The Archivist Read online

  The Archivist

  of Dunstibourne Hall

  L.P. Fergusson

  To Chris

  - 1 -

  BS Moreton was feeling rattled. He had planned to spend the morning in the office in case Radio Shropshire rang. He had floated a programme idea past a researcher there a few days ago and was hoping she would get back to him. Twenty minutes after he had settled down at his desk, however, Rosemary brought a memo up from the estate office. On first reading he had puffed at it and dropped it on to the top of his hot file, but after a few moments’ thought, he retrieved it and read it again with a rising sense of irritation.

  To: BS Moreton, Archivist to the Earl of Duntisbourne

  From: Simon Keane, Chief Executive

  Re: The Dywenydd Collection

  In order to incentivise the forward planning for the new season, Sam Westbrook from Interpretative Exhibition Design has been appointed Exhibition Manager. The trustees are confident a new exhibition will drive footfall to the Hall, but recognise that in order not to wrongside the demographic, professional expertise is essential. Please ensure this information is cascaded down to all concerned.

  ‘Oh, blow!’ BS said as he flung the memo aside.

  An exhibition of the Dywenydd Collection? It was an absurd idea and one which he had successfully stalled for five years, ever since Keane, that land agent from Chatsworth, had arrived. BS was the archivist here at Duntisbourne; if anyone was going to create an exhibition it was him, but he had good reasons for not wanting the spotlight to fall on this particular collection. For scholars it was fascinating, but the general public wouldn’t see it that way. Would they be interested in the craftsmen who created the objects, the historical figures who had used and enjoyed them? Of course not. They would come in their tittering hordes because the collection dealt with the erotic, which was why it had been locked away upstairs from public view in 1838, and in the opinion of BS Moreton, that was exactly where it should stay.

  He creaked back into his chair and stared out of the window across the empty courtyard. He would much prefer to spend the morning waiting for Susie from Radio Shropshire to call because she had an attractive voice when he spoke to her on the phone, and he was hoping to fix a date to meet her in person. He sighed heavily. Perhaps he was going to have to face the inevitable, that Westbrook would arrive and the exhibition would go ahead, but he wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

  ‘Blow me down to the ruddy ground,’ he muttered and reluctantly began to pack the memo and a few essentials into his rucksack before setting off through the empty Hall to make his way upstairs. The archivist was feeling his age. His knee was aching, and he had that old hot pulse deep in the left-hand side of his lower back.

  During the winter, Duntisbourne Hall was run by a skeleton staff of cleaners and conservationists, but today BS met no one. He made his way along the minstrels’ gallery to a small oak door studded in metal and pierced with woodworm. Struggling with the keys at his hip, he chose one and unlocked the door. Opening it towards him, he stood at the foot of a spiral staircase to get his breath before starting the steep ascent. The stone of the treads was buffed and dipped in the centre from centuries of traffic, each step only large enough to take his feet if he tucked them sideways into the outer edge. He supported himself on the central column with one hand, and navigated with his stick on the outer.

  He was a tall man, heavily built, and could only proceed if he stooped. As the years passed he found the staircase increasingly claustrophobic, and this morning in particular he felt as if he was trapped in a tube of stone, a drop spinning away behind him, the ceiling inches from his head. He could never remember how many turns he had to make and today it seemed as if he would never reach the top. Eventually he stretched up his hand and heard the rattle of a brass doorknob in the darkness. He turned it and entered the room known as the sealed chamber even though the seal had been broken eighteen years earlier by his own hand on the instructions of the earl.

  As the central light flicked on, the first thing to greet him was a portrait of a fleshy-faced man dressed in a sable cloak with three rows of black ermine tails. The sitter was corpulent, and his stomach protruded from beneath the brocade waistcoat, bulging over spindly legs clad in royal blue velvet pantaloons. His mottled face looked out from under the powdered wig with an expression of fat-lipped lechery. BS didn’t imagine the ninth earl had been particularly pleased with this portrait, but considering the ‘wicked earl’ had been a philanderer, a pornographer, an opium addict and a heavy drinker, it may have been the best Thomas Laurence could do. The painting had been hung as a temporary measure on a row of stout Victorian coat hooks which ran along the left-hand wall because BS had been worried that he might put a foot through the canvas if it remained at floor level. That had been sixteen years ago.

  The room was dusty, but not damp. Situated above the great hall and underneath the rafters, any residual heat from below rose to keep the sealed chamber a few degrees warmer than the rest of the Hall. It still smelt of bats, a scent that BS liked because it reminded him of the den he had created as a child in the roof space of the miner’s cottage where he grew up. He was sad when he realised the colony had left the Hall at some time during the nineties when essential repairs to the guttering on the north side were undertaken.

  The collection in the sealed chamber was in disarray, but it was housed in the mahogany furniture which had been installed in Victorian times by the tenth earl. The walls on either side were fitted with deep drawers below and shelves above. Artefacts that were too large for the drawers had been boxed and put on the shelves, and those too large for either stood behind a screen which stretched across the left-hand corner of the room. To the right of the screen was a plain desk, chair and lamp, provided more recently so that scholars had somewhere to work when examining the collection. They were not allowed to take anything from the room, and had to be supervised. BS had spent many days alternately reading and snoozing on a threadbare chaise longue in the other corner while a visitor studied.

  BS Moreton was a man of habit, and before he began his task he liked to arrange his desk. He burrowed into his rucksack and found his foolscap notepad ruled in blue with the crest of the Earl of Duntisbourne at the top. Many years ago one of the shop managers had put in an order for these and added one zero too many, so instead of two hundred they had received two thousand, shortly before the foolscap size was replaced universally with A4. Although BS could never find a ring binder that fitted the pages, he felt more at home with foolscap paper. He didn’t like the squat A4 size – it was too modern for his taste.

  When he was working he followed the tradition of the British Library, always using pencils in case he accidentally marked one of the books. He bent to pull the waste bin towards him and began to sharpen half a dozen HBs using an ancient but efficient pencil sharpener. As he completed and inspected each pencil, he laid it down next to its companion. Finally he retrieved from the rucksack his large, green artist’s rubber, the smell of which always transported him back to his schoolroom days.

  Thus organised, it was time for his coffee. This was brewed for him each morning by his wife, who warmed the thermos with boiling water before filling it. BS had been told by his doctor that he should cut down on the caffeine, but he couldn’t see the point. If he was slowing up a bit, surely the best thing for him was a belt of strong coffee every few hours. Besides, he didn’t take a lot of notice of medical advice because it was always changing. Take alcohol consumption, for example. After years of feeling guilty that he had a drink every night, lo and behold it turns out you live longer if you have a drink every night. In another few years the doctors would be telling him that he should make sure he had at least four cups of strong coffee a day b
ecause there was good evidence that people who drank strong coffee lived seven years longer than people who drank green tea, or some such nonsense.

  ‘Decaffeinated, darling?’ his wife would ask each morning as she reached for the ground coffee.

  ‘No, Patricia my love, give me a belter,’ BS replied. Decaffeinated could wait until the weather improved.

  Warmed by his coffee, BS reached into his rucksack and drew out the memo. As he reread it, the fury he had felt earlier that morning returned. Why this man was unable to use plain English baffled and exasperated him in equal proportion. When did visitors become foot fall?

  He laid the memo down on the desk and shook his head at it. Keane was unable to write or even speak without resorting to business jargon and often, instead of making a point clearer, it rendered the meaning impenetrable. For example, the first time BS heard the CEO talking about pushing the envelope, he thought it was a euphemism for something smutty. The recollection brought a smile to his face and lightened his mood, galvanising him into action.

  He made his way over to a shelf of books which ran along the back wall. Somewhere in here, hidden in plain view, was an inventory of the Dywenydd Collection and he wanted to go through it before Westbrook arrived. He ran his fingers along the spines and eventually drew it out. There was no blocking on the spine to tell the casual observer the contents of the book, but to BS each spine was as distinctive as the features on a person’s face, and although he could never recognise an actor when they played a different role on television, he had an uncanny ability to pick a book out of a shelf of hundreds of volumes.

  He needed both hands to lift the tome down. It was heavy and the leather binding had softened from use into a texture which was more like suede, stained with age to the colour of dark tobacco. BS carried the volume across to the desk and opened it. The spine creaked and popped and a rich smell of age rose up from the pages, the mustiness sweetened by a trace of vanilla like a corked wine. The ledger had been filled out by a number of different hands over the centuries, but during the last couple of decades BS was confident the only eyes to read the material had been his and he doubted anyone else now living had read the words in this volume.

  BS had several reasons for keeping the book to himself. It not only itemised the erotic accoutrements but specified their uses, and it was this aspect of the tome that BS wished to conceal. He was a devout Catholic and believed that holy purity was impossible to obtain if the act of human union was not accompanied by love – the love between a man and his wife. Throughout his life he had maintained his own guard against impurity but he knew that when people faced temptation, it was often hard to resist. When scholars came to study items in the collection he trusted their motives were erudite, but he suspected that if they were able to read the vivid descriptions of these objects in use, it might put evil thoughts into their minds, and he did not want the responsibility of corrupting another man’s soul. The knowledge could lead them away from the historical importance of the object and encourage them to lose interest in the craftsmanship involved. He preferred to speculate with them through discussion as to the use of the items, which had the added advantage of allowing him to appear to have an uncanny breadth of learning and deduction.

  He sat down in front of the book and began to turn the pages. He should decide now which pieces were suitable for an exhibition and could be handed over to Westbrook when he arrived, and which were not. Pulling his notepad towards him, he began his task. He drew a line down the centre to create two column; the left-hand one he entitled ‘Exhibition’ and the right-hand one ‘Muniments Room’. He would repack any particularly salacious pieces and ferry them downstairs to the undercroft while the exhibition was being created, leaving no one any the wiser.

  He made a note of the Thomas Laurence painting of the ninth earl in the left-hand margin and looked around deciding what to do next. Should he start opening cases, pulling out artefacts and making notes? Or should he work systematically through the inventory locating each item in the correct order? He couldn’t decide, so he dragged the library steps over to the first shelf, climbed up to the fourth step, and lifted a dust sheet covering a group of boxes to see if anyone had written the contents on the outside. No one had.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s start with you,’ and he flipped the dust sheet aside and with care brought the box down from the shelf. He placed it on the floor by the desk and scraped away at the string with his penknife. Opening it, he reached in and worked his fingers through the sawdust. It reminded him of searching the bran tub as a child, trying to identify a wrapped toy before committing to drawing it out and claiming it. His fingers felt the edge of a plate which he drew up and into the light.

  To the ignorant eye it would have looked like an exquisite antique dish, but BS immediately recognised the work of Fabergé, the great Russian jeweller, and knew that this was the pudenda display tray of Peter the Great who was said to have had a particularly fine set of pudenda. He brushed the sawdust away with the cuff of his shirt and placed the tray next to the open inventory. His memory had not let him down – the description confirmed that it was one of the Russian trays. It didn’t take him long to locate the next item on the inventory, a glass tray with a raised coloured pattern thought to have belonged to Catherine the Great because of its different shape. He sat back in his chair and pondered the pieces before noting them down in the left-hand column. Without an accurate description of their use, these fine pieces could certainly grace the exhibition.

  According to the inventory, there were at least two more display trays somewhere in the collection, but the next item that BS drew out of the sawdust looked more like two cream jugs fused together but without handles or spouts. Although heavily tarnished, he could see the object was made of solid silver and must have weighed a good six pounds. Moving across the room so that he was standing under the central light he turned it over in his hands until he found the hallmark. He was right, RG – Robert Garrard of London, beginning of the eighteenth century. And on the bulbous base, he could make out the earl’s coat of arms with the motto, Dywenydd o Flaen Anrhydedd, Pleasure Before Honour, which had been adopted by the wicked earl to obfuscate the contents of the erotic collection and swiftly changed back to Gwthio fe ddaw by his bookish son, the tenth earl, after his death. BS chuckled to himself. It was difficult to translate this original motto without it sounding salacious. The College of Arms maintained the closest Welsh translation was Push, It Will Come, but he intended to devote time at some point researching this original family motto and arriving at a more worthy interpretation. Placing the silver item on the desk, BS ran a finger down the inventory until he located the silver testicle cooler, noting it in the left-hand column. It was a lovely piece of craftsmanship, and without the description it could indeed be a type of jug. There was nothing in the design to suggest it was used to chill the testicles before sex in order to increase the chances of conception.

  As the morning wore on, BS relaxed into his task. When he first took up his post he had looked through most of the boxes of artefacts, but that was many years ago. He had revisited some of his favourites periodically over the years, and every time he did, he was struck anew by the beauty of many of them. He congratulated himself on the number of items he had approved for the exhibition. He was keeping an open mind about the situation. However, he continued to feel troubled by the thought of prurient eyes peering at them. During his days as headmaster at the Cathedral School he had taken a group of classics scholars to Italy, and had been appalled at their behaviour when they visited the Gabinetto Segreto in the Naples museum. These bright, intelligent creatures had dissolved into snorting idiots when confronted by ancient interpretations of the act of love. BS feared that the modern holidaymaker would be unable to separate eroticism from pornography.

  Judged on tummy-time, BS felt the morning was nearing an end. He had achieved a fair amount, and was working his way through the contents of one of the drawers which had several o
bjects in it that were proving difficult to find on the inventory. He could remember some of the tasks performed by groups of items: the silver scissors, for example, the blades of which formed the shape of a pair of women’s legs, went with the sharpened silver straw used to inflate the testicles after nicking a small hole in the scrotum. The resulting orgasm, the ledger explained, was a great deal stronger. He identified the foreskin crimpers and a set of scrimshaw stiffeners, but he could not fathom an object the size of a large walnut which was evidently made of gold. Taking a watchmaker’s eyeglass from the drawer of the desk, he squeezed it out of its velvet pouch and wedged it under his brow, bending low over the desk to bring the object into the pool of light thrown by the lamp. The work was intricate in the extreme, the design oriental – he could make out the snarling mouth of a Chinese dragon. As he ran his fingers over it, it sprang open into two halves, and immediately BS guessed what it was – a glans helmet to enlarge the head of the penis, the clever spring holding it in place however active the wearer became.

  ‘What a beautiful object,’ a voice behind him said, and swinging round BS found himself looking into the eyes of a handsome woman who stood a few paces behind him. Beyond her the door into the sealed chamber stood open. Smiling, she held out her hand, palm up, and added, ‘May I see?’

  BS clapped the helmet shut and hid it behind his back. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. You really shouldn’t be up here. This part of the Hall is off-limits, particularly for women.’

  She lowered her hand and smiled at him, but there was something in her eyes that made him think she could be mocking him. To his shame, he felt a glow of heat rising up his neck.

  ‘Oh, Mr Moreton, this part of the Hall is very much on-limits for me,’ and she raised her hand again, this time to introduce herself. ‘Sam Westbrook, from Interpretative Exhibition Design. They told me I would find you up here. I’m glad to see you’ve already made a start.’