To the hilt

CHAPTER FIVE

After a moment of internal chill I said carefully, 'Why do you think I have the Cup?'

He looked astonished but not yet alarmed. 'Because I sent it to you, of course. You are good at hiding things, Robert said. I sent it to you, to keep it safe.'

Hell's teeth, I thought. Oh God. Oh no.

I said 'How? How did you send it to me?'

For the first tune he seemed to realise that however good his plans had been, somewhere along the line the points had got switched. He frowned, but still not with anxiety.

'I gave it to Robert to give to you. That's to say, I told him where to find it. Are you listening? Stop looking so blank. I asked your uncle Robert to take the damned Cup to Scotland for you to take care of. So don't tell me you don't have it.'

'Er…" I said, clearing my throat, 'when did you send it to Scotland?'

'I don't know.' He waved a hand as if the detail were unimportant. 'Ask Robert. If you haven't got the Cup, then he has.'

I breathed slowly and deeply, and said, 'Who else knew you were sending the Cup to me?'

'Who? No one else. What does it matter? Robert will pass the Cup to you when you go back to Scotland, and you can keep it safe for me until the brewery's affairs are settled because, like the horse, the Cup belongs to me, and I don't want to see it counted as a brewery asset and sold for a drop in the ocean.'

'Bill of sale?' I suggested hopelessly.

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'No.'

I asked with artificial absence of urgency, 'When did all this happen? When did you ask Himself to take the Cup to Scotland?'

'When? Oh, sometime last week.'

'Last week… while you were still in the Clinic?'

'Of course while I was in the Clinic. You're being very dense, Alexander. I was feeling very ill and I'd had so many drugs and injections, I was thinking double, let alone seeing, and Robert came to visit me while I was worried sick by Tobias Tollright, and he, Robert, of course, not Tollright, said he was leaving the next day for Scotland for his annual shooting and fishing, and for the Games, and it made sense to ask him to look after the Cup, and he said he would, but better still he would entrust it to you. I asked if he trusted you enough… and he said he would trust you with his life.'

Hell, I thought, and asked, 'Which day was that?'

'I can't possibly remember. Why do you think it matters?'

His own illness had been painful and traumatic but he hadn't, I thought, had a lot of fists thudding like ramrods into his ribs and abdomen until he could hardly breathe, he hadn't been head-butted and bounced half unconscious down a mountain and he hadn't spent three days bruised, aching and sorry for himself, swallowing Keith Robbiston's pills to make life tolerable.

By that Friday morning, as it happened, the waves of overall malaise had receded; only individual spots were at that point sore to the touch. I felt more or less normal.

Next time you'll scream.

I relaxed into my chair and asked conversationally, 'Did you tell Patsy that I was looking after the Cup?'

Ivan said, 'I do wish you and Patsy could like each other. Your dear mother and I are so fond of each other, but with our children we are not a successful family. You and Patsy both have such strong characters, it's such a shame you can't be friends.'

'Yes, I'm sorry,' I said, and it was true that I was. I would actually have liked to have a sister. I went on, 'She did, though, tell Desmond Finch that I'd stolen the Cup, and he believes it and is spreading it about, which is unfortunate.'

'Oh, Desmond,' Ivan said indulgently. 'Such a good man in so many ways. I rely on him, you know, to get things done. He's thorough, which so many people are not these days. At least through all this troubling time I can be sure that the brewing and sales are running as they should.'

'Yes,' I said.

The spurt of returning health that had carried Ivan through the morning began to fade, and we sat quietly together, taking life at his pace, which was slow to negligible. I asked him if I could bring him anything, like coffee, but he said not.

After a while, in which he briefly dozed, he said with weakness, 'Patsy couldn't have been sweeter when I was in the Clinic. She came every day, you know. She looked after my flowers… I had so many plants, people were so kind. Everyone in the Clinic said how lucky I was to have such a loving, thoughtful and beautiful daughter… and perhaps she was in and out when Robert came, but I can't think how she thought you had stolen the Cup. You must be mistaken about that, you know.'

'Don't worry about it,' I said.

Armed with generous cash from my mother I trekked back by rail to Reading and went to see the firm of Young and Uttley, the investigators recommended by Tobias. An unprepossessing male voice on the telephone having given me a time and a place, I found a soulless box of an office - outer room, inner room, desks, filing cabinets, computers and coat stand - with an inhabitant, a man of about my own age dressed in jeans, black hard boots, a grubby singlet with cut-out armholes and a heavy black hip-slung belt shining with aggressive studs. He had an unshaven chin, close-cropped dark hair, one earring dangling - right ear - and the word HATE in black letters across the backs of the fingers of both hands.

'Yeah?' he said, when I went in. 'Want something?'

'I'm looking for Young and Uttley. I telephoned-'

'Yeah,' said the voice I'd heard on the phone. 'See. Young and Uttley are partners. That's their pictures on the wall, there. Which one do you want?'

He pointed to two glossy eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs drawing-pinned to a framed cork board hanging on a dingy wall. Alongside hung a framed certificate giving Young and Uttley licence to operate as private investigators, though to my understanding no such licence was necessary in Britain, nor existed. A ploy to impress ignorant clients, I supposed.

Mr Young and Mr Uttley were, first, a sober dark-suited man with a heavy moustache, a striped tie and a hat, and secondly, a wholesome fellow in a pale blue jogging suit, carrying a football and a whistle and looking like a dedicated schoolteacher going out to coach children.

I turned away, smiling, and said to the skinhead watching me, 'I'll take you as you are.'

'What do you mean?'

'Those pictures are both you.'

'Quick, aren't you?' he said tartly. 'And Tobe warned me, and all.'

'I asked him for someone good, honest and discreet.'

'You got him. What do you want done?'

I said, 'Where did you learn your trade?'

'Reform school. Various nicks. Do you want me or not?'

'I want the discreet bit most of all.'

'Priority.'

'Then I want you to follow someone and find out if he meets, or knows where to find, four other people.'

'Done,' he said easily. 'Who are they?'

I drew them for him in a mixture of pencil and ballpoint, having somewhere lost my charcoal. He looked at the drawings, one of Surtees Benchmark, and one of each of my four attackers.

I told him Surtees's name and address. I said I knew nothing about the others except their ability to punch.

'Are those four how you got that eye?'

'Yes. They robbed my house in Scotland, but they have south-east England voices.'

He nodded. 'When did they hit you?'

'Tuesday morning.'

He mentioned his fee and I paid him a retainer for a week. I gave him Jed's phone number and asked him to report.

'What do I call you?' I asked.

'Young or Uttley, take your pick.'

'Young and Utterly Outrageous, more like.'

'You're so sharp, you'll cut yourself.'

I went grinning to the train.

I spent the later part of the afternoon shopping, accompanied by my long-suffering mother, who paid for everything with her credit cards.

'I suppose,' she said at one point, 'you weren't insured against the loss of your whiter clothes and your climbing gear and your paints?'

I looked at her sideways, amused.

She sighed.

'I did insure the jeep,' I said.

'That's something, at least.'

Back at Park Crescent I changed into some of the new things and left the jodhpur boots, padded jacket, crash helmet and goggles for return to Emily sometime, and I told Ivan (having checked with Margaret Morden) that so far the brewery's creditors were earning haloes and had agreed to meet on Monday.

'Why don't you stay here?' he said, a shade petulantly. 'Your mother would like it.'

I hadn't told him about the attack on the bothy so as not to trouble him and he hadn't persisted in asking how I'd hurt my eye. I explained my departure in the one way that would satisfy him.

'Himself wants me up there… and I'd better do something about the Cup.'

Relaxing, he nodded. 'Keep it safe.'

The three of us tranquilly ate an Edna-cooked dinner, then I shook Ivan's hand, hugged my mother warmly, humped my bags and boxes along to Euston, boarded the Royal Highlander and slept my way to Scotland.

Even the air at Dalwhinnie smelled different. Smelled like home. Cold. Fresh. A promise of mountains.

Jed Parlane was striding up and down to keep warm and blowing on his fingers. He helped carry my clutter out to his car and said he was relieved to see me and how was I feeling.

'Good as new.'

'That's more than can be said for the bothy.'

'Did you lock it?' I asked, trying not to sound anxious.

'Relax. Yes, I did. In fact I got a new lock for it. Whatever was there when you left is still there. Himself asks me to drive over and check every day. No one is sniffing around, that I can see. The police want to interview you, of course.'

'Sometime.'

Jed drove me not to the bothy but, as arranged, straight to Kinloch Castle to talk to Himself.

The castle was no fairy-tale confection of Disney spires and white-sugar icing, but like all ancient Scottish castles had been heavily constructed to keep out both enemies and weather. It was of thick and plain perpendicular grey stone with a minimum of narrow windows that had once been arrow slots for archers. Built on a rise to command views of the valley at its foot, it looked dour and inhospitable and threatening even on sunny days, and could chill the soul under nimbostratus.

My father had grown up there, and as a grandson of the old earl I'd played there as a child until it held no terrors: but times had changed and the castle itself no longer belonged to the Kinloch family but was the property of Scotland, administered and run as a tourist attraction by one of the conservation organisations. Himself, who had effected the transfer, had pronounced the roof upkeep and the heating bills too much for even the Kinloch coffers, and had negotiated a retreat to a smaller snugger home in what had once been the kitchen wing with living quarters for a retinue of dozens.

Himself would on occasion dress in historic Highland finery and act as host to visiting monarchs in the castle's vast main dining-hall, and it had been after one such grand evening, about six years earlier, that an enterprising band of burglars in the livery of footmen had lifted and borne away ah irreplaceable gold-leafed eighteenth-century dinner service for fifty. Not a side plate, not a charger, had surfaced since.

It had been less than a year later, when a second theft had deprived the castle of several tapestry wall-hangings, that Himself had thought of a way of keeping safe the best known and most priceless of the many Kinloch treasures, the jewel-encrusted solid gold hilt of the ceremonial sword of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

It had, of course, meant taking the hilt out of its supposedly thief-proof display case and replacing the real thing with a replica. Ever since he had whisked the genuine article to safety, Himself had politely refused to tell the castle's administrators where to find it. It belonged to him, he maintained, as it had been given personally by Prince Charles Edward to his ancestor, the Earl of Kinloch at the tune, and had been handed down to him, the present earl, in the direct male line.

So had the castle, the administrators said. The hilt belonged to the nation.

Not so, Himself argued. The castle transfer documents had not included personal property and had in fact specifically excluded the hilt.

There had been hot debates in newspapers and on television as to when, if ever, a gift to one man became the property of all.

Moreover, as Himself pointed out, the hilt had been given as thanks and appreciation for hospitality, horses and provisions. The facts were well attested. Prince Charles Edward, on his long retreat northwards (after his nearly successful campaign to win the English crown) had stayed for two nights at Kinloch Castle, had been comforted and revictualled, his retinue rested and re-horsed, for which services he had passed on to the then earl the hilt of his ceremonial sword, the blade having been earlier snapped off short in an accident.

The sword had never been used in nor intended for battle: it was too heavy and too ornate, a symbol of power and pomp only. The Prince, his dreams shattered like the blade, had left it behind and ridden on towards Inverness, to what proved to be his army's last decisive defeat at Culloden.

The Prince, tougher in flight, had famously escaped across Scotland to the Western Isles, making it safely back to France. The Earl of Kinloch, not so lucky, had been beheaded by the English for his allegiance (like poor fat old Lord Lovat) but had by then passed the splendid hilt to his son, who passed it to his son, and so on down the generations. It had become known as the 'Honour of the Kinlochs', and Himself, the present earl, though he had had to cede his castle, had finally won a declaration in the courts (still disputed) that the hilt, for his lifetime at least, belonged to him.

Since he had 'disappeared' the hilt, the castle had been further robbed of a display of Highland artifacts: shields, claymores and brooches. Himself, in residence in London at the time of that break-in, had made sarcastic remarks about bureaucrats being hopeless custodians of treasures. Ill-feeling flew like barbs in the air. The castle's bruised administrators were now hell-bent on finding the hilt, to prove that Himself was no better at guarding things than they were.

Under guise of rewiring and refurbishing the castle, including Himself's wing, they were inching with probes everywhere, determined on uncovering the cache. All they had wrung out of Himself was a promise that the Honour of the Kinlochs had not left his property. The ill-feeling and the search went on.

Jed having decanted me at the private wing's seldom-locked door I went inside and found my uncle in his dining-room, dressed in tweeds despite the early hour and pouring coffee from a pot on the sideboard.

He gave me, as always when we met after an interval, the salutation of my whole name, to which I replied with old and easy formality.

'Alexander.'

'My lord.'

He nodded, smiled faintly, and gestured to the coffee.

'Breakfast?'

'Thank you.'

He took his cup over to the table and began eating toast. Two places had been laid at the table, and he waved me to the free one.

'That's laid for you,' he said. 'Your aunt stayed in London.' I sat and ate toast and he asked me if I'd had a good journey.

'I slept all the way.'

'Good.'

He was a tall man, topping me by at least four inches, and broad and large without looking fat. At sixty-five he had grey hair showing a white future, a strong nose, heavy chin and guarded eyes. His physical movements tended to be uncoordinated and clumsy; his mind was as tough and solid as an oak. If it were true that he'd told Ivan he would trust me with his life, then the reverse in general was also true, but like many good men he tended to trust too many people, and I wouldn't have staked my life on his absolute silence, even though any indiscretion would have been unintentional.

He said, spreading marmalade, 'Jed told me what happened at the bothy.'

'Boring.'

He wanted me to tell him in detail what had happened, so I did, though with distaste. I told him also about Ivan giving me the power of attorney, and my experiences in Reading.

He drank three cups of coffee, stretching as if absently for slice after slice of toast.

Eventually I asked him calmly, 'So do you have the King Alfred Gold Cup? Is it here?'

He answered broodingly, 'I did tell Ivan you were good at hiding things.'

'Mm.' I paused. 'Probably someone heard you.'

'God, A?

I said, 'I think it was the chalice, not the hilt, that those men were trying to find at the bothy. I also think they hadn't been told precisely what they were looking for. They kept saying "Where is it?" but they didn't say what they meant by it. I thought at the time they meant the hilt, because I didn't know Ivan had given you the Cup, but also it seemed possible they were simply fishing for anything I valued.' I sighed. 'Anyway, I'd say now the it was definitely the Cup.'

He said heavily, 'Jed said they'd hurt you badly.'

'That was Tuesday. Today's Saturday, and I'm fine. Don't worry about it.'

'Was it my fault?'

'It was the Finance Director's fault for running off with the brewery's cash.'

'But mine for suggesting you to Ivan.'

'It's history.'

He hesitated. 'I still have to decide what to do with that damned lump of gold.'

I did not make instant glad-eyed offers to keep it safe.

He listened to my silence and gave me a rueful shake of the head.

'I can't ask it of you, I suppose,' he said.

Next time you'll scream… There would be no next tune.

I said, 'Patsy has told a few people that I already have the Cup. She's saying I stole it from the brewery.'

'But that's nonsense!'

'People believe her.'

'But you've never been to the brewery. Not for years, anyway.'

I agreed. 'Not for years.'

'Anyway,' said my uncle, 'it was Ivan himself who took the Cup out of the brewery, on the day before his heart attack. He told me he was feeling deeply upset and depressed. His firm of auditors - what's that chap's name… Tollright? - were warning him he was on the point of losing everything. And you know Ivan… he was worried both about his workpeople losing their jobs and about himself losing face and credibility. He takes his baronetcy and his membership of the Jockey Club very seriously… he could not bear having his whole life collapse in failure.'

'But it wasn't his fault.'

'He appointed Norman Quorn to be Finance Director. He says he no longer trusts his own judgment. He's taking too much guilt onto his own shoulders.'

'Yes.'

'So when he could see bankruptcy and disgrace ahead, he simply walked out with the Cup. Sick at heart was the phrase he used. Sick at heart.'

Poor Ivan. Poor sick heart.

I asked, 'Did he take the Cup to Park Crescent? Is that where you collected it from?'

My uncle half laughed. 'Ivan said he was afraid it would be as accessible in Park Crescent as in the brewery. He wanted to keep it out of any asset-pool and he didn't want to leave a paper-trail, like renting a bank vault, so he left it… you'll laugh… he left the treasure in a cardboard box in the cloakroom of his club. Left it in the care of the door-keeper.'

'Hell's teeth.'

'I fetched it from his club. Gave the doorman a thank you. Brought the Cup up here, in my car. James and I drove up here together as usual, you see. The family flew up, of course.'

James was his eldest son, his heir.

'I didn't tell James what I'd got,' Himself observed thoughtfully. 'James doesn't understand the word secret.'

James, a friendly fellow, liked to talk. Life, to my cousin James, was mostly a lark. He had a pretty wife and three wild children, 'all away sailing this week,' explained Himself, 'when they should be back at school.'

My uncle and I left the dining-room and walked outside round the whole ancient complex, as he liked to do, our feet quiet on the sheep-cropped grass.

'I asked Ivan how much the King Alfred Cup was actually worth,' he said. 'Everyone tends to refer to it as priceless, but it isn't, of course. Not like the hilt.'

'How much did Ivan say?'

'He said it was a symbol. He says you can't put a price on a symbol.'

'I suppose he's right.'

We walked a way in silence, then he said, 'I told Ivan I wanted to get the Cup valued. If he wanted me to get you to look after it, I had to know its worth.'

'What did he say?'

'He got very agitated. He said if I took it to a reputable valuer he would end up losing it. He said it was too well known. He began panting with distress. I had to assure him I wouldn't take it to anyone that would recognise it.'

'But,' I said, 'no one else could give you a reliable estimate.'

He smiled. We rounded the southernmost corner and turned our faces into the endless wind.

"This afternoon,' he said, raising his voice, 'we'll find out.'

The valuer summoned to the castle was neither an auctioneer nor a jeweller, but a thin eighty-year-old woman, a retired lecturer in English from St Andrew's University, Dr Zoл Lang, with a comet tail of distinguished qualifications after her name.

My uncle explained he had met her 'at some function or other', and when she arrived, gushing but overwhelmingly intellectual, he waved a vague hand in my direction and introduced me as 'Al, one of my many nephews'.

'How do you do?' Dr Lang asked politely, giving me a strong bony handshake with her gaze elsewhere. 'Cold day, isn't it?'

Himself made practised small-talk and led the way into the dining-room, where with gentle ceremony he sat his guest at the table.

'Al,' he said to me, 'there's a box in the sideboard, right-hand cupboard. Put it on the table, would you?'

I found and carried across a large brown cardboard box stuck all over with sticky tape and conspicuously marked in big black handwritten capitals, 'Books. Property of Sir I. Westering'.

'Open it, Al,' Himself instructed without excitement. 'Let's see what we've got.'

Dr Lang looked politely interested, but no more.

'I have to warn you again, Lord Kinloch,' she said in her pure Scots voice, 'that almost no significant works of goldsmiths' art survive from the ninth century in England. I have done as you asked and kept your request private, which has been no hardship as the last thing you want, I'm sure, is ridicule.'

'The last,' Himself agreed gravely.

Dr Zoл Lang had straight grey hair looped back into a loose bun on her neck. She wore glasses and lipstick, and clothes too large for her thin frame. There was a small gold brooch but no rings. Something about her, all the same, warned one not to think in terms of dry old virginal spinster.

I ripped off the sticky tape and opened the box, and found inside, as promised, books: old editions of Dickens, to be precise.

'Keep going, Al,' my uncle said.

I lifted out the books and underneath came to a grey duster-cloth draw-string bag enclosing another box. I lifted that out also.

The inner box, in size a twelve-inch cube, was of black leather with gold clasps. Between the clasps, stamped in small gold letters, were the words MAXIM, London. I freed the box from its protecting bag and pushed it across the table to Himself.

'Dr Lang,' he said courteously, pushing the box on further into her reach, 'do us the honour.'

Without flourish she undid the clasps and opened the box, and then sat as still as marble while I felt her surprise in mental gusts across the table.

'Well,' she said finally, and again, 'Well…'

Inside the box, supported by white satin-covered cushioning, the King Alfred Gold Cup lay on its side. I had never actually seen it before and nor, from his expression, had my uncle Robert.

No wonder, I thought, that Ivan had wanted to keep that Cup for his own. No wonder he wanted it hidden and kept safe. That Cup must have come to mean as much to him as Prince Charles Edward's sword hilt had come to mean to the earls of Kinloch, the affirmation that the personal stewardship of symbolic treasures should not be whisked away by ephemeral grey-faces, who wouldn't, down the decades, care a jot.

King Alfred's Cup, bigger than I'd imagined, was in shape a wide round bowl on a sturdy neck with a spreading foot. The rim of the bowl was crenellated like many castles (Windsor, but not the Kinlochs'): its sides glittered with red, blue and green inlaid stones and overall it shone with the warm unmistakable golden glow of twenty-two carats at least.

With almost reverence Dr Lang lifted out the astonishing object and stood it on the polished wood of the table, where it gleamed as if with inner light.

Dr Lang cleared her throat and said as if pulling herself down to earth, 'King Alfred never saw this, of course. It's shaped like a chalice, but if King Alfred ever used anything like this to take communion, it would have been much smaller and, of course, very much lighter. This cup must weigh five or more pounds. No… sad as I am to say it, this cup is modern.'

'Modern?' Himself echoed, surprised.

'Certainly not medieval,' regretted the expert. 'Almost certainly Victorian. Eighteen-sixty, or thereabouts. Very handsome. Beautiful, even. But not old.'

The cup had what looked like a pattern engraved right round the top below the crenellations and again round the lower third of the bowl. Dr Lang looked attentively at the patterns and smiled with obvious enjoyment.

'The cup is engraved with a poem in Anglo-Saxon,' she said. 'No trouble spared. But it's still Victorian. And I doubt if those coloured stones are rubies and emeralds, though you'd need to get an informed opinion for that.'

'Can you read the poem?' I asked.

She glanced at me briefly. 'Of course. I taught Anglo-Saxon for years. Wonderful vigorous poetry, what little's left of it. No printing presses or copying machines then, of course.' She fingered the bands of engraving. 'This is Bede's Death Song. Very famous. Bede died in 735, long before Alfred was born.' She turned the cup round, searching with her fingers for the beginning of the verse. 'In literal translation it says, "Before that sudden journey no one is wiser in thought than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be adjudged to his soul, of good or evil, after his death-day." '

Her old voice held the echo of years of lecturing to students; the authority of confident scholarship. At seventeen I had run away from that sort of slightly didactic tone and deprived myself of much enlightenment in consequence, and all these years later I found I still irrationally resented her perfectly justifiable consciousness of the high ground of superior knowledge.

Be ashamed of yourself, Al, I thought. Be humble. Bede's Death Song's message was of taking stock of the good and evil one did on earth because hell after death was a certainty. Unimaginable centuries later I believed that the only real hell was on earth and usually undeserved: and I was not going to discuss it with Zoл Lang.

I took it for a certainty that Ivan knew what teaching was engraved on his Cup. He had judged and found himself culpable and was harder on himself precisely because his standard for his own probity had been set so high. I wondered if he valued the Cup more for what was inscribed on it than for its intrinsic worth.

'So how much,' Himself was asking his expert, 'should one insure this Cup for?'

'Insure?' She pursed her lips. 'You could weigh it and multiply by the current price of gold, or you could maintain it is a valuable and interesting example of Victorian romanticism, or you could say it's worth dying for.'

'Not that.'

'People die in defence of their property all the time. It's a powerful instinct.' She nodded as if to emphasise the point. 'I don't think you could insure this Cup for any more than its worth in gold.'

Its weight in gold wouldn't save the brewery or go anywhere near subtracting even a significant nought.

My uncle thoughtfully restored the Cup to its box and closed the lid. The whole room looked a little darker at its eclipse.

'The accounts of King Alfred burning the cakes and suffering from haemorrhoids were all tosh,' Dr Lang said in her lecturing voice. 'King Alfred suffered from spin-doctors. But the fact remains, he is the only king in Britain ever to be called great. Alfred the Great. Born in Wantage, Berkshure. He was the fifth son, you know. Primogeniture wasn't supreme. They chose the fittest. Alfred was a scholar. He could read and write, both in Latin and his native tongue, Anglo-Saxon. He freed southern England - Wessex - from the rule of the invading Danes, first by appeasement and sly negotiation, then by battle. He was clever.' Her old face shone. 'People now try to make him a twentieth-century thinking social worker who founded schools and wrote new good laws, and the probabilities are that he did both, but only in the context of his own times. He died in 899, and no other well-authenticated king of that whole first millennium is so revered or honoured, or even remembered. It's a great pity this remarkable gold chalice here isn't a genuine ninth-century treasure, but of course it would have been either stolen or lost when Henry VIII devastated the churches. So many old treasures were buried in the fifteen-thirties to keep them safe, and the buriers died or were killed without telling where the treasures were hidden, and all over England farmers still to this day find gold deep in their fields, but not this Cup. Alas, it wasn't around in the days of Henry VHI. I think, actually, that the proper place for it now is in a museum. All such treasures should be cared for and displayed in museums.'

She stopped. Himself, who disagreed with her, thanked her warmly for her trouble and offered her wine or tea.

'What I would like,' she said, 'is to see the Kinloch hilt.'

Himself blinked. 'We have only the replica on show.'

'The real one,' she said. 'Show me the real one.'

After less than three seconds he said, smiling, 'We have to keep it safe from Henry VIII.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean we have had to bury it to keep it.' He was making a joke of it and, unwillingly, she smiled tightly and settled for a sight of the copy.

We walked down the long passage where once relays of footmen had hurried with steaming dishes from kitchen to Great Hall, and Himself unlocked the weighty door that let us into the castle proper.

The Great Hall's walls, thanks to the theft of all the tapestries, were now for the most part grimly bare. The display cases, since the disappearance of the priceless dinner service, were unlit and empty. The long centre table, where once fifty guests had dined in splendour, bore a thin film of dust. Without comment my uncle walked down the long room under its high vaulted ceiling until he came to the imposing grilled glass display unit at the far end that had once held the true Honour of the Kinlochs.

Himself flicked a switch. Lights inside the glass case came to brilliant life and beamed onto the gold-looking object inside.

The replica hilt lay on black velvet and, even though one knew it was not the real thing, it looked impressive.

'It is gold plated,' its owner said. 'The red stones are spinel, not ruby. The blue stones are lapis lazuli, the green ones are peridots. I commissioned it and paid for it, and no one disputes that this is mine.'

Dr Zoл Lang studied it carefully and in silence.

The hilt itself, though larger than a large man's fist, looked remarkably like the King Alfred Gold Cup, except that there were no crenellations and no engraving. There was instead the pommel, the grip that fitted into the palm of the hand: and instead of the circular foot, only the neck into which the snapped-off blade had been fastened.

The ceremonial sword that Prince Charles Edward had hoped to use at his coronation as rightful King of England and Scotland had been made for him in France (and, amazingly, paid for by him personally) in 1740. It had been his own to give, and on impulse, in gratitude and despair, he had given it.

Dr Lang, with fervour and unexpected fanaticism, said intensely, 'This imitation may be your own, but I agree with the castle's custodians that the real Honour of the Kinlochs belongs to Scotland.'

'Do you think so?' Himself asked politely, good manners and jocularity in his voice. 'I would argue with you, of course, and I would defend my right of ownership…' He paused provocatively.

'Yes?' she prompted.

He smiled sweetly. To the hilt.'