise have been destroyed, including the Gashry report, which he was particularly interested in because the Shelkins, original name Schulkin, also come from Huguenot stock. He wrote an article about Huguenot MPs, mentioning Gashry, in the Huguenot Association journal about ten years ago. That’s what put me on to him. He’s a rather eccentric individual, afraid officialdom might yet accuse him of stealing the documents he removed and cancel his pension. But I was able to persuade him to let me read the report. And a fascinating read it was too.

“Gashry spent several weeks at Castle Horneck, Borlase’s residence on the outskirts of Penzance. He questioned every member of the household and undertook extensive enquiries in the neighbourhood. He made himself a thorough nuisance. But I imagine he knew this was a task he had to take seriously. His career might have been badly compromised by failure.

“Complete success was nevertheless beyond him. He was suspicious of the servants, but could prove nothing against any of them. A pair of strangers had been seen in the area on the day of the murder who matched the description of two men seen in the nearby village of Ludgvan the day before that. This was significant, because Walter Borlase’s younger brother, William, was Rector of Ludgvan. There could easily have been confusion between the two. William Borlase was an antiquarian in his own right. Shillingstone had originally intended to stay with him, but building work at the rectory meant he was put up at Castle Horneck instead. Someone, Gashry reasoned, had been looking for Shillingstone-and the ring. The burglary had been carefully planned.

“Gashry tried to establish who knew where the ring was being kept. It appeared that the only person other than Borlase and Shillingstone who might have known-and he denied it-was Borlase’s steward, Jacob Tozer. Yes, the Tozers enter the story at this point. They enter, never to leave.

“Was there a connection between Tozer and the two strangers? If so, what was their joint motive for stealing the ring? It had to be a powerful one, given their willingness to murder Shillingstone in the process. Yet the example of the widow on St. Mary’s showed that the ring was too notorious to be easily sold for profit. Why did they want it, then?

“At some point, Gashry hit on a possible answer. Perhaps the theft of the ring was camouflage. Perhaps the murder of Shillingstone was the real object of the exercise. But, again, why? What had Shillingstone done? He had returned from the Scillies with several crates of geological specimens, which were still in an outhouse at Castle Horneck. He had been awaiting the next sailing of the tin-ship for London to transport them to the capital. Borlase had paid the specimens no heed before or after Shillingstone’s death, so his assertion that only the ring had been stolen was questionable, given his uncertainty over how many crates there had originally been, not to mention what they actually contained. Those remaining were opened and found to hold unremarkable mineral samples. Undaunted, Gashry formed the hypothesis that Shillingstone had been murdered after interrupting the theft from the outhouse of one or more of the crates in which something else altogether was being transported. The theft of the ring had then been staged to distract attention from the true purpose of the crime.

“Jacob Tozer became Gashry’s prime suspect. He knew when the Borlases would be out, he could be presumed to have discovered where the ring was being kept, and he also had a key to the outhouse where Shillingstone had stored his crates. But Borlase had complete confidence in his steward and Gashry could unearth nothing in the way of solid evidence against him, despite a snap search of the cottage adjoining Castle Horneck where Tozer lived with his wife and children. Tozer certainly didn’t crack under the pressure. Gashry described him as ‘infuriatingly imperturbable.’

“However tireless his investigations may have been, Gashry was no closer to recovering the ring. He decided to travel to the Scillies in order to find out more about the aged widow and Shillingstone’s antiquarian researches.

“His first objective, after what seems to have been a nightmarish crossing, was soon accomplished. The Reverend Symons informed him that the woman’s name was Mary Mumford. She was a native of St. Mary’s and had lived all her life in a cottage close to the bay where Admiral Shovell’s body had been washed up.

“Gashry’s achievements in respect of his second objective are, sadly, a mystery. According to Shelkin, several pages were missing from the report when he came across it and he was never able to find them. The report resumes with Gashry back in Penzance, the search for the ring abandoned and preparations for his masterstroke under way. Based on descriptions of the ring provided by Symons and Borlase, he proposed to have a replica made and presented to Lady Hyndford as the real thing. She’d only been a child at the time of her father’s death and had no reason to challenge its authenticity. A line would be drawn under an affair Gashry described as ‘toilsome and intractable.’

“So you see, the ring stolen from Heartsease almost certainly is the genuine article, kept hidden by Jacob Tozer after his theft of it from Castle Horneck and passed on as an heirloom in his family, to be squabbled over by later generations.

“As for who stole it from Heartsease, only one name springs to mind. After I’d told Kerry all this, she asked me to arrange for her to meet Herbert Shelkin. In his retirement, he runs a dubious kind of genealogical research agency, in Lincoln. I accompanied her when she went up there to speak to him. What soon became obvious under Kerry’s gentle grilling was what I should have guessed at the outset. He had the missing pages from the Gashry report all along. He didn’t want anyone to know what they contained. He was keeping one secret back for his very own.

“Eerily, in view of what was to happen later, he warned Kerry not to enquire into the matter further. He said it was dangerous ground-his exact words: dangerous ground. He declined to explain. Indeed, he declined to say very much at all, at least of substance. The man’s happy enough to blather irrelevantly for hours at a stretch. What’s beyond dispute is that he knows the true history of Tozer’s ring, as very few others do. As soon as Hayley told me about the burglary, I thought of Shelkin. Why he should have stolen it I don’t know. But there’ll have been a reason. And he’ll have thought it a good one.”