The Salisbury Manuscript

A House by the Arno

‘It’s a very extraordinary story,’ said Eric Selby. He’d already given a brief account of how he’d been summoned by Miss Nugent to see Walter, intimating that he had a great deal more to say. ‘What I have to say is quite shocking in its way, especially for you, Helen.’

‘I am not a little girl any longer, Uncle.’

‘Well, I would normally have some doubts about telling either of you, but Walter Slater said that he does not care now who knows his secret. His confession. He told me I might as well shout it from the rooftops. Once I had persuaded him to talk, it poured out of him like — well, like water from a breached dam, like blood from a wound. The poor fellow.’

‘Where is he now?’ said Helen. ‘He is not still in the bell-tower at St Luke’s surely?’

‘I accompanied him on his way back to Venn House though I didn’t see him right to the front gate. Nevertheless he promised me that he would return home and sleep in his own bed, not in the damp and discomfort of the ringing chamber.’

Canon Selby was sitting with his god-daughter and Tom in the seclusion of his drawing room. The rest of the household had long since gone to bed. Selby no longer looked so distracted as when he’d first appeared at the door. A good measure of brandy and Helen’s solicitous words had restored him to his usual humour.

‘Walter Slater has made a confession, you say?’ said Tom.

‘Yes, but it was not what you might think. Nothing to do with Felix’s death. At least I do not think so. It wasn’t even Walter’s confession in a sense but another’s. All I can say is that his father behaved very badly, his uncle too.’

‘Percy and Felix Slater?’

‘The pair of them,’ said Selby, shaking his head. ‘Mind you, I had had my suspicions once upon a time. There’d been rumours around the close many years ago. I’d put them to one side though.’

If all this had been designed to sharpen the curiosity of his listeners, it was succeeding. Both sat on the edge of their chairs, while the Canon leaned back in his and took another sip from his glass.

‘It appears that Walter Slater is not the nephew of Felix,’ he continued. ‘He is not the nephew but the son.’

‘What?’ said Tom.

‘There is more. Nor is Amelia the aunt of Walter. Rather, she is his mother.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘Walter was in complete ignorance of his real parentage until the other day, the day of Felix’s death in fact. Percy travelled to Salisbury to tell him. It seems that something had prompted Percy to do this, to put the record straight once and for all.’

Helen said nothing. Tom felt himself go cold.

‘I called on Percy Slater that day,’ he said. ‘He invited me to go to Northwood House. I don’t really know why. He talked about his brother in quite bitter and sarcastic terms, venting his feelings. He told me not to be taken in by his holy act.’

‘Implying that Felix was a hypocrite,’ said Canon Selby. ‘Well, there’a a grain of truth in that. But we should not judge the dead too harshly.’

‘My God,’ said Tom, ‘do you suppose it was something I said which caused Percy to go off and reveal the truth to Walter?’

He struggled to remember in detail what had passed between him and Percy Slater. There’d been talk about gambling and an argument about the material which had been transferred to Felix, together with some general aspersions on the character of the Canon. Had Tom said something which caused the Canon’s brother to go straight to Walter and tell all? If so, Tom realized with dismay, then he must bear a share of the consequences. Whatever those consequences had been, exactly. He put that disturbing thought to one side.

Selby noticed his agitation and said, ‘Don’t worry, Tom. If you did make some remark — if, I say — then it was surely unintended. Like a man walking along a mountain path who idly kicks a stone over the edge and starts a landslide.’

‘Thank you, sir, but that’s not a very comforting reflection,’ said Tom.

‘I mean that someone would have kicked the stone over sooner or later. It was bound to happen. From what Walter told me, his father — his uncle, I should say — had been on the verge of informing him of his true parentage on several occasions. He was merely waiting for the right provocation.’

‘Which I provided.’

‘We don’t know that, Tom,’ said Helen.

‘It is enough to say that Percy acted rashly, even dangerously, by telling this story when he did,’ said Eric Selby. ‘Yet he cannot be altogether bad, for he brought up Walter as if he were truly his son.’

‘What is the story?’ asked Helen. ‘Tom was only just now describing to me the Slaters’ marriage. How they met in Florence and so on. A ‘strange union’, you said.’

‘That was no secret,’ said Tom. ‘Both Walter and Percy said as much.’

‘It seems that Felix not only met Amelia when he was visiting Florence many years ago. Her parents had a house by the Arno. It seems that they became — well. . that they became. .’

‘Lovers,’ said Helen.

‘Thank you, my dear. Yes, they became lovers. Shortly after Felix returned to England, Amelia suffered a double shock. Her parents died in an outbreak of cholera. No sooner had she lost them than she discovered that she was with child. Having no one else to turn to, she eventually travelled to England to find Felix Slater.’

‘To throw herself on his mercy,’ said Helen.

‘Why, yes, that is how it must have been. We can have no idea of what words passed between Felix and Amelia, but we do know the result. Felix was a rising churchman in the town, fixed on a respectable course of life after all his — his gadding about on the Continent. Of course, he’d been a clergyman when he went abroad but possibly the warmer air — or the looser customs of foreigners — or something else, I don’t know what — caused him to forget his vows and his vocation. But he paid the price after he returned for here was a woman, half English, half Italian, on his doorstep, pleading for his protection.’

‘Couldn’t they simply have married and have done with it?’ said Tom. ‘If Amelia was expecting a child then, when it came, they could have claimed. . they might have pretended. .’

‘That the baby was premature,’ said Helen.

Both men looked at her, Tom with new respect, Eric Selby with a kind of relief at his god-daughter’s plain speaking.

‘Amelia was not precisely with child when she arrived in Salisbury,’ said the Canon. ‘You might say that the child was with her. By this time, Walter had already come into the world. She turned up with a three-month-old baby. Or six months old. Walter can’t be quite sure. You understand that he was in a distressed and confused state when he was telling me all this. What he knows, from Percy, is that his mother travelled through Italy and France by herself, a baby son in her arms.

‘Though he might agree to marry Amelia, Felix could not — or would not — acknowledge the child as his. At least he did not do so publicly, no doubt thinking of his position. Instead he turned to his brother for help. Percy and his wife had recently lost their own son in infancy. Whether the idea came from Felix or from Percy doesn’t matter, but it was the older man who offered or was persuaded to take Walter as if he were his own child. As you’ve discovered, Tom, Percy isn’t a man who has much time for convention. Perhaps he was pleased by this evidence that his clerical brother was — how should I put it? — capable of being a sinner. Perhaps he was moved to pity by the sight of the baby. Perhaps his wife, his first wife, was eager to adopt little Walter as her own. But, whatever the reason, it was an act of kindness that they took the boy. Took him quietly and without fuss and brought him up as if he were truly their own child. At the time they lived in London, far enough away from Salisbury for gossip and rumour not to travel. Though, as I’ve said, there had been a little whispering in Salisbury itself. He could not keep everything concealed. Felix and Amelia were married in due course. Percy soon afterwards lost his first wife, the woman whom Walter had always been led to believe was his mother. Later Percy married again. I do not know whether Percy’s second wife is aware of the truth — that she is a step-aunt rather than a stepmother.’

‘And meanwhile Walter grew up believing that Felix was his uncle and Amelia was his aunt?’ said Tom.

‘It is an extraordinary situation, is it not?’

But there had been little signs and pointers, thought Tom, there’d been puzzling moments which were now explained.

Such as the affectionate way that Amelia had bade farewell to Walter in the porch of Venn House the first time he’d encountered them. or the young man’s reference to her as not being especially ‘aunt-like’, which Tom had taken as being no more than a comment on her age and manner. Then there had been Percy Slater’s odd attitude to his ‘son’, the dismissive way he’d talked about him. Tom had put it down to disapproval of Walter’s decision to go into the Church and to lodge with Felix.

But, regarded in this new light, the situation suddenly became plain. Felix’s saying that Walter was just the son he would like to have was the nearest he had come to admitting the truth. There was a kind of daring hypocrisy in the statement. Similarly, hadn’t Canon Slater mentioned his happiness when Walter came to live with him? With them, of course, with the unacknowledged father and mother. What was Amelia Slater’s attitude to all this? She must surely have been delighted to have her son under her own roof for the first time. What was her part in all of this? How easy or hard had she found it to remain silent all these years? Was it part of the understanding between the couple that she should never refer to Walter’s true parentage?

He was suddenly aware that a silence had fallen and that Helen and Eric Selby were looking at him curiously. Rapidly, he explained how the story they’d just heard had thrown light on several small incidents or remarks which he’d noticed since his involvement with the tangled affairs of the Slater family. He had one final question for Canon Selby.

‘Do you think that George Slater, the father, was in on the secret?’

‘Who can tell, Tom? It is possible he was kept in ignorance. His older son lived in London while George did not, by all account, have much to do with the younger one. Perhaps he also took Walter for the son of Percy.’

‘Why do you ask, Tom?’ said Helen.

‘Because if George Slater did know, then he might have made some reference to it in his manuscript, his memoir.’

And, Tom thought without saying it out loud, that might have been a motive for the theft of the Salisbury manuscript and the murder of Felix.

Running over the events of this dramatic day as he lay, restless, in his bed at The Side of Beef, Tom Ansell realized how the revelation of Walter’s parentage had shaken everything up. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope. New patterns emerged. But they were ugly patterns, with a bloody red and a jealous green the predominant colours.

Canon Slater emerged in a new light. Tom wasn’t sure whether it was a flattering light or not. The passion that had run in his veins hadn’t simply been for the artefacts of the past. He had once, in his younger days, been the lover of a woman — a girl, in fact, for Amelia could have been little more than that when they met in Florence by the Arno — a girl whom he had got with child, as the expression goes. Tom wondered whether the Canon’s preoccupation with the past, with digging up remains, was somehow related to his having buried the scandalous part of life, if only as a kind of reverse image of it. Then he recalled Slater saying that he’d always been interested in disinterring the past from his earliest days, that he’d enjoyed fossicking round the Downton estate as a child. Well, Felix Slater was dead now and there’d be no more fossicking.

If there’d been a shortage of suspects or motives for the murder of Canon Slater before, there were now several to be drawn directly from Felix’s own family.

Tom had scarcely known his father — not much more than a tall man in a blue uniform, as he’d described him recently to Henry Cathcart — but at least he could recognize him as a father. He tried to put himself inside the mind of a man of about the same age as himself who, with brutal suddenness, discovers that the gentleman and lady he’s been brought up to treat as his uncle and aunt are his actual parents. It was as if he’d discovered that the man his mother had taken for a second husband — Martin Holford, a kindly but somewhat aloof figure who’d steered Tom into his career in law — was revealed to be his actual father. How would he, Tom, respond? Disbelief at first, yes. And then. . what? The effect would surely be overwhelming.

Walter’s reaction had been a compound of anger and dismay. His immediate instinct had been to run away from Venn House and hide himself in the comforting surroundings of St Luke’s. But had that really been his immediate instinct? Had he rather been driven by fury or distraction to go straight to Venn House and confront the man now revealed as his father? Did he kill the cleric while his mind was turned by the news, and then flee to the shelter of the bell-tower?

Tom thought again. If Walter Slater had endured a distraught encounter with Felix, then there would have been the sounds of it reverberating round the household on the evening of Felix’s death. Raised voices and angry tones would have been overheard by the servants. And by Mrs Slater too, surely. Unless she was somehow involved in her husband’s death, an accomplice to his murder. Tom had a vision of Walter storming into the house and confronting his mother. Of tears and embraces coupled with garbled explanations and infinite regrets, while anger bubbled away underneath. Had they together gone to see Felix? Together brought about his death?

The strain on Amelia over the years must have been immense too. If Walter had been subject to a violent shock, she had had to endure many years of pain. To have surrendered her son all those years before and then to have him return home as a kind of guest, but without being able to acknowledge him for who he was, must have added to an almost intolerable burden.

But even as Tom’s imagination painted the picture of an anguished mother, he wondered whether it was so after all. What he’d seen of Amelia Slater suggested a coolness, a detached and half-amused attitude to things. She didn’t look as though she might be carried away by a sudden rage. Yet one of the things that Tom had learned even in his brief time as a lawyer was that there was no predicting human responses. The most passionate and vehement person might take an insult or shock with equanimity, while the meekest of individuals could suddenly lash out in fury.

If Amelia Slater hadn’t herself been the murderer, however, that did not mean she might not be covering up for her son’s action. For the first time in her life she might have acted in truly maternal, protective fashion. Another picture: Amelia entering Felix’s study and seeing Walter standing over her husband’s body and — understanding and forgiving everything in an instant — giving him the time to make his escape before she ran out with her maid into the fog and darkness of the West Walk to raise the alarm.

There was a third member of the Slater family to consider. Percy Slater had travelled from Downton to Salisbury on the day of his brother’s murder — and shortly after Tom had called on him — to find Walter and to put the record straight, as Eric Selby had expressed it. If Walter had indeed gone on to kill his father, then Percy bore part of the blame for the manner in which he had revealed to the truth to his nephew. He, too, must have lived for years with the weight of deception, with the pretence that the boy who’d known him as a father was no son to him. All that time, his resentment at his pious and holy brother must have been simmering. According to Canon Selby, Percy had on several occasions come close to revealing the truth. That he had finally done so without warning, on a fog-bound afternoon, was perhaps the least surprising thing of all.

To go to the son instead of having it out with his brother perhaps showed a kind of vindictiveness — or cowardice — on Percy’s part. He intended to wound the young man who had betrayed him by going to live in his father’s house and following his father’s priestly vocation. He has turned Walter’s head, Percy had said of Felix. It must have looked like gross ingratitude for Percy’s having taken on Felix and Amelia’s young child all those years before.

Had Percy taken a further step though? Perhaps he hadn’t been content to wound with mere words but had resorted to force. Was it Percy who’d been the unknown visitor to Felix’s study and who, while his brother was occupied about some business at his desk, had taken the flint from the display case and plunged it into the exposed neck of the man he despised?

One thing seemed certain. That Felix Slater had been killed by someone he knew. The evidence showed Felix was taken off guard when he was sitting at his desk. That argued for someone close to him, a member of his family. Yet, by the same token, it suggested there’d been no violent argument or furious confrontation beforehand. Which, in turn, indicated that if it had been Walter or Amelia or Percy — or some combination of the three — who had killed him, then the murder had occurred at a composed moment, when the sound and fury had died down. Which, by another turn, tended to exonerate Walter and Amelia and Percy, since Tom couldn’t believe in a ‘composed moment’ with all these family secrets being dug up, such old and rotting secrets smelling to high heaven.

They’d discussed how much of this should be conveyed to Inspector Foster, since it might alter the way he treated the murder investigation. Eric Selby’s view was that the secret was primarily Walter’s and that it was his to tell to Foster if he chose. At the least he should have another day or so to come to that decision.

Tom’s mind had chased in circles and he settled to sleep with nothing resolved. Nor did he sleep soundly. It was perhaps the thought of rotting secrets which caused Tom to dream of the other part of this long day, the part before he and Helen had heard Selby’s revelation.

He was once again on the slope of Todd’s Mound, gazing into a dark hole bored straight into the hillside. He recognized it as the burial chamber. Standing above him was Canon Selby, sermonizing, jabbing with his forefinger, holding forth like an old-time preacher. Behind him and over the ridge of the hill there gathered black clouds while the wind scattered a few brown leaves. The owlish, benevolent look had vanished from Selby’s face. In its place was a rigid contempt. He was denouncing Felix Slater for hypocrisy and immorality. Denouncing him by name. Around him were the members of the Slater family, Amelia his wife and Percy his brother and Walter his son. They were nodding in agreement with every fervent word.

But there were others present as well. It was a jumbled reprise of the scene outside Venn House when Tom had been escorted away by Inspector Foster and the constables. In Tom’s dream there was Fawkes the coachman-cum-valet to Percy, there was Henry Cathcart, there was a gaggle of servants, including Bessie the housemaid and Eaves the gardener. They too were nodding their heads vigorously. Someone said, ‘I did it.’ Tom struggled to identify the speaker but he could not. Could not even say whether it was a man’s or a woman’s voice. The words were blown about on the wind like dead leaves.

Eric Selby stretched out his arm and pointed down the hill. Tom turned to look. He expected to see Felix Slater, the object of Selby’s vitriol. But there was a different dead man making his way up the hill. It was Andrew North. Although he had never seen him alive Tom recognized the sexton, on account of his worm-eaten countenance and the rents in his raggedy clothes through which his flesh glowed grey and green. Lower down the steep slope stood North’s sister, Mrs Banks. She was wringing her hands. Dead as he was, North was moving up the slope with vigour. To his alarm, Tom observed that he seemed to be making in his direction. But North veered away from Tom, merely turning his gaunt and eroded head as he passed. Then the dead sexton fell on to his hands and knees in front of the entrance to the hole and, like some animal, scuttled inside without a backwards glance.

Tom shivered, not because of the chill from the rising wind, but because he knew that North was never going to come out alive from that hole again. Except that he was already dead. So, if he was dead, would he emerge alive after all? In search of some solution to this conundrum, Tom looked uphill towards where Selby was orating. But there was no one there at all. The slope of Todd’s Mound was quite bare.