She carried the books back to her own shop. Beth was in Scotland for the entire week and Quire Court was never particularly busy on Wednesday afternoons, so after she had finished applying Danish oil to a beautiful but neglected Regency escritoire destined for a customer in Hertfordshire, she had a snack lunch then curled up in the little office behind the shop.
The more promising of the books was called Fragments of Great War Treasures and had several index references to Holzminden and to the sketches themselves. It was slightly annoying, however, to discover that the author wrote about the sketches with an air of faint contempt, as if feeling a pitying amusement for anyone sufficiently credulous to actually think they might exist. He or she wrote:
They are almost certainly apocryphal. Indeed, it would not be making too strong a statement to place them with such ephemeral objects as the Holy Grail, the Lost City of Atlantis and/or Avalon, and the missing jade zodiac heads of China.
In my opinion, the fabulous Holzminden sketches fall squarely into these categories – and I use the word ‘fabulous’ in the sense of fabled or mythical. They even have a sinister legend attached to them, one that might have come out of an M.R. James ghost story or even, (God help us), a Sixties horror film. No real credence can be given to the legend, of course, but I am including it as a curio.
Nell, who liked and admired M.R. James’s stories and found some horror films quite entertaining, turned to the title page to see who the author of these rather sneering put-downs might be, and was unreasonably annoyed to discover that it was a certain B.D. Bodkin, whose works she had sometimes consulted, and with whom she had in fact exchanged correspondence last year while trying to provenance some Victorian watercolours. But she wanted to know more about these sketches, so she read on. He wrote, didactically:
Reports vary as to how many sketches there are. But most sources agree that there were probably two. The belief is that the sketches were done while the artist was under sentence of death, and that he had been driven mad by his approaching execution. One source, (uncorroborated), suggests that the taint of madness clings to the sketches. That macabre legend has clung to the sketches down the years and has no doubt added to their notoriety.
Well, B.D. Bodkin, thought Nell, I’d very much like to hear what you’d have to say if you knew there’s a framed sketch hanging in a dark old house in the depths of East Anglia, with the legend ‘Holzminden 1917’ inscribed on it. I suppose you’d say it was a fake. I suppose it might be a fake. Or perhaps a copy of an original – yes, I’d better keep that possibility in mind.
But one of the sentences from the book had stuck in her mind. The taint of madness clings to the sketches.
Nell certainly did not believe that statement, any more than B.D. Bodkin did, but she was aware of a prickle of unease at the knowledge that if one of those sketches really was inside Fosse House, Michael was shut in with it – until tomorrow at the very least. It did not matter, of course. And yet …
And yet with no knowledge of the legend, he had already talked about hearing whisperings in the house. A whispering voice, he had said; a voice that had murmured about needing to keep a hold on sanity … I do wish he hadn’t said that, thought Nell.
She was no longer as vehemently sceptical about the supernatural as she used to be – she had had one or two strange and inexplicable experiences over the last couple of years, and her scepticism had taken a few dents. She had come to the rather unwilling acknowledgement that it might be possible for strong emotions or events – particularly tragic or violent events – to leave a lingering impression within a house. Under certain circumstances, it was just about credible that people with a particular sensitivity might pick up on those fragments. Michael had certainly done so at least twice. But she refused to believe there was anything malevolent inside Fosse House, and by way of emphasizing this, she carried on reading what else B.D. Bodkin had to say.
He did not say anything more about the sketches, but he had devoted a whole section to extracts from letters written by a German officer who had been an attendant at Holzminden camp. They had been taken from a privately-printed volume of memoirs originally published in the mid-1950s, and were signed simply ‘Hugbert’ and addressed to ‘My dearest Freide’. The translation from German to English seemed quite good, although some of the phrasing was a little stilted.
The letters seemed to have earned their place in the book because Hugbert had had some brief contact with Siegfried Sassoon. There were several missives referring to Sassoon, whom Hugbert had seen while guarding the Hindenberg Line in Verdun, remarking that even from a distance he looked peculiar, but then everyone knew the English were a peculiar race. Nell made a note of the pages in case this might be of use in the Director’s book, then turned to the later letters, which probably had been included to give a little more background to Hugbert and to Holzminden.
The first one was dated September 1917.
My dearest Freide,
All goes well here, but Holzminden camp is bleak – an old cavalry barracks they have adapted for British officers, and a grim place. But anything is better than those weeks in France.