Pantheon

Chapter Twenty-two

He had once heard Bernard Grey joke that the best-informed people in England were the tea ladies at the Palace of Westminster: they overheard everything. It wasn’t just hatred born of hindsight that made that quip grate on James. He had found it irritating even before he had discovered that Grey was centrally involved in the plot to spirit his wife and child to North America without his knowledge. Because the joke rested on what was meant to be a shared assumption, that it was surprising, and comical, to imagine tea ladies knowing anything about anything.

Still, grudgingly, James had to admit that there was a grain of truth in the old bastard’s little apercu. If you wanted to know what was happening in college — which undergraduate had been caught cheating in his prelims, which fellow had been found masturbating in chapel — then there was no point idling about high table. The place to go was the porter’s lodge, where the true authorities were to be found.

He couldn’t do that in Yale, a place he had never visited until two days ago. He knew no one here. Except for one man, whom he needed to thank anyway.

James knocked on the door of 459 College Street. In the rush of his arrest this morning, he had barely been given time to get dressed, let alone pick up the key to the Elizabethan Club he had been given. But the butler was in and opened the door to him. As he did so, James realized that he did not know the man’s name.

‘Ah, good morning-’ James met his eye.

‘It’s Walters, sir.’ The dark skin of the butler’s face was creased with age; he was much older than James had first appreciated. ‘Good morning to you too, Dr Zennor.’

‘I’m very grateful to you for what you did for me, umm, last-’

‘There’s no need to say anything, sir. We look after our guests here.’

‘But what you told the police; it’s largely because of you that they released me.’

‘I just told the truth, Dr Zennor. They asked me and I told them.’

‘Well, I’m grateful all the same.’ James paused. ‘Could we…?’ He gestured at the main drawing room, as if to introduce a topic that was best not discussed standing in the doorway.

Once safely out of idle earshot, James said, ‘I wondered whether you might be able to help me track something down. A pin.’

‘A pin, sir?’

‘For a lapel. One was shown to me this morning, and my guess is that it’s something a Yale man would recognize immediately, but it meant nothing to me.’ The butler nodded, as if awaiting guidance. ‘It was an Egyptian cross, you know with the loop at the top?’ James sketched the pattern in the air. ‘Inside the loop was an animal head. A dog or something. Perhaps a wolf.’

Walters looked away, weighing what he had just heard. At last he looked up. ‘I think I know what you were looking at, Dr Zennor. And you’re right. It would be recognizable to most Yale men.’

‘What is it?’

‘What you had there was a wolf’s head pin. And Wolf’s Head is one of the most powerful secret societies in the university.’