Michael sat back, his mind filled with the images Sister Dominique’s lively letter had summoned.
It was good to hear that the sisters of Sacré-Coeur had withstood the invasion – that they had hidden out in the crypt, eating lentils and waiting for deliverance – which had either come because Iskander had sent it, or because the Belgian armies had been resisting the Germans and had come to the convent. He reread the paragraph in which the trustful Dominique had expressed concern over Leonora’s innocence, and thought she probably need not have worried, because deflowering virginal seventeen-year-olds was unlikely to have been in Iskander’s code. Rogue and burglar he might have been, but Michael thought he had possessed the principles of a gentleman.
There were no further notes after the letter, but there was, rather unexpectedly, a further letter from the ubiquitous Chuffy, giving details of a niece’s christening at which he had stood godfather – ‘The little sprog yelled her head off, and the godmother got potted on gin afterwards and had to be decanted into a taxi’ – and went on to express a hope of seeing Boots at Christmas, because somebody called Bingo was giving a party at the Club which it would be a crying shame for Boots to miss.
Michael could not see why this should have been filed with the Palestrina Choir history, and was just deciding it had been shuffled together with the notes by mistake, when he turned to page two of Chuffy’s letter, in which Chuffy observed that if Boots could not come up to Town for Bingo’s festive bash, he, Chuffy, would have to come along to what he called Boots’s draughty barracks and rout him out. Chuffy wrote:
I always felt inheriting that old place out of the blue affected you. Extraordinary how a thing like that can change a chap, although it’s a change I wouldn’t mind having in my life, not that it’s very likely, because nobody in my family has a brass farthing, and I’d hate to see the guv’nor hand in his dinner pail anyway.
It’s nothing to do with me, but I don’t think it’s good for you to be forever worrying about the house and whether it’s secure after dark, or frowsting over that stuff you’re writing. I do understand you want to find out the truth about Stephen, well, I dare say a good many of us would like to know the truth about Stephen, but all work and no play, old man … Poor old Stephen is certainly dead, in fact he’s officially dead – I remember you coming up to Town for some Court thingummy that pronounced him dead. Seven years without anyone hearing from him or something, wasn’t it? I recall I thought the length of time sounded frightfully Biblical – all those plagues and famines and whatnot. But I do know that the wigged gentlemen in Lincolns Inn pronounced Stephen dead and handed you the ownership of Fosse House.
Next time you come up to Town I’ll introduce you to one or two corking girls – it’d do you a power of good to paint the town red, or at least give it a few pink splodges.
Michael laid down the letter thoughtfully. It sounded as if it was the unknown ‘Boots’ who had been writing the history of the Palestrina Choir. He examined this deduction from several aspects and thought it stood up to scrutiny.
Stephen Gilmore had been pronounced as dead by the courts. Assuming the courts had dated his disappearance from the end of the Great War, that seemed to place Boots’s inheritance of Fosse House as 1925 at the absolute earliest.
The clock, which had been ticking quietly away to itself, suddenly chimed the half hour, making Michael jump. Six thirty. Assuming dinner would again be at seven, he had just time to see if there was any more information to be gleaned about Boots and his quest.
He had not really expected to find anything, particularly since he had no idea of Boots’s real name, but near the bottom of the box was a brittle, faded newspaper cutting with a smudgy photograph of a wedding group. There was no date but Michael thought the clothes looked right for around 1930.
The cutting seemed to be from a local paper, and it informed its readers of a wedding that had been celebrated in the Church of St Augustine.
The groom was Mr Booth Gilmore, and readers will remember that Mr Gilmore inherited Fosse House some five years ago after a presumption of death was declared on his second cousin, Mr Stephen Gilmore. Mr Booth Gilmore has since lived quietly at the house, pursuing various academic interests.
The bride was Miss Margaret Chiffley, the cousin of an old school-friend of Mr Gilmore – see here for full details of Miss Chiffley’s gown and the gowns of the bridesmaids. A wedding breakfast was held after the ceremony at Fosse House.
This newspaper offers its congratulations to Mr Gilmore and his new wife.
So, thought Michael, ‘Boots’ was Booth Gilmore, and Chuffy finally succeeded in dragging his old school-friend from his ivory tower for long enough to meet and marry a suitable lady – whom Chuffy, obliging as ever, had even provided, from his own family. Chuffy was the sobriquet for Chiffley, of course. He smiled because it was a typical fashioning of a schoolboy nickname for that era. It was an unusual surname as well; it might even be possible to trace Chuffy or his descendants.
It was a shame that the faces in the newspaper photograph were too blurred to make out any details, and even more of a shame that the paper had not listed the names of everyone. He would have liked to identify Chuffy in particular. But everyone seemed to be smiling, and Michael found himself hoping Booth and his lady had been happy.
It seemed that on one level, at least, they had. Just beneath the wedding notice was a smaller clipping that announced the birth of a daughter in 1936: ‘To Booth and Margaret Gilmore (née Chiffley), a daughter, Luisa Margaret. Thanks to all concerned.’